HEIWAJIMA, JAPAN — Bill Sanchez looked out over the canal. ‘‘That’s where the geisha girls used to be,’’ he said, pointing at the opposite bank, now lined with modern apartment buildings. ‘‘They used to wave at us.’’
Was that a twinkle in his eye or just the reflection of the water?
For most American servicemen held as prisoners during World War II, returning to Japan is a complicated thing.
But 96-year-old Sanchez, who spent 42 months doing back-breaking work here, said Thursday that the war was bad for everyone. He’s heartened at the way America’s former enemy has emerged from the ashes.
‘‘I went through all that suffering and the Japanese went through all those bombings,’’ he said, standing on this waterway that ran alongside what was once Camp Omori, where he was held prisoner.
Now, the camp site is a sprawling venue for boat races along the canal, complete with a Jumbotron and betting windows. The neighboring mall features huge signs declaring ‘‘Big fun” and ‘‘Game panic.’’
‘‘I take a bit of pride in all of this. What they have done is unbelievable,’’ said Sanchez, who was brought to Japan on a ‘‘hell ship’’ in 1942 after the United States surrendered in the Philippines, where he was stationed. He was wearing a crimson garrison cap with ‘‘American ex-prisoners of war’’ on it.
Sanchez, from Monterey Park, Calif., is one of seven former POWs visiting Japan on a trip organized by Japan’s foreign ministry ‘‘to promote mutual understanding between Japan and the United States through encouraging a reconciliation of minds.’’
About 36,000 Allied prisoners of war were held in Japan during the war and were compelled to work in coal mines, shipyards, and munitions factories under extremely harsh conditions.
Their mortality rate was as high as 27 percent, according to the POW Research Network Japan, and many of those who survived went home emaciated.
The seven men, all in their 90s, who came to Japan this week were being treated like VIPs, with receptions and a trip on the bullet train.
But the real reason they are here is to go back to those places where they toiled 70 years ago.
Three of the former POWs were driven in a small bus through the streets of Tokyo on Thursday, past modern high-rises and under bridges where driverless trains take passengers to huge waterfront shopping malls.
The first stop for Sanchez was the railway yards in Tokyo, where, after Omori, he worked as a stevedore, hauling coal and lumber from barges on the canal.
The site now boasts a flashy supermarket with outdoor escalators, and the canal was lined with paved paths and faux-log fences.
‘‘This isn’t it,’’ Sanchez said as the bus pulled up at the spot where the map said the train station used to be. ‘‘Sukoshi mo,’’ he said to the driver, using the Japanese he had kept in the recesses of his brain for 70 years to tell him to go a little farther.
So they did, to Omori. There, Sanchez told tales to his fellow POWs: 99-year-old Jack Schwartz, a civil engineer in the Navy who was captured on Guam on the third day of the war; and Oral Nichols, now 93, who was a civilian helping to oversee the construction of an airstrip on Wake Island when it easily fell to the Japanese. He was imprisoned for virtually the entire war.
They stopped for lunch. Sanchez chose sushi, eating his raw fish and roe with chopsticks and slurping his soup straight from the bowl, just like a local.
Back on the bus, crawling through the gridlock, the men tried to remember Japanese characters and sound out the words on sides of trucks and shop fronts. They joked about how they were having much better food this time around in Japan and marveled at the ubiquitous heated toilet seats.
Schwartz, from Hanford, Calif., was eager to get to Kawasaki, south of Tokyo, to the site of the camp where he spent more than half of his 1,367 days in prison. As an officer, he had been put in charge of the camp, a job he said came with no authority but plenty of blame, meaning he also suffered his share of beatings.
‘‘I consider myself the luckiest POW,’’ he said. ‘‘I didn’t have to do hard labor because I was an officer, and I didn’t get that sick, and I was never that terribly mistreated.’’
Schwartz has recently been transcribing the diaries he kept while in the camp. As the bus made its way toward Kawasaki, Schwartz’s son Jack Jr., read out a diary entry that recorded the mundane and the mortifying with equanimity.
‘‘September 2. Arrived at Yokohama at nine and took 10 minute ride to Kawasaki. Trucked to camp. What a place. High stockade. 2nd floor windows barred. Other prisoners were already present. We were forced by a firing squad to take an oath not to escape etc.’’
Once the former POWs arrived at the site of the camp in Kawasaki, however, a guard at the factory told Schwartz that he was not allowed inside to take a photo next to the building where he once worked, even as Jack Jr., stressed his father’s age and the significance of the place.
Still, Schwartz was moved just to be there again.