Laurens Van der Post was a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII.   One day he had a remarkable experience:

All the Dutch and English senior officers were suddenly summoned to parade one afternoon in the prison quadrangle.  The summons, though extremely quick and unexpected, was not quick enough, I was happy to note, to escape our system of early warning.  I had time enough to tell the Royal Air Force squadron-leader who was my secret second-in-command to prepare to alert his platoon officers for the plan we had evolved for just such a contingency.  But within a minute of being paraded I began to feel reassured that this, whatever it was going to be, was probably not the prelude to massacre, because we were confronted only by the strange and terrible Gunzo Mori, his satellite Kasayama, and the usual posse of excitable armed Korean guards.

Mori had summoned us in a great rage because we had refused to provide the Japanese command with a list of names of any technicians among us who could have helped them in the local armaments industry that the Japanese had set up.  We had pretended that there were no such people among us, and the Japanese command, quite rightly, took us for liars.  It was a striking indication, even in this perverted form, of how instinctively the Japanese attached far more importance to inner values than outer ones.  A person’s thought, and his way of thinking, in a sense seemed always to matter more to them than what a person did.  We had at times in the past been confined to our prison barracks without food and water for days because we were held guilty of “wrong thinking.”  Ordered not even to converse with one another, we were forced to sit behind walls in silence so that we should contemplate the imperfections of our mind and spirit. Far back at the beginning, before I joined up with Nichols and his men, I had even been condemned not so much for trying to carry on the war against the Japanese but for having shown “a spirit of willfulness” in not obeying the orders of General Ten Poorten to all the Allied forces under his command and surrendering immediately to the nearest Japanese military commander.

I had also on several occasions been beaten because the vegetables I tried to grow in our various prison camps, to augment our diet, were not growing fast enough, or because the pigs which I tried to breed on such swill as we could gather from the Japanese kitchens and our own, in the hope that they might be a valuable supplement of proteins to a diet dangerously deficient in them, developed malnutrition afflictions of their own, the sows casting still-born litters or just dropping dead themselves from heart exhaustion.  And the cause of it all, according to the Japanese, had been something “wrong in the spirit” that I brought to these matters, never the lack of proper food or fertilizers.

Much of the rage to which we were exposed on this occasion, I was certain therefore, was due to a sense of perverted idealism in Mori and his assistants. In some way, I suspected, he was seeing himself as an instrument of righteousness correcting a manifestation of evil in us. I thought too that the rage was made all the more dangerous because he was aware, as all the Japanese had been aware from the beginning, that however much they ruled our lives and had complete power over our bodies, they had utterly failed to change our mind and spirit.  On the contrary, imprisonment in one way had improved the quality and texture of the spirit of our men and helped them to become finer instruments of life than they had ever been before.  Somehow the Japanese were aware of this and could neither understand nor forgive us for it.

The parade had been called in such a hurry that we stood in line in haphazard order without regard to rank or seniority.  I came about twelfth in the front rank of officers.  The first officer in the line was a Battle of Britain pilot, Wing-Commander “Micky”  MacGuire—still in the Royal Air Force today—knighted, an air marshal and a senior member of the general staff of the combined British services.  He had played no part in preparing the false return which was the ostensible cause of this Japanese outburst of indignation.  But that fact did not spare him from being the first to be punished.

Being first, he was called out of the line and made to stand to attention in front of Mori, who at that moment looked to me like some Samurai character out of one of the “Noh” plays, about to exact revenge for an outrage to his honor—a vastly popular theme of the classical Japanese theater, as I had noticed some twenty years before.  His little sulfur satellite, Kasayama, with his usual ostentatious servility to his master, had not forgotten, even in the haste with which the scene had been set, to carry along with him a heavy wooden armchair for Mori to sit in, should he wish to do so.  But Mori had ignored it.

He just stood beside the chair for some time screaming at MacGuire in the way the Japanese did when all their emotions were most deeply engaged—the sound coming not so much from their throats as from somewhere immediately behind their navels.  He was using words so fast and of so vulgar and crude a kind, that I recognized only a few of them, but enough to follow the accelerating drift of passion in them.  At the same time his hand would repeatedly go to the hilt of the sword at his hip as if he were tempted to draw it and do away with MacGuire on the spot.

In the end it was not the sword but the wooden chair that he chose as his weapon.  He suddenly bent down and lifted the chair from the ground.  Small as he was, he was broad-shouldered and immensely strong.  He raised it high into the air and brought it down with such force on the head of the tall, emaciated MacGuire, who even at the best of times was a slender person, that the chair was shattered.  MacGuire was left tottering and dazed, fighting with all his determination and courage (of which he had more than most men) to stay upright on his feet. Even this was not enough for Mori, because he then proceeded to hit MacGuire with his fists and kick him with his jack-booted feet before pushing him, weak and in a state of profound shock, back to join our line.

He then called out the officer next to MacGuire and each officer in turn was beaten up, both with fists and a piece of the shattered chair, with Kasayama now joining in more and more with kicks to help the punishment along.  This to me, still unbeaten, and trying to appraise the situation and its full potential of consequences for us, was one of the worst moments of the afternoon, because I knew, as no one else in the camp did, how this powerful collective sense of the Japanese and their converts, which I have already mentioned, tended to take over in such situations.  For instance, even on lesser occasions when we had been slapped and beaten for minor offenses, every other guard or soldier on duty had somehow felt compelled, as if by some instinctive sense of honor, to join the beating in their turn and show their solidarity of spirit as a Russian Marxist would have had it.  I could visualize that before long the rest of the guard, already on the verge of flocking to Mori, might join in unbidden, but worse still, for the first time in years I saw a machine gun being mounted at the gates.  I began to wonder if my interpretation of the cause of the parade had not been too naive and that this might not be just a pretext for the ultimate solution I had feared.

Still in a turmoil of doubt and wondering what I should do to resolve the crisis, my turn came to face Mori.  I walked towards him suddenly feeling strangely calm.  It was as if I had become another person and somewhere far down within me, someone far wiser and with the benefit of having had to face this kind of thing ever since the beginning of man on earth, took command of me.  I faced Mori, and this other self gauged Mori’s blows and anticipated his kicks so accurately that it was able to make me move my head and body at the last moment before the blows and kicks fell in a manner not perceptible to the enraged man and his satellites, yet sufficient to rob them of their severity—to such an extent that I hardly felt them.

Indeed the physical impact of what Mori was trying to do to me seemed so irrelevant that, during the whole time of his assault on me, this process within me of appraising the full meaning of the incident and searching my imagination for a way of putting an end to it all before it developed into something worse, even something which Mori himself might possibly not have intended, went on unimpeded, and if possible, with greater clarity than before.  The result was that, when Mori delivered his final kick and pushed me back to my place in the line and I once more caught a glimpse of the machine gun at the gates, it was as if I heard from deep within myself very clearly a voice of command from this other self, ordering me as with the authority of life itself: “Turn about!  Go back and present yourself to Mori for another beating.”   Rationally, everything was against such a course of action.  If there were normally anything which provoked the Japanese to extremes of punishment it was any action on our part that broke their rules and sense of order.   Yet this voice that rang out almost like a bell within me was so clear and insistent that I turned about without hesitation, walked back and once more stood to attention in front of Mori before the next officer could take my place.

Mori was already in a position to beat up his next victim.  He was on the point of attacking again when the realization came to him that he was being confronted with the very person whom he had beaten just a moment before.  The shock of this slight variation in a process which he had taken for granted was great, and showed immediately in his eyes.  He looked at me over his raised cudgel, arrested in its downward move, as a cliche would have it, like someone who was seeing a ghost in broad daylight.   Indeed, so grave was the shock that it utterly broke up the accelerating rhythm of passion and anger in which he had been imprisoned.  Slight as the irregularity was, it began drawing him out of the preconditioned processes of collective and instinctive reaction in which he had been involved and made him, I believe, suddenly aware of himself as an individual facing not an abstract and symbolic entity but another individual being.  He stood there glaring at me, a strange inner bewilderment at this unexpected turn of events showing in the somber glow of his dark eyes.  Then, taking another sort of half-hearted swipe at my head, he grumbled with a kind of disgust that he thought the whole matter utterly incomprehensible and beneath contempt.   He gave me a shove in the direction of our line, turned about, and still muttering tersely to himself, walked away and out of sight, Kasayama at his heels. We were left standing there until late that night, when Nichols and Jongejans, catching a glimpse of the Japanese lieutenant in command of our camp through a lighted window in his office, risked breaking ranks and, going to him, unorthodox and dangerously provocative as it was, got permission at last for us to dismiss.

Thinking it all over for hours that night in my own private little world underneath my mosquito net, I came to the conclusion that the afternoon’s scene could not have happened six weeks before, and that it was in its own way slight—slight by our prison standards—evidence of the tension mounting in the Japanese military spirit—evidence perhaps of what the new mysteriously silent Kim had warned me; ominous testimony that the Japanese were near to breaking through such restraints as had governed them in our treatment up till then.  The whole incident that afternoon could have been a slight instinctive dress-rehearsal for the final parade, the ultimate cataclysmic phase of our time in prison.