July 28, 2000: Back to the travails of Jim Yoshida in the Imperial Japanese Army. For those of you who need more context, see "An EPJ" parts five and six.
My only consolation was that I excelled in ju-kenjitsu or bayonet practice with a wooden rifle and a rubber tipped wooden bayonet. My superior weight and height enabled me to handle all comers. I could take on a dozen men, one after another, flip them, shove them over, and pin them down. . . I would have liked nothing better than to meet any or all of the noncoms in ju-kenjitsu, but they permitted the recruits to take on only each other.
As a soldier I performed reasonably well . . . But I still faltered during recitations from the Military Handbook. Sergeant Kido seemed to take a perverse delight in testing me. And when I failed as I invariably did, sometimes he gave me the rifle treatment. Sometimes he slapped me across the mouth or struck me on the cheeks, jeering and ridiculing me. "Yoshida, you are the most stupid private I have seen. How long have you been studying the Gunjin Chokuyu? Three months? Six months? And still you cannot recite properly. Stupid, stupid, stupid." Then, whack, a blow across my face.
The long passages of Gunjin Chokuyu were so much gibberish to me, couched in a very difficult, scholarly form of Japanese that was alien to everything I knew. . . I could not understand why Kido seemed to have it in for me. He was harsh toward the other recruits but the harshness seemed to turn into cruelty when he was dealing with me . . .
[During a military encounter, Yoshida's cannon crew, the rentai-ho crew, screw up and put themselves in unnecessary danger. Although Kido saves them, he is furious with them.]
It was past midnight when we returned to Yoyang. We were ready to hit the sack but Sergeant Kido had other ideas. He followed us into the barracks. "The eight men making up the rentai-ho crew will line up facing each other, four on a side," he ordered. "Now listen to me. You were failures as soldiers today. Your performance was abominable. You forgot everything we taught you. We will now help you to remember."
What happened then was a nightmare. Kido ordered the men on one side to strike those on the other side. In the face. With closed fists. Then on signal the men on the other side were to strike back. We were to punish each other, first one side, then the other, hitting as hard as we could. I was aghast. Outweighing my opponent by sixty pounds, I could kill him if I punched him full in the face while he stood without attempting to protect himself. I pulled my first punch. Surprised, my opponent pulled his punch when it was his turn. Sergeant Nakamura caught on immediately.
"Yoshida, you aren't going to get off that easy," he growled. Pushing my opponent out of the way, the sergeant took the man's place. If he saw the gleam of triumph in my eye at the prospect of slugging him legally, it was because I could hardly restrain my enthusiasm. But Sergeant Nakamura outfoxed me again. He traded places with me after each blow so that he was punching every time, and I was always at the receiving end.
He bruised my cheek and cut my lip. I could feel a welt rising on my right cheek. My left eye was half closed and still Kido called out the cadence - - one, two, one, two. I could hear the men weeping, not so much in pain but in anger at the stupidity of all this, the inhumanity of punishing a friend for nothing, the utter nightmarish bestiality of this exercise in sadism. If there was any consolation, it was in noticing with my good eye that Sergeant Nakamura had sprained a knuckle. He winced each time he hit me, and his blows became much less forceful. Finally, it was Nakamura who told Kido: "That's enough. We don't want to overdo it." The throbbing pain in my head made sleep come hard that night. I heard one of the men sobbing quietly.
Next morning just before roll call, I encountered Lieutenant Hamasaki in the hallway. With a surprised look he stopped me. "Yoshida, what happened to your face?"
For a fleeting moment, I felt an impulse to tell him the truth. And then I remembered an age-old code. Men don't snitch. I would take care of Nakamura and Kido in my own way when the opportunity came. [Also, to the erudite perv it seems very unlikely that given the Japanese respect for hierarchy that Hamasaki would have done anything to Yoshida's NCOs. From other accounts I have read of life in the imperial Japanese military soldiers being made to slap each other was a common form of punishment; Hamasaki probably knew about it.]
The lieutenant saw the other bruised faces and told Nakamura to dismiss us for the day.