ON MY FIRST day in Japan, my new friend Hiroki turned to me and asked an unusually direct question: "Why are you in my country?" It was not an unreasonable query, because while he was in the company of 13 of his fellow English language students, I wa
s in Kyoto with a fairly odd assortment of people. We ranged from a 21-year-old engineering student to a 29-year-old maker of animal costumes and a 46-year-old collector of military memorabilia. We had little in common and no obvious reason to be in Japan together for ten days.
But there was no simple answer to Hiroki's question. "It's because of our grandparents," I said. "They were here, in the Far East. During the war… they were soldiers… and were taken, er, prisoner…?"
I waited for a nod, some flicker of recognition, but there was nothing, only a blank expression on Hiroki's face. There was an awkward silence; possibly I looked embarrassed, which Hiroki took as the cue to move on.
And that, neatly, could be the motto of the initiative I was trying, and spectacularly failing, to explain. The programme I was on, Pacific Venture, is indeed all about moving on, yet its name – deliberately, I assume – offers no clues, and it is billed, equally cryptically, as a 'Japan-UK Peace Exchange'.
Since 1995, with funding from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and donations from private business, the Pacific Venture programme has taken groups of 'young people' – getting older all the time – from Britain to Japan. These disparate groups have only one thing in common: grandparents who were prisoners of the Japanese during the Second World War, of whom there were around 50,000 from the UK. That's a lot of grandchildren.
When I heard about Pacific Venture I wasn't sure I wanted to get involved, mainly because I wasn't sure what my grandparents – both of whom were PoWs and who passed away in the last decade – would make of it. Although I knew something of the Far East PoW experience and that it was generally bad, I wasn't exactly sure what my grandparents had endured. I suspect that we grandchildren had been spared many of the details. And, of course, we had been too young to ask.
I didn't have a full understanding of what their feelings were towards the Japanese, though my grandfather, speaking about his captors in 2001, said, "You have to forgive, because hatred corrodes you." I also remember my grandmother articulating thoughts that ran counter to that. Then again, I recall accompanying her to a remembrance service for the victims of the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the end of which we tossed white petals into the Water of Leith.
What I did know of my grandparents' story was extraordinary. But, significantly, it wasn't the story of their time as PoWs, but the story of their marriage. There was just one other detail with which we were all familiar: that at the end of the war my grandfather, who was 6ft 4in, weighed eight stone. Of the time in between, their four years as PoWs, little was said.
MY GRANDFATHER, Drummond Hunter, was a law student at Edinburgh University when war broke out. The 20-year-old soon found himself heading to the Far East with the Royal Scots Second Hong Kong Battalion. When he arrived in Hong Kong, he met a British volunteer nurse, Peggie Scotcher, for whom the war had interrupted – and, as it turned out, ended – a promising career as a ballerina.
Their first meeting was inauspicious. Peggie thought Drummond "the most arrogant man I'd ever met". Her view seems to have been quickly revised, though – before long they were 'courting' and within weeks they were engaged. But the idea of marriage must have been something to cling on to rather than a concrete plan. The future was shrouded in the bleakest uncertainty. And on December 7, 1941, their fears were confirmed: the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Manila, Singapore and Hong Kong, which Drummond had spent the past 18 months protecting with a barbed-wire fence, a hopeless defence against the air attacks that followed.
Four days later, with the Royal Scots positioned on Golden Hill, they found themselves under mortar attack; that was followed by hand-to-hand fighting with swords and bayonets. By 8am some 29 Royal Scots were reported dead. Then came the machine-gun fire.
Drummond was struck in the left arm and just below the right shoulder, and was carried unconscious off Golden Hill. Anaesthetised with a bottle of beer, he was taken to the British Military Hospital – to Peggie.
After 13 days, his wounds had healed sufficiently for him to be transferred to the Hong Kong Hotel. But on his way there, during another air raid, the ambulance crashed and Drummond's back was broken. He was pulled from the wreckage and taken back to hospital.
Now it was Christmas Eve. The next day, Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese, but Drummond's response was to suggest he and Peggie get married. He believed if they were married they might, as capture was now inevitable, be kept together.
At the time he was naked, ready to be put in plaster from neck to hips, but he asked the hospital chaplain to fetch the marriage licence from the pocket of his tunic. They were then married in a ceremony that even my grandfather described, 60 years later, as "truly bizarre… the bride and chaplain ducking under my bed as the bombs fell, me immobile with a mattress over me as protection. We had the nurses' Christmas cake and a glass of champagne from the one remaining unsmashed bottle."
His hope that they might be kept together proved futile, however. While Drummond couldn't be moved, his new bride was taken to the Stanley Internment Camp. "I was very worried for Peggie," he admitted in 2001, two years after her death. "At St Stephen's Hospital the Japanese troops shot all the doctors and raped the nurses."
He, meanwhile, remained in hospital, in plaster for a year, though he was regularly visited by Japanese officials and pestered to sign an oath of loyalty to the Japanese emperor. He refused. "I told them that wherever I am, Scots Law prevails," he said. "They thought I was mad."
But by Christmas 1942 he was fit enough to join his fellow PoWs, in the Argyle Street internment camp. "For three years we lived on two 6oz dishes of rice a day. Everyone's ribs stuck out and of course people died of diphtheria and cholera and malnutrition. At one point we were burying a man a day," he said.
During their four years in camp my grandparents communicated by letter: one a month, with a limit of 25 words. "I used to run words together and pretend they were Scottish words, so the camp commander couldn't understand them," said Drummond. He also recalled some of the treatment of his captors. "If you didn't bow, they'd make you stand for hours in the heat."
The Far East experience seemed typically to be much worse than that in German PoW camps, a claim borne out by the statistics: 27% of Japan's prisoners died in captivity, compared with 4% of Germany's.
Among American soldiers in the years after the war the mortality rate remained high. Dr John Pritchard, who is one of the founders of Pacific Venture, told us that there can be only one explanation: that the physical and psychological trauma experienced in Far East camps was extreme.
And, in this sense, what is most remarkable about Peggie and Drummond is what they did after the war. Drummond became a campaigner for the rights of prisoners, helping to establish the Howard League for Penal Reform in Scotland. He also gave up law to become chief executive for the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for the mentally ill. He resolved, he explained later, "Not to be part of the world, or strive to be Lord Advocate, but to change it for the better."
Peggie, his constant ally from the moment they were reunited, helped run the Howard League and joined the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons. The common theme in the many organisations with which they were involved was a championing of the underdog; overwhelmingly, my grandfather, in particular, concerned himself with people who were incarcerated. He sought to humanise hospitals and prisons, introducing art and drama. The wards of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital were transformed, in the words of one colleague, into "one of the finest art galleries in Edinburgh".
He provided the antidote to modern tabloid stories depicting prisons as holiday camps. He railed against challenges to prisoners' basic human rights; he deplored the practice of slopping out, for example. He understood what it meant to lose your liberty – and that, he reasoned, was punishment enough. He would have gone even further: he wanted to see prisons abolished altogether. Failing that, he was determined to humanise the places in which people were locked up.
It was an intriguing response to having been imprisoned himself. But there was, said his psychoanalyst friends, an explanation. In their view it was a classic case of abreaction – 'the free expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion'. "They told me I had found the nearest thing to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and decided to change it," said Drummond. "I think that's true."
WHEN OUR GROUP met for the first time at a briefing in London and shared some of our grandparents' stories, we were advised to "carry the spirit" of our grandparents. "Don't go looking for an apology," we were told. I thought about my grandparents, and what they would have made of the trip. I'm pretty sure they would never have imagined their eldest grandson dressed in traditional kimono and slippers, in a smoky karaoke drinking den, standing on a small stage in front of 50 sweating, smiling, drunken Japanese businessmen, belting out 'New York, New York' to a tumultuous reception.
And of course there were other aspects to Pacific Venture that were more meaningful, in particular those linked directly to our grandparents' experiences. For some, the most profound was in Hakone, where we met Minoru Katsumata, an 85-year-old war veteran.
He told us that he remembered eating lunch one day and his boat, which came under fire from American submarines, going down soon after.
Finally, after nine hours in the water, he was picked up by a Japanese boat. They landed on an Indonesian island, and the crew spent the next three years there, living off "very delicious bananas" – he smiled at the memory – and wild boar.
"You cannot imagine how hard war was, because you haven't seen it," said Katsumata quietly, though he acknowledged that he was more fortunate than most.
Still, he claimed that, of those who were conscripted from his area, "80% died during the war, most others not long after." He paused and added: "Malnutrition."
We travelled from Kyoto to Tokyo. We were tourists, visiting temples, museums, high-rise towers, shops, the British embassy. We attended a lunch in Tokyo hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which began with a speech by the department's director, Toshiro Iijima. He did what no one had done so far in our five days in Japan: he mentioned the prisoners-of-war.
"I know your relatives suffered difficulties in the past, and I wish to express my sympathy and sorrow from the bottom of my heart," he said , patting his chest. We stared at him in silence, a lump in the throat. Because this, as our host in Japan told us, was unusual – unusual for the Japanese to openly acknowledge the war; unusual to hear an apology; it can even be unusual for the Japanese to know about the war.
Mary-Grace Browning, one of the Pacific Venture co-ordinators, explained that Japanese schoolchildren are not taught about the Second World War. My friend Hiroki probably had no idea what went on. "The aim of Pacific Venture, right at the beginning, was to allow people to make up their own minds about how they actually felt," said Browning. "The idea is that the grandchildren of PoWs should meet each other, and then travel together as a group to Japan to meet as many Japanese of their generation as possible, and then to decide whether they could be friends."
If friendship is the aim, then by any reckoning Pacific Venture is a success. It took me almost the full length of our stay to appreciate why, and it had everything to do with our penultimate port of call: Hiroshima. Here we spent two nights in the home of a Japanese family, an experience that was extraordinary and humbling. Amy and Sam – as they insisted I call them – were so kind it was embarrassing. We visited the town hall, near the spot where the bomb dropped, which somehow remained standing and remains as a skeleton-like relic. We stood looking at the building at 8.15am, the precise moment when the bomb exploded, and marked every morning by haunting, chiming bells. We toured the peace park and the museum – it was harrowing, but it was also wonderfully inspiring. Whatever the arguments about the world's first A-bomb and the horrible, excruciating deaths of 140,000 people, there can be no other description of it than as a dreadful tragedy. But many would prefer to describe it as an atrocity – and it is very difficult, having toured the museum, seen the photographs and read the testimonies, to disagree.
But Hiroshima today is a living symbol of world peace. The decision to rebuild the city in this spirit seemed to be there from the start. The city was re-established on positive, life-affirming foundations, and now the message that resonates is one of peace.
I couldn't help thinking afterwards that it was a shame I had met Hiroki on my first day in Japan. Had we met nearer the end, I'd have had a clearer idea about the purpose of our visit. In answer to his question, I think I would have replied, simply, "To make friends." And although I will never know, I feel sure my grandparents would have approved.
The full article contains 2437 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
