Photo taken by Matt Prosser - Creative Commons
The Wikipedia article about the Battle of Biak says, correctly, that the Marines invaded Biak on May 27 and finally won the battle on August 17, but the description of the aftermath of this battle is fuzzy. The article says, “The Japanese fought to annihilation,” and that 4,000 Japanese were never found, MIA or presumed dead. It is as if they simply vanished from the earth, stepping through a portal to another dimension with the door closing forever behind them.
Fought to annihilation. That sounds like a sudden cataclysm, as if they were all decisively consumed in a single great conflagration. Vaporized. Raptured to heaven. So often, the language we use to describe wars is obfuscatory, deliberately or unconsciously concealing an atrocity or papering over a moral ambiguity. A word like a smear on the page. Nothing to see here.
This is one of those instances.
***
On May 29, 1945, a report was submitted detailing the interrogation of Tabata Kazuo, a sergeant in the medical corps who was captured on January 2 while searching for food in the vicinity of American soldiers bivouacked on the west side of Biak island. By this time, the American military had gained control of most of the island, but pockets of Japanese soldiers who had not surrendered were hiding in the mountainous interior of the island. Sergeant Kazua was one of them. He told his captors to be en route to deliver the regimental flag pole of his unit to Battalion Headquarters and thereby surrender himself. He was 26 years old, 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 132 pounds. Kazua reported that he had served in the 222nd Infantry Regiment and had worked as a clerk in a government lumber mill before he entered the military. He was one of just 200 Japanese soldiers who surrendered during and after the Battle of Biak. Most of them had died in battle, many burned to death by gasoline bombs tossed into the caves where they were hiding. Some committed suicide rather than be captured.
The report he gave to his interrogators is shocking. After the Americans defeated the main Japanese force defending the airfield on the southeastern part of the island in August, the remnants of the 222nd had divided into small groups to avoid capture, and they were wandering the high country in the island’s interior. They were starving and morale was low. Military discipline had begun to break down. Some men deserted their units and disappeared into the jungle. The sick were murdered in what the report describes as “mercy killings.” In mid-October, one of the noncommissioned officers in his group killed a man with a saber whose leg was too swollen for him to walk. Some injured or sick men who could not keep up were left to die. If a man died in the bivouac area, he would be buried in a shallow grave. At night, some soldiers would dig up the bodies to eat the flesh.
A soldier from another group was killed at night and the murderers cannibalized his corpse.
Sargeant. Kazuo also reported that it was dangerous to walk around at night alone or unarmed. Starvation was driving some of the men to turn on one another. Some men died of fever. Others died of starvation, pleading for a pinch of salt as they died.
All the while, they were being hunted. “Some, while seeking food, were killed by the enemy, some by the natives,” he reported. Sometimes the men were able to dig up potatoes from abandoned gardens.
In his written statement, he says “Never in the history of the world’s warfare, has an army met with so tragic a fate as is the lot of the present Japanese force on Biak Island, whose members continually roam the jungles in search of food; all will inevitably die of starvation.”
***
A U.S. reconnaissance team discovered one of these small groups, a camp of seven starving Japanese soldiers, taking them by surprise. This is the report that Al Rogers gave in a 2020 article in the Crossville Chronicle. He was 98 years old at the time, recounting the story to a reporter.
“All were killed,” he said bluntly.
While searching the camp, one of the American GIs discovered a diary that was written by the group’s commanding officer, a Captain, on the backs of labels peeled from cans of plum tomatoes and condensed milk his men had stolen from the Americans. The journal begins around August 30, 1944 and runs to the end of December of that year. In it, he shares his hope for a Japanese counterattack and eventual victory over the Americans.
He seems like a sensitive soul. On the back of a label for Del Monte sliced peaches he wrote a beautiful poem called “White Butterfly”
White Butterfly
Butterfly, why are you so silent?
Just about the time the sun rises up in the valley,
you always appear from nowhere,
Although you spread your wings at times,
you come to stop and remain silent.
You fly here without any sound:
May I ask where is your home?
Crossing over that valley and then the next,
'til you reach a cedar tree in a wide field
Why a butterfly has flown by,
Its toward the evening and the insects hissing.
The rats and eagles are beginning to appear
You do not go home right away
your folks will start to worry.
Elsewhere in this makeshift journal, he wrote, “I sneaked secretly into the enemy position to steal their rations. This happened one evening when the moon was shining brightly.”
Another entry was written on the wrapper of Alpine sweetened condensed milk: "This milk is very good. It was found by Sup. Pvt. Kurimura beneath some leaves one morning. He returned without finding any bread. The next time we will find some at all costs."
On one of the Del Monte labels, the Captain wrote, "There are seven of us remaining. I wonder what has happened to the others. Must one suffer so much in order to live?"
On other labels, the Captain referred to his two sons and his family in Japan. He worries that he will die and no one will ever know what happened to him.
Rogers learned about the diary years after the war ended, while attending a veterans reunion. Someone brought the labels and an English translation to the event.
“We were taught the Japanese were dogs,” he admitted, “but I understand after reading his diary they were educated men, just like us, just fighting for their country.”
Rogers also reported that he had tried several times to locate the Captain’s sons, to pass on details of their father’s death, but he was unsuccessful.
***
I began this book to prove the truthfulness of a wild, gruesome, seemingly implausible story my grandfather told me as a boy: He had hitched a ride to the hospital annex on the Southeastern side of the island, chasing, as he always did, a better cup of coffee and some good conversation. There, the chaplain for his unit introduced him to an American officer who led a militia made up of male residents of Biak into the hills to hunt the Japanese soldiers who had not surrendered. This officer had a string of dried, desiccated human ears tied to his belt. They reminded my grandfather of dried apricots.
I came tantalizingly close to proving the veracity of this story when I uncovered an Associated Press story that was published in the October 12, 1944, edition of the Birmingham News with the title, “Biak Natives Collect Jap Ears.” The article explained that Biak islanders whose families had been abused by the Japanese while they occupied the island had formed into a militia and were hunting the remaining Japanese soldiers in the island’s interior. “When they return, they bring with them inevitably the prize that seems most thoroughly to satisfy their spirit of revenge,” the article reports. “They bring ears strung on a sharp stick—Japanese ears.”
On the same day, the Spokesman Review of Spokane, Washington, carried a story about eight Japanese soldiers who surrendered to an American infantry bivouac on Biak’s interior plateau. “The enemy soldiers obviously were in poor condition, starving and weak, but they held themselves erect and in close order, keeping step unfailingly.”
***
Biak islanders took ears as trophies—I had verified that part of the story—but would an American officer have so brazenly exhibited ears as trophies, as my grandfather reported?
I have no doubt about it.
The trophy-taking by American soldiers in the South Pacific is now well documented. On Guadalcanal in 1942, some American soldiers used pliers to rip out the teeth from the mouths of dying Japanese soldiers; they were looking for teeth with gold fillings. Writing in his memoir With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, former Marine E.B. Sledge describes witnessing another Marine on Peleliu extracting gold teeth from a wounded soldier by cutting the victim’s cheeks and then kneeling on his chin to force the jaws open. Soldiers heading to the front joked about making necklaces from these teeth, or pickling the ears of dead Japanese soldiers. Some soldiers cooked and scraped the skulls of Japanese soldiers to turn them into souvenirs.
The practice was widespread enough to prompt a crackdown in 1942 by the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, who ordered that "No part of the enemy's body may be used as a souvenir" and threatened "stern disciplinary action" against soldiers who violated the rule. These souvenir skulls created schisms in families and marriages during the war, and in the decades that followed. Many descendants of World War II veterans who inherited these skulls were deeply disturbed by them and conflicted about how to handle them. A few tried to return skulls to Japan or even locate the families of the dead soldiers.
Famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh wrote about these atrocities. In his journals, he explains that a soldier told him he had seen dead Japanese soldiers with their ears and noses cut off.
He wrote, “Our boys cut them off to show their friends in fun, or to dry and take back to the States when they go.” In 1943, Yank magazine published a cartoon of the parents of a soldier receiving a pair of “Jap ears” mailed home by their son from the South Pacific.
There was a black market for these body parts in the Pacific Theatre. On the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, not far from Biak, Filipino partisan fighters received payment from the Americans: one bullet and 20 centavos for each pair of severed ears. A short article in the November 25, 1944, Bakersfield Californian reported that merchant marineman Norman Doolittle had recently acquired a necklace of Japanese teeth and a “Jap skull” from Biak.
When he was visiting a liberated concentration camp in the summer of 1945, Charles Lindbergh was reminded of the trip he had taken to Biak a year earlier. “Where was it I had felt like that before?” he mused. “The South Pacific? Yes: those rotting Japanese bodies in the Biak caves; the load of garbage dumped on dead soldiers in a bomb crater; the green skulls set up to decorate a ready room and tents.” Lindbergh was criticized for making this comparison. How dare he equate the Nazi reign of terror with the actions of American soldiers in combat?
But I understand what Lindbergh was saying. How can you not but feel sympathy for the hundreds of Japanese soldiers, abandoned to die by their own government, slowly starving to death, resorting to cannibalism, and hunted like animals by men who would desecrate their bodies and leave them to rot in the jungle after they had been killed? How can you not feel ashamed to learn that American soldiers boiled the heads of decapitated enemy soldiers so they could send the skulls home as war souvenirs? How can a thinking, feeling, civilized person peer into the oven of a Nazi concentration camp and not see in it the ashes of all the other humans who have died of mass murder?
***
The picture of dozens of browned skulls and bones piled atop a funeral pyre is seared into me.
On November 25, 2013, descendents of Japanese soldiers who died defending the caves on Biak participated in a mass cremation of remains. In the photo, a woman and a man slide wood into the pyre. The fire has begun to burn on one side of the neatly stacked platform of logs and kindling. The orange flames are eating away at the white covering that was spread like a tablecloth atop the pyre to hold rotting bones in place. A modern Japanese flag hangs in the background.
Around the same time, the Japanese government was engaged in a sustained effort to recover war remains from battlefields across Asia. Ikotsu shushu—literally “bone collecting”—has been going on since the end of the war. The remains of nearly half of the 2.4 million Japanese soldiers who died overseas have never been recovered. As Japan began to lose ground during the war, many Japanese soldiers in overseas posts were increasingly isolated, cut off from communication, resupply, and reinforcement. Many died of illness, malnutrition, and starvation. Battles with allied forces were fierce, and many of the soldiers had been indoctrinated to fear what would happen to them if they surrendered or were captured.
Japanese tourists sometimes travel to Biak specifically to visit the caves where many Japanese soldiers died. One such site, Goa Jepang, has been turned into a privately owned museum. Three kilometers long, this cave sheltered 3,000 Japanese soldiers during the attack by American soldiers in the summer of 1944. The Americans bombed the cave from the air and tossed drum-sized gasoline bombs into the caves to burn out the defenders. Nearly all of the Japanese soldiers died in these attacks, and for many years after the war, the cave was littered with their remains, which were mixed in with bottles of medicine, shrapnel, guns, and helmets. In 1999, representatives of the Japanese government gathered most of the bones, cremated them, and returned the remains to Japan.
Many descendents of these soldiers have made pilgrimages to this site, often in groups. According to Yusef Rumaropen, the caretaker of the site for many years, they would often walk some way into the cave, stop, and then begin to weep.
***
I am now left to consider the fate of bones—how some treat them with reverent care, while others desecrate them.
A small percentage of remains repatriated by the Japanese government have come from the fireplace mantles and dusty shelves in the offices of American homes, where, after seventy or eighty years, the boiled skulls and necklaces of gold teeth extracted from dead or dying Japanese soldiers and then sent home by American soldiers have taken on a new significance. According to Simon Harrison, who researched the subject extensively for a 2006 article he published in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, these skulls caused rifts within families, strained marriages, and even led to attempts by the veterans who brought them home to later attempt to return them to Japan. “After their trophies were sent home, or brought home, it seems that many eternal and their families did not know what to do with them, because there were no accepted cultural schemata for the use of such objects,” he wrote.
***
I remember another story from the annex: One Sunday, my grandfather stayed late to talk to the chaplain. After the sun set, and while they were standing outside of the mess hall, they had a clear view down the hill to the beach, which by that hour was bathed in moonlight. They watched three rail-thin figures creep out of the trees and stand on the rocky beach, less than a hundred feet distant. These men stood for a minute staring out over the ocean before they walked back into the dark thicket again.
Many years have passed since I was a boy, and my grandfather is dead almost forty years now, but I still often try to conjure that scene in my mind. I like to imagine that the Japanese officer who authored “White Butterfly” was among those men on the beach that night. I picture the painter and the poet, a stone’s throw away from each other in the dark, momentarily caught up in the strange beauty of that night, both of them happy to be alive and with no real malice in their hearts.
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