Ninja (27 page)

In what then can those engaged in this kind of warfare put their hope? The Nakano Military School answered this question with a simple sentence: “In secret warfare, there is integrity.” And this is right, for integrity is the greatest necessity when a man must deceive not only his enemies but his friends. With integrity—and I include in this sincerity, loyalty, devotion to duty and a sense of morality—one can withstand all hardships and ultimately turn hardship itself into victory.
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Well, it may be a challenge to you and me to justify the deception of friends or a nationalist, militaristic agenda as moral, but secret services the world over have no problem in believing it. And many Nakano graduates and teachers were able to maintain their personal integrity by opposing or avoiding the worst aspects of Japanese wartime behavior.

How the entrance examiners found men with the right qualities was as much a matter of gut reaction as analysis. A corporal arriving for the interview was ushered into a room where half a dozen high-ranking officers started to fire questions at him. “You,” said one, “d'you like women?” The corporal was totally nonplussed, unable to answer yes or no. Afterward, he asked the assistant commandant, Ueda Masao, if the questions were planned. No, came the reply, nor did it matter; whatever the question, it was the way the interviewee answered that mattered, not what he said. The interview was not an examination but a personality test to see how the candidate responded to pressure. In this case, apparently, confusion was seen as a perfectly appropriate response.

When the war broke out in Europe, Nakano graduates focused on British-ruled India and the rest of Southeast Asia. They scored some extraordinary successes, thanks to a team of agents under the remarkable Fujiwara Iwaichi, a onetime lecturer at the Nakano School and at the outbreak of war a captain in the army's Eighth Section, which handled intelligence. At first glance, he seemed a conventional type. Akashi Yoji, the translator of his memoirs, met him after the war: “The lanky general with his short haircut, tight lips and hawkish eyes gave me the impression that he was a man of strong will and principle . . . something like the old-fashioned samurai with all the virtues attributed to that class.”
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But there was much more to him than that; indeed, he impressed everyone with whom he came in contact during and after the war—Malayan, Indian, even British—everyone except his own benighted superiors.

In September 1941, Fujiwara was given the task of leading covert operations in Malaya. He was supposed to contact Indians in the British Indian Army and in the independence movement, and Malay and Chinese anti-British groups. He had five Nakano graduates, each “sound in thought and pure in heart”—in his own positive,
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positive, words—but utterly naïve. Fujiwara was “dumbfounded by the unexpected order,” first, because he (like his team) had no experience of espionage, and second, because he was very different from regular soldiers and officers. He was the opposite of everything Japan would soon come to stand for: arrogance, xenophobia, brutality. Fujiwara was loyal and patriotic, of course, but also generous, flexible, and idealistic. In addition, he was highly emotional, often weeping at crucial moments, contrary to the chilly stoicism usually associated with Japanese officers. All of this made him one of those rare romantic figures in Japanese history. He knew it, too, comparing himself to Lawrence of Arabia (not the only Nakano graduate who did so, as we will see).

In Fujiwara's view, operations so far had been “devoid of a principle that would inspire the cooperation of alien nationals.” What was needed was “an ideology based on noble and universal political principles,” which ought to involve “an understanding of the Asian peoples' aspirations for freedom and liberation.” After a sleepless night agonizing over these ideological differences, he accepted his task, telling himself he would do what he could to revolutionize attitudes in the imperial army. In that, he failed; but he made a pretty good start.

He called his young officers to his home, had his wife prepare a supper of sea bream, and gave them a pep talk of shining idealism and—in hindsight—staggering naïveté:

Keeping in mind His Majesty's concern for benevolence that extends not only to our troops but also to enemy soldiers, we must impress his concern about indigenous peoples and the enemy, especially prisoners of war, and build, by inducing them to cooperate with us, the foundations for a new friendship and peace out of the ashes of war. . . . We must impress on them that this war is a war of righteousness aimed at freeing indigenous people and POWs and helping them to achieve their national aspirations and happiness. . . . We should be modest and moderate, refraining from being loud-mouths, political bullies or swaggerers. Men of such arrogance will not achieve anything.
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It's a message he repeats several times. “We were inexperienced, ill-prepared and ill-equipped to challenge the Western colonial powers. For us, the only way to break through this citadel of colonialism was to respect national aspirations with love and sincerity and win their hearts. Sincerity could move even heaven.” Seldom has an officer been so out of tune with the spirit of his government and its top military brass, and seldom so prescient.

The Fujiwara Kikan (Agency), as it was called—F. Kikan for short—set themselves up under cover in Thailand. At the heart of several nations and colonies all about to be at war with one another, Bangkok had suddenly become a center of international espionage. Fujiwara's account makes the city sound like the set of a farce, with German, French, Japanese, Chinese, American, and British agents all sneaking around trying to avoid being followed, constantly changing rickshaws and doubling back on their tracks.

Fujiwara made surreptitious contact with Pritam Singh, a young, fragile-looking Sikh, the leader of the Indian Independence League, banned as subversive by the British. He was ushered furtively up to Fujiwara's hotel room. “I have come to help you realize your high ideals,” Fujiwara told him, as excited “as if meeting a sweetheart.” Other meetings followed, one in a smelly warehouse that appeared to be a pickle factory, where Fujiwara promised to help the cause of Indian nationalism if Singh provided information and spread anti-British propaganda among Indian military units. Fujiwara and Singh agreed that Indian soldiers who surrendered to the Japanese would be returned to the frontline, where they would help undermine the morale of Britain's Indian troops.

When the invasion came, Fujiwara's operation rapidly moved from its covert, ninja-style roots to something overt, large-scale, and very political, with important consequences. Indian units in Malaya, outflanked, overrun, and cut off, surrendered by the hundred—some twenty-five hundred of them by mid-January 1942. Fujiwara was so impressed by one of the prisoners, Captain Mohan Singh (there are many Singhs in this story), that he organized a lunchtime banquet for him and his officers, with Singh acting as master chef. Singh was impressed by Fujiwara's readiness to embrace Indian ways, eating with his fingers, trying curry for the first time, so different from the racial superiority and aloofness of the British. Singh was bowled over by Fujiwara's qualities, reeling them off in a foreword to Yamashita's memoirs—shrewd, tactful, well-informed, calm, cool, unruffled, sympathetic. It seemed a match made in heaven: “Mentally, emotionally and spiritually, we had become one.” A few days later, Fujiwara agreed to back Singh as commander of an Indian national army.

When Singapore fell on February 15, Fujiwara and Singh had thousands of Indian prisoners from which to build the Indian National Army. Two days later, in a terrific propaganda coup, Fujiwara spoke to forty-five thousand of them in Singapore's Farrer Park, his words translated first into English, then into Hindi. Japan was waging a war of Asian liberation, and had no designs on India, he said, to much cheering. “When I told them of my conviction that the fall of Singapore would provide a historic opportunity for Asian peoples who had suffered under the yoke of British and Dutch colonialism to liberate themselves from bondage, they went into a frenzy. The Park reverberated with such echoes of applause and shouts of joy that I had to stop my speech until the tumultuous commotion had subsided.” Japan was their friend, Fujiwara went on. She recognized their freedom struggle. She would help. The prisoners need not remain prisoners, if they chose to join the struggle to free India. With “continuous applause, flying caps and waving hands,” tens of thousands surged forward to pledge themselves to the cause of national liberation.

That was Fujiwara's moment of triumph. But his success drew the appalled gaze of those in power. Almost immediately, higher echelons of the government and army took over from Fujiwara, with a very different agenda. Disagreements arose with Indian nationalists over the timing, size, and leadership of the INA. Japanese racism surfaced. Indian leaders, believing they would be treated as equals, made demands that the Japanese saw as unreasonable. Indian prisoners were used as mere laborers. Resentment grew. In March, having been in office only four months, Fujiwara was replaced by Iwakuro Hideo, a founder of the Nakano School, who lacked Fujiwara's idealism. In December 1942, the Japanese, fearing revolt, disarmed the INA and arrested its commander, Mohan Singh.

But this new Indian army was too important an asset to be allowed to die. The key to what happened next lay in Berlin, where the leading nationalist militant, Subhas Chandra Bose—wealthy, brilliant, charismatic—was in exile. Bose had courted Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s, had an Austrian wife, and in 1941 had fled house arrest in India through Afghanistan, where he was given a false passport by the Italian ambassador, completing his journey to Berlin through the Soviet Union three months before Germany invaded. In Japan's conquests, Bose saw his chance. The day after Singapore's surrender, Bose met Japanese diplomats in Berlin and begged to be allowed to command the Indian prisoners in Malaya, in effect to re-form the Indian National Army. Tokyo agreed, Hitler agreed, and Bose sailed by U-boat to Madagascar, there to be transferred to a Japanese submarine and taken via the Dutch East Indies to Tokyo and, finally, to Singapore. There he revived the INA as the army of his Provisional Government of Free India. It fought with the Japanese against the British and Commonwealth forces in Burma throughout the war, until March 1945, when the British advance into Burma totally undermined its morale. In the words of one account, as Lieutenant General William Slim's 161st Brigade drove south, “it rounded up parties of dispirited INA, whose only anxiety appeared to be to find out where to ‘report in.'” Some twenty thousand of the INA troops were repatriated to India, where they were to be tried for treason, making them a focal point for those striving for freedom from British rule. Protests turned to demonstrations and riots. As it happened, it was Gandhi's pacifism, not Bose's militancy, that came to dominate Indian politics, but it remains true that, in totally unpredictable ways, the decision to set up the Nakano School in 1937 played a significant role in Indian independence ten years later. Fujiwara played the most crucial part, for “without him it is doubtful whether the INA would have existed.”
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Fujiwara chalked up another success in Malaya with a man whose story makes a remarkable footnote in the history of Japanese covert warfare. His name was Tani Yutaka, and he became famous as a bandit leader known in Malaya as Harimau, “the Tiger.” Just before World War I, his father, a barber, had come to work in Malaya with his wife, bringing baby Tani with him. When he was twelve, his parents had another child, a girl. At the age of twenty, Tani returned to Japan to do his military service but failed the physical because he was too short. He stayed on in Japan to work. By then, Japan had started to build her mainland empire, carving Manchukuo from northern China and earning the hatred of Chinese everywhere, with catastrophic results for Tani and his family. Back in British-ruled Malaya, local Chinese took out their anger on the Japanese community. Among the victims were Tani's family: His father's barbershop was burned and his sister, now eight, killed.

Tani returned to Malaya, radicalized by the tragedy and consumed with hatred both of the Chinese and of the British, who had (in his view) failed to protect his family. In his anger, he turned to crime, for which he was well qualified as a Malay speaker with intimate local knowledge. He gathered a band of Malay and Thai bandits—actually, a small army of between one thousand or fewer, or three thousand or more (estimates vary)—who specialized in robbing trains as well as routine theft. As his notoriety grew, he acquired his nickname: Harimau, “the Tiger.”

As the Japanese prepared for expansion, his skill in mounting what were in effect commando-style raids brought him to the attention of Japanese intelligence. An agent made contact, appealed to his sense of patriotism, and recruited him into the Fujiwara Agency. Come the invasion, Tiger Tani gathered intelligence and led raids on British units, which included derailing a British supply train outside Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately for him, life in the Malayan jungle gave him severe malaria.

Fujiwara finally met the Tiger, between bouts of malaria, just before the fall of Singapore. “Harimau of Malaya, who had rampaged through Kelantan at the head of several hundred bandits, was, contrary to my expectations, a fair-skinned young man of small stature. His appearance was so gentle and timid that he hardly gave me the impression of being Japanese.” A few days later, Fujiwara sent Harimau, now much weaker, to a military hospital in southern Malaya, then on to another in Singapore, where Fujiwara visited him, bringing flowers and some good news. “He was lying in bed amongst a row of other Japanese soldiers. Outside his bedroom were five Malays sitting on their haunches, as if they were servants attending a noble. Their eyes were bloodshot due to sleepless nights of looking after their master. . . . I told him: ‘Tani, today I talked to General Manaki of the military government requesting him that you be appointed an officer of the military administration. General Manaki has agreed to it.' His joyful reaction was so overwhelming I was quite taken aback.”