Even those stories, though certainly not "untold", may not be told often enough. Bridge on the River Kwai now seems stilted and contrived. Post-war novels purporting to reveal the bottomless perfidy of the Japanese (the shocker, Camp on Blood Island, was on my childhood bookshelves) are best forgotten.

Stories about prisons elsewhere - the Wooden Horse, Colditz castle or Douglas Bader with his artificial legs - often seemed more romantic and daring.

We owe a debt to Richard Flanagan for a contemporary, deeply compassionate imagining of prison life under the Japanese (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).

A more generous tribute still should be paid to those who planted and nurtured the Cowra Peace Park, commemorating the lives and deaths of Japanese prisoners in Australia.

In his book The Emperor's Grace, Mark Baker recounts a story which occurred between two sets of photographs. The first depict Australian soldiers who later became prisoners of war; they consistently look cheeky, innocent, a bit amused, entirely unaware of the horrors ahead of them.

The second set, titled "Liberation and Homeward Bound", show exhausted, emaciated diggers released from Japanese prisons, possibly still too groggy to appreciate their good fortune. To borrow from a description of the end of another battle, those Australians seem "white for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty".

We might empathise best with suffering when that is presented to us on a human scale, with faces and names attached to the numbers of those who died or were imprisoned. The most graphic example is the deeply poignant Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which illuminates the faces and announces the names of the one million children murdered during the Holocaust.

Baker knows how to make his stories personal. Early on he introduces the reader to John Frederick Douglas Lush, a champion pre-war hurdler who married a model and radio actress. The reader follows Lush, his purloined golf shoes and his mates throughout the war.

Baker has a conversational, natural style of writing. Happily, he does not waste much space on the tedious minutiae of military order - apart from noting a few rolls of names typed in quintuplicate. He provides a fair account of the lamentable Singapore campaign in 1942, emphasising one Australian win (an ambush at Gemas) and one hero (a fighting Lieutenant Colonel) at the same time as he praises the "bull-headed, tough-talking" Japanese General Yamashita.

After a frog race on Melbourne Cup day, Lush and other prisoners were transferred from Singapore to Japan. Although that destination might have proved preferable to the Burma Railway, the choice seems a bit like picking between the various circles in Hell. Exposed on deck, eating weevil-ridden rice, some of the prisoners nonetheless considered overpowering the guards, seizing the ship and sailing to a neutral port. In their own interests, others talked them out of any re-run of the mutiny on the "Bounty".

A proportion of the shipment of prisoners were sent to the stainless steel and chemical works at Naoetsu, described by Baker as a place of unrelenting hardship and brutality. Baker's focus is more on the shipyards at Kobe, Lush's destination.

Perversity and brutality can take odd forms. Who knew that the guards would have kept their charges late at night on a cold parade ground until all of them could recite the numbers in Japanese from one to one hundred? Who would have thought that the Japanese had any interest in a questionnaire asking prisoners, "what are your thoughts while at work?"

Had Baker answered that question on behalf of the prisoners, he would likely have written: obtaining some food in addition to rice; sleeping under blankets not made from wood fibre; enjoying even rudimentary medical attention; having Red Cross parcels delivered; receiving any mail; or not being beaten severely for trivial offences.

Here the tales of privation are leavened, if only slightly, by memories of mateship or extra rations (oranges once, whale meat and horse meat very occasionally). At the next camp to which Lush was sent, Japanese food was supplemented by ferns, guinea pigs and snakes. His weight halved to 48 kilos. Baker picked well in focusing on Doug Lush. As measured by integrity, decency, compassion, honesty or dignity, Lush was a remarkable man.

Those five qualities may well comprise the bedrock of leadership, at least the brand of leadership required to help others survive in a Japanese POW camp.