TAKEN CAPTIVE: A JAPANESE POW'S STORY
by Shohei Ooka
translated from the Japanese and edited by Wayne P. Lammers
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996
A Pacific Basin Institute Book

From the Foreword by Frank B. Gibney

Shortly after New Year's Day, 1944, a thirty-five-year-old literary critic named Shohei Ooka was called to serve in the Japanese Imperial Army. His summons was typically terse and admitted no appeal. Upon reporting to a regimental depot in Tokyo, he was given rudimentary training and shipped off with a newly formed infantry battalion to join the garrison troops on the Japanese-occupied island of Mindoro, then nervously awaiting the expected American landing in the Philippines.

There were few more improbable soldiers. A graduate of Kyoto Imperial University but born and raised inTokyo, Ooka was part of a small but vigorous group of young intellectuals who were attracted to the study of European, in particular French, literature. By that time, he had translated several works by Stendhal. In fact, translating Stendhal's detached descriptions of nineteenth-century French battlefields was as close as Ooka had come to experiencing the horrors of war.

To become a private soldier in the brutal Japanese army of those days was a sudden introduction to the real thing--and in Ooka's case, under the most adverse possible conditions. Predictably, he was repelled by army life. In February he wrote a caption for a photograph taken of him in uniform: "Second Class Private--and not very happy about it. I must try to keep my hatred for the military from turning into hatred for humankind."

On December 15, 1944, two U.S. regimental combat teams landed on Mindoro, as a prelude to the larger attack on Luzon. There were fewer than a thousand Japanese troops on the island at the time. They were unsupplied and unsupported, written off as expendable by General Yamashita Tomoyuki's headquarters. Ooka's unit was soon scattered. Hundreds were killed by the advancing Americans. Those who were left, hungry and wounded, wandered through the hills in small groups, scavenging in the inhospitable jungle. Some offered last-ditch resistance. Others committed suicide, following the stated Japanese military doctrine that to be taken prisoner meant ultimate disgrace for a soldier and his family.

In the end, many were in fact taken prisoner as the fighting entered its final stages. Ooka was one of these. After his capture, he was brought to an American prisoner-of-war camp on Leyte. There he remained until he was repatriated to Japan at the end of 1945.

This experience changed Ooka's life. On returning home, he began to sort out what he had felt and thought--the reflections of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan observer thrown with his companions into a desperate, primitive struggle for life. Taken Captive (Furyoki) was published in separate parts between 1948 and 1951, and it established Ooka's postwar reputation. In 1951, he published a second war book, the novel Fires on the Plain (Nobi), which won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature and was later made into a prize-winning film. Although he wrote other highly regarded books over the years, the war experience dominated his thinking. One of his last books, A Record of the Battle of Leyte (Reite senki), was characterized by the critic Kato Shuichi as "the finest work of war literature since the [medieval] Heike Monogatari."

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (click on 1, 3, and 7 to read excerpts)

1. My Capture
   
2. San Jose Field Hospital
   
3. Rainy Tacloban
   
4. Sunny Palo
   
5. Living as POWs
   
6. Brothers in Arms
   
7. Seasons
   
8. Labor
   
9. August 10
   
10. New Prisoners and Old
    
11. Theatricals
    
12. Going Home
13. Appendix: Nishiya Company Chronicle

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