Shohei Kuwabara, a 79-year-old announcer, recalled the nightmare of being raised by a sadistic father in the postwar years.

The father was prone to drunken rages, committed physical and psychological torture against his family, and would not hesitate to humiliate and torment his wife.

She had told Kuwabara that his father was never like this until after he returned home from fighting in World War II.

The issue of Japanese soldiers traumatized by their harsh war experiences has long been buried or ignored.

However, Kuwabara and many others experienced firsthand how the war transformed their loved ones, often turning them into postwar monsters.

After years of prodding by affected family members, the government decided to start its first study on the conditions of former soldiers who suffered psychological trauma during World War II.

At a Diet session in March 2023, then health minister Katsunobu Kato said Shokei-kan, a government-established museum in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward, would conduct the study.

The museum preserves and exhibits historical materials related to wounded and retired soldiers.

Experts involved in the museum operation held a meeting on March 13 this year.

Two days later, members of an association of families of Japanese soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, met with health ministry officials.

Akio Kuroi, head of the group, asked the ministry to “conduct a fact-finding survey to clarify the overall picture.”

For Kuwabara, a clear explanation for his father’s atrocious behavior didn’t come until years after his death.

‘WAR IS HELL’

Kuwabara’s father, Sakae, was a police officer in Kyoto before he was sent to China as a soldier in 1938. After being wounded, he returned home a year later and was “a changed man,” according to Kuwabara.

Sakae got into trouble and resigned from the police force after being transferred.

Kuwabara’s mother, Fumi, supported the family financially.

Kuwabara said he will never forget the day when he was a fifth-grader and his father brought his mistress into the family home, where they ate Fumi’s home-cooked food in front of the family.

Sakae then ordered Fumi to lay out a futon and said, “Go to the bathhouse with Shohei now, and don’t come back for two hours.”

Kuwabara said: “We sat side by side in the cold weather amid the lumber of a nearby sawmill. I asked her, ‘Why don’t you leave him?’ She said, ‘I’m sure he will return to the gentle man he was before the war. We’ll just have to be patient, OK?’”

Sakae drank shochu every night, and went into violent rages once or twice a week. He would throw miso soup in Fumi’s face, overturn a table, and say, “What is this bad food?”

His cruelty extended to Kuwabara and his two brothers.

The father once tied up Kuwabara and leaned him over a railroad bridge.

“A train was passing right below me, and I thought I’m going to be killed,” Kuwabara recalled.

Sakae died at the age of 76.

“All I could think was, ‘He’s finally dead,’” Kuwabara said.

When his mother died in 2012, Kuwabara found a book while sorting through her belongings. The cover said, “Diary in camp by Sakae Kuwabara.”

It seems that Fumi had self-published her husband’s military diary written during the war.

“I read it all at once,” Kuwabara said.

In the diary, Sakae describes how he was talking to a comrade just before a bullet pierced his iron helmet and killed him. Sakae also mentions how he used a bayonet to fatally stab a Chinese person who was hiding in a house.

Kuwabara said so many thoughts ran through his head as he read these and other accounts.

“Pops, how many people have you killed? You must have had a hard time.”

At one point in the war, Sakae’s unit attacked an enemy position and most of his comrades were killed in the battle.

He also found the bodies of several Chinese soldiers, chained so they could not escape.

Sakae wrote of his sympathy in the diary, “Both in China and Japan, it is tough being a private soldier.”

The words that his mother repeatedly said, “The war has changed him,” became clear to Kuwabara for the first time.

Later, he read the diary on his radio program. Kuwabara received many responses afterward, and all of them said, “My family went through the same thing.”

“My mother used to say before she died, ‘War is hell, whether you live or die,’” Kuwabara said. “She was right.”