John David Provoo

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 and he became a Buddhist priest.

Provoo was born in San Francisco, California, on August 6, 1917. 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. He also began studying the Japanese language around that time, with a Buddhist priest as his teacher. 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.

When the United States' entered World War II, Provoo returned to the United States and enlisted in the United States Army. He was sent to the Philippines, where he worked as a G-2 clerk at the army headquarters in Manila. His Japanese language skills won him consideration for the 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. He was captured by Japanese forces in the Battle of Corregidor in 1942 and made a prisoner of war.

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. In accounts that vary in their details, Provoo shot an army captain named Burton C. Thomson, a veterinarian stationed on Corregidor, or reported him to Japanese troops who shot him. One American prisoner stated that Thomson had provoked Provoo by responded to Provoo's demand that he bring him some food with a comment to the effect that next time he saw Provoo he would kick him so hard that Provoo could taste his boot. Another said Thomson had refused Provoo's demand to move American prisoners out of hospital beds to make room for Japanese troops. One POW wrote in his memoirs that Provoo was so hated by his fellow prisoners that one had tried to kill him by putting ground glass in his food, and that Provoo later threatened to kill a colonel named Cooper. The diaries of Frank Fujita, one of the few 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.

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