On 1 January 1943, at Sakamoto Unit HQ at Wanyai we decorated our billets with the shichi-go-san (7–5-3, lucky numbers) ornaments, but in bamboo only, for New Year's Pine & Bamboo, and on a Thai-Burma site celebrated the New Year with mochi (rice balls) made with Thai rice. In the midst of the jungle with the heat making one sweat, a hot New Year, no one was able to feel quite the full New Year spirit. We prayed for our homeland's prosperity and when we had completed the formal ceremony of bowing from afar to the Imperial Palace, many of the troops took a siesta and listened to the shrilling of the cicadas. Officers and men wondered for how many months they would be living the jungle life, bathing every day in the Kwae Noi, and bit-by-bit becoming used to enduring the heat, the dangers, the coarse food and clothing … all this was what their sense of duty led them to accept in this job.

After the previous November when the order to construct this railway was formally promulgated, the Construction Unit HQ also inaugurated it, and the GOC, Shimoda, also held an inspection of the current circumstances. Already from September the previous year trains had been running between Nong Pladuk and Kamburi, but the roadbed West of the Mae Khlaung bridge, together with work on the Chungkai cutting and the plank viaduct at points 103 and 109 km, and also the building of the bridge over the Mae Khlaung not having been completed, the situation was that the temporary wooden bridge was said to be nearing completion. The van of the Thai-side's Survey Unit was nearing Thā Khanun, but the embankment for the centre-line had not as yet reached Kinsaiyok. On the other side, the survey in Burma had got as far as Nikki in November, but the roadbed had only reached Thanbyusayat. Engineering had been planned to take one or two months until the end of the year, but the volume of work on Thaiside which remained to be done, together with that on Burma-side, added up to over two-thirds of the total volume of work.