The Other Side of Tenko

This book deals with male prisoner-of-war camps run by the Japanese as told by a British soldier named Len Baynes.

The book covers his capture and the various prisoner-of-war camps that he was in during his captivity. The camps varied wildly in nature, some of them being fairly livable, and some being nothing but ruins, if that. The treatment of the prisoners by the Japanese was just as variable.

Baynes says that some of the captors treated the prisoners decently, even showing compassion at times. Other captors, though, were brutal in their nature, thinking nothing of hitting or beating a prisoner. Beatings were also normal punishment for someone violating the camp rules.

The prisoners were just as variable a lot. Some of them appeared to be very decent people; some were not, stealing from others whenever they could.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the book is the numbers of prisoners that died from diseases; far more died from that cause than from beatings. Malnutrition, injuries that were not treatable due to lack of medicines, contaminated water, all worked with other causes to result in numerous disease-related deaths. The people that died this way, of course, was not have died that way normally, although they might have been killed in the course of the way in some other manner.

The book is good in that it shows just how incredibly variable all the conditions were that the prisoners found themselves in. It also shows that some of the Japanese were actually quite decent in how they took care of prisoners, while others were just as barbaric as various tales from World War II have shown. It was basically a matter of luck as to what the various prisoners would encounter.

It is, at times, a rather upsetting book and is not one that I would suggest young people read unless their parents are ready to talk to them about what is covered in the book.

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