By Dorothy Nixon

The Trial of Sumida Haruzo, published 1951. T and A Constable Ltd William Hodge and Company Edited by Colin Steeman BA Barrister at Law and S.C. Silkin (no copyright indicated) has become a Law School Classic. It is a chronicle of the Double Tenth Incident. I referred to it for my play. The bits of waterboarding I reprint her FYI as waterboarding (or the water torture as they called it) is very much in the news.

There is no doubt about it, The British believed water boarding to be torture and one of the worse kind of tortures -if there is a hierarchy of such things. Actually, there is a hierarchy, because the torture my grandmother suffered wasn't deemed as such. She may have been slapped and kicked and beaten, screamed at and humiliated and threatened with death, day after day, starved until she just about died, but that wasn't the important torture. Indeed, a piece of testimony claims that the women's worse problem was that they "suffered the humiliation of having to sleep in the same room with the men. "

As my grandmother spent one month in the cage and 6 in solitary, I'm guessing the prosecutors didn't feel her experience in solitary was 'torture.' Although my grandmother writes 'one month in the cage is worse than 20 years" she also claims that solitary is even worse. To suffer terribly is one thing, to suffer alone quite another. There were a number of ways water was used to torture victims: Sometimes they were dunked, sometimes water was forced into them by hoses.

"A few days later I was taken to the YMCA where I was very badly tortured. I was asked to kneel on a rough plank with a triangle iron bar between my legs and was beaten with iron rods, bamboo sticks and ropes and was given the water treatment....How was the water treatment done?...I was pushed into a water tub for half an hour..."

Page 86 "He lifted one side of the ladder and another Auxiliary boy lifted the other and I was dipped into a pool of water. The pool is very large and approximately 3 feet deep. I saw Number 7 adjusting his watch and then placed me into the pool with my head downwards....Did your face go under water?...Yes.... How long did you stay there? I cannot tell.... Could you hold your breath for that length of time?....I just managed... Did they bring your head out of the water? Yes, but it was too late to take any breath because they dipped me again."