The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 7 | Article ID 2821 | Jul 02, 2008

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Magnificent Obsession: Japan's Bone Man and the World WarII Dead in the Pacific

David McNeill

Magnificent Obsession: Japan’s Bone Manand the World War II Dead in the Pacific

David McNeill

The lone survivor of a Japanese infantry unit inWorld War 2, Nishimura Kokichi promised hiscomrades he would bring their bodies back toJapan. Sixty years later, he is still trying tofulfill his pledge in a story of indomitable willand determination.

Nishimura Yukiko listened to her husband,Kokichi, in shock. After thirty-five years ofmarriage and four children, the 59-year-old wasleaving. He would hand the keys to the familybusiness, one of Tokyo’s most successfulengineering works, to his eldest son then boarda plane for Papua New Guinea where he wouldstart a new life. The object of his attentions wasnot another woman but the bones of men killedover three decades before. “I’ll be gone for along time, probably years,” he said.

It was 1979 and the Nishimura family wasabout to be split asunder. Only daughterSachiko sided with her father as he remindedhis wife of a pledge made before they married:to find the bodies of his dead friends.Nishimura Kokichi would spend 26 yearsfulfilling that promise, at the cost of hisbusiness, his life in Japan, and his relationshipwith his sons and wife, whom he never sawagain. “I heard she died a few years back,” hesays, adding that he can’t even recall her name.As for his sons: “They are nothing to do withme.”

Today, Nishimura lives with Sachiko in an

otherwise bland landscape of densely packedsuburbia north of Tokyo, in a house with anunusual driveway. Stuck into a pillar beside itsgarden of well-trimmed shrubs is the propellerof a World War Two B-24 airplane. Thesymbolism is rich: a war trophy from Papua,but it could have been one of the fleet ofAmerican bombers that reduced dozens ofJapanese cities, including Tokyo, to rubble andincinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killingperhaps half a million people.

Nishimura outside his home in Kazo, Saitama

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After a quarter of a century fighting theweather, bureaucrats in two countries, fadingwar memories and now his own declininghealth, the propeller signifies a last thumbingof Nishimura’s nose at the world, says a newbiography; “one heroic, if futile, final gesture.”

Nishimura has been thumbing his nose at theworld for most of his life. As a private duringJapan’s campaign to conquer Papua NewGuinea, he was the sole survivor of a platoon of56 infantrymen from his native KochiPrefecture in southern Japan. Starvation,cannibalism, disease and death on an epic scalestudded his tortuous path home. Had he livedtill 25, his story would have been extraordinarybut he is still alive and fighting a battle that hasdefined his life since the war -- bringing backthe bodies of the men he fought with.

According to Japan’s Minister of Health andWelfare, the remains of 1.2 million of itssoldiers and civilians are scattered across Asia,nearly half of the 2.4 million Japanese killedoverseas during World War II. Victims ofJapan’s timorous postwar diplomacy, and theshame and amnesia that descended on thenation after the war ended, most lie where theyfell in the battlefields of China, The Philippinesand Papua New Guinea. Defeated and occupiedJapan also lacked the resources and thediplomatic clout required to recover its deadwhen they were most likely to be found: in theimmediate years following surrender.

But the abandonment of the war dead is alsoseen by some veterans as an extension ofJapan’s entire wartime military strategy in Asia,which dispatched millions of soldiers as far tothe southeast as Papua and deep intoManchuria in the north, then abandoned themwithout supply lines to fend for themselves. Bywar’s end, about 6.5 million Japanese, including3.5 million military personnel, were strandedacross the region; 1.1 million in Manchuria andhundreds of thousands in Papua and the Pacific

islands. Many would never make it home.

Those figures are considered shamefully highby men like Nishimura. In contrast, Americaspares little effort to recover its war dead: Just17 percent of the half a million U.S. soldierswho fell in the combined Pacific, Korean andVietnam conflicts remain listed as missing.“Everybody today is against war in Japan, butnobody wants to talk about what happened,”laments the old infantryman. “It’s pitiful. Whydid all those people die?”

In 1942, the 22-year-old was ordered insweltering heat to cross Papua from Kokodaover the Owen Stanley Mountain Range andtake the capital, Port Moresby, in what becameone of the most infamous battles of World WarII. In two weeks of fighting, he was shot by ayoung Australian and watched his entire unitbeing wiped out. But the barbarity was justbeginning.

Over the following months, he and comradesengaged in a savage war of attrition that lefthim a skeletal 28 kilos. The survivors resortedto eating horses, rats, tree bark and eventuallythe flesh of dead Australian and Americansoldiers, which they called “white pork.”

“It was eat or die,” Nishimura told Australianjournalist Charles Happell, author of the newbook The Bone Man of Kokoda. Happelldescribes how the battle for Papua scarred himdeeply and left him with a lifetime of guilt. “Hesaid if I survive the war I will come back andtry to find your bones,” says Happell. “He grewup at a time when those old-fashioned ideals ofduty, honor and sacrifice had some traction inJapanese society. He was a man who thoughthis word was his bond.”

Nishimura did survive New Guinea, the sinkingof his ship off Taiwan and near-death in Burma,where he was abandoned, delirious withmalaria in the jungle, then a decade wanderingJapan after the war ended. A gifted engineer,

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he built up a successful business, married andhad children, before that fateful night threedecades ago when he reminded his family of hispromise. To his mind, they rejected him: “Imarried my wife on condition that I would goback to New Guinea but neither she nor mysons understood this. It made me sad.”

Nishimura in Taiwan after release from hospitalfollowing his Papua ordeal

At an age when most men are consideringretiring, the 60-year-old former companypresident set up base in one of the world’spoorest and most dangerous places, living intents and makeshift huts as he searched forbones. In a quarter of a century of digging,armed with a metal detector and hand tools, heestimates he found the remains of about300-350 men, including some former membersof his 144th Infantry Regiment. “It is hard totell because they have become so damagedover time.”

The dig, and the quest to find the families ofthe dead, became an obsession, consuming hislife and about 400 million yen of his ownmoney. The collection of skulls, femurs, goldteeth and rusting knives, swords, buckles andspoons steadily built up in his rickety hut. Hisfame reached Japan, where TV crews weredispatched to the island. In the mid-1990s, theJapanese ambassador in Papua offered to takecare of his treasures and return them to Tokyo.Reluctantly, Nishimura agreed, a decision hecame to bitterly regret.

Instead of being reunited with their families,the remains were incinerated in the charnelhouse of Chidorigafuchi Cemetery, Japan’sequivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier;unidentified bodies cannot be interred in familyplots or enshrined at Yasukuni, the officialmemorial for military dead. Says Happell,Nishimura was furious. “These youngconscripts died for Japan, but they were treatedno better than criminals.” The decisionreinforced his distrust of the authorities; theywanted to leave his colleagues buried,forgotten along with the rest of the war’sugliness. Aged 75, he would continue to go italone.

The welfare ministry rejects Nishimura’scriticism, but the once steady stream ofremains from abroad has turned into a trickle:just 604 came home in 2005, down from a highof 35,000 in the early 1970s. “We send teamsout every year to many countries,” said aspokesman. In Papua, where the bodies ofabout 78,000 of the 127,600 Japanese troopswho died there remain, the search becomesmore difficult by the year, said SusumuKiyosawa of the Japanese Embassy. “You haveto remember that it is 60 years since the end ofthe war. There is not much left.”

Nishimura refuses to accept these claims.“They’re just words,” he says. They don’t care.It has always been the same.” He continued todig until last year when, at 87, his crumbling

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body forced him to return to Tokyo. Before heleft, he fought hard against one more indignity:Skeletal remains dug up by locals, displayed onstalls to tourists and even, he recalls withdisgust, offered for sale. “I asked the peoplethere: ‘What if it was a member of your family.Would you treat them like this?’

“I know of one Japanese man who went toPapua and was so upset he paid to buy someremains,” he recalls. “So now the locals knowthey can get money for them.”

It is, explains Happell, the worst possible wayfor Nishimura to leave the country. “The onlytime he cried was when he talked about thebones of his comrades becoming part of thesetourist attractions. He hates the fact that thebones that have been recovered are sitting ontrestle tables, and that the government knowsthat they’re there and doesn’t go get them.”

Back in Saitama Prefecture, his backboneweakened by repeated bouts of malaria,Nishimura rifles through his belongings toreturn with a dusty picture of wartime EmperorHirohito, taken during a visit to KochiPrefecture. For most Japanese, the war was adisaster and for many the emperor a reviledfigure who reigned over a military cult thatdemanded death rather than surrender. ButNishimura believes the country had no choicebut to fight. “We were starved of oil andsupplies, but I knew we would lose. America

was so powerful.” He believes “reds” havehelped make Japan ashamed of its past.Ultimately though, says Happell, discussion ofthe war all comes back to one thing: “theforgotten dead.”

Before he dies, the indomitable formerinfantryman has two typically ambitious finalmissions to fulfill. He wants to help build a newcity at the mouth of New Guinea’s longestriver, the Sepik. As an engineer with half acentury of experience, he says he has pouredover maps of the area and badgered Papuaofficials for years on the prospects for the city,which would, he believes, help lift the countryout of poverty. And he would like to see all thegraves of the 365 troops in the 144th InfantryRegiment from his native Kochi Prefecture. Sofar, he thinks he has visited over 330. “I’m notsure how many. At my age, things begin tofade.”

This is an extended version of an article thatrecently appeared in The Irish Times and TheJapan Times. David McNeill writes regularly fora number of publications, including TheChronicle of Higher Education, The Irish Timesand the London Independent newspaper. He isa Japan Focus coordinator. Charles Happell’sbook is The Bone Man of Kokoda: TheExtraordinary Story of Kokichi Nishimura andt h e K o k o d a T r a c k(http://www.panmacmillan.com.au).

Posted at Japan Focus on July 17, 2008.