Back to Guards List

Some notes about this list:

• This list covers only those Japanese guards or personnel with a connection to the Burma-Thailand Railway. [Yes, there were Koreans and some Taiwanese on the Railway but since they worked for or had been drafted into the IJA, let’s just go with the shorthand of ‘Japanese’ from this point on.]
• The list has been made up from reading of a range of records and added to over a period of about four years.
• The full list from which this is distilled has almost 9,500 entries.
• The full list started with the aim of attaching proper names to the nicknames by which guards tended to be known by POWs.
• This list in its present form consolidates (from my original list) what can be up to 20 entries for a single individual into single records. 
• This list should be read in conjunction with the camps list which is also available here.
• It will be seen that the list covers almost a thousand Japanese personnel who were either held in custody, mentioned in the reports of war crimes investigators or featured in books about the Railway.
• According to Rod Beattie, ‘The Death Railway,’ p.114 (and he is a reliable source) about 15,000 Japanese personnel worked on the Railway. So that detail in itself is significant. That indicates that the Japanese who worked on the Line had considerably less than a 1 in 15 chance of being reported for ill-treatment in postwar affidavits because it must be remembered that this list contains a number of personnel simply held in custody, particularly in Bangkok’s Bangkwang Jail and at Rangoon Jail.
• There will be errors in my list. Sorry, but resources and time preclude a foolproof representation. Like most things on this website, the list should be considered a working document and the links, connections and questions it throws up could generate almost unlimited discussion. What I have had to do with this list is work on the basis of probability and  reasonable inference. There will be connections I have made which could be debated and may well be wrong. Since I started work on it, I have made thousands of changes and will probably need to make thousands more before I’m done.
• It should also be noted that not all errors will be mine. Remember that these records have passed through many hands since 1945 and that in the postwar era the recollections of POWs were not always 100% reliable. They were under a great deal of stress and, even in 1945, two years had passed since the railroad construction was completed. There were many other barriers to clear and definite recollection and identification of individuals: some of these included the language barrier, differences in pronunciation, the unfamiliarity of POWs with Japanese names, individuals with similar names or nicknames and the POWs’ sometimes limited perspectives on the individuals or incidents they reported. Moreover, many of the victims or witnesses died: remember that in ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces, the mortality rate was 44 percent. A product of trawling through these records is my realisation of the need for a number of references in order to provide reasonable corroboration and reliable identification. A valuable witness is one who could recall a series of critical details: the place an incident occurred, to whom it occurred, when it occurred and at least some details of the perpetrator’s proper name. In the absence of that coming from a single source (which was unlikely) there needed to be reasonable corroboration. So, if a POW were unfortunate enough to be beaten without other POWs witnessing it, it was unlikely the offender would suffer any ill-consequences from the postwar war crimes prosecution process. In addition, once other witnesses were involved, there was an increased chance of conflict in the details they remembered so that in many cases multiple versions tended to muddy already murky waters.  Thus one can readily see the difficulties war crimes investigators faced in the postwar period when witnesses had returned home and been scattered to the four winds. 
• The title of the column headed ‘Link or Rely’ should be ‘Link or Reliability’ but space would not permit. If there is an ‘N’ in that column it indicates that only one reference to the particular individual was found. If there is a number it means that there were multiple records and the number is my estimation of the strength of the link or connection between those records. For instance, if two records showed an individual’s full name and gave the same nickname, the number would be high. If records relating to another individual showed only elements of these details, the number would be lower. For the highest number to be achieved, I needed to see records showing both the family and given names and, if applicable, a nickname – and this usually meant that individual was held in custody or sought by Allied authorities. Anyway, I’m sure you get the general idea and further looking through the list will illustrate how that number operates. It is, however, a rule of thumb guide only.