One Man's Justice by Akira Yoshimura Read Free Book Online Page A

were human beings inside it.
    He was surprised that most of them looked to be around twenty years of age, some as young as seventeen or eighteen. It shocked him to think of the Superfortresses he had tracked so meticulously, constructed with the latest equipment and instruments, being manned by young men scarcely past their teens.
    Some of the men were the same height as the average Japanese, but most were around six feet tall, and all were endowed with sturdy frames and well-muscled buttocks. To men used to a diet of meat, the rice balls and pickled radish must have hardly even qualified as food. Nevertheless, they munched away at their portions, licking grains of rice off their fingers and biting noisily into the pickles.
    Their facial expressions varied. Most avoided eye contact with their captors, but some, whose face muscles were more relaxed, gazed imploringly toward Takuya and his colleague. Others cast frightened glances at them.
    In the end cell a fair-haired man lay on a straw-filled futon on the concrete floor, eating a rice ball. A dark bruise from a blow to the face covered the area from his nose to the pointof his right cheekbone, and bandaging on his rib cage was visible through his unbuttoned jacket.
    â€˜This one’s been shot with a hunting-rifle,’ whispered the slightly built legal officer, appearing suddenly from behind. Takuya looked into the cell as the lieutenant read out the report prepared by the kempeitai on this particular American prisoner. The man had been a crew member of a B-29 involved in a night raid on Yawata and Kokura on the twenty-seventh of March. When his plane was hit, he had parachuted into the woods near Ono in the Oita area. People from a nearby village saw this and ran out to find the man, then clubbed him with sticks before shooting him through the shoulder and right lung with a hunting-rifle. Evidently the wounded airman had been handed over to the police by the villagers, and then on to the kempeitai , who had arranged for him to receive medical treatment before being transported to Western Regional Headquarters.
    The man was obviously aware that people were watching him through the bars, but he ignored them, staring up at the ceiling as he ate. He seemed to Takuya to have long eyelashes and a remarkably pointed nose.
    When he heard how the villagers had beaten and shot this American, Takuya realised that despite his being a military man, bound by duty to clash with the enemy, his own feelings of hostility toward the B-29 crews paled in comparison to the villagers’. Up to this point, his contact with the enemy had been limited to information about aircraft detected by electronic listening-devices or seen by spotters. In contrast, inhabitants of the mountain villages no doubt felt intense hatred when they saw B-29s flyingover, as the objective of the bombers’ mission was nothing less than the mass slaughter of civilians such as themselves. This hatred was the driving force behind their outbursts of violence toward the downed crew members.
    It occurred to Takuya that these twenty-four American airmen in front of him were the embodiment of an enemy which had slaughtered untold numbers of his people. They had come back again and again to devastate Japanese towns and cities, leaving behind countless dead and wounded civilians. The idea that these men were receiving rice balls despite the virtual exhaustion of food supplies for the average Japanese citizen stirred anger in Takuya towards those in headquarters responsible for such decisions.
    â€˜Look at the awful shoes they’ve got on,’ said the officer, with raw contempt in his eyes.
    The prisoners’ shoes were all made of cloth, reminiscent of those ordinarily worn when embarking on nothing more adventurous than a casual stroll. Some were torn at the seams. Considering the obvious inexperience of the young men manning the bombers, and their cheap footwear, Takuya wondered whether the much-vaunted