Japanese Pow Quotes

The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person's face. When you forgive, it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total.

I'd made it this far and refused to give up because all my life I had always finished the race.

Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God.

All I want to tell young people is that you're not going to be anything in life unless you learn to commit to a goal. You have to reach deep within yourself to see if you are willing to make the sacrifices.

The great commandment is that we preach the gospel to every creature, but neither God nor the Bible says anything about forcing it down people's throats.

The world, we'd discovered, doesn't love you like your family loves you.

God knew my needs and took care accordingly.

To live, a man needs food, water, and a sharp mind.

I was raised to face any challenge.

It was all in His hands now - as it had always been.

Someone who doesn't make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn't act like he'd just become king of the world, either. Athletes in my day were simply humble in our victory. I believe we were more mature then...Maybe it's because the media puts so much pressure on athletes; maybe it's also the money. In my day we competed for the love of the sport...In my day we patted the guy who beat us on the back, wished him well, and that was it.

I've always been called Lucky Louie. It's no mystery why.

God has given me so much. He expects so much out of me.

(On surviving on the raft for 47 days) We had truly made it on a wing and prayer.

All I knew was that hate was so deadly as any poison and did no one any good. You had to control and eliminate it, if you could.

The race film had confirmed a dead heat. That was great. But even better, most of the New York press finally learned to spell my name correctly.

(after asking Christ into his heart) I waited. And then, true to His promise, He came into my heart and my life. The moment was more than remarkable; it was the most realistic experience I'd ever had. I'm not sure what I expected; perhaps my life or my sins or a great white light would flash before my eyes; perhaps I'd feel a shock like being hit by a bolt of lightning. Instead, I felt no tremendous sensation, just a weightlessness and an enveloping calm that let me know that Christ had come into my heart.

Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died.

At a Japanese POW camp, this dead American was found near war’s end, still standing, at a sink at which he was trying to drink. American soldiers and guerrillas went behind enemy lines to rescue the men at this camp, but they were too late. They found the bodies of 150 POWs, starved to death.

Every morning, the Omori POWs were assembled and ordered to call out their number in Japanese. After November 1, 1944, the man assigned number twenty-nine would sing out “Niju ku!” at the top of his lungs.

In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather become prisoners of war. In Saipan hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands. Even in life-or-death situations cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers.

The Bible speaks of the Word of God as added. Sometimes it's planted by the wayside, and nothing grows there. Sometimes it's sown among the thorns and represents the person who makes the decision an then goes back to his old life of bars and chasing women or whatever. A third seed is sown among the rocks. There's sand and dirt between the rocks, and when it rains you'll see a stalk of green coming up. But on the first day with sunshine it wilts because there is no room for roots. The fourth seed is planted on fertile soil, and finally it takes hold and has a chance to grow and live. That's what happened to me.

I wonder what they'd do if they knew the truth about my high life and my low life and all the demons in between.

Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.

Some former POWs became almost feral with rage. For many men, seeing an Asian person or overhearing a snippet of Japanese left them shaking, weeping, enraged, or lost in flashbacks. One former POW, normally gentle and quiet, spat at every Asian person he saw. At Letterman General Hospital just after the war, four former POWs tried to attack a staffer who was of Japanese ancestry, not knowing that he was an American veteran. Troubled former POWs found nowhere to turn.

As the train pushed off for Yokohama, the POWs’ last sight of Naoetsu was a broken line of Japanese, the few civilian guards and camp staffers who had been kind to them, standing along the side of the track. Their hands were raised in salute.

I could soon see outlines of people in the water in the distance, all of them covered in oil. I had no way to know who they were, whether Japanese or POWs. It was easy to mistake a Japanese for one of my own. I made up my mind that if it came down to me or a Japanese, he would be going to meet his ancestors.

if Japan’s prime minister were to visit Nanking, fall on his knees before Chinese spectators, and beg forgiveness for Japan’s wartime massacres at Nanking; if throughout Japan there were museums and monuments and former POW camps with photos and detailed explanations of Japanese wartime atrocities; if Japanese schoolchildren were routinely brought on school outings to such sites in Japan, and to sites outside Japan such as Nanking, Sandakan, Bataan, and Saipan; and if Japan devoted much more effort to depicting wartime non-Japanese victims of Japanese atrocities than to depicting Japanese victims of the war.

In literature, plays, and cinema, substitutionary sacrifice is always the most riveting and moving plot point. In the movie The Last of the Mohicans, British major Duncan Heyward asks his Indian captors if he might die in the flames so that Cora, whom he loves, and Nathaniel can go free. When, as he is being dragged away, Duncan cries, “My compliments, sir! Take her and get out!” we are electrified by his unflinching willingness to die to save others, one of whom has been his rival. He dies with his arms bound and stretched out, as if he were on a cross. In Ernest Gordon’s memoir of being a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, he recounts how at the end of a day of forced labor the guards counted the shovels, and one was apparently missing. A furious guard threatened the British POWs that unless the guilty person confessed, he would kill them all. He cocked his gun to start shooting them one by one. At that moment, one prisoner stepped forward calmly and said, “I did it.” He stood quietly at attention, and “he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53: 7) as he was beaten to death. When they all got back to the camp and counted the shovels again, it turned out that they were all there. The man had sacrificed himself to save them all. In the first Harry Potter novel, the evil Lord Voldemort can’t touch Harry without being burned. Later Dumbledore explains it to him. “Your mother died to save you. . . . Love as powerful [as that] . . . leaves its own mark. . . . [T]o have been loved so deeply . . . will give us some protection forever.” Why do these stories move us? It’s because we know from the mundane corners of life to the most dramatic that all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice. We know that anybody who has ever done anything that really made a difference in our lives made a sacrifice, stepped in and gave something or paid something or bore something so we would not have to.

This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center called Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all. If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated “as well as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Allied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years.

In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination. In the midst of it were the prisoners of war. Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.* Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.* By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate. In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake, and Tarawa, and all but 11 POWs at Palawan. They were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down. On the morning of September 2, 1945, Japan signed its formal surrender. The Second World War was over.

Let those who have never seen the inhumanity of man to man not think that soft words and examples in disarmament will do anything to prevent domination by the strong.

The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian ‘coolies’. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian PoWs – as well as Dutch prisoners and conscripted Indian labour – to construct 250 miles of railway through the mountainous jungle on the Thai-Burmese border.

Balchus

Every week they heard new rumors. The men and women would be put into separate camps. They would be sterilized. They would be stripped of their citizenship. They would be taken out onto the high seas and then shot.They would be sent to a desert island and left there to die. They would all be deported to Japan. They would never be allowed to leave America. They would be held hostage until every last American POW got home safely. They would be turned over to the Chinese for safekeeping right after the war. You've been brought here for your own protection, they were told. It was all in the interest of national security. It was a matter of military necessity, It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty.

From "The Prisoner's Cross". This excerpt is from the author's father's real WW2 Japanese POW journal, and recounts a miracle the author's father experienced there. "It was as gray day, and after I had shoveled the iron scrap out of the last drum, I rested on my shovel.Of-course I checked if any guard was doing the rounds. I had crossed paths with remarkable Christians in the camps. Their insights often offered me just the message I needed at a particular-time, and had nurtured not only my faith, but my understanding of how to live it. Still an anger was welling up in me. The winter was coming; we had now been away some two and half years from our family. We never heard anything after their last visit to the Jaarmarkt. There was an anger about the lostness of years, of being 27 and having already spent three birthdays in concentration camps. Suddenly in a mood of utter anger I kicked the heap of iron pieces which flew back at me and landed on the tip of my boot. My kick, at least, had released the tension, and I was ready to start work again, when I noticed the piece of iron on my boot. It startled me. All the pieces had different forms, leftovers, and cutoffs, waste material, less useful than anything else except to get the dirt and rust off the iron cast tools. I slowly bent over and let the iron scrap rest in my hand. It was in the form of a cross four inches long. I kept staring at it, forgetting all about the guard who might come along at any time. I never speculated how it got in the heap, how just this piece hit-the-door, when I kicked the heap apart, how it landed on my boot. There are a million accidental events that happen on any given day. Somehow, this seemed like a message and an answer to my self-questioning a short time back; what in God’s name am I doing in this God forsaken place? It had been in the same mass of scrap iron for days. I had shoveled the scrap in the rotating drum over and over, to glance off the big implements, and remove the rust. The cross in my mind had always been a big question mark. How could a man on a cross, 2000 years back have any usefulness in our time? Slowly I began to perceive that the event might have a purpose now. Jesus of Nazareth was put on a cross by people who absolutely rejected the unconditional love of God expressed in that cross, and then shared by Christians with others. People came and lived and died by that cross, and the strange power of that cross went on in human beings generation after generation unexplainably. People died for it in fierce confession of their faith, in giving their lives for others. The cross was never totally gone from this world, whatever happened outside Jerusalem in 33 A.D.. Now it had jumped on my boot. I let it roll back and forth in my hand. This little insignificant piece of iron scrap had cleaned far more important pieces of iron, it was only an implement. When I opened the drum several times a day, the big pieces came out clear and well. Maybe being a Christian was doing the same thing.

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Many of them went out of their way to help us at great risk to themselves, slipping us food. When I think about how the Japanese civilians treated us as POWs in their country, I can only feel very ashamed at how we treated our own Japanese Americans, taking their homes and businesses and placing them in camps.

When I complained about the pain and exhaustion of the final lap in a mile race—which took about a minute—Pete gave me some advice that’s stuck with me to this day: “Isn’t one minute of pain worth a lifetime of glory?

When the tide of combat turned against them or when small units were isolated and in danger of losing their POW’s, the vindictiveness of the North Korean soldier could not be restrained. Men accustomed to torture and summary execution all their lives, both from Japanese and Communist rulers, could not be expected to behave with nicety toward foreign captives. Nor did they.

Beyond the deprivations, degradations, and tortures these prisoners endured, each man often recounts how he got to the camps Weller visited. These conflicts, and all they implied, would have been instantly recognizable to the 1945 public. Many of the Dutch and the British, the Australians and Canadians, were taken in the defeats of Singapore (130,000), Java (32,000), and Hong Kong (14,000). Many of the Americans got captured on Guam or Wake; or in the Philippines (75,000), to then endure the Bataan death march, on which one in four died. Some built the Siam-Burma railroad, which claimed yet another 15,000 lives, same ratio. Nearly everywhere, in a hurry, the Japanese won and the Allies lost. The United States saw its navy smashed at Pearl Harbor and its Pacific air forces wiped out in Manila, just before MacArthur got himself safely out to Australia. This litany of early military disasters added up to astonishing numbers. In a mere six months the Japanese, at a cost of only 15,000 of their own men (deaths and casualties), took 320,000 Allied soldiers out of the war, either as deaths, casualties, or prisoners; over half these were Asiatic. White prisoners, about 140,000 total over the course of the conflict, became slave labor across the growing Japanese empire. (Asiatic prisoners were often turned loose, as good propaganda among the subjugated peoples.) Japan had not signed the 1929 Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of prisoners of war, and a Japanese soldier would sooner be killed than captured: thus every enemy soldier who surrendered was a coward, a cur, a thing. Any notion of “inhumane treatment” toward a surrendered Chinese, much less a white man, was incomprehensible. White men were the foe, so their role was to work, then die. Whether their deaths proved painful did not matter to the Japanese. Unlike the Nazi POW camps, there were few escape attempts, for it was obvious to any Allied POW in Asia that a white face was an immediate giveaway even had he succeeded, and the Japanese made it clear that they would execute ten men for every man who escaped. Statistically it was seven times healthier to be a POW under the Nazis than under the Japanese. By war’s end, one out of every three white prisoners had died as their captives—“starved to death, worked to death, beaten to death, dead of loathsome epidemic diseases that the Japanese would not treat,” as Daws puts it. Another year of war and there would have been no POWs still alive. (A Japan War Ministry directive of August 1944 iterated that “the aim is to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.”)

The owner of the coal mines, Baron Takaharu Mitsui (1900–1983), a graduate of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and world famous as a philatelist, was head of one of the two most powerful industrial families in Japan (along with Mitsubishi), and among the wealthiest men in the country. His mines produced half of its coal, though those at Omuta had been closed down in the 1920s as unsafe. He was well aware of the work and living conditions of the POWs, having visited the camp several times in his open touring car. Like other companies that used Allied prisoners as slave labor—Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Kawasaki—Mitsui paid the Japanese army a leasing fee per prisoner of two yen per day (above the average Japanese daily income), and the army kept the money. Though the prisoners were supposedly being paid a wage that was a minuscule fraction of this, very few ever received anything.

When the Germans surrendered with their arms raised high, holding a white flag, they weren't at all how i imagined them: hard, cruel, tall and monstrous with cigars chomped between their lips talking about how they wanted to shoot babies and old people. Instead they were boys like us, teenagers, tired, scared, dirty, and looking almost relieved that their was over, for now, that they can rest their bone-tired bodies in the POW camps.

In northern Borneo, the last 38 of the POWs marching to Ranau were murdered by the Japanese two weeks after the official end of hostilities.

Clay Wampler was a cowboy from Colorado who joined the army in 1940. He was sent to the Philippines later that year as part of the Thirty-First Infantry. He surrendered on Bataan, survived the death march, and met Pete Banning in a POW camp. His life was saved when a Japanese guard sold him enough quinine to break his malaria. While being transported to a labor camp in Japan, he and Pete escaped.