Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps

336 Pages·2020·9.725 MB·English

by  Sarah Kovner

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