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Yi Hak-nae and the Burma–Thailand Railway

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Gavan McCormack
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Extract

August in Japan is a time of remembrance—of family dead (honoured in the festival of Obon) and of war dead (those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in particular). Seventy-five years after the end of the war, the ranks of those who remember it have grown thin, but in August 2020 one story caught my eye. It was the story of Yi (or Lee) Hak-nae, born in the then Japanese colony of Chosen (Korea) in 1925 and known during the war and during his trials by his Japanese name, Hiromura Kakurai. Now aged in his nineties, Yi is the last survivor of 148 Koreans convicted of war crimes in the Allied trials that followed the East Asian and Pacific wars and continued to 1947. His story, published by Reuters in 2020, was headed ‘The Survivor: Last Korean War Criminal in Japan Wants Recognition’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 19 , Issue 15 , August 2021 , e1
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2021

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References

Notes

1 Ju-min Park, ‘The Survivor: Last Korean War Criminal in Japan Wants Recognition’, Thomson Reuters, 5 August 2020.

2 ‘Moto BC-kyu senpan no gaikokujin 95-sai kokunai saigo no shogensha’, ‘Ohayo Nippon’, NHK 7 August 2020. NHK published the same story in English a month later: ‘Seeking Answers to Clarify Wartime Chaos’, NHK World, 14 September 2020.

3 ‘Nakama no munen harashitai’ Chosen hanto shusshin moto BC-kyu senpan ga uttae, sengo 75 nen susumanu ho seibi', Tokyo shimbun, 14 August 2020.

4 Yi Hak-nae, ‘Chosenjin BC-kyu senpan keishisha no munen ni kotaete hoshii’, Sekai, September 2020, pp 198–204, and Utsumi Aiko, ‘Shogen to shiryo: Yi Hak-nae san no baai’, ibid., pp 205–8. For a short, authoritative account of the state of scholarship on the issues, see also Utsumi Aiko and Okuta Toyomi, ‘Taimen tetsudo—gisei to sekinin’, Osaka keizai hoka daigaku Ajia Taiheiyo kenkyu senta nenpo, No. 16, 2019, pp 26–33.

5 Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson (eds), The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993, Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1993, revised and expanded Japanese translation Taimen tetsudo to Nihon no senso sekinin (Gavan McCormack, Hank Nelson and Aiko Utsumi, eds), Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1994.

6 Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris, Australia's War Crimes Trials 1945–51, Brill Niihoff, 2016.

7 On these details, including the elephants, see Utsumi and Okuda.

8 ‘Proceedings, Military Court—Trial of Japanese war criminal Korean guard Hiromura Kakurai’, Singapore, 18 and 20 March 1947. National Archives of Australia, NAA, A471, 81640.

9 Trial transcript, pp 57–9. The two he named were Major E. L. Corlette of the medical corps and Sergeant B. P. Harrison-Lucas of 2/2 Casualty Clearing Section.

10 [Sir] Edward Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop: Java and the Burma–Thailand Railway 1942–1945, Melbourne: Nelson, 1986 (2005), pp 203–4.

11 Tony Stephens, ‘Desire for Vengeance Touched Even “Weary”,‘ Sydney Morning Herald, 10 July 2020.

12 For details of the tribunal, see the trial record cited above. See also Gavan McCormack, ‘Apportioning the Blame: Australian Trials for Railway Crimes’, in McCormack and Nelson, pp 85–119. (See especially ‘The Case of Yi Hak-nae’ at pp 91–5.)

13 Trial transcript, defence counsel, ‘Closing address’, pp 48–54.

14 Dunlop restated this complaint about Hirota in his paper for the 1991 conference. Edward Dunlop, ‘Reflections, 1946 and 1991‘, in McCormack and Nelson pp 144–50.

15 ‘War Crimes—Military Tribunal—Hirota Eiji’, Singapore, 18–21 September 1946. National Archives of Australia, A471, 81301.

16 From the address he delivered to the conference; see McCormack and Nelson, p. 120.

17 Author communication from Yi. I have no idea what happened to this watch after Dunlop's death, but I assume it will surface one day in the Australian War Memorial or some other museum. It deserves to be seen as a symbol of reconciliation.

18 ‘Nakama no munen’ gives the figure of three million, but Yi (Sekai, September 2020) says two million.

19 Yi Hak-nae, Kankokujin moto BC-kyu senpan no uttae, Tokyo, Nashinokisha, 2016, pp, supplement, pp 4–5.

20 Stephens.

21 Message to this author, reproduced in Stephens.

22 Captain D. F. H. Sinclair, assisting defence counsel, Hiromura trial transcript, 18 March 1947, pp 29–30. See also Georgina Fitzpatrick, ‘The Trials in Singapore’, in Australia's War Crimes Trials, p. 592.

23 McCormack and Nelson, p. 148.

24 Eric Lomax, The Railway Man, Vintage, 1995 (the film of the same name was released in 2013); Richard Flanagan's Narrow Road to the Deep North (Random House, 2013) won the Booker Prize in 2014. A Japanese translation of Flanagan's book was published in 2018 under the title Oku no hosomichi e.

25 Hank Nelson, ‘Appendix A: Australian forces on the railway’, in McCormack and Nelson, pp 160–61.For details on the ‘F’ Force case, see McCormack and Nelson, pp 18, 100–10.

26 For details on the Nagatomo case, see McCormack and Nelson, pp 97–100.

27 Narrelle Morris and Tim McCormack, ‘Were the Australian Trials Fair?‘, in Fitzpatrick, McCormack and Morris, pp 781–809, at p. 789.

28 Morris and McCormack, p. 809.