Merry Christmas, Mr. Shirabe
by Asami Nagai
The Daily Yomiuri
July 29, 2000

FUKUOKA -- On Oct. 31, 1998, N.G.J.W. Van Marle, a former Dutch prisoner of war during World War II, was finally reunited with Masaji Shirabe. The two men, bath wrinkled and. gray-haired now, had not seen each other for 55 years, not since the days Van Marle was a POW in Shirabe's labor camp near Nagasaki.

As commandant, Shirabe, now 85, was known for his humanitarian treatment of internees in his charge.

"It's been a long time and I don't recall much," he said. "My motto as a camp commandant was to treat internees as equal people with rights and dignity that should be respected. That's all."

Shirabe was a would-be priest-turned-soldier who had studied theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto. On Oct. 22, 1942, he met about 1,200 Dutch, British and American POWs arriving at Nagasaki Port to transfer them to his camp on a nearby island, where they were to labor in the dockyards.

As commandant; he allowed the prisoners a self-governing system under 27 officers, made possible through the preservation of the Allied troops' own military hierarchies. A Dutch officer who had long worked at a Kobe trading company acted as interpreter, liaising between the POWs and their Japanese overseers.

Shirabe declared one day a week a holiday. As a devout Baptist, he permitted internees to celebrate Christmas, and even went so far as to invite a priest from a local church into the camp.

In the climate of wartime Japan, it was perhaps inevitable that his way of treating POWs was criticized as "too lenient," Shirabe said, adding that on one occasion he even took them out of the camp to attend Mass at a Nagasaki cathedral.

"I never saw them as enemies," he recalled. "Rather, Japanese soldiers gave me the biggest headache, because some of them stole internees' personal belongings."

The organizers of an exhibition on the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, slated to open in Japan Aug. 1, decided to use Shirabe's story as one of the personal histories on display.

"He decided for himself how to act in wartime. I think it is an important message that people have to make their own decisions in such circumstances," said Erik Somers, exhibition director of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation and curator of "Dutch, Japanese, Indonesians -The Japanese Occupation of Indonesia Remembered." 

Just before Shirabe was transferred to another camp in early 1943, he asked one internee to sketch all 27 officers' portraits, and requested each officer to add his signature. This memento, which the former commandant has treasured ever since, was of great help when Von Marle visited him two years ago.

"He looked just like his portrait on this piece of paper. Seeing this, I soon remembered him," Shirabe said with a chuckle. 

The artwork and a photo showing the reunion of the two former enemies -with Van Marle pointing at his own portrait -will be on show at the exhibition.

"With them, we wanted to suggest that there is a possibility that enemies can live together during a war," Somers said. 

Shirabe surely proved this point. A black-and-white photo taken on Dec. 25, 1943 at a camp in Yamaguchi Prefecture shows him smiling shyly while POWs raise a toast, surrounded by Christmas decorations. 

After the war, Shirabe became a priest and moved to Okinawa Prefecture, where he and his family remained for 35 years. These days, they tour nursing homes and kindergartens around the nation, using puppets to dramatize Christian teachings. 

"In the years following the war, we often wondered what those internees were doing when they returned home," said Shirabe's wife of 60 years.