The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

Volume 20 | Issue 10 | Number 6 | Article ID 5702 | May 15, 2022

War, Trauma, and Humanity in a Japanese Veteran’s New
Guinea War Memoir: Ogawa Masatsugu’s “Island of Death”(1969)
Ryōta Nishino
experiences.
Abstract: Upon its publication in 1969, a war
memoir by a Japanese veteran, Ogawa
Masatsugu (1917–2009), “The Island of Death,”
New Guinea: Humans in Extremis (Shi-noshima Nyūginia: Kyokugen no naka no ningen),rose to prominence for its portrayal of the raw
realities of the author’s combat experience in
New Guinea. Although it secured its place inJapan’s war memory of the Asia-Pacific War,what remains overlooked, and merits further
exploration is Ogawa’s efforts in grappling withhis war trauma and psychological damage. This
article argues that Ogawa’s memoir marks theinitial step in his long healing process throughemploying two narrative threads. First, heidentified the initial traumatic episode as anincident in China, where he had fought before
New Guinea. Second, Ogawa created a binary
between the compassionate New Guineans andthe callous Japanese officers. The two threads
led him to frame himself as a victim andbystander but let him leave questions ofviolence, humanity, savagery, and civilization
unaddressed. His capture as a prisoner of war
and his repatriation to Japan dealt further
blows to his already fragile self. It was thisawareness of psychological damage that led
Ogawa to write his memoir and to start his longroad to recovery. Thus, Ogawa’s memoir is nota mere personal story, but rather it reflects theinner struggle of many war veterans in Japanand elsewhere attempting to come to termswith and give meaning to their traumatic war

Keywords: the Asia-Pacific War, New Guinea,
Japan, military memoir, war trauma, Ogawa
Masatsugu (1917–2009)

Introduction
In the complicated politics of memory of the
Asia-Pacific War in Japan, Japanese soldiers
occupy an ethically compromised territory of
being complicit in the war of aggression that
resulted in a devastating loss. How can we
make sense of the fraught positions the soldierveterans occupied before, during and after the
war? Travelling to sites of mourning such as
erstwhile battlegrounds and cemeteries canfacilitate the visitors’ vicarious appreciation of
the war and veterans’ remembering of theirexperience.1 Another form of travel veteranstake in search of answers to ethical quandaries
of war may be writing. Many wrote private
diaries, memoirs, and novels. Included in theplethora of memoirs by Japanese veterans of
the Asia-Pacific War is a war memoir by Ogawa
Masatsugu titled “The Island of Death,” New
Guinea: Humans in Extremis (“Shi-no-shima”
Nyūginia: kyokugen no naka no ningen;hereafter “Island of Death”). Ogawa’s memoir
offers a detailed account of the hardships heendured as a private in New Guinea. Ogawa
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wrote the draft shortly after being repatriatedto Japan in 1946 and decided to publish it
unmodified in 1969, a period when theescalation of the Vietnam War revived pacifist
rallying calls in Japan. Upon publication,“Island of Death” won the inaugural Ōya Sōichi
non-fiction prize in 1970. The judges found that
“Island of Death” depicted the minutiae of thecruelty of the war and the inner struggles of arank-and-file soldier. Recalling the details wasin itself an achievement because the Allied
captors had ordered Ogawa and other Japanesesoldiers to have all of their private diaries
incinerated (Bungei Shunjū 1970, 220–223).

effects of extreme conditions on the officers’
morality. His juxtaposition informed his
understanding of human civilization. He linked
these two narratives in an implicit attempt at
self-portrayal as a psychologically damaged
veteran who was striving to recover his
morality and values. Yet in the process, Ogawa
overlooked vital questions about his role as asoldier and bystander in violent acts. This
oversight, it is concluded, delayed his direct
engagement with the loss he mourns.

Japan’s Imagining of the Asia-Pacific War
and the New Guinea Campaign

Though it never rose to the stature of a bestseller, “Island of Death” is a long-selling book.
Following changes of the title and the
publishers it remains in print and readily
obtainable as a paperback (Figure 1). 2
Sociologist Takahashi Saburō validates thesignificance of “Island of Death” as arepresentative memoir of the Shōwa 40s(1965–1974), 20 to 30 years after Japan’s
defeat, in two respects. First, “Island of Death”
renders the harrowing realities of the war fromthe perspective of a low-ranking soldier.
Second, instead of a chronological account of
battles, “Island of Death” offers an
introspective probing of the essence ofhumanity in the midst of war (Takahashi 1998,
13, 76–77).3 This article reinterprets “Island of
Death” as a site of working-through traumatic
experience and situates Ogawa as the subject
engaged in this arduous task. This re-reading
can then facilitate the crossing of the rigid
categories of victim and perpetrator.

Amidst the thorny politics of collective andindividual memory of the Asia-Pacific War, the
New Guinea campaign is all but forgotten in
today’s mainstream Japanese media. The
attrition rate was among the highest for that ofJapanese soldiers, making it one of the harshestof all the campaigns the Japanese fought induring the Asia-Pacific War. Of some 150,000
soldiers deployed to New Guinea, 127,000 died.
Of these, over 90% (114,840) died of illness and4
starvation (Fujiwara 2001, 135). Ogawa was
one of 91 of the 6,151-member 79th Regiment
who returned home (1.47%), and the sole
survivor of his 260-man company (Ogawa
2000b, 220). This overwhelming rate of
attrition inspired many memoirs and several
high-profile accounts. Of the well-known works
are the documentary film Yukiyukite shingun(1987) and autobiographical manga and essays
by another veteran-author, Mizuki Shigeru. 5
Their expressions of sorrow at their comrades
and of anger at the war, their superiors andeven the Emperor fed into a narrative of
victimhood that gained acceptance in postwar
Japanese society. At the collective level, selfidentification as a victim of the war gained
considerable ideological influence in postwar
Japan, where alternative narratives vied for
public recognition and acceptance (Hashimoto
2015; Hosaka 2014). For instance, nationalists

The article argues that, despite unresolved andunaddressed issues, “Island of Death” marks
the beginning of Ogawa’s eventual healingfrom trauma. Dominant across “Island of
Death” are two themes. First, the author
travelled back in time to trace the origins of his
trauma. Second, he observed the New
Guineans and the Japanese officers. The
comparison led him to conjecture the corrosive2

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positioned the Japanese soldiers as tragic
heroes; progressives consider them as
perpetrators of violent acts or implicated in themachinery of violence (for example Seaton
2007, 19–23).

enables the writer to work through the trauma.
Recent essays by David Stahl, Kyle Ikeda, andJustin Aukema (2016) have also set the stage
for further exploration of fictional and semifictional writing about the trauma of theJapanese Asia-Pacific War. Psychologists havedemonstrated that story-telling, including
writing memoirs and novels, can facilitate theprocessing of psychological damage.
Psychologists generally agree that “three Rs”— re-experience, release and reintegration ofmemory — are necessary steps on the path
towards autobiographical repair (Shimokōbe
2000, 136–137). Through the process, thevictim takes ownership of traumatic memories
as part of the life course, not as separate
6
incidents. The process can put the veteran into
something of a false consciousness where theveteran feels satisfied with the narrative
written but ends up postponing the painful, butultimately meaningful, confrontation with thesource of trauma. Historian Eric Santner
perceives a vital connection between traumatic
memories and the Freudian notion of thepleasure principle. Santner argues thatworking through traumatic memories is so
painful that societies develop “fetishizednarratives.” These narratives engender scripts
for acting out traumatic memories but
paradoxically impede the opportunities to workthrough the kernel of traumatic memories.
Correspondingly, such “fetishized” narratives
delay the integration of self from the period
before a traumatic event and the person who
emerges after such events. The postponed
integration of the fragmented selves and posttraumatic development invites the return ofrepressed emotions (Santner 1992, 144, 147).
Words and silences in Ogawa’s memoir reveal
the extent to which he has, and at times has
not, worked through traumatic memories.

As the discussion below shows, Ogawa
portrayed himself as a victim of war and a
bystander of injustice and violence. While thesetropes are common in many memoirs, what sets
“Island of Death” apart is the elaborate effort
the author took to articulate his traumatic
experience before the language of trauma had
become widely known in Japan. The concept of
trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD) only entered professional and popularparlance in the aftermath of the Great HanshinAwaji earthquake of January 1995 along withthe publications of Japanese translations ofseminal works on trauma. This stands incontrast to the West, where conflicts such as
the two World Wars and the Vietnam War
provided impetus for the convergence andrefinement of psychiatry and neurology(Nakamura 2018, 7). During the wartime andmuch of the postwar era, under-reporting warrelated psychological disturbances were thenorm. For example, during the wartime
psychiatrists routinely attributed combatants’
psychological disturbances to individual
responses such as the lack of manliness andcourage and registered far fewer cases thanobserved (ibid., NHK 2018). In the postwar era,
Japanese psychiatrists applied the same logic ofindividual capacity when they overlooked the
diagnoses of atom bomb victims in Japan(Zwigenberg 2018). A closer look at “Island of
Death,” therefore, offers an insight into deepseated trauma of a defeated nation in whichveterans and citizens lived without due
recognition or diagnosis and passed theinchoate trauma to next generations.
Veterans’ writings have gathered attention
from multiple disciplines such as history,
literature, and psychology. An emerging
consensus suggests that the act of writing

The Structure of “Island of Death”“Island of Death” follows a loosely3

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chronological order, beginning with Ogawa’s
arrival in New Guinea and ending with his
return to Japan. However, this chronology is
disrupted in places. As is the case with many
war memoirs, Ogawa wrote from the vantage
point of a veteran who disavowed war andviolence but did not reveal his attitude towards
the before conscription. What Ogawa said wasthat he had served in northern China before
arriving in Wewak, in central north New
Guinea, in January 1943 at the age of twentysix (See Figure 1). The memoir’s middle section
has a stream-of-consciousness feel; he uses
frequent flashbacks and crisscrosses in timeand space, often without mentioning dates orplaces. The meandering structure indicates
how Ogawa’s thoughts lurch from one topic toanother. His sophisticated vocabulary andprose can be overly long-winded for the
average reader. Such complexities reflect his
background. Rare for a private, Ogawa had
obtained a degree in Japanese literature before
conscription. In the postwar era, he became aprofessor of literature at a number of Japanese
universities. His intellectual predisposition
gave him unique perspectives on war and its
representation and places him in the ranks ofthe conscript-turned-writer Ōoka Shōhei who
held a degree in French literature.

Nightmares and Psychological Affliction
Throughout “Island of Death,” Ogawa madenumerous comments about his psychologicaldamage as oblique references to Japanese,
Chinese and Western literary canons. The mostdirect comment appears in the epilogue Ogawa
wrote in 1969. Reflecting on the writing of thememoir over twenty years previously, herecalled feeling “scars etched deep in [his]consciousness” (ishiki no shinsō ni kizumi
tsukerareta kizu) (Ogawa 1998, 351) andbearing “stupendous aftereffects” of the war(tohōmo nai kōishō) (ibid., 264). These are a
few clear instances of Ogawa’s linguistic andcognitive resources to name his trauma without
using the term. His grasp of the conditions did
not, however, make him confident about thepossibility of the nightmare ever ending (ibid.,7353). In his final book published in 2000
(reissued in 2013), he admitted that he felt
liberated from nightmares and proved himself
wrong (Ogawa 2013, 218). The absence ofspecificities makes it unclear to the reader
what he did to achieve this state. Whatemerges from the memoir, the epilogue, andthe essay, all written at different junctures, isrecovery from nightmares is possible.
Psychiatrists understand that recurrent
nightmares are a vital manifestation of
traumatic memories. Analysis of nightmares isessential to identifying the traumatizing events,
overcoming the debilitating effects, andachieving autobiographical repair (for example,
Caruth, 1996; Herman, 1992; Hunt 2010,
51–52). Ogawa noted the onset of hisnightmares as early as December 1943 —nearly a year after he had arrived in New
Guinea. Following the defeat of the Battle ofFinschhafen in December 1943, Ogawa’s unit
began a three-month march due west with theAllies in pursuit (Ogawa 1998, 227). The
Japanese walked through the precipitous andarduous Finisterre range whose altitude

Figure 1. Map showing New Guinea Island
and adjacent islands.
Map reproduced with the permission of
CartoGIS Services,
Scholarly Information Services, The
Australian National University.
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exceeded 10,000 feet. They exhausted their
supplies during the retreat. Ogawa recalls
hearing other soldiers groaning at night —ostensibly troubled with hunger, illness, pain,
and nightmares:

from the very surrounding of New Guinea:

Nature in New Guinea was nothing but
violence that gripped us in perpetual fear.
We could not afford to enjoy the scenery.
The most violent was rain. I recall it rained
about half the year, and the humidity was
high. Our weapons rusted quickly. Metalrotted. Wounds took a long time to heal. …
Marching in the rain was the worst of all.
.... Mud came up to our knees. … We weremuddy dolls on marches, as if walking was
the only will we had (ibid., 236).

When we slept in the open, I saw eerie
illusions. Feet, feet, feet – countless feetbegan on big marches. Bare feet, feet withshoes, feet with socks, feet with blood,feet-in-chains dragging along. Each footsplashed yellow mud and followed one
another. From somewhere I saw rays oflight as if shining onto the mud. The feetwithout the bodies dance about. Is it a
dream? Is it real? I put my head up andpeer through the darkness. I see soldiers
lying around. They are actually alive (ibid.,237).

The raw and bleak picture subverts the imageof the tropical islands of sunshine, leisure, andhappiness. It makes the soldiers seem like toys
deployed to ‘the island of death’ at the whim of
the strategists thousands of miles away. The
climate and the environment exacted a toll on
the body and mind of the soldiers and madetheir goods useless. Ogawa’s impression
concurs with that of many other soldiers. In
historian Fujii Tadatoshi’s analysis of Japanesesoldiers’ memoirs, letters and diaries, many
Japanese soldiers stationed on the Pacificislands feared that the jungle would “swallow”
them, for they lacked the know-how to sustain
themselves in the bush. Furthermore, theofficers’ demands of unquestioning obedience
to unrealistic orders and unpredictable andsporadic enemy attacks dampened the moraleof the rank-and-file soldiers. They felt
vulnerable and powerless in what became thelong-drawn-out war of attrition (Fujii 2000,
182).

The feet represent the futility of the marches
and the powerlessness of the soldiers. They had
no option but to obey the order; they walked
with no knowledge of the route, destination, or
the purpose. Another kind of nightmare Ogawa
had during the march repeated the themes ofconfusion between the illusion and the reality.
He saw a ray of light on several occasions in his
sleep. He woke up and wondered if the lightgave him hope for deliverance, or if it wasdeath beckoning him. Awake or asleep, Ogawa
could not escape from drudgery and fear of thewar.
The hardship Ogawa experienced had much to
do with the conditions in New Guinea. Foodand supplies were depleted shortly after
arrival. Diseases were rampant. He sensed thatthe war assailed the soldiers before they fought
the enemy. Daily sights and sounds consisted of
his comrades dying along the way or pleadingwith him and others to end their lives (ibid.,
333–334). For Ogawa, the Allies were thedistant enemy. The more direct threat came

The nightmares Ogawa experienced in New
Guinea did not end at Japan’s defeat or his
repatriation but lasted for decades.
Subsequently he recognized the nightmares fell
into three categories. First, a flat oblongshaped airplane pursued Ogawa from above.
He ran away until he reached a corner only to5

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find he could not run any further. The aircraft
cackled as it flew off. Then he found himself
surrounded by countless graves. Second,Ogawa felt gripped with a sense of foreboding
he could not name. To fight off his anxiety hetried to shoot his rifle into the air. As he tried
to put bullets into his rifle, he found the inside
was full of maggots. Ogawa then looked forways of killing himself. The third category had
him scrambling up a slippery slope while an
object pursued him from behind. Ogawa knew
it was not the enemy but could not tell what itwas. He slipped and fell so many times andcame very close to getting caught by the
shadow of the object. In the end his limbs grew
numb and tired, and he stopped moving. Thenthe shadow began towering over him (Ogawa
1998, 352; Ogawa 2013, 218). Ogawa’s
descriptions of these nightmares can be seen as
instances of re-experience and release.
However, the memoir and subsequent writing
fall short of probing the meanings of thenightmares and reintegrating the traumatic
memory they represent into his life story.

another recollection of the effects the New
Guinea jungle had on the soldiers. By contrast,in the early phase of the war in China, theJapanese were in the ascendancy and were able
to maintain their soldiering selves. It is this lossof soldiering identity that Ogawa reexperienced and released in the memoir in themilieu of Japan’s emasculating defeat. His
continuing nightmares demonstrate that helacked sufficient wherewithal to mourn this lossof identity and accommodate it in anunderstanding of his personal history, as wellas into Japan’s turbulent transwar history.
Following this brief comparison of two war
zones, a middle section of “Island of Death”
relates two incidents in China and describes his
psychological harm. In the first, a platoon
leader he refers to as “Captain U” demandedthat some soldiers, including Ogawa, stab todeath a captured Chinese civilian in his 50s.
The order froze Ogawa’s body; he recalls
witnessing the man getting stabbed multiple
times and dying on the ground. Ogawa
interprets that his reaction came not from“resistance by reason, but [came from] aphysiological shock” (ibid., 201). Ogawa recallsthat the incident prompted recurringnightmares and led him to conclude that thetrue purpose of war was to kill people. In thesecond incident, “Captain U” got all theJapanese troops under his command tovolunteer to kill a young Chinese soldier theJapanese had caught. Hesitation amongst theJapanese soldiers irritated “U”’s aides. One ofthem shouted: “You cowards! Why are you
here? Men like this one killed your superiors!
Take revenge!” Two or three came forward.
However, one of U’s aides handpicked a soldier
who had not volunteered. This soldier ran away
screaming, pointing his finger at five or six men
to carry out the order together. Ogawa wasspared from the order, but watched the killing,“stupefied as if it had occurred in a faraway
world” (ibid., 202). Ogawa ends thedescriptions of the killing by saying that it“sank deep into his mind like a piece of lead”

What Ogawa did in “Island of Death” instead,however, was to trace the origins of hisnightmares. As the memoir progresses, Ogawa
wonders why his nightmares began in New
Guinea but not in China where he had fought
earlier. He then attempts to integrate the two
separate campaigns into his life story. This
reflective quality distinguishes “Island of
Death” from many Japanese veterans’ New
Guinea memoirs that discussed just that
campaign. Ogawa conjectured the differencesin New Guinea and China might explain. In
China, the Japanese traversed on plains indaylight. The similarity of the culture and therelative availability of food presumably madehim feel less alienated. The Japanese had
sufficient weapons and ammunition to fight the
Chinese. However, Japanese soldiers in New
Guinea faced a very different situation. Ogawa
found New Guinea gave “none of thefoundation to build [his] identity as a soldier”(Ogawa 1998, 333). This recollection reinforces6

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“Noble” and “Ignoble Savages”(ibid.). These responses mark Ogawa’s
psychological numbing and distancing from theevents. Ogawa’s defense mechanism shaped his
personal identity as a victim of circumstances
which aligned with the broader collective
identity of the Japanese as the victim of thewar. The security Ogawa’s identity gave him
helped him avoid the arduous work of
deconstructing and reconstructing his life
story. What subsequently changed Ogawa was
the real combat situation that left him with“sticky emotions” (ibid., 201).

The second prominent narrative thread that
Ogawa developed in “Island of Death” relates
to the idea of “civilization.” He refers to thisconcept many times throughout the text andloosely equates it with so-called modernity; but
he does not go to the same extent as criticizing
Japan’s feudal mindset, as some other veteran8
authors at the time did. Rather, Ogawa
remained conflicted about the meanings ofcivilization. Earlier, he observed his Imperial
Japanese Army-issued weapons rusting in New
Guinea. While this point can make subtle
criticism of the limit of materiality ofcivilization, what preoccupied Ogawa was thequestion of what made humans civilized.
Ogawa regarded New Guineans as uncivilizedalbeit humane and compassionate and theJapanese officers as civilized but morally
degenerate. The contrast enabled him tohighlight the individual and collective guilt of
the Japanese troops in New Guinea. In turn, thecomparison accentuated Ogawa’s unresolved
issues of creeping doubts about civilization andsilence over his role in the war. It is theseunresolved issues that made him an implicatedsubject and impeded his three Rs — reexperience, release and reintegration of
traumatic memory towards recovery.

Immediately after narrating the first incident,
Ogawa goes on to relate a second incident.
While he was on the frontline, he wasconsumed in a kill-or-be-killed mania and only
came to his senses after seeing death andwreckage. He then felt a certain “dryness [in] aworld of abstraction through the works ofphysics and geometry” (ibid., 201–202). Exactly
what he meant here is unclear, but he implies
that his “dryness” and “abstraction” werebuffers that cushioned him from the raw andcorporeal sensations of the acts of aggression
he had committed. These sensations formed asediment of memory in Ogawa's subconscious
and followed him through New Guinea andback to Japan. Indeed, military psychology has
established that soldiers on frontline duties
suppress their fear and anxiety about fighting.
When they withdraw from the frontline,
suppressed emotions tend to come to thesurface and overwhelm them (Nakamura 2018,38). Albeit brief, Ogawa’s descriptions in China
offer clues to human qualities that he lost andthe soldering identity that replaced them. The
absence of frontline combat and the associatedexcitement in New Guinea prompted him torecall and question what happened to him in
China. Still, Ogawa fell short of fully exploring
connections between the two campaigns toforge tangible psychological links to identify
and manage the sources of his trauma.

Ogawa’s perception of the New Guineans camewith ambivalence. On the one hand, Ogawa
showered the New Guineans with gratitude for
their generous offers of food and shelter. On
the other hand, Ogawa judged them throughthe lens of a hierarchical notion of“civilization.” In an early phase of the New
Guinea campaign, he found it strange to
receive food and shelter from the New
Guineans, who apparently expected nothing in
return. He even admitted to feelingembarrassed for suspecting possible ulterior
motives: “As I spent time with them, it became
clear that this was a virtue only known to those
who have not gone through the baptism ofcivilization” (Ogawa 1998, 38). His encounters7

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One incident Ogawa recalled in the Sepik
River, in the island’s interior, brought his
paternalistic assumptions into sharper relief.
The village chief requested the Japanese tointervene in a dispute with a neighboringvillage. Men in the neighboring village had
abducted a woman working on a plantation andwere demanding a ransom. The Japanese
mediation helped to resolve the matter in thechief’s favor. The dispute gave Ogawa and his
accompanying army doctor the following
impression:

with the kindness of strangers continued wellinto the later phase of the war. In February
1945, Ogawa returned to one village after a few
months on a march. The village chief saw
Ogawa and said: “Boon nottin, me sori” (“Youare nothing but bones. I’m sorry”) (ibid., 121).
Indeed, Ogawa was so emaciated that aJapanese medic had to resuscitate him.
Meanwhile, his comrades had already dug agrave for him in anticipation of his imminent
death (ibid., 122). The chief’s compassion
struck a chord in Ogawa. Appreciation for New
Guineans is a common theme in Japanese war
memoirs (Iwamoto 2006, 53). “Island of Death”
follows suit. Ogawa regarded the New
Guineans’ generosity and compassion as
extremely beautiful and untainted by thecorrupting influences of so-called civilization(Ogawa 1998, 144, 285).

We found the people in the Sepik region
are very frank about sex. This means thatthey may not have sensibility for love. In
no way can romantic love take place if one
sees the opposite sex as a sexual object. …
[L]ove demands a high level of mental
sophistication. We concluded that we did
not find anything that resembled love intheir lifestyle. There is no such thing aslove between New Guinean men andwomen — this was our conclusion (Ogawa
1998, 151–152).

Such episodes and Ogawa’s gratitude sat
uncomfortably with his preoccupation with his
understanding of civilization and his conclusionthat the New Guineans were inherently lacking
in it. Ogawa could not fathom why the New
Guineans helped the Japanese even when theJapanese were losing and risked potential
retribution from the Allies for assisting theJapanese. It was this apparent selflessness thatcompelled Ogawa to name the New Guineans“gullible children of nature” (oroka na shizenji)(ibid., 144) to the point of making a caricaturethat reinforces the “noble savage” trope.
However, historian Eric Bergerud (1996, 118),
for instance, finds that the New Guineans
helped soldiers out of compassion, rather thanas an expression of loyalty to a particularnation. Still, Ogawa’s compliment reduced the
New Guineans into child-like “noble savages.”
While his impression infused the personal andhumane to an otherwise impersonal and cruelwarzone, this story should not discount the
crucial point that the war dictated the nature ofinteraction between the New Guineans, on the
one hand, and the Japanese and the Allies, on
the other.

The ambivalent conclusion underlines the reachof the Japanese imperial imaginary of the South
Seas Islands, such as Taiwan and Micronesia
under formal Japanese control, to New Guinea.9
Naoto Sudo (2010) and Robert Tierney (2010)
have argued that Japanese intelligentsia
invented cultural tropes of Japan's tropicalempire. In what Sudo and Tierney name
“Nanyō-Orientalism” and “interstitial
imperialism,” the Japanese positioned
themselves as non-Western imperialists
catching up with the West and superior toindigenous peoples of the South Seas. Creating“the savage” out of the indigenous Taiwaneseand Micronesians elevated the Japanese above
them in the racial hierarchy. Inherent here
were ambiguous sentiments of admiration andnostalgia for the indigenous people. Their8

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putative “savagery” reminded the Japanese ofprimitiveness they had supposedly lost.

the perpetrator camp.
Ogawa’s description of the raid finds him
adopting a fly-on-the-wall attitude, as a witness
watching what the Japanese officer did. Whatremains conspicuously absent is his
involvement in the raid. His silence stands incontrast to his recollection of the execution of a
Chinese man earlier in the narrative. Ogawa
wrote he was spared from stabbing the man todeath. His exemption afforded him to become awitness to the event. His account of the potato
raid says little about the roles he played in it
either on his volition, under pressure from his
superiors or fellow combatants, or in selfdefense against the villagers. Although arguingfor silence can be futile, historian Jay Wintercontends, what the veteran chooses to write oromit in a memoir, are political decisions that
control, regulate, and project a veteran’s selfidentity. Winter also notes that silence andomissions highlight disturbing memories theveteran evades (Winter 2018, 38, 43). The
distance Ogawa created between himself andthe others afforded him to become an innocent
bystander. This identity became part of a“fetishized narrative” that put himself on thevantage point of criticizing the officers’
degradation of civilization.

It was within this cultural paradigm that Ogawa
and the doctor perceived the New Guineans as“the gullible children of nature.” Ogawa’s viewof the New Guineans was constantly in the
background to compare Japanese officers. He
judged them as “ignoble savages” who failed tomaintain their standards of civilization. In one
example, Ogawa accompanied a party of ten
soldiers on a potato raid. The group arrived in avillage. Near a hut a lone villager was guarding
a pile of potatoes. The Japanese captain told his
men: “Go for it. We don’t need to care about
finishing off a native or two” (Ogawa 1998,
282). The villager sensed danger and ran away
into the bush. As the soldiers helped
themselves to the potatoes, they heard thevillager’s drum beats to warn other villagers.
The Japanese fled. The captain fired at the
ground once or twice to intimidate the villagers
and initiated a discussion with the village chief.
The captain conceded that stealing wasunethical and admitted that he should haveasked the chief first. In his defense, however,the captain explained that he could not help
stealing because the food shortage had becomeso acute. He then added: “If you cannot pardon
the theft, then I have no option but to fight.
Many soldiers are so hungry” (ibid.).

Ogawa’s silence over the issues he did not andcould not examine has significant bearings on
his persistent trauma. He accumulated painful
memories in China and New Guinea andbrought them back to Japan. In Japan, Ogawa’s
war continued ‘in the head’ despite histransition from a soldier to a civilian. His
struggle fits with what Michael Rothberg(2019) names the implicated subject. Rothberg
argues that we, present-day citizens, are notcomplicit in violent and unjust events of thepast, but we are implicated in trans-local andintergenerational legacy of the past. The
implicated subject complicates the position of
the bystander to look into their involvement orcomplicity in past events, and thecontemporary imbalance of power and privilege

What did the chief do? He replied: “All right,
what’s the point in a pointless fight? Why didn’t
you tell one of the boys? It’s no good to behungry. Now that I understand, I’ll give away
all the potatoes” (ibid.). While Ogawa gave theofficer’s logic short shrift, he saw the villagers
had “a greater spirit of tolerance andcompassion than the Japanese” (ibid., 283).
Through this episode Ogawa judged theofficer’s actions as unbecoming of the
supposedly “civilized” standards as Japanesesoldiers. Pitting the civilized but callous
Japanese officers against the uncivilized but
benign New Guineans disturbs the victim
narrative and puts the Japanese squarely into
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the past events created. Ogawa’s silence
helped him carve out the figure of the
bystander but hindered direct engagement withthe awkward issues of his complicity during theraid and what the raid means to him in hiswhole life story.

work of the three Rs — re-experiencing,releasing and reintegrating the traumatic
memories — towards his healing. Yet at thesame time his failure to fully confront themeaning of such episodes can be seen as one
potential source of his persistent nightmares.

Following the potato raid, Ogawa continues toobserve of Japanese officers’ ethicaldegradation and exploitation of the New
Guineans. In one village Ogawa watches aJapanese soldier bartering his razor blades forthe villagers’ bananas. Also witnessing is aJapanese officer. He finds the razor blades had
become rusty and tells the soldier to cancel thetrade. The officer then takes the bananas fromthe villagers, claiming that the bananas are areward for intervening in the unfair trade. The
officer turns to the soldier and berates him,saying “Shame on you! You are not Japanese!”and “This is no good for the dignity of theEmperor’s army.” The villagers look on looking
bemused. That same evening, a village elder
offers the soldier several bananas. Ogawa
understands this gesture as the elder
commiserating with the soldier for bearing theofficer’s excessive anger and compensating forthe shame that the elder might havecontributed to the soldier’s humiliation (Ogawa
1998, 284–285). On this occasion, the officer
ostensibly protected the innocent inhabitants
and thus upheld his dignity as a member of a
supposedly more “civilized” culture. However,Ogawa adopts the stance of a bystander andpoints to the officer’s perverse post-hoc
rationalization in order to take the bananas.
Ogawa’s morality tale casts the New Guineansas ‘friendly natives’ falling prey to uncivil anddevious Japanese officers. His positioning as a
bystander enables him to create the division
between the victim and the perpetrator. The
potato raid and the razor blade incident allow
Ogawa to position himself as an innocent
bystander absolved of personal responsibility;
but he comes short of interrogating his own
position as an implicated subject. This kind of
mental abstraction spares him from the difficult

Traumatizing Encounter with the Allied
Captors and Return HomeIf his wartime experience caused Ogawa
profound trauma that lasted for years, the final
pages of “Island of Death” relate the emotional
impact of Japan’s defeat. At the end of thenarrative, Ogawa writes of his subsequentcapture and experience as a prisoner of war(POW) and ends the memoir with his return tohis hometown, Hiroshima. All of these
impressions added to his grave realization that
he and his fellow Japanese troops had been
completely stripped of their once privileged
position in Japanese society. After the Japanesesurrendered, Ogawa and his comrades walkfrom inland to an Australian-run POW camp by
the sea. There, the Australians were to disarm
the Japanese before sending them to another
POW camp. At the seaside camp, Ogawa sees
half-naked Australian troops chewing gum andtoting machine guns, ready to shoot any
Japanese who resisted. Ogawa senses that theAustralians’ appearance was a staged
performance intended to humiliate theJapanese. He describes the Australians as“greasy giants,” with glistening muscularbodies and radiant blond hair; they smirked
contemptuously at ‘the shriveled and dirty lines
of soldiers’ (ibid., 309). What Ogawa saw was
the triumphant bodies of the victors in sharp
contrast to the emasculated Japanese bodies.
An Australian soldier’s questioning of Japanese“Lance Corporal O” seemed to inflict yet morehumiliation on the Japanese. Ogawa writes:“Lance Corporal O was short. He had a baby
face. A long arm took away O’s cap, and thehand patted his head. [The Australian] then10

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the altered landscape of Hiroshima presents
him with an even more profound paradox about“civilization”. The atom bomb represented the
epitome of human civilization and scientificendeavor. When the news of the atom bombover Hiroshima reached Ogawa and his
comrades, they believed the bomb brought the
war to its end sooner. They even drew a sigh ofrelief for its getting him out of the jungle (ibid.,
302). Yet, his survival came at the cost of
unprecedented destruction and the deaths ofmany civilians. New Guinea and Hiroshima arevery different places, but the damage tohumanity brought together different war
experiences Ogawa and others had. In spite ofthe debilitating vulnerability and emptinessOgawa felt, he still managed to take to writing
to reclaim his humanity.

asked ‘How old are you? Eighteen?’. It was
bizarre to see a thirty-year-old man assumed tobe eighteen.” (ibid.) For Ogawa, Lance
Corporal O was superior to Ogawa, both byrank and age. However, in the eye of theAustralians, Lance Corporal O was just anothermember of a vanquished nation. These episodes
are uncomfortable reminders that what
followed the defeat added to the emotionalburden Ogawa carried with him.
The final incident that seared trauma onto
Ogawa’s mind came upon his return to hishometown of Hiroshima. Ogawa and his
comrades had learned of the news of the atombombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki within days,
even in New Guinea. Ogawa disembarks a train
at Hiroshima and walks out of the station. As
the sight of the devastated city comes into viewand left him wonder:

Conclusion

Is this what that bomb could do? Did I live
to see this devastation? The bomb killed
several tens of thousands of people, and it
helped me to live. … Here [Hiroshima] was
no place for human habitation. I went fromthe jungle to a ruin. I went from theviolence of nature the war meted out tothe violence of civilization. I have gone
between two realms that excluded
humans. I could find no means of putting
together my shattered self. An empty
breeze passed through an empty heart(ibid., 350).

Of a plethora of writing and cultural artefactsof war, the veteran’s memoir is no lesssignificant to studies of war, autobiographicalwriting, and trauma. Japanese memoirs of the
Asia-Pacific War inform us how individual
veterans tried to come to terms with the defeat
from the vantage point of their return to thedefeated homeland. Ogawa’s “Island of Death”
is an informative text that reveals the severityof trauma when concepts of it had barely takenroot in Japan. In other words, Ogawa’s memoir
is not only a personal record of his inner war
but speaks to many war veterans in Japan andelsewhere who lacked the wherewithal ormeans to articulate how they felt.

His journey from one death zone in a New
Guinean jungle to another in Hiroshima offers
no consolation of homecoming. It was the warof conflicting civilization between the Allies andthe Japanese that brought him to New Guinea.
There Ogawa fought a war against nature andthe corrosive effects of the jungle on a type ofcivilization he valued. Upon returning to Japan,

This article has explored two narrative threads
in “Island of Death” when we read it as
Ogawa’s attempt at psychological recovery. In
the first, he unearthed his traumatic memories
in China and New Guinea and recognized they
were indeed on the same continuum. The
second thread involved him contrasting the
New Guineans and the Japanese officers in an
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attempt to repair his broken faith in humanity.
Ogawa did not elaborate how he finally
unshackled himself from his decades-longnightmares in subsequent publications. Given
that he wrote the draft of “Island of Death”
shortly after his return home, he was most
likely immersed in narrating his wartime life asa victim and a bystander. “Civilization” was aconvenient rhetorical device to sustain thebinary of noble and ignoble “savages.” Ogawa’s
experiences of the prisoner of war camp and adevastated Hiroshima dealt further
psychological blows to him. In this context of
his psychological state, Ogawa portrayedhimself as a victim of the war and a bystander
but fell short of assisting him to terms withtraumatic experiences. If one considers
Ogawa’s declaration of eventual freedom fromhis nightmares, it becomes possible to re-read“Island of Death” less as the endpoint but moreas the beginning of the author’s
autobiographical repair. Actions that remained
unspoken and pent-up emotions could manifest
in many dreams. None is too inconsequential to
the long war Ogawa experienced and thetrauma that his memoir passed down tosubsequent generations.

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tegami, nikki, taikenki o yomitoku [Soldiers’
War: Reading Letters, Diaries and Memoirs].
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This article is a part of The Special Issue: Re-examining Asia-Pacific War Memories:
Grief, Narratives, and Memorials. See the Table of Contents here.
Ryōta Nishino is Designated Assistant Professor at the School of Law, Nagoya University,
Japan. His research interests revolve around the circulation of history and historical memory
in various media such as school textbooks and travelogues (Studies in Travel Writing,Japanese Studies, Journal of Pacific History, and Pacific Historical Review). His second book,
Japanese Perception of Papua New Guinea: War, Memory and Travel, is due in October 2022
from Bloomsbury Academic.

Notes
1

See articles by Alison Starr, Beatrice Trefalt and Collin Rusneac in this special issue.
The original title was Kyokugen no naka no ningen (“Human Beings in Extremis”). In 1983
Chikuma Shobō republished it under the new title. Since1998 Kōjinsha has published it.
Ogawa is not completely unknown in the English-speaking world. An anthology of oral historyof Japanese experience of the Asia–Pacific War, by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook,features Ogawa’s oral testimony (Ogawa 2000a, 267–276). Yuki Tanaka introduces Ogawa’s
witnessing of suspected cases of cannibalism by Japanese soldiers (2018, 125–126).
3
Along with Ogawa’s “Island of Death,” Takahashi lists Kamiko Kiyoshi’s Ware Reite ni
shisezu as the other representative memoir of the Shōwa 40s. See Justin Aukema’s article inthis special issue for an analysis of Kamiko’s memoir.
4This figure excludes Rabaul, New Britain Island, which became the site of a large base andnaval and army headquarters for Japan’s South Pacific operations. At the end of the war there
were 100,000 Japanese troops stationed at Rabaul.
5
Yukiyukite shingun followed veteran Okuzaki Kenzō as he interrogated former officers whom
he suspected of murdering his compatriots and of cannibalism in New Guinea. See Tanaka
2019.
6Shimokōbe credits Nishizawa (1998) for the 3Rs. Nishizawa adopted the formulation ofrecovery from childhood trauma by the US psychiatrist Kendall Johnson (1989).
7
I refer to the pages in the 1998 edition.
8
See Justin Aukema’s article in this special issue.
9
The Western imagination of the Pacific Islands has engendered a copious amount of study.
Mahon Murphy’s article in this special issue draws our attention to a lesser-known colonial
fantasy of the German empire.
2

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