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Ryozo Watabe
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Demons still haunt Christian soldier
He didn't kill but couldn't stop atrocities
by Setsuko Kamiya
He didn't kill but couldn't stop atrocities
by Setsuko Kamiya
26th in a series
Before
and during the war, Japanese believed the Emperor was a living god. They also
believed they were fighting for him and dying on the battlefield was honorable.
Christians
were often the targets of discrimination during the era of Emperor worship,
largely because they were judged as not regarding the monarch’s divinity as absolute.
Some people may have even viewed Christians as followers of an enemy religion.
During the war, however, Christian churches obeyed authorities and were
controlled by the military government.
Ryozo
Watabe, 86, is highly critical of Japanese churches for giving in to what he
now sees as a government that misled the people into wars of aggression. A
devout Christian, Watabe followed his faith and refused to kill as a soldier.
And
though he never took anyone’s life, Watabe is still in agony. He says he has no
words to express how much he regrets not being able to stop others from
killing.
“As
a Christian, the answer was clear. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But I couldn’t say
that to others,” Watabe said.
To this
day, he is filled with remorse that he lived in fear rather than faith during
the war.
Watabe
was a 21-year-old economics student at Chuo University in Tokyo when he was
drafted in January 1944. He was among the university students who were forced
after 1943 to give up their studies and make up for the shortage in soldiers.
Watabe
said he didn’t consider refusing the mandatory service, not because it would
have been futile but because, as he put it, the Bible says everyone must submit
to the governing authorities.
“But
I was determined to refuse (to do certain things) without reservation, if I
faced a situation where I should do so based on my faith,” Watabe said.
There
were a few people around Watabe who advised him to follow orders if he wanted
to avoid getting into trouble in the military.
Growing
up in the town of Oguni, Yamagata Prefecture, Watabe developed his religious
beliefs under the influence of his father, Yaichiro, a dedicated Christian and
disciple of Kanzo Uchimura, an important figure in Japan’s Christian community
in the early 1900s. The rural area had very few other Christians.
Watabe
said he grew up in an environment where it was natural that his father welcomed
his nanny to the table for meals with the family, teaching him that
discrimination was not the way of their God. In those days, it was common for
masters and servants to eat separately.
Before
Watabe’s departure to China in January 1944, his father begged him to come home
alive because the war was not worth dying for. On the night before his
departure, “my father also told me to always pray to
God,” Watabe said.
While
Watabe was in China, his father was seized by the special police because of his
Christian beliefs. His mother and sisters meanwhile suffered unfair
distribution of food and supplies, he said.
Once
staff officers learned of Watabe’s religious beliefs, he was blacklisted. “In
the military, they had a term for those who were considered at risk of
disobeying the regime — ‘tagged’ — and I became one of them,” he said.
Watabe
was assigned to a brigade based in Hebei Province in northern China. He was in
a group of 49 new recruits who were trained for combat.
In April
that year Watabe faced his first test. One morning, a senior soldier announced
that as part of the recruits’ training and to test their nerve, they were going
to bayonet Chinese Eighth Route Army prisoners of war.
Watabe
said he could only pray to God for guidance.
Later,
when the first POW was brought to the execution site, an officer instructed the
trainees to thrust their bayonets upward when they stabbed and demonstrated the
technique. Watabe said he couldn’t believe the horrific sight.
The
recruits were ordered to follow suit. Watabe recalled how the first one shook
as he ran to bayonet the Chinese victim. The soldier’s first attempt failed, or
at least it wasn’t the way the officer had shown them. The commander shouted at
him and ordered to do it again. And he did.
“No
one had killed others before this. Murder was a crime that resulted in a life
sentence or the death penalty, but now it was an act of service to the
Emperor,” he said. “I just feel that there were actually few people who could accept that
without much hesitation.”
But one
after another, the recruits took turns executing the POWs. Watabe’s turn was
approaching.
Right
before his turn came, Watabe said he heard the voice of God: “Put on Christ. It is a sin not to follow God’s teaching.
Refuse the slaughter with your life.”
Watabe
later heard that the human body can feel pain when one is under extreme
pressure, but he believes it was God talking to him. And on hearing his voice,
Watabe did not move.
The
commander came to him and asked: “Are you telling me
that you refused to kill the POW because of your faith?” To this, he replied
“Yes, sir!”
Several
hardened troops cursed Watabe and spat on him. One seized him by the collar.
The ranking officer stopped them and ordered the training to resume. He said
Watabe would be punished later.
Watabe
said he was not court-martialed or locked up. Nor was he condemned. Instead, he
was subjected to torture. It began at night a few days later and it came in
many variations.
Ranking
officers would take any occasion to beat him, using gaiters, boots and belt
buckles. They also kicked and punched him. On other occasions, he was made to
hold a wash basin with a hole over his head and bear the water dripping from it
in the cold weather.
Sometimes
when one soldier failed to follow orders, all of the recruits had to face each
other and slap the other. Watabe said that because his platoon had 15 soldiers,
he was always the odd man out and had to face a hardened veteran who would use
any tool at hand to beat him.
“I
thought it was happening to me because my faith was not strong enough,” Watabe said.
On one
such occasion, Watabe passed out. When he came to, a medic talked to him. “He told me that I was a fool, and I should just shut my
eyes and stab (the POW) and that would be the end of it,” Watabe said. “These words still give me the shivers.”
Standing
out as a rebel, Watabe was assigned several times to other duties. He thinks
the officers didn’t want a troublemaker under their command. In the end, he
became one of the unit’s two communications soldiers. Watabe was trained in
Morse code and became good at it. He feels luck was on his side as this
assignment helped him survive.
Despite
avoiding direct combat, however, the two years he spent in the military forced
him to witness many atrocities.
Of all
the horrific sights, Watabe said the memory of taking a village with around 500
households still haunts him. The combat lasted six days, and Watabe estimates
that around 500 out of the 800 Japanese soldiers taking part were killed or
severely wounded. All of the villagers were killed.
During
the operation, Watabe helped treat wounded soldiers with the medics. He saw
soldiers turning ferocious as the combat became severe. But the image that
haunts him to this day is the execution of a young Chinese woman and her small
child.
“I just
cannot forget the innocent look in the eyes of the baby. I don’t think he knew
what was happening,” Watabe said. “At that moment, I should have shouted not to
kill them, or stood in front of the baby and the mother and be killed with
them. That’s what a man with faith should have done. But I closed my eyes.”
Watabe
said he is ashamed he was intimidated by something other than God, believing
this means his faith wavered.
He
secretly kept a diary in the form of tanka. Soldiers were strictly prohibited
from keeping diaries and their belongings were inspected, but Watabe wrote his
poems in a small notebook when he was in the latrine. Luckily, it was never
found.
After the
war, Watabe worked as an official at the Board of Audit. He kept quiet about
his experiences until about 15 years ago, when his granddaughter sat on his lap
and innocently asked him whether war was scary.
In 1994,
Watabe published “Chiisana Teikou” (“Small Resistance”), a compilation of
around 600 of his wartime tanka. Each describes what he saw or felt as he lived
through the ordeal.
Since
then, Watabe has given numerous speeches and has written about his experiences
and thoughts on the war in the hope that young people will not repeat the same
mistake.
He
repeatedly said that the fact he could not try to stop others from killing was
not simply out of fear of being persecuted, but because he also could not stand
up to authority, a quality he feels is typical of Japanese. And he feels people
need to overcome this.
“It’s
easy for a person to blindly follow the decision of a government or a nation,
but that decision is not always right,” Watabe
said. “Even though one may end up disobeying orders,
each person must establish a strong ‘self’ and act according to their
conscience. This could be anguishing, but in the long run that’s the only key
to happiness.”
In this
occasional series, we interview firsthand witnesses of Japan’s march to war and
its crushing defeat who wish to pass on their experiences to younger
generations.
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| Military portrait of prison camp guard Takashi Nagase |
Resisting immoral
leadership
Dec
3, 2009
Thank
you for running Setsuko Kamiya’s Nov. 19 article, “Demons
still haunt Christian soldier.” The story of Ryozo Watabe is important. I
was moved to read his words of personal struggle against what he knew to be
immoral, and I am thankful for his desire to share his experiences with others.
Watabe
spoke of the Japanese church obeying the government during the time, and yet
there are examples of churches that refused to obey the government, such as the
Mino Mission church in Ogaki, Gifu Prefecture, in 1933. This church stood
against “kokutai” (state structure) and Shinto militarism, and was persecuted
because of it. It was a conflict between the principles of “Don’t resist that
which is more powerful” and “We must obey God rather than man.”
Watabe’s
Christian faith served him as a guide for what was moral or immoral, whereas
those around him gave their allegiance to whatever power was winning at the
time. Another example of resistance is found in the founder of the Mukyoukai in
Japan, Uchimura Kanzo. Watabe is right when he says we must learn to resist
following immoral leadership.