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Voices and Silences of Memory: Civilian Internees of

the Japanese in British Asia during the Second World
War
Felicia Yap
The Journal of British Studies / Volume 50 / Issue 04 / October 2011, pp 917 - 940
DOI: 10.1086/661602, Published online: 21 December 2012
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021937100001714
How to cite this article:

Felicia Yap (2011). Voices and Silences of Memory: Civilian Internees of the Japanese in
British Asia during the Second World War. The Journal of British Studies, 50, pp 917-940
doi:10.1086/661602
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Voices and Silences of Memory: Civilian
Internees of the Japanese in British Asia
during the Second World War
Felicia Yap
W hen 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 nu-
merous internment camps in the region.1 Since the end of the war, the expe-
riences 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
Felicia Yap is a fellow in international history at the London School of Economics. Her publications
have examined issues of captivity, collaboration, and resistance during the Japanese occupation of British
Asia.
1
The precise number of British internees held by the Japanese during the war is unclear. After the
war, various documents offered figures ranging from 15,012 to 18,486. Some studies in the 1950s
proposed that 19,800 British passport holders were interned during the conflict. A memorial book
completed by the Association of British Civilian Internees—Far East Region (ABCIFER) in 2009
contains the names of 20,800 British internees (19,217 civilian, 1,551 dominion, and 32 colonial).
See Ronald William Bridge, in “Introduction to Memorial Book” and “ABCIFER—a History” (March
2009) (copies available from the author upon request); Michael Cunningham, “Prisoners of the Japanese
and the Politics of Apology: A Battle over History and Memory,” Journal of Contemporary History 39,
no. 4 (October 2004): 562. Van Waterford gives the following estimated numbers of British internees
in Japanese-occupied territories: Japan (350), China and Hong Kong (7,250), French Indochina (188),
Burma (190), Siam (200), Philippines (1,500), Malaya and Singapore (3,900), Sumatra (700), Java
(700), and Borneo (225), noting that these figures were approximate, as some prisoners did not reveal
their nationality. See Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II: Statistical History,
Personal Narratives and Memorials concerning POWs in Camps and on Hellships, Civilian Internees,
Asian Slave Labourers and Others Captured in the Pacific Theatre (Jefferson, NC, 1994), 211, 233,
235, 248–49, 261, 268, 293, 319, 329; D. van Velden, De Japanse Interneringskampen Voor Burgers
Gedurende De Tweede Wereldoorlog (Japanese civilian internment camps during the Second World War)
(Groningen, 1963), 519–44.
Journal of British Studies 50 (October 2011): 917–940

䉷 2011 by The North American Conference on British Studies.
All rights reserved. 0021-9371/2011/5004-0006$10.00
917
918 䡵 YAP
and publishing successes, their voices have been largely neglected in wider com-
memorations 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 suc-
cessive 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.”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 tes-
timony 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, repa-
ration, 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,
2
Annette Wievorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY, 2006), xv, 1, 129.
VOICES AND SILENCES OF MEMORY 䡵 919
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 nar-

ratives 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.”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 po-
litical leaders” (as Jay Winter has phrased it), which, in turn, has provided a
framework within which individual memories were reshaped and constructed.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 indi-
viduals as their own.”5 As Peter Novick has documented, Jewish organizations
have been instrumental players in spreading awareness of the Holocaust within
American society.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.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
3
Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War
Two (Cambridge, 2007), 203–4.
4
Jay Winter, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War,” in War and
Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge, 1999), 41.
5
Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford, 1999), 2.
6
Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London, 2000),
208. For other recent studies and review articles of Holocaust memories, see Michael Rothberg, Mul-
tidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA, 2009);
and Tim Cole, “Scales of Memory, Layers of Memory: Recent Works on Memories of the Second
World War and the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (January 2002): 129–38.
7
Winter, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance,” 40–41, 59.
920 䡵 YAP
comparative absence of support networks or organizational structures from which

Holocaust survivors have commonly benefited.8
Race was another critical factor that influenced these processes of bearing tes-
timony. 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.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.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.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.”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.”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 par-
ticular, 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.14 As a result of these
8
Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 202–3.
9
The broader racial context of the Pacific war, especially in terms of British and Japanese racial
perceptions of each other, is documented by John Dower in War without Mercy: Race and Power in
the Pacific War (London, 1986).
10
Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 168, 171.
11
Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New
York, 2004), 67–68.
12
David Bosanquet, Escape through China (London, 1983), 11; Horne, Race War! 68.
13
Gwen Priestwood, Through Japanese Barbed Wire (London, 1944), 24–25.
14
For some recent discussions of colonial violence within the British Empire, see Stephen Howe,
“Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France,” His-
toire@Politique 11 (May–August 2010): 1–18; Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of
Empire in Kenya (London, 2005). Similar debates have also been played out on the “other side,”
with the Japanese imperial legacy and the experiences of Japanese settlers and colonists coming under
renewed scrutiny in recent years. Some key texts in this regard are Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire:
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.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.”16 Elements of colonial nostalgia have char-
acterized 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.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 nos-
talgia” became an established feature of British public culture, with a profusion
of memoirs, family biographies, and novels about the closing decades of empire.18
Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, CA, 1998); and Lori Watt, When Empire
Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA, 2009).
15
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London,
2004), 34–35.
16
Priestwood, Through Japanese Barbed Wire, 1–2; Joan Cummack interview, 5 July 1995, Hong
Kong Museum of History, Oral History Project, quoted in Horne, Race War! 62. For other nostalgic
discussions of prewar colonial experiences, see K. H. Digby, Lawyer in the Wilderness (Ithaca, NY,
1980); Hilda E. Bates, “Missie Bates: Memoirs of a Colonial Nursing Sister,” Imperial War Museum,
London, Documents and Sound Section (hereafter IWM), 91/35/1; Peter H. H. Howes, In a Fair
Ground or Cibus Cassowarii (London, 1995); and C. Hudson Southwell, Unchartered Waters (Calgary,
1999).
17
Elizabeth Buettner, “From Somebodies to Nobodies: Britons Returning Home from India,” in
Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. Martin Daunton and
Bernhard Rieger (Oxford, 2001), 221–40; Antoinette Burton, “India, Inc.? Nostalgia, Memory and
the Empire of Things,” in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester, 2001),
217–32.
18
Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, 2004), 264–67,
and “Cemeteries, Public Memory, and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India,” History and
Memory 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 5–42.
922 䡵 YAP
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 sug-
gested that nostalgia may even serve a “function of denial,” as pleasurable sen-
sations that accompany nostalgic memories may “distort or camouflage” more
painful ones.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 admin-
istrators, business chiefs, wealthy taipans (owners of foreign mercantile establish-
ments), 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 Eu-
ropean connections). Within the camps, the Japanese frequently preferred to leave
the internees to their own administrative devices. In drawing up their initial reg-
ulations 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.”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.21
19
Nancy Wood, “Colonial Nostalgia and Le Premier Homme,” in Vectors of Memory, 145–46; Harvey
A. Kaplan, “The Psychopathology of Nostalgia,” Psychoanalytic Review 74, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 474.
20
“Copy of Original Japanese Internment Regulations, Foreigners Joint Living Quarters, Civil Ad-
ministrative Department, Gunseicho,” 8 January 1942, U.S. National Archives and Records Admin-
istration (NARA), College Park, MD, RG 389, box 2121A.
21
Only a few analytical studies of civilian internees of the Japanese have been conducted in recent
years. For a comparative analysis of internment in East and Southeast Asia from the perspectives of
men, women, and children, see Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese,
1941–1945: A Patchwork of Internment (London, 2004); and Bernice Archer and Kent Fedorowich,
“The Women of Stanley: Internment in Hong Kong,” Women’s History Review 5, no. 3 (September
1996): 373–99. The experiences of Australian civilians interned by the Japanese are documented in
Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners.
For some internees, these circumstances (and the imposed idleness of intern-
ment) offered ample possibilities for reflection. Others began recording their ex-
periences simply to prevent mental inertia during captivity. As the Stanley internee
L. A. Collyer remarked in his diary, “Everything that occupies the mind is inval-
uable in our present circumstances. That was the main reason for my commencing
this scribble.”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 per-
ceived danger or fear of the Japanese authorities.23 However, many of these records
were lost, damaged, or deliberately destroyed as a result of the pressures of in-
carceration, and the evidence that remains today is often fragmentary and geo-
graphically 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.24 Finally, a third and much larger wave of material
appeared over subsequent decades, in the form of published camp diaries, biog-
raphies, 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 ad-
ministrative 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.”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.”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
22
L. A. Collyer, “A Diary, 1st January 1945–9th September 1945, Kept by L. A. Collyer Whilst
Interned by the Japanese in Stanley Internment Camp, Hong Kong,” 16 March 1945, Hong Kong
University Library (hereafter HKUL), MSS 940.547252 C71, 34. See also Peter E. I. Lee, quoted in
Don Wall, Kill the Prisoners (Mona Vale, New South Wales, 1996), 2.
23
Katherine de Moubray diary, interpolation written in 1949, IWM, Con shelf, 8; Hobart B. Amstutz,
“An Amstutz Newsletter Covering 20 January 1942 to 7 September 1945,” 28 December 1945,
Australian War Memorial (hereafter AWM), Canberra, 3DRL/7415A, 10.
24
Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians, 13.
25
John Beville Archer, ed., Lintang Camp: Official Documents and Papers Collected from the Records
of the Civilian Internment Camp (No. 1 Camp) at Lintang, Kuching, Sarawak, during the Years 1942–
1945 (Kuching, 1946), preface; John Beville Archer and Vernon L. Porritt, eds., Glimpses of Sarawak
between 1912 and 1946: Autobiographical Extracts and Articles of an Officer of the Rajahs (Hull, 1997),
43, 47.
26
J. L. Noakes, “Report upon Defence Measures Adopted in Sarawak from June 1941 to the
Occupation in December 1941 by Imperial Japanese Forces,” 15 February 1946, Bodleian Library of
Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (hereafter RHL), Oxford, MSS Pac.s.62, preface.
924 䡵 YAP
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.27 After this incident, the fear of possible repercus-
sions 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.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 1969.29 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.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.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.32
These fears also affected what was ultimately recorded and remembered during
this period. Indeed, many records kept during the war itself were often under-
pinned by a sense of restraint and caution arising from self-imposed censorship,
with details deliberately “veiled in code” or omitted altogether.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.”34 The Changi internee Tyler Thomson was similarly “cautious
and circumspect,” noting that he “undertook no direct discussion of the Japanese
27
This incident was known as the Double Tenth (10 October 1943), when the Kempeitai arrested
and tortured some fifty-seven civilians and internees on suspicion of their involvement in a raid on
Singapore harbor (which was carried out by Allied commandos and culminated in the sinking of a
number of Japanese ships). None of these individuals had, in fact, been involved in the planning or
execution of the raid. For more details of the episode, see Colin Sleeman and S. C. Silkin, eds., Trial
of Sumida Haruzo and Twenty Others: The “Double Tenth” Trial (London, 1951).
28
For some examples, see Archer, Lintang Camp; A. H. P. Humphrey diary, 6 September 1945,
IWM 67/191/1, 277; Josephine Foss, letter to “Family and Friends,” 24 August 1945, RHL,
MSS.Ind.Ocn.s.83, 1; memo to the Colonial Secretary, 9 September 1945, Hong Kong Public Record
Office (hereafter HKPRO), HKRS 163/1/81; Franklin Gimson, letter to G. E. J. Gent, Colonial
Office, 1 September 1945, HKPRO, HKRS 163/1/81, 1; G. C. Allen diary, IWM, 96/19/1, foreword.
29
“Journal of an Unidentified Civilian Internee in Singapore, 1942–1945,” IWM, misc. 219(3150).
30
Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 17; Hilda E. Bates, “Missie Bates: Memoirs of a Colonial
Nursing Sister,” IWM, 91/35/1, preface.
31
Agnes Newton Keith, Three Came Home (London, 1948), 10.
32
W. H. P. Chatley, “Report on Wireless Activities and Escape Plans in the Civilian Internment
Camp, Stanley (Afterwards Known as the Military Internment Camp),” 27 November 1945, HKPRO,
HKRS 163/1/81, 2, 6; J. L. Noakes, “Report upon Defence Measures Adopted in Sarawak from June
1941 to the Occupation in December 1941 by Imperial Japanese Forces,” 15 February 1946, RHL,
Oxford, MSS Pac.s.62, preface. See also John Stericker interview, “Surrender of Hong Kong 1941 to
Surrender of Japanese 1945, Radio or Television Script, Hong Kong,” HKPRO, HKMS 100/1/3, 3.
33
Tyler Thompson, Freedom in Internment: Under Japanese Rule in Singapore, 1942–1945 (South
Pasadena, CA, 198–), 77.
34
Lee, 3 October 1943, in Wall, Kill The Prisoners, 132.
or our treatment in camp.”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.”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.”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.”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.”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).40
Thus, some internees even made false or deliberately misleading statements in their
diaries to protect themselves if their writings were ever confiscated.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.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.”43 Indeed, this urge to
35
Thompson, Freedom in Internment, 77.
36
G. C. Allen diary, 19 August 1945, IWM, 96/19/1. See also John Hayter, Priest in Prison: Four
Years of Life in Japanese-Occupied Singapore, 1941–1945 (Worthing, 1989), 16.
37
W. A. Baker diary, 9 June 1942, IWM, 01/24/1, 13.
38
G. C. Allen diary, 3 June 1945, IWM, 96/19/1.
39
Stericker, “Surrender of Hong Kong 1941 to Surrender of Japanese 1945,” HKPRO, HKMS
100/1/3, 3.
40
For internees’ fears of the potential of Japanese sexual violence in the camps, see Twomey, Aus-
tralia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 96–97.
41
In May 1945, G. C. Allen wrote in his Changi diary that the camp “is full of the news that Germany
is at last and finally beaten. . . . I cannot check it up and I cannot even remember whom I got it from.”
He later inserted a note in the margin after the war: “Of course I knew perfectly well. That was for
the benefit of any of our gaolers who might see my record.” See G. C. Allen diary, 5 May 1945, IWM,
96/19/1. See also Donald C. Bowie, “Captive Surgeon in Hong Kong: The Story of the British
Military Hospital, Hong Kong, 1942–1945,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society 15 (1975): 152.
42
Annette Hamilton, “Skeletons of Empire: Australians and the Burma-Thailand Railway,” in Memory
and History in Twentieth Century Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (Melbourne,
1994), 96–97.
43
Geoffrey Emerson, “A Note on Personal Interviews,” in “Stanley Internment Camp, Hong Kong,
1942–1945: A Study of Civilian Internment during the Second World War” (MPhil diss., University
of Hong Kong, 1973), 308.
926 䡵 YAP
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, over-
whelmed in numbers and living in a cage, we have never surrendered.”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.”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.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.”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.”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.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
44
Lionel Morris, “Escape without Freedom,” IWM, 91/18/1, 115; G. W. Pringle diary, IWM, 85/
36/1, 28788.
45
Document written by a Stanley internee, HKPRO, HKRS 163/1/81, 3.
46
Keith, Three Came Home, 9.
47
Hilda E. Bates, “Missie Bates: Memoirs of a Colonial Nursing Sister,” 21 September 1944, IWM,
91/35/1.
48
Keith, Three Came Home, 10.
49
See also Felicia Yap, “Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War and Internment Experience: The
Lintang Camp, Kuching, Sarawak, 1942–1945” (MPhil diss., University of Cambridge, 2004), 9.
accounts of life under the Japanese.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.”51 Some ex-internees began publishing revised
versions of their camp diaries, while others produced short pamphlets and news-
letters based on records kept during the war.52 Agnes Newton Keith began gath-
ering 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 star-
ring 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.53
CAPTIVITY MEMORIES AS SILENCE AND STRUGGLE
Despite the emergence of some published material in the years immediately fol-
lowing 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 war-
time 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
50
Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians, 13. For some examples of these accounts, see C. P.
Ambler diary, 17 May 1942, IWM, 84/30/1; Ernest P. Hodgkin, “Changi Diary: A Civilian Internee’s
Account of Imprisonment in Singapore (February 1942 to August 1945),” 26 April 1942, AWM,
PR00788. Matthew Stibb has observed similar trends in the emergence of memoirs of British ex-
internees of the Ruhleben Camp in Germany after the First World War; most memoirs appeared “in
the months immediately following the armistice” and were often “printed privately for circulation among
friends and family.” See Matthew Stibb, British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp,
1914–1918 (Manchester, 2008), 169.
51
John Stericker, “Captive Colony: The Story of Stanley Camp, Hong Kong,” HKUL, MSS
940.547252 S8, preface, 2.
52
Some pamphlets and newsletters published by ex-prisoners both during and immediately after
the war include Hobart B. Amstutz, “An Amstutz Newsletter,” AWM, 3DRL/7415A; George E.
Baxter, Personal Experiences during the Siege of Hong Kong, December 8th–25th, 1941: Internment
by the Japanese, January 5th–June 29th, 1942 (Sydney, 194–); Jean Gittins, I Was at Stanley (Hong
Kong, 1946); M. F. Key, Hong Kong Before, During and After the Pacific War: Being Chiefly an
Account of the Stanley Civilian Internment Camp (Hong Kong, 1946); Robert B. Hammond, Bond-
servants of the Japanese (San Pedro, CA, 1943).
53
928 䡵 YAP
POWs held captive by the Japanese in Asia, in comparison, was 25 percent).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.”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.”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.”57 John Stericker felt likewise;
as he concluded of Stanley, “there is little of the sheer brutality of Belsen.”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.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.”60
Many ex-internees upon returning home to Britain were also silenced by their
54
Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, 145; Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson,
The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History (St. Leonards, New South Wales, 1993), 164.
55
Mercury, 14 September 1945, 3, quoted in Christina Twomey, “Remembering the War and For-
getting Civilians: The Place of Civilian Internees in Australian Commemorations of the Pacific War,”
in Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia, ed. Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn (Oxford, 2008),
216, and Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 203–4, 207.
56
Hobart B. Amstutz, “An Amstutz Newsletter,” AWM, 3DRL/7415A, 13.
57
Franklin Gimson, quoted in Horne, Race War! 84.
58
John Stericker, “Captive Colony: The Story of Stanley Camp, Hong Kong,” HKUL, MSS
940.547252 S8, author’s note. See also Gittins, I Was at Stanley, 17; and Ernest P. Hodgkin, “Changi
Diary: A Civilian Internee’s Account of Imprisonment in Singapore (February 1942 to August 1945),”
16 September 1945, AWM, PR00788, 64. The Stanley internee Jean Gittins noted that “we found
when the war was over that many other camps had suffered hardships and privations far greater than
ours. The large numbers who succumbed to malnutrition and disease in Shamshuipo, Hainan and
Singapore, to name a few of the POW camps, and the pitiful state of many of those who managed to
survive, made light of our situation. Above all, the poignant stories told by returning prisoners from
Japan showed how relatively fortunate we, in Stanley, had been.” Quoted in Alan Birch and Martin
Cole, Captive Years: The Occupation of Hong Kong, 1941–1945 (Hong Kong, 1982), 178.
59
Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians, 9, and “‘A Low-Key Affair’: Memories of Civilian
Internment in the Far East, 1942–1945,” in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martin
Evans and Ken Lunn (Oxford, 1997), 46.
60
G. C. Allen diary, IWM, 96/19/1, foreword.
discovery of an indifferent society burdened with its own scars and postwar prob-
lems (and generally oblivious to what they had been through).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.”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.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 re-
ception that greeted ex-internees in postwar Britain may have accordingly con-
tributed to a suppression of wartime memories.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.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.”66 Unlike ex-
61
Archer, “A Low Key Affair,” 53, and The Internment of Western Civilians, 13; Ben Shepard, “A
Clouded Homecoming?” History Today 46, no. 8 (August 1996): 10–13.
62
Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 14.
63
Winston Churchill, quoted in Angus Calder, The People’s War, 1939–1945 (London, 1969), 274.
64
65
The immediate priority of the federation was a campaign to secure a share of Japanese assets
confiscated under the 1952 Japanese Peace Treaty, “to be distributed to ex-POWs as compensation.”
By the 1950s, the federation was “organising regular meetings, a grand annual reunion at the Royal
Albert Hall or Royal Festival Hall” for more than two thousand ex-POWs (a figure sustained until the
1980s) and a “remembrance service at the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.” See Karl Hack and
Kevin Blackburn, “The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat: Protest and Ex-Prisoner of War
Memory in Britain and Australia,” in Forgotten Captives (Oxford, 2008), 154.
66
Sibylla Jane Flower, “Memory and the Prisoner of War Experience: The United Kingdom,” in
Hack and Blackburn, Forgotten Captives, 62.
930 䡵 YAP
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.”67 Some were also forced to come to terms
with a “‘Rip van Winkle effect’ of their lost years when confronted with “unex-
pected bereavement, infidelity or estrangement” (many internees received very few
messages from their families and friends in three and a half years).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.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.”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.71 Equally overwhelming for many, too, were the postwar
challenges of financial insecurity and unemployment. Several ex–colonial admin-
istrators 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 1948.72 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
67
Bowie, “Captive Surgeon,” 151. See also Sheila Bruhn-Allan interview, Singapore National Archives
(SNA), Oral History Department (OHD), 2740, 26; Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians, 12–
13.
68
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London,
2007), 57.
69
A. D. Blackburn, “Stanley Internment Camp,” in “An Account of Personal Experiences of My
Wife and Myself at Hongkong during the Japanese Attack and Afterwards, 1942,” HKUL, MSS
940.547252 B62, 4.
70
Gittins, I Was at Stanley, 22.
71
Hank Nelson, Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon (Sydney, 1985), 212–13. See also Betty
Peters, “The Life Experience of Partners of Ex-POWs of the Japanese,” Journal of the Australian War
Memorial 28 (April 1996); and Gabriele Rosenthal, “German War Memories: Narrability and the
Biographical and Social Functions of Remembering,” Oral History 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1991): 37.
72
For an analysis of the origins of the Malayan emergency, see A. J. Stockwell, “‘A Widespread and
Long-Concocted Plot to Overthrow Government in Malaya’? The Origins of the Malayan Emergency,”
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, no. 3 (September 1993): 66–88.
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.”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.”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.”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.”76 Thus, the true depth (or actual extent) of accumulated wartime trauma
was often unclear, with scars remaining even after several years.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 Jap-
anese or from buying Japanese cars (and even Japanese electrical appliances).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.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
73
Gittins, I Was at Stanley, 16, 18.
74
O. W. Gilmour, With Freedom to Singapore (London, 1950), 96.
75
Quoted in Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 57.
76
Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 164, 182.
77
Cathy Caruth has argued that trauma is characterized by “a temporal delay that carries the individual
beyond the shock of the first moment” and is thus often experienced “belatedly; in its repeated possession
of the one who experiences it.” See Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma:
Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), 4, 10.
78
Interviews with Douglas Bidmead (10 February 2004), Ernest Darch (13 February 2004), Peter
E. I. Lee (18 December 2005), and Graham Ranald (26 May 2005).
79
Michael Ferrier, “Stanley Internment Camp, 1942–1945,” in L. A. Collyer, “A Diary, 1st January
1945–9th September 1945, Kept by L. A. Collyer Whilst Interned by the Japanese in Stanley In-
ternment Camp, Hong Kong,” 16 March 1945, HKUL, MSS 940.547252 C71, 82.
932 䡵 YAP
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 “nei-
ther politic nor appropriate” to discuss unpleasant memories of the conflict.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 mem-
orandum 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.”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.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
80
81
A. Gilmour, memos to the Colonial Secretary, 8 and 9 September 1945, HKPRO, HKRS 163/
1/81.
82
To qualify for the scheme, “one had to be a British national over the age of twenty-one on 8
December 1941, normally resident in the United Kingdom before internment, and to have returned
to the United Kingdom before an application for compensation was made.” See Andrew Dismore,
“Wartime Civilian Prisoners (Far East),” 7 September 2004, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Han-
sard vol. 424, pt. no. 26, cols. 686–700. In 1948, the American War Crimes Act granted payments of
US$60 per month for adult internees and US$25 for children for the period spent in internment (some
were also awarded US$1 per day for “missed meals”). See Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians,
239.
concomitant desire to set the record straight).83 In 1957, David Lean’s film ad-
aptation of Boulle’s novel became an international box-office hit, won seven Acad-
emy 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.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.85
Memories of internment were also stimulated by changes in mediums of ex-
pression (and their objectives). The 1960s and 1970s, in particular, were char-
acterized 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 dif-
ferent memories. These changes were accompanied by new democratizing incli-
nations whereby the experiences and perspectives of “ordinary” people were given
increasing weight.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.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 “in-
dividual alone became the public embodiment of history.”88 History documentaries
became individualized and focused on “authenticity,” through their foregrounding
83
Pierre Boulle, Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai (Paris, 1952), translated into The Bridge over the River
Kwai (London, 1954); James Clavell, King Rat (London, 1962); Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
(London, 1950). The 1956 movie A Town Like Alice (based on the first half of Shute’s novel) depicted
the experiences of a group of British women and children captured by the Japanese in Malaya. Due
to its popularity, the movie was remade and serialized on television in the 1980s. The miniseries attracted
70 percent of the television audience in Australia and an average audience of 15 million in Britain. See
Penny Summerfield, “Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in
Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 4 (October 2009): 949–51;
Christina Twomey, “Retaining Integrity? Sex, Race and Gender in Narratives of Western Women De-
tained by the Japanese in World War II,” in Prisoners of War: Prisoners of Peace; Captivity, Homecoming
and Memory in World War II, ed. Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (Oxford, 2005), 176.
84
David Lean continued to suggest dark overtones to the British imperial venture in Lawrence of
Arabia (Academy Award for Best Picture, 1962), as well in his 1984 adaptation of E. M. Forster’s
novel, A Passage to India.
85
Singapore Standard, 7 May 1958 and 20 May 1958; Yorkshire Post and Leeds Reporter, 6 May
1958, quoted in Hack and Blackburn, “Bridge on the River Kwai,” 158–59.
86
Remco Raben, “Dutch Memories of Captivity in the Pacific War,” in Hack and Blackburn, Forgotten
Captives, 103–4.
87
Wood, Vectors of Memory, 9.
88
Wievorka, The Era of the Witness, 97.
934 䡵 YAP
of eyewitness accounts or survivor testimonies. This occurred in parallel with shift-

ing paradigms within academic history to a new focus on the marginalized, per-
secuted, 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.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.”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.”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
1987.92 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 Aus-
tralian 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.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 par-
ticular, several ex-internees were awakened to their memories by issues of com-
memoration and compensation during this period. A succession of war anniver-
saries (such as the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the end of the war in 1995
89
For related debates about the fragmentation and democratization of memory during this period,
see Raben, “Dutch Memories of Captivity,” 103–5; Paula Hamilton, “The Knife Edge: Debates about
Memory and History,” in Darian-Smith and Hamilton, Memory and History, 9–33; T. G. Ashplant,
Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London,
2000), 49; Annette Wievorka, “From Survivor to Witness: Voices from the Shoah,” in Winter and
Sivan, War and Remembrance, 137–39.
90
Henry Krystal, “Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up,” in Caruth, Trauma, 83; Hans
Schweizer-Iten, letter to John Hayter, 29 March 1990, IWM, 90/21/1.
91
Bowie, “Captive Surgeon in Hong Kong,” 151.
92
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (London, 1984).
93
Mark Cornelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, 2004),
254.
and 2005) began generating an extraordinary amount of commemorative interest

by inundating public forums and television screens with war stories and simulta-
neously 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 ex-
perience, testimony and current status as ‘victims’ or ‘survivors,’” as well as financial
reparation or compensation.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.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.96 Some even “booed and
whistled, in a calculated gesture of disrespect.”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 govern-
ment eventually decided that all surviving British ex-captives (or their surviving
spouses) were to receive an ex gratia payment of £10,000 each.98 Although the
94
Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper, The Politics of War Memory, 3–4.
95
Archer, Internment of Western Civilians, 240–43. By 2004, the association had an active mem-
bership of seven hundred fifty, representing the estimated 2,400 surviving British ex-internees of the
Japanese, including those who had been born in captivity. See Cunningham, “Prisoners of the Japanese,”
562.
96
More than two decades earlier, the Shōwa Emperor Hirohito (Akihito’s father) was accorded a
“silent welcome” as he traveled with the queen up The Mall during his state visit to Britain in October
1971—“a welcome that referred directly to Japan’s war record and in particular the treatment by the
Japanese of POWs and civilian internees.” See Flower, “Memory and the Prisoner of War Experience,”
65.
97
The Economist commented on their cause, noting in an editorial that “if they really wanted to do
something to pacify the former prisoners, it would be open to both governments . . . to renegotiate
the miserly settlement of claims reached by their predecessors in the 1950s.” See the Economist, “Don’t
Mention the War,” 28 May 1998.
98
The campaign by ABCIFER and JLCSA was initially supported by a “Cross Party Group” of
members of the House of Commons and, subsequently, by the executive of the NFFCA and the British
Legion in 1998. See Flower, “Memory and the Prisoner of War Experience,” 67. By September 2004,
some 1,882 payments had been made to former internees. See Dismore, “Wartime Civilian Prisoners
936 䡵 YAP
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.99 This an-
nouncement 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 govern-
ment—though starkly belated—has provided a measure of closure to their wartime
ordeals.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.101 The decreased marginaliza-
tion of Eurasians as a group has also encouraged many to publicize their war
experiences. Some, like Sheila Allan, began publishing their camp diaries to con-
siderable 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.”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
(Far East),” 7 September 2004, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Hansard vol. 424, pt. no. 26, cols.
686–88.
99
The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 declared that Japan should pay reparations “for damage
and suffering caused by it during the war.” But the treaty nevertheless recognized the constraints faced
by Japan at the time. In Article 14, Section b, the Allied Powers waived “all reparation claims of the
Allied Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken
by Japan and its nationals in the course of the prosecution of the war.” Certain types of wartime-seized
Japanese assets were nevertheless “retained, and used to compensate victims.” See P. Scott Corbett,
“In the Eye of a Hurricane, Americans in Japanese Custody during World War II,” in Hack and
Blackburn, Forgotten Captives, 120, 124.
100
Bidmead interview, 10 February 2004; Lee interview, 18 December 2005. The Canadian gov-
ernment subsequently agreed to a C$24,000 (£10,000) ex gratia payment to Pacific war veterans and
their widows. Following these developments in America, Canada, and Britain, the Australian Minister
for Veteran Affairs announced in May 2001 that a payment of A$25,000 would be granted to surviving
ex-POWs of the Japanese or their widows. See Archer, Internment of Western Civilians, 243.
101
The 2000 revised compensation scheme made a distinction between “British citizens” and “British
subjects,” and all ex-internees who lacked a “blood-link” to Britain were consequently excluded from
compensation. Former Stanley internee Diana Elias accordingly filed a civil action case against the
British government in 2001, arguing that this “blood-link” distinction was discriminatory (despite
being a holder of a British passport, the distinction rendered her ineligible for compensation due to
her Baghdadi Jewish ancestry). The High Court in London ruled in her favor in 2005, and the verdict
was upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2006. See the Standard, “Subjects of Rough Justice,” 28 October
2006.
102
Bruhn-Allan interview, 11, 45.
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.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.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 ex-
periences). 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 remi-
niscing still makes me emotional.”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.”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
103
Sheila Allan, Diary of a Girl in Changi, 1941–1945, 3rd ed. (Pymble, New South Wales, 2004),
190, 192. Carolyn Steedman has argued that the process of reworking imbues current events “with
meaning” and that “reworking provides an understanding that the child at the time can’t possess.” See
Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Essays on Writing Autobiography and History (London, 1992), 23.
104
Bidmead interview, 10 February 2004. See also Samuel Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Com-
memoration,” in Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, 208, 212.
105
Gladys Tompkins, “Three Wasted Years: Women in Changi Prison” (Hamilton, 1977), IWM,
66/254/1, preface.
106
J. S. Potter, quoted in Margaret Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun: The British in Malaya, 1880–
1960 (London, 2000), 292.
938 䡵 YAP
would not have missed much of it for anything in the world.”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 sur-
vivors, 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.”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 under-
standing of true values, and a greater tolerance in dealing with people.”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 in-
timately 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.”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 in-
terviewers, 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.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.112 Many
studies of individual (and collective) memory have approached memory as some-
thing tenuously connected with historical experience and shaped by forces of
107
These sentiments were also expressed by many ex-POWs of the Japanese. See John R. Gardiner
memoir, IWM, 66/309/1–4, 429.
108
Cathy Caruth, “An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton,” in Trauma, 135; Rodney Mace, “Invisible
History,” History Today 32, no. 12 (December 1982): 30–31.
109
Lawrence Kadoorie, “The Kadoorie Memoir,” 6 February 1979, in Dennis A. Leventhal, Sino-
Judaic Studies: Whence and Whither: An Essay and Bibliography (Hong Kong, 1985), 94.
110
Wievorka, The Era of the Witness, xv, 96; Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, eds., Witness and
Memory: The Discourse of Trauma (New York, 2003), 35.
111
Bidmead interview, 10 February 2004.
112
Scholars like Jay Winter have documented the memory phenomenon known as “interference”
whereby earlier memories are obscured by new memories. See Jay Winter, “Setting the Framework,”
in Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, 12.
displacement, selection, cross-referencing, and substitution.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.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 represen-
tations. In some conversations, he noted, he felt as though he was listening to
narrations of the film Gallipoli.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.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).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 con-
straints 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 con-
fronted 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 incon-
sequential 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 con-
nected with various social and political developments within British society, such
113
See Wood, Vectors of Memory, 2; Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3; Winter, “Setting the
Framework,” 13; Lynn Z. Bloom, “Reunion and Reinterpretation: Group Biography in Process,”
Biography 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 224.
114
Pierre Sorlin, “Children as War Victims in Postwar European Cinema,” in Winter and Sivan, War
and Remembrance, 107.
115
Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne, 1994), 7–8.
116
Hamilton, “Skeletons of Empire,” 101–4.
117
Sorlin, “Children as War Victims,” 107.
940 䡵 YAP
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 de-
velopment 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 co-
lonialism. 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 tes-
timony has often been a challenge.

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W hen invading Japanese forces seized most of Southeast Asia and

Journal of British Studies 50 (October 2011): 917–940

THE BROADER CONTEXT OF MEMORY

Methodologically, this article concentrates on the emergence of internment nar-

comparative absence of support networks or organizational structures from which

controversial currents, civilian captives of the Japanese—being men and women

suspected of anti-Japanese activities. Many of these internees were interrogated by

CAPTIVITY MEMORIES AS SILENCE AND STRUGGLE

Memories of Far East internment were also overshadowed by a postwar frenzy

of eyewitness accounts or survivor testimonies. This occurred in parallel with shift-

and 2005) began generating an extraordinary amount of commemorative interest

displacement, selection, cross-referencing, and substitution.113 Film and television,

as the changing cultural climate and the democratization of representation. Some

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