Behind Japanese Lines by Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling Page B

down the road, sometimes with Japanese guards nearby, sometimes not. Now and then a guard would search a prisoner and take whatever possessions he happened to fancy. I was stopped once by a guard who took my sunglasses. Later others successively took my ring, my watch, and finally my canteen, though another Japanese, for reasons unknown, then gave me back a canteen—which still another guard promptly took away from me again.
    This was typical of Japanese unpredictability. Any Westerner who had much to do with the Japanese was invariably struck by how their psychology differed from that of Occidentals, and by their abrupt changes of mood. One moment they would be calm, smiling, reasonable, even generous: the next, storming in some inexplicable rage and acting like savages. An American Jesuit who spent the war years at a college in Manila wrote a perceptive book about the Philippines under Japanese occupation. He ascribed the sudden shifts in mood among the Japanese to their lack of an underlying philosophy or fixed religious faith. Some of their philosophical and moral ideas came from Confucianism and Buddhism, which are more truly
attitudes toward existence
than religions in the Western sense; and some have been derived from Shintoism, which is basically a mixture of animism and ancestor worship without either a rational view of the cosmos or a moral code. Then, in modern times, this variegated ancient legacy has been overlaid lightly by a mixture of Christianity and rationalism, a combination that has never been entirely reconciled and digested in the West itself much less in the non-Western world. The vast divergences among all these traditions, not to speak of what resulted when they were muddled together, he thought, had produced fundamental instability in the Japanese character. 2 Needless to remind the reader, I never tried to analyze the Japanese at this level, but I can testify that they were extraordinarily capricious.
    Examples of their unpredictability abounded during the first days of our captivity when everything was still wondrously disorganized. Robert Mailheau, a fellow survivor of the Death March, was once near a Japanese battery that suffered a direct hit from an artillery shell fired from Corregidor. The battery and its whole crew were blown to bits. Perhaps a hundred American and Filipino prisoners nearby let out a spontaneous cheer. While this was great for their morale momentarily, one would expect that it would have been followed bysome swift and terrible retribution. Yet, for whatever reason, the Japanese did nothing.
    Where I was, a guard would sometimes stop us periodically and take one or more men out of a group to fix a stalled truck, drive pack animals somewhere, or do some other menial chore. Once while we were still in the extreme south of Bataan, I was picked, with half a dozen other men, to dig some foxholes. While we were busy at it, the heavy mortars on Corregidor opened up on us. All we American diggers hit the dirt at once, as we had been trained to do, but the Japanese just laughed at us and stood unconcernedly in the open, seemingly confident that none of the shells had their names on them. Apparently they had never heard the admonition that the shell to fear is not the one with your name on it but the one addressed “To whom it may concern.” Their bravado in such cases also helps to explain why Japanese casualties were so much higher than American.
    Another time I was removed from the road and forced to help a Japanese company prepare a bivouac. Here one of the guards spoke to me in English. I asked him where he had learned the language. He said he had been trained in Yokohama to be a teacher of English. I then asked him which side he thought would win the war. He replied thoughtfully, without the customary Japanese menace or boasting, that he believed Japan would. He added that the training he had undergone in Japan was tougher than anything he had experienced so far in