Ernest gordon takashi nagase biography

Japanese Army officer

Takashi Nagase (永瀬 隆, Nagase Takashi, 20 February 1918 – 21 June 2011) was a Japanese military interpreter during World War II. He worked for the Kempeitai (military secret police) at the construction of the Burma Railway in Thailand, and spent most of his later life as an activist for post-war reconciliation and against Japanese militarism. He made over a hundred visits to Thailand, and from the 1970s, arranged several meetings between former Allied prisoners of wars and their Japanese captors, in efforts to promote peace and understanding. In 1993, he met and reconciled with British former POW Eric Lomax—in whose torture sessions Nagase had been involved—an encounter retold in Lomax's 1995 autobiography The Railway Man.

Early life and military service

Nagase was born in 1918 in Kurashiki, Okayama, Japan and learned English at an American Methodist college in Tokyo. He joined the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, and became an interpreter for the Kempeitai at the construction of the Burma Railway, known for its brutal conditions leading to the deaths of over 12,000 Allied prisoners of war and 90,000 Asian labourers or romusha. Nagase was involved in the interrogation and torture of many Allied POWs. Following Japan's surrender, Nagase spent seven weeks working for the Allied War Graves Commission as a volunteer, helping recover bodies for proper burial. After returning to Japan, he founded an English-language school in Kurashiki.

After the war

Nagase was first introduced to the British public in the documentary made by ex-POW John Coast about the realities of life on the Thai-Burma Railway, which was first broadcast in the UK on BBC2 on 15 March 1969. It was repeated on BBC1 on 4 August 1969 and again on Boxing Day 1974. The documentary was an early colour broadcast and part of the series One Pair of Eyes. Return to the River Kwai featured interviews with Nagase and

Ernest Gordon as a POW.  At the end of the war, the six foot Gordon weighed less than 100 pounds.

Gordon (1916-2002) and Takashi Nagase (1918-2011), one of his guards in the Japanese camp.

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     Ernest Gordon was a Scottish POW in World War II.  He wrote Miracle on the River Kwai to tell the story of his experiences at the hands of the Japanese as he and his fellow soldiers were force to work on the Burma-Siam Railway (the story behind the 1957 movie The Bridge On the River Kwai).

     The cost to construct the Burma-Siam railway was astronomical.  There were 393 fatalities for each mile of track laid, as prisoners labored under inhumane conditions.  Oppressive heat, tropical diseases, stinging insects, and inadequate food, clothing, and shelter exposed workers to the harsh elements of the Thai jungle.  Many succumbed to the brutal environment.  Others, suspected of lagging, were bayoneted or decapitated by sadistic guards.

    Like frightened, cornered animals, the men adopted an extreme survival mentality.  Prisoner on prisoner crime was rampant.  Men were motivated primarily by fear and hate.  Gordon describes their descent into hell:

As conditions steadily worsened, as starvation, exhaustion and disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived was increasingly poisoned by selfishness, hatred, and fear.  We were slipping rapidly down the scale of degradation.  We lived by the rule of the jungle; survival of the fittest.  It was a case of “I look out for myself and to hell with everyone else.”  The weak were trampled underfoot, the sick ignored or resented, the dead forgotten.  When a man lay dying, we had no word of mercy.  When he cried for our help, we averted our heads.  We had long since resigned ourselves to being derelicts.  We were forsaken men, and now, even God had left us.  Hate, for some, was the only motivation for living.  We hated the Japanese.  We wou