The matter of cigarettes seemed to be memorable for Japanese servicemen taken prisoner. American practice of offering cigarettes in their first peace gesture to newly-captured PoWs often made this strong impression. It recurs often in a study cited elsewhere in this forum section, Ulrich Straus’
The Anguish of Surrender (University of Washington Press, 2003):
At Iwo Jima. soldier Ishii Shijji (page 59):
[Ishii was one of those few who had been] taken into custody, prisoners were asked their names and unit designations by a Japanese-American soldier and then thoroughly stripped and searched. “Strangely,” American soldiers offered them cigarettes, but the new POWs remained mute with eyes cast down. Taken by bus to a stockade, they marvelled at the engineering miracles that transformed the island into a formidable base for the aerial assault on Japan during the brief time they had been holed up in their cave. Huge amounts of war materiel, including aircraft and landing craft, as far as the eye could see, dotted the landscape. All this demonstrated to Ishii, as nothing else, the imbalance of power between the United States and Japan and why the struggle on Iwo Jima had ended as it had.
A sense of relief overcame Ishii when he saw that the POW camp already held dozens of his countrymen … In his memoir, Ishii went on rapturously about the cleanliness of the field hospital, the clean drinking water, soap, medicines, and his soft bed, while only hours before he had been starving and drinking his own urine simply to survive … Then he smoked his first cigarette as a prisoner, a moment lovingly described. Truly, as Ishii wrote later, it was the “difference between heaven and hell.”
At Saipan, IJA signal corpsman Kobayashi Shigehiko (page 61):
{Kobayashi] still had a grenade and two bullets left. In his memoirs he claimed to recall that, as he was weighing for the umpteeneth time the option of committing suicide or getting shot by the Americans, the Geneva Convention came to his mind and from that time forward dominated his thinking …
When Kobayashi heard some Americans talking nearby, he threw away his rifle and readied the grenade so that he could pull the pin at the last moment, delaying his decision until the very last second. He recalled that he jumped out from his hiding place, startling the Americans, who all shot and missed him … Of his own free will he had decided to face an unknown world, Kobayashi’s initial encounter with the enemy in that new world occurred when an American NCO gave him a cigarette, and Kobayashi thought he should say something, so he said in English, “Don’t kill me; help me.” Instinctively, he realized the American would not kill him.
At Leyte, former business student Matsubara Shunji was in a vehicle repair unit, reorganized as infantry (page 65). His makeshift unit was going to be expended in a
gyokusai charge, when:
… Somewhat later Matsubara met a fellow “intellectual,” a lieutenant, from whose cryptic remarks he gleaned that he, too, would try to avoid throwing his life away. A few more days passed while they huddled in defensive positions, and then they heard the unmistakeable sounds of a gyokusai charge, followed by silence. Matsubara’s men looked at him beseechingly, their eyes asking, “Will we be next?” Fleeing Japanese troops passed through their positions yelling at them to abandon their positions before it was too late.
Finally, the opportunity to surrender to a group of Americans presented itself. Matsubara shouted at them, “No resistance, no weapons.” He was stripped of his insignia of rank and his wristwatch, then offered a Lucky Strike cigarette by a soldier who lit it for him. The American asked him for his Japanese cigarettes as a souvenir, trading them for a pack of the GI’s Luckies. The Americans were understandably curious about this English-speaking Japanese, a rarity in those days, and asked him about his hometown and where he had learned his English. Matsubara, in return, asked similar types of questions. He felt that once communication between himself and the American NCO was established, the mutual desire to kill one another evaporated, if only for a brief time …
At Guam, medical doctor Sato Kazumasa (pages 69-70):
[Kazumasa was in a ragtag group that] realized they had a chance, but nobody felt able to talk openly about the possibility of surrendering. They fenced verbally, Japanese-style, attempting to discover the position of the others without revealing their own. Most important to them, whether they lived or died, was that they do it together … Sato was consumed by fear – fear of becoming a POW only to be killed by the Americans, and of jumping into the totally unknown future. When the group reassembled, full agreement was reached to surrender.
There was great relief finally to have made such a decision. On their last night in the jungle they feasted on all their hoarded food. One person even sang a song from his native place. They remembered their fallen comrades with a prayer. Then they walked single file behind a white flag to the [American tanks’] road. They came upon a group of Americans led by a sergeant. They were immediately given food. Hardly believing their good fortune in finding the Americans so kind, they asked for cigarettes and received a whole carton. They were assured they would not be killed. The tension went out of their faces and “one cursed a fate that had delayed their deliverance from the jungle for so long.”
At Iwo Jima again, soldier Nakajima Yoshio, after long holding out in a cave, heard the Americans' call to come out and thought (page 83):
… he was going to die anyway, [so] he thought he might as well do as he was told. He crawled out into the sunlight … but was temporarily blinded and found himself with his hands tied behind his back … he was overwhelmed by the Americans’ kindness in giving him a bandage and some medication.
En route to a POW holding pen, Nakajima was interrogated by a Nisei. Nakajima became teary-eyed on hearing Japanese again. He reached a barbed-wire enclosure and saw three Japanese huddled in a corner. He was pretty sure that this was the place where he would be killed. The first night, totally exhausted, he slept soundly [but] was awakened in the middle of the night, but it was just an American who wanted to try out his minimal Japanese language skills. The next morning, after further interrogations, Nakajima’s hands were untied and he was given American rations and cigarettes. Nakajima thought this was a major improvement over the stale bread the Imperial Japanese Army usually fed its troops.
In general, page 118:
Not having been indoctrinated about dealing with enemy interrogations, Japanese POWs were at a distinct disadvantage when confronted with a friendly face that offered them a cigarette.
And culturally, from page 144:
Traditionally, Japanese have lived in a society that highly prizes the reciprocal giving and receiving of favors, including those exchanged between superior and inferior. Once drawn into a “human” (that is, emotional} conversational relationship with their interrogators, the prisoners realized that they had already received many favors from their captors. They had generally been treated decently. Of particular importance to the Japanese, they had not been insulted or humiliated. These Americans did not look down on them with contempt. In almost all instances recorded by former prisoners, Americans had readily given them a cigarette, often more than one. The offer of a cigarette, highly prized in wartime, was a gesture of friendship that the Japanese gratefully accepted …
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Balrog wrote:Were the cigarettes sold to the Chinese really spiked with Heroin?
Some more
modern-day musing about “Golden Bat”-brand cigarettes and their cultural history in Japan. The other reference earlier given here to Matsui is more fully quoted below:
Opium was an important source of revenue for the Manchukuo government, through the Opium Monopoly Bureau set up by [civil financial administrator] Hoshino Naoki. Following the example of the British in another part of China about a hundred years before, the Kwantung Army used opiates to weaken public resistance, and deliberately fostered drug addiction in Manchukuo and occupied areas of China. One means of hooking new users was the distribution of medicines containing morphine and of special cigarettes bearing the popular Japanese trademark “Golden Bat” but with mouthpieces containing small does of heroin. These various narcotics, supplied quite legally to the Opium Monopoly Bureau by Mitsui and other trading companies [racked up profits] of twenty to thirty million yen a year for financing the industrial development of Manchukuo (according to testimony presented at the Tokyo war crimes trials in 1948) … Another … stated that the annual revenue from the narcotization policy in China, including Manchukuo, was estimated by the Japanese military at 300 million dollars a year.
There is no mention of just how these spiked smokes were distributed or sold. More then than now, cigarettes had a certain cultural weight – the possessing, giving, smoking, and mark of status that these things gave – that added to their lure, apart from the trap of heroin added to them.
When I was in the air force 25 years ago, small five-cigarette packs of Newport brand were distributed free in certain places at my air base. This was long after cigarettes were discontinued in C-ration boxes. I smoked some of them and although the habit did not take, it says much that I smoked them at all.
-- Alan
