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Dissect Them Alive, Page 2
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The local population were the Moro people, an assortment of jungle tribes legendary as ferocious head hunters. The occupying Japanese feared and hated them; as the US forces drew closer, they arrested many of them as “spies”, and threw them into a hellish pit where they were left to rot. “I don’t know whether they really were spies or not,” said Mr Makino. “All that was needed was for someone to say that they were. We knew that we’d lost the war. Our psychological state was very strange by then. In those conditions, we could do anything, absolutely anything.” It began with a practice which has been described by a number of former Japanese soldiers - the “testing” of traditional Japanese swords on live prisoners. “There were university graduates who had no idea how to fight, but who were officers because of their education,” Mr Makino says. “They carried swords, but never used them. They’d say, ’Bring the POWs - we will see how sharp these swords are!’ So they tied up the prisoners and chopped their heads off. But the swords were so rusty, they couldn’t do it cleanly.”
One day towards the end of 1944, Mr Makino was summoned by his commanding officer, a navy doctor whom, even now, he declines to name. “I was his number two, and he told me that if anything happened to him, I had to take over from him. He told me to come and see a vivisection.
“The first time it was one prisoner, a middle aged man. He’d already given up - there was no struggle. He was tied to the bed and anaesthetised with ether, so that he was completely unconscious. The Lieutenant showed me what to do. He cut him open, and pointed out, ’Here’s the liver, here’s the kidneys, here’s the heart.’ The heart was still beating, then he cut the heart open and showed me the inside. That was when he died.” “I didn’t want to do it, but it was an order, you see. At that time, if a commander gave you an order it was understood that it was the order of the Emperor, and the Emperor was a god. I had no choice - if I had disobeyed, I would have been killed.” The “operation” took about an hour; when it was over the body was sewn up and thrown into a hole in the earth. Eight more vivisections followed, Mr Makino said, up to three hours long. “Over the course of time, I got used to it,” he said. “We removed some of the organs, and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were women, young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it, but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education.
“I admired the lieutenant, and I was flattered that he asked me to do this because he really trusted me. I felt truly honoured. But now I know I was used.” When the Americans landed in force in March 1945, the Japanese scattered into the jungle. Mr Makino spent seven months there, until well after the Japanese surrender, living like an animal off cats, snakes, lizards and licking water off leaves, utterly alone. A photograph take of him after his rescue by locals shows a living skeleton. But as soon as he had returned to Japan, the feelings of remorse began.
He married, had two sons, worked in a hospital and became a salaryman for a construction company. And whenever he could he returned to Zamboanga. He published a pamphlet about his
experiences and spoke in schools about the horrors of war. But he never spoke of the experiments, until October when he was being interviewed by a Japanese newspaper. “It slipped out,” he said. “But now I have talked about it, I must not stop.” Apart from a few local papers, a second interview on the news agency, Kyodo, was largely ignored by the Japanese media, an indication perhaps of the reluctance to air the subject of wartime atrocities. “No one else who knew about it survived, and it is a miracle that I am alive,” said Mr Makino. “I have to talk about it, to tell the story to children who know nothing about such things. It brings me peace to a certain extent, but not a complete peace. I was under orders, you see. But I know that I did a terrible thing.”
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 Copyright 2006 nopukob.com
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