HONOLULU -- After a Japanese soldier named Shuji Ishii was taken prisoner by American Marines on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II, he expected the worse, including being put to death. Instead, he wrote later in a memoir, he was astonished to find himself in a sanitary hospital and to be given clean drinking water, sufficient food, soap, medicine, cigarettes and a soft bed.
Compared with his filth, starvation, and drinking his own urine just before his capture, Ishii said, "It was the difference between heaven and hell."
Ishii's account comes from a newly published book, "The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II," by Ulrich Straus, a retired diplomat who speaks Japanese fluently and was a translator during the war crimes trials in Tokyo during the postwar occupation.