John David Provoo

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John David Provoo (August 6, 1917 – August 28, 2001) was United States Army staff sergeant and practicing Buddhist who was convicted of treason for his conduct as a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II. His conviction was later overturned on a technicality, and he became a Buddhist priest.[1][2]

Childhood

Provoo was born in

San Francisco, California, on August 6, 1917.[1] He began to practise Buddhism as a teenager, and became a strict adherent. His brother George recalled how he would stand at the kitchen sink saving ants from drowning, in accordance with the Buddhist principle of the sanctity of life.[1] He also began studying the Japanese language around that time, with a Buddhist priest as his teacher.[3] He worked for a time in a federal bank in San Francisco, and in 1940 moved to Japan to study in a Buddhist monastery near Tokyo.[1][3]

World War II

When the United States entered

Counter Intelligence Corps, but he was rejected because a background check led officials to suspect he might be homosexual and the time he had spent in Japan made them question his loyalty.[4] He was captured by Japanese forces in the Battle of Corregidor in 1942 and made a prisoner of war.[5]

According to his fellow prisoners, Provoo used his fluent Japanese to rise to a position of power in the POW camp and he abused his fellow prisoners to gain additional privileges from the Japanese.

Japanese American soldiers captured by the Japanese during World War II, placed Provoo on Taiwan and then at Camp Omori, a Tokyo Bay facility that housed prisoners making propaganda broadcasts for the Japanese.[7]

After the war, Provoo was arrested, but then released in 1946 after eight months of investigation which concluded that there was no evidence he had collaborated with the Japanese. He re-enlisted in the army six weeks later.[3][5]

Re-arrest and trial

Provoo had a difficult time in the Army. He was placed in Army stockades twice and hospitalized under restraints once. In 1949, the Army planned to court martial him for homosexuality, but instead made an arrangement with the U.S. Justice Department, which wanted to prosecute Provoo for treason, that they arrange for him to be discharged in New York, where the government thought it had a better chance of winning a conviction.

Bellevue Hospital Center for psychiatric evaluation at the request of the prosecution.[10][11][12]

His trial finally began on October 27, 1952. General

hearing impairment.[13] The government called 34 witnesses, including 20 who traveled to New York from Japan to testify.[8] Provoo was represented by unpaid court-appointed counsel. The defense called 35 witnesses.[8] Provoo testified on his own behalf. When cross examined, he was asked to explain why, after re-enlisting, he had been imprisoned or hospitalized by the Army on various occasions. When the prosecutor asked, "Now, Mr. Provoo, isn't it a fact that in November 1946 you were hospitalized at Camp Lee, Virginia, because of homosexual aberrations?", Provoo's counsel asked for a mistrial without success. The prosecutor, over the objections of Provoo's counsel, continued the line of questioning, filling 200 pages of the court transcript.[14]

After a fifteen-week trial, on February 11, 1953, the jury found Provoo guilty on charges of offering his services to the Japanese Army, helping to cause the execution of a fellow prisoner, and making two propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Japanese. He was the eighth U.S. citizen convicted of treason after World War II, and only the second whose conviction related to actions during imprisonment in a POW camp.[15] When his sentence was announced the following week, the court spared him from execution on grounds of his emotional instability and sentenced him to life imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.[16] In total, the costs of Provoo's trial were estimated at $1 million.[17]

On August 27, 1954, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction on the grounds that the cross-examination about his alleged homosexuality had prejudiced the jury and the venue was improper.[8] Judge Thomas Walter Swan wrote:[14]

It is obvious that the cross-examination informed the jury that on several occasions after reenlistment the defendant had been charged with being, or suspected by military authorities or hospital doctors of being, a homosexualist. Neither by court martial nor by a civil court was he ever brought to trial and convicted on any charge of sodomy. Obviously such a charge was utterly irrelevant to the issue whether he had committed treason while a prisoner of war. But these highly inflammatory and prejudicial collateral and irrelevant charges were brought to the jury's attention. Nor was it done by accident or unintentionally.... That the facts so developed were so prejudicial as to constitute reversible error, if they were improperly admitted, is too plain for debate. They had no relevancy to charges on which he was being tried and were certain to degrade him in the eyes of the jury.

Of the government's argument that the questioning was a legitimate way of testing Provoo's veracity, he wrote:[14]

No authority has been cited which suggests that homosexuality indicates a propensity to disregard the obligation of an oath. The sole purpose and effect of this examination was to humiliate and degrade the defendant, and increase the probability that he would be convicted, not for the crime charged, but for his general unsavory character. Permitting it was error. The error was plainly prejudicial. Indeed we can conceive of no accusation which could have been more degrading in the eyes of the jury nor more irrelevant to the issue of treason on which he was being tried.

The court also ruled that the Army had improperly brought Provoo to New York for discharge only so he could be arrested and charged there, when he should have been discharged, arrested, and tried in Maryland.[14]

Because the sixty-nine witnesses at Provoo's trial had been scattered all over the country and General Wainright had died, the

U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, but that court upheld the lower court's ruling in a per curiam ruling without recorded dissent on October 17, 1955.[19][20]

Later years

Provoo found it difficult to recover from being tried for treason. He said it felt like "towing a shipwreck" behind him.[1] He settled in Baltimore, but had trouble holding down a job because of the publicity which had surrounded his trial. His wife divorced him.[21] In September 1957, he was arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska, and pleaded guilty to a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a 16-year-old runaway boy from Maryland.[22] He was sentenced on August 29, 1958, to three years in the men's reformatory.[23]

After his release from prison, Provoo went to Japan to resume his Buddhist studies.

Pahoa on the Island of Hawaii. He also started up the non-profit Buddhist School of America.[1] He built a small temple and some cabins. He lived there and usually had a few students living with him. As a Buddhist teacher, he went by the Buddhist name "Nichijo Shaka".[1]
He had earned the honorific titles "Reverend" and "Bishop" but preferred to be called "Nichijo". He occasionally conducted religious services for people in the community and received people for counseling.

He died at

Hilo Medical Center on August 28, 2001. His ashes were buried at the Hawaii Veteran's Cemetery No. 2.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Asato, Lisa (October 27, 2001). "Treason trial shadowed ex-soldier's life". Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Archived from the original on January 21, 2002. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  2. ^ "Obituaries". Honolulu Star-Bulletin. October 4, 2001. Archived from the original on February 5, 2005. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  3. ^ a b c d e "Case of the Buddhist Sergeant". Time Magazine. November 24, 1952. Archived from the original on November 7, 2012. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  4. ^
    ISBN 0-246-12690-6
    .
  5. ^ a b c "Justice Denied". Time Magazine. October 31, 1955. Retrieved February 6, 2008.[permanent dead link]
  6. ^
    ISBN 0-8420-2725-4
    .
  7. ISBN 0-929398-46-7
    .
  8. ^ a b c d "Treason Conviction of Provoo is Upset" (PDF). New York Times. August 28, 1954. Retrieved April 16, 2015.
  9. ^ a b Kennedy, Paul P. (September 3, 1949). "FBI Seizes GI as a Traitor Upon His Release by Army". New York Times. p. 1. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  10. ^ "Provoo Treason Trial Delayed". New York Times. January 4, 1951. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  11. ^ "Treason Trial Adjourned". New York Times. June 19, 1951. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  12. ^ "Provoo Committed to Bellevue". New York Times. August 30, 1951. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  13. ^ "People: Names make news. Last week these names made news". Time Magazine. December 22, 1952. Archived from the original on January 8, 2012. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  14. ^ a b c d "United States v. Provoo, August 27, 1954". Open Jurist.
  15. ^ "Guilty of Treason". Time Magazine. February 23, 1953. Archived from the original on December 22, 2008. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  16. ^ "Life for a Traitor". Time Magazine. March 2, 1953. Archived from the original on December 22, 2008. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  17. ^ a b "Million-Dollar Loss". Time Magazine. September 6, 1954. Archived from the original on October 22, 2012. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  18. ^ "Criminal Law ... speedy trial". American Bar Association Journal. 41: 856. September 1955. Retrieved April 16, 2015.
  19. ISBN 0-299-07204-5
    .
  20. ^ "Court Frees Provoo of Treason Charges". New York Times. October 18, 1955. Retrieved December 21, 2009.
  21. ISBN 0-7890-0140-3
    .
  22. ^ "Provoo Pleads Guilty; Joined Maryland Youth Who Ran Away From Home". New York Times. September 8, 1957. Retrieved December 21, 2009.
  23. ^ "Treason Trial Figure Jailed". New York Times. August 30, 1958. Retrieved April 16, 2015.

Further reading

  • John Oliver and Nichijo Shaka [John David Provoo], Nichijo: The Testimony of John Provoo (2014),
    ISBN 978-0-692-32614-5, available online
  • Barak Kushner, "Treacherous Allies: The Cold War in East Asia and American Postwar Anxiety", Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 45, No. 4 (October 2010), pp. 812–843, available online, accessed April 18, 2015

External links

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