Between 1946 and 1949, some 12,000 New Zealanders served in J Force, the New Zealand component of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in post-war Japan. The force was there to oversee the demobilisation and demilitarisation of the country, including the repatriation of soldiers and civilians returning from overseas. Comprising an army brigade and a Royal New Zealand Air Force squadron, the NZ contingent was stationed in towns across southern Honshu. One of those towns was Yamaguchi, which in May 1947 was home to 27 Battalion and 5 Engineer Works Company, 2NZEF (Japan).
Murata Shinichi lived on his own a few hundred metres from the back entrance of the New Zealand camp in Yamaguchi, where he sometimes worked for the occupation forces. Possibly ex-army, he was one of more than six million Japanese repatriates, civilian or military – hikiagesha – who had been transferred back to the home islands from the occupied territories of the Japanese Empire, and was consequently almost destitute, living on local government rations and dressed in army clothing.
He had chosen to return to Yamaguchi to be near his older brother, who lived next door. He had poor eyesight. We know these few facts only because in the early hours of Sunday, May 4, 1947, in circumstances that are still not clear, he was illegally removed from his home by New Zealand soldiers, and a short time later shot in the back of the head as he attempted to leave them. The soldiers left his unattended body in the street and headed back to their camp.
The soldier responsible for the death was Sapper Sydney Keystone of 5th Engineer Company, a 22-year-old apprentice baker from Marton, who had volunteered for J Force the previous year.
Back at the barracks in Yamaguchi, Keystone eventually reported the incident to his company sergeant major (CSM), relating the story suggested to him by his two companions during the walk back to camp.
The CSM told him to go to bed and then alerted the camp’s provost detachment before heading out to the scene of the shooting. Murata’s body was taken to the Japanese Red Cross hospital and, under instruction from NZ military police, Japanese police looked for forensic evidence and collected witness statements from the area’s inhabitants.
The next afternoon, Keystone repeated to the military police the story he had told the CSM: he had challenged a Japanese civilian inside the camp grounds and then chased him out into the street before shooting him as he ran away.
Four days later, while under open arrest and with his story crumbling, Keystone made a further statement in which he confessed that he was “well under the influence of liquor” when he went on duty, and that while he could faintly remember leaving camp and wandering through alleyways, nothing was very clear to him up to the time he realised he had shot a Japanese man. “I cannot remember what time I left camp or any other details other than I have stated as I was very drunk.” He was placed under close arrest on May 10.
Court-martial
Keystone was charged with murder and tried by general court-martial at Yamaguchi on June 7. The president, members of the court and the prosecuting officer were all officers from various J Force units; the Judge Advocate was a barrister from Northern Ireland serving in the RAF, and the defending officer was an experienced Indian Army barrister. NZ nurses were drafted in as court stenographers. Witnesses were called, 33 in total, and all for the prosecution.
Over the next six days, the court heard the evidence and visited the scene of the shooting. The story they heard was as follows.
On Saturday evening, May 3, Keystone and several companions went to the engineers’ beer bar when it opened at 7pm and drank heavily for three hours before stumbling back to their rooms. Keystone then left his room after 11pm to go on his rostered picket duty – each unit in the camp patrolled its own area.
Keystone received from a previous sentry a well-used and somewhat rusty Thompson submachine gun and two short magazines carrying 10 rounds each. Although it was against orders, he suggested to the soldier he was to share picket duty with that they each do one shift, allowing the other to get some sleep. This was accepted.
Taking first shift, Keystone then made his way to the back gate of the camp to meet two of his earlier drinking companions and drink more beer. At this point, Keystone appears to have been spoken to by the orderly officer from 27 Battalion, who reluctantly conceded during the trial that he may have mentioned to his own sentries to “ignore any shots coming from the engineers’ area, as the sentry was drunk”.
Back at the gate, Keystone stuffed a number of beer bottles into his tunic and the three men ventured out of the camp to look for women, leaving the engineers’ area unguarded but possibly safer.
When they reached the main road running parallel with the camp, they unsuccessfully asked a visitor from Hiroshima for the location of any “pom-pom girls”.
Then, over the next few hours, the trio proceeded to invade half a dozen homes in and around the main road or lanes leading off it, supposedly looking for women but too drunk to exhibit any coherent sense of purpose.
They were apparently polite and not intentionally threatening, but the sudden uninvited presence in the middle of the night of a group of armed foreign soldiers was understandably terrifying for the families in each house.
Their ramble took Keystone and the remaining member of the trio (the third man had earlier passed out beside a baby in one of the homes they had randomly entered) into streets and alleys leading to the edge of town and the farmland beyond. About 1.30am, they eventually entered the home of Murata. The court did not learn what happened in the house, but several shots were heard by neighbours, and investigators later found two shell cases on the floor and a bullet embedded in a post. Over the course of his venturing into town, Keystone appears to have fired nine rounds in total.
Murata reluctantly accompanied the two back to the main road, where they were seen by their other drinking companion, who was by now making his own way back to camp. He was catching up with them slowly when he saw the Japanese man turn away from the soldiers and head back down the road, passing him on the other side of the street. At that point, he heard Keystone’s fellow sapper say, “Why don’t you let the Jap have one”, or words to that effect.
Keystone loosed off three single shots from a distance of about 20 metres, one of which struck Murata in the back of the head, exiting below his right eye. He collapsed to the ground, bleeding profusely.
The trio walked over to the body. Keystone appeared to be in shock and uncertain as to what had just happened, so one of his companions helpfully explained that he had “shot a Nip”. A Japanese doctor later testified that Murata had died through loss of blood, and might have lived if first aid had been given immediately. Instead, the soldiers headed back to camp. It was approximately 1.45am.
The defence did not call any witnesses, and neither it nor the prosecution made a closing statement. Keystone was found guilty of murder. Before sentencing on June 13, the defending officer’s plea in mitigation of punishment suggested that if discipline and control had been of a standard normally expected of a unit of 2NZEF, Murata would still be alive.
The mandatory sentence for murder was “to suffer death by being shot”. However, after the Judge Advocate General’s office with J Force had looked at the court transcript of proceedings, the verdict was confirmed on June 25 by the commander of 2NZEF Japan, but the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Keystone was shipped home to New Zealand in July 1947.
US intervention?
This sequence of events gave rise to long-lasting rumours among some J Force veterans that the American authorities of General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation regime put pressure on the New Zealand authorities to execute Keystone.
However, the events simply followed 2NZEF standard procedure and government policy and there is no evidence of US intervention. Military historian John McLeod, current director, heritage, commemorations and protocol at the New Zealand Defence Force, says no member of 2NZEF was executed for any crime – he has looked at more than 3000 court-martial files in the course of his work.
Peter Fraser’s government did not want NZ soldiers shot by firing squad, any more than it wanted NZ civilians to be hanged. To ensure this outcome, the Expeditionary Force Emergency Regulations 1940 stipulated that any death sentence imposed by court-martial required the governor-general’s concurrence. The military authorities took the hint and subsequent mandatory death sentences were invariably commuted in theatre to life imprisonment. It would in any case have been a politically brave move for any NZ government in 1947 to authorise the execution of a NZ soldier for murdering a Japanese national.
Even as Keystone was on his way home, the court-martial proceedings were being reviewed in NZ by the Judge Advocate General (JAG), and his opinion was that the murder verdict was not supported by the evidence and the blame lay with the Indian officer defending Keystone.
Fred Jones, Fraser’s minister of defence, was informed that the officer did not draw the attention of the court to the evidence of drunkenness, which might have induced the court to alter the charge to manslaughter. A finding of manslaughter was substituted for murder and Keystone’s prison sentence was reduced to five years’ hard labour on August 20, 1947.
The JAG wrote: “If the defending officer had drawn the attention of the court to the evidence of drunkenness and the effect of this, together with the goading of the accused by his companions to shoot the Japanese, on the accused’s mind, together with the improbability of his being able to shoot accurately in his drunken condition, the court might have come to the conclusion that the accused, so far as he could form any intention, meant merely to fire in the direction of, and not at, the Japanese. In other words, his act was gross horseplay or carelessness and was manslaughter.”
The court might have come to that conclusion, but it did not. In fact, the court spent considerable time trying to ascertain the soldiers’ level of inebriation and the Judge Advocate also went into the issue of drunkenness at some length in his closing address.
Similarly, discussion of manslaughter book-ended the proceedings. If the Judge Advocate was dropping broad hints that a finding of manslaughter would be perfectly acceptable under the law and circumstances of the case, the court chose not to take the hint.
The change of verdict and reduced sentence were communicated to Keystone on board HMT Dunera when it arrived in Wellington on August 27, 1947. He was transferred to Paparua Men’s Prison near Christchurch and there remained a soldier prisoner. The Prisons Department provided “board and lodging”, but the army controlled his sentence and conditions.
In response to pleas for clemency from his family and others, it was pointed out that, as he was a military prisoner, reviews of his sentence would be eligible earlier and more frequently than those of a civilian prisoner, and that he would be eligible for a significant reduction in the sentence if he behaved himself – which explains what happened over the next two years.
On July 20, 1948, the sentence was remitted to three years’ hard labour, and the following year, the army sought and obtained the minister of defence’s agreement to Keystone’s release in June 1949, as he had served two-thirds of his newly reduced sentence. Keystone was the last of eight soldiers sentenced on charges of murder or manslaughter while on active service overseas, and all the others had been given the benefit of one-third final remission. The minister was reminded that “his was one of the less serious cases”.
Two days after his release from Paparua on June 15, 1949, Keystone, by then 24, was discharged from 2NZEF. In the decades after his release, his life was unsettled.He found bush and farm work, married and separated and continued to have problems with drink and the law. He died in 1991 at the age of 66.
Of Murata Shinichi, little information is available. The court-martial file contains no equivalent of today’s victim impact statements and the NZ authorities in Japan were keen to be seen to treat the occupied population fairly. The hard fact is that in the immediate post-war environment they had no interest in the unfortunate victim as a person.
