A man of two uniforms: Eric Shimada or Shimada Masakazu (1912–2010), interpreter at Australia’s war crimes trials, 1945–46

Georgina Fitzpatrick

On 15 October 1945, a reconnaissance party consisting of 32 Australian and Dutch personnel organised the formal surrender of the Japanese Garrison of the Talaud Islands, an archipelago north-east of Celebes (now Sulawesi). When Colonel Koba Shigeru¹ and his men formed up, part of the ceremony included listening to an address from General Sir Thomas Blamey, commander-in-chief, Australian Military Forces.² This moment, captured in a photograph (Figure 1), was a scene being repeated at that time on numerous islands to the north of Australia—islands that had been occupied by the Japanese forces during World War II.

The reconnaissance party had also been tasked to investigate any war crimes committed during the Japanese occupation.³ In particular, it was to follow up evidence from several local Malays about the execution of four Allied airmen in March 1945: one American, United States Air Force Lieutenant James Steel; and three Australians, Flight Lieutenant Francis Hann, Warrant Officer Peter Walters and Flight Sergeant Leon King. Following a presentation of colours sent to the Talaud garrison by Emperor Hirohito, the airmen had been tied to crosses (evoking sacrificial overtones of crucifixion) and bayoneted as a formal military exercise by selected junior naval personnel.⁴ They had not been tried as required by Japanese military law.⁵ In Australian military law and international law, this was considered murder.

Figure 1: Japanese surrendered troops parade at Beo, Karakellang, 15 October 1945.

Note: Colonel Koba and several of the officers in the first two rows were later brought to trial.

Source: AWM: 119832.

As the investigations of the reconnaissance party continued that day in October 1945, suspects were pulled out of an identification parade by those who had witnessed the executions and were questioned on the beach at Beo, Karakellang (now Karakelong).⁶ This preliminary investigation is also captured in a photograph (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Members of the Japanese forces are interrogated on the beach, 15 October 1945.

Source: AWM: 119842.

Such reconnaissance parties were supposed to include at least two interpreters from the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS).⁷ Unfortunately, the reports made to Morotai Headquarters do not name the interpreters and, as freely admitted to me by the Australian interpreters I interviewed in 2009 and 2010, the standard of expertise among the linguists was variable.⁸ It is likely that there was a certain amount of mutual incomprehension, which could explain what happened next. At this point, Lieutenant Bruce Padman recounted:

a Japanese P[riva]te approached the shore party with the request that he be used as an interpreter as he could speak English very well. Advantage was taken of his offer and conversation took place between this man and myself.⁹

So began the employment of Shimada Masakazu (also known as Eric Shimada) in the service of the Australian Military Forces in 1945 and early 1946, then with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) in Japan, and finally as one of the interpreters at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) held in Tokyo, 1946–48.

Shimada, the suspects and the witnesses accompanied the reconnaissance party back to Morotai, one of the Molucca Islands (now Maluku and part of Indonesia), where the first set of 25 Australian-run trials was to be held, prosecuting crimes committed in nearby islands before the Dutch authorities resumed control of their former possessions.¹⁰ Shimada was required for a number of roles. His cooption from the ranks of the recent enemy is not in itself unusual. As I will argue, other Japanese nationals became interpreters in Australia’s trials. However, the manner in which he was recruited, the status he was given and the way in which he was dressed was decidedly unusual. By piecing together scattered references to him in the Australian war crimes materials, I will set out his anomalous position and explore his relationship with ATIS.

However, first it is necessary to give a little background about Australia’s war crimes trials, the shortage of interpreters for both the trials and related tasks, the sources available for a study of Shimada’s work for ATIS and something of his background.

Australia’s war crimes trials

Between 1945 and 1951, the Australian military services conducted 300 war crimes trials at eight different locations: Wewak, Morotai, Labuan, Darwin, Rabaul, Singapore, Hong Kong and Manus Island. There were 952 defendants, mostly Japanese, but also some Korean and Taiwanese colonial subjects. The military courts, set up under the Commonwealth War Crimes Act 1945, were presided over by three to five military officers, none of whom were required to have legal training. To assist with legal advice, a judge advocate could be appointed, but this was not mandatory. The prosecuting officer tended to have been a lawyer in civilian life recruited into the Australian Army Legal Corps. The defending officer might be Australian (particularly at early trials) but could be Japanese and therefore accustomed to a completely different legal system and operating through interpreters.¹¹

In recent years, several studies of Australia’s war crimes trials have been published, filling what had been a void.¹² However, interpreters at the Australian trials have been glimpsed only incidentally. Apart from Colin Funch’s Linguists in Uniform, which charts the development of ATIS and the training of Australians as Japanese linguists during wartime, and my own study of recruitment of interpreters for the Australian trials,¹³ there has been little written. By focusing on Shimada’s work for the Australian war crimes apparatus, piecing together the admittedly minimal information about his life at this time and placing him in the context of the immediate postwar upheavals, this article will explore his unusual story.

The demand for interpreters, September–October 1945

Shimada stepped forward with his offer to interpret at a time of volatility. The defeat of Japan had created a power vacuum in the islands of the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch were in no position to take immediate control of their former possessions, much as they wanted to. Therefore, the Australian Military Forces had been allocated responsibility for supervising the surrender of all Japanese units east of Lombok.¹⁴ Isolated Japanese units had to be informed of the surrender and of the arrangements to concentrate the surrendered personnel at particular locations. In the Australian Army’s area of responsibility, there were 344,038 Japanese personnel.¹⁵ Suspects, accused of committing atrocities during the years of Japanese occupation, needed to be identified and taken to Morotai for further investigation and possible trial. There was an acute shortage of interpreters for these tasks.

In my earlier work, and building on Funch’s study, I identified five different categories of interpreter recruited by the Australian military: the ‘ready-mades’ (a term coined by Funch), consisting mainly of expatriates with prewar years of residency in Japan; enlisted men (and a few women) trained at the various wartime language schools in Australia; some self-taught linguists; a number of people I dubbed the ‘happenchancers’, who might be on the spot and played a part, from clarifying specific words to full-scale interpreting; and, finally, interpreters on loan from the better-resourced American and British allies and even the Japanese enemy.¹⁶ Shimada was both a ‘happenchancer’ and recruited from the ranks of the enemy. Although other interpreters from the surrendered Japanese personnel were used in the Australian-run trials, the nature of Shimada’s recruitment and subsequent employment by the Australian military at the Morotai trials differed quite markedly from their participation, as I will argue later in this article.

Sources for a study of Eric Shimada

Eric Shimada, as he is nearly always called in Australian archival sources, was known to me from my first year of historical research into the 300 Australian-run war crimes trials. The trials at Morotai in which he played an unexpected part as both witness and interpreter happened to be among the second group of trials I worked on in 2009. His presence within the huge apparatus surrounding the trials so intrigued me that I began making a note of any mention of him in the hundreds of files I was working through. I also consulted the specific transcripts of those trials in which he was involved.¹⁷ Then the Japanese historian Kayoko Takeda gave a lecture in Melbourne that I attended, publicising her book on interpreters at the IMTFE. Shimada was one of those interpreters. She had interviewed him in 2000 about his role in Tokyo, providing a glimpse into his career after his work for the Australians was completed.¹⁸

My final source was an article in an online journal for the Australian–Japanese diaspora written by Shimada’s daughter, Dr Yuri Furuno. It included the transcript of an interview Shimada had given to his granddaughter in 2003 when he was aged 90. It also included two photographs, one showing him in Japanese uniform and another in an Australian uniform.¹⁹ I noticed that he had been elevated from Japanese private to Australian sergeant with three stripes on his arm. What did this mean? It deserved further exploration.

Eric Shimada (1912–2010)

In the investigation files at the Australian War Memorial (AWM), a list outlining Shimada’s personal details, based on information he provided in 1945, does not really give many clues. Married with two children, he was 32 when discovered in the ranks of the surrendered troops of the Talaud garrison in October 1945. He revealed that his father was German and his mother Japanese, but he claimed (or the Australian taking his details wrote down) that his father had been killed in action during World War I (WWI) and that his mother had died in childbirth. An A. E. Shimada, given as next-of-kin, was described as an aunt.²⁰ The family account identifies his mother as Ei and his father as Eugen Wohlgemuth. According to them, Eugen did not die in WWI but rather in the late 1920s. The family has also recently discovered that he was not only German but Jewish. However, they believe that Shimada never knew his European family was Jewish. Eugen was born in 1875 in Strasburg, West Prussia (now in Poland), and moved with his family to Berlin in 1889.²¹ A railway engineer hired by the Japanese government before WWI, he had been deported as an enemy alien in 1915 when Eric was three years old. According to the family, Eugen subsequently returned to Japan in 1923 to collect his family, but his Japanese wife did not want to transplant herself and the children to Germany.²² Eugen returned to Berlin where he remarried.

Although Eric was educated at Japanese schools, according to Takeda he had considerable exposure to foreigners. He studied English writing at his university preparatory school in Tokyo (attended after five years of high school at Numazu, Shizuoka) and learnt spoken English from an American missionary. Funding for his education had come from a scholarship provided by a German–Japanese business association of which his father, Eugen, had been a member. The allowance was delivered by a member to Shimada’s aunt (presumably the aunt he listed as next-of-kin when giving his details to the Australian military).²³ While he was supporting himself through Keio University, he worked as a copy boy with HAVAS, the French news agency, later Agence France-Presse. He became a correspondent with the agency, writing articles in French.²⁴ During this period of his life he seems to have become friends with some of the foreign correspondents based in Tokyo, including those whose names appear on the AWM list of Shimada’s personal details. Among references he provided to his Australian captors, he named Captain Kennedy, Reuters correspondent in Tokyo in 1933, and Mr Thompson, the United Press correspondent in Tokyo in 1941.²⁵ If they were contacted during the vetting period, perhaps they spoke warmly of him. He was a Westernised, middle-class man with excellent English—someone to whom the Australian officers could relate.

However, the Australian authorities could not entirely discount the fact that he had served in the enemy forces. His military record was presumably assessed. Several salient facts stood him in good stead. Drafted into the 32nd Division, Imperial Japanese Army, in August 1943 (so he did not rush to join up as a volunteer in earlier years), he came with that division to the Talaud Islands well after their capture in early 1942. It was likely that he had never been in action, as he claimed at the time of the surrender of the Talaud garrison.²⁶ He arrived as part of reinforcements when the islands were on the sidelines of war. Never implicated in the executions of captured Allied airmen, the crime being investigated at war’s end, he was merely a foot soldier.

The Allied Translator and Interpreter Section and the recruitment of Eric Shimada

Intelligence Officer Lieutenant Bruce Padman, one of the reconnaissance party supervising the surrender of the Talaud garrison, in his report describing Shimada’s offer to interpret, was very taken with Shimada, whom he described as speaking ‘with an Oxford accent and … quite intelligent’. Padman opined that ‘in a great many things his outlook is occidental and he has never wanted to take part in the war as he never believed that Japan could win’. Padman, there to investigate possible war crimes, proceeded to question Shimada. After reporting the information he received from Shimada in relation to the executions of Allied airmen by members of the Talaud garrison, Padman asserted that his ‘long experience as an interrogator of Japanese and [his] knowledge of similar cases’ convinced him that Shimada, ‘if treated as a European and his sense of justice appealed to’, would tell them all he knew. Leaving aside the paternalist and racialised mindset these comments reveal, we learn from this report that it was Padman who proposed that Shimada be brought to Morotai to assist in the interrogation of those suspected of carrying out the executions and that he could possibly go on to a further role. Padman recommended that:

this man [Shimada] be vetted and quartered by AFADVATIS [Australian Forces Advanced Allied Translator and Interpreter Section] and allowed to become used to contact with Australian forces and subsequently accompany the ATIS Detachment … to Japan as a civil employee. His command of English [and] his liberal mind fits him for a job which would be of material value to the Detachment.²⁷

Padman’s determination to speak on Shimada’s behalf is striking. His resolve to succeed in his case to have Shimada incorporated into the ATIS Detachment comes across as pleading at times—for example, concerning Shimada’s supposed opposition to the war, which he proclaimed without offering any evidence. Padman’s motivation, apart from the recognised need for more interpreters, is unclear. However, what is clear is that what he was suggesting was most unusual, if not unique. Other Japanese nationals, borrowed by the Australian military for interpreting and translation tasks, remained part of the Japanese military forces. David Sissons, himself an interpreter at the Morotai trials and the foundation father of research into Australia’s war crimes trials, made this clear in a note stating that all the interpreters based at Advanced HQ Morotai were ‘on strength’ of ATIS, ‘except for Japanese nationals’.²⁸

Captain Edwyn Durance, who had led the reconnaissance party to the Talaud Islands in HMAS Bowen and was of higher rank than Padman, was not so sure of Shimada. Although he agreed that Shimada spoke ‘excellent English’ and that he had a ‘co-operative attitude’, he suggested that Shimada had been ‘deliberately evasive’ about the Beo atrocities concerning the executed Allied airmen. In his report, Durance wrote: ‘Before he is used by ATIS in any official capacity it is considered necessary that further investigation of the man’s integrity be made.’²⁹ However, a brigadier (with an indecipherable signature) authorised not only that Shimada be released on parole from the compound where the surrendered Japanese personnel were kept, but also that he be transferred to ATIS.³⁰ In a further minute summing up the investigations of the reconnaissance party into the executions of the Allied airmen, Shimada is mentioned twice. First, it was explained that:

An English-speaking Japanese, known as Pte Shimada, was retained by the ‘I’ [Intelligence] representative³¹ on the Bowen due to his ability to speak English and belief that he would later give evidence regarding the execution.

Further down the minute paper, Shimada was again the subject of a paragraph:

On 25 Oct 45, when the Force returned to Morotai, Pte Shimada volunteered … hearsay information that the execution had taken place and he offered the names of people who, he believed, had been witnesses.³²

This indicates that it was not only his fluency in English but also his willingness to report wrongdoing, even if committed by his own side, that singled him out. Another report on intelligence activities concerning war criminals, noted that:

Pte Shimada (witness for the prosecution No 1 par excellence), known as ‘Mr Eric’ and domiciled with AFA ADVATIS, Morotai, can supply a long list of Japanese guilty of atrocities, torturing and bashings at Beo.³³

From these snippets, it seems that the initial interest in Shimada focused more on his usefulness as a witness providing information on alleged war crimes than as an interpreter at the Australian-run trials. However, his role with the Australian military developed into something more—namely, quasi-membership of the Australian Army. His absorption into ATIS was not repeated with other Japanese interpreters borrowed from the Japanese military.

Australian uniform

Although it was commonplace for the Japanese military to supply ‘a number of interpreters to accompany parties engaged in technical inspections and inter-island reconnaissance’, and later to interpret at the war crimes trials, Shimada was the only known Japanese national to undertake these tasks in Australian uniform.³⁴ The others retained their status in the Japanese forces and wore their Japanese uniforms or civilian clothes.

For example, at Rabaul, where two-thirds of Australia’s war crimes trials were held, there was extensive use of Japanese personnel for interpreting and other duties, especially Hattori Shoji, Naval Lieutenant Nishimura Jiro and Captain Suzuki Heihachiro. Hattori Shoji, a civilian auxiliary, interpreted at some 18 trials at Rabaul, including one held in April 1946, where he was described by an Australian observer as ‘about 5’7” and well built; dressed in a white shirt, gray riding breeches and tan riding boots’.³⁵ His attire was civilian clothing, as shown in Figure 3. Although he was borrowed from the Japanese military forces, he remained in his customary clothing, unlike Shimada.

Figure 3: Interpreter Hattori Shoji, 18 November 1945.

Source: AWM 098044.

The two military interpreters, Nishimura and Suzuki, mentioned above, were also used extensively at the Rabaul trials, particularly when it became apparent that the young Australian interpreters were not fluent enough to interpret both ways in a courtroom (English to Japanese as well as Japanese to English).³⁶ Nishimura interpreted at 23 trials and was part of the Japanese defence team at 10 others. Suzuki interpreted at 24 trials. Suzuki, who was born in America, had gone to Japan as a child and surrendered with the Japanese troops in Rabaul. Although he was often the defence interpreter, he was described by a contemporary report as the ‘court interpreter’.³⁷ This meant that he interpreted for the court (the military officers acting as judges) rather than for the defence.³⁸ However, even though this suggests a certain level of trust between the court and the captured linguists, as far as I am aware, these other Japanese interpreters remained in Japanese uniform. Shimada’s position and clothing appears to have been unusual.

Shimada’s transfer

Despite the sergeant’s stripes on his Australian uniform, Shimada’s employment by ATIS was not an actual recruitment into a branch of the Allied military apparatus, but an honorary position. This was confirmed in passing by the late Ian Kennison CBE, former director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. As a junior army officer in early 1946, Kennison had been one of four Australian officers hearing the case against 91 Japanese camp personnel tried together, who were charged with ill-treatment of prisoners of war at Tantui (formerly called Tan Toey in Australian documents) on the island of Ambon, one of the Molucca (Meluku) islands. This unusually large trial began on Ambon and continued at Morotai.³⁹ In an interview in 1998, Kennison spoke of Shimada:

Anyway there was an Australian officer who heard him [Shimada] talking English so they picked him out, took him to Morotai (he had a tropical ulcer), cured his ulcer and put him in Australian uniform, with three stripes on it. Shimada became an honorary Sergeant in the Australian Army. He was assigned to our court as the Defence interpreter.⁴⁰

In old age, Kennison made contact with Shimada as did retired judge John Williams, who had been the prosecuting officer in that trial.⁴¹

Shimada was probably supplied with an Australian uniform so that he would not be constantly challenged as he moved around the camp at Morotai. He had been granted ‘parole’, meaning he had freedom of movement, but wearing the uniform of a Japanese private would surely have caused problems. The addition of three stripes seems a nice flourish but was likely provided in order to give him some authority. It was in the nature of a courtesy rank. I believe it was a makeshift solution to what might have been an awkward problem so soon after war’s end.

Shimada’s multiple roles

In her study of Japanese nationals as interpreters for the Allies in the postwar period, Kayoko Takeda explored the multiple roles and the risks run by these individuals.⁴² Takeda identified four roles in which we may find such interpreters: as witnesses at Allied war crimes trials; as interpreters at these trials; as one of the accused in a trial; and, finally, as working for the Allied occupation forces in postwar Japan interpreting and translating. Shimada carried out three of these differing roles, sometimes within the one trial.

He appeared at the first Morotai trial, that of Captain Iwasa Tokio on the morning of 30 November 1945. It was one of a cluster of eight trials held between late November 1945 and January 1946, prosecuting several officers and men for the executions of captured Allied airmen at Beo—that is, the matter originally investigated by the reconnaissance party in October 1945. It was a case that captured the attention of the press and many of the service personnel based on Morotai, not merely because this cluster of trials was the first held there but also because of the nature of the executions as a type of performance, a ritual.

Shimada appeared as a witness. This was what Lieutenant Padman had hoped and promised his brigadier when seeking parole for Shimada. We learn from the trial transcript that he was ‘examined by the Prosecutor without the aid of an interpreter’, which would have provided a much-needed respite for the Australian personnel, and was the sixth witness for the prosecution.⁴³ He was testifying in the trial of those who had been part of Talaud Force to which he belonged as a Japanese serviceman. It is, perhaps, not surprising that the president of the court (Colonel James McKinlay) ordered that his name be suppressed from publication in the press.⁴⁴

Although Shimada was not present at the executions of the four airmen, he had been involved in some of the preliminaries. He had been called upon by the Kenpeitai⁴⁵ to interpret when the captured airmen were being questioned and he testified that he ‘interrogated’ the three Australian airmen who were later executed along with the captured American. The word ‘interrogated’ is slippery. The actual interrogator of the men was Sergeant Kubota Katsuya (the third witness). Kubota posed the questions that Shimada translated into English.⁴⁶ Similarly, Shimada interpreted for Corporal Sazake Kenzo who interrogated another of the captured airmen.⁴⁷ It was never suggested by either of these witnesses that Shimada took part in any torture of the prisoners.

Shimada gave evidence that he was in the Beo area from 17 April 1944 to 15 October 1945 and that he was ‘very often used as an interpreter’. He explained that he was the only English-speaking Japanese in the area and that all three Australian airmen were interrogated through him. This could have placed him in a perilous position when the matter came to the trial. He might have been cited as a co-participant in whatever happened to the airmen during that period of questioning.⁴⁸ Eight men identified as interpreters were tried in other Australian trials; all were accused by witnesses as participating in beatings and other forms of torture during interrogations and in other settings.⁴⁹ However, there is no evidence that Shimada was ever considered for prosecution.

As a witness at this trial, Shimada might be considered to have breached the code of ethics relating to interpreters, especially in relation to more recent war crimes trials.⁵⁰ However, he was not being questioned about the nature of the Kenpeitai interrogations. As explained at the beginning of this article, individuals from the Talaud garrison were being prosecuted for murder for the illegal executions of four captured airmen. Shimada’s testimony was educed to establish the identities and Australian residency of the airmen, required when establishing the jurisdiction of the court under the War Crimes Act 1945. He was able to describe their uniforms and remembered some of their names and personal details.⁵¹

Shimada subsequently appeared as the first witness at the trial of 91 suspects who ran the notorious Tantui prisoner of war camp on Ambon, where the death rate was 77 per cent.⁵² Sworn in as ‘Eric Shimada attached ATIS HQ 33 Inf[antry] Bde Ambon’—there was no rank assigned yet—he testified that he had translated from Japanese into English, Law No. 41 from the Book of Rules and Regulations published by the Legal Department of the Japanese Navy. It related to prisoners of war. He had also translated a section from the Japanese book of court martial law. In other words, he was appearing in his capacity as interpreter and translator of Japanese text. Although it cannot be confirmed in the trial transcript, a Japanese source identified Shimada as one of the interpreters at the trial as well.⁵³ In later years, Kennison specified that Shimada interpreted for the defence.⁵⁴ As Shimada had not served on Ambon, the location of the alleged crimes, there was no direct conflict of interest in his role as either translator of key documents or as interpreter of proceedings.

In his next court appearance, he was sworn in as Sergeant Eric Shimada of ATIS, to be one of the interpreters at the trial of Vice Admiral Ichise Shinichi and five others for the alleged murder of an Australian prisoner of war on Ambon. The trial (M41) was held from 16 to 20 February 1946 on Morotai. The accused were implicated in the execution of Private William Boyce who had attempted to escape from Tantui camp.⁵⁵ In what seems to be an indication of trust, Shimada was appointed as one of two ‘court interpreters’ rather than as interpreter for the defence.⁵⁶ But that was merely one of his roles. He also translated several of the documents provided as evidence in the trial. One of these was a statement made by Lieutenant Miyazaki Yoshio, who was one of the accused.⁵⁷

However, it is Shimada’s third role as a witness under cross-examination by the Australian defending officer Captain John Travers that is most intriguing. Travers raised the possibility that Miyazaki, when giving his statement, might not have realised that Shimada was no longer a fellow Japanese soldier but a translator for ATIS and the Australian investigators. Shimada explained the situation:

I asked him to write what he knew about the execution case of Boyce and he wrote it in my presence. It was a straight-out narrative, not question and answer. That was all that was said. At the time I was attached to the AMF [Australian Military Forces]. I had the status of a P[riva]te.⁵⁸

When Travers cross-examined him, Shimada admitted that it was unlikely Miyazaki knew that Shimada had been in the Japanese Army since they had served in different locations. He also explained that when he interviewed Miyazaki he was wearing an Australian uniform. However, to a direct question from the prosecuting officer, Captain Alexander Mackay, asking if he had ever been ‘an enlisted member of the Aust[ralian] forces’, he replied ‘No’. He had been recruited to duties with ATIS ‘due to the shortage of interpreters’ with no command or authority over members of the Australian Military Forces or the Japanese prisoners of war.⁵⁹

The defending officer, Captain Travers, did not regard the situation as satisfactory and submitted in his closing address that the ‘prosecution has not proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused spoke voluntarily’. He suspected that the request for a statement might have come across to the Japanese suspect as a command, and argued that, without a caution as to the right to silence, ‘no man [was] obliged to incriminate himself’. Travers did not specifically focus on Shimada’s uniform; however, when it emerged that Miyazaki had not been cautioned by Shimada, the Australian lawyer thought this grounds for dismissal of the charge.⁶⁰ Although the possible confusion caused by Shimada’s Australian uniform was not the reason the judge advocate general gave in recommending that Miyazaki’s conviction and death sentence be set aside, this aspect of the case has been discussed in detail to bring out both the Janus-like and multiple roles that Shimada played as an interpreter.⁶¹

Return to Japan

After this trial, Shimada departed for Japan where he worked as an interpreter for BCOF, still in his Australian uniform. Surely this would have been problematic for a Japanese national so soon after war’s end. In the draft version of her article about her father, Furuno included a family story of her mother’s surprise at seeing him return in that uniform when he had left in the other.⁶² However, I do not know if it caused trouble either with his family or his community. As Shimada explained in 2003, he was assumed to be Australian in his Australian uniform when he supervised the ballot boxes at the first postwar election (10 April 1946) in Hiroshima in his role with BCOF. He would travel in a jeep each day from the military base in Kure where he was stationed.⁶³

Although his family believed that he had been offered the possibility of becoming an Australian citizen, probably by Padman, the intelligence officer who first recruited him and who Shimada called ‘his supervising officer’, Padman did not have the necessary authority.⁶⁴ The highest rank Padman attained was temporary captain when he was posted to Kure with BCOF.⁶⁵ He returned to Australia in May 1946 and to civilian life. It would have been unlikely in the Australia of 1946, years before the end of the White Australia policy, for Shimada’s Japanese heritage to have been overlooked by immigration authorities who were busy deporting Asians who had landed in Australia during the war and others who were considered enemy aliens.⁶⁶ This would have been compounded by the discovery that Shimada had a Japanese wife and children. At the end of his time with BCOF, Shimada’s only option was to become Japanese again.

Shimada’s subsequent shedding of his Australian uniform was prompted by practical considerations rather than issues of stigma or identity (Figure 4). Once he left his employment with BCOF, he would no longer have access to BCOF rations, an important matter in postwar Japan. Norman Sparnon, one of the Australian interpreters in ATIS and a friend of Shimada’s, realised that if Shimada remained in that uniform after he passed his interpreter examination for the IMTFE in Tokyo and subsequently left BCOF for new work, he would have a problem.⁶⁷ What agency would be responsible for his rations? As Shimada explained in an interview:

I needed to go through the proper procedure to return to being a ‘Japanese civilian’. That is, if I didn’t return from war as a Japanese soldier, I wouldn’t be able to receive my rations of food. So he [Sparnon] brought me back to Kure and put me on a small Australian ship and took me to a place where Japanese troops returning were being processed, something like an immigration checkpoint. My Australian military uniform was taken off, and I went in alone … I wrote down the name of my unit (of the Japanese Army) and received my tickets for the rice rations, and went back to Tokyo as a civilian.⁶⁸

Figure 4: Shimada, fourth from the left, with other translators at the IMTFE, Tokyo, arriving at court with the translated judgement.

Source: Courtesy of Stephanie Leah Shimada.

Shimada subsequently interpreted at 323 sessions of the IMTFE, including some of the afternoon session on 6 January 1948 during Prime Minister Tojo Hideki’s evidence.⁶⁹ In her study of the interpreters, Takeda has explained that they worked for 30-minute periods, but that the transcripts do not reveal which interpreter did which portion of the trial. All they show are the names of all those for a specific session.⁷⁰ The high number of sessions Shimada interpreted at seems formidable, and was due, probably, to his ability, which Kennison noted, to operate ‘both ways’.⁷¹ Although this meant that he was able to translate from English to Japanese as well as from Japanese to English, it is also a wonderfully evocative phrase in light of Shimada’s ambiguous position as a Japanese enemy soldier in Australian garb.

Following his work at the IMTFE, Shimada left interpreting behind and returned to his prewar employment with the Tokyo Bureau of Agence France-Presse until his retirement in 1969. Soon after, for a short time, he became editor of the English newsletter published by the Information Section of the Consulate-General of Japan in Sydney in early 1970. At different times, his children settled in Australia and Shimada himself came to Brisbane on a permanent residency visa in December 1998 at the age of 86. He died in Brisbane in August 2010.⁷²

Conclusion

Eric Masakazu Shimada played an interesting role in a period of Australia’s postwar history that is little known—the Australian war crimes trials and related investigations. The interpreters were, and have remained, largely invisible. Due to the nature of their occupation, they slipped into an anonymous, middle ground between the two groups they sought to assist using their linguistic skills. Not much attention was paid to them at the time, much less in retrospect. That Shimada stood out from this obscurity demanded my attention. His absorption into ATIS when a Japanese national, so recently the enemy, was puzzling to me. When the photograph of him in Australian uniform surfaced, it raised even more questions about his status and his role.

Setting Shimada within the context of the Australian trials, the scarcity of interpreters and the nature of employment of Japanese nationals as interpreters, I have shown him to be an anomaly. Other Japanese interpreters, borrowed from the Japanese military forces to meet Australia’s need for linguists, remained part of the Japanese military. They were not quartered with ATIS and did not wear Australian uniforms. Their status as Japanese military or civilian auxiliaries attached to the Japanese military was unambiguous.

Although mentions of Shimada in the Australian investigation files and trial transcripts—in which he appears as a witness, translator of documents and interpreter of evidence—are meagre, his story begged to be told. Using a biographical lens, I have charted Shimada’s experience to provide a closer study of an under-researched category of people engaged in the postwar trials. In doing so, I have demonstrated the peculiar, even unique, circumstances surrounding his engagement and outfitting in an Australian uniform.

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1. 1 Note on names: Japanese names in this article have the family name first followed by the given name except where Japanese historians have followed Western practice.

2. 2 The original iteration of Blamey’s address, made at Morotai on 9 September 1945 may be found online on the Australian War Memorial website, accessed 21 October 2025, awm.gov.au/collection/C1290327.

3. 3 Advanced Headquarters (HQ), Weekly Operations and Intelligence Report no. 1, 15 August – 12 October 1945, 5, Australian War Memorial (AWM): AWM54, 423/11/168.

4. 4 The prosecutor referred to the ceremony in his opening address as ‘a Roman Holiday’, a description taken up by newspaper reports of the time. See National Archives of Australia (NAA): A471, 80718, 23; ‘Japs Made Roman Holiday of R.A.A.F. Executions’, Canberra Times, 1 December 1945, 1.

5. 5 For a discussion of Japanese policy and practice, see Tristan Moss and Georgina Fitzpatrick, ‘Crimes against Captured Airmen’, in Australia’s War Crimes Trials, ed. Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 239–65. A description of these executions may be found on pp. 252–3.

6. 6 Karakellang was one of the islands in the Talaud archipelago.

7. 7 For the types of personnel and their duties on these reconnaissance visits, see ‘Report on Operational and Administrative Activities’, HQ Morotai Force, 15 August – 31 December 1945, AWM: AWM54, 423/2/55. The linguists were among the personnel allotted from Morotai HQ to surrounding islands, including the Talaud Islands to the north of Morotai.

8. 8 I interviewed John Wright, Gordon Maitland, Joseph da Costa and John Hook, all members of ATIS.

9. 9 Minute, ‘Japanese Soldier Recommended for Release or Parole’, Lt B. Padman, intelligence officer, Talaud Force to Col. R. E. Wade, ‘A’ Branch, Advanced HQ, 19 October 1945, AWM: AWM54, 1010/9/8.

10. 10 For a discussion of the choice of Morotai for the first set of trials, see Georgina Fitzpatrick, ‘The Trials on Morotai’, in Australia’s War Crimes Trials, ed. Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 373–407.

11. 11 Criticisms of these provisions are considered in Georgina Fitzpatrick, ‘War Crimes Trials, “Victor’s Justice” and Australian Military Justice in the Aftermath of the Second World War’, in The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, ed. Kevin Jon Heller and Gerry Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 327–47, doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199671144.003.0016.

12. 12 Chapters on the trials at each of the eight locations by Fitzpatrick may be found in Australia’s War Crimes Trials, ed. Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack and Narrelle Morris (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 373–686. See also, Sandra Wilson, Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz, Japanese War Criminals: The Politics of Justice after the Second World War (New York: Columbia Press, 2017); Dean Aszkielowicz, The Australian Pursuit of Japanese War Criminals, 1943–1957: From Foe to Friend (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390724.001.0001.

13. 13 Colin Funch, Linguists in Uniform: The Japanese Experience (Clayton: Japanese Studies Centre, Monash, 2003); Georgina Fitzpatrick, ‘Interpreters at Australia’s War-Crimes Trials, 1945–1951: From “Ready-Mades” to “Happenchancers”’, in Communication, Interpreting and Language in Wartime, ed. Amanda Laugesen and Richard Gehrmann (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 153–70, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27037-7_8.

14. 14 Advanced HQ, Weekly Operations and Intelligence Report no. 1, 15 August – 12 October 1945, 1, AWM: AWM54, 423/11/168. The Australian military were also given responsibility for supervising surrenders and temporary administration of Borneo, New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, Nauru, Ocean Islands, Bougainville and adjacent islands.

15. 15 This figure included Japanese civilians and auxiliaries. For a detailed table, dated October 1945, giving numbers by location, see Gavin Long, The Final Campaigns (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1963), 555.

16. 16 Fitzpatrick, ‘Interpreters at Australia’s War-Crimes Trials’, 155–60.

17. 17 These have been digitised. For a guide to the war crimes files and trial transcripts, see Narrelle Morris, Japanese War Crimes in the Pacific: Australia’s Investigations and Prosecutions (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2019).

18. 18 Kayoko Takeda, Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: A Sociopolitical Analysis (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), 54–5, doi.org/10.1353/book811.

19. 19 Yuri Furuno, ‘About My Father’, Nikkei Australia: Japanese Diaspora in Australia (17 December 2020), nikkeiaustralia.com/about-my-father/. I thank Dr Keiko Tamura for alerting me to this article. Unfortunately, the photographs were not of sufficient quality to republish.

20. 20 ‘SHIMADA Masakasu Personal Details’, AWM: AWM54, 1010/9/8.

21. 21 I thank Stephanie Shimada for her additional information about her great-grandfather, Eugen Wohlgemuth. Email to author, 17 August 2024.

22. 22 Furuno, ‘About My Father’.

23. 23 I thank Dr Furuno for her additional information. Email to author, 17 August 2024.

24. 24 Takeda, Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, 54.

25. 25 ‘SHIMADA Masakasu Personal Details’. Malcolm Duncan Kennedy was a Reuters correspondent, 1925–34. A brief account of his varied career as an army officer, businessman, civil servant and British intelligence officer (during WWII) may be found at the University of Sheffield Library, GB 200 MS 117, 236. See archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/4f624f63-78ee-3866-add7-bbc71bba4df3. H. A. Thompson, another press correspondent in Japan, is mentioned in passing in Peter O’Connor, The English-Language Press Networks of East Asia, 1918–1945 (Folkestone: Brill, 2010), 67, 87n44, doi.org/10.1163/ej.9781905246670.i-414.

26. 26 ‘SHIMADA Masakasu Personal Details’. His superior officer, Major Tamura Toshio, also stated that this battalion (2nd battalion, 32nd Division), drawn mainly from Tokyo, had never been in action, NAA: A471, 80718, 67.

27. 27 Minute, ‘Japanese Soldier Recommended for Release or Parole’.

28. 28 David Sissons Papers, National Library of Australia (NLA), MS 3092, Box 32, Envelope marked ‘Key to Courts and Personnel’.

29. 29 ‘Report on Shimada, Formerly Koba Force’, 6 November 1945, AWM: AWM54, 1010/9/6.

30. 30 Minute, ‘Japanese Soldier—Ldg. Pte. Shimada—Release on Parole’, 16 October 1945, AWM: AWM54, 1010/9/6. In this minute, the brigadier ordered 1 Base Sub Area to arrange with Adv HQ ATIS to transfer Shimada to ATIS.

31. 31 This is Padman, the intelligence officer. Padman and Shimada remained friends until they lost contact in Kure, Japan, during Shimada’s BCOF period.

32. 32 Minute, ‘Atrocities on Karekellang Is. in the Talaud Group’, November 1945, AWM: AWM54, 1010/9/6.

33. 33 ‘Report on Intelligence Activities’, 20 October 1945, AWM: AWM54, 1010/9/8.

34. 34 Weekly Operations and Intelligence Report no. 2, for week ending 19 October 1945, AWM: AWM54, 423/11/168, 8.

35. 35 Eddie Allan Stanton watched him at the trial of Makeda Bishin, NAA: A471, 80784. Stanton believed he must have been educated in America and described him as a ‘very handsome figure with smooth pale skin’. Hank Nelson ed., The War Diaries of Eddie Allan Stanton: Papua 1942–45, New Guinea, 1945–46 (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 333.

36. 36 John Ferris to author, 26 January 2010. Ferris was one of the Australian interpreters at Rabaul.

37. 37 ‘S. A. Sergeant Has Last Say in Rabaul Trial’, Advertiser, 27 March 1947, 4. In the first trial held at Morotai, beginning on 29 November 1945, in which Captain Iwasa Tokio was prosecuted for the execution of one of the Allied airmen on the Talaud Islands (M9), the terminology of ‘court interpreter’ and ‘defence interpreter’ specifically appears, NAA: A471, 80718, 13. Thereafter, such specificity was rare.

38. 38 John Hook, interview by author, 11 March 2010.

39. 39 This trial is discussed at length in Fitzpatrick, ‘The Trials on Morotai’, 384–7, 390. For the trial transcript, see NAA: A471, 81709, PARTS 1-7.

40. 40 Ian Kennison, interview by Jan Billet, 9 December 1998, 11. Transcript provided to me by Michael Carrel. The emphasis is mine.

41. 41 Furuno, ‘About My Father’. Her article reproduces a photograph of Williams and Shimada meeting again in Sydney in 1991. It also reproduced extracts from a letter Kennison wrote to her father in 1998.

42. 42 Kayoko Takeda, ‘Guilt, Survival, Opportunities, and Stigma: Japanese Interpreters in the Postwar Occupation Period (1945–1952)’, in New Insights in the History of Interpreting, ed., Kayoko Takeda and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016), 225–46, doi.org/10.1075/btl.122.09tak.

43. 43 NAA: A471, 80718, 45.

44. 44 I found no evidence that any newspapers, reporting this first trial at Morotai with great interest, broke the suppression order.

45. 45 The Kenpeitai (Japanese military police) were akin in reputation to the Nazi Gestapo.

46. 46 Evidence of Kubota, NAA: A471, 80718, 34.

47. 47 Evidence of Sazake, NAA: A471, 80718, 43. Sazake was a member of the 8th Field Provost Unit.

48. 48 Several historians have considered the role of interpreters working for the Japanese (usually the Kenpeitai) and their complicity or otherwise in crimes. See, for example, Takeda, ‘Guilt, Survival’, 225–46; Shi-chi Mike Lan, ‘“Crime” of Interpreting: Taiwanese Interpreters as War Criminals of World War II’, in New Insights in the History of Interpreting, ed., Kayoko Takeda and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016), 193–223, doi.org/10.1075/btl.122.08lan; Sandra Wilson, ‘Interpreters as Japanese War Criminals’, War in History 29, no. 4 (2022): 824–43, doi.org/10.1177/09683445211043407. Takeda has also considered whether ‘linguistic mediation’ was itself ‘viewed as a war crime’ in her study of the interpreters tried in the British set of war crimes trials. See Kayoko Takeda, Interpreters and War Crimes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 3, doi.org/10.4324/9781003094982.

49. 49 This is an under-researched area in relation to the Australian trials, but the accused interpreters were not in court for the ‘crime’ of interpreting. One egregious example was civilian interpreter Ikeuchi Masakiyo who, in effect, ran the Tantui camp in Ambon. His death sentence reflected the overwhelming evidence from survivors of his enthusiastic participation in the ill-treatment of prisoners of war there.

50. 50 For a discussion of the ethical issues, see Takeda, Interpreters and War Crimes, 3, 138–52.

51. 51 NAA: A471, 80718, 45-7.

52. 52 NAA: A471, 81709 PART 1, 121. For a detailed account of the Tantui camp, see Joan Beaumont, Gull Force: Survival and Leadership in Captivity, 1941–1945 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988).

53. 53 The names of personnel sworn in for that trial did not include the names of the interpreters, NAA: A471, 81708 PART 1, 84. However, Shimada and Captain Teck Song Lim were named among the trial interpreters by Sōmiya Shinji, leader of the Japanese Defence team, in his 1946 account of the trial. For an English translation, see ‘The Account of Legal Proceedings of Court for War Criminal Suspects’, John M. Williams papers, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, MLMSS 2207.

54. 54 Kennison, interview, 11.

55. 55 For an account of the torture and death of Boyce, see Beaumont, Gull Force, 122–24; trial transcript, NAA: A471, 81644.

56. 56 The second court interpreter was Captain Leonard Teck Lim of ATIS. Lim was born in Malacca and had been in the Malayan Police. He had been evacuated before the surrender of Malaya to the Japanese. See David Sissons to John Williams, 15 August 1991, David Sissons Papers, NLA, MS 3092, Box 21, Ambon. The interpreter for the defence, Kanehiro Yoshihide, was provided by the Japanese Army. See trial transcript for M41, NAA: A471, 81644, 21.

57. 57 Statement of Miyazaki, 15 December 1945, NAA: A471, 81644, 99. This had been certified by Eric [sic] Shimada: ‘I certify that the above is a true and correct translation of the original Japanese statement of which it purports to be a translation.’

58. 58 See trial transcript for M41, NAA: A471, 81644, 30.

59. 59 NAA: A471, 81644, 32.

60. 60 NAA: A471, 81644, 37. Travers was one of several Australian military lawyers assigned to defend Japanese accused. This is an under-researched aspect of the war crimes trials.

61. 61 The judge advocate general queried whether such a junior officer would understand that the order to execute Boyce, a prisoner of war, was illegal. Miyazaki was subsequently one of the 91 tried for ill-treatment of prisoners of war at the Tantui camp on Ambon. He was found guilty, given the death sentence and hanged at Rabaul on 25 September 1947.

62. 62 Dr Furuno provided me with the draft article for which I give her thanks, as it contains material not in the published version.

63. 63 Eric Shimada, interview with his granddaughter, 2003, reproduced in Furuno, ‘About My Father’.

64. 64 Furuno, ‘About My Father’, draft version, 5.

65. 65 Bruce Hamilton Padman, ‘Officer’s Record of Service’, NAA: B883, NX10478, 18.

66. 66 Indonesian wives of Caucasians sheltering in wartime Australia were deported, long-term Japanese residents interned during the war were deported and Japanese brides of Australians serving with BCOF had enormous difficulties in gaining entry.

67. 67 Kayoko Takeda confirmed that he passed this examination. Email to author, 19 August 2024. For Sparnon, see Funch, Linguists in Uniform, 30–1; service file, NAA: B883, VX142069.

68. 68 Shimada, interview, reproduced in Furuno, ‘About My Father’.

69. 69 Takeda, Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, 53.

70. 70 Kayoko Takeda, ‘Interpreting at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal’, in Doing Justice to Court Interpreting, ed., Miriam Schlesinger and Franz Pöchhacker (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010), Table 1; 17, 26; endnotes 4, 7.

71. 71 [Ian Kennison], An Australian War Crimes Trial in the South West Pacific Area, 1945–1946: Letter from a Former Junior Member of the Court, para. 32. Typescript in author’s possession courtesy of Michael Carrel. Kennison also sent this paper to Shimada in 1998 for comment.

72. 72 Furuno, ‘About My Father’, draft version.