Crosses and Tigers

When Nagase Takashi returned to Japan from his period of service as a kempeitai interpreter at the Kanchanaburi POW camp near the Thai-Burma border at the conclusion of Asia Pacific War, he returned with a mountain of unfinished psychological business. Years of watching some of the most abject examples of man's inhumanity to man left him deeply scarred and, although he was not to realise it at the time, the remaining years of his life would be devoted to his own personal mission of atonement and reconciliation. He has already written a series of testaments of the soul-searching in which he subsequently found himself engaged – and we are indebted to Gill Goddard for making some of this material available in English in this newly revised edition of two of his essays.