More than 60 years had passed, but Akira Makino still suffered nightmares about Filipino hostages and the injections that rendered them unconscious. Then there was the one about the surgical knife gouging a human liver.
Every time he woke up to the flashbacks of horrific killing scenes, he shut his eyes tight and tried to turn his mind away from something he no longer wanted to think about. But Makino, 84, also feltppine island of Mindanao in August 1944.
He was assigned as a medic in the 33rd coast guard squad of about 20 soldiers who were in charge of detecting enemy airplanes. His squad joined a landing force of some 1,500 troops on the fabled Yamato, once the world's largest battleship which US bombers sank later in the war.
"The Yamato was such a huge ship that it could not easily find a suitable port," he said. "So the ship anchored in the middle of Manila Bay and we dispersed to a variety of destinations in the Philippines."
Soon after arriving at the Japanese military base at Zamboanga on the western tip of Mindanao, Makino found himself and his unit cut off from headquarters, with the situation growing worse by the day. They received no military supplies or orders, let alone medical packages.
The main enemy facing the small Japanese squad were the guerrilla bands formed by local Muslim Moros, who constantly threatened their station, he said. "We were told the Moros were such cruel people that they attacked enemies with spears, and we actually rescued some people assaulted by them," Makino said. "I was told many times I should not walk in the palm tree jungle after dark."
Naturally, he said, almost all the hostages they captured were Moros. "We were supposed to keep them alive in captivity, but it was no problem if we 'disposed' of them, in the beheadings the Japanese have become infamous for."
He remembered at least 50 hostages being killed, "including those who got this," he said, moving his hand to imitate a sword cutting off a head. The frail old man recalled that many others were kept alive as human guinea pigs for his superior combat doctor, who wanted to show young medics like himself how to conduct surgical operations.
"We first anaesthetised them -- we usually used injections or oxygen gas," he said. "Then they passed out in a few seconds." The combat doctor would tell him to watch as he sliced open a hostage's stomach, a scene that Makino says made him so ill he couldn't eat or drink for days afterwards. "When cooking chicken, the doctor would get amused and say, 'Oh, this is just like human intestines,'" he said.
But Makino said he eventually became accustomed to what he had to do. "I was desperate," he said. "I didn't want to do anything like that if possible. But I had to follow the orders of my superior as a military man, otherwise I'd have been beaten up." He could not put a definitive number on how many of the 50 people the unit killed were vivisected or how many of the operations he took part in.
He did say he could never forget those days on the tropical island and even six decades later he could barely talk about his experiences without breaking down. As he talked about his experiences and memories with AFP, he lowered his eyes and said he felt the most profound guilt over the way the bodies were handled afterwards.
The Japanese made Moros dig holes in the ground, he said, and then they hurled in the bodies with the stomachs still open. "The mud got in all over the human stomach. My captain said there was no need to close the wounds because that would just be a waste of suture thread." His voice suggesting the troops had some mercy, Makino added: "But we didn't leave any of the bodies out on the ground."
--- Driven to desperation as war's end neared --- Makino's confession revives memories of Imperial Japan's "mad scientist" Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, who led the infamous Unit 731 in north-eastern China, where the Japanese made their colonial base of Manchukuo and conducted germ warfare tests on prisoners.
Ishii is believed to have attempted the mass production of biological weapons by testing deadly germs such as anthrax, dysentery and cholera on prisoners of war, mainly Chinese, and dropping plague-carrying fleas and rats on their villages. Makino said his unit in the Philippines did not have any organised plan and that it did not test plague germs.
"It was a one-off thing," Makino said. "We didn't take data or anything." Another veteran, one of only a handful surviving from the Philippine battlefield, said the final days of the war were so desperate they did whatever they thought necessary just to survive. Yoshihiko Terashima, 86, a former naval chief commander, said he did not commit any living-body experiments himself but added: "That could have easily happened."
"It must have been natural for military doctors to come up with the idea of using whatever they had for tryouts in such destitute situations," he told AFP in a separate interview. "They had no medicine and no supplies, so then of course they would have had to come up with ways with whatever they had. And they must have done the same thing to injured Japanese soldiers as well," he said.
He contrasted the situation in the Philippines with that in north-eastern China, then known as Manchuria. "There (in Manchuria) Japan was winning the war. During the time of Makino (in the Philippines) we were losing it."
The Americans landed on the Philippines' main Luzon island in January 1945 and within six months declared victory. An estimated 218,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in the battles on Luzon island alone. Like many Japanese soldiers, Makino and Terashima each fled into the jungles.
At his home in a Tokyo suburb, with cabinets full of war documents and a rolled-up map of the world lying on the floor, Terashima recalled the destitute conditions that he face a while fleeing from US attacks. "When you holed up in a cave at night, you see huge rats crawling up on the faces of dead bodies, eating the eyeballs," Terashima said in a firm voice.
"So we took an iron helmet to catch them and ate them. "Those dying just lay on the ground, living a few days by eating the maggots that were infesting their own faces." In later years, both Makino and Terashima repeatedly returned separately to their former battlefields to collect the remains of Japanese soldiers.
Makino travelled back and forth between Japan and the Philippines more than 10 times, taking everyday supplies like rice, pencils and clothes to needy residents of Mindanao. "I've done it out of a quest for redemption," Makino said.
--- Remaining silent for his wife --- Makino said the past haunted him for years, so much so that he hesitated to marry. "I would tell people that I had reasons for not being able to marry." It took him 10 years to make up his mind to marry a friend's sister, but said he could not talk to her, or anybody, about the surgical killings committed by his unit in the Philippines.
"It was cruel, too cruel to talk about it to a woman," he said. "My wife might have thought I was such a cruel person. That's what was in my mind. "While she was with me, I just didn't want her to know about it," said Makino, who kept a monochrome photo of her on his bedside at the hospital where he died in May.
The small, business-card size photo showed a young woman posing in a silk dress, a capeline and gloves. Another photograph, in colour and taken years later at an amusement park, showed two boys wearing baseball caps and his wife, all smiling.
"We were together by fate, so I didn't want her to know anything bad. She grew up as the youngest of four children in her family and totally depended on me." Makino said her death more than three years earlier freed him to talk publicly about the experiences that haunted him.
"You have to talk when you know you have done something guilty," he said. "We lost the war because we deserved it," Makino said with bitterness. "We didn't have enough soldiers, enough arms nor enough bullets. We didn't have enough of anything." Makino, whose jobs after the war included laboratory assistant and salesman for a water pipe company, said his life has been one of ups and downs.
"My life was such a mess, not planned at all," he said. "Maybe it was my fault because I had volunteered to join the navy. But I would have been drafted eventually anyway," he said. "In those days people would have thought something was physically wrong with a man if he was not in the military. Born as a man during that era, I had to go to the war."
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