Ghosts, Seen Darkly: Richard Flanagan on Visiting the Site of a Japanese Prison Camp

1.

In the winter of 2012, against my better judgement and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing—much as I said they were—and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned. It was very cold, a bitter day, and an iron sky threw a foreboding cast on the Inland Sea beneath which my father had once worked in a coal mine as a slave laborer.

Nothing remained.

Though I had no wish to be bothered with it, I was taken to a local museum where a very helpful woman found numerous photographs documenting a detailed history of the coal mine from the early twen- tieth century—its growth, its processes, its Japanese workers.

There was no photograph of slave laborers.

The woman was kind and, as they say, a fount of knowledge about local history. She had never heard of slave laborers working at the Ohama coal mine. It was as if it had never happened, as if no one had ever been beaten or killed or made to stand naked in the snow until they died. I remember the woman’s tolerant smile: a smile of pity for me thinking there had ever been slave laborers at the Ohama coal mine.

2.

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.

But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.

And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.

3.

At 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, said “Bomb away!,” and forty-three seconds later 60,000 people died while eighty miles to the south my father, a near-naked slave laborer in his fourth year of captivity as a prisoner of war, continued with his grueling work pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels that ran under the Inland Sea.

Broken, ill, body and will near the end, knowing only that when in a few months the winter cold returned he could no longer endure and would die, he was unaware that he was now going to live. As my father made his way along the bleak mine tunnel only very occasionally punctuated with dim electric light bulbs a fellow Tasmanian POW remarked that it looked like his hometown of Penguin on a Friday night.

4.

At the mine-head entrance, where my father and his fellow slave laborers once ran the gauntlet of guards who beat them as they passed, there now stood a love hotel. There was no memorial, no sign, no evidence, in other words, that whatever had once happened had ever happened. There was some neon signage. There was a business that catered for quick opportunistic sex in tiny rooms that allowed for sexual release and deliberately little else.

What remained, or rather what existed, was only the oblivion of pleasure in another’s arms—the same oblivion that simultaneously prefigures and denies death. As if the need to forget is as strong as the need to remember. Perhaps stronger.

And after oblivion? We return to the stories we call our memories, perplexed, strangers to the ongoing invention that is our life.

5..

Next to me that bitter day there stood an elderly Japanese man, Mr. Sato. He was tiny and frail, neatly dressed in a sports blazer and dress pants too long in the cuff from where, I assumed, he had shrunk with the passing of years. His hands were covered in thin white cotton gloves, and when he pointed out some long-vanished feature of the camp and mine below, all I saw was a loose thread dangling from the glove’s cuff. I don’t remember his shoes. Mr. Sato’s head came to my chest.

He lived and cared for a daughter who, I was told by the translator, was very disabled. Mr. Sato had once been a guard at Ohama Camp. He showed me where the barracks had been, the farm up the hill, the mine head downhill, closer to the sea.

In front of us, to my embarrassment and unspoken anger, were a TV crew and several photographers from local newspapers. I had gone through a series of contacts to be at the mine head, and somehow the local council had become involved. Without my knowledge they had asked the media along. The TV crew and newspaper journalists wanted one thing: Mr. Sato and I embracing, an image of forgiveness, of understanding, of time healing.

That would be, I knew, a lie. It wasn’t for me to forgive.

Does time heal? Time does not always heal. Time scars. Mr. Sato’s gloved hand was raised, pointing, the cold world below bisected by an unravelling thread.

6.

Earlier that day I had met local, elderly villagers who had been children during the war. I had not wanted to meet them. I felt—how can I put this?—ashamed. My shame was perhaps that my return might be misunderstood as vengeance or anger.

But I didn’t know what my return was. They had been children and I had not then existed. I felt, in short, unequal to them and their lives. Maybe I was ashamed, somehow, of being my father’s son presuming that his and their history might also be mine. I worried I might be seen as an unwelcome ghost, a specter looking over the scene of an unsolved crime in which I was implicated. But the ghost of whom?—the murdered, the murderer or the witness, or all three?

Because it was an arrangement made by others I didn’t know how to cancel it without causing offense. The elderly villagers were friendly, warm people.

When telling their tales of the wartime privations they had endured as the children of the rural poor, they recalled the dissonance between what the adult world said and what as children they saw, and a childish irreverence took hold of those old voices and weathered faces. They remembered when the POWs had disembarked in late 1944, how the devils they had been taught to fear for so long were no more than pitiful, near-naked skeletons.

As well as the cruelty of the Japanese guards, my father had spoken of the kindness of the Japanese miners, some of whom may have been these elderly villagers’ fathers, who would share their meagre food with the starving POWs.

7.

When I left school I worked as a chainman, the name given to a surveyor’s laborer, a job centuries old set to vanish only a few years later with the advent of digital technology. It was the chainman’s job to drag the twenty-two-yard chain with its hundred links with which the world was measured.

By my time, the measuring chain was a thin steel band fifty meters long, but little else had changed from a century before. The chainman still carried a slash hook and axe to clear the survey lines of scrub and trees, and a whetstone and file to keep both sharp.

I learnt to look out for evidence of old surveys from many decades before—collapsing stone cairns, rotting pegs, or the vulva form of bark on old eucalyptus trees. With the axe I would carefully scarf away the bark until what was revealed was a deep prism-shaped cavity skillfully hewed into the tree trunk long ago, sometimes over a century before. The apex of the inverted prism was the survey point.

I would stare at the marvel of that unaltered wound, the exact same as the day it was hewed by another axe. Time hadn’t healed the tree, only scarred it, hiding something that was still happening. For beneath the scar the wound remained, a portal to the past bleeding fresh sap in the present, into which, if I stared for too long, I would feel myself falling.

Standing there that day in front of a Japanese TV crew with its young woman reporter, the handful of local photographers and bored journalists determined to get the only story that made sense and get out, was a similar moment of accelerating velocity. I had no desire to embrace Mr. Sato. Perhaps he felt the same. But not wishing to embarrass him or anyone else I put my arm around him and he around me. Everyone seemed happy with this.

When the photos and filming were done I let my arm drop. Mr. Sato remained curling into me. When I went to move away, his head seemed to slump into my chest. And so there we stood.

Perhaps he too was falling through some infinite void, or perhaps it was just the cold. I had no idea. I can’t say I liked him holding me that way, this man who may once have beaten my father, but nor did I know how to be rid of him, to withdraw the warm comfort of my body.

I thought of Mr. Sato suffering with his disabled child and how at the end of his life he was being rightly punished. Then I felt ashamed thinking such a thing, aware that beneath this thought lay another I didn’t wish to acknowledge.

I looked away to the trees, bare, sad scrags; the earth unloved and cold around them, the rank grasses and weeds wretched-looking and lost. All of nature there seemed exhausted and disordered and me somehow a part of it.

Below, the sea could be heard rolling in and out along its stony coast, as it always had and always would, concertinaing through the crimes and sins and loves and passions of those who passed through this sad country. My whole trip felt as incomprehensible as that sound of rocks rolling into oblivion.

Would I have done the same as Mr. Sato? And when I tried to push that question away another arose. If Mr. Sato, who seemed a decent man, was capable of being a guard, doing evil or just standing by when evil was done, would I be any different? Would I too join in beating the prisoners, even though I didn’t wish to, would I too order a naked man to freeze to death kneeling in the falling snow, because it was what was expected, because it was too hard to say no? Or would I look away and choose not to help him?

Then I lost the thread of my thoughts. The day was going. I thought of the prisoner made to kneel in the snow overnight without clothes, a story that had always left my father indescribably sad in its pointlessness. Would I do the same? I suddenly hated Mr. Sato’s embrace and I hated Mr. Sato with all my being as he continued to lean on me.

A cold wind blew and petered away. Afterwards it only felt that much colder, the sea continued rolling in and out, we no longer noticed each other, it occurred to me that neither of us had any idea what the other was thinking or feeling, how standing there we could have been mistaken as brothers or lovers.

We stood for a very long time as the journalists and TV crew departed, as dark clouds hastily gathered above us, seeming to shudder in unknown judgement and quickly disperse in their disappointment, as the Inland Sea reflected back to me only its own mystery. What had happened? To this day I have no idea. There is no why.

8.

Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts? What if time were plural and so were we? What if we discovered we begin tomorrow and we died yesterday, that we were born out of the deaths of others and life is breathed into us from stories we invent out of songs, collages of jokes and riddles and other fragments?

My father used to laugh about one of his fellow POWs who spoke of having seen the atomic bomb blast light up the night sky over their camp as if it were day.

The atomic bomb over Hiroshima exploded at 8:16 in the morning. The past is always most clearly seen by those who never saw it.

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Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is available via Knopf.