Posted on: Sunday, December 5, 2004

THE RISING EAST

By Richard Halloran

After a Japanese soldier named Shuji Ishii was taken prisoner by American Marines on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II, he expected the worse, including being put to death. Instead, he wrote later in a memoir, he was astonished to find himself in a sanitary hospital with clean drinking water, sufficient food, soap, medicine, cigarettes, and a soft bed.

Compared with his filth, starvation, and having to drink his own urine just before his capture, Ishii said, "it was the difference between heaven and hell."

Ishii's account comes from a newly published book, "The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II," by Ulrich Straus, a retired diplomat who speaks Japanese fluently and was a translator during the war crimes trials in Tokyo during the postwar occupation.

Among Straus's key points is that decent treatment of Japanese prisoners, in contrast to the often-brutal experience of American prisoners at Japanese hands, went far to inducing them to tell American interrogators what they wanted to know, thus producing vital intelligence for U.S. forces.

"Almost invariably," Straus found, "POWs reacted favorably to the good medical treatment and ample food they received." Marine Maj. Sherwood Moran had lived in Japan as a boy and spoke fluent Japanese, and was a particularly effective interrogator because he treated each prisoner as another human rather than as the enemy.

This book is pertinent today when the news is filled with the International Committee of the Red Cross's allegations of American abuse of Muslim prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That has been compounded by reports that senior U.S. officers were warned before the news become public that Iraqi prisoners were being mistreated at Abu Ghraib. In addition, the court-martial trial of a soldier alleged to have been abusive at Abu Ghraib has just begun.

Beyond civilized treatment, Straus's research showed that knowing the Japanese language was critical to successful interrogation. He calls U.S. Japanese language programs "America's secret weapons," some of which were set up even before the war began. Some taught Caucasian Americans who started with no ability in Japanese while others taught Japanese-Americans who brought rudimentary Japanese to the classroom. The Japanese-Americans, or Nisei, were critical to U.S. success in the battle against Japan.

For operations and intelligence-gathering in Iraq, the U.S. has about 200 intelligence people who speak Arabic, but they are not enough. Some are interrogators but others are translators, which is not so effective and slows the process. American officials say they avoid using Iraqi citizens as interpreters because they are not reliable and could be terrorized by Iraqi insurgents. So far as is known, not many Arab-Americans have stepped forward to assist in U.S. operations in Iraq.

Like language, effective interrogation requires an understanding of the prisoner's culture. Japanese and Iraqis are driven by beliefs and values that differ from those of Americans. To cite but one example, Arabs and Japanese emphasize personal relations in a group far more than do individualistic Americans.

Straus found, for instance, that Japanese feared the Americans would find a way to notify their families that they had been taken prisoner, which would have been far more shameful than being accused of giving away military secrets. Specialists in Arab culture say Iraqis too fear what their compatriots will think of them.

Americans who questioned Japanese prisoners developed interrogation skills by trial and error as did their successors during the war in Vietnam. Those skills, however, were lost after Vietnam. "We were woefully unprepared for interrogating Iraqis and Afghans," says a U.S. official. "Interrogation is more art than science, and we just weren't ready for it."

Straus says that Japanese prisoners rarely defied interrogators because Japan's high command had decreed that no Japanese would surrender and therefore did not train soldiers to resist. U.S. officials today say that al-Qaida terrorists have been trained to resist interrogation, but the Taliban in Afghanistan nor the insurgents in Iraq have not.

Not all Japanese prisoners were well treated, by any means. "Hatred of the enemy was intense," Straus writes, "and there was little confidence that a fanatical Japanese soldier holding his hands high above his head could be trusted." That has its parallel in Iraq.

A few Japanese tried to escape. One slipped out of Camp McCoy in Wisconsin headed for Mexico in the mistaken belief it was only 300 miles away. Another, Straus reports, "was spotted poling down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft."

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. He wrote this article for The Advertiser.