Scars of war: Missing toenails

By Carole Biniasch

JAKARTA (JP): When we were growing up, one thing about our father puzzled us greatly... his toes simply looked different. Like most Chinese fathers, ours was a man of few words, and one would not broach a subject as delicate as ten toes that looked rather odd.

Curiosity did get the better of my reserve, however, and one day I asked him. That was over thirty years ago, but his image and his words are still etched indelibly into my memory.

He touched each of his toes gingerly, looked at me with eyes misty with unshed tears and said, "The Japanese took them... all my toenails."

He said it with great sadness, but I could not detect any rancor in his voice.

My teenage self boiled over with anger, with a hatred more intense than any I had ever felt, and my whole being screamed for revenge.

I could not for the world imagine that I could forcibly removed someone's toenails with a pair of pliers. The image horrified me then, and still haunts me today.

As a young lad, my father had trekked his way down to Canton. Together with his older brother, they had sold themselves as coolies to a ship captain in return for free passage to Singapore. There, he worked off his debt, taught himself to read and write, married my mother and started life as a trader in medicinal goods. He had never bore arms against anyone, he had never been remotely connected to a soldier's lot.

When Singapore fell, he fell captive to the Japanese for the sole reason that he was Chinese, male and he was aged between 18 and 36 years old. He spent the next two years in a prison camp and to the day he died seven years ago, he could not figure out why his Japanese jailers tortured him. He had no secrets to tell; no military intelligence to impart. Yet, they subjected him to the whole gamut of inhuman tortures. Removing his toenails was just one of the many.

What awaited him at home in Penang was worse. His first-born son, died of a middle ear infection when six months old because there wasn't a doctor left on the island to treat him. I never knew how he took the news, because I had never talked with him about the dead child. In fact, I knew nothing of the existence of this brother until an aunt told me about him six years ago.

My mother had never ever mentioned him, but after I found out I asked her. She could not tell me where he was interred as she did not know herself. Someone took him away when he died, that was all she said.

Growing up in the 1950s, most of the physical scars of war, like bombed buildings and charred corpses, had long disappeared -- except in the memories of those who lived through the horrors. What I knew of the Japanese occupation, I learned through books, documentary films and, lately, questioning older friends and relatives whose tongues and memories have been somewhat unlocked by the passage of some 50 years.

The sights and sounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being vaporized made me wonder about the fragility of human lives. But my conscience has never been burdened by the question of the necessity of this course of action. Perhaps among those Japanese casualties, there were some who had the nasty habit of removing toenails with pliers; perhaps among the children who died, some would have grown up to continue the practice.

Perhaps a few thousand men got out of the war with their toenails intact because the Japanese surrendered when they did. For a folk as circumspect and polite as the Japanese, I find it difficult to understand why they find it impossible to say a simple sorry for starting a war of expansion and then subjecting the conquered to some of the cruelest treatment ever meted out to prisoners of war.

Each time I see a Japanese man over 70, I wonder if he could have been one of my father torturers.