"He is most interested in having contact with you for he has lived with many unanswered questions all these years, questions to which perhaps only you can help him to find the answers." So wrote Patricia Lomax in a letter sent from her home in England to Takashi Nagase, who at the time lived in Okayama Prefecture.
The letter was sent in 1991, two years after Patricia's husband, Eric, saw an article about Nagase in The Japan Times.
For decades, Eric Lomax had lived with the gruesome memories of his time as a 21-year-old British prisoner of war in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, where Nagase acted as a military interpreter (he was previously an English major at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo). Lomax and 25,800 other British soldiers (plus 18,000 Australians) formed a portion of the POWs forced to build the Thailand-Burma railway under horrid circumstances. Nagase translated orders, supervised interrogations and was present at the torture sessions inflicted on Lomax for two straight weeks in August 1943.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.