I’m still working through the hack aftermath, so today’s Bonus Fact goes to the Internet Archive… as will likely be true for the next few weeks. Thanks! — Dan

When a court hands down a prison sentence, the person on the receiving end is rarely hoping for more of it. Defense attorneys argue for leniency, parole boards get petitioned, and an early release is generally considered good news (for the convict, at least). Even people who accept that they deserve punishment tend to count the days until it's over. That's just human nature — nobody volunteers for extra time behind bars.

Well, almost nobody.

Hitoshi Imamura was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, and by the standards of that army, an unusual one. He led the 1942 invasion of Java, and once in charge there, he ran the occupation with what historians describe as a surprisingly light touch — as Spanish history site La Brújula Verde notes, it won him real support from the local population. Later, he was put in command at Rabaul, a Japanese stronghold in New Guinea, where roughly 100,000 troops were cut off from resupply for much of the war. His fix was to turn them into farmers: per Japanese history magazine Rekishi Kaido, Imamura ordered every soldier to cultivate about 200 tsubo of land — roughly 7,000 square feet — and raise ten chickens each. His men didn't starve.

But the men under his command did terrible things, too. In 1942, Japanese military police on Java captured Allied soldiers, stuffed them into bamboo baskets meant for pigs, and, according to witness testimony, threw them into the sea. Others died in Imamura's area of command in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. After the war, an Australian military court at Rabaul convicted him of failing to prevent atrocities by his troops and sentenced him to ten years in prison. (A Dutch court tried him separately and acquitted him, finding too little evidence to tie him to the crimes.) In 1950, he was sent home to Japan to serve his time at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo — the same place that held many of Japan's most senior wartime leaders.

He didn't want to stay there. Many of his former soldiers were serving their own sentences in an Australian-run prison camp on Manus Island, off the coast of New Guinea, in much rougher conditions. So Imamura asked — reportedly through his wife, directly to Douglas MacArthur — to be transferred there to serve alongside them. MacArthur approved it, and he was said to be struck by the request, remarking that it was the first time since arriving in Japan that he'd seen genuine bushidō, the samurai code of honor. Imamura spent the next three years on Manus, until the camp closed in August 1953 and he was returned to Sugamo. He was released in 1954, his sentence complete.

His sentence, but not his punishment.

Imamura believed ten years was too light for a commander whose men had done what his had done. So, according to a Japanese blogger who documented it, he had his eldest son build a small hut in the garden of his home in Tokyo's Setagaya ward — three tatami mats in size, about 50 square feet, laid out like his old cell at Sugamo. He moved in, and he stayed for the rest of his life. He lived on his military pension, wrote his memoirs, and, per Japanese history site WhiteOrder, gave every yen of the royalties to the families of soldiers who had died in the war and of men executed for war crimes. He wasn't entirely cut off from the world — Xataka reports that he quietly advised Japan's defense ministry — but home, for him, was a cell. He died on October 4, 1968, at age 82.

The cell outlived him. In 1990, it was taken apart and rebuilt on land owned by one of his former officers from Rabaul, in the town of Nirasaki, west of Tokyo, and more than 200 veterans turned up for the ceremony. It's still there, and people still come to see it — though unlike its original occupant, they all leave when they're done.

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Today’s Bonus fact: Sugamo Prison, where Imamura served out his sentence, was torn down in 1971, and the Sunshine 60 skyscraper and its Sunshine City shopping complex went up in its place. Today, the site is home to an aquarium, a planetarium, a Pokémon Center, and, per Stars and Stripes, the Bandai Namco Gashapon Department Store — which Guinness certified in March 2021 as the world’s largest capsule-toy store, with more than 3,000 machines. A memorial stone in the park next door marks where the prison’s gallows once stood.

From the Archives: The Holdout: Another Japanese officer who served far longer than anyone required.

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And thanks! — Dan