When invading Japanese forces seized most of Southeast Asia and the western half of the Pacific during the Second World War, some twenty thousand British civilians were incarcerated in numerous internment camps in the region.Footnote 1 Since the end of the war, the experiences of these internees of the Japanese have occupied a marginalized position in public memories of the conflict. In postwar Britain, public images of captivity in the East have been largely dominated by recollections of prisoners of war (POWs) of the Japanese, particularly those who were subjected to brutalities on the Burma-Thailand Railway. While the private memories of Japanese-held civilians have received increasing public attention in recent decades as a result of some film and publishing successes, their voices have been largely neglected in wider commemorations of the conflict. Despite this, however, several British and other Allied detainees of the Japanese have nevertheless recorded their distinctive wartime experiences out of a desire to memorialize or bear testimony.
Within the broader historiography of memory, few studies have examined the internal psychological processes that have prompted Japanese-held civilian captives to express their memories in public. Even fewer studies have explored chronological change or the stages in which civilian detainees of the Japanese have articulated their war memories over the past six decades. As this article will demonstrate, many ex-internees have, in fact, veered between extremes of silence and eloquence in expressing their wartime memories due to an array of extraordinary influences. To this end, some useful comparisons may be drawn with the different phases of Holocaust testimony over the same period. As Annette Wievorka has suggested, witnesses bearing testimony about the Holocaust have passed through “three successive phases” over the past six decades—from those testifying “in the midst of the genocide” itself, to the emergence of Holocaust witnesses as “social figures” in the years after the war, and finally to their evolution in a society where survivors have been “exploited and reified.”Footnote 2 This article argues that there were also three waves of narrative testimony in the case of Japanese-held civilians. The first phase of testimony occurred during the war itself, in the form of diaries and other private writings. This was followed by a second wave in the years immediately after the war, and a third and much larger phase of testimony over subsequent decades. However, these three phases were influenced by very different factors and played out in altogether different ways.
In analyzing these vicissitudes of narrative testimony, this article will focus on the memory processes of civilians who were incarcerated by the Japanese in four key theaters of the war in British Asia: Hong Kong, Sarawak (Borneo), Malaya, and Singapore. It aims to explore the ways in which their memories have surfaced, both publicly and privately, and the impetus provided by personal and cultural forces to these processes of remembering. It also attempts to elucidate the reasons for relative silence on the part of some ex-internees. The absence of captive testimony was a commonplace phenomenon during the twentieth century; not all Holocaust survivors, POWs of the Japanese, and gulag prisoners recorded their experiences. However, this article suggests that Japanese-held civilians were often deterred from articulating their internment memories by a set of distinctive (and unusual) circumstances, both during and after the war. In particular, fear of possible repercussions by Japanese camp authorities and other pressures (often unique to the postwar colonial context) dissuaded many internees from memorializing their experiences.
In the decades following the war, acts of memory repression or retrieval were often prompted by political and cultural developments within British and European societies. As this article will demonstrate, memories of internment were often triggered after the passage of several years by issues of war compensation, reparation, and commemoration, as well as by the linked incentives of distance and time. Also, as many ex-internees were protagonists of Britain’s colonial past, this article will situate the retrieval of their memories within broader imperial debates, especially within the context of the ambivalent (and often contentious) legacy of colonialism.
The Broader Context of Memory
Methodologically, this article concentrates on the emergence of internment narratives rather than their contents. It attempts to examine why ex-internees of the Japanese have opted to remember or remain silent about their experiences. The focus of this article, therefore, is on processes of bearing testimony and situations in which wartime memories are triggered. There is one conspicuous war experience to which Japanese-run camps have often been related: the Holocaust. Christina Twomey has argued that the prominence of the Holocaust as a benchmark for the trauma of war and internment has often beleaguered attempts by Japanese-held civilians to “find a place for their histories.”Footnote 3 Indeed, although the theaters of captivity were vastly different, the comparative scale and gravity of the Holocaust may have overshadowed internment memories in a competitive endeavor for public recognition. In more recent decades, memories of the Holocaust have coalesced within a “national theatre of collective memory choreographed by social and political leaders” (as Jay Winter has phrased it), which, in turn, has provided a framework within which individual memories were reshaped and constructed.Footnote 4 Indeed, Nancy Wood defines “public memory” as memory characterized by “a will or desire on the part of some social group or disposition of power to select and organize representations of the past so that these will be embraced by individuals as their own.”Footnote 5 As Peter Novick has documented, Jewish organizations have been instrumental players in spreading awareness of the Holocaust within American society.Footnote 6 Former internees of the Japanese have not fared as well as Holocaust survivors in similar efforts at public activism or recognition. Also, unlike Holocaust survivors, civilian internees of the Japanese have had comparatively little recourse to networks of “fictive kinship” (as Jay Winter puts it) constituted by survivors who shared traumatic experiences. These “families of remembrance,” as Winter also describes them, often have a critical impact on individual well being, as well as on public representations and understandings of wartime experiences.Footnote 7 While some returned to their home countries, most ex-internees of the Japanese had, in fact, dispersed quickly and widely in the months after their liberation, due to various pressures of the postwar period. For many, the process of remembering has often been an intensely personal (and lonely) one, partly as a result of the comparative absence of support networks or organizational structures from which Holocaust survivors have commonly benefited.Footnote 8
Race was another critical factor that influenced these processes of bearing testimony. In particular, the act of memorializing (both during the war and in the years immediately after the conflict) was often intimately tied up with colonial racial attitudes.Footnote 9 Before the war, these colonial territories were characterized by class-cum-racial hierarchies, with the British and other European elites at the very pinnacle of these social pyramids. For many British civilians, the rapid collapse of these privileged universes and their humiliating subordination by invading Japanese forces was an intensely traumatic and sobering experience. As Christina Twomey has argued, the “transition from privilege to poverty” was “keenly felt” by many internees of the Japanese.Footnote 10 Gerald Horne has similarly observed that the “loss of a life of racial privilege” was behind the nervous and querulous behavior of many British captives in Hong Kong.Footnote 11 The prisoner David Bosanquet, for instance, was thoroughly “disillusioned” by the collapse of British Hong Kong: “We had been beaten ignominiously. It had happened so fast. It left us utterly deflated. Our world had collapsed. Many of us, me included, were racked with strange new doubts, apprehensive of what the future held—if there was to be one.”Footnote 12 Gwen Priestwood similarly remembered “a feeling of tired hopelessness in the air” after the surrender of Hong Kong; as she put it, it was “a scene of tragic depression.”Footnote 13 It was being defeated in a context redolent with vivid racial overtones that made the iniquities of captivity particularly distressing. Like Priestwood, many captives of the Japanese were compelled to articulate their mental anguish in one form or another. Indeed, it may be argued that the outlet provided by writing, especially during the war itself, was often a means of coping with the harsh realities of racial reversal.
Other characteristics of the colonial enterprise have also affected the ways in which internment has been remembered, both at the time and afterward. In particular, much complexity has stemmed from the fact that internment memories are often embedded within broader debates about the nature of British imperialism. In the decades following the war, there has been a tempestuous reevaluation of the imperial record and its legacies, with issues of colonial violence or repression drawing particularly heated attention. Writings have even perpetuated stereotypes of colonizers as avaricious, brutal exploiters or painted them as decadent elites leading lives of degenerate pleasure in tropical environments.Footnote 14 As a result of these controversial currents, civilian captives of the Japanese—being men and women previously complicit in imperial systems of rule either as expatriates or direct agents of the colonial state—have often found themselves in an awkward position when recounting their wartime memories. They have responded to these ambiguities in a variety of ways. Some have deliberately taken their wartime experiences as the primary focus (or starting point) of their narratives, thus closing off the “colonial” dimension (with its less romantic undertones of racism, violence, and exploitation) from view. By consciously omitting details of their pre-internment lives in colonial Asia, these internees have centered their experiences within the prism of suffering, loss, and victimhood under the Japanese.
On the other hand, it is also possible that nostalgia for an earlier colonial period may have provided a direct incentive for some to memorialize their experiences, both during (and long after) the war. Indeed, many records surveyed in this study contain vivid references to prewar colonial experiences as vanished idylls of “peace, prosperity and colonial chic,” especially in contrast to the harsh traumas of war or imprisonment.Footnote 15 In 1944, Gwen Priestwood recalled dancing at the Peninsula Hotel to the strains of a “perfect orchestra” and dining “under softly shaded lights, waited on by silent, smoothly efficient Chinese waiters,” while Joan Cummack remembered prewar Hong Kong (in an interview in 1995) as “absolutely paradise … sailing, parties and the servants.”Footnote 16 Elements of colonial nostalgia have characterized the emergence of memories from various parts of the British Empire in more recent decades. Scholars like Elizabeth Buettner and Antoinette Burton, for instance, have explored how descendants of colonial families (such as those who belonged to “Raj families” in India) have made nostalgic accounts of their colonial connections available to a wider public.Footnote 17 As Buettner has argued, many were persuaded to recount their stories out of a conviction that they were “part of the last generation of Britons to have experienced colonial life first-hand.” Indeed, in the late 1970s and 1980s, many became increasingly convinced that the time left for them to “set the record straight” was limited. During this period, “Raj nostalgia” became an established feature of British public culture, with a profusion of memoirs, family biographies, and novels about the closing decades of empire.Footnote 18 The Raj phenomenon (which peaked in the 1980s) may have resulted in a more conducive setting (and an audience) for ex-internees of the Japanese to come forward with their recollections. Nancy Wood and Harvey A. Kapland have suggested that nostalgia may even serve a “function of denial,” as pleasurable sensations that accompany nostalgic memories may “distort or camouflage” more painful ones.Footnote 19 Indeed, it is possible that nostalgia for an earlier colonial past (with its overtones of glamour, chic, and romance) may have assisted these ex-captives of the Japanese in coping with distressing memories of war and imprisonment.
Waves of Memory
The civilian internment camps of British Asia (Stanley in Hong Kong, Changi and Sime Road in Singapore, and Lintang in Borneo) were unusual for a variety of reasons. In these camps, several key fragments of British colonial society were thrown into close, fettered proximity for three and a half years: colonial administrators, business chiefs, wealthy taipans (owners of foreign mercantile establishments), missionaries, and wives of high-ranking officials were forced to coexist with policemen, prostitutes, stragglers, and clerks. The Japanese authorities had originally decreed that all “enemy aliens” (such as British, American, and Dutch civilians) should be held captive in internment camps. National allegiance thus determined the wartime experiences of these civilians: they were detained simply because they were citizens of enemy states. These prisoners, however, were joined at later stages of the occupation by other colonial minorities such as Eurasians and Baghdadi Jews whom the conquerors increasingly came to perceive as a threat to their new order (partly because of their part-European ancestry or prewar European connections). Within the camps, the Japanese frequently preferred to leave the internees to their own administrative devices. In drawing up their initial regulations for Stanley, the Japanese even stipulated that the internees were to be “self-governed” and the British community should be looked after by its own “Civil Administrative Officer or his suitable subordinate of old Hong Kong.”Footnote 20 Unlike POWs of the Japanese, internees in British Asia were generally exempted from harsh labor by their captors, apart from manual work within their own camps such as the cultivation of vegetable gardens. The internees were accordingly able to maintain considerable levels of administrative autonomy while retaining most of their former colonial institutions in camp life, such as executive councils and civil judiciaries, as well as public works, sanitary, education, and medical departments.Footnote 21
For some internees, these circumstances (and the imposed idleness of internment) offered ample possibilities for reflection. Others began recording their experiences simply to prevent mental inertia during captivity. As the Stanley internee L. A. Collyer remarked in his diary, “Everything that occupies the mind is invaluable in our present circumstances. That was the main reason for my commencing this scribble.”Footnote 22 Indeed, the evidence suggests that personal accounts of internment under the Japanese were written and/or published over three major phases. The first wave of testimony occurred during the war itself, in the form of diaries, journals, letters, and private notes, though these were often constrained by perceived danger or fear of the Japanese authorities.Footnote 23 However, many of these records were lost, damaged, or deliberately destroyed as a result of the pressures of incarceration, and the evidence that remains today is often fragmentary and geographically scattered. A second phase of published material appeared in the years immediately after the war. These were commonly written in the form of memoirs, booklets, or short autobiographical accounts and were often published by small firms or missionary societies.Footnote 24 Finally, a third and much larger wave of material appeared over subsequent decades, in the form of published camp diaries, biographies, autobiographies, and oral testimonies. This wave appears to have peaked in the late 1950s, in the 1970s and 1980s, and yet again in the 1990s.
While the Japanese authorities did not explicitly prohibit the keeping of administrative and private records by the internees, they nevertheless regarded their captives’ writings with apprehension and even confiscated some materials during periodic inspections of the camps. At Lintang, John Beville Archer noted that his captors were “extremely suspicious of any papers or writing materials found in our possession”; “On one occasion, I found it hard to explain that some really awful doggerel which I had scribbled on a soap wrapper was only an attempt at poetry and not part of a cipher message from South East Asia Command.”Footnote 25 J. L. Noakes observed that as the Lintang camp “was frequented by inquisitive Japanese soldiers and officials and surprise searches occurred from time to time … the chance of my paper falling into Japanese hands was ever present and was a considerable source of anxiety.”Footnote 26 At Changi, such fears became more acute after the Japanese raided the camp in October 1943 in the wake of an Allied attack on Singapore harbor and removed the writings and personal possessions of several internees suspected of anti-Japanese activities. Many of these internees were interrogated by the Kempeitai (the military police arm of the Japanese army), and fifteen captives eventually died under torture.Footnote 27 After this incident, the fear of possible repercussions for keeping any sort of written record became so acute that several internees opted to destroy their diaries and other camp writings to avoid such dangers.Footnote 28
As a result of such risks, both real and perceived, many internees attempted to conceal their written records from their captors in ingenious ways. Some wrote in code or shorthand; others hid their writings with care. One journal concealed in a box of mahjong tiles remained forgotten for almost twenty-five years until it was discovered in 1969.Footnote 29 Dorothy Jenner wrote her Stanley diary on toilet paper and placed it in the soles of her shoes during camp inspections, while the Lintang internee Hilda Bates concealed her diary and other notes “between two layers of sacking” in the seat of a chair.Footnote 30 Agnes Newton Keith’s book Three Came Home, based largely on her Lintang experiences, was partly constructed from tiny notes she stuffed into her son’s toys or buried in tins at night.Footnote 31 At Stanley, official camp records were secreted in shell casings or mosquito nettings. The Stanley internee W. H. P. Chatley buried several important government papers and a Union Jack, while the Lintang internee J. L. Noakes hid a report on British wartime defense preparations in the false bottom of a box and in the hollow legs of a camp stretcher.Footnote 32
These fears also affected what was ultimately recorded and remembered during this period. Indeed, many records kept during the war itself were often underpinned by a sense of restraint and caution arising from self-imposed censorship, with details deliberately “veiled in code” or omitted altogether.Footnote 33 “One had to write in these vague and obscure terms,” explained a Lintang prisoner, “because of the ever-present possibility of searches by Jap guards and subsequent scrutiny of seized diaries.”Footnote 34 The Changi internee Tyler Thomson was similarly “cautious and circumspect,” noting that he “undertook no direct discussion of the Japanese or our treatment in camp.”Footnote 35 The diarist G. C. Allen also felt “cramped by possible repercussions if I wrote too freely as I would have wished or reported everything that has happened.”Footnote 36 This sense of restraint was often heightened by a distrust of fellow inmates and the possible presence of quislings within the camps. As the Changi internee W. A. Baker remarked in his diary (which was written in the style of a letter), “It’s better not to mention names in this letter as one never knows what may happen to one’s property in these crowded quarters.”Footnote 37 An inmate similarly felt “I cannot let myself go to the extent that I would like … it would be at least unwise to write all my thoughts in detail. Even now some of my wild criticisms might lead me into a spot of bother if ever read by the wrong people.”Footnote 38 Indeed, even administrative record keeping was conducted with circumspection. The Stanley camp secretary John Stericker was convinced that “minutes of meetings had to be very carefully written. Had some of the things said in Committee been recorded we would all have been executed had the Japanese found them.”Footnote 39 While such fears may not have been entirely justified in all instances, it is possible that the actions of many internees were colored by preexisting racial attitudes about the cruelty and depravity of their captors (and their capacity for barbaric violence).Footnote 40 Thus, some internees even made false or deliberately misleading statements in their diaries to protect themselves if their writings were ever confiscated.Footnote 41
Despite these fears, a considerable number of internees (and POWs) nevertheless wrote, sketched, drew, and painted in the camps, instead of allowing their wartime experiences to remain unrecorded. These were remarkable achievements in view of the practical constraints of captivity; as the war progressed, writing materials became increasingly difficult to procure or replace. Many were convinced that it was their compelling duty to bear testimony and memorialize their experiences in one form or another.Footnote 42 As Geoffrey Emerson observed from his interviews with Stanley ex-internees, “nearly everyone in Camp, at one time or another, planned to write about the internment experience after liberation.”Footnote 43 Indeed, this urge to memorialize was widely felt by both internees and POWs of the Japanese. At Lintang, the prisoner Lionel Morris felt that his camp diary was “detailed and precise. I had even then determined to record all events with a view to writing at greater length at a later date,” while George Pringle insisted that “by every means in our power we must make every endeavor to record as accurately as possible the most important details of our lives in Kuching. How else will our people at home know of … the many ingenious plans and schemes we have evolved to keep ourselves active in the war and to show that even though we are unarmed, overwhelmed in numbers and living in a cage, we have never surrendered.”Footnote 44 As a Stanley internee similarly insisted, “It is the sacred duty of any person who has had access to the information required and who has the courage to record in black and white the truth.”Footnote 45
Most unusually, some Japanese camp officials were also intent on mythologizing the events of captivity. At Lintang, the journalist Agnes Newton Keith was ordered by the Japanese camp commandant Colonel Tatsuji Suga to draft a book entitled “The Life and Thoughts of an Internee.” To this end, he even promised her writing materials (and some relief from camp duties), though stressing that he would “censor” the product.Footnote 46 The internee Hilda Bates observed in her diary that Keith was “much sought after by the Nip commandant who fondly imagines that a cup of coffee in his office, or a packet of biscuits sent to her small son will give him a heroic place in future writings.”Footnote 47 As Keith noted in Three Came Home, she titled her camp writings “Captivity,” noting that she “told the truth, but not all the truth. There was much which for my own sake and that of others in camp I could not say, and there were also things that I did not dare to say to Suga … but he stood more than I believed he would. I complained persistently of wrongs and mistreatments, I constantly asked for better food and less work. … I said that I believed Suga did what he could for our women’s camp. And that, as he was kindhearted to women and children, please could we have some more food? This story was submitted to Suga at given intervals.”Footnote 48 While Colonel Suga’s true motivations for commissioning this project remain unclear, it seems reasonable to suggest that an urge to memorialize was felt during the events of captivity, both by the internees and the Japanese.Footnote 49
Some internees, however, simply waited until liberation came to write about their wartime experiences. A second wave of personal accounts were completed accordingly at the point of freedom or written within a few years after the end of the war, often as a means of providing families and close friends with firsthand accounts of life under the Japanese.Footnote 50 As John Stericker (the Stanley camp secretary) felt, “in order to record the story of Stanley properly it was necessary to write it while … events were fresh in mind.”Footnote 51 Some ex-internees began publishing revised versions of their camp diaries, while others produced short pamphlets and newsletters based on records kept during the war.Footnote 52 Agnes Newton Keith began gathering up her notes and diary entries from various hiding places, which she used as the basis for the writing of a book about her internment experiences. Published in April 1947 to critical acclaim, her book (Three Came Home) was turned into a motion picture in 1950, with the Oscar-winning actress Claudette Colbert starring as Keith. But despite Keith’s personal success, the general impact of this second wave of materials appears to have been fairly limited. Indeed, a significant number of accounts produced during this period were written largely for private purposes or were published by relatively obscure publishing houses.Footnote 53
Captivity Memories as Silence and Struggle
Despite the emergence of some published material in the years immediately following the war, the evidence suggests that a significant majority of ex-internees of the Japanese remained silent about their experiences during this period. One key reason for this was the postconflict discovery of greater wartime horrors. When the atrocities of the Holocaust began filtering into public consciousness, the wartime sufferings of civilian captives of the Japanese in British Asia rapidly paled in comparison. Unlike the Holocaust camps, there were no piles of bodies or gas chambers in theirs. Indeed, ex-internees of the Japanese had suffered more from the crime of omission rather than of commission, having been neglected rather than actively persecuted. Most of them had, in fact, survived the war, albeit in a malnourished and weakened state. Death rates across the internment camps of British Asia were comparatively low, ranging from 5 percent in Hong Kong, 4.8 percent in Malaya, to 5.6 percent in North Borneo (the overall death rate of British POWs held captive by the Japanese in Asia, in comparison, was 25 percent).Footnote 54 But comparisons between these theaters of imprisonment began soon after the end of the conflict—war correspondents covering the liberation of the internment camps in British Asia were inclined to discuss them in relation to Holocaust camps. In September 1945, an Associated Press journalist in Singapore noted that certain periods of the civilian internment experience “were hard and bitter” but assured his readers that “Sime Road was not another Belsen or Buchenwald.”Footnote 55
Within the broader context of Japanese treatment, it also became evident after the war that many Asian civilians, Allied POWs on the Burma-Thailand Railway, and Dutch internees had suffered greater brutalities under the conquering forces. As a result of these revelations in the postwar mass media, some ex-internees who were held captive in Hong Kong and Singapore even became convinced that their wartime treatment was relatively “mild” and “kind,” “compared to the utterly inhuman way in which internees were treated in Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Siam.”Footnote 56 “Now that I am able to contrast our treatment with that of other camps,” reflected Franklin Gimson, the top official detained in Hong Kong, “I think we were extremely fortunate that we escaped so lightly.”Footnote 57 John Stericker felt likewise; as he concluded of Stanley, “there is little of the sheer brutality of Belsen.”Footnote 58 It is possible that some ex-internees may have even felt a kind of “survivors’ guilt” for getting off relatively lightly. Some who had originally intended to publish accounts based on their war experiences became increasingly predisposed to deride their memories of the period as mundane or less dramatic in comparison.Footnote 59 Some even privately depreciated the nature of their captive experiences in writing. “A friend who has read my journal in original criticises it as boring,” lamented the Changi internee G. C. Allen after the war. “I know too well that it is boring but the life and experiences it tried to record were so utterly boring. If any internee produces an interesting account of that existence, I shall suspect him of gilding the lily.”Footnote 60
Many ex-internees upon returning home to Britain were also silenced by their discovery of an indifferent society burdened with its own scars and postwar problems (and generally oblivious to what they had been through).Footnote 61 And indeed, the civilian population of Britain—themselves rationed, bombed, or displaced during the war—had little sympathy to offer, and this may have been colored by memories of humiliating surrender to the Japanese in early 1942 and a feeling that the “degenerate colonials” of the East had brought their misfortunes onto themselves. As Twomey has argued, for most of the general public in Britain, the Second World War was essentially a triumph against the evils of fascism in Europe: events elsewhere were merely “sideshows.”Footnote 62 But what had transpired in the Pacific theater also brought home some uncomfortable truths, such as the ignominious failure of Britain to defend her colonial possessions in the East and their rapid collapse to an underrated Asian enemy. The fall of Singapore in 1942, in particular, was widely portrayed as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history” (as Churchill himself put it), a moment of unparalleled humiliation that marked the lowest point in Britain’s wartime fortunes before the tide turned in the nation’s favor.Footnote 63 Returning civilians from British Asia were not only tarnished with the brush of demoralization and defeat but occupied an ambiguous and awkward position in relation to perceptions of war and empire. The indifferent public reception that greeted ex-internees in postwar Britain may have accordingly contributed to a suppression of wartime memories.Footnote 64 Indeed, those who feel that their memories are inconsequential rarely leave records of their experiences.
There was also another group of ex-prisoners competing for attention during the early postwar period: British ex-POWs of the Japanese. Ex-internees returning home to Britain were overshadowed by ex-combatants, first, in sheer numerical terms (some fifty thousand British POWs were incarcerated by the Japanese during the war, in contrast to some twenty thousand British internees). In contrast to civilians, many ex-POWs were able to draw succor from the existence of a thriving veteran’s culture in postwar Britain. A variety of POW clubs and associations quickly sprang up all over the country, and a national committee (the National Federation of Far Eastern Prisoners of War Clubs and Associations of Great Britain and Northern Ireland [NFFCA]) was established in 1952 to represent the interests of the POW community.Footnote 65 Considerable amounts of money accrued over the years (partly derived from the proceeds of Japanese assets seized during the war) enabled the NFFCA to “distribute welfare funds to the various clubs and associations under their wing for the benefit of POWs and their widows and families.”Footnote 66 Unlike ex-POWs, returning internees lacked similar social networks to help them cope with the first hurdles or challenges after their return to Britain.
Memories of internment, too, were often superseded by a personal need to adapt to postwar conditions. Both ex-internees and ex-POWs were disoriented by the rapid transition from captivity to freedom (as well as by illness or war-inflicted disabilities), and their repatriation to Britain may have contributed to a further sense of dislocation. As the Hong Kong surgeon Donald Bowie felt after returning home, “the vocabulary was new, the developments were enormous and we had much ground to make up physically.”Footnote 67 Some were also forced to come to terms with a “‘Rip van Winkle effect’ of their lost years when confronted with “unexpected bereavement, infidelity or estrangement” (many internees received very few messages from their families and friends in three and a half years).Footnote 68 As the Japanese permitted very little communication between civilian and POW camps in their occupied territories, many interned women were unable to find out whether their husbands were prisoners or not or, indeed, if they were still alive.Footnote 69 Jean Gittins, for instance, was devastated by the discovery of the death of her husband at the end of the war; as she wrote, “my spirit broke, I was terror stricken, alone—almost insane.”Footnote 70 Others were silenced simply by the lack of understanding, empathy, or interest that they encountered, especially when attempting to communicate with wives, husbands, children, or other family members who had not shared similar wartime experiences.Footnote 71 Equally overwhelming for many, too, were the postwar challenges of financial insecurity and unemployment. Several ex–colonial administrators were eager to return to their old positions in the East but frequently found themselves in intense competition for jobs with people who had not been interned. There were also a variety of unexpected and trying developments within the postwar imperial context. Those who returned to Malaya, for instance, were quickly forced to deal with the threat of communist revolt, which broke out into a full-fledged insurgency in June 1948.Footnote 72 More often than not, their memories of internment were quickly superseded by pressing demands of the present, such as the challenges of new jobs, relationships, as well as personal and public circumstances.
Prolonged trauma and accumulated emotional baggage also had a role in shaping (or suppressing) memories of incarceration. For many ex-internees, the physical and psychological toll of the war was real and acute. The Hong Kong internee Jean Gittins was convinced that “for over thirteen hundred days we led a vague, perplexing, debilitated day to day existence. … We were just human machines—mechanical, apathetic, resigned.”Footnote 73 The physical and mental effects of protracted captivity were disconcertingly visible at the point of liberation. As the returning British administrator O. W. Gilmour observed: “A number of my friends were quite unrecognisable, on account of the great beards which adorned their faces and the deteriorations in physique. … Some had grown old beyond what the years could account for, and, worst of all, a number had obviously changed completely; the change having started in frustration of mind and worked outwards.”Footnote 74
Of the first one thousand repatriates from Malaya and Singapore, some six hundred were said to be displaying a “degree of anxiety,” while over five hundred were classified in postwar psychological reports as suffering from “mild apathy and depression.”Footnote 75 However, opportunities for articulating such anguish were limited in a postwar society that encouraged a stiff upper lip and prescribed emotional self-control, stoicism, and fortitude as “antidotes to the sufferings wrought by war.”Footnote 76 Thus, the true depth (or actual extent) of accumulated wartime trauma was often unclear, with scars remaining even after several years.Footnote 77 Indeed, in my interviews with ex-prisoners of the Japanese, I was struck by how some wounds from the war have persisted even decades later. After more than fifty years, some ex-prisoners have still refrained from conducting business dealings with the Japanese or from buying Japanese cars (and even Japanese electrical appliances).Footnote 78 As Michael Ferrier wrote of his mother (who had been interned at Stanley during the war):
She never told us whether or not she had been abused and I never asked her, possibly because I wanted to spare her any painful memories but more probably because I wanted to believe that nothing had happened to her. Nevertheless both my parents ended the war with a deep and abiding hatred for all things Japanese. In 1955 my mother was quite distressed when I told her that I was going to Japan for a holiday. Even after the passing of ten years, she could not accept that anyone, much less a member of her own family, would want to associate in any way with such a vile race of people.Footnote 79
Memories of Far East internment were also overshadowed by a postwar frenzy of reconstruction within the colonial context. From a general perspective, the postwar years were widely underpinned by war weariness and a conviction that the period of Japanese occupation should be “put behind” so that one could “look ahead.” For the British who returned to Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore after the war, the imperative to rebuild these territories and to redeem Britain’s damaged reputation in the East was immediate and pressing, and it was consequently “neither politic nor appropriate” to discuss unpleasant memories of the conflict.Footnote 80 Even the compilation of official memories of the period took a backseat to more pressing postwar issues. Some groundwork for an official history of the Stanley camp was undertaken by the ex-internee A. Gilmour, who felt that the “final report should … be a straight-forward and concise document couched in the flat language one associates with Government Reports.” He suggested that prominent “non-official and official” internees be invited to contribute to the project, noting in a memorandum that “a considerable amount of criticism of various aspects of Camp Administration” had existed at various stages of internment and that “these ought perhaps to be ventilated rather than suppressed for later eruption.” It appears, however, that the colonial secretary was ultimately unsuccessful in his attempts to locate a possible candidate to finish the project. As one correspondent replied, “I regret I can suggest no one, for what is possibly only an academic work, at present: every one is fully engaged on more urgent tasks and I fear most of us will have to go on leave before a work of this volume could be completed.”Footnote 81 Due to the need to get the economy restarted again, the writing of the official history of the Stanley camp was a luxury that postwar Hong Kong felt it could not afford at that time.
Voices of Captivity
While some ex-internees continued to nurse scars and remain silent about their wartime experiences, a third (and larger) wave of war memories nevertheless began to appear over the subsequent decades. This wave appears to have been triggered by a variety of chronological cues, such as by issues of wartime compensation that surfaced in the early 1950s. Between 1952 and 1956, some 8,800 adult British internees were awarded a sum of £48.50 each from the proceeds of frozen Japanese assets.Footnote 82 A stream of books, novels, documentaries, and films about prisoners of the Japanese that began to appear from the 1950s, such as Pierre Boulle’s novel Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) and James Clavell’s King Rat (1962), began to infuse some ex-internees with nostalgic vigor or simply an indignation that their experiences of captivity had been inaccurately depicted in these works (and a concomitant desire to set the record straight).Footnote 83 In 1957, David Lean’s film adaptation of Boulle’s novel became an international box-office hit, won seven Academy Awards, and propelled the experiences of Japanese-held prisoners into wider public consciousness. Its success was nevertheless accompanied by debates over whether the film presented a distorted version of reality and portrayed captives of the Japanese in a perfidious light.Footnote 84 In particular, there were protests from ex-prisoners who feared their experiences of captivity were reduced to unsavory images of collaboration with the Japanese (Bridge on the River Kwai) or that of a ruthless struggle for survival (King Rat). Many were accordingly encouraged to come forward and share their own experiences of imprisonment out of a moral imperative to present more authentic truths. On 5 May 1958, ex–Hong Kong Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson discussed the Bridge on the River Kwai at the Churchill Tea Club in Bradford and argued that the film gave “an entirely wrong impression of the relations between the Japanese and the British” and that conditions were “far less endurable” than those portrayed.Footnote 85
Memories of internment were also stimulated by changes in mediums of expression (and their objectives). The 1960s and 1970s, in particular, were characterized by significant alterations in the cultural climate in Britain, as well as in other parts of the Western world. During this period, “national” narratives of history became progressively fragmented, thus allowing space for a variety of different memories. These changes were accompanied by new democratizing inclinations whereby the experiences and perspectives of “ordinary” people were given increasing weight.Footnote 86 The growth of mass media as a “vector of cultural memory” was influential in this regard, with the increased possibilities for publication and broadcasting that were created.Footnote 87 Linked to these developments were changes in journalistic practice, such as the increasing attention devoted to human interest stories. As one scholar has noted, the craze for “ethnological life stories” and attention to the “man in the street” rapidly fostered a culture in which the “individual alone became the public embodiment of history.”Footnote 88 History documentaries became individualized and focused on “authenticity,” through their foregrounding of eyewitness accounts or survivor testimonies. This occurred in parallel with shifting paradigms within academic history to a new focus on the marginalized, persecuted, or victimized. From the early 1970s, there was a new wave of publications on the Pacific war (which paralleled a peak in publications about the war in Europe), in which personal accounts, memoirs, and war diaries featured prominently.Footnote 89 The decade was also characterized by renewed assessments of the colonial era and debates over Britain’s imperial past.
In the 1980s, a variety of personal psychological cues such as old age, retirement, deteriorating health, or bereavement became increasingly prominent factors in triggering renewed wartime remembrances. As Henry Krystal observed, “old age, with its losses, imposes the inescapable necessity to face one’s past.”Footnote 90 The Hong Kong surgeon Donald Bowie wrote that “it was not until I retired … many years later that I found time to return to the task I had wanted to tackle for so long.”Footnote 91 Several ex-internees began to feel an urge in their later years to record their wartime experiences for posterity (or to leave their families with written testimonies of a key event in their personal histories). Indeed, the race against death has often added an urgency (and poignancy) to the recording of their testimonies. Perhaps the most eminent of these works is J. G. Ballard’s semiautobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), based largely on his own experiences as a child internee in Shanghai, which was turned into an award-winning film by Steven Spielberg in 1987.Footnote 92 The release of the film coincided with a widespread resurgence of interest in China during the 1980s as the country began to emerge as a new economic powerhouse. The success of Ballard’s novel (and related film) was instrumental in creating a new awareness about the experiences of Japanese-held prisoners in the public sphere during this period. It capitalized on the interest earlier generated by Tenko, a highly successful television series coproduced by the British and Australian Broadcasting Corporations between 1981 and 1984. The series dramatized the experiences of a range of British, Australian, and Dutch women who were interned by the Japanese in Java, and it attracted an audience of 14 million viewers per week in Britain.Footnote 93 Interest persisted in the following decade with the production of Bruce Beresford’s 1997 film Paradise Road, which depicted the story of a group of European women interned in Sumatra.
The confidence of British ex-internees in recounting their war memories was heightened by an array of other high-profile developments in the 1990s. In particular, several ex-internees were awakened to their memories by issues of commemoration and compensation during this period. A succession of war anniversaries (such as the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the end of the war in 1995 and 2005) began generating an extraordinary amount of commemorative interest by inundating public forums and television screens with war stories and simultaneously triggering a surge of private reflections. This enhanced public attention has also created new incentives for affirming—or challenging—received memories. At the same time, social groups that had been subjected to wartime injustice or trauma became increasingly inclined to “demand public recognition of their experience, testimony and current status as ‘victims’ or ‘survivors,’” as well as financial reparation or compensation.Footnote 94 In the 1990s, the “comfort women” issue was extensively reported in the world’s media, after several of these women testified at an international public hearing in Tokyo in December 1992 and began seeking compensation from the Japanese government. In 1994, some surviving British internees established ABCIFER (Association of British Civilian Internees Far East Region), which began lobbying for a renegotiation of the pitiful settlements of the 1950s. In 1995, the ABCIFER teamed up with organizations from America, Australia, and New Zealand in a lawsuit against the Japanese government for the ill treatment of civilian internees. The compensation they sought (US$20,000 per internee) was based on the amount granted to civilians of Japanese descent who had been interned by the Americans during the war. However, the Tokyo lower court eventually rejected the suit.Footnote 95 In May 1998, the state visit of the Heisei Emperor (Akihito) to Britain created much bitterness among ex-prisoners of the Japanese. In a public display of their emotions, hundreds of former internees and POWs deliberately turned their backs on the visiting royals during their procession with the queen up The Mall to Buckingham Palace.Footnote 96 Some even “booed and whistled, in a calculated gesture of disrespect.”Footnote 97 Further demonstrations were given extensive publicity on British television, radio, and national newspapers.
A second critical development during this period was a resolution of the battle for financial compensation—albeit some fifty-five years after the end of the war. In November 2000, after much lobbying on the part of both ABCIFER and the JLCSA (the Japanese Labour Camp Survivors’ Association), the British government eventually decided that all surviving British ex-captives (or their surviving spouses) were to receive an ex gratia payment of £10,000 each.Footnote 98 Although the government was originally adamant that the San Francisco Treaty of 1951–52 had resolved the contentious issue of wartime compensation, the increasing probability of a legal challenge appears to have prompted this change of policy.Footnote 99 This announcement came two years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act in America, which offered American survivors of internment a presidential apology and a payment of US$20,000 as symbolic compensation for what they had endured. Some British ex-internees have testified that this compensation package from the government—though starkly belated—has provided a measure of closure to their wartime ordeals.Footnote 100
Such cues provided by issues of compensation and commemoration in the 1990s have resulted in an influx of new material by ex–child internees, many of whom had spent their formative years in the camps. Written decades after the actual events of imprisonment, these retrospective accounts are generally contemplative and anecdotal in character and appear to have been commonly prompted by a desire to make sense of the years of captivity. The experiences of various minority groups within the British Empire, such as Eurasians and Baghdadi Jews, also came into greater public focus during this period, even as recently as 2006, when the media began publicizing that some of these ex-internees were excluded by the British government from receiving compensation.Footnote 101 The decreased marginalization of Eurasians as a group has also encouraged many to publicize their war experiences. Some, like Sheila Allan, began publishing their camp diaries to considerable public interest (her book was first published in 1994 and is now in its third edition). Allan was encouraged by her family to make her wartime experiences known and found the publication of her wartime diary to be “a healing process,” albeit one that is “still continuing.”Footnote 102 As her diary suggests, she was a motherless child of seventeen when first interned; at Changi, she lost her father too. Like many young internees, she had come of age during captivity and had to begin her adult life with very few possessions of her own. As she wrote forlornly in her diary in September 1945, “I don’t think anyone really knows what he or she is going to do. … I’m not sure how the world is going to treat me … and I’m scared, really scared.” It may be argued that the distance of several decades may have provided sufficient emotional distance for these narrators looking back on their younger versions to see an altogether different person, a child whose innocence was irretrievably tarnished by war and imprisonment.Footnote 103 The passage of time may have also supplied them with new insights about the significance (or value) of their internment experiences and the impact of captivity on their subsequent lives. These elements featured significantly in my interview with the late Douglas Bidmead in 2004, who was interned at the Lintang camp in Sarawak as a youth and learned the science of bookkeeping from a fellow internee over the years of incarceration. During our interview, Bidmead reflected at length on how his life and subsequent postwar career as an auditor were shaped by his wartime education and experiences (and particularly by his interest in bookkeeping). However, his focus often shifted to broader issues of postwar significance: the events of internment were no longer simply about what occurred but what they really meant, how they changed him, and how they affected his subsequent life.Footnote 104
Ways of Remembering
The evidence also suggests that some ex-internees were prompted to recount their experiences as a result of the intersection of their war memories with later life stages (especially in terms of the perceived positive impact of these wartime experiences). Some have even described internment as an adventure into the frontiers of the human spirit, of stoicism in the face of adversity, and of heroic fortitude in the midst of danger. Others were convinced that their wartime experiences were emotionally liberating and offered an unexpected sense of fulfillment. As Gladys Tompkins reflected in her 1977 memoirs, her years of Changi internment “were not really wasted—they were rich in experience and unforgettable. In fact reminiscing still makes me emotional.”Footnote 105 J. S. Potter similarly felt that “to lose one’s property, to suffer privation and experience cruelty does not do one any harm, rather good, providing one is not permanently maimed. … The experience of captivity taught me a sense of values.”Footnote 106 Indeed, many retrospectives have focused on core values of resilience, mateship, and fellow feeling, with sentiments along the lines of “we were all friends and comrades during difficult times,” “those years of internment were not really wasted,” “they did me quite a lot of good,” or “I would not have missed much of it for anything in the world.”Footnote 107 Scholars have observed that war testimonies frequently place an emphasis on lessons acquired (and shared) in adversity. From his interviews with Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors, Robert Jay Lifton observed that they often “talk about something they’ve learned. Some have amazed me and troubled me by saying they would not want to have missed the experience.”Footnote 108 Many ex-internees were similarly persuaded that they had experienced something of value during the war and that incarceration had taught them something useful about life. “In retrospect,” reflected Lawrence Kadoorie in 1979, “I can say [that internment] provided a clearer perspective, a better understanding of true values, and a greater tolerance in dealing with people.”Footnote 109
The contribution of ex-internees to oral history enterprises has also added a new dynamic to the recent wave of war narratives. Such developments were intimately linked with the increasing scholarly interest in oral histories over the past two decades; as Wievorka has argued, the proliferation of testimony projects has resulted in the “era of the witness.”Footnote 110 The public aims of these oral history projects (i.e., the acquisition and preservation of firsthand testimony about the Pacific war), and perhaps more intrinsically the physical proximity and interest shown by interviewers, may have enabled many ex-internees to believe that it is indeed possible for their voices to be heard. Several have described their participation in these projects as being profoundly cathartic or unexpectedly liberating, especially from the burden of prolonged silence. On a related note, the retrieval of internment memories may also be linked to a three-generational family process. The children of ex-internees often had little interest in what had happened to their parents or were similarly intent on escaping the past (especially one that had little conventional heroism attached to it). However, as some ex-internees have noted, the baggage of war was often replaced by curiosity two generations later. Indeed, they were encouraged to speak about their experiences as result of the interest shown by their grandchildren.Footnote 111
Though not the focus of this study, some observations may be made about the content of these late-life remembrances. Many retrospective memories surveyed in this study contain significant elements of reordering and change, with new layers added and old memories replaced or rearranged. Thus, by no means is there a single, consensual narrative of internment under the Japanese; few ex-internees held identical opinions about the significance of their wartime experiences.Footnote 112 Many studies of individual (and collective) memory have approached memory as something tenuously connected with historical experience and shaped by forces of displacement, selection, cross-referencing, and substitution.Footnote 113 Film and television, in particular, have been widely acknowledged by scholars as powerful elements in shaping private interpretations of the past. For instance, war films may provide ex-prisoners with images that can often replace actual memories of the period, thus “creating a contrived but very effective” idea of past events.Footnote 114 In his interviews with Australian veterans from the First World War, Alistair Thomson was struck by the extent to which private memories became entangled with public representations. In some conversations, he noted, he felt as though he was listening to narrations of the film Gallipoli.Footnote 115 Likewise, in her interviews with Australian POWs, Annette Hamilton noted that scenes derived from the film Bridge on the River Kwai were frequently juxtaposed with the personal recollections of those who had labored along the railway.Footnote 116 Many retrospectives of ex-internees of the Japanese similarly contain complex intersections between personal experiences with episodes described in books, films, or memoirs written by other ex-prisoners of the Japanese (which validated and may have even substituted their own memories of the period).Footnote 117 It may thus be suggested that private memories of internment cannot be separated from the effects of public and cultural forces, especially if they are distanced from events by several decades or more.
Conclusions
This article argues that motivations to remember (or forget) in the case of Japanese-held internees were altogether distinct from other Second World War captives as a result of their unusual circumstances of captivity and their ambiguous positions in the postwar world. There is thus a need for a greater awareness of these constraints and limitations when examining memories from the Pacific theater and for studies to adopt a more diagnostic approach when constructing histories based on these recollections. Many British ex-internees of the Japanese have either confronted or avoided the act of bearing testimony over the past six decades about their experiences of incarceration. As this article has demonstrated, some were prompted to record their experiences out of a desire to memorialize or bear witness. However, other ex-internees were deterred from doing so by a variety of personal and cultural dilemmas. Some were convinced that their experiences were inconsequential in the light of greater brutalities perpetrated by the Japanese during the war, while the memories of others were subsumed by the harsh realities of postwar conditions. But the evidence also suggests that many began to speak about their wartime experiences after several years. Their actions were intimately connected with various social and political developments within British society, such as the changing cultural climate and the democratization of representation. Some deeply repressed memories of the war were also revived in later years by a range of personal psychological cues, such as old age, retirement, or bereavement. Recent decades have also witnessed a rising effort by some ex-internees to publicize their war memories out of a moral urge to correct false impressions and to present more accurate truths, especially in the light of portrayals of Japanese captivity in film and in the mass media.
However, this process of remembering has been far from a simple linear development from silence to eloquence. When the stark horrors of the Holocaust emerged into the public consciousness after the war, the sufferings of Japanese-held civilians quickly paled in comparison. National memory of the Second World War celebrated the defeat of fascism in Europe; ex-internees of the Japanese not only belonged to an altogether different theater of war but were perceived to be passive prisoners rather than active citizens for the duration of the conflict. Also, being physical embodiments of a colonial past (and of humiliating defeat by the Japanese), British ex-internees have occupied an ambiguous position in relation to understandings of empire, especially with regard to the uneasy legacy of colonialism. Such fundamental ambiguities have often relegated ex-internees of the Japanese to the sidelines in the construction of official narratives of the war and bedeviled their own attempts to make sense of their experiences. Indeed, a large proportion of their testimonies have alluded to their struggles for attention and recognition, or to the neglect, incomprehension, or indifference that they have encountered. For many ex-internees of the Japanese, the very act of bearing testimony has often been a challenge.
