The Ofuna Camp operated under a deliberate fiction. The Japanese position was that it served only as a temporary holding facility -- prisoners would be transferred elsewhere, so it did not need to be reported as a prisoner-of-war camp. In practice, it was an interrogation center run by a detachment of the Guard Unit of the Yokosuka Naval District, a rarity since most other Japanese POW camps were operated by the Imperial Japanese Army rather than the Navy. Commander Yokura Sashizo commanded the facility. The prisoners sent to Ofuna were not ordinary captured soldiers. They were high-value targets: submarine officers, aviators, and communications specialists -- anyone who might possess critical knowledge of Allied strategy. Among the most prominent prisoners was Commander Richard O'Kane, the most decorated U.S. submariner of the war. The interrogators' goal was simple: extract as much military intelligence as possible, as quickly as possible, from men the outside world believed were dead.

Life inside the Torture Farm ran on deprivation and control. Prisoners occupied individual cells and were forbidden to speak to anyone, including talking in their sleep. In good weather, they could sit outside their cells but were required to stare straight ahead. The rule of silence was absolute. Meals amounted to small portions of rice and soup -- one inmate recalled subsisting on roughly 500 calories per day. There were no blankets. The only clothing was whatever the prisoner had been wearing at the moment of capture. Interrogations occurred every two weeks, with interrogators comparing notes across sessions to catch inconsistencies. Lying, refusing to answer, or showing the slightest disrespect brought beatings with wooden clubs. Guards slapped prisoners for minor infractions or sometimes at random. Officers received harsher treatment than enlisted men. Inmates reported that some guards appeared to enjoy the violence. The camp's medical orderly, Sueharu Kitamura, was later tried for causing the death of one prisoner and contributing to the deaths of three others. Originally sentenced to hang, his punishment was eventually reduced to thirty years of hard labor.

The normal stay at Ofuna was supposed to last eight days, but some prisoners languished for months. Three crew members from a captured submarine remained at Ofuna for the duration of the entire war, forced to intercept Allied radio transmissions. Despite the systematic abuse, the mortality rate was lower than at many other Japanese camps. Of the estimated one thousand prisoners who passed through Ofuna during the war, six died in captivity. On August 21, 1945, the remaining 126 American and nine British prisoners were liberated. Commander Yokura Sashizo was later convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. The camp compound itself survived the war intact. In a strange turn of postwar reinvention, the buildings were converted into a kindergarten, where Japanese children played in rooms that had once held men who officially did not exist.

The kindergarten operated in the former camp buildings until they were demolished in 1969. Today, the residential neighborhood of Kamakura that surrounds the former camp site shows no visible trace of what happened there. The area sits in the hills southwest of Yokohama, a quiet corner of the Kanagawa coastline more associated with Zen temples and hiking trails than wartime atrocity. But the testimony of survivors has preserved the Torture Farm in historical memory. The accounts describe a system designed not just to extract intelligence but to strip men of their identities -- unnamed, unrecorded, and unacknowledged. The camp's most chilling innovation was not any particular method of brutality but its foundational premise: that a human being could be made to disappear entirely, alive but erased from every official record, existing in a place that the rest of the world did not know was there.