THE PICTURE WAS REVERSED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 350, 8 March 1946, Page 16

THE PICTURE WAS REVERSED

James Bertram Revisits Japan

HEN James Bertram wrote six articles for The Listener recently on the war in the Far East, the fall of Hong Kong, and his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in the hands of. the Japanese, we had no idea, nor had he, that by this date he would have been to Japan again, and come back with the feeling of having closed the last chapter of that story. He is back in New Zealand now, and has just made his report to the Government on the war crimes cases he helped to investigate on this last trip, as a member of the New Zealand delegation to the Far Eastern Commission. While he was in Wellington we interviewed him, and asked him to bring the account of his adventure up to date. The last of his six articles was chiefly about the Omori prison-camp near Tokyo, and about some of the jobs he was made to do while he was there. Since that was published, Mr. Bertram has been there again, landed at the very docks where he used to work, identified some of the Japanese guards who maltreated prisoners, at Omori brought away as souvenirs the- boards on which he scratched verses and quotations while in solitary confinement, eaten lavish salads (out of a bowl carved in ice) at a luxury Japanese hdtel, travelled in the Emperor’s private railway train, visited old friends in China; and altogether enjoyed the satisfaction of reversing the whole picture of his relations with the Japanese. ». "There was Old Scarface" He left New Zealand on December 19 for Honolulu. After a week there he left for Japan on the Mt. McKinley, an American command ship that had been used in the invasion of the Philippines. Already he began to go back over old experiences-he shared a cabin on board with Major Charles Boxer, his friend of Hong Kong days (who in the meantime had married (in America) Emily Hahn; the author of China To Me). The Mt. McKinley reached Yokohama on January 9, and then went on to dock at Shibaura, the railway docks in Tokyo harbour where Mr. Bertram had once loaded and unloaded trucks and boats for the Japanese. "So I landed right on the spot where I’d been working, and in my first hour or two I had found some of the bosses still on the job. Some of them started to tell me how some prisoners had travelled a long way to give evidence on their behalf, but not all of them could do that; and there was old Scarface sliding away into a shed, and one or two others who didn’t want to be seen. I was able to pick up one or two men there who oughtn’t to have been at large." Extraordinary Transformation Then began the Commission’s work n Tokyo. Headquarters of Supreme Command, Allied Powers, were in Tokyo itself, and at first there were conferences every day with all the various staff sec-

tions, exchanging all the information that had been collected, and so on. In between conferences, the Commission made .trips into the country, to other cities, factories, and so on. "We went to Myanoshita, the great tourist place near Fuji, and that’s where we had this magnificent banquet. The hotel staff were being all very formal and polite, and the salads were in big bowls carved out. of blocks of ice. But the star turn was a great American eagle carved in ice, dripping from his wings. And there was a cake, with the flags of 11 nations stuck in it! It must be an extraordinary transformation for the whole Japanese propaganda machine, and the tourist industry, to begin quite suddenly to turn on all this sort of thing for Americans and British, to go right back to what they were doing in 1930 or thereabouts. "We made a couple of other trips, both in the Imperial train, which now belongs to General Eichelberger, and they gave me great pleasure-I used to work on the railways. One trip was to Nikko. I think it’s the most beautiful part in all Japan, with marvellous shrines, and avenues of thousands of cryptomeriasJapanese cedars. And the other was to Sendai; we saw the gaol there. "I made another trip, to Kyoto. The rest all went on to see the British occupation area, and Hiroshima, and I stayed in. Kyoto. It was interesting to me because it was the one large city that hadn’t been bombed. I had been there before the war, and it is still much the most pleasant Japanese city. It was modelled on Pekin, and still has the atmosphere of old Japan. Hopeful Sign "One most interesting thing I saw there: a man showed me some old back copies of a Japanese socialist paper of the early 1900’s, which was attacking the conduct of the Russo-Japanese war, and even in 1904 was saying that the (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) copper-mine at Ashio was unfit for human beings to work in. That was one of the places Allied prisoners had to work in this time, and we had to investigate the conditions. I think it’s a point of great significance-40 years ago there was open agitation by a socialist group for better treatment of prisoners, and so on. Of course the paper was suppressed in due course, but it was one of the pieces of evidence we had of the existence at some time of a more liberal Japanese opinion. The name of the paper was Heimin Shimbun." On his way home, Mr. Bertram took a detour to see China again. His time there was cut down to three days instead of the week he had hoped for, but he did see Madame Sun, and the old China battlefields, and Hong Kong. Then he came back here via Saigon, Borneo, and Darwin, and reached Auckland on February 16. His next move now is to go away on his own somewhere in New Zealand to write a book. That will take several months. In the meantime we are allowed to say that we have the expectation of some more articles from him, and perhaps we may print the photograph taken by an American news photographer at the moment when he removed the boards from the cell at Omori on which he had written "A prisoner ought never to pardon his cell" (Spender), "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage" (Lovelace), and "Freedom is a bourgeois illusion" (Lenin).