Unthinkable Crime

A U.S. military commission on Guam last week read into the record a Japanese Army major's confession of cannibalism. Unlike rumored instances elsewhere, this was no story of starving Japanese eating their own or enemy dead in an effort to survive. It was ritual cannibalism practiced on the bodies of U.S. flyers who had been decapitated after being shot down in the Bonin Islands. The sole excuse: "war madness."

Though three other officers and ten smaller fry were also on trial, archvillain of the piece was Major Sueyo Matoba, a slim, mild, scholarly Jap with a sadistic nature which had won him the nickname "Tiger of Chichi Jima." Major Matoba had stomach ulcers; he also loved sake.

By 1945, when the blockaded Bonins had no fresh meat, he hatched the idea that liver would soothe his gnawing stomach pains. The islands' commander, fat, bullnecked Lieut. General Yoshio Tachibana, had ordered all captured U.S. flyers executed. That was the chance Matoba had been waiting for.

Cannibal Feast. At least two aviators were beheaded publicly by Matoba's own 308th Battalion, to buoy the troops' morale. In each case, the liver was cut from the still-warm bodies, delivered to Matoba's cook, cut into strips and served in sukiyaki. At one gay party, where the cannibal dish was washed down with sake, Tachibana was Matoba's guest. That night, during a U.S. air attack, Matoba boasted that enemy bombs could not hurt him because he had eaten the enemy's flesh.

Other unit commanders who wanted a morale-booster for their own men were given the privilege of staging the executions of flyers captured in their bivouac areas. On at least two occasions the livers of the executed men were served in the officers' messes while strips of flesh cut from the legs were used to flavor enlisted men's soup.

Ironically, the crime of devouring human flesh was so unthinkable that it was not listed in international law, was not clearly punishable as a crime in itself. The evidence* could be used only to support such formal charges as murder or prevention of honorable burial.

* Operating at the start only on suspicion, U.S. investigators got their first firm lead from Frederick Arthur Savory--a great-grandson of U.S.-born Nathaniel Savory who colonized the Bonins in 1830--when he returned from exile in Japan bearing gruesome reports of executions and cannibalism.

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