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Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps PDF

336 Pages·2020·9.725 MB·English
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PRISONERS OF THE EMPIRE PRISONERS EMPIRE of the Inside Japa nese POW Camps Sarah Kovner Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts | London, E ngland 2020 For Lily Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca First printing Cover photos: (top) Myanmar, Soft_Light/Getty Images Plus; (bottom) Prisoners in Bataan, 1942, photo by Keystone/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Cover design: Jill Breitbarth 9780674250192 (EPUB) 9780674250208 (MOBI) 9780674250215 (PDF) Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-0-674-73761-7 (alk. paper) Contents Introduction 1 A History Both Familiar and Strange 1 From Avatar of Modernization to Outlaw Nation 13 2 Singapore 43 A World Gone Topsy- Turvy 3 The Philippines 67 Commonwealth of Hell 4 A War of Words 96 5 K orea 120 Life and Death in a Model Camp 6 Captivity on the Home Front 137 7 Endings and Beginnings 157 8 Undue Pro cess 177 9 Prisoners of History 195 Renegotiating the Geneva Conventions in the Wake of War Conclusion 208 Never Again, and Again Notes 221 Archival Sources 307 Acknowl edgments 309 Index 311 Lake Baikal SIBERIA Karafuto MONGOLIA MANSHŪKOKU (MANCHUKUO) Hokkaido Mukden Sea of Konan (Hŭngnam) Japan Beijing Honshu Keijō (Seoul) Jinsen (Incheon) J A P A N Yellow CHŌSEN Tokyo (KOREA) Sea Moji Zentsuji Fukuoka Nagasaki Shikoku Nanjing Shanghai Kyushu C H I N A East China Sea PACIFI C OCEAN FORMOSA Hong (TAIWAN) Kong BURMA PHILIPPINE Hainan SEA Rangoon Burma-Thai railway South Santo Tomas Luzón Cabanatuan THAILAND China Bataan Manila Los Baños Bangkok FRENCH Sea Mindoro INDOCHINA PHILIPPINES Palawan SULU Mindanao SEA North Bornea CELEBES MALAY SEA S STATES Sarawak u matra SHŌCNhAaNn-TgŌi Borneo (SINGAPORE) D U T C H E A S T I N D I E S Japa nese Empire with discussed camps and capitals. MANSHŪKOKU Number of POWs transported (MANCHUKUO) Sea of Konan <500 Japan Honshu 500–1,000 Keijō Jinsen CHŌSEN JAPAN 1,001–3,000 (KOREA) Tokyo Yellow Pusan 4,000–10,000 Sea MojiKobe Osaka 15,507 Kochi Nagasaki Mortality rate Shanghai 52% 36% 22%–25% C H I N A 11%–20% 1%–10% FORMOSA (TAIWAN) PACIFIC Hong Kong Takao OCEAN BURMA Hainan PHILIPPINE Rangoon South SEA Moulmein China Luzón THAILAND Sea Tavoy Manila Bangkok GUAM FRENCH INDOCHINA Saigon PHILIPPINES Palawan Mindanao Jesselton Davao PALAU Sandakan North Bornea Belawan MALAY Sarawak CELEBES STATES Kuching SEA Changi Borneo SHŌNAN-TŌ (SINGAPORE) S u m atra Makkassar Batavia Surabaya DUTCH EAST IND IES Transporting POWs across vast expanses. INTRODUCTION A History Both Familiar and Strange In two days in December 1941, the Imperial Japa nese Navy and Army shocked the world with attacks on Pearl Harbor, Malaya, and Thailand. Japan invaded China in mid-1937, and careful observers had predicted Japa- nese military action. Yet most people in the United States and Britain were taken completely by surprise. In t hose days before email and f ree phone calls, before direct flights to Tokyo and Thailand, any threat from Japan seemed impossibly far away. But now Japa nese forces rapidly advanced across thousands of miles of open ocean, from the Aleutians to the straits of Malacca, from the Marshall Islands to the Burma Road. In the first five months of the Pacific War, they took as prisoners more than 140,000 Al- lied ser vicemen1 and 130,000 civilians from a dozen countries. Japa nese commanders hastily set up hundreds of POW camps and civilian intern- ment centers. Of the American POWs, one in three did not survive the war. And by the war’s end, more Australians had died in captivity than in combat. Once far away, Japan and the Japa nese became all too familiar to Western countries, above all as objects of hatred. Ever since, memoirs, popu lar histories, and literary accounts have de- scribed how the Japa nese systematically humiliated and abused their cap- tives. Whether the tragic Lieutenant Col o nel Nicholson in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai, or the heroic army airman Louis Zamperini in Laura Hillenbrand’s best- selling book Unbroken, POWs are portrayed as martyrs to the unmitigated cruelty of their guards and camp com- manders.2 These accounts often pre sent Japa nese be hav ior as simply inex- plicable. When they do offer an explanation for the harsh treatment of POWs, they often attribute it to Japa nese military education and the bushidō code— a military ideology once applied to samurai, and revived and refigured over the course of the early twentieth century. The Japa nese 1 P R I S O N E R S O F T H E E M P I R E military trained soldiers to feel extreme shame about being taken captive, and supposedly inculcated contempt against any enemy soldier who willingly surrendered. Considering that POWs in the Pacific accounted for only about 0.5  percent of Allied ser vicemen, popu lar understanding of this history has had an out- sized impact on memories of the war. Sixty- five years a fter World War II ended, Unbroken became one of the longest- running best sellers of all time. The suffering of POWs in the Pacific is so familiar in popu lar culture that it can be invoked and immediately recognized without any context or ex- planation, whether as background to a character in a John Grisham thriller, or as the beginning—in media res—of Call of Duty: World at War, the blockbuster video game.3 Yet t here have always been aspects of the captivity experience that re- sisted easy explanation. When Japan and Rus sia went to war in 1904, the international press and Western observers praised Japan’s generous treat- ment of Rus sian POWs. Japan’s scrupulous conduct forced Western powers to redefine international law as universal, rather than as the custom of Christian civilization. In World War II, many guards were not Japa nese soldiers at all, but gunzoku— Korean and Taiwanese civilian employees. And even if Japa nese notions of military honor could account for the treatment of Allied POWs, how could they explain the experience of ci- vilian internees? This experience was diff er ent from what POWs endured, but was also difficult. Some men and w omen w ere even held in the same camps as POWs. This too has s haped how people remember the Pacific War, such as in the J. G. Ballard book (and Steven Spielberg film) Empire of the Sun, and the many other accounts of Eu ro pe ans, Americans, and Australians rounded up in places like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Manila.4 Fi nally, how do we explain why the suffering and death of Allied POWs became infamous in the United States and the British Commonwealth, while it hardly figures in Japa nese popu lar memories of the Pacific War? These questions call out for a comparative analy sis. But English- language accounts usually lack an international perspective. Americans study Americans, and Australians study Australians. Very few even cite Japa- nese sources.5 These accounts seldom mention Japa nese and Japanese- American internees in the United States. Yet while the war was still being fought, the government in Tokyo focused on how the United States treated 2

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