The first monument of any type dedicated to the workers who died building the TBR was erected at the behest of the Japanese themselves in 1944. Even though the IJA looked down on these workers as little more than slaves, the Bushido code that drove the conduct of the Japanese military sought to recognize and even honor those who died in that process. The IJA viewed them as having ‘died in the service of the Emperor’ and there were deserving of recognition.
Dedicated in March 1944, this shrine is one of the few existing items that even mention the existence of the romusha. It was conceived by the commander of the TBR project and built by POW ‘volunteers’. There is no mention that any of the romusha were even involved in its construction. One of those volunteers was a US Pow who had been a stone mason.
For some time there was a controversy as to whether or not the POWs themselves were included in this remembrance. But a translation of the inscription on the obverse of the obelisk clearly states that it is dedicated to both the romusha and the POWs.
The four corner sections of this shrine contain panels in the various languages. Each corner has two panels. One pair are in Chinese and Japanese. One corner has panels in Tamil and Indonesian[1]. The third pair is in Thai and Vietnamese. This is the only indication of any Vietnamese being involved in the TBR.
The final corner section remains an enigma. Rather than an inscription it contains an icon with an English phrase, but the companion panel is blank. It has been noted that this corner was damaged[2] by bombs that fell short during one of the attacks on the nearby bridges and that it was rebuilt after the war. There is a passage in the biography of LtCol. Toosey written by his granddaughter that states that he observed that there were corner plaques in English and Dutch. Since there are currently no plaques in Dutch and the only English appears on an icon not an inscription, we can either believe his observation (memory) or not.
Given the existing pairings – Thai/Viet; Chinese/Japanese; Indonesian/Tamil – it would make sense to have paired English with Dutch. So if indeed the shrine was intended to include the POWs in this remembrance along with the romusha, panels in these languages should have been included since the Allied POWs spoke these languages. That then begs the question as to why the post-war reconstruction did not reconstitute either English or Dutch panels. Seemingly the best explanation is that there was no record of the exact wording in the original panels. So in their place the icon with an English phrase and the blank panel were substituted[3].
One might speculate as to why there is no inscription in Burmese. The simplest explanation is that this was built by workers and engineers on the Thai Sector of the TBR. They would have had no contact with the Burmese workers and may not even have had anyone available to provide a statement in that language if they had even wished to include one. Additionally, there were only 8 panels available so Burmese might have been excluded for lack of space.
For decades, this little known shrine was the singular remembrance of the romusha who contributed so much to the construction of the TBR.
[1] It has been suggested that the language in this panel would have been understood by Malayans or the natives from Java and Sumatra in the then Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia).
[2] The inscriptions on the adjacent corner currently display damage said to have been caused by those same bombs.
[3] In some way this reminds us of the way the iron bridge was rebuilt in the 1950s with rectangular sections replacing the semi-circular ones that were destroyed in 1945.