Chaplain Kagao Shunin

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Before long, the men of the Red group (prisoners serving fixed or life terms, who wore red uniforms) came to my room and said, “Father, congratulations on the New Year.” Trying not to show my dark mood, I answered with a smile as I always did: “Congratulations to you, too.”

Next I went to the solitary cells of the Blue group (the death-row prisoners in blue uniforms), who could not come to my room, and offered my New Year’s greetings.

Among them was the General who had supplied the second half of the verse in my dream. I tried to study his face discreetly, but I feared that if I watched him too closely he might find it strange and ask me why, so I hurried away from the spot.

Yet the dark shadow that had settled over my heart did not lift in the least. Ever since my posting to Muntinlupa, I had believed that if the war criminals truly trained themselves and became, as the saying goes, genuine human beings, the protection of the gods and buddhas would surely be theirs. I had practiced that discipline myself and preached it to those who came to hear my Dharma talks. For that very reason, I could not help feeling that the dream was somehow a warning from the Buddha.

The reason is this. Even for men sentenced to death, when days pass in which the day of execution seems to have receded, a slackening of the readiness to face death is unavoidable. The training of the war criminals therefore went through ups and downs. There was also friction: the faiths that men sought to follow differed from person to person — Catholicism, a Protestant denomination, Buddhism — and conflict arose between followers of different religions. I had always to take care that they not forget they were compatriots. Even in the 74 solitary cells, whose occupants’ frame of mind was sharply different from that of the Red group, I could not say that the spirit of wako-dojin (softening one’s own brilliance and mingling with the dust of the world, that is, harmony) filled the air.

Moreover, among the war criminals there were some who believed, and whom others believed, to have had nothing to do with the incidents for which they were tried; and there were others who thought that the war crimes trials themselves were nothing but the old rule that the victor is the righteous army and the loser the rebel — that they had been saddled with a loathsome criminal charge simply because they were on the losing side.

As religious men, however, we continued on the one hand a campaign for release and commutation of sentences, appealing against such contradictions. On the other hand, we strove in the belief that if each man became aware of his human karma (zaigo) and grew into a person fit to harbor the heart of the Buddha, he would surely be able to break free even from the bonds of reality. Yet we remained, all the same, still far from this ideal.