Terraced Hell: A Japanese Memoir of Defeat & Death in Northern Luzon, Philippines

by Tetsuro Ogawa

This memoir from a Japanese civilian placed with the army in World War II offers a rare glimpse of the Japanese experience and psychology during this desperate time.Near the end of World War II , when the Japanese military machine was crushed but still hanging on, thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians were caught in the backlash of the war in Northern Luzon, the Philippines, where half a million Japanese perished.This is an honest and straightforward account of defeat and death in the Philippines, described by a Japanese teacher who survived the horrible ordeal. "Several things compelled me to write this story," says Ogawa. "Since it was my record of a dangerous and fateful year in my life, I thought I should write an exact account of it for my children, an account which could be passed on to future generations."Ogawa questioned a system which demanded death rather than surrender where defeat was imminent and all hope gone. Constant bombing was their daily fare, along with daring guerrilla raids and incursions of head–hunting tribal Igorots.This illustrated war memoir is intensely interesting, if somewhat gruesome reading, and is a valuable and important contribution to the literature of World War II.

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 15, 1992

Reviews

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terraced Hell is the memoir of Tetsuro Ogawa written for his children recounting his struggles as a Japanese civilian teacher in the final year of WWII in the Philippines, specifically his experiences as the newly recruited food procurement unit member in Northern Luzon after the 1945 American invasion. He relates the brutal realities of Allied bombings, Filipino guerrilla attacks, and encounters with Igorot tribes (sometime headhunters). Ogawa describes the once-beautiful rice terraces as a “hell” of suffering, where half a million Japanese died. He reflects on the Japanese military’s death-over-surrender code and failure to acknowledge wartime crimes, while admitting to the shameful treatment of the Filipino people.
While I found the book somewhat interesting in the beginning, it was rather pedestrian in its daily recounting of searching for food, retreating further into the mountains, noting the shrinking number of men in the units, etc. Perhaps I have just read variations of this story too many times.