Dr Rowley Richards was a doctor with Australian prisoners in Burma (now Myanmar) who helped save the lives of many POWs. Having been initially imprisoned in Singapore, and then sent to work on the railway, he later became a slave labourer in Japan. In this audio interview Dr Richards discusses the hierarchical honour based culture of the Japanese that led to ritualised brutality with prisoners considered as dishonourable and the lowest of the low in a chain of command.
Audio Transcript
" ... It became essential for us to try to understand why we were being treated the way we were. We learned fairly early of course that the Japanese despised anybody who became a prisoner; in their own culture, it was a matter of honour to arrange for somebody to decapitate you rather than submit to become prisoner or to commit hari kari. Therefore those of us who did not do this in the eyes of the Japanese were the lowest form of animal life. In addition to this, we learned very quickly the hierarchical structure of the Japanese, in that a colonel would have no hesitation in dealing out physical punishment to a major, and then he, in turn, to a captain and so it went on, so that you’d have a first class private would have no hesitation in beating up a second class private. And then right at the bottom of that hierarchy was the prisoner of war, and he copped it from everybody. But it was important to realise that in many cases, while we saw cases of bashing of prisoners of war, we also saw similar cases of Japanese versus Japanese, or perhaps more correctly, Japanese versus Koreans, and then the Koreans down the line. [©Copyright ABC]"