On Saturday April 21st, Makato Kato, conveyed to the NBCC Platinum Jubilee the message of the Japanese Baptist Convention as its General Secretary. He started his remarks by first apologizing to the Naga people for all the sufferings of hurts and dislocations and hurts the Nagas must have experienced because of the Japanese invasion of their land by the Imperial Army of Japan in 1944.
As an elderly Naga sitting in the audience I was touched by what he said. The obvious humility, sincerity and thoughtfulness in him as a leader impressed me. If he is not a man with a developed sense of responsibility for his nation and the world that went beyond his immediate field of work as a Christian, he would have most probably gone straight to his message from his Convention leaving out what had happened in the Kohima area the Second World War. I for one would have thought, though with real sadness, “Well here is another Church worker who thinks only of his denominational issues and needs and regards the wrongs and evils done in history as ‘politics, not religion and spiritual’ and therefore not the concern of the Church”.
On my return to my village I started to think of our own struggle for freedom and its fighters as I too have been privileged to be one of them at the humbler level of service. What a respected contemporary of mine, a veteran Naga soldier from Jotsoma, once told to some of us came back to me. He recalled the arduous walk back with supplies from the Chittagong region of the-then East Pakistan through Chin Hills, avoiding the passage through Cachar District of Assam. Over a thousand of our soldiers were on the march. Those who went through first easily procured rice and meat from the villages by paying what was stated by the hosts. But those who came last found food supplies were less available. My friend said “In some cases some of us took even hens hatching their eggs or raising their chicks though the owners clearly said they were not happy to sell their hens. I thank God we paid double of the price mentioned to us. But I am sorry many years later that our hunger made us to mistreat some of those villagers. It is so easy to become selfish”.
I am recalling the Japanese soldiers who came to my village. Our village gave them what little rice we could collect freely with admiration of their courage and determination that had brought them so far away from their land. We have heard Japanese soldiers behaved cruelly elsewhere. But those whom my villagers met were disciplined soldiers who cared for their nation’s reputation. If we had gone as far as the Japanese did for their nation’s cause and suffered most terribly for their convictions would we have behaved properly with discipline worthy of our cause? I am grateful for what Makato Kato has said to us. He said the meaning of Makato is “truth”. He is a man who takes the meaning of his name seriously.
Zapuvisie Lhousa,
Mezoma Village
