In February 1945, as the U.S. Sixth and Eighth Armies closed in on Manila from north, east and south, the Japanese garrison went berserk, killing 40,000 Filipinos in a 20-day orgy. Among those machine-gunned to death in the streets: the wife and three of the children of the man who is now President of the Philippine Republic, Elpidio Quirino. After the war, the Philippine government condemned 79 Japanese to death and 48 more to long prison terms, for these and hundreds of other atrocities. Charged with "command responsibility" for the rape of Manila, Lieut. General Shizuo Yokoyama was sentenced to death.
In Manila last week, Shizuo Yokoyama, now 68 and tuberculous, plodded up a gangway, bowing and smiling, and boarded the Japanese steamer Hakusan Mam. With him on the way to Japan were 105 other war criminals, the last of the Japanese invaders to leave the Philippines. They too were a far different-looking lot from the domineering Japanese soldiers who once lorded over and terrorized the Filipino populace, and left behind 91,180 noncombatant Filipino dead. In a surprise amnesty, President Quirino (now in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins hospital) had commuted 56 death sentences to life imprisonment in Japan, and pardoned all those serving prison terms. Later he even pardoned three of the men once sentenced to die. Said the President: "I do not want my children and my people to inherit from me hate for people who yet might be our friends . . . After all, destiny has made us neighbors."
On board the Hakusan Maru, prisoners changed their PW-stamped olive drab and khaki for white shirts and trousers, squatted down eagerly for a Japanese meal of baked sea bream, rice and sake. Said Yokoyama: "The memory of the destruction and murder committed in the Philippines will remain with me as a nightmare that I will carry to my grave . . ."
Aboard the ship also went 17 black wooden boxes containing the ashes of war criminals whose death sentences had already been carried out. Conspicuously missing: the bodies of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the "Tiger of Malaya," who was hanged unceremoniously in February 1946, and Lieut. General Masaharu Homma of Bataan death march notoriety, who was shot by a firing squad. Their bodies could not be found in a sugarcane field where they were thought to have been buried.
The Japanese were surprised and delighted by the unexpected amnesty. Said Tokyo's English-language Nippon Times: "Nobility of spirit . . . made this possible . . . It is easy for us to beg forgiveness, but how difficult it must be for the Filipino people, who were so brutally treated, to forgive us."