Thanboddhay Pagoda was a place of sanctuary for many local people during World War II. Pic: Minh Zaw

A SMALL bullet hole in the banister of a wooden staircase is the only sign that Moe Hnyin Monastery, 20 kilometres southeast of Monywa, was touched by the fierce fighting of World War II.

The lack of physical evidence of the role that Moe Hnyin played in the war is at least partly testament to the influence and power of Moe Hnyin Sayadaw, the original abbot of the monastery.

During the Japanese occupation, from 1942 to 1945, the monastery complex and the adjoining Thanboddhay Pagoda was a place of sanctuary and hope for many local people as the battle for control of Myanmar and Southeast Asia was waged around them.

“Thousands lived out the war years within the pagoda precincts, watched over sternly by the abbot and his monks,” wrote Khin Thandar in Enchanting Myanmar: A Guide to Tourism Destinations and Beyond. “Living there for the duration of the war, they had to keep to the strict rules of conduct laid down by the abbot. Waste of water or fuel was not allowed, the place was kept pristine, and the children were tutored in their schooling.”

The calm in the pagoda complex belied the storm raging around it. Monywa was the scene of some of the toughest fighting in Myanmar in 1942, as the British troops struggled to stave off the Japanese advance.

U Chit Thein Oo, a contributing editor at The Myanmar Times, was born in Monywa and lived at Moe Hnyin for a year during the Japanese occupation. He said he remembers vividly the destruction as the Japanese advanced northward in 1942.

“It was in my hometown that the Japanese first bombed the area around Monywa. They hit a British ammunition train – it burned for three days. That was in the initial period of the Second World War, in Monywa, and a lot of ammunition was lost. The Japanese dive-bombed – it was the first time I ever saw that. I got hit here,” he said, pointing to a two-inch scar on his forearm. “A splinter. I was about a mile away, it wasn’t very serious, just a burn. I was very young at that time.”

But he said the monastery’s residents were spared both the bombing and the worst aspects of the occupation.

“Moe Hnyin was known as the monastery for rich people,” he said. “These people were traders, doctors, engineers – successful people – and they brought their wives and daughters, it was a society … just like an upper-class refugee camp.”

U Chit Thein Oo said he was only able to live in Moe Hnyin because of the generosity of “a rich man”. His mother, a midwife, was forced to work as a nurse in the Japanese hospital at Nyaung Bin Zauk a few miles from Moe Hnyin and Thanboddhay Pagoda but would also deliver babies for the monastery’s wartime residents.

He said that while life was relatively peaceful there was also a darker aspect to the congregation, which his mother knew all too well.

“Those people paid my mother a lot of money to help them give birth to their children. So, they relied on her and she knew a lot about them,” he said.

“It was a very strange time. In particular, there were many sexual problems because everything was mixed up and it was crowded. Before the war Moe Hnyin was isolated, the monastery was quiet and then it became crowded with monks, nuns and laypeople. The rich people had nothing to do there, no work to do. When they were free, what do you think they would do?

“It was a dangerous situation but under the monks’ care, the people enjoyed a sort of protection. So the people living at Moe Hnyin supported the monastery because they were able to seek refuge there.”

To show their gratitude for the protection they received, the monastery’s occupants helped fund the ongoing construction of Thanboddhay Pagoda. As well as monetary support, residents were also required to contribute their labour to the pagoda, which today houses more than 500,000 Buddha images – minus a few “souvenirs”, U Chit Thein Oo said.

“Everybody had to help make the Buddha statues because they needed so many for the pagoda. The statues were made from concrete; you used a wooden mould to make them. Everybody, women and men, had to help,” he said before chuckling:

In 1943 the pagoda’s hti was hoisted with the help of the Japanese “because some of the Japanese were Buddhist also”.

This shared Buddhist tradition may have been one reason the refugees were largely left in peace by the Japanese. According to testimonies in the book Tales by Japanese Soldiers, the invaders were also under instructions to maintain cordial relations with the Myanmar people.

Lance Corporal Koji Kawamata said in the book that when the 15th Army crossed the Thai border into Myanmar, soldiers were instructed “to be careful not to repeat the foolish mistakes in China which had alienated nearly all the local residents. … Looting and arson were strictly forbidden.”

An official handbook distributed to soldiers in July 1943 also warned against plundering and, in particular, rape, as it would “block future unification of Japan and Myanmar”.

But U Chit Thein Oo said the reason for Japanese non-interference at Moe Hnyin was less virtuous.

“When the Japanese occupied Monywa [in April 1942] a Japanese colonel, the administrator for the district, came and resided in Moe Hnyin because he knew it was quite safe there from British bombing,” he said. “Because of the colonel, none of the Japanese soldiers, the rank and file, interfered with us. They stayed away from the monastery.”

But the Japanese soldiers treated the people outside the camp much differently, he said, as well as the dreaded kampaitai (secret police), who executed many leaders of the Myanmar resistance.

“We hated the Japanese. Even when I was a young man, only nine or 10, they would slap my face. They were very rude, uneducated – the common soldiers were of peasant stock,” he said.

“[The colonel who lived at Moe Hnyin] was very nice, an educated man, not haughty or arrogant and he was very obliging to the monks. But the junior officers were rough, fascists.”

Living conditions outside Moe Hnyin were also extremely harsh. While there was a lack of food, the real threat was disease, particularly cholera and malaria.

“After one year I had to go back to my native village, Kyaukka, about one mile east of Monywa,” he said. “It was very difficult to survive and many people died – not from starvation but from diseases because we had no good medicine. I lost many relatives to disease and soon after the Japanese surrendered, more than 2000 children died in my village from cholera.”

“Two of my uncles died of tetanus, it was also very dangerous and people didn’t understand. If you had it, you would offer some food to the nat spirit at the banyan tree.

“People didn’t know what was happening so they would blame an evil spirit.”
The Japanese soldiers were not spared either – many of the 180,000 who died while serving in Myanmar succumbed to disease. At the hospital in Nyaung Bin Zauk – the largest in upper Myanmar – they died in their thousands.

“When I went to see [my mother at the hospital] I had to put on a mask because of the contagious diseases, it was very dangerous place to be,” he said. “Many soldiers died at Monywa. … They would often just cut off the finger to send back to Japan and throw the rest of the body in the [Chindwin] river.”

In Tales by Japanese Soldiers, Captain Shosaku Kameyama, from Japan’s majority-Buddhist Niigata prefecture, summed up the suffering of both the Japanese and Myanmar during World War II: “In the human mind there exists Buddha as well as demons, and natures vary. But the environment of the war turns human beings evil.”

U Chit Thein Oo was similarly philosophical: “That’s what we underwent during the Japanese occupation,” he said, matter-of-factly. “We grew up very quickly. By about 12 years of age we knew everything – a day during the war is worth a year during peacetime.”