Americans in Captivity

A World War II diary casts new light on Tehran

At a concentration camp in the Philippines, American civilian prisoners and their Japanese captors held a party in 1942 for some departing guards, sharing sukiyaki and singing Auld Lang Syne. "They really liked each other," Prisoner Natalie Crouter wrote in her diary. "The pity of it--that our enemies should tell us this--that prisoners in a prison camp have given them more fun and friendliness than they ever had before. How it lights up the poverty, the barrenness of their past . . ." For one night, she wrote, the Americans and Japanese "were just boys again, sorry for the mess we are mixed in together."

At the time, the Tokyo press was shrieking about "white devils," and Hollywood was churning out propaganda movies depicting Japanese as bloodthirsty primitives. But for the diarist, now 81 and living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the fact that Japanese and Americans were getting along at the camp was perfectly normal. A flinty, no-nonsense New Englander who once worked in the campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti, Crouter viewed World War II as a tiresome family quarrel, and not a fit activity for respectable adults. Her book (Forbidden Diary, $14.95, to be published next month by Burt Franklin & Co.) is remarkable for the interplay it creates between that view and the delicate Japanese-American minuet at the camp. In some ways, the book also sheds light on the ordeals of today's hostages in Tehran and Bogota.

Crouter was a housewife in Manila when the Japanese invaded the Philippines in December 1941. She, her husband Jerry, an owner of a gas station and an insurance agency, and their two children, aged twelve and ten, were interned for three years at Camp Holmes, a former police barracks in the mountains near Baguio. As prisoners, they were far better off than captured GIs. The mountain site offered healthfully low temperatures and country-club scenery, and for most of the war was not even enclosed by a fence. Prisoners ate as well as guards, and the Japanese carefully protected Red Cross shipments from the wiles of looters and grafters. With approval of their captors, some 500 inmates organized the camp, setting up an adult education program that offered lessons in nine languages including Japanese--taught, of course, by guards. The Americans mixed easily with their captors and were even allowed to own knives and bows and arrows.

Still, no prisoner could forget his real status. The Japanese did not permit mail in or out, and the penalty for being caught with a radio was death. (The inmates listened anyway, without getting caught, and heard the "news" that the Japanese had bombed Seattle and invaded Missouri.) Though cruelty was rare, a Baptist missionary, aged 26, was killed, apparently because the Japanese considered him a spy for China, and two men who tried to escape were tortured but allowed to live.

The camp settled into "a routine, almost a contentment," according to Crouter, and politeness emerged as a major issue. Major Rokuro Tomibe, the camp commander and an extraordinarily decent man, dressed down his staff for not being courteous enough to prisoners. In turn, Tomibe sulked because some Americans used the term Jap. A few inmates tried to convince him that it was an innocent abbreviation, but he recognized the affront.

Crouter, in turn, was irritated by the Japanese attitude toward women. "Feudal," she wrote, after a guard said that American women opened and shut doors too aggressively, instead of gently like Japanese women. In 1943 the Japanese placed Lysol-soaked cloths in boxes outside the huts and announced that any prisoners who failed to wipe their feet on the cloth would be beaten. Wrote Crouter: "I am rather confused over Japanese politeness and tea ceremony in comparison with the Sergeant offering to slap any woman who wouldn't dip her feet into the door box. Like us, their nature is capable of contradictions, but they could cut down on the bows when they are in the slapping phase."

Though she could be huffy, Crouter was never bitter, vengeful or condescending. She emerges from the diary as a slightly remote secular saint, bestowing high-minded affection on all comers. Yamamoto, a wide-eyed guard from Yokohama, was encouraged with his charcoal drawings. A pair of guards who arrived as "fire-breathers from Bataan" were soon rendered "tame and friendly" by the Crouter treatment. She was saddened when Tomibe came to Japanese class and lectured on harakiri. "He is living with the idea and may do it," she wrote. "Is he modern enough to break away, to learn from defeat what he could never learn from victory, as we have for two years?"

Tomibe survived the war and was cleared of war-crimes charges on the basis of prisoner testimony. Three years ago, he attended a reunion in San Francisco with Crouter and other ex-prisoners, thanking the Americans and their children for teaching him about free will and democracy. The Americans, for their part, were grateful that Tomibe had not tried brainwashing or psychological games.

The prisoners did not lapse into passivity or childlike dependence on their captors--as has happened in many hostage situations, and could well have happened at the embassy in Iran. But even with decent treatment, the Crouter family suffered great psychological damage Natalie's husband, weak and despondent during captivity, died in 1951 at the age of 58. Daughter June was in therapy for three years, and Son Fred still suffers from violent nightmares.

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