When an ear of corn slammed against Donald Faivre’s head, the Illinois farm boy stormed away from harvest and tumbled 6,400 miles from his grain fields along a surreal chain of firing squads, peg legs, Tojo, Tokyo Rose, cannibalism, and a curious set of prison sketches penciled by a Japanese doctor caught in the dragnet of World War ll’s most heinous acts.
Two years later, Faivre returned to his Midwest corn and soybeans, carrying home the poignant sketches. He protected the collection in his farmhouse for decades, steadfastly hoping to return the drawings.
With the patience of a stone, the sketches waited 70 years, finally finding their rightful owners in 2023, thanks to Faivre’s remarkable integrity. Amidst the horrors of WWll, he was thrown into a bizarre tale juxtaposing guilt, acquittal, honor, and shame, yet maintained a sense of justice, rather than retribution. Faivre emerged from the rabbit hole as he entered—a farmer with a heart of gold.
Fat Man and Little Boy
On Aug. 6, 1945, exactly 1,338 days after Pearl Harbor, six B-29 Stratofortress bombers took off from the Pacific island of Tinian at 2:45 a.m., noses pointed north by northwest on a 1,500-mile flight to Japan. Among the squadron: Enola Gay. She and her 12-man crew carried a single 9,700 lb. bomb—Little Boy—packed with 140 lb. of uranium.
At 9:15 a.m., Little Boy was dropped from 31,000’. The bomb plummeted 43 seconds and exploded 2,000’ above the city center of Hiroshima. Less than 2% of the uranium payload detonated, creating a superheated, 12,500-degree blast that erased 4.7 square miles of the city in the sliver of a second.
Three days later, on Aug. 9, another B-29, Bockscar, dropped Fat Man, a 10,800 lb. bomb containing 13.6 lb. of plutonium, on Nagasaki, bleaching the city under an atomic flare. In total, roughly 200,000 Japanese were killed by Fat Man and Little Boy.
On Aug. 15, Japan surrendered.
On Sept. 2, Japan formally capitulated, signing terms aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. The hunt began for some of the most abominable war criminals on record.
Roughly one year later, 60 miles west of Chicago, in DeKalb, Ill., 18-year-old Donald Leo Faivre volunteered for the Army. Destination Japan.
Fed Like a Man
From birth, Faivre had a ticket to history. In 1920, his parents, Joe and Mae, bought a black-dirt farm in DeKalb County once owned by the barbed wire king, Joseph Glidden, pivotal in shaping U.S. agriculture and the American West. Joe found massive piles of rusting barbed wire on the property in a central depression surrounded by cottonwood trees, likely prototype rejects from Glidden’s factory. Young Faivre was raised on Glidden’s old stomping grounds.
Born in 1928, the last of nine children in a traditional Catholic family, Faivre was even-tempered and good-natured, but fueled by a stubborn streak. At 10, he dared to call a spade a spade: After a day of threshing beside an adult crew, Faivre waited in the chow line with farmhands, but was told to step aside—adults eat first. He slipped away to fish on the Kishwaukee River till dark, returning home as Mae demanded: “Where have you been?”
“I work like a man. Shouldn’t I be fed like a man?”
The Notorious
Into his teens, raven-haired Faivre sprouted to a muscled 6’ in height, a sharply cut physique contrasting a mild demeanor. Just months after Faivre’s high school graduation, and just over one year past the close of WWll, the main act of the Nuremburg Trials ended in Germany on Oct. 16, 1945, with the hanging deaths of 13 top Nazis for crimes against humanity. (Fifteen were supposed to drop, but Herman Goering cheated the noose with a cyanide pill and Martin Bormann was sentenced in absentia.)
Twenty-one days out from Nuremburg, on a Wednesday morning, Nov. 6, Faivre filled a crib with ear corn under the eye of his eldest brother, and mentor, Joby. Harvest pressure mounting, the siblings went chin to chin over whether the crib had enough room for one more load of corn. Faivre, nay; Joby, yea.
Seniority broke the deadlock. Joby unloaded a final wagon of corn, only to trigger an overflow into the dirt. The spillage was shoveled back in the wagon and dumped in a separate crib, further heating the war of words. Joby grabbed an ear, wound up, and smoked Faivre in the head. Brothers.
Incensed, Faivre walked off the farm, dragging tracks into town, and volunteered for Army service. Astonishingly, in a flash, the northern Illinois farm kid with a far horizon limited to the Iowa state line, shipped out to the Tokyo Trials. Assigned jailor duties at Sugamo Prison, Faivre was slated to guard some of the most notorious war criminals and architects of atrocities in the Pacific Theater, including Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, diplomat Koki Hirota, War Minister Seishiro Itagaki, radio broadcaster Tokyo Rose, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, and General Akiro Muto.
Faivre, qualified as a marksman, volunteered for the firing squad.
Nightstick and Pocketknife
As a military policeman in the Eighth Army, Faivre arrived in Japan to find Tokyo in partial ruin. Prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. nuclear Target Committee had removed Tokyo from the list of potential atomic bomb sites. The Committee was banking on the highest visibility of atomic impact and sought cities with minimal prior damage. Tokyo was already blown to hell.
Months earlier, in March 1945, in Operation Meetinghouse, 279 B-29s dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo, a city built mainly of wood. After absorbing the single deadliest air raid in history, Tokyo was decimated—a quarter of the imperial capital destroyed and over 100,000 killed in less than 24 hours. However, Sugamo Prison, located at city’s edge and built in 1895, was largely untouched.
After Japan’s surrender, U.S. forces expanded Sugamo to 20 acres and housed 2,000 Japanese military personnel and civilians accused of murder, rape, torture, human experimentation, pillage, and abuse of POWs. Prisoners were classified under three designations: A, B, and C. “A” was reserved for Japan’s leaders—the war architects by action and title. “B” and “C” signified the rank-and-file accused of crimes against Allied soldiers or civilians.
Faivre was assigned to guard class A prisoners and watched over the occupants of 8-man cells or 2-man cells through screens in each door. He was on duty from 6 a.m. to noon for two days; noon to 6 p.m. for two days; 6 p.m. to midnight for two days; with one day off.
The irony was stunning: Only several months prior, Faivre was cutting Illinois corn, but now he controlled the daily existence of the Pacific Theater’s most infamous names, including Tojo, who pushed the button on Pearl Harbor. At 18 years young, Faivre walked the floors of Sugamo armed with a nightstick and a pocketknife to cut rope or cloth. Suicide insurance.
Diamond in the Rough
“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” wrote General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864. Fifteen years later, during a speech at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, Sherman amplified his position: “Some of you young men think that war is all glamor and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all hell.” History shortened the sentiment to, “War is hell.”
Bottom line, Sherman was right.
Soaking up the starvation and devastation in Tokyo, Faivre was overwhelmed by steady scenes of suffering. Nude pensioners wandering roadside; scavengers eating garbage; bodies floating in the bay; and countless burn victims.
“My dad related a story that the prisoners at Sugamo were very well fed and the jailers were not supposed to feed the general public,” says Faivre’s daughter, Suzan Peterson. “But the guards and jailers would scrape the leftovers from the prisoners’ plates on a tray and go out behind the prison and lay the trays down or dump them on a table. The little kids would all run up and grab the food and eat it. When dad would tell this story he’d have tears in his eyes because he felt so sorry for the starving children.”
Despite only making $600 per month, Faivre’s U.S. currency went far. With the Yen-to-Dollar exchange rate set at 360-to-1, Faivre spotted a huge raw diamond for 40,000 Yen at the Imperial Palace gift store. He set aside a portion of each paycheck, aiming to buy the rock.
With 27,000 Yen saved, his plans unraveled. At Christmas, Faivre attended midnight mass in Tokyo, and heard the singing of a children’s choir from a local orphanage. The diamond faded. Faivre gave 27,000 Yen to the orphanage during the offering, and never bought the diamond.
“No matter what, my dad was a man that respected common people,” Peterson explains. “He respected their humanity. That’s who he was.”
Remember Pearl Harbor
Hideki Tojo tried. Five years after ordering the attack on Pearl Harbor as prime minister, and months before imprisonment behind the walls and barbed wire of Sugamo, Tojo attempted to shoot himself as U.S. forces surrounded his yellow-stucco home.
After a doctor marked an X in sumi ink on Tojo’s bare chest atop his heart, Tojo fired an American-made .32 Colt 1903 semi-automatic, the same pistol used in his son-in-law’s suicide, into the X, but missed—the bullet entering his upper stomach and exiting the rear torso.
Slumped in an armchair as American soldiers and reporters gathered, Tojo was rushed to hospital and spared for trial. (While imprisoned, suffering from extreme tooth decay, Tojo was fitted for full dentures by naval dentist Jack Mallory, who secretly inscribed Morse code into the roof of the dentures.
Unbeknownst to Tojo, Mallory carved out a tiny chain of dots and dashes that sat atop the prime minister’s tongue: Remember Pearl Harbor.)
Faivre confirmed Tojo’s entry and exit scars via the .32 Colt. In a Dec. 13, 2002, interview for the Veterans History Project, Faivre recounted seeing Tojo disrobe at Sugamo after returning from court:
“When they came back from the war crimes trial in Tokyo ... they took off their trial clothes in one spot and walked across about 30’ without any clothes on ... the front of him had a scar about that big around (quarter-size) where the bullet went in, and I was watching for it because I knew he had shot himself ... the scar on his back was bigger than a half dollar.”
Faivre also recalled a remarkable encounter with Mamoru Shigemitsu, Japan’s foreign minister who surrendered to General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz in Tokyo Bay on the USS Missouri, signing unconditional terms atop a folding table pulled from the enlisted mess deck and cloaked with a green tablecloth.
Shigemitsu had lost a leg in 1932 during a bomb attack in Shanghai, China, and subsequently used a cane to support an artificial leg. Mirroring Tojo, on the return from trial proceedings, Shigemitsu stripped down on reentry to Sugamo—exposing the prosthesis.
“When they came back and I saw them all nude, Shigemitsu had a wooden leg,” Faivre described. “They had to take it off to look at it and make sure it had no poison inside. They had to give him a set of crutches to go across ... the officer that inspected it handed me the leg and I carried it over 30’ and handed it to him.”
Whether hauling a wooden leg or catching a glimpse of Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri), Faivre collected vignettes by the day, often assisted by a stream of prison currency: cigarettes. Permitted to buy one Lucky Strike carton per week at Sugamo’s PX, Faivre doled out the contents to inmates, exchanging mundane conversation with Japanese officers, many of whom spoke English—often before they walked away to execution. (Faivre removed his name from the firing squad—a method, according to Army regulations, consisting of eight shooters, with five to seven of the rifles containing live rounds, and one to three blanks, shot from 15 paces at a hooded prisoner wearing a 4”-round black or white target patch over the heart. Only one Japanese prisoner was executed by firing squad at Sugamo; 51 others were hanged.)
Recognizing his peculiar historical position, alongside the hourglass reality of pending executions, Faivre traded Lucky Strikes to Class A prisoners in exchange for two remarkably unique documents. On two separate 100-Yen notes, Faivre obtained the signatures of 41 officials, sometimes signed twice (71 total signatures) in both English and Japanese: Tojo, Itagaki, Hirota, Shigemitsu, Muto, Kimura, and Matsui.
On Faivre’s prison beat, among the most reviled of the scores of prisoners, was Dr. Shichiro Matake, tagged with the vilest accusation of WWll: cannibalism.
And the monstrous charge was grounded in the deaths of millions of civilians and Allied soldiers.
Abominable
Rivaling the crimes of Nazi Germany, the scope of atrocities committed by the Japanese military leading up to and during WWll is staggeringly vast at a cost of tens of millions of lives: Bataan Death March, Hell Ships, Manilla Massacre, Rape of Nanking, Sook Ching Massacre, Tamil Killings, Unit 731, Bangka Island Massacre, Burma Railway, Chichi Jima Incident, slaughter and starvation of POWs, mass rape, forced prostitution, biological warfare, and vivisection.
Human vivisection—experimentation on living beings with no healing purpose—conducted by Japanese officials is extensively documented. Unit 731, headquartered in China, specialized in biological and chemical warfare research, using 300,000-plus POWs and civilians as human guinea pigs.
Even more macabre, cannibalism. Between 1944 and March 1945, Japanese soldiers on Chichi Jima Island tortured and executed U.S. pilots or crew shot down during bombing raids. (Among the squadron was George H. Bush, who bailed out over open water and was rescued by a U.S. submarine.) After the murders, four of the airmen were eaten—livers and thigh muscles—by Japanese officers. The story remained partially buried until the publication of Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, in 2003.
In May-June 1945, doctors, interns, and nurses at Kyushu Imperial University, housing one of Japan’s most prestigious medical schools, conducted vivisection experiments on eight U.S. airmen from a downed B-29. For at least four days, doctors injected the airmen with seawater as a proxy for saline, removed lungs, hearts, and livers, cut into brains and stomachs, and performed amputations. After the airmen died, their heads were severed and bodies preserved in formaldehyde.
Allegedly, on the evening of June 3, a day after the last vivisection, an airmen’s liver was cooked and consumed by doctors. Twenty-five Kyushu medical staffers subsequently were indicted on vivisection charges. Five separate staffers were charged with cannibalism, including 40-year-old Shichiro Matake—imprisoned at Sugamo and guarded by an unassuming farm boy from Illinois.
Rice Paper
During interrogation, Matake confessed to cannibalism. He faced the noose, charged with violating the “Laws and Custom of War.” Prosecutors said Matake, “did, in or about June 1945, willfully and unlawfully eat part of the liver of an unknown American prisoner, held captive by the Japanese Empire, and who died in captivity.”
However, Matake proclaimed his innocence. Faivre believed him. “My dad befriended him and got to know him well,” Peterson says. “Dad’s decency always shown through, and what probably started with a cigarette exchange developed into some level of understanding. Mr. Matake came to trust my dad.”
As the months rolled by, Matake chronicled his incarceration with a series of sketches—pencil on rice paper—detailing his despair. Measuring roughly 7”-by-10”, the images depict Matake in various prison life scenes, pining for his pregnant wife and two children.
Matake gave the sketches to Faivre, intended for delivery to his family. “My dad wanted to help and get the pictures to Mr. Matake’s family, but that was forbidden,” Peterson details. “He held onto them, afraid to get charged with something illegal.”
During trial, Matake contended he was forced into a confession. Further, he claimed to have arrived at the hospital on June 7, four days after the final vivisection of U.S. airmen. After deliberation, of the 30 Kyushu University doctors and staff, 23 were convicted of vivisection, five were sentenced to death, and four to life imprisonment. Matake was found not guilty—acquitted of cannibalism, but the damage was done.
“The charges were false, but the association stuck,” Peterson says. “Mr. Matake was shunned by his own people. This was someone who had once started a clinic for the poor, and then was forced to be a surgeon in the war, and then wrongly accused of cannibalism. He went home, but his family never understood—he was a hardened man.”
Tour of duty completed, Faivre shipped backed to the U.S., jumping to restart life on the farm. He returned to the black dirt of DeKalb County carrying Matake’s eight Sugamo sketches, unsure of whether to risk their return. Days turned to months to years to decades, and Faivre’s hopes faded.
In Japan, Matake returned to medicine and died at 61 in 1969, long past the executions of Tojo, Hirota, Itagaki, and Muto in 1948. To the end of his days, Matake maintained his innocence.
On his Illinois farm, Faivre married Arlene Herrmann and fathered 11 children, grateful for a life in the rows. In June 2015, Faivre, 87, died peacefully—beloved by all.
In 2020, five years after Faivre’s death, his wife, Arlene, passed. Matake’s rice paper images remained frozen in 1948, protected in a glass frame on the farmhouse wall. It was time for the sketches to go home.
Going Home
Peterson and her siblings determined to complete the circle. But how could they find Matake’s relatives, if any remained?
“Dad always wanted to get the drawings to Mr. Matake’s family, but he was afraid he’d get in trouble or face a charge of treason,” Peterson says. “Dad treasured those drawings and kept them safe. When we took them down, there was one—a picture of Matake in front of a wash basin—that disintegrated because it had gotten sunlight for years, but the rest were in perfect condition.”
“We put them in acid-free envelopes in a file, and we wanted what my Dad wanted—for them to go to Matake’s family.”
Peterson took a shot in the dark. Her best friend’s daughter and son-in-law lived in Japan. Peterson used the couple to put out feelers, hoping for a return on wafer-thin odds.
As word spread on social media, Peterson was contacted by a Japanese museum keen to display the sketches. “No. No. There was no way,” Peterson says. “We were only giving them to the original family or they were going nowhere.”
“And then it happened—almost like a miracle,” she continues. “A Japanese reporter started helping and he eventually went to Matake’s old neighborhood, searching house by house with no luck. At the last house of the neighborhood, an old woman answered the door. She remembered the Matake family. She said his daughter had moved and she remembered what town. They went to that town and found her. Unbelievable.”
Matake’s daughter, 74, and one of his sons, 76, were still alive. In November 2023, Peterson mailed the original sketches to her friends in Japan—and delivery was made to the Matake family after 70-plus years and 13,000 miles roundtrip.
The reunification was covered by five newspapers and three television stations in Japan, including a Zoom call between the remaining Faivre and Matake families. “All those years and all that effort by my dad, and we got to watch the final ending as their family got the pictures back,” Peterson says. “It was so cool and gratifying more than I can put in words. In a small way, maybe we helped my dad restore a family’s love for their father.”
“And we still have the Yen with the autographs,” Peterson adds with a grin.
A Simple Man
An airborne ear of DeKalb County corn set an incredibly unlikely domino chain in motion.
“Dad was proud to serve, but he was so happy to come back and be a farmer,” Peterson says. “He was always sincerely grateful to his older brother, Joby, for throwing the corn at his head. Dad said, ‘It showed me how much I loved farming and how much I loved my family.’”
“My dad had such a tremendous appreciation for ordinary people,” she adds. “He always tried to look for the humanity in everyone, even when dealing with enemies. After all those years under his care, I know he’s so happy the pictures are returned.”
A simple man with a heart of gold, never swayed by the hell of war.
Respect to Donald Leo Faivre; DeKalb, Illinois; American farmer and soldier; April 19, 1928-June 16, 2015; Rest in Peace.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man
Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam
Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam
The Arrowhead Whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland
Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History
