Courage, mon amie

Letters

Vol. 24 No. 8 · 25 April 2002

From Hideki Matsuoka

Terry Castle and her readers (LRB, 4 April) may be interested to hear of my experience as a Japanese boy visiting war memorials in England. In 1977 the headmaster of my school in Yamagata Prefecture announced that he would take a dozen boys from the intermediate school (between the ages of 10 and 14) to accompany him on a sponsored trip to England that summer. Every boy would be expected to walk 12 miles each day. The total length of the trip would be ten days. The money raised would go to charity. Only those at the top of each class would qualify for the opportunity, although we understood this to mean Dr Koshiro's favourites, of whom I was one. The headmaster's youngest son would be in the group.

This was the year Dr Koshiro was due to retire.

All of us at the school knew that our headmaster, who was in his early sixties, had been in service in the war. Not unusually for a man of his age, he did not talk about his experiences. The only pupil who expressed any curiosity was female and not one of Dr Koshiro's favourites.

So we prepared ourselves for two weeks in the beautiful county of Berkshire. We were told before we left, without any of our parents in attendance, that we would be visiting many war memorials. Those of our parents who had been abroad would have done this, Dr Koshiro said; not to visit would be inconsiderate. We had not seen photographs of them only because taking pictures of war memorials was considered inappropriate. We must believe, he assured us, that our parents would have behaved correctly. And so must we. Our visit would be our way of showing our nation's sorrow for what had happened in the 1940s. I don't remember that any of us regarded this as particularly onerous; it was like taking time out of a holiday to visit elderly relatives.

Our first night on British soil was spent in a campsite near Henley-on-Thames. We woke to rain denting the tent canvas. As we gathered for morning roll-call Dr Koshiro emerged from his one-man tent in the uniform of a Japanese officer of the Imperial Army. He then read the list of names as if nothing was unusual. For me, the experience was strangely exciting. It was as if we had suddenly become part of a fancy-dress party. In Japan, this would have been almost unimaginable. My enjoyment was somewhat moderated when, as we began our walk, our headmaster unfurled the old prewar Japanese flag. He proceeded with the flag on a short pole resting on his shoulder. He later informed us that this was in imitation of the British Forces surrendering in Malaya. Our little group walked unmolested into Henley and up to the war memorial in the centre of the town. Here we read the names of the fallen and Dr Koshiro led us in a short prayer. It was early in the morning on a Sunday and there were few people about. Standing there in our shorts, we didn't connect the dead with the war against Japan. Dr Koshiro told us he knew some of these men, that they had died in his camp. The Berkshire Regiment had played a prominent role in the war in Asia. They were all, he told us, brave men. By being here, we were honouring them. That night he told us how despicable some Japanese had been during that dark time. He knew because he had been in charge of a prisoner of war camp in Burma. He promised us that he had done his best to treat the captives humanely. Becoming very agitated, he told us that the Army had sent him drunkards, mental defectives and common criminals as guards; it was they who behaved so cruelly and gave our country such a bad name. As schoolchildren, we were not aware that our country had a particularly odious reputation. We thought of ourselves as rather obscure, though this was perhaps more a reflection of our provincial status.

Along the way I remember two small children, rather poorly dressed and not under apparent parental supervision, asking if the man leading us was the Emperor. Dr Koshiro laughed and gave the children some sweets from home. This seemed to confirm them in their belief. This is perhaps not so strange when we remember it was the year of Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, when many Heads of State visited, though none perhaps in this manner.

In a village, whose name I forget, we were met in the square by a policeman who told Dr Koshiro that he should, for his own safety, exchange his uniform for ordinary clothes. Patiently, our headmaster explained that he had come to pay his respects to the men who had been so badly treated. I remember him using the words 'apology' and 'sorry'. The policeman took him to one side. Later, a sombre Dr Koshiro told us that veterans of the war who lived in the town might be upset by the sight of his uniform. It did not matter, he told us, because he could still pray for their souls however he was dressed. I now understand that the sight of a Japanese officer would be the last thing a former prisoner of war would want to see. The only death threats Dr Koshiro received, however, were when we arrived home, from far-right activists who thought that what he had done was a humiliation for Japan.

As for our own safety, we were only once in danger. One night a group of young men, probably drunk, caused a disturbance at our campsite. They were chanting 'We want the Japs.' Suddenly we felt that Dr Koshiro might have to save us. He was clearly terrified. Tents were being hit and a considerable commotion was in progress. The oldest among us said that, if necessary, he would fight. Dr Koshiro got out of his tent alone, with his sword, and confronted the youths. By this time others who had been disturbed were standing around in the dark. He said that he had been a camp governor, that he had treated Englishmen badly, and that he was very sorry. He then offered his sword to the leader of the youths, saying that if he felt that a wrong should be avenged, he should do so now. After a brief silent interval the youths turned away laughing, carrying the sword in its lacquer sheath. They did not return. I shall always admire Dr Koshiro for this. We were none of us more than 13 years old. Some of these youths seemed to be in their twenties, perhaps even older.

The next day, we were going to London.

When we arrived for a few days' sightseeing (no memorials mentioned) the Jubilee celebrations for the Queen were in full swing. Accommodation was impossible to find. We were reduced to camping out in the public parks. We did meet some individuals who were passionately concerned with Japan's conduct towards Europeans in the war, and yet showed no resentment towards ourselves, or Dr Koshiro. Many Japanese tourists have had similar experiences. I was told that a veteran of the war in Asia had spoken for some time to Dr Koshiro, who had handed him the officer's uniform. This peace offering was not appreciated, and the clothing was dropped on the ground. After this, the uniform was stowed away and none of us saw it again. I remember joining in the singing and general festivities of the Jubilee holiday.

This is not simply the story of a gentle, deluded old man whose attempts to expiate his guilt were poorly judged. Certainly, he took us with him on false pretences and exposed us to possible harm. If he was trying to impress on us the need to evaluate aspects of our country's past which have perhaps not received the attention they should in the Japanese curriculum, I can attest that this was a failure. When we returned home our parents were appalled to hear what had happened, and they were all relieved when Dr Koshiro retired. The sponsorship money was not collected, and the very idea of pupils going on trips further afield than the southern islands was dismissed.

In Tokyo some years later, I heard from the elder Koshiro son that his father's claims about his role in the war had been exposed. It transpired that although he had joined the Army he had been allowed to continue his literary studies. Throughout the period 1942-44 he was preparing his doctoral thesis on Balzac. He had never been a camp commander; he had never left Japan. Unless he felt guilt that he should have been fighting, he had no reason to reproach himself. My interlocutor informed me that his brother, who had been on the trip, was so ashamed of this deception that he had not attended his father's funeral.

While standing before the memorials I experienced sorrow for so many dead, and this is not an emotion which can be countermanded. I do feel that one does not need to make so public an apology, and that such gestures can often be just that. Dr Koshiro appears to have been under the illusion that he could somehow carry the guilt of the nation on his shoulders. This is a fallacy. The sense of watching a high-risk fancy-dress performance at such a vulnerable age has left me with an ineradicable distrust of compulsory displays of sentiment. Yet I have found it necessary to question Japanese war behaviour, and how the country projects itself: sometimes it seems as if we think we were the principal victim. Perhaps Dr Koshiro is an example of what can happen if a culture internalises its guilt.

Hideki Matsuoka
Yokohama

From Andrew Makinson

In her search for historical and literary exemplars of heroic women, Terry Castle may find some reward in looking back to the ancient Greeks. Sophocles' Antigone is the first character who springs to mind. But Vera Brittain's idealisation of the death of her fiancé, and the heroism that she draws from it, made me think of Euripides' Iphigenia, who, while the soldiers gather at Aulis, impatient for war, is required to submit to her own sacrifice to the goddess Artemis, in order to produce a favourable wind for the ships. At first overcome with fear and weakness and desperately afraid of death, she suddenly changes her mind, caught up in a heady mix of noble patriotism, youthful idealism and romantic intoxication with the cult of male heroism, of which the dashing but quixotic Achilles stands, much like Brittain's fiancé, as an equivocal representative.

Again, in The Trojan Women, Euripides traces the complex effects of military devastation on a series of female characters. The uncanny mania of his Cassandra resembles Brittain's traumatic hallucinations, while the black, nihilistic anguish of Andromache resonates with Castle's 'ghoulish' fascination with the sickening realities of death. But it is the emerging heroism of Hecuba that Castle may find most inspiring. At the close of the play, the former Queen, faced with the humiliating prospect of being designated the concubine of the wily Odysseus, lifts her broken body up from the rubble and ashes of Troy and begins the long walk towards the Greek ships.

Andrew Makinson
Epsom, Surrey

From Graham Kemp

As a sometime visitor to a great-uncle's Somme battlefield grave, I'm more confident than Terry Castle that these plots contain what the headstones advertise. Philip Longworth's The Unending Vigil, which she cites, describes the extraordinary pains taken by the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission and its predecessors to identify and where necessary reinter every body which could be found. It's true that headstones lined up on front-line burial trenches are less orderly than those that result from cemetery concentration and battlefield clearance, but nowhere are bodies 'piled willy-nilly'. Nor is there anything like the German mass graves at Langemarck or the French ossuary at Verdun. There's an obvious irony here, but the principle was thought important.

Graham Kemp
University of Liverpool

From Michael Barber

The occasional soldier in puttees seen at Shorncliffe by Terry Castle must certainly have been 'ghostly' because puttees were replaced by anklets when battledress was introduced c.1939.

Michael Barber
London SW19

From Joseph Nuttgens

Terry Castle describes her great-uncle as looking 'pale, spindly … rather stupid … and over-fond of self-abuse'. At my Catholic boarding school, it was the thinner, more sensitive and brainier boys who resisted, or persuaded us lesser mortals that they resisted, the temptation of that shameful, secretive act carried out in the inescapable presence of the Almighty and in full view of the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God Herself. The more robust, sportier ones, however, often in small, select groups, would find some remote spot in the school grounds, or a local haybarn, and get down to it with some zest – on the principle that if they were going to sin then they should at least get some fun out of it.

Joseph Nuttgens
High Wycombe

---

Vol. 24 No. 9 · 9 May 2002

From Eva Goldsworthy

Reading Terry Castle's essay (LRB, 4 April), I remembered the British cemetery in the small town of Pemba in Northern Mozambique. There are a couple of dozen tombstones, a memorial to men who died in the First World War. One stone reads: '237334 Sapper Archibald Rutherford, Royal Engineers, 25 February 1918. Age 21.' At the bottom is carved: SACRIFICED FOR MONARCHICAL AMBITION.

Eva Goldsworthy
Knighton, Powys

From David Craig

I find it hard to enter the mental world of someone like Terry Castle who believes it was 'noble' and 'sublime' for the soldiers in the Great War to 'slog forward deliberately' into the streams of bullets fired by the German machine-guns. These sons, brothers and fathers were going to their deaths to gain a few yards of waterlogged French terrain. If they had refused the homicidal orders of their commanders, they would have been shot down en masse by their own guns, as were hundreds of French mutineers. I grew up, in the 1930s, minus one uncle whom I never knew (killed not long before the 1918 Armistice), among friends of my father's who still struggled to breathe having been gassed in 1916. The prolonged atrocity of that war was a blight on the generation who fought it and on the next generation of us whose view of history as a series of ghastly, often avoidable calamities inflicted by ruling classes on overly meek citizens was shaped by what happened in Flanders, Gallipoli and the rest of the killing-fields.

David Craig
Burton-in-Kendal

From Marguerite Helmers

Terry Castle aligns herself with the British women who have written memorably about the war years, but does not offer evidence that other women from the US might be similarly interested. I count myself among those American females who are also possessed with the years 1914-18, but I have often noted that the Great War is not as much of a presence in American consciousness or culture as it is in England. Where one finds tangible memories of the war in every town in England – memorials in the town square, plaques in churches, framed photographs in homes – it's rare to find in the US as much care taken to preserve the memory of those Americans who fought and died. This no doubt accounts for some of the secretive hoarding of artefacts and reclusive harbouring of facts to which Castle alludes.

Marguerite Helmers
University of Wisconsin

From Stuart Hood

Michael Barber says that puttees were replaced by anklets in 1939 (Letters, 25 April). In August 1940, waiting to embark for the Middle East in the ranks of 4th Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, I was issued with knee-length puttees as part of my tropical uniform. We were led to believe that these difficult bits of gear were prescribed because – even though we were about to join an armoured division – ours was notionally a mounted unit. We had yet to learn that cavalry (i.e. armoured car) units in the desert were still putting out each evening the signal: 'Water horses.'

Stuart Hood
Brighton

From Anthony Buckley

Joseph Nuttgens informs us that at his Catholic boarding school the more robust and sporty pupils used to get together for sessions of group masturbation. Until the last few decades of the 20th century, the English language lacked the resources to make an adequate response to such a revelation. Now, however, on behalf of the civilised world, I say to Mr Nuttgens: thank you for sharing that with us.

Anthony Buckley
Coventry

---

Vol. 24 No. 10 · 23 May 2002

From Kaori Miyamoto

I am somewhat sceptical that the letter which appeared above the name Hideki Matsuoka in the issue dated 25 April was actually written by somebody from Japan. It reads like a typical Western romanticisation of Japanese society and culture, as seen in Madame Butterfly or Memoirs of a Geisha. There are a few indications that the writer may not have been really familiar with Japan. 1. The age of students in Japanese intermediate schools is 12 to 15, not 10 to 14. 2. The Japanese don't have a tradition of raising money by sponsored walks, nor generally of giving to charity, unlike in the West. 3. The Japanese are usually meticulously organised when it comes to trips, and it is unlikely that parents would be unaware of where their children were going and what they were going to do. In particular, it's unlikely that they would have allowed their children to stay in tents as opposed to hotels. 4. Japanese intermediate school students wouldn't have worn shorts at a war memorial in Britain. 5. Dr Koshiro would have been roasted if the parents found out what he'd done. 6. I don't believe that men were allowed to continue studies instead of serving in the Army in 1942-44, especially if the studies concerned something fluffy such as literature, and particularly the literature of France, an enemy country. There were very few people who pursued a doctoral degree in Japan back then anyway, and those who did so were unlikely to end up as headmasters of an intermediate school.

Kaori Miyamoto
Paris

From Elizabeth Robinson

Perhaps Terry Castle's puttee-wearing Shorncliffe soldier was not 'ghostly' at all (Letters, 25 April). Anklets may well have replaced puttees in 1939 – though Michael Barber does not say whether he is referring to long puttees, or short – but they proved unsatisfactory: they failed to anchor the trouser bottoms securely. Much more certain is the fact that my husband, in about 1965, fresh from Sandhurst, bought himself a pair of Foxe's puttees (short) in a pleasing light greenish fawn – which he dyed black (to resemble the anklets) and wore in comfort throughout his Army career and, as a Reservist, into the 1980s. Puttees were reintroduced in the early 1970s – in a sort of chutney-brown colour. They would seem to have the advantage over anklets or the modern high-cut boots of being infinitely adjustable to suit individual ankle configurations – and are highly recommended even for civilian wear, since they keep feet and ankles toasty-warm in the draughtiest house.

Elizabeth Robinson
Stroud

---

Vol. 24 No. 11 · 6 June 2002

From Yoshida Masayuki

I am confused by Kaori Miyamoto's letter (23 May). She accuses Hideki Matsuoka of being a Westerner romanticising Japanese society and culture, then promptly launches into a manifesto of idealised Japanese behaviour that wouldn't look out of place at the Zennippon Aikokusha Dantai Kaigi (National Conference of Patriotic Associations). To suggest that Japanese parents would be any more aware of where their children were going or what they were going to do than parents in any other culture highlights a problem that has always been peculiar to Japan: the denial of parental fallibility. Were Japanese parents superior to all others, there would not be such high instances of child prostitution in Japan. This, incidentally, is not a modern condition but dates back to the days of the war, when the Japanese Army enlisted 'comfort-women' to 'ease' the soldiers' wartime burden. Many of those enlisted – 'coerced' is probably the right word – were children. Today the circumstances are different and Japanese schoolchildren are selling their bodies for mobile phones. Do their parents know where they are or what they are doing?

Back in the war there were people who pursued academic studies – not many, but enough to warrant a mention. My uncle was among them. Contrary to what Miyamoto's schoolbooks may have taught her, history 'koshiki happyo' is never the entire story. The Nanjing Massacre did happen, and some Japanese felt shame, perhaps the same shame that Dr Koshiro experienced. Pockets of people wanted their lives back, pockets of people didn't appreciate the emperor worship that was crippling their country, and pockets of people did what they could to maintain their own sense of dignity and independence – including continuing their studies behind closed academic doors. Ironically, this is what the war came to symbolise for the Japanese. Koshiro was more patriotic than he perhaps thought himself to be, and needn't have carried so much guilt.

Yoshida Masayuki
Kuala Lumpur

From Chang-rae Park

As someone who has only limited knowledge of Japanese society and culture beyond manga and Kurosawa films, I suppose Kaori Miyamoto would think of me as someone who romanticises her people. But if Hideki Matsuoka is not Japanese, why would he make up such a story? There is a reluctance on Miyamoto's part to face up to the real issue at stake: Japan's wartime conduct and its subsequent refusal to acknowledge the effects of xenophobic militarism on its own society, let alone on those nations that Japan invaded.

Chang-rae Park
London W12

From Peter Regent

Marguerite Helmers (Letters, 9 May) conjectures that the fact that the First World War is 'not as much of a presence in American consciousness and culture as it is in England' is partly accounted for by the prevalence of war memorials and related memorabilia here. It seems perverse not to mention the obvious fact that the war memorials and the awareness have a common source in the fact that Britain was at war for four years, and the British Empire suffered over three million casualties, with over 900,000 dead, whereas the US was at war for 18 months, with troops in action for less than a year, and suffered 350,000 casualties, with 126,000 dead.

Peter Regent
Newport-on-Tay, Fife