The turn for the worse in Chungkai came when Colonel Yanagida went down to command Nakom Paton Base Hospital and we had inflicted on us a certain Colonel Ishi. Ishi was a big, pig-like Nip, with the little mind of a man who liked to tweak and make miserable his camps by nasty, pointless little orders and restrictions. He had a high falsetto laugh and a practically perpetual idiotic grin that had nothing of humour in it. There was a story told about him that illustrates his character and the typical hysterical basis of all Nips’ characters. He had three Korean privates up before him for some fault or other in his office. At the beginning, when he was enquiring the nature of their crime, he was nodding and grinning and speaking quietly. He then proceeded (as all Nips can do) to work himself up into an hysterical fury and he ended up shouting at the top of his voice, standing on his table and kicking the Koreans in the face with his jack-boots.

Under Ishi, the Group Commander, was Kokubu, the Camp Commander, a real gorilla of a Nip, but not so bad as some. He hated the officers, and he hated the Koreans. He had very bad teeth and could only eat ‘pap’ rice and soft foods but he was drunk every night, and when Kokubu got drunk somebody suffered. In the earlier days it had always been the prisoners, but now it might be some of us, or it might equally be some of the Nips. Frequently at night he’d call the Koreans out on parade, abuse them drunkenly for some imagined fault, hit them until he was tired and go about next day with a bandaged and bloody hand. On one occasion he terrified some of his own sergeants with drunken sword play in his house, swishing at them and just missing them, till the sergeants, who’d almost imperceptibly slunk to the floor, made a bolt for it. But he was a genuine tough egg in spite of his drink, and an expert in Judo. When he had had sole charge of the camp he’d not been spiteful and at times had granted requests almost liberally. On one occasion he even made a joke. We had asked for permission to send our Concert Party down to Kamburi where they had no shows. Kokubu grinned, and said: ‘Certainly! And would you like me to invite over Winston Churchill to Chungkai next weekend?’ Of Kokubu the Koreans used to say: ‘In Japan there are three sorts of Japanese: those who ride in a car, those who ride in a rickshaw, and those who walk. Kokubu walks.’ Certainly, taken together, Ishi and Kokubu were a pair of swine.