By January 1943, the Japanese forces on Guadalcanal were desperate. A nasty, poisonous, back-and-forth jungle battle that began in August of the previous year was nearing an end. The Second Marine Division’s advance, backed by hard-fought air and naval superiority and logistical dominance, had cut off individual units of the Imperial Army, leaving it fragmented. For the US Marine Corps, relief was in sight. For the Imperial Japanese Army, at a local and global level, any hope for victory was slipping away.
Marine second lieutenant D.W. had been on the island since the beginning of the battle. On January 18 he was leading a platoon when they received a bayonet and grenade charge from a small group of Japanese soldiers who had been cut off from the main retreat. 25-year-old Sergeant Kiyoharu Watanabe charged D.W. with his bayonet, and the lieutenant shot him twice with his pistol. After the skirmish was over, D.W. buried his attacker with his own hands in a shallow grave on the ridge where they had fought. ‘I killed him – I had to bury him’, he later told a journalist. His words were ambiguous: this was not so much a matter of honor but of hygiene, but at the same time, even on battlefields of mass death, killing brought a measure of responsibility. He also took a bloodstained, signed flag and an Inkan (a kind of personal seal) from the body as mementos.
D.W. was sent to the comparative luxury of wartime New Zealand after the Guadalcanal campaign to recuperate and train for a possible invasion of the Japanese home islands, and it was there that he met his future wife. He and his fiancée married in Chicago in 1946, but she did not like the US, and they returned to New Zealand, where they lived for the rest of their lives. In the relative tranquility of post-war Auckland, D.W. could forget the most unpleasant memories of the campaign, rail against communism and forever avoid having to eat rice ever again. A new enemy – Soviet Russia – replaced the old ones of Germany and Japan. But New Zealand’s proximity to Asia meant that the new rise of Japan was seen there as clearly as in any mostly-white nation in the ‘West’. D.W. bought Japanese cars – more economical, reliable and effective than any others in New Zealand from the 1980s. Japanese tourists visited Auckland’s monumental war museum, and the language that D.E.W. had once begun to learn in order to receive the surrenders of his enemies could be heard on the streets of the city center.
In 1985 D.W. met a visiting Mazda Motor Corporation manager (and Hiroshima survivor), T.M., and ended up showing him his trophies, which he kept mostly hidden away in a drawer in his desk. For the next eight years T.M. searched for the surviving relatives of Watanabe and another soldier named Kobayashi (whose flag Watanabe had carried). Unfortunately these were common names, but T.M. was eventually able to track down Watanabe’s surviving sisters and Kobayashi’s brother (Kobayashi had died in 1942, and Watanabe presumably held on to the flag with the intention of returning it).
Corresponding with former enemies was doubtless awkward, but he tried to forge through the formalities – or what he saw as formalities – of dealing with the families of the man he killed. ‘If you think it appropriate’, he wrote, he wanted his respect and sympathies conveyed to the families of the dead soldiers, five decades after he shot one of them. In his letter to the family of the man he shot, he called Watanabe a ‘true Samurai’, and quoted an article he had read in an American news magazine which said ‘the future of Japan’s relationship with the U.S. must depend on young people’. The future held the promise of a kind of cooperation (tolerance in a modern sense wasn’t really what he meant, I think) to offset the few months of intense violence that he had experienced. Sadly, even after so much time and despite his noble intentions, a morsel of fear remained: D.W. was wary of a request from T.M.for a photograph, asking for a guarantee that it wouldn’t be used for any sort of revenge against himself or his family. It was quickly cleared up that the photo was for display in the Japanese consulate library and not for some more sinister purpose of revenge.
Being part of the small family that D.W. feared for, I find it immensely sad and strangely moving that for my late grandfather noble intentions born out of a long-buried memory of violence never translated fully into trust. I’m of a very different generation, which claims to have put aside some of the earlier mistakes of chauvinism and prejudice. Tolerance and a theoretical equality of all humanity are all very well, but trust is another thing, especially when undermined by experience or incomprehension. Can we hold on to our principles when our trust and pride are truly tested?
Please contact the author if you want more information. Some of D.W.’s papers are held by the Auckland War Memorial Museum