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March 24, 2008
Grace's Great Raid
Why is there evil in the world? This is the question that often becomes a defense against any possible good God. But, as others have suggested, another hard question to answer, without a good God, is how there can arise goodness in the midst of great suffering and in response to great cuelty? This story, or obituary, from the New York Times (thank you, James Altena) contains two stories of grace, one for an American veteran who recently died and the other for a Japanese veteran of World War II. The American, Jacob DeShazer, was a bombadier on the Dolittle raid.
After bombing Tokyo in the Dolittle raid, Corporal DeShazer landed in Japanese-occupied China. He and other surviving crewmen "were starved, beaten and tortured at prisons in Japan and China — spending most of their time in solitary confinement — until their liberation a few days after Japan’s surrender in August 1945."
"Amid his misery, Corporal DeShazer had one source of solace." He begged a guard to get him a Bible.
"I eagerly began to read its pages. I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity. I realized that these people did not know anything about my Savior and that if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”
Corporal DeShazer decided to preach the gospel to his former enemies. After college, in 1949 he preached his first sermon in Japan.
In 1950, he gained a remarkable convert.
Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and had become a rice farmer after the war, came upon the DeShazer tract.
“It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as my personal savior,” Mr. Fuchida recalled when he attended a memorial service in Hawaii in observance of the 25th anniversary of the attack. He had become an evangelist and had made several trips to the United States to meet with Japanese-speaking immigrants.
The two men met several times before Fuchida's death in 1976. Great enmity, but one Cross overcame it. Two missionaries of the reconciling Cross. Amazing.
Posted by James M. Kushiner at 10:31 AM | Permalink
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Sometimes God seems to "forget" to be subtle. And what a wondrous glimpse into His providence we are then privileged to behold!
Posted by: Bill R | Mar 24, 2008 12:09:13 PM
Many Japanese seemed to have a religious conversion after World War II. Tojo, for instance, became a very devout Buddhist. However, relatively few Japanese adopted Christianity. Fuchida was therefore somewhat unique, but then his whole life was unique: from being the man who led the Pearl Harbor raid, to missing death at the Battle of Midway by inches, to flying through the mushroom cloud at Hiroshima in a trainer aircraft whose fuselage had actually been bent by the blast (cancer killed Fuchida, but whether his exposure to radiation, or his habitual chain smoking, or both were responsible isn't clear). I wonder whether his having gone from the heights of nationalist exhilaration after Pearl Harbor to the depths of despair after Hiroshima did not prepare him for the reception of the Gospel, which provides such a different (and yet in some ways similar) path to the Bushido to which he had previously devoted his life.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Mar 24, 2008 2:36:39 PM
Welcome back, Stuart--we missed you!
Now, where are James Altena and GL? Don't tell me they enjoyed Lent so much they've decided to observe the Eastern version as well!
Posted by: Bill R | Mar 24, 2008 3:25:47 PM
I'm DeShazer was able to find it in his heart to forgive. From what I've read of the World War II Japanese military, it is quite likely his guards were people to be pitied.
The Japanese military had a harsh regime of systematic brutality and cruelty towards its soldiers. Upper-level officers would routinely demand lower-level soldiers to perform degrading acts. Beatings were an everyday occurrence. It was designed to de-humanize the soldiers and make them equally capable of great cruelty.
I know a lot of people don't want to hear the side of soldiers who were raping women, killing babies, and torturing POWs, but I think in many cases the Japanese soldiers themselves were victims in that war.
Posted by: Seth R. | Mar 27, 2008 1:13:17 AM
>>>I'm DeShazer was able to find it in his heart to forgive. From what I've read of the World War II Japanese military, it is quite likely his guards were people to be pitied.<<<
Bad as DeShazer's treatment was, it did not come close to the worst that the Japanese did to Allied prisoners, as, for instance, on the Bataan Death March or along the Siam-Burma Railway. I have met quite a number of World War II veteran--ex-prisoners of the Japanese-- who have not found it in their hearts to forgive the Japanese, not so much for what was done to them personally, but for what was done to their fellow prisoners, particularly those who did not survive the experience. Bad as American sentiment is, it is far worse in Australia, where the animosity of Aussie veterans is palpable indeed. Back in the 70s, when Australia was opening new relations with Japan, the Japanese prime minister visited the country and was treated to a VIP parade. Aussie vets lined the parade route, and when the PM's limo passed, they turned their backs on him, en masse.
The thing which most sticks in their craws is the utter lack of contrition on the part of the Japanese (except for the part about losing the war, of course). They refuse to acknowledge their complicity in horrendous crimes against humanity, while simultaneously wrapping themselves in the mantle of victimhood ("We were just minding our own business when the perfidious Americans dropped two Atom Bombs on us").
I can fully understand the inability of many ex-POWs to reach the inner peace of DeShazer. On the other hand, I also know a number of former U.S. soldiers, airmen and Marines who have, over the years, become quite close to their Japanese counterparts, even attending each other's unit reunions. That's because the men fighting on the sharp end have a shared experience which transcends nationality; both realize they committed brutal acts against the other. Time has smoothed over the rough edges, and now they bask in their shared survival. The atrocities committed against Allied prisoners were not committed by frontline Japanese troops (indeed, Allied prisoners reported that, in most instances, they were treated well by the men to whom they surrendered) but by rear-echelon troops, often Koreans and other "undesirable elements" who were themselves systematically brutalized by their superiors. So the onus of ill treatment tends not to fall on the Japanese who were actually fighting against our troops.
This, of course, does not hold for those Japanese who fought against their fellow Asiatics. For every American, British, Australian or Dutch POW who died in captivity, there were ten or more Filipinos, Chinese, Malays, or Burmese. And one cannot gloss over that Japanese front-line troops systematically butchered Chinese civilians in the millions, as a matter of course and of policy.
It was, by all accounts, a really nasty war, one matched for its brutality only by the Nazi-Soviet holocaust.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Mar 27, 2008 7:14:08 AM
Japanese Units 100 and 731 were the ones engaged in biological warfare research. They did terrible things to the (mostly Chinese) prisoners. Then the head honchos escaped retribution by handing over their "data" (which was completely useless, unscientific trash). Human nature, I guess, but ugly all the same. And, yes, there was no remorse expressed.
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Mar 27, 2008 8:14:50 AM
I second Stuart (as if that were at all necessary). The first hideous period postcards I saw of Japanese atrocities in China made me wonder, "How could some clever, brave photographer take these pictures and smuggle them out...?"
No. They were taken BY the Japanese as propaganda - the sort of pictures anyone today would have taken as propaganda AGAINST the occupier. Twentieth-century bushido (its relations to traditional samurai ethic was quite tenuous) was a horrifying mania, and more alien to Westerners than National Socialism. Indeed, only about a dozen Japanese were executed for war crimes under MacArthur - because the application of the European war's standards of "war criminal" would have decapitated Japanese society as surely as they routinely decapitated captives.
I've done oral history with Pacific vets, the crew of the cruiser that accepted the surrender of the island of Truk...let's just say reconciliation was not a prominent theme among them. No Mitsubishis to be seen in that parking lot - and these were not POW survivors or close-combat infantry, just an ordinary Navy surface crew. The difference between one petty officer's statements about the Japanese - and about the German POWs he supervised on a different assignment - was instructive; he was downright fond of "his Germans" ("except the SS guy").
DeShazer's story is truly miraculous, above and beyond "ordinary" forgiveness between military enemies.
Posted by: Joe Long | Mar 27, 2008 8:42:59 AM
Well, while we are on the subject of honchos who escaped retribution, there is the enigmatic and notorious Col. Tsuji Masanobu, one of the aggressive young officers who helped mastermind the outbreak of the war in China, then later became a troubleshooter for the Japanese general staff. A tactical genius and master of improvisation, Tsuji helped plan the Japanese conquest of Malaya, then moved to the Philippines after the Japanese offensive stalled at the Bataan peninsula. He was later prominent in the Solomon Islands campaign. In fact, Tsuji was something of a Japanese Walter Zelig (the amazing chameleon man), showing up at critical points in the Pacific war as if out of nowhere.
Tsuji's more sinister side involved his instigation and execution of widespread massacres in China, the murder and abuse of prisoners in Malaya and the Philippines. He returned to the China-Burma-India front in 1944, where he helped stabilize the Japanese position after the failure of the Imphal campaign. While there, he pressed for completion of the infamous Siam-Burma railway. During this time, he is credibly alleged to have murdered an American airman named Lt. Parker and ritually eaten his liver.
When Japan surrendered, Tsuji, still in Burma, was arrested by the British but escaped. He was condemned to death in absentia for his war crimes, but first hid out in Indo-China, and then made his way back to China, where he is alleged to have entered the service of Chiang Kai-Chek (strange bedfellows indeed!), apparently doing intelligence work on both the Chinese and Soviet communists.
He returned quietly to Japan in 1948, apparently having cut a deal with the U.S. occupation forces (probably he turned over his files on Mao and the Soviets to our intelligence agencies), and in 1952 actually was elected to the National Diet on a nationalist party ticket. He apparently kept his contacts with various intelligence services, doing chores for the British and the Americans, and possibly others. In 1961, he is alleged to have traveled incognito to Vietnam, where he literally vanished from the face of the earth--or, at least, nobody has been able to trace his whereabouts since then. Since he was only about 60 years old at the time, he could have lived for another decade or more, or he could have come to a well-deserved end with a bullet in his skull, but there is no way of knowing.
All we do know is that this man--as responsible as any for the carnage in Asia and the Pacific between 1932 and 1945, was never brought to justice for his crimes, and in fact, returned to his native land as something of a hero. No wonder Australian and American veterans of the war (to say nothing of the Chinese and other assorted East Asians) harbor great resentments against the Japanese people.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Mar 27, 2008 8:44:39 AM
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