The Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness

CHAPTER TWELVE

BANGKOK WAS NOT the city I remembered. After the nine-hour flight in refrigerated comfort the heat closed around us as soon as Patti and I emerged from the plane.

Escaping the heat was easy; this time I was an honoured guest, and they had sent an air-conditioned Rolls. Bangkok’s skyline was now all semi-skyscrapers and glass buildings. I remembered a deathly emptiness in the streets and our prison truck making a great deal of noise; now there were six-lane freeways with an endless honking column of cars and lorries. It reminded me of TV pictures of Los Angeles. Everything seemed so hot and slow despite the busy rush of vehicles. It took us no less than three hours to reach our hotel from the airport.

Two days later, feeling tense and irritable as the moment came closer, we set off for Kanburi. Bangkok Noi Station is on the west side of the city, another once-great cavern from the steam age which, in its time of glory, linked Bangkok to Singapore. Those days ended in 1927, with the opening of a new bridge across the Menam River, and the station became a backwater – an appropriately stagnant place from which to send trains to the Burma-Siam Railway. The trains still run from here to Kanburi and beyond it to Nam Tok, but there the line peters out less than a third of the way to its original terminus in Burma, and Bangkok Noi has become a little more neglected. But a thriving market stretches alongside the station, women traders selling everything from fruit to pieces of vivid coloured cloth, and has expanded on to the old carriage sidings and the tracks themselves, where we browsed along the stalls. The last time I had walked through a railway station in Siam it was with a rope around my middle, my arms in splints and the possibility of a death sentence ahead.

The train to Kanburi, a big diesel locomotive pulling seven coaches in blue-and-white livery, runs through flat, fertile land crossed by irrigation ditches and green with rice, fruit and palm trees. I looked at the countryside intently, but it gave back little enough to help prepare me for what I was doing; I was remembering the past while hoping for a different future in the years that remained, and it was not easy to reconcile the two.

At Nong Pladuk, the train passes through a little station with one platform, very neat, tidy and bright: boxes full of red and yellow flowers and small shrubs in wooden barrels give it the look of a model station, a toy. There is no trace of the camp to the north of the line, behind the platform, where the first POWs from Singapore set up the first camp for the construction of the railway. But on the south side of the line, in sidings tattered with dry grass and weeds, there are rows of covered goods vans like those used for moving POWs up the line. Some of them have almost certainly survived and stand there in the heat with their doors open, as they used to when they were underway packed with thirty prisoners and their baggage.

Above the sidings there is an old-fashioned wooden water-tower on stilts. This is the original built by the Japanese Army for watering the engines, mainly those imposing C56s; here is where they were gathered, fuelled and repaired. I saw one of the first big fleets of them on my way to Bangkok for our trial.

To the west of Nong Pladuk near Ban Pong the single track divides in two; the line on the left is the old main line to the south, which ends at Singapore; the line to the right is the proper beginning of the Burma-Siam Railway. It looks peaceful today, a clean and well-kept track swinging off towards the wild uplands of Kanchanaburi Province and Three Pagodas Pass, the border with Burma. Just before the two tracks diverged I looked hard at the ground beside the railway on the north side. The railway stores and the temporary workshop camp were just beside the line. Thew made the first radio there, and brought back his stolen Buddha to our hut. There isn’t a trace of the camp now; pleasant houses, gardens and a large school seem to occupy the same ground.

From Ban Pong to Kanburi for thirty miles the line runs through villages and more fiat rich land, even a few factories with their own sidings: a use has been found for this section of the railway, at least. As the mountains rose up wooded and indistinct in the haze, we reached Kanburi. The big railway workshops have disappeared like everything else, and I stared at the nearly empty sidings as though I could make some evidence appear, but I saw none.

Out in front of the station, on a deserted piece of track, stood a magnificent old locomotive. It was a Garratt, an engine legendary for its mighty hauling power in the last decades of steam, a giant handsome workhorse with two sets of eight-coupled wheels; why it had been placed here I couldn’t imagine, but it had the aura of a great piece of human effort and it awakened all the old passion in me. The big Garratt’s iron strength looked fragile against the green of the trees and plants aroimd it in this hot, damp weather, the sheer power of the forest which had so appalled Nagase when he was searching for graves in 1945. There is some fatal sadness about these machines in the tropics: they embody so much failure and tragedy, and decaying beauty.

A short run beyond Kanburi brought us to the platform at the River Kwae Bridge; the train was longer than die platform, so we got down on to the track itself and walked beside it, next to the dried and oil-stained timber of the sleepers. The heat was ferocious and the smell of diesel rose up from the track. We came to a broad area in front of an open level-crossing which leads on to the bridge. The engine, its siren blasting, growled across the bridge, the seven coaches slowly moving through the girders of the eleven spans set on their concrete piers, and then the train disappeared westwards towards the mountains. Silence rose up, and was gradually drowned by the noise of lorries and motorcycles resuming their journeys as the level-crossing opened again. The bridge piers in the brown muddy water were cracked and pitted by the fragments of bombs dropped in 1944, when the US Army Air Force damaged the bridge. They looked as though they had not been touched for fifty years.

We booked into a hotel across the river from the town, and had lunch in the River Kwae Restaurant, where we met Tida Loha, its remarkable proprietor. She had had the generosity and imagination to give Nagase a plot of land next to the bridge so that he could build his temple of peace, and she is an astute and diplomatic woman. She has met many ex-POWs and Japanese ex-servicemen over the years, and knows a great deal about the fierce hatreds that were played out between strangers in her town during the war.

Time was now running out. Nagase and I had arranged to meet in the morning, on the opposite side of the bridge near the little museum devoted to the railway, and I could not bear to alter the arrangement even a little, so that when he and his wife arrived at his hotel at six in the evening instead of at midnight, as planned, there was a kind of panic. Ian Kerr, an associate of the Medical Foundation who had come to the meeting in case there was a crisis, saved me from having to stay in my own room, a prisoner once again in Kanburi, by taking Patti and me out for dinner, to a floating restaurant where I played with a friendly cat and tried to forget about the next day. It was late when we went to bed.

In the morning we crossed to the other side of the river and walked up the steps to a broad veranda overlooking the bridge. I sat down to watch and wait. I was dressed rather formally in a shirt and slacks, and wore a Sutherland tartan tie – surely the only tie for miles around. The sun was climbing and the air was oppressively hot, though it was not yet nine in the morning.

From about a hundred yards away I saw him walk out on to the bridge; he could not see me. It was important for me to have this last momentary advantage over him; it prepared me, even now that I no longer wanted to hurt him. I walked about a hundred yards to an open square, a kind of courtyard overlooking the river, where we had arranged to meet.

A huge smiling figure of Buddha dominated the courtyard and as I sat down I realized that there was another benign presence throwing a shadow on to the wide expanse of terrace: a carefully preserved locomotive, a veteran of the Royal Siamese Railway, built in Glasgow, I noticed, in the year of my birth. This exquisite relic could have come from a brightly-lit dream, with me sitting on an empty square, a silent steam engine close at hand, waiting for something to happen.

He came on to the terrace, walking past the engine. I had forgotten how small he was, a tiny man in an elegant straw hat, loose kimono-like jacket and trousers. From a distance he resembled an oriental carving, some benign wizened demon come to life. He carried a shapeless blue cotton shoulder bag. As he came closer I could see that he wore around his throat beads of dark red stone on a thick string. I remembered him saying to me again and again ‘Lomax, you will tell us’, other phrases he had recited in the voice I hated so much…

He began a formal bow, his face working and agitated, the small figure barely reaching my shoulder. I stepped forward, took his hand and said ‘ Ohayo gozaimasuj Nagase san, ogenkidesu ka.’ ‘Good morning, Mr Nagase, how are you?’

He looked up at me; he was trembling, in tears, saying over and over ‘I am very, very sorry…’ I somehow took command, led him out of the terrible heat to a bench in the shade; I was comforting him, for he was really overcome. At that moment my capacity for reserve and self-control helped me to help him, murmuring reassurances as we sat down. It was as though I was protecting him from the force of the emotions shaking his frail-seeming body. I think I said something like ‘That’s very kind of you to say so’ to his repeated expressions of sorrow.

He said to me ‘Fifty years is a long time, but for me it is a time of suffering. I never forgot you, I remember your face, especially your eyes.’ He looked deep into my eyes when he said this. His own face still looked like the one I remembered, rather fine-featured, with dark and slightly hidden eyes; his wide mouth was still noticeable beneath cheeks that had sunken inwards.

I told him that I could remember his very last words to me. He asked what they were and laughed when I said ‘Keep your chin up.’

He asked if he could touch my hand. My former interrogator held my arm, which was so much larger than his, stroking it quite unselfconsciously. I didn’t find it embarrassing. He gripped my wrist with both of his hands and told me that when I was being tortured – he used the word – he measured my pulse. I remembered he had written this in his memoir. Yet now that we were face to face, his grief seemed far more acute than mine. ‘I was a member of Imperial Japanese Army; we treated your countrymen very, very badly.’

‘We both survived’, I said encouragingly, really believing it now.

A little later, I’m sure he said: ‘Tor what purpose were you born in this world? I think I can die safely now.’

He asked me if I remembered the ‘bath house’ where I was tortured. I had to admit I couldn’t recall it; he said that there was an episode between the shouting in the room and the drowning with the hosepipe in the yard, when they took me into some sort of bathroom and filled a metal tub, and the Kempei Gunso held my head underneath the water. ‘You remember big can?’ Nagase asked, making a round shape with his hands. I had to take his word for it. I told him that I did certainly remember the Gunso’s wooden ruler banging on the desk, and that I didn’t like him very much. Nagase agreed that he was ‘a very rough man’.

It’s impossible to remember everything we talked about, but we sat there so long that the sun moved right around and we were no longer in the shade. (Patti told me later that she was having a sharp argument in the background with a journalist who spotted a story on the terrace and was trying to photograph us; I never heard a thing.) The content of our conversation hardly mattered. We laughed a lot, after a while, and were happy in each other’s company. I can recall snatches of what we said quite clearly, especially some of his quaint phrases, and have an impression of the rest.

At one point Nagase suddenly began talking about my map. He reminded me that I’d tried to tell him I had a sketch of the line ‘because you are mania of railway’, as he put it. ‘I tried to believe it,’ he said, ‘but at that time in Japan railway mania was not so popular.’ Then he said that he knew we had every kind of’mania’ in our country and had tried to persuade the Gunso that I was not the leader of the group. I pointed out that the Gunso hadn’t believed me anyway, and Nagase said that they had wanted a spy; they could not understand otherwise where we had found the makings of a radio, and were obsessed with preventing contacts between us and civilians. He himself had, as I suspected, searched prisoners’ belongings at Singapore when they were leaving for Ban Pong and the north.

He asked where I had hidden the map in the Sakamoto Butai; it had always puzzled him why they failed to find it when they searched the huts. I explained that it was in a hollow bamboo in the wall of the latrine and that the American-speaking interpreter had only found it later when I’d been reckless enough to hide it in my kit. Nagase spoke of ‘that fellow’s’ suffering as a ‘minority man’ in America before the war, and how he had a ‘hard mind towards the white man’.

He told me what he had done in the last year of the war after he had recovered from his malaria: translating propaganda leaflets dropped by our planes, patrolling the perimeter of the camps searching for spies and parachutists, generally appeasing the futile hunger for information of a defeated empire; he spent a lot of time hiding from bombers and fearful of treading on delayed-action bombs.

He wanted to know if Captain Komai, who was held responsible for the deaths of Hawley and Armitage, had beaten us personally; he had met his son a few years earlier. I said that I thought he had probably done so, but I couldn’t be sure. Nagase assumed that I had been tortured again at Outram Road, and I had to explain that there are rare occasions when overt torture is not the worst punishment. He was kind enough to say that compared to my suffering his was nothing; and yet it was so obvious that he had suffered too. ‘Various sufferings, various sufferings in my heart and mind…’ He told me how he had studied history and become totally opposed to militarism; about his wife, Yoshiko, who was quite wealthy, about his English-language school and her teaching of the tea ceremony.

Later that morning we went into the museum next to the terrace. The long rooms were stiflingly hot. Laid out on the floor were rusty chains which had been used to move the wooden sleepers; a few spikes; some ropes and saws. There was a set of big rusty iron hooks – couplings for goods vans – and a few of the little four-wheeled bogies used to push more and more heavy timber and iron up the line and on to the backs of already-exhausted men. They looked insignificant lying there, the wheels jammed with rust and useless except to remind people what had been done with them. The big iron cooking vessels, called kwalis, of the kind we used for cooking rice when I was mess officer were laid out as though for offerings on a long table.

By then we had introduced Mrs Nagase and Mrs Lomax to each other, and they were finding a common language of sympathy and understanding. Nagase said he had often walked past the site of the Kempeitai house when he came to Kanburi, so we decided to go to visit it together. The building has of course been demolished and the site built over. We were driven by Tida Loha, who helps so many of the former POWs who visit Kanburi, and Patti sat in the firont of the car with her. I sat in the back between Nagase and a Japanese firiend of his, and my wife turned around while we were moving through the crowded streets and just looked at us. Our eyes met and we smiled: I knew she was thinking; there I was sitting between two Japanese men on my way back to that place, and all three of us smiling and laughing.

The Kempei house was well and truly gone. The yard where the ‘monkey houses’ were kept is now occupied by a family dwelling. Places where such things have been done can be wiped out so easily. Torture, after all, is inconspicuous; all it needs is water, a piece of wood and a loud voice. It takes place in squalid rooms, dirty back yards and basements, and there is nothing left to preserve when it is over. Marks on the body can fade quickly too, and it is thanks to people like Helen Bamber that the hidden traces which can’t simply be built over are uncovered and brought back into the light.

After our inconsequential return to the place where we had first met, we visited the war memorials. To reach the Allied cemetery at Chungkai we took a long-tailed craft which ripped along the river like a speedboat past reed-beds, cultivated fields and green walls of trees. The heat was amazing. Even the river seemed to be sprouting under it – weeds, lily pads, trailing bits of vegetation. When we alighted we walked through the red-roofed portico and a cool gallery. The traditional legend is picked out on the entrance: ‘Their Name Liveth For Ever More’. The vast graveyard is immaculately clean, gardened and swept. Bronze tablets are set into blocks of glittery limestone, shaped like lecterns. Some of the tablets are dedicated simply to ‘A Soldier of the 1939-45 War, Known Unto God’. Might the vanished Bill Williamson be lying here unclaimed?

We walked around, Patti and I drifting off together and leaving Nagase and Yoshiko behind. We talked a little, and there was then a moment of doubt; I think I finally expressed, among those lines of graves, a resolution for which I had been searching for years.

The Japanese War Memorial, which POWs were forced to build some time in 1944, is a sadder and more neglected place. A cenotaph now showing blotches of weather and stress was erected in a compound surrounded by low trees; it is ill-kept and deserted. The cenotaph incorporates plaques to the dead of other countries, like an afterthought. Some ex-POWs, who can never forgive, throw stones at the memorial when they come here; the scars are visible on the stained concrete. Mrs Nagase told us that morning that her brother was killed in the last days of the war, somewhere in Burma, one of the many young men who were never given a chance.

Nagase and I talked a lot about the railway. The utter futility of it still astonished both of us. The P5Tamids, that other great engineering disaster, are at least a monument to our love of beauty, as well as to slave labour; the railway is a dead end in the jungle. Most of the track in the border area was torn up after the war, the sleepers used for firewood or for building houses. The line had some strategic military value at the time, but only in the service of a doomed campaign that cost millions of lives. The line has become literally pointless. It now runs for about 60 miles and then stops. The rest of it is as abandoned as the little line which I found on Unst in the Shetland Islands in 1933.

As we walked and talked, I felt that my strange companion was a person who I would have been able to get on with long ago had we met under other circumstances. We had a lot in common: books, teaching, an interest in history, though he still found one of my ‘manias’ puzzling; and I warmed to him more and more as the time in Kanburi went by. We were due to fly to Japan together at the end of the week.

I still needed to consider the matter of forgiveness, since it so concerned him. Assuming that our meeting, in itself, constituted forgiveness, or that the passage of time had made it irrelevant, seemed too easy; once someone raises forgiveness to such a pitch of importance you become judicial. I felt I had to respond to Nagase’s sense of the binding or loosening force of my decision.

A kind Thai woman who we met that week tried to explain the importance of forgiveness in Buddhism to me; I understood that whatever you do you get back in this life and if what you have done is tainted with evil and you have not made atonement for it, evil is returned to you in the next life with interest. Nagase dreaded hell, and it seemed that our first meeting had made parts of both our lives hellish already. Even if I could not grasp the theology fully, I could no longer see the point of punishing Nagase by a refusal to reach out and forgive him. What mattered was our relations in the here and now, his obvious regret for what he had done and our mutual need to give our encounter some meaning beyond that of the emptiness of cruelty. It was surely worth salvaging as much as we could from the damage to both our lives. The question was now one of choosing the right moment to say the words to him with the formality that the situation seemed to demand.

We flew to Osaka, surrounded by Japanese businessmen. I was separated from Patti until a very sophisticated gendeman, speaking excellent English, heard from her what we were about and gave up his seat so that we could be together. Mrs Nagase and some of her pupils, young professional women of great charm and courtesy, met us at the airport and within a couple of hours we were on the extraordinary bullet train from Osaka to Okayama; it was like riding a missile adhering to the rails. We sat on the top deck as we swept past the continuous spread of small houses and other buildings along the coast of the inland sea.

Kurashiki, where we went next, is a jewel, an Oxford or a Bath among Japan’s devastated and rebuilt cities, almost untouched by the war and its old city later spared by developers. I loved the wide, clean canal running through it, the swans and the little bridges. Yoshiko took us to *the old house’, her family’s pre-war residence which is maintained as a traditional Japanese dwelling. She comes from an old and substantial Kurashiki family, and she is proud of her city. The house is beautifril, with internal paper walls and graceful plain rooms furnished sparsely with low tables and hangings. We sat on cushions for the tea ceremony, though I was unable fully to concentrate on the intricate and graceful ritual because it was some time since I had attempted to sit cross-legged. I was struck, though, by the low doors of the tea-house in the yard, built small so that a man wearing a sword could not pass through them. This seemed a civilized precaution.

In the ‘new house’, where the Nagases live, I saw the same chaos of books and papers with which I am surrounded at home. One day I sat unwittingly in his study in the same chair, in almost the same position, in which Nagase had sat for his photograph for the Japan Times and in which I had rediscovered him.

Nagase was determined to show me the cherry blossoms at their finest, and it became a running joke. He would announce each morning that the cherry blossoms were ‘open today 30 per cent’, or 45 per cent, and that soon we would be able to see them as they were meant to be seen. He once took us to a park in Okayama, and was disappointed to find that in that particular garden the blossoms could only be judged to be 40 per cent open.

It was astonishing to be walking around this handsome town: a few years before I could not have imagined meeting a Japanese person voluntarily and now I was strolling in streets full of them, a tourist in my seventies, an honoured guest of two good people. Everyone we met was extremely courteous, and it was wonderful to me to see these crowds of smiling, well-dressed young people who are heirs to an economic superpower that leads the world in electronics, when I remembered my patient explanations of how a radio transmitter works in that wooden room in Siam in 1943!

Their command of engineering skill was displayed most beautifully in the bridges over the inland sea, connecting Honshu and Shikoku. I asked specially to see them, since the marvel of the Forth Bridge was one of my childhood wonders. They form the greatest span of bridges in the world, nine miles long, a sequence of bridges leaping off and disappearing gracefully over the horizon.

So we did what tourists are expected to do in Japan, and it was most enjoyable, but this is not a travel book and all the time I was aware of an unresolved question between Nagase and me. I found it hard to choose the right moment; there were always others around, and Nagase had a tendency to wish to make our encounter public, a symbol of reconciliation, and this gave some of our outings the character of official visits, with Japanese pressmen dogging our footsteps.

Meanwhile, we attended to things that were important to both of us, in different ways. We went to Hiroshima, and Patti and I laid a bunch of mixed flowers on the memorial. A director of the Peace Memorial Museum, himself deformed by radiation, showed us around. Terrible photographs of burnt children, of people with radiation sickness, of obliterated streets; we saw a man pointing out, with the stump of his hand, the image of a human figure preserved as if it had been photographed by the flash of the atomic blast.

The whole atmosphere of Hiroshima is like that of a shrine. Nagase and I were guilty of violating its respectful busy gravity rather disgracefully. We were walking around the museum together, Patti and Yoshiko in firont of us with some of Nagase’s friends. In the background there was a hubbub of chattering and commentary. Suddenly, as Patti later told me, she heard an outburst of unseemly hilarity behind her. There we were, two old gentlemen laughing our heads off in this sanctum of peace.

We had been talking about the last days of the war. Nagase asked me when I had heard about the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. ‘On 8th August,’ I told him. He was astonished: this was at least two days before he and his unit were told about it. He wanted to know how we could possibly have known, locked up as we were in Changi and deprived of contact with the outside world. Ah, I told him, but of course we had a radio. And for some reason that set us off, even in a place of such awful seriousness.

One day, to the surprise of our hosts, I asked to see a memorial of a very different kind, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the centre of Japanese imperial tradition and the chief cult centre of what was once Japan’s state religion, Shinto Buddhism.

Nagase and I had talked about historical truth and he was concerned – almost to the point of obsession – with ensuring that the Japanese should be aware of what their army did in the name of the Emperor before 1945. He believes that there must be a break with all vestiges of the cult of obedience to authority; he is a militant spiritual humanist. He often talked about how there was so little in the way of good history to put into Japanese schoolchildren’s hands; so little encouragement to face up to the past and come to terms with it. Nagase’s crusading spirit, which is courageous and laudable, can become a little wearing, as when he wished to publicize our outings; but the more he talked the more I could understand his zeal. His obsession had become atonement and reconciliation, which need publicity – whereas mine had been with private remembering and revenge. The positions he takes up arouse fierce hostility in Japan. He once said that he would not be surprised ‘to wake up and find myself dead’.

A clearer picture of what he is fighting against cannot be seen than at Yasukuni, to which we were taken by Professor Nakahara, who we had the good fortune to meet again. The shrine is at one level a moving war memorial, dedicated to the worship of those who died for the Emperor, but at another it is an unashamed celebration of militarism. Cherry blossom trees are bedecked with little white ribbons with personal messages and requests. In the grounds you can find a monument to the Kempeitai – it is like seeing a memorial to the Gestapo in a German cathedral. In firont of a museum building next to the shrine, and very much part of it, is parked a field gun, for all the world like the Imperial War Museum in London – except that this is a place of religious worship. And alongside the artillery-piece, there is an immaculate C56 steam locomotive, described by the shrine authorities as the first engine to pass along the Burma Railway. It stands proud, its smoke-deflectors polished and its great wheels pressing down into the gravel, its beauty a monument to barbarism.

Nagase told me how he had protested vigorously when the C56 was installed at Yasukuni in 1979. He wrote to the officials of the shrine, and reminded anyone who would listen that Tojo is reputed to have visited Siam when the construction of the railway was about to start, and said that it must be completed even though one prisoner should die for every sleeper on the line; and Nagase had pointed out that this particular engine demanded a sleeper for every metre of track. Both Tojo, as a soldier of the Emperor, and the machine are worshipped at Yasukuni.

In all the time I spent in Japan I never felt a flash of the anger I had harboured against Nagase all those years, no backwash of that surge of murderous intent I had felt on finding out that one of them was still alive. Indeed Nagase gave me the impression of having been prepared for a much more irritated and difficult encounter than ours turned out to be.

Perhaps that is why he seemed afraid, suddenly, when I asked to see him alone in his hotel room in Tokyo, where we were staying prior to our return to Britain. Days before, I had worked out what to do. I had decided to give him a piece of paper which I thought would meet both our needs, and had planned to give it to him in Kyoto; he had wanted very much to show me the great temples of the ancient former capital of Japan.

It rained heavily on the morning of our planned visit to Kyoto, and Nagase felt unwell, so we went with Yoshiko to that extraordinary place. In the rain, the glitter of the Golden Pavilion was softened, its image in the lake blurred. We walked around the stark, simple gardens and looked at everything we could, but I was worried about Nagase’s brush with his old cardiac trouble and anxious now to make our final peace.

Looking out the window of our room in the nondescript, modem Tokyo hotel, I could see through a gap created by a building site the coming and going of trains in the huge Tokyo railway station. I sat waiting for Patti and Yoshiko to go out. My request to see Nagase on his own must have carried a charge of electricity, for it disturbed Yoshiko and she said to Patti, with a worried look on her face, ‘Heart’, and glanced pleadingly at me. I said that it would be all right, but she could not hide her distress.

After they had gone I went next door. There in that quiet room, with the faint noise of trains and the city streets rising up to us, I gave Mr Nagase the forgiveness he desired.

I read my short letter out to him, stopping and checking that he understood each paragraph. I felt he deserved this careful formality. In the letter I said that the war had been over for almost fifty years; that I had suffered much; and that I knew that although he too had suffered throughout this time, he had been most courageous and brave in arguing against militarism and working for reconciliation. I told him that while I could not forget what happened in Kanburi in 1943, I assured him of my total forgiveness.

He was overcome with emotion again, and we spent some time in his room talking quietly and without haste.

The next morning we saw Nagase and Yoshiko to their train back to Kurashiki. He phoned us from there that evening to make sure that we were all right. I thought that I had seen him for the last time, perhaps for the last time in our lives. The following day we ourselves made our way to the train for Osaka, from where we would fly to Britain. When after a journey of three hours, the train drew to a halt in Osaka, we stepped on to the platform. At the exact spot where our carriage door opened there was my friend Nagase standing with Yoshiko, smiling and bowing. They knew exactly which coach we were in, and they were the excited children, so pleased to have tricked us; it was good to see them.

They took us to the airport and we left Japan. As the plane tilted us over the bay of Osaka, I held my wife’s hand. I felt that I had accomplished more than I could ever have dreamed of. Meeting Nagase has turned him from a hated enemy, with whom friendship would have been unthinkable, into a blood-brother. If I’d never been able to put a name to the face of one of the men who had harmed me, and never discovered that behind that face there was also a damaged life, the nightmares would always have come from a past without meaning. And I had proved for myself that remembering is not enough, if it simply hardens hate.

Back in Thailand, at the Chungkai War Cemetery, when Patti and I walked off on our own, she had had a moment of doubt as she looked at the rows and rows of graves, and wondered whether we were doing the right thing after all. It was only a moment, for we both knew we should be there. I said then: ‘Sometime the hating has to stop.’