Souvenirs of a dead man

The cap of a dead Japanese soldier is kept in a box in a cupboard at my place.  It was given to me by my grandfather when I was quite small.

It was one of my WWII playthings I got from him, along with a fibreglass insert for an American helmet.

The cap is quite small, and I often wondered how a man could have possibly worn it.  Or was he a child like me?

There are words inked inside the cap.  I still wonder if it is the name of the soldier.

My grandfather drove jeeps for the Americans in New Guinea in WWII, and came back from the war with a range of souvenirs, besides the cap.

He told a story that he had a brace of Colt 45 pistols.  On the way into Newstead wharf, an officer told the returning soldiers to get rid of their contraband.  Dutifully my grandfather threw his pistols over the side of the ship.  To his dismay, he was never searched, and always bemoaned the loss of his pistols.

I think of those pistols at the bottom of the Brisbane River whenever I cross the Breakfast Creek bridge and look at the agitated brown river water.

For whatever reason, he kept the cap.  I have little doubt it came off a dead soldier.

When going through my father’s things in 2010, I found a bundle of small photos my grandfather took in New Guinea.  There are photos of a wrecked Japanese ship on a beach.

The writing on the back says “Kioto Maru/Japanese ship-grounded/1943”.  I now know the Kyoto Maru was already grounded when the Allies took Lae, but I always wondered if the cap came from a soldier who perished on that ship.

I have started to think I should see if it is a name inside the cap, and establish whether he perished in the Lae area.

I now fantasize that I find out who it belonged to, and I send it back to a tearful and grateful family.

But the reality is that there are souvenirs throughout Australia that won’t be going back to Japan.  A cap is not the worst souvenir Australian soldiers brought back.  In Australian museums, I have heard there are collections of Japanese bones.  

When fathers and grandfathers have died, and children have looked in those boxes buried deep in cupboards, they must have found these shocking souvenirs. 

Unsure what to do, they have donated them to museums, where they in turn are put in boxes at the back of cupboards.

War is brutal and gruesome, but the war in the Pacific was probably the conflict that most brutalised our soldiers.  Things happened in the jungle that were not passed down into our popular culture.

I was always fascinated by what my grandfather did, and I still am.  When I was a wide-eyed kid, I asked him if he killed anyone.  He gently said no, he had to keep both hands on the wheel of the jeep.

I believe him, and the paper of his war record backs him up.  His war was a mundane one of driving supplies.

But I still have the cap of a dead soldier in my cupboard.  I don’t know where it will be in the future, or if I will pass it onto my own son or grandson.

If I do keep it in the family, I will tell the truth of it.  Of nameless bones, of the needless Australian deaths at Tarakan and Balikpapan, and a rusting ship on a beach.

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