ABSTRACT
In April 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Schwartz, a medical offi cer from Fort Worth, Texas, arrived in Jinsen, Korea, as a prisoner of war. Schwartz had been captured in the Philippines during the Battle of Bataan three years earlier. He had treated survivors of the Bataan Death March and endured wretched conditions in several camps and prison hospitals. A ship that was to transport him from Manila was bombed and sank. Hundreds of POWs died aboard a second “hellship,” as the POWs called the vessels that carried them across the Pacifi c. Finally, a third ship delivered him to Japan. After a comparatively comfortable two-day journey via ship and train, Schwarz and his comrades arrived at their fi nal destination in Korea. They were immediately impressed by the good conditions. “We were placed in a large, well-constructed frame barrack building and were there fed better than at any of our previous camps,” Schwartz later wrote. “The Japanese camp offi cials, on the whole, were more friendly than any we had previously encountered.” 1
The relatively benign conditions of POW camps in Korea surprised Schwartz, and even now they can seem anomalous compared with common accounts of the POW experience. Bestselling biographies, Booker Prize-winning novels, and popular historical works in the United States and Europe commonly portray Japanese POW camps as uniformly awful, with guards regularly humiliating and abusing captives. 2 Authentic historical accounts exist, but they typically focus on the most notorious episodes. The vast majority of historians in Japan have focused on politics and command responsibility rather than the conditions of particular camps. 3 Some, like Utsumi Aiko, challenge nationalist mythmaking. Utsumi’s recent work has focused on Korean guards and the ways in which they too were victims. For Utsumi, the inadequacies of the POW system are explained by institutional fl aws in the management of POWs, Tokyo’s changing attitudes toward international society, and Japan’s relative poverty compared to the United States and Europe. 4
In South Korea, few scholars have studied POW camps. An exception is the Commission on Verifi cation and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea, which seeks to win recognition and compensation. Korean historian Cho Gun analyzes the Korean guards through the frame of colonialism in Korea and concludes – like Utsumi Aiko – that the guards
suffered too, both at the hands of their Japanese offi cers and war crimes prosecutors. 5 This more subtle argument is an important response to the depiction by popular Western histories. 6 However, it also tends to make Allied POWs themselves mere bystanders in this history.
