Preface

Summary

It is a long time, forty years, since the end of the Second World War, and with the lapse of time what happened in it is like a distant historical fragment of a past which people have now forgotten. With the end of the war we Japanese set up a new constitution which outlawed war, sought peace and declared that Japan would never again go to war.

But how can the present generation who have no war experience understand what war is? By the same token, how can they bear malice, how criticize, how amend the real truth? To them it is the responsibility of those who did experience it to tell them the reality … they can describe it and it is plainly their responsibility to do so. One must admit, however that they are getting few in number.

When our army made their strategic attack on India, they planned a railway for military purposes to transport supplies overland. After the war, the construction of this railway was the background to the film Bridge built in the Battlefield (Japanese title of Bridge on the River Kwai), and the prisoners in it were supposed to be those who sang the theme song the ‘River Kwai March’. Moreover, because so many were sacrificed, the slur, ‘Death Railway’ was slammed on it. Full details of the actual conditions of its construction do not now exist. The film is full of errors, and to have dubbed it ‘Death Railway’ is clearly far from the reality.

Its construction involved an unusually difficult operational sequence in military action in a war area. To use prisoners-of-war and their help to complete the task constituted a unique phenomenon in a world railway construction.

In mountainous terrain in a jungle belt pivoting on the Three Pagodas Pass on the Thai-Burma frontier, construction meant enduring a climate of sweltering heat and heavy rainfall, meant battling with epidemics of serious diseases such as malaria and cholera, and mastering nature in the form of jungle for a distance of 415 kilometres and in the space of one and a half years completing the task: the solid fact, in my opinion, is that the Japanese left behind them a record of considerable enterprise.