Shobun - A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific

BOOK REVIEW

SHOBIN - A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific

by Michael J. Goodwin

When nations clash in war, more than armies are involved. Cultures become antagonists as well, and there are occasions when the differences are so great that what one group comes to regard as commonplace another may regard as a heinous crime.

So it was in World War II, especially in the Pacific theater. For centuries Japanese culture had seen death in battle as glorious and surrender as a dishonoring disgrace. Those who yielded rather than die lost not only face and honor, but even their right to life itself. At the same time, that culture taught that all others were barbarians, entitled neither to respect nor to what Western culture would consider humanitarian treatment.

In wartime those unique cultural values combined to produce tragedy. Though fewer than one- tenth of all Allied prisoners of war in Germany perished in captivity, fully a third of those taken by the Japanese died in their prison camps, victims of climate, inadequate nourishment, routine neglect, and even brutal mistreatment.

Worse yet was the fate of a few, chiefly air- men, who fell into Japanese hands in the later years of the war. Their story is the story of

Shobun: A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific. Through years of difficult research both here and abroad, Michael J. Goodwin has pieced together the harrowing tale of one patrol plane's crew after the crash landing of their PBY Catalina and their subsequent capture. It is a story of the clash of

cultures, of bureaucratic neglect and inefficiency, of the code of bushido, of willful flouting of the rules of war, of brutality, and of terrifying tragedy-all wrapped in the shifting definitions of the Japanese word "shobun."

And Shobun is something more. Underlying the book is the story of a son's search for the father he never met, of the attempt to recover from the bland pages of official documents and the harsh, hot landscape of the Southwest Pacific a sense of a man's life, and somehow, to make some sense out of his brutal death. Further, it is a search for truth and justice for all those unfortunate Allied airmen who became victims to a hazard of war that none expected, and who fell to the most deadly enemies of all: prejudice, incompetence, and the darkest side of human nature.

150 pp - hardback - Published 1995

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