Cowra's Japanese Garden and the WW2 POW Breakout
A symbol of goodwill, reconciliation and peace
It’s Spring and a perfect time to explore a Japanese garden. There are several around where I live including Sydney’s Auburn Gardens and one to the city’s north, at Gosford, but I have come a little further afield to the one in Cowra which historically, is the most interesting.
This garden’s design, by landscape architect Takeshi ‘Ken’ Nakemima, is a copy of the first strolling garden which was created for Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in the early 1600’s so it has the elements of a mountain, rocks, mountain waterfalls, lakes, rivers flowing to the sea and pine trees.
The Cowra Japanese Garden and Cultural Centre was established in 1960 as a symbol of friendship between Cowra and the people of Japan, a relationship which first started when the Australian army established a Prisoner of War camp in the town in World War 2.
The original internment camp, spread across 74 acres, was divided into four quarters with Italian & German internees living in sections A & C whilst more than a 1000 Japanese POWs were in section B & D.
For the Japanese who were interred here, it was a great dishonour to be held captive as they had a saying “do not take the shame of capture in life”. Their attitude was in stark contrast to the Italian prisoners who joked among themselves and seemed quite happy to sit out the war in captivity.
Photo: AWM - Japanese prisoners playing baseball several weeks before the breakout
On August 4, 1944, the Japanese were told that many of them were going to be moved to another prison camp in Hay and so they took a vote to mount an attack on their prison guards the following day. Their aim was “to die honourably” but for those who did escape, whatever their fate, to make sure “no civilian would be harmed.”
War historian Gavin Long later recorded,
‘At about 2 a.m. a Japanese ran to the camp gates and shouted what seemed to be a warning to the sentries. Then a Japanese bugle sounded. A sentry fired a warning shot. More sentries fired as three mobs of prisoners, shouting “Banzai”, began breaking through the wire, one mob on the northern side, one on the western and one on the southern. They flung themselves across the wire with the help of blankets. They were armed with knives, baseball bats, clubs studded with nails and hooks, wire stilettos and garotting cords.’
(The bugler was Hajime Toyishima. He was Australia’s first Japanese POW, captured in 1942 when his plane crashed on Melville Island after the bombing raid on Darwin. He was arrested by Tiwi islander, Matthias Ullunguru, who was out hunting and just as in the movies, simply approached him from behind and said “stick em up”.)
Toyishima and 233 other prisoners would die in the Cowra Breakout whilst another 108 would be wounded. Many were gunned down by Privates Ben Hardy (George Cross) and Ralph Jones (George Cross) who as sentries manned the Vickers machine guns and began firing at the first wave of escapees. The guards were over-run and clubbed to death but before dying had the presence of mind to render the gun useless by throwing aside the gun’s bolt. Two other soldiers were also killed in the incident.
To create a diversion, the POWs had first set fire to their huts and those who were too ill or maimed to join the escape instead chose suicide, some running into the burning huts.
After the breakout a number of Japanese remained on the loose for over a week. Some focused on an honourable death through suicide, two lay across the tracks of an oncoming train and were killed that way. Hunger became a pressing issue for others still on the run.
Margaret Weir who was a school girl at the time, recalled that one of the farmhands on their property
‘brought three dishevelled young Japanese up to the house at morning tea time, just as mother was taking some scones out of the oven. Mum was very calm, … but we’d heard the frightening stories about the Japanese and what they were capable of doing so I was terrified.’
She ran off to get her cousin and when they came back,
‘we saw them sitting on the back veranda, and Mum was serving them tea and scones. They finished, and thanked her, and sauntered off down to the creek and soon after the army arrived and recaptured them.’
The Cowra prison breakout, involving over a thousand POWs, was the largest of its kind in World War 2. It has inspired many stories and a mini-series, but two of the most interesting tales are novels. One is called The Night of a Thousand Suicides, a first-person narrative by Teruhiko Asada who based the documentary like novel on a long interview he did with one of the survivors of the breakout. The other is the more recent Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Wiradjuri author, Dr Anita Heiss. She crafts a speculative tale about a Japanese POW who whilst hiding on an Aboriginal mission, is helped by a young woman there.
But the greatest inspiration from that event is this garden which many Japanese claim was created by Buddha who willed Cowra’s citizens to create a garden so that the spirits of the soldiers who died here can rest in peace.
Photo: L.A. Hickey
Along with a visit to Cowra’s Japanese Garden history buffs can also see the barren site where the camp was originally built and, more movingly, the Japanese War Cemetery where the remains of the Japanese who died in Australia during WW2 are interred. The Australians who were killed on that infamous night are buried in the adjacent Australian War Cemetery.
Beautiful gardens made from an ugly war, it reminds you of the futility of war with the garden so lovely. Well cared for in the middle of nowhere. Very peaceful. Well worth a visit.