The Sea and Poison — Shūsaku Endō, confronting War Crimes
31 Tuesday Jul 2018
Pride in our ancestors, and countrymen is common in stories we tell each other, of their hard work, sacrifice and good deeds. We feel somehow related to those qualities, by lineage or proximity. What about those ancestors, or countrymen, who did inconceivable acts — rape, torture, cannibalism? Not so many stories there. Lineage or shared culture? Not so much.
The same asymmetry of interest seems to be true of novelists –professional story tellers. We have many many stories of heroes of war, fighters for liberty and justice or, lately, those who have suffered much, the innocent victims, their courage and endurance. Where are the stories of war criminals, of the Hannibal Lecters of our families, nations, wars? If fiction is to enlarge and deepen our understanding of humankind why would they be missing? Without acknowledgment of their existence and deeds do we have full understanding of what brought us to our present condition, or towards that which we may be going?
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One writer who has grappled with telling such a story is Shūsaku Endō in his 1958 Umi to dokuyaku. Translated in 1992 by Michael Gallagher and published by New Directions as The Sea and Poison, it is a short, shocking novella, told in restrained, descriptive prose and dialog. No hyperbole, simply the imaginative re-creation of a small group of doctors and nurses who used captured American pilots in medical experiments, in Japan during WWII. In a country defeated (unimaginable!) in a war they had initiated (as a great nation should!) and a king who was a god ( whose voice on the radio was more earthshaking than the surrender it announced,) the idea that the sacred military and honored doctors had committed crimes could not be formed. Endō, with a great deal of courage, did so, telling an absolutely necessary story. Unfortunately for the English-language reader, the reading is made more difficult than simply the emotional impact, by authorial choices: shifts of narrator, a lack of sharpness of themes and a puzzling lack of conclusion. The Sea and Poison is, nevertheless, a book to be read when trying to understand human behavior — and certainly not just of the Japanese.
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On the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of the four islands of Japan, the city of Fukuoka was being bombed regularly by American airplanes — May, 1945. It was a port city and home to a naval base and hospital where the wounded, soldiers and civilians were being treated. American pilots who had bailed out of crippled planes were being held in a POW camp Senior doctors at the hospital decided that the cause of medical science , and the return of Japanese soldiers to the war, would be advanced by experimenting on the prisoners; not their corpses, but while alive: vivisection. This is the story, based on actual events. Thirty doctors and nurses were tried in Yokohama after the war, for such war-crimes, along with others who had carried out similar experiments on thousands of Chinese prisoners in Manchuria during the war. Several were executed. Several got long prison sentences.
We don’t know, as we begin to reading, any of the above. A narrator in a Prologue tells of moving to a dusty suburb of Tokyo some years after the war. He meets two men, one of whom says that in China where he had been they “could do anything with the women.” The other, who was military police, “had really seen some things.” Because of medical needs, the narrator seeks out the town doctor. Doctor Suguro is a strange, withdrawn man, said to be married but whose wife is never seen. He lives in dark, shabby home and yet is an expert at the techniques of pulmonary injection, between the ribs, needed by the narrator.
Through a chance conversation and subsequent archival research on a trip to Fukuoka he learns the story of the doctor — which we get only the bare outline of: during the war at a hospital in Fukuoka, a military medical unit had engaged in “vivisection” experiments on live human beings: captured American airmen. After the war twelve were tried for war crimes. Several got long sentences; Dr Fukuoka was among them and received two years.
The narrator thinks,
“Even in this West Matsubara to which I had moved, no matter how few its shops and houses, I had got to know two men who had tasted the experience of killing a man. And I could count Dr Suguro as a third. … How strange, I thought, that up to today, I had hardly reflected at all upon this. Now, this father of a family coming in through the door, perhaps during the War he killed a man or two. But now his face as he sips his coffee and scolds his children is the face of a man fresh from murder. … Just as with the show window in West Matsubara, past which the truck rumble, the dust of the years settle on our faces too.”
The next section begins oddly. We realize after a few pages that the original narrator is gone, (never to reappear,) and a third-person omniscient narrator is telling a story of years before, in Fukuoka, not the opening setting, and that Dr Suguro is now a major, being-revealed character. Who he is, and what he did, along with others, is now the story. Of the doctors and nurses introduced, Suguro is one of the kinder, offering sweets to an elderly woman, worrying about an upcoming operation on a young, well-connected, woman. Others, “The Old Man,” Nurse Oba even Suguro’s friend Toba, are more brusque, less caring. Contention between leading doctors at the hospital for the directorship, recently vacated, sets up competing operations, and chances taken.
From the hospital on the outskirts of Fukuoka, Suguro and the others can witness the daily destruction of the city. Smoke rises in giant columns and can be seen from the hospital windows. As Toda says, and repeats,
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Saline to be injected into blood stream of the first man. The possible quantitative limits of such a procedure before death are to be ascertained.
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Air is to be injected into the veins of the second prisoner and the volume at which death occurs is to be ascertained.
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There is to be an excision for the lung on the third prisoner. The limit to which the bronchial tubes may be cut before death is to be ascertained.
As the operation begins, Suguro suddenly can not go through with it; he backs up and stands, barely, against a wall while regular soldier-onlookers joke and snap pictures.
With the section titled “Those To Be Judged” the style changes again. A participating nurse and Suguro’s friend Toda tell their own stories, giving backgrounds, friends, incidents of youth, boyhood misbehavior and sexual activity. Toda is somewhat self-reflective but having recounted several events in which he is not very kind to others he says:
Götz and Meyer: A Serbian Tale of the Holocaust by David Albahari is one of the most amazing books I’ve read. (my review here.)
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inc Unit 731 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731