(Studies in The Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) Anoma Pieris, Lynne Horiuchi - The Architecture of Confinement - Incarceration Camps of The Pacific War-Cambridge University Press (2022)

The Architecture of Confinement
In this global and comparative study of Pacific War incarceration

environments, we explore the arc of the Pacific Basin as an archipelagic
network of militarized penal sites. Grounded in spatial, physical and
material analyses focused on experiences of civilian internees, minority
citizens and enemy prisoners of war, the book offers an architectural
and urban understanding of the unfolding history and aftermath of
World War II in the Pacific. Examples are drawn from Australia, New
Zealand, Singapore, Japan and North America. The Architecture of
Confinement highlights the contrasting physical facilities, urban forma-
tions and material character of various camps and the ways in which
these uncover different interpretations of wartime sovereignty. The
exclusion and material deprivation of selective populations within
these camp environments extend the practices by which land, labor
and capital are expropriated in settler-colonial societies – practices
critical to identity formation and endemic to their legacies of liberal
democracy.
Anoma Pieris is a Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and
Planning at The University of Melbourne. Her previous publications
include Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser under the
Cloth (2012), Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of
Singapore’s Plural Society (2009), Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri
Lanka (2018) and the anthology Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary
Politics and Built Space (2019).
Lynne Horiuchi is an independent architectural historian whose inter-
disciplinary work on the planning, design and construction of Japanese
American incarceration crosses over into Asian American and diasporic
studies with a focus on citizenship, space and race. She has created
community-based exhibits, course work and planning models using
oral history and family photographs. She is co-editor of Urban
Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island (2017) with Tanu Sankalia.
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
General Editor
Robert Gerwarth, University College Dublin
Jay Winter, Yale University
Advisory Editors
Heather Jones, University College London
Rana Mitter, University of Oxford
Michelle Moyd, Indiana University Bloomington
Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration of
two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict,
and the impact of military events on social and cultural history.
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare presents the fruits of
this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history by
cultural historians and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social and
cultural history, to the benefit of both. The series offers the latest scholarship in
European and non-European events from the 1850s to the present day.
A full list of titles in the series can be found at:

www.cambridge.org/modernwarfare
The Architecture of
Confinement
Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War
Anoma Pieris
University of Melbourne
Lynne Horiuchi
Independent Scholar
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316519189
DOI: 10.1017/9781009007191
© Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pieris, Anoma, author. | Horiuchi, Lynne, author.
Title: The architecture of confinement : incarceration camps of the Pacific
War / Anoma Pieris, University of Melbourne ; Lynne Horiuchi,
Independent Scholar.
Other titles: Incarceration camps of the Pacific War
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge
University Press, 2022. | Series: Studies in the social and cultural history of
modern warfare | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021039851 (print) | LCCN 2021039852 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781316519189 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009007191 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945 – Concentration camps – Pacific
Area – History. | Prisoner-of-war camps – Pacific Area – History – 20th
century. | Internment camps – Pacific Area – History – 20th century. |
Architecture and war – Pacific Area – History – 20th century. | Prisoners of
war – Pacific Area – History – 20th century. | Prisoners of war – North
America – History – 20th century. | Japanese Americans – Forced removal
and internment, 1942–1945.
Classification: LCC D805.P16 P57 2022 (print) | LCC D805.P16 (ebook)
| DDC 940.53/17091823–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039851
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039852
ISBN 978-1-316-51918-9 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Figures page vii

List of Maps xii
List of Tables xiv
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xvii
List of Abbreviations xxi
Introduction 1
anoma pieris and lynne horiuchi
1 Carceral Archipelago 15
anoma pieris
2 A Network of Internment Camps 43
anoma pieris
3 Prisoner-of-War Resistance 84
anoma pieris
4 Land and Labor 116
anoma pieris
5 A Military Geography 144
anoma pieris
6 The Colonial Prison 179
anoma pieris
7 Empire of Camps 207
anoma pieris
8 Prison City 234
lynne horiuchi and anoma pieris
9 Recovery, Redress and Commemoration 267
lynne horiuchi
v
vi Contents
10 Intersectional Sovereignty 290

anoma pieris
11 Border Politics 318
anoma pieris
Select Bibliography 340

Index 358
Figures
2.1 Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees (DPWI).

Drawn by Catherine Woo and Yoke Lin Wong page 49
2.2 Camp 1, Tatura, Vic., divisions between A- and
B-compounds; cutting firewood. Photographed by James
Tait. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra,
052408; 052465. 55
2.3 Cowra, NSW, specifications for erection and completion of
twenty timber-framed buildings and resiting of three
timber-framed buildings in POW camp, December 1944.
Courtesy of National Archives of Australia. NAA: SP155/1,
DEF397047, [Box 19], 44/45 56
2.4 Dhurringile Mansion, Vic., January 1966. Photographed by
John T. Collins. Reproduced with permission from the State
Library of Victoria, Melbourne, J.T. Collins Collection, La
Trobe Picture Collection, Image H98.250/903 66
2.5 Hatto Gunther Herman Duffner, axonometric drawing of
Camp 1, Tatura Group, Vic., 1944, by internee civil
engineer. Reproduced with permission from Museums
Victoria, Karl Muffler German Pastry Chef Collection,
MM93594 70
2.6 Karl and Slawa Duldig with Eva, in front of their hut at Camp
3, Tatura Group, Vic., Sister Burns, Compound 3D Tatura,
1941, photograph, 67x116mm, Inv. No. 6053. Courtesy of
Eva de Jong-Duldig, Duldig Studio, Melbourne 78
2.7 Karl Duldig, plan of Tatura Camp, Vic., 1941, pencil,
445x571mm, Inv. No. 7273. Courtesy of Eva de Jong-
Duldig, Duldig Studio, Melbourne 78
3.1 Cowra POW Camp, NSW, 6 August 1945. Courtesy of
Australian War Memorial, Canberra, P03160.002 91
3.2 Murchison, No. 13 POW Group, January 1943: POWs
returning to quarters after day’s work (a), and their sleeping
vii
viii List of Figures
quarters (b). Courtesy of Australian War Memorial,

Canberra, 028614; 028544 96
3.3 Cowra NSW, August 1944: blankets thrown over the barbed
wire in B-compound (Japanese section), at No. 12 POW
Camp, by escaping prisoners in the early hours,
5 August 1944. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial,
Canberra, 073485 103
3.4 Immigration-internees’ camp, Pahiatua, March 1945.
Courtesy of Archives New Zealand, Wellington, Archway,
R23461512, series, 24414 (GA2330), File 15 108
3.5 Featherston POW Camp, plan of Compound 2, illustrating
the “Incident.” Courtesy of Archives New Zealand,
Wellington, Discipline, New Zealand Military Forces,
Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry on Mutiny at the POW
Camp, 25 February 1943, 118. Archives New Zealand, AD1
1291, 310/11/3 112
3.6 Featherston POW Camp, with furniture and concrete
products factory. Photographed by Noel Earl. Courtesy of
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand,
PAColl-3152-001 114
4.1 George Teltscher, Australian internment camp, 2-shilling
note, 1941. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra,
RELC02743.001 and courtesy of the State Library of New
South Wales, Sydney 128
4.2 Hay, NSW, November 1942: at an old brickworks, Italian
POWs producing 1,000 bricks a day. Photographed by Harry
Turner. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra,
150895 136
4.3 Camp gardens, Loveday Group, SA, B-compound of No. 14
Camp, January 1944: a landscaped Japanese-type garden (a),
Japanese Shinto shrine (b), tennis clubhouse built by
internees (c). Photographed by Hedley Keith Cullen. Hay,
NSW: Garden at the 16th garrison battalion POW detention
camp, with Colosseum model in the foreground (d).
Photograph by Geoffrey McInnes. Australian War Memorial,
123010; 123011; 123014; 063365 140
5.1 Colonial residential archetypes, Singapore: Black-and-white
bungalow at No. 16, Adam Park, former home of Gerhard
Seefeld (a), Gillman Barracks (b), apartment block at
Portsdown Road (c), Kitchener Barracks (d). Photographed
by Anoma Pieris in 2018 153
List of Figures ix
5.2 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and British POWs at

Selarang Barracks, Changi, Singapore, 2 September 1942.
Photographed by George Aspinall. Courtesy of Australian
War Memorial, Canberra, 132937 155
5.3 Murray Griffin, AIF POW Theater Changi, Singapore, 1943:
a former workshop, used for a year by AIF concert party.
Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ART
26496 157
5.4 Murray Griffin, RC Chapel, Changi Prison, Singapore, built
late in 1944, later removed to Australia. Courtesy of
Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ART 26461 158
5.5 Interior and exterior views of the 100-m hut at Changi POW
Camp, 1942–5. As depicted by Murray Griffin (a);
photographed by John Rosson (b). Courtesy of Australian
War Memorial, Canberra, ART 26492 and PO4485.042 164
5.6 Jack Chalker, study for “Interior of the artist’s hut, Havelock
Road Labour Camp.” Courtesy of Australian War Memorial,
Canberra, ART91805 165
5.7 Syonan Jinja Shrine, as represented on 15-cent stamp. Issued
by the Japanese Occupation administration of Syonan-To in
1943. A. Pieris collection 168
5.8 Aerial view of Queenstown, Singapore, 1944. Photograph by
Singapore Improvement Trust, National Archives, UK,
INF10/324/27 176
6.1 Changi Prison, Singapore. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule
(left); Changi, Singapore Island, June 1953 showing rural
environs (right). Photographed by No. 1 (b) Squadron,
RAAF. Australian War Memorial, PO2379.002 185
6.2 An overhead perspectival view of Changi Prison, after
H. E. McKenzie’s drawing, “A Japanese internment hell in
Singapore: Changi Criminal Jail,” The Illustrated London
News, 27 October 1945, 451. Redrawn by Anoma Pieris 192
6.3 H. E. McKenzie, a corner of the old prison workshop in
Changi Prison, Singapore, 14x11ft, in which six internees
were forced to live with all other improvised possessions for
two years, The Illustrated London News, 27 October 1945, 450 193
6.4 Australian POWs in Changi Prison Camp. Courtesy of
Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 043131 201
6.5 Leslie Cole, “British women and children interned in
a Japanese prison camp,” Sime Road, Singapore, 1945, oil on
canvas. Imperial War Museum, UK, IWM: ART LD 5620 204
x List of Figures
7.1 Koichi Inomata, Naoetsu Tokyo-04-Branch Camp, Niigata.

A Bridge across the Pacific Ocean, Japan Australia Society of
Jō etsu, 1996, 126. Reproduced with permission from the
Japan Australia Society of Jō etsu 224
7.2 Ernest Buckmaster, Japanese civil internment camp at
Jurong, Singapore, 1945. Courtesy of Australian War
Memorial, Canberra, ART 23384 228
7.3 Japanese POWs guarded by Indian troops, filling in air-raid
trenches on St. Andrews Cathedral grounds, Singapore,
September 1945. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial,
Canberra, 117033 231
8.1 Manzanar Relocation Center, from a tower. Photograph by
Ansel Adams. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, LOT 10479-2, no. 8, LC-DIG-ppprs-00199 240
8.2 Western Defense Command and Fourth Army
Organizational Chart. Lynne Horiuchi, redrawn by Yoke Lin
Wong 247
8.3 Plan of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Records of the
War Relocation Authority, 1941–89, Record Group 210,
NA, USA, NAI 4688259. Courtesy of NPS, Manzanar 248
8.4 Kango Takamura, Gallery of guayule workers, Manzanar
Relocation Center. Kango Takamura paintings, Collection
0433, Box 1, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young
Research Library, UCLA. Reproduced with permission from
the Takamura Estate 256
8.5 Manzanar Relocation Center, external view of the lathe-
house for guayule rubber experiments under Walter
T. Watanabe, with staff of twenty-five workers at the War
Relocation Authority Center. Manzanar Relocation Center.
Photographed by Dorothea Lange. UC Berkeley, Bancroft
Library, BANC PIC 1967.014 v.21 CC:732—PIC 257
8.6 Elevated photo of New Denver, BC. Courtesy of Japanese
Canadian Cultural Center Archives, 2001.9.6 263
9.1 Toyo Miyatake: Internees planted lawns using seeds
provided by the WRA to mitigate the dusty conditions of the
site. Manzanar Relocation Center. ©Toyo Miyatake
MP0057. Courtesy of Toyo Miyatake Studio 274
9.2 Pool in Manzanar Pleasure Park. Photograph by Ansel
Adams. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Washington, DC. LOT 10479-2, no. 22 277
9.3 Toyo Miyatake: Snow-covered garden between the mess hall
and barrack at Block 22, Manzanar Relocation Center.
List of Figures xi
©Toyo Miyatake MP 0067. Courtesy of Toyo Miyatake

Studio 278
9.4 Gardeners and janitors in front of gazebo, Manzanar
Children’s Village. Courtesy of Manzanar National Historic
Site, NPS. Reproduced courtesy of Karyl Matsumoto 281
9.5 Sue Kunitomi Embrey dancing at the 1973 Manzanar
Pilgrimage. Courtesy of the Manzanar Committee 285
10.1 Nikkei Internment Memorial Center, New Denver, BC, with
Centennial Hall in foreground and Kyowakai Hall behind it.
Photographed by A. Pieris in 2016. Reproduced with
permission from the Kyowakai Society, New Denver 298
10.2 Japanese War Cemetery, Cowra, NSW. Photographed by
A. Pieris, 2012 301
10.3 Cowra Japanese Garden, NSW. Photographed by A. Pieris,
2012 305
10.4 Peace Memorial Park, Naoetsu, Jō etsu, Niigata.
Photographed by A. Pieris, 2017 310
10.5 Changi Chapel, Singapore, 15 September 1945 (left). Eighth
Division Ex-POWs of the Japanese, attending a church
service in a small chapel in Changi Prison. Australian War
Memorial, 117658; Chapel reconstructed at Duntroon,
Canberra, Australia (above right); replica in the Changi
Museum, Singapore, (below right). Photographed by Anoma
Pieris, 2012 314
11.1 Rabaul, New Britain, September 1945. Officers of a 2/4
Armored Regiment inspecting Japanese-type 95 Ha-Go
Light Tanks in a tunnel behind Rabaul township. Courtesy of
Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 096838 325
11.2 Proposed galley block, Japanese War Criminals’ Compound,
Manus Island. NAA: MP375/13/0, WCC2/6, War Criminals
Compound Manus, Dwg. No. MA226, 22 November 1951 333
Maps
1.1 Map of the Pacific Basin showing locations of key case

study sites. Drawn by Catherine Woo page 39
2.1 Bonegilla Military Training Camp, Vic. Courtesy of National
Archives of Australia. NAA: B3712-Dr150-Folder4-part1,
1 April 1954. 54
2.2 The distribution of POW and internment camps in Australia.
Drawn by Catherine Woo 61
2.3 Tatura Group, five camps around the Waranga Basin, and
Murchison Camp 13. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based
on the numerous indicated sources 65
2.4 Camps 1–3, Tatura Group. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,
based on the numerous indicated sources 68
2.5 Camp 4, Rushworth, Tatura Group. Drawn by Zachariah
Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated sources 80
3.1 Gaythorne Internment Camp, Qld., capturing different
stages of occupation. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based
on the numerous indicated sources 89
3.2 Marrinup POW Camp, WA. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,
3.3 Camp 13, Murchison, Tatura Group, Vic. Drawn by
Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated
sources 95
3.4 Cowra POW Camp, after the breakout. Drawn by Zachariah
4.1 Control centers and hostels in Australia. Drawn by
Catherine Woo 121
4.2 Hay, NSW, Camps 6, 7 and 8. Drawn by Zachariah
4.3 Loveday Group, Barmera, South Australia, Camps 9, 10 and
14. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous
indicated sources 138
xii
List of Maps xiii
4.4 Harvey, WA, Camp 11. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,

5.1 Changi Cantonment, Singapore, in 1945. Drawn by
Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated
sources 150
5.2 Singapore, showing the distribution of camps. Drawn by
Catherine Woo and Yoke Lin Wong 160
5.3 POW and internment camps, Singapore: Kranji POW Camp,
Nee Soon Camp, Pulau Blakang Mati (top left to right),
Adam Park and Adam Road, Buller Camp, and River Valley
Road, Havelock Road and Great World camps (bottom left to
right). Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the
numerous indicated sources. Retraced with permission from
the Museum of Military Medicine, UK 166
6.1 Outram Road Jail, Singapore. Drawn by Zachariah
6.2 Sime Road Camp, Singapore. Drawn by Zachariah
Dahdoule with reference to drawings by Jane Booker Nielsen
and Harold McKenzie. Courtesy Singapore History
Consultants Pte Ltd 202
7.1 Japan’s “Empire of Camps.” Drawn by Yoke Lin Wong 215
7.2 Map of the Burma-Thai Railway. Drawn by Catherine Woo 221
8.1 Concentration (internment) camps for people of Japanese
ancestry in Canada and the USA. Drawn by Dhara Patel 236
8.2 Plan of land improvements, Manzanar Relocation Center,
18 June 1942. National Archives, USA NAI 4688259, sheet
no. 6, 5 June 1945. Records of the War Relocation Authority,
1941–89, Record Group 210, courtesy of National Park
Service, Manzanar 241
9.1 Known gardens and landscaping at Manzanar. Burton,
Garden Management Plan (NPS, US Department of Interior:
Manzanar National Historic Site, 2015), 115, fig. 4.8.
Courtesy of National Park Service, Manzanar 275
11.1 Australia’s immigration detention, accommodation and
offshore processing facilities, adapted and compiled from
online graphics and data provided by the Australian
Government and published in news media 2013–16. Drawn
by Dhara Patel 321
11.2 Map of the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSPs)
in Rabaul. Drawn by Yoke Lin Wong 328
Tables
2.1 Distribution of POW and internment camps in Australia page 58

2.2 Camps in extant facilities and wooded areas 59
5.1 Camps and working parties, conjectured from numerous
sources 161
xiv
Preface
The intellectual collaboration underlying this book began in conversa-

tions at the University of California, Berkeley, during the late 1990s when
we were part of a cohort of passionate students. These were followed by
several journeys between Australia and the USA over a five-year period
when we developed this topic. Anoma’s conceptual commitment to post-
colonial border-thinking, with expertise in Singapore’s penal history and
newer interest in Australian migrant stories, coalesced with Lynne’s
commitment to bringing an understanding of Japanese American incar-
ceration within the purview of “built environment” disciplines. Lynne’s
firsthand knowledge of the Japanese American community, and their
grievances and triumphs, provided the opening for an ambitious com-
parative study that might explore race and citizenship in settler societies
by focusing on wartime incarceration. Our interests cross over in Asian,
Southeast Asian, Australian and Asian American studies from divergent
geographies, rooted in shared theoretical frameworks. We are influenced,
among others, by scholars like Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakrovorty
Spivak, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Lisa Lowe, who have laid bare the
structural racism encoded within Western liberalism.
This book was inspired by the drawing “Ideal City,” based on the
footprint of the Cowra prisoner-of-war (POW) camp, exhibited by art-
ist/architect Alex Selenitsch, at Melbourne’s Place Gallery in 2011. The
image has been reproduced on the book’s cover. Alex, who as a two-year-
old passed through postwar immigrant camps hastily converted from an
earlier generation of military buildings at Cowra and Bonegilla, first
compared the camp’s distinctive geometry to Vincenzo Scamozzi’s Ideal
City, observing that the city, a twelve-sided polygon with a twelve-pointed
star through its peripheral ramparts, “is a fusion of military control,
rational organization and faith and hope for the future – [and that]
these are founding qualities of OZ [Australia] since the first fleet.” The
first fleet refers to eleven ships, including six convict transports and two
naval vessels that arrived from England in 1787 to establish the penal
colony at Botany Bay, the first European settlement in Australia. Noted
xv
xvi Preface
Alex, they “were repeated for the Fleets of Displaced Persons who arrived
here just after WW2 [World War II]”; 170,000 refugees were sent to
Australia by the International Refugee Organization after World War II to
be placed in repurposed military camps, Alex’s family among them.
Utopian sentiments and dystopian social processes characterizing the
spaces of both migrant streams were intensified at sites like Cowra; the
town’s military training facility, located near the POW camp, was con-
verted for migrant accommodation after the war. Innovative architectures
adapted for convicts, prisoners of war, internees, immigrants and refugees
accumulated as a carceral taxonomy; an archipelagic continuum across
time. Beginning with these Australian sites, this book explores the disper-
sion of this carceral taxonomy along the arc of the Pacific Basin, as the
underlying footprint for an architectural history of the wartime camps.
This book also draws from Alex’s creative use of discarded scrap
material salvaged from vacated design studios at the end of each
academic year. “Ideal City” is a composition of twelve separate sheets.
Its various sources and dialogic evolution fittingly convey the residual and
relational materialities of immigrant emplacement, a feature of the subal-
tern practices described in this book. The resourcefulness of immigrants
in building affective resilience is mirrored in the strategies by which
wartime internees and prisoners of war transformed their austere and
forbidding surroundings. These underlying themes of genealogy and
subalternity recur throughout this book.
Much of the evidence gathered in this book has been fragmentary
because of the erasure of many key sites and loss of wartime records.
We have narrated these stories as best we can from the available evidence,
mindful of the instability of sources and materials and changes to these
over time.
Anoma Pieris
Lynne Horiuchi
Acknowledgments
Anoma Pieris
The larger research project, Temporal Cities: Provisional Citizenship
– Architectures of Internment (2015–18) FT140100190, culminating in
producing this volume, was funded by an Australian Research Council
(ARC) Future Fellowship. A University of Melbourne Establishment
Grant enabled collaboration with my partner investigator Lynne
Horiuchi and funded Alex Selenitsch’s Liminal House exhibition, which
contributed intellectually to this project’s framing. The grant enabled
fieldwork in all of the cited sites and related international archives. I am
grateful to the university and ARC for granting the time and funds for
conducting this research.
Material in this book was first developed in the following publications:
Anoma Pieris, “Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second
World War Internment and POW Camps”, Fabrications 26:3 (2016),
255–285; Pieris, “Changi: A penal genealogy across the Pacific War”,
Fabrications 26:1 (2016), 50–71; Pieris, “Divided Histories of the Pacific
War: Revisiting Changi’s (post) colonial heritage”, 107–24 in Sybille
Frank and Mirjana Ristic (eds) Urban Heritage in Divided Cities:
Contested Pasts (Abingdon: Routledge 2019, ); Pieris, “Intersecting sover-
eignties: Border camps and border villages in wartime North America” in
Pieris ed. Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary politics and built space
(London: Routledge, 2019); Pieris, “Displacement, labor and incarcer-
ation: a mid-twentieth century genealogy of camps” Chap. 30, 413–28 in
Farhan Karim ed. The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social
Engagement (Abingdon: Routledge 2018); Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi,
“Temporal Cities: Commemoration at Manzanar, California and Cowra,
Australia”, in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 3 (2017),
292–321; Pieris, Re-reading Singapore’s ‘Black and White’ architectural
heritage: the aesthetic affects and affectations of adaptive reuse,
Architectural Theory Review 22:3 (2019), 364–85; Pieris, “Organic
Heritage Diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific Region: Reconciliatory
xvii
xviii Acknowledgments
Landscapes”, in Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers

(eds) Frontiers of Memory in Contemporary Asia (Hong Kong University
Press, 2022). Material was also published in the Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) conference proceedings
in 2014, 2016 and 2017.
Key individuals who generously gave of their time and attention include,
in Australia, Lurline and Arthur Knee (Tatura Irrigation and Wartime
Camps Museum), Kay Ball and Warrick Finlay (Murchison Historical
Society), Rosemary Gower and Max Scholz (Barmera), Lawrance Ryan
and Graham Apthorpe (Cowra), Don Kibbler and Tony Mooney (Cowra
Japanese Garden), Ariele Hoffman (Jewish Museum, Melbourne), Eva de
Jong-Duldig and Melinda Mockridge (Duldig Studio, Melbourne), David
Houston (Hay Internment and Prisoner of War Camps Interpretive
Centre) and Steven Bullard (Australian War Memorial); in New
Zealand, Mark Pacey; in England, David Tett; in Singapore, Jeya
Ayadurai, Francis Li, Jon Cooper and Lee Yng; in Japan, Yoshikazu
Kondo, Yoko Ishizuka and members of the Japan Australia Society-
Jō etsu; in the USA, Bruce Embrey, Gann Matsuda and the Manzanar
Committee, Jeff Burton, Rosemary Masters, Alisa Lynch, Bernadette
Lovato, National Park Service rangers at the Manzanar National Historic
Site and Alan Miyatake; in Canada, Paul Gibbons and members of the
Kyowakai Society, Cole Harris and Amanda Murphy at New Denver.
A number of individuals who were interviewed for the project, too numer-
ous to be acknowledged here, are mentioned at relevant places in the book.
I am grateful to researchers and archivists at various institutions for
assisting me with queries. They include staff at the Tatura Irrigation and
Wartime Camps Museum, Australian War Memorial, the National
Archives of Australia (Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne), the National
Library of Australia, State Library of South Australia, State Library of
Western Australia, Harvey Visitor Center, Cowra Breakout Association,
Berri Library, State Library of Victoria, Museums Victoria, the Jewish
Museum of Australia, Duldig Studio; National Archives of Singapore,
National Library Singapore, Changi Museum; Imperial War Museum,
London, British Museum, National Archives UK, Museum of Military
Medicine, The Royal Philatelic Society; UC Berkeley’s Environmental
Design Archives, Bancroft Library, UCLA Charles D. Young Library,
National Archives and Records Administration archives in Washington,
DC, Eastern California Museum, Independence; National Parks Service,
Manzanar National Historic Site, Karyl Matsumoto; Toronto’s Japanese
Canadian Cultural Center, Burnaby’s Nikkei National Museum and
Cultural Center, New Denver’s Nikkei Internment Memorial Center;
and the Jō etsu City Council. I apologize for any omissions from this list.
Acknowledgments xix
I am grateful to Greig Crysler at UC Berkeley’s College of

Environmental Design for hosting me as a visiting scholar in 2015, and
the University of Melbourne for hosting my partner investigator Lynne
Horiuchi on her visits to Australia.
A number of people assisted me in preparing maps, drawings and
tables, and formatting data for the manuscript at various stages.
Foremost among them is Zachariah Dahdoule, who painstakingly recon-
structed the camp plans from blurry aerial photographs and fragmentary
drawings. Miki Hawkinson translated the Japanese documents men-
tioned in Chapters 10 and 11. Lian Zhou translated an oral history
from Chinese to English. Catherine Woo, Dhara Patel and Yoke Lin
Wong drew and annotated a number of maps, and Yoke Lin assisted
me in formatting images and tables. Wendy Roberts and Yvette Putra
helped prepare the manuscript for review and submission. I am particu-
larly grateful to May Yee for copyediting the manuscript and Geraldine
Suter for preparing the index. Thanks also to the CUP editors, reviewers,
publishing team and consultants for their support.
A few people deserve very special thanks: most importantly, my dear
friend and collaborator Lynne Horiuchi, who agreed to explore this
difficult and ambitious topic with me, and without whom its global
scope could not have been achieved. Alex Selenitsch was an inspiration
throughout. My friend Lai Chee Kien in Singapore continually alerted
me to relevant material. My sister Aneela and friends Isabelle Vergnaud
and Sandarshi Gunewardena hosted me during research. My life partners
Athanasios and Bijou enthusiastically accompanied me on fieldtrips,
attended commemorative ceremonies and offered encouragement
throughout this project. I wish to specially thank my dear friends and
neighbors Vivien and Gwen Stevenson, whose many tales of wartime
service recounted over years of Sunday afternoon tea provided the
broader context for understanding the meaning of the war for Australia.
Lynne Horiuchi
This project builds on my several decades of research on the Japanese
American incarceration histories, activism and involvement with the
Manzanar Pilgrimage and lengthy conversations with Sue Embrey. I am
deeply indebted to Greg Robinson and Roger Daniels who have over the
years provided me with the intellectual foundation for my work on this topic.
Anoma came to Berkeley as a visiting scholar in late 2015, contributing
to a course on Race, Space and Ethics at the College of Environmental
Design run by myself and Greig Crysler. We traveled to Washington, DC,
together and later in April 2016 to Los Angeles and the Manzanar
xx Acknowledgments
Pilgrimage. My thanks to Bruce Embrey, Gann Matsuda and the

Manzanar Committee, JK Yamamoto of Rafu Shimpo and the National
Park Service staff and rangers, including Jeff Burton, Rosemary Masters,
Alisa Lynch and Bernadette Lovato, for enabling our research through
interviews, a focus group and access to archival photographs and images.
Thanks also to the staff at the NARA, Washington, DC, Bancroft Library
and Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley, the Eastern
California Museum, Inyo County and the Charles E. Young Library at
UC Los Angeles. Thanks to Karyl Matsumoto and Alan Miyatake for
providing images and permissions for individual photographs used in
Chapters 8 and 9.
I visited Australia in late 2016 and was hosted by the University of
Melbourne, traveling to Cowra, Canberra and several other significant
sites related to this project, including Melbourne’s Duldig Studio, the
Jewish Museum of Australia and the annual luncheon of the Dunera
Association. Anoma and I have since visited back and forth between
Australia and California in developing this topic. Our thanks to the
editors of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures of the Americas (ADVA),
Susette Min and Shipu Wang for giving us the opportunity to test our
collaborative work in their journal in 2017.
I would like to thank the University of Melbourne for hosting me and
involving me in a workshop at the faculty, and Lawrance Ryan, Graham
Apthorpe and several members of the Cowra Shire Council for introdu-
cing me to the project sites and their histories and arranging meetings with
Don Kibbler, Tony Mooney and the Cowra Guardian.
Among the many people who have provided intellectual assistance,
encouragement and companionship along the way, I would especially
like to thank Sean McPherson, Dell Upton, Greg Levine, Sandra Luft
and the brilliant colleagues I’ve met at the University of California at
Berkeley. In the Japanese American community, I am indebted to
Chizuko Omori, Emiko Omori, Patricia Shimomura, Hershey
Miyamura and Michiko Yoshida for their generous help in this project.
To Anoma, I owe the honor of participating in this endeavor that is
largely hers, guided by the exceptional breadth of her work and generosity
that taught me so much about looking west from America across Asia and
looking north from Australia to Southeast Asia, New Guinea and the
Bismarck Archipelago. Members of the Jose Roberto Gonzalez family
also hosted me in Canberra; Ben and Claudia White drove me to Cowra.
My life partners, Manuel Reyna and Marley, have been constant, faithful
and patient companions in completing this volume.
Abbreviations
ACT Australia Capital Territory

AIF Australian Imperial Force
AMF Australian Military Force
ANZ Archives New Zealand
AWM Australian War Memorial
BANC Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
BC British Columbia
BCSC British Columbia Security Commission
BL British Library
CAC Civil Aliens Corps
CCC Civil Constructional Corps
CED College of Environmental Design, University of
California, Berkeley
CWRIC Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment
of Civilians
DPWI Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FSA Farm Security Administration
IJA Imperial Japanese Army
InPOW Indian prisoner of war
INS Immigration and Naturalization Service (USA)
IPOW Italian prisoner of war
IWM Imperial War Museum
JACL Japanese American Citizens League
JAER Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement
Records
JCCC Japanese Canadian Cultural Center
JPOW Japanese prisoner of war
NAA National Archives of Australia
NAB National Archives and Records Administration
Building, Washington, DC
xxi
xxii List of Abbreviations
NACP National Archives and Records Administration at

College Park, MD
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, USA
NARA–Pacific National Archives and Records Administration–
Region (SF) Pacific Region (San Francisco)
NAS National Archives of Singapore
NA-UK National Archives, United Kingdom
NHS National Historic Site
NIMC Nikkei Internment Memorial Center
NLA National Library of Australia
NLS National Library of Singapore
NPS National Park Service
NSG NewspaperSG (Singapore)
NSW New South Wales
QLD Queensland
RAAF Royal Australian Airforce
RDPWI Report of the Directorate of Prisoners of War and
Internees
RNZAF Royal New Zealand Air Force
SA South Australia
SIT Singapore Improvement Trust
STV State Library of Victoria
Tas. Tasmania
TIWCM Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum
UCLA University of California, Los Angeles
USA United States of America
Vic. Victoria
WA Western Australia
WCC War Criminals Compound
WCCA Wartime Civil Control Administration
WRA War Relocation Authority
Introduction
Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi
This book provides a new starting point for analyses of wartime built
environments, framed by the assumption that sovereignty has unimagined
complexities and that the material worlds of internment and prisoner-of-
war (POW) camps in settler-societies offer valuable insights into the forms
of geopolitical awareness surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, a historical
period marked by imperial conflict. The temporal, spatial and material
transformations wrought by the Pacific War, affecting Asia, Australasia
and North America’s west coast, are the primary foci. Across the eleven
chapters that follow this Introduction, we envision various Pacific Basin
localities as an archipelagic configuration connected by this shared history
of violence and by resilient legacies. Architecture, we argue, offers unique
historical insights into this interconnected physical geography.
Organized around three geographical areas directly affected by Japan’s
military aggression – Australia, Singapore and the USA – the book’s special
focus is on the taxonomy of concentration-camp types that emerged,
temporarily, in these and related theaters of conflict and that were designed
for the incarceration of POWs, civilian internees and certain racially differ-
entiated categories of citizens. By comparing their architecture across
representative case studies, we map the changing indices of wartime
racialized and political relations in these disparate but temporarily
codependent settler and colonial societies. Each of the core case studies
examined here offers different insights into how social conditions were
politicized by war and affective responses of individuals whose lives were
disrupted. We are also interested in a longer history of these physical
facilities extending before and after the conflict, applying what Michel
Foucault described as a genealogy of power–knowledge relations – in
this case as a genealogy of a programmatic type.1 This book’s
1
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 83, describes genealogy as a combination of erudite
and local knowledge “which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and
make use of this knowledge tactically today.” This approach has been successfully tested
1
2 Introduction
comparative and temporal approach is aimed at globalizing a topic too

often confined to national histories.
The imperial and national border conflicts occurring across the Pacific
War are reconceptualized as a field of competing sovereignties, drawing on
how borders and human displacement have been discussed in the social
sciences, through theoretical approaches to “border-thinking” applied
more recently in the anthology Architecture on the Borderline, on the physical
and material manifestations of geopolitical borders and border conflicts.2
Approaches informed by this method are inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s
writings on the US–Mexico border, favoring epistemes arising from lived
experiences of marginality and resistance at the border of colonial matrices
of power.3 The Pacific War’s distance from the European conflict, leading
to neglect of many dimensions of it, the remoteness of battles fought in the
Pacific, the tensions between imperialists and colonial and subject popula-
tions, and the movement of prisoners and refugees between far-flung
geographies heighten the interplay of border conditions and experiences.
An argument for presenting this “assemblage” of conflicts in the Asia-
Pacific as a singular Pacific War has already been made by Twomey and
Koh in an excellent anthology.4 Their collection politicizes diverse social
dimensions of war, using remembrance, social subjectivity (race, sexuality
and culture), the war’s aftermath and the place of veterans as frameworks
for inquiry. The physical dimension of the war remains as a background to
their studies. In adopting a spatial approach to this “assemblage,” this book
reconsiders the “archipelago,” a metaphor used by many authors to char-
acterize penal environments as clusters of gulags.5 As detailed further in
Chapter 1, it contrasts this previous approach with the idea of an “archi-
pelagic consciousness,” after the work of Eduard Glissant, as a possible way
of uncovering the heterogeneity of camp environments as spaces where
multiple forms of sovereignty may intersect.6
for architecture by Singapore-based scholars Chang Jiat-Hwee and Lee Kah-Wee, assert-
ing its usefulness for a discipline committed to artifactual histories.
2
Anoma Pieris, ed., Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built Space
(Abingdon: Routledge, Architext, 2019).
3
The term “border-thinking” was first used by Gloria Anzaldúa in her work on the US–
Mexico border, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute
Books, 1999), and later developed by Walter Mignolo in Local Histories/Global Designs:
Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
4
Christina Twomey and Ernest Koh, The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
5
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 204–5, 297, 307; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The
Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (Melbourne: Collins, Fontana, 1974).
6
Eduard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Introduction 3
Whereas normative expressions of political and cultural sovereignty are

more easily traceable, with its sense of personal sovereignty and self-
consciousness shaping the modern profession, architectural scholars are
only beginning to explore how the politicization of these positions for the
suppression of rights and privileges during national or global catastrophes
also implicates architects and architectural production. In addressing
these issues, however, many architectural histories tend to take nation-
state sovereignty for granted, naturalizing boundaries that have
a relatively short historical instrumentality. This insular approach to
global histories is partly influenced by postwar nation-building (or
rebuilding) narratives.
Accounts of the Pacific War are likewise circumscribed by national
interests formed after the war, rather than the broader imperial alliances
forged defensively at the time.7 Multiple processes, such as the dissol-
ution of empires, political decolonization and the divisive alignments of
the Cold War era, cloud our understanding of its contested physical
geography. The war accelerated the processes by which fluid imperial
geopolitical territories were redacted into the narrower, culturally hege-
monic nation-state sovereignties recognized today. These many forces act
to project the reductive parameters of national sovereignty onto the war’s
multilateral histories. Any one of many competing accounts of the war
cannot capture the intersecting political and cultural complexities of this
shared history.
The same can be said of the human subjects caught up in the war’s
many border conflicts. Before geopolitical boundaries were drawn around
individual nation-states, cultural and political identities were more por-
ous and fluid, though also, at times, contradictory. Modern subjectivity
was not as yet congruent with political identity, as other societal forces of
individuation (urbanization, waged labor and psychosocial individu-
ation) were applied unevenly across the colonial world. The kinds of
geopolitical awareness that link modernity and national identity, although
already prevalent in localized border struggles, became pervasive and
global during the two World Wars. World War II’s Pacific theater
awakened Europeanized forms of political self-consciousness in colon-
ized populations on whom oppressive systems of colonial government had
been historically imposed. The systemic racialization of settler-societies
gave rise to an internally divisive race politics that was aggravated by
wartime hostilities. The war also shifted the loci of imperial conflict to
7
The war in Asia commenced against China in 1937, but war with the Western powers
began with attacks on European colonies in Asia and at Pearl Harbor in December 1941,
ending when Japan capitulated in August 1945.
4 Introduction
encompass a previously peripheral geography – the Pacific Basin. As the

cultural opacity attributed to its eastern regions lifted, Asia’s peoples were
perceived as competitors and threats to European colonizers, who by the
early twentieth century dominated South and Southeast Asia. A global
comparison of Australia, Singapore and the USA allows unpacking of
these sensibilities, as these settler-societies reoriented to confront a rising
imperial power in Asia that had never been colonized.
When wartime actions are approached as border conflicts, certain
nation-state formations appear more sensitive than others to the
upheavals caused by multiracial citizenship. “New World” settler-
colonial environments, like the USA, Canada, Australia or New
Zealand (identifying more recently as Aotearoa New Zealand), can be
differentiated from Europe or Asia because of comparable histories of
immigration, labor coercion, land expropriation, dispossession and geno-
cide of Indigenous populations, and of colonial settlement, but also as
experimental sites for new exogenous political systems with migrants as
their basis. In these nascent liberal democracies, the ruling settler major-
ities constructed white privilege through systemic racialization alongside
selective opportunities for economic equity and social mobility. Colonial
settlers in Australia, for example, used fraudulent treaties, annexation or
occupation to expropriate land, putting in place a “white” society where
the majority culture was not Indigenous to the geography. Generations of
immigrants, attracted by settlement opportunities, benefited from previ-
ous legacies of violence and became complicit in their histories. Such
colonial strains of governance by expropriation were deepened by global
conflict. Similarly, the war sharpened and opened to critical scrutiny
North America’s racialized boundaries around civil liberties and tenuous
claims of geopolitical legitimacy.
The war also shifted large populations within Asia and Europe and
between these and other settler environments – evacuating civilians,
creating refugees and transporting enemy nationals into hostile geog-
raphies, thereby aggravating tensions around sovereign rights related to
securing national borders to date. The inadequacies of legislative instru-
ments designed to protect captive combatants, civilian internees and
citizens globally were harshly exposed by the war. Lisa Lowe’s attention
to the colonial redistribution of land, labor and capital across four
continents has served as inspiration for examining the wartime redistri-
bution and deprivation of property and opportunity as a punitive
strategy.8
8
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
Approach and Framing 5
Approach and Framing

Beginning with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and simultaneous invasion
of Malaya in December 1941, this volume spans the material worlds of
the rural concentration camps in southeastern Australia and New
Zealand as a discursive entry point into a broader history spanning
Australasia and the Pacific. Australia’s defense of Malaya and
Singapore, and the experiences of captive Australian and other Allied
soldiers in urban and suburban camp facilities during Japanese occupa-
tion, form the basis for the second study of the transformation of an entire
island into a camp and the dispersal of prisoners across Japan’s emergent
empire. Although more remote from Australasia, the attack on Pearl
Harbor that drew the USA into World War II, with immediate repercus-
sions on its Pacific coast, acknowledges the importance of testing this
content against US and Canadian case studies. Specific rural sites in
Manzanar in California and New Denver in British Columbia are com-
pared. Focus on the material worlds of these several sites highlights the
ontological conditions of incarceration, but also flattens characterizations
of perpetrators and victims, whose identities shift across them.
Related penal processes are instructive in three ways. Firstly, understand-
ing these processes builds awareness of the spatial legacies of carceral
environments used to warehouse war-displaced populations across the
Pacific Basin, within which similar forms of civic deprivation were repro-
duced. Secondly, although they were temporary holding facilities for transi-
ents, these camp geographies took on the proportions of urban settlements,
impacting local communities and their resources in pervasive and unsettling
ways. Thirdly, as with any urban community, incarcerated populations
often adapted their environments in order to salvage some measure of
their undermined civility. Their resilience to the dehumanizing pressures
of an overly militarized physical environment gave a range of cultural
capacities material form. The complex social processes uncovered through
these three lines of investigation frame a specialized disciplinary contribu-
tion to social and military histories on this topic. Our interest in the forced or
underpaid labor that fashioned and transformed these camp environments
provides important overlaps between these and architectural histories.
This book asks how architecture mediates expressions of sovereignty,
while looking for various political, cultural or personal articulations of sover-
eign identity as manifested in the built environments of the Pacific War. This
book is preceded, for example, by Jean-Louis Cohen’s Architecture in
Uniform, which examines the wartime careers of architectural luminaries.9
9
Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War
(Paris: Hazan/CCA Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011).
6 Introduction
Studies of Nazi architectural innovations – the forced-labor concentra-

tion-camp system and individual death camps like Auschwitz – have
been explored in a number of studies, most notably Paul Jaskot’s The
Architecture of Oppression.10 When compared with these largely Europe-
centered studies, architectural accounts of Pacific War-related envir-
onments are few, with camps providing the broader contexts for social
and political histories. Defiant Gardens, Confinement and Ethnicity and
Archaeologies of Internment are titles that emphasize physical
materialities.11 Nevertheless, in these collections’ separate chapters,
the national lens often persists. By looking at sites and experiences of
social exclusion and oppression as border spaces, this book raises
broader questions about wartime articulations of sovereignty.
Under the radar of territorial sovereignty, taken for granted in
national histories, embodied expressions of cultural sovereignty in
minority and diasporic populations offer fresh insights into lives during
internment. Material remains are frequently animated and politicized
through reflexive memory-making practices that challenge national cul-
tures of memorialization and conservation. Among the architectural
histories that bring these issues to the fore, including most recently
work on First Nations or immigrant architectures,12 are analyses of
conflict environments, including of World War II. Connie Chiang’s
Nature Behind Barbed Wire and Lynne Horiuchi’s forthcoming book,
Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and
Japanese Americans during World War II, examine Japanese American
incarceration environments.13 Blackburn and Hack explore how these
10
Keith Mallory and Arvid Ottar, Architecture of Aggression: A History of Military Architecture
in North-West Europe (London: Architectural Press, 1973); Yisrael Gutman and
Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994); Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced
Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002).
11
Kenneth T. Helphand, ed., Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (San Antonio,
TX: Trinity University Press, 2006); Jeffrey F. Burton et al., eds., Confinement and
Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (Tucson, AZ:
Publications in Anthropology; The Western Archaeological and Conservation Center,
the U.S. Department of the Interior, 1999); Adrian Myers and Gabriel Moshenska, eds.,
Archeologies of Internment (New York; London: Springer, 2011).
12
Most recently, Mirjana Lozanovska, Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling Migration
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); and Elizabeth Grant et al., The Handbook of Indigenous
Architecture (Singapore: Springer, 2018).
13
Connie Y. Chiang, Nature behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of Japanese
American Incarceration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Lynne Horiuchi,
Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans
during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, in press), based on
“Dislocations and relocations: the built environments of Japanese American internment”
(PhD thesis, University of Santa Barbara, 2005).
Approach and Framing 7
war memories, including those linked to commemorative sites, impact

the different communities within Singapore’s multiracial society.14
The interdisciplinary umbrella of critical heritage studies aligned with
cultural studies and cultural geography has invigorated interest in physical
sites, more recently producing the broadest range of analyses on the Asia-
Pacific region, including Places of Pain and Shame, Hiroshima Traces and
Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East
Asia.15 These volumes compare numerous instances of heritage “disson-
ance,” an approach famously theorized by Tunbridge and Ashworth as
a means for confronting nationally sensitive but suppressed histories.16
In focusing on how ethnosocial histories are politicized in the making of
physical memorial sites, many of these important works neglect the
significance of physical design and planning. The physical effects of war
and urban destruction are more likely to be raised in architectural studies
on contemporary conflicts such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina or the Middle
East, or on urban conditions created by the amassing of displaced persons
in Europe’s current border camps.17 By presenting the camp as a modern
institution and a spatial biopolitical technology, these works critique both
national and international humanitarian policies, in ways that resonate
with the framing of this book, but usually lack the accumulated wealth of
archival resources and reflective memoirs that might foreground human
experiences and subjectivity.
Given the richness of available spatial and material data, the lack of
mainstream architectural interest in Pacific carceral landscapes is persist-
ent and baffling. One could explain their absence from postwar national
or nation-building histories in several ways. Camps tend to be fragile
structures, unlike the more aesthetically captivating and permanent,
urban penal architectures that are the subject of institutional histories.
14
Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack, War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and
Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012). See also P. Lim Pui Huen and Diana Wong,
War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies Press, 2000).
15
William Logan and Keir Reeves, eds., Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with “Difficult
Heritage” (London; New York: Routledge, 2009); Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces:
Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun-Kyung Lee, Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering
Colonial Prisons in East Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
16
J. E. Tunbridge and G. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as
a Resource in Conflict (Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 1996).
17
For example, A. Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); B. Kenzari, Architecture and Violence
(Barcelona: Actar, 2011); R. Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War
(London: Reaktion Books, 2016); Irit Katz, Claudio Minca and Diana Martin, eds.,
Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology (London;
New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018).
8 Introduction
While Holocaust scholars have studied camps as laboratories of totalitar-

ianism, machines of mass extermination, spaces of dehumanization and
genocide, the enduring horror of concentration-camp histories has not
prevented the physical destruction of many sites, and at times has pro-
voked it. In fact, camps with varied programs of transit, detention, forced
labor, concentration or extermination for the European theater of war
have been enumerated in their thousands. But unlike, for example, the
art-deco bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, they remain functional buildings of
negligible aesthetic significance, an institutional vernacular of sorts.
Quite apart from the atrocities concealed by their destruction, the camp
environments’ short duration and inferior materiality, compounded by
hasty erection, prefabrication and basic design or planning, denied them
the attention given to permanent or elegant military structures that out-
last conflicts. As spaces fashioned for denying sovereign rights, their
significance is immense, proving to be empirically rich sites for analysis.
Their further modification by local labor or by captive populations defers
a self-conscious interpretation of their design attributes. However, camps
are often provisional sites for irresolute strategies of punishment and
precursors to the institutionalization projected by permanent buildings.
As such, they may broker or enforce the conditions of citizenship, pro-
tected or violated during hostilities. These largely temporary facilities
were substantial interventions in their respective national landscapes,
executed on an urban scale.
An architectural history of camp environments needs to review their
construction, operation, dispersal and commemoration across four tem-
poral periods. The first period covers site selection, preparation, provision
of infrastructure, materials and labor in setting up of camps, including the
conversion into concentration camps of extant military or penal facilities
or civic institutions, as well as new constructions under appointed mili-
tary or civilian administrations. Transportation conduits for people and
supplies, and water resources for the incarcerated population, are critical
site considerations. The planning, design and construction of camp facil-
ities by military, community or private contractors overlap with
the second operative phase’s arrival and involvement of prisoners, as the
camp continues to be modified. Facilities include: residential barracks or
huts, mess halls and utility buildings; associated schools, hospitals, stores
and community and religious structures; quarters for military or admin-
istrative personnel; surveillance structures and fortifications; temporary
structures and landscape features; and camp-related agricultural areas
and industries. In addition to those facilities designed for or approved by
the military or camp administration, prisoners transformed the camps
internally by adapting existing structures, extending them using salvaged
The Shape of the Book 9
materials, or demarcating spaces for recreation or beautification modify-

ing the natural landscape. This period of activity roughly coincides with
the duration of war. The labor extracted from POWs or internee popula-
tions opens up a broader landscape that extends beyond the camp perim-
eter and intersects with the surrounding geography.
The third period of dispersal follows the decommissioning of camps:
dismantling, auctioning and repurposing of buildings and building mater-
ials, and in some instances, retention of some facilities for use as postwar
migrant or military camps. The fourth period, typically, has a time lag of
several decades, when pressure from redress movements or requests by
former prisoner groups prompt the construction of commemorative
spaces and structures – officially for interment of the war dead, and
unofficially through the activities of former prisoners, their descendants
and associated local communities. These take forms including cemeter-
ies, peace parks, interpretive centers, museum collections and heritage
precincts. They are drawn together through tourism networks that spill
over from established battlefield tours. Sociospatial practices described or
recorded at that time, or retroactively, significantly modify our interpret-
ation of all these physical phenomena. In fact, although the focus of this
book is on wartime camp environments, given the retrospective nature of
this study, the evidential starting point is based on this fourth period’s
materialities.
This book’s schema for selecting case studies favors long-neglected
sites whose heritage dissonance removed them from nation-building
narratives, but whose material and human remains partially withstood
deliberate or unintended erasure in the immediate postwar era. While
memories are tended through processes of historical recovery, other sites
and conditions have surfaced shaping a retrospective politics. That polit-
ics remains salient for contemporary crises of statelessness and border
control. Camps built during the Pacific War may serve as examples in
a prehistory of the current border-camp phenomenon; and architecture,
arguably because of its focus on physical sites and materialities, is an ideal
discipline for exploring their evolution over time. As stated earlier, we
looked for examples where effervescent materialities anchored by real
artifacts and conserved by host communities have substantiated these
nationally marginalized histories.
The Shape of the Book

Chapter 1, “Carceral Archipelago,” lays out the reasoning behind the
book and its investigative schema, drawing links with the interpretations
of incarceration familiar to the discipline. The chapter’s central argument
10 Introduction
is that the Pacific War’s imperial border contestations were inscribed in

those national populations who were alienated or disenfranchised by new
hostilities; and that camps treated as border facilities became places for
testing cultural boundaries, advancing programs of assimilation but also
of defiance, dissidence and cultural recovery. In Chapters 1 and 10, case
studies are viewed comparatively in order to gain an understanding of the
differing physical makeup of each camp environment in the various
national sites explored.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 focus on Australia and New Zealand. Chapter 2,
“A Network of Internment Camps,” introduces the eighteen major camps
created to intern “enemy aliens,” as well as overseas internees/refugees
and POWs, in Australia, as an expanding military-camp typology, an
extension of the punitive-space typologies that had historically filtered
entry into the continent. Unlike in other case studies, the proximity of
POW and internee populations from both theaters of conflict forced
Australia to devise ever more complex schemes that would segregate
nationals of belligerent countries, as well as the political factions within
groups. The centerpiece of this chapter is the Waranga Basin’s Tatura
group of seven camps – the key camp cluster in Victoria.
Chapter 3, “Prisoner-of-War Resistance,” discusses how the captive
population of Germans, Italians and Japanese, their patriotism sharpened
by concentration, railed against confinement in Australia and New
Zealand’s camps. Using “escape” as its central theme, the chapter exam-
ines breakout attempts at camps in Murchison, Cowra and Featherston,
offering insights into their enforcement of the 1929 Geneva Convention’s
regulations for the treatment of POWs. The deployment of POWs and
internees for agricultural projects forms a substantial part of wartime
histories. Across the Pacific theater civilians and POWs, as well as alien-
ated citizens (in North America), supplemented wartime industry
through their nominally waged employment in manufacturing and agri-
cultural industries. Chapter 4, “Land and Labor,” focuses on farms and
rural industries associated with the Hay and Loveday group camps. It
looks at the penal economy, the labor regimen and the ways in which the
labor of Italian POWs became integrated into a larger network of wartime
labor circulation throughout Australia.
Camps in Australia were housed in remote rural locations near small
towns that sent large proportions of their populations as soldiers to the
Pacific War. The majority of Australian service personnel came to and
passed through Singapore. They defended the island in the weeks before
its capitulation and suffered greatly as Japanese captives. Chapters 5 and
6 focus on Singapore. Chapter 5, “A Military Geography,” describes the
dispersal of camps at the fall of Singapore, following the fate of Australian
and other Allied soldiers across an emergent camp geography more varied
than that represented in many histories of the conflict. This chapter’s
main aim is envisioning the entirety of the island as converted to an
encampment through the distribution of Allied camps, including the
dispersal of work camps in requisitioned domestic and institutional
facilities.
Chapter 6, “The Colonial Prison,” discusses the two most notorious
institutions in wartime Singapore, the Changi and Outram Road prisons,
with key focus on civilian internment at Changi. It describes the colonial
origins of penal institutions and the erection of Changi Prison as the first
modern (reinforced-concrete) penal complex. The prison’s functional
inversion for internment through forced removal and dispossession of
once-privileged colonial civilians is discussed in terms of “subalterniza-
tion,” a recurring theme in the chapters that follow.
Changi Prison and Changi POW Camp were nodal in a broader net-
work of forced-labor dispersal that stitched together the Imperial
Japanese Army’s (IJA’s) artifice of “Asian co-prosperity.” Key features,
like the Burma-Thai railroad between Thanbyuzayat and Ban Pong,
mobilized some 60,000 Allied troops including 13,000 Australians, and
when their labor proved insufficient given the urgency for completion,
a further 200,000 rǒmusha were either enticed or coerced into working
alongside them. Chapter 7, “Empire of Camps,” describes the Southeast
Asian camp network as temporarily extending an emergent military
industrial complex centered in Japan and already tested before the war
in its East Asian colonies. This alliance of the military and defense
industries manifests physically through temporary, existing or purpose-
built facilities, ranging from factory dormitories to timber-and-attap
(palm frond thatch) huts. The distribution of working parties across
Asia, including when constructing the Burma-Thailand (Burma-Thai)
railroad, the journey to Japan, more specifically from Changi to Naoetsu,
and, finally, the concentration, forced labor and eventual post-
capitulation dispersal of Japanese Surrendered Personnel, convey the
aggregation and dissolution of the Japanese Empire through a study of
its camps.
At this point the book shifts from concentrated sites in Australasia,
affected by the war, to repercussions farther across the Pacific in North
America. How did the latecomer into World War II respond to the threat
to US territories posed by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941? Unlike enemy aliens in Australia or colonizers in
Singapore, in both the USA and Canada it was largely birthright citizens
who became victimized. This action of legalizing separation and intern-
ment of a targeted immigrant minority was built on racialized histories of
12 Introduction
dispossession and immigrant restriction, similar to Australia but on

a larger scale. Whereas camps evolved as complex combined typologies
across Australia and appropriated various buildings under the Japanese
occupation of Singapore, they were segregated and classified for various
categories of prisoners in the US case. This book concentrates on only
one of these categories connected to the Pacific War histories of the USA
and Canada where the civil liberties of birthright citizens, among others,
of Japanese ancestry were suspended. Its main focus is the use of dispos-
sessed and alienated citizens for agricultural and industrial projects,
a deployment that under the Geneva Convention’s guidelines was not
permissible for civilian internees.
The sites of the Canadian and US internment or incarceration of
people of Japanese origin were spatially initiated through their demarca-
tion of a strip of land along the Pacific coast varying approximately inland
as an exclusion area. The Canadian government moved “people of
Japanese origin” (ancestry) in British Columbia, including Japanese
Canadian citizens, into the mountainous terrain of the Kootenays region.
Camps, named Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers, were designed
as prison cities laid out in grid systems with repetitive rows of standard
military barracks, using US Army Corps of Engineers standard plans.
The incarcerated civilian populations immediately set about altering the
camp cities to make them more habitable. Chapter 8, “Prison City,” links
and compares these two cases.
Like other traumatized populations, their move to redress the injustices
of incarceration occurred at a temporal distance after the event and was
initiated in the USA mainly at the insistence of college-aged children of
Sansei incarcerees, demanding to know what had happened in “camps.”
This Nisei leadership of the postwar redress movement included many
extraordinary “unquiet” Nisei women, at a time when the patriarchal
structure of Japanese American communities prevailed. Sue Embrey’s
legacy as thirty-year Chair of the Manzanar Committee is the creation of
the National Park Service’s Manzanar National Historic Site. Chapter 9,
“Recovery, Redress and Commemoration,” examines the historical arc of
sovereignty and national belonging through the physical sites created for
redress and reconciliation at Manzanar, within the larger contexts framed
by this book.
Heritage sites and institutions have preserved and interpreted the his-
tories of these many sites through encounters with former captives and
collection of their stories, objects and artworks, onsite at the physical
locations of former captivity. Chapter 10, “Intersectional Sovereignty,”
explores the challenges of representing dissonant historical narratives
related to questionable practices of incarceration, particularly of civilians.
It examines the construction of physical memorials, cemeteries and peace

gardens as a reparative practice with ensuing tensions for national mem-
ory-making, asking what lessons might be drawn regarding settler citizen-
ship. This review of the camp environments questions whether these
spaces can be sustained without due recognition of their politicization.
It highlights issues that might inform national policies while simultan-
eously heightening transnational awareness of the interconnected strands
of carceral heritage.
The concluding Chapter 11, “Border Politics,” takes us to the edges of
the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese
Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the
Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea later associated
with the infamous offshore Manus Island detention center. It makes the
case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as
important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of
sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.
This book is the result of a four-year-long transnational research pro-
ject. Time spent in North America with my collaborator in this project,
Lynne Horiuchi, whose expertise on the US incarceration environments
comes from decades of working with this material, provided important
insights into how the struggle for Japanese American civil liberties politi-
cized this topic ahead of commemorative processes. The numerous aca-
demic studies on this topic illuminate multiscalar complexities within
civilian-internment histories, comparable in scope to the abundant litera-
ture on the Holocaust. My understanding of the US context is largely
mediated by Lynne’s insights, and she has led and mainly written the US
chapters, to which I contributed with insights on Canada. We framed the
topic jointly, and Lynne commented on each chapter’s focus within the
broad narrative. My expertise in Singapore’s penal history is extended
here to wartime incarceration of its colonial population in a broader range
of facilities.18 Australia serves as an important link between the USA and
Singapore. An insular, seemingly peripheral continent, Australia was
a key player with the USA in the Pacific War and with the British in the
Battle for Singapore; however, this is not a military history. Given our
collaboration and interest in Asian American, feminist and postcolonial
theory, our approach’s foundation is a set of methods not typically applied
to wartime incarceration histories but useful for tracing their “intersec-
tional” social identities and tactics of “subalternization” (concepts that
Chapter 1 elaborates on).
18
Anoma Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural
Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).
14 Introduction
Each of the case studies has a similar coterie of memoirs, heritage or

archeological reports and art-historical analyses that help situate their
histories. But more importantly, they are anchored in their former phys-
ical sites by material or human remains. Given the fragility of these
environments and postwar disinterest in them, the few that have resisted
the forces of change become conveners for representative and broader
built-environment histories. Visits to the key sites examined for this book,
when we met with their custodians and heard the stories, and participated
in key commemorative events, preceded their selection, governed in part
by the ways in which reconciliatory practices had injected remote or
marginal localities into a field of national memory. Given their exclusion,
in many instances, from the metanarratives of the nation-state, we are
greatly inspired by the protracted struggles of these communities.
1 Carceral Archipelago
Anoma Pieris
Two tropes circulating in discussions of the types of architecture that

were purpose-built for confinement are the carceral archipelago and the
panopticon prison, both used in scholarship on disciplinary institutions in
ways useful for our focus. They are not as evident in discussions of Pacific
War incarceration environments. For this volume, a wide arc of the
Pacific geography interpreted through carceral sites conjures a network
of isolated camps reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s description of
the Soviet gulag system under Stalin.1 The analogy likewise resonates
with Michel Foucault’s account of the proliferation of disciplinary insti-
tutions such as prisons, asylums and clinics in the urban fabric of nine-
teenth-century Paris, spatializing the substantial links between
incarceration and citizenship in ways useful for our disciplinary lens.2
Foucault uses the example of the panopticon prison’s centralized surveil-
lance and cellular isolation to describe the institutionalized biopolitical
control imposed on social deviants and, by extension, citizens of the
bourgeois state during the Enlightenment era.3 The significance of both
these examples is in their analysis of penal environments as characterizing
attributes of nation-state sovereignty in the systems these authors sought
to critique. Similar analogies could be sought for the wartime prisoner-of-
war (POW) and internment camps during World War II; however, in
dealing with camps rather than urban penal institutions, we encounter
a different interpretation of social deviance that is excised as inimical to
nation-state sovereignty. In Giorgio Agamben’s thesis on homo sacer,4
which reflects on the horrors of the Holocaust, the camp is presented as
a nomos of modernity – an exception to sovereignty – where political
subjects are excluded from the protections of the state and reduced to
bare life. His interpretation is quite different to the opaque and pervasive
1
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.
2
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 204–5, 297, 307.
3
Foucault’s ideas on these social technologies, which he described as “biopower,” were first
discussed in The History of Sexuality: Part 1, The Will to Knowledge (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978); Part 5, “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” 140–5.
4
Agamben, Homo Sacer.
15
repackaging of sovereign power described by Foucault. Agamben, by

examining groups rendered stateless and deprived of civil liberties,
exposes the racialized biases of that normative sovereignty. In both
these examples of how certain minorities not conforming to majoritarian
social norms were criminalized, freedoms related to the accumulation of
land, labor and capital are denied.
The ephemeral physical contexts for human displacement, along with
contemporary processes of excision and punishment, have earned con-
siderable interest globally. Agamben’s work is increasingly applied to
studies of offshore detention spaces where unauthorized asylum seekers
are incarcerated at the nation’s outer limits.5 Their criminalization for
deviating from designated citizenship pathways is governed by new bor-
der-control regimes; and these in turn appear pronounced in liberal
democracies that were formerly settler-colonies. The literal displacement
of asylum seekers into carceral island-facilities reproducing the technolo-
gies of gulag-like oppression suggests that these two modes of punitive
segregation overlap. Their lessons prove useful for exploring how sover-
eignty was instrumentalized under conditions of greater exigency in war-
time concentration camps. In unsettled political environments of global
conflict, sovereignty was asserted defensively as well as through territorial
expansion, and the push and pull of these two opposite forces was felt in
the POW and internment camps.
This chapter explores how the discipline of architectural history might
contribute to knowledge of global conflict through attention to physical and
material phenomena. Whereas Twomey and Koh use the term “assem-
blage,” to draw the various Pacific Basin conflicts into a protracted event
called “The Pacific War,” this chapter reconsiders the “archipelago” as
a metaphor for envisioning a parallel unfolding of the military camp geog-
raphy, and with it the creation of punitive, segregated enclaves.6 The
historical background to the conflict and the key legislations governing
captive accommodations, at the time, are important for understanding
why the camps were first established and whether their attributes are
traceable in the civilian detention environments operative today. The chap-
ter’s central argument is that the Pacific War’s imperial border contestations
were inscribed in those populations alienated or disenfranchised by new
hostilities, through experiences uncovered in analyses of the wartime treat-
ment of so-called enemy aliens, racialized minority citizens and POWs in
three settler/colonial contexts: Australia, Singapore and the USA. The
5
Suvendrini Perera, “What is a camp?,” borderlands, 1:1 (2002), www.borderlands.net.au/
vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html; Alison Mountz, “The enforcement archipelago: detention,
haunting, and asylum on islands,” Political Geography, 30 (2011): 118–28, esp. 121.
6
Twomey and Koh, The Pacific War.
Carceral Archipelago 17
patterns for disenfranchisement had much to do with how race and labor
were organized in settler/colonial societies, attributes of which were shared
to different degrees across these three geographical localities. While com-
parison of these evidently different settlement structures is unusual, it
captures representative historical insights into aspects of liberal democratic
government.
The camp populations responded dynamically to the military regimes
that confined them. Unlike the overdetermined carceral environments
described by Foucault or Agamben, camps in the Pacific theater of World
War II were not intended either for punishment or extermination, and
need to be treated as holding spaces run by the respective governments’
militaries. Because their forced removal and incarceration was part of the
punishment, there was a degree of laxity within camps that enabled their
populations to practice forms of defiance, dissidence and cultural recov-
ery. While corporeal violence was indeed evident, this book’s focus is on
the structural violence that these physical environments facilitated
beneath cruder forms of coercion, such as forced population removals,
the severity of camp designs, the regulation and discipline of captives and
forced or unfree labor.
While intended for creating docile, disciplined subjects, penal environ-
ments have historically proven to be creative sites of resistance, politiciza-
tion and productivity because of inherent flaws in disciplinary regimes.7
Systemic failures often reveal forms of human agency within carceral
systems. Similarly, the notion of a subject reduced to bare life, stripped
of personal complexities and identity, raises, and also reinforces, state-
lessness as a subject category antithetical to liberal personhood in discom-
fiting ways. Although deprived of sovereign care, the depoliticized and
incarcerated modern subject does not necessarily lose the residual and
intersecting social and cultural histories and processes attached to iden-
tity. Popular and informal accounts and practices highlight subversion
and resistance in the most forbidding facilities. Physical changes insti-
gated by captive populations are revelatory.
Given the archipelagic metaphor’s overuse in emphasizing the instru-
mentality of carceral conditions, particularly as a means of conveying
oppression through isolation, the concept of a multivocal and creolized
“archipelagic consciousness,” a term introduced by Eduard Glissant in
studies of Caribbean societies, offers a useful counterpoint.8 Brian
Bernards and Paul Carter have applied this term in identifying similar
7
See Frank Dikotter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in
Africa, Asia and Latin America (London: Hurst & Co., 2007).
8
J. Michael Dash, Eduard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23.
heterogeneity and creolized sensibilities in societies linked by the South

China Sea across Southeast Asia, strengthening Glissant’s argument that
various strains of imperialism have produced a plural cultural geography
with myriad social and cultural overlays.9 Despite its racialized colonial
history, archipelagic consciousness is argued to be antithetical to the
gulag or continentalist mentality that constrains or controls diversity
that, in Carter’s interpretation, is seen as significant for decolonization
processes.10 The archipelago is reconceptualized as a powerful metaphor
for multiplicity or geopolitical diversity, contrary to the gulag system,
although both British and Japanese imperialists, the key protagonists in
the Pacific conflict, come from archipelagic geographies.
The contradiction between these various interpretations of the archi-
pelago persists as an unreconciled paradox throughout this book.
Oppressive and opaque penal structures that are archipelagic in their
isolated island-like formation are interconnected and networked through
human mobilities and materialities, and nascent forms of archipelagic
consciousness can be traced within them. Unlike their penal counter-
parts, which magnify sovereignty, the carceral architectures of the Pacific
War are spaces for testing and reframing its limits. Within them, citizen-
ship is recast as an agonistic state. These underlying paradoxes unsettle
the gulag system’s overproduction of militarized forms of governmental-
ity. Prisons, in instrumentalizing sovereign power, secure deviants intern-
ally within national boundaries. Camps, in contrast, are border
phenomena into which groups deemed threatening to sovereignty during
wartime are excised. Racial or national categories of identification are
selectively suspended, fixed or destabilized. In exploring the camp as
a society in transition, a border world at the oppressive limits of sover-
eignty, we encounter a concentrated site for shifting identity politics.
Theoretical interest in intersecting sovereignties, in complex forms of
national belonging, identification and disenfranchisement spun off from
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal work on “intersectionality,” is a useful
starting point for exploring both the structural and dynamic conse-
quences of the interaction of two or more axes of subordination: “the
manner in which racism, patriarchy, class oppression and other
9
Brian Bernards, Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast
Asian Postcolonial Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Paul Carter,
“Tropical knowledge: archipelagic consciousness and the governance of excess,” etropic,
12:2 (2013); Refereed Proceedings of the Tropics of the Imagination Conference,
4–5 July 2013, Cairns Institute, James Cook University, 7995, http://etropic.jcu.edu.au/
pgcontents.htm.
10
Carter makes the argument for a form of geopolitical relationality as a decolonizing
praxis. See Paul Carter, Decolonising Governance: Archipelagic Thinking (London:
Routledge, 2018).
Carceral Archipelago 19
discriminatory systems contribute to create layers of inequality that struc-

ture the relative positions of women and men, races and other groups.”11
During war, or national crisis, the assignation or embodiment of political
sovereignty obscures other identity categories, overdetermining how
racialized or ethnicized colonial subjects, enemy aliens, immigrants and
birthright citizens are differently treated within the broader structures of
imperial or national sovereignty. The concerns and entitlements associ-
ated with political sovereignty are often suspended for those perceived as
potentially unpatriotic. The specter of “statelessness,” threatening to
normative sovereignty, emerges as another axis of oppression that
attaches to already embedded racialized or other forms of social
discrimination.
This book argues that World War II spatialized the parameters of
statelessness against which postwar nationalisms took shape. The phys-
ical spaces used for testing its limits included civil jails, formerly used for
incarcerating criminals, POW camps established to hold enemy combat-
ants and internment camps for enemy aliens or enemy nationals of
a hostile power. In the US example, as with the Holocaust but very
different from it, naturalized and birthright citizens were also incarcerated
in what have come to be recognized as concentration camps.
Studies of World War I camps in Europe, Asia and Australia corrobor-
ate our analyses, providing important backstories for the genealogical
approach. Matthew Stibbe’s Civilian Internment during the First World
War, including imperial Britain and imperial Germany but also extending
its scope to Brazil, India, Thailand and Portugal, presents internment as
a migration-led process that mobilized prisoners across international
borders – an approach that resonates with ours.12 Mahon Murphy’s
study of 30,000 German civilians and soldiers imprisoned in colonies in
Asia and Africa during World War I touches on many of the camps cited
here for Japan, Australia and New Zealand.13 Importantly, he identifies
Australia as an ultimate destination for ridding British colonies of poten-
tially problematic internee populations, an approach also adopted during
World War II.14 Spatial and material evidence of the kinds sought are
11
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a Black feminist
critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics,” The University
of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989: 1, article 8, 139–67; K. Crenshaw, “Background paper for the
Expert Meeting on the Gender-related Aspects of Racial Discrimination,” United Nations,
2000, www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/genrac/report.htm.
12
Matthew Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War: A European and Global
History 1914–1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
13
Mahon Murphy, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of
the German Overseas Empire 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
14
Ibid., 190.
found in country-specific studies that focus in depth on a national con-

text. Australian historian Peter Monteath provides a more comprehensive
overview of the physical conditions in the recipient camps in Australia,
extending his study to cover both World Wars.15 Bohdan Kordan focuses
on the use of civilian internment labor on public works projects, camp
building and road works, and also for national park development in
Western Canada, in an effort to understand enemy aliens’ exclusion
from – alongside their deployment for – the Canadian national
project.16 Many of this book’s topics, including imperial ambitions,
national tensions, colonization, labor and migrant identity, are evident
across these studies, justifying a similarly ambitious sociospatial explor-
ation of World War II incarceration environments. The mid-twentieth-
century political context was very different, however, because European
empires were waning and Japan was on the rise, alongside the increasing
global presence of Britain’s former settler-colonies. World War II enabled
these nascent polities to demonstrate through military aggression their
independence and internationalization as equal partners on the global
stage.
War in the Pacific

Against the raging conflict in Europe, but markedly different from it, war
in the Pacific acted as a catalyst for US military imperialism and also for its
internal struggle for civil liberties, while also prompting Australia’s auton-
omy from Britain and alliance with the USA, and precipitating demands
for political decolonization across Asia. These changes were underscored
by the specter of Japanese wartime empowerment and ultimate defeat.
Given the vastness of the Pacific theater of World War II, concentration
on these three former Anglophone colonies as nodal to the conflict and
arraigned against Japan offers a slice of the greater history of the war, not
through the lens of empires but of their growing offspring. Australia, the
island continent at this Pacific geography’s edge, serves as the entry point.
The focus on three politically very different settler-dominated environ-
ments at different stages in the colonial process, rather than on more
established culturally homogeneous political geographies, is a deliberate
extension of the decentered approach synonymous with “border-
thinking.”17 Because these are nations “in-process” at the periphery of
15
Peter Monteath, Captured Lives: Australia’s Wartime Internment Camps (Canberra:
National Library of Australia, 2018).
16
Bohdan Kordan, Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada during the Great
War (New York: McGill-Queen’s University, 2003).
17
Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs.
War in the Pacific 21
a still-demanding parent geography to which they are militarily, and in

Singapore’s case politically, tied, their boundaries are, in fact, weak and
forcibly maintained. More significantly, in these three geographies the
varied racialized terms of sovereignty underlying settler and colonial
identities were destabilized by the war, creating critical starting points
for marginalized groups’ subsequent struggles for social equity. There
was a perceptible shift from the Europe-centered histories of an earlier era
to a broader geography of self-conscious competition and outright rejec-
tion of the age of empire’s incestuous dependencies. Moreover, despite
being drawn into the war’s European nexus, the USA and Australia’s
Pacific orientation and their direct exposure to Japan’s imperial aggres-
sion prompted the formation of geopolitical alliances in defense of their
colonies (or administrative territories) in the Philippines and New
Guinea, respectively. Singapore was a strategic battleground and
a physical border in the Asia-Pacific, but also a node through which
other sites in Asia were accessed. Although alliance with Britain animated
these three separate geographies, focus on these rather than older imperial
interests offers insights into the war’s impact on their legacies of immi-
grant-citizenship.
As former settler-colonies and self-governing federations, both the USA
and Australia maintained bilateral relations with Britain as participants in
the Anglosphere, as nations sharing common cultural and historical roots
with the United Kingdom, like other British Dominions such as Canada and
New Zealand. A marked difference was the USA, a federated republic, while
the Commonwealth of Australia, federated in 1901 as a Dominion of the
British Empire, maintained constitutional ties with Britain until 1986.
Nevertheless, these “New World” environments emerged through similar
troubling processes that differentiated their settler societies, such as the
genocide of First Nations populations, expropriation of their lands and
unfree labor of transported convicts or enslaved populations. By the early
twentieth century they had emerged as colonizers, displacing established
European powers in the Philippines and New Guinea in their desire to gain
a regional foothold and exploit labor and resources. Internally, the struggle
had shifted from suppression and genocide of native populations to
competition for opportunities and resources between European and other
non-European immigrant-settlers, governed by a hierarchy of racialized
opportunities. Lisa Lowe argues that the nineteenth-century introduction
of Chinese contract labor marked “a shift from colonial mercantilism to
a new division of labor and the expansion of international trade.”18 In the
decades that followed, because of numerous legal restrictions placed on
18
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 27.
landownership, leasing or sharecropping by non-European immigrants,

Asians remained differentiated from “white” as well as First Nations and
other laboring populations, occupying a “liminal, ambiguous intermediary
position” in a largely Anglophone society.19 Successive US and Australian
legislation restricted the entry and degree of participation of nonwhite
immigrants in property and labor economies, so as to maintain the relative
advantages of “white” landholders or workers. Alienation through disen-
franchisement of land or labor appeared as a racialized political strategy.
Lowe’s work in tracing Asian labor movement across four continents after
the abolition of slavery alerts us to the ways in which exploitive labor
networks underscored Anglo-American imperialism and Western
liberalism.
Singapore displayed some attributes of a settler-colony because of its
predominantly settler population, but exogenous government as a crown
colony, and as an extractive-mercantilist economic entrepot, cast the
largely Asian population as colonial subjects. Whereas Asian settlement
was not as invasive as in the USA or Australia and not predicated on
creating a “white” society, racialized hierarchies and political emascula-
tion were features of colonial society. There was also greater hybridity and
diversity within Singapore’s Asian settler population, including regionally
emplaced Malays, and Chinese, Indian, Eurasian and other groups who
had lived in the region and also intermarried long before European
contact. As first argued by J. S. Furnivall, these plural social divisions
created a situation where “different sections of the community live side by
side, but separately, within the same political unit.”20 He believed that in
tropical societies immigration was anticipated and incorporated through
sedentarization, whereas Dominions, while having plural features, had
a common social will (shaped by cultural hegemony) that placed a bar on
immigration.21 These important distinctions between two settler modal-
ities influenced the representation and reception of wartime histories. In
Australia and the USA, legislative restrictions expanded to exclude resi-
dent populations on the basis of ancestry or nationality.22 In Singapore,
19
Ibid., 28. The Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited the ownership of agricultural land by
“aliens” ineligible for citizenship, and the Alien Land Act of 1920 prohibited leasing and
sharecropping. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC),
Personal Justice Denied (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 290–2.
20
J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands
India (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 304.
21
Ibid., 303–6.
22
Such as the US Alien Land Laws of 1913, 1920 and 1923, which prohibited Asian
immigrants from owning land and other forms of property and restricted immigrant
quotas for various groups; and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which formed
the basis of the “White Australia Policy.”
War in the Pacific 23
each ethnic community, siloed by language or religion, seemingly experi-

enced the war differently. The war hardened, but also strained, these
various interracial relationships, prompting new political alliances and
worldviews. It also cultivated strains of postcolonial and minority con-
sciousness in the generations who inherited the divisive legacies of the
war, politicized through the discriminations they experienced.
Japan, in contrast, a largely racially homogeneous society, apart from its
Indigenous populations, had opened its doors in 1868 to foreign technol-
ogy after 250 years of isolation (Sakoku – closed country). The ensuing
period of revolutionary reform, the Meiji restoration, under an embodied
political sovereign – the Meiji Emperor – modernized Japanese society
and politics. Legal reforms, urbanization, industrialization and military
expansion (as well as the internal pacification of Indigenous Ainu and
northern-frontier settler-colonialism) saw accelerated growth along cap-
italist lines and growing territorial ambitions in the Pacific. Although
allied with the Entente powers in World War I, naval expansion in the
interwar period spearheaded a program for political ascendance through
Asian unification, announced in June 1940 as the Greater East Asia Co-
Prosperity Sphere.23 The envisioned empire included Northeast Asia,
Southeast Asia and Oceania, including Europe’s Asian colonies. Korea
(1910–45), Taiwan (Formosa) (1895–1945) and Manchuria (1932–45)
were already integrated into this territory. Three months later, the
Japanese government signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the US-Pacific Fleet’s military base in
Hawaii, on 7 December 1941 proved historically pivotal. It drew the
formerly neutral USA into the global conflict. The underlying intention
was to prevent the Fleet from coming to the aid of multiple territories in
Asia: Midway, Malaya, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines’ Batan
Island were attacked simultaneously. Japanese troops marched or
bicycled across Malaya into Singapore, taking the island on
15 February 1942. This action cast a wider net over Japan’s Pacific
territory. Four days later, with their sights on Timor and New Guinea,
Japan attacked Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Japanese occupation of French, British, US and Dutch colonies in Asia
(e.g., Indo-China, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, the
Philippines and Netherlands East Indies) unsettled the racialized hier-
archies through which European oppression had been justified.
Singapore was defended by British Commonwealth forces, whose hasty
23
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was announced by Japanese Foreign
Minister Hachirō Arita in a radio address on “The International Situation and Japan’s
Position,” 29 June 1940; William Theodore De Bary, Sources of East Asian Tradition: The
Modern Period, 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 622.
capitulation was an unmitigated Allied disaster. Predominantly British and

Australian troops and Allied nations’ civilians were taken captive. The
period of Japanese occupation was a divisive interregnum during which
the regional settler population, as colonial subjects, were torn between
competing oppressive regimes. Singapore acted as a transit point for troop
movement and for forced-labor distribution in Asia – a node in
a transborder carceral network across the South China Sea.
Intersections of Sovereignty in Captivity

Both Australia and New Zealand had interned enemy aliens during World
War I, accommodated in tented, hutted or prison facilities. The largest
camp, Holdsworthy (later Holsworthy) (NSW), held up to 6,000
internees.24 Australia joined the second global conflict alongside
Britain, on 3 September 1939, and, like Britain, interned those enemy
aliens whose politics was seen as “prejudicial to public safety or the
defense of the Commonwealth.”25 By May 1940 a total of 268
Germans were being held, awaiting the construction of internment
camps. In July 1940, following the defeat of France and entry of Italy
into the war, Italians were interned, as were women enemy aliens and
naturalized subjects of enemy origin. Australia also agreed to accept up to
50,000 POWs and enemy alien internees including refugees from Europe
on behalf of Britain, in order to remove them from the European theater
of war.26 They began arriving in September 1940. Japanese internment
commenced in December 1941.
By the end of the war Australia had interned 8,921 local residents,
cumulatively during the conflict, for varying time periods, and a further
7,877 overseas internees.27 The latter, from the United Kingdom, and
various theaters of conflict including North Africa and colonial Pacific
24
National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA), Holsworthy (Liverpool), NSW
(1914–20, 1939–46), www.naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/internment-camps/
WWI/holsworthy.aspx. The camps were at Berrima, Bourke, Trial Bay and
Holsworthy in NSW, Molonglo in ACT, Enoggera in QLD, Langwarrin in Vic.,
Rottnest and Garden Islands in WA, Torrens Island and Fort Largs in SA and Bruny
Island in Tas. See Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Home Front
Experience in Australia, 1914–1920 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press,
1989); Nadine Helmi and Gerard Fischer, The Enemy at Home: German Internees in
World War I Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011). Approximately 7,000 were
detained in Australia during World War I.
25
Under regulation 20 of the National Security Regulations of 1939.
26
NAA: A5954, 804/1, War Cabinet Minutes, vol. 3, Meetings 17 June 1940 to 17
September 1940. POWs and Internees from Abroad, Agendum 157/1940, supplement
No. 1, item 431, 310.
27
Report on the Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees (hereafter RDPWI), AWM
(Australian War Memorial) 54 (780/1/6), vol. 1, ch. 3, 19, ch. 23, 93.
Intersections of Sovereignty in Captivity 25
territories, were placed in eighteen large, purpose-built hutted or tented

camp facilities and some smaller facilities similar to those for the military.
Australia’s numbers were few when compared with North America’s
incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians (120,000
civilians in the USA; 21,460 in Canada), but highly relative to the popu-
lation at that time. Australia’s population, though under 7 million, had
1 million service personnel engaged across the two theaters of conflict.
Australia, like North America but on a much smaller scale, was a recipient
nation for POWs. This meant that, unlike North American segregation of
these groups, Australian camps were proximate or even components
within camps for 25,727 captive enemy combatants, merchant seamen
and prisoners taken by the Australian and US forces in the Pacific.28 This
number was close to the 22,000 Australians taken captive by the Japanese
in Asia. New Zealand, with a population of around 1.6 million and
140,000 service personnel, interned only 886 persons and 812 Japanese
POWs.29 Although population figures for these antipodean nations were
far lower than Japan’s 73 million with nearly 6 million service personnel
(by 1945), or the USA’s 132 million with 16 million service personnel,
their ratios of military to civilians and captives were relatively high.30
The paucity of material on the Australian internment camps, when
compared with North America, is possibly due to ambivalence toward
and ignorance of the associated history, perceived nationally as an exten-
sion of British or US policies for which those nations were culpable, rather
than an Australian concern. But this is also due to the repatriation of
POWs and Asian internees, as well as the stigma the Japanese especially
associated with captivity. Key sources on the broader histories include
Beaumont et al.’s Under Suspicion, Margaret Bevege’s Behind Barbed Wire
and Klaus Neumann’s In the Interest of National Security.31 Genuine
efforts at understanding local histories supplement these with site-
specific accounts tied to local collections, oral accounts and physical
28
RDPWI, vol. 2, 106.
29
Archives New Zealand, AD1 1291, 310/11/3, Discipline – NZ Military Forces,
Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry on Mutiny at POW Camp, Featherston, New
Zealand, 25 February 1943 (Copy no. 23), 1943, 78–90; David McGill, Island of
Secrets (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001), 112.
30
Figures are taken from US Census Bureau, A Look at the 1940 Census, www.census.gov
/newsroom/cspan/1940census/CSPAN_1940slides.pdf; Department of Veterans Affairs,
America’s Wars, www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf; e-Stat,
Statistics of Japan, www.e-stat.go.jp/en; Edward Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and
Fall, 1853–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 235.
31
Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien and Mathew Trinca, eds., Under Suspicion
(Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2008); Klaus Neumann, In the Interest of
National Security (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2006); Margaret Bevege,
Behind Barbed Wire (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993).
remains. Titles like Walls of Wire, Stalag Australia, Marched in and

Haywire convey the gist of these storylines.32 Graham Apthorpe’s
A Town at War is possibly the most comprehensive book on Cowra’s
wartime history, including an account of a breakout.33 This last incident
is the subject of many popular histories, discussed in Chapter 3. A third
cluster of publications, highly dependent on bilingual scholarship,
focuses on different nationalities including Germans, Jews, Italians or
Japanese, retroactively historicizing Australia’s multicultural heritage for
these minority communities. Johann Peter Weiss’ It Wasn’t Really
Necessary, Yuriko Nagata’s Unwanted Aliens and Mia Spizzica’s Hidden
Lives typify this approach.34 Recent publications include Captured Lives,
Nazis in Our Midst and Dunera Lives.35 Indeed, more books have been
written on the fates of HMT Dunera passengers than on any other group,
which, alongside NSW’s Cowra, is etched in popular memory.36 These
many empirically rich studies accept Australia’s identification as an insu-
lated outpost of the British Empire, rather than a major player in the
Pacific.
Conversely, works on Australians imprisoned by Japan offer
a transnational overview of colonial Southeast Asia under the Japanese.
A comparison with Australian camps has not been attempted to date.
These studies invariably encompass experiences of British POWs taken
captive alongside Australians, and Americans to a lesser extent.
Australian World War II deaths were 27,073, including 8,296 who died
in captivity, of the 30,560 POWs.37 Around 140,000 Allied personnel
and 13,000 civilians taken captive across Asia by the Imperial Japanese
32
Joyce Hammond, Walls of Wire: Tatura, Rushworth, Murchison (Rushworth, VIC:
J. Hammond, 1990); Barbara Winter, Stalag Australia: German Prisoners of War
(London; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1986); Knee and Knee, Marched In: An
Account of the Seven Internment and Prisoner of War Camps in the Tatura Area during
World War 2 (Tatura: Lurline and Arthur Knee, 2008); Ian and Caroline Merrylees,
Haywire: The War-Time Camps at Hay (Hay, NSW: Hay Historical Society, 2006).
33
Graham Apthorpe, A Town at War: Stories from Cowra in World War II (Cowra:
G. Apthorpe, 2008).
34
Johann Peter Weiss, It Wasn’t Really Necessary: Internment in Australia with Emphasis on
the Second World War (Eden Hills, SA: J.P. Weiss, 2003); Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens
(St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996); Mia Spizzica, Hidden Lives: War,
Internment and Australia’s Italians (Carindale, QLD: Glasshouse Books, 2018).
35
David Henderson, Nazis in Our Midst: German-Australians, Internment and the Second
World War (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016); Monteath,
Captured Lives; Ken Inglis et al., Dunera Lives, vol. 1 (Clayton, VIC: Monash
University Publishing, 2018).
36
Paul R. Bartrop and Gabrielle Eisen, eds., The Dunera Affair: A Documentary Resource
Book (South Yarra, VIC: Schwartz & South Yarra and Jewish Museum of Australia,
1990); Cyril Pearl, The Dunera Scandal (Port Melbourne: Mandarin Australia, 1990).
37
NAA, Conflicts, World War II, www.naa.gov.au/collection/explore/defence/conflicts
.aspx.
Army (IJA), following the invasion of Malaya in early 1942, were distrib-
uted across a vast network of camps in newly occupied territories.38 Of the
22,000 Australian POWs in Asia, some 15,000 were captured in
Singapore.39 An incomplete map titled Japanese Prisoner of War Camps
during WWII 1941–45 collated by the medical research committee of
American ex-POWs enumerates over 300 known camps across Asia: in
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore,
Malaya, French Indo-China, Burma, Thailand and along the Burma-
Thai Railroad.40 These included a range of facilities, such as hastily
requisitioned prisons and military barracks, timber-and-attap hutments,
and military tents. The most rudimentary facilities were in forced-labor
camps on various military industrial and infrastructure projects estab-
lished in contravention of Article 31 of the 1929 Geneva Convention
forbidding deployment of POW labor in war industries.41 Camps in
Singapore spread across the island, repurposing British military facilities,
with the main hub and transit camp at the Changi military cantonment.
The entire island was converted to a punitive geography, with Changi as
one node in a network dispersed across Southeast Asia. As camp numbers
given in diverse sources vary, because of the incompleteness of records,
any numbers stated in this book are mainly indicative of their prolifer-
ation, and need to be treated only as such.
The Story of Changi Singapore, a firsthand account by New Zealander
David Nelson, stands out among the over 100 similar memoirs of
Japanese captivity.42 Henry Probert provides a physical history of the
area, including the cantonment’s prewar construction, recently revisited
in a study of military barrack designs by Chang Jiat-Hwee.43 Critical
scholarship has begun to take over this largely ex-POW-led discourse,
as revisionist nation-building narratives insert wartime experience of the
ancestors of contemporary “Singaporeans” into the field of memory.
38
See Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack, Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia
(New York: Routledge, 2008).
39
Australian Government, “The Anzac Portal, Australian PO 1940–1945,” https://anzac
portal.dva.gov.au/history/conflicts/australias-war-19391945/resources/australian-
prisoners-war-19401945.
40
“Japanese POW and Internment Camps during World War II” [map], Medical Research
Committee of American Ex-POWs, 1980, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=5540008.
41
ICRC database, “Convention relative to the treatment of POWs,” Geneva, 27 July 1929,
www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/57jnws.htm.
42
David Nelson, The Story of Changi Singapore, 3rd ed. (Singapore: Changi Museum,
2012).
43
Henry Probert, The History of Changi (Singapore: Changi Prison Press, 1965; reprinted
Changi University Press, 2006); Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture:
Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Studies can be divided into those exogenous to Singapore representing

viewpoints of Australian or British servicemen, largely based on archives
in those countries, or of local-based scholars analyzing the politics of
remembrance. R. P. W. Havers, Hank Nelson, Joan Beaumont and
Christina Twomey fall into the first group, while Kevin Blackburn, Karl
Hack and Paul Kratoska lead in the latter category, as claimants on this
newly politicized space.44 Akashi Yoji and Yoshimura Mako, Lee Geok
Boi, Gregg Huff, and Majima Shinobu have further expanded it through
reference to material on Japanese administration of Singapore.45
Compared with these accounts, little has been written on the architecture
of Changi Prison, beyond POW memoirs. In 2004, the building’s immi-
nent demolition inaugurated processes that injected this and other sites
into national heritage discourses lately preoccupied with the war as
a means for stretching national memory beyond independence to annex
and cultivate a Singaporean version of imperial history. Muzaini and
Yeoh have addressed this shift.46 As with Australia, revisionist histories
frequently compartmentalize ethnicized accounts, reinforcing the plural
political model adopted by the nation-state.
Material on camps in Japan and East Asia are harder to come by, with
the most recent scholarly publication being Sarah Kovner’s Prisoners of the
Empire.47 The 32,418 POWs held in Japan from 1942 were distributed
across branch camps, detached camps and “dispatch” camps, operated
from administrative camps set up in major cities. Dispatch camps, typic-
ally two-story wooden structures used as warehouses or company dormi-
tories, were run by corporations in ship building, mining, construction,
steel production, and chemical manufacturing and transportation mobil-
ized for the war effort. By 1945 there were approximately 130 camps
44
R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW
Camp, Singapore, 1942–45 (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Hank Nelson, POW:
Australians under Nippon (Sydney: ABC, 1985); Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten
Prisoners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Blackburn and Hack, eds.,
Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia. See also Malcolm Murfett et al., Between
Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
45
Yoji Akashi and Mako Yoshimura, eds., New Perspectives on the Japanese Occupation in
Malaya and Singapore, 1941–45 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008). See also Geok Boi Lee,
The Syonan Years: Singapore under Japanese rule, 1942–45 (Singapore: National Archives
of Singapore, 2005).
46
Hamzah Muzaini and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contested Memoryscapes: The Politics of Second
World War Commemoration in Singapore (New York: Routledge, 2016).
47
Sarah Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2020). See also Greg Leck, Captives of Empire: The Japanese
Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941–45 (Bangor, PA: Shandy Press, 2006);
Michael D. Hurst, Never Forgotten . . . The Story of Japanese Prisoner of War Camps in
Taiwan during World War II (Taipei: Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, 2020).
distributed across the Japanese archipelago.48 Initially located in the

Keihin (Tokyo-Yokohama) and Hanshin (Osaka-Kobe) industrial
areas, they were moved northward toward the Sea of Japan in 1945
when invasion was imminent. An estimated 2,000 civilians of Allied
nations were held in civilian facilities in Japan. Camps were also estab-
lished in the eastern reaches of Japan’s imperial geography enumerated in
records as China, eighty-nine camps; Korea, fourteen; Taiwan, sixteen,
although here too numbers are unstable.49 This East Asian theater of the
conflict, not the focus of this book, is perhaps the least-known camp
geography of the war. Judith Bennett’s Natives and Exotics provides an
excellent environmental study of Pacific island territories that were trans-
formed by the conflict.50
In comparison, North America’s incarceration environments have
produced numerous social histories, energized by postwar movements
for redress and the establishment of Asian American Studies in the wake
of the late 1960s protest movements. Between January and
February 1942, official exclusion and mass incarceration orders of the
US and Canadian governments forcibly removed birthright citizens and
immigrants of Japanese ancestry deemed sensitive to enemy attack from
west coast military exclusion zones. They were confined in civilian
Assembly Centers, typically stalls for accommodating livestock in fair-
grounds and racetracks, and then moved to semipermanent camps in
remote environments across seven states. These actions criminalized
and impoverished a Japanese settler population that had already estab-
lished niches in North American society and economies, though con-
strained by various racialized restrictions circumscribing social
mobility. West coast peoples of Japanese origin were singled out and
incarcerated en masse. Their accommodation was vastly different on the
two sides of the US–Canada border: with ten military-style barrack
cities termed “War Relocation Centers” purpose-built in the USA,
and domestic-scale work camps in British Columbia’s mountainous
interior repurposed or rebuilt for Japanese Canadian internees. In
both North American examples, like in Australia, internees were
employed in farm work, road work and manufacturing, and housed in
a range of physical facilities. The key difference is, unlike in Australia,
these workers included US and Canadian birthright and naturalized
citizens. Immigrants of German and Italian origin, of larger communi-
ties, did not suffer the same indignities, unless suspected of and arrested
48
POW Camps in Japan Proper, POW Research Network, Japan, www.powresearch.jp/en/
archive/camplist/index.html#seikatsu.
49
“Japanese POW and Internment Camps during World War II” [map].
50
Judith Bennett, Natives and Exotics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).
as individuals for specific prejudicial activities, whereas west coast

Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians were incarcerated on the
basis of enemy race and nationality.
This was not the same throughout the USA, and we need to be wary of
reading the vast and varied landscape of incarceration through this more
focused history. Camp typologies had already been expanded to include
Justice Department detention camps, Citizen Isolation Centers, Federal
Bureau Prison camps, US Army Facilities and Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) Facilities. Honouliuli Camp in Hawaii,
a site somewhat exceptional to mainland patterns because nearly 40 per-
cent of Hawaii’s population was of Japanese origin, transitioned from
a civilian internment camp for 300 Japanese and European detainees to
a POW camp holding over 16,000 soldiers and labor conscripts from
Italy, Japan, Korea, Okinawa and Taiwan during the course of the war.51
A further 1,800 Japanese were deported from Latin America to the USA
and held in INS camps including Crystal City, alongside Americans of
European and Japanese descent and their US-born children.52 From
1943, following an infamous “loyalty questionnaire” aimed at assessing
Nisei suitability for military service, Tule Lake Relocation Center was
redesignated as Tule Lake Segregation Center, a punitive facility for those
failing the test. Angler in Ontario was a similar facility in Canada. In this
manner, Japanese entry into the war extended and enlarged the North
American carceral landscape into a racialized and multifarious
geography.
Foundational comparative studies include Saunders and Daniels’ Alien
Justice, which compares wartime internment in Australia and North
America, covering all the Axis enemy alien groups, and Greg Robinson’s
study of the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians.53
Personal Justice Denied (Report on the Commission on Wartime Relocation
and Internment of Civilians) likewise gives the core structure for
51
Suzanne Falgout and Linda Nishigaya, eds., Breaking the Silence: Social Process in Hawaii,
vol. 4 (Honolulu: Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2014), xv,
xviii.
52
Some 1,800 Japanese from Peru, 250 Japanese from Panama and substantial numbers
from Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua
and Venezuela; Densho Encyclopedia, encyclopedia.densho.org/Japanese_Latin_America
ns. See Jan J. Russell, The Train to Crystal City (New York: Scribner, 2015).
53
Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels, eds., Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and
North America (St. Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2000); Greg Robinson,
A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009). See also Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the
Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).
The Instrumentality of Camps 31
introducing this case study.54 Numerous archeological and other studies by

the National Park Service (NPS) are important for understanding the
physical context of incarceration, particularly Confinement and Ethnicity:
An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites.55
Manzanar came under NPS management after being declared a National
Historic Site in 1972. The Garden Management Plan: Gardens and
Gardeners at Manzanar and the NPS website provide extensive empirical
material gathered over time and from various government archives.56
Harlan D. Unrau’s detailed report on Manzanar includes data from gov-
ernment records and sociological studies of the camp population con-
ducted at that time.57 Although inflected by bureaucratic biases, such
reports are useful for understanding the site’s physical history. Critical
historical analyses that spatialize the camps using evidence of their built
environments include the work of Lynne Horiuchi and Connie Chiang,
mentioned in the Introduction.58
The Instrumentality of Camps

As border environments in an imperial conflict involving old imperialists
like Britain and new aspirants like Japan and Allies in settler societies,
camps are significant for testing the parameters of sovereignty before
decolonization in the Pacific region. This study approaches these as (hos-
tile) host environments where “intersectional” subjectivities based on
complex cultural and political alignments are isolated and cauterized.
Culturally differentiated minority citizens were punished for associations
with hostile nations or as racial phenotypes, and were incarcerated along-
side enemy troops, or resistance fighters in some arenas. By expanding
intersectional theory to embrace other dimensions of geopolitical subject-
ivity, this study signals multiple cultural, social and political embodiments
of sovereignty as fundamental to identity formation, open to the forms of
repression imposed by sovereign power. It asks that the scope of this body
of theory, with its genesis in critical race theory and feminist sociology,
54
CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied.
55
Jeffrey F. Burton et al., Confinement and Ethnicity.
56
Jeffery F. Burton and Manzanar National Historic Site, Garden Management Plan:
Gardens and Gardeners at Manzanar (Manzanar National Historic Site, CA, 2015).
57
H. D. Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry during World
War II: A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center (US Department of the
Interior, National Park Service, 1996).
58
Lynne Horiuchi, “Architects at war: designing prison cities for Japanese American
communities,” in Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences, eds.
Beth Tauke et al. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 101–20; L. Horiuchi, “Dislocations
and Relocations.”
consider the broader cross-border mobilization and suppression of

embodied forms of belonging. It argues that, in addition to the categories
of identity typically addressed in intersectional theory, the built environ-
ment also mediated intersecting forms of political, cultural and personal
sovereignty. “Intersectional” identification crossed these boundaries of the
many forms of self-awareness impressed upon or emerging within dis-
placed persons because of the abrogation or defensive articulation of their
legal rights. The interpellations of these different forms of sovereignty,
intensified by the global conflict, are evident in the camps.
In exploring this premise, we demonstrate how the aesthetic and cul-
tural strategies that captive communities developed to counter environ-
mental repression reveal tactical, conflicted and resistant aspects of the
human condition, offering lessons for postwar constructions of national
belonging. Intersectional geopolitical alignments often occur as intimate
cultural practices that are territorialized and, we argue, become legible in
a range of material and spatial practices sensitive to these complex inter-
pellations of sovereignty. The self-awareness that arises through displace-
ment and oppression could be understood in Avery Gordon’s
theorization of “complex personhood,”59 where power permeates social
relations, framing our ways of thinking and acting. In her interpretation,
multiple histories and forces shape self-consciousness: personal figures,
social figures and institutions that reproduce power relations and struc-
tural inequality continue to haunt us. “Haunting,” in Gordon’s view, “is
an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is
making itself known.”60 This spectral presence manifests as the tension
between personal, cultural and political sovereignty within internee and
POW camp populations, or in the greater context of World War II
wherever Aryan, Japanese and Jewish identities were being essentialized.
While in the case of the Nazi or Japanese military it fueled totalitarian
imperial ambitions, the same violence was also used for persecuting
Jewish and other marginal groups. German or Japanese internees negoti-
ated these power relations by positioning themselves as victims or loyal-
ists, or as ambivalent or distanced subjects, in relation to Nazi or Japanese
military ideology. Jewish diasporic identities were likewise caught
between orthodoxy, liberal cosmopolitan practices of their natal
European geographies and racialized Nazi persecution.
Despite their value for unveiling embedded social complexities, both
above approaches from a US-centric feminist sociology remain
59
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
60
Ibid., xvi.
circumscribed by their geopolitical loci, and fail to test the boundaries of the
taken-for-granted sovereignty within which their scholarship operates.
Although Crenshaw’s later work expands on the concept, outlining its global
relevance, and US geopolitical sovereignty is continuously decentered and
decolonized at the Mexico–US border, such theories do not anticipate their
broader transnational or global applicability.61 Nevertheless, by aligning
their politics of race, critique of power relations and attention to civil liber-
ties, we gain useful strategies for identifying intimate experiences of oppres-
sion overlooked in broader geopolitical analyses. Political spaces of
incarceration need to be understood as the overpowering biopolitical con-
text for these more intimate relations of power.
For these broader questions of structural exclusion, we turn to theories of
decolonization and more specifically to the impact of Japanese imperialism,
combining the divergent and often insulated fields of Area Studies,
Postcolonial Studies and Asian American Studies with architectural history.
Japan’s entry into World War II influenced the Pacific geography in unpre-
cedented ways, diverting regional attention away from Europe and dividing
US interests between its Atlantic and Pacific coasts. State oppression mani-
fested very differently within national or imperial formations, depending on
systemic exclusions of Asians, or even non-Anglophone Europeans, in settler
ideologies. For example, under Australia’s “White Australia Policy”
(1901–73),62 a series of acts that restricted nonwhite (mainly Asian) immi-
gration to Australia, non-British cultures were forced to assimilate into
Anglo-Australian cultural values, so that enemy aliens or POWs stood out.
In Singapore, each ethnic community experienced occupation differently:
the British as captives, anti-Japan-occupation Chinese cruelly eliminated,
Malays developing a nascent nationalism and Indians split between the pro-
Japan Indian National Army and British loyalist troops. In the USA, where
people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated en masse, restrictions to
naturalization of Japanese immigrants produced very different relations
with US and Japanese sovereignty across three generations of the racialized
collective. The immigrant subject was internally split by two forms of geo-
political loyalties, as acquired through migration or characterized by race.
The rich conceptual debates around racial and political identification
have proven useful for rethinking the wartime camp geography as an
interlinked network of concentrated border sites. Different scalar read-
ings of similar phenomena call for skills drawn from architecture, art
history and geography. The selection of the sites followed a particular
61
See P. R. Grzanka, ed., Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2014).
62
NAA: A1559, 1901/17, Immigration Restriction Act 1901.
schema. Given the paucity of data on many sites and the archival labor
involved, the core cases refer to those sites where heritage practices have
produced both formal and informal knowledge around human and
material remains. The ways in which prisoners recouped diminished
resources, so as to maintain accustomed everyday comforts, are evi-
denced in the many personal objects donated to museums and archives.
Interpretation of these ephemeral materialities calls on the postcolonial
“subaltern studies” approach, introduced by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak for uncovering relations of colonial dominance and
subordination in suppressed histories of impoverished, laboring or mar-
ginalized individuals or social groups,63 except that these incarcerated
populations were otherwise stable and variously entitled through colonial
or settler forms of belonging or property ownership and waged labor,
before they were alienated as enemies of the state. Their impoverishment
stripped them of all material privileges, and they sought to simulate these
lost materialities throughout captivity. Their “subalternization” – the
silences and limits imposed on them as hostages to sovereign power – is
a concept introduced through this work that builds on this previous
historiography of inequality and subjection.
Human remains are an added and serious concern, given the politics of
their repatriation and the affective entailed diplomacy. Lives were lost on
both sides of the conflict, and deaths during captivity were treated very
differently to battlefield casualties. Civilian deaths passed largely
unnoticed, except by families. Elderly persons as well as civilian men,
women and children became exceptionally vulnerable during captivity,
given that camps were designed for the temporary accommodation of
young men as military recruits. Sickness, depression and lethargy due to
inactivity, the dissolution of family units, lack of privacy and injuries caused
by harsh treatment of captors, punitive incarceration or isolation all created
degrees of depravation, sometimes leading to death. Criminalized by vio-
lent processes implicating them from afar, civilians often had little recourse
to individualized legal processes that might secure their release. After the
war, when national sentiment was focused on military heroism, the suffer-
ing of these civilians receded, surfacing only decades later when national-
level redress or local reconciliation efforts were raised. Scholarship on
silent, lost or untold stories addresses this gap.64
63
Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?,” in
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313.
64
Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners; David McGill, POW: The Untold Story
of New Zealanders as Prisoners of War (Lower Hutt, NZ: Mills Publishing, 1987); Arthur
At many of the sites examined in this study, accommodation for civil-

ians and combatants was proximate and similar. Troops were often drawn
from civilian conscripts or volunteers. Distinctions between volunteers,
conscripts or career servicemen, which were blurred during the early
twentieth century, became divisive because of social antipathy toward
the Vietnam War, which cast military conscription and military culture in
a negative light. Dispossession and incarceration, although experienced
very differently by these three groups, had comparable affects. But more
importantly, whereas military personnel and civilians are often seen as
obverse categories, wartime histories, commemorative events and peace-
keeping activities blur these boundaries. Some Japanese American civil-
ians were recruited for or drafted into the US Army from the camps.
Military police or soldiers supervised the forced removal and incarcer-
ation of civilian populations and in some cases took part in planning camp
facilities. In the Pacific War, unlike in Europe’s Holocaust, the harshest
treatment was received by military POWs. Military and civilian histories
often entwined. More significantly, the families of combatants saw their
loved ones through interpersonal relationships not dependent on military
standing.
These delineations are often confused in the terminology used during the
conflict. Literature on Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Asia differen-
tiates civilian internees, typically termed enemy aliens, from captured
combatants of a hostile power identified as POWs. Internment camps
and POW camps appear as separate categories. The term “concentration
camp,” first associated by some writers with the facilities built by the British
for Boer internees in South Africa,65 and applied to the Nazi camps for
Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust, has come to be retroactively
applied to the US facilities, although not without controversy, for Japanese
American citizens and immigrants.66 “Concentration” has come to imply
the incarceration of citizens by their own governments; “internment” is
A. Hansen and Betty E. Mitson, eds., Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese
American Evacuation (California State University, Fullerton: Oral History Project, 1974).
65
Andrea Pitzer, “Concentration camps existed long before Auschwitz,” Smithsonian
.com, 2 November 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/concentration-camps-
existed-long-before-Auschwitz-180967049. Pitzer, a journalist and author, traces the
term’s origin to the 1895 reconcentración of rural inhabitants by Cuban governor general
Arsenio Martinéz Campos, but the incarceration of 200,000 civilians by the British
during the 1900 Boer war is perhaps the better-known example.
66
Roger Daniels, “Words do matter: a note on inappropriate terminology and the incarcer-
ation of the Japanese Americans,” in Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans
and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, eds. L. Fiset and G. Nomura (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2005), 83–207; Karen L. Ishizuka and Japanese
American National Museum, LA, Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American
Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
used for enemy alien internees, or for those who are not birthright or
naturalized US citizens, separately incarcerated under different laws.
These terms have been revised by wrongfully incarcerated citizen groups
challenging the euphemisms by which many governments masked their
wartime culpability, highlighting the failures of liberal democracy. In the
USA, for example, terms like “evacuation,” “detention” and “relocation”
veiled the violence of mass incarceration of Japanese American citizens,
enabling control of the incarcerated population under national rather than
international law.67 Camps were called “Assembly Centers” or “War
Relocation Centers,” and only later “internment camps,” associated with
the incarceration of enemy aliens rather than citizens.
The instability of terms points to the lack of clear criteria differentiating
the treatment of categories of prisoners in the international conventions
established prior to World War II. While the 1929 Convention clearly
regulated POW treatment, discipline, labor and accommodation,68 similar
protections for “civilians of an enemy nationality” were still in draft form.
The Tokyo Draft Convention of 1934 stated preference for the compulsory
residence of noncombatant enemy civilians in a specified district, or where
necessary in fenced-in camps secured by the detaining power.69 This
convention, yet to be ratified when war broke out, did not account for the
criminalization and incarceration without trial of naturalized or birthright
citizens alienated by their own governments, as with the case of interned
European Jews or Japanese Americans. Given that the draft regulations
could not be enforced during World War II, many individual nation-states
acted in their own interests, producing that war’s many human tragedies.
Moreover, while a signatory to the 1929 Convention, Japan did not ratify it,
although Germany did. Only the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949
would differentiate these two distinct categories.70
As evident across the next chapters, this lack of distinction between
civilians and combatants normalized patterns of mistreatment relevant
for the interpretation of rights, entitlements and civil liberties, until today.
They define the boundaries drawn around proper citizenship that contain
67
Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress
Settlement (Vancouver National Association of Japanese Canadians, Winnipeg:
Talonbooks, 1991), 24.
68
ICRC database, Convention relative to the Treatment of POWs, Geneva, 27 July 1929,
“Treaties, state parties and commentaries,” https://ihldatabases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl
.nsf.
69
ICRC database, Draft International Convention on the Condition and Protection of
Civilians of enemy nationality who are on territory belonging to or occupied by
a belligerent, Tokyo, 1934, https://ihldatabases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Treaty.xsp?
documentId=85EE9A58C871B072C12563CD002D6A15&action=openDocument.
70
ICRC database, Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of
War, 12 August 1949, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/INTRO/380.
those excluded from it. The underlying logic and ultimate purpose of this
book is to understand statelessness as a sociospatial phenomenon, one
that diminishes displaced persons by placing them in military-style, puni-
tive facilities. This study sees Australia’s normalization of onshore or
offshore detention facilities as evolving from practices first tested during
World War II; or the US government’s incarceration of DREAMers,
travel bans on immigrants from and visas for residents of Muslim coun-
tries or attitudes to Latin American migrants as traceable to racialized
practices of exclusion evident in wartime incarceration histories. The
denial of civil liberties or dehumanization of particular groups based on
nationality, ethnoreligious identity or impoverishment has precedents in
these nation’s pasts and in that temporal global shift from imperial to
national forms of sovereignty. Singapore’s recurrent national crises over
degrees of social engineering and guest-worker management needed to
maintain economic prosperity, and its securitization, plural political
model and ambivalence toward its colonial past, are also linked to its
defensive self-construction through wartime exigencies. As argued in the
Introduction, many discriminatory political legacies of these postcolonial
and settler nation-states are connected to the Pacific War.
In the decades after World War II the USA was transformed internally by
the civil rights movement’s struggle for civil liberties. A campaign initiated
by second-generation Nisei activists during the 1960s lobbied for and
achieved their goal of redress decades later with a federal law granting
reparations under the Civil Liberties Act in 1988. Australia relaxed its
White Australia Policy in a bid to populate the continent against future
Asian (Communist) expansion, accepting non-Anglophone European
immigrants and refugees. Its government introduced a series of legal
reforms between 1966 and 1973 dismantling the racist aspects of this policy.
Compared to many other European colonies, Singapore’s decolonization
was achieved belatedly, with colonial government resumed at the war’s end.
Self-determination through independence and demilitarization through
British troop withdrawal occurred more slowly, between 1963 and 1975.
These three geographies were impacted differently by the war. Whereas
US interests were split between Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and
Singapore was divided internally around conflicting loyalties, for
Australia these two theaters remained interlinked. Approximately
1 million Australians fought in World War II, shifting from early involve-
ment in North Africa, West Asia, Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean
to campaigns in the Pacific.71 As the war moved closer home, to New
71
AWM, Enlistment Statistics, Second World War, www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclope
dia/enlistment/ww2.
Guinea, remote imperial obligations were displaced by concerns for

national safety. Australia’s defense policy became increasingly dependent
on the USA. After Major General Douglas MacArthur was appointed
Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific area, US and Australian
troops fought under his command in the Papuan and New Guinea
campaigns. Locations across Southeast Asia, North American west
coast cities, Hawaii, numerous Pacific islands, and Japanese cities and
ports became familiar to Australians as military bases and through troop
movements. Some 150,000 US troops were stationed in Australia, mainly
in Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville, from 22 December 1941
onward.72 Battles in the Pacific involving US and Australian troops
reinforced this regional geography.
Case Studies
As stated in the Introduction and earlier, this research was initiated
through specific case studies devolving in scale across the three geograph-
ical areas selected for inquiry relative to their distance from Australia,
which is examined more thoroughly with the ambition of anchoring its
Pacific position as a key node in the war (Map 1.1). Within Australia,
focus is placed on the Tatura Group of seven camps, where the family
group camps offer key insights into intersectional identities more diverse
than those apparent in camps elsewhere. Tatura is also the only location
in Australia to establish a sizeable collection of POW and internee mem-
orabilia and research materials dedicated to the wartime camps. The
Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum and the Murchison
Historical Society cover and have kept alive the story of the camps,
aided by key physical sites such as the Tatura German War Cemetery
and the Italian National Ossario that draw the descendants of former
internees and associated immigrant communities to their annual com-
memorative events. The physical campsites at Tatura are presently
inaccessible, with many sites returned to former owners or passed to
other private owners for grazing land, although ruins of foundations and
cellblocks still remain. National-heritage-listed Camp 1 at Tatura now
belongs to the local field and game club. Dhurringile Mansion, a former
POW facility, was converted to a state minimum-security prison, seem-
ingly continuing an aspect of its wartime brief. At Loveday, except for the
heritage-listed, fenced-off garrison quarters seemingly left to ruin, very
little is traceable of the wartime camps. The NSW Hay racecourse, which
72
AWM, US forces in Australia, www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/homefront/
us_forces.
Case Studies 39
Map 1.1 Map of the Pacific Basin showing locations of key case
study sites. Drawn by Catherine Woo.
hosted two camps, reverted to its original function after the war, and
a third of the farmland was returned to its private owner. The Hay
Internment and Prisoner of War Camps Interpretive Centre is housed
in two repurposed railway carriages at the decommissioned railway sta-
tion. Camps at Harvey and Marrinup in Western Australia were built over
or reforested, with an Italian shrine at Harvey being the only substantial
physical memorial of architectural import. The Camp at Gaythorne in
Brisbane has succumbed to suburban development. From among the
Australian camps, only Cowra is managed as a national-heritage-listed
former POW camp site, maintained as a complement to a series of
commemorative spaces forming a Peace Precinct and including the

Japanese War Cemetery and the Cowra Japanese Garden.
Remains at Aotearoa New Zealand’s two major sites at Matiu/Somes
Island and Featherston are similarly scant; however, like at Cowra and
following its example, the Japanese Memorial Gardens at Featherston
were built as a gesture of friendship in response to requests made by ex-
POWs. A Peace Park created at a former factory-camp site in Japan’s
Naoetsu, in Joetsu City, notorious for its Australian POW deaths, was
inspired by and is intimately connected to Cowra. Australia’s largest
camp complex was established after the war in Rabaul, New Guinea, for
Japanese Surrendered Personnel, touched upon briefly in Chapter 11.
New Guinea was the site of Australia’s Rabaul and Manus War
Criminals’ Compounds.
Singapore’s wartime narratives were largely exogenous and concen-
trated on Changi Prison, Changi POW Camp and Kranji War Cemetery.
These were unique anomalous sites familiar to ex-POWs of the former
colonizers and their allies, distant from the wartime experience and
imagination of Singapore’s Asian communities. However, revisionist his-
tories since the 1980s have created the impetus for several small museums
developed to depict “Singaporean stories” of the war. These include the
Former Ford Factory, Reflections at Bukit Chandu Interpretive Center,
Battle Box at Fort Canning Bunker and Fort Siloso, significant for histor-
ies of the battle for Singapore and Japanese occupation period, more so
than of captivity. Other temporary work camps and requisitioned build-
ings have been largely redeveloped and lost to public memory. The sites
where Indian troops were held or the locations of wartime refugee camps
are less known. In writing about Singapore, military penetration during
its defensive fortification and later through Japanese occupation casts the
whole island as a field of camps. Singapore also opens up a wider labor
network that extends to other sites in Southeast Asia and Japan. These
movements open up the ephemeral materialities of temporary labor
accommodation.
North America is too vast to document in this comprehensive manner,
and its inclusion is mainly comparative. From the ten War Relocation
Camps, Manzanar has been selected because of its designation as
a representative National Historic Site for collective stories in 1992,
following decades of Nisei activism. Its peak population around 10,000
is sufficiently complex to draw comparative lessons on national intern-
ment strategies. A smaller case study of a group of internment camps in
New Denver in British Columbia, Canada uncovers how, despite similar
attitudes to race, cross-border approaches differ in these two established
settler environments. A comprehensive NPS recovery program for the
Case Studies 41
Manzanar site, its gardens and some physical structures is mirrored by

New Denver’s recovery through landscape intervention, with the Nikkei
Internment Memorial Center designed as a cluster of former internment
huts set in an ornamental Japanese-style garden landscape.
These various physical sites and the literature that supports them
conjure up a dense field of empirical data, and any effort at capturing it
would be an ambitious undertaking. Given the large numbers mobilized
and displaced, and their varied national and political identities, the con-
flict’s physical geography, although temporary, was complex.
Documenting it demands a different perception of the Pacific War, not
through a chronology of belligerence but as a captive geography: a scatter
of physical spaces that were occupied, fortified and contained.
Imperialism in its hunger for territory used these temporary architectural
technologies for diffusing its violence around the Pacific Basin. These
spaces for containing and punishing the enemy were largely but not
entirely purpose-built. Captive populations, whether combatant or civil-
ian, were incarcerated in domestic, military and institutional buildings.
Their conversion contributed to the institutional apparatus of militarized
power relations, wherein the civil liberties and legal rights of noncomba-
tants, including resident aliens, colonial subjects and birthright citizens,
were suspended to varying degrees. Behind their barbed-wire boundaries,
competing nationalities, loyalties and hostilities were tested, sorted and
also fused. Equivalent practices of punitive confinement, civic depriv-
ation, impoverishment and humiliation were exacted on those communi-
ties perceived as inimical to the nation, host-nation and/or empire. Each
military confrontation, capitulation or victory expanded this diabolical
landscape.
In this book’s view, the camps were the physical corollary to those
broader geopolitical movements by which ethnocultural and political
geography were fused and essentialized, raising the specter of stateless-
ness as antithetical to sovereignty. The figure of the camp as signifying
statelessness, a salient metaphor for contemporary crises of citizenship,
casts this history in a prescient light. From the viewpoint of architecture,
a retrospective inquiry into the camp as a twentieth-century model of
incarceration, different from the prison and used to detain civilians,
seeks a deeper understanding of the camp as an instrument for denying
civil liberties. It was a space where the discipline of benign constraints,
otherwise associated with nomadism, training or recreation, turned
punitive. Varying prohibitions with lasting and traumatic effects were
enforced across the many different physical facilities configured as or
appropriated for camps. By examining their emergence across an inter-
connected carceral continuum, we are able to capture the corrosive
power of empire as exacted through architecture, even in its most

temporary and dispersed physical form. Our focus on settler/colonial
environments, where diasporic populations renegotiated the terms of
their still-nascent sovereignty, deviates from that imperial model, pre-
figuring a critique of the postwar nation-state. The chapters that follow
enter the life-worlds of the camps.
2 A Network of Internment Camps
Anoma Pieris
Australia’s internment and prisoner-of-war (POW) camps were built on

a longer settlement history that established a norm of periodic occupation
of tented or hutted townships, camps for the military and for miners, and
seasonal First Nations settlements. Penal settlements, “Aboriginal” mis-
sions and World War I internment camps, by containing and consequently
criminalizing socially or racially differentiated individuals or groups,
adapted this provisional typology for forms of physical segregation, so
that by 1939, when war broke out in Europe, Australia had amassed
a sizeable range of such carceral facilities. The militarized camp environ-
ments adapted for civilian or military confinement during World War II
augmented this broad taxonomy, and the mutability of identity categories
like race or nationality that governments used for controlling enemy
nationals manifested in camp designs. These camps, although inland
from Australia’s physical borders, marked the legal boundaries of British
subjecthood, incarcerating those who fell outside it, whether “enemy
aliens” or POWs. Physical anomalies in the nation’s rural topography,
like carbuncles on its epidermis, they were liminal spaces, physically within
the nation, but politically conceived in response to the actions of its allies.
Identity categories were also conflated because internee and POW
accommodation was adjacent and interchangeable in many of Australia’s
camp facilities, placing enemy soldiers and resident aliens in close proxim-
ity to one another and within sight of rural townships. The inflow of enemy
aliens or POWs continually reorganized the camp population along
national lines – as locally resident nationals of countries within the Axis
partnership were interned when their homelands were annexed by Hitler’s
Germany. There was an outflow of Italians in September 1943, when their
government (having overthrown Benito Mussolini) ended the “Pact of
Steel.” Overseas internees and POWs were transported to Australia from
Britain, North Africa and islands in the Pacific, following arrangements
made with Allied governments for their incarceration far from the theaters
of conflict. Diasporic nationals were further differentiated within overseas
internee groups, based on their place of residence when captured or
arrested. Among the most interesting features of the Australian camps
43
was their physical adaptation to accommodate these different prisoner

categories.
Pursuing emergent racial and national tensions as its main line of inquiry,
Chapter 2 examines the shifting identities of civilian internees in an expand-
ing military camp geography, focusing on the Tatura Group in Victoria, the
recipient space for the largest number of local and overseas internees. Their
broader setting, including Australia’s eighteen main internment and POW
camps, was the expanding military geography for preparing 1 million combat
personnel for the global conflict. By interpreting stories, photographs and
memorabilia donated to the Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps
Museum, the chapter uncovers the intersectional heterogeneity of the
“enemy” nationals who were incarcerated in this homogenously “British”
territory, pursuing a broader line of inquiry to the national responses or
minority experiences covered in previous scholarship. Through domicile or
entry into Australia, and incarceration, repatriation or assimilation, these
many nationalities and diasporas’ presence punctured and weakened the
“white” nation’s ideological armature constructed since Federation in 1901
to be impervious to races deemed inferior to the British. Their efforts at
humanizing the Australian Army’s hostile camp environments to simulate
familiar conditions evocative of the places they came from illustrate the
recurrent theme of resilient materialities repeated in subsequent case studies.
Since mandatory legal protection for civilian internees was still in draft
form at the outbreak of World War II, the design of their accommodation
was not separately regulated, and each of the warring nations treated this
category of prisoners very differently.1 In the United States, for example,
persons of Japanese origin living in western seaboard states, interned en masse
and isolated in ways comparable to “alien” internment in Australia, were
accommodated in purpose-built, military-style barrack camps. In Japanese-
occupied Singapore, mainly British civilian internees were held in Changi
Prison and later in Sime Road Camp, moving from a colonial institution to
a hutted camp. In Japan, a small number of Allied civilians (2,138 in
January 1941), some from within the country and others from captured
territories, were held in hotels, churches, temples and club facilities.2
The lot of these internees was also different from captured enemy
combatants because, in the case of Australian immigrants, their political
1
ICRC database, Treaties, State Parties and Commentaries, Draft International
Convention on the Condition and Protection of Civilians . . . (Tokyo, 1934), https://ihl-
databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/320?OpenDocument.
2
Based on a table of internment facilities in Mayumi Komiya, Enemy Alien Internment
(Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobun Kan, 2009); Gaiji Geppo (Foreign Affairs Monthly Report),
Dec. 1941, Tokyo, and General Conditions of External Police Affairs, Mid-1941, vol. 1,
Japan, http://mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/fukuoka/fuk_01_fukuoka/fuku
oka_01/CivCamps.html.
The Australian Historical Context for Internment 45
persuasions did not necessarily align with the wartime national policies
of their countries of origin. Their incarceration highlighted unassimil-
ated forms of racial and cultural differentiation within Australian society
and tested the boundaries of restrictive immigration and naturalization
policies that had hitherto insulated settler sovereignty. The visibility and
propinquity of large concentrations of non-Anglophone internees
exposed rural Australian townspeople, mainly of British origin, to cul-
tural practices deemed foreign. Incarceration stripped these so-called
enemy aliens of the security that had prompted migration decisions and
characterized settler citizenship, such as land tenure, private property
and material comforts linked to new economic opportunities, disposses-
sion of which was brought home to them because of the austerities and
deprivations of barrack camp facilities, heightening the emotional
trauma of being uprooted. More importantly, the systemic racism that
surfaced during wartime reflected both the legal restrictions introduced
at Federation and the prejudices of the colonial past.
The Australian Historical Context for Internment

Australia had emerged as a self-governing territorial unity through systemic
forms of labor exclusion that preserved British cultural dominance during
the early twentieth century. The first act of Australian Federation in 1901,
the Immigration Restriction Bill, put in place highly selective immigrant
processing strategies including the notorious “dictation” test aimed at
preventing non-Europeans and certain non-Anglophone Europeans from
entering the country.3 Upon arrival by ship to Australia, skin color and
European ancestry had to be proven in order to disembark. A series of
subsequent legislations followed, collectively labeled the “White Australia
Policy,” mainly targeting Asian and Pacific Islander labor migrants.4
Violence against Chinese miners and discriminatory regulation of their
shops and factories at the turn of the century had already racialized labor
competition across the six former colonies through legislations comparable
to contemporaneous North American immigration restriction acts.5
Italians, who replaced Pacific Islander labor in Queensland, were “white
3
A fifty-word dictation test, fashioned after the Natal Act of South Africa.
4
NAA: A1559, 1901/17, Immigration Restriction Bill; Immigration Act No. 17 of 1901
and Naturalization Act of 1903.
5
See, e.g., 1861 Chinese Immigration Regulation and Restriction Act, 1881 Influx of Chinese
Restriction Act of NSW; and 1853 Act to Make Provisions for Certain Immigrants, 1906
Factories and Shops Amendment Act, Victoria: aimed to restrict Chinese immigrants. In the
USA, the Federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and California Alien Land Law of 1913
prohibited agricultural landownership by “aliens”; ineligible for citizenship; the Alien Land
Act of 1920 prohibited leasing and sharecropping.
enough to be admitted to Australia . . . [but also] black enough to be

exploited and discriminated upon,” writes Francesco Ricatti; the structural
racism of Australia’s early democracy placed them between Europeans and
Asians.6 The 1925 Ferry report on the presence of southern and eastern
Europeans in Queensland’s sugar cane plantations was “instrumental in
establishing overt racism as the central attitude of the Commonwealth
towards southern Italians,” he writes.7
These various acts, by controlling the numbers of Asians or Pacific
Islanders entering Australia, limiting their economic activities and freezing
the numbers in existing communities, formed the legal basis for a Britain-
centric model of Anglophone cultural hegemony and racialized government
predicated on preserving “whiteness” at the core of national identity.
Australians were regarded as British subjects, until the Nationality and
Citizenship Act, which came into effect in 1949.8 “Whiteness” was con-
structed defensively to exclude First Nations peoples and “inferior” Asian
races whose proximity and numbers posed a threat to this proposition.
Although in 1939, in response to rising antisemitism in Europe, the
Australian government had agreed to settle 15,000 Jewish refugees (5,000
yearly), before migration out of Europe became impossible (only 6,636
entered), their numbers were restricted to prevent a sudden increase in the
non-“White” population, given local Anglophone antisemitism.9 Australia’s
population was relatively small, estimated at around 7 million on the eve of
World War II, with internalized prejudices influenced by these restrictions.10
Once Britain declared war on Germany, on 3 September 1939, Australian
Prime Minister Robert Menzies followed suit, committing the expeditionary
Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF) for the overseas conflict and the
Citizens Military Forces (militia or army reserve) for home defense.11
Despite the human cost of World War I, a new generation of young
6
Francesco Ricatti, Italians in Australia: History, Memory, Identity (Cham, Switzerland:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 58.
7
Ibid. See Catherine Dewhirst, “The ‘southern question’ in Australia: the 1925 Royal
Commission’s racialisation of southern Italians,” Queensland History Journal, 22:4
(2014): 316–32.
8
Parliament of Australia, Klapdore et al., Australian Citizenship: a chronology of major
developments in policy and law, 11 September 2009, www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/
Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/0910/AustCitizenship.
9
Andrew Markus, “Jewish migration to Australia, 1938–49,” Journal of Australian Studies,
7:13 (1983): 18–31, 23.
10
The population in 1933 (next census in 1947) was 6.6 million (excluding “full-blood
Aboriginals”), of which only 49,000 were either non-Anglophone Europeans or of mixed
descent: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2110.0. Census of the Commonwealth of Australia,
1933, vol. 1. part xii, Race, 902, www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/2110
.01933?OpenDocument. “Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander” peoples were counted in
the census only after 1967.
11
The first expeditionary force had been created for World War I.
Australians joined up in the empire’s defense, seeing enlistment as an over-

seas adventure and opportunity. Around 990,000 persons enlisted, of which
557,799 were deployed overseas: the 8th infantry division in Malaya,
and several battalions in the region including in New Britain, Ambon and
Timor; the 6th, 7th and 9th divisions in the Middle East; and the navy and air
forces in both theaters of the war.12 They were recalled from 1942 onward for
the defense of Australia and campaigns in New Guinea under US General
Douglas MacArthur’s command. For many, this was their first encounter
with Europe, Asia and the Pacific Island territories. Ocean travel was long
and perilous, their journeys carried them into the worst conflicts, with defeat
or captivity often dulling their enthusiasm; nevertheless, these movements to
and from their natal geography expanded horizons and forced exchanges
between colonized populations, from whom Australians had been structur-
ally insulated.13 The pressures of the global conflict, experienced through the
arrival of 150,000 US service personnel (by mid-1943), internees and pris-
oners sent from Britain and the Pacific and refugees from Nazi Europe,
likewise opened up Australia.14
At home, the Department of the Army advised the Commonwealth
Government on National Security Regulations that interpreted for
Australia the 1929 Geneva Convention provisions.15 Enemy aliens were
registered and their movements restricted under the Security Service,
which set up Advisory Committees and an Aliens’ Tribunal from
November 1940 to hear the appeal cases of those arrested or issue release
orders.16 In some cases, where activities were seen as compromising
national security, or with members of pro-Nazi or Fascist organizations,
enemy aliens were interned through processes overseen and managed by
the newly created army Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees
(DPWI) headed by Col. John McCahon. Many were “dobbed in”
(informed against) by disgruntled neighbors or relatives.17 Those
12
Australian War Memorial (AWM), Enlistment Statistics, Second World War, www
.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/enlistment/ww2.
13
AWM, Casualties of War, www.awm.gov.au/wartime/article2. Of the 331,000 serving in
the Australian Imperial Force, approximately 213,000 became battle casualties, 54,000
died, 4,000 were taken prisoner and 155,000 were wounded. The Australian population
then was 4.9 million.
14
David Horner, “Chap. 8: The Anzac contribution,” in The Pacific War Companion, ed.
Daniel Marston (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2005), 143–57; AWM, United States
Forces in Australia, www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/homefront/us_forces.
15
The National Security Act, Act No. 15 of 1939, from Australian Government, Federal
register of legislation, www.legislation.gov.au/Series/C1939A00015: amended 1940,
1943, 1946.
16
National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations, C1939L00088 SR 1939 No. 88, Federal
register of legislation, “Notice to persons detained under regulation 20,” www
.legislation.gov.au/Details/C1939L00088.
17
See, e.g., Bev Hunt, letter to TIWCM, on Arthur Burchardt, 20 February 2004.
unsuccessful in appealing their arrest were removed to internment

facilities far away from their properties or farms. Their families bore the
brunt of increasing social hostility, causing some women to voluntarily
join their spouses in the camps. A subsequent Commonwealth census on
31 December 1942 put their number at 22,000 internees.18
Whereas local German and Italian internees were detained selectively
for different lengths of time, dependent on the reasons for arrest and the
tribunal’s judgments, overseas internees and POWs, held on behalf of
Britain or the USA, were incarcerated for the duration of the war. They
were highly differentiable from Anglophone Australians by culture and
language, and in the case of Germans and Italians, including German and
Austrian Jews, they embodied cultural attributes that Anglo-Australians
associated with the “enemy.” Decades of insulation meant that internal
friction within these groups was often unfathomable to the Australian
camp authorities, or misunderstood. Even so, with around 45,000 resi-
dent Europeans in a population of 6.6 million (excluding First peoples) at
the 1933 census, European cultures were more familiar to Australians
than that of Japanese internees.
Attitudes to the Japanese were an extension of prejudices against Asians
embedded in the White Australia Policy, even though the Japanese were
nationals of the region’s most powerful industrial and military force.19 As
indentured agricultural and industrial workers, societal prejudice
impacted them adversely. Only 2,084 Japanese were recorded as residing
in Australia in 1939.20 Unlike their European counterparts, they could
not become naturalized, so were gathered from locations across the
continent and interned en masse.21 Alongside their recruitment drives,
the Commonwealth Advertising Division released racialized propaganda
on the “inferiority” and “savagery” of Asians.22
The DPWI (Fig. 2.1) was responsible for the custody and control of
local and overseas civilian internees, for enemy POWs, for the welfare of
Australian POWs held by the enemy and later for tracing, apprehending
and conducting trials of minor war criminals in the conflict’s aftermath.23
18
Noel W. Lamidey, Aliens Control in Australia 1939–46 (Sydney: N. Lamidey, 1974), 5.
19
Barry York, “White Australia and the dictation test,” Voices: Quarterly Journal of the
National Library of Australia, 6:3 (1996): 27–36, 31, https://search-informit-com-
au.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=970302944;res=IELAPA.
20
Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2110.0. Census of the Commonwealth of Australia,
1933, vol. 1, part xi, Nationality, www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/
2110.01933?OpenDocument.
21
Klaus Neumann, In the Interest of National Security: Civilian Internment in Australia during
World War II (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2006), 13.
22
See NAA: C934, 91, “The hand that waved the fan,” 1942.
23
Report on Directorate of POWs and Internees (Australian Army Headquarters, DPWI),
1939–51 ORMF0024 (Official Record), hereafter RDPWI.
DPW & I 0 1/c PW Information

(Colonel) Bureau (Major)
DPW & I
(Colonel)
Deputy Director DPW & I

(Lt-Col in lieu of AAG) (Colonel)
AAG (PW) DAAG (Employment) DAAG (Internees)

SC
(Lt-Col) (Major) (Major)
(Coordination)
1 S/Capt 1 S/Capt
(Capt)
1 Sgt 1 Sgt
DAAG (Aust PW) DAAG (Enemy PW)

Senior Clerk (Sgt)
(Major) (Major)
3 S/Capts 3 S/Capts
1 Cpl 1 Cpl Clerks & Typistes (4 Ptes), Orderly (1 Pte)
AAG (PW&I) SC (Co-ordination) AAG (War Crimes)

(Lt-Col) 1 Cpl (Lt-Col)
Orderly
1 Pte
AAG (Enemy PW&I) DAAG DAAG

DAAG DAAG
(Major) DAAG (Investigations) (Investigations)
(Employment) (Aust PW)
2 S/Capts (Adm) (Major) (Major)
(Major) (Major)
1 WO (Major) 4 S/Capts 5 S/Capts
1 S/Capt 1 S/Capt
1 Sgt 2 Cpls 2 Cpls
Senior Clerk (Sgt) Registry

General
Clerks & Typistes 1 S/Capt
2 S/Capts
1 Cpl 1 Sgt
1 Sgt
4 Ptes 2 Ptes
RDPWI, AWM: 54 (780/1/6), DPWI, viii.
Fig. 2.1 Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees (DPWI).

Drawn by Catherine Woo and Yoke Lin Wong
Operating from its base in Army Headquarters in Melbourne, the

Directorate’s duties extended to handling reports from official visitors,
inspectors and the International Red Cross, as well as the large-scale
employment of POWs and internees; it oversaw their evacuation,
internment or imprisonment, transfer and repatriation, and administered

transit accommodation in tented facilities or civil jails. The DPWI was in
charge of all permanent camp facilities, transit camps, subsidiary camps,
hostels and other forms of labor accommodation, and requisitioned sev-
eral penitentiaries as transit accommodation, linking earlier spaces of
criminal containment to this internment geography. Urban jails at
Bathurst, Darlinghurst and Long Bay in NSW and similar facilities in
Alice Springs and Fremantle, Gladstone Jail in South Australia, Rottnest
Island in Western Australia and Peat’s Island Asylum on the Hawkesbury
River (for women) acted as temporary portals to internment camps.24
Some of these facilities had been used for civilian internment during
World War I. Rottnest Island had served as a prison for Indigenous
Australians (1838–1904), and continued this function alongside its con-
version to an internment camp for German and other nationalities in
August 1914.25 Italian internees were held there before being sent to
the mainland camps, from January to September 1940.26 Many other
sites used during World War I between August 1914 and June 1920 were
provisional in nature, holding German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish
internees for short periods in tents and timber huts until they were moved
to more permanent military-camp-like facilities. This was true of island
facilities, including Torrens Island, next to the existing southern quaran-
tine facility in Adelaide, and Bruny Island off southeastern Tasmania.
Three smaller internment camps in New South Wales, one at Trial Bay
and two family camps at Berrima and Bourke, included decommissioned
jail buildings.27 Whereas internees in these family group camps had
relative degrees of freedom, this was not the case in military camp facil-
ities, where regimentation and regulations were more strictly imposed.
Langwarrin, in Victoria, at the venereal-disease hospital and the
Enoggera military camp in western Brisbane funneled internees to the
purpose-built Holdsworthy (later Holsworthy) Camp west of Sydney, in
its first such deployment during August 1914 to May 1920, becoming the
largest of Australia’s wartime internment camps, with rows upon rows of
linear barracks.28 Holsworthy held as many as 6,000 internees moved
from smaller facilities, as well as overseas enemy aliens transported from
the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, Hong Kong, British North Borneo and
Fiji.29 Internee families were eventually moved in May 1918 to
24
RDPWI, vol. 3, Chap. 1, Accommodation for POWs and Internees, 214.
25
Monteath, Captured Lives, 37–63.
26
NAA, Rottnest Island, WA (1914–15, 1940), www.naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/
internment-camps/WWI/rottnest-island.aspx.
27
Monteath, Captured Lives, 53–63. 28 Helmi and Fischer, The Enemy at Home.
29
Monteath, Captured Lives, 46–7.
Australia’s Militarized Camp Complexes 51
Canberra’s Molonglo internment camp, a miniature township of forty

residential barrack blocks. Sites near Holsworthy and Enoggera were
redeployed for civilian internment during World War II, as Liverpool
(Moorebank) and Gaythorne camps, respectively, both attached to mili-
tary establishments, although their location in or near coastal capital cities
was deemed unsuitable for such a politically sensitive program.30
Camps in many forms, for the military, for wartime workforce and
prisoners, were ubiquitous and pervasive during World War II. As
internee numbers grew, public spaces, including parks and racecourses
in state capitals, were requisitioned temporarily, part of a larger military
landscape of public facilities used for housing both Australian and
American troops. Internees were held at Northam, Orange and
Adelaide showgrounds, and Melbourne’s Wirth’s Circus, before being
transported to purpose-built camps further inland and away from coastal
areas.31 This move was comparable to the initial evacuation of the USA’s
Japanese Americans to Assembly Centers prior to incarceration in pur-
pose-built inland Relocation Centers or internment camps. Military
camp facilities were likewise located further inland where land was avail-
able for accommodating the surge of new recruits. Unlike in World War I,
when expeditionary forces had trained overseas, military recruitment and
training for an expanded fighting force was on home turf, and the previous
distinction between permanent, brick-and-mortar, urban barracks and
tented field accommodation was superseded.
Australia’s Militarized Camp Complexes

The nationwide distribution of military sites amplified the war’s penetra-
tion, since by the beginning of 1940 the entire Australian population was
on a war-footing. Sensitive industries and installations were relocated
away from coastal cities, while remote rural towns vied for the economic
impetus created by camps nearby.32 The passage of thousands of new
recruits through these camp spaces, in preparation for expeditions over-
seas, familiarized the war for rural Australian families, while the juxtapos-
ition of military training, internment and/or incarceration facilities meant
that the co-constitution of sovereign power and border securitization was
played out in rural Australia. The act of enlisting, through conscription to
citizen military forces or volunteering with the AIF, heightened patriotic
sentiment toward the Australian nation and the British Empire. Camp
30
Weiss, It Wasn’t Really Necessary, 80. 31 Hammond, Walls of Wire, TIWCM.
32
Bruce Pennay, The Army at Bonegilla, 1941–7 (Wodonga, VIC: Parklands
Albury-Wodonga), 2.
construction, initially by the Department of Interior’s Works and Services

Branch, would fall under a newly created Allied Works Council, after the
fall of Singapore in February 1942 and Japanese occupation of Southeast
Asia brought US troops to Australia in defense of the Pacific. They were
stationed in Melbourne, Sydney and increasingly in Brisbane once
MacArthur moved his headquarters there from Melbourne in July 1942.
The Allied Works Council (AWC), under Director-General Edward
Granville Theodore, was formed to build defense works in Australia,
including graving docks, airfields, roads, rail and wharf facilities, oil
installations, munitions factories, hospitals, hangars, and, among other
facilities, military camps for the Australian and US Forces, newly created
Civil Constructional Corps and camps for POWs.33 The Works and
Services Branch, under the Director-General of Works Charles Andrew
Hoy, was merged with the AWC, the Commonwealth Directorates were
expanded to States and Territories, and works including engineering,
architecture and administration were assigned to individual directors
alongside personnel, finance, mechanical equipment and materials sup-
ply. The Council liaised with the Director-General of Manpower and the
Director-General of War Organization and Industry. The Directorate of
Architecture under the AWC Works Directorate, including the
Melbourne-based Central Design and Barracks Design offices, was led
by Henry Maitland Rolland, former supervising architect for the Federal
Capital Commission during the construction of Canberra and the provi-
sional parliament, who had overseen the expansion of the Royal Military
College, Duntroon. The Directorate of Architecture assumed responsi-
bility for the design of all the military architectural works, including
designs for military and POW camps, while Works Directors appointed
to each state and territory oversaw the production of working drawings,
arrangement of contracts, and erection and coordination of works.34
World War II military camps were expansive purpose-built, hutted,
town-like configurations, composed of accommodation blocks, services,
civic amenities, hospitals and transportation networks that from the
introduction of conscription for home defense in January 1940 until the
war’s end processed thousands of personnel. Many of them, like
Bonegilla Army Camp in Victoria and Greta Army Camp in NSW,
accommodated as many as 6,000 personnel, with internment or POW
camp facilities sometimes located nearby. The military camp at Cowra in
central-west NSW, for example, trained between 80,000 and 100,000
33
National Library of Australia (NLA), Report on the activities of the Allied Works Council
for 1 July 1943 to 15 February 1945, https://nla.gov.au:443/tarkine/nla.obj-52824266,
5–15.
34
Ibid., 75.
soldiers from 1940 to 1947 and was co-located with Camp 12, a 4,000-
person POW facility.35 Plans for these expansive military facilities show
groups of buildings, organized in linear configurations by company and
rank, sitting organically in the undulating topography and rural road
system (Map 2.1). When on 3 July 1940 Robert Menzies’ Australian
government, as a British Commonwealth member, agreed to receive
a number of Britain’s POWs and civilian internees, these were reconfig-
ured into “concentration camps” distributed in the populous southern
states and Western Australia, avoiding infinitely more vulnerable north-
ern Queensland and the Northern Territory. The estimated cost recover-
able for prisoner accommodation by the Australian government from
Great Britain and its colony – Malaya – was £480,000 (at that time).36
Common to all of the concentration camps were two or three unyielding
6–10-feet-high boundary fences of four-pronged knotted wire with needle-
sharp barbs set up to 30 feet apart.37 Two such parallel fences, less than 2
feet apart, enclosed each camp property with Concertina or Dannert wire,
with large coils of barbed wire in the gaps. Barbed wire fencing divided the
camps internally into segregated compounds (Fig. 2.2). Entry to each
camp configuration was through a gated wire-cage. Barbed wire would
persist as an ominous presence in internee artworks and memoirs, as
integral to the affective experience of incarceration, and was used for the
titles of two prominent 1990s histories of the camps: Walls of Wire and
Behind Barbed Wire.38 At nighttime, each camp complex was bathed in
a haze of floodlighting, seemingly intensified because of blackout laws
enforced in nearby towns.39 Guard towers, with floodlights, periodic
searches, detention cells and daily rosters, maintained the penal routine.
Huts were organized according to a military grid.
Similar accommodation was used across all camp facilities; the stand-
ard P-series huts – named after Victoria’s Puckapunyal army training
facility – were typically 60x18 (or 36)-feet timber-framed structures
with corrugated-iron roof and wall cladding reliant on local materials
and domestic timber-frame building techniques.40 The height at the tie
35
Jenny Hayes, Australia: A New Country – A New Life (Jenny Hayes and Cowra & District
Historical Society & Museum, 2007), 43.
36
NAA: A5954, 804/1, War Cabinet Minutes, vol. 3, Meetings 17 June 1940 to 17
September 1940. POWs and Internees from Abroad, Agendum 157/1940, supplement
No. 1, item 431, 310–11.
37
RDPWI, vol. 3, Chap. 1, Security Arrangements in Camps, 5.
38
Hammond, Walls of Wire; Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire.
39
Hammond, Walls of Wire, 68.
40
Patrick Miller, “A little marvel of timber and tin – the Military P1 Hut of the Second World
War,” 14th National Engineering Heritage Conference, Crawley, WA, 18–21 September
2007, 2–3, www.ipenz.org.nz/heritage/conference2007/papers/miller_patrick_
paper.pdf
Map 2.1 Bonegilla Military Training Camp, Vic. Courtesy of National

Archives of Australia. NAA: B3712-Dr150-Folder4-part1, 1 April 1954.
beam on top of the wall panel was around 8 feet, and 12 feet at the
gable. A variation on this type, the C-series, was used liberally across
all the camps (Fig. 2.3). Raised on stumps like Australian houses,
joined by longitudinal bearers and floor joists, the walls were erected
on a platform of boarded floors. Huts were entered through their
gable ends, had five top-hung windows along one face and were
ventilated by an 8-inch-width run of chicken wire beneath the roof
eaves. Galvanized corrugated-iron cladding was favored over timber
weatherboard or asbestos-cement sheets for the walls and roof,
because of their larger spans, thermal properties and ease of main-
tenance, but above all, recovery value.41 Although designed to
41
NAA: K1141, M1940/41/77, Harvey – Erection of Internment Camp – Various Camp
Buildings, 5 September 1940.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 2.2 Camp 1, Tatura, Vic., divisions between A- and B-compounds;

cutting firewood. Photographed by James Tait. Courtesy of Australian
War Memorial, Canberra, 052408; 052465.
Fig. 2.3 Cowra, NSW, specifications for erection and completion of

twenty timber-framed buildings and resiting of three timber-framed
buildings in POW camp, December 1944. Courtesy of National Archives
of Australia. NAA: SP155/1, DEF397047, [Box 19], 44/45
accommodate twenty sleeping berths, double-tiered bunk beds multi-

plied the numbers in each hut. Huts in the internment and POW
camps were designed for twenty-four prisoners each.
Easily constructed using local labor and materials, these pragmatic
modular units were modified in situ by local labor or by internees or
prisoners for numerous functions, such as mess halls, guard huts,
canteens, medical-aid posts, dental surgeries, recreation sites, class-
rooms, and offices. Further design modifications catered to ablutions,
showers, toilets, laundries, offices, and storage spaces. Huts could be
Australia’s Internment Camps 57
applied to varying site conditions, in multiples of 9-foot lengths by

43-feet width, making them easily adaptable for domestic uses after
the war.
Australia’s Internment Camps

Built and numbered in the order of their construction, the intern-
ment and POW camps comprised three key clusters (Tables 2.1, 2.2;
Map 2.2) and several isolated facilities. The largest cluster of seven
camps formed the Tatura Group (no. 1–4, 13 and Greytown and
Myrtleford camps), approximately 113 miles north of Victoria’s cap-
ital, Melbourne, and included an Italianate mansion, Dhurringile.
Three camps (no. 6, 7, 8) were built further north at Hay, NSW,
265 miles north of Melbourne, on a flat town site. The Loveday
Group in South Australia (no. 9, 10, 14), approximately 143 miles
northeast of state capital Adelaide, was on a well-established irriga-
tion colony fed by the Murray River. Harvey (no. 11), 88 miles south
of Perth in Western Australia, Marrinup (no. 16), 37 miles southeast,
and NSW’s Cowra camp (no. 12), 117 miles north of Canberra, were
isolated from the rest. The Liverpool camp at Moorebank, in South
Sydney’s outskirts near the former Holsworthy campsite, was
reopened in October 1939 as a holding camp for Australians con-
sidered a security risk as well as other overseas internees. Gaythorne
in Queensland, next to Brisbane’s Enoggera Army Camp, was the
only such facility in a capital city. Smaller “wood camps” were
established in forest areas. Additionally, many army camps like
those at Bonegilla, Greta and Brighton in Tasmania held small num-
bers of Italian POWs on labor deployment, mainly after 1943, and
Northam in Western Australia held POWs awaiting repatriation at
the end of the war.42 Soldiers unfit for active service or former World
War I servicemen who had reenlisted were stationed at each camp’s
garrison headquarters as guards. The larger group camps contained
fully equipped hospitals and infirmaries, and dental facilities were
available in many camp compounds.
Although information on the camps was classified under security regu-
lations, the involvement of contractors, suppliers or professionals – doc-
tors, dentists, nurses – meant that local communities were aware of the
42
Bruce Pennay, The Army at Bonegilla, 11; Christopher Keating, A History of the Army
Camp and Migrant Camp at Greta, New South Wales, 1939–1960 (Sydney: Uri Windt,
1997), 29; Alison Alexander, Brighton and Surrounds (Gagebrook, TAS: 2006), 276–7.
Table 2.1 Distribution of POW and internment camps in Australia
Nationalities
Camp Number
no. Location Dates incarcerated Physical description POWs Internees
1 Tatura, Vic. Aug. 41–Jan. 47 1000 2 compounds G, A, I

2 Tatura, Vic. Sep. 40-Jan. 47 1000 1 compound G G, I
3 Rushworth, Vic. Sep. 40–Feb. 46 1000 family groups 2 compounds Europeans Europeans
4 Rushworth, Vic. Nov. 40–Aug. 46 100 family groups 2 compounds Asiatics
5 Myrtleford CTT, Vic. Feb. 42–Oct. 46 1000 officers 2 compounds I from N. Africa I Merchant Seamen
[2000 total?]
6, 7, 8 Hay, NSW, Aug. 40–46 5000 3 compounds each I, J G, I, J
(6 and 8 were
octagons, 7 was
a hexagon)
9 Loveday, Barmera, SA Jun. 41–Feb. 44 1000 I
10 Loveday, Barmera, SA Apr. 41–Feb. 44 1000 I
11 Harvey, WA Sep. 40–Apr. 42 500 I
12 Cowra, NSW Jun. 1941–Jan. 47 4000 4 compounds I, J, K, F I, Indonesians, Jav.
13 Murchison, Vic. Jun. 1941–Jan. 47 4000 4 compounds J Officers and Ors, G and I
14 Loveday, Barmera, SA Jun. 42–Dec. 46 4000 4 compounds I, G J, G, I
15 Yanco, NSW March 43–Dec. 45 800 I
16 Marrinup, WA Aug. 43–Jul. 45 1200 G, I
17 Sandy Creek, SA Apr. 44–May 46 600 Transit Tents I
18 Brighton, Tasmania Feb. 44–1945 600 2 compounds in Sec. I
1. of Brighton
Army Barracks,
[I=Italian; G=German; J=Japanese; A=Asians, Jav= Javanese; F= Formosans; K= Koreans]. Drawn by Anoma Pieris. RDPWI, part iii, AWM: 54 (780/1/6),
Matters affecting both enemy POWs and enemy internees, 223. Approximate numbers at camps, represented in order of construction.
Table 2.2 Camps in extant facilities and wooded areas
Nationalities
Number Physical
Camp no. Location Dates incarcerated description POWs Internees
Gaythorne, Qld Ennogera 1940–6 1,800 5 compounds (3, I, G, J, K, F I, sundry

camp plus 1, plus 1) and sundry
Dhurringile, Vic Oct. 39–Jan. 40 and 150 plus 50 officers German Japanese and Internees: G, J, I,
Aug. 41–Jul. 45 German Finnish,
POWs in the Portuguese,
later period Albanian and
Chinese
Orange, NSW 1940–1 Fairground
Bathurst, NSW Jail
Holsworthy, 1939–46 500 PW and All nationalities
Liverpool, NSW, internment
camp, also
transit
Long Bay, State Sep./Oct. 39–Jun. Various
Reformatory, NSW 40–Feb. 41
Grange, NSW Feb. 40–Jul. 41 300–400 G, I
Wembley, WA Jun. 43–Aug. 43 200 I
Northam, WA 1945–6 3,600 4 areas of ex-AIF I
barracks,
unfenced
Parkeston, WA Apr. 42–Nov. 42 500 I
Rottnest Island, WA Jan. 40–Feb. 40 500 I
Table 2.2 (cont.)
Nationalities
Number Physical
Camp no. Location Dates incarcerated description POWs Internees
Woodman’s point Dec. 41–Feb. 42 Unknown J

Katarapko, Woolenook and Woodcamp
Moorook West, SA
Greytown, Vic. Woodcamp
Blue Range, ACT Dec. 1942– 27? Woodcamp I I
[I=Italian; G=German; J=Japanese; A=Asians, Jav=Javanese; F=Formosans/Taiwanese; K=Koreans]. Drawn by Anoma Pieris. RDPWI, part iii,
AWM: 54 (780/1/6), Matters affecting both enemy POWs and enemy internees, 224.
Based on RDPWI, AWM 54 (780/1/6), vol.3, 223.
Map 2.2 The distribution of POW and internment camps in Australia.

Drawn by Catherine Woo
prisoners in their midst. Families of the guards and administrative staff

resided within the local communities. There were gardens and farm areas
some distance from the camps, to which prisoners in (khaki-dyed) bur-
gundy prison gear were transported in full view. Camp locations were also
evident to the farmers whose land was requisitioned for them, and who
erected the first facilities on these sites. Despite local prejudices and the
changing overseas fortunes of Britain, these rural communities were not
generally hostile toward the captives.
Some 16,798 internees passed through the Australian camps across the
duration of the conflict,43 and at their peak operation in June 1942, the
camps held 12,256 local and overseas internees categorized as “enemy
nationals” – Germans, Italians or Japanese – many finding their incarcer-
ation baseless and confounding.44 Their numbers were small when com-
pared with those incarcerated in Asia and the USA but were
proportionately a larger representation of the Australian population at
that time.45 As internee numbers increased with the war’s escalation, the
challenge for the Australian soldiers guarding the camps was of fulfilling
the requirements of the 1929 Geneva Convention’s Article 9, by keeping
various nationalities apart, while also separating single men and family
groups, political enemies and refugees, and Asians from Europeans once
Japan entered the war in December 1941. Local internees included 4,754
Italians, 2,013 Germans, 1,141 Japanese, 232 Chinese, 39 Portuguese,
702 Javanese and 40 others (of varied nationalities), while overseas
internees included 3,753 Germans, 425 Italians, 3,160 Japanese, and
539 others.46 Forty-seven British internees, including fourteen
“Australia First Movement” members, were imprisoned solely for their
political beliefs, held first at Liverpool camp, and later interned alongside
other Axis internees at Loveday and Tatura.47
Faced with various interpellations of identities and nationalities, the
DPWI adhered to the 1929 Geneva Convention by distributing the popu-
lation within each camp into compounds identified by the three Axis
nationalities, dividing them internally when the need arose. This strategy
43
Hammond, Walls of Wire, 9. Following the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations
of 1939.
44
Neumann, In the Interest of National Security, 7.
45
1940 United States Census. The 16th US Census, by the Census Bureau, determined the
resident population to be 132,164,569, an increase of 7.3 percent over the 1930 popula-
tion of 123,202,624, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_United_States_census.
46
RDPWI, 91.
47
Bruce Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement (Carlton:
Melbourne University Press, 1968; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968). The
far-right political movement active between 1941 and 1942 displayed anti-British,
Australian nationalist sentiment, leading to the arrest of some members.
had its problems, because European internees included merchant seamen

(later identified as POWs), naturalized Australians of Italian or German
extraction (from the Barossa, Goulburn Valley and Queensland’s cane
plantations) and those from Axis-occupied countries (small numbers of
Finns, Austrians, Romanians, Hungarians and Bulgarians) allegedly
interned for their political views and membership in Fascist organizations,
providing a thicker overlay of attitudes. The identities of diasporic Germans
from Britain, Palestine, New Guinea and the Torres Strait, including
European Jews, were conflated with those of their natal cultures, attributed
with political loyalties with which they were often at odds. The most overtly
racialized application of the policy was with regards to Japanese civilians
working in northern Australian cane fields and pearl fisheries, who were
interned en masse along with diasporic Japanese from the surrounding
Pacific Islands, French and Dutch colonial territories – including New
Caledonia, New Guinea, New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands – and
from Netherland East Indies and New Zealand, as well as a small number
of Koreans and Taiwanese (Formosans) who were part of the Japanese
Empire. Queensland would intern the highest percentage of its ethnic
population (around 43 percent) and send them to Victoria for confinement,
while in Victoria, despite larger numbers of local enemy aliens, the percent-
age interned was the smallest from among the holding states.48
Just as it failed to appreciate the internal complexities of “national”
identification, the Convention by its various guidelines subjected elderly
persons, as well as civilian men, women and children, to austerities meant
for disciplining soldiers.49 The removal of prisoners away from the sensitive
coastal zones heightened their isolation and dependency on the camp
administration. The stipulation to accommodate them in militarized gar-
rison-like quarters placed them in hutted accommodation unsuited to family
units. Unlined timber compartments with thin partitions provided poor
protection against the extreme Australian summer and winter temperatures,
and deprived internees of privacy. Common ablution areas and dining
facilities imposed military-style routines. Although religious freedom was
respected, and undue violence not used, many internees were impoverished
by their forced removal and could not maintain their professional skills.
They were fenced in like criminals, politically emasculated and humiliated,
sentiments that colored their affective reception of the unfolding camp
geography.
48
49
Convention relative to the Treatment of POWs, Geneva, 27 July 1929, International
Committee of the Red Cross, www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/52d68d14de6160e0c12563
da005fdb1b/eb1571b00daec90ec125641e00402aa6.
The Tatura Group of Camps

The Tatura Group, the first and most complex among the camps across
Australia, offers a microcosm of the nature of wartime incarceration
because it covered the entire range of designed or repurposed prison
camp facilities. Five of its seven facilities encircled the Waranga Basin in
north-central Victoria, drawing water for everyday and farm use without
disadvantaging supply-dependent townships (Map 2.3). The human-
made reservoir’s 624-square-feet area and 99 miles of shoreline offered
a natural camouflage and recreation space.50 Adjacent farmlands, taken
by settler pastoralists from the Ngurai-illam peoples, the traditional
owners of the Goulbourn Valley in the nineteenth century, were alienated
temporarily by the military.51 The Greytown and Myrtleford (no. 5)
wood camps lay outside this radius. The entire group was administered
by the 17th Garrison Battalion, comprising 39 officers and 659 of other
ranks.52
The Dhurringile Mansion (Fig. 2.4), designed in Victorian Italianate
boom style for prominent pastoralist James Winter by architects
Frederick Wyatt and Lloyd Tayler in 1875, was hastily leased by the
Commonwealth Government at the war’s outbreak, an incongruous
addition to the Tatura Group; a sixty-eight-room, two-story, red-brick
building, with four underground rooms, a four-story tower, a grand stair-
case leading to a platform with a pipe-organ and a set of stained-glass
windows.53 Its setting, a 4,000-acre estate outside Murchison town, with
an elaborate complex of stables, outbuildings and manager’s quarters,
and reputedly the largest shearing shed in Victoria, was fenced off and
these facilities were expanded using labor drawn from the local
community.54 The mansion’s elaborate and permanent construction
was comparable to the prison architecture that frequently dignified rural
townships.
50
51
Ibid., 66; Ian D. Clark, Goulburn River Aboriginal Protectorate (Ballarat, VIC: Ballarat
Heritage Services, 2013).
52
James T. Sullivan, Beyond All Hate: A Wartime Story of a Japanese Internment Camp 1941–
1946: No. 4 Internment Camp, Zeglin Road, Rushworth, Victoria, Australia (Camberwell:
James T. Sullivan, 2007).
53
Warwick Finlay, Winter Irving (Murchison and District Historical Society), undated,
Victorian Heritage Register, Dhurringile, http://vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/places/result_
detail/863, registered in 1998. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 34. Sold by the Winter family
in 1906, passing through several owners before purchase by Vincent Vernon Hart in
1925. Since Hart was an absentee owner, the property was available for rental by the
Commonwealth Government at the outbreak of war.
54
Hammond, Walls of Wire, 33; Knee and Knee, Marched In, 7–8. Civilians working at
camps 1 and 13, William Pargeter, in ibid., 13.
Based on SLV: Aerial Survey of Waranga Basin,1:31,680 State Aerial Survey of Victoria topographic map, 799 A, Murchison, 1954.
Map 2.3 Tatura Group, five camps around the Waranga Basin, and Murchison Camp 13. Drawn by Zachariah
Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated sources
Fig. 2.4 Dhurringile Mansion, Vic., January 1966. Photographed by John

T. Collins. Reproduced with permission from the State Library of Victoria,
Melbourne, J.T. Collins Collection, La Trobe Picture Collection, Image
H98.250/903
Dhurringile had its designation changed from an internment to a POW

camp during the course of the war, incarcerating forty-seven civilian employ-
ees of German firms in the wool industry between October 1939 and
January 1940, and then vacated for 150 German POWs captured in the
Middle East, and a further fifty German officers, from August 1941 to
July 1945. Many of the POWs were from the German raider HSK
Kormoran that, early in the war, in November 1941, torpedoed and tragically
sank the Royal Australian Navy’s cruiser HMAS Sydney off the Western
Australia’s coast – with all hands onboard. Maintained by German govern-
ment “Reichstrue” (True Empire) money, supplied through the “Protecting
Power” Swiss consul, they were notorious for making Nazi proclamations
and holding nationalist celebrations, behavior repeated in many “German”
POW compounds.
The German wool buyers were transferred to Camp 1, on uncultivated
farmland, Victoria’s first purpose-built camp: a misshapen rectangular
enclosure built in January 1940 by “neighbours, strays and even passing
strangers” with building supplies from the Victorian State Rivers and Water
Life in the Tatura Camps 67
Supply Commission depot.55 The camp, overlooked by six guard towers

and guarded by a garrison quartered onsite, was divided internally into two
compounds of twenty-nine and sixteen sleeping huts, respectively, as well as
thirty-four other huts for amenities like kitchens, mess halls and stores.56
Because the haphazard overall design of Camp 1 called for too many
towers, formal geometries were introduced in subsequent designs
(Map 2.4).57
When compared with the formulaic rigor of the US camp facilities, the
Australian camps were highly adaptive. At Camp 2, the changing fence-
lines of an uneven pentagon plan suggest several attempts to resolve
hitherto unanticipated functions including greater segregation, surveillance
and fire protection. Camp 3 for overseas internees and Camp 4 for enemy
aliens, on the northwestern Waranga Basin shore near Rushworth, were
imperfect, internally quartered diamonds – with a central firebreak. Once
allocated for family groups, these two camps were equipped with domestic
comforts unavailable to the military, although they were also fenced in and
guarded with the same intensity as other camps.58 Huts were divided into
twelve 8x10-feet compartments, each with two beds, a mattress and straw
palliasse and hot-water supply and showers.59 Families fashioned individ-
ual hearths for their cabins, building stoves from 44-gallon drums and
stovepipes from empty jam tins as nominal defenses against the winter
cold.
Life in the Tatura Camps

Beneath the inflexible national categories that determined camp alloca-
tions, internee identities proved to be more mutable and adapted to new
forms of self-consciousness around cultural, communal identification,
multivocality or modern political consciousness important for their sur-
vival in the extraordinary forced circumstances. Their expression and
negotiation of identities seemed all the more remarkable given the uni-
formity imposed by the assimilatory structure of “white Australia” preva-
lent outside the camp environments. The concentration and saturation of
cultural differences and free expression of different habits would ordinar-
ily have been threatening to settler values, but the camps as border spaces
operated outside these rules. In some instances, local internees aligned
themselves with national positions adopted by their compatriots, due to
55
Ibid., William Pargeter: Civilians working at camps 1 and 13, interview with Arthur
Knee, 15 September 1996, TIWCM, on land belonging to farmers John B. Noonan,
James Henry Ewan and E. A. Coyle.
56
Ibid., 20. 57 Ibid. 58 Hammond, Walls of Wire, 101–13.
59
Templer Record, TIWCM, Helmut Ruff, 4.
Based on SLV: Photo-map of Victoria, Murchison 799 A1 and A2, Aerial Survey of Victoria, 1949,
with reference to Camp 2 alterations and sketch plan from 1945, C0549, TIWCM.
Map 2.4 Camps 1–3, Tatura Group. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,

based on the numerous indicated sources
close proximity and interdependence; in other instances, political factions

divided national or racial groups within the camps. Quite apart from these
more self-conscious performances of identity, behind the perimeter
fence, and despite depression, ennui and rigid structures governing activ-
ities, internees overwhelmingly strove to simulate aspects of their former
lives. The camp architecture was humanized through adaptation, super-
ficial modification and landscaping and cultivation of the spaces around
the huts (Fig. 2.5). The huts were repurposed for numerous everyday
administrative and recreational activities, anticipated in military camp
environments but not in the designs for internment or POW facilities.
Camp 1 established programs for hygiene management, postal services,
installing and managing equipment, finance and selling, distributing
milk, and maintaining baths, kitchen, canteens and welfare, as well as
sports (gymnastic, athletics, dancing), culture, music, a library, work-
shops, exhibitions, cinema, school halls, printing and newspapers.
Following matron Trix Moore’s specifications, the Area Engineer for
the Victorian camps, Capt. James Wardrop (architect with fellow veteran
Phillip Hudson of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance) planned a sixty-
bed hospital for the Tatura Group, including an operating room and
maternity ward.60
Familiar culinary traditions introduced by internee cooks formed the
affective armature of internee life, integrating mess halls with a range of
hospitality spaces that sprang up within the camps. This was hardly
surprising, given the number of Austrian and German internees keen to
reproduce their hometowns’ café culture. Dedicated cafés, accountable
to canteen management, promoted urbane continental modes of social-
ization, despite the flimsy facilities. At Camp 1’s corrugated-iron Café
Wellblech, black coffee and German cakes could be had over a game of
dominoes or while watching entertainments on its stonework promenade;
at the café attached to Eberhard Schuster’s skittle alley, participants took
refreshments while awaiting their turn to play.61 At Camp 4’s Grand
Café, run by the sad-faced Felix Danzig, prewar owner of Kater
Restaurant and Union Bar in Vienna, toast, scrambled eggs, coffee,
sandwiches, cake and lemonade were served on an outdoor terrace! The
culinary fare of the internees became the envy of the military guards,
unused to such delicacies. The café interior was decorated with familiar
scenes, including a portrait of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, laughing at
its anti-Nazi patrons, a stark reminder of the wartime context.62
60
Interview with the Army Garrison Hospital Matron, Trix Moore, “‘Collar the Lot’:
World War 2 Internment Camps, Tatura,” unedited interviews, 1997, TIWCM.
61
Schuster, Recollections, 1. 62 Hammond, Walls of Wire, 84–5, 117, 119.
Fig. 2.5 Hatto Gunther Herman Duffner, axonometric drawing of Camp 1, Tatura Group, Vic., 1944, by internee civil
engineer. Reproduced with permission from Museums Victoria, Karl Muffler German Pastry Chef Collection, MM93594
Garrison rations were generous, since the army adhered to the Geneva
Convention, although the internees supplemented these with donations
from their local communities. Red Cross delegate Dr. Morel, visiting on
20 February 1942, described a Friday menu:
Breakfast, cereals, salmon pies and tomatoes, bread, jam and tea. Lunch, Cold
Roast beef, lettuce, beetroot, tomato sauce, potatoes, oranges, bread, butter, jam,
tea. Dinner, kidney soup, roast beef and mustard, potatoes, cardoons (edible
thistles), compote of prunes and custard, bread.63
There were smoked sausages from Melbourne’s Groebecker (retailer of
continental small goods), rye bread and “luscious cakes,” made with half-
pound rations provided to internees.64 Café Wellblech had ice-cream in
refrigeration boxes, and a team of German internees from New Guinea
squeezed and bottled orange juice. When fermented during the summer
this beverage supplemented the many wines made from sugar, jam, fruit
or “jungle juice” prepared in a boiler-room still.
By taking ownership of food production and making decisions on what
to consume or not and in what form, internees gained a measure of
affective control over their bodies. At the family camps this extended to
reserving mess-hall tables for family dining.65 Because the army supply,
while generous, was incompatible with dietary preferences, particularly of
Italian and Japanese internees, food was always in surplus. “We lived like
kings or millionaires,” a former Japanese internee told Camp
Commandant James Sullivan.66 They buried unwanted food, burnt it,
used it for fertilizer and even polished floors with milk, afraid that owning
up might lead to cutbacks. The internees’ fondest memories were of
informal picnics on the shores of the Waranga Basin.67
The cultural landscape of culinary practices extended to and trans-
formed the camp’s physical landscape. Rations were supplemented by
camp vegetable gardens, piggeries and dairies, although the 1929
Geneva Convention provisions dictated that, apart from camp mainten-
ance, internee work should be voluntary. Dr. Morel recorded 778
internees as undertaking paid labor in 1942, including gardening, wood-
cutting and other various trades.68 Camp 1 had fourteen acres of market
garden, with twelve, six and two acres of garden each, at the subsequent
camps. Twenty-five further acres were acquired for Camp 4, less than
five miles from the camp, and irrigated with water pumped from the
63
NAA: MP508/1, 255/736/82 Visit of International Red Cross Delegate to Internment
Group Tatura 16–20 February 1942 (trans.), 3.
64
Schuster, Recollections, 3. 65 Sullivan, Beyond All Hate, 135, 178. 66 Ibid., 196.
67
Ibid., 132–9.
68
NAA: MP508/1, 255/736/82 Visit of International Red Cross Delegate, 6.
reservoir.69 Cultivated by six internees, it produced 1,250 lb of cauli-

flower, 4,697 lb of cabbages, 1,270 lb of silver beet, 120 lb of lettuce and
100 lb of onions in August 1942. Others planted flowers and vegetable
beds outside their huts, irrigated with waste water and fertilized with
composted kitchen waste. Planting was used to articulate sleeping-unit
boundaries, personalizing family spaces, when structural changes could
not be applied. A flower garden with a sun clock softened Camp 4’s
kindergarten space.70
Similarly, open spaces within the camps were modified for many recre-
ational activities not anticipated in the military designs, with some minor
physical structures such as platforms, boundaries or half-walls built to
facilitate them. In addition to the skittle alley at Camp 1, there were tennis
courts in practically all the camps, and Camp 4 included a nine-hole golf
course. Artworks, concert programs and periodicals capture the ingenuity
with which familiar cultural practices transformed the ordinary buildings’
functions, becoming tools for group cohesion, but also platforms for
dissident or resistance activities. A satirical, clandestine magazine,
Brennessel: hinter Stacheldraht (Nettle: Behind Barbed Wire, 1941–2),
printed secretly by German internees at Camp 1, advised on the war’s
progress, gleaned through clandestine radios and masked by notices on
handball, tennis, marbles and skittles championships. Concerts and dra-
matic performances cultivated and maintained their cultural sensibilities,
while interrupting everyday monotony and keeping internees entertained.
Camp 1 had a light orchestra, and a theater group led for a while by
Hermann Schulz, a fellow internee who had worked under the renowned
Austrian-born theater and film producer Max Reinhardt; “[A] small
nucleus of actors,” with a production range as diverse as Shakespeare,
Oscar Wilde and several German productions (Zer Brochener Krug,
“Broken Pitcher,” Biberpelz, “Beaver Coat,” Hauruck, “Youth at the
Helm”).71 The talented Dr. George Gruber, conductor and choirmaster
of the (breakaway) Vienna Mozart Boys’ choir touring Australia at the
outbreak of war, used his internment at Camp 1 to organize a fifty-voice
men’s choir that performed on a purpose-built dais and stage.72
Education and employment activities oriented internees toward repat-
riation and life after the war. Lectures were conducted by fellow intern-
ees, many of them former Australian university lecturers, in philosophy,
engineering and physical sciences. Several were employed by the camp
administration as “cooks, store keepers, boiler house attendants, bath
house and hospital orderlies, librarians, waiters, milk bar and canteen
69
Hammond, Walls of Wire, 68. 70 Sullivan, Beyond All Hate, 188–9.
71
Schuster, Recollections, 5. 72 Hammond, Walls of Wire, 37–46.
Division within Camps 73
workers, book keepers and clerks, shop assistants and so on,” servicing
a burgeoning camp population.73 They established cottage industries in
the open shower sheds for woodworking, making folding canvas chairs
and lampshades, and for cobblers and tailors. Interned German wool
buyer Eberhard Schuster recalled finer crafts like jewelry, leatherwork
or opal polishing. The recycled treasures of prisoners on display at the
Tatura Museum – notes on toilet paper, potato-block-prints, camp news-
papers, lead melted into gifts and toys, furniture and musical instruments
built from packing cases – demonstrate both material resilience and
deprivations endured. Among the signs of their domestication were the
growing numbers of pets, including a parrot, a magpie, a lizard, cats, dogs
and white rabbits.74 Despite their banal architecture and lack of civic
buildings, in terms of their strategies of domestication and range of
activities the internment camps imitated concentrated townships.
Division within Camps

We need to be cautious in imagining the camps as harmoniously united
communities under a lax security regime affected only by inaction.
Despite political emasculation, national loyalties and divisions permeated
camp society, mirroring cultures of oppression and resistance elsewhere.
Cultural opacities and prejudices perpetuated by Australia’s cultural
insularity often affected how guards interpreted these conflicts.
Significantly, the cause of detention determined the location of each
internee and period before release; internees with similar political inclin-
ations were often grouped together, as in the case of the First Australian
loyalists. Wrongful arrests were also numerous, as the evidence suggests:
for example, German-born émigré scientist Wolf Klaphake was interned
with pro-Nazi internees consecutively at Orange, Tatura and Loveday
camps during 1940–4 because he had been a member of the Nazi Party,
though he had used this affiliation only to mask and plan his escape from
Germany.75 Klaphake’s appeals to be separated from Nazis at Tatura
went disregarded by the authorities. Similarly, his wife, Maria Klaphake,
who fled Nazi persecution to Australia, was interned in 1941 because of
her friendship with an Italian fruiterer.76 At the Loveday Group, internal
73
Schuster, Recollections, 7–8.
74
Hammond, Walls of Wire, 120, quoting Emery Barcs, Backyard of Mars: Memoirs of the
“Reffo” Period in Australia (Sydney: Wildcat Press, 1980).
75
Klaus Neumann, Wolf Klaphake, 1900–67, NAA, http://naa.gov.au/collection/snap
shots/uncommon-lives/wolf-klaphake.
76
Neumann, “Fifth Columnists? German and Australian Refugees in Australian Refugee
Camps,” Public Lecture, for NAA, Goethe Institute (Sydney) and Center for European
political rivalry between Italian royalists and Fascists led to the murder of
Francesco Fantin by a fellow Italian internee.77
The authorities called Camp 1 the “Nazi or National Socialist
camp.”78 Although the neutral Swiss representative of the “Protecting
Power” conveyed the German government’s directive to segregate loy-
alists, the Australians claimed this was difficult to achieve.79 Many
German internees who had fled Nazi ideology in the prewar years
found themselves re-immersed in its politics.80 As recorded by Klaus
Neumann, a small group of Jewish Austrian and German nationals,
along with anti-Fascists interned at Camp 1 in August 1941, pleaded
unnecessary hardship and mental torture from being confined together
with their persecutors and political enemies.81 Neumann writes that the
group included an Austrian monarchist, a German Communist,
German and Austrian Jews, and many so-called non-Aryan Christians
(classified as “Jews” under the Nuremberg Laws). When internal unrest
became overly disruptive, the Australian authorities transferred the
dissenting groups to other camps. The German and Austrian refugees
were later transferred to Camp 4, and then to Loveday to be interned
with Italian Fascists. Similarly, Italian Fascists in Camp 1,
B-compound, were later transferred to Hay.82 Individual POWs were
similarly relocated following any major incidents, in order to prevent
collective dissent. Among those most affected by internal dissonance
and Australian officials’ ignorance and prejudice were German-
speaking Jewish internees. Best known among the many stories of unjust
incarceration is the case of 2,732 civilian internees (2,546 enemy aliens,
including German Merchant Seamen and 2,239 civilian internees of
German, Polish, Czech, Austrian or Italian origin) who made the peril-
ous fifty-seven-day ocean journey in September 1940 from Britain
aboard HMT Dunera, the first of many ocean-liners converted to hired
military transport to arrive in Australia.83 Around 70 percent of the
internees were Jewish. There were also in this group 200 Italian and
251 German and Austrian survivors of the SS Arandora Star, a ship
torpedoed en route to Canada with many lives lost. German seamen
Studies at the University of NSW, 17 April 2002, 7–8, TIWCM, Camp 1, Klaus
Neumann.
77
78
Christine Winter, “The long arm of the Third Reich: internment of New Guinea
Germans in Tatura,” Journal of Pacific History, 38:1 (2003): 85–108, 87, 90.
79
Ibid., 89. 80 As discussed in Henderson, Nazis in Our Midst.
81
Neumann, “Alien concepts,” 2003, TIWCM collection, unidentified.
82
Jennifer Dumble, “Conservation Report, Internment Camp 1, Tatura,” June 1993,
History 5.2, unpaginated.
83
Bartrop and Eisen, The Dunera Affair, 20; Inglis et al., Dunera Lives, vol. 1, 73.
among them would be treated as POWs. During the journey hostile

British guards, smarting from the ill-fated battle of Dunkirk, imprisoned
the internees in the hold and threw their baggage overboard.84 Upon
arrival in Australia, they were transported to the Tatura Camp 2 and the
Hay internment camps.85 Many overseas internees were highly accom-
plished individuals of considerable social standing in Europe, who spoke
out about their mistreatment after the war, among them Jewish intern-
ees, Catholic Germans and political internees.86
A group of Jewish internees (sixty-seven men, seventy-nine women,
twenty-four children) from the Straits Settlements, some fleeing Nazi
Europe at the beginning of the war, were likewise sent to Australia on
the HMT Queen Mary in September 1940, and, though identified with
their transport vessel, grouped by the authorities as Straits Settlements
internees. In fact, internees often identified with the transport that
brought them to Australia, ships like the Dunera, Queen Mary, Queen
Elizabeth, Ranjitiki, Zealandia and Marella, just as migrants would do in
postwar decades. In the case of the Dunera internees, their common
identity was forged by group adversity and prejudicial treatment, and
their experience of incarceration in the ship’s hold. Conversely, internees
on the Queen Mary arriving as passengers were shocked by their place-
ment in internment camps.
The tenacity of national loyalties and persistence of political factions is
understandable, given that many internees, like POWs expecting to be
repatriated after the war, treated Australia as a temporary space of exile.
Australia’s prohibitive immigration policies during that period, and its
remoteness and insignificance in the global order, contributed to this
preference, except for a few, including some members of the disenfran-
chised Jewish diaspora who saw no possibility of return. In others, this
implicit expectation led to accentuating national or cultural identities,
and acting as proxy agents of nation-state sovereignty defending national
values. Meanwhile, resident “aliens” who had partly assimilated Anglo-
Australian culture during the prewar years were immersed in the natal
cultures (and nationalist politics) they had left behind. This sensibility of
exilic existences umbilically tied to European identity persisted, despite
serial dislocations and even after postwar repatriation. German Dunera
internee Josef Friedrich, for example, saw the southern continent as
a midpoint in a longer itinerary of camps looping from the Isle of Man
84
Weiss, It Wasn’t Really Necessary, 197–202; Knee and Knee, Marched In, 36–41. The
Dunera story is discussed at length in Cyril Pearl, The Dunera Scandal (North Ryde,
NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1985).
85
Vivien Achia, “Max’s story: a wartime odyssey,” TIWCM, Camp 2.
86
Inglis et al., Dunera Lives.
back to postwar Europe. Within Australia, he passed through Tatura

camps 2, 4 and 1.87 Upon release and repatriation in August 1945,
Friedrich returned to a labor camp in Bohemia (Czechoslovakia) but
was driven from home by the postwar anti-Sudetengerman pogrom. He
fled with his family to a German refugee camp, eventually gaining
employment at Siemens in Erlangen through a fellow former Tatura
internee.
This global geography of internment camps was not so evident to
others, like German adventurer and electrical contractor Oskar Speck,
for whom Australia was the endpoint of a longer, seven-year, 31,000-mile
odyssey onboard his folding kayak Sunnschien (Sunshine).88 Escaping the
Weimer era but not his association with Germany, he was arrested on
Thursday Island in September 1939. Following an unsuccessful attempt
at escaping Camp 1, Speck was transferred to and spent the war at
Loveday, establishing a successful opal-cutting business in New South
Wales upon his release. The camp was the threshold for Speck’s change of
nationality.
Whereas individual political affiliations or economic circumstances
may have determined the choices made by Friedrich or Speck, for
Jewish overseas internees, collective cultural sovereignty associated with
their natal lands was embodied within a carapace of national or cosmo-
politan values. This embodiment was the basis of their persecution in
Europe, dislocation and separation from families, mirroring diasporic
movements caused by millennia of such expulsions, although the degrees
to which these expressions manifested materially varied. A group of
Jewish Dunera internees in Camp 2 maintained their orthodoxy with the
support of local Jewish communities who provided special clothing and
blankets, including traditional four-cornered undergarments; they main-
tained kosher kitchens and bonfires to cleanse utensils.89 Daily rituals
were conducted at a hut allocated as a synagogue. A small Yeshiva or
Talmudic College taught Czech and Hungarian Jews. Austrian- and
German-Jewish internees who mingled with compatriots were affected
by intergroup hostilities. The Jewish internees from the Straits
Settlements at Camp 3 grew distressed at hearing the Nazi anthem
“Horst-Wessel-Lied” being sung in the adjacent compound.90 Their leader
Gerhard Seefeld, who left a luxurious black-and-white bungalow in
Singapore’s Adam Park for a timber barrack at Tatura, appealed
87
Josef Friedrich, 6 December 1998, TIWCM.
88
Penny Cuthbert, “50,000 km by kayak,” Signals 58, 2002, 10–14, TIWCM.
89
Hammond, Walls of Wire, 93–5.
90
S. P. Koehne, “Disturbance at D Compound: the question of control at Australian
internment camps during World War II,” 71–86, 74, TIWCM.
repeatedly for their release without success. Their Australian guards

thought them troublesome, and unlike the disciplined Germans who
seemingly accepted their fate.91
Diasporic German communities from Iran, Palestine and New Guinea,
including those opposed to the Nazis like 665 Templars from Palestine,
shared this sense of unsettlement due to the impossibility of return, an
ontological reality barely understood at the time.92 They were interned in
Camp 4 with 170 Italians who traveled with them aboard the HMT Queen
Elizabeth in mid-1941.93 Removed from the influence of interwar
Nazism, their patriotism was tempered by geocultural experiences in
Europe’s colonial territories and the political complexities these pro-
duced; they were grouped based on their places of domicile when cap-
tured, as highlighted in Marched In.94 Their political and cultural loyalties
or racial attitudes were often incommensurate with Axis ideologies, so
they could not be easily categorized by coupling place identity with
nation-state sovereignty.
Forms of modern self-consciousness nurtured by the interwar avant-
garde sustained cosmopolitan, European aesthetic sensibilities in many of
the internees, expressed in their artworks and crafts and proposals for
architectural improvements projecting a liberal sense of personhood and
cultural dynamism still nascent in conservative Australia. Internee virtu-
osity appeared all the more incongruous because of their imposed ano-
nymity, and their conviction and defense of personal sovereignty. Many
eminent artists, musicians and photographers are among the personalities
recently documented in books, such as Dunera Lives and Bauhaus
Diaspora and Beyond, connecting individual internees to the interwar
explosion of talent in movements like Bauhaus, Vienna Secession and
Wiener Werkstätte.95 Hewn from a log while on woodcutting duty with
tools borrowed from a former stonemason, artist Karl Duldig’s sculpture
of a mother and child evoked a former urban civility (Fig. 2.6), and his
D-compound landscape plan with garden beds and sculptures recalled
the avenues of interwar Vienna (Fig. 2.7). He, his wife Slawa and their
toddler Eva had traveled by subterfuge from Vienna through Europe to
91
Jon Cooper, Tigers in the Park: The Wartime heritage of Adam Park (Singapore: Literary
Centre, 2016), 38; 1720 Seefeld, TIWCM, Camp 3; S. P. Koehne, “Disturbance at
D Compound,” 82.
92
They were a southern German religious movement that had established late-nineteenth-
century settlements in the “Holy Land.”
93
Templer Record, TIWCM, Helmut Ruff, 60 years of Templers in Australia; Knee and
Knee, Marched In, 48.
94
Ibid.
95
Ken Inglis et al., Dunera Lives; Philip Goad et al., Bahaus Diaspora and Beyond
(Melbourne: The Meigunyah Press, 2019).
Fig. 2.6 Karl and Slawa Duldig with Eva, in front of their hut at Camp 3,
Tatura Group, Vic., Sister Burns, Compound 3D Tatura, 1941,
photograph, 67x116mm, Inv. No. 6053. Courtesy of Eva de Jong-Duldig,
Duldig Studio, Melbourne
Fig. 2.7 Karl Duldig, plan of Tatura Camp, Vic., 1941, pencil,
445x571mm, Inv. No. 7273. Courtesy of Eva de Jong-Duldig, Duldig
Studio, Melbourne
Singapore before deportation to Australia, bringing these modernist cur-

rents with them. Karl attracted many commissions from Singapore’s
colonial residents and sculpted busts of prominent personalities. At
Tatura, he drew on scraps of toilet paper, begged or bartered from fellow
inmates.96 Bauhaus-trained artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, whose
familiar woodcuts of Tatura conveyed its desolation and uniformity,
sketched an open-air theater and swimming pool as a monument to
Australian culture and sports.97 Italian artist Cesare Vagarini, from the
Palestine group, who restored church frescoes in Jerusalem for the
Vatican before his internment, romanticized the camp hutments in
vibrant oil paintings.98 His affective artworks contrasted sharply with
the sterility of the military’s many photographs.
After December 1941, Camp 4 was vacated for 3,184 Asian intern-
ees, including women and children, held hostage for the actions of the
Japanese imperial forces in the Asia-Pacific (Map 2.5).99 The camp
commandant James Sullivan, who befriended many of these families,
wrote sympathetically of their plight, noting that even if born in Japan,
many were part of the diaspora, and residents of the Northern
Territory, the Netherlands East Indies, New Hebrides, Solomon
Islands and New Caledonia.100 Some had been exempted because of
concessions gained under the Anglo-Japanese Commercial Treaty of
1894. Among them were Chinese Taiwanese civilians from Japan’s
imperial territories, who maintained their separate identities. Camp
leader Albert Ueno headed the Japanese Ueno Acrobatic Troupe,
which toured Australia with Wirth’s Circus in the 1930s before being
interned.101 A woman warden and mothercraft nurse, Frances Sproat,
oversaw the needs of the families that, despite dissuasion by author-
ities, increased by 104 births.102
96
See Eva de Jong-Duldig, Driftwood: Escape and Survival through Art (North Melbourne:
Arcadia, Australian Scholar Publishing, 2017).
97
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, National Gallery of Australia, NGA 2015.992 and National
Gallery of Victoria, P104-1971, prints from woodcuts of the Tatura camp; TIWCM,
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, 9168_hirschfeld–mack, Internment Tatura. Letter to Magda
Bell.
98 99
Knee and Knee, Marched In, 49. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 120.
100
James T. Sullivan, Beyond All Hate; Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment
in Australia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996).
101
AWM, P04355.001, Group portrait of members of the Japanese Ueno Acrobatic
Troupe.
102
Sullivan, Beyond All Hate, 335, 351.
Based on SLV: Photo-map of Victoria, Murchison 799 A1, Aerial Survey of Victoria,
1949, and James T. Sullivan, Beyond All Hate, 228.
Map 2.5 Camp 4, Rushworth, Tatura Group. Drawn by Zachariah

Other Intersections of Identity

When compared with the camps for single men, where age, gender and
mental state as well as formal training may have determined labor cap-
acity, the gendered, generational complexities of family camps revealed
other individuated and communal internee experiences unrelated to
Other Intersections of Identity 81
nationality or place of origin. Mothers were fully occupied with caring for
their families. Elderly men who could not participate in labor-intensive
tasks lost out on related wages. Women found paid employment adjusting
military coats and charity clothing at Camp 4’s clothing factory, super-
vised by tailor Shimpei Murayama from Noumea.103 A shoe factory was
set up for men. Activities for 293 German and Italian children, protected
by adults from harsher realities, turned confinement into a wild adventure
at Camp 3. School was under a row of cypress trees in Camp 3 and in
regulation P-huts in Camp 4, the latter indicative of the internal hetero-
geneity of the group categorized as Japanese.104 A Chinese school
in A-compound taught English, Chinese and Indonesian languages,
whereas B-compound internees from the Pacific Islands studied in
English. A C-compound Japanese-language school also serviced
D-compound.105 The identities of individual Camp Dressing Station
girls offer deeper intersections of place and race, including Marie Tonda
from Brisbane,106 and Shizuyo Kanegae, with a First Nations mother and
Japanese father, captured in Broome, along with members of twenty-eight
other families.107 Five First Nations wives among them who joined their
husbands in internment lacked privileges comparable to Anglo-
Australian interned wives. Tjauw Siek was from China; Mary Stace’s
mother was Japanese, her father English; Sai Kwie Kia was of Chinese
origin; Tie Twan Chu, Taiwanese. They, along with Cecilia Miyakuni,
were all captured in the Netherlands East Indies. At least three of the
girls joined the 169 women and 207 children who left for Japan on
repatriation ships in February 1946. Yuriko Nagata enumerates 100
Australian-born Japanese internees, half of them children under
sixteen.108
The plight of mixed-race families, caught between racism, anti-Japanese
paranoia and Australia’s assimilationist eugenic strategies, is evident in the
story of Mary Ellenor (Lena) Matsumoto, a First Nations-Filipina from
Broome who followed husband Kakio and four children into Tatura, only
to be separated when seamen (pearlers) were reclassified as POWs and he
was removed to Cowra.109 She suffered a mental breakdown and was
institutionalized in South Australia, while her children were sent to
a convent 200 miles away. Similarly, four mixed-race Takagaki children,
because their deceased mother was Australian, were removed from Tatura
103
Ibid., 111–14. 104 Hammond, Walls of Wire, 102.
105
Sullivan, Beyond All Hate, 119–21. 106 Ibid., 92–96.
107
Nagata, Unwanted Aliens, 54–5. 108 Ibid., 55.
109
Noreen Jones, Number 2 Home: A Story of Japanese Pioneers in Australia (Fremantle:
Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002), 159–61, 179–84.
Camp 3 and separated from their Japanese father to prevent their becoming
“too Japanese.”110 The family, reunited at the end of the war, was not
repatriated because of their mixed descent.
Stories of postwar absorption into Australia are relatively few among
Japanese internees, with only 135 permitted to remain (124 local and
11 overseas internees) because of being Australian born, married to
Australians or unfit to travel, while seventeen locals were deported to
Japan.111 While Italian and German internees could opt for naturaliza-
tion on assurance of employment within one year of release, the major-
ity of Asians – even residents who had worked in Australia – were
forcibly repatriated at the war’s end. Yuriko Nagata, who has followed
many internee stories, describes their arrival in war-damaged cities and
towns in Japan, Korea or Taiwan, which their ancestors had left gener-
ations ago, to conditions and treatment far worse than at Tatura.112
White Australia’s postwar borders closed behind them, then reopened
six years later for Japanese war-brides of Australian servicemen, mainly
from the postwar British Commonwealth Occupying Forces in
Japan.113
***
The internment camps, as extensions of a broader military camp geog-
raphy integral to the physical transformation of wartime Australia, were
environments that created new awareness of race and nationality and
were generative sites for alternative expressions of internee political con-
sciousness and modernity. They circumvented the binary systemic racism
of white Australia. As their partitions multiplied to accommodate the
intersectional complexities of the interned populations, the camps
exposed the artificiality of an imposed and bounded political sovereignty,
based on Australia’s predisposition toward colonial race hierarchies.
When accommodating diverse family groups and civilians, the intern-
ment camps assumed archipelagic characteristics. Far more rigid bound-
aries were adhered to in the POW camps. In some of the examples cited in
this chapter, and unlike the POWs described in the next, internees main-
tained a more mutable relationship with nation-state sovereignty. At the
same time, multiple human displacements through and across the camp
system turned it into a remote place of transit – points in a longer journey
110
Sullivan, Beyond All Hate, 356. 111 RDPWI, vol. 1, 96.
112
Nagata, Unwanted Aliens, 201, 207.
113
NAA: A4940, C639, 1953-53, Japanese wives of servicemen and ex-servicemen –
Admission to Australia – Policy.
Other Intersections of Identity 83
originating in Europe or Asia – that forced open the nation’s former

insularity and influenced the responses of internees.
Although created as sites of exception, concentration often sharpened
the many political or cultural forms of sovereignty that internees identi-
fied with or expressed. Among them, diasporic populations presented the
most complicated intersections of place, race and political loyalty, expos-
ing creolized forms of sovereign belonging, politically suppressed but
nevertheless fundamental to settler-societies. The spaces they occupied
acted as temporal borders to a different trajectory of involuntary
European migration, forced by the war. According to the Directorate:
of 2,542 Dunera internees, 940 were released in Australia, with 700
remaining; from 287 Straits Settlements internees, only 8 left the country;
719 of the 987 Palestine internees chose to remain; and only 66 of the 496
internees from Iran were repatriated or redistributed; so, after accounting
for births and deaths, the population gained through internment num-
bered 2,303.114 Their social integration was accompanied by significant
changes to national policy during World War II’s penultimate months.
In July 1945, before Japan’s capitulation, the Australian government
set up a new Department of Immigration to process an influx of postwar
migrants and refugees. Australia’s first Minister of Immigration, Arthur
Calwell, who is credited with the policy, stressed the need to populate the
nation as a strategy to secure it.115 While mainly targeting assisted British
immigrants, Calwell also offered employment without discrimination to
continental Europeans, along with the possibility of citizenship in an
agreement signed with the International Refugee Organization on
21 July 1947.116 The anticipated growth rate was 2 percent per annum,
with a 10:1 ratio of British to those of “alien” origin. More importantly, he
appealed to Australians to help newcomers assimilate, a request unthink-
able in previous decades. War had punctured the nation’s hard borders
and although still impervious to Asians, the White Australia Policy had
weakened, but was not renounced.
114
RDPWI, vol. 1, 98.
115
Arthur Calwell, Ministerial speech to the House of Representatives, 2 August 1945,
quoted in Jerzy Zubrzycki, “Arthur Calwell and the origin of post-war immigration”
(Canberra: Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research), 1–2, www
.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/zubrzycki_1.pdf.
116
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Historical documents, 283 Agreement
with the International Refugee Organization, 21 July 1947, https://dfat.gov.au/
about-us/publications/historical-documents/Pages/volume-12/283-agreement-with
-the-international-refugee-organisation.aspx.
3 Prisoner-of-War Resistance
Anoma Pieris
Placing prisoners-of-war (POWs) and internees in adjacent compounds

or repurposing camps for different prisoner categories was a peculiarity of
the Australian system; in many other nations, internees and POWs were
kept entirely apart. This flexibility was possible because the internment
camp model adhered to the 1929 Geneva Convention’s POW accommo-
dation guidelines. POW camps, as penal architectural typologies, were
also nominally connected to Australia’s extraordinary legacy of peniten-
tiaries, because of their regimes of punishment and blocks of punishment
cells. These affinities became more apparent when dedicated POW camp
facilities were designed. Compared to internment camp facilities, POW
camps were secured with dedicated garrisons and additional guard posts,
because the temptation to escape, associated with prisons, was height-
ened. Camp security was further tightened following escape attempts.
The distinct plan types associated with the Australian POW camps
evolved, however, once large numbers of racially different enemy nation-
als captured by Australia’s allies were transported to be held on their
behalf. They included German and Italian POWs captured by British
forces in North Africa and the Middle East, and Japanese (JPOWs)
captured by US or Australian forces in defense of the Pacific. New
Zealand, balancing POWs against population numbers, reluctantly
agreed to receive a small US-captured JPOW contingent from the
Solomon Islands, the area of the Pacific where Royal New Zealand Air
Force (RNZAF) squadrons were fighting.
The Directorate enumerated a total of 25,727 POWs held in Australia
during the war, largely captured in the Middle East: the smallest number,
1,658 (6.4 percent), Germans; the largest (71.6 percent), 18,432 Italians
arriving via camps in India. Captured merchant seamen and those on
enemy vessels were included in this number from February 1942.1 Some
5,637 (21.9 percent) were JPOWs captured by Australian and US forces
in the Pacific.2 Although, among the 425,000 enemy POWs received by
the USA, only 5,424 were Japanese, this figure, equivalent to Australia’s,
1 2
RDPWI, Part II, Administration of Enemy Prisoners of War, 6. Ibid., 105–6.
84
Prisoner-of-War Resistance 85
must be understood against the prohibitive immigration policies limiting

Japanese entry, unlike in the USA.3 Numbers in New Zealand were few
(812), mainly JPOWs, so only two sites near Wellington, North Island’s
southern city, were converted to internment and POW facilities. The
necessity to follow the 1929 Geneva Convention governed the compar-
able treatment of prisoners in Australia as in Britain, but wartime hostil-
ities and racial prejudices exacerbated by the continent’s physical
isolation affected the behavior of guards toward prisoners. Nazi arrogance
was often greeted with fear and hostile admiration, rather than disdain.
The Japanese prisoners from the Pacific theater of the war were more
affected by the mutual opacity and racism cultivated in both Australia and
Japan during decades of isolationist policies and the effects of racist
wartime propaganda. POW numbers were only slightly higher than
internees, the latter often only confined for short periods pending appeals
to the Aliens Tribunal.
Focusing on POW resistance, Chapter 3 examines incarceration on
both sides of the Tasman Sea, expanding the taxonomy of carceral facil-
ities, discussed so far, to include discrete structures purpose-built to hold
POWs. In Australia, dodecagon-shaped camp plans inverted the radial
panopticon arrangement familiarized in nineteenth-century prison
designs, while New Zealand’s military barracks evolved from nineteenth-
century quarantine facilities. By overlaying enemy imprisonment on
colonial-period pathologies of criminalization and disease, these struc-
tures became politicized in ways that sharpened distinctions between the
various expressions of nation-state sovereignty that enemy POWs per-
sonified. Beyond these national innovations, camps were a discrete global
typology, universalized through successive conventions, known to the
belligerent powers but not equally adhered to across the wartime geog-
raphy. The 1929 Convention specified accommodation within fixed
limits, in towns, fortresses or fenced camps, but POWs could not be
imprisoned or confined in penitentiary-type facilities and periods spent
in punishment cells could not exceed thirty days. Camp locations were
selected to maintain POW health and safety, and different nationals had
to be kept apart. Everyday operation of the POW camps was also regu-
lated by international guidelines. Both Australia and New Zealand main-
tained these priorities, by removal to rural locations away from sensitive
coastal zones and accommodation in hutments “the same as depot troops
of the detaining Power.”4 The memory of World War I’s influenza
3
Arnold Kramer, “Japanese prisoners of war in America,” Pacific Historical Review, 52:1
(1983): 67–91, 67.
4
ICRC database: Geneva Convention, 1929, articles 9, 10.
epidemic still fresh, the governments were also concerned that tropical
intestinal parasites could enter the water system, via the JPOWs.5
Beyond segregation by nationality, according to the Convention, and
racialization as Europeans or Asians, POW populations within the
Australian camps were separated by military rank, as Officers, Non-
Commissioned Officers (NCOs) and Other Ranks (ORs).6 Merchant
seamen along with ORs were included in the POW category. These
various groups were assigned separate compounds. Segregation intensi-
fied what Australians interpreted as the national character of the various
groups, with these ascriptions fostered and circulating as stereotypes.
Germans were regarded as disciplined but belligerent, Italians as con-
genial and disorderly, and Japanese as opaque. Official commissions
reviewing escape attempts highlighted Nazi or Japanese character traits,
heaping wartime’s racial invectives on the structural prejudices of past
colonial and current immigrant policies. From the point of view of the
prisoners, however, Australia and New Zealand were remote and
unfamiliar geographies removing them out of sight of their home gov-
ernments, increasing their vulnerability. Their patriotic sentiments were
acutely sensitized to the changing fortunes of war gleaned from camp
authorities, clandestine sources or through rumor. POWs in each
national grouping were divided internally along political lines in ways
that made cohabitation risky for some. Because of the volatile emotional
landscape produced by the confluence of these many forces,
a continuous cycle of attempted escapes, recapture and punishment
enlivened POW camp life, particularly in the first example discussed
here, of German POWs at Murchison’s Camp 13.
The 1929 Geneva Convention was largely adhered to across Europe,
because the onset of war prevented the ratification of separate regulations
(for civilians and POWs), mooted in Tokyo’s 1934 draft convention,
though, in fact, such measures were not formalized until 1949.7
Lacking international consensus, the USA, Australia and New Zealand
had official visitors from the Red Cross and the “Protecting Power”
5
NAA: MP742/1/0, 259/4/822. Department of Defense Minute Paper, POWs from the
Japanese war area, 16 December 1941.
6
ICRC database: Convention relative to the Treatment of POWs. Geneva, 27 July 1929,
www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/57jnws.htm, articles 9, 21.
7
ICRC database: Treaties, State Parties and Commentaries, Draft International
Convention on the Condition and Protection of Civilians of enemy nationality . . . [who
are on territory belonging to or occupied by a belligerent], Tokyo, 1934, https://ihl-
databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/320?OpenDocument; Convention (III) relative to the
Treatment of POWs, Geneva, 12 August 1949, https://ihldatabases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl
.nsf/Treaty.xsp?documentId=77CB9983BE01D004C12563CD002D6B3E&action=
openDocument; Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of
War, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/380.
Prisoner-of-War Resistance 87
regularly monitoring the conditions of POW and internee imprisonment.

Military rank was respected; the respective governments issued military
wages and forced ORs into nominally paid employment. There were
many instances of German POWs citing the Convention in defense of
their rights and, as in the Murchison Camp case below, forcing adminis-
trative review. More self-assured and convinced of their superior military
strength in Europe, they maintained military discipline and displayed it
more readily than other groups. In contrast, though a signatory, Japan did
not ratify the 1929 Convention and the incarceration terms were not
generally known to many JPOWs, so they were unaware of the conduct
expected of captives.8 Their actions during and attitudes to captivity were
guided by the Senjinkun field services code issued in January 1941,
which, by forbidding retreat or surrender, aggravated the shame and
dishonor associated with captivity; an ideologically, culturally and polit-
ically powerful concept that many JPOWs internalized. Pressured by
responsibilities and obligations to their home communities and the desire
not to dishonor them, many JPOWs’ overriding concern was to prevent
news of their capture from reaching their families.9 Because of this, many
gave false names or ranks.
The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) ingrained in soldiers a sense of patriot-
ism, duty and unquestioning loyalty to the group, and commanded unques-
tioning obedience to superiors, often using arbitrary violence – practices that
made the Australian treatment of prisoners appear weak to many
JPOWs.10 Australians, guided by the Convention, were acutely mindful
of the need to avoid any basis for reciprocal mistreatment, partly influ-
enced in some instances by notions of Christian charity.11 This disjunc-
tion between the Australian and Japanese military cultures, long
insulated from one another because of isolationist immigration policies
founded on racial prejudice, and fueled by wartime propaganda, led to
mutual misunderstandings, which could have fatal outcomes for enemy
combatants. Other nuanced complexities internal to Japanese culture
around military rank and status influencing attitudes toward manual
labor, or requirement to labor, were often misinterpreted by Australians
as military chauvinism, denying acts of POW resistance as
8
Steven Bullard, trans. Keiki Tamura, Blankets on the Wire: The Cowra Breakout and Its
Aftermath (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2006), 20.
9
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire (New York:
Random House, 1970), 512.
10
Steven Bullard, “The emperor’s army: military operations and ideology in the war against
Australia,” in Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51, eds. Georgina Fitzpatrick et al.,
International Humanitarian Law Series: V.48 (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016), 27–57,
44–51.
11
Bullard, Blankets on the Wire, 28.
circumstantial or strategic agency. Revisionist accounts of catastrophic

events leading to JPOW deaths, at NSW’s Cowra POW Camp 12 and
New Zealand’s Featherston POW Camp, offer deeper insights into the
spatial experience of the POW camps, challenging the somewhat biased
findings of official inquiries.
POW Camps
Military camps repurposed for POW incarceration initially accommo-
dated a few hundred captives, from around September 1940, in
a pattern that was repeated throughout the war (see Map 2.2 and
Tables 2.1 and 2.2). Dhurringile Mansion in Victoria, occupied in
August 1941 by some 150 German officers, was an anomaly (see
Fig. 2.4). Smaller tented facilities with a few hutted service buildings,
built at Yanco in NSW, and Myrtleford (No. 5) in Victoria were more
pragmatic than punitive. In these various facilities, the greatest challenge
was of adapting and segregating existing spaces for increasing POW
intake, because of internal division of military captives by rank and
branch, whether Army, Navy, Air Force, etc., and, like the internment
camps discussed in Chapter 2, camp geometries grew evermore complex.
The Directorate of Manpower’s expanding labor program in June 1941
called for the diversion to Australia of Italian POWs captured during the
North African campaign and held for three years in India, with 13,207
dispatched from 1943 to 1945.12 Staging camps were maintained at the
Australian geography’s two extremities in Western Australia and
Queensland, from where labor was redistributed to other parts of each
state. Gaythorne in Queensland (1940–6), a long, rectangular facility,
used as a World War I internment camp, was elongated in 1943 by a fifth
compound for JPOWs (Map 3.1). Expanded into a 1,800-person facility,
it was further partitioned for officers and ORs, before and after interroga-
tion, as separate from any local internee men and women.13 The camp
held local internees and POWs from all three main national groupings,
and from 1943, Taiwanese POWs transferred to work in the dockyards.14
Marrinup (No. 16, 1943–5), in Western Australia, situated near a mill
and a township, becoming the state’s main administrative camp for POW
labor distribution, was likewise extended in September 1943 from
12
RDPWI, Part 11, Italian PW transferred from India, 102–4. The Australian 6th Division
troops fought with the Allies in their first major battle at Bardia, Libya in January 1941.
13
NAA: MP742/1, 255/9/111, Gaythorne Internment Camp, 11 May 1943, Gaythorne
PW & I Camp, Inspectors report, 29 March 1943.
14
State Library of Queensland, Australian Internment Camps of World War II, www
.slq.qld.gov.au/blog/australian-internment-camps-world-war-ii.
Based on NAA: MP742/1, 255/9/111, Gaythorne Internment Camp, folios 19, 20, 23 and 24.
Map 3.1 Gaythorne Internment Camp, Qld., capturing different stages of occupation. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,
Based on NAA: K1214, 30/32/4. Portion of the state forest, No.23 Marrinup, 13-21.
Map 3.2 Marrinup POW Camp, WA. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,

a diamond-shape to a parallelogram, to accommodate 1,200 German and

Italian POWs, and further partitioned internally to divide Italian Fascists
from Royalists (Map 3.2).15
A more compact design was tested in the first 4,000-person POW camp at
Cowra (No. 12, June 1941 to January 1947) (Fig. 3.1), at Murchison
(No. 13, June 1941 to January 1947) and Loveday (No. 14, June 1942 to
December 1946). A dodecagon figure of four 1,000-person compounds,
quartered by an intersecting access-way and firebreak, was controlled by
garrisons at the two ends and four strategically placed guard posts.16 By
orienting the buildings radially and placing towers at the perimeter, surveil-
lance was amplified. These changes were further justified after Australian and
US forces in battles around New Guinea captured many JPOWs, since their
racial segregation was a greater priority than with European POWs. While
such elaborate geometries were unprecedented in military camp facilities,
comparable layouts were evident in nineteenth-century prison buildings,
with both the radial prison and the European fortified city as close corollaries.
15
Shire of Murray, in Herit, Marrinup POW Camp, http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/
Public/Inventory/PrintSingleRecord/a8a772cd-f390-420a-9e04-3e5730701cf7.
16
POW Camps 91
Fig. 3.1 Cowra POW Camp, NSW, 6 August 1945. Courtesy of

Australian War Memorial, Canberra, P03160.002
The model for the radial separate prison, a progressive experiment

imported from Britain to Australia in the early nineteenth century, was
unique among the elaborate carceral architectures that, alongside churches
and town halls, dignified the continent’s colonial building stock.17 The
pattern was partially adapted at Berrima, Adelaide, Bathurst,
Rockhampton and Darlinghurst jails, with buildings radiating from an
open yard, church or hall.18 Statutory instruments like stocks, pillory and
gallows, the practice of marooning, or city jails and barracks were replaced by
cellular facilities as more sophisticated mechanisms for penal reform.19 The
17
The first panopticon prison in Britain at Millbank in London, built in 1816, held convicts
before they were transported to Australia.
18
James Semple Kerr, Out of Sight, Out of Mind (Sydney: National Trust of Australia
2000), 113.
19
Ibid., 22–4.
cruciform structure of Port Arthur Separate Prison, with its radiating exercise
yards, seemingly was replicated albeit by inverting figure and ground as the
cruciform access roads and radiating hutments of the dodecagon camp.
A closer comparison is found in two structures deployed for racialized
confinement in WA, the dodecagon-shaped Roundhouse (1831) and the
octagonal Quod – the Rottnest Island Aboriginal Prison (1863). The
Roundhouse was a police lockup, designed by architect Arthur Head and
civil engineer Henry Reveley (whose father assisted Bentham in his design
for the panopticon prison), built to emphasize law and order in the colony.20
It held colonial convicts and First Nations prisoners until Fremantle Prison
(1857) was built. The Quod, built by its First Nations prisoner occupants,
a panopticon structure of 29 inward-oriented cells for 167 inmates forming
the prison’s wall, had by 1904 incarcerated 3,700 men and boys, 364 of
whom died there.21 Wartime redeployment of both these polygonal geom-
etries invoked histories of racialized incarceration different to the treatment
of colonists.
Larger than small Australian townships (typically around 2,000 per-
sons) and with associated garrison and infrastructure, the 4,000-person
camps functioned as self-contained penal units, distinct from these earlier
models because of their visual porosity, which made their exercise of
sovereign power transparent and visible when compared with the opacity
of fortified prison buildings. Wartime captives, as nationals of a different
state apparatus, were subject to discipline but not reform; in fact, their
internal military structure disciplined captive POWs.22 Their removal
from social spheres of influence was the overpowering objective.
Nation-state or cultural sovereignty was articulated very differently
across the camp taxonomy discussed so far. The military training camps
were saturated spaces of nation-state sovereignty where youthful patriot-
ism was feverishly practiced, whereas internment camps were waiting
rooms where terms of national belonging were in flux. Many enemy
combatants in the POW camps embodied and defended an inimical
proto-sovereignty. They were masculine spaces of potentially hostile
soldiers united by military loyalties, even when divided by politics, their
routines undisturbed (as in the case of internees) by family responsibility.
This distinction was recognized by the garrison battalions that guarded
them, and in the distribution of sentry towers with guns trained on the
20
Audrey Fowler, “Fremantle’s oldest building,” Fremantle Society Newsletter 1 (3), 1973,
https://fremantlestuff.info/society/newsletter/1973June.html#roundhouse; John White,
“Henry Reveley, architect and engineer,” Early Days, 7:8 (1976): 24–42.
21
Glen Stasiuk, Wadjemup, Rottnest Island as Black Prison and White Playground, PhD
Exegesis, Media Studies, Murdoch University 2015, 12.
22
NAA: MP742/1/0, 259/4/822, Department of the Army, Minute paper, 23 July 1941.
The Right to Escape 93
sleeping huts. Military accommodation, discipline and austerities were

combined with established penal technologies of classification, isolation
and compulsory labor.
The Right to Escape

Individual POW escape attempts differed from group efforts, and were
treated with comparative moderation by the authorities because the provo-
cations felt by the escapee were more personal, and related to
the opportunities presented or the desperation felt in each case. Since the
articles of the 1929 Geneva Convention, which Australia and New Zealand
adhered to, protected the right to escape, disciplinary action against recap-
tured POWs, such as confinement in the jail cells in camp compounds, was
always maintained at just under the stipulated thirty days (with three-day
gaps before being repeated).23 A lament by Angelo Salvatore scratched on
the walls of his concrete cellblock at Loveday conveying the overpowering
loneliness of solitary confinement humanizes the plight of individual POWs:
Priva di sonno [deprived of sleep]
La vita alla mia cara patria [(my) life for my dear homeland]
Dolore per la mia cara moglie [pain for my dear wife]
Lunga vita al mio caro figlio [long life to my dear son]
E fede in Iddio [and faith in the Lord]
Salute ai mie fratelli [good health to my brothers]
Buon riposo mia cari [good rest my dear].24
Diet could be limited for those in cells, but reading, writing and sending
or receiving mail was continued, excepting for parcels and fund remit-
tances. A POW had the right of defense and an advocate of choice, and of
appeal overseen by the Protecting Power. In some respects, under emer-
gency regulations POWs had more rights than provisionally stateless
overseas internees. An uninterrupted view of surrounding farmlands
possibly aggravated temptations to escape, despite the deliberate selec-
tion (except for the few urban camps) of sites without distinctive land-
marks on the horizon; small numbers of prisoners also absconded during
farm work, periodically, throughout the war.25 A serial escapist from
Camp 13, Col. Edgardo Simone (“the Fox”), originally captured at
Bardia, Libya (the first Australian Army engagement overseas) and
23
International Committee of the Red Cross, Convention relative to the Treatment of
POWs, Geneva, Section V, Chap. 3, Art. 45–67, 27 July 1929, https://ihl-
databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/305.
24
Thanks to a Melbourne CO.AS.IT (Italian Assistance Association) staff member for
translating this inscription in 2016.
25
Dhurrungile Mansion 18, Tartura District, and Historical Society Collection.
transported to Australia,26 remained at large for ten months working as

a fruit-picker and salesman (June 1942 to April 1943) under the assumed
name of George Scoto, and even won the Watkins Products “dealer of the
month” award.27 Upon recapture at Koorlong near the NSW border he
was incarcerated, only to escape once again from the Hay Jail.28 While
many escapees were re-apprehended, conspicuous in burgundy-dyed
prison uniforms, a few evading recapture emerged for repatriation at the
war’s end. The audacity of individual escapees was treated lightly, how-
ever, when compared with group breakout attempts.
The will to escape prompted clandestine efforts at modifying the camps;
and in some examples like Dhurringile, a network of tunnels, some over
75–150 yards long and originating in the most unexpected places, like the
laundry, music room or garden tomato-beds, threatened to disturb the
foundations of the historical mansion, courtesy of its German officer
inmates.29 Tunnel mouths were cleverly boarded up and concealed
under hessian, netting and grass. Their interiors were lined with roof
timbers and excess sand deposited in the mansion’s cavity walls. A daring
escape of twenty Germans was thus enabled in January 1945.30 A more
complex tunnel system was uncovered at Murchison Camp 13.
Camp 13 (Map 3.3) was a dodecagon-shaped camp with two guard units,
equipped with towers, gun emplacements and punishment cells, to the north
and south across the central firebreak, entered through barbed-wire cages at
the two ends (Fig. 3.2). A fenced compound with a sleeping hut, workshop,
kitchen and other facilities was provided for guards on duty. Additional
guard towers were to the east and west. A separate garrison headquarters,
due east of the whole complex, included a workshop area, small hospital and
full complement of staff and officers’ facilities including sports grounds (e.g.,
for cricket), workshops, stables and storage space. The strong military
presence was warranted because of the heightened patriotism of the POWs
held there – Italian POWs from Libya, Germans from the Afrika Corps 2nd
Division, Italian Seamen, German Luftwaffe and HSK Kormoran crew,
whose officers were imprisoned at Dhurringile. Both Hitler’s and
Mussolini’s birthdays saw annual festivities.31 POWs were empowered by
26
“Italian officer on four charges,” The Age (Melbourne), 29 June 1943, 3.
27
A dealer in essences, spices, medicinal products, cosmetics, cleansers, floor wax, fly
spray, stock preparations, etc.
28
Merrylees, Haywire, 69, 120.
29
TIWCM: Dhurringile (unpublished history), 18, donor Rhonda Rose; TIWCM:
Buschmann, Dhurringile, 50.
30
“20 Germans escape through tunnel,” The Age, 12 Jan. 1945, 5; “German escapees dug
120-yd. tunnel,” The Sun (Sydney), 12 January 1945, 3.
31
For example, NAA: MP70/1 2001/00492528, Intelligence reports Tatura Camp,
20 April 1944.
Based on SLV: Photo-map of Victoria, Aerial Survey of Victoria, Murchison 799 A4, and Plan of POW Camp 13,
by 7, Aust. CRE Works, August 1946, on display at the Murchison Historical Society.
Map 3.3 Camp 13, Murchison, Tatura Group, Vic. Drawn by

Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated sources
a sense of group superiority when compared with the Australians guarding

them, who were of lesser military rank, veterans or unfit for combat, while
the early Nazi successes increased their hubris. Every fine Sunday morning,
the German Army, Navy and Luftwaffe would march in freshly pressed
uniforms around the compound, finishing with the infamous goosestep that
inspired fear and awe in many captured cities.32 Their disciplined displays in
military regalia expressed national unity and loyalty.
32
(a)
(b)
Fig. 3.2 Murchison, No. 13 POW Group, January 1943: POWs returning
to quarters after day’s work (a), and their sleeping quarters (b). Courtesy of
Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 028614; 028544
The POW tradesmen had a good understanding of the camp’s layout,

because as many as forty-two carpenters, thirty-one bricklayers, eighteen
cabinetmakers and joiners, twelve plumbers, and several other trades
were employed in constructing 198 huts for this camp.33 A survey of
Camp 13, prepared while the prisoners were awaiting repatriation in
January 1947, shows eight variations of P-huts on a 10x18-ft module,
including for ablutions and laundry facilities, and C-huts of varied lengths
and 18ft width for administrative and other functions. Recreation halls
were irregular variations on 100x30-ft buildings.34 C-compound had
a church, whereas in other spaces, padre, music and barber shops were
co-located. Workshops, stores, tennis courts, libraries and service spaces
(laundries, latrines, urinals, ablutions, concrete rubbish bins, incinerator,
hot showers) were repeated in every quadrant, alongside (93.6x24.6-ft)
mess halls, kitchens and canteens. B-compound had a soccer ground.
The twenty 110.5x30-ft units of detention cells were an important excep-
tion when compared with the internment camps.35 These were frequently
occupied by miscreants and recaptured escapees, the most daring and
successful effort being through a 78-yard-long tunnel.36 Noticing suspicious
soil deposits in flowerbeds and the camp’s central drain in July 1942, camp
authorities brought in police detectives all the way from Melbourne,
a measure the perturbed POWs protested as contravening Geneva
Convention guidelines.37 The detectives made several discoveries before
being forced to withdraw: a 75-yard-long timber-lined electrified tunnel,
6x3ft wide and 12ft underground, linked C- and D-compounds;38 entry
shafts to another tunnel leading to the camp perimeter were located beneath
the floors of two huts; and a search made of C-compound on 10 July
revealed improvised weapons, clothing and cash.39 Given that police could
no longer legally enter the facility, a US Army engineering detachment,
stationed at the nearby Mangalore Camp, was brought in to blast open the
tunnel, damaging the related huts, to the hoots and jeers of the unruly
prisoners, a scene audaciously depicted in a cartoon-style wall mural at the
Garrison Recreation Hall by POW artist Hans-Wolter von Gruenewaldt.40
33
NAA: MP742/1/0, 259/4/822. No. 13 PofW Camp Murchison, AMF-Southern
Command, 17 September 1941.
34
Based on a survey conducted in 1946 on display at the Murchison Historical Society.
35
7 Aust. CRE (works), Murchison Vic., POW Camp no. 13, Dwg no. 6416, August 1946.
36
Hammond, Walls of Wire, 136, 142.
37
RDPWI, vol. 2, 183–4; Hammond, Walls of Wire, 141; Barbara Winter, Stalag Australia:
German Prisoners of War in Australia (North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1986).
38
“Secret tunnel in prison camp,” The Herald, 17 July 1942, 3.
39
J. J. Green, Senior detective, Police Department, Special Branch, 14 July 1942, TIWCM,
Camp 13, security.
40
Angus Brammall, “German internee found escape in art,” The Advertiser (South
Australia), 13 April 1946, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article35689709.
A mining engineer interned in South Africa who had survived the SS

Arandora Star sinking and arrived on the HMT Dunera to be reclassified as
a POW, Von Gruenewaldt decorated camp buildings with many artworks,
though this one depicting sunburned diggers, a racially mixed US detach-
ment (including a Japanese and a Black American) and an effeminate Anglo-
Saxon man lapping an ice-cream cone best conveyed his opinion of his
captors, while recording the relative heterogeneity of US troops in Australia.
Seeking to punish POWs for their insubordination, camp authorities
canceled an eagerly anticipated football match and, to the prisoners’ con-
sternation, dyed their prized military uniforms burgundy, making their
humiliating penal status instantly recognizable, and stripping them of their
military distinction. When called to parade on 21 September 1942, the
disgruntled and disaffected POWs rushed the guards.41 The guards opened
fire for ten to fifteen seconds, shooting dead Tobias Tschurtschenthaler, and
wounding nine of his mates. An elaborate funeral ceremony followed. The
concerns of the authorities were not unfounded. A search conducted at
Camp 13 in September 1944 uncovered pro-Nazi propaganda, disguised
as Educational Course material for Reichsarbeitadienst (RAD) Leaders and
Reichkunde – the history of the Third Reich, including policies of true
Nazism, antisemitism and racial laws. Among memorials built at Camp 13
(no longer extant) was a German Africa Corps memorial of an eagle atop
a stone cairn, the Reichsadler and Nazi Party emblem.
Despite open acts of insubordination and numerous escape attempts,
Murchison never saw a mass breakout, although the military group
dynamic masked and influenced individual preferences, unlike among
the internees. The desire to escape was amplified because, unlike Italian
POWs who were released on work assignments and rarely resisted captiv-
ity, the Germans were confined to the camps. At Marrinup, where the
surrounding forest and relative freedom of woodcutting duties gave the
German seamen greater liberties, and relations with guards were amic-
able, no such group resistance was organized.
The Cowra Breakout

The group dynamic was different among the Japanese. The strictures of
the imperial military code demanded forms of solidarity, loyalty and
sacrifice, and the sense of shame and dishonor associated with captivity
drove soldiers to acts of martyrdom unintelligible to Australians, unaware
of the fundamentally militaristic and authoritarian nature of the increas-
ingly militarized Japanese imperial government. Knowledge of Japanese
41
Australian Army report, Camp 13, TIWCM.
The Cowra Breakout 99
excesses in China and concern for nearly 22,000 Australian POWs in Asia
affected Australian perceptions of the JPOWs. More importantly, attacks
on Sydney and Darwin in 1942 and battles in the seas around the
Australian territory of New Guinea made Japan a greater national threat.
Although the bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 killed 235
people and injured a further 300 to 400 in what was arguably the most
tragic wartime incident on Australian soil,42 the tale of the attempted
breakout of 1,104 JPOWs at Cowra Camp 12 on 5 August 1944 has
comparable popular diffusion. Frequently described in hyperbolic terms
as the largest prison escape of World War II, with 359 escapes, 235 deaths
(including 4 Australian guards) and 108 injured, the breakout’s notoriety
can be attributed to several publications and a television series that have
immortalized it.43 Authors like Graham Apthorpe have since actively
recuperated a broader history of the town and the adjacent Cowra
Military Training Camp, including stories of other POW nationalities.44
Public opinion on the breakout was influenced by several factors.
Apthorpe reflects that former simplistic attitudes toward color and cul-
tural differences were complicated by specific national alliances and
hostilities – toward Black American soldiers, British, Dutch or Japanese
imperial subjects or European citizens of Allied or Axis partnerships.45
The shifting indices of global race relations filtered into communities
hosting POW camps. The adjacent military camp housed 80,000 to
100,000 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) soldiers between 1940 and
1947, substantially altering the town’s scale and economy.46 Many sol-
diers from the Riverina area had been taken prisoner in Asia by the
Japanese, causing grief and anxiety in their families. Some 510 names
on the “Cowra District War Memorial Honour Roll” demonstrate how
other overseas conflicts also impacted the townspeople; in fact, their war-
dead far outnumbered the Japanese interred there.47
42
NAA, The bombing of Darwin, Fact Sheet 195, www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/
fs195.aspx.
43
Teruhiko Asada, Cowra Breakout (North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1985);
Asada, The Night of a Thousand Suicides: The Japanese Outbreak at Cowra (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1972), Seaforth Mackenzie, Dead Men Rising (North Ryde, NSW:
Angus & Robertson, 1975); Harry Gordon, Die Like the Carp (London: Corgi Books,
1978) and its expanded version Voyage from Shame (St. Lucia: University of Queensland
Press, 1994); The Cowra Breakout (television miniseries, Kennedy Miller, 1984); On That
Day, Our Lives Are Lighter than Toilet Paper: The Cowra Breakout (Nippon Television,
2008). And most recently, Tom Keneally, Shame and Captives (North Sydney, NSW:
Random House Books, 2013).
44
Apthorpe, A Town at War. 45 Apthorpe, A Town at War, 19–27.
46
Ibid.; Jenny Hayes, Australia: A New Country, 43.
47
Register of War Memorials in NSW, Cowra, http://warmemorialsregister.nsw.gov.au/
search/results/Cowra.
Knowledge of the site was restricted before the catastrophe. Under the
Crimes Act 1914–32 and the Defence Act 1903–34, trespass, spying,
unlawful access, sketching, painting or photographing the site was pro-
hibited, and camp employees had to be natural-born British subjects, and
not “aliens.” Because Australian identity was defined in terms of British
subjecthood, and camp erection and maintenance was funded by Britain,
initially to receive Britain’s POWs, the camps reified perceptions of
Australia as a displaced British territory. The arrival of JPOWs, con-
versely, marked Australia’s political realignment following a new strategy
led by Prime Minister John Curtin, who, on 27 December 1941, against
the wishes of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, redirected
Australian troops to the defense of the Pacific. “Without any inhibitions
of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of
any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United
Kingdom,” he stated.48 US troops arriving in Melbourne, Brisbane and
Sydney would fight with the recalled 7th and 9th Australian infantry
divisions and some battalions of the 8th in and around New Guinea. By
the war’s end some 4,100 JPOWs had been handed over by US forces for
incarceration in Australia, paid for as reciprocal Land Lease expenditure,
alongside a further 1,000 AIF-captured personnel, including 207
Javanese, 74 Chinese, 61 Taiwanese, 56 Koreans and 33 Indonesians.49
The Cowra POW camp (1942–7), acquired by the Commonwealth in
early 1942, was purpose-built on a portion of a 256-acre site, including
164 acres owned privately by Cecil Read, and the rest by the Cowra
parish.50 The State Department of Public Works built the original
camp’s C- and D-compounds in September 1941, using local labor for
essential buildings and facilities, while the A- and B-compounds were
built by the first group of Italian POWs.51 The cost to the government was
£90,000 (at that time), for fifty-seven buildings built of second-grade
hardwood or cypress.52 Gables had fixed hardwood louver blades and
there were twelve glazed windows for each building of 4x3 ft overall
width, with sashes pivot-hung from above. Whereas the camp could be
secured with four guard towers, six were prescribed.53
48
John Curtin, “The task ahead,” TROVE, online; The Herald, Melbourne, 27
Dec. 1941, 10.
49
RDPWI, Part II, 105–6. 50 NAA: SP857/3/0, CL 10187.
51
NAA: SP 1008/1/0, 420/34/42, Cowra POW camp No. 1 construction of permanent
buildings [Box 21], August 1941.
52
NAA: SP155/1/0, DEF319930, COWRA Specification for pre-cut timber materials and
joinery for 57 buildings at POW camp, 8 September 1942 [Box 17], 21 September 1942.
53
NAA: SP 1008/1/0, 420/34/11, Cowra POW camp – construction of [6 pages; box 21],
29 May 1941.
The prisoner population was surprisingly diverse ethnically and in

geographic provenance, though the notoriety created by the breakout
diverted attention from the camp’s racial and national diversity. The first
group arriving at Cowra, of Italian civilian internees, some Albanian and
Greek nationals, and Indonesian merchant seamen, were housed in
tents.54 Next, when NSW’s Cowra, Hay and Yanco camps received
15,000 Italians captured by the British in North Africa, 5,000 were
diverted to the camp.55 At the time of the breakout, in 1944, Italians
occupied A- and C-compounds, B-compound housed Japanese ORs and
NCOs, and D-compound housed Japanese officers as well as Koreans and
Chinese from Taiwan, and a few Thais and Malayans (Map 3.4).56 Other
Asians among them were subjects of Japanese imperial territories, includ-
ing merchant seamen. Some 1,200 Indonesians from New Guinea – mem-
bers of the dissident Javanese Independent Party and Communist Party,
and their families – were prisoners of the Dutch.57 In 1946 the camp’s
population peaked at 4,600.58
A Korean POW communicated breakout rumors two months before
the event, but the main provocation for the escape bid was the adminis-
trative decision to avoid overcrowding by sending Japanese prisoners
below lance-corporal rank to the camps in Hay.59 Panic-stricken over
the plans for their separation, B-compound voted on a plan of action,
using toilet paper as ballot sheets with 80 percent favoring a breakout.
Weapons were fashioned from work tools and kitchen and sporting
equipment. A POW attempting to warn the guards was captured by his
comrades and killed. In the early hours of 5 August 1944 the prisoners,
having set their huts on fire, rushed the security posts, stabbing and killing
two guards. The guards in turn retaliated, aiming their mounted machi-
neguns at the ensuing onslaught. Throwing blankets over the barbed-wire
fencing, several hundred POWs climbed over and escaped into the sur-
rounding darkness, while a small number died in the conflagration or in
desperation committed suicide (Fig. 3.3).
Popular accounts attribute the JPOWs actions to their antipathy
toward POW status and the influence of patriotic hardliners over the
rank and file. They also dwell on the Japanese military code and suicidal
tendencies. In seeking to shift the allegiance of peasant conscripts from
feudal lords to the emperor, the Japanese government had forged
a military ideology combining various attributes of the samurai fighting
ethos, deification of those killed in battle and a national network of shrines
54
Apthorpe, A Town at War, 30. 55 Ibid., 10. 56 Ibid., 18. 57 Ibid., 33.
58
Ibid., 16–18.
59
See NAA: A373, 10020, Escape of Japanese POWs from Cowra, 1944; NAA: A989,
1944/925/1/140, POW escape from Cowra.
Based on a hand-drawn map of the Cowra POW camp, 1939-45. AWM: P02567_002.
Map 3.4 Cowra POW Camp, after the breakout. Drawn by Zachariah
where they were worshipped, alongside local community networks that

emphasized the individual’s obligations to the wider abstract state
embodied in the figure of the emperor, notes Steven Bullard.60 The
dogma of the Field Services Code enhanced the shame felt by captives,
and their sense of disembodiment due to admission of defeat, tapping into
cultural perceptions of shame.61 Bullard also notes, because the “Value of
Honor” clause related to capture, terming imprisonment as disgraceful,
“gained its strength and authority from the deep connection of a soldier to
his family and community . . .. The conflict between an acceptance of
60
Bullard, “The emperor’s army,” 44–5. 61
Bullard, Blankets on the Wire, 80–2.
Fig. 3.3 Cowra NSW, August 1944: blankets thrown over the barbed
wire in B-compound (Japanese section), at No. 12 POW Camp, by
escaping prisoners in the early hours, 5 August 1944. Courtesy of
Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 073485
their fate as a soldier of empire and internal feelings and attachments to

friends and family must have been extremely stressful.”62 However,
rather than honor suicide as it was circulated in the (Japanese-related)
military propaganda of both the Japanese and the Allies, it was group
consensus and fear of reprisals that informed JPOW actions at Cowra,
and friction around these issues between army moderates and navy hard-
liners factionalized the camp in the leadup to the breakout.63
In the Court of Inquiry that followed the breakout, it became apparent
that confusion, panic and general misunderstanding had precipitated
events. Unlike the Italian, Korean and Taiwanese prisoners who per-
formed farm work outside the camp, the Japanese were “invisible,”
confined to its boundaries, making their escape and recapture more
controversial in the locality.64 The newspapers, ignoring wartime restric-
tions, broke the startling news of their escape, alarming an otherwise
62
Bullard, “The emperor’s army,” 50, 51.
63
Apthorpe, A Town at War, 148, 185–9; Bullard, Blankets on the Wire.
64
Apthorpe, A Town at War, 16, 18.
ignorant metropolitan public.65 Rumor and sensationalization exagger-

ated the perceived threat, even though fugitives when apprehended made
little attempt at resisting recapture: three were caught hiding in a bush
foxhole, and three others, after sleeping in a farmer’s woodshed, were
hosted by his wife to scones and tea.66
In the aftermath of the breakout, it fell on the army to find a means for
accommodating a large number of bodies of deceased JPOWs, far more
than would die of natural causes in Australia’s camps. They were interred
in a section of the Cowra cemetery, apart from the camp. The Japanese
Embassy explored the possibility of repatriating the remains in 1955, but
eventually opted to establish a cemetery in Australia. Discussed in
Chapter 10, the story of the creation, care and formalization of this
space, and the return of former JPOWs to commemorate their deceased
compatriots, reflects Australia’s changing attitudes toward Japan. The
surviving JPOWs were distributed to other camps at Hay and Tatura.
During a twelve-week period from December 1944, twenty timber-
framed buildings were replaced in B-compound and three others were re-
sited from the southern guard’s area. Thirty-eight buildings from Dubbo
camp were retrofitted to replace eighteen double-sleeping huts, the work-
shop and the canteen.67 Their destruction by fire prompted new building
standards and quality control of materials to ensure greater resilience,
using the best approved Australian timbers, such as cypress pine, plus
joinery and finishing, “sound, seasoned, and free of sapwood, shakes,
large and loose knots, and other defects,” even though all timber fittings
were by then in short supply.68 Walls were covered with 26-gauge
corrugated-iron sheeting, and the roof was covered with camouflage
asbestos-cement sheets. Wartime quotas on materials were lifted to
expedite reconstruction and ensure quality.69
The tragedy of the breakout irrevocably damaged the reputation of the
dodecagon camps.70 Their large 1,000-person compounds, by concen-
trating nationalities, amplified the numbers who could collaborate for
dissent. Consequently, compound leaders gained exceptional influence,
undermining the camp commandant’s authority. The radial internal
arrangement blocked the field of vision or of fire. Rectangular or square
65
See, e.g., “POWs break from camp at Cowra: widespread manhunt,” The Sun (Sydney),
5 August 1944, 3.
66
“War prisoners escape from camp: wide search by troops, police,” Daily Telegraph
(Sydney), 6 August 1944, 4.
67
NAA: SP155/1, DEF39703T, Cowra specification for the transportation of 38 timber-
framed buildings from Dubbo [Box 19], 1 December 1944.
68
Ibid. 69 Ibid., DEF39704T.
70
RDPWI, Part 3, Chap. 9, Reports by Commands on Internee and POW administration,
271–3.
New Zealand’s Quarantine Camps 105
plans with buildings situated centrally, away from boundary fences and
raised 2 ft above the ground to expose tunnels, were advised. The radial
pattern had run its course.
The Cowra POW camp continued to be occupied until postwar
repatriation in 1947, but not by JPOWs. Other possible uses were conjec-
tured in a letter from the secretary of the Aboriginal Welfare Board to the
Eastern Command at Victoria Barracks as early as December 1943,
asking if some 100 Aboriginal persons currently living at Cowra’s
Erambie Mission could be moved to the campsite.71 Although this plan
did not eventuate, in the minds of state administrators, carceral facilities
were interchangeable; in fact, sites had been similarly repurposed previ-
ously at Rottnest Island, where the Aboriginal prison was followed by
a tented World War I internment camp. Although World War II POW
camp facilities were not as extensively reused in Australia, being largely
built on requisitioned private lands, this practice of recycling the same
group of facilities or proximate spaces for new and more notorious func-
tions was common practice across the Tasman Sea.
New Zealand’s Quarantine Camps

Unlike Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, because of its smaller popula-
tion, did not agree to accept prisoners on behalf of Britain, limiting the
numbers incarcerated during World War II. Consequently, when com-
pared with its neighbor, its camp history is (physically) elastic, because of
the continuous repurposing and modification of static sites and facilities
for different kinds of incarceration, including imprisonment, internment
and quarantine over a longer period. New Zealand also shared Australia’s
fears of non-British immigration and passed a comparable series of
restrictive acts prejudiced against Asians from the late nineteenth century
onwards, additionally targeting certain European nationals in the desire
to maintain a British-born majority. The Undesirable Immigrants
Exclusion Act of 1919 prohibited Germans and Austro-Hungarians
from entering the country; and successive immigration restriction acts
from the 1920s onward prevented entry to non-British immigrants with
some few exceptions.72 Its internment facilities were consequently linked
to an earlier mid-nineteenth-century history of quarantining British-born
71
NAA: SP1048/7/0, S38/2/226, Tenure of land – POW Camp – Cowra, Acting Secretary
Aborigines Welfare Board to Deputy Assistant Adjutant General, Eastern Command, 6
December 1943.
72
Ann Beaglehole, “Immigration regulation – 1914–45: restrictions on non-British immi-
gration,” Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/immigra
tion-regulation/page-3.
migrants in island facilities created to buffer the New Zealand archipelago

from shipborne diseases brought by infected humans and livestock.
As with the convict system in Australia, this history of implicit vio-
lence – of forced removal, segregation from local populations, separ-
ation by gender, surveillance, invasive treatments such as washing and
fumigation and burial practices – began an incarceration genealogy of
recipient facilities revived during World War I for Germans and Austro-
Hungarian detainees. Following general paranoia and riots in various
localities,73 these unfortunate enemy nationals were sent to Motuihe
and Matiu/Somes islands in Auckland and Wellington harbors, respect-
ively. Resembling penal colonies rather than sanatoriums, the functions
of both islands shifted between these programs. Motuihe Island held
a “better class” of internees.74 Matiu/Somes Island held ordinary enemy
nationals and military reservists. By placement in these environments
and treatment as prisoners, internee identities were pathologized. Their
numbers soon increased to 296, including 84 New Zealand residents.75
Once the Cabinet revoked their naturalization, in late 1919, they were
deported.76
The quarantine buildings were dormitory structures with “double
bunks, tables, forms, shelves, compartments for married quarters and
others for singles.”77 A brick smokehouse was built for fumigating immi-
grants’ bodies and clothes. Internees maintained the island and its build-
ings, their labor supposedly voluntary, but brutal and coercive treatment
by retired schoolmaster and camp commander Major Dugald Matheson
became the subject of a parliamentary inquiry in 1919.78 Health-related
concerns and responses prompted the removal of 321 internees to the
Featherston Military Training Camp (1915–27) during the influenza
epidemic toward the end of World War I, a pandemic that cost stationed
troops 160 lives.79 A major facility for preparing soldiers for the Western
73
Val Burr, “German-ating the seeds of anger: the Great War’s impact on Germans in
Manawatu and Rangitikei” (BA Honors thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North,
1996). See also Burr, “Somes Island internment camp for enemy aliens during the First
World War: an historical enquiry” (MA thesis, Massey University, 1998).
74
Motuihe Project, World War I Internment Camp, https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/
handle/10179/11636/01_front.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y; Somes Prisoners, www
.somesprisonersnz.net, redirected via www.oocities.org/somesprisonersnz.
75
National Library of New Zealand, Papers Past, H-33, POWs at Somes Island (Report of
Mr Justice Chapman respecting the treatment of), appendix to the Journal of the House
of Representatives, 1 January 1919, 2, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/parliamentary/
AJHR1919-I.2.2.4.48#save_as.
76
David McGill, Island of Secrets (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001), 68.
77
Ibid., 34, 36. 78 National Library of New Zealand, Papers Past, H-33.
79
Alice L. Hutchison et al., Featherston Military Training Camp: The Record of a Remarkable
Achievement (Exhibition catalogue, Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History,
Masterton, 23 January–31 July 2016), 22.
New Zealand’s Quarantine Camps 107
Front with a 4,500 capacity, the camp held as many as 8,500 at one time.
Consequently, there were ninety 120x20-ft hutments, additional tented
accommodation and around 500 horses stabled, introducing a sizeable
population to the area that expanded the nearby town’s economy.80 The
main highway divided sleeping and communal facilities and a railway
siding ran parallel to the road, marking the southern boundary of the
subsequent World War II POW camp.81 Toward the end of World War
I the Featherston camp was used as a quarantine hospital for venereal-
disease and tuberculosis patients. Meanwhile, in 1934 Matiu/Somes
Island was reestablished as an animal quarantine station.82
The passage of populations across a few selective facilities in New
Zealand, because of the smaller numbers of prisoners and fewer facilities
deployed, makes it harder to disentangle incarceration and internment
histories from quarantine histories. Once Britain declared war on
Germany in 1939, these former sites were reinstated for military use. By
November 1942 internees at Matiu/Somes Island numbered ninety-eight
Germans, thirty Italians, forty-seven Japanese, two Austrians, three Thais,
a Finn, a Pole, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a Norwegian and a Hungarian.83
Only five of the Japanese internees were residents of New Zealand, with the
remainder from Pacific islands. German and Japanese women and children
evacuated from Tonga were accommodated in residential houses south of
Auckland, at Pukekohe and Pokeno, respectively.84 At least two of the
internees held at Matiu/Somes Island were interned there during both
wars, including George Dibbern, repatriated to Germany after World
War I, who returned to New Zealand on his 32-ft ketch, Te Rapunga, in
1930, was arrested on arrival and was reinterned during World War II.85
As the war continued and New Zealanders became more conscious of
the 1929 Geneva Convention directives, the haphazard adaptations of
extant facilities were superseded by military barracks. Deteriorating facil-
ities at Matiu/Somes Island and its proximity to Wellington prompted the
Protecting Power’s Swiss Consul in January 1943 to demand the reloca-
tion of internees, and a 1,000-person camp for 886 internees and their
guards was purpose-built according to international guidelines on the
64-acre Pahiatua racecourse (Fig. 3.4).86 Barrack dormitories, recreation
spaces and mess facilities, built by the internees, were assigned by
80
Ibid., 44, 10. 81 Ibid., 8. 82 McGill, Island of Secrets, 72. 83 Ibid., 112.
84
ANZ: AD 1389, series 1, 337/3/92–337/12 vol. 2, Internment camps: establishment of.
Memorandum to Prime Minister, 14 July 1942.
85
Erika Grundman, Te Rapuga and the Quest of George Dibbern (Auckland: David Ling Pub.,
2004).
86
ANZ: AD 1389, War Cabinet memorandum, Accommodation, Somes Island, 14
Dec. 1943 and A. Hamilton, member of war cabinet to Prime Minister, 18
February 1942.
Fig. 3.4 Immigration-internees’ camp, Pahiatua, March 1945. Courtesy

of Archives New Zealand, Wellington, Archway, R23461512, series,
24414 (GA2330), File 15
nationality, with dissenters and internationals (including Jews and Thais)

allocated separate huts.87 Older internees were housed two to a cubicle
within the larger dormitories. There was a twenty-bed hospital with
laundry, dispensary and operating theater;88 and a Catholic chapel (and
schoolroom) for fifty internees was approved in August 1943.89
Recreation rooms were created separately for German, Italian and
Japanese nationals, with workshops for woodwork, paua-shell work,
a billiard room and a YMCA room.90 The presence of as many as 300
Japanese men from Noumea transformed the group dynamic.
At first, adherence to the Geneva Convention worked in the internees’
favor. When two-story barracks, like those used for naval personnel,
were proposed as cost-saving, they were turned down as too
87
ANZ: AD 1389, Re. Internees at Pahiatua, Minute, 4 November 1942; Memorandum to
Dr L Bossard, 5 February 1944 and Memorandum for PM, 10 March 1943.
88
ANZ: AD 1389, Internment Camp Pahiatua, Material to complete Internee Building, 4
December 1942. HA Patterson Govt. Architect.
89
ANZ: AD 1389, Works Paihatua Internment camp, 13 August 1943.
90
ANZ: AD 1389, Furniture, Lockers and Cubicles for Internees at Pahiatua Internment
Camp, 28 December 1942.
The Featherston POW Camp 109
congested,91 but, once the Italians departed in late 1944, leaving seventy
guards with 100 internees, they were summarily returned to Matiu/
Somes Island.92 The Pahiatua Camp was repurposed in
November 1944 for Polish child-refugees, an example of the postwar
reuse of an internment camp facility comparable to Australia.
As evident in the discussion of internment facilities, physical separ-
ation, militarization, enemy nationals’ segregation and labor regimes all
impacted the ways in which the nation’s close encounter with wartime
tensions was interpreted and received. Whereas in Australia, a new gen-
eration of camps was designed for POW accommodation, New Zealand’s
reuse of extant sites and facilities connected them temporally in a carceral
continuum including both human and animal quarantine. These changes
occurred alongside the creation of the first POW camp.
The Featherston POW Camp

New Zealand’s World War II engagements were mainly in Europe, with
some 140,000 New Zealanders fighting overseas. Some 11,928 personnel
died during active service, a ratio of 6,684 per million (out of a population
of around 1.6 million) – the highest fatality ratio in the Commonwealth.93
New Zealand troops helped encircle and contain the Japanese in the
Solomon Islands, but the main protagonists there were US troops with
around one-third of the 45,000 RNZAF personnel serving in the
Pacific.94 Nearly 600 New Zealanders, including 345 RNZAF personnel,
lost their lives in the Solomon Islands campaign. Despite this emphasis on
the European theater of war, the “Featherston incident,” variously called
a “mutiny,” “massacre” or “riot,” similar to the “Cowra Breakout,” has
been the subject of numerous popular and revisionist accounts as the only
such military confrontation on home soil; Charlotte Carr-Gregg has
compared the two histories.95 In fact, the shared sense of tragedy linked
these two sites, although the circumstances in Featherston were different
91
ANZ: AD 1389, Memorandum to War Cabinet, Internment Camp Pahiatua,
6 July 1942.
92
ANZ: AD 1389, 1, 337/3/92, Somes Island, Accommodation for Internees, Army head-
quarters Wellington, Memorandum, 18 September 1943.
93
New Zealand History, Second World War overview, 4, nzhistory.govt.nz/war/second-
world-war/counting-the-cost; Statistics New Zealand, The New Zealand Official Year
Book, 1940, www3.stats.govt.nz/New_Zealand_Official_Yearbooks/1940/NZOYB_%
201940.html.
94
Horner, “Chap. 8: the Anzac contribution,” 156–7.
95
Vincent O’Sullivan, Shuriken: A Play (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1985);
Mike Nicolaidi with Eric Thompson, The Featherston Chronicles: A Legacy of War
(Auckland: Harper Collins, 1999); Jim Henderson, “Featherston our gulag,” POW-
WOW, 8:3 (1973): 14–15; Charlotte Carr-Gregg, Japanese POWs in Revolt (Brisbane:
from Cowra. Not only was Featherston the only POW camp in New
Zealand, created at the behest of Solomon Islands’ US forces, as a place
to confine prisoners captured at Guadalcanal, but the site reused an
abandoned military and quarantine facility that had been, largely, razed
to the ground.96 This meant that the JPOWs arriving in September 1942
had to live in tented accommodation while constructing the camp, and
that work allocations, the nature of the work and the rank of those
expected to work became chief provocations for internal dissent.97
Naval officer Michiharu Shinya’s memoir, as well as containing recol-
lections by ex-guards and ex-POWs, highlights how the obligation to
work had been misinterpreted because of the JPOWs’ unfamiliarity with
Convention guidelines.98 Shinya reminisced, they:
were in no mood to work for an enemy country . . . such a thing would go beyond
all that was proper . . .. Some men then urged resolute resistance. Others advo-
cated moderation, and others caught between them thought only of sensibly going
about their lives. In these conditions with every man having a conflicting opinion,
it was as though someone had upset a hive of bees.99
Naval personnel saw labor assignments as a form of disloyalty and
humiliation,100 and though sentiments similar to those evident at
Cowra were indeed brewing within the camp, they were not the direct
cause of the conflict; JPOW disaffection had more to do with the categor-
ies and status of clusters of prisoners and the way they were distributed in
the camp compounds. Compound 1’s 564 internees were members of IJA
work units, less disciplined than the military prisoners, but more coopera-
tive. As draftsmen, architects and skilled tradesmen in civilian life, they
were led by an architect/naval engineer named Shinya Hashimoto.101
Friction between the naval regulars from Compound 3 and their seven
officers over a planned rebellion had already led to the segregation of
those the authorities felt most threatened by, in a “suicide compound,”
with the remaining 248 placed in Compound 2. The latter shared this
space with forty-eight new arrivals, still undergoing health checks and
University of Queensland Press, 1978); Owen Sanders, Incident at Featherstone (Petone:

Price Milburn; Wellington: New Zealand Red Cross, 1982).
96
ANZ: AD 1389, POW camp, Featherston, Memorandum from Minister of Defence to
Minister of Finance, 16 September 1942.
97
ANZ: AD 1389, POW camp, Featherston, 14 September 1942.
98
Michiharu Shinya, The Path from Guadalcanal (Auckland: Outrigger, 1979).
99
Ibid., 65.
100
ANZ: AD1 1291, 310/11/3, Discipline – New Zealand Military Forces, Proceedings of
a Court of Inquiry on Mutiny at POW Camp, Featherston, 25 February 1943 (Copy
no. 23), 1943, 78–90; Carr-Gregg, Japanese POWs in Revolt, 25.
101
Nicolaidi, The Featherston Chronicles, 18; ANZ: AD1 1291, Second Witness Capt.
Alexander Ashton, interrogation officer, 14.
interrogation. Apart from internal conflicts over honor, shame and insub-
ordination, comparable to the sentiments arousing Cowra JPOWs, mili-
tary status placed the naval regulars above these labor conscripts. Being
forced to work as menial laborers would have been highly offensive to
them.
Every evening the compound leader would delegate work allocations,
according to a worksheet provided by the camp administration.102 Jobs
included clearing gorse bushes, digging drains or pits, clearing stones
from the ground surface, collecting and screening river shingle, and
erecting tents and huts. POWs were also expected to perform the duties
of batmen or kitchen fatigues. On 25 February 1943, 244 JPOWs from
Compound 1 (54 percent from a camp total of 812) were required for
work outside the camp, and 105 from Compound 2 (42 percent).
A further seventy-two were employed inside the compound. Once new
draft NCOs and sick personnel were accounted for, 130 personnel
remained. Ignorant of the 1929 Convention’s directives that camp
administration could require such work, the POWs saw labor as a tool
of deliberate humiliation and staged a sit-down protest.
A diagram of Compound 2, included in the March 1943 Court of
Inquiry report’s appendices, helps recreate the scene (Fig. 3.5).
Prisoners assembled in the quadrangle flanked by huts, facing adjutant
Lt. James Malcolm, an arc of soldiers gathered behind him. Other soldiers
mounted latrine roofs. During an attempted arrest of group leaders
amidst the hasty retreat of the JPOWs, Malcolm fired, killing a prisoner
and injuring Sub-Lt. seaman Adachi Totaro (identified in some docu-
ments as Toshio). During the days preceding the incident, Adachi had
emerged as the leader of the naval regulars, and his testimony became
central to the inquiry into the “mutiny.”
As the JPOWs scattered, throwing stones and rushing the guards, they
were fired on from front and back. Over forty seconds, seventy rounds of
Tommy-gun ammunition and a further 150 rounds of rifle ammunition
were expelled, killing thirty-nine JPOWs and a soldier (hit by
a ricocheting bullet) on the spot. Of the seventy-four injured, a further
thirty-seven died. Shinya writes:
This incident also brought home painfully to each individual the limitations of
being a prisoner of war. In the face of armed strength, human self-assertion and
the like will bring no results. It was a feeling of being beaten into accepting one’s
fate with something like a hammer on the head. Yet nonetheless, our having been
through this experience was a source of gain, in that we Japanese comrades, who
102
ANZ: AD1 1291, Adachi, 155–6.
Fig. 3.5 Featherston POW Camp, plan of Compound 2, illustrating the “Incident.” Courtesy of Archives New Zealand,
Wellington, Discipline, New Zealand Military Forces, Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry on Mutiny at the POW Camp,
25 February 1943, 118. Archives New Zealand, AD1 1291, 310/11/3
had hitherto each diversely behaved according to his own convenience and
without restraint, were given the sense of identity to unite as one.103
In April 1943, soon after the incident, two new 500-person compounds
and two additional 100-person isolation compounds were designed for
the camp. An “open space just inside the gates [in] which guards can be
assembled to deal with a threatening situation” was added to their
layouts.104 Compounds were subdivided internally and surfaced to pre-
vent removal of stones. There were plans for a second guards’ camp, in
anticipation of 2,000 new arrivals, but only a few dozen JPOWs eventually
arrived. Shinya notes that the simple eight-person prefabrication huts,
each with two-tier wooden bunks, mess halls, cookhouses and ablution
houses, were commonly called “doghouses” in English, an association the
Japanese would have found insulting.105
Unlike the case of Cowra, where evident misunderstanding, rumor
and panic prompted the JPOWs’ hasty and fatal actions, the
Featherston incident uncovered internal social complexities based
on military rank and status in relation to labor conscripts, including
the perception that labor outside the camp was humiliating. Not
understood by their New Zealand guards, the Japanese evidently
saw labor as a punitive strategy, a hardly surprising assumption
given how the IJA instrumentalized labor for humiliating Allied
POWs in Asia. However, the actions of the Featherston JPOWs
were not hostile. Whereas the Cowra JPOWs intended to overpower
the guards (whose defensive retaliation was found by the official
inquiry to be justified), the guards at Featherston Camp made the
first move. No order to shoot was given, and the JPOW “weapons”
were construction tools and stones.
Following their unsuccessful and tragic effort at resisting labor,
rather than captivity, the Featherston JPOWs appeared to have
accepted their fate. They built a hospital and also a factory on the
campsite, and made rope, furniture and concrete curbstones for the
town (Fig. 3.6). In fact, as the war wore on, outside work proved
attractive as a means of escaping confinement; in lieu of a holiday,
two prisoners at a time would accompany the fifty-person POW
farm-work unit employed in services vegetable production for the
Department of Agriculture at Greytown.106 By mid-1945 leisure
103
Shinya, The Path from Guadalcana, 69.
104
ANZ: AD 1389, PW Camp Featherston, memorandum for Army HQ, 20 April 1943.
105
Shinya, The Path from Guadalcana, 71.
106
ANZ: WAII2 22, 35, 4/11, POW Camps – Featherston Prisoners, Market gardens.
Fig. 3.6 Featherston POW Camp, with furniture and concrete products
factory. Photographed by Noel Earl. Courtesy of Alexander Turnbull
Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PAColl-3152-001
activities included concert parties and film shows, although the offi-
cers considered tennis too indulgent a pastime.107
***
The POW camp was the harshest camp environment in the Pacific
geography, its taxonomy invoking the many spaces and methods, includ-
ing of prisons and quarantine stations, by which human activity was
forcibly restrained. But, unlike convicts whose reform through punish-
ment served to demonstrate sovereign power’s pervasive spread, or civil-
ian refugees who transitioned through assimilation to accept it, POWs as
enemy nationals remained hostile to the holding nation and committed to
an inimical, alien sovereignty. At the end of the war they were repatriated
to Europe or Japan, on that basis.
Although powerless to change their status, POWs, never rendered state-
less by captivity, used their authority as representatives of their nations to
make certain demands. Even as captives, they embodied their sovereign
rights and their respective sovereign boundaries to a far greater extent than
107
ANZ: WAII2 22, 36, 11/18, Visit by Dr. L. Boassard, 15 June 1945, Kamikuro Sakujiro,
In the Matter of Making a Tennis Court, 20 April 1945.
civilian internees. These boundaries, determined by patriotic military cul-

ture, were tested during resistant acts. Although comparatively inflexible
and closed to the many intersections of identity open to internees, POW
patriotism, social status and military culture eroded internal group homo-
geneity. Other social factors and realities, intensified by antipathy to incar-
ceration, animated the captives, fatally for the JPOWs held at the Cowra
and Featherston camps. A kind of cultural blindness caused by the mutual
isolationism that these racially homogeneous societies had previously cul-
tivated propelled events to their eventual crises.
When compared with POW behavior in purpose-built camp configur-
ations, the intersectional identities performed in internment environ-
ments suggest a nascent liberal consciousness born of multiplicity.
Where the boundaries around sovereignty were tightly drawn for
German and Japanese POWs, in some cases similar physical facilities,
converted from internment to POW camps, hosted hostile, isolationist
cultures of fatal volatility. Or so it seemed in the official accounts, eager to
substantiate the many prejudices that wartime enmity propagates. Quite
opposite attitudes to sovereignty and labor surfaced in instances where
these boundaries were relaxed for unguarded employment of Italian
POWs, discussed in the next chapter, when the government sought to
directly exploit this population of captives.
4 Land and Labor
Anoma Pieris
Just as the war transformed the Australian geography through the

proliferation of camps, and the dispersal of camp labor was key to escapes
and violent outbreaks, prisoner-of-war (POW) labor was also mobilized
more broadly for the land’s material reconfiguration. It sat within
a broader restructuring of national labor policy in war readiness by
a government made newly aware of its military unpreparedness following
the capitulation of British Singapore in February 1942. The workforce of
unfree farm workers, mainly of some 17,000 Italian POWs, interacted with
and was encompassed by the expanding national labor geography, swelling
the mandate of the Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees (DPWI).1
Situating the camps within this larger labor economy, Chapter 4 exam-
ines POW and internee labor closely, diverting from everyday materiali-
ties to their largely forgotten industry in camp farms, or in agricultural and
infrastructural work across rural Australia. It focuses on the productivity
of the Hay and Loveday groups. In addition to diaries and private records,
it includes newspaper accounts. Beginning with the nationwide redistri-
bution of Italian POWs, the chapter’s narrative circles inward to the
closed worlds of internees – their farmlands and wood camps. It describes
the relative freedoms afforded the neutralized Italians when compared
with the camp-bound German and Japanese POWs and internees. Their
relative mobility responded directly to the changing fates of the war.
The ways in which the camps occupy the contoured sites convey the
topography in each locality, capturing in part the embodied experience of
moving through it between camps and farms. Depicting the camp in
contour plans is a major innovation of this book, already evident in
preceding chapters but most relevant as we step outside the camps.
Although previously described as self-contained townships and discern-
ible types in a broader taxonomy, by tracing the paths of labor conscripts
into the surrounding landscape, this chapter follows the laboring body
across state borders into semirural settlements and private properties,
1
RDPWI, vol. 1, part iii, chap. 2, 231–2.
116
Wartime Labor Policies 117
expanding the web of the wartime carceral geography and the mobility of
its intersectional sovereignties. More importantly, this labor contributed
to or even altered this landscape, while maintaining roads and railroads,
culling timber to fuel homes and industries, and tending the farms and
livestock that fed the troops. The DPWI loosened its spatial hold on the
restrictions fences and guard towers imposed on enemy nationality and
sovereignty, opening up white Australia’s restrictive labor regime. These
changes were significant for subsequent patterns of postwar European
labor mobilization, which are rarely connected to these wartime camp
histories.
Wartime Labor Policies

Labor controls introduced in 1940 had determined a list of reserved
occupations; when the Pacific War escalated in early 1942, the incumbent
Labor Government established two complementary emergency defense
organizations – a Manpower Directorate and a Women’s Employment
Board – to coordinate men and women employed for the war effort, the
latter mainly for ammunitions manufacture and farming under the
Australian Women’s Land Army.2 The Directorate’s powers extended
to a form of industrial conscription exempting persons from service or
prohibiting enlistment because of labor needs in essential industries, and
suspending legal obstacles to employing women in certain industries.
From February 1943 the Citizens Military Forces were conscripted to
serve in the southwest Pacific zone, and by that July the Department of
War Organisation of Industry had recruited 618,000 men and 110,000
women as fighters and war workers.3
Because of the need to strengthen defenses against a Japanese invasion
on the mainland and Australia’s New Guinea territories, Australian
Imperial Force (AIF) 6th, 7th and later 9th infantry divisions were called
back from the Middle East. National industry at a hitherto unprecedented
scale was oriented toward armament, with ammunitions manufacture
and aircraft and ship building mirroring changes already afoot in US
west coast cities. As already discussed in relation to the creation of
camps, the government set up the Allied Works Council (AWC, Agency
CA 497, 1942–5), described by Prime Minister John Curtin as “the
greatest single instrumentality of its kind in Australian history,” to
2
Director General of Manpower, Control of Manpower in Australia: A General Review of the
Administration of the Manpower Directorate, February, 1942–September, 1944 (Sydney:
Government Printer, 1944).
3
Australian Federal Election Speeches, John Curtin, 26 July 1943, https://electionspeeches
.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1943-john-curtin.
118 Land and Labor
provide Australian and Allied forces the necessary infrastructure and

services for conducting the war and defending the country.4 A Civil
Constructional Corps of around 50,000 noncombatant civilians were
called up or volunteered to work on projects as varied as maritime
works, railways, bridges, aerodromes, depots, camps and related facil-
ities, factories, workshops, hangars, hospitals, pipelines, petrol storage or
repair facilities, salvage and disposal units, transportation, timber sup-
plies, and agriculture.5 They built and maintained some 5,000 miles of
road.6 In the area of architecture, the US Army Services of Supply
prefabrication program introduced seven types of structures: huts, ware-
houses, hospitals, cool stores, Air Force control towers, and power and
transmitter huts.7 Nearly thirty dehydration factories were erected in
centers adjacent to agricultural areas.8 By the time of its absorption by
the new Commonwealth Department of Works in February 1945, the
AWC had carried out 2,151 major projects, of which 40 percent (from
July 1943) had been for the US military, as a contribution to Reverse
Lend Lease Aid.9 The infrastructure for Australia’s postwar industrial-
ization took root. The DPWI supplemented these activities with the labor
of 13,207 Italian ordinary recruits (ORs) transported from camps in
India, where they had been incarcerated from October 1943 to
February 1945. They joined 4,396 other Italians who had been sent to
Australia in 1941 directly after capture in the Middle East.10
Except for 300 German POWs from Murchison Camp 13 who were
employed in vehicle maintenance in Queensland’s Wallangara Hostel in
1946, no others were permitted to work outside the camps. Japanese
POWs were likewise restrained, confined to camp maintenance, camp
farms or wood camps. Internees, who could not be conscripted under the
Geneva Convention’s Article 23, were similarly employed until their
release to the civilian corps. DPWI’s employment scheme demonstrated
the “inestimable value” of POW labor in assisting Commonwealth supply
of essential foodstuffs to troops and allies. The army’s rural labor
accounts quoted some 7,000,000 hours of labor costing £2,000,000,
adjusted from what was owed by the United Kingdom, for POW
upkeep.11 Unguarded labor was a “considerable savings in time, labour
and expense,” turning “a liability in the form of men costly to maintain
4
Ibid.
5
NAA: A659, 1945/1/3162, AWC – Report of activities July 1943–February 1945, 84, 13.
6 7 8
Ibid., 42. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 67.
9
Ibid., 10. The Lend Lease program authorized US equipment production for export to
Allied nations and secured the necessary equipment and services for their operation,
deemed essential to US defense. Recipient nations were expected to assist US forces in
reverse lend-lease aid.
10
RDPWI, part ii, chap. 1, 101–3. 11 Ibid., part iii, chap. 2, 235.
The Employment of POWs 119
into an asset of real production value.”12 As in Australia’s convict era,

imprisonment and labor were linked.
The Employment of POWs

Generalized labor scarcity and the pressing need for workers for wartime
industries meant that POW labor was categorized and deployed differ-
ently from the labor of internees. As discussed in Chapter 3, labor assign-
ments uncovered and encouraged differential treatment within various
POW groups of military recruits, labor conscripts, officers and ORs. The
Japanese POWs at Featherston saw laboring for the enemy as
a humiliating admission of defeat heaped upon anxieties regarding their
reduced status, and consequent treatment following repatriation to
Japan. For German and Italian POWs, incarceration only temporarily
disrupted their abilities to serve; they were paid workers, employed by
their nation’s militaries, awaiting repatriation in a familiar barrack
landscape.
Unlike internees, POW officers, as waged national-army members,
were neither stateless nor impoverished. Officers at Dhurringile drawing
a salary from Germany, and protected by Article 23 of the 1929 Geneva
Convention – directing that POW officers receive comparable pay to
those of equivalent status in the detaining power – consequently refused
to work in Australia.13 Regulation 27 of the National Security
Regulations stated that the Minister of the Army could, following discus-
sion with belligerent powers, accordingly fix the pay rates (and rates of
exchange).14 Salaries would be paid monthly to the prisoners’ trust
accounts maintained by the camp administration, following deduction
of accommodation and mess costs. Officers of the three main Axis powers
were paid £5–39 monthly, depending on their station, while protected
personnel such as medical officers were paid at higher rates; of the combat
personnel only Italians were paid.15 Unfit and indigent German and
Japanese personnel were paid £3 quarterly and 6 shillings weekly,
respectively, through their “Protecting Powers,” provided they signed
allegiance to the Reich or the Emperor.16
Work available for POWs followed three classifications: (a) unpaid
work on camp fatigues and maintenance; (b) paid construction,
12
Ibid., 231.
13
ICRC database: Convention relative to the Treatment of POWs. Geneva, 27 July 1929,
www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/57jnws.htm.
14
RDPWI, part ii, chap. 16, 152. 15 Ibid., sec. 7–17.
16
NAA: D844, 73A/1/6 Military History, Internment in South Australia, 3 September
1939–15 August 1945, Loveday Internment Group, 4th Military District, 17.
120 Land and Labor
improvement, repair and services; and (c) paid work for governmental
projects and private enterprise.17 After January 1942, the War Cabinet
determined that POWs could be dispatched to farms, wood camps,
pumping stations and hospitals, and were also employed by private enter-
prise. Their status did not change with the cessation of hostilities.18
Although hutted facilities (mess huts, kitchens, lavatories, etc.) were
built by civil laborers, POWs would live in tents while building sleeping
huts and other amenities. For the C-class who wandered beyond the
vicinity of camps, or worked for private enterprises, their escorts, accom-
modation, security measures, medical services and clothing were regu-
lated by the army. Pay was deductible from the amounts owed for their
upkeep by Britain to Australia. The scope of their labor was largely
determined by their perceived threat to the Australian public.
The 1,400 German POWs held by the Commonwealth were con-
fined to workshops in the camps, or camp farms, maintaining services,
army vehicles, reconditioning ordnance stores, repairing furniture,
tents and boots. A few were sent on woodcutting duty, but on the
whole Germans remained confined.19 Japanese POWs were engaged in
camp maintenance, cooking and fatigues, except at Loveday where
they worked on the camp farm. Because of their reluctance to contrib-
ute to the Allied war effort, and the problems arising from their
attempted breakout from Cowra, the extent of their labor was not
widely publicized.20
C-class unguarded, rural work was designed entirely for Italian POWs,
who contributed to sustaining agricultural production throughout the
war.21 The viability of the scheme led the Director General of
Manpower to request that those captured in North Africa and incarcer-
ated in India be transported to Australia for work, many directly to
administrative centers like Marrinup.22 A minimum of 200 POWs were
allotted to each area and, to distribute them, rural control centers were
opened throughout Australia (except in the Northern Territory) in
ninety-six different houses or shops, in a fifty-mile radius from the
17
RDPWI, part iii, chap. 2, 224–6.
18
Alan Fitzgerald, The Italian Farming Soldiers: Prisoners of War in Australia 1941–47
(Mawson, ACT: Clareville Press, 2007, 1st ed.; Melbourne University Press, 1981),
59. See also Bill Bunbury, Rabbits and Spaghetti: Captives and Comrades, Australians,
Italians, and the War, 1935–1945 (South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press,
1995).
19
A small group of German motor mechanics was transferred to Wallangara hostel in
Queensland in 1946.
20
NAA-Sydney: A1608/1, F20/1/2, Water supply for Loveday Internment Camp, 17
Aug. 1942.
21
22
Director General of Manpower, Control of Manpower in Australia, 213–14.
worksite, beginning with Coonabaraban in NSW, and Hamilton, Victoria

(Map 4.1). Each Control Centre had an officer, six NCOs, a driver and an
interpreter, and phrasebooks were issued to help overcome language
difficulties. Food preferences were catered to. By 22 June 1944 around
8,475 POWs were working in the following industries: dairy, vegetables
Based on RDPWI, v.3. 236, Schedule of 96 PW control centers in Australia 1943-46

(metropolitan localities not included).
Map 4.1 Control centers and hostels in Australia. Drawn by

Catherine Woo
122 Land and Labor
and fruit, meat production, poultry, meat fodder and cereals, wool, other
rural industries, and mixed farms; and by March 1945, of 17,032 Italian
POWs in Australia, 10,295 were working in rural industries.23 Groups of
fifty or more POWs residing at thirty-four hostels, typically in military
camps like Greta or Bonegilla, and some in major cities, set out for work
on a daily basis.24 These patterns of employment preceded similar
arrangements for employing European refugees and assisted migrants in
federal and other industries after the war.
Prisoner mobility was not without its problems, caused by ambivalence
regarding Italian POWs’ penal status after Italy’s surrender in 1943. For
example, at Rowville POW Hostel on Melbourne’s outskirts, holding 300
Italians from 1944 to 1946, the camp commandment fatally shot Italian
POW Rudolfo Bartoli, on 30 March 1946, when he attempted to leave the
compound’s loosely fenced boundary to visit a young woman on a nearby
farm.25 A subsequent investigation into the alleged mistreatment of pris-
oners, and the ways the incident was misrepresented in the newspapers,
connecting it to a possible mutiny despite imminent repatriation, suggests
the volatility of public sentiment and the misuse of authority by an official
exploiting these ambiguities.26
The impact of these unguarded workers was felt mostly in Queensland
and Western Australia where they integrated with local communities.
Brisbane’s Gaythorne (Camp 17) acted as a transit camp from which
some 1,500 Italians employed in the rural agriculture industry were
redistributed to nine control centers in southeast Queensland and to
a POW hostel in north Queensland. In Walking in Their Boots, Joanne
Tapiolas writes, they attended church services and received treatment at
local hospitals, sharing traditions and meals with host families; they left
concrete evidence in the form of buildings and macadamia trees, their
stories reported in local newspapers.27 Some were buried in local ceme-
teries, to be moved later to the Tatura Italian Ossario, where Italian POW
and internee remains from across Australia were interred. Several
returned after the war to build new lives for themselves and their families.
Among several projects, Tapiolas highlights the Prisoner of War Control
(PWC) Hostel at Home Hill on the Burdekin River where 277 POWs,
supervised by Australian Military Forces (AMF) personnel and local
23
24
Ibid., Appendices. Schedules of control centers and hostels.
25
Darren Arnott, No Regard for the Truth: Friendship and Kindness – Tragedy and Injustice,
Rowville’s Italian POWs (Melbourne: Darren Arnott, 2019).
26
“Italian shot in prison camp mutiny,” Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 31 March 1946, 1.
27
Joanne Tapiolas, Walking in Their Boots: Italian POWs in Queensland, 1943–47
(Townsville: Joanne Tapiolas, 2017), 48.
farmers, collaborated with Land Army workers and Department of

Commerce and Agriculture staff on a Commonwealth farming project
spanning 1,503 acres along the riverine tract.28 The food supply line for
US and Australian troops in north Queensland and New Guinea, it
covered several farming properties producing massive quantities
(4 million lb cabbages, 7 million lb corn and 4–5 million lb tomatoes for
US troops in 1945) and amassing modern machinery.
Similar to Gaythorne, but far more remote, the 39-acre, 1,200-person-
capacity POW Camp 16 at Marrinup (August 1943–April 1946), 51
miles south of Perth, WA, near an abandoned mill town, was conceived
as a staging camp for Italian POWs sent to twenty-eight control centers
across the state.29 At first its three compounds were divided for German
seamen, Italians and 200 personnel of the Western Command’s
Headquarters 13th Brigade.30 The 200 Germans, transferred from
Victoria, supplied Perth with 2,500 tons of firewood – half the annual
requirement – to fuel the city’s power generators, pumping stations and
industry, with increased demand seeing the relocation there of a further
100 German POWs. By September 1943 approximately 1,100 Italians
were held at Marrinup, and by mid-1945 3,500 Italians were distributed
across the state.
Relations between farmers and POW workers were sometimes tense.
Insubordination, indiscipline and unsatisfactory work meant their free-
dom was revoked. Those who fraternized with Australian women were
severely disciplined.31 There were several instances of consensual liaisons
at Cowra, while in his “Sex and the POW” chapter Alan Fitzgerald
recounts eight civil cases against them for forming relationships with
local women, none suggesting the POWs used force. These and other
stories reveal that, unlike for many internees trapped behind barbed wire,
Italian POW–Australian relations were amicable, and farming families
welcoming. Their repatriation in May 1946 made way for returning
servicemen, to be employed on farms.
Among the government bodies that employed Italian POWs were the
Department of Commerce and Agriculture in Queensland, the Water
Conservation and Irrigation Commission, Department of Commerce
and Agriculture, and Forestry Commission in Victoria, the State
Conservator of Forests in South Australia, the Forests Department in
28
Ibid., 51–64.
29
Martin Gibb, “Marrinup timber town and Marrinup POW Camp: historical context and
documentary evidence of structures as a background for the archaeological survey”
(1990), State Library of Western Australia.
30
Rosemary Johnston, “Marrinup POW Camp, a history” (1986), 29, State Library of WA.
31
RDPWI, part ii, chap. 6, 124.
124 Land and Labor
Western Australia, and the Commonwealth Flax Commission.32 Many

farmers employed them seasonally. Given the challenge of harvesting
40,000 acres of tomatoes for canning in Victoria’s Shepparton area, in
1944 the Department of Commerce and Agriculture employed 860
Italian POWs from Camp 13. Around 736 POWs picked the 1945 crop,
filling 581,931 cases of fruit. Farmers employed Italians during harvest
time, some billeted as farmhands.33 Lurline and Arthur Knee observe,
“For those of us who grew up during the war in Shepparton, an open
truck transporting Italian prisoners to the nearby orchards was
a ‘common sight’”;34 wearing burgundy jackets, they would frequently
sing at the tops of their voices, “calling out ‘Belle, Belle’ to any young girls
they passed . . . some of these families became very attached to prisoners,
and there are many recorded stories of former prisoners returning to
Australia after the war, sponsored by their wartime employer, some to
marry into the family, most to become Australian citizens.”35 For a few,
their wartime labor became instrumental for assimilation and naturaliza-
tion in the postwar decades. Darren Arnott recounts an escape attempt by
POW Francesco Ponzani, a friend of Rudolfo Bartoli at Rowville Camp,
aided by the parents of his sweetheart, June Peterson.36 She even accom-
panied him on the repatriation ship, although they later returned to
Australia.
In June 1944, Italian POWs were sent to South Australia to maintain the
railway line from Post Augusta to Perth. Although afforded comparable
freedom, perhaps relished by the POWs, accommodation was more basic
than at camp. Some 300 employed repairing and maintaining over 277
miles of Trans-Australian Railway track were domiciled in seven camps
run from the Cook control center.37 Each camp consisted of fifty POWs
accompanied by eighteen soldiers, including six fettlers and gangers,
accommodated in a poorly fenced compound of furniture-less 8x10-ft
tents, a mess hut (partitioned for POWs and guards) and traveling canteen
service. Drain latrines and hurricane lanterns completed the picture of
a desolate desert camp in the semiarid bush-lands between Perth and
Kalgoorlie. At the Central Australian Railway basecamp at Port Augusta,
POW compounds were placed 300 yards from the tracks. A further 300
prisoners worked on the North-South and East-West lines, respectively,
and on drainage work in the Murray River irrigation district, their
32
Ibid., 232. 33 Knee and Knee, Marched In, 115. 34 Ibid., 115. 35 Ibid., 116.
36
Darren Arnott, “Military camp,” Rowville-Lysterfield Community News, October 2001, htt
ps://rlcnews.com.au/articles/military-camp.
37
NAA: B300/2 8247 Part 1, Engineer of the Way and Works to Minister of State for the
Interior, Port Augusta, 1 May 1942.
Internee Labor 125
contributions, though not coerced, mirroring the infrastructure work

carried out by Allied POWs under the Japanese.38
Like manual laborers the world over, differentiated by social class,
these anonymous POW workers are enumerated in government reports
on the success of the unguarded labor scheme. Excepting those few who
returned to Australia, repatriation erased many of their stories. Historians
writing on the camps, too, can be faulted for favoring stories of pedigreed
internees or POWs. Integral to this neglect is the way in which when
fulfilling military needs labor was instrumentalized for separating civilians
from combatants. Although this distinction was collapsed with the mili-
tary’s employment of civilian internees, the work experiences of different
groups of prisoners continued to be graduated by nationality and penal
status, with Italians wandering farthest afield.
Internee Labor
Under Article 23 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, internees did not need
to work, limiting their activities to the narrowly circumscribed territory
associated with camps and adjacent farm areas or wood camps. Their
confinement remained an enduring paradox when compared to the
mobility of laboring Italian POWs. Whereas armed personnel understood
that they risked imprisonment if captured, civilian internees were unpre-
pared for this bleak interregnum in their lives, with no freedom, material
means and vocations to sustain them. Apart from those preoccupied with
caring for families, internees of all ages worked at mitigating the harshness
of their militarized environment and supplementing everyday rations and
clothing with whatever means available. They maintained or repaired
camp facilities. Many younger internee men undertook physically taxing
work like gardening, farming or woodcutting. These largely self-
contained activities produced a range of banal essentials for everyday
use, which, when possible, were embellished or made culturally distinct-
ive. Camp economies were frequently interlinked with this labor, so work
allocations, the ability to work, the nature of work assigned and the forms
of leisure relative affluence afforded became part of the social or symbolic
capital of each camp.
An elected camp leader and council typically determined labor alloca-
tions in internment camps and mediated with authorities for related
benefits. The authorities calculated labor value at a daily rate. Internees
in Australia were encouraged to voluntarily engage in paid labor, within
the fenced boundary and under guard, at the rate of up to 1 shilling for
38
Ibid., Part 2.
126 Land and Labor
a six-hour day.39 The camp administration paid via trust accounts on

which they drew for supplies or rations in internment’s early stages, using
coupons and later camp tokens as currency. Work could include erecting
sleeping facilities, cultivating vegetables, camp improvements, salvaging
stores, drainage work for irrigation projects or work in camp-related farms
growing produce or tending livestock. Some internees were employed in
wood camps farther afield, living there in tented facilities periodically.
Prolonged confinement and the presence of families incentivized many
internees to transform camp environments. Some put down physical
roots, whether by improving camp buildings, furnishing apartments or
planting foliage. As discussed in Chapter 2, their energies were often
dedicated to simulating environments and conducting activities that
could reinstate aspects of lost privileges and associated dignities.
Emboldened by civilian expectations around accommodation and
rations, they sought mainly to improve and supplement these by numer-
ous means. The ways in which these expectations manifested materially in
individual examples uncover other intersections of urbanity and class.
From the viewpoint of camp authorities, the segregation of internees
from the local population removed them from the local economy, their
lack of currency being a deterrent to escape; yet, monetization performed
a social function, translated to other material registers and interpreted
according to the internment context’s limitations. Some camps, like at
Hay, within town areas, saw greater interaction between internees and
traders, while most camps were quite separate from the local community,
functioning as a world apart. Transactions in goods, materials or favors
bound the camp as a community, and in the early years of wartime
incarceration, cigarettes, chewing gum and pencils were often bartered
in lieu of money. As evident in correspondence regarding labor in various
camps, objects were regarded as valuable according to pragmatic value or
affective aesthetic qualities, and accordingly earned their creators
income. Artworks and treasures were circulated amongst internees and
between internees and guards. Following the introduction of a dedicated
camp currency across all Australian camps, the circulation of money,
rather than barter of objects, regulated value and helped abstract labor
in a manner commensurate with local economies and in some cases, as in
the case of waged labor, in competition with them.
The camp administration was slow to come up with a semilegal means
of tender, perhaps because the government had not expected the war to
drag on. At first, Australian Defense canteen paper coupons were issued
in lieu of money, until copper tokens were introduced in late 1942. Two
39
RDPWI, part ii, chap. 16, 152, part iii, chap. 2, 233.
Internee Labor 127
Melbourne firms – Arendsen and Sons and KG Luke and Co. – minted
shillings and pennies in various denominations, worth £30,000, but
invalid for tender outside the camp.40 In use from July 1943, they had
holes in the center, wreathed with berries and gum nuts, with the denom-
ination on the obverse side and the words “internment camps” on the
reverse.41 Their resemblance to Australia’s first coin, “the holey dollar,”
which convicted English counterfeiter William Henshall minted for
Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1813, is telling, since holes were made
in those early coins to prevent their leaving the penal colony.42 The camp
tokens’ evocation of that earlier foundational incarceration history is
interesting, since their hollowing stripped them of value, preventing
wider circulation, until recalled and melted down in 1946. Coins that
evaded destruction are the most pervasive and collectible Australian-
camp souvenirs to date.
The Dunera internees at Camp 7 in Hay went a step further, devising
a scheme to print their own banknotes to be used for compensating
voluntary work and paying for purchases in camp canteen, coffeehouse
and workshops.43 Once personal funds were received by the local bank, in
1941, the group, presided over by Camp Leader Andreas Eppenstein and
led by interned German banker Richard Stahl, initiated a competition for
designing the notes, which was won by George Teltscher, a thirty-seven-
year-old Viennese of Jewish origin.44 His design had as its central figure
the Australian coat-of-arms showing a kangaroo and emu, holding
a shield between them with a ram depicted. The sheep conveyed the
bleakness of the flat farmlands stretching before them, while
a concertina barbed-wire border spun an anthem of resignation, “we are
here, we are here because we are here,” around the tableau (Fig. 4.1).
Eppenstein’s name was woven into its fleece. An earlier iteration of this
shield had a drawing of a camp hut. On the banknote’s reverse side, the
hutted camp’s relentless uniformity was depicted as penned-in rows of
merino sheep, their fleece interwoven with the names of Teltscher’s
40
Sterling and Currency, “The background to Australia’s WWII Internment Tokens,”
based on Ian Todd’s article, www.sterlingcurrency.com.au/research/background-
australias-wwii-internment-tokens.
41
Nik Sharplin, “Australian WWII internment camp tokens,” The Australasian Coin and
Banknote Magazine 7:2, March 2004, 46.
42
In 1813, in a bid to retain currency in the colony, Governor Macquarie had Spanish silver
dollars cut and counter-stamped by William Henshall; National Museum of Australia:
“Rare coin for the national collection,” www.nma.gov.au/explore/collection/highlights/
holey-dollar.
43
Inglis et al., Dunera Lives, 130.
44
Michael P. Vort-Ronald, Hay Internment Camp Notes and War Savings Certificates
(Michael P Vort-Ronald, 2nd ed., 2017), National Library of Australia, NLA Nq2017-
888, 5.
128 Land and Labor
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4.1 George Teltscher, Australian internment camp, 2-shilling note,

1941. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra, RELC02743.001
and courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
hut-mates. Sheep farms were the antithesis of the urban environments

that many of the internees at Hay had left behind. Serial numbers on
notes corresponded to those of the internees.45
45
Ibid., 41, Notes on the Notes, Letter to the editor of the Dunera news from Henry
Teltscher, June 1994.
The Civil Aliens Corps 129
Commissioned by internees, who paid him through bank accounts in

Hay, The Riverine Grazier’s publisher printed 3,000 notes in three denom-
inations: sixpence (blue), 1 shilling (green) and 2 shillings (red).46
Pleased at the outcome, the Hay Commonwealth Bank head dispatched
a set to his Sydney head office, unwittingly alerting the authorities. The
notes were hastily withdrawn from circulation to prevent their entry into
the local economy. This brief experiment was described by Ken Inglis
et al. as “the internees’ will to civilize the environment into which fate had
cast them,”47 a strategy likewise demonstrated in the proposal of an
internee parliament, based on a constitution written on toilet paper
onboard HMT Dunera.48 Characterized by ex-internee Klaus Leowald
as “a small working republic,” it required every six huts to form a kind of
cabinet to nominate councils to oversee work allocations.49 The desire for
liberal democracy, emboldened by Nazi persecution, persisted in this
manner within the camp. With camaraderie, humor and cynicism, they
highlighted liberal entitlements that were being denied.
The idea of a self-governing camp with elected leaders, consensual
work allocations and a monetary economy paints a more favorable picture
of camp life than actually occurred. The Dunera internees suffered frus-
tration and depression due to wrongful internment, exacerbated by anx-
iety over families left behind in Europe, whose fates were often unknown
for the war’s duration. Many artists and professionals among them were
stripped of their social status and cultural capital, exiled in a country and
society seemingly devoid of any cosmopolitan traits. The only forms of
employment available to internees were manual labor and farm work,
which few had experienced previously. While the opportunity to work was
often preferable to the enervation caused by inaction, such labor helping
to restore spirits, for many indigent rural immigrants, whether from
within Australia or overseas, further impoverishment by serial displace-
ments, separation from families and labor conscription exacerbated and
extended previous hardships.
The Civil Aliens Corps

For a fortunate few between the ages of eighteen and sixty, labor acted as
a conduit to freedom, via the Civil Aliens Corps (CAC) established from
May 1943 to May 1945 under the Allied Works Council (Agency CA
497).50 Organized in companies, internees were employed in general
46
Inglis et al., Dunera Lives, 131. 47 Ibid., 130. 48 Ibid., 128.
49
K. G. Leowald, “A Dunera internee at Hay, 1940–41,” Historical Studies, 17:69, 516.
50
“Civil aliens under AWC: employment in important works,” The Argus, Melbourne,
4 May 1943, 2.
130 Land and Labor
unskilled laboring tasks for the Australian Defence Force, including

timber production, potato digging, controlled burning of forests, railway
repair and maintenance, and construction work on Butler’s Gorge Dam
in Tasmania. Some 1,868 (11 percent) out of the 15,727 “aliens” regis-
tered were enumerated on 15 February 1945 as serving, with peak
employment at 3,500. Of the thirty-nine Australian Army employment
companies established during the war, eleven were “alien” units.51 Alien
internees, Chinese seamen and Kupangoes (Timorese) were in the 8th,
7th and 23rd employment companies, respectively; for example,
Samsudin bin Katib (or Kalib), a twenty-four-year-old Muslim pearl
diver from Broome, joined the 23rd Australian Employment Company
in June 1942 following initial detention in WA’s Fremantle prison.52 In
the 36th Employment Company, 693 Javanese seamen, including 102
from Cowra, worked on loading and unloading at breaks of gauge-rail
points and in various depots in Wallangara, Helidon, Warwick and
Toowoomba in Queensland.53 Loveday’s Italian internees were sent to
Adelaide’s Wayville Camp.54 Around 1,000 Taiwanese POWs from
Loveday, intended for construction and maintenance work, accompanied
the AMF to New Guinea.55 This was the farthest outpost that the POW
labor network reached.
Writing on experiences in the 8th Employment Company, a group of
around 400 volunteers raised in April 1942, Klaus Loewald notes that
when transport cancelation to Great Britain dashed hopes of return, an
AMF liaison officer asked for volunteers, couching it as a moral obligation
of internees.56 In a letter to the Official Visitor on behalf of Tatura Camp
2’s Jewish population, B-compound, leader Hans Natenson objected,
stating their willingness to work, but as free men.57 He declared Britain
had done them a great injustice by preventing their return and reunion
with families, or efforts to save them from Nazi persecution, and by
refusing the right of legal immigration or citizenship. Other tensions
51
NAA: AWC, 84; Neil C. Smith, The Australian Army Labour Service (Brighton, VIC:
Mostly Unsung Military History Research and Publications, 2006). See also June Factor,
“Forgotten soldiers: aliens in the Australian army’s employment companies during
World War II,” www.yosselbirstein.org/pdf/eng/other/Forgotten_Soldiers.pdf.
52
NAA: P617, 507/1/224, 1942, Method of Employment of Labour Company; NAA:
B883, WX36791, 1939–48, Samsudin bin Kalib, Service no. WX36791.
53
NAA: MP742/1, 92/1/256, 1942–1945, 2, 78. 36 Australian Employment
Company – Indonesian.
54
NAA: AP613/1, 90/1/141. Release of Internees from Loveday Camp, part 4.
55
RDPWI, part ii, chap. 20, 170–1.
56
Klaus Loewald, “The Eighth Australian Employment Company,” Australian Journal of
Politics and History, 31:1 (1985): 78–89, 79.
57
NAA: MP742/1/0 255/11/56, Additional Memorandum in relation to some fundamental
aspects of our situation, 7 February 1943.
The Civil Aliens Corps 131
emerged over issues of allegiance, such as wearing Australian military

uniforms (being employed by the army but not carrying guns) and the
possibility of future naturalization for several internees.
“I had learned ‘nothing’, I had no special skills and I detested the shabby
way in which the new army unit had been created,” noted Loewald, giving
in when unable to join a second, successful transport that emptied out the
camp.58 On 31 August 1942 he was housed at Caulfield Racecourse in
Melbourne in a stable “which seethed with fleas.”59 He noted the mutual
cultural ignorance of Australians and Europeans, but praised the “magnifi-
cent” commanding officer, Edward R. Broughton, and the natural hospi-
tality extended to anyone in uniform. Loewald wrote:60
[T]he people of the city picked up our men when they were walking through the
streets during their hours of leave, took them home, gave them dinners, invited
them to places of entertainment, and generally outdid themselves in kindness.
The internees were able to participate in the city’s cultural life, attending
free Town Hall concerts and South Yarra, Little Theater productions.
They produced the public musical revue “Sergeant Snow-White.’” Some
joined the university and others got married.61
Many local internees, forcibly removed from homes, jobs and families
in Australia, did not see conscription as an opportunity. Among them
were large numbers of Italians forced to join the corps, if they did not
volunteer for military service. Daniela Cosmini-Rose describes discrep-
ancies between the treatment of enemy aliens and Australian workers in
the CAC camps.62
In case of alleged breaches, the aliens were liable to a reprimand, cancellation of
leave, suspension without pay, or face a fine up to £100 and/or a maximum six
months’ imprisonment. During the period 1942–45, nationally 1058 prosecu-
tions were laid, and 947 convictions were obtained for such offences as refusal to
obey travelling instructions or a direction to work. In 305 cases sentences of
imprisonment were imposed and the remainder were met by fines . . .. The files
also demonstrate the insensitivity and deep-seated distrust of the Italians by camp
supervisors and medical officers who, in their brief reports, accused them of being
“humbugs,” “malingerers” and “foolish.”63
Whereas many internees were released from camps at the end of 1944,
she notes, it was May 1945 before CAC workers were allowed to go
58
Loewald, “The Eighth Australian Employment Company,” 80. 59 Ibid., 81–2.
60
Ibid., 82. 61 Ibid., 84.
62
Daniela Cosmini-Rose, “Italians in the Civil Alien Corps in South Australia: the ‘forgot-
ten’ enemy aliens,” Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 42 (2014):
43–52, 45.
63
Ibid., 49–50.
132 Land and Labor
home.64 For them, as with many other conscripted “aliens,” forced

removal and isolation, even for paid employment, was only marginally
better than being interned. The internment of impoverished Italian immi-
grants from remote rural areas and their use for work by the army, even
after Italy capitulated, forced their families into prolonged hardship and
hostility.65 Unlike many affluent northern European internees, who
mobilized social connections to publicize their wrongful internment as
prominent figures within Australian society, the suffering of many local
Italian and Asian internees went unnoticed for decades, until bilingual
scholars from within their respective diasporas, like Cosmini-Rose, Mia
Spizzica or Yuriko Nagata, conducted ethnographic studies of the war-
time generation. This literature, while employing racialized categories
imposed by authorities, and framing their critiques as minority viewpoints
within the broader framework of Australian multicultural politics, also
reveals interracial and diasporic complexities within these groups.
The Hay Camp Farms

When, dressed in burgundy uniforms and equipped with farming imple-
ments, internees stepped out from barbed-wire containments, they
extended the carceral geography beyond the figure of the camp into
surrounding townships and farmlands. Irrigation infrastructure for
camp farms and permanent brick-and-mortar facilities for housing live-
stock gave their labor concrete form. Once camps were dismantled after
the war, these peripheral features remained like encrustations around an
obscured physical history. Farm camps were connected to water sources,
reliance on which would not disadvantage supply-dependent townships.
Their location in remote, semiarid environments or bush-land areas away
from coastal cities exacerbated this need. At Hay, a semiarid plain con-
sidered among Australia’s flattest and plagued by summer dust storms,
836 of the 1,252 acres occupied by Camps 6, 7 and 8 were irrigated by the
Murrumbidgee River. The complete lack of contours, compared with
other camps, is depicted in the town plan (Map 4.2). The annual rainfall
was 11 inches, and summer temperatures were 100–120 degrees
Fahrenheit. Werner Pelz evocatively recounted the psychological effect
of this stark landscape:
Round and round and round I carried my impatient soul, scratching it against the
indifferent barbs, chafing against the dead circular searchlight glare that
64
Ibid., 50.
65
Mia Spizzica, Hidden Lives: War, Internment and Australia’s Italians (Carindale, QLD:
Glasshouse Books, 2018).
Based on, Hay Internment and POW Camps Interpretive Center archive, plan titled PW Group Hay, traced from 53 Aust. DCRE (Works), 2 Aust. Works in 1943, and Merrylees,
Haywire, 190, 193. Adapted with permission.
Map 4.2 Hay, NSW, Camps 6, 7 and 8. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated sources
134 Land and Labor
contained our world by night. At times I was overwhelmed by a hysterical longing

for a straight, clean road bisecting the horizon, going on and on and on, past fields
and meadows and gardens and houses and girls, but above all, straight. Around us
was the desert, blind, cracked, treeless, dust merging into dust, flatness into
flatness, all into the haze of an indistinct horizon where sky and earth were neither
severed nor joined.66
Hay was a town camp. Two hexagonal camps (7 and 8) flanking the Hay
showground and Camp 6 on the main street’s east side came under the 16th
Australian Garrison Battalion, commanded by the indomitable Colonel
C. S. Thane, keen to demonstrate the soil’s fertility and diversity once
irrigated by internee-built infrastructure. Ironically, given their mainly
urban backgrounds, it was the Dunera internees at Camps 7 and 8 who
commenced the farm projects in 1940, constructing dams with picks, shovels
and wheelbarrows, with minimal tools and backbreaking, slow labor. As
reported by The Riverine Grazier, Hay was a “show camp,” with a monthly
average of over twenty visitors and fifty-three in one exceptional month.67
The farms prevailed and succeeded despite the rapid turnover of work-
ers, but when Dunera internees departed to Tatura in mid-1941, it was
a blow to the local businesses supplying the canteens.68 Stories of indi-
viduals interwoven with these camp histories resurfaced at Tatura, or
Loveday, illustrating the fluid passage of population across the carceral
network, while their physical interventions in the land around the camps
remained fixed. Italian civilians were moved from Camp 6 to 7 and 8, and
later sent to Loveday to make room for Italian POWs. Japanese internees
from Australia’s northern islands were placed from December 1941 in
Camp 6, with nineteen dying there. Hay would eventually become an
exclusively Japanese camp with internees, merchant seamen and from
1944 some survivors of the Cowra breakout.
Some physical interventions were substantial. Hay internee irrigation
works commenced during 1941–2, damming the river with a low-level
weir in the racecourse farm’s center ring, using tools borrowed from local
townspeople. Next, two dams were built to collect water drawn from the
Water Commission’s channels and irrigate the market gardens first pro-
visioning the camp.69 The old aerodrome was irrigated also with hand-
made dams, built of bush timber and recycled railway sleepers, linked
through channels and culverts to service the West and Northwest farms.
66
Werner Pelz, Distant Strains of Triumph (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), 97.
67
“Hay POW camps: developing farming projects,” The Riverine Grazier, 29
December 1944, 2.
68
Merrylees, Haywire, Timeline, 7; “POWs to be sent here,” The Riverine Grazier,
23 May 1941, 2.
69
“Hay POW Camps . . .,” The Riverine Grazier, 29 December 1944, 2.
The Hay Camp Farms 135
The 725-acre River Farm on farmer McEvoy’s paddock was irrigated

with river-water by a POW-built 200-yard-long fluming of bush timber
and galvanized iron, with a pump set in a 30-ft-deep concrete well.
Once the irrigation system was stabilized, productivity soared. The
West Farm, which this infrastructure serviced, produced soybean, cotton,
sunflower, tobacco, peas and other crops.70 The Northwest Farm, an
expansion of western projects, cultivated peas, oats and wheat as fodder
for livestock, and pyrethrum for insecticide. A hay-press was used for
baling hay and stripping grain for fowls. Sewerage effluent diverted to
these farms made fertile ground for market gardening. The River Farm
had permanent pastures of millet, sorghum, corn and lucerne, as well as
a cotton crop exceeding Queensland’s in quality and price. Firewood
from a branch camp at Toogimbie was supplied by river barges.
These agricultural projects were also supported by manufacturing,
including for the construction industry. POWs supervised by the Public
Works Department produced bricks for WG Butterworth and Co., with
an annual output of 300,000 bricks for sewerage works, farm buildings
and pathways (Fig. 4.2).71 A cane-grass industry was set up to provide for
roofing. The construction materials were used for establishing permanent
farm buildings including: a piggery, a dairy with a brick milking shed large
enough for forty-eight cows, a trolley way for wheeling fodder; a cool
room, can room, hayshed and feeding shed; a brick silo with a grain mill,
chaff cutter and elevators, and a brick staff cottage.
The poultry project on high ground near the cemetery had fowl runs
and houses, with incubator room and brooder capable of an annual
output of 5,000 birds. Seed production at the old reservoir produced
a ton of carrot seed in 1944, alongside onion, cauliflower and cabbage
seed. Other popular vegetables were peas, beans, silver beet, lettuce,
cucumbers, marrows, melons, pumpkins, poppies and pyrethrum,
amounting to 1 million lbs in the crops recorded from 1 July 1943 to
30 April 1944. That same period saw 41,000 gallons of milk, 10,000
dozen eggs, 3 tons’ cotton, 70 tons’ oaten hay and 341 bags of wheat. At
1,700 lb shelled peas per acre, across ten acres in the winter of 1943, the
camp’s yields were deemed comparable to North America’s highest.72
As in America, much of the produce in Australia would be used for
canning, providing food for troops at home or overseas. Numerous agro-
businesses would expand and diversify to meet national needs. The real
monetary rewards were for the army, able to produce surplus quantities of
meat and vegetables for troop consumption and also for sale in the Australian
market, at a time when local manpower was diverted to the battlefront.73
70 71 72 73
Ibid., 2. Ibid. Ibid. Merrylees, Haywire, 55.
136 Land and Labor
Fig. 4.2 Hay, NSW, November 1942: at an old brickworks, Italian

POWs producing 1,000 bricks a day. Photographed by Harry Turner.
Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 150895
The Loveday Projects

Unlike at Hay, the Loveday camps benefited from an extant reticulated
water system, run by steam-powered pumps diverting water from the
Murray River and serving vineyards, orchards and soldier settlements – the
pride of South Australia’s Riverlands. Large permanent pumping plants,
designed in the late nineteenth century for Mildura and Renmark irrigation
settlement schemes, revolutionized high-volume, high-lift irrigation for
horticultural crop cultivation in expansive planted acreages.74 By strange
coincidence, the Chaffey brothers who established these schemes built
a similar colony at Manzanar, California – the Japanese American incarcer-
ation site described in Chapters 8 and 9.
The two plants built at Loveday in 1924 were the largest steam-engine
and pump units installed in Australia at that time, servicing over 600 acres
of vines and fruit trees.75 A third plant was installed for domestic supply.
Two identical vertical steam engines, coupled to their respective pumps
74
David Mack, Irrigation Settlement: Some historic Aspects in South Australia on the River
Murray 1838–1978 (Cobdogla Irrigation and Steam Museum, 2003), 62; Report of the
Parliamentary Committee on Land Settlement on the Loveday Division of the Cobdogla
Irrigation Area, Parliamentary Papers, 28 November 1945.
75
Mack, Irrigation Settlement, 293.
The Loveday Projects 137
and boilers, pumped water along concrete Hume pipes.76 Maintaining

this reticulated water supply by feeding boilers proved a major incentive
for setting up the 1,320-acre camp, while making wood camps at
Katarapko, Woolenook and Moorook West indispensable outliers.77
Manpower was also needed to maintain river-pumping facilities to irri-
gate the settlements, so fruit and dried-fruit production could continue,
serving Britain’s fighting forces and civilians.78 River steamers and barges
transported the harvested timber to the Irrigation Pumping Plants.79
Of the Loveday Group’s three camps (9, 10 and 14), under command-
ant Lt. Col. ET Dean, Camps 9 and 10 were 1,000-person diamond-
shaped compounds of thirty-nine buildings each, similar to Tatura’s
Camps 3 and 4 (Map 4.3). Each had headquarters of forty buildings,
with a twenty-bed hospital attached, an oval and a recreation hut. Camp
14, for 4,000 persons, established on the Loveday Aerodrome and serviced
by two AMF compounds, was a dodecagon figure (like Camps 12 and 13)
built for the internment of civilian Japanese, including from the Free
French Authorities and the Netherlands East Indies.80 Similar to the
other 4,000-person camps, Camp 14 was divided into four compounds,
each holding eighteen double-sleeping huts, four large mess halls (for 250),
two large kitchens each serving 500, two latrines, two washhouses and
ablutions blocks, and hobby huts. In the eastern corner of Compound 14B
was a 120-bed hospital. The group headquarters consisted of various
services: medical, dental, engineers, bulk canteen, motor transport, petrol
and oil, bulk quartermaster’s stores, signals, intelligence, etc. – providing
for complete self-sufficiency.81 Internee-built sporting facilities followed
national preferences: Italians favoring soccer; Germans, tennis; Japanese,
baseball. The Japanese also built a timber-and-thatch tennis clubhouse.
Whereas Camps 9 and 10 had 60x18-ft huts, Camp 14 had double-
width huts; its population was always changing, with Japanese arrivals
from Adelaide River Northern Territory, Pacific Islands, New Zealand
and the Netherlands East Indies. By May 1943, with 5,382 internees, the
camp’s numbers exceeded its capacity.82
Although Japanese internees were not typically allowed outside camp
areas, at Loveday they were employed on the 500-acre camp farm and
additionally in Woolenook wood camps. Japanese POWs were employed at
76
Ibid., 288.
77
State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, Government Publications Collection,
Parliamentary Papers, no. 48, 28 November 1945; Report of the Parliamentary
Committee on Land Settlement on the Loveday Division of the Cobdogla Irrigation
Area; Military History Internment, 3.
78
NAA: Military History Internment, 20. 79 Ibid., 25. 80 Ibid., 3. 81 Ibid., 2.
82
Ibid., 7.
Adapted with reference to aerial view at the Cobdogla Irrigation and Steam Museum, and drawings of the camps reproduced in E.T. Dean, Internment in South Australia,
17, 20, and appendices.
Map 4.3 Loveday Group, Barmera, South Australia, Camps 9, 10 and 14. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous
indicated sources
Moorook West, and Italians at Katarapko. Others worked in the camp’s

vegetable and flower gardens, which the administration reported they
enjoyed.83 Lt. Col. Dean recorded the Loveday Group’s exceptional pro-
duction figures as including 2,161 tons of vegetables valued at £29,140 and
a further 42,761 lb of vegetable seed.84 Tomatoes would be sent to the
Berri Co-operative Packing Union factory, juicing citrus and grapefruit for
both Australian and US troops, given the difficulty of shipping fresh
supplies from North America to the Pacific area.85 Nearly half of the 400
acres farmed were for research crops of guayule rubber, opium poppy (for
morphine) and pyrethrum (for insecticide).86 The camp accounts enumer-
ated thousands of tons of firewood, and internee-produced timber, and
thousands or tens of thousands of pigs, fowls and eggs sold. There was soap
and lime production, ordnance projects for general maintenance, conver-
sion of salvage and infrastructure work, and repair of 27,747 boots.
Whereas Hay camp farms had proven the area’s untapped potential, the
Loveday sites were chosen for their fertility. The pride expressed by com-
mandants reporting these figures, and keenness for visitors and media
coverage, suggests an eagerness to dispel public criticism of preferential
treatment toward enemy aliens previously raised by Australian media.87
Such accounts of “prisoner productivity” are disturbingly reminiscent of
the experiments of an earlier penal-reform era. While the compulsion for
their employment was purely opportunistic, reform-through-labor resur-
faced during wartime as a generalized disciplining practice reviving patterns
of labor coercion as integral to Australia’s historical geography. Although
these wartime prisoners were not convicts, the continuum of prison build-
ings, incarceration camps and labor depots they moved through evoked the
physical geography of the eighteenth-century penal economy. While pris-
oners may have preferred labor engagements to confinement in camp
compounds, this was hardly equivalent to freedom of choice and opportun-
ity. As uncovered in the example of Dunera internees’ efforts, freedoms were
expressed differently, through ephemeral objects and practices less tangible
than these protracted efforts at reshaping the land.
Throughout the camp landscapes, tools provided for farming encour-
aged bouts of creativity, evident in random images interspersed among the
83
Military History Internment, HQ Loveday Group to HQ SAL of C area Keswick, 25
February 1943.
84
E. T. Dean, Internment in South Australia (Adelaide: Committee on the History of
Internment in South Australia, 1946).
85
“Fine amenities building at Berri,” Murray Pioneer, 27 September 1945, 5; “New vista on
the Murray,” Advertiser (Adelaide), 15 May 1946, 8.
86
Pyrethrum excludes the 1945–6 crop.
87
“Last prisoners have left Loveday,” Murray Pioneer (Renmark, SA), 23 January 1947, 1,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article109421696.
140 Land and Labor
photographic evidence of this extraordinary mobilization of POWs and

internees. A Shinto shrine and sunken garden spanned with a wooden
bridge at Compound 14B exemplifies Japanese aesthetic ingenuity
and serves as a reminder of differing cultural practices of leisure and
commemoration, even as the aforementioned tennis club emphasizes
their modernity (Fig. 4.3). At Loveday, Italian sculptor Tito Neri created
life-size mud models of Adam and Eve, the snake coiled between them,
later covered with concrete. At Hay, incarcerated Italians built a miniature
model Colosseum; at Harvey Camp, a wolf mother and Romulus and
Remus: signaling their ancient urban heritage against the tendency, per-
haps, to equate them with “peasant stock.” Beneath the maze of facts and
figures, these unusual though minor architectural features interrupted the
conformity demanded of laboring internees and POWs.
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 4.3 Camp gardens, Loveday Group, SA, B-compound of No. 14

Camp, January 1944: a landscaped Japanese-type garden (a), Japanese
Shinto shrine (b), tennis clubhouse built by internees (c). Photographed
by Hedley Keith Cullen. Hay, NSW: Garden at the 16th garrison
battalion POW detention camp, with Colosseum model in the
foreground (d). Photograph by Geoffrey McInnes. Australian War
Memorial, 123010; 123011; 123014; 063365
Whereas the POWs and internee activities, described in previous chap-

ters, superficially altered their carceral environments through minor modifi-
cations to physical facilities, with sculptures, artworks and creative planting
schemes, irrigation infrastructure, farm buildings and planting practices
made permanent changes to the land. The remains of channels, reservoirs
and piggeries and traces of a previous generation of wartime agriculture can
still be seen wherever camps reverted to farmland, in the paddocks at Hay
and Loveday. They suggest a different perception of the camps, not as
hostage-keeping spaces for Australia’s allies, but as embryonic sites for
a future national industry. This change is evident in some of the postwar
uses to which the camps were put. Harvey Internment Camp (11) with
hutments along gently sloping site contours, the least-confining design, after
its early 1942 closure was used for training various groups, including the 3rd
Australian Corps, ex-servicemen or -women, and eventually secondary
students under the Agriculture and Education departments, as the Harvey
Agricultural College in 1950 (Map 4.4).88 Loveday Camps 9 and 10 were
vacated in January 1944 to make room for 700 AIF personnel sent for grape
picking in the Murray Riverlands; Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF)
personnel were billeted for fruit picking in February 1945.89 Loveday was
reestablished for German and Italian POWs awaiting repatriation in late
1946, but by then portions of its farmlands had been acquired for agricul-
ture, for example 35 acres of tomatoes purchased by the Berri Corp.90
Repatriation delays kept prisoners in these and in military control centers:
WA’s Northam Army Camp accommodated 3,500 POWs awaiting repatri-
ation until September 1946.91 Several escapees during labor dispersal
evaded capture until 1953.92
***
Unlike previous chapters, focusing on physical facilities interpreted
through their social impacts, this chapter concentrated on how war-
time scarcity and labor demand expanded the carceral geography,
offering Italian POWs greater freedoms and opportunities than local
or overseas internees. This seeming inversion of liberties remained an
enduring paradox for the war’s duration, demonstrating how rights
88
Register of Heritage Places, Heritage Council of Western Australia, Harvey Agricultural
College, 6 January 2017, http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/Admin/api/file/20fbbc9
d-da59-45cf-ae04-3bcfcba2f2f3.
89
NAA: AP613/1, 38/1/6, box 1, 8, Release of RAAF personnel for fruit picking in Barmera
area and their occupation of Loveday Internment Camp.
90
“Italians leaving Loveday,” Advertiser (Adelaide), 16 September 1946, 9.
91
Northam Army Camp, Heritage Association, Inc., Story Lines/POW, The Italian POW
Experience, http://northamarmycamp.org.au/storylines/pow/the-italian-pow-experience.
92
RDPWI, part ii, 194.
142 Land and Labor
Based on NAA: MP742/1, 259/102/462, folio 7. Annotations from leaflet provided at Harvey Visitor Center
for Memorial in 1992.
Map 4.4 Harvey, WA, Camp 11. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based
on the numerous indicated sources
afforded military labor, even as labor conscripts were linked to their

embodiment of an alien sovereignty recognized by Allied powers.
Although this observation cannot be generalized, given that German
and Japanese POWs lacked similar liberties, interned enemy aliens
confined to camp complexes had limited opportunities. Moreover, by
blurring the physical boundaries between internees, POWs and service
personnel, labor allocation made incarceration a more ambiguous
practice.
As a postscript to this process, following the Loveday camp closures,

disposal sales in 1947 by redistributing huts and building elements in
surrounding small towns and farming properties further blurred the
carceral boundaries. The South Australia Department of Lands bought
140 huts from Camps 9 and 10 in 1945, in preparation for the Loxton
soldier settlement scheme.93 Individual huts were adapted for Adelaide’s
mail branch unit and Renmark bank premises.94 Prefabricated huts from
Loveday were sold for £25, guard towers for £15–33 and a concrete
twenty-cell detention block for £100.95 Similarly, auction lists at other
camps, for “Camp Equipment, Furniture, Cooking Utensils, Tools,
Farming Machinery, Tractors, Engines, Contents Engineer’s Depot,
Plumbing, Carpentering Tools, Spare Parts,” suggest that every useful,
movable part of the former camps was reutilized.96
Unlike in Singapore, discussed in the next chapter of this book, where
prewar architecture was requisitioned for a range of military uses,
Australia’s involvement in the global conflict saw new and highly adapt-
able barrack typologies and camp configurations invented and intro-
duced for the first time. The camps’ dissolution in the wake of labor
dispersal and domesticizing physical facilities, including soldier settle-
ment, saw the repurposing of some former carceral facilities as more
generalized postwar forms of labor containment, thereby neutralizing
their punitive aspect. The life of military camps was also extended
through repurposing for new agricultural and industrial ventures no
longer dependent on unfree labor. Many former camps housed postwar
immigrants and refugees brought to populate Australia, as a defense
against Asian encroachment, and employed, like the Italian POWs, in
infrastructure and industrial projects without much alteration to their
regimented, austere facilities. Large army camps, like Bonegilla, Greta,
Northam and Cowra, were repurposed as immigrant reception centers
and hostels, from which the government drew indentured
workers with no consideration of how war-displaced refugees might
respond to temporary military housing. Their arrival, prefigured by
POW labor deployment, marked a shift in immigration policy catalytic
for the subsequent racial transformation of White Australia.
93
“Hutments at camps bought by Dept. of Lands,” Murray Pioneer, 15 November 1945.
94
NAA: AP567/1/0, 1949/60, and AP567/1/0, 1947/131, Department of Works and
Housing.
95
“Disposals sale at Loveday Camps,” Murray Pioneer, 12 June 1947, 1.
96
Murchison Historical Society Archive: Murchison No. 13 POW Camp, Extensive
Auction Sale, Commonwealth Disposals Commission, 1–3 October 1947, Dennis
Lascelles, Ltd.
5 A Military Geography
Anoma Pieris
Landing in Kota Bharu, in Kelantan, Malaya, over an hour before the air
attack on Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941, the 30,000-person-strong 25th
Army under General Yamashita Tomoyuki traveled southward to Singapore,
catching the Allied forces under Lt. Gen. A. E. Percival by surprise. The
Malaya Command, a force three times larger than Tomoyuki’s, included the
British Army, British Indian Army and Australian Imperial Force. They were
joined on the island by the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force comprising
European and Eurasian residents, two Malay regiments and Dalforce, a small
force of Asian civilian volunteers. The outnumbered Japanese were still an
enemy to be reckoned with, not the weak, poorly armed adversary imagined
by the Allies.1 On that same day (7–8 December 1942 across two time zones)
they had also invaded Hong Kong and the Philippines, landed troops in
Thailand and dropped the first aerial bombs on Singapore. An air force of
over 500 planes supported the offensive, bombing key military facilities and
strafing the city and port.
The fall of Singapore just seventy days later was attributed to Britain’s
miscalculations in fortifying the island against naval attack, a strategy
based on Japan’s visible interwar naval buildup. Defensive armament of
the seaward-facing southern and eastern shores left open the connection
to the Malayan peninsula. Once the Japanese reached Johore, the new
Sembawang naval base was exposed and had to be abandoned, the
seaward-facing guns could not be turned and the Bunka Straits beyond
Singapore came under aerial fire. Reports on the last days before British
capitulation convey the collective entrapment of Singapore’s population
against the imminent onslaught. Refugees from Malaya crowding into
tenements in the city’s poorer areas had doubled the population to over
a million. Concerned for safety, in a belated adoption of a scorched-earth
policy, the British only partially destroyed infrastructure, supplies and
ammunition. The hospitals overflowed with victims of bombing raids and
1
C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1988 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 166; Lee, The Syonan Years, 55.
144
A Military Geography 145
various institutions functioned as makeshift camps. Of the forty-four

ships of evacuees who left Singapore in the final week, when their plight
was brought home to European civilians, all but four were sunk, their
passengers captured or killed.2 These factors, compounded by Japanese
control of the reservoirs, prompted the fateful decision to capitulate.
Some 130,000 Allied troops were taken captive, among them 15,000
Australians. This historic failure fractured British-Australian relations,
so Australia increasingly turned to the USA for military support. Four
days later, on 19 February, the Japanese launched an air attack on
Darwin.
Chapter 5 explores the interlocking fates of the Allied forces in Asia
during defense and captivity in Singapore, a racially divided British colo-
nial settlement in Asia. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) was unpre-
pared for its easy victory and the large number of surrendered personnel
needing to be accommodated, 52,200 of whom were dispatched to the
British cantonment Changi in the northeast. Others, housed in hastily
requisitioned houses and barrack buildings across the island, were put to
work repairing the damage. When compared with Australia, where the
home front was never invaded or destroyed, except for parts of Darwin,
and civil infrastructure remained intact, under the occupation army
Singapore was militarized and converted to an expanded prison-camp
complex. The Gunseikanbu (Central Military Administration) and
Kenpeitai (Military Police Corps) created an entirely new power struc-
ture dominating every aspect of life. Under the 1907 Hague Convention
(Section III, Articles 42–56), to which Japan was full signatory, the
occupation forces could exercise military but not sovereign authority
while hostilities were ongoing, and had to respect institutions, laws and
administrative structures and govern with the interests of the occupied
territory’s inhabitants in mind; however, all colonial civilians were
interned and anti-Japanese Chinese settlers were systematically and bru-
tally eliminated.3 This violence was spatialized through the military
repurposing of domestic and civic architecture for internment, prisoners-
of-war (POW) working parties or detention facilities.
This chapter traces these transformations as evidence of how colonial
– and colonized – settler status was altered under the Japanese, upending
all power relationships the colonized peoples had taken for granted over
a century under British rule from 1819. By converting cantonments into
camp sites and turning the whole island into a camp, the authority
embodied in British colonial architecture was destabilized. Moreover,
2
Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 182.
3
ICRC database, Hague Convention, 1907, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/195.
the war-oriented militarized spatial practices shaped a defensive physical

and material history around the intersections of incarceration, militariza-
tion and domesticity in the postwar and post-independence period.
Anxieties these associations created influenced several sociospatial trans-
formations including the design of public housing. Wartime defense and
capitulation provided structures for contemporary citizenship.
Unlike previous chapters on Australia venturing only tentative reflec-
tions on the war’s impact on postwar migration and citizenship, this
chapter draws connections between militarization, Japanese occupation
and the resumption of British colonial government in postwar Singapore
that delayed the commencement of decolonizing processes until 1963. It
describes wartime Singapore’s pervasive camp taxonomy as infusing both
military and civilian structures with programs unthought of when they
were first designed. There are several reasons for this approach, including
a need to examine the divided temporal legacy created by war and
decolonization, not evident in the other case studies. Unlike for
Australia or North America, war in and around Singapore and occupation
by an Asian power brought about drastic political changes with lasting
societal impacts. Britain’s false confidence in the island’s impregnability
and betrayal of her subject population colored colonial relations from
then on. Japan treated Singapore as a subordinate nodal point and critical
foothold in its pan-Asian empire. The fall of Singapore induced a change
in Australia’s military tactics toward home defense, with greater collabor-
ation with the USA. The British colonial rulers, the Japanese military
administrators and the postcolonial government each recreated
Singapore in its own image, treating the country as a blank canvas for
inscribing their authority.
A Divided History
On 15 February 1942 the British surrendered to the IJA in a brief cere-
mony at the Ford factory on Bukit Timah Hill.4 Singapore would be
renamed Syonan-To (Light of South-Island), its economy and society
reconfigured as a Japanese-administered Chinese protectorate. The
Eurocentric traditions that had shaped the colony were temporarily sus-
pended. The clock, the calendar, the currency, and the language of
operation and systems imposed would thereafter accord with Tokyo.
The IJA headquarters was moved to the grounds of Raffles College and
the Gunseikanbu to the Fullerton Building, while the Kenpeitai military
4
Gen. Yamashita shifted his headquarters from Johore’s Sultan’s Palace to the Ford factory
once his troops entered the island.
A Divided History 147
police took up facilities throughout the city, most notably the East District
Branch at Stamford Road YMCA and the main Outram Road Jail. On
16 February all Allied personnel, excepting those needed for reconstruc-
tion, gathered at the Padang, the colonial parade ground near the
waterfront.
Numerous British and Australian accounts of the fall of Singapore
contrast with Singaporean and Japanese views on Japan’s victory and
administration, recounted most recently by Gregg Huff and Shinobu
Majima.5 They write on Chösabu (Research Department), a group of
academics and civil servants who reported on the captured territories and
advised the administration on policy. Apart from the predominance of
Chinese-descent immigrants, the major challenge was to feed a refugee-
swelled population and to impose discipline on a society shaped by
individual enterprise. A policy of self-sufficiency and exploitation minim-
ized Japan’s burden.6 Limited prewar industry in Syonan-To due to
British dependence on cheap labor meant that the Japanese lacked infra-
structure to launch wartime industries. Huff and Majima note that some
45,000 persons were employed in occupied-Japanese factories.7 The
wartime experiences of the predecessors of today’s Singaporeans were
very different from those of the British and their allies.
Any history of the camps must heavily rely on captives’ stories in diaries
and memoirs written during or after the war and official reports docu-
menting this period – roughly from 15 February 1942 to 15 August 1945.
POW accounts build a damning record of harsh treatment, corroborated
in the 330 war-crimes trials for Asia. The colonial archive is marked by the
privileges that gave some but not others the space to tell their stories after
the war. Accounts frequently sublimate colonialism’s injustices in projec-
tions of wartime suffering. Asian settler experiences of the war are equally
insulated, sometimes polemicized internally by divided loyalties. This gap
caused by the colonial society’s stratification, political divisions and class
structure, and preference for natal and community loyalties fractures the
collective narrative. Much of the material on this period is located outside
the physical geography where the recorded events took place – donated to
archives in Britain or Australia by repatriated soldiers and returning
colonial civilians. Although local historians have adjusted these imbal-
ances by writing on civilian experiences of the war, most notably Lee
Geok Boi’s Syonan: Singapore under the Japanese, 1942–1945, such
accounts appear circumscribed by national histories and boundaries.8
5
Gregg Huff and Shinobu Majima, World War II, Singapore: The Chösabu Reports on
Sayonan (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2018).
6
Ibid., 4. 7 Ibid., 45. 8 Lee, Syonan.
Whereas Australians mobilized by the war were forced to stretch their

national imagination to embrace surrounding and far-off geographies,
Singaporeans were constrained by wartime captivity, encircled and recon-
figured through new Japanese imperial practices, with different agendas
and expectations. Exogenous and asymmetrical power-relations overdeter-
mined their fates. Camp typologies that had taken root during its defensive
militarization now cast the island as an encampment repurposed for cap-
tivity. Two prisons, Outram and Changi, discussed in Chapter 6, occurred
at the nexus of this geography. Camps for concentrating refugees, sus-
pected dissidents, POWs or internees were dispersed around them.
Interconnected work camps broadened carceral architectural typologies
from two-story masonry barrack buildings to colonial housing estates,
timber-and-attap (palm-frond thatch) huts, and tented facilities. Their
physical diversity, broad spatial distribution and human flows of POW
labor transformed their reception and meanings. But the key difference
between these and similar carceral typologies in Australia was their inver-
sion of authority, unimaginable to Asian settlers up to that point. Each
ethnoracial group, in turn, assumed a precarious subjecthood under the
Japanese, according to their relationships with authorities. The multi-vocal
expressions of wartime experiences reveal how relations between the
British, the Japanese and the subject population continued to be racially
divisive. Singapore’s population in the last prewar census, in 1931, stood at
557,745: 75.1 percent Chinese, 11.7 percent Malays, 9.1 percent Indians
and 4.2 percent minorities, including European, Eurasian, Arab, Jew and
Ceylonese.9 They included those working directly for the colonial admin-
istration or drawn into hostile or favorable relationships with the Japanese
based on the politics of their home countries.
Fortress Changi
Because of military penetration during the years immediately preceding the
war, and across a range of ordinary and extraordinary support facilities
created, war had been foreshadowed across Singapore’s island landscape.
These environments had their genesis in the interwar fortification of the
island, when Anglo-Japanese relations aimed at containing Russia deteri-
orated and the former ally was regarded as the next major threat. The
British initiated the “Singapore Strategy,” escalating military facilities so as
to increase defensive power and personnel in East Asia. They funded the
new Sembawang naval base in the protected northeastern part of Johore
9
Saw Swee-Hock, “Population trends in Singapore, 1819–1967,” Journal of Southeast
Asian History, 10:1 (1969): 36–49, 39, 41.
Fortress Changi 149
Strait, which the Royal Engineers (41st Company) completed in 1938. On

the 1927 Gillman Commission’s recommendations, the Changi defensive
battery and eastern cantonment were built to defend it.10 Because of war-
related exigencies and defensive fortification, militarization and town plan-
ning again appeared as co-constitutive, a throwback to eighteenth-century
colonial city plans.
Numerical increases in British military presence called for rapid expan-
sion of facilities such as residential barracks, detached houses and a host
of auxiliary buildings. Military townships with superior infrastructure and
amenities were designed for colonial lifestyles with retinues of support
staff, creating what Chang Jiat-Hwee, after Agamben, describes as excep-
tional spaces of colonial authority.11 Despite the resultant influx of
Europeans, the cultivated aloofness and disregard for the masses living
in squalor around them produced what Turnbull described as an envir-
onment of mutual mistrust.12 Racial disparities internalized by both the
British and local Asian settlers were further exacerbated by the Japanese
threat. Following the outbreak of war in China, local Chinese antagonism
toward Japanese businesses (many being fronts for espionage activities)
caused disturbances in the city.13 Local Chinese organizations led relief
efforts, independently of the colonial government, and expressed nation-
alistic sentiment toward their natal homeland.
The penetration of military bases and housing estates, into a sleepy
kampung (rural low-rise timber-and-attap villages) and plantation topog-
raphy or into vacant lots on the edges of dense urban thoroughfares,
presents Singapore’s carceral archipelago as merging with the architec-
ture of its surrounds. But a closer look at period maps shows regimented
layouts and large-scale detached colonial-style masonry barrack buildings
as distinct from either the contiguous rows of shophouses or the more
organically formed kampung clusters around them. Housing estates built
for government employees or military also contrasted with the incremen-
tal accretion of detached and walled-off private suburban bungalow
properties on the edges of these military schemes.
The British Changi cantonment was a well-laid-out military estate built
by Chinese contractors and Chinese and Indian labor during the 1930s
(Map 5.1).14 Far East Airforce Squadron Leader H. A. Probert describes
10
National Archives-UK (NA-UK): CO273/538/3, Singapore Naval Base, Committee of
Imperial Defence, October 1927.
11
Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture, 51–93; Agamben, Homo Sacer.
12
Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 138. 13 Ibid., 161.
14
NA-UK: CO273/538 PRO, Report of the Gillman Commission in Construction and
defence of Singapore naval base, 1927; L. N. Malan, “Singapore: the founding of the new
defences,” Royal Engineers Journal, 52 (1938): 213–35; J. F. F., “Changi cantonment
1933–37,” Royal Engineers Journal, 51(1937): 355–62, 354.
Adapted from NA-UK: CO 1047_964_002, Map of Johore and Straits Settlements, 128/5 (1937), WO252/1362 (15),
NAS: TM000413, Survey Map of Singapore, 1945.
Map 5.1 Changi Cantonment, Singapore, in 1945. Drawn by

Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated sources
Fortress Changi 151
it as a “garden city,” a term associated with the early twentieth-century

British Town Planning movement that was guiding urban experiments in
the colonies.15 The site’s undulating topography gave a distinctive char-
acter to each of four barracks complexes – of eight, fourteen, seven and
two blocks, respectively: Kitchener Barracks housing the Royal Engineers
on a ridge overlooking the Straits of Johore, the Royal Artillery’s Roberts
Barracks on the next ridge to the south, the Gordon Highlanders’
Selarang Barracks on a plateau farther south, and the Anti-Aircraft regi-
ment, mainly Punjabis of the Hong Kong and Singapore regiments,
assigned the eastern India Barracks, which had hutted facilities.16
Married officers’ quarters were built on the crests and slopes of hillocks
and around the officers’ messes, the area pleasantly landscaped with
wooded and luxurious tropical foliage. The whole complex, which
opened on 15 February 1938, with garages, canteen stores and ‘coolie’
linerooms, reflected colonial sociospatial hierarchies.
The military barracks and housing were substantial constructions com-
prising brick-paneled walls inside reinforced concrete frames built with
granite and sand quarried from within the Changi area.17 They were raised
on Bakau-timber pile foundations and topped with either sloping Marseille-
tile or flat concrete roofs. Along with other purpose-built military estates
dispersed in civilian areas, such residential facilities exemplified colonial
civility domesticating military rigor with picturesque landscaping and
period aesthetics.18 Like many other colonial undertakings of the period,
built on the backs of underpaid Asian labor, they conveyed the ethos of
unchallenged exclusivity and authority, a force seemingly confident that its
numerical presence was an adequate defense. This was hardly surprising
since, for over a century, Europeans had defeated Asian rulers with superior
firepower, establishing cantonment cities. By World War II, however, they
depended heavily on the British Indian Army, and their complacency was
reflected in Changi’s generous layout reflective of colonial indolence and
hubris, used by the Japanese military to their strategic advantage.
The barrack buildings at Changi cantonment were exemplary testing sites
for colonial designs for thermal comfort, troop hygiene and sanitation
adapted across Singapore during the 1920s and 1930s, as discussed by
Chang.19 Whereas mid-nineteenth-century barracks had been modeled on
15
Probert, The History of Changi, 14.
16
Imperial War Museum, UK (IWM): Private papers, 11017, TM Hart, 01/24/1 Changi
POW Camp, 1942–1945, 1.
17
Probert, The History of Changi, 18, 23; J. F. F., “Changi cantonment 1933–37,” 355–62.
18
Julian Davidson, Black and White: The Singapore House, 1898–1941 (Singapore:
Talisman, 2006), 109–31.
19
Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture.
sprawling Anglo-Malay plantation houses, these grand brick-and-mortar

constructions embodied early twentieth-century modernist ideas and aes-
thetics. Chang describes how colonial engineers developed distinct typolo-
gies applicable across imperial territories with some climatic variations and
how these prototypes were modified and disseminated in successive revisions
of Barracks Synopsis.20 Residences for the higher-ranked military personnel
paralleled those provided for important government officials with their
expansive acreages, manicured lawns and orchards. Black-and-white (mock-
Tudor) apartments and bungalows introduced by the colonial Public Works
Department that populated the military or government employee housing
estates at Tanglin, Alexandra Park, Ridout Road, Adam Park and Ridley
Park, for example, date from the twentieth century’s first three decades and
are located in close proximity to adjacent barracks (Fig. 5.1). At the
Sembawang, Seletar and Changi airbases, residential quarters serviced
expansive military facilities, their scale and character mirroring the military
hierarchy. By the early 1940s their designs had shifted stylistically from
stripped-down classicism to an art deco aesthetic, strains of the progressive
modernism that had overtaken Europe between the two world wars.
This ambient landscape was rudely transformed by protracted battles
in early February 1942 as the Allies retreated before the advancing
Japanese army.21 Residential estates associated with military facilities
became battlefields. Many of these would later be commissioned as
temporary camps for work parties. Japanese army officials comman-
deered barracks, hospitals and military facilities.
During the last two weeks of February 1942, as tens of thousands of
surrendered troops, injured soldiers and stragglers made their way
Changi-ward to designated POW camps, concerned bystanders from
among the Asian settler population anxiously watched their painful
retreat. Among them were 15,000 Australian and 35,000 British and
Dutch POWs.22 A further 3,500 civilian internees, mainly British and
other European women and children, would join them in March, after
screening at Katong. Their slow, humiliating progress on this fourteen-
mile journey and the punitive reconfiguration of that former exceptional
space conveyed to former colonial subjects Britain’s disempowerment,
creating a void now occupied by the Japanese.
The seven camps that made up Changi’s 6,100-acre expanse encom-
passed the military cantonment and the vacated Changi village with
20
Ibid., 51–93.
21
Justin and Robin Corfield, The Fall of Singapore: 90 Days – November 1941–February 1942
(Melbourne; London: Hardie Grant, 2012); David Nelson, The Story of Changi
Singapore, 3rd ed. (Singapore: Changi Museum 2012), 6.
22
Repurposing Changi Cantonment 153
(a) (b)
(c)
(d)
Fig. 5.1 Colonial residential archetypes, Singapore: Black-and-white

bungalow at No. 16, Adam Park, former home of Gerhard Seefeld (a),
Gillman Barracks (b), apartment block at Portsdown Road (c),
Kitchener Barracks (d). Photographed by Anoma Pieris in 2018
Australians at Selarang Barracks, and British and Dutch prisoners in the

other three.23 Quarters were appropriated, stores consolidated, damaged
buildings repaired, amenities reconnected and large numbers of prisoners
concentrated in facilities, initially with limited oversight by the IJA.
Providing firewood for the camp, setting out gardens and dismantling
and moving hutted facilities became a priority.
Repurposing Changi Cantonment

Their reversal of fortune came home to Allied troops as they crammed
into formerly spacious facilities. Congestion was evident across the
23
Ibid.
cantonment, with around 750 in facilities, each planned for 100 men.
Ground floors of barrack buildings were used for messes and storage
spaces, while two upper floors and verandas with washing and lavatory
facilities were converted to dormitories.24 Sixty to seventy men occupied
blocks of six three-roomed terrace houses, designed as married-rank
quarters, and up to one hundred personnel occupied the detached offi-
cers’ bungalows. All auxiliary buildings were likewise converted into
usable spaces. Roberts Hospital drew the sick and wounded from
Alexandra and Tanglin hospitals, and the Fullerton building was filled
to capacity. T. M. Hart, a member of the Federated Malay States
Volunteer Force’s 1st Selangor Battalion, observed as many as 300
patients on floors designed for fifty. He wrote,
In every building, every available square inch of floor space was used for sleeping
accommodation. Each man was allowed a space 6ft by 2/12 ft in which to live, eat,
sleep, keep his kit and have his being. Gangways between rows of sleeping spaces
were reduced to a minimum and practically non-existent. Meals were served and
eaten out in the open except in bad weather when they were eaten in one’s bed space.
Beds were non-existent and men slept on their ground sheets on the concrete floor.25
To add to the discomfort of the first two months of captivity, the British
had sabotaged the water supply as part of the scorched-earth policy, so the
sewerage system could not be used. The condition of the pit latrines and
surrounding swarms of flies caused a dysentery epidemic. POWs had to
repair the supply lines, and construct bore-latrines. Essential discipline
and self-reliance were not evident in many of the nationals forced into
close proximity. Indeed, the freedom afforded at Changi came at a price.
The captives built their own barbed-wire enclosure, and the thriving
black market for procuring food from outside the camp had to operate
by stealth.26 In late August 1942, in contravention of the Geneva
Convention, the IJA executed four POWs caught attempting to escape
and introduced a “non-escape declaration” form. By demanding that
each prisoner sign the document, they eased pressures on Japanese man-
power needed for securing the camp.
In several examples discussed in this book, extraordinary impositions of
power brought events to crisis, squashing the spirit of resistance still
harbored by captives. When Changi POWs refused to sign the declar-
ation, 15,000 men were concentrated in the Selarang Barracks Square,
a metal rectangular 150x300-yard parade ground, surrounded on three
sides by seven barrack blocks. They occupied every available inch: a scene
captured by George Aspinall using a contraband camera, which he
24
IWM: Private papers, 11017, TM Hart, 2. 25 Ibid., 2.
26
IWM: Private papers, 18740, Col. HC Outram, 66/222/1, 23–5.
Fig. 5.2 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and British POWs at Selarang
Barracks, Changi, Singapore, 2 September 1942. Photographed by George
Aspinall. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 132937
ingeniously concealed in the false bottom of an Australian water bottle

(created for this purpose) until the war’s end (Fig. 5.2).27 Medical Officer
Captain H. Silman recounted,
Flies were increasing in number and swill etc. was accumulating. Latrines were
dug all through the first night; the men worked like Trojans, digging long rows of
trenches 16 ft deep while the sappers made latrine tops from doors of billets, men
were sleeping on the roofs and all over the courtyard except for the space for
cookhouses and latrines. The road running round the billet was out of bounds and
the Jap sentries beat up anyone treading on the road. A machine gun was mounted
on one corner and surrounded with barbed wire.28
Despite forty cases of dysentery on that first night, the men remained
defiant:
It was an amazing sight. The courtyard looked like Hyde Park with its flickering
lights, men sleeping all over the place, concerts going on in every corner, pianos
playing for sing-songs, men feverishly digging latrines by lamp light.29
27
Tim Bowden, Changi Photographer: George Aspinall’s Record of Captivity (Singapore:
Times Editions-Marshall Cavendish, 2005), 93, 135.
28
IWM: Private papers, 18748, Capt. H. Silman 15/18/1, Diary entry, 2 September 1942, 58,
29
Ibid., 59.
Rather than risk a major epidemic among them, the Allied officers gave
in, and the POWs signed the declaration, albeit defiantly. Several
Australians signed off as nineteenth-century bushranger and convicted
folk hero, Ned Kelly.30 They could now return to and move more easily
within the Changi enclosure, with far less interference from the Japanese,
but were demoralized at giving up, once again, without a fight. Officers
continued to have relative privileges and infractions were punished
internally. Once the military high command and the governor were
removed to Taiwan in August, the chain of command was readjusted to
maintain military discipline. Camp conditions were alleviated once work-
ing parties were redistributed or sent overseas.
The transformation of the camp environment by civic activities is an
important phase in every POW narrative, significant at Changi for raising
flagging POW morale, on which official Australian war artist Murray
Griffin offered a continuous visual record.31 During the first six-month
period, facilities for recreational activities and entertainment mush-
roomed, including theaters, clubs and churches. Under “clubland” in
his diary, British gunner V. V. Britten cited twenty-four examples that one
might encounter in any colonial society, such as a Farmers’ Circle, Turf
Club, University, Cambridge Society, Medical Society, and Yacht,
Equestrian, Automobile and Traveler’s clubs, some of them possibly
indulging in fantasies of escape.32 Theaters, which offered greater cul-
tural diversity, conjured similar establishments in their hometowns, such
as the Palladium, Phoenix or Gaiety; or captured their current predica-
ment, such as the Pavilion, Rice Bowl and Coconut Grove (Fig. 5.3).
Once the poor diet, hard labor and constant illness had depleted their
strength for sports and other active pursuits, notes Sears Elderidge,
interest in entertainment intensified.33 Midge Gillies details education
programs in The Barbed-Wire University,34 and Kevin Blackburn writes on
football and cricket in The Sportsmen of Changi.35
30
Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience, 65–80; ABC, internet archive,
Changi, The Selarang Barracks Incident, 2002, web.archive.org/web/20020210095902/
http://www.abc.net.au/changi/history/selarang.htm.
31
Michelle McDonald, ed., Changi (Sydney: Edmund & Alexander, 1992); official war
artist Murray Griffin’s illustrated personal account of his time in Changi.
32
IWM: Private papers, 15188, V. V. Britten, chap. 18, 102–3.
33
Sears Eldredge, “Captive Audiences / Captive Performers – Complete Text,” 2014. Book
Chapters. 24. https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/thdabooks/24. See also Lachlan Grant,
ed., The Changi Book (Sydney: New South, 2015), 34.
34
Midge Gillies, The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the
Second World War (London: Aurum Press, 2011).
35
Kevin Blackburn, The Sportsmen of Changi (Sydney: New South, 2015). See also
Roland Perry, The Changi Brownlow (Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2012).
Fig. 5.3 Murray Griffin, AIF POW Theater Changi, Singapore, 1943:
a former workshop, used for a year by AIF concert party. Courtesy of
Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ART 26496
POW ingenuity is best recounted in J. N. Lewis Bryan’s Churches of

Captivity.36 When patriotism waned and hope receded, ecclesiastical
spaces served existential needs. Sickness and death were constant com-
panions forcing captives to confront their own mortality. Bryan identifies
the first churches created with the aid of POW architects in an “Indian
Mosque, a NAAFI Refrigeration building, a bombed 30 yard rifle range,
a large garage, amongst other buildings.”37 By mid-1942 seven churches
were in operation, and open-air services held in all parts of the camp.38
Bryan’s book shows images of the Rifle Range’s Temple Church,
Singapore Race Club Church, Church of Ascension at Great World
amusement park (using four shops including a Chinese beauty parlor),
Selarang’s St. Luke’s Chapel – a bandstand practice hut, and St. Luke’s
on the ground floor of a Roberts Hospital barrack. In the latter, murals
painted by British POW Bombardier Stanley Warren are still extant.
36
J. N. Lewis Bryan, The Churches of Captivity in Malaya (London: Society For Promoting
Christian Knowledge, 1946).
37
Ibid., 9.
38
These were the Volunteer Church at Fairy Point, Changi’s British Battalion Church, 1st
MIB’s open-air Glade Church, India Lines’ St. George’s Church converted from
a mosque, St. Edmund’s, 18th Div. Garage Church, and 11th Div. Birdwood Camp’s
hutted Church of St. Barbara.
New timber-and-attap constructions were sometimes erected, such as

for Holy Trinity Church Selarang, and St. George’s and St. Paul’s
churches in Changi. In fact, Changi Prison area had several churches,
including: St. Andrew’s and St. Luke’s for the hospital on Half Moon
Street; St. George’s for officers, which had been moved from the jail; and
the Ohel Jacob synagogue in the jail courtyard. The Roman Catholic, Our
Lady of Christians Chapel, built by architect Lt. Hamish Cameron-Smith
and volunteers, was removed postwar in 1945 and reconstructed as
a memorial decades later in Duntroon, Canberra (Fig. 5.4; see
Chapter 10).39 These churches were connected to two Changi cemeteries
where 809 burials, up to September 1945, collected bodies of deceased
POWs. These and other burial sites associated with the camps reinforced
the essential role played by religious buildings.
Changi camp’s symbolic and social spaces are well documented in
sketches and paintings, although their provisional hosts have been effaced
by time. Hand-drawn concert programs, Christmas cards and handmade
Fig. 5.4 Murray Griffin, RC Chapel, Changi Prison, Singapore, built

late in 1944, later removed to Australia. Courtesy of Australian War
Memorial, Canberra, ART 26461
39
Monument Australia, National POW Memorial, http://monumentaustralia.org.au/
australian_monument/display/90117.
Work Camps 159
gifts crafted for close comrades reveal a parallel smaller-scale affective

economy. In cards exchanged by Australians, the bush landscape of their
homeland and the surrounding island environment recur as themes.40
Such details offer glimpses into the many ways in which Australians were
aligning themselves with their natal geography and differentiating them-
selves from the British on whose behalf they were fighting. Such
a concentration of Australians had not occurred in Singapore or else-
where before. Their theaters, churches and material effects, while
inflected by or deferring to British cultural origins, could be seen as
conjecturing aspects of exclusively Australian enclave life. These commu-
nal endeavors were soon interrupted by their redistribution as working
parties.
Work Camps
As working parties were dispersed within and beyond Singapore, canton-
ment architecture gave way to scattered facilities, including extant resi-
dential and institutional buildings, newly built hutted facilities or those
repurposed from refugee camps. A map surreptitiously created, and
concealed at some risk by Britten,41 charts a networked continuum of
penal sites (Map 5.2). The sight of Allied prisoners working in urban
areas made public their humiliation. Their subjugation by the IJA repli-
cated strategies all too familiar to Asian settlers, unmasking racial author-
ity as political power.
At first, as POWs repaired war-damaged infrastructure, they made tem-
porary use of many available buildings.42 Some were institutions like
St. Andrews College on Serangoon Road, while, as indicated in a few
represented in Table 5.1, others at Kranji, Woodlands Hospital, Towner
Road and Blakang Mati used masonry or timber barracks.43 POWs dis-
patched for stevedore work at Keppel Harbour camped on the docks. At
Sime Road, built as the Royal Air Force’s Far East Headquarters, there were
timber huts with proper roofing. Extant buildings and shops were
40
AWM: 3DRL/3589, Collection of Lt. Col. William David Jeater.
41
IWM: Private papers, 15188, V. V. Britten, chap. 18. 101, 111.
42
Postal historian David Tett provides an approximate account of several facilities (2002),
as do mail-distribution records (NA-UK: WO361/2230, 1942–5) and aerial photographs
taken in April 1944 (NA-UK: WO252/1362, 1944).
43
David Tett, A Postal History of the Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in East Asia during
the Second World War, Vol. 1: Singapore and Malaya 1942–45, The Changi Connection
(Bristol: Stuart Rossiter Trust Fund, Wheathampsted: BFA Publishing, 2002), 27–9;
NA-UK: WO361/2230, 1942–5 POWs, Far East: correspondence and statistics of mail
compiled by Bureau of Records and Enquiry; Changi Camp, Singapore and aerial
photographs taken in April 1944 (NA-UK, WO252/1362, Singapore Island and southern
Johore: supplement on defenses, 1944).
With reference to VV Britten IWM-UK: 15188, Private Papers of VV Britten; Changi Museum and
Fort Canning War Rooms, Singapore Island: World War Two Prison Camps, 1942-45 (2015) and
numerous published sources. Adapted by Anoma Pieris.
Map 5.2 Singapore, showing the distribution of camps. Drawn by

Catherine Woo and Yoke Lin Wong
Table 5.1 Camps and working parties, conjectured from numerous sources
Location Working party Physical form Approx. Number Known Dates
River Valley Road Work camp and major Two-story attap-roofed structures 1500–8000 men 13 March 1942–5
transit camp with walls made of palm leaves
built prewar to house refugees
Havelock Road Work camp and transit Large attap huts at the center of
camp Chinatown, Refugee camp, later
Indian Army camp and used as
prison for Chinese by the
Japanese before being used by
POWs
Sime Road Buried the dead, built Far East HQ of RAF, opposite golf April 1942
the roads and helped course on a 25-acre site, wooden (opened), mostly
construct the Shinto huts with real roofs mostly on empty in1943,
Shrine, work camp hillocks with proper concrete reoccupied early
and transit camp paths, nurses’ quarters and May 1944 by
hospital, men’s camp swung internees
around the women’s section
Great World Amusement Park Docks godowns and 500 British and March–Dec. 1942
building walls in Australian POWs
Singapore’s cold
storage
Bukit Timah Race Course Camp Building shrine Race course building and Chinese 200 British POWs May–July 1942–
shops
Adam Park Burying the dead from Affluent residential area 1000 British and 2000 3 April 1942–
the battle, road Australian POWs October
building and building
the Shinto shrine
Table 5.1 (cont.)
Location Working party Physical form Approx. Number Known Dates
Towner Road Camp Breaking up old vehicles Native huts on swampy ground 400 POWs April–October 1942
Caldecott Camp Road leading to Shinto Suburban houses in Caldecott 102 British and May 1942–
shrine Estate off Lornie Road Australian POWs July 1942
Kranji Build roads and dig pits Ex-naval HQ at Mandai, May 1942–5
for fuel drums previously camp for sick Indians
Woodlands Hospital Camp Hospital Old RAF Camp also known as 1200 sick from Changi May 1944 (opened)
Kranji Hospital, hutted camp
known as Woodlands
Keppel Harbour Warehouses and docks Camp on the docks 1000 POWs, POWs May–Oct. 1942
transferring from (later for transit)
Java, Dutch and other
nationalities en route
to Thailand or Japan
Blakang Mati Operate a supply base Permanent camp 1000 Australian and March 1942–5
for the Japanese British and a few New
Airforce Zealanders
Drawn by Anoma Pieris. Tett, A Postal History 1; NAA-UK, BRE Records, WO361/2230.
Work Camps 163
repurposed at Bukit Timah Racecourse. Where accommodation was

unavailable, prisoners built temporary huts with IJA-furnished materials.44
Linear timber barracks, built by Allied POWs under IJA orders at
Changi, show huts wider than the colonial archetypes, intended for thirty
persons rather than twenty.45 Each hut was 200x20 ft, with gable roofs
rising to 14-ft peaks and clad with woven attap screens with an eave gap
for ventilation. The key difference was an approximately 10-ft-wide
earthen corridor that ran between two knee-high 6.6-ft sleeping plat-
forms, instead of continuous timber flooring (Fig. 5.5). Shortage of
space also forced the prisoners to build two-to-three-tier bunk-beds,
elevating themselves in the rainy season when the floor turned to mud.
Camps at River Valley Road, Havelock Road and the Great World
amusement park were located in close proximity to one another on part
of the old Fraser and Neave factory site in facilities formerly housing
refugees. Havelock Road consisted of twenty to twenty-five 150-person
attap huts accommodating British POWs and Straits Settlements
Volunteer Force (European and Eurasian) personnel numbering around
5,000.46 Len Baynes described its filth and disorder, “after the comparative
cleanliness and discipline of Changi,” noting “the camp itself was a sea of
mud” because a “sluggish, dirty and oily” tidal river flowed past it.47 Their
latrines were shallow trenches, “which writhed with maggots,” but the huts,
“with a gangway up the centre, a platform each side well up off the ground,
and another similar one about four feet above that,” were better than most.
“We had about three feet of floor-space each, some on the top and some on
the bottom platform,” he wrote (Fig. 5.6). Fifty-person working parties
were sent from River Valley camp to the Fogden Brisbane sawmill factory,
the cabbage-patch camp and Alexandra Road to build godowns.
Whereas urban camps were hastily reinforced facilities, working parties
in residential districts occupied vacated colonial properties, in luxurious
colonial estates reserved for senior government servants. POWs building
Upper Thomson Road, the scenic route around the reservoir, were sta-
tioned at a dozen or so houses on Browning Road, including that of the
Chief Justice of Singapore. Spacious bungalows were cramped with a few
44
Grant, The Changi Book, 168.
45
Lachlan Grant, The Changi Book, 168. Based on 8th Division in captivity, Miscellaneous
records of the Australian Army Education Services at Changi, Australian War Memorial:
AWM 54, 554/11/33.
46
National Archives of Singapore (NAS): Oral History project, Cleaver Rowell Eber,
Accession no. 000186, Reel/Disc 10–14, 85–92. Allen, Peter Henry Gay, Accession
No. 001451.
47
WW2 People’s War, An archive of World War 2 memories, BBC, “The Will to Live,”
chap. 13, The River Valley Road POW Camp, Len (Snowie) Baynes, 15 October 2014,
www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/56/a2128556.shtml.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5.5 Interior and exterior views of the 100-m hut at Changi POW
Camp, 1942–5. As depicted by Murray Griffin (a); photographed by
John Rosson (b). Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra,
ART 26492 and PO4485.042
Work Camps 165
Fig. 5.6 Jack Chalker, study for “Interior of the artist’s hut, Havelock
Road Labour Camp.” Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra,
ART91805
hundred personnel, sleeping cheek-by-jowl with “no room to stretch, no

wardrobes, no furniture.”48 Working parties were noted at: Adam Park,
Adam Road, Caldecott Road, Farrer Park, Reformatory Road (Clementi
area), Tanjong Pagar, Telok Blangah and Normanton Road. Both scav-
enging and infrastructure works took POWs deeper into rural areas like
Tanjong Rhu, Pasir Panjang, Bukit Panjang, Nee Soon and Loyong.
Islands like Pulau Brani, Pulau Damar (Laut) and Pulau Blakan Mati
were at the edges of this geography (Map 5.3).49
Knowledge of these spaces is time-sensitive and fragmentary, because
POWs on work assignments passed through numerous camps. Australian
signalman Keith Wilson moved from Changi’s British Barracks to Adam
Park to bury corpses of soldiers who had died during battle. He next cut
sod for a Japanese golf course. Wilson lived under a bungalow raised on
stub foundations, because the interior was intolerably congested as other
48
NAS: Oral history, Cyril Gilbert, Accn no. 002964/2 Disc 1. 11–19 and Stanley Bryant-
Smith, No. 002613, 17–18.
49
Tett, A Postal History, 28.
Based on NA-UK: WO 252/1362, 38, 18, 37, 32; CO 1047_964_002; BL: 60010(1) HIND 1073 North Sheet (1) Second Edition 1945, NAS: SP002116,
Singapore 1945, NLS: SP006350 and Papers and photographs of Warrant Officer Edward Frederick Doughty RAMC 1921 to 1971, RAMC 1867-Box 393,
Museum of Military Medicine, UK.
Map 5.3 POW and internment camps, Singapore: Kranji POW Camp, Nee Soon Camp, Pulau Blakang Mati (top left to
right), Adam Park and Adam Road, Buller Camp, and River Valley Road, Havelock Road and Great World camps
(bottom left to right). Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule, based on the numerous indicated sources. Retraced with
permission from the Museum of Military Medicine, UK
Work Camps 167
buildings on that estate.50 He prepared the ground for a Shinto shrine at

Bukit Timah Hill, the Syonan Chureito: a timber pillar memorializing fallen
Japanese, with a wooden cross for Allied soldiers behind it.51 A second
shrine, the Syonan Jinja by MacRitchie Reservoir, was designed by Major
Yasuji Tamura after the famous Ise Grand Shrine in Japan, and constructed
by Japanese carpenters, while Australian POWs built a road, bridge and
entrance steps leading to it. The monument, depicted on a 15-cent stamp,
was enshrined on 15 February 1943 (Fig. 5.7).52 Singapore’s Asian com-
munities had to pay homage at these monuments on the anniversary of the
Allied defeat.53 Kevin Blackburn notes that these shrines were vehicles of
wartime ideology and propaganda: “the militarists used State Shintoism to
uphold an imperial regime.”54 The Syonan Jinja was planned to eventually
have fifteen square kilometers (5.7 square miles) of surrounding park and
sporting facilities, as the principal shrine outside Japan.55 Its stadiums and
exhibition pavilions were intended for programs disseminating imperial
propaganda. These plans never materialized.
POW movements can be spatialized as layers across a single site like
Adam Park, excavated by battlefield archeologist Jon Cooper, for remnants
of regimental heraldry and technology.56 Built to house Municipal Council
and government town planning body - Singapore Improvement Trust
(SIT) employees, the estate was caught in the three-day battle between
the First Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment and the Japanese 41st
Fukuyama Regiment in mid-February 1942. Two months later it was
converted to a temporary camp for Australian POWs, including Wilson,
ordered to build the two shrines.57 The POWs converted the damaged
bungalows into a surgery, dentistry, canteen, orderly room, administration
building and operating theater, and divided interior rooms into sleeping
quarters, with a chapel on the upper floor of No. 11, a damaged black-and-
white bungalow. Once the shrines were completed in October 1942, they
departed to build the Burma-Thai railway or overseas to Japan.
50
Keith Wilson, You’ll Never Get off the Island: Prisoner of War, Changi, Singapore,
February 1942–August 1945 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 18.
51
Ibid., 18–19; NAS, “A shrine and Pagoda for Syonan,” Syonan Shimbun, 8 May 1942, 6.
52
He was the commander of the Japanese 5th Division’s Engineers Regiment.
53
NAS: “Shinto Shrine on Singapore Island,” Straits Times, 17 October 1946, 6.
54
Kevin Blackburn, “Heritage site, war memorial, and tourist stop: the Japanese Cemetery
of Singapore, 1891–2005,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society,
80:1 (June 2007): 17–39, 30.
55
Kevin Blackburn, “The Japanese war memorials of Singapore: monuments of commem-
oration and symbols of Japanese imperial ideology,” Southeast Asia Research, 7:3 (1999):
321–40, 324–5.
56
Jon Cooper, Tigers in the Park: The Wartime Heritage of Adam Park (Singapore: The
Literary Centre, 2016).
57
Ibid., 255.
Fig. 5.7 Syonan Jinja Shrine, as represented on 15-cent stamp. Issued

by the Japanese Occupation administration of Syonan-To in 1943.
A. Pieris collection
Wilson was fortunate to be allowed to stay on in Singapore. He occu-

pied a hut built for the RAF on Sime Road, and was trucked in daily to
warehouses on the wharves. At Changi cantonment he lived at house
No. 208, Selarang Barracks, and later in a temporary timber hut in the
Garden and Wood area nearby. When working on the aerodrome, a major
project engaging POWs, and later at the camp cookhouse, he lived inside
and outside Changi Prison.58
The camp population’s depletion due to the distribution of overseas
working parties halted many recreational activities. Facilities changed their
functions and were gradually dismantled, until the POWs returned to
Changi Prison in 1943. Toward the final years of internment, all capable
men, like Wilson, were sent to work on Changi airfield.59 Russel Braddon
describes “Digging out the white, gritty, glaring face of that hill, shovelling
58
Wilson, You’ll Never Get off the Island: the eight chapters are named after these different
locations.
59
Camps for Indian POWs 169
it into skips, pushing the skips into the other side of the strip and emptying
them onto the swampy fringe – gradually filling in and levelling.”60 He
writes of heat exposure, deficiency diseases, sores and fatigue. Returning
overseas working parties redeployed on this project occupied temporary
facilities that sprouted around the prison, including fifteen new huts, seven
kitchens, chapel sanctuaries, canteens, workshops, stores libraries, etc.61
Camps for Indian POWs

POW environments for Indian POWs (InPOWs) are a neglected feature of
this broader geography and distinct from those of other Allied troops.
Regiments from India, arriving in Singapore at the outbreak of World War
II, fought on the Malayan mainland defending the causeway and
Sembawang. They were housed in wooden hutments at Tyersall Park.
Following British capitulation, approximately 38,000 Indian troops under
the Malayan Command became prisoners of the Japanese.62 But their
loyalties were split by the nascent nationalism being fought for at home
during the 1920s and 1930s, where the All-India Muslim League supported
the British while the Indian National Congress demanded independence,
and several leaders were imprisoned for the war’s duration. Charismatic
nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bhose collaborated with the Japanese.
Faced with the choice of volunteering for the collaborating Indian National
Army (INA) or being incarcerated as POWs, some 20,000 joined up under
Captain Mohan Singh.63 The INA’s Rani of Jhansi Regiment, a few hun-
dred women, trained in the former colonial Bras Basah jail complex.64
InPOWs were split by INA loyalty.
The seven camps for Indian Army personnel in Singapore were at Nee
Soon, Bidadari, Seletar, Tyersall Park, Buller, Tengah Aerodrome and
Kranji, including Kranji Hospital. They were administered by Indian
officers who had joined the INA. Those reluctant to join up were separ-
ated, subjected to repeated recruitment drives and, upon refusal, concen-
trated, penned in by rank and punished.65 Port Dickson in Malaya was
60
Russell Braddon, The Naked Island (London: Werner Lauries, 1952), 233.
61
Grant, The Changi Book, 170.
62
Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable
Fortress (New York: Routledge, 2004), 188; note the total strength of regulars was
37,191, with 18 Indian battalions and 727 Indian volunteers.
63
G. J. Douds, “Indian POWs in the Pacific, 1941–45,” in eds. Blackburn and Hack,
Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia, 74.
64
Vera Hildebrand, Women at War: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment
(New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2016).
65
Brig. Jasbir Singh, Escape from Singapore (New Delhi; Frankfort, IL: Lancer Publishers,
2010), 47–9: an account of his father, Capt. Balbir Singh, and two other Indian POW
captains, Pritam Singh and G. S. Parab.
also designated as a camp for Indians and 8,000 were sent from Singapore
to New Guinea.66 British officers of the Indian Divisions were incarcer-
ated at Selarang and Birdwood camps.
Nee Soon, a series of aging barracks built to accommodate 3,000, was
pressed into housing 22,000 InPOWs. There were four to five rows of
sleeping spaces to each room, and water supply and latrines were inad-
equate, creating a “perennial stench.”67 Subsoil water stood in craters
caused by heavy bombardment, breeding countless mosquitoes.
Dysentery spread quickly. Unlike Changi prisoners, who sometimes
received tinned meat or fish, the fare for InPOWs was largely wheat,
rice and lentils. Their predicament worsened because of Japanese indif-
ference and INA guard brutality.68
The Indian Annual Register for 1945 carries trials of INA members,
detailing coercion and resistance in the camps.69 Muslims and Gurkhas
were often singled out for punishment, for refusal to join the INA. At
Kranji Camp in August 1942, 300 Muslim POWs were shot, and some
killed.70 The Bidadari Camp’s most obdurate Gurkhas were set upon and
bayoneted in September 1942. Several Gurkha regiments were concen-
trated in Buller Camp, accommodating 7,000–10,000 InPOWs.
The first year of captivity was a period of feverish activity, repairing
war damage, sorting out loyalists and moving between camps. As the
Japanese embarked on major construction projects, these movements
spanned outwards to major roads, railways and airfields. Non-volunteer
InPOWs were sent on work assignments alongside their Allied counter-
parts, building or repairing aerodromes at Seletar, Sembawang and
Kallang. Nee Soon POWs were sent to a Bukit Timah Road fatigue
camp, where, with 4,000 men, including Australians, they quarried and
loaded stones for the Tengha Airfield. Work camps were secured with
fences and searchlights.71 Indian officer Capt. Dharghalkar, from the
Cavalry regiment, moved from Nee Soon to Buller Camp and then to
Bidadari, before being sent to Thailand on a working party.72 He spoke
of beatings and continuous labor without rest or medical attention,
suggesting that InPOWs suffered most at Indian hands. Split by wartime
loyalties and nascent anticolonial nationalism, which the Japanese
exploited through the INA, InPOWs felt the trauma of coercion acutely,
66
Peter Stanley, “‘Great in adversity’: Indian POWs in New Guinea,” Journal of the
Australian War Memorial, www.awm.gov.au/journal/j37/indians.asp.
67
Singh, Escape from Singapore, 54. 68 Ibid., 52, 59.
69
N. N. Mitra, ed., The Indian Annual Register, July–December 1945, vol. II (Calcutta:
Annual Register Office).
70
Ibid., 226. 71 Singh, Escape from Singapore, 60.
72
Mitra, The Indian Annual Register, Proceedings of the first trial, 2 November 1945, Capt.
Dhargalkar’s Evidence, 221.
Further Legacies of Encampment 171
with pressures intensified according to ethnicity, religion and rank.

Their derelict camps, shown in video footage of Lord Louis
Mountbatten’s September 1945 post-surrender tour, suggest treatment
far worse than of the European POWs.73 Their postwar repatriation to
India, and poor recognition of their service in Singapore, meant that
very little was known of their suffering.
Further Legacies of Encampment

This chapter adopted a different lens for understanding wartime
Singapore, intimating that precarious and temporary domicile was foun-
dational to the island’s postwar and postcolonial history. It ends in an
effort at tracing how militarization, intensified by conflict, was domesti-
cated in the war’s aftermath. Central to this argument are accounts given
so far of ordinary structures repurposed for military uses. In their conver-
sion to camps, their exceptionality as colonial facilities was applied to an
even more sinister purpose. The norms and forms of these temporary
facilities extended into the postwar period, when the disciplinary charac-
ter of militarized systems became pervasive.
The IJA surrendered to Supreme Allied Commander (Southeast Asia)
Lord Louis Mountbatten, at the Singapore (City Hall) Municipal
Building on 12 September 1945, two weeks after official surrender to
General Douglas MacArthur aboard US battleship Missouri.74 The sur-
rendered Japanese Service Personnel were redistributed into concentra-
tion camps, to various work assignments in former military areas and to
outlying Riau archipelago islands, to await repatriation to Japan. These
changes coincided with the more generalized upheavals of the postwar
period, caused by dissolution of the military penal environment and
resumption of British control. War-crimes trials were held at eight loca-
tions in Singapore, including the Supreme Court, Victoria Theatre,
YMCA building, Goodwood Park Hotel and Changi Prison.75 Fifty-
nine of the 131 cases tried dealt with POW abuse and neglect in prisons
and camps. The convicted Japanese officers or civilian personnel were
held and executed at Outram Road and Changi Prison in 1948.76
73
IWM: JFU 318, “The Mountbattens visit Singapore POWs, 13 September 1945,” Video
and Film archive.
74
On 2 September 1945.
75
Singapore War Crimes Trials, Singapore National Heritage Board, www
.singaporewarcrimestrials.com.
76
Vernon Cornelius-Takahama, Pearls Hill Prison, Singapore Infopedia, Singapore
Government, http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_129_2005-01-25
.html.
Japanese war criminals were similarly incarcerated in prisons and prison

camps throughout Southeast Asia.77
Demobilization and repatriation did not remove military presence in
Singapore. Tensions between the colonial rulers and their subjects con-
tinued after the war, invigorated by the power assumed by guerrilla
fighters and unease caused by wartime abandonment by the British.
The Indonesia National Revolution, a four-year struggle, ended the
Netherlands East Indies’ colonial administration. This period was cha-
otic, with Japanese, British and Dutch forces ranged against the
Republican forces on different war fronts, and Dutch soldiers billeted
en route in some of the Singapore camps. The Malayan Emergency,
a conflict between Malayan Communist Party guerrillas and
Commonwealth forces, erupted during this period (1948–60), and
Britain acted forcefully against the perceived Communist threat.
Emergency powers allowed detention without trial of individuals sus-
pected of anticolonial actions, largely rural Chinese influenced by the
Malayan Communist Party. As noted by Karl Hack, over 2 million sup-
porters of the anti-Japanese guerrillas became the epicenter of the strug-
gle, subject to British counterinsurgency strategies.78 The year 1948 saw
army sweeps of villages seen as guerrilla bases, burning of houses and
forced detention and subordination under emergency regulations, creat-
ing a new punitive legacy. Large numbers were sent to detention camps
for screening and deportation, seemingly continuing wartime segregation
and Kenpeitai practices in dealing with the former enemy. The camp
system accommodated 14,000 at its peak. By the early 1950s, the New
Villages (a euphemism for these sites of forced removal and detention)
had replaced the detention camps. Lai Chee Kien notes that a White
Paper released in 1952 accounted for the uprooting of 423,000 men,
women and children, in 410 new villages.79 This journey through eviction,
detention and settlement, aided by militarization and punitive legislation,
produced the conventions through which state violence was masked.
The impact on Singapore was greater militarization as a regional base
and garrison island: the largest Royal Navy base outside the United
Kingdom. Whereas the earlier-dispersed facilities had precipitated sub-
urbanization, the new model reverted to fortified cantonments,
77
NA-UK: WO 357/5, 1946–8. Convicted Japanese war criminals held in prison in Borneo,
Changi Prison, Civil Prison.
78
Karl Hack, “Detention, deportation and resettlement: British counterinsurgency and
Malaya’s rural Chinese, 1948–60,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
43:4 (2015): 611–40.
79
Chee Kien Lai, “Concrete / concentric nationalism: the architecture of independence in
Malaysia, 1945–1969,” PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2005,
chapter 2, “Landscapes of the Nation,”48.
Further Legacies of Encampment 173
reminiscent of early European colonists’ defensive forts. Demobilization

and redistribution of wartime properties, and demilitarization of former
military estates, was accompanied by expansion of these segregated
facilities.80 The surge of military activity drove up the price of labor,
contracting and materials in the building industry; in fact, Murfett et al.
observe, “the expansion of the facilities reached a point where the military
presence became a pillar of the local economy” and by “1952 their
combined total of local workers employed exceeded 30,000, making the
presence of the bases, and labour relations there, significant economic,
social and political questions in Singapore.”81 Base employment pro-
vided skills training that underwrote many modern processes paving the
way from colony to independent nation-state.82
Singapore became part of the Federated Malay States in 1963 and,
following expulsion in 1965, seceded to form an independent city-state.
Independence brought its own conflicts, most notably during Konfrontasi
(confrontation), when Indonesia, suspicious of the new federation’s colo-
nial backing, launched a series of cross-border raids between 1963 and
1966. Commonwealth troops were deployed in defense operations in
Malaysia and Borneo, further justifying British military presence in the
region as a defensive and peacekeeping force. But this role proved unsus-
tainable given the burden it placed on the British economy and Britain’s
need to turn to Europe and the NATO alliance. A decision to cut back on
British armed forces precipitated their withdrawal from Asia. The
announcement was made in 1967, and some 50,000 personnel including
civilians had pulled out by 1971.83
Loh Kah Seng declares that the pullout dismantled Singapore’s largest
industry (approximately fifty-six sites occupying one-tenth of the land area
and contributing to one-fifth of the Gross Domestic Product) and the
livelihoods of one-sixth of the island’s labor force.84 It proved catalytic for
national development, involving reeducation of labor through vocational
training, institution of national military service and acceleration of industri-
alization, infrastructure and urban renewal strategies to fill the economic
shortfall. The resultant political anxiety and consternation forged a new kind
of unity. Faced with the need to fill the void with a population under
2 million and the economic cost of a standing army, conscription was
80
Probert, The History of Changi, 97–8.
81
Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans, 370, 373. 82 Ibid., 370.
83
“Britain to pull-out troops by mid-1970s” (reported 19 July 1967, Straits Times),
31 December 1999, 38.
84
Loh Kah Seng, “The British military withdrawal from Singapore and the anatomy of
a catalyst,” in Singapore in Global History, eds. Derek Heng and S. M. K. Aljunied
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 195–213, 197.
introduced, a move aimed at nurturing national consciousness in

Singaporeans whose unity was essential to national prosperity, and in par-
ticular among the Chinese majority, culturally resistant to soldiering.85
A citizen army based on up to two and a half years’ national service limited
related costs, and servicemen could reenter and benefit the economy after
serving.86 A five-power defense agreement with Malaysia, Britain, Australia
and New Zealand in 1971 established a model for defense cooperation on
a more equal basis, in case of regional unrest.87 Land made available from
decommissioned military bases created opportunities for commercial and
industrial development, critical to the newly independent nation.
Disciplining Dwelling
The uprooting of colonial authority during the Japanese interregnum had
disrupted the city and its institutions, disassembling their constitutive
materialities. The postwar period and Malayan Emergency saw the
renegotiation of this spatial terrain, relinquished by departing colonials,
to competing nationalist factions. The prolonged decades of post-disaster
upheaval produced the ideal scenario for state-organized national devel-
opment via a new postcolonial tabula rasa.
Although discussed as military camp facilities, the carceral geography
described in this chapter covered barracks, institutions, private dwellings
and housing estates, the last proving critical for Singapore’s postwar recon-
struction. As in Europe, planned urban renewal during the 1950s
expanded social-housing provision, initiated by the SIT.88 Estimating as
many as 400,000 squatters in 1954, SIT formed a “New Towns Working
Party” modeled on Britain’s new towns.89 The island’s first public-housing
projects, distinct from military or government employee-housing estates,
were built. Christopher Tremewan uses the term “working class barrack”
to link slum clearance for housing provision to the kinds of state violence
typically associated with the military.90
85
The National Service (Amendment) Act, 1967, Government Gazette, Republic of
Singapore, No. 6, 17 March 1967.
86
Bernard Chen, Minister of State (Defense), “The Singapore armed forces a total per-
spective,” in The Singapore Armed Forces: Singapore Ministry of Defense Public Affairs
Department (Singapore: Times Printers, 1988), 10–14.
87
Singapore National Library, Singapore: The First Ten Years, 94.
88
The Trust was established in 1927 by the Singapore Improvement Ordinance.
89
Calvin Low, 10-Stories: Queenstown through the Years (Singapore: Education and
Outreach Division, National Heritage Board, with Central Singapore Community
Development Council and Queenstown Citizens’ Consultative Committee, 2007), 41,
in reference to Housing and Development Board Annual Report (Singapore: 1960).
90
Christopher Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 45–73.
Disciplining Dwelling 175
The earliest satellite town built by SIT, Queenstown, so-named after

Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, was built in an area formerly
occupied by Hakka village Ying Fu Lut and Hokkien village Boh Beh
Kang.91 It was designed for five planned neighborhoods: Princess Estate,
Duchess Estate, Commonwealth Estate, Tanglin Halt and Queens Close;
Princess Estate, completed in 1956,92 partly occupied the site of decom-
missioned British military Buller Camp, along Alexandra Road.93 When
it opened in May 1953, after a ten-month construction period, the estate
had 222 low-cost two-bedroom flats designed in 21 three-story blocks.
The spirit of decolonization occurring elsewhere in the region was
resisted in street naming, including Strathmore Ave., Margaret Rd. and
Clarence Lane.94 In fact, British rule in Singapore ended in 1963, five
years before Queenstown was completed, converting the estate into
a celebrated achievement for SIT’s successor from 1960 onwards,
Singapore’s Housing Development Board.95 The town had 19,372 dwell-
ing units in multistory apartment complexes, a marked departure from
the previous era’s salubrious bungalow estates (Fig. 5.8).96 This was
a “total environment” with infrastructure, amenities and many iconic
landmarks including the Queenstown Remand Prison, built in 1966.97
The Singapore government’s effort at gaining political legitimacy
through public-housing provision has been analyzed in many sources
often critical of the structural violence that accompanied the process.
Tremewan suggests tendencies of state repression, enabled by the military
presence, as well as forced resettlement and suburbanization inherited
from the British.98 Rather than utilizing crown land in the British bungalow
belt housing wealthy civil servants, the government disrupted local settle-
ments, often opposition strongholds, Loh argues: “Formerly ‘servants of
the British Empire’, residents in these new housing neighbourhoods were
being socialized as worker-citizens of the post-pull-out state.”99
***
91
Low, 10-Stories, 9–23. 92 Ibid., 99–105.
93
“New homes for hundreds,” The Times, 27 May 1953, 5, Microfilm Reel No. NL3304,
National Library Board Libraries, Singapore; see also “Proposed Development at
Alexandra Rd – Buller Camp – Princess Margaret Estate, 1952,” SIT, HDB 1080, NAS.
94
NAS: SIT 79, 26 January 1952, Proposed dev. at Princess Margaret Estate, Buller Camp.
95
Aline K. Wong and Stephen H. K. Yeh, eds., Housing a Nation: 25 Years of Public Housing
in Singapore (Singapore: Maruzen Asia for Housing & Development Board, 1985).
96
Singapore Housing Development Board (SHDB), First Decade in Public Housing
1960–69, 1970.
97
Low, 10-Stories, 99. The prison was demolished in 2010.
98
Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control, 45.
99
Loh, “The British Military Withdrawal from Singapore . . .,” 212.
Fig. 5.8 Aerial view of Queenstown, Singapore, 1944. Photograph by

Singapore Improvement Trust, National Archives, UK, INF10/324/27
In this final stage of the modernizing process initiated with British and
Singaporean collaboration, postwar residents were extracted from the
easy sociality and unregimented workday of kampung lives and inserted
into a global industrial economy and an alienating domestic grid. The
population ratios at independence would be replicated in each new apart-
ment neighborhood as an affirmation of the pluralist polity.100 Breaking
down prior communal ontologies, isolated nuclear families were ready for
forms of individuation demanded by future citizenship. This grand social-
engineering project, much valorized, critiqued and debated in academia,
would discipline and reeducate the local population, while national ser-
vice introduced in 1967 would militarize the male members of the
postcolony.101 Furthermore, by militarily casting men as defending
their country and protecting homes, and women as civilian recipients of
their protection, Singaporeans were gendered as agents and dependents
in a hierarchy of value. These differentiations coincided with the creation
100
Chua Beng Huat, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (London:
Routledge, 1995), 109.
101
Ibid.
Disciplining Dwelling 177
of barrack domesticities, neighborhoods identified by a three-digit num-

bering system with on average one hundred units per block, leased for
ninety-nine years to homeowners. The city was simultaneously repro-
duced as an urban cantonment defensively prepared for a regional threat.
The adjacencies between militarization and urban planning, first realized
when designing the Changi cantonment, reached new heights in the
Singapore version of Le Corbusier’s unrealized functionalist utopia, the
Radiant City.102 By the end of the 1970s, 70 percent of Singaporeans
occupied multistory public-housing apartment blocks, rising to 84 per-
cent by 1987.103 Other forms of accommodation were dwarfed and
forgotten as these became the primary modalities for nation building.
Several features of the barrack housing model, such as rigid repetitive
lines, uniform architecture, identification by numbers and linear rect-
angular block form, show how key modernist tenets align with militaristic
goals. The introduction of underground and aboveground civil-defense
shelters, the latter as rentable neighborhood shelters, during the 1980s
reiterated this relationship, as a defensive articulation of the very units of
sovereign belonging.104 Underlying these processes was real concern for
the “Total Defense” of Singapore given its small size, small population
and geographic vulnerability sandwiched between potentially hostile
(Muslim-majority) neighbors. By the 1990s, the household shelter,
a windowless pantry-cum-storeroom with thickened steel-reinforced con-
crete walls and ceiling, was being introduced.105 They were often used as
bedrooms for family maids or neighborhood-level minimarts.
Unlike Australian carceral environments, which were dismantled or
repurposed for liminal functions at the threshold of citizenship, as border
spaces rather than homes, Singapore’s barrack environments, especially
at Changi, outlasted the war. Changi Prison, discussed in the next chap-
ter, resumed its civil function of incarcerating criminals, whereas Changi
cantonment was reoccupied by the British and later by the Singapore
military forces, continuing its military associations. It was the barrack
model, rather than its architecture, that served as an antecedent for new
forms of domestication that were military in origin. Although colonial
military estates were recognized for their acclimatized models of private
102
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: J. Rodcker, 1931).
103
Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 303.
104
Housing and Development Board Annual Report, 1989/90, SHDB, 18–19. Civil
Defense Shelter Act of 1998 stipulates a range of shelter types to be adopted in the
event of a state of emergency. Civil Defense Shelter Act 12 of 1997, revised 1998, and
the Building Maintenance and Strata Management Act 2004, https://sso.agc.gov.sg/
Act/CDSA1997#P1II-.
105
Edward Lewine, “It’s a bomb shelter,” New York Times, 10 September 2006, www
.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/realestate/its-the-bomb-shelter.html.
housing, desirable to expatriates for their colonial ambience and settings,

these were not typologies that resonated with populations who belonged
to a former subject race. In his celebrated memoirs, then-prime-minister
Lee Kuan Yew suggests the link between the “citizen soldier” and the
provision of universal housing: “If a soldier’s family did not own their
home, he would soon conclude he would be fighting to protect the
properties of the wealthy.”106 Housing, in his view, gave “every citizen
a stake in the country and its future” and ensured national stability.107
Through housing provision for every citizen, owned by the state but
leased to individual family units, the violence implicit in colonial environ-
ments became domesticated and normalized.
106
Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First World: The Singapore Story 1965–2000
(Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), 117.
107
Ibid., 116.
6 The Colonial Prison
Anoma Pieris
By the early twentieth century the penal systems associated with colonial
prisons were important symbols of modernization prominent throughout
Asia, their permanent architecture frequently dominating the built envir-
onment, and their proximity to military cantonments, as in the case of
Singapore’s Changi Prison, adding to the adjacent cantonments’ authori-
tative presence in ways immediately useful for the occupying forces. The
Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) in Asia requisitioned several colonial
prisons alongside other military and institutional facilities in Singapore,
Borneo, Johor, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Rangoon and Taiping, in an
interconnected carceral network linked with prisoner-of-war (POW)
camps. With imposing edifices and modern innovations in prison design,
their architecture embodied the curious coupling of regression and
enlightenment that accompanied the colonial project, attributes adopted
by the Japanese in Meiji-period prison designs. Huang and Lee argue that
the introduction of modern prisons in East Asia played an important role
in avoiding semi-colonization, demonstrating reform and realizing sover-
eignty against European and US diplomatic pressures, but also in their
turn becoming tools for Japan’s experiments in colonization and oppres-
sion with strategies similar to those adopted in European colonies.1
Prisons as permanent structures typically continued their uses beyond
the war’s duration, returning to their civil functions and reformative
agendas, while also retaining wartime associations. Complexities created
by accumulative associations across political regime changes have proven
challenging when colonial-period institutions are considered for heritage
listings. When compared with wartime destruction and recuperation of
the militarized built environment, described in Chapter 5, the colonial
prison presents a relatively static genealogy of an architectural presence
that maintains its carceral function and association over time.
Chapter 6 introduces Singapore’s prison buildings, Outram Road Jail, or
Pearl’s Hill civil prison, and particularly the (in)famous Changi Prison, as
prominent features in the island’s colonial and then Japanese occupation
1
Huang and Lee, Heritage, Memory, and Punishment, 5.
179
landscape, as the only buildings that retained their carceral functions after
the war. Designed for segregating European from Asian criminals, they
became holding places for European and Eurasian (colonial) civilian
internees and POWs during Japanese occupation, and in the case of
internees before relocation to Sime Road, a starkly different hutted camp
facility. Unlike the POW workforce, internees were kept out of sight in
confinement and thus were acutely aware of their surroundings. Focusing
on accounts of elderly men, women and children, which offer deeper
intersectional insights into their vulnerability, this chapter explores the
wartime history of Singapore’s last colonial prisons.
Their temporal persistence as carceral facilities – when compared with
the more ephemeral POW camp sites – raised one of them, Changi Prison,
as a representative site of Singapore’s wartime story and a commemorative
space for largely British and Australian war veterans and ex-POWs who
were held there or in Singapore during 1942–5. This unique distinction
was prolonged through the postwar creation of an adjacent museum and
chapel that gave greater prominence to wartime incarceration than to the
experiences of the much larger criminal population that had passed
through the prison gates. Popular accounts of the war in Singapore likewise
favored experiences of Allied soldiers or colonial civilians held captive in
the prisons, over the experiences of the Asian subject population outside
their walls (over 96 percent of a population of 550–600,000), left by the
British to the mercy of the IJA.2 The racial hierarchies and internal divi-
sions described in Chapter 5, which inhibited a common collective mem-
ory of the war, and the prison’s ignominious reputation as a penal
institution contributed in part to its demolition in 2004.
Social memories attach to physical objects, including architectural works
predating and outlasting wartime events. The longevity of artifacts is
a potential basis for linking politically disparate histories of different custo-
dian groups and anchoring them in geographies. Across an artifact’s time-
line, we can construct genealogies of occupation and use. Antithetical
approaches to sovereignty may intersect in an object’s or space’s lifetime,
reflecting political changes in a settler-society, from European, to Japanese,
to postcolonial administrations, in the case of many colonial buildings in
Southeast Asia. By focusing on a single artifactual history, including the
wartime changes to its intended penal program, we gain insights into how
architecture might be historicized. This approach is useful for heritage
nominations of sites or buildings that focus on their physical history.
Very little is known of the design and construction of Changi Prison,
despite its being feted as unique and exceptional for its time. An account of
2
Saw, “Population trends in Singapore,” 36–49, 39, 41.
Prison Design in Singapore 181
its conception as Singapore’s last colonial prison provides the preface to its
wartime repurposing. Unlike the adjacent British military cantonment,
which held Allied troops as POWs, the prison’s functional transformation
to a holding place for European colonial civilians and POWs altered its
intended brief, where, like many colonial institutions of the era, the alloca-
tion of spaces reflected colonial privileges or the subordinate role of
“native” populations – in this case, Asian settlers. This inversion of author-
ity tested the limits of the physical spaces by exposing the racialized bases
both of prison design and of representations of wartime histories. While the
story of internment serves as a critical subtext for understanding the prison
environment, it is inflected by these biases identifying the British colonial
civilian population and Allied military forces as the main stakeholders for
this history and territory, although the former were small and the latter
there temporarily. When reading their accounts we need to be aware that
placement in a facility meant to incarcerate Asians amplified European
internees’ humiliation. Stripped of entitlements and reduced to the status
of “native” criminals, their degradation was aggravated by the systematic
erosion of material forms of dignity, such as clothing, amenities, diet and
everyday comforts, as well as greater denials of freedom, space, time,
privacy and health. Their loss of privilege inflected their perception of the
facility and colored the several hundred records through which (in the
absence of accounts by Singaporean criminals) our understanding of
the prison has been gained. Consequently, the history of wartime incarcer-
ation has eclipsed the longer institutional histories.
Prison Design in Singapore

As outlined by many scholars, colonial prisons were exceptional build-
ings, with modern designs of confinement already tested in Europe and
America and introduced in the colonies decades after their conception, as
part of a continuing genealogy of institutions aimed at discipline and
reform.3 This genealogy has resonance for Singapore, which had
imported Indian transportees since 1825, using their labor to build the
settlement’s roads, infrastructure and institutions over the next five dec-
ades until, because of protests by residents regarding their potential
volatility, “transportation” ceased. But this meant that, like Australia,
Singapore was in part conceived as a penal colony, and the prison was
always a permanent, imposing feature at the rear of the European town,
larger than any other religious or administrative complex. The ubiquity of
3
Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Asia,
Africa and Latin America (London: Hurst & Co., 2007).
penal labor employed by the municipal and public works departments

(PWD) in worksites across the island shadowed everyday urban life until
the late nineteenth century. After 1867, with no more transportees, the
prisoners were largely from the regional settler population.
Singapore never adopted Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. A design for
a five-winged radial prison with three-story cellular wards, proposed in
1878 by prison Superintendent J. F. A. McNair, was abandoned for
a more conservative pavilion plan.4 Pearl’s Hill (later Outram Road)
Prison was designed by McNair and completed with PWD convict
labor in 1882, expanding the site of the original civil jail (Map 6.1).5 It
contained the first cellular wards in Singapore: linear, detached two-story
structures with corrugated iron partitions, laid out in two parallel lines,
while all the other facilities, including European and “native” hospitals,
womens’ criminal and civil prisons, and industrial workshops, were
arranged in perpendicular rows behind it.6 The pavilion prison plan was
an architectural innovation and test site for acclimatized early twentieth-
century institutional typologies alongside military barracks, hospitals and
government housing.7 It also proved more conducive to racial segregation
of Europeans from “Asiatic” prisoners or staff, manifesting the principle
of separation very differently from the cellular panopticon. Sixty
Europeans, receiving preferential treatment tied to colonial property
and privilege, were afforded individual furnished cells, interior bathing
facilities and toilets, and engaged in stone-breaking and drilling, out of
sight of the other prisoners in a separated enclosure. “Natives” or Asian
settlers shared narrower cells in their men’s wards, with up to four
prisoners to each of the 180 cells.8 Women had a separate ward including
matron’s quarters. Separate dietary and religious requirements were
catered for – for example, the Chinese ate pork, unlike many Malays
and Indian Muslims, while some Hindu castes were vegetarians, distinc-
tions strictly adhered to in penal policy.9 Racialized divisions embodied in
many colonial institutions were intensified in Singapore’s prison designs
because of the predominantly settler population they serviced.
4
NA-UK: CO 273/95, SS 12710, Proposed criminal prison at Singapore, 349: thanks to
Jiat-Hwee Chang who alerted me to this document; CO 273/95ff, MR410, architectural
plans of the prison.
5
Walter Makepeace et al., eds., One Hundred Years of Singapore, vols. 1 and 2, reprint
(Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991; orig. pub., London: John Murray, 1921), 289.
6
NA-UK: CO 700/SS, Criminal Prison, Singapore 1881.
7
Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture.
8
National Library of Australia (NLA): 5203; Annual report on the Singapore Criminal
prison, for the year 1882, Council papers, Straits Times Weekly Issue, 7 June 1883, 7.
9
NLA: Straits Settlements Blue Book 1936, Prisons, 759–60.
Design and Construction of Changi Prison 183
Based on NA-UK: CO 1047_964_002, Map of Johore and Straits Settlements, 128/5 (1937), WO252/1362(17),
NAS: SP002116, Singapore, Malaya 1945, Survey Department Singapore.
Map 6.1 Outram Road Jail, Singapore. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,

Design and Construction of Changi Prison

By 1933, overcrowding and numerous escapes from Outram Road Jail
rendered it a “blot on the settlement,” with a daily average of 1,688 in an
800-person facility.10 The solution was a new penitentiary outside city
boundaries.11 Changi Prison, built in 1936 for $2,013,000 (at that time) at
the 11.5 milestone on Changi Road, was designed as a criminal prison, on
10
Newspaper SG (NSG): Singapore Daily News, 18 Jan. 1933, 6.
11
Robert L. Jarmon, ed., Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements, 1854–1941 (Slough:
Archive Editions, 1998), vol. 10, 1932–5. Report of the prison, 127.
the edge (4 miles distant) of the expansive military cantonment in the island’s
northeast.12 The new facility could accommodate 568 of the 900 prisoners in
Singapore. A suburb was planned around the prison for staff, employees and
those servicing the complex. Out of sight of the colonial gentry, afforded the
luxury of an expansive acreage, the complex of high walls and turrets, four-
story ward blocks and industrial workshops embodied the progressive mod-
ernity being institutionalized in the colonies, in an urban architecture
incongruous for its rural setting (Fig. 6.1). Its telephone-pole plan followed
innovations made by Edmund DuCane, the surveyor general of military
prisons and director of convict prisons who first tested a spatial configuration
of long corridors linking parallel pavilions, avoiding the “dank dark courts
and corners” (and triangulated spaces) of the radial, panoptic plan at
London’s Wormwood Scrubs, 1874–91.13 Changi Prison additionally
incorporated European advances in electrification and sewerage. The win-
dows of one block did not overlook the yard of another block, preventing
communication between prisoners of different classes.14 Already applied to
hospital designs in the tropics,15 including the Melaka General Hospital
(completed 1934) by government architect Frank Dorrington Ward
(1885–1972), the pavilion plan integrated functions emphasizing prisoners’
health, recreation, vocational training and spiritual lives.
Like its predecessor at Outram Road, the new prison was racially segre-
gated: one two-story cell block for Europeans, and two four-story cell
blocks for Asians, with separate workshops and yards.16 These were sup-
ported by kitchen and laundry blocks, a hospital block, and recalcitrant and
punishment blocks accommodated inside the prison walls. The “Asiatic”
cell blocks and service blocks had steel-framed structures, while other
buildings were constructed in reinforced concrete with hollow-block pan-
eling. The whole complex covered an area of nearly 13 acres, surrounded
by a 3,000-foot-long and 24-foot-high reinforced-concrete wall. Outside
the wall, the staff quarters were likewise graduated for Europeans and
Asians; the inclusion of a mosque, temple, school and clubhouse for
warders and their families, signaling their ethnic heterogeneity. As in
Outram Road Jail, cell sizes were graduated, and diet was differentiated
12
Probert, The History of Changi; NSG: “The new prison at Changi,” Sunday Tribune,
Singapore, 16 February 1936, 11, Reel no. NL 1445.
13
Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2000), 95–7.
14
Johnston, Forms of Constraint, 97, quoting E. F. DuCane, A Description of the Prison at
Wormwood Scrubs (London: Wormwood Scrubs, 1889), 5.
15
Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture, 97.
16
NA-UK: CO275/136, Straits Settlements Annual Departmental Reports 1934
(Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1935), 599; “HM convict prison, Changi,
Singapore,” The Malayan Architect, 8:4 (1936): 84–5.
Based on NA-UK: CO 1047_964_002, 128/5 (1937), Map of Johore and Straits Settlements, WO252/1362(16); WHE Neil, “Surveying under duress,” Empire Survey Review: 68:IX,
April 1948, 268-76.
Fig. 6.1 Changi Prison, Singapore. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule (left); Changi, Singapore Island, June 1953 showing rural
environs (right). Photographed by No. 1 (b) Squadron, RAAF. Australian War Memorial, PO2379.002
by race and religion, with “separate grille enclosures in the kitchen for each
nationality.”17 Extramural activities such as printing, book-binding, tailor-
ing, carpentry, laundry, weaving, shoemaking or basket-making, and the
selection of cooks, orderlies and clerks from upper-grade prisoners, empha-
sized reform through productive labor, frowned upon by then in Britain but
practiced in the colonies where labor exploitation was integral to racialized
governance and control.18 Given its greenfield location, farming and agri-
culture, impossible at Outram, expanded Changi Prison’s labor regime.
Unlike Outram Road Jail – built with convict labor – Changi was built by
Woh Hup (harmony-cooperation), a Chinese general-contracting outfit
with a growing reputation, supervised by PWD architect Dorrington
Ward.19 Their cooperation was symptomatic of the pressures urban expan-
sion placed on the government and municipality, and the post-1887 loss of
Indian transportees’ unfree labor. Ward, a Royal Engineer and son of an
architect from Hastings, appointed PWD chief architect 1928–39, was best
known for the impressive Kallang Air-terminal (1937) and Supreme Court
building (1939) for which he was honored in 1941.20 Similarities between
Changi and Lewes Prison in Sussex, such as the turreted entrance and
cruciform multistory complex, suggest that the prison most familiar to
Hastings’ natives has close parallels with Changi. From 1931 to 1933,
Ward and his architectural unit prepared the sketch designs, working
drawings and estimates for a hybrid plan, part cruciform, part telephone
pole, like other contemporaneous public institutions in the colony.21 The
reinforced-concrete structure was designed by the PWD’s London-trained
Eurasian civil engineer, W. J. C. Le Cain, formerly of Seah & Le Cain,
a firm known for its modern concrete buildings, who was also engineer for
the Supreme Court.22 The PWD Director was G. Sturrock.23 Although
a 1946 US Army report claimed the prison’s engineers to be Americans
who modeled it after New York State’s Sing Sing Prison, no evidence of
this was found in the period’s public works reports.24
17
NLA: Straits Settlements Blue Book (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1936), Prisons,
759–60; “Increased expenditure on public works,” Malaya Tribune, 12 December 1932, 2.
18
Jarmon, ed., Annual Reports, 1937, 70/277.
19
NLA: Straits Settlements Blue Book, 385, identifies William Gordon Stewart as the
Executive Engineer for Changi Prison.
20
NSG: “Eighteen Malayans receive honours,” Straits Times, 2 January 1941, 11.
21
See Annual Departmental Reports of the Straits Settlements, NA-UK: CO275/131,
1932, 1060; NA-UK: CO275/134, 1933, 435, 871, 876 and CO275/143, 1933, 493;
Jarmon, ed., Annual Reports, vol. 10, 1932–5, 18, 106, 163, 263.
22
“Read of the men who helped to build the new Supreme Court,” Straits Times,
6 August 1939, 8. Le Cain’s former business partner was Seah Eng Choe.
23
“Mr. G Sturrock Entertained,” Malaya Tribune, 9 April 1935, 9.
24
James L. Norwood and Emily L Shek, “Prisoner of war camps in areas other than the four
principal islands of Japan,” World War II Operational Documents, Ike Skelton
Design and Construction of Changi Prison 187
With the rapid escalation of military projects during the interwar

period, increasing numbers of local Chinese contractors were engaged
on government projects. Woh Hup, established by Hakka tin-miner-
turned-carpenter Yong Yit Lin from China’s Lantan village in northeast-
ern Guangdong Province (near Meixian), grew from a minor outfit into
a major contracting company. Working from its base on River Valley
Road, the company cut its teeth on Clifford Pier, as well as the infamous
Hill Street Police Station (built 1934), which was used as a holding area
during Kenpeitai interrogation. Both buildings were designed by
Dorrington Ward, and as advertised by Woh Hup, the company executed
a further $1,500,000 worth of work for the admiralty from 1936
onward.25 A trusted favorite, contracting for the military, air ministry,
PWD Singapore, Johore and the Federated Malay States, the firm was
able to distribute equipment costs across various simultaneous projects,
making it more competitive. Selected for the prison’s main and smaller
contracts, Woh Hup drew on traditional labor networks from southern
China and Hong Kong.26
Lee Sam, a skilled laborer from Guangdong like Yong, came via
Hong Kong with ten men from his southern village (Chonglou near
Kaiping) to join a labor gang at Changi.27 Sharing food and common
quarters in the Southbridge Road area (identified by him as Soi See Mun/
Water-deity gate), the team worked daily at the prison site from 7 am to
5 pm, along with other Cantonese- and Hakka-dialect workers, paid
according to a measure-and-pay system, where supervisors under the
main contractor oversaw sections of a major contract.28 Although highly
lucrative, at a daily rate of $1.10, the instability of this method meant pay
was irregular, sometimes as monthly installments, and entirely dependent
on the supervisor’s assessment of work quality.29 Lee recalls building the
Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library, https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/

digital/collection/p4013coll8/id/3035/rec/1.
25
Other important constructions included Clifford Pier, Hongkong and Shanghai Bank
headquarters, SCV Drill Hall, Office of the Protector of the Chinese, Pearl’s Hill
Barracks, Alexandra Officers Mess, Police Dept., Johore, Mental Hospital QRS,
Residency, Seremban and the Sembawang; NSG: Singapore Free Press and Mercantile
Advertiser, 14 February 1938, 4, Advertisements column, Woh Hup. The firm continued
to work on military and government facilities both before and after the war (National
Library Board, Singapore Memory Project: Memory of Andrew Tan, 2013, online).
26
NSG: “Changi Prison: List of local tenders,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile
Advertiser, 16 March 1934, 2. “An unbelievable act, in building a legacy: Woh Hup’s
90th Anniversary (1927–2017),” 90, in reference to editorial “Confession of Ignorance,”
Straits Times, 18 September 1934.
27
National Archives, Singapore (NAS), Oral history interviews, Lee Sam, Accn.
no. 000214, interviewed by Tan Beng Luan, 18 September 1982, Reel 2, 22–3.
28
NAS: Oral history interviews, Lee, Reel 3, 36.
29
NAS: Oral history interviews, Lee, Reel 3, 34.
brickwork on warders’ houses, pouring “Western cement” (concreting),

fixing iron grillwork to floors and building concrete tables, with few
opportunities for his carpentry skills.30 With its structural steel work
imported from England and hollow-concrete blocks, steel grills and sani-
tary fittings supplied locally, Changi Prison was substantially more
advanced than the masonry penal complexes preceding it. “Immense
electrically operated portcullis . . . the glare of powerful searchlights and
brilliance of electric lights of the porch” impressed the local spectators at
its opening.31 Despite its modern concrete-and-steel construction signal-
ing a break with building traditions, the prison remained a forceful for-
midable expression of racialized colonial authority.
A Divided Society
Singapore society on the eve of World War II was highly stratified, even
though higher ratios of Asian settlers to Europeans and the growing
affluence of Asian merchants and businessmen led to a blurring of spatial
and class boundaries and increasing representation of Asian interests by
their elites. Preeminent historian Mary Turnbull notes that, while oppor-
tunities were available to prominent Asians, mixing with Europeans and
interracial marriages were frowned upon.32 Although Asians might
advance through business or professional life, talented English-educated
Asians had little prospect of political or bureaucratic careers with racial
separation culturally and legally enforced, making racialization
a powerful disciplining tool for maintaining colonial power as white
privilege. Top-level administration was reserved for natural-born British
subjects of “pure” European descent on both sides. “The colonial regime
was snobbish, condescending, somewhat contemptuous, but benign,”
Turnbull noted.33 Military defeat and humiliation weakened many insti-
tutional structures that had rigidly maintained sociospatial hierarchies.
Erosion of civilian life had already commenced with the first air-raids and
related chaos over a two-month period prior to British capitulation, with
inflows and outflows of civilians, refugees and internees. Groups of enemy
nationals were dispatched via the St. John’s Island quarantine station to
overseas destinations. Some 295 German, Italian and Jewish refugees left for
Australia in September 1939, on HMT Queen Mary, and were interned at
Tatura Camp in Victoria. Japanese women and children were held at the
island from December 1941, while their menfolk were incarcerated at
30
NAS: Oral history interviews, Lee, Reel 3, 33–5.
31
NSG: “New Changi Gaol opens its doors,” Straits Times, 31 January 1937, 14.
32
Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 150. 33 Ibid., 150.
A Divided Society 189
Changi and Outram Road prisons, before their removal to India. By

February 1942, the British internment camp for Japanese civilians at New
Delhi’s Purana Qila (Red Fort) held 2,810, including 942 women and
children, mainly from Malaya and Rangoon.34 Civilian refugees in
Singapore were largely accommodated in religious institutions like
St. Joseph’s Church, St. Anthony’s Boys School, St. Andrew’s Cathedral35
and similar facilities, as their numbers swelled with incomers from
“upcountry” Malaya. Camps at River Valley and Towner roads (later for
POWs),36 at Serangoon Road, Kerbau Road and Race Course Road,37 and
the 3,500–4,000-person Gandhi camp at Coronation Road, Johore, were
purpose built to meet the growing need.38 Injured soldiers retreating from
fierce fighting would also be treated in makeshift facilities. When evacuees
from Malaya were asked to return there by 14 March 1942, under threat of
punishment or property seizure, these camps were repurposed, including for
working parties.39
British colonial civilians found facilities appropriate to their status, in
government institutions, businesses or hotels. Retired steamship captain
W. A. Baker, with his wheelchair-bound wife Bert, was enjoying his
retirement in St. Nicholas Flats, a row of twenty-one three-story houses
on River Valley Road, secure in the colony’s future, when the stoppage of
services –gas, radio reception, trash collection, newspaper delivery, water
slowing to a trickle – uprooted them.40 The Bakers packed and repacked
suitcases, bade goodbye to their domestic staff, burned sentimental
belongings and prepared for evacuation, itemizing the necessities they
would carry with them. A stream of retreating battle-weary soldiers
passed outside under a thick pall of smoke.
After a few days at the Raffles Hotel, “more like the left luggage office of
a railway station,” on the morning of 17 February, they gathered with
other colonial civilians in the padang (civic green space). They formed A,
B, C, D, E and F companies, of several hundred persons each, who were
directed to a row of houses behind Joo Chiat Police Station along the
coastline. These, converted to temporary camps, included the home of
34
IWM: Private papers, 11359, K. Fukuda, 347.
35
NAS: Oral Interviews, Edward Scully, Accn. No. 000261, Reel 4, 34–5.
36
BBC, “WW2 people’s war: an archive of World War Two memories”; Len Baynes, “The
will to live,” in River Valley Road POW Camp, 15 October 2014,” www.bbc.co.uk/hist
ory/ww2peopleswar/stories/56/a2128556.shtml.
37
NAS: Oral Interviews, K. M. Rengarajoo, Accn. no. 000276, Reel 2, 21.
38
NAS: Oral Interviews, Mohindar Singh, Accn. no. 000546/65, Reel 11, 110.
39
NSG: “All refugees from upcountry must leave Syonan by Mar. 14,” Shyonan Shimbun,
9 March 1942, 3.
40
IWM: Private papers, 10188: Captain WA Baker 01/24/1, a retired captain of SS Katong,
for the Straits Steam Ship Co.
the Sultan of Trengganu, the Karikal Mahal, a mansion built by Moona

Kadir Sultan, a wealthy Indian cattle merchant, two convents (camps 3
and 4), Katong House camp, a beach house and Roxy camp near the
cinema of that name. From there the internees would leave for Changi.
The Wartime Prison

The march from Katong to Changi Prison became idiomatic of a path of
humiliation, an eight-mile journey made by various groups during the
last weeks of February. A continuous human column of some 3,500 per-
sons stumbled wearily forward, with their bedding and suitcases,
through the dust raised by military vehicles. The state-of-the-art mod-
ern prison facility they arrived at provided no relief. Baker wrote, “Can
you imagine what it is like to live in concrete? To stand and walk in
concrete, to sit and sleep in concrete, to see all around you nothing but
concrete except for innumerable iron bars and gratings?”41 His diary
entries are interspersed with glimpses of Bert, segregated in the women’s
section of the building.
The prison cell, (12 or) 14x8 ft, “quite as large as many a country
cottage room,” Baker noted, had one third of its floor space taken up by
a 7x3-ft by 16-inches-high solid “concrete coffin,” a concrete neck pillow
fixed to its head. A squatting pan latrine at the left corner of each cell was
shared by the three inmates. He wrote: when sleeping, they would lie on
either side of the “mortuary slab” and one upon it.42 He described the
exterior-facing wall as having a narrow 4x1-ft (horizontal) window,
barred with iron-mesh, and a ledge above, blocking out the sky but
keeping out the rain: “the knowledge that you can’t get out smothers
the soul.”43 Conversely, in the barrack buildings outside the prison walls
or hastily erected hutments, POWs were free to walk around the camp
environs and slept in relatively airy though cramped quarters. As in the
case of Australia, confinement was imposed more strictly upon internees:
at Changi in a seemingly impenetrable concrete prison complex.
The everyday routine, rationed food and clothing, poor accommo-
dation, restricted space and manual labor, already rehearsed in the
penal system for which Changi was designed, was aggravated by the
added trauma of internment without recourse to the law or right of
appeal. Although patterned along military lines, incarceration turned
civilian internment into a form of criminal punishment, in violation of
the 1929 Geneva Convention’s Article 9 forbidding confinement of
captives. Prisoners displayed tremendous fortitude in confronting this
41 42 43
IWM: Baker, dated 26/6/42. Ibid. Ibid.
The Wartime Prison 191
environment’s incivility.44 They made much of the available work-

shops and equipment to produce functional objects, adapted spaces
and initiated activities.A drawing by H. E. McKenzie, reproduced in
The Illustrated London News of 27 October 1945, documents the war-
time prison in detail (Fig. 6.2). A second sketch by him, of “a corner of
the old prison workshop in Changi Jail, Singapore 14ft by 11ft, in
which six internees were forced to live, with all other improvised
possessions for two years,” shows the inventive creation of washbasins
from half kerosene tins, a cloth-covered box-cupboard for food, home-
made tin mugs, a packing-case table and spectacles using toothbrush
handles for frames (Fig. 6.3). The drawing’s caption observes,
each of the more than 3000 internees had a space of approximately 8ft. by 3ft. in
which to live, move, breathe, eat and sleep. The only way in which most of them
could accommodate such miserable baggage and clothing as they possessed, or were
able to contrive from camp oddments, was by suspending it from walls and ceilings.
The ingenuity with which functional objects were repurposed from scrap
materials echoed the adaptive reuse of many buildings.
The Changi Prison population after two years’ captivity was around 3,000
men and 650 women and children, far exceeding its 700-person capacity.
After three years these numbers increased to 4,000 men and 1,350 women
and children, taking into account some 20 births, and 200 deaths, mainly of
elderly men. Consequently, individuals from various levels of the highly
stratified colonial society were forced to live in close proximity; previously
segregated social classes and races coexisted in the internment camps. Unlike
the men, mainly Britishers over military age, women were of many age
groups and backgrounds, including nurses, doctors and other professional
women, mothers and wives (mainly without children) who had stayed
because of the men, as well as internees’ non-European wives. The register
of the first group of internees at Changi suggests that almost half were not
housewives.45 They included five doctors, fifty-eight nurses and a midwife,
a health service employee, an x-ray engineer, a physical therapist, and
a medical officer. By 1943, women internees included British, Australian,
Canadian, Armenian, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Irish, Czech, Dutch, German,
French, American and Brazilian, as well as Chinese, Burmese, Thai,
Javanese, Malay, Tamil, Iraqi, Turkish, Japanese nationals, Eurasians and
Jews. Intersectional cleavages and tensions of colonial society, intensified at
Changi Prison, had to be suppressed in order to gain group consensus over
everyday issues.
44
Kevin Blackburn, The Sportsmen of Changi; Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of
War Experience, 60–1.
45
IWM: Doc. 8755, Register of internees in Changi Camp, Singapore 1942.
Fig. 6.2 An overhead perspectival view of Changi Prison, after

H. E. McKenzie’s drawing, “A Japanese internment hell in Singapore:
Changi Criminal Jail,” The Illustrated London News, 27 October 1945,
451. Redrawn by Anoma Pieris
Sally Craddock, in her biography of Dr. Cicely D. Williams, a doctor in

Singapore’s Colonial Medical Service, observed that the elderly, used to
privileged, well-nourished lives with little emotional reserves or hope to
draw on, found it hardest to adjust to incarceration, although all ages
experienced the inescapable obsession with food, and suffered dizziness,
anxiety and insecurity. She described: “Nocturnal diuresis, in the night-
mare ridden, quarrelsome, frightened community of overcrowded
women and children, was of a perpetual irritation to themselves and
each other.”46 The majority of women ceased to menstruate or became
irregular. Anemia was endemic and edema recurrent, and pellagra and
beriberi surfaced as malnutrition took hold. Women also gave birth in the
prison, and milk was a precious commodity reserved for them and the
children, although of the babies born at Changi, Williams noted, all were
breastfed and survived.47
46
Sally Craddock, Retired Except on Demand: The life of Cicely Williams (Oxford: Green
College, 1983), 106.
47
Jennifer Stanton, “Obituary, Dr Cicely Williams,” Independent, 16 July 1992, www
.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dr-cicely-williams-1533501.html.
Women Internees at Changi 193
Fig. 6.3 H. E. McKenzie, a corner of the old prison workshop in Changi

Prison, Singapore, 14x11ft, in which six internees were forced to live
with all other improvised possessions for two years, The Illustrated
London News, 27 October 1945, 450
Women Internees at Changi

Stories of the 527 women and 116 child internees (by 1943) record
experiences in two diametrically different types of facilities: at the
Changi Prison for the first twenty-six months until May 1944, and after
that at the hutted Sime Road Camp in the island’s interior. Despite
overcrowding, the six-year-old Changi Prison had permanent structures,
plumbing, flush toilets and electricity, although tables and benches were
of concrete and furniture and utensils were not supplied. Sime Road was
a loose arrangement of single-story timber-and-attap huts around the
former Malaya Command headquarters. But it was the prison that fea-
tured predominantly in internee accounts.
Sleeping spaces in the women’s camp were either 8x12-ft private “bed
squatter” cells occupied by two to three women, or dormitories along the
length of the building’s corridors. Mothers with children were allocated
larger cells in the former European block.48 As few bathrooms served the
entire building, they bathed under a row of showers in the open court-
yard. The women’s section had no kitchens, so after three weeks the men
took over the cooking.
The first camp commander, Dr. Eleanor Hopkins, then Dr. Cicely
Williams who replaced her from February to June 1943, along with the
substantial support staff noted above, took responsibility for the health of
the internees.49 Williams’ writings illuminate the internal life of internees
alongside keen medical observations. A rebel who despised colonial hyp-
ocrisy, she had grown up in Jamaica with a mother who practiced “back
verandah medicine.”50 Her work on Africa’s Gold Coast, on the condi-
tion she named Kwashiorkor (poor nutrition for weanlings), had been
dismissed by the British medical fraternity. For disobeying hospital rules
she was transferred to Malaya to run the Singapore General Hospital
children’s ward.51 Upon arrival Williams spent her first two weeks with
her cousin John Farewell, the engineer supervising constructions at
Changi cantonment.52
As a single woman from a Caribbean colony, Williams was ignored by
Singapore circles, evidence of the colonial society’s snobbery and class
consciousness; but, unafraid of controversy, she campaigned fiercely
against major milk distributors who pushed artificial alternatives over
breast milk, famously speaking on “Milk and Murder” at the local
Rotary Club in 1939.53 She continued her medical services, as well as
her work on nutrition at Changi, secretly compiling her notes on rickets in
Malaya and lecturing at the men’s camp on childhood diseases, the only
woman to pass between the two enclosures. She later was interrogated
and incarcerated by the Kenpeitai because of this. She observed, “The
dominant features of our lives were discomfort, noise, over-crowding,
queuing, bowing and inadequate food, while the dominant emotions were
48
NAS: NAB 375, Box 1, PP/CDW/B2/14. Source Wellcombe Library, Papers of
Dr Cecily Williams Medical Officer, British Colonial Service 1936–48 (hereafter,
Williams), 27.
49
NAS: Williams. 50 Sally Craddock, Retired Except on Demand, 1–7.
51
Craddock, Retired Except on Demand, 71–2, 100; Sue Reeves, “Cicely Williams and kwashi-
orkor,” Hekteon International, a Journal of Medical Humanities, 28 January 2017, https://hek
int.org/2017/01/28/cicely-williams-and-kwashiorkor.
52
Craddock, Retired Except on Demand, 74.
53
Craddock, Retired Except on Demand, 78.
irritation, fear, resentfulness, anxiety, and above all insecurity.”54

Fortunately everyone thought the war would soon end. The lack of
normality for the children, many from what Williams calls the “undiscip-
lined strata of society,” was one of the many hardships of confinement in
a concrete prison: “In Sunday school a teacher was explaining that God
made flowers and birds,” wrote Williams, and a child demanded “and
concrete? . . . and aeroplanes?”55
Caring for their children energized the women to organize various
activities from everyday chores to maintaining schools and hospitals,
lectures, entertainments, exhibitions and festivals. Gender segregation
gave them greater authority, although separation from husbands, fathers,
fiancés, friends or relatives in the nearby men’s camp was sorely felt,
particularly since internees were not thus separated in all camps; for
example, at Hong Kong’s Stanley Camp married couples could remain
together. The first meeting permitted to couples was for one hour on
Christmas Day, 1942; however, “notes were slipped in by the fatigues,
sentries were bribed, conversations were conducted through drains and
there were even advanced gymnastics over the walls,” easing the pain of
separation, Williams wrote.56 Wives and fiancées would carry the dust-
bins to the quadrangle so they could hand them over for the men to
dispose of, on the off-chance of seeing their loved ones.
Unlike Australia’s internment camp environments, there were no
women administrators or guards at Changi. However, in Williams’ view:
“There was little looting or violence except that organised by their own
authorities,” and when, after a few months, Sikh guards were substituted
for the Japanese, their behavior varied: some deliberately ill-treated the
internees; others were “kindly disposed” toward them.57 The voyeurism of
the Japanese guards was a particular concern, nevertheless, because of the
lack of privacy.58 They would wander in and out of the women’s quarters at
all hours, a concern also once internees’ clothing and undergarments
deteriorated over time.59 Older women would form escorts and walk beside
the sentries to prevent their intrusion into the cells. Despite this, fears of
Japanese sexual violence toward “white” women in camps seem to gener-
ally not have materialized, at least at Changi. Such violence against
European women was rare, unlike indigenous Chinese and Korean
women who were forced into sexual slavery.60 The Japanese had internal-
ized colonial racial hierarchies placing other Asians beneath them, so
54
NAS: Williams, 27. 55 Ibid., 28. 56 Ibid., 28. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.
59
Sheila Allan, Diary of a Girl in Changi, 1941–45 (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 2nd ed.
1999), 107.
60
Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 98–9.
though exploiting colonized groups, they respected the status of “white”

women. Brothels were mentioned in a few camps; at Sime Road women
sought favors with their Japanese overseers, Twomey observed, but
whether through choice or compulsion it was hard to say.61
Connections were maintained through exchanges of gifts, toys, internal
mail and mail across the region’s camps; outlets for the internees’ hopes
and desperations, also recorded in more intimate diaries. In fact, diaries
offer the most profound accounts of individual resilience, indicative of
how age, gender and responsibilities toward family members colored
experiences for women; these objects and artifacts are particularly useful
for illustrating how their confinement was perceived and communicated
to others in the camp geography. Perhaps the most significant examples of
these sentiments are the Changi Quilts stitched by the women internees
for convalescing soldiers, encouraged by the Girl Guides.
Bernice Archer noted that while sewing or quilting bees were ordinarily
means of greater socialization, in the prison where privacy was rare and far
more desirable, embroidery was a private expression of individual senti-
ments and hopes.62 They were the largest such artifacts to be produced in
the camps. Three designs for embroidered quilts of sixty-six 8-inch
squares of calico fabric, for Australian, British and Japanese soldiers
convalescing in the camp hospital, were for expressing impartial sym-
pathy. Sheila Allan, a seventeen-year-old Eurasian interned at Changi
Prison along with her father and Thai stepmother, noted, “Presented to
hospitals in the military camps these quilts were often the sole means of
communicating details of the women’s location and safety to husbands
and friends.”63 Allan’s square, however, showed a kangaroo on a map of
Australia, her father’s homeland, which she had never visited but hoped
to reach safely, someday.64
Stitched from calico fabric taken from unbleached flour, sugar or rice
bags, which were washed, cut and embroidered individually and backed with
white cotton sheeting, each quilt depicted an emotional geography intended
to bring solace to their respective nation’s soldiers. Those for the Australian
and British troops displayed nostalgic and patriotic patterns – maps, flags,
home scenes, flowers or messages of hope – while the Japanese quilt had
floral motifs and scenes of Mt. Fuji.65 Eight squares in the Australian quilt
depicted walls, cells or exterior views of the building, which the administra-
tion objected to. While the word “gaol” included in many squares passed
61
Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, 99.
62
Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese, 1941–1945
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press [2004], 2008), 162.
63
Allan, Diary of a Girl, 179–80. 64 Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians, 162.
65
Allan, Diary of a Girl, 176.
unnoticed, “prison,” if embroidered, had to be unpicked.66 A tablecloth

pattern that Allan embroidered as a gift for Eleanor Hopkins depicted
maps of Singapore and Malaya with tropical scenes around a perspectival
view of the entire prison building.67
A teenager’s view on captivity, Allan’s account discloses the levity of
children’s experiences, surrounded by many protective women who fil-
tered their anxieties. Both her fears and romantic fantasies found expres-
sion in whimsical journal entries. School was held in the dining hall, and
children played in the rose garden and carpenter’s shop.68 Mothers,
doctors, nurses and teachers took care of children’s needs, and the enter-
tainment committee lifted their spirits, although family life was sorely
missed. Allan seemingly thrived in an environment of maternal carers and
siblings, becoming infatuated with Dr. Eleanor Hopkins, a dreamed-of
replacement for the Malayan mother she never knew. But she also real-
ized the frustrations of emerging womanhood. The concrete walls were
claustrophobic since women, unlike the men, could not work in the
surrounding gardens, though suspension of direct patriarchal controls
gave them greater autonomy.
There were favorably recollected moments when the regimen was
relaxed, partly due to Williams’ efforts: monthly walks to the sea after
November 1942, and for a short period weekly walks in the prison
garden, where the men cultivated vegetables and briefly flowers (until
the Japanese prohibited this).69 Greater liberties were introduced after
February 1943 under the “humane policy” of Controller of Enemy
Aliens Isohi Asahi and camp head Naito.70 Lectures by internee men,
organized concerts, dancing and dramas, and religious services by visit-
ing priests eased seclusion for women internees. Weekly meetings were
permitted between husbands and wives, or fiancés. A small internee
hospital was equipped and run by six medical women and seventy
nursing sisters.71 Williams even left the camp briefly, in August 1942,
to work for Asahi in his city office on a report on Changi’s food
situation.72 This relaxed era ended in March/April when Asahi was
replaced by Jikko Tominaga, fluent in English and with a University of
California psychology degree.
Williams also highlighted the camps’ many shortcomings. An occupying
force with limited resources, the Japanese spent sparingly on rations and
amenities. The diet consisted largely of rice, ingeniously reconstituted in
a variety of ways by camp cooks but nevertheless lacking in necessary
calories, protein and vitamins. Malnutrition caused high mortality rates
66 67
Ibid., 178. Ibid., plate between 96–7. 68 Ibid., 62. 69
NAS: Williams, 31.
70 71
Ibid., 29. Ibid. 72 Ibid., personal notes, 40.
from beriberi and pellagra. There were beatings, face-slapping and

ill-treatment of internees; forms of humiliation that reinforced IJA
authority.73 The Japanese did not feel accountable to other belligerent
nations with regards to the treatment of captives. Such violations deepened
the desperation of the internees, isolated by their invisibility. Internees were
permitted only five postcards and three radio messages during the entire
period, and received only four and a half Red Cross parcels, while many
others were intercepted and distributed among Japanese guards.74 The
International Red Cross were never permitted into the camp.
Several Chinese and Eurasian friends attempted to smuggle across
money, messages, medical supplies or radio parts, among them
Elizabeth Choy and her husband who ran an ambulance supply line
from their canteen at Tan Tock Seng Hospital to Changi.75 The Asian
population was deeply divided by employment under the Japanese
administration, or loyalties to the British, the Japanese or their home
governments: many, particularly Chinese and Eurasians, were suspected
of anti-Japanese activities.76 With their colonial masters obscured by
prison walls, they faced a different regime in which the downtown
Outram Road Jail, near Telok Ayer, figured ominously.
Incarceration in Outram Road Jail

Whereas Changi was an outlier in Singapore’s carceral geography,
Outram Road Jail was its nexus, as a dreaded military prison, a place of
extreme punishment and deprivation, a menacing presence in civilian
lives, and a place of no return. In it the paths of former colonizers and
hapless subjects crossed.
The jail’s inmates were mainly local Chinese settlers targeted by the
Japanese Kenpeitai, who in the early stages of occupation conducted the
“Sook Ching purge” to eliminate anti-Japanese Chinese nationalists from
the new Chinese protectorate. Eager to move on to Burma and Sumatra,
retaining only one brigade in Singapore, the Kenpeitai focused on poten-
tial subversives mobilized in response to Japan’s brutal invasion of north-
east China in 1936. The genocidal purge from late January to
February 1942 involved concentration, screening, detention, incarcer-
ation and execution of large numbers of suspected Chinese resisters, often
without due cause – a process that converted rural sites to killing fields,
73
Ibid., 33. 74 Ibid., 30.
75
Elizabeth Choy, Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 10 October 2006, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
obituaries/1531003/Elizabeth-Choy.html.
76
Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack, War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and
Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012).
Incarceration in Outram Road Jail 199
with Kenpeitai holding centers and Outram Road Jail as anchors in

a geography of excessive violence. The network of screening centers and
detention camps, springing up on vacant properties at Tanjong Pagar,
River Valley Road, Jalan Besar, Kallang and Geylang junction, and Payar
Lebar, were conduits to this diabolical stealth geography.77 Lee Geok Boi
mentioned centers at Smith Street, Neil Road and Tiong Bahru in Telok
Ayer, as well as Nee Soon, Jurong, Upper Serangoon, Punggol and Telok
Kurau School in Katong.78 Executions were carried out on beaches,
including around Changi, some witnessed by POWs required to dig
graves for the victims. Suspected dissidents were incarcerated at
Kenpeitai holding centers. Some 1,470 prisoners, mostly Chinese, are
believed to have died at Outram Road Jail, with 121 executed there.79
Three internee women, including Williams, entered this parallel but
quite separate carceral network, following their arrest in October 1943
(in the “Double Tenth Incident”) as potential collaborators informing
a successful Singapore harbor raid by Australian commandos (Operation
Jaywick). The Kenpeitai conducted mass arrests, and torture and impris-
onment of sixty internees and civilians at the time. Ill-treated, neglected
and starved, fifteen would die.80 Elizabeth Choy, arrested with her hus-
band, was stripped, beaten and “slapped, kicked, spat at and subjected to
electric shock treatment” during 200 days of confinement.81 Williams was
held from 23 October 1943 to 25 March 1944.
Williams’ account of incarceration assumes a clinical rationality, with
only occasional sarcasm, mainly focusing on care for fellow inmates.82
While undergoing interrogation, she occupied cells in two different
Kenpeitai facilities – including the notorious YMCA Building – shared
with Chinese “Coolies,” Japanese soldiers, Eurasians and Europeans
placed together irrespective of race or class distinctions, confined without
privacy, or consideration for gender, as many as five to a cell. The toilet pan
77
NAS: M. Shinozaki, My Wartime Experiences in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 1973), Call no. RSEA 959.57023 SHI-[HIS]), 119; NAS:
Oral Interviews, Boon Leong Chia, Accn. No. 001813, Reel 4 describes a site corner of
Keppel and Cantonment roads open area; NAS: Oral interviews, Teck Phuan Goh,
Accn. no. 002128, Reel 5, describes Surin Ave, Victoria School and Telok Kurau
School as screening centers.
78
Lee, The Syonan Years, 106.
79
NSG: “Deaths in Outram Road Gaol during Japanese Occupation,” Straits Times, 25
February 1946.
80
NAS: Williams, 31.
81
Elizabeth Choy, Obituary; “Former M.O.I. Chief testifies against Japs,” Straits Times,
21 March 1946, 3. Testimony of R. H. Scott at the Singapore war-crimes trials, SNA
digital collection.
82
NAS: Williams, 35–6, Section IV, Statement of Dr. C. D. Williams, made for the police
investigating the treatment of internees by the Japanese Gestapo, written in Sime Road
Camp Hut No. 1, 2 September 1945.
was used in full view of inmates with the guards looking on.83 In January
Williams was moved to a larger cell with ten to sixteen men and two
women, many suffering from severe health problems caused by prolonged
incarceration, torture and poor diet. When she returned to Changi Prison
in March 1944, she was suffering from beriberi and dysentery. She would
experience numbness in her feet for the rest of her life.
From the Prison to the Sime Road Camp

Two months after Williams returned to Changi, in May 1944, following over
two years in a concrete prison, 510 civilian internees were moved to the hutted
Sime Road Camp. Some 11,700 Allied POWs returning from forced labor
camps in Burma, Thailand, Sumatra and Malaya, many suffering severe
malnutrition and sickness, were concentrated in the vacated jail and its
vicinity, an area less than one quarter of a square kilometer, with 3,000
cramped into the prison building.84 A photograph taken in 1945 shows the
main thoroughfare of a cell block (Fig. 6.4).85 Their experiences in these final
months would influence POW perceptions of the prison as a “hell hole.”86
Conversely, for the women and children, Sime Road Camp, a hutted
encampment in the island’s verdant interior, offered more freedom than
previously.
Drawings of the Sime Road Camp show an undulating topography,
similar to other Singapore military estates, but without the permanent
facilities and pukka constructions of Changi (Map 6.2).87 Rare footage of
Lord Louis Mountbatten’s postwar September 1945 tour of the camps
likewise provides glimpses of the huts in the background.88 Internees
were housed in old army huts with wooden, concrete or earthen floors,
which, though severely overcrowded, had the luxury of outdoor space.
“The horrors of noise, noise of women’s voices, of children crying, of
domestic clatter, of wooden clogs on iron staircases, of strident echoes
from prison walls, were things of the past,” noted Williams.89 However,
internee numbers increased further to 5,000, due to the internment of
Baghdadi-Jewish and Eurasian and Chinese civilians from Singapore,
Penang and Seremban, including 700 women and children.90 Permitted
83
NAS: Williams, 37.
84
Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience, 137–65.
85
Australian War Memorial (AWM), image archive, Changi, AWM 043131and 116463.
86
In books like Peter Brune, Descent into Hell (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2014).
87
A map of the camp during the Japanese occupation has been drawn by Jane Booker
Nielsen based on a sketch plan by Harold MacKenzie, Changi Museum collection.
88
IWM: JFU 318, Film and Video archive, The Mountbattens visit Singapore prisoners of
war, War Office Directorate of Public Relations, undated, 1945.
89
NAS: Williams, 32. 90 Women and children doubled, and 200 men were added.
From the Prison to the Sime Road Camp 201
Fig. 6.4 Australian POWs in Changi Prison Camp. Courtesy of

Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 043131
their freedom during the early stage of the war, they were interned
belatedly in March 1945 because of renewed suspicion of partial European
origins or connections. Extra numbers also placed pressure on daily rations,
which was a little rice, 1 ounce of dried fish supplemented by root vegetables
(sweet potato, cassava), and 6 ounces of green leaves. Japanese currency
inflation meant that provisions were available only at ludicrous prices; des-
peration caused internal division and animosity as they fought over scarce
resources. Some internees opted to work for the Japanese: the men building
foxholes and gun emplacements in the internment camps, the women in
match and military clothing factories. The burden of camp chores thus fell on
others, with certain individuals fraternizing with the Japanese for favors, even
spying and reporting on other internees.
Based on NA-UK: CO 1047_964_002, Map of Johore and Straits Settlements, 128/5 (1937) and WO 252/1362 (16)
photomap and drawings by Jane Booker Nielsen and Harold McKenzie.
Map 6.2 Sime Road Camp, Singapore. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule

with reference to drawings by Jane Booker Nielsen and Harold
McKenzie. Courtesy Singapore History Consultants Pte Ltd
Despite the crowded quarters, leaking roofs and mosquitoes, young Sheila
Allan enjoyed the freedom of gardening among the trees and grass, although
like many others she suffered bouts of malaria and periodical hospital visits.91
91
Allan, Diary of a Girl, 111.
She had to watch weak and elderly internees fade away, including her father,
whose growing depression and eventual death in June 1945 left her orphaned
and bereft.92 Among her memorabilia held in the Australian War Memorial
archives, letters of condolence from fellow internees, written with grace and
empathy on mere scraps of paper, belie the frequency of internee deaths by
then.93 Levels of mutual civility stayed the harsh discipline and petty griev-
ances that otherwise divided the community. The women internees were
shadows of their former healthy selves, frail and palsied figures in tattered
clothes, as depicted by artist Leslie Cole (Fig. 6.5).
Their removal to Sime Road Camp segregated the internees from the
POWs. Experientially they had switched positions, as Changi converted
to the hellish congested prison recollected by many who survived the last
months there. Sime Road Camp, with its trees, gardens and various
agricultural projects, had greater affinity with rural camps such as the
two new agricultural settlements, New Syonan (Endau in Johore) and
Fuji Village (Bahau in Negeri Sembilan), to which Chinese and Catholic
Eurasians, respectively, were sent by the Japanese administration in
1943.94 Though unconnected to the Changi story, the resettlement of
urban residents to counter food shortages, perhaps also to prevent anti-
Japanese resistance, uncovered the ragged ends of the carceral
geography.95 Hara Fujio identified over thirty such communities for
Chinese settlers; and Vivian Blaxell noted others for Malays and
Indians set up by the Japanese occupiers in Malaya and Singapore.96
Relocation and isolation from their urban communities produced
a category of settlement formed under duress, strangely reminiscent of
the later Malayan Emergency era’s New Villages.
***
This chapter’s focus was on “European” civilian captives at Changi
Prison and later at Sime Road, a history distinct from that of POW
incarceration, which will be resumed by linking Changi to Japan in the
next chapter. When compared with the broad regional dispersal of POW
labor, for a large part of the war, colonial civilians, government servants
and administrators were behind prison walls. Their immobilization was
92
Ibid., 131–3. 93 AWM: Sheila Allan, PR00666, 1942–92.
94
Fiona Hodgekins, From Syonan to Fuji-Go: The Story of the Catholic Settlement of Bahau in
WWII Malaya (Singapore: Select Publishing, 2014).
95
Vivian Blaxell, “New Syonan and Asianism in Japanese era Singapore,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, 6 (January 2008), 1–15, https://apjjf.org/-Vivian-Blaxell/2644/article.pdf.
96
Ibid., in reference to Hara Fujio, “The Japanese occupation of Malaya and the Chinese
community,” cited in Paul Kratoska, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya: A Social and
Economic History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 277.
Fig. 6.5 Leslie Cole, “British women and children interned in

a Japanese prison camp,” Sime Road, Singapore, 1945, oil on canvas.
Imperial War Museum, UK, IWM: ART LD 5620
heightened by the prison’s divisive design, and the IJA exerted little
additional effort to modify the building. Gender separation, segregation
of families and physical isolation compounded the forced removal and
incarceration experienced by internees. Added to that was the impenetra-
bility of the concrete structures, and the lack of open space or connection
to the outside, to trees and the surrounding landscape. Later, despite the
openness of Sime Road Camp, its fragile hutted facilities had different
punitive effects, aggravated by gender, advanced age and physical disabil-
ity for certain internees.
Conditions in the two wartime internment facilities, Changi Prison and
Sime Road Camp, were made public in the months following Japan’s
1945 surrender. On 27 October, the Illustrated London News published the
aforementioned drawings by McKenzie of Changi’s Japanese internment
hell. The account was accompanied by scenes of Singapore after liber-
ation. A week later, on 3 November 1945, “Life in a British women’s
internment camp at Singapore” featured seven photographs showing
women outside attap huts, queuing for “starvation rations,” cleaning
camp drains, incinerating refuse and bowing to their guards.97 The article
enumerated 200 British and 1,220 Asian women and children interned,
including two titled “ladies,” wives of British officials, typists, etc.:
Penned like cattle in crude huts, without privacy, with leaky roofs, starved,
punched and slapped by their Japanese guards, and subjected to every humili-
ation, for long these white ladies, in an equatorial climate, slept on mud floors,
defenceless against snakes, centipedes, bugs and mosquitoes by night, and the
brutalities of the Japs by day, which they suffered as normal features of their daily
lives. They were inspired by confidence in ultimate victory and by preserving
a sense of humour.
The plight of civilian internees and Allied POWs, exposed by General
Mountbatten’s tour of the liberated camps, was seamlessly blended into
the Allied victory narrative, alongside scenes showing the local population
greeting their colonizers with delight. Only following their release after
Japan’s surrender in September 1945, when they regained contact with
locals, did the full force of the Japanese occupation come home to the
internees. Williams wrote,
The welcome that we received from our Asiatic friends, whose trials and tribula-
tions had been on the whole far worse than anything we had endured in the shelter
of internment, was affectionate beyond anything we felt we could have
deserved.98
Outside the prison walls, the Asian settler population had adapted to the
determinants of a different regime. Racial barriers between them and
Europeans had increased in their opacity because of the entirely different
and incommensurable experiences of the war. The anti-Japanese resist-
ance fighters (Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army) who had collabor-
ated with the British, the Indian National Army that opposed them and
other vocal political factions had all sown the seeds of self-determination
in the colonists’ absence. The British, although welcomed back, had been
unmasked as oppressors, no longer able to command their colonial sub-
jects’ subservience as they had in the prewar decades. Many chose to
return home to Britain along with the troops, exposing the fragility of
British commitments to the island’s settlers and advancing the eventual
dissolution of colonial sovereignty.
The postwar experiences of the three individuals encountered in this
chapter illustrate this process. Yong’s role in the South Seas China Relief
Fund Committee placed him at risk in the days before the fall of
97
“Life in a British women’s internment camp at Singapore,” Illustrated London News,
3 November 1945, 479.
98
Written on SS Niew Holland, 29 September 1945.
Singapore in February 1942, but, unable to escape to India, he worked

under the Japanese administration registering subsidiary soldiers.99 After
the war, he regained his former status as president of the Chinese
Chamber of Commerce, naturalized British subject and Justice of the
Peace, but was fatally shot by a disgruntled teak merchant in May 1950.100
Although never acknowledging his contribution, The Malayan Architect
published an image of Woh Hup’s banner flying above Changi Prison’s
entrance during coronation celebrations in 1953.101 Upon returning to
Britain, Cicely Williams was recognized as a pioneer in maternal and child
health, and in 1948 was made head of a dedicated division in the World
Health Organization. She continued her work in Southeast Asia, Africa and
the Caribbean, where her research on Kwashiorkor eventually won her
global acclaim.102 Sheila Allan, inspired by Dr. Hopkins, pursued a career
in nursing, training in Melbourne where she joined her aunt after the war.
Her Diary of a Girl in Changi, published in 1994, is a coming-of-age story
comparable to that of Anne Frank.103
Singapore’s colonial prisons likewise recovered their former civil status,
identified initially as sites for Japanese war-crimes trials and executions in
1948, and during the early 1960s for incarcerating anticolonial political
dissidents and leftwing political activists.104 Outram Road Jail was demol-
ished in 1963 to make way for the Outram Park housing estate, and
Changi Prison torn down for a state-of-the-art replacement built incre-
mentally during 2004–10, their historical significance muted by the post-
colonial zeal for modernization. Although significant for former internees
and POWs, the Australian or British governments had no claims on the
building once the island gained independence from Britain as a state of
Malaysia in 1963 and as an independent republic in 1965. Changi
Prison’s perceived historical irrelevance to Singapore’s nation-building
story or to Singaporean experiences of the war (revisited in Chapter 10 of
this volume), decided its fate.
99
Singapore Memory Project, “Together at Clifford Pier, memory of Andrew Tan,”
5 May 2013, www.singaporememory.sg/contents/SMA-5e2a3510-6de8-4f0b-b071-
33423ded592f.
100
NSG: “New Chinese Chamber Chief,” Singapore Free Press, 1 March 1948, 5; “Yong Yit
Lin killed at his club,” Straits Times, 26 May 1950, 1; “S’Pore jury ‘challenged’: Yong
murder opens in Assizes,” Straits Times, 17 October 1950, 7.
101
“Singapore Jubilee decorations,” The Malayan Architect, vii: 6 (June 1935), 152.
102
Stanton, “Obituary, Dr Cicely Williams.”
103
Allan, Diary of a Girl; Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Garden City,
NY: Double Day, 1952).
104
Vernon Cornelius-Takahama, “Pearls Hill Prison,” Singapore infopedia, Singapore
Government, http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_129_2005-01-25
.html.
7 Empire of Camps
Anoma Pieris
For a brief three-and-a-half-year period under Japanese occupation,

separate territories of Southeast Asia, including Singapore, formerly
differentiated as European and US colonies, became a contiguous
geopolitical entity governed from Tokyo by an increasingly militar-
ized imperial regime. They melded with Japan’s core imperial terri-
tories in East Asia, including Chosen (Korea), Taiwan and northeast
China’s province of Manchukuo (Manchuria), where Japan’s archi-
tects, engineers and planners had found new space and opportunity
for grand imperial projects to modernize their colonies throughout
the twentieth century’s first four decades. At the outermost edges of
this geography were scattered archipelagic clusters in the Pacific
Ocean and the South China Sea. Between September 1931 and
August 1945, the period of war in Asia, large portions of this
extended geography became part of an exploitive military industrial
complex, an alliance of the military with defense industries that
extracted raw materials and manpower from captive territories.
Japan’s expansionist political ambitions were veiled in racialized rhet-
oric of a “pan-Asian” identity and its commitment through military
conquest to regional “co-prosperity.”
Beginning with a discussion of Japan’s industrial and imperial
emergence as a key competitor with Western imperial powers, and
the ways in which architecture and urban planning practices mani-
fested its rise, Chapter 7 explores this expanded production and labor
regime in Pacific War factory camps and work camps. It follows the
spatial and material aggregation and dissolution of the Japanese
Empire as conveyed through this camp geography. The movement
of the prisoner-of-war (POW) workforce from Singapore (or Java) to
the Burma-Thai railway and eventually to Japan, as mirrored in many
POW memoirs, is used to gain insights into specific scenarios, includ-
ing a camp in Naoetsu, Japan. The chapter ends with a discussion of
Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSP) demobilization. Taking its cue
from Sarah Kovner’s Prisoners of the Empire, which offers an incisive
analysis of captivity under the Japanese, it describes how the spatial
207
208 Empire of Camps
transformations wrought by industrial expansion and incarceration

overlapped.1
Kovner argues that, rather than seeing the Japanese as “inhuman” and
“indistinguishable,” we need to understand that they never anticipated
captive numbers as high as 140,000 service personnel and 130,000 civil-
ians, so inattention to camp management and lack of interest in prisoner
care led to cruel treatment; that conditions altered drastically as Japan,
burdened by war, experienced “cataclysmic changes” leading to wide-
spread deprivation, influencing incarceration conditions and experiences
in different places and at different points in the conflict.2 She notes that
the changes to POW treatment occurred after its June 1942 defeat at the
Battle of Midway, when Japan faced the prospect of prolonged conflict.3
Prime Minister Tō jō Hideki issued explicit instructions to camp com-
mandants on POW treatment, and determined Japanese military and
Japanese companies would use POWs to meet critical shortages in indus-
tries. Kaori Maekawa notes that “the Points Concerning the Treatment
of Prisoners of War” (Furyo Shori Yoryoi) stipulated that Caucasians
interned in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and China be used as labor for
the enlargement of production and for operational demand, while non-
Caucasians would be released and used in their original places to max-
imum advantage.4 Some within this latter category – Christian Ambonese
and Mendonese of the Royal Netherlands Indies Army and certain British
Indian personnel – remained in detention. Highlighting labor exploitation
as a core military strategy, this chapter concurs that work-camp accom-
modation and administration, while adhering to these principles, largely
depended on local conditions and exigencies.
Imperial Expansion, Modernization and Industrial

Growth
Japan’s imperial geography was first expanded through hostilities with its
immediate neighbors: the annexation of both Taiwan and Korea after the
first Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), a conflict between the declining Qing
and rapidly modernizing Meiji empires, and Japan’s victory in the 1904–5
Russo-Japanese War. The Chinese Eastern Railway seized from the
1
Sarah Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2020).
2
Ibid., 1, 10, 138. 3 Ibid., 56.
4
Australia-Japan Research Project (AJRP): Remembering the war in New Guinea,
Symposium papers, 19–21 October 2000, Australian National University, Kaori
Maekawa, “Forgotten soldiers of the Japanese army: Asian personnel in Papua New
Guinea,” http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/remember.nsf/pages/NT000013D6.
Imperial Expansion, Modernization and Industrial Growth 209
Russians became an instrument of economic expansion, presaging inva-

sion of Manchuria in September 1931 and the Second Sino-Japanese War
(1937–45), identifying China as Japan’s chief rival, who paid highly in
casualties. Mass murder and rape by Japanese forces invading China’s
capital Nanjing in 1937 accounted for approximately 300,000 deaths.
Once Japan entered the tripartite alliance with the Fascist regimes in
Germany and Italy in September 1940, its aggression was directed at
Europe’s Southeast Asia colonies, enlarging this territory. John Dower
described how the pact invigorated Japan’s ambition to “revise the
Eurocentric cartography of the West” by placing itself at the center of
the map, displacing the colonial term “Far East” with “Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere.”5 After the fall of Singapore, in February 1942,
one of Japan’s leading geographers christened America as the “Eastern
Asia Continent” and Australia the “Southern Asia Continent,” linked
across an expanded Sea of Japan. Ministry of Health and Welfare bur-
eaucrats likewise reported on four “Stages in the Enlargement of the East
Asia Cooperative Body,” extending to Japan’s Chinese territories, then to
Southeast Asia in Stages 1 and 2. Stage 3 projected the conquest of India,
and Stage 4 of Central Asia. The physical character and distribution of
the wartime camp geography echoed these staged developments, becom-
ing less formal and more fragmented farther away from the Japanese
archipelago, and producing the weakest and most temporary configur-
ations in the Pacific islands. A multiplicity of forces thus influenced
Japan’s actions, including the Fascist ideologies of its Axis partners, rising
militarism and the shifting balance of power between the emperor and the
government; the country’s industrial growth, colonial labor regimens and
wartime incarceration practices became closely intertwined.
Japanese imperial ideology, while equally self-serving as its European
counterparts, challenged the notion of white supremacy, its superiority in
Asia being based on its defeat of a world power – the Soviet Union – and
the fact that it had never been colonized or forced into giving up home
territory. Conversely, Japan’s encroachment into neighboring territories
fed the impetus to industrialize the nation on a par with imperial
European competitors and ahead of other Asian countries, where
European colonizers maintained labor-intensive agricultural and mining
industries, delaying the kinds of advancements that exceptionalized
Japan’s Meiji Period. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth
century, in tandem with its imperial expansion, during the Taisho
5
John Dower, War without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 273, in reference to
translated document, “An investigation of global policy with the Yamato race and nucle-
aus,” by the Research Bureau of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Population and
Race section, 1943.
210 Empire of Camps
(1912–26) and Shō wa (1926–89, under Emperor Hirohito) periods,

Japan produced an imperial-scale urban planning and formal language
of civic architecture imitative of the West and integral to the moderniza-
tion of its physical landscape and society. Its Western ideological founda-
tion was established through employing foreign experts during the Meiji
era, modernization experiments in the East Asian colonies and expansion
of Japanese businesses to Europe’s Southeast Asia colonies. In the after-
math of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake in its imperial seat since the
mid-nineteenth century, Tokyo was transformed into a modern metrop-
olis connected by a nationwide rail network, with a range of institutional
and other architect-designed Western-style buildings, including model
factories and department stores.6
Although the cultural worlds of art and architecture in Japan, as in Britain,
contrasted with the creative force of industrialization as ideologically separ-
ate worlds, they became closely aligned in how the architecture and spaces of
Japan’s East Asian colonies were conceived. Twenty percent of Japanese
professional architects grew up, studied and practiced in colonial territories.7
Grand projects of imperial urban planning and modernization were reserved
for colonial capitals like Taipei and Seoul, with elaborate Western-style civic
buildings in eclectic, neoclassical and imperial Japanese crown style.8
Manchukuo – Harbin, Dalian, Hsinking, Mudanjiang, Mukden – under
the Kwantung army formed part of the constellation of cities in northeastern
China, analogous to the treaty ports through which European trade had
forced its way into China and Japan.9 Denison and Ren describe an imperial
frontier and blank canvas, whose foremost profiteers were Japanese archi-
tects conducting utopian modern experiments that influenced the mother
country.10 Architects Junzo Sakakura, Yoshikazu Ochida and Kunio
Maekawa proposed master plans for cities and agricultural settlements
there – more expansive than any realizable in Japan.11
6
Ken Tadashi Oshima, International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai
Kenchiku (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 176–7; David B. Stewart, The
Making of Modern Japanese Architecture (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 33–62.
7
Yasuhiko Nishizawa, “A study of Japanese colonial architecture in East Asia,” in
Constructing the Colonised Land: Entwined Perspectives of East Asia around WWII, ed.
Izumi Kuroishi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 11–41, 37.
8
Ibid., 34.
9
Yeonkyung Lee, “Taipei and Seoul’s modern urbanization under Japanese colonial rule:
a comparative study from the present-day context,” Sustainability, 12 (2020): 4772;
http://doi.org/10.3390/su12114772.
10
Edward Denison and Guangyu Ren, Ultramodernism: Architecture and Modernity in
Manchuria (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 48, 52, 55.
11
Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (Koln: Taschen,
2011), 63–74, 72, quoting Junzo Sakakura. Others cited: Kunio Maekawa, Yoshikazu
Ochida.
Imperial Expansion, Modernization and Industrial Growth 211
The rise of Japan and its Western-style industrialization ahead of other

colonial territories in Asia, and the emergence through these processes of
a modern Japanese subjectivity, was incomprehensible to white popula-
tions who had internalized colonial racialized hierarchies. As Japanese
emigrants joined the global flows to “New World” settler-societies,
attracted by opportunities for settlement, work or study, their entry was
curtailed by immigrant quotas reflective of a more generalized anti-Asian
racism, which recognized Japan as an economic competitor, and increas-
ingly as a military threat. Their en-masse incarceration following Japan’s
attack on Pearl Harbor, discussed in Chapter 8, built on these many
fermenting prejudices. Japanese military aggression was equally shaped
by antipathy toward the West inflamed by these restrictions and a sense of
being superior in Asia, but its foundations lay in a comparable progressive
and similarly ruthless imperial ideology.
By the outbreak of war in Europe, following a decade of planned
industrial expansion, heavy industry constituted 73 percent of Japan’s
industrial output.12 While mainly dependent on raw materials like iron,
steel and coal from its colonies in northern China, Mongolia and
Manchukuo, Japan also imported iron ore and rubber from European
colonies in Southeast Asia.13 The vast industrial infrastructure was
worked on by Japanese civilians, and several million Chinese and
Korean labor conscripts.14 A Munitions Ministry set up in 1943 brought
Japan’s shipping, aircraft, light metal, coal, iron and steel industries under
special control, which, following invasion of Southeast Asia in 1942,
would increasingly employ Southeast Asian labor conscripts and Allied
POWs.15 Japan’s wartime empire in Asia expanded not through modern
urban and architectural developments as in the interwar period, but
through proliferation of forced labor camps connected to infrastructure
and industries. Strategies used to extract labor from convicts and colonial
subjects were applied without compromising work conditions with
reform or humanitarian treatment, but instead with increasing punitive
control over Allied POWs. The desire to humiliate Caucasians, and
display their subjection, the use of physical punishment as a military
norm, and the excessive brutality of individual guards all compounded
the adverse effects of policies that were already implemented unevenly
12
Jerome B. Cohen, “The Japanese war economy: 1940–45,” Far Eastern Survey, 15:24
(4 December 1946): 361–70, 361.
13
John R. Stewart, “Manchuria as Japan’s economic life line,” Far Eastern Survey, 4:23
(20 November 1935).
14
Paul H. Krakotska, ed., Asian Labour in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Singapore:
National University of Singapore Press, 2006), 3.
15
Cohen, “The Japanese war economy,” 365.
212 Empire of Camps
across the prison-camp geography. Yet, Asian captives were treated as

inferior to Caucasian POWs.16
The term “Empire of Camps,” used by Aidan Forth to describe the role
of camps in Britain’s late nineteenth-century imperial expansion, is
applicable to Japan because of its use of similar temporary architectural
facilities to service its military industrial complex.17 As elaborated by
Forth, the systemic use of camps as tools of colonial expansion enabled
forms of governmentality that in turn preceded more permanent strat-
egies of institutionalized containment and control. Japan’s wartime
Empire of Camps included many permanent institutions built by
Japanese architects in the colonies, such as prisons and military barracks,
factory dormitories requisitioned for military use and the seemingly ubi-
quitous temporary timber-and-attap huts that accommodated the over-
flow of incarcerated populations and housed military and labor conscripts
in the field. They served a pragmatic purpose. Accommodation was
needed for millions of laborers – including soldiers, civilian workers and
“comfort women” from across Southeast Asia, China, Korea and
Taiwan, mobilized or forcibly conscripted by the Japanese military during
wartime; although arguably, indentured labor exploitation patterns had
already been introduced through Britain’s colonial plantation economy.
In fact, racialized subordination occurred on both sides of the conflict
and, as highlighted by Paul Krakotska, around 500,000 support staff were
used by Allied Land Forces in Southeast Asia.18 Asian labor conscripts
were nevertheless distinct from POWs and housed in separate
compounds.
Emerging Imperial Camp Geography

Japan’s comparatively humane treatment of European prisoners prior to
World War II places its Allied prisoner camps in a harsher light. After the
Russo-Japanese War, over 70,000 Russian captives were sent via Harbin
to captured territory in the Russian Empire and to camps in twenty-nine
towns in Japan.19 Later, during World War I when Japan sided with the
Entente powers, Japanese troops captured over 4,500 German and
16
Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire, 5.
17
Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2017).
18
Krakotska, Asian Labour, xvii and Krakotska, “Labour in the Malay peninsula and
Singapore under Japanese occupation,” in Krakotska, Asian Labour, 237–48, 242–3;
Michiko, “Malayan labour,” 252, 256.
19
Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg, “Photo-exhibition: the POs of
the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905,” 3–10 October 2018, http://polithistory.ru/en/visi
t_us/view.php?id=13511.
Emerging Imperial Camp Geography 213
Austro-Hungarians prisoners at the German colony of Qingdao, bringing

them to Japan. In both these examples, Hague Convention guidelines for
camp facilities were adhered to. German POWs were incarcerated at
Kurume, Aonogahara (Hyogo-ken), Nagoya and Narashino (Chibaken)
on Ninoshima Island (off Hiroshima), and Bando, Oita, Shizuoka and
Narashino, the latter two previously holding Russians.20 Barrack layouts
included offices, guardrooms, kitchens, mess halls, sickbays, laundries
and bathhouses, which, although fenced in, apart from a few exceptions,
allowed prisoners some integration with the local community. If located
close to urban centers, workshops for various small-scale industries were
attached to the camps; technical engineers were singled out and directed
to more complex work, such as in machine, food and metal-plating
industries. The general laxity of some camp regimes meant that
German POWs were able to teach locals gymnastics and soccer, bake
bread, make cheese, hold concerts and theatrical events, and print news-
papers, comparable to the activities mentioned previously for Australia or
Singapore.21 Among over one hundred orchestral performances held at
the Bando and Tokushima camps between April 1917 and January 1920,
an orchestra led by Paul Engel famously performed Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony for the first time in Japan, on 1 June 1918. Although letters
written home by German POWs suggest racial tensions and resentment,
this was a relatively lenient and productive environment when compared
with World War II camps; in fact, sixty-three Germans chose to stay on in
Japan.22
Public exhibitions of prisoners’ arts and handicrafts became conduits to
forms of early twentieth-century modernism already penetrating Japan.
Atsushi Otsuru describes a March 1919 exhibition, held in the recently
completed exhibition hall, later renamed as the Hiroshima Prefectural
Industrial Promotion Hall designed by Czech modernist architect Jan
Letzel, where the Ninoshima Camp prisoners’ characteristically
European handicrafts transported Japanese visitors to a seemingly
European setting.23 The exhibition attracted over 10,000 visitors and
the prisoners’ craftworks were almost all purchased, many by the exhib-
ition center for their permanent archives. The building is familiar today as
20
Compare Atsushi Otsuru, “POWs (Japan), 1914–1918,” International Encyclopedia of the
First World War, Ute Daniel et al., Freie Universität Berlin, 2014–10–08, http://doi.org/
10.15463/ie1418.10131, with Sandra Barkhof, “German POWs in Japan during the First
World War: letters from the colonial frontline, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 10:3
(2017): 253–65.
21
Otsuru, “POWs.”
22
Eric Johnston, “Bando POW camp: chivalry’s last bastion,” Japan Times, 13 June 2006,
www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/06/13/national/bando-pow-camp-chivalrys-last-bastion.
23
Otsuru, “POWs.”
214 Empire of Camps
the Genbaku Dome, the ruined building marking the epicenter of the
6 August 1945 atomic bomb blast, which destroyed this collection.
Japan’s distance and disengagement from World War I’s European
nexus, with no associated loss of manpower, may explain its earlier benign
treatment of prisoners. Some thirty years later, wartime exigencies related
to industrial production and extraordinary troop movements, burdening
the Japanese economy and militarizing the society, reconfigured prisoners
as slave labor. Testimonials at several war-crimes trials held after World
War II, discussed in Chapter 11, reveal the depreciating labor value and
dehumanizing treatment of Allied POWs, and the ways in which camp
conditions were deliberately compromised. Responsibility for accommo-
dating prisoners in Japan’s colonies was passed on to Japanese colonial
administrators and companies.
World War II POW camps on the Japanese mainland (Map 7.1)
formed two main categories: Branch Camps (and smaller Detached
Camps) operated by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), and the
Dispatch (also called Dispatched) Camps with food, clothing and hous-
ing provided by the employing companies. They fell under the main
administration camps for four major cities: Hakodate, Tokyo, Osaka
and Fukuoka, with the Dispatch Camps in industrial and mining areas
such as Keihin (Tokyo and Yokohama) and Hanshin (Osaka and Kobe).
The POW Research Network Japan (POWRNJ) maintains a frequently
updated online record of information on these facilities.24 They estimate
around 130 camps in Japan during the war, holding around 36,000 Allied
POWs, with new camps in Sendai, Nagoya and Hiroshima established in
April 1945. They enumerate 3,500 POW deaths in the camps, while
11,000 died due to Allied attacks on the “hell ships” transporting them
to Japan.
Existing warehouses, company dormitories or school buildings were
frequently modified as prisoner accommodation – typically two-story
timber buildings surrounded by barbed-wire-topped wooden walls or
palings. Two- or three-story bunks would flank a central corridor.
Traditional Japanese-style toilets included communal bathing facilities,
located separately in outhouses, along with cookhouses and storerooms.
Heating was from converted oil drums. Building types varied. Wakayama
Camp in Osaka had ten bungalow-type huts, an infirmary, gardens and
sports-ground; POWs worked either in the camp or a machine factory. At
Muroran, Hakodate Group, in Hokkaido, twenty-seven single-story
24
The descriptions of East Asian POW camps found here are from NA-UK: WO361/2232,
POWs, Far East: International Red Cross Committee camp reports; camp locations and
compositions, 1 January 1944–31 December 1945; corroborated using POW Research
Network Japan website’s data.
Numbers based on Japanese POW and Internment Camps during World War II, Medical Research Committee of American Ex-POWs, January 1980. Research and proof of
authenticity by Frances Worthington Lipe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5540008. Numbers are indicative not conclusive.
Map 7.1 Japan’s “Empire of Camps.” Drawn by Yoke Lin Wong

216 Empire of Camps
dormitories housed thirty men each. They labored in the steelworks,

loading and unloading merchandise and repairing motor vehicles.
A similar arrangement was evident at nearby Kamiiso, where POWs
were employed in a concrete factory. Hakodate main camp was at
a former quarantine facility, and prisoners worked at a tool factory. Red
Cross reports noted that the respective camp commandants assured the
inspecting delegate that prisoners were not employed in war industries,
while prisoners, well aware of this deception, found every opportunity to
sabotage the equipment and supplies.25
POW testimonies at the war-crimes trials disclose their forced
employment in shipbuilding, port transportation, steel manufacture,
electrochemical industries, construction companies and mining. In
these scenarios, the factory entrance functioned like a customs check-
point where prisoners were handed to the security police.26 Factory-
gang foremen would select and supervise workers; and the inherent
nature of these civilian guards, rather than military regulations, often
determined how prisoners were treated. The worst of the camps were
associated with coalmines. The POWRNJ identifies: Mitsui and
Sumitomo mining companies, and Hokkaido Coal and Mining
Company in Hakodate; Jobai, Mitsubishi and Furukawa mining com-
panies in Sendai; and Nippon Steel Tube and Nippon Mining compan-
ies in the Tokyo Group. This last group appeared to be more closely
aligned with shipbuilding or electrochemical companies. The parent
companies employed POW labor in their various branches in different
parts of the archipelago. Many POWs in the Osaka Group were
employed in nickel and copper mines. The prominence of Nippon
Steel and other prominent steel manufacturing companies in many of
the localities reinforces this sensibility of pervasive industrialization
channeled for wartime production, exploiting the manpower of Allied
prisoners. US POWs captured in the Philippines, held at Hoten Camp
in Mukden, worked at the Mitsubishi MKK factory building machine
tools.27 The majority of 1,200 or so prisoners were housed in army
barracks – three two-story brick buildings with tiled roofs and wooden
floors.28 Associated dispatch and branch camps serviced an ironworks,
tannery, textile factory and steel and lumber mills. Two of the units in
25
Ibid.
26
Alex Dundie, ed., The Story of “J” Force (Sydney, NSW: Alexander Dundie, 1994), 18.
27
MKK is the acronym for Machu Kosaki Kai Kibasha Ki Kaisha; Linda Goetz Holmes,
Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of the Mukden POW Camp (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 2010), 40.
28
NA-UK: WO361/2232, Hoten (otherwise Mukden camp), 13 November 1943.
Emerging Imperial Camp Geography 217
Manchukuo later became notorious for covert experimental research

into biological warfare, using civilians as subjects.29
Conditions in camps varied, deteriorating in type and materiality far-
ther away from Japan, thereby affecting the experiences of laboring POWs
in Southeast Asia. Sarah Kovner notes that of the camps in Korea, Jinsen
(Inchon) was in 80x35-ft former military barracks, Keijō (Seoul) was
a four-story brick building at the former Iwamura Silk Reeling Mill and
the dispatch camp Kō nan (Hungnum) was in the heavily industrialized
zone. Jinsen and Keijō were established as propaganda camps where
Japanese officials took interest in the conditions of Allied prisoners who
worked in farms, army warehouses or harbor establishments, in relatively
easy work.30 While spartan, they were well constructed and porous to
their surroundings, with conditions often better than those for Koreans
living outside.31 Prisoners from the Kō nan camp worked in the Nippon
Chisso carbide factory, at scorching furnaces making dangerous
chemicals.32 Single-story tile-roofed timber barracks, or huts made of
mud, bamboo and thatch, similar to huts used in Southeast Asia, were
more likely in subtropical Taiwan. In addition to mining, agriculture,
infrastructure work and stevedoring, prisoners created symbolic spaces in
the expanded imperial landscape. Taihoku camp POWs constructed
a victory park with a manmade lake and island, and a Mt. Fuji replica
near the primary Shinto shrine in Taiwan.33
Colonial institutions like prisons, hospitals or schools had repetitive
cellular designs that could easily be adapted for POW accommodation,
although they had to accommodate greater numbers than they were
designed for. Military barracks were naturally the most desirable, and
were frequently expanded with temporary lines. Shanghai’s Kiangwan
POW Camp comprised seven newly built 200-yard-long 300-person
wooden barrack buildings, with lavatories at one end.34 Java’s Bicycle
Camp was the 10th Infantry Battalion barracks, with 100-foot-long tile-
roofed brick buildings with colonnaded verandas on either side.35 The
Philippines’ Camp O’Donnell on Luzon Island was a US colonial
29
Denison and Ren, Ultramodernism, 133.
30
Sarah Kovner, “Allied POWs in Korea: life and death during the Pacific War,” 107–24 in
The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation and
Imperial Afterlife, ed. Kushner et al. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 108–9.
31
Ibid., 125–6. 32 Ibid., 114.
33
Michael D. Hurst, Never Forgotten: The Story of the Japanese Prisoner of War Camps in
Taiwan during World War II (Taipei: Mei-Hua Publishing, 2020), 203.
34
Greg Leck, Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China,
1941–45 (Bangor, PA: Shandy Press, 2006).
35
Bill Griffiths, Blind to Misfortune: A Story of Great Courage in the Face of Adversity
(London: Leo Cooper, 1989), 34.
218 Empire of Camps
military-training facility expanded with bamboo barracks to accommo-

date several thousand captured US and Filipino troops. These last two
camps, like Changi, were staging camps (transit camps distributing
labor).
Work Camps Along the Burma-Thai Railway

Work camps took on a more rudimentary character, focused on construc-
tion, or agriculture, because European colonizers had not invested in
industrialization prior to the war. POWs worked alongside labor con-
scripts on many projects. Although the IJA destroyed specific evidence of
their deployment at the war’s end, along with other damning records,36
the Chösabu (Research Department) reports, by Japanese academics and
civil servants who accompanied the military to Southeast Asia, provide
important data. Gregg Huff and Shinobu Majima note that after British
capitulation, around 70,000 persons, more than a fifth of Sayonan’s
workforce, were employed by the Japanese in pursuance of a policy of
exploitation with minimum expense.37 Frustrated by the lack of industri-
alization under the British, they had to divert factories producing rubber
and tin to ammunition production.38
POW working parties across Southeast Asia and overseas set off from
staging camps like Changi, causing camp population and activities to
decline.39 Changi reduced from peak strength of 45,562 persons in
March 1942 to 12,032 in August 1945.40 The Bureau of Record and
Enquiry (BRE), stationed at no. 1 Temple Hill, led mainly by a Singapore
Improvement Trust land surveyor and engineer, New Zealander David
Nelson, secretly documented their dispersal from mid-1942. Upon real-
izing that Changi was a staging camp, the BRE maintained unit rolls on
scraps of salvaged paper,41 documenting, for example, that in 1942, “A,”
“B” and “C” forces and Japan “B” and “Z” Party saw 38,377 POWs
departing Changi for Saigon, Burma, Ban Pong, Borneo, Taiwan,
Chosen, Kuching, Moulmein, New Guinea and Japan.42 They were
followed by 76,505 POWs of “D,” “E,” “F,” “G,” “H,” “J,” “K” and
“L” forces in 1943. Prisoners from other parts of Southeast Asia passing
36
Shuji Shimokoji, “Historical issues in Japanese diplomacy: towards neighboring coun-
tries,” Paper presented at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard
University, 2003, 8, https://programs.wcfia.harvard.edu/files/fellows/files/shimokoji.pdf.
37
Gregg Huff and Shinobu Majima, World War II, Singapore: The Chösabu Reports on
Sayonan (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2018), 7.
38
Ibid., 21. 39 NA-UK: War Office records, WO 357/5, 1946–8.
40
Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience, 61–2, 82–8; Nelson, The Story
of Changi Singapore, 18, 182.
41
Ibid., 30. 42 Ibid., 202–4.
Work Camps Along the Burma–Thai Railway 219
via Changi communicated POW movements, casualties and burials,

enabling recordkeeping with a high degree of accuracy.43
Gathering information was difficult, and risky. Strict rules forbade
communication between camps or working parties.44 The POW roll
held at Pudu Jail in Kuala Lumpur, for example, was written on the
reverse side along the length of a toilet-paper roll, and handed over by
a staging Indian Army officer en route to Tokyo via Changi.45 But when
the first POW mail arrived in December 1942, with unit details deleted by
British censors, the only group capable of identifying the recipients’
whereabouts proved to be the BRE. This paper trail followed the POW
working parties across the Asia-Pacific. A summary of mail handled by the
BRE by 23 August 1945 enumerated 1,756,000 letters, barring those
received by the Australian Imperial Forces.46 Of these, 325,000 were for
prisoners at Changi, 920,000 for those overland and overseas, 190,000
for Indian POWs, 55,000 for civilian internees, 26,000 for local civilians,
55,000 for missing POWs and 185,000 for those missing or killed.
Analyzing the mail to Singapore and Malaya, David Tett identified the
triangular civil censor stamp, or, more ominously, stamps bearing the
words: “undelivered for reason status unknown – return to sender,”
“delivery impracticable”; or worse still, “addressee reported missing,”
“prisoner of war” or “damaged by fire in transit.”47 The postcards from
Malaya that arrived in the UK or Australia, via Tokyo-Switzerland-
Portugal, had five vertical characters reading “Furyo Shū yō jyo” (POW
Camp), a hand stamp in Kanji characters in violet or red reading
“Malayan POW Camp” and “Des Prisonniers De Guerre.” Tett noted
that 20,000 cards arriving in 21 July 1943, 90 percent from prisoners in
Malaya, were the first of only five cards permitted each for POWs.48
Letters had to be printed, within a twenty-five-word limit, and prisoners
agonized over what to say, often resorting to platitudes to spare their
families worry.49 A letter sometimes arrived months after its author died.
The regional mail network penetrated the furthest reaches of the Empire
of Camps, exceeding its outer limits to send desperate messages of resili-
ence and survival, by road, rail and ship, to the world beyond its bound-
aries. POW-built roads, airfields and, most importantly, the overland
railway connecting Japan’s Southeast Asian territories strengthened
these routes, once US naval victories made maritime routes unsafe.
By connecting Malaya’s extant railway infrastructure to a new route
across Southeast Asia, the IJA linked three distinct territories in much the
43
Ibid., 49. 44 Ibid., 55. 45 Ibid., 53. 46 NA-UK: WO361/2230.
47
David Tett, A Postal . . ., Vol. 1, Singapore (Melton Mowbray: Stuart Rossiter Trust
Fund, 2002), 38–45, 53, 198.
48
Ibid., 198–9. 49 Ibid., 203.
220 Empire of Camps
same way that newly nationalized railways had integrated Japan at the
turn of twentieth century and the trans-Manchurian railway system seized
from the Russians in 1905 opened up northeastern China. Their brutal
and coercive exploitation of unfree labor expedited the process, complet-
ing the entire 258-mile length between Burma and Thailand through
harsh and sometimes impenetrable tropical terrain in an astounding
twelve months (Map 7.2).50 Around 62,000 captive Allied POWs were
deployed constructing the Burma-Thai railroad, in over sixty temporary
work camps, with fragile, inadequate and exposed shelters, poor diet and
hard labor, so many died of tropical diseases like cholera, pellagra, mal-
aria or beriberi. Others succumbed to brutal treatment or injuries during
railroad construction along the track. Of the 9,500 Australians among
them, 30 percent did not survive.51 Some 270,000 Asian rǒmusha (labor
conscripts) worked alongside the prisoner workforce.
Railway construction was hard physical labor: felling trees, blasting
rocks, building embankments and preparing the ground for the track.
Along the 258 miles between Thanbyuzayat (Burma) and Ban Pong
(Thailand), at regular intervals, huts for 450 men formed unfenced
clusters around central squares in a linear constellation of camps.52 As
transportation to large sections along the route was difficult, materials
were sought from surrounding jungles or from dismantled portions of
track. Monsoonal rains, floods and landslides aggravated the risks.
Camps, supply lines, hospitals and other support facilities, too, had to
be constructed from scratch. These hastily erected timber-and-attap huts
approximated those built for early twentieth-century “native” troop
accommodation, producing a military vernacular for the tropics.
Because of their linear forms and rudimentary materials, they resembled
traditional longhouses and Malay kampung huts.
A cookhouse and guardhouse were the only other structures, with no
mess huts or ablution facilities. Prisoners ate out in the open and bathed
in streams or waterholes. Hospital huts at base-camps, and at points along
the line, were similarly constructed of timber and attap. Writing on his
experiences as a doctor on the Burma-Thai railroad, famed Australian
POW Edward “Weary” Dunlop noted the helplessness of officer-
prisoners, without authority or resources to intervene on behalf of
50
Anzac Portal, “The Burma-Thai railway and hellfire pass,” https://anzacportal
.dva.gov.au/history/conflicts/burma-thailand-railway-and-hellfire-pass/events/building-
hellfire-pass-0.
51
Peter Stanley, Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War (Canberra: Department of
Veterans’ Affairs and AWM, 2002), 22.
52
“Diary of British (Sumatra) POW Battalion, May 1942–March 1945,” 4, courtesy David
Tett; RDPWI, part IV, Australian POWs, chap. 2 appendix.
Based on data from the ANZAC portal and other sources, https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/history/conflicts/burma-thailand-railway-and-hellfire-pass/events/building-hellfire-pass/map-burma.
Map 7.2 Map of the Burma-Thai Railway. Drawn by Catherine Woo

222 Empire of Camps
suffering men. “Those in the medical services had the stimulus of the
stark needs of a deluge of piteously ill men, and most doctors were fearless
in approaches to our captors,” he wrote:
However, much of the salvage of sick and broken men was achieved by securing
the involvement of the whole stricken force in the sharing of slender resources,
money and food, and contributing ingenious improvisations and gifts of labours of
love out of their ebbing energy . . .. Who could forget one of my devoted medical
staff (S/Sgt Alan Gibson), who was himself reduced to a near naked skeleton,
shivering with chronic malaria and racked with dysentery, yet when confronted
with a man naked and tormented with cholera, dropped his last shred of comfort
in the world – his blanket – over the dying man.53
In a self-portrait made at Konyu, Thailand in July 1943, famous British

satirical cartoonist Ronald Searle depicts himself as a thin figure with
a bandage around his left arm, with various parts of his ragged shirt torn
off for other uses.54 Among many illustrations of the prisoners in camps,
Searle included occasional portraits of Asian refugees and “Coolies.”55
The rǒmusha’s living conditions, diet and treatment along the railroad
were far worse than the POWs’ because of Japanese internalizing of
colonial racial hierarchies. According to numbers reported by the Allies,
out of 182,496 employed across Southeast Asia, 40 percent did not
survive the war, among them 40,000 from Malaya.56 They had fewer
hospitals and less access to doctors or medicine along the railway line.
When cholera broke out in Burma’s railway camps, those infected were
isolated, and left to die.
The Journey from Changi to Naoetsu Camp

POW working parties dispersed further east to Japan or its colonies
experienced the horror of crossing the ocean in crowded “hell ship”
holds while being torpedoed by the Allies. On 29 November 1942 around
1,400 British and Dutch POWs at Singapore boarded the Kamakura
Maru to Nagasaki, along with Japanese civilians possibly repatriated
from Western countries. “C” Force’s 550 Australians, of the 2/20th
Battalion of the 8th Division under Lt. Col. A. E. Robertson, were among
53
E. E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop: Java and the Burma-Thai Railway 1942–
45 (Melbourne: Nelson Publishers, 1986), xv.
54
Imperial War Museum, IWM-UK: IWM ART 15747 76, Ronald Searle, Self-portrait,
1943, Konyu, Siam Thailand Jungle July ’43.
55
IWM-UK: IWM ART 15746 F1, Ronald Searle, Refugees, Malaya, January 1942; IWM
ART 15747 148b, “Chinese Coolies waiting,” Singapore 1944.
56
Nakaharo Michiko, “Malayan labour on the Thailand-Burma Railway,” 249–64, in ed.
Krakotska, Asian Labour, 258–9.
The Journey from Changi to Naoetsu Camp 223
them.57 This group, captured in Singapore, had been moved from Adam
Park to Sime Road in November 1942, in readiness for their departure to
Japan. Upon arrival at Nagasaki, 300, up to the letter “S,” were selected and
entrained to Naoetsu, in northwest Honshu’s Niigata prefecture, a 52-hour
journey along Japan’s west coast. Niigata had been a nineteenth-century
treaty port. The remaining Australians were moved south to Kobe.
Naoetsu POW Camp (Tokyo-04-Branch Camp, 7 December 1942 to
2 September 1945) was on the windswept Hokura riverbank, unbearable
in summer and snowbound in winter. The famous Olympic runner Louis
Zamperini would describe the town as a “bone-numbing frigid waste-
land,” with people tunneling down to their houses through 10–12-ft drifts
of snow.58 Prisoners were issued hessian coats with fur collars, possibly
left over from the Russo-Japanese War, boots, seven blankets each and
work uniforms. As snowfall worsened, they were issued straw-padded
“Emu” jackets. The first casualty was Lt. Col. Robertson, who died of
spinal meningitis and malnutrition in March 1943.59
On arrival, the prisoners occupied twenty-five-person squad rooms in
a requisitioned schoolhouse. In March 1943, they moved to a temporary
building in nearby Arita, and in October to a corrugated-iron salt-
warehouse belonging to the Shin-etsu chemical company. The three-
acre site was surrounded by 10-ft wooden palings topped with barbed
wire; the warehouse building was approximately 120x60 ft, with a 40-ft-
high gable.60 Internally, on each floor of the barn-like building, a central
corridor was flanked by two-tier sleeping platforms. Because of the
unlined walls and ceilings, the building was an “ice box.”61 Single-story
barrack quarters for the Japanese guards, a small headquarters building,
kitchen, warehouse and pigsty were on other parts of the site. Onsite
latrines had concrete floors, urinal troughs and timber-covered concrete
pits, with sewage siphoned into the river. Water for the camp from a well,
1 mile away, had to be carried in buckets on sleds. Washing facilities were
nonexistent, and baths were taken at six-week intervals at the factory.
In May 1945 when some 400 US personnel from Osaka and Kobe
arrived at Naoetsu, sixty Australians had already died.62 A total of 698
POWs (338 American, 231 Australian, 90 British and 39 Dutch) were
then crowded into the warehouse, while new barracks and an infirmary
57
Don Wall, Singapore and Beyond (W. Mantach, 2/20 Battalion Ass., 1985), 260.
58
Louis Zamperini and David Rensin, Devil at My Heels (New York; London: Harper,
2003), 173.
59
Alan B. Lyon, Japanese War Crimes: Trials of the Naoetsu Camp Guards (Loftus, NSW:
Australian Military History Publications, 2000), 26.
60
North China Marines, Naoetsu 4-B, www.northchinamarines.com/id35.html.
61
Wall, Singapore and Beyond, 269. 62 Lyon, Japanese War Crimes, 22.
224 Empire of Camps
Fig. 7.1 Koichi Inomata, Naoetsu Tokyo-04-Branch Camp, Niigata.

A Bridge across the Pacific Ocean, Japan Australia Society of Jō etsu, 1996,
126. Reproduced with permission from the Japan Australia Society of Jō etsu
were added to the complex (Fig. 7.1).63 Among this group of US Army
and Navy personnel were American civilian tradesmen taken on Wake
Island, two Koreans and a Japanese American.64
Reflecting on POW work assignments in Japan, Alex Dundie observed
that equipment was typically old, none of the men were trained for factory
work and they were malnourished and weak.65 Their employers pushed
them to the limits of human endurance, so accidents were inevitable.
Prisoners at the Shin-etsu Chemical Factory were employed in breaking
up and smelting various types of mineral rock for the manufacture of
carbide and silicon in large dry-cell electrodes used for factory furnaces.66
Work on the six furnaces involved eighteen-hour shifts in temperatures up
to 1,204 degrees Celsius. The men wore heavy suits to withstand the heat,
shoveling coke and quartz into the furnaces, pausing every half-hour for
63
POW Research Network, Japan, POW Camps in Japan Proper, www.powresearch.jp/en/
archive/camplist/index.html.
64
North China Marines, Naoetsu 4-B. 65 Dundie, The Story of “J” Force, 23.
66
Wall, Singapore and Beyond, 262.
The Journey from Changi to Naoetsu Camp 225
a thirty-minute rest.67 They would get so dehydrated that POW John

Cook recalled men screaming in agony when attempting to urinate.68
First Nations serviceman Private George Henry Beale of the 2/20th
Battalion was the second of sixty Australians to die at that camp. Born in
Quirindi, New South Wales, George and his brother Private Frederick
Beale had both enlisted in the same company and fought together in
Singapore and Malaya.69 On 29 May 1943, around 4.30 am after
a twenty-four-hour shift, he was caught in the coke escalator, injuring
himself badly. He was cut in the leg and stomach and his pelvic bone was
broken, weakening him too greatly to survive surgery.
Half of the Naoetsu POWs worked at the Nippon Stainless Steel
factory breaking up slag and scrap iron, transporting it in skips along
the railway line and loading the contents into the foundry.70 A Navy
rescue detachment made parts for fighter aircrafts and torpedoes, and
the prisoners worked on these alongside Koreans and Chinese laborers.
A third form of employment was in loading and unloading coal from
barges, ships and trains, for Joetsu Transportation and Naoetsu Harbor
Transport Company, under military control.71 When unloading coal
from ships at the end of Naoetsu’s breakwater, as the ships rose and fell
when the swells came in, they would get covered with black dust. They
would next take the barges upriver and unload the coke into baskets,
which they carried on their backs uphill to waiting trains. While carrying
a hundred-pound load into a train car, Zamperini, shoved aside by
a guard, fell five feet, tearing knee and ankle ligaments.72 Injuries meant
half rations.
Deceased POWs were cremated, their ashes stored in brick-shaped
boxes in the warehouse. These were later enshrined in the main hall of
the nearby Kakushin-ji Buddhist temple by the empathetic English-
speaking priest Enri Fujito, who had befriended the prisoners. He is
remembered for his statement, “among the dead there are neither
enemies nor allies.”73 The ashes were interred at the Yokohama War
Cemetery after the war.
Naoetsu is rated among Japan’s harshest POW camps because of the
brutality of the guards. Zamperini recalls walking barefoot from the camp
67
Roger Maynard, Hell’s Heroes (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009), 164. 68 Ibid., 164.
69
Informal portrait Aboriginal serviceman NX31660 Private George Henry Beale, 2/20th
Battalion. AWM: C1123252.
70
Maynard, Hell’s Heroes, 162.
71
Koichi Inamata, Bridge across the Pacific Ocean: Out of the Dark Days of Tragic Events at the
POW Camps at Naoetsu and Cowra (Naoetsu: Council to erect statues of peace and
friendship at the former Naoetsu campsite, 1996), 93–4.
72
Zamperini and Rensin, Devils at My Heels, 178–9.
73
The Peace Memorial Park and Museum, brochure (Joetsu: Niigata Prefecture, 1996–7).
226 Empire of Camps
to the steel mill, train yard and port, with his feet wrapped in rags, because
guard “Bird” Mutsuhiro Watanabe would make POWs lick the dirt off
their boots.74 The guards reduced POW diets, exposed them to harsh
weather and repeatedly beat them, abusing their authority over their
hapless victims. Of seven convicted at the International War Crimes
tribunal at the Yokohama courthouse in November 1946, two military
guards were sentenced to death by hanging.75 A year later, six out of seven
civilian guards brought before the court suffered the same fate.76
Japan’s war was fought in many territories that had become
dependent on colonial import–export economies, and occupying
these became a burden once supply lines were cut. Turning them
into self-sustaining environments proved impossible in the short
term. In such adverse circumstances, decisions were made based on
military exigency, victimizing many POWs, leading to excessive cas-
ualties. At home, the militarization of Japanese society around
national and imperial ideologies, their distance from supply lines,
and later scarcity and malnutrition hardened their resolve as the
war wore on, prompting actions, though considered culturally
ingrained, which were largely shaped by the conflict. Interspersed
among the accounts of unimaginable brutality are reflections by
POWs on more positive encounters with many local Japanese factory
workers laboring alongside them. Deprivation of food and basic
necessities was compounded by deteriorating conditions across the
POW camps.77 Negative attitudes toward the Japanese were also
extensions of settler-colonial racism, overlaid by convictions of
Asian inferiority, inflamed by existential threat. To be forced to
submit and be humiliated by a supposedly inferior race exaggerated
the effects of captivity. The fact that the IJA made their humiliation
public, using it to demonstrate the impotency of the colonizers,
meant that their labor was being manipulated for deeper racialized
politics. War-crimes convictions and the incarceration and forced
labor of Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSPs), after the war
ended in 1945, became the means for overturning these temporary
role reversals and seeking a form of colonialist justice or revenge. The
wartime carceral geography continued across the temporal boundary
postwar in new archipelagic camp formations created for extracting
labor from the defeated JSPs.
74
Zamperini and Rensin, Devils at My Heels, 176–7.
75
Lyons, Japanese War Crimes, 52–4. 76 Ibid., 61–3.
77
Tom O’Lincoln, Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth (Brunswick, VIC:
Interventions, 2011), 26, 73–90.
Dissolution of the Empire of Camps 227
Dissolution of the Empire of Camps

World War II ended with the Soviet Occupation of Manchukuo and
Japan’s acceptance of the Allies’ demand for surrender on
15 August 1945. The demobilization of some 600,000 Indian, British,
Dutch and Australian forces from across Southeast Asia, redistribution of
returned POWs, evacuation of civilian internees and repatriation of
766,193 JSPs (125,686 in Malaya and Singapore) was a significant
challenge.78 These populations had to be housed, hospitalized and provi-
sioned until they could be moved. Their numbers included Koreans,
Taiwanese and civilians who had to be segregated from the Japanese.
The total number of JSPs remaining in Singapore in September 1945
stood at 39,000, including 11,000 civilians. They were concentrated in
camps at Jurong and at Batu Pahat in Johore.79 In September 1945 Louis
Mountbatten moved the Southeast Asia Command from Ceylon (Sri
Lanka) to Singapore, which was converted into a key node in the repatri-
ation process. It oversaw the dissolution of the Southeast Asian strong-
hold of the Empire of Camps. The British reclaimed their former
territories, and Singapore’s civil government took charge in April 1946.
The empire’s end produced a different camp geography.
Mamoru Shinozaki, senior adviser to the civilian administration, in
charge of wartime labor recruitment, spoke of shock, despondency, fare-
well parties with excessive drinking and wanton destruction to gardens,
while more than fifty officers stationed at Tanglin barracks committed
suicide.80 He walked seventeen miles with the Japanese municipal staff to
the Jurong internment camp, a path reminiscent of the journey to Changi
after the fall of Singapore. The camp population included fifty depart-
mental chiefs and staff – men, women and family units – under the head of
the Japanese association, Ishiwara Sanyo Kabushiki Kaisha.81 The
Japanese association prepared for civilian internment by building thirty-
six huts for 6,800 persons, with electricity, water supply, medical supplies
and communications. Vegetable gardens were soon established. Unions
created for distributing rice, cigarettes, textiles and salt to the general
population diverted their stock for internee use.82 A painting of the camp
by Ernest Buckmaster, a war correspondent sent to document the sur-
render, shows the bustling activity around the camp site (Fig. 7.2).
78
NA-UK: WO 203/6098, Malaya, 15 and WO 203/2556, Current operations: operational
reports and notes. September–December 1945.
79
TAC HQ 14th Army to ALFSEA, secret communication, Current Ops General, Part II
WO203/2555, Current operations: operational reports and notes, August 1945.
80
Mamoru Shinozaki, My Wartime Experiences in Singapore, interviewed by Lim Yoon Lin
(Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1973), 98–9.
81
Ibid., 103. 82 Ibid., 105.
228 Empire of Camps
Fig. 7.2 Ernest Buckmaster, Japanese civil internment camp at Jurong,

Singapore, 1945. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ART
23384
Organized internally by departments of General Affairs, Building,

Medical and Garrison, and with a daily newspaper, Japanese civilians
coped as well as possible with captivity.83 Thirty Chinese women married
to Japanese men were also interned, and later repatriated with them to
Japan, while the British provided a bus route from the city so Chinese
employees could visit their former employers. The mood of the captured
internees was often dispirited; thirty-three died of disease, and five,
unable to face defeat, committed suicide.84
Jurong camp became a halfway point in the repatriation pathway for
civilians from Malaya, Java and Sumatra during the next two years. JSPs
were screened at Kluang airfield in Johore, where intelligence personnel, war
criminals and guards were detained, and the rest transported to Netherlands
East Indies’ Riau archipelago, along with JSPs from Sumatra, and Andaman
and Nicobar islands, in an operation facetiously called “Nipoff.”85
83
Ibid., 104–6. 84 Ibid., 105.
85
NA-UK: Concentration of Japanese forces to islands in the Riouw [Riau] Archipelago,
WO 203/2567, September–December 1945; WO203/2569, Jan.–Feb. 1946; WO203/
6118, JSP: policy and employment, June–July 1946, 3; Ashley Jackson et al., eds., An
Imperial World War: The British Empire, 1939–45 (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Approximately 105,000 surrendered personnel under HQ Malaya

Command, including 2,504 ex-POWs from India, were concentrated on
Riau’s Rempang and Galang islands, where they had to make do with a 200-
bed tented hospital and build their own accommodation from salvaged
timber and woven attap.86 Japanese civilian prisoners held at New Delhi’s
Purana Qila and later moved to Deoli, a western desert camp, returned to
Singapore, to be redistributed to their places of origin.87 There were similar
sites of concentration in several cities across Southeast Asia, a small part of
5 million JSPs repatriated from the Pacific theater between 1945 and 1947,
detailed by General Douglas MacArthur.88 The USA was responsible for
repatriation from Korea, the Ryukus, the Philippines and other Pacific
islands, while China and the Soviet Union oversaw their own processes,
the Soviets retaining 469,000 Japanese as forced labor after 1948 (violating
the Potsdam Declaration’s Clause 9 on the right to return home).89 Civilian
and military repatriates (hikiagesha) from Japan’s former colonies, former
pioneers of Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere, having fled Soviet military vio-
lence and Chinese reprisals, found they were not welcome in Japan.
Christian Hess highlights that they formed a politicized category distinct
from the rest of the population, and were subject to the scorn and shame
accompanying that society’s internalization of defeat.90 They could not
return without sponsorship, and many Japanese women who married into
Chinese families remained in China as zanru fujin (stranded war-wives).91
The use of JSPs for postwar reconstruction repeated the patterns of
submission and humiliation imposed on Allied captives. In Southeast
Asia, around 104,500 JSPs were deployed in food production and eco-
nomic rehabilitation until 1947, under Japanese military chain of com-
mand. They compensated for the acute labor shortage caused by the
deaths of around 100,000 civilians from among the Burma-Thai railway’s
86
The final concentration camps for Andaman and Nicobar Islands and parts of Java, Bali,
Lombok, Malaya and Sumatra: NA-UK: WO203/6118[fn85], 8; POWs and JIFs,
WO203/2557, Current operations: operational reports and notes, January 1945, 403;
NA-UK: WO 203/2567; Exodus to Rempang Island, IWM image nos. A 30953–62, 29
October 1945. See map in NA-UK: WO 203/2568, Concentration of Japanese forces . . .,
December 1945.
87
NA-UK: FO 916/477, Japanese in India Welfare, 1942. See also others in this series.
88
Douglas MacArthur, Reports of General MacArthur (Washington, DC: Superintendent of
Documents, 1966).
89
Ibid., 159, 161.
90
Christian Hess, “The fate of Japanese settlers in Manchuria,” in End of Empire: 100 Days
in 1945 That Changed Asia and the World, eds. David P. Chandler et al. (Copenhagen:
NIAS Press, 2016).
91
Rowena Ward, “Left behind: Japan’s wartime defeat and the stranded women of
Manchukuo,” The Asia Pacific Journal, 5:3 (2007), Article ID 2374, https://apjjf.org/-
Rowena-Ward/2374/article.html.
230 Empire of Camps
150,000 forced laborers.92 Some 7,600 of them were retained for railway
maintenance, while others worked repairing military facilities in
Singapore, including at Keppel Harbor, naval dockyards and airstrips,
and in food production and as plantation labor in Malaya, including for
civil contracts.93 They were involved in the construction of Kranji War
Cemetery, the repository of exhumed remains of deceased Allied service
personnel from sites across the island and overseas.94 Kunitara Ueda
resentfully recalled cutting grass, building a church and making wooden
boxes as gifts for visiting Anglican priests at Changi.95 Photographs of
JSPs working in public view capture their reversal of fortune (Fig. 7.3).
***
This chapter described the proliferation of camps in tandem with industrial-
ization, showing how Japan’s expanded sphere of militarized “co-prosperity”
was inscribed on laboring bodies both of POWs and local populations in the
temporarily occupied territories. While comparable to the exploitive violence
of past European colonizers, Japan’s actions were measured by international
standards set by its global competitors, after many of their own labor policies
had been revised. This camp history’s reception has also been impacted by
Japan’s failure to recognize these prison sites postwar, alongside its enshrine-
ment of war criminals at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine national war memorial
and its creation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorative peace parks for
civilian atomic bombing victims, when compared, for example, with the
German government’s early establishment of national memorials at former
concentration camps.
IJA actions extended an ambitious military industrial complex that mani-
fested physically as an Empire of Camps, the dissolution of which occurred
alongside the surrender and departure of captured Japanese military person-
nel. In postwar Singapore, facilities reverted to prewar uses, and the depart-
ing Japanese had destroyed monuments, like the Syonan Jinja, fearing
British desecration. A Japanese cemetery that predated the war had become
the recipient space for commemorating the war dead, refashioned with four
memorials by the JSPs.96 Traces of their postwar labor activities were
retained only in those gated military bases that outlasted independence,
such as the Admiralty House pool and a Japanese-style garden’s ornamental
bridge for the Commodore Superintendent at 128 King’s Avenue. Similarly
92
NA-UK: WO203/6119, appendix a.
93
Shinozaki, My Wartime Experiences, 110; NA-UK: WO 203/2564, Malaya Current
Operations, 1 September–31 December 1945; NA-UK: WO203/6118.
94
Blackburn and Hack, War Memory, 64–70.
95
Kunitaro Ueda, Singapore National Archives, OHC 1444, Reel 2.
96
Blackburn, “Heritage site,” 17–39, 30.
Fig. 7.3 Japanese POWs guarded by Indian troops, filling in air-raid

trenches on St. Andrews Cathedral grounds, Singapore, September 1945.
Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 117033
in Japan, as prominent companies were not held accountable for their

wartime actions and their factories returned to previous private uses, dormi-
tories were dismantled to make room for up-to-date facilities, the sites
inaccessible to the general public.
Many changes at the heart of the defeated empire awaited the returning
JSPs. Sea-lane blockages and strategic bombing of major cities took their
toll on Japan, with escalating inflation and mass unemployment crippling
the economy – conditions aggravated by soldiers returning and extensive
war damage, including to major industries and transportation
232 Empire of Camps
networks.97 Alan B. Lyon, the Australian Army representative of the

British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, who served as
a War Crimes Commission member for the trial of Naoetsu guards,
observed,
towards the middle of May 1945, bombing raids on Tokyo by some 300 or more
B-29 bombers dropped both High Explosive and Incendiary bombs on the major
part of the city. It was estimated that over 3,000,000 were left homeless as
a result . . .. It was claimed that the destruction of Tokyo was even greater than
the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.98
The Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, reduced to its
structural skeleton during atomic bombing, became the central feature
of the famed Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum, winning
architect Kenzo Tange postwar international prominence. This preserved
ruin of a building designed after the Vienna Secessionist aesthetic would
come to symbolize how the empire had been thwarted by a horrific civilian
tragedy – killing or wounding over 200,000 people. This memorial strat-
egy of preserving a ruin was strange to and intensely debated by the city’s
residents, as recounted by Lisa Yoneyama.99 Jorg Gleiter noted that the
ruin’s symbolic metaphorical presence was a key distillation point for the
city’s reconstruction, its form linked to the founding myth of a new
Japan.100 Its symbolism would haunt Japanese modernist architects,
producing fantasies of techno-utopian recovery or projections of future
ruin.101
On-ground realities were sobering. Architect Kenzo Tange recalls
drawing the Hiroshima master plan from salvaged materials found in
the burned-out city-hall basement. He worked with three others in a hut
with a corrugated sheet-metal roof, on the former city’s scorched earth.102
This image of architects camping out on a dystopian tabula rasa contrasts
with the utopian plans they had projected onto Manchukuo’s imperial
landscape. Instead, they were immersed in a postwar camp geography of
refugees, repatriates and reconstruction workers, refilling brutally
97
John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin
Books, 1999).
98
Lyon, Japanese War Crimes, 24: observation made in February 1946.
99
Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
100
Jorg H. Gleiter, “Brutalism as a symptom: on the path of Japanese modernism’s reverse
development,” 238–49, in Brutalism: Contributions to the International Symposium in
Berlin (Zurich: Park Books, 2012), 124.
101
In reference to Tange-led Metabolists and architect Arata Isozaki’s critique of their
fantastic proposals.
102
Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan, 81, from Kenzo Tange, Ippon no empitsu kara [From
One Pencil] (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center, 1997).
gouged-out urban voids. Displaced urban populations in makeshift shel-

ters traded on the black market or traveled to rural areas to barter for food.
Westernization, in the form of Americanization, would gradually take
hold over the six years and eight months of postwar Allied occupation.
Postwar social dysfunction in Japan or across Southeast Asia was still
less severe than in Europe, which Keith Lowe described as a “savage
continent” racked by violence, vengeance and moral depravity.103 The
return of colonial rulers constrained Southeast Asian subject populations,
while Japan was contained by US authority. Both the Japanese occupa-
tion and anti-Japanese guerrilla movements had sown the seeds of polit-
ical self-determination in colonized Asian subjects; and their expulsion
ignited a political consciousness that sought colonialism’s demise. The
vision of an empire being dismantled, contained and ejected out of its
former territories set a powerful precedent for decolonization in the
following decades. In contrast, demilitarized, pacified and punished for
its naked aggression, Japan pursued liberal democracy under US stew-
ardship. The extraordinary US role in this process also begs closer exam-
ination of the incarceration of Japanese Americans, in this book’s next
chapters.
103
Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (London:
St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
8 Prison City
Lynne Horiuchi and Anoma Pieris
The incarcerations of alien enemies and “people of Japanese ancestry” in

Canada and the United States comparatively provide examples of
“camps” created by Allied nations that further refract the complexity of
national belonging, forced movement and incarceration. The spatial scale
and size of the dislocations were significantly greater for civilians in the
USA, while in Canada, the use of confiscated property to pay for the
confinement was emotional and financial punishment for being “of
Japanese ancestry” and a different example of extreme spatial violence.
In the eyes of the Japanese government, the forcibly removed and
incarcerated North American Japanese communities had formed an inte-
gral part of the Japanese colonization abroad, although emigrants to the
Americas and Western nations embodied different ideological and mater-
ial aspirations from those settling in Japan’s Asian colonies such as
Formosa (Taiwan), Chosen (Korea) or Manchukuo (Manchuria),
where Japan’s settler-colonists belonged to the dominant power. From
the first decades of the twentieth century, while concomitantly asserting
their international standing among Western nations, the Japanese gov-
ernment had had to defend North American Japanese immigrant com-
munities from British and American settler-colonial racism and the vitriol
of American anti-Asian campaigns that specifically targeted Japanese. In
the USA, anti-Asian political groups successfully barred emigrants from
all Asian nations from legally entering the USA and from obtaining
American citizenship or owning land based on their inadmissibility to
the category of free white citizens as an undesirable “yellow” race that
made them unassimilable. Discrimination based on the inferior status of
their “yellow race” extended to international negotiations as Japan com-
peted for equal status with Western nations. For example, Japanese
militarists and the press considered the 1920 Washington Conference,
which limited Japanese armaments in spite of Japan’s defeat of Russia in
1905, an irreconcilable offense. At the same time that the White Australia
Policy codified the inferiority of Asian people and exclusion from the
continent after Federation in 1901, the American 1924 Quota
234
Prison City 235
Immigration Law targeted the Japanese and all Asians, stating that the
quota would not apply to “aliens ineligible for citizenship.”
The sites of the Canadian and American internments or incarceration
of “people of Japanese ancestry” were spatially initiated through the
demarcation of a strip of land along the Pacific coast, including Alaska,
varying approximately inland as an exclusion area (Map 8.1). Japanese
immigrants and colonial settlers of the Japanese empire, who retained
their Japanese citizenship in part because they were banned from becom-
ing citizens of the USA, and “members of the Japanese race” in Canada,
including naturalized citizens and Japanese Canadians, were forced to
move from these areas to controlled isolated rural sites.1 The mass incar-
ceration of the group included people described as “enemy aliens,”
“internees,” “evacuees” or simply “Japanese,” without consideration for
American citizenship or status as a British subject born in Canada.
Spatially and in material type, the camps for Japanese Canadian and
American immigrant families differed in part because of their historic lack
of access to citizenship, property ownership and the differing character-
izations of their body politics. Japanese Canadians, for example, were
considered British subjects if born in Canada, yet limited in access to
property, fishing licenses, voting and myriad other rights constrained by
colonial practice using racial characteristics to prevent them from com-
peting freely with non-Asians and relegating them to second-class
Canadian citizenship; their citizenship rights were then revoked between
March and October 1942.2 Japanese born in the USA had been accorded
equal rights under the 14th amendment of the American constitution,
while, along with their immigrant parents, they were discriminated
against in social, economic and political sectors of American society
based on their race in ways that were often codified. Germans and
Italians that were white/Caucasian were not incarcerated en masse but
individually.
The initial World War II spatial jurisdictions authorized curfews, bans
on fishing, limitations on movement and frozen bank accounts; the sub-
jects of exclusion were required to register with the government and then
stripped of their personal property and forced to move. The Canadian
government moved “members of the Japanese race” in British Columbia,
including Japanese Canadian citizens, into the mountainous terrain of the
1
Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1976), 220. Naturalized Canadians of Japanese ancestry had no
constitutionally guaranteed rights.
2
Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress
Settlement (Vancouver, with National Association of Japanese Canadians, Winnipeg:
Talonbooks, 1991), 2, 31.
236 Prison City
Adapted from maps published by Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time (NAJC, Winnipeg: Talonbooks,
1991), 30 and Burton et al. eds. Confinement and Ethnicity (Tucson, AZ: NPS 1999), 35, 39, 51
Map 8.1 Concentration (internment) camps for people of Japanese

ancestry in Canada and the USA. Drawn by Dhara Patel
Prison City 237
Kootenays region where they were left mid-winter; meanwhile, the gov-
ernment sold off their confiscated possessions and paid them an allow-
ance out of the proceeds to pay for their upkeep.3 With delegated
authoritarian powers, the US military and other national security agencies
interned Japanese nationals as enemy aliens suspected of espionage with-
out charges or evidence under the rule of law. Under the authority of
Presidential Executive Order 9066 Japanese immigrants in America living
in this spatial strip were subject to incarceration as “people of Japanese
ancestry” in camps the US government euphemistically named Assembly
Centers and Relocation Centers. In prison cities laid out in grid systems
with repetitive rows of standard military barracks using US Army Corps
of Engineers standard plans, the populations immediately set about alter-
ing the cities of their incarceration to make them habitable with recre-
ational amenities, schools, libraries, stores, theaters, parks, churches and
other structures modeled after the racially segregated communities of
their provenances, which somewhat normalized their urban experiences
in spite of their disenfranchised and impoverished living conditions while
incarcerated.4
There are many historical parallels between US and Canadian wartime
exclusion processes and the effects of historical racial discrimination built
upon anti-Asian discriminatory legislations in both countries. Although
the Canadian Order-In-Council P.C. 1486 mirrored the American presi-
dential E.O. 9066, the incarceration of the two groups and subsequent
postwar deportations conditioned by Commonwealth and US law dif-
fered substantially.5 There was also a separate internment process in both
nations with separate internment camps for enemy aliens, which included
Japanese, German and Italian nationals.6 There was similar wartime
employment of internees in agricultural and infrastructure industries
and similar postwar agitation for redress. Unlike in Australia, organiza-
tion as labor preceded internment for Japanese nationals in Canada with
the early separation of Japanese men for employment in highway con-
struction, while the US military and government systematically sought to
use “evacuees” for incarcerated unfree or cheap labor and possible pris-
oner exchange while keeping families generally intact. The Canadian
3
Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, 220.
4
For a general history and analysis of E.O. 9066, see CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied:
Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, [1997] 2000), 104–15.
5
Gordon K. Hirabyashi, “The Japanese Canadians and World War II,” in Japanese
Americans from Relocation to Redress, eds. Sandra C. Taylor, Roger Daniels and Harry H.
L. Kitano (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).
6
Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World
War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003).
238 Prison City
internment camps at New Denver, although holding as many as 12,029

persons, were residual or deemed unproductive when compared with the
large American self-supporting agricultural projects maintained with
prison labor. There were also significant differences; Japanese
Canadians were considered British subjects, yet with limited rights.
Along the entire American coastal strip, citizenship was key to national
identity as Japanese immigrants had been deemed unassimilable and
barred from becoming British subjects or American citizens. Germans
and Italians were also excluded from the US and Canadian west coast and
some interned. Approximately 7,000 German nationals out of a total of
1.2 million and over 3,200 Italians were sent to US Army, Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS) or Department Justice internment
camps; an additional 10,000 were required to move out of restricted
areas in California. Canada interned approximately 800 Germans and
600 Italians because of their restricted immigration.7
While the American cases have been discussed as civil liberties viola-
tions, the sites of incarceration have drawn much less discussion as
material cultural sites. The case study of the Japanese Canadians high-
lights differences evident from the outset around accommodation, labor
creation and the mass uprooting of a smaller Japanese Canadian popula-
tion, a total of 21,460 people out of the Canadian population of 11 million
in 1939 of whom 75 percent were naturalized or Canadian-born citizens.
The 1940 US census counted approximately 125,000 Japanese and
Japanese Americans out of a total population of 132 million. The
Manzanar Relocation Center as a case study, comparatively to the
Canadian removals and incarcerations, provides insight into the mass
incarceration of “people of Japanese ancestry” in the USA, two-thirds
of whom were also American citizens. This was a much larger project,
requiring housing units for a total of 120,000 people twice over – first in
Assembly Centers and in Relocation Centers and then the management
of ten semi-permanent prison cities.
Chapter 8 examines the transformation of the Manzanar landscape
from both the government and the prisoners’ perspectives following
the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans under the
Presidential Executive Order 9066 (E.O. 9066) issued on 19
February 1942 that delegated power to the military. As with the
Japanese Imperial Army and in the Pacific theater, prisoners provided
labor. This chapter examines the government’s early planning for large-
scale agricultural and industrial development at Manzanar and its use of
7
Stephen Fox, Fear Itself: Inside the FBI Roundup of German Americans during World War II
(New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005), 380.
Prison City 239
capital, land and the “evacuees” as unfree labor units skilled in agricultural
and horticultural labor. This focus elucidates the a priori assumption that
the incarcerated subjects were largely a labor resource to be dedicated
specifically to agriculture, managed and moved about as needed. The
early planning stages also raise questions about the military and the execu-
tive branches’ willingness to disregard the constitutional rights of the
prisoners even before the issuance of E.O. 9066 in persistent, unacknow-
ledged and planned systematic ways. From the prisoners’ perspective, the
chapter examines their labor and control over their contributions to agri-
culture at Manzanar. The chapter links and compares the larger American
and Canadian contexts framed by this book with an examination of the
transformative power within the carceral context of community coopera-
tives and the housing conditions in the Canadian interior for elderly
persons, women and children whose dependency on others cast them
outside this labor economy.
Manzanar Relocation Center was a unique metropolis and racially
segregated prison city, located approximately 218 miles (350 kilo-
meters) north of Los Angeles, the provenance of the majority of its
residents as a result of government policy to move families and
communities together. Built in east-central California for the sole
purpose of incarcerating Japanese and Japanese Americans, the US
Army’s Western Defense Command and Fourth Army (Western
Defense Command) directed the construction by Griffith and
Company of Los Angeles as the general contractor, which the US
Army Corps of Engineers oversaw. The boomtown lay at the toes of
the continuous bajada or apron of alluvial flows from the Sierra
Nevada mountain range, with the highest mountains in the USA
spectacularly dominating the site in the west and the White-Inyo
Mountains in the east. The Western Defense Command used mili-
tary standards and processes to access large-scale amounts of material
and land quickly and to create developing partners of complex net-
works of federal, state, regional and local agencies. The urban space
for the spatial confinement of approximately 10,000 Japanese and
Japanese Americans at Manzanar evolved with hurtling and dramatic
speed, beginning on 5 March 1942, a week after its selection as a
site; by 11 April 1942, the prisoners’ first news-sheet, Manzanar Free
Press, noted that it was the most densely developed and populated
town of the Eastern Sierras (Fig. 8.1 and Map 8.2). By contrast, the
county seat of Bishop, the second most populous city, had a popula-
tion of 1,490 people in 1940; the prisoners’ news-sheet noted on 11
April 1942 that the “magic” town had become in three weeks the
240 Prison City
Fig. 8.1 Manzanar Relocation Center, from a tower. Photograph by

Ansel Adams. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
LOT 10479-2, no. 8, LC-DIG-ppprs-00199
largest city in Owens Valley and the largest California city east of the
Sierra, with a population of 3,302.8
Manzanar was the first “Reception Center” or “Assembly Center” site
to be developed, reflecting the chaos and instability of the first three
months of prison city development. It was also euphemistically renamed
for each urban transformation it came to represent as it was converted
from the Owens Valley Reception Center under the direction of the
Western Defense Command to the Manzanar Assembly Center under
the jurisdiction of the Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA)
as a division of the Western Defense Command, and finally to the
Manzanar Relocation Center under the administration of the War
Relocation Authority (WRA). In fact, it gathered several other references
as a type early in the process: as a concentration camp, a refugee camp, a
resettlement camp and an internment camp for enemy aliens. In addition
to government naming that obscured the violence of disenfranchisement,
8
The term “prison city” is used to highlight the urban building and characteristics of the
site. For a general history of Manzanar Relocation Center see Harlan D. Unrau, The
Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry during World War II: A Historical
Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, vol. 1 (Denver, CO: US Department of the
Interior, National Parks Service, 1996). See also Manzanar Free Press, 1:1, 11 April 1942.
Map 8.2 Plan of land improvements, Manzanar Relocation Center, 18 June 1942. National Archives, USA NAI
4688259, sheet no. 6, 5 June 1945. Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1941–89, Record Group 210, courtesy
of National Park Service, Manzanar
242 Prison City
forced movement and unfree labor associated with the mass incarcer-
ation, it was referred to as a voluntary “evacuation” and the prisoners as
“evacuees.”
E.O. 9066 authorized the Secretary of War or his designated military
commanders, principally General John L. Dewitt and the Western
Defense Command and Fourth Army (Western Defense Command)
stationed at San Francisco’s Presidio, to:
prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded and
with respect to which the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be
subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military
commander may impose in his discretion.9
Although E.O. 9066 did not refer to ethnic or racial groups, this spatial
authority was the legal key allowing the US military to exclude people of
Japanese descent by blood line, including American citizens from the west
coast, Alaska and parts of Arizona, from their designated Military Areas 1
and 2 (see Map 8.1). The Western Defense Command carried out its
ethno-racialization through 108 Exclusion Orders specifying the removal
of “people of Japanese ancestry” suspected of espionage and sabotage but
without charges or evidence under the rule of law, ordering them to report
to Control Stations between 24 March and August 1942.
The US Census Bureau used both meta and micro data to geographic-
ally locate Japanese American communities, while Public Law 503 passed
by Congress on 9 March 1942 criminalized whoever violated any Army
order.10 Unlike the mix of nationalities in both the Singapore and
Australian examples, and the proximity there of prisoners-of-war
(POWs) and internees, the North American camps were more rigidly
demarcated, segregated, enclosed and classified.
The imprisoned population immediately set about altering the mili-
tary’s prison cities to make them habitable for a diverse population of
bachelor laborers, families with young babies and children, the elderly,
the young adult Niseis who were American citizens, and the Isseis who
were Japanese citizens reaching their maturity with varied connections to
their homeland. Using their cooperative and commercial power from
within the camps, the prisoners subsequently worked to normalize their
urban experiences in the prison cities by reconstructing many of the
organizations, religious institutions, social amenities and recreational
facilities of the racially segregated communities of their provenances. By
activating the view through the prisoners’ eyes in parts of this chapter, we
9
US Executive Office of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066,
Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas. 19 February 1942.
10
Public Law 503 of 21 March 1942.
Military Power in the Development of the Manzanar Site 243
may understand the prisoners’ movement through spatial confinement,

negotiations of power, subjection as units of labor exchange and their
cultural material production within the camps.
Military Power in the Development of the Manzanar Site

Military use of power was spatially exclusionary and enforced with some
planning and coordination taking place before the issuance of E.O. 9066
and the creation one month later of the sole purpose administrative
agency for managing the mass incarceration, the WRA. Military power
was consolidated at the Manzanar site as the finances for development
and construction flowed through the US military. The military controlled
the planning and construction of prison cities, capturing all the construc-
tion contracts for the Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers from
March through December 1942. Using the US Army and WRA budget-
ary reports, a conservative and approximate estimate for the cost of the
project between 1942 and 1946 may be estimated at over $300 million.
Departments of Justice, War, Labor and Agriculture, the Federal Security
Agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Office of the
Attorney General, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the INS, the
Navy, and the Office of Facts and Figures were already coordinating with
the Army in late January 1942. In early February 1942, President
Roosevelt initiated the funding for “the task of removing and distributing
in other localities enemy aliens now living in prohibited areas” with
$500,000 to the Federal Security Agency.11 Just as Manzanar construc-
tion was beginning, the Army requested on 8 March 1942 a General
Purpose Fund of $50 million with $1 million available immediately.12
The mass incarceration was one of the largest domestic defense projects
undertaken during World War II, requiring phalanxes of federal, state
and local governments with an official Federal Regional Advisory Council
convened specifically to address its planning.
The Army’s Provost Marshal General Allen W. Gullion, the highest-
ranking lawyer for the US Army, and his assistant Karl Bendetsen worked
out the spatial logic of E.O. 9066.13 By 5 February 1942, Gullion issued a
call to Commanding Major Generals for reports on “Camps for Use of
11
Lynne Horiuchi, Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and
Japanese Americans During World War II (PhD diss., University of California, Santa
Barbara, 2005), 123.
12
M. H. Flint to Colonel Magill, 8 March 1942, Records of U.S. Army Defense
Commands (World War II) RG 499, Entry E136, Box 137 (NACP).
13
Klancy Clark De Nevers, The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen – Perry Saito and the
Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (Salt Lake City: University of
Utah Press, 2004), 98–107.
244 Prison City
Alien Enemy Evacuees,” requesting detailed reports of state, county and

municipal facilities, such as prison farms, pauper farms, agricultural
experiment farms, migratory farms, state parks, fairgrounds and other
sites with utilities suitable for the “use of considerable numbers of evac-
uees.” The request went on to specify that Americans of Japanese descent
including women and children would be among the “evacuees.” Similar
requests went out by telegraph and airmail letters to state governors, the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) officers and many other agencies;
the selection of Owens Valley/Manzanar and Parker/Poston was already
under discussion.14 Facing opposition from the Los Angeles County
Department of Water and Power (LADWP), DeWitt threatened to use
his powers under E.O. 9066 to establish military areas to claim land.15 By
6 March, V. B. Stanberry of the National Planning Resources Board
reported that Manzanar and the “Parker Indian Reservation” sites had
already been selected and by 30 March, Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher
Bowron was writing to finalize the lease arrangements.
Historical Occupation of the Manzanar Site

The Relocation Center prison cities were represented as American home-
front projects to ensure that Japanese American communities were
removed to remote areas, with all the obvious contradictions of a mass
incarceration of Japanese American citizens for the purposes of national
security and military necessity. Because of the forced movement of the
entire Japanese American population from the American west coast and
the use of the prisoners for labor exchange, industrial enterprises, land
development, infrastructure improvements and labor markets, the mater-
ial landscape of Manzanar is historically linked to a large number of
carceral typologies in its economic functions. Historically applying the
genealogies of colonial divisions reveals how liberal property rights for
whites, espoused by John Locke, were simultaneously linked to slavery as
a labor force and the social construction of the US constitution providing
conditions for the racialization and disenfranchisement of indigenous
populations like the Paiute at Manzanar. The coerced labor of the
14
Jay L. Benedict, Major General U.S. Army, “Confidential Memo: Camps for Use of
Alien Enemy Evacuees” to Commanding General, Headquarters, Western Defense
Command and Fourth Army, Presidio of San Francisco, California, 5 February 1942,
Records of U.S. Army Defense Commands (World War II), RG 499, Entry E136, Box
137 (NACP).
15
Transcript of telephone conversation between General DeWitt, WDC and Fourth Army
and Lt. Colonel Bendetsen, 4 March 1942, Office of the Provost Marshal General,
Washington, DC, Records of U.S. Army Defense, RG 499, Entry E136, Box 137
(NACP).
Historical Occupation of the Manzanar Site 245
Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans followed, conflated into a

racialized category of “Japanese” at Manzanar Relocation Center, related
to the colonial settler use of migrant Japanese and Chinese labor for
railroad construction and agricultural work in America from the mid-
nineteenth century, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the exclusion
of “Japanese” from the Pacific coast codified in the Immigration Act of
1924. The discrimination against Asians through the denial of naturalized
American citizenship, legalized spatial exclusion, alien land laws and
racial covenants exempted them from the universal ideologies of excep-
tional liberalism in the American west.
The Owens Valley Paiute originally occupied for at least 600 years the
land on which the Western Defense Command sited Manzanar
Relocation Center. The Manzanar site is land to which the Big Pine
Paiute Tribe, the Bishop Paiute Tribe, the Fort Independence Indian
Community of Paiute Indians and the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Tribe
share claims today. The land the Paiute named Piyahu-Nadu, or the
“place where the water flows,” was drastically altered through the survey-
ing and acquisition of property by American settlers colonizing the west-
ern United States.16 When they began claiming land in Owens Valley for
cattle ranches during the early 1860s, Paiute access to the valley’s lush
grasslands was circumscribed and their traditional food sources depleted.
Their removal and confinement was a precedent that began in July 1863,
when the US military forcibly removed nearly 1,000 Paiute from their
land and forced them to march to the Fort Tejon Reservation 200 miles to
the south across desert land.
The Manzanar Relocation Center drew water metaphorically from
name places representing Indigenous and American colonial settlement;
it was located between two of the perennial streams that flow from the
Sierra Nevada: Georges Creek and Shepherd Creek (see Map 8.2).
Georges Creek, named after a Paiute, was one of the largest of the forty
streams flowing off the Sierra Nevada feeding the Owens River, a logical
place for John Shepherd to develop his 1,300-acre cattle ranch. Southern
California developer George Chaffey bought the Shepherd Ranch in
1905 and subdivided it to create Chaffey’s Manzanar Irrigated Farms,
comprising a community of 200 who grew apples, pears and peaches
sustained by a mutually owned irrigation system; Chaffey later took his
expertise in irrigation and marketing to Australia. Southern Californian
dominance took hold with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in
16
Wendy Yamashita, “The colonial and the carceral: building relationships between
Japanese Americans and indigenous groups in the Owens Valley,” Amerasia Journal,
42:1 (2016): 131.
246 Prison City
1913; by 1926, the City and County of Los Angeles owned all of the
orchards and water rights that drained into the LA Aqueduct.17
Military Models and the Wartime Civil Control

Administration
The establishment of the WCCA of the Civil Affairs Division of the
Western Defense Command with Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen in charge
on 11 March 1942 preceded the creation of the WRA on 18 March. The
WCCA made their headquarters in the Hotel Whitcomb in the heart of
San Francisco on Market Street near Van Ness Avenue, a geographic
location that created an urban intersection between the Western Defense
Command offices at the Presidio, the WRA, the western offices of cooper-
ating federal agencies and the US Army Corps of Engineers. The WCCA
directed many of the decisions about physical constructions that would
regulate the material lives of the prisoners. Bendetsen managed all of the
Army’s operational functions and policy directions as the military coequal
to Milton Eisenhower, director of the WRA. He claimed to have “con-
ceived the method, formulated the detail plans for, and directed the
evacuation.” Appearing as service adjuncts to the Army’s work, the
most important cooperating federal agencies in the carceral project are
listed at the bottom of the WCCA organizational chart: the Federal
Security Agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and
the Bureau of Census (Fig. 8.2). The site selection and planning for all
the “Relocation” Centers involved the use of “evacuee labor” as part of
the intensely researched and well-coordinated site selection planning.
The Owens Valley Reception Center

The Owens Valley Reception Center site was laid out over one square mile
of desert scrubland as a racially segregated prison city; the prisoners’
residential area was fenced and guarded. The central portion encompassed
540 acres; the total lease from the City of Los Angeles was for approxi-
mately 6,200 acres (2,509 hectares). Like the other Relocation Center
sites, it was built according to the 1939 Theater of Operations 700 series
standards as temporary cantonment barracks for male troops and auxiliary
buildings with military names – mess halls, latrines, etc. The rigidity of this
military planning and construction was overbearing, with gridded layouts
17
Jane Wehrey, Images of America: Manzanar (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008),
9. See also 7.
The Owens Valley Reception Center 247
Karl R. Bendetsen Papers, Box 621, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.
Fig. 8.2 Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Organizational

Chart. Lynne Horiuchi, redrawn by Yoke Lin Wong
248 Prison City
and shelter sharing more characteristics with POW camps than with the
large army bases built during the period of US military mobilization from
1939 through 1941 in preparation for World War II (Fig. 8.3).
Fig. 8.3 Plan of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Records of the
War Relocation Authority, 1941–89, Record Group 210, NA, USA,
NAI 4688259. Courtesy of NPS, Manzanar
The Owens Valley Reception Center 249
Manzanar site was the earliest site to be developed and served as a kind
of experimental building site, first as a reception center or assembly
center, located within a military zone. Thus, when it was converted to a
“relocation” site, it failed to exclude the prisoners from the Military
Area 2.
The military refused to provide community facilities as seen in an
image of a typical plot plan in their final report. WCCA sited “Future
Schools and Community Activities” in the middle of the segregated
prisoner housing, which contained units the Army consistently
claimed were “apartments” in spite of their complete lack of living
accommodations, i.e., sewage, water, kitchen facilities or bathrooms.
Fourteen to sixteen military barracks were organized in a pedestrian
city with blocks designed to house 250 to 300 people each. Such
rigid military structuring of the prison cities provided practically no
accommodation for children, women or the elderly. With no running
water, caring for children or the elderly was difficult. The barracks
were a minimum of 100 feet from the communal latrines. Designing
for schools, community planning and staff housing was assigned to
the Farm Security Administration Office of the Engineer IX and XI
headed by Vernon DeMars; however, with the exception of staff
housing, their plans generally did not materialize.
The military police arrived at the Owens Valley Reception Center site
on 15 March 1942 and the first convoy of sixty Japanese and Japanese
American volunteers for setting up the camp arrived on buses from Los
Angeles on 21 March 1942. As an observer noted:
There were no finished barracks for them, nor doors, windows, or steps, and the
expression that “The houses were built around the Japanese” can be taken
literally.18
After 1 June 1942, the Manzanar site would serve as a semipermanent
prison city for nearly four years under WRA jurisdiction. The material
and urban characteristics of the site bore the stamp of the military hastily
building over an extremely short period of time, with military construc-
tion continually ongoing for improvements for most of 1942 to bring
Manzanar up to minimum standards and only declared complete in
December 1942.
18
Dr. Carter to Dorothy Swaine Thomas, “Progress and Organizational Report on
Manzanar, Japanese Relocation Settlement,” 1 June 1942, 3. Online Archive of
California, BANC, JERS, MSS 67/14c, cubanc6714_b210o10_0002, The Bancroft
Library University of California.
250 Prison City
The Japanese Canadian Exclusion and Internment

The “mass uprooting” of a much smaller population of Japanese
Canadians but a larger percent of the population when compared with
the USA (0.2 percent when compared to 0.09 percent Japanese
Americans) highlights a different approach to incarceration in this neigh-
boring settler society.19 The War Measures Act was brought into force in
Canada on 25 August 1939, followed by the Defense of Canada
Regulations enabling censorship or banning of various organizations and
activities. As a first response to Japan’s aggression in and around the Pacific
Basin, Japanese nationals deemed threatening to national security were
sent in May and July 1942, respectively, to internment camps in Petawawa
and in Angler, both in Ontario, to camps shared with German POWs.20
Japanese Canadians who protested government directives or failed to
comply were later sent to a second internment camp at Petawawa, holding
mainly European internees. Such camps had been created for the 600
Italian Canadians and 800 German Canadians suspected of subversive
activities and interned in Canada, along with captured German seamen
and some 3,000 European refugees.21 Petawawa was an internment camp
during World War I. Some 699 Japanese Canadians were fenced and
guarded as in the US camp facilities, with sentry towers and searchlights,
suggesting that only incarcerated dissenters in Canada were guarded with
the kinds of fortification its southern neighbor applied to all civilian
prisoners.22 In British Columbia’s interior, the mountainous topography
acted as a natural barrier, isolating the camps so that securing them was
seen as unnecessary. Armed Mounties guarded entry points to the
internment areas, and camps were largely clustered in the Kootenays.
An order-in-council PC1486 on 16 January 1942, issued by the Canadian
Prime Minister Mackenzie King, saw the forced removal of Japanese
Canadians – both citizens and resident aliens – from the west coast protected
zone.23 Some 8,000 of this number were detained for processing in the
19
Roger Daniels, ed., Two Reports on Japanese Canadians in World War II (New York: Arno
Press, [1944 and 1947] 1978), 2.
20
Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps in North America (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger,
1981), 185.
21
The Canadian Encyclopedia, War Measures Act, available at: www.thecanadianencyclo
pedia.ca/en/article/war-measures-act; and Internment, www.thecanadianencyclopedia
.ca/en/article/internment.
22
Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 31, for numbers.
23
Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 16, 31; Greg Robinson, By Order of the President:
FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009), 98–101 and 132–3; see also Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was;
Forrest E. La Violette, The Canadian Japanese in World War II (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1948); Barry Broadfoot, Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame: The Story of
Japanese Canadians in World War II (Toronto: Doubleday, 1977).
The Development of Agriculture at Manzanar 251
former Pacific National Exhibition buildings in Hastings Park, Vancouver

and redistributed for employment or internment during the next six months.
The British Columbia Security Commission operating under the authority
of the Federal Minister of Labor, and aided by the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police and the Commissioner of Japanese Placement, organized
their exile for the duration of the war. Internee labor distribution, accom-
modation and containment shaped the associated carceral geography.24
The Development of Agriculture at Manzanar

The Relocation Centers established under E.O. 9066 were segregated
Japanese American communities in remote areas. The Manzanar prison-
ers were imagined as dangerous enemies, spies, saboteurs and a threat to
the health and wellbeing of Southern California who could possibly
pollute water sources. They were criminalized under Public Law 503
passed by Congress if they disobeyed the US Army orders. Their unpro-
ductive idleness was imagined as morally lax and potentially socially
disruptive. Removal of Japanese Americans and Japanese also posed a
threat to the nation’s food supplies. In an effort to manage any disruptions
in the cultivation and harvesting of crops, the land transfer of agricultural
property from the Japanese American community to others was directed
by the FSA with the assistance of the Federal Reserve Bank as communi-
ties were removed. Agricultural work along with infrastructure improve-
ments became a major focus of coordinated site selection envisioned as a
way to occupy the prisoners. While the “evacuees” allowed work activities
were broad under WRA, pay for that work was unclear and controversial.
This use of “evacuee” labor for agriculture and infrastructure as part of
the WCCA’s site selection criteria was intensely researched and highly
coordinated from the third floor of the Whitcomb Hotel with multidis-
ciplinary teams staffed by the WRA, the Bureau of Agricultural
Economics, the Census Bureau, the FSA, the Soil Conservation Corps
and a host of other New Deal federal agencies. Using their agencies’
historic data and research, they surveyed for lands on which the prison
populations with their assumed agricultural skills could be put to work in
a systematic way. The site selection criteria included peak capacities of
12–15,000 people on isolated low-cost sites from approximately 4,500
acres to 71,600 acres (1,820 to 29,000 hectares approximately), with a
temporary military encampment near improved roads or rail connections
and convenient for potential work projects at or near the site. Manzanar,
as the first developed site, might have served as a land use model for other
24
Daniels, Two Reports on Japanese Canadians, 5, 8.
252 Prison City
sites. By 27 March 1942, the Soil Conservation Services was already

asking “for the use of enemy aliens in carrying out conservation prac-
tices,” with a request for information about military supervision assuming
their prisoners’ unfree status.25 The WCCA surveys included questions
about the use of labor in agriculture and “other pursuits” adjacent to the
project as well as industrial and agricultural projects within the Relocation
Center.
Planning and Rural Development

At Manzanar as at other camps, the binary tensions between the unbal-
anced proportion of jailers to the incarcerated, generally in the range of
200 staff to manage a city of 10,000, structured complex relationships in
the development of the Relocation Center that were continuously negoti-
ated over the duration of its existence. The material conditions of spatial
confinement and incarceration were in constant flux at Manzanar as a
result of negotiations between the US federal government, the military,
cooperating government agencies, private interests, nonprofit organiza-
tions and the prisoners.
In agricultural reports of 1942, Japanese reporting on the “original condi-
tion” noted that Mr. J. R. Harrison and Mr. Aiji Hashii were in charge of the
Agricultural Project, while the final report of the Agricultural Section of the
Operations Division at Manzanar credited only J. R. Harrison, Farm
Superintendent. The WRA report assumed government policy control
over production, allowing the “evacuees” to handle and supervise as much
as possible.26
For example, Project Foreman, K. Kawase, of the Farm Project in the
Production Division at Manzanar, reported to Yoshi Ohi on conditions
for planting at Manzanar in May 1942:
The Agricultural Project was planned … primarily to raise food products for local
consumption. Because of the abundance of manpower and the difficulties in
acquiring adequate machinery and farm equipment, the plans are to use the
minimum of large equipment and the maximum of hand labor. The primary
purpose of the first year is … the adaptability of the vegetables and soil.27
25
Kenneth Chalmers, SCS State Coordinator, Fort Collins Colorado to Robert B.
Cozzens, State Coordinator, Berkeley, California, Records of the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics Western Regional Office, Berkeley, California, War Relocation
Records, 1942, RG 83, Box 1, National Archives and Records Administration – Pacific
Region (San Francisco) (NARA-Pacific Region (SF)).
26
Final report of the Agricultural Section, Operations Division at Manzanar JERS, BANC
MSS 67/14c, Reel 3.
27
Yoshi Ohi and K. Kawase, Agricultural Report, 2 June 1942, JERS, BANC MSS 67/14c,
Reel 157.
Temporary Sugar Beet Workers 253
Commenting on the 11 May 1942 ground breaking for “our” green

vegetable farm, Ohi and Kawase identified a number of vegetables that
reflected an Asian and Japanese palate: Japanese kabocha (pumpkin),
melon and radishes, as well as Chinese cabbage or nappa and winter
radishes. In addition, in May 1942, they planted corn (Howling Mob),
cucumber (Boston Pickling) green beans (Improved Long Green), red
radishes, carrots, beets, turnips, endive (Batvian Long Leafed), green
onion, stone tomatoes (20,000 earliana plants), white rose potatoes,
string beans (Black Bush), beans (Long Tender), H.B. melon and honey-
dew on a total of 158 acres.
The Japanese American community clearly claimed ownership of the
agricultural production. Reflecting this pride, watercolorist Kango
Takamura on 26 October 1942 recorded the agricultural fieldwork with
the caption:
Residents transformed dusty semi-arid land into green truck farms, growing
vegetable crops of all kinds. I sketched this scene of workers harvesting large,
ripe, sweet watermelons.28
Temporary Sugar Beet Workers

From the prisoners’ perspective, working in a skilled or unskilled volun-
tary agricultural labor pool was speculative. On 9 June 1942 the first
“Labor Battalion” authorized to work outside the Relocation Center
departed on seasonal work leave for the sugar beet fields of Idaho. One
hundred and twenty-five men and four married women took four
Greyhound buses to Reno, Nevada where they took a train to Rupert,
Idaho. Of the original volunteers, twenty-one withdrew over skepticism
about getting paid, the insecurity of the lack of any written agreement and
poor pay for stoop labor. The reasoning of those departing varied. One,
an admitted “amateur,” commented:
I’m flat broke and need the cash. I sure hope they really pay this time. Lots of us
are still skeptical but anyway hopeful. I came up here with the first volunteers.29
One single man with no dependents could no longer stand the regi-
mented routine of the Relocation Center, noting his relief at getting out.
Another, a successful landscape gardener in Hollywood, reveled at the
opportunity to leave:
28
Kango Takemura, Kango Takamura Collection LSC.0433, Box 2, Library Special
Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
29
“Manzanar sends first ‘labor battalion’ to sugar beet fields of Rupert Idaho,” JERS
BANC MSS 67/14c, Reel 148.
254 Prison City
There’s no future here. I know that I can get along somehow on the outside. My
bosses here didn’t know the first thing about farming. They were incompetent.30
The crowd sending them off opined about their prospects. Clarence
Morimoto, who had farmed in Salinas and Sacramento, managed farm
laborers and worked as a landscape gardener, commented:
About 90 percent of these fellows on the buses are greenhorns. They really don’t
know what’s ahead in sugar beet work. It’s about a week late for the thinning
season in Idaho now, so the beets will be several inches taller than is usual for
proper thinning. It’ll take lots longer to thin out. My guess is … perhaps even three
to four days to do even one acre.31
Some thought they would come back to Manzanar either completely broke
or without much money. “They’ll just say: ‘We saw the country.’” Others
thought their food would improve but noted that they would be on curfew
so they would not be allowed to go anywhere. Others wondered if they
would be treated like Mexican braceros, patrolled and herded by guards.32
Seabrook Farms Permanently Off the Military Grid

Some 2,500 of the “evacuees” were able to “relocate” from the WRA to
Seabrook Farms, purportedly the largest farm-to-freezer operation in the
world with quality control and production in the model of modern manu-
facturing, a family operation run by Charles Seabrook and his son, John
Seabrook, who entered the business in 1939 with a chemical engineering
degree from Princeton.33 Seabrook residents, some from Manzanar, were
able to participate in commercial agricultural production replete with
white coats and uniforms, precise mechanization and modern machinery.
Settling into Seabrook worker housing, Michi Ikeda reported in
September 1945 in meticulous records maintained by the Japanese
American community that 180 families lived in apartments, 54 in dormi-
tories, 126 in the New Village (new worker housing) and 149 single
people in dormitories, with more resettling in Seabrook.34 Chotaro
Nishimura, who had a distinguished career as landscape gardener, and
his son Mark Mokutaro were among the Manzanar residents who reset-
tled in Seabrook, New Jersey.35
30
“Manzanar sends first ‘labor battalion’.” 31 “Manzanar sends first ‘labor battalion’.”
32
“Manzanar sends first ‘labor battalion’.”
33
Fuju Sasaki Papers, Collection 1440, UCLA Library, Department of Special
Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, Box 1, Folder 1–2.
34
Sasaki Papers, UCLA, Folder 1–2.
35
Jeffery F. Burton and Manzanar National Historic Site, “Garden Management Plan:
Gardens and Gardeners at Manzanar, Manzanar National Historic Site, California.”
National Park Service, US Department of Interior, 2015, 100–1.
Manzanar Relocation Center’s “Little Guayule” Project 255
Manzanar Relocation Center’s “Little Guayule” Project

Meanwhile at Manzanar, Japanese and Japanese American agricul-
tural specialists supplemented the industrial agriculture projects in a
top-secret war effort and an example of environmental patriotism
inside the prison city. Working at the Guayule Chemical Laboratory
division of the Guayule Experimental Project, they were responsible
for carrying out modern scientific experiments for a project to pro-
duce rubber from guayule plants under the direction of Dr. Robert
Emerson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
According to Betty Smocovitis, Dr. Emerson was responsible for
initiating the “Little Guayule” project at Manzanar under the direc-
tion of Shimpe Nishimura assisted by Kenji Nozaki, while Walter T.
Watanabe supervised the nursery propagation and fieldwork. They
planted the first crop of 169,000 guayule plants grown from cuttings
in June 1942.36
Two artists have created some of the best records of the material culture
and work on this project: watercolorist Kango Takamura and photog-
rapher Dorothea Lange. Takamura painted and described each seem-
ingly important phase in the production of rubber from guayule plants,
identifying Japanese and Japanese American scientists and workers.
Excerpts from his gallery of guayule workers (Fig. 8.4) include: (a)
“The first successful growing of guayule rubber plant cuttings”; (b)
“Rooted cuttings are transplanted to milk cartons and then to the field.
Transplanting is done carefully and speedily by hand of the experiment-
ers”; (c) “Promulgation of plants by cutting method has been succeeded
for the first time. Guayule cuttings are treated with a phytohameon before
setting in a flat”; (d) “The chemists work incessantly in search of a better
method of extracting rubber. Here a chemist is preparing latex from
guayule.” Takamura identifies Mr. Akaboshi transplanting root cuttings,
the chemist Mr. Hirozawa preparing latex in the laboratory and Mr. Hata
treating the cuttings with phytohameon, the chemical crucial to their
successful propagation. He provided a view of the working environments
in the field, the laboratory and the lathe-house with pride. He may also have
had access to the project as a worker himself as a botanical illustrator.
Dorothea Lange, working in her official capacity as a photographer for
the WRA, recorded the beauty of the modernist lathe-building where
some of the work took place and the rustic pine fence that marked off
its perimeter (Fig. 8.5). Her photographs also provide extensive
36
Vassiliki Smocovitis, “Genetics behind barbed wire: Masuo Kodani, emigre geneticists
and wartime genetics research at Manzanar Relocation Center,” Genetics 187 (February
2011): 357–66.
256 Prison City
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 8.4 Kango Takamura, Gallery of guayule workers, Manzanar

Relocation Center. Kango Takamura paintings, Collection 0433,
Box 1, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library,
UCLA. Reproduced with permission from the Takamura Estate
documentation of the guayule project from the field to work in the lathe-
house and laboratory. While she photographed workers and their envir-
onments, only Dr. Emerson, Walter T. Watanabe as project director and
George J. Yokomizo as hybridizer are recorded by name in the Manzanar
guayule project photographs.37 Unlike Kango Takamura, she may have
been unable to fully celebrate the patriotic participation of the individual
Japanese scientists and workers in this top-secret defense project given the
Army’s scrutiny of her work.38
Under the direction of Dillon Myer, work on the experiment was
suspended on 23 June 1943. He claimed ingenuously that the WRA “is
not authorized by either presidential authorization or appropriation to be
37
Dorothea Lange, Manzanar, CA, 29 June 1942, WRA no. C-732, BANCPIC
1967.014_PIC, War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American
Evacuation and Resettlement.
38
Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (London; New York: W.W. Norton
& Co., 2009), 315–26.
Manzanar Relocation Center’s “Little Guayule” Project 257
Fig. 8.5 Manzanar Relocation Center, external view of the lathe-house

for guayule rubber experiments under Walter T. Watanabe, with staff of
twenty-five workers at the War Relocation Authority Center. Manzanar
Relocation Center. Photographed by Dorothea Lange. UC Berkeley,
Bancroft Library, BANC PIC 1967.014 v.21 CC:732—PIC
engaged in research work in cooperation with institutions or other local

agencies.”39
Betty Smocovitis has traced the professional career of Masuo Kodani, a
cytogeneticist specializing in the study of plant chromosomes, who was placed
in charge of the laboratory created in the Manzanar Hospital that examined
guayule growing at other sites, as well as specimens grown at Manzanar
Relocation Center. Smocovitis has found that Kodani, a promising and
brilliant student who was granted a Rockefeller research fellowship at the
University of Rochester, found his career derailed and his degree delayed by
several years as a result of his incarceration and in spite of his exemplary
scientific research and recognition in his field. She writes, “Race was clearly
the 700-pound gorilla in the room, a fact of life that determined not only
Kodani’s war-time experience of the war but also their life in post-war
America.”40
39
Ralph Merritt to Dr. Emerson, 23 June 1943, JERS 1939–1974 BANC MSS 67/14c,
Guayule Correspondence, Reel 2. See also Connie Y. Chiang, Nature Behind Barbed-
Wire, 13.
40
Smocovitis, “Genetics behind barbed wire,” 363. Connie Y. Chiang, Nature Behind
Barbed-Wire, 136.
258 Prison City
The Cooperative Enterprises

In other sectors of work improving not only their diet through agriculture
but also the Manzanar landscape, the prisoners were active and reason-
ably successful. Working cooperatively as a community provided the
prison city residents with substantial recreational amenities, buildings
and services. The 1945 mapped inventory drawn up for salvage purposes
for Manzanar lists in its legend, among the assets of other investments:
rock river beds, rock flower beds, basketball courts, tennis courts, slides,
soft ball diamonds, swing sets and a Dutch oven.41 There were many
others that went unaccounted, i.e., the judo and kendo dojos, wrestling
(sumo) arenas, several outdoor theaters, Japanese baths or furos, a simu-
lated golf course, a teahouse, gazebos, picnic areas, and more.
Even in the earliest months of settling into the camp, Manzanar resi-
dents created an outdoor amphitheater with a concrete stage 40’ by 60’
just beyond the southeast corner of the camp, where a natural slope was
terraced to seat 3,000 to 5,000 people with benches for 2,000. The
canteen/general store in operation before being taken over by Manzanar
Cooperative Enterprises defrayed part of the costs. The residents built
another temporary theater stage in camp, and subsequently a permanent
20’ by 30’ stage against the wall of the recreation hall in Block 16.42
The prisoners captured nearly all the commercial capital in the prison
city through the Manzanar Cooperative Enterprises, which they owned,
operated and managed. From 24 May through 1 October 1942,
Manzanar Consumer Enterprises ran the center’s canteen/general store.
They were incorporated on 5 September 1942 and reported gross income
as of 1 October 1942 as $235,000.43 They employed at their greatest
expansion 237 people and rented from the WRA seven barracks and six
ironing rooms. As a product of New Deal cooperatives, the Manzanar
Cooperative Enterprises joined the Association of California
Cooperatives and the Associated Cooperatives of Northern California,
enhancing their credit rating and procurement possibilities. They partici-
pated in establishing the Federation of Center Enterprises, which then
established a procurement office in New York City, employing three
buyers.44 Their service departments included the canteen, a fish market,
a barber, a beauty shop, a shoe-repair shop (important to the pedestrian
city), a photo studio and a watch-repair shop.
41
Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation, vol. 2, “Map 4: other investments, January 1945.”
42
Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation, vol. 1455.
43
Guy Helvering, Commissioner, Treasury Department to Mr. E. M. Rowalt, Acting
Director, War Relocation Authority, 22 December 1942, JERS, 1939–1974 BANC
MSS 67/14c, Reel 145.
44
Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation, vol. 1, 588–9.
The Japanese Canadian Camps 259
Not only were residents of the prison city used as unfree labor and a
mobile agricultural workforce conforming to prevailing racial stereotypes,
but the extent of their work in transforming agriculture for the prison
cities and for a top-secret defense project went unrecognized. Their
dehumanized assignment to agricultural work reinforced the govern-
ment’s vision for the stereotypical labor classes for which the “Japanese”
were considered fit.
The Japanese Canadian Camps

When compared with the urban scale and concentration of the American
sites, the camps in Canada were little more than villages, and thereby
disadvantaged in terms of their capacity to physically transform their
surroundings either by agriculture or by increased activity. There were,
however, substantial increases in the population of the interior regions due
to the arrival of internees. Local towns were transformed by the demands
they made on their economies. However, when compared with the US
camps with their agricultural and other industries, the absence of able-
bodied single men pathologized the camps as unproductive.
Indeed, unlike in the USA, labor camps were the first solution for
segregating 1,500 Japanese nationals in Canada, and later, following
their exclusion, 650 Japanese Canadian men and boys over thirteen years
of age. Between March and June 1942, some 2,161 persons were assigned
to road construction camps at Blue River-Yellowhead, Revelstoke-
Sicamous, Hope-Princeton, Schreiber and Black Spur.45 Segregation by
gender, age and productivity thereby occurred at the outset.
The British Columbian Security Council, the Canadian counterpart to
the WRA, oversaw much of the degradation of their lives as their families
were separated, and, after confinement in exhibition buildings at
Hastings Park in conditions similar to yet worse than the Assembly
Centers, they were then sent inland to the interior Canadian Rockies.
Ann Sunahara writes of fear and disillusionment among women confined
in the exhibition building once their husbands and children had left.46
Whereas the road construction camps provided “a good diet and healthy,
if crude, accommodations,” at Hastings Park they were in full view of a
thousand strangers, unless provided the relative luxury of a horse stall, she
writes.47 Some 3,991 farm workers, including family units of four
45
Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 31. Hyphen indicates highways. Roger Daniels,
Concentration Camps in North America, 186.
46
Ann Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the
Second World War (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1981).
47
Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 50.
260 Prison City
members or more, next left for sugar beet farms in Alberta, Manitoba and
Ontario (men only).48 They occupied quarters meant for summer migra-
tory workers unfit for winter use. Self-supporting sites and approved
employment absorbed a further 2,520 persons, in sites largely dispersed
across BC. The remaining 12,029 who could not labor were left waiting
for months at Hasting Park until their relocation commenced.
From the inception of the camp system, Japanese Canadians were
divided along the lines of race as people of Japanese ancestry rather than
nationality. In addition to an individual’s political status as immigrant,
naturalized citizen or Canadian-born, the gender, age and health of that
person could be reasons to exclude them. Health checks conducted at
Hastings Park determined the individual’s productivity. Hospitals were
created across the camp system with a Tuberculosis Sanatorium at New
Denver to exclusively treat Japanese internees.
Ethnicity and politics were likewise divisive. Some ninety-three Japanese
Canadians married to non-Japanese Canadians and their children were
excluded from the uprooting.49 Internal conflict further factionalized
the community. Those who assisted the British Columbia Security
Commission (BCSC) were regarded as collaborators, termed inu (dogs).50
Some Kibei (Japanese Canadians educated in Japan), influenced by the
propaganda of the Japanese Vice-Consul, chose voluntary internment as a
way of demonstrating loyalty to Japan.51 When the government announced
its final plans to send families to “Interior Housing Centers,” a euphemistic
term for basic hutted facilities, a Nisei Mass Evacuation Group refused.52
Having taken away their possessions and livelihoods, revocation of the
right to live with their families was intolerable, they argued.53
The government’s refusal to compromise and the possibility of separ-
ation sent ripples through the Nisei. Some went into hiding, while others
interned themselves voluntarily and were incarcerated at Petawawa.54
Another group wrecked part of the Immigration Shed.55 Unrest con-
tinued into the road camps, where married men isolated from their
families agitated to be reunited or became depressed with worry. Many
in the road camps remained unemployed because the US Western
Defense Command did not want them on vital transcontinental rail and
road links to Alaska.56 Given these various pressures, by June 1942 plans
were afoot for interning 1,216 married men. They would be removed
48
Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 31. 49 Ibid.
50
Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 53–4. 51 Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 59.
52
Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 57; Daniels, Concentration Camps, 186.
53
Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 58. 54 Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 58.
55
Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 59. 56 Daniels, Concentration Camps, 186.
from road work camps and sent for camp construction into the interior
housing center sites.
At first, the Department of Labor considered using Prairie Indian
Schools that had been established for assimilating First Nations children
from the 1870s.57 A second alternative was the shack camps used by the
lumber industry, crude timber cabins for a seasonal workforce. Unlike the
rationalized, purpose-built barracks expediently erected in the USA,
these were domestic-scale structures configured like rural settlements,
nestling in the undulating topography. Many of these were in ghost towns
of the former silver-mining industry, built on traditional lands of the
region’s Sinixt Nation, who had been depopulated by disease and dis-
persed during the previous two centuries. Patterns of racial exclusion and
land expropriation were thus layered one upon the other as Japanese
Canadian settlers became dispossessed exiles.
New Denver on Slocan Lake with five camps in its immediate vicinity
was the center of operations for all of the camps in the Slocan Valley.58
The camps combined extant buildings with newly built domestic
“shacks,” typically 14ft or 16ft by 16ft, 24ft or 28ft shiplap timber cabins,
dependent on family size.59 These, like in Australia, utilized domestic
construction practices and the labor of internees. A boat builder, Phillip
Matsumoto, working under a white foreman, led a team of internee-
carpenters in building them.60 Only Popoff had a multiunit barrack,
and only Tashme was on a grid plan.61
The Selkirks, the Purcells and the Eastern Monashee mountains encir-
cled the Slocan Valley and, once within it, past the guard posts, freedom
of movement was permitted between camps. The three camps associated
with New Denver village included the Orchard Camp, south of Carpenter
Creek, adjacent to the municipality’s boundaries, and two neighboring
camps leased to the Security Commission – the sixty-acre Harris Ranch
and two-acre Nelson Ranch found to the north and south of the town,
respectively. Together their population was 1,506 persons, three times
the number in New Denver village. At the peak of the occupation fifty
57
Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 63.
58
Slocan City, Greenwood, Sandon, Kaslo, New Denver and Rosebery were created in this
fashion, whereas new towns were built at Tashme and Lemon Creek. (Slocan extension
was a composite of Slocan City, Bay Farm, Popoff and Lemon Creek.)
59
Daniels, Two Reports on Japanese Canadians, 5–7. Henry Shimuzu, Images of Internment:
Life in the New Denver Internment Camp, 1942–46 (Victoria, BC: Ti-Jean Press, 2008), 8.
60
The camp was reconfigured in approximately 1942/3 and again between 1957 and 1960
when the title was deeded to occupants by the BCSC.
61
Linda Kawamoto Reid and Beth Carter, Karizumai: A Guide to Japanese Canadian
Internment Sites (Burnaby, BC: Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, 2016),
27; Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 30.
262 Prison City
elderly men and two cooks lived in the Harris ranch-house.62 A further
150–200 men, women and children were housed on the Far Field
(around six persons per shack) in what Shizuye Takeshima describes as
summer bungalows of two rooms, flanking a kitchen – shared by two
families (four adults and three children).63 Some 244 shacks were built at
New Denver for single families and thirty-one were shared by two
families.64 J. C. Harris wrote that the winter of 1942–3 was exceedingly
harsh: “the huts were wet and draughty, and with wartime scarcities there
was no material to fix them.”65
Among key features that differentiate many Canadian from US camp
facilities is their proximity to established populations and preference for
domestic building typologies, despite the underlying reality of dislocation
and exile. The three camps at New Denver, although separated from it,
appeared as extensions to the nearby village. There was some limited
social interaction with the townspeople in theatrical events, dances,
sporting competitions, school productions and church activities.66 The
internees appealed to the BCSC for common amenities and improve-
ments such as plumbing, lamps and much-needed woodsheds.67 A com-
munal bath-house constructed by them in 1943 was later converted into a
Kyowakai Hall with an Otera (Buddhist temple/shrine) at one end.68 The
physical settler infrastructure was improvised.
Although the subzero winter temperatures proved oppressive, the
spring and summer months were spent humanizing and beautifying the
camp. Unlike at Manzanar where such improvements were confined to
the edges of barracks or designed as block gardens or parks, camp families
at New Denver made individualized claims. They cleared the spaces
around their shacks, creating flowerbeds and vegetable plots, and separ-
ated plot boundaries with rows of planting (Fig. 8.6).69 At the ranch-
house, the elderly residents created a mosaic of ornamental gardens with
small waterwheels that turned in the creek and bridges, one of which was
big enough to walk across.70
62
Cole Harris, Mist and Green Leaves: Japanese Canadians on Harris Ranch (New Denver,
BC: Chameleon Fire Editions, 2015), 6, 9, 10.
63
Harris, Mist and Green Leaves, 11, 13; Shizuye Takeshima, A Child in Prison Camp
(Toronto: Scholastic Library Publishing, 1991), 16.
64
Patricia Roy, “If the cedars could speak: Japanese and Caucasians meet at New Denver,”
BC Studies, 131 (2001): 81–92.
65
Harris, Mist and Green Leaves, 14.
66
Harris, Mist and Green Leaves, 20–1; Shimuzu, Images of Internment, 14, 20, 30, 32.
67
Takashima, A Child in Prison Camp, 33.
68
Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre, New Denver, Village of New Denver, pamphlet.
69
Takashima, A Child in Prison Camp, 39–40; Shimizu, Images of Internment, 16, 34.
70
Granny to Ellen, Bosun Ranch, 5 July 1943, family files; Harris, Mist and Green Leaves,
16–18.
Fig. 8.6 Elevated photo of New Denver, BC. Courtesy of Japanese

Canadian Cultural Center Archives, 2001.9.6
The domestication of the Canadian camps through various measures

occurred, ironically, because of the separation and concentration of
families, and self-built accommodation at a scale feasible for internee-
carpenters. They were radically different from the US barrack envir-
onments, contracted to hired workers and built with the assistance of
internees. But the simulation of domesticity did not mean that the
Canadian government was more sympathetic to the internees’ plight.
Unlike in the USA, their properties were confiscated and sold to
generate the monthly payments they received for their upkeep.71
With this they purchased groceries at inflated prices because of the
opportunism of local shopkeepers stretching a limited supply to meet
increased demand. While family cohesion was better maintained
because of access to a shared hearth within each shack, and meals
were prepared and eaten inside each home (not in the crowded mess
halls), each family ultimately had to fend for itself.
71
Daniels, Two Reports on Japanese Canadians, 24. This was done by the Custodian of Alien
Property.
264 Prison City
Whereas the internee energy in the US camps and their claims on their
productivity suggest forms of collective agency recovered under duress,
Ken Adachi’s depiction of the Canadian camps is quite the opposite. He
describes the inertia and increased dependency of those in the Interior
Housing Centers as spaces segregated from the regimes of productivity.
Employment in woodcutting, gardening or maintenance, available to
internee men, was conducted with some reluctance following the liquid-
ation of their assets because of the conviction that the government owed
them a living.72 Immigrants who had once been proud of their pioneering
spirit refused to work for low wages under white bosses, he notes. For the
Issei, Adachi adds, it was an “enforced retirement” – a release from
battling a hostile white world, by retreating into “islands,” where racial
identification was intensified. For the Nisei, however, caught midcareer,
and especially among the adolescents, “a sense of futility enveloped in
boredom” prevailed, and their interests and activities largely reflected
those of their age group rather than race. Among the greatest anxieties
affecting the population, noted by Adachi, was the anxiety over what lay
ahead.
The Canadian government took a harsh view of social integration after
the war’s end. Focusing on identifying loyalty and racial dispersal, it
delayed the return of former internees to their places of origin until
April 1949. A shameful legacy of deportation under the January 1946
National Emergency Transitional Powers Act shrank the Japanese
Canadian community in BC to 6,776 persons.73 Many chose voluntary
relocation further eastward within Canada and a small number were
repatriated to Japan.74
***
While much of the discourse and writing about the American and
Canadian exclusion and incarceration of people identified by bloodline
as Japanese has been directed to the abrogation of civil liberties under the
rule of law, the use of space to order and move people as a governance tool
has gradually moved to the forefront of research and writing. This chapter
draws attention to systematic uses of historically discriminatory ethno-
racialized categories and to the confinement and material lives of people
they targeted. Socially and economically, the impacts of the removal
of Japanese American and Japanese Canadian communities were
72
Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, 271–4.
73
Reid and Carter, Karizumai, 47; Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 51.
74
Tatsuo Kage, Uprooted Again: Japanese Canadians Move to Japan after World War II,
trans. C. Merken (Victoria, BC: Ti-Jean Press, 2012), 12; Reid and Carter, Karizumai,
47; Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 51.
exacerbated through historically persistent fear and hatred of colonial

subjects considered racially inferior that accelerated in a wartime crisis.
The spatial powers of exclusion, confinement and forced movement are
clearly linked to the abrogation of American or Canadian civil rights.
Material losses and disenfranchisement in microscale significantly vio-
lated civil rights; at the scale of mass incarceration, the social and eco-
nomic injustices loom large in impact and significance.
Trapped in their unfree status, the Japanese American and Canadian
communities quickly adapted to reconstitute their communities with
limited resources. In the US camps, community cooperatives captured
commercial capital to provide recreational amenities from their profits,
while in Canada, the lack of opportunity sapped the strength of the
younger generation.
While the Japanese Canadian case was smaller and more localized, it
was more extreme in several material ways. Greg Robinson has charac-
terized it as a mass expulsion of approximately 22,000 people. Families
were separated, and the majority of the population was pressured to
accept deportation following the war; the rest, dispossessed and without
assistance, were banned from returning to the west coast until 1949.75,76
These North American cases are markedly different from Australia and
Singapore because they deal more directly with the rights of citizens,
masking the processes of racial exploitation and incarceration in a
vocabulary that might be used for those who are internally displaced. In
fact, the processes of disenfranchisement and deprivation of choice and
opportunity effectively aligned citizens with how enemy aliens were trea-
ted in Australia, by pushing them into the outer borders of citizenship.
This distancing was also physically evident in the placement of camps.
Although located away from the coast and far from urban centers, the
camps acted as a border zone for wartime sovereignty. Boundaries
between “white” colonizers and Asian imperialists that were carving up
Pacific territories were redrawn against minority citizens with conflicting
citizenships inside North America, reducing them to a racialized
collective.
The ability of the Japanese American community to claim agricultural
development to provide food for themselves and to manage a top-secret
scientific project to produce synthetic rubber is testament not only to their
skills, their scientific management of plants and their ability to beautify
the wastelands into which they were incarcerated. They also managed to
75
Stephen Fox, UnCivil Liberties: Italian Americans Under Siege during World War II
(McKinleyville, CA: Universal Publishers, rev. 2002), xi.
76
Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 132, 171, 273.
266 Prison City
transform large parts of the prison city into landscaped areas and beauti-
fully crafted gardens, the subject of Chapter 09. Through their coopera-
tive enterprises and cooperation with the WRA, they were able to
replicate some semblance of the segregated communities from which
they were forced to move. Through the material culture and social forces
of their labor and ability to work communally, they recouped some
semblance of pride and comfort in their everyday lives that would carry
over into the postwar years toward the reconstitution of their lives and
redress for the incarceration.
9 Recovery, Redress and Commemoration
Lynne Horiuchi
Japanese American community building in the American prison cities of

World War II has been considered an exceptional break in national and
local belonging because of their forceful dislocations, disenfranchisement
and extreme losses cumulatively. Yet, the trajectory of the Japanese
American community building, although significantly limited by racial
discrimination, has a long arc beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.
Their trajectory was not unidimensional but rather inhabited by intergen-
erational differences, religion, national loyalties, class structures, political
formations, rural/urban communities, varying cultural tastes and random
divisions like competing athletic teams. Recovery from the “evacuation”
for the occupants of the American prison cities began immediately with
rebuilding their lives in intensely proactive projects ranging in scale from
micro to macro and that are possible to document because of the prolific
recording of oral histories, research, scholarship and community
activism. Yet, to more fully understand Japanese American community
building in these prison cities and beyond, two different axes of measure
are important – scale and continuity.
As with other groups experiencing trauma and unlike memorialization
of fallen soldiers, the incarceration event could only be revisited decades
later; the result is a generational break in memorializing the event.
Because their elders had told their children very little about what they
had referred to as “camp,” most Sansei or third-generation Japanese
Americans grew up with no memory or knowledge of what their parents
referred to as “camp.” Or if they were children growing up in the
“camps,” their families had shielded them from their discrimination in
part through community building based on normative American envir-
onments, illusionary as they were with barbed wire, guard towers, search-
lights and their lived experience as prisoners. “Camp” was the oblique
reference used to mask references to the prison cities of Japanese
American incarceration. The Sansei’s elders – the Issei or first-
generation immigrants, Nisei second-generation American-born and
Kibei American-born educated in Japan – preferred not to conjure up
traumatic memories or disturb theirs or their Japanese American
267
communities’ return path to assimilation and integration into postwar

American society. The Sansei or third generation, American-born, were
the first to open up discussion about the incarceration in the late 1960s
and early 1970s as they approached adulthood.
This chapter draws on material from the Japanese American commu-
nity’s multigenerational material recovery as a continuous and challen-
ging process –from pre-“camp” conditions, in “camp” and post-World
War II, extending the analysis to the present. Against this history of
community building, the chapter also uses the trajectory of the life of
Nisei activist Sue Kunitomi Embrey and her voice to bridge these tem-
porally truncated historic periods and to provide a contextual microanaly-
sis. The intersection of differences in her life over time makes her both
representative and exceptional as a daughter, sister, woman of color and
married woman, and then a single divorced woman, community activist,
educator and writer. She was the driving force for preserving Manzanar as
a National Historic Site maintained by the National Park Service (NPS).
The chapter also examines the establishment of the Manzanar National
Historic Site with the participation of the Sansei that helped educate the
general public during the redress movement and also led to the preserva-
tion of other internment and confinement sites. The preservation of the
Manzanar Relocation Center site was both an unabated community-
building and political process, boosted by the Sansei activism protesting
events they linked historically to Japanese American community incar-
ceration and racial justice, for example civil rights, the Vietnam War, the
animus levied against Muslim America after 9/11, the detention of immi-
grant children and other related issues.
When compared with other global processes of commemoration and
cultural recovery, the US example remains nationally circumscribed. Not
only were the camps created by the US government, but also those incar-
cerated included innocent citizens whose civil rights had been abrogated,
so that the politics of redress are very differently inflected compared to the
kinds of international reconciliation discussed in the other examples in this
book that will be studied more closely in the following chapter.
Military Building as the Received Environment

and Prewar Models for Building
For examining the building of the “camps” in the USA, the initial scale of
military building is dominant. The material scale of the incarceration was
defined by military resources capitalized by millions of dollars in construc-
tion contracts to incarcerate the West Coast Japanese American popula-
tion. With speed prioritized, military building for the incarceration had to
Models for Everyday Spaces in Prewar “Little Tokyo” 269
proceed at a massively efficient scale, producing two sets of housing units

for 120,000 people – first for accommodations in the Assembly Centers
and then at the Relocation sites. The end products were radically different
from the domestic constructions built with internee labor in Canada, or the
far smaller and varied series of hutments reproduced across Australia.
When compared with both these parallel examples, the rigid structuring
of the military prison cities imposed disciplinary measures not conducive to
family living and certainly unsuited to the women, children and elderly
prisoners incarcerated in barracks.
Models for Everyday Spaces in Prewar “Little Tokyo”

While the prisoners were able to make significant changes to the military
building to improve their everyday lives, their efforts need to be measured
against their constraints, available capital and models for building. Their
received military environments in the prison cities contrasted with the
everyday space within Japanese American communities prior to their
confiscation through removal that then served as models for community
building within the “camps.” Their experienced knowledge from within
very tightly organized sustainable communities, whether rural or urban,
differed significantly from outside perceptions of them as they turned
inward to shield themselves from anti-Asian antagonism prevalent from
the 1860s through the beginning of World War ll. Politically active and
aggressive anti-Asian movements – based on the cultural and scientific
assumptions of the time that Asian races were physically, culturally and
mentally inferior – generally aligned with softer visions of Orientalized
races. The spatialization of anti-Asian culture included the specific exclu-
sion of Asian races as unacceptable neighbors and property owners; there
were many public spaces closed to Asian Americans such as swimming
pools, beaches and theaters, as well as mainstream department stores and
other commercial spaces. Access to space and property for Asian immi-
grants in early twentieth-century America in urban spaces was limited by
legal prohibitions to their land ownership and racial covenants or where
racial covenants were not in place or enforced, and in spaces relegated to
poor laborers and people of color, which on occasion also included people
of Mediterranean origin and Jewish people.1
1
Lynne Horiuchi, “Object lessons in homebuilding: racialized real estate marketing in San
Francisco,” in “Race and Landscape,” ed. Dianne Harris, special issue, Landscape
Journal, 26:1 (Spring 2007): 61–82. See also Michel S. Laguerre, The Global Ethnopolis:
Chinatown, Japantown and Manilatown in American Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2000).
These Japanese American urban communities then served as hubs for

Japanese immigrant laborers in agriculture, mining, railroad construction
and service labor, eventually developing as full service communities for
ethnic Japanese and their families. Like other ethno-racialized groups,
they created from Hawaii to the Imperial Valley in Southern California to
British Columbia in Canada an insulated cultural life relying on inter-
group community services for self-maintenance to counter and protect
the community from majority antagonisms and aggressions. While their
transglobal diasporic communities tentatively aligned with the Japanese
government and its imperial colonial settlement policies, these commu-
nities maintained from within strong social infrastructure systems to
maintain themselves. Their early community building involved the
reuse of older buildings with some development carried out by religious
institutions, and on occasion with Christian missionary and Buddhist
community assistance in obtaining property.2
Sue Kunitomi Embrey’s family moved within these Japanese American
communities. Her Issei father, Gonhichi Kunitomi, emigrated from
Okayama in 1898 to work as a contract agricultural laborer on a Hawaii
plantation, arriving around 1901 in San Francisco and then working as an
itinerant farm laborer, working up and down the coast with a bedroll on his
back. Her mother, Komika, also from Okayama, emigrated to America and
married Gonhichi, then working in Los Angeles as a gardener in 1910, in
what Western references would have depicted as a “picture bride” mar-
riage, but actually a traditional marriage arranged by her mother. Pre-
World War II, Sue’s family lived in a small bungalow adjacent to “Little
Tokyo” or a place that the Issei may have known as Nihonjin Machi – “a
place where Japanese people lived,” although it was a mixed neighborhood
demographically and on the edge of “Manila Town.” Of the major land-
marks Sue remembered were the wholesale vegetable and flower markets
run by Japanese and the Honpa Hongwanji Temple. The farmers and
retailers who had organized the wholesale market supplied the Los
Angeles Little Tokyo grocery stores, and Sue remembered “piles of fresh
Japanese vegetables such as nappa cabbage, daikon (white radish) would
send their fragrant smell out along the street.”3 They would be stocked
with fresh fish supplied by Terminal Island or Santa Monica fishermen.
She also remembered close by a clock-repair shop, a sushi restaurant,
a shoe store, a department store, a barbershop and Toyo Miyatake’s
2
Lynne Horiuchi, “Inventing homelands in Japanese American concentration camps,” in
Commemoration and the American City, eds. David W. Gobel and E. G. Daves Rossell
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 248–65.
3
Diana Meyers Bahr, The Unquiet Nisei: An Oral History of the Life of Sue Kunitomi Embrey
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 11–19.
Traditional Designs and Everyday Functions 271
studio, a photographer who had already gained national acclaim. Directly

across from their home, the Tokyo Club of Yamato Hall served a dual
purpose as a community center and gambling site. It sponsored “cultural
programs, Japanese plays, Kabuki dances, on a huge stage on the first
floor”; Gonhichi and Komika Kunitomi would often attend, bringing
their lunch. It also housed a kendo dojo, a judo dojo, a sumo wrestling
ring and an archery field.
Many of these building types were replicated in Manzanar and at other
Relocation Centers, although the Japanese American community’s trans-
formation of the Manzanar site from an essentially bleak military com-
pound into a space that functioned for everyone in the Japanese American
community involved the significant intent and energy of many individ-
uals. It was first of all the prison city for which the War Relocation
Authority (WRA) provided an urban administrative structure, but
which was effectively run by the residents themselves.
The residents of both the Assembly Centers and the Relocation
Centers set about making aesthetic improvements almost immediately
upon their arrival, most often in informal ways. The WRA’s goal was to
provide recreational facilities to control the population and to keep idle-
ness at bay for fear of social uprising, while the goal of community efforts
was to provide for their own needs and their children’s pleasure and
recreation. Since the ratio of WRA staff to prison city residents was
approximately one to fifty, the WRA had little choice but to delegate
a good portion of WRA administrative control to the residents, which
significantly increased their ability to implement action. At the same time,
their agency was masked in the narratives of official government reports
that often subsumed their efforts into activities sponsored by the WRA.
Traditional Designs and Everyday Functions

While there was some Orientalizing of the aesthetics by the Japanese
American community initially in “camp” informal building, form fol-
lowed function inside the camps for immediate primal needs like basic
furniture, personal hygiene and privacy.4 Traditional buildings, such as
the numerous Japanese furos or hot tubs, were built to address basic
community needs related to personal hygiene. For example, Sue
Kunitomi Embrey, in an oral history, explained the women’s dilemmas
in seeking privacy in the military-styled “latrines,” which had a long
trough of sinks on the right side and the toilets side by side and back to
back with no partitions:
4
Lynne Horiuchi, “Inventing homelands in Japanese American concentration camps.”
most of us went to the farthest one to try to get some privacy. Later, some people
had the ingenious idea of getting these big cardboard boxes to put around a person
that was going to the bathroom. They would take turns.5
Using cardboard as their recycled building material, the community
worked to provide privacy in the “latrines.”
Sue explained the affective impact of the lack of privacy for toileting
and showering on the Issei women. The lack of privacy in the “latrines”
was a shock as they had been accustomed to private bathrooms in the
USA, unlike their communal lives and bathing in Japan:
So in the beginning, people like my mother would stay up late hoping to take
a shower when her neighbors weren’t around, but they all stayed up late. They all
wanted to take their shower in privacy. So it ended up in our block we put a . . . like
a Japanese soaking tub . . . they bought the cement and made what we call a o-furo,
and people would wash themselves under the shower and then go in and soak in
the tub. And then it pretty soon became sort of a socializing method, you know,
for our older generation, because . . . they were kind of, I guess, taking over the
custom that they have in Japan.6
The Japanese American Issei adaptation of their traditional Japanese soak-

ing tub as a form then became the logical way to create bathing facilities
that could also function as community meeting places for socializing,
relaxing, and exchanging information and community gossip.
A communal bath-house at New Denver converted into a Kyowakai Hall
with an Otera (Buddhist temple/shrine) at one end would in later years
form the nexus of a commemorative facility, discussed in the next chapter.7
A garden created around it likewise referenced the gardens in the camps.
The Gardens of Manzanar

Gardens were a major mode the prisoners used to change their environ-
ment. Victory gardens that covered large swathes of the firebreaks
between Blocks 11 and 17 produced vegetables for the mess halls and
flowers.8 While Helphand reports that Japanese style and design provided
“a common symbolic language,” the informal gardens were actually quite
hybrid, and style was not a paramount or driving force. Sue explained the
communal interest in gardens:
5
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview with John Allen. Densho ID: denshovh-esue-02, Manzanar
National Historic Site Collection and Densho Digital Archive, 6 November 2002, Segment 8.
6
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview with John Allen, Segment 8.
7
Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre, New Denver, Village of New Denver, pamphlet.
8
Lynne Horiuchi and Anoma Pieris, “Temporal cities: commemoration at Manzanar,
California and Cowra Australia,” in Alternative Sightings of Camps, Art and Revolution,
eds. Shipu Wang and Suzette Min, special issue, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the
Americas, 3 (2007): 292–321.
The Nurserymen’s Japanese Gardens 273
there were gardens all over the place. And I think that they wanted to really
beautify the place because it was such a barren and windy place and people
wanted to be able to . . . sit there and enjoy each other’s company and not have
to sit in the hot sun, or stand in the hot sun waiting for their meals.9
With such a large proportion of gardens, the WRA implemented some
control and the residents worked within and without the WRA structure
to provide support for gardening and gardening initiatives. For example,
it was the WRA that arranged for the growing of lawns to reduce and
alleviate the fierce dust storms at Manzanar by allotting each block 200
lbs of rye seeds and six shovels (Fig. 9.1). By 8 August 1942, the WRA
reported that 155 lawns had been planted. They also provided one
lawnmower for every two blocks excluding only Blocks 1 and 7. Thus
lawns in the western American tradition would have covered a majority of
the interior of the blocks in gridded arrangements as documented in
photographs, paintings and oral histories.10 Trees grown by the Farm
Division from seeds and cuttings in a lathe-house or gathered from nearby
sites lined streets and shaded buildings.11
The Nurserymen’s Japanese Gardens

Manzanar also had an extraordinary group of nurserymen and profes-
sional gardeners from the robust Japanese American floriculture and
commercial garden services sectors in Los Angeles, who had been
established since the turn of the century and who, as a group, contrib-
uted their professional skills to landscaping all of the land within the
prison city boundaries.12 Sue Embrey recalled the gardens that prolif-
erated under their guidance and contributed beauty, grace and literal
touchstones to their Japanese homelands, landscaping the central
communal areas in nearly every block.13 There were also many experi-
enced agricultural workers and farmers, including some from Florin
who had managed to build their own homes and own land prior to their
9
10
Lynne Horiuchi and Anoma Pieris, “Temporal cities” and Harlan D. Unrau, The
Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry during World War II:
A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center (Denver, CO: US Department
of the Interior, National Park Service, 1996), 276–7.
11
Jeffery F. Burton and Manzanar National Historic Site, Garden Management Plan
(Manzanar National Historic Site, CA: National Park Service, US Department of
Interior, 2015), 69–72.
12
William M. Mason and John A. McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles 1869–1920 (Los
Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, 1969), 17, 20, 33.
13
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview with John Allen, Segment 12. See also Kenneth
I. Helphand, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (San Antonio, TX: Trinity
University Press, 2006), 179–92.
Fig. 9.1 Toyo Miyatake: Internees planted lawns using seeds provided by
the WRA to mitigate the dusty conditions of the site. Manzanar Relocation
Center. ©Toyo Miyatake MP0057. Courtesy of Toyo Miyatake Studio
incarceration and who contributed their expertise. Together their

efforts literally reinvented large sections of the prison city into green
spaces, public gardens, recreational spaces, landscaped buildings and
mess hall gardens at a remarkable scale given prison conditions, their
restricted resources and the military landscape that was their canvas.
The nurserymen/gardeners contributed greatly to transforming the
Manzanar landscape using the existing WRA organization of work, both
minimally paid and volunteer, within the prison city and negotiated with
the WRA. The best known of the building projects in Manzanar were the
extensive Japanese gardens, largely designed by the professional Issei
gardeners and nurserymen, many of whom Jeffrey Burton has identified
in his archaeological work for the Manzanar National Historic Park
(Map 9.1).14 The gardens were generally major landmarks like Pleasure
14
Jeffery F. Burton and Manzanar National Historic Site, Garden Management Plan,
91–110.
The Nurserymen’s Japanese Gardens 275
Map 9.1 Known gardens and landscaping at Manzanar. Burton, Garden

Management Plan (NPS, US Department of Interior: Manzanar National
Historic Site, 2015), 115, fig. 4.8. Courtesy of National Park Service,
Manzanar
Park, later renamed Merritt Park after Director Ralph Merritt, the Three-
Sacks Garden, the landscaping at the Children’s Village and Cherry Park.
For example, Kuichiro Nishi of the Pacific Rose Nursery in West Los
Angeles, who immigrated to the United States in 1906, was one of the
master gardeners who created Merritt Park, between Blocks 33 and 34.
Kuichiro Nishi budded 15,000 roses from wild shoots, which were then
planted in what became Rose Park in Blocks 23 and 33.15 Nishi attempted to
negotiate with Manzanar Director Ralph Merritt by naming the park after
him. He had wanted to dedicate a stele with an inscription in Japanese to the
memory of his fellow Japanese immigrants memorializing the Issei gener-
ation with the inscription:
I do hereby dedicate this park to the memory of fellow Japanese immigrants. We
have lived here for more than half of our lives, struggling for our mere livelihood.
Although we were ushered into this place with the breaking of friendly relations
between the two countries we have come to enjoy this quiet, peaceful place. As we
are nearing the completion of this park on this tenth month, I do hereby name this
park “Merito Park.” I also dedicate this park for the enjoyment of the people and to
the memory of the time of our residence here. In the year 1943, Kuichiro Nishi.16
While the Director Ralph Merritt accepted the naming of the park after
him with the recognition of Nishi’s extensive work on the park, he sent
a note, attached to Nishi’s drawing of the stele and the inscription in
Japanese on Pacific Rose Nursery stationery, explaining to Lucy Adams,
Director of the Community Management section, that “the setting up of
long Japanese characters inscriptions does not make for friendly under-
standing with those upon whom must depend to maintain the park in later
years.” Nishi’s dedication was instead inscribed on a small, framed
wooden sign installed in the Tea House at the park. The nurserymen
were nonetheless able to set up a large stone stele dedicating the Pleasure
Park with Nishi’s name prominently displayed in Japanese.17 The park
itself has become an iconic representation of the prisoners’ artistic
production (Fig. 9.2).
Informally Developed Gardens

There were also many quasi-clandestine, clandestine and informal
projects. The earliest and best known of these was the Three-Sacks
Garden for Block 6’s mess hall initiated by Harry Ueno, a kitchen worker.
He also later investigated the disappearance of sugar from the Manzanar
storerooms and was sent to an Isolation Center as an unjustly accused
“troublemaker.” Ueno’s efforts working for the community began with
the building of an informal garden for his mess hall at Block 22 because he
was concerned that there was no shade and no place to sit when people
had to queue outside the mess hall. Sue remembered:
15
Bahr, The Unquiet Nisei, 65.
16
National Archives, Washington, DC (NAB), Record Group (RG) 210, Entry 48,
Box 224.
17
Jeffery F. Burton and Manzanar National Historic Site, Garden Management Plan,
45–747.
Informally Developed Gardens 277
Fig. 9.2 Pool in Manzanar Pleasure Park. Photograph by Ansel Adams.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.
LOT 10479-2, no. 22
His garden was almost the full length of the barrack, the mess hall, which was 100
feet. And they got an order for cement and they brought in the rocks and put
together . . . yucca trees and different shrubs. He had an order for three sacks of
cement and it was not enough, so he asked that they keep the order requisition
form and not turn it in, so each time that he was finished with the three sacks he
would send someone to the warehouse and get another three sacks.18
One of the earliest and most elaborate of the prisoners’ gardens at
Manzanar, the Block 22 mess hall garden, was built between July and
August 1942; it became known as the Three-Sacks Garden, with
a more formal name referencing the waters of the Kiyomizu
Temple in Kyoto with a pond full of carp and trout (Fig. 9.3).19
Ueno would later be the pivotal figure in disturbances that led to what
was called the Manzanar “riot” on 5 December 1942. He was suspected of
the beating of Japanese American Citizens League member, Fred Tayama,
who was a highly unpopular figure within the camp as a possible FBI
informer and leader of the Manzanar Japanese American Citizens League
18
19
Ueno stated that the name came from the Kiyomizu Temple garden, known for its sacred
waters above Kyoto, and “otowa-no-taki” or the sound of feathers. The Manzanar Free
Press reported it as “otoba-no-ike,” so it is not clear if there was a typing error involved.
See Helphand, Defiant Gardens, 181–4; Burton, Garden Management Plan, 25.
Fig. 9.3 Toyo Miyatake: Snow-covered garden between the mess hall
and barrack at Block 22, Manzanar Relocation Center. ©Toyo Miyatake
MP 0067. Courtesy of Toyo Miyatake Studio
(JACL), a Nisei organization that cooperated with the government and the
WRA. Ueno, on the contrary, was a popular figure who, in addition to the
garden, helped organize the 1,500 mess hall workers of the Manzanar
Kitchen Workers’ Union dominated by anti-WRA Kibei, Japanese
Americans educated in Japan. Ueno had also investigated Assistant
Project Director Ned Campbell and the Chief Steward Joseph
Winchester for stealing meat and sugar.20 After a protest or “riot” of
2,000 to 4,000 prisoners, 500 of them surrounded the jail where Ueno
was held; the army was called out and fired tear gas, shotgun and machine
gun blasts into the crowd, killing one and injuring eleven. Ueno was
removed from Manzanar without charges or due process and sent to
different city and county jails and ultimately to the WRA Leupp Isolation
Center in Arizona and the Tule Lake Segregation Center in California.21
20
Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry, vol. 2, 479–91. See
also Lon Kurashige, “Resistance, collaboration and Manzanar protest,” Pacific Historical
Review, 70:30 (2001): 387–417.
21
Lynne Horiuchi, “Spatial jurisdictions, historical topographies and sovereignty at the
Leupp Isolation Center,” Amerasia Journal, 42:1 (2016): 96–7.
Linked Gardens and Landscaped Spaces 279
Such disturbances, which were not uncommon and were the WRA’s
worst nightmare, occurred on a regular basis in different forms: work stop-
pages, and general strikes that lasted for days such as at the Colorado River
Relocation Center in Arizona and at the Tule Lake Segregation Center,
where demonstrations triggered the imposition of martial law and the build-
ing of stockades to hold “troublemakers.” After the intake of “disloyal”
prisoners at Tule Lake from other Relocation Centers, a stockade/jail was
built to hold striking prisoners protesting poor working conditions and
strikebreakers. Ueno was then transferred with other inmates from the
WRA Leupp Isolation Center to one of the stockades at Tule Lake.
Harry Ueno’s informal work in creating the garden reflects his
strengths in community organizing and administration, although he
later disavowed any community organizing because of the impacts on
his family. He credited the garden design to Akira Nishi, brother of
Kuichiro Nishi, who also lived in Block 22; George Saburo Takemura
was the designer of the wishing well fountain for the pond.22
Linked Gardens and Landscaped Spaces

The communal nature of the gardens and the Manzanar gardeners’
success may be seen in their coordination in creating substantial green
areas in addition to lawns – linked pathways, large areas populated with
gardens and landscaped recreational areas. The whole northwest area of
the camp was replete with contiguous gardens and recreational areas,
which also used existing landscape features, many of which are being
restored by the NPS: North Park between Blocks 32 and 33, the Block 33
garden, Merritt Park, the Block 34 Mess Hall Garden, the Hospital
Garden, the Block 29 pond garden, the Children’s Village and Cherry
Park. In 1943, fourteen acres were opened up north of Blocks 32 and 33,
and a zoo was created near North Park.
The Children’s Village, located on remnants of the pear and apple
orchards, together with Cherry Park constituted an exceptionally large
lawn and garden site in the largest northern firebreak. Over one hundred
orphans, most of them removed from Shonien, the Salvation Army
Japanese Children’s Home in San Francisco and the Los Angeles
Maryknoll Home for Japanese Children, were housed in the Children’s
Village. In an exception to housing policies, the Western Defense
Command ordered the US Army Corps of Engineers on 5 May 1942 to
construct three buildings for an orphanage next to the hospital using
similar plans with a small kitchen, showers and toilet facilities following
22
Burton, Garden Management Plan, 100, 169.
up on verbal requests from WCCA liaison, Lt. Col. Knute Haneston.23

The orphans remembered the accommodations as three barrack-like
buildings: one with a kitchen and the “mess hall” with accommodations
for the administrators and a reading room; the middle barrack was for the
older girls and nursery; the third barrack was for the boys.24
The Children’s Village assistant superintendent, Lillian Matsumoto,
remembered that a number of men who were gardeners planted and
maintained the landscaping and lawns:
Thanks to these wonderfully imaginative gardeners . . . we had a park-like setting
unique to the entire camp, where we could take the infants and children for
afternoon play and where the staff could find relaxation while watching over
them. Our grounds were now a cool place, somewhat free of the desert dust.25
Volunteer gardeners planted nearly the entire Children’s Village site an
approximately 1.2-acre area in the firebreak east of Block 29 with grass
and also flowering vines to accompany low rustic fences they built of tree
limbs collected in the desert; 1,000 annuals were planted there in
July 1942 along with trees and shrubs. A garden, a baseball diamond,
a basketball court and a volleyball court graced the site as well as a rustic
gazebo, “a lacework of tree trunks and large branches,” measuring
10’x10’ built on the back lawn (Fig. 9.4).26
Just adjacent to the Children’s Village to the south, Cherry Park graced
one of the largest firebreaks at Manzanar. The park was inspired by
Francis B. Uyematsu, a nurseryman from Montebello and Sierra Madre
who donated 1,000 cherry trees, twenty wisterias, camellias and other
plants, which he had shipped to Manzanar at his own expense. Uyematsu
was allowed to return to his business, Star Nursery, to gather the plants.27
His granddaughter observed, “He really wanted to share his magical
touch with plants with his community.” William Katsuki is credited
with the park design, and Uyematsu supervised the planting and care of
the cherry trees, wisteria and other plantings.28 The wisteria arbor that
covered a flowing stream must have been one of the more spectacular
landscape features. In all, the Japanese Issei nurserymen left formidable
23
National Archives at College Park, MD (NACP)_RG 499, Entry A1, Box 91.
24
Catherine Irwin, Twice Orphaned: Voices from the Children’s Village of Manzanar
(Fullerton: Center for Oral and Public History at the California State University,
Fullerton, 2008), 109; Heather C. Lindquist, ed., Children of Manzanar (Berkeley, CA:
Manzanar History Association, 2012), 94.
25
Catherine Irwin, Twice Orphaned, 122.
26
Burton, Garden Management Plan, 60–1; Densho Encyclopedia, “Manzanar Childrens’
Village,” https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Manzanar_Children’s_Village, accessed
21 October 2019.
27
NAB: RG 21, Entry 48, Box 224. 28 Burton, Garden Management Plan, 35–6.
Intersectional Sovereignty in the Camps 281
Fig. 9.4 Gardeners and janitors in front of gazebo, Manzanar

Children’s Village. Courtesy of Manzanar National Historic Site,
NPS. Reproduced courtesy of Karyl Matsumoto
legacies, now being restored, and touchstones to their Japanese home-

lands all around the camp.29
Intersectional Sovereignty in the Camps

As Harry Ueno’s case demonstrates, the peace and contemplative spaces
were refuges not unlinked to political tensions within Manzanar and
subject to disruption. Nowhere was intersectional sovereignty more in
tension in the Japanese American community than in the “camps.” This
tension was considerably leveraged by a loyalty questionnaire that had
originally been designed to screen Nisei for service in segregated US
Army units; they were literally being asked to serve in the army after
being incarcerated because of their potential for sabotage and espionage
based on their race. The WRA then clumsily administered the modified
questionnaire with mandatory responses on 6 February 1943 to the entire
adult prison population.30 Two questions immediately split families who
29
Burton, Garden Management Plan, 115.
30
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), Personal
Justice Denied (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997, with a foreword by
Tetsuden Kashima), 191 (original report, Washington, DC, 1982); Greg Robinson, By
faced removal to a Segregation Center for possible repatriation by nega-

tive responses:
Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States on
combat duty, where ordered?
Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of
America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign
or domestic forces, and foreswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor,
to any foreign government, power or organization?31
Not only were the young Nisei men interested in serving in the armed
forces offended by these questions, especially since they had no connec-
tion to the Japanese emperor other than their ancestry; they also faced
possible combat against their Japanese relatives while under the cloud of
suspicion as enemies of the USA. The Issei had to consider committing
treason by denying any allegiance to the government of their national
citizenship with no recourse to American citizenship because they had
been denied naturalization rights in the United States. If they answered
“yes,” they rendered themselves stateless. If they answered “no,” they
divided their family loyalties into two countries, two citizenships, and
possible physical separation for an unknown period of time.
Sue’s family was no exception; her family answered “yes” because her
brothers, as American citizens, insisted; Sue’s mother Komika was
indecisive although the younger children, Midori and Tets, refused to
go with her if repatriated to Japan. Sue’s brother Hideo volunteered but
was rejected for poor eyesight; Jack was recruited from Heart Mountain
Relocation Center; Frank was inducted into the Military Intelligence
Service, a unit that served in the Pacific Theater; Kinya served in the
army. Sue, then a shy young Nisei woman, left Manzanar for Madison,
Wisconsin, with minimal support and over her mother’s objections.32
The Postwar Dislocations of Resettlement

For the Issei, nowhere was their sense of identity sharper or more in crisis.
For the Nisei, leaving the camps was a crucial game of politics and
ideology they were forced to play just as they were coming of age. Nor
was it a negotiation particular to the “camps.” Some were forcibly
repatriated to Japan and some consequently stripped of their American
citizenship. As Japanese American communities regrouped postwar, pri-
marily on the American west coast after years of unlawful imprisonment
Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003), 180–1.
31
CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 191–2. 32 Bahr, The Unquiet Nisei, 87–91.
The Postwar Dislocations of Resettlement 283
and decades of discrimination, they faced significant hostility, housing

discrimination and economic losses.33
Because of the Japanese American community’s nearly complete dis-
enfranchisement and dispersal during the war, recovery and redress post-
war were delayed; the resettlement and reconstitution of their
communities involved years of community building. For the Issei, not
much was left to show for their years of work and sacrifice, and many of
them in their fifties and sixties felt they were too old to start over. The
Nisei took over the mantle of community leadership, significantly through
JACL national, regional and local chapters in the resettled Japanese
American communities, which were now located all over the USA,
although still concentrated on the west coast. The first official recognition
of redress and reparations for the injustice of camps came with the
Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 signed into law by President Harry
Truman. At the time of the last payout in 1965, the US government
had disbursed almost $37 million for 26,558 claims, a minimal compen-
sation compared to the $400 million in losses estimated by the Federal
Reserve Bank in 1942.34 While redress and reparations were among the
issues the JACL officially considered, they focused instead in the postwar
era on efforts to repeal the 1950 Emergency Detention Act in addition to
participating in the civil rights movement. The JACL was not further
involved in redress until Edison Uno pushed to have it revisited within the
JACL in the 1970s.
Community activism surged in the 1970s, spurring legislative and
judicial action to examine the civil rights violations of the incarceration.
Beginning in 1980, the Congressional Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), sponsored by
Congressman Norman Mineta, and Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark
Matsunaga, held hearings in ten cities to gather testimonies, sparking
a cathartic release of personal stories about the “camps.” After three years
33
Lon Kurashige, “The problem of biculturalism: Japanese American identity and festival
before World War II,” Journal of American History, 86:4 (March 2000): 1632–54, 1635.
E.O. 9066 has been revisited several times at the Supreme Court, notably by Chief Justice
Roberts who argued on 26 June 2018 in a decision on President Donald Trump’s travel
ban, “The forcible relocation of US citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly
on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential author-
ity.” Justices Sottomayor and Ginsburg further clarified the Supreme Court position
overruling the Korematsu case against the United States Government. Constitution
Daily, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/did-the-supreme-court-just-overrule-the-
korematsu-decision, accessed 25 August 2019.
34
Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil
Liberties Act of 1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 25; Yasuko
I. Takezawa, Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), 33.
of research and investigation, the CWRIC recommended that Congress

appropriate $20,000 to each victim. Its report also gave energy to actions
moving forward in the judicial branch with the challenges of Supreme
Court cases upholding the military curfews and exclusion orders. On
10 August 1988, Congress approved H.R. 442, also known as the Civil
Liberties Act of 1987, incorporating the CWRIC’s recommendations and
signed by President Ronald Reagan. Importantly, the bill included sup-
port for a Civil Liberties Education Fund that would be a model for state
funding and has also contributed substantially to the ability of the
Japanese American community to document the event; the bill’s passage
also resulted in a letter of apology from President Reagan sent to all the
former prisoners and their families.
In the two decades following the incarceration, Manzanar Buddhist
minister Rev. Sentoku Mayeda and his Christian minister friend Soichi
Wakahiro returned yearly to the Manzanar Cemetery to clean the Ireito
(Monument to Venerate the Spirits of the Deceased); the annual trips
involved cleaning the monument, a small obelisk painted white in the
cemetery, which itself had been an interfaith project designed and built by
Ryozo Kado with calligraphy by Rev. Shinjo Nagatomi.35 Their trips may
be described as a return home to clean the graves of ancestors, a ritual
recognized in Japan as o-hakamairi, associated with the summer Buddhist
Obon festival but often a personal pilgrimage as well.36 This symbolic
return was transformed by the Sansei when they organized the first
Manzanar Pilgrimage in the bitter cold of December 1969. Efforts to
establish the Manzanar Relocation Center as a permanent site commem-
orating the incarceration, largely through the advocacy of the Manzanar
Committee and its annual pilgrimage, paralleled the community-initiated
political movement for redress and reparations from the 1960s through
the 1980s alongside the protests of the Vietnam War and the civil rights
movements.
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, known as the “Unquiet Nisei,” was clearly an
exceptional Nisei, marrying non-Japanese Garland Embrey in 1950, but
her entry into championing the preservation of the Manzanar confine-
ment site was somewhat serendipitous. When she attended the first
Manzanar Pilgrimage, her interview by neophyte television news reporter
Tritia Toyota about “camp” conditions was broadcast on the 6 o’clock
news and created a great deal of consternation in the Los Angeles
35
Duncan Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 139.
36
Williams, American Sutra, 140–2; Jane Wehrey, Images of America: Manzanar
(Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008), 120.
Japanese American community, most of whom preferred the incarcer-

ation not to be publicized.
Sue became the person to whom the Sansei would turn for infor-
mation about the “camps,” and she became the driving force of the
Manzanar Committee, which in turn became an important node of
activism and educational programming for the redress and repar-
ations movement. At the same time, Sue was active in the anti-
Vietnam War and United Farm Workers movements, among
a number of other progressive movements. She spearheaded the
preservation of the Manzanar site. Alongside members of the
Manzanar Committee, she was successful in obtaining the designa-
tion of the site as California State Landmark 850 in 1973 with
controversial wording naming it a concentration camp site (Fig. 9.5).
Fig. 9.5 Sue Kunitomi Embrey dancing at the 1973 Manzanar

Pilgrimage. Courtesy of the Manzanar Committee
While the Manzanar Committee continued to organize the Manzanar

Pilgrimage to provide buses, programming, portable toilets and accom-
modations for the annual return to the site during the 1970s and 1980s,
the pilgrimage established the important groundwork for the site’s pres-
ervation as well as for educating the general public about the redress
movement. Working with Rose Ochi, Sue obtained nonprofit status for
the Manzanar Committee and initiated a formal legislative strategy to
preserve Manzanar for historical and educational purposes. Manzanar
was officially established as a National Historic Landmark in 1985, and
as a National Historic Site on 3 March 1992 with the transfer of property
from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to the NPS, with
a diverse commission including Inyo County residents. Sue, spending
a significant amount of her available income, attended many of the
meetings, guiding the transformation of the site into the Manzanar
National Historic Site maintained by the US NPS with a substantial
visitor center. In her last interview, Sue concluded, “Looking back on my
life I think I have accomplished what I wanted to do. I hope I have
established a direction for young people to follow.”37
Building on the processes initiated and sustained through continued
community involvement of the Japanese American residents of Los
Angeles, the Manzanar National Historic Site has grown to gather histor-
ies of all the incarceration sites, with an onsite exhibit space at the former
gymnasium transformed into a visitor center; programming, an archive
and ongoing archaeological and conservation work are part of their
mission. Three new barrack buildings and one rehabilitated 1942 mess
hall convey aspects of the incarceration story. The NPS, assisted by
members of the Japanese American community, are restoring the aban-
doned gardens in a landscaping strategy aimed at conveying some aspects
of the garden plan. The reconstructed guard tower #8 greets visitors
along Manzanar’s frontage road.
Bruce Embrey, Sue Kunitomi Embrey’s son, in a direct generational
lineage to her community activism, took on the responsibilities of organ-
izing the annual pilgrimage after Sue’s death in 2006. The Manzanar
Pilgrimage continues to be a unique symbolic embodiment of the
Japanese tradition of o-hakamairi for Bruce Embrey’s family and the
Japanese American community as a “direction for young people to
follow.” Bruce explained the Manzanar Committee’s framing of the
programming for the Manzanar Pilgrimage in an interview following the
2016 Manzanar Pilgrimage:
37
Bahr, The Unquiet Nisei, 152.
Because basically people didn’t tell their kids, or tell anyone really, what they
experienced, and there was no formal, real detailed analysis until the mid-
seventies . . . the pilgrimage always was a way to communicate with people, the
younger generation, the broader public, what happened. So we felt through telling
the story of Children’s Village [in 2016], we accomplished that, and we highlighted
a really crucial and a unique component of Manzanar, which was the orphanage.
From our vantage point, it highlights the absurdity of the Executive Order that we
constantly referenced in the course of the speeches. The military necessity of locking
up 101 orphans, including several who didn’t even realize that they were Japanese
because they were mixed race. I just feel like that was really useful.38
Bruce went on to explain the political legacy and relevance of the

Manzanar National Historic Site:
The pilgrimage . . . had a part that was saying this is what we need to do as
a community to keep moving forward. This is what needs to be redressed. So
there was an action plan . . . in the early days especially. I can name different things
they were trying to get accomplished. But the relevance today, obviously, was the
need to highlight the xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism that’s being spewed out
daily.39
The preservation of the Manzanar Relocation Center site also spurred on

national efforts aligned with and parallel to Sue Embrey’s to preserve not
only other confinement sites but also stories and artifacts. The NPS took
the lead in surveying sites in the mid-1980s, creating the Minidoka
Internment National Monument in Idaho in 2001 (now the Minidoka
National Historic Site); the Bainbridge Island Japanese American
Exclusion Memorial as part of the Minidoka site; the Tule Lake Unit of
the World War II Valor in the Pacific Monument in 2008; and Honouliuli
National Monument in Hawaii in 2015. The educational component of
the HR 442 Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was augmented by the passage of
Public Law 109–441 signed by George W. Bush that authorized the
allocation of $38 million for the Japanese American Confinement Sites
Grant Program. Other sites have been preserved by local initiatives and
nonprofit organizations such as the Heart Mountain Wyoming
Interpretive Learning Center and the Topaz Museum. Preservation
efforts span the spectrum from the Relocation Center sites to less well-
known sites of internment such as the Tuna Canyon Detention Station in
Tujunga, California.40
38
Manzanar National Historic Site Oral History Project, University of Melbourne Focus
Group. Participants: Anoma Pieris, Lynne Horiuchi, Atha, Jeff Burton, Alisa Lynch,
Rose Masters, Bernadette Johnson and Bruce Embrey, 1 May 2016.
39
Manzanar National Historic Site Oral History Project.
40
National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, Japanese American Confinement
Sites Grant Program, “2017: A year in review – preserving and interpreting World War II
Even in the changing landscapes of civil liberties in the United States,

Manzanar will likely maintain a visibly active presence in America as
a landmark event in the nation’s history. Yet as perspectives about the
incarceration continue to globalize, its relation to Japan and its imperial
history will be more robustly examined. Manzanar’s layered colonial settler
landscape received the spectacular Japanese gardens of its Issei immigrant
floriculture specialists who, as Japanese imperial colonial settlers themselves,
maintained some affinity to their homeland. Their status was so ambivalent
that they also participated in a top-secret American project to produce
synthetic rubber. While nearly stateless in Manzanar, they negotiated
a prison city maintained as though by an American colonial government
colonial government. Their children, mostly young adult Nisei, exited camp
and reclaimed their American citizenship, concealing from their Sansei
children any knowledge of their “camp” experience. Their Sansei children
came of age with civil rights and Vietnam War protests transferring that
activism to the establishment of the Manzanar Pilgrimage and the Manzanar
National Historic Site, which are now substantial material sites with activities
that commemorate the incarceration. Digital sites developed by Sansei such
as Densho by Tom Ikeda and 50 Objects developed by Nancy Ukai also
maintain the material culture of the incarceration.41
The prison cities for Japanese Americans continue to circulate in the
news cycle as examples of unjust imprisonment or targeting of minorities
through attacks on Muslims after 9/11, the detainment of prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay, and the detention of immigrants and their children. In
their activist tradition that had provided the impetus for redress in the
1970s and 1980s, Japanese American Sansei of Tsuru (folded cranes) for
Solidarity protested at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 2019, a site where
Geronimo was held with other Apaches as prisoners-of-war at the turn
of the century and where Japanese “enemy aliens” considered national
security risks were imprisoned during World War II. The Sansei, now
elderly, called for the American public and government to “Stop
Repeating History” and the detention of immigrant children at Fort
Sill, as they continued to educate about the Japanese American incarcer-
ation, keeping it at the forefront of social media. The incident under-
scored the historical layering of settler colonialism, anti-Asian
discrimination, racial discrimination against people of color and minor-
ities, the violation of civil rights, and the inhumane imprisonment of
Latino/a children. In both intended and unintended ways, the Fort Sill
Japanese American confinement sites” (Winter 2017/2018) [online newsletter], 4, www

.nps.gov/jacs/downloads/Newsletter12_2017.pdf.
41
Nancy Ukai, 50 Objects/Stories: The Japanese American Incarceration, https://50objects
.org, and Tom Ikeda, Densho, https://densho.org, accessed 2 March 2021.
protest represented the intersectional sovereignty of Native Americans,

Latin Americans, Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global audience.
Within a national context, it was a political protest to end the detention of
minorities and children.
The establishment of the Manzanar National Historic Site was
a significant effort in recovery from the incarceration, a site with which
Japanese American communities now interface with pride, regardless of
the wide ideological spectrum of American politics they hold. The redress
movement was shaped by bipartisan legislation; subsequent legislation
and memorials reflect the Japanese American community’s legacy of
military service in Europe during World War II in the 442nd
Regimental Combat Unit – the most decorated military unit in
American history, and Military Intelligence Service in the Pacific
Theater, as well as the community’s legacy in campaigns for civil liberties
and social justice, all of which may also be considered a legacy of their
community building.
10 Intersectional Sovereignty
Anoma Pieris
One intention of this book is to offer multiple and cross-border perspec-

tives on wartime incarceration in a number of settler-societies. This
approach looks beyond the national exceptionalism of many past histor-
ical analyses to compare diverse physical responses to external political
pressures that manifested intolerance of racial difference or of enemy
nationality. Camps were discussed as border spaces where heterogeneous
populations, placed in prison cities outside the protection of sovereign
governments, resisted the imposed uniform racialized categorizations,
linking ideas of border-thinking with an exploration of intersectional
sovereignty, as this book’s contribution.1
Conceiving of borders as a lived space critical for rethinking sovereign
structures and processes, Chapter 10 explores how the life-worlds of the
camps were extended beyond the postwar era through the parallel cre-
ation of commemorative places in Canada, Australia and Singapore. It
examines how the material dissonance of residual camp heritage collected
from vacated sites and gathered by local communities has been used to
mobilize incarceration histories outside mainstream national memorial
cultures, sustaining awareness and promoting ethical consideration of
related injustices. Some of the remarkable processes sustaining these
memories long term have arisen from survival strategies that materialized
in the camps, while others respond to transnational commemorative
practices of exogenous origin. The chapter acts as a bridge to
Chapter 11 on punitive border control in Australia. Together they explore
the productive and destructive legacies of wartime sovereignty, drawing
the narrative of wartime camps to a close.
The sociopolitical contexts for commemoration differed in each of the
countries studied, informing the reception and interpretation of incarcer-
ation histories. Postwar developments at Manzanar were distinctive
because the USA had incarcerated Japanese American citizens, who
later energized struggles for civil liberties; similar processes were evident
1
Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova, “Theorizing from the borders: shifting to geo-
and body-politics of knowledge,” European Journal of Social Theory, 9:2 (2006): 205–21.
290
Background to Commemoration in Canada 291
in the Canadian case. In Australia, shrouded in the White Australia

Policy, or in Singapore, awakened to decolonization, the struggle was
never so direct. Belatedly during the postwar era, these settler-societies
contended with new internal forms of politicization in their various tran-
sitory and competing forms. Following centuries of imperialism when
genocide, slavery, indenture, transportation and apartheid had cast citi-
zenship as an exception composed of protected entitlements – racializing
the pathways to social mobility – the reconfiguration of sovereignty to
align with national rather than colonial agendas saw multiple claimants to
civil liberties on ethnoracial grounds. To apply the metaphor of intersec-
tional sovereignty explored in this book, in these predominantly settler-
environments’ intransigent legacies of colonial racialization, deepened by
wartime division, inhibited the expression of a creolized consciousness,
such as that described by Eduard Glissant.2
Background to Commemoration in Canada, Australia

and Singapore
Stories of civilians and citizens incarcerated in North America gained
public attention during the 1980s, after Japanese American Sansei and
Nisei – US-born generational leaders – campaigned for redress and
compensation, as described in Chapter 9. In Canada, where immigrants
or naturalized citizens of Japanese ancestry were not protected by
a constitution, the National Emergency Transitional Powers Act
(replacing the War Measures Act) in January 1946 ordered either volun-
tary relocation east of the Rockies away from the Pacific coast or voluntary
repatriation or deportation to Japan.3 For many, hostels established by
the Department of Labor formed the next phase of displacement. Many
families were internally divided and traumatized by this choice. By
January 1947 British Columbia’s Japanese population had reduced to
6,776 (one-third of prewar figures); they were not allowed back to their
places of origin until April 1949.4 Here too, recognition of injustices took
many decades. Inspired by successes south of the border – of the Japanese
American Citizens League, the Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress and
US Congressional Commission hearings – the redress movement led by
the National Association of Japanese Canadians reached a settlement in
September 1988.5
2
J. Michael Dash, Eduard Glissant.
3 4
Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, 338–9, 413. Ibid., 335.
5
Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 64–5.
The heterogeneity uncovered in the camps was suppressed in the

postwar decades because of the assimilationist stances of Australia’s
postwar governments and later by the strategically ethnoracial politics
by which marginalized communities and particularly First Nations com-
munities contested them. The postwar nation, still operating under its
restrictive immigration policies, did not compensate former “enemy
aliens” or prisoners-of-war (POWs) held on behalf of Britain and the
USA, and distanced itself from direct culpability for its incarceration
history. The government was preoccupied with the repatriation and
reabsorption of expeditionary forces, recovering and burying their war
dead, and concluding Australia’s war-crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific.
The country maintained its White Australia Policy restricting Asian
immigration until 1973, but alongside intakes of British immigrants
opened its borders to non-Anglophone Europeans, to increase the demo-
graphic presence of Australia in the region and provide critical labor for
Federal Government-funded industrial projects. Some 170,000 war-
affected European Displaced Persons and annual intakes of assisted
passage immigrants arriving via country-to-country agreements increased
the population from 7.5 to 12.7 million between 1947 and 1971.6 These
“New Migrants” – a term differentiating them from Australian-born
generations – were housed in immigrant reception centers and hostels,
many repurposed from military camps in which POW working parties had
been temporarily stationed until their repatriation in the late 1940s.
Camps at Bonegilla, Greta and Northam, for example, saw this change
of use, and at Rushworth (Tatura Camp 3) immigrants were housed in
the former internment camp. They were reconfigured as legitimate tran-
sition environments where new entrants into Australia were educated into
assimilatory Anglo-Australian values. Consequently, Northern and
Southern European immigrant communities linked with the formerly
incarcerated populations grew in numbers but had different associations
with and perceptions of the military camp typology.
The first Asian immigrants permitted to enter Australia in 1952 were
650 Japanese war brides who had married members of the Australian
Occupation Forces in Japan. Australia resumed diplomatic relations with
Japan in 1957. Other Asian immigrants were excluded until the White
Australia Policy’s dissolution in 1973. Yet Australians continued to be
prejudiced toward their regional neighbors, in attitudes exacerbated by
the experiences of many service personnel imprisoned by the Japanese
and fears of Communist expansion in the changed Cold War global
6
James Jupp, ed., From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration
(Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1988), 12–13.
Background to Commemoration in Canada 293
environment. The post-1975 arrival of large numbers of Asians displaced

by the Vietnam War acted as a watershed for demographic change in
Australia, altering public attitudes toward military conscription and
accelerating a nascent multiculturalist evolution encompassing Asian
migrants by the 1980s. New immigrants were educated into the Anglo-
Australian interpretation of the Anzac spirit rooted in Australian valor
(and defeat) at Gallipoli during World War I, rather than recent confron-
tations in Asia.7
Postwar Asia was very different. Decolonization and withdrawal of
military forces divided the interpretation and reception of wartime history
of former colonials from their once-colonized subjects. While compensa-
tion payouts were belatedly offered by their respective governments to the
former Allied internees held in Asia during the early 2000s, compensation
cases heard by the Japanese government were often dismissed by Japan’s
Supreme Court under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.8 Singapore
remained a British colony until 1963 when it joined the Federation of
Malaya, then was expelled from it, declaring independence in 1965.
Directly after the war’s end the colonial government took strict measures
against Japanese investment in Singapore, only relaxed for Japanese
businesses in 1955. During this period until 1977 Japan serviced numer-
ous bilateral war reparations agreements with a number of formerly
occupied Asian territories, as stipulated by Article 14 of the San
Francisco Peace Treaty.9 Compensation was offered in kind, rather
than cash payments, enabling Japanese firms, including general contrac-
tors, to become established in Asia through involvement in war-
reparation projects.10 However, colonial governments in Singapore and
Malaya were not among the beneficiaries because of US pressure to limit
demands on Japan in the interest of rebuilding it as a defense against
Communism in Asia.11
7
“Anzac” refers to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The Gallipoli campaign
was a World War I military campaign in (present-day) Turkey.
8
Federal Register of Legislation, Compensation (Japanese Internment) Act No. 41 of
2001, C2017C00296, www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2017C00296: authorized
a compensation payment of AUD25,000 to civilians in respect of deceased veterans or
civilians. On 7 November 2000, the UK Government announced an ex-gratia payment of
£10,000 to former POWs and other detainees of Japan: Jon Lunn, “Ex-gratia payment
for Far East POWs and civilian internees,” Library, House of Commons,
27 March 2009, http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN03887/
SN03887.pdf; US, Library of Congress, Japan WWII POW and Forced Compensation
cases, www.loc.gov/law/help/pow-compensation/japan.php.
9
NA-UK: FO 371/170788, 1963. Japanese war compensation for Singapore; reparations
agreement with Burma.
10
Hiroshi Shimizu, Japanese Firms in Contemporary Singapore (National University of
Singapore Press, 2008), 34–41.
11
Ibid., 36.
Whereas Australian camps were distributed across several states,

Singapore’s were concentrated in a conurbation, the whole island dotted
with the traces and memories of camps. Among these, the two most
significant commemorative sites originating in postwar colonial efforts,
the Changi Prison Museum and Kranji War Cemetery, mainly appeal to
visiting war veterans or ex-POWs from Britain and Australia and their
descendants. These are representative global sites of a wider arc of war in
the Pacific, encompassing Sandakan, Kanchanburi, the Kokoda Track
and Hellfire Pass. Reinforced by pilgrimages of survivors and descend-
ants, battlefield tourism and peace memorialization intersect at these sites
as commensurate features of military heritage.
Following independence, Singapore let go of the binary racial
divisions of its colonial past and devised a multiracial and pluralist
political model conceived for equitable division of entitlements based
on the formula the British had used for the governance of the col-
ony’s different settler-minorities. Various ethnoracial stakeholders for
Singapore’s wartime history, politicized by the war, had also devel-
oped contradictory perspectives on their relationships with the
British. A defining factor that united them across ethnic lines was
their experience of Japanese occupation in the war-damaged city and
their absence from the British or Australian story of Changi. The
immediate postwar and independence-period political focus was on
the Sook-Ching purges and negotiating a blood-debt treaty with
Japan.12 Discovery of extensive human remains, of over several thou-
sand bodies (actual numbers unverifiable), in February 1962 brought
new pressure on the Japanese government with the Chinese Chamber
of Commerce (CCC) demanding compensation for victims’ families.
The People’s Action Party government (PAP), eager to cultivate
Japan as a trading partner in export-oriented industrialization,
negotiated a grant of SGD 25 million and an equivalent amount
in Yen loans. This quasi-reparation agreement had originally
included a Japanese-funded cenotaph to which the CCC was vehe-
mently opposed. The PAP government held a competition for
a national monument to the civilian war dead, four tapering 230-ft-
high pillars designed by architect Leong Swee Lim, built jointly with
the CCC in 1967. The Japanese funds were distributed across
numerous other projects. The developmental agendas of the land-
scarce city-state did not include consideration for colonial war-
heritage, at the time.
12
Blackburn and Hack, War Memory, 135–73.
Former Wartime Camps’ Material Dissonance 295
Former Wartime Camps’ Material Dissonance

The commemorative responses to incarceration sites in each of these
case-study contexts, while characterizing the salient features of postwar
citizenship described above, maintained aspects of the multiple coexisting
forms of sovereignty, described in the camps. The “material dissonance”
of memory-making practices that numerous stakeholders have created at
physical sites has proven to be invaluable for sustaining incarceration
histories long term.13 The multivocality of these processes, as well as
their internal tensions and contestations reproducing the creolized con-
sciousness observed in the camps, have converted these sites and prac-
tices into extensions of a lived border space. Unlike at the Manzanar
National Historic Site, legislated as a national remembrance site in
1992, local communities with limited resources manage these memory-
making strategies, coming to terms with a history they are part of or
connected to through descent or have inherited through dwelling in
towns associated with former wartime camps. Their efforts contrast
with the authorized monuments to military heroism and deceased
soldiers.
Material remains of former captives offer a measure of resilience to the
multiple forces that obscure memories of them. Their descendants and
host communities have struggled to preserve, represent and recognize
former carceral sites, unveiling residual forms of cultural and political
sovereignty in fragments of buildings or memorials. Archeological studies
of these precede heritage nominations for some of the sites.
Reconstruction of building or landscape segments have often proven
valuable for igniting public interest around physical histories, supple-
mented by interpretive exhibits conveying ethical messages or inviting
greater empathy for incarcerated communities. In some examples,
human remains delay site reclamation, while in others, ex-internees or -
POWs, or their descendants, return to revive and recover their histories,
introducing objects and simulating past experiences; in still others, tour-
ism initiatives fuse with commemorative practices to animate neglected
histories. On a smaller and more intimate scale, ordinary objects made or
artworks drawn by POWs become exceptionally precious because of their
unusual beauty, scarcity, relative cost, and hours of creative labor, under
the duress of prison conditions, or the surrounding stealth practices. The
social lives of these artifacts, whether large or small, fixed or mobile,
provide revelatory traces of human resilience even after their makers
have passed on. Retention of these tangible remains and their donations
13
J. E. Tunbridge and G. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage.
by individuals and their families to local collections and archives consti-

tute the most substantial movable carceral heritage.
Localized encounters with dissonant materialities typically occur dec-
ades after official practices of national commemoration are established.
During that interim period the sites may be neglected because they were
decommissioned or returned to private ownership or because of discom-
fiture caused by the undergirding racist policies and the uncovered sys-
temic violence, particularly for those nations that saw the Allied victory as
a victory for liberal democracy over Fascism. Moratoriums on related
records have aided this process of selective memorialization. Societal
pressures – on internees to assimilate, to suppress incarceration histories
and the shocking revelations in the war’s immediate aftermath of the
atrocities prisoners overseas suffered under the enemy – may have dis-
suaded communities from making their unjust treatment public.14 Even
where evidence was scarce, commemorative gardens still proved to be
remarkably successful in attracting visitors to former camp sites, either by
building on extant landscaping traditions or introducing new ones, des-
pite the hard labor required for maintaining such facilities in semiarid
climates in some instances in Australia and the USA. Their pacifist
messages also less disturbing than the tangles of barbed wire and brick-
bats, their aesthetic beauty is still equally capable of masking the harsh
realities that cruder representations convey. Such reconstructions are
invariably reinterpreted through a politicized field of memory-making
circumscribed by new challenges resulting from each respective nation’s
interpretations of sovereignty and citizenship and their reception by locals
and visitors at these sites. The remainder of this chapter analyzes
a selection of sites already encountered in this volume.
Community-Led Commemoration at New Denver

As discussed in Chapter 9, the successful creation of the Manzanar
National Historic Site depended on many factors, including annual pil-
grimages to tend the remaining graves and activism of those like Sue
Kunitomi Embrey. This was possible because camp populations had
been predominantly from Los Angeles, a four-hour journey south of
Manzanar. The land was returned to the city of LA, and the barrack
structures dismantled and salvaged, except the auditorium building, used
as the Inyo County garage. In contrast, New Denver’s sanatorium con-
tinued to treat invalid Japanese Canadians after the war and some families
14
Trials of Japanese nationals and their Asian allies were held in Tokyo, the USA, and
various parts of the Pacific, 1945–51.
Community-Led Commemoration at New Denver 297
with members undergoing treatment there remained in the Orchard long

after other camps in the valley had been salvaged. The village also gath-
ered other aged and invalid former camp residents, prevented from
returning to the west coast but unable to travel east of the mountains
once restrictions were lifted in January 1946. The provincial administra-
tion awarded deeds to those residents who had occupied their homes for
more than ten years, several modified from internment shacks.
This permanent settlement of former internees enabled a benevolent
community organization begun in the camp – the Kyowakai (Working
Together) Society – to continue its activities, also creating new commem-
orative sites and facilities to build greater public awareness of wartime
injustices.15 Founded in 1943 to assist internee liaisons with the BC
Securities Commission, the nonprofit Society, incorporated in 1977,
remains the only still-operational wartime Japanese Canadian internment
organization.
Kyowakai Hall, converted from the communal bath-house built in
1943, was used continuously as a community facility, until a new
Centennial Hall was built adjacent, to commemorate a century of
Japanese immigration to Canada in 1977 (Fig. 10.1). The Slocan Lake
Garden Society’s Kohan Japanese Internment Memorial Reflection
Gardens were created in 1989, also on the former camp site, to celebrate
the success of the redress movement. The physical beauty of the lakeside
setting and mountain backdrop produced tangible associations resonat-
ing strongly with both Canadian and Japanese interpretations of the
landscape. During the early 1990s, the Kyowakai Society conceived of
a Nikkei Internment Memorial Center (NIMC) at the Orchard site,
commemorating their history and encouraging awareness of unjust
internment. The facility, which opened in 1994, reflected the Society’s
hopes for preventing future discrimination, through forms of visitor edu-
cation in which they had direct inputs.16
Writing on this unique memorial facility’s creation, Kirsten Emiko
McAllister describes anxieties around the reinvention, interpretation,
representation and remaking of these spaces at every stage of the process,
noting how with the passing away of older men, women elders assumed
leadership in its creation, continuing an internment tradition where
women took on responsibilities for their families.17 The intersectional
15
Thanks to Paul Gibbons and, through him, other members of the Kyowakai Society, and
Amanda Murphy, New Denver Recreation and Cultural Services Coordinator, who gave
extensive feedback on this subject, following Anoma Pieris’ visit in 2016.
16
Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Project (Vancouver:
UBC Press, 2010), 205.
17
Ibid., 157, 205, 244.
Fig. 10.1 Nikkei Internment Memorial Center, New Denver, BC, with
Centennial Hall in foreground and Kyowakai Hall behind it. Photographed
by A. Pieris in 2016. Reproduced with permission from the Kyowakai
Society, New Denver
strands of lived experience at this site, including during incarceration,

were clearly evident in its physical design, which arranged three austere
internment shacks brought from the West Kootenay region around
a space defined by the original Otera (shrine). The Otera was partitioned
and concealed from view as a private community space within the
Kyowakai Hall. Japanese Canadian elders furnished shack interiors with
collections of artifacts, which were modified on their advice.18 The adja-
cent Centennial Hall was retained exclusively for the community’s use.19
New Denver Village took over NIMC operations in 2010, with collabor-
ation forming a reconciliatory practice aimed at preventing cycles of
future discrimination. Their mediation of visitor interactions was needed,
observes McAllister, because of some visitors’ sensitivity to public injust-
ices and the facility’s proximity to former internees’ homes.20 NIMC’s
18
Ibid., 173–8. 19 Ibid., 124–62.
20
Ibid., 244. As numbers in the Society dwindled, operations were handed over to New
Denver, although the Society is consulted on interpretation of site histories and other
issues.
Community-Led Commemoration at New Denver 299
creation process uncovered many intersections of ethnic, national and

place identification migrants negotiate in drawing attention to social
injustices and did so, moreover, in unique adaptations of the physical
landscape.
Different generations of buildings with distinct public or private uses were
tied together through a karesansui (dried-up water scenery) Hei-wa Tei-en
(Peace Garden), designed by renowned landscape designer Roy
(Tomomichi) Sumi, who had been interned at the Tashme, Rosebery,
New Denver and Blue River Road camps.21 Sumi had worked with distin-
guished Japanese landscape architect Kannosuke Mori on the University of
British Columbia’s Nitobe Memorial Garden, where his main task was to
use Canadian practices and materials to interpret and coordinate traditional
Japanese garden design.22 Mori, who had trained under imperial gardener
Shigejiro Ogawa, assigned to overseas projects by the Japanese government,
had wished to create “A Japanese Garden in Canada,” not “A Canadian
Japanese Garden,” in an explicit expression of heritage diplomacy.23 The
garden replaced a memorial to Japanese agricultural economist and states-
man Inazō Nitobe, destroyed because of anti-Japanese feelings after the
war’s end.24 Vancouver Japanese community fundraising, to supplement
philanthropic and government support for the project, and Sumi’s involve-
ment brought added local influences and interpretations to Mori’s project.
Goto and Naka intimate that the philosophy of Sakuteiki (classical
tradition of Japanese garden-making) was followed more closely by
internees as a memory of nature rooted in place experience, unlike the
gardens built for world exhibitions or Japonism that projected idealized
representations of Japan as an ancient civilization in competition with
the Western classical past.25 The gardens were created with limited
materials to satisfy emotional needs and build “cultural dignity” in the
face of extreme adversity. In their interpretation, the internment gar-
dens symbolized resistance, patriotism, and also hope. Immediately
after the war, when assimilating masked their “persecution and belit-
tling,” Japanese Americans like Douglas DeFaya (Shoju Douglas
Mitsuhashi), famous for Long Island’s John Humes Garden, privately
21
Emiko Sumi and Howard Shimokura, “Roy Tomomichi Sumi: renowned designer and
architect of Japanese Gardens,” Nikkei Images, 20:3 (2015): 16–18 (Burnaby, BC: Nikkei
National Museum and Cultural Centre).
22
Ibid., 17.
23
Seiko Goto and Takahiro Naka, Japanese Gardens: Symbolism and Design (New York:
Routledge, 2016), 144.
24
Ibid., 143.
25
Ibid., 138; Lynne Horiuchi, “A local global utopia: the Japan Pavilion at the Golden Gate
International Exposition,” in Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island, eds.
Horiuchi and Tanu Sankalia (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2017), 96–125, 102.
designed and built Japanese-style gardens or taught classes in bonsai.26

The authors interpret the inconsistencies and adaptations evident in
Sumi’s work and in other internee-built gardens as indicative of
a tradition passed down by the diaspora and applied through the spirit
of American individualism, for defining and defending their interwoven
practices and beliefs.27
At New Denver, identarian strands of internee experience are synthe-
sized through Japanese garden traditions. As stated in the NIMC story-
board, the pebble river integrates the various features, beginning from the
headwaters north of Kyowakai Hall and winding through “rapids,” and
under two footbridges, to become more tranquil before emptying into the
lagoon. Meditative “Standing Stones,” representing the garden’s skeleton,
have been carefully oriented and placed by Sumi. The modified and
restored internment shacks appear like uncanny teahouses crammed
with period objects. The landscaping around them revives an internment
tradition of, when possible, creating beautiful ornamental gardens outside
the shacks. Internees’ receptivity to their host environments produced
creative intersectional expressions of sovereign belonging that unsettle
the Japanese imperial assumption of national and racial homogeneity,
the Japanese colonial sense of superiority and colonial settlement, and
the wartime Canadian government’s conviction of their unassimilability.
Transnational Commemoration across Incarceration

Landscapes
Unlike at New Denver, in Australia continuous habitation by internees of
former camp localities was not possible. Physical sites associated with
Australia’s incarceration landscape were impacted by the nation’s history
of exclusion and selective immigration, and given that camp properties
reverted to private ownership, human rather than physical remains
became the resilient core features for conveying their stories decades
later, and not at the instigation of migrant communities but through the
collaboration of local councils with foreign governments over interment
sites and facilities. These facilities are sustained by elderly residents,
council members and historical societies. The two official museums for
the Australian sites, the Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum
and the Hay Internment and Prisoner of War Camps Interpretive Center
(in a group of railway carriages at the defunct station), have gathered
stories and memorabilia from locals and ex-POWs or -internees over the
years, presenting the most comprehensive account of wartime
26 27
Goto and Naka, Japanese Gardens, 140. Ibid., 143.
Transnational Commemoration across Incarceration Landscapes 301
Fig. 10.2 Japanese War Cemetery, Cowra, NSW. Photographed by

A. Pieris, 2012
incarceration in Australia. At Harvey, a shrine built by Italian internees

was encased in a chapel building in 1992. Local information centers,
museums and historical societies at Murchison, Barmera (Loveday) and
Cowra include wartime heritage as part of larger displays.
Three sites – the Tatura German War Cemetery (1958), Murchison
Italian National Ossario (1961) and Cowra Japanese War Cemetery
(1964) (Fig. 10.2) – gathered for their respective nations enemy nation-
als’ bodies and ashes, including internee remains interred throughout
Australia. Like the Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites in
Asia, most notably Singapore’s Kranji War Cemetery, these sites are
incongruous in their host contexts, not being organic extensions of the
patrimony of nearby settler-communities. Military memorials and ceme-
teries like these sustain unsettling vestiges of a former imperial sover-
eignty. Annual memorial ceremonies organized by the various embassies
along with local councils, with limited participation from their respective
metropolitan immigrant communities, favor political ambivalence on
sensitive topics, among which the events and spaces at Cowra are unique.
The unsuccessful and tragic “breakout,” which concentrated Japanese
POW remains at Cowra, became the foundation for a sustained program
of heritage diplomacy, once Japan officially acknowledged their presence
in 1963, and despite the numbers of town and regional servicemen who
had fought against, lost their lives to or been captured by the Japanese
army. The dedicated Japanese War Cemetery for interring the remains of
JPOWs, civilian internees and battle-for-Darwin casualties was co-
located with the Australian War Cemetery at Cowra (in an area used
since the 1950s), as a sign of the mutual respect between military
cultures.28 Australia’s losses in overseas conflicts and sensitivity toward
burial overseas facilitated the co-location and combined ceremonies,
which were greatly legitimized by the efforts of the Returned and
Services League subbranch local members, who had tended the graves
in the interim decades. Shigeru Yura, a Japanese architect teaching at the
University of Melbourne during the 1960s, designed its unique layout
with an indirect entryway inspired by the Katsura Palace.
Exogenous memorials, like these in Australia, have become a force of
internationalization, seemingly partitioned from Canberra’s national
memory practices, more focused on the achievement and fates of overseas
expeditionary forces. There is massive investment in military memorials
led by the Australian War Memorial, built on axis with the national
parliament, its museum and archival repository more imposing than the
National Museum of Australia. “Far Eastern POWs” were poorly
acknowledged in national ceremonies in the immediate postwar decades.
No official apology has been offered to local internees, and there is no
national memorial for them. Repatriation of POWs and many overseas
internees has seemingly obviated the need to right wrongs committed on
behalf of Britain or in concert with that nation’s wartime internment
policy.
These memorials can be further contextualized by the three forms of
memorialization initiated in postwar Japan, foremost being commemora-
tive peace parks for over 200,000 civilian casualties of the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki catastrophic atomic bombings. At Hiroshima, where Kenzo
Tange’s modernist museum and Western-style master plan highlight
the global audience intended for the site, debates around its design,
preservation of the ruined Genbaku Dome and reconstruction of the
hospital have uncovered the complexities and contradictions raised by
civilian memories of the events.29 Conversely at the Yokohama War
Cemetery, created by the Australian War Graves Group for memorializ-
ing Commonwealth servicemen who died as POWs or with the
Commonwealth Occupying Forces in Japan, the Cremation Memorial
housing an urn of ashes of 335 POWs has no hold on the public
28
Ai Kobayashi and Bart Ziino, “Cowra Japanese War Cemetery,” in Places of Pain and
Shame, eds. Logan and Reeves, 99–113.
29
Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces.
imagination in Australia or in Japan.30 The site was unrelated to former

POW camps. The official enshrinement of convicted war criminals along-
side Japan’s war dead at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine attracts much inter-
national controversy annually, whenever public figures visit it, because of
the manner in which it perpetuates the military nationalism the postwar
peace treaties sought to extinguish.31 Japan’s cultures of war remem-
brance and reconciliation have also been impacted by internal struggles
between groups favoring leftwing or rightwing political beliefs as well as
their East Asian former colonies’ compensation claims for numerous
wartime atrocities.32
Distinct from the national memorial sites discussed above, purpose-
designed landscapes at both Cowra and Naoetsu have developed organically
through the layering of memorial spaces and landscape features to express
desired forms of heritage diplomacy, while the visitors they attract to com-
memorative events sustain local commitment to creating greater awareness
of the incarceration sites.33 The absence of a related immigrant community
in place at these former camp localities has provoked greater transnational
engagement with Asia, when compared with the US or Canadian sites.
Their civic orientation recalls the lack of civic facilities in the camps and
efforts made by internees and POWs to simulate them. The largest and most
impressive such space is the Cowra Japanese Garden, which alongside the
Cowra Japanese War Cemetery and a conserved portion of the former camp
site, combined as a Peace Precinct, became key tourist attractions. Together,
the Cowra RSL subbranch, Cowra Municipal Council (from 1968) and
Cowra Tourism and Development Corporation have spearheaded the
development of an extended reconciliation landscape.34
The design of ornamental commemorative Japanese gardens overseas in
secular sites is differentiable from both the nineteenth-century taste
for Japonism and the internee gardens described previously. Gregory
Missingham notes that while ornamental gardens were featured in expos-
itions and embassies before World War II as part of Japan’s efforts at trade
and cultural diplomacy, they reemerged as spaces for commemoration and
30
Joan Beaumont, “The Yokohama war cemetery, Japan: imperial, local and national
remembrance,” in Remembering the Second World War, ed. Patrick Finney (New York:
Routledge, 2017), 158–74.
31
Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory and Japan’s Unending Postwar
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015).
32
Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher and Edward Vickers, Remembering Asia’s World War
Two (New York: Routledge, 2019), 13.
33
Anoma Pieris, “Organic heritage diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region: reconciliatory
landscapes,” in Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and Cross-Border
Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism, eds. Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee and Edward
Vickers (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022).
34
Horiuchi and Pieris, “Temporal cities,” 292–321.
transnational friendship in postwar decades.35 When compared with their

prewar deployment for making Japan visible as an ancient civilization and
imperial competitor to Western imperial powers, these postwar garden
designs embodied bounded national sensibilities encouraged by the host
country’s orientalized expectations. Conversely, the Hiroshima peace park
was modeled after modernist Western landscape traditions, distinct from the
ornamental gardens in palaces, temples and shrines. The choice of
a Japanese garden for Cowra was incidental to the need for tourism revenue
during the 1970s economic slump, and unconnected to any garden tradition
practiced by Japanese POWs there, although there is ample evidence of
garden creation at Loveday Camp 14 (see Fig. 4.3).36 Italian POWs built
camp gardens at Cowra, including fountains with a world globe and a model
of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, conveying their worldliness and urbanity.
The Cowra Japanese Garden, unlike the NIMC, combines Australian
expectations with Japan’s exported garden design.
Cowra Japanese Garden

The aesthetic beauty and national reputation of the 5-hectare strolling
garden, designed by internationally renowned Japanese landscape gar-
dener Takeshi (Ken) Nakajima, belies the very local, personal interests
that initiated it, through the perseverance of Donald Kibbler, a builder
trained in architectural drawing, and President of the Cowra Tourism
Development Corporation.37 Having secured a Cowra-based Japanese
wool-manufacturing company as his first investor, Kibbler carted
a Japanese garden model in the back of his station wagon, lobbying for
support for the project – the first stage initiated with help from the
Department of Tourism, the Federal Government, the Japanese
Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Keidanren (Japan Business
Federation).38 The cemetery (1964) and a Festival of International
Understanding (1965) preceded it; and its two-phased construction
(1978–9, 1984–6), with intensive community commitment sustaining
the garden through drought periods, saw broader public engagement in
the project.
35
Gregory Kenneth Missingham, “Japan 10±, China 1: a first attempt at explaining the
numerical discrepancy between Japanese-style gardens outside Japan and Chinese-style
gardens outside China,” Landscape Research, 32:2 (2007): 117–46, 117, 128.
36
Don Kibbler and Tony Mooney, interview with the authors, Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi,
Cowra Japanese Garden, NSW, Australia, 19 November 2016.
37
Ibid.
38
Don Kibbler, “Cowra-Japan conversations,” interview with Terry Colhoun for the
Australia-Japan Research Project, 27 February 2003, http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/ajrp2
.nsf/trans/3D3B83F45CF2C4B0CA256D56001F25E1?openDocument.
Fig. 10.3 Cowra Japanese Garden, NSW. Photographed by A. Pieris,

2012
Selected by competition, Nakajima designed a strolling garden with 3

kilometers of pathways and two lakes conceived as cathartic spaces for
Japanese visitors and local residents alike (Fig. 10.3).39 He conceived of
the garden’s unique commemorative purpose as a piece of Japanese
homeland where deceased soldiers’ souls resting in the cemetery might
find release. An avenue of cherry trees associated with nearby Young
township gained new expression at Cowra, as they were planted to con-
nect the two sites; they became diseased, were replaced by Australian
apple trees and later reinstated. Rocks, topiary and water channels, simu-
lating mountain streams and rivers flowing down to the ocean, inserted
the visual composition of an alien geography into Cowra’s rugged land-
scape. Australian eucalypts planted alongside Japanese flora extend an
invitation to deceased Australian comrades, in Nakajima’s interpretation.
Trees, pathways and water features enable “incorporating practices,”
a term Paul Connerton uses to describe how memory is embodied in
movement, and species of trees express national character in strategies
that are sufficiently ambiguous not to stir up difficult memories.40 Several
39
Nakajima designed Japanese gardens in Montreal, Moscow and around the EXPO 67
Japanese pavilion. See “Cowra Japanese Garden” website.
40
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 79.
pavilions, including Edo Cottage, Bonsai House, Pottery House, Arbor

and Teahouse, were designed and adapted to Australian standards by
other Japanese and Australian professionals, while Nakajima’s choices to
keep the existing canopy intact and incorporate local plant species mir-
rored Sumi’s efforts at maintaining place authenticity.
The insertion of a simulated micro-landscape evocative of the former
enemy may appear incongruous, or even resonate with imperial strategies
for imprinting power through landscaping strategies evident in the
Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries in Asia or indeed at Yokohama.
For example, New Zealand’s Featherston, Japanese Memorial Gardens,
created in 2001 to commemorate deceased POWs across the road from
the former camp, take the form of sixty-eight cherry trees organized in
rows to depict soldiers in formation, much like the battalions represented
by the Commonwealth war graves. The messages implicit in the Cowra
Japanese Garden’s design, in comparison, were not evident without
interpretation or association with other key spaces of Cowra’s wartime
past, and risked being read only as an orientalized tourism landscape,
until these were combined as a Peace Precinct. The heritage redevelop-
ment of the former POW camp site, using a landscape plan with story-
boards identifying other POW groups including the “breakout” story,
came belatedly in 1989, after these many reconciliatory practices invited
reflexive scrutiny of events.41 Nakajima evidently felt great affinity for the
garden, even asking to have his own ashes scattered there.
These metropolitan and transnational commemorative practices
appear ambitious for a rural locality like Cowra. Their legitimacy is
reinforced annually by the presence of official visitors and ex-POWs or
their descendants from Japan who attend the August Breakout anniver-
sary ceremonies and the many visitor exchanges between the two coun-
tries. Several Japanese visitors have planted cherry trees along Cowra’s
Anzac Avenue, helping realize the town’s capacity for transnational heri-
tage diplomacy. Independently of national processes for fostering Japan–
Australia relations, Cowra has entered into a “Peace and Friendship
Agreement” with Jō etsu City in Niigata, Japan, the site of a former
POW camp with which it has no direct historical links.42
Extranational and ethnoracial currents collaborated to produce
Cowra’s internationalization outside normative minority-multicultural
designations that might have narrowly politicized them. There was not
a local resident Japanese community to seek redress for incarceration at
Cowra, because of their repatriation or return to Australia’s Northern
41
The site was listed in the State Heritage Register of NSW in 1999.
42
Jō etsu City was founded in 1971 by the merger of Takada and Naoetsu.
Territory. Participants from Nikkei Australia, a group created by

researchers leading a Civilian Internee Project, have only been actively
exploring the Cowra stories since 2013, and their interest extends to local
settler, First Nations and POW stories.42 Likewise, the Cowra-Italy
Friendship Association focused on the Italian internees, preserving sev-
eral artworks and forging links with visiting families. National negligence
of this wartime carceral heritage means that the assemblage of memorials
in this small rural community is sustained by locals coming to terms with
the breakout’s casualties and reaching out to Japan.
Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park and Museum

Cowra’s links with Jō etsu City were established through personal over-
tures, since Japan’s suppression of POW histories made official connec-
tions unlikely. When compared with formalized memoryscapes
conveying collective national trauma, the accretion of memories at
Naoetsu, over time, captures the ways in which concerned locals come
to terms with their nation’s culpability, choosing to act independently of
official channels. Reconciliation at Naoetsu was first instigated by an
Australian soldier from Cowra, Matt Cliff, interned at the Naoetsu
POW Camp (Tokyo-04-Branch Camp), who sought closure, like many
others, through returning to a former site of trauma. He found that the
timber factory buildings on the 3-acre plot belonging to the Shin-etsu
chemical company had been demolished and a domestic building had
been built on it. The site’s revival as a Peace Memorial Park under the city
council forged bilateral links between Cowra and Jō etsu. Key to this
relationship were the actions of Buddhist priest Enri Fujito, who, by
preserving at Naoetsu’s Kakushin-ji temple the remains of those who
had died at the camp, enabled their postwar interment at the Yokohama
War Cemetery.43 Because members of the Cowra RSL local subbranch
had tended the JPOW graves, this reciprocal act of caring touched both
communities. Conversely, in the aforementioned Featherston example,
the memorial garden’s creation was delayed because of resistance from
the local Returned Services Association, serving to highlight the signifi-
cance of demonstrations of mutual empathy at Cowra and Naoetsu.44
43
The Peace Memorial Park and Museum [brochure], Jō etsu City: Niigata Prefecture,
1996–7.
44
Yukiko Numata Bedford, “The ‘Peace Gardens,’ Featherston, South Wairarapa and the
Chor-Farmer,” Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network, 5:2, 7
December 2012, www.environmentalhistory-au-nz.org/2012/12/the-peace-gardens-
featherston-south-wairarapa-and-the-chor-farmer.
The peace park idea germinated in correspondence between local high-

school principal Wasaburo Goto and ex-POW Theo Lee beginning in
1978.45 Lee had been incarcerated at Changi and several work camps
before being transported to Naoetsu POW Camp from November 1942
until August 1945. Letters and books from Australia followed and were
used to teach English conversation at the local community center, spark-
ing interest among a group of citizen housewives. Theo and Joy Lee
accompanied ex-POW Jack Mudie to Japan in the 1980s, befriending
Shoichi and Yoko Ishizuka, who were also instrumental in setting up the
peace park. Shoichi, taken prisoner in 1946 during service in Indochina,
was well treated by the Allies, compared with Japanese treatment of Allied
POWs at Naoetsu camp. Troubled by this difference, he determined to
uncover its history. The separate histories of Cowra, Changi and Naoetsu
were interwoven to form a collective narrative including Japanese POWs,
soldiers and civilian guards executed for war crimes.
In 1988 Kibbler and Tony Mooney of the Cowra Australia-Japan
Association visited to plan a memorial service for Australian POWs who
died at Naoetsu.46 Following a service held in collaboration with several
local associations in May, three gum trees gifted by the Nara Mayor were
transplanted from that city’s sports park to a spot outside the Jō etsu City
Hall. These gum trees later grew so big that they had to be cut down.
A plaque commemorating the Australian dead was entrusted to the city
by ex-POW Frank Hole, with the expectation that a memorial would be
built.47 Mooney and Kibbler invited Naoetsu citizens to contribute to the
Cherry Tree Avenue being planted at Cowra. The reciprocal gifting of
representative flora, despite maintenance difficulties, while staking
a lasting claim deferred the need to articulate the underlying politics of
long-distance memory-making.
The Cowra and Naoetsu commemorative landscapes evolved in tan-
dem, thereafter inspiring the peace park campaign. Like the Cowra
Association members, Naoetsu Japan-Australia Society members had
lost family in the conflict and shared deep unsettling sentiments sur-
rounding the war. They successfully convinced the mayor and city coun-
cil to commit to the peace park. Their proposal was to purchase the
former camp site, then, with private ownership, build the memorials
and install statues sculpted by artist Tetsuji Okamoto. The target date
for unveiling the memorials was World War II’s fiftieth anniversary in
45
Koichi Inamata, Bridge across the Pacific Ocean: Out of the Dark Days of Tragic Events at the
POW Camps at Naoetsu and Cowra (Naoetsu: Council to erect statues of peace and
friendship at the former Naoetsu campsite, 1996, Japanese language), 21–2.
46
Cowra-Japan Conversations, Tony Mooney.
47
Inamata, Bridge across the Pacific Ocean, 11, 76–7.
1995. To achieve this, the group had to procure funds, educate the public
and convince bereaved families of the Naoetsu guards that such a project
could be cathartic. Despite the inclination to suppress these difficult
memories, and some muted threats to the association, the proposal
gradually gained support.48
A remarkable feature of the Naoetsu story is of neighborhood fundraising.
Eighty percent of Naoetsu citizens donated to the project, supplemented by
Jō etsu offices, donations by Australian ex-POWs and movies held by the
Association. Public opinion was openly sought during educational exhib-
itions at the library and high school. The proposal was to place the plaques
for the deceased guards and POWs side by side. From April 1995 onwards,
at four gatherings held for deceased personnel’s bereaved families, their
descendants came onboard.49 Rather than state the guard’s names, their
plaque was annotated “eight stars in a peaceful sky.” Reaction by Australians
to being commemorated alongside individuals they considered war crim-
inals, culpable for Australian deaths, prompted the decision to create two
separate but similar granite-cube memorials and place them apart.50 Despite
these many adjustments, the proximate accommodation of memorials to
guards and deceased POWs was agreed upon, and thirty-two Australian
visitors attended the 8 October 1995 unveiling ceremony. A second gum
tree was planted at the Kakushin-ji temple by Hole and Mudie.51 Another
was planted at the peace park. The peace park’s emphasis was on our
common humanity, a sentiment demanding different degrees of acquies-
cence from the representatives of the various injured parties.
The park is a long rectangular site on the south Hokura riverbank at the
south end of the Kojo Bridge. Green in summer, it is icy and windswept in
winter because of its proximity via the connecting Seki River to the Sea of
Japan (Fig. 10.4). Two sculptures by Okamoto of Hiten or heavenly
maidens “Yukari-san” and “Sakura-san” (Eucalyptus and Cherry
Blossom) rise above a central circular commemorative plaza, identifying
it as a special place. Composed as a requiem for sixty Australian POWs
and eight camp guards, they are raised 5 and 6 meters (around 16.5 and
19.5 feet) and titanium-wrapped against salt damage.52 A second “Statue
over the Waves,” of a young girl listening to a conch shell, conveys the
association with tropical Singapore. The plaza symbolically divides the
site into a past that must be confronted and a future of friendship and
trust. Over the years, a small museum, converted from a postwar domes-
tic building retained on the site, has gathered numerous exhibits on
48
Ibid., 34. 49 Ibid., 34–5. 50 Ibid., 35–7. 51 Ibid., 44.
52
Memorial Magazine for the 20th Anniversary of the Japan-Australia Society of Joetsu: The
Footsteps of the Last Ten Years (Jō etsu: Japan-Australia Society, 2017), 27–8.
Fig. 10.4 Peace Memorial Park, Naoetsu, Jō etsu, Niigata. Photographed
by A. Pieris, 2017
display for visitors and school groups. A sculpture of a lone koala hugs
a tree stump at the building entrance. Several more trees were planted at
the park’s twentieth anniversary in 2015. Canberra blue gums gifted by
Australia, alongside third-generation trees from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, now assume a shared sociality linking the international tribu-
nal’s narrative of Japan’s culpability for war crimes with Japan’s postwar
national narrative of civilian victimization by atomic bombing. Because of
the park’s northeasterly exposure, the blue gums have become stunted,
evidently struggling to tolerate wintry blasts. The paired flora introduces
a fourth subject category of Japan’s civilian victims.
The park is not picturesque like the gardens at Cowra but stark and
sparsely planted, and its messages are literal. It captures a number of
dissonant perspectives, asking perpetrators and their victims to share their
peace agenda. Avoidance of ornamental garden themes emphasizes the
modernity of the transnational commemorative practice similar to peace
parks elsewhere in Japan.53 Non-endemic tree species take on a bodily
53
Informal conversation between Yoshikazu Kondo and Anoma Pieris at the Peace Park,
18 November 2014.
Transnational Memories in a Post-Colony 311
presence as national representatives, though maintaining them onsite has

proven to be challenging. Whereas at Cowra and Naoetsu the trees were
impacted by environmental conditions only, sites like these can also be
targeted by individuals unhappy with their reconciliatory messages.
The day after the cherry trees were planted at Featherston, for example,
vandals uprooted forty, but they were quickly replanted and survived.54
Townspeople tending this alien flora have to put aside the prejudices
fostered by wartime national governments, extending the care that
Naoetsu’s civilians were unable to offer the POWs. Their collaboration
and commitment break down the barriers that segregated the prisoners
from everyday civility, as new generations of concerned citizens enter and
reanimate the sites. This desire for reciprocal understanding, even dec-
ades later, has much to do with the forms of accountability demanded by
the juxtaposition of flora. Where that sense of accountability is inapplic-
able, as in the case of Singapore, producing memorial assemblages like
those created at Cowra or Naoetsu has proven to be challenging.
Transnational Memories in a Post-Colony

Singapore’s colonial history as part of the Straits Settlements, Britain’s
failure to defend Singapore and protect its Asian settlers, the postwar
resumption of colonial government, and brutality toward rural Chinese
during the Malayan emergency all created a comparatively ambivalent
context for transnational memories. Britain’s postwar recounting of war-
time history neglected the plight of the abandoned population, an omis-
sion taking Singaporeans many decades to rectify. Joan Beaumont has
accurately identified Singapore’s memorial strategy as one of dealing with
exogenous transnational forces that intervene in national memory.
Writing on Changi Prison, she observes,
The trans-national significance of the prison was asymmetrical; the past was not
a single narrative shared by Singaporeans and Australians. In such circumstances
then, perhaps inevitably, the priorities of the local custodians of the site took
precedence over the claims of those outside the nation state.55
Efforts to expand and recreate occupation experiences as key components
of postcolonial national memory in Singapore commenced during the
1980s. Several new museums were created, including, most notably, the
interpretive center at Bukit Chandu, a Japanese occupation period exhib-
ition at Former Ford Factory, and military exhibits at Santosa’s Fort
54
Bedford, “The ‘Peace Gardens’.”
55
Joan Beaumont, “Contested transnational heritage: the demolition of Changi prison,
Singapore,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 15:4 (2009): 298–316, 313.
Siloso and Fort Canning’s Battle Box. Following an oral history project
and exhibition, “When Singapore Was Syonan-To,” by the National
Archives of Singapore in 1992, for the fiftieth anniversary of the British
colony’s capitulation to the Japanese, other dimensions of this period’s
history surfaced, juxtaposing tales of POW captivity with quotidian war-
time experiences.56 Revisionist national memory-making is inventive and
defensive because of tensions between national and transnational claims
caused by competing and mutually exclusive politicization of events.
Colonial histories salvaged post-independence appear incongruous
within this schema, producing a racially divided history at one level,
while the need to amalgamate the stories of Singapore’s linguistically
distinct communities split the national objective along the categories of
Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other (CMIO), created to manage ethnolin-
guistic and cultural differences in the plural political structure. However,
former military barracks and military estates leased by the Singapore
Land Authority to expatriates or high-end businesses (which thrive on
colonial nostalgia) do sustain some of the spaces associated with wartime
events. British archeology student Jon Cooper, for example, has high-
lighted these by excavating battlefield remains at Adam Park.57 Yet, many
contemporary Singaporeans are divorced from and disinterested in these
histories. The incommensurability of various stakeholder experiences is
exemplified by the case of the chapel and museum associated with Changi
Prison.
Changi Chapel and Museum

As discussed in Chapter 5, chapels were important fixtures in the wartime
POW and internment landscape, with many in the Changi area, built at
various times. Their symbolism exceeded their denominational religious
functions and came to represent survival, fortitude and sources of solace
in the face of mounting casualties. The Roman Catholic Our Lady of
Christians Chapel, designed and built by an architect in civilian life, Lt.
Hamish Cameron-Smith, was marked for conservation by the Australian
War Graves Registration Unit in 1945, dismantled by a group of surren-
dered Japanese personnel and crated to Canberra. It remained in storage
for decades, until it was eventually recovered and reassembled in 1988 at
Duntroon’s Royal Military College, as the National POW Memorial for
56
National Heritage Board, The Japanese Occupation: 1942–45 (Singapore: National
Heritage Board, 1996); Lee, The Syonan Years.
57
Jon Cooper, Tigers in the Park.
Australia.58 By then its representation of a denominational minority at the

time of its creation was subsumed into a more generalized understanding of
what the salvaged structure symbolized; changes caused by increased post-
war immigration to Australia of Roman Catholics, shifting attitudes nation-
ally toward Catholicism as well as being the only chapel structure still
intact.59 Its belated reinstatement is surprising because memorialization
had been high on ex-POWs’ agendas as they awaited repatriation at the
war’s end, mindful of comrades who would never return. Australian POW
architect John Brinley likewise contributed many POW chapel designs but
more notably, as recounted by Athanasios Tsakonas, submitted the prize-
winning entry in a POW competition for Changi War Cemetery held in
September 1945, a proposal abandoned in 1947 when Imperial War Graves
Commission architect Colin St. Clair Oakes selected Kranji as the more
desirable site.60 Nevertheless, for veterans and their descendants, whose
home governments were slow in acknowledging former POWs’ sacrifices,
the extant physical prison facility anchored their experiential memories,
especially once Changi POW Camp’s barrack spaces returned to military
uses and became inaccessible to the public. Their memories of the broader
carceral landscape converged and became attached to the Changi Prison,
a building that resonated with both civilians and POWs.
Given the continuing interest of overseas visitors, a dedicated Changi
Chapel was created inside a portion of the Changi Prison hospital in
1953.61 This facility with a small museum attached saw a steady stream
of visitors until 1988, when its disruption to the running of the prison
forced its closure. As a concession made to visiting British and Australian
Pacific War veterans and their families, the Singapore Tourism Board built
a replica that year, combining attributes of the many timber–and-attap
chapels built outside the prison walls.62 In 2001, ahead of the prison’s
redevelopment, the Changi Chapel and Museum were moved to a new
purpose-built complex over half a mile away (Fig. 10.5).63
58
Monument Australia, National POW Memorial, http://monumentaustralia.org.au/
australian_monument/display/90117. National Capital Authority: Changi Chapel, online.
59
In the 1947 census, the ratio of Anglicans to Roman Catholics was 39:20 per cent of the
Australian population, whereas by 1986 it was 23:27 percent. Australian Bureau of
Statistics, 4102.0. Australian Social Trends, 1994, Special Feature, Trends in
Religious Affiliation. www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/10072EC3F
FC4F7B4CA2570EC00787C40?opendocument.
60
Athanasios Tsakonas, In Honour of War Heroes: Colin St Clair Oakes and the Design of the
Kranji War Memorial (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2020), 86–9.
61
Blackburn and Hack, War Memory, 87.
62
Ibid., 89–95; www.changimuseum.com/exhibition/chapel.htm.
63
Anoma Pieris, “Divided histories of the Pacific War: revisiting Changi’s (post)colonial
heritage,” in Urban Heritage in Divided Cities Contested Pasts, eds. Sybille Frank and
Mirjana Ristic (New York: Routledge, 2019), 107–24.
Fig. 10.5 Changi Chapel, Singapore, 15 September 1945 (left). Eighth Division Ex-POWs of the Japanese, attending a church
service in a small chapel in Changi Prison. Australian War Memorial, 117658; Chapel reconstructed at Duntroon, Canberra,
Australia (above right); replica in the Changi Museum, Singapore, (below right). Photographed by Anoma Pieris, 2012
Unlike in Australia, where the chapel’s symbolism was treated as

normative and representative (irrespective of denomination) of the
Anglo-Australian culture of the Australian POW majority, in
Singapore it signaled the cultural differences between the colonial
internees and Allied troops. The British military’s withdrawal from
Singapore in 1967 likewise changed the context for this history. Once
local Singaporean attitudes changed from the earlier ambivalence
toward wartime memories to a new nostalgia for its nation-building
decades, the Changi Museum and Chapel were positioned differently.
The government seemed confident that the divergent national loyalties
still prevalent at independence had been sufficiently melded into
a singular subjectivity within which ethnicity could be couched. The
function of state-led museums and exhibits was to give that unity
a longer genealogy. As argued by Hamzah Muzaini and Brenda Yeoh,
in order to develop Singaporean sensitivity to this history, the museum’s
curators assiduously localized its range of displays.64 Between 2001 and
2007, Changi Museum Pte. Ltd. (TCMPL), an associate company of
Singapore History Consultants Pte. Ltd. (SHC), undertook the man-
agement of the Changi Museum and Chapel under the Singapore
Tourism Board (and later under the National Heritage Board). Their
exhibits were conceived as conduits to Singapore’s divided wartime
history catering to two audiences; visiting war veterans with families
from overseas and the Singaporean public.65
The Singapore government demolished Changi Prison in 2004,
ignoring appeals from the Australian government and veterans’ organ-
izations to preserve it as a feature of their wartime story, told within the
colonial-sovereignty framework – distasteful for that reason to an inde-
pendent nation-state.66 Once demolished, as a concessionary gesture,
the prison’s physical remnants were reconstituted as token memorials to
its longer genealogy, and a preserved 196.8-yard-long section of wall
with two turrets was modified to include the main gate.67 The wall was
integrated into the billion-dollar prison complex built on the same site in
2015. Various parts of the dismembered prison were gifted to
64
Hamzah Muzaini and Brenda S. Yeoh, Contested Memoryscapes: The Politics of Second
World War Commemoration in Singapore (New York: Routledge, 2016), 47–67.
65
Interview with Jeyathurai Ayadurai, Changi Museum Director, by Anoma Pieris,
17 January 2017.
66
K. C. Vijayan, “Still time to save Changi Prison,” Straits Times, 20 February 2004, 2.
67
“Parts of Changi Prison will be preserved,” Singapore government press release, Media
Relations Division, Ministry of Information, Communication and Arts, 6 March 2004,
www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/speeches/view-html?filename=2004030602.htm.
Commonwealth allies, dispersing the former prison’s physical frag-

ments farther afield. A cell door, two brass cell-number plates, and
two curved steel anti-climbing hooks, once attached to the wall, were
sent to the Australian War Memorial in Australia; and a cell door,
concrete block, window grills and shutters to New Zealand’s Air Force
Museum in Christchurch.68 Twelve years later when the Singapore
government belatedly gazetted these displaced features as its seventy-
second national monument, it appeared to be a case of “too little too
late.”69 Changi had become an artifact scatter of itinerant, dismantled
parts, alongside the privately hoarded memorabilia circulating in the
global economy. Singapore had regained the long-compromised sover-
eignty of its prison site.
***
Commemorative practices described in this chapter were highly depend-
ent on local interventions that sublimated nationalistic sentiments in
favor of greater transnational reciprocity and empathy, using the aware-
ness of incarceration histories tactically to achieve this. The former treat-
ment of incarceration sites as segregated border spaces provided the
foundation for former POWs initiating dialogic relationships with other
places and communities associated with POW camp localities. In the case
of Cowra and Naoetsu, these efforts were inspired by the desire for
understanding and expressing remorse for POW deaths. In some
examples, in Canada, Australia and Japan, stakeholder groups have
used pacifist landscape practices similar to those used in their country’s
national commemorative strategies, but, unlike at those other sites, by
assembling materially dissonant features and artifacts evocative of war-
time tensions and humanizing the experiences of incarceration through
their representation, they have also prevented the dissimulation of under-
lying ethical responsibility or exposition of wartime injustices. Many of
these commemorative strategies were predicated on maintaining continu-
ous occupation of the sites, through dwelling in and using them as at New
Denver, or by inventing environments simulating aspects of that past
history as in Cowra and Naoetsu. Singapore’s division of history into
colonial and postcolonial periods disabled this possibility of continuity,
initially displacing the responsibility for memorialization to exogenous
actors, thus preventing the organic evolution of a similar reciprocal prac-
tice. The Singapore case demonstrated how the disassembly or dispersal
68
Based on Pieris’ communication with the respective museums, 26–27 July 2019.
69
This question was put to Pieris by journalist Melody Zaccheus during a 2016 interview
regarding the prison.
of wartime heritage’s constituent components made the historicization of

incarceration difficult to achieve subsequently. In this final example of the
redeveloped Changi Prison, the border was no longer a lived space from
which government policies could be scrutinized but had resumed its
function as a punitive site of state control. The nature of this other border
condition associated with state violence will be discussed next.
With reference to the twin themes of carceral architectures and inter-
sectional sovereignties raised in the broader research project, the political
and racialized anxieties of settler-governments resurface in their neglect
of the former incarceration sites or delayed recognition of their stories,
making the endurance of the examples discussed here even more remark-
able. This deferral of responsibility is perpetuated because dehumanizing
military buildings have since been normalized as architectural solutions
applicable to other forms of local accommodation, such as immigrant
centers and work camps, obscuring their punitive violence. Their spatial
technologies have been redeployed for new practices of detention, not for
“enemy aliens” or hostile combatants, but for asylum seekers and refu-
gees, discussed in the next concluding chapter.
11 Border Politics
Anoma Pieris
By setting aside the discipline’s preference for studying architects and

their built works, this book offered a broader understanding of the mater-
ial worlds of wartime incarceration environments as socially produced
and sustained by multiple stakeholders, often under extreme duress.
Studying how wartime designs for urban layouts, barrack architecture,
housing, factories, farms and gardens were organized by racialized atti-
tudes to settler citizenship, it uncovered the instrumentality of architec-
ture as a technology of state control. Highlighting the actions of an
emergent generation of regional competitors and including Japan in this
grouping, the book explored the complex overlays of imperial and
national ambitions as determined by very different priorities to those of
the waning empires hitherto dominating the world stage. With these foci
in mind, the material and spatial practices of the incarcerated populations
were examined to demonstrate the intersectional complexity of the racial-
ized “national” categories that governments imposed, and to emphasize
their diverse expressions of modernity, political consciousness, and indi-
vidual and group subjectivity. Chapters 9 and 10 linked the histories of
the selected wartime camps to the struggle for civil liberties in North
America, the construction of reconciliatory transnational relationships
between Australia and Japan, and the fragmentation of war memories in
postcolonial Singapore – deepening our understanding of “intersectional
sovereignty” as a concept for thinking about multiple forms of sovereign
belonging that are as integral to an individual sense and expression of
identity as race, class, gender, culture and so on. In comparing carceral
camp environments across the Pacific Basin and highlighting how pris-
oner labor was deployed, each chapter discussed how human resilience is
fortified by the spatial imagination, and the physical spaces and material
practices that conjure it.
This concluding chapter refocuses on Australia, the study’s starting
point, to ask how camp architectures’ dissimulation and repurposing is
linked to discourses of postwar sovereignty, human rights or civil liberties,
as in the example of Manzanar. This chapter illuminates two exceptions
from sovereign protection: the first due to war crimes – human rights
318
Border Politics 319
violations beyond the 1929 Geneva Convention’s international rules of

engagement; the second, of “stateless” persons incarcerated for failing to
follow proper procedures for seeking asylum in Australia. Exploring the
neglected outermost periphery of Chapter 7’s “Empire of Camps,” this
chapter looks at the Australian-mandated territories in New Guinea,
a group of islands in the Bismarck Sea, completing the arc of the Pacific
Basin geography the book explores. It reengages with the Pacific War’s
temporal boundary and physical border as reconfigured for controlling
Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSPs) and war criminals, touching
briefly on Australia’s role in the war-crimes trials and tribunals in the
Pacific, excellently analyzed by Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack
and Narelle Morris.1 Australia’s reconfiguration of military camp archi-
tectures as war criminals’ prisons thus stretched its “carceral geography”
beyond the continent’s limits, testing the types’ availability for later
punitive deployments aligned with new forms of institutionalized con-
finement in later decades.2 The more punitive elements of the mainland
prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, such as their cell blocks, securitization
through isolation and greater proximity to military facilities, and even the
deployment of tunnels to escape detection, are evident in this final
example of camp configurations at Rabaul at the war’s end and later,
after capitulation, in War Criminals Compounds (WCCs) at Rabaul and
Manus. Refocusing on congruencies of imprisonment and labor, this
chapter shifts from the theme of sovereign borders as productive trans-
national spaces, discussed in Chapter 10, to their destructive legacies,
introducing these Pacific island border camps as the ultimate testing site
of the liberal consciousness that was defended by the Allies. Can this
physical history shed light on the persistent dilemmas of contemporary
border-protection policies, which have grown increasingly intransigent
and punitive? This question is most pertinent to settler-societies like
Australia, predicated upon and welcoming convicts, postwar refugees
and assisted passage migrants in the past.
During the postwar period, many of the Australian mainland camp
facilities studied in this book crossed from penal to military or civilian
uses: reused as accommodation for returned servicemen employed in agri-
cultural industries, or related military training camps converted into
migrant reception and training facilities. The excision of punitive detention
to offshore islands may explain this gradual demilitarization and
1
Georgina Fitzpatrick, Timothy L. H. McCormack and Narrelle Morris, Australia’s War
Crimes Trials 1945–51 (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, International Humanitarian Law Series,
vol. 48, 2016).
2
Dominique Moran, Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2015).
320 Border Politics
neutralization of camps onshore for civilian use, albeit in some cases adja-
cent to military camp facilities. In addition to twenty major reception
centers established by 1949, numerous industry-funded migrant hostels
and work camps expanded this geography, channeling immigrants to
work opportunities. Camps at Bonegilla, Greta, Northam and Cowra, for
example, made this transition in the two postwar decades during which
Australia accepted large numbers of European-assisted passage migrants
and refugees. Over 300,000 migrants are believed to have passed through
Bonegilla between 1947 and 1971.3 Assimilatory reeducation, the separ-
ation of women and children while men were conscripted to worksites, and
the challenges of entering an Anglophone society racialized these immi-
grants through settler-colonial strategies that differentiated Northern from
Southern European migrants and Europeans from the British.
Although many former internment and POW camps were dismantled,
Camp 3 at Rushworth reopened as a Displaced Persons reception camp
in December 1948.4 Operational between 1948 and 1953, the facility first
housed Eastern European women and children, followed by Italian
migrant men, casting a humanitarian mantle over its more sinister war-
time past.5 Military sites and facilities continued to act as border spaces,
shifting from border exit points for repatriated POWs to entry points and
host spaces for future Australian citizenry. As discussed in the previous
chapter, this dispersed and highly securitized border was maintained as
the frontline of Australia’s defense against the regional spread of
Communism during the decolonization era, continuing the racialized
determinants of its sovereignty. During the 1990s these camp typologies
were reactivated for insidious border politics aimed at preventing illegal
maritime arrivals from entering Australia. During the 1990s to 2000s, the
physical genealogy, mentioned in the Introduction as an impetus for this
book, extended as a new continuum of sixteen detention facilities dis-
persed across the mainland, some attached to immigrant centers and
a further four concentrated on offshore islands (Map 11.1). The meta-
phor “carceral archipelago,” used by scholars to describe island detention
spaces, prompts reflection on its continued resonance for ongoing
debates about the legal boundary between statelessness and citizenship.6
3
Bonegilla Migrant Experience, www.bonegilla.org.au/About-Us/About-Bonegilla-
Migrant-Experience.
4
“DP Camp at Rushworth,” Shepparton Advertiser, 21 December 1948, 1, http://nla
.gov.au/nla.news-article169564518.
5
“Progress at Rushworth Camp,” Shepparton Advertiser, 24 June 1949, 1, http://nla.gov.au/
nla.news-article188082359 and “Migrant Camp Ends at Rushworth,” Shepparton
Advertiser, 19 June 1953, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article173892234.
6
Alison Mountz, “The enforcement archipelago: detention, haunting and asylum on
islands,” Political Geography, 30 (2011): 118–28.
Border Politics 321
Map 11.1 Australia’s immigration detention, accommodation and

offshore processing facilities, adapted and compiled from online
graphics and data provided by the Australian Government and
published in news media 2013–16. Drawn by Dhara Patel
The camps for JSPs in New Guinea and their associated War
Criminals’ Prisons or WCCs are outliers to the Australian prison
camp geography, not discussed previously as resulting from or
responding to the physical facilities described so far. As transit points
for JSPs awaiting repatriation to Japan at the edge of the Australian
continent, they signaled the dissolution of the Empire of Camps.
This last group of camps’ physical concentration at the temporal
boundary of the Pacific War prefigures the late-twentieth-century
creation of an offshore detention complex in one of these sites, at
Manus. This connection illuminates an aspect of Australia’s continu-
ous exploitation of punitive infrastructure for defending nation-state
322 Border Politics
sovereignty. Focusing on New Guinea, this chapter revisits the sev-

eral camp types discussed throughout this book.
Islands of Sovereignty
The southwest Pacific campaign was complicated by its archipelagic
geography, fought primarily in the Solomon Islands, Netherlands East
Indies, Papua, New Guinea and New Ireland, a cluster of islands includ-
ing present-day Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The islands were
European colonial outposts seized for resource exploitation. The eastern
half of New Guinea, including the islands of New Britain, New Ireland
and Nauru, was designated an Australian territory from the early twenti-
eth century.7 Although perceived as untamed wildernesses outside the
main theaters of conflict, these territories were significant for Australian
military histories, in particular of the Kokoda Track campaign, fought
July to November 1942 for the New Guinea southern coastline. These
islands’ inhabitants – islanders, Australian nationals, indentured laborers
and immigrant settlers of Chinese or European origin – came under the
Japanese occupation forces from 1942 to 1945. The combined US and
Australian forces in the region were commanded by US Gen. Douglas
MacArthur, and included the Australian First Army diverted from the
Middle East. Gen. Hitoshi Imamura, who had previously led the advance
on the Netherlands East Indies, commanded the Japanese Eighth Area
Army (defending the Solomon Islands and New Guinea). New Guinea
was Australia’s last battlefront.
These Pacific island territories were literally on the boundary of a vast
arc of ocean. Judith Bennett argues that the belligerents saw them as
“bridges, barriers, bastions, and occasional bargaining chips,” of strategic
value for Australia’s defense, where “Fear of the enemy and the environ-
ment coalesced.”8 Her account conjures an untamed borderland where
“natives” are exploited and the environment degraded, with malaria
spreading in waterlogged craters and trenches built by the warring
groups. Villages were abandoned or evacuated by the various occupying
armies. By treating these archipelagic northern territories as a forward
defense line, Australian and US forces fighting in the Pacific sought to
7
The British southeastern portion of New Guinea, named Papua, was handed over to
Australia in 1906. Northeastern German New Guinea and the formerly German island of
Nauru were mandated to Australia, New Zealand and the UK by the League of Nations
after World War I. Today, the half of New Guinea known as Western New Guinea is a part
of Indonesia, and the eastern half is the sovereign nation of Papua New Guinea, gaining
independence from Australia in 1975. Nauru gained independence in 1968.
8
Judith Bennett, Natives and Exotics: World War II and the Environment in the Southern
Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 1, 16.
Islands of Sovereignty 323
prevent Japanese penetration farther south to Australia. By defeating

them and commanding this territory and other surrounding islands in
1942, Japan sought to isolate rather than occupy the southern continent,
to prevent US forces from getting a foothold from which to threaten
Japan’s Asian territories.9
The colonial civil administrations both for Papua and the Territory of
New Guinea had been replaced in early 1942 by the Australian and New
Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU), a nucleus of civilian administra-
tors and civilians, authorized by the New Guinea Force commanding the
territory under Australian National Security Regulations to act as
a military reconnaissance, patrol and intelligence unit. They recruited
and later conscripted essential islander labor (including both indentured
and casual labor), employing around 50,000 between February 1942 and
November 1945 as carriers for troops in construction of housing and
infrastructure, and in farming and plantation work, particularly in rubber
production; a valued wartime commodity.10 Having seized the islands
incrementally from early 1942 onward, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA)
developed Rabaul in New Britain, a large island immediately to the
mainland’s northeast, as a major base with four airfields for over
100,000 personnel stationed in the area. Similar to the Australians, the
Japanese occupation forces exploited islander labor, alongside labor con-
scripts from Japan and its Asian territories, both belligerents thus acting
as imperialists.
New Guinea retained its sovereignty as an Australian territory under the
Japanese occupation force, in accordance with the Hague Convention’s
guidelines. Australian civilians were evacuated ahead of the occupation of
Rabaul, leaving Chinese and several hundred European and Eurasian
residents to be incarcerated alongside Allied and other POWs. Some 700
Chinese civilians retreated to Refuge Gully at Ratongor and Vunakambi, to
camps set up in Christian missions, which converted to internment
camps.11 Sacred Heart Mission concentration camp, a hutted camp at
Ramale, held 331 civilians of seventeen different nationalities, including
mixed-race children of German and islander descent.12 Allied military and
9
Hiromi Tanaka, “Japan in the Pacific War and New Guinea,” in From a Hostile Shore:
Australia and Japan at War in New Guinea, eds. Steven Bullard and Tamura Keiko
(Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2004), 28–41, 30.
10
NAA: AA1970/500, Folder of papers on ANGAU’s history and activities; Noah
Riseman, “Australian [mis]treatment of Indigenous labour in World War II Papua and
New Guinea,” Labour History, 98 (May 2010): 163–82, 169.
11
Peter Cahill, “Chinese in Rabaul – 1921 to 1942: normal practices, or containing the
Yellow Peril?,” Journal of Pacific History 31:1 (1996): 72–91, 89.
12
Gordon Thomas, Prisoners of War in Rabaul: Civilians in Captivity, 1942–45 (Kirrawee,
NSW: Galloping Press, 2012), 191.
324 Border Politics
civilian prisoners in Rabaul were held in the Kuomintang Hall premises and
in the back of a Chinese tailor shop, and later at a former army camp on
Malaguna Road, until mid-1942 when they were put on ships to Japan.13
One of these ships was tragically bombarded and several hundred prisoners
lost their lives. Indian and Chinese POWs sent from Shanghai and
Singapore served in the IJA’s labor units alongside laboring Allied internees
and POWs. The Japanese forces occupied the New Guinea coast and
hinterland, operating from their base in Rabaul town until late 1943,
when the arrival of US forces in New Britain and relentless Allied air raids
forced their retreat into a subterranean geography.
As the attacks targeting Rabaul escalated in early 1944, US and
Australian POWs were moved away from the township to the Tunnel
Hill POW Camp, a cave mountainside along a road originally excavated
by the Germans, where in early March thirty were reportedly removed
and executed by the Kenpeitai.14 Part of an extensive network of under-
ground tunnels in the island’s volcanic ridges, the prison cave was integral
to an subterranean barrack landscape, which was expanded in the
final year of World War II. Excavated by Chinese and Indian POW
labor, the tunnels of varied sizes lined in either timber or concrete with
clusters of outdoor relief structures were modified as command centers,
armament and equipment depots, hospitals, sleeping quarters, kitchens,
and factories.15 Japanese and Taiwanese carpenters furnished their inter-
iors with two-tiered sleeping accommodation, and cookhouses had com-
plex systems of chimneys. In his postwar memoir, Imamura estimated
that the tunnels, buried under 10 meters (approx. 33 feet) of earth,
collectively made up around 500 linear kilometers (310 miles) in total:
a room of 560,000 tatami mats.16 Although the extent is unverifiable, we
know of these excavations from multiple sources including recollections
of civilian internees, photographs of which taken after the war can be
found in the Australian War Memorial archives (Fig. 11.1). Editor of the
Rabaul Times Gordon Thomas, one of four civilians to be interned in
Rabaul from 1942 to 1945, tasked with electrifying one such complex,
describes the Tunnel Township of Namari, near Ramale, as accommo-
dating 1,000 supply staff.17 The interned missionaries and nuns of the
13
Ibid., 27.
14
Tom O’Lincoln, Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth (Melbourne:
Interventions, 2011), 84–7. See 1st Lt. James A. McMurria Affidavit, RG 331 Box 943
Rabaul Reports; NARA #7 IMG_0029 et al., cited in “Allied POWs under the Japanese,”
www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/other/rabaul/mcmurria_affidavit_rabaul.html.
15
Thomas, Prisoners of War in Rabaul, 138–9.
16
Australian War Memorial, AWM 315, 419/057/055, Hitoshi Imamura, “The tenor of my
life,” part III, 150–1.
17
Ibid., 138–9, 142.
Fig. 11.1 Rabaul, New Britain, September 1945. Officers of a 2/4

Armored Regiment inspecting Japanese-type 95 Ha-Go Light Tanks in
a tunnel behind Rabaul township. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial,
Canberra, 096838
Sacred Heart Mission likewise utilized the tunnel network to escape from
Allied bombing, at Kokopo and later at Ramale.18
Tunnels were increasingly integrated into IJA facilities throughout Asia
as Allied air-attacks grew more frequent and military bases were des-
troyed. A drawing by POW Charles Thrale depicts a scene inside
a tunnel system at Singapore’s Adam Road, while Sime Road Camp is
believed to have nine tunnel entrances, built during the final year of the
war (see Map 6.2).19 Thrale describes a warren of such underground
“funk holes” created for the IJA by POW X labor parties returning from
work on the Burma-Thai railroad. Similar tunnel networks to those in
Rabaul were built in Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan at Okinawa and Iwo Jima,
and more notably at the Matsuhiro Underground Imperial Headquarters
near Nagano built by several thousand Korean labor conscripts from
18
James Benson, “James Benson’s experiences as prisoner of Japs in Rabaul,” Pacific Islands
Monthly 16, 4, 19 November 1945, 38.
19
Cooper, Tigers in the Park, 313. See IWM ART 15417 26, Charles Thrale, “The Funk
Holes of Singapore.”
326 Border Politics
November 1944.20 Military cave-warehouses in Taiwan’s Hualian

County used as comfort stations associated with sexual slavery became
the subject of compensation claims decades after the war.21 Like Winston
Churchill’s Cabinet war rooms or air-raid shelters in tube stations, or the
Führerbunker in Berlin, the penultimate military architectures of the
Pacific War were underground.
Despite its peripheral location, many features of the war fought else-
where in Asia were replicated thus in Rabaul. The racial complexity of the
emergent Japanese Empire was seemingly also concentrated on this tiny
island geography, while the extreme nature of the Japanese atrocities that
Allied troops experienced in these remote locations ignited greater hostil-
ity. Peter Stanley estimates that 5,674 Indian POWs, out of some 10,000
sent from Singapore to the area, were later recovered by Australian units
at Rabaul.22 A large number of war crimes were against non-European
POWs (Chinese, Indians and a few Indonesians) and civilians, including
islander laborers, Chinese who were citizens of the Australian-mandated
territory and laborers transported from mainland China during the war.23
Thomas also witnessed the arrival of several hundred Korean “comfort
women” which number soon increased to several thousand, and whose
forced prostitution was not addressed in the war-crimes trials alongside
other atrocities.24 Accusations of gratuitous killings, sexual exploitation
and cannibalism have darkened accounts of Japan’s actions in New
Guinea while Japanese soldiers, because of high casualties from heavy
battles, hunger and sickness, described it as “hell on earth.”25
The US-led offensive to recapture New Guinea, starting from
September 1943, is considered one of World War II’s most grueling
campaigns, demonstrating US-Australian cooperation, with Australians
playing a greater role once the Americans were diverted to the Philippines
in October 1944. With Japan’s surrender in September 1945, 151,677
defeated Japanese soldiers and military civilians of the Rabaul-based
20
Matsuhiro Imperial Underground Headquarters, http://matsushiro.org/en.
21
Chou Ching-Yuan, “A cave in Taiwan: comfort women’s memories and local identity,”
in Places of Pain and Shame, eds. Logan and Reeves, 114–27.
22
Peter Stanley, “‘Great adversity’: Indian POWs in New Guinea,” Journal of the Australian
War Memorial, 37, www.awm.gov.au/articles/journal/j37/indians.
23
Caroline Pappas, “Law and politics: Australia’s war crimes trials in the Pacific,
1943–61,” DPhil thesis, University of New South Wales, 1998, 163.
24
Thomas, Prisoners of War in Rabaul, 30; Hank Nelson, “The Consolation Unit,” The
Journal of Pacific History, 43:1(2008): 1–21.
25
Australia-Japan Research Project (AJRP): Remembering the War in New Guinea,
Symposium papers, 19–21 October 2000, Australian National University, Yukio
Toyoda, “The war in New Guinea as portrayed in Japanese newspapers,” http://ajrp
.awm.gov.au/ajrp/remember.nsf/pages/NT000013D6.
Eighth Area Army came under Australian control.26 Those who surren-
dered in the Bougainville area and Nauru were confined on Fauro Island,
while the remaining 137,168 were concentrated on New Britain’s Gazelle
peninsula.27 The largest prisoner group ever held by the Australian First
Army, under the control of 10,000 Australian servicemen, they were
placed under Maj. Gen. Eather and concentrated just south of the neck
of land between Blanche and Talili bays.28 Indigenous occupants there
were hastily evacuated, and eleven camps, including the group headquar-
ters under Imamura, were established.29 Named Gazelle, Tauril,
Minamizaki, Akane, Kagamihara, Tobera, Tomma, Nishiboekiten,
Kokopo, Tabuna and Talili (group headquarters), the camps had
a sizeable administrative structure, including interpreters for the
Australian military, communications media, military policemen, and
personnel for conducting court-martials and running the hospitals
(Map 11.2).30 A section of the Japanese Labor Camp No. 4, renamed
the War Criminals Military Prison, was cordoned off for those awaiting
trial and sentencing.31 Civilian labor units of 663 Chinese and 688
Malaysian contract laborers, as well as Taiwanese and Korean personnel,
were separated at the Kokopo Camp.32 Subsistence agricultural activ-
ities, developed because of their isolation, had already prepared the JSPs
as a self-organized labor force.33 They had achieved levels of self-
sufficiency by planting rice, plant proteins, fruits and vegetables, and
breeding farm animals, like the internees at Hay and Loveday, as well as
manufacturing familiar necessities and luxuries like miso and soy sauce,
peanut oil, and growing tobacco, and brewing sake and palm wine.34
The Allies’ treatment of JSP labor differed from that of the islanders,
exploited for the war effort as an assertion of Australia’s sovereignty under
the exigent demands arising because of Japan’s entry into the war.
Conversely, the Australian Army’s deployment of JSP labor after the
26
Georgina Fitzpatrick, “Chapter 16: The Trials in Rabaul,” in Australia’s War Crimes
Trials, eds. Fitzpatrick et al., 507–67, 513.
27
NA-UK: WO 203/6119, Japanese surrendered personnel: policy and employment,
Aug. 1946.
28
Hiromi Tanaka, “Japanese Forces in post-surrender Rabaul,” in eds. Bullard and Keiko,
138–53, 140, 142. The Japanese forces surrendered to the Australian First Army’s Lt
Gen. Sturdee.
29
Australian War Memorial, AWM: 82, 2/199, 1946, Captured Japanese documents in
Japanese, Map of Japanese camps in Rabaul; AWM: 82, 2/248, 1945, Administrative
documents.
30
Tauril was abolished soon after it was set up.
31
NAA, Japanese war crimes in the Pacific: investigations and prosecutions, 8, the Japanese
war criminals’ compound, http://guides.naa.gov.au/jpn/chapter8/index.aspx.
32
AWM: 82, 2/259, 1945, Administrative documents and orders.
33
Tanaka, “Japanese Forces in post-surrender Rabaul,” 138.
34
AWM: 82, 2/259, 1945.
328 Border Politics
AWM 82, Captured Japanese Documents, 2/193, Plan for food self-sufficiency
in Talili Group, 2/199, Map of Japanese camps in Rabaul.
Map 11.2 Map of the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSPs)
in Rabaul. Drawn by Yoke Lin Wong
war’s end demonstrated their renewed authority in the Pacific, but also
their regard for their former adversary. Protected by 1929 Geneva
Convention guidelines, JSPs were not a subservient colonial labor force.
They preserved their autonomy and self-sufficiency, continuing practices
sustaining them during the war and appealing against mistreatment by
local guards. They worked erecting the acclimatized military vernacular
that local laborers had produced under ANGAU supervision, previously
under the Australian military construction division. A 2,000-person JSP
construction battalion of military specialists erected each of the twelve
camp compounds in two months.35 Separate working parties dealt with
building, civil engineering, transport and water supply. Planned as rect-
angular barbed-wire-fenced grids, on 850x1,200 yards of flat land, they
were designed for accommodating 10,000 persons, a capacity similar to
35
AWM: 82, 2/199, 1946, Map of Japanese camps in Rabaul; 2/173, 1945, Draft plans for
moving into camps.
the US-built camps for Japanese Americans and larger than any built in
Australia. Each camp had a 400–800-patient hospital.36 Camp huts, sized
as twice-six-tatami (around 213 sq.ft), were large and airy timber-and-
bamboo structures, raised on stub columns with timber rather than
earthen floors, different from the Japanese barracks.37 They had top-
hung openings and louvered monsoon panels, unlined ceilings, and gal-
vanized-iron and palm-leaf or cogon-grass roofs. Building materials,
construction methods and even the formal design of the huts were derived
from local practices. The Australians ensured that the military hierarchy
was retained in the size and detail of the buildings, much like the vernacu-
lar architectural traditions of the area.38
The JSPs resumed previous farming practices, although expectations of
repatriation and flagging morale meant their productivity reached only
60 percent of wartime yields.39 The shore camps would barter fish for rice
or greens from camps in the hinterland. Their preference for morale-
boosting vehicle-repair and tool-making enterprises, proposals for engin-
eering, pharmaceuticals and miso factories, and building plans for an
11,000-sq.-ft engineering factory at the Kagamihara campsite all reflect
that soldiers were drawn from an industrialized society.40 Even from
a small sample, such as the 286 “War Criminals” at Rabaul, 103 were
farmers; many more worked in offices and industries.41 Imamura, in two
October 1945 policy statements, “Frame of mind for life in the Rabaul
camps” and “Guidelines for education in the camps,” reframed their
prolonged confinement as reducing the burden their early return might
place on their war-devastated homeland, while equipping them with
vocation skills for reconstruction work.42 Various subjects taught at pre-
war high-school level were comparable in range to Hay, Tatura or Changi
University educational programs. Hiromi Tanaka intimates that Japan’s
miraculous economic recovery was not entirely dependent on domestic
rehabilitation but also due to the return of some 6 million Japanese, half
36
AWM: 82, 2/248, 1945.
37
AWM: 82, 2/248, 1945; 2/188, 1946, Memorandum regarding newspaper articles on
affairs in Rabaul and report on the Talili Group. Papua and New Guinea, Bridge and
house building – under ANGAU during the Pacific War, NAA, A6510, 2380.
38
AWM: 82, 2/188, 1946.
39
Tanaka, “Japanese Forces in post-surrender Rabaul,” 144.
40
AWM: 82, 2/258, 1945, Authorities of Camp Commanders; AWM 82, 2/169, 1945,
Plans for formation of Japanese camps; AWM 82, 2/248, 1945.
41
NAA: MP375/19/01, Documents relating to War Criminals’ Compound Rabaul, issued
for information November 1947.
42
Tanaka, “Japanese forces in post-surrender Rabaul,” 146, 150.
330 Border Politics
being service personnel.43 They departed for Japan in March 1947, leav-
ing behind compatriots in the “War Criminals” compound.44
“Prisons for War Criminals”

Because they were held in geographical locations where crimes had been
perpetrated, the war-crimes trials’ processes around the Pacific Basin (by
Australia, Britain, China, France, Holland, Philippines and the USA)
reanimated the former colonial institutional and prison networks that had
been drawn into the wartime incarceration geography. Franziska
Seraphim describes “a carceral system” composed of British prisons in
Singapore, Hong Kong and Rangoon; the US prison in Muntinlupa,
Manila; Dutch prisons in Jakarta (Dutch Batavia); and Japanese prisons,
Sugamo in Tokyo and Fushun in Manchuria, extended after the Soviet
war-crimes trial in Khabarovsk to their gulag system in Eurasia.45 Of the
37,756 Allied prisoners who died under the Japanese (27 percent of those
captured, compared with 4 percent under the Germans), Australians
suffered death rates of 37 percent.46
Under the War Crimes Trials Act of 1945, Australia’s 296 trials were
held between November 1945 and April 1951 at Labuan, Wewak,
Morotai, Rabaul, Darwin, Singapore and Hong Kong, with the final set
held at Manus Island between June 1950 and April 1951. The Army
established a suborganization under the Directorate of POWs and
Internees, and two overseas investigatory sections: (including prosecu-
tions) in Singapore, Hong Kong and Manus Island; and (investigations
only) in Tokyo.47 The trials for war crimes on the Burma-Thai railway
were held in Singapore between June 1946 and July 1947. As colonial civil
administrations in Asia resumed their authority, the Australian trials were
shifted closer to home, but to offshore islands to limit the impacts of
simmering public hostility aroused by the state of and media accounts on
returning POWs. The separate WCCs created by the Australian Army,
first at Rabaul, and later transferred to Bismarck Archipelago’s Manus
43
Ibid., 152.
44
Narrelle Morris, “Chapter 20: The Australian War Criminals’ Compounds at Rabaul
and Manus Island, 1945–53,” in Australia’s War Crimes Trials, Fitzpatrick et al.,
689–731, 697.
45
Franziska Seraphim, “Carceral geographies of Japan’s vanishing empire: war criminals
prisons in Asia,” in The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization,
Postwar Legitimation and imperial Afterlife, eds. Kushner et al. (New York: Routledge,
2017), 135.
46
Pappas, “Law and politics,” from R. John Pritchard and Sonia M. Zaide, eds., The Tokyo
War Crimes Trial (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 196 (Proceedings, 40, 537).
47
Tim McCormack and Narelle Morris, “Chapter 1: The Australian War Crimes Trials,
1945–51,” in Australia’s War Crimes Trials, Fitzpatrick et al., 5–26, 15.
“Prisons for War Criminals” 331
Island, were not part of Australia’s formal carceral system centered on its
convict past, or of the wartime camps, but were conceived as addenda to
the JSP camp network. The WCC prisoners were segregated until their
sentencing, confinement, execution by hanging or transit, before dispatch
to longer-term imprisonment in Japan.48 Of the 137 Japanese prisoners
sentenced to death in Australian military courts, eighty-seven were
hanged or shot onsite at Rabaul and a further five at Manus Island;
those sentenced to imprisonment were eventually sent to Tokyo’s
Sugamo Prison.49 General Imamura, having survived an attempted sui-
cide, was sentenced at the War Criminals Court in Rabaul in May 1947 to
a ten-year term at Sugamo Prison, but volunteered to stay back with his
men until repatriation in 1953.
Rabaul’s WC Military Prison was part of Labour Camp No. 4 com-
manded by Major Thomas William Upson, Eighth Military Division
Headquarters, and guarded by 130 local constables from the New
Guinea Police Force.50 By July 1946 there were 562 prisoners awaiting
trial and/or sentencing.51 Archived plans in December 1946 show
a rectangular fenced compound guarded by four security towers, with
a row of nine 72x25-ft barrack buildings each partitioned internally into
twelve compartments (for untried or convicted prisoners) on either side of
a central corridor. Washrooms and lavatories were detached, and the five
condemned cells and garden were segregated. Kitchens, mess-halls,
stores and workshops and their gardens, a hospital and a large “native”
police compound were similarly fenced in, their galvanized-iron roofs,
concrete bases and mesh-and-canvas walls very similar in form and
construction to the JSP barracks.52 Subordinate “native” police guards
were used to control the prisoners, a practice similar to the IJA’s use of
Korean, Taiwanese or Indian guards at POW camps.
There were three possibilities for the treatment of the war criminals once
the territories returned to their civilian administrations: building a 500-
person prison in Rabaul, holding them on a small uninhabited island or
repatriation to Japan.53 The first option was discarded because Australian
prisons might seem “luxurious” when compared with Japanese penal
48
Gideon Boas and Lisa Lee, “Chapter 5: Command responsibility and other grounds of
criminal responsibility,” in Australia’s War Crimes Trials, Fitzpatrick et al., 135–73, 151.
49
NAA Research Guide, Narrelle Morris, “Japanese war crimes in the Pacific: Australia’s
investigations and prosecutions,” 151, www.naa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020–06/
research-guide-japanese-war-crimes-in-the-pacific_0.pdf; Morris, “Chapter 20,” 730.
50
Ibid., 698. 51 Ibid., 702.
52
NAA: MP742/1, 96/1/2903, Organization – War criminals Military Prison Rabaul, 1946,
and MP927/1/0, A336/1/19, Punishment of Japanese war criminals – Establishment of
Special Prison, Rabaul, War Criminals’ Compound Manus.
53
Ibid., Punishment of Japanese War Criminals, Minute Paper, 18 January 1946.
332 Border Politics
facilities, deferring punishment. The Rabaul civilian administration and

ANGAU were greatly desirous of their labor because of the associated cost-
savings, but lacked the necessary organization and facilities. The second
option overlapped with the need to rehabilitate a naval facility inherited from
the departing Americans on Manus Island, northwest of Rabaul. This
economic advantage delayed the third option of repatriation, with proposals
to distribute their labor more effectively in two separate camps.54 The Navy
made the argument that civilian labor from the Department of Works and
Housing was slow and costly, while the Japanese war criminals had sufficient
tradesmen among them to build expediently and at little cost.55
The neglected remnants of the former US Seeadler Harbor, built by the
US Navy Construction Battalions (captured from the Japanese by the US
Navy in March 1944 and abandoned in 1946), had included expansive
infrastructure – barracks for 150,000 personnel with extensive wharfage,
airfields and a harbor with sufficient anchorage for around 800 ships. The
base had served as a staging area for Gen. MacArthur’s successful advance
into the Philippines in October 1944.56 The majority of the US-built phys-
ical facilities were sold to the Chinese government, leaving the remainder to
the Australians for a new Royal Australian Navy (RAN) base at the harbor’s
eastern end, Lombrum Point. The prisoners were transferred to Manus in
February 1949, the Navy assumed command of them in March and the new
RAN base opened in April 1950.57 It was later named HMAS Tarangau.
The vacated Rabaul WCC was repurposed as a “native” hospital.58
The deployment of war criminals’ labor recalled Australia’s colonial penal
practices of island incarceration and unfree labor extraction at Port Arthur,
Tasmania or Norfolk Island, while their militarized organization and mobility
produced scenarios comparable to the wartime distribution of unguarded
POWs. But their accommodation was unlike any used previously in
Australian camps; Manus Island’s new compound comprised six or seven
US-built galvanized-iron Quonset huts, on concrete bases, each accommo-
dating fifty men (Fig. 11.2).59 Their cylindrical-roof profiles and elongated
forms ironically conjured up an interiorized spatial experience reminiscent of
54
Morris, “Chapter 20,” 702–7: at Lorengau and Point Lobrum.
55
NAA: MP927/1/0, A336/1/19, Dept. of Navy to The Secretary, Dept. of Army, 7
September 1948.
56
Naval History and Heritage Command, Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II,
vol. II, Part 3, Chapter 26, Bases in the Southwest Pacific, www.history.navy.mil/content/
history/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/b/building-the-
navys-bases.html; Karl James, “Remembering the war in New Guinea,” AWM,
9 September 2013, www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/remembering-war-new-guinea.
57
NAA: MP927/1/0, A336/1/19, War Criminals’ Compound Rabaul, Transfer to Civilian
Administration, 27 December 1951.
58
Ibid.
59
NAA: B557, 15, Photographs of the War Criminals’ Compound, Manus Island, 1946–9.
Fig. 11.2 Proposed galley block, Japanese War Criminals’ Compound, Manus Island. NAA: MP375/13/0, WCC2/6,
War Criminals Compound Manus, Dwg. No. MA226, 22 November 1951
334 Border Politics
Rabaul’s tunnels. There was a galley, cafeteria, recreation hut, hospital,

isolation hut and cell block, and workshops for various trades. A maximum
of ten men worked in a special garden adjacent to their compound.60
A separate compound housed 140 “native” police guards.61 Prisoners were
dispersed daily as working parties across the naval base, a liberty not afforded
to Japanese POWs previously. They operated a sawmill, undertook demoli-
tion and construction works, and were engaged in maintaining equipment
and vehicles for the Navy.62 The Sunday Herald reported on the “vital” labor
of “diligent, resourceful” prisoners who maintained a six-day work regime,
showing “amazing ingenuity in adapting material salvaged from the great,
corroding heaps of abandoned jeeps, bulldozers, tractors, cranes, refrigerator
plants, and earth moving equipment that litter the island.”63 The church to
St. Nicholas, a cruciform plan made up of Quonset huts with a spire above
the central transept, was built by Japanese prisoners supervised by RAN
shipwrights for Chaplain Patrick Heyler.64 They also built a cinema, storage
sheds and swimming pool, making better progress than the civilian workers of
the Commonwealth Works and Housing Department.65 L. B. Kenny noted
that they maintained a fleet of motor vehicles and the island’s electrical
supply, made exquisite furniture, repaired clothing and boots, and painted
pictures on lacquer, their diet supplemented with whatever fishermen pro-
vided – even shark or crocodile meat.66 Eighty percent could speak English
fluently, but chose to speak to the commandant in Japanese. They all held
Imamura in the highest regard.
Labor mobility offered a degree of freedom, evident in orders for
sporting equipment, instructions for driving to swimming and fishing
places, and the list of preferred Japanese movies.67 Prisoners asked for
60
NAA: MP375/18, G, War Crimes Trials – Manus 1950–1: List of functions of Royal
Australian Navy staff, War Criminals’ Compound, Manus.
61
NAA: MP742/1/0, 133/1/200, 1 Australian War Criminals’ Compound, Manus Island,
Native Police discipline.
62
Ibid.: staff [part file 96/1/3510 – Proposed New Establishment]; NAA: MP375/13,
WCC2/28, War Criminals’ Compound Manus: General duties of hut leaders, duty
parties, cooks, pantrymen, etc.
63
“The Japanese who have left Manus are still . . . unrepentant war criminals,” Sunday
Herald, 2 August 1953, 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18517744.
64
Jerry Lattin, Naval Historical Society of Australia: Lobrum, a Personal Memoir,
June 2013, Naval Historical Review, www.navyhistory.org.au/lombrum-a-personal-
memoir; Letter: Manus Island, Nick Helyer, 24 December 2013, www
.navyhistory.org.au/tag/manus-island-japanese-pows.
65
Navy, HMAS Tarangau History, www.navy.gov.au/history/base-histories/hmas-
tarangau-history.
66
L. B. Kenny, “RAN Guarded Nip Prisoners 1945–46,” Naval Historical Review,
December 1976, www.navyhistory.org.au/ran-guarded-nip-prisoners-1945–46/2.
67
NAA: MP375/13, WCC1/8, War Criminals’ Compound Manus: Commandant’s
Orders; Ibid., WCC2/1, Amenities [for war criminals].
“Prisons for War Criminals” 335
increases in the salt ration – for preserving vegetables for their traditional
diet – but opted for pajamas instead of kimonos.68 They complained of
“the injustice of their trials and sentences, the climate, the food, the
working hours and duties, their health and the monotony of incarcer-
ation,” noted Morris, while the Australian press took on the theme of
unwarranted leniency.69 Sensational accounts of ill-treatment, aired in
the Japanese press after repatriation, reflected “views in Japan of the
post war allied war crimes trials as simply victor’s justice.”70 There
were no riots, or escapes; in fact, offenses were mainly for idleness,
insubordination or unlawful possession of prohibited goods.71 Deaths
were due to accidents and suicides.72 Kenny wrote evocatively that, on
boarding the repatriation ship in June 1953, the prisoners were
“greeted with wild emotional scenes by the crew”; they, the new
guards, staid officials and women nurses – all were weeping for joy
that they were to return home at last.73 Gen. Imamura, repatriated
with them, served his sentence at Sugamo Prison until his release in
1954. Dissatisfied with his sentence’s levity, he famously built a three-
tatami (approx. 53-sq.ft) prison-hut in his garden, and produced
a five-volume war memoir.74
HMAS Tarangau continued as a RAN base, until handed over in 1974
to the government of newly independent Papua New Guinea, as its
defense forces’ patrol base. Before this, in 1968 the town of Lorengau,
west of Lombrum Point, hosted the Salasia Camp, a line of corrugated-
iron shacks, for West Irians fleeing the Indonesian government’s reinte-
gration of Dutch New Guinea. During the 1970s, despite this early show
of humanitarianism, the Australian government’s immigration policy
underwent substantial changes. At first the approach was positive, the
White Australia Policy’s dissolution in 1973 seeing an influx of Asian
refugees including by boat, fleeing the Vietnam War. But increasingly, the
sense that Australia was losing control of migrant selection prompted
changes in the migration program.
68
Ibid., WCC2/5, Request for alteration to ration scale, and WCC2/33, Request for
permission to make clothes.
69
“Jap prisoners live pleasantly on Manus,” Brisbane Telegraph (Qld: 1948–54),
26 June 1950, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article212091426; Morris, “Chapter 20,” 725.
70
Morris, NAA, Research Guide, 183. 71 Morris, “Chapter 20,” 718–19.
72
Morris, NAA, Research Guide, 184.
73
Kenny, “RAN Guarded Nip Prisoners 1945–46.”
74
Asano Tomizo, The Message of “Three Tatami Hut”: After the War the Army General Hitoshi
Imamura (Tokyo: Shinpu Shobo, 2012) [in Japanese].
336 Border Politics
Australia’s Detention Archipelago

This inclusion of immigrant detention centers in a history of wartime
confinement may seem incongruous and radically different from empir-
ical World War II histories on military engagements or social experiences.
This approach is uniquely facilitated by this project’s architectural focus
on the transformation of physical environments and facilities over time.
More recently, sovereign states’ integration of prisons, detention centers
and border camps as punitive armatures for incarcerating suspected
terrorists or undocumented migrants has sparked new architectural inter-
est in contemporary border politics.75 New works, exploring the humani-
tarian costs of statist violence or interstate warfare, through designed
responses that document or mitigate their effects, have produced visual
tools and vocabulary for related architectural studies, but the origins of
camp environments are not always historicized. Australia’s past as a penal
colony, with a continuous legacy of racialized confinement up to the
twenty-first century across two World Wars, suggests contingent and
interlocking scenarios.
Under the Migration Act of 1958, unauthorized boat arrivals to
Australia were subject to detention in exterior areas of migration centers,
with illegal entrants being deported. A policy of mandatory immigration
detention for arrivals without visas, a measure to prevent abuse of off-
shore entry processes, won bipartisan support in 1992. Thereafter,
“irregular” or “unauthorized” asylum seekers would be confined in pris-
onlike detention facilities, in contravention of Article 31 of the United
Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which
Australia is a signatory. A spike in boat arrivals between 1999 and 2000
forced this issue to its crisis, and new concerns were raised including
deterrence of people smugglers and preventing deaths at sea.76
These asylum seekers were not “criminals,” their expectations echoing
the many preceding generations of migrant Australians who until the
1970s had also arrived by sea, including the belatedly celebrated British
convicts. Like the many post-World War II refugees in Australia, the
asylum seekers were mainly war-displaced and stateless individuals or
families without the protection of a representative sovereign state. They
were accused of not following the legal entry procedures, as provocation
75
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter,
2017, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1653; Irit Katz et al., eds., Camps Revisited
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
76
Janet Phillips and Harriet Spinks, “Boat arrivals in Australia since 1976,” Parliament of
Australia, Social Policy Section, www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_
departments/parliamentary_library/pubs/bn/2012-2013/boatarrivals.
Australia’s Detention Archipelago 337
for their long-term detention during prolonged government scrutiny of

individual cases.
This detention policy produced a continuum of sixteen onshore car-
ceral facilities, including urban detention centers like at Maribyrnong,
Melbourne established in 1966 or Villawood, Sydney a decade later, as
well as residential housing, migration transit and alternative accommo-
dation. These different border-crossing options allocated to various cat-
egories of legal or illegal immigrants were dispersed on the mainland in
a manner similar to the distribution of wartime carceral facilities. Many
design aspects of these facilities, such as electrified steel-paling fences
with vortical coils of razor-wire, were indistinguishable from the high-
security prisons they were modeled after.77 Independent security and
project-services contractors were appointed to manage the facilities.
Some of these facilities had been used during the Pacific War. The
Brighton Army Camp and Northam Training Camp, which had both
held Italian POW working parties, are associated with onshore detention
facilities. The isolation, incarceration and punitive treatment of detain-
ees, and their appeals, protests and deaths, echo aspects of the wartime
incarceration histories covered in this book, but seem even more desper-
ate and futile. In 2001, the Howard government introduced the “Pacific
Solution,” whereby Australia’s offshore islands, including Christmas
Island, Manus, Nauru, Ashmore and Cartier, offshore installations such
as oil rigs, as well as other territories and islands external to mainland
Australia, were excised from the continent’s migration zone, thickening
its border infrastructure (see Map 11.1).78 Extremely punitive Australian
government policies, based on administrative agreements with the Nauru
and Manus Island governments, established Offshore Processing Centers
on their territories, incarcerating applicants, including families with small
children, sometimes for years in a backlog while their applications were
being processed. These prisons commenced or ceased operation along-
side changing border-protection regimes.
Established as part of the Pacific Solution (2001), the detention facility at
Lombrum Point fell into disuse from 2003–8, then was reopened in 2012 for
unauthorized maritime migrant arrivals, by the Gillard Labor government
under a regional resettlement arrangement with the Papua New Guinea
government termed the PNG-Solution. This has continued since 2013,
77
Joseph Pugliese, “The tutelary architecture of immigration detention prisons and the
spectacle of ‘necessary suffering,’” Architectural Theory Review, 13:2 (2008):
206–21, 208.
78
Parliamentary Library, Excisions from the migration zone: policy and practice, https://
parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%22library/prspub/
J4TB6%22.
338 Border Politics
under Operation Sovereign Borders of the subsequent Abbott-led Liberal

coalition, which subsumed border protection into the Department of
Immigration’s portfolio. Successive Australian governments made morally
repugnant resettlement deals with Southeast Asian nations outsourcing
responsibilities and “redistributing” the refugees.79 These processes were
mirrored by Europe’s fortification against refugee influxes, along with
worldwide multiplication of detention centers and Displaced Persons
camps, many as populous as small cities. Visiting the Manus Island
Detention Center in 2013, when work had already commenced for a new
facility at Lorengau, Ferng and Anderson describe an assortment of salvaged
World War II-era buildings, temporary structures, tents and demountables
built on the former naval base’s footprint.80 At the time of their study, the
proposed new 10,000-person facility was poised to be the epicenter of a vast
detention infrastructure, including Manus Island, Nauru and sixteen main-
land Australia detention centers.81 These plans were not realized, as only
4,000 asylum seekers passed through these facilities between 2012 and
2019.
The implosion of Australia’s offshore detention regime and recent
closure of facilities were responses to protests by detainees and by local
residents, staff strikes, media exposure, legal actions, riots, hunger strikes,
and deaths. When compared with previous “war criminals,” this uncer-
tainty and lack of sovereign representation have exposed asylum seekers
to high levels of precarity. The name of Manus Island was besmirched by
security contractors’ mismanagement, the murder of a detainee, sexual
abuse allegations, a shooting incident by PNG defense personnel and
a declaration of the center’s illegality by the PNG Supreme Court in
2016. Some 600 men who refused to leave, fearing local hostility, were
forcibly removed to other facilities and eventually to Port Moresby. The
USA entered a bilateral agreement with Australia in 2016 to resettle over
a thousand refugees. The politics of mandatory detention have polarized
the Australian public for over three decades, dehumanizing detainees and
damaging Australia’s reputation as a democracy.
***
How do we remediate physical sites that are contaminated by violent
histories such as at Manus Island? This site’s carceral heritage forms the
backstory for its punitive repurposing, shifting too easily from military
79
Refugee Council of Australia, Offshore Processing Statistics, www.refugeecouncil.org.au/
operation-sovereign-borders-offshore-detention-statistics.
80
Sean Anderson and Jennifer Ferng, “The detention-industrial complex in Australia,”
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 73:4 (2014): 469–70.
81
Anderson and Ferng, “The detention-industrial complex,” 471.
Australia’s Detention Archipelago 339
incarceration to unjust, prolonged forms of civilian confinement echoing

historical wartime injustices, since publicly politicized through redress. In
this instance, the exploitation of former colonial territories as prisons for
Australia suggests that confinement has become indelibly associated with
the entry points to citizenship for those whose “criminality” is judged by
changing immigration policies. The physical legacies of civilian and POW
incarceration facilities appear to be structurally linked to subsequent
policies of postwar immigrant reception and asylum-seeker detention,
while echoing past colonial strategies of “Aboriginal” containment, con-
vict transportation and quarantine. The camp in these many scenarios
literally functions as a sovereign border, a place of temporary excision that
immigration-dependent settler governments instrumentalize selectively
for managing those who fall outside the “national” or “economic” prefer-
ences and quotas of immigrant intake. The multiplication of detention
practices on the same excised camp spaces, over time, deepens the latent
violence of this narcissistic model of citizenship.
During punitive detention, detainees are unable to mobilize the inter-
sectional forms of sovereignty, discussed in previous chapters – regarded
as stateless and depoliticized subjects in readiness, should they be
accepted, for the inscription of new forms of national belonging.
Because physical camp facilities are treated as “neutral” spaces, which
governments may configure either for punitive or benign uses, their
boundaries are reconstituted as hard or soft entry points into national
territory. In Australia, camps historically have been recipient processing
spaces for a parade of “enemy nationals” or of future citizens – convicts,
First peoples, quarantined maritime arrivals, internees, POWs, surren-
dered military personnel, war criminals, refugees, migrants and asylum
seekers have all passed through them. Most recently, during the global
pandemic in 2020, Christmas Island, one of the offshore detention cen-
ters, was repurposed as a quarantine camp. The examples of detention
spaces, raised in this final chapter as a contemporary manifestation of this
recurrent pattern, are too reminiscent of these many legacies of confine-
ment to be treated in isolation. They are produced by the growing
convergence of global incarceration and immigrant processing practices,
each critical for historicizing the changing parameters of sovereign
belonging.
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Index
Locators in bold refer to figures, those in italics refer to tables and those in bold and italics
refer to maps.
Abbott Government, 338 anti-Asian discrimination, 211, 234, 237,

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 269, see also Japanese Americans;
peoples, 50, 64, 92, 105, 339 White Australia policy
Aboriginal missions, 43, 105 Anzac Avenue, Cowra, 306
Aboriginal Welfare Board, 105 Anzac spirit, 293
Adachi, Ken, 264 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 2
Adam Park, Singapore, 76, 152, 161, Aotearoa New Zealand. See New Zealand
165–7, 223, 312, 325 Apthorpe, Graham, 26, 99
Adams, Lucy, 276 SS Arandora Star, 74, 98
Agamben, Giorgio, 15–17, 149 Archer, Bernice, 196
agriculture, 113, 123, 139, 141, 186, 203, archipelagic consciousness, 2, 17–18
244, 253, 265, 270, 272, 329 architects, 3, 64, 69, 92, 110, 157, 182, 184,
Hay camp farms, 132–5, 141 186, 210, 212, 213, 232–3, 294,
Manzanar, 238, 246–52 302, 312–13, 318
Little Guayule Project, 255–7 architectural history, 3, 5, 6–9, 16, 33, 180
rural development project, 252–3 Arendsen and Sons, 127
temporary sugar beet workers, 253–4 Arnott, Darren, 124
new projects, 135 arts, 53, 72, 77–9, 98, 126, 140, 157,
Seabrook Farms, 254 158–9, 191, 196–7, 203, 213, 227,
workforce, 10, 12, 116, 120, 122, 124, 253, 255, 295, 307, 308, 309
209, 238, 251, 252, 259, 327 Asahi, Isohi, 197
Ainu people, 23 Ashworth, G., 7
Aliens Tribunal, 47–8, 85 Asia, 23, 25, 35, 79, 83, 99, 113, 147, 303
Allan, Sheila, 196–7, 202, 206 East, 11, 28, 29, 148, 179, 207, 209, 210
Allied forces, 5, 26, 118, 144, 145, 167, 212 postwar, 293
Allied POWs/prisoners, 27, 113, 125, 145, South, 4
152, 159, 163, 200, 205, 211, 212, Southeast, 4, 11, 18, 23, 26, 27, 37, 40,
214, 216, 217, 220, 330 52, 171, 172, 180, 207, 209, 210,
Allied Works Council (AWC), 52, 211, 217, 218, 219, 222, 227, 229,
117–18, 129 233, 338
All-India Muslim League, 169 West, 37
Anderson, Sean, 338 Asian American Studies, 29, 33
Anglo-Australian culture, 33, 48, 75, 81, Asians, 4, 22, 25, 33, 45, 46, 48, 62, 79, 82,
292, 293, 315 105, 132, 147, 152, 180, 181, 182,
Anglo-Japanese Commercial Treaty, 184, 188, 205, 212, 226, 293, 335,
1894, 79 see also anti-Asian discrimination
358
Index 359
Aspinall, George, 154 Baker, Bert, 189, 190

Assembly Centers, 12, 29, 36, 51, 237, 238, Baker, W.A., 189–90, 276–9
240, 243, 249, 259, 269, 271 Bando camp, 213
assimilation, 33, 81, 83, 114, 124, 234, 238, barracks, military. See military barracks
261, 268, 292, 296, 299, 320 Barracks Synopsis, 152
Associated Cooperatives of Northern Bartoli, Rudolfo, 122, 124
California, 258 Bathurst, NSW, 59
Association of California Cooperatives, 258 Battle of Midway, 208
asylum seekers, 16, 319, 336, 338, 339 Bauhaus, 77, 79
Auschwitz, 6 Baynes, Len, 163
Australia, 5, 13, 19, 21, 22, 37, 86, 87, 100, Beale, Frederick, 225
120, 121, 126, 174, 209, see also Beale, George Henry, 225
names of particular camps;White Beaumont, Joan, 25, 28, 311
Australia policy Bendetsen, Karl, 243, 246
border politics, 318–39 Bennett, Judith, 29, 322
camp distribution, 58, 61 Bentham, Jeremy, 92, 182
camp divisions, 73–80 Bernards, Brian, 17
camp typology, 10, 43, 84, 143 Berri Co-operative Packing Union, 139
commemoration, 291–4, 296, 313, Berri Corp, 141
316, 318 Bevege, Margaret, 25
detention, 37, 85, 140, 337, 338 Bhose, Subhas Chandra, 169
detention archipelago, 322–30 Bidadari camp, Singapore, 169, 170
internment, 24, 25, 62, 100 bin Katib, Samsudin, 130
internment camps, 38–42, 57–63 Blackburn, Kevin, 6, 28, 156, 167
internment historical context, 45–51 Blakang Mati, Kranji, 159, 162
literature on camps, 25–6, 30, 35 Blaxell, Vivian, 203
militarized camp complexes, 51–7 Blue Range, ACT, 60
relation with Britain, 21, 24, 100, 159 Boi, Lee Geok, 28, 147, 199
relation with US, 20, 38, 145, 146, 326, 338 Bonegilla Army Camp, Vic., 52, 54, 57,
Australia First Movement, 62 122, 143, 292, 320
Australian and New Guinea Administrative border camps, 7, 18, 336
Unit (ANGAU), 327–8, 332 border control, 16, 290
Australian Army, 44, 47, 57, 93, 104, 116, border crossing, 40, 337
120, 130, 135, 232, 327, 330 border politics, 13, 318–39
Australian Defence Force, 126, 130 islands of sovereignty, 322–30
Australian Department of Immigration, prisons for war criminals, 330–5
83, 338 border protection, 319, 337
Australian Employment Company, 130 border spaces, 67, 290, 316, 317,
Australian Federation, 21, 44, 45, 234 320
Australian First Army, 322 border-thinking, 2, 20, 290
Australian government, 46, 47, 53, 64, 83, Bowron, Fletcher, 244
117, 292, 304, 315, 335, 337, 338 Braddon, Russel, 168–9
Australian Imperial Force (AIF), 51, 99, breakout. See Cowra Breakout
117, 141, 144, 155, 219, see also Brennessel (magazine), 72
Second Australian Imperial Brighton, Tas., 57, 58, 337
Force (AIF) Brinley, John, 313
Australian Military Forces (AMF), 122, Brisbane, 38, 52
130, 137 Britain, 20, 21, 24, 43, 46, 53, 63, 100, 105,
Australian War Graves Group, 302, 312 120, 130, 144, 148, 152, 172, 173,
Australian War Memorial (AWM), 203, 174, 176, 205, 206, 212, 227, 292,
302, 316 294, 311, see also United Kingdom
Australian Women’s Land Army, 117, 123 fall of Singapore. See Singapore
Austrians, 48, 69, 74, 76 British Columbia (BC), 12, 29, 40, 235,
Austro-Hungarians, 50, 105, 106, 213 246, 260, 291, 299, see also New
Axis powers, 43, 62, 77, 99, 119, 209 Denver, BC
360 Index
British Columbia Security Commission military building and prewar models,

(BCSC), 246, 259, 260, 261, 268–9
262, 297 panopticon design, 15, 92, 182, 184
British Commonwealth forces, 23, 82, 302 pavilion plan, 182, 184
British Empire, 21, 26, 51, 212 POW camps, 19, 88–93, 115
British Indian Army, 144, 151 Carr-Gregg, Charlotte, 109
British Town Planning movement, 151 Carter, Paul, 17, 18
Britten, V.V., 156, 159 Catholics, 75, 108, 158, 203, 312–13, 314
Broughton, Edward R., 131 cemeteries. See names of particular
Buckmaster, Ernest, 227, 228 cemeteries
Buddhism, 225, 262, 270, 272, 284, 298, 307 census, 48, 148, 242, 246, 251
Bukit Timah camp, Singapore, 146, 161, Centennial Hall, New Denver, 297, 298
163, 167, 170 Central Design and Barracks Design, 52
Bullard, Steve, 102 Chaffey brothers, 136, 245
Buller camp, Singapore, 169–70, 175 Chaffey, George, 136, 245
Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 251 Chalker, Jack, 165
Bureau of Records and Enquiry (BRE), Chang, Jiat-Hwee, 27, 149, 151, 152
218–19 Changi airbases, 152, 168
Burma-Thai railway, 11, 27, 167, 207, 220, Changi cantonment, 27, 145, 149, 150,
221, 229, 330 151, 168, 177, 194
work camps, 218–22 repurposing, 153–9
Burton, Jeffrey, 274 Changi cemeteries, 158, 313
Bush, George W, 287 Changi Chapel and Museum, 230, 294,
WG Butterworth and Co., 135 307–17, 314
Changi POW Camp, 11, 40, 150, 152, 154,
Café Wellblech, 69, 71 155, 156, 157, 158, 164, 201, 218, 313
Caldecott Camp, 162 Changi Prison, 11, 28, 40, 44, 148, 158,
Calwell, Arthur, 83 168, 171, 177, 179–206, 185, 192,
Cameron-Smith, Hamish, 158, 312 193, 201, 311, 312, 313
Camp O’Donnell, Philippines, 217–18 arts and handicrafts, 191, 196
camp typologies, 85, 92, 143, 146, 148, demolished, 206, 315
152, 182, 244, 292 design and construction, 11, 180, 182,
Campbell, Ned, 278 183–8, 190, 192, 317
“Camps for Use of Alien Enemy diet, 170, 197
Evacuees,” 244 segregation, 180, 184
Canada, 20, 235, 237, 238, 246, 259, 265, Wartime Prison, 190–2
299, see also Japanese Canadians; women internees, 193–8
New Denver, BC Changi, Singapore, 27, 163, 177, 219,
commemoration background, 294, 308
291–4, 316 architectural design, 151–2
Canadian Department of Labor, 291 Fortress Changi, 148–53
Canadian government, 12, 29, 235, 263, journey to Naoetsu, 222–6
264, 300 cherry blossom, 309
Canadian Order-In-Council PC 1486, Cherry Park, Manzanar, 275, 279, 280
237, 246 cherry trees, 280, 305, 306, 308, 311
carceral archipelago, 9, 15–42, 320 Chiang, Connie, 6, 31
case studies, 38–42 children, interned. See interned children
instrumentality of camps, 31–8 Children’s Village, Manzanar, 275, 275,
intersectional sovereignty, 24–31 279, 280, 281, 287
Pacific War, 20–4 China, 29, 146, 149, 198, 209, 210, 211,
carceral architecture, 7–9, 18, 41, 118, 148, 220, 229, 326
149, 159, 330 Chinese, 81, 145, 148, 149, 172, 174, 182,
design, 24–31 186, 187, 198, 199, 200, 203, 211,
internment camps, 19, 38–42, 57–63, 92, 228, 229, 311, 323, 324, 326,
115, 127 327, 332
Index 361
immigration exclusion legislation, 245 commemorative ceremonies, 2, 9, 28, 38,

labor, 21, 45, 130, 143, 149 267–89, 294, 295
Chinese Chamber of Commerce (CCC), commemorative practices, 295, 306, 316
206, 294 community-led at New Denver, 296–300
Chinese Eastern Railway, 208 landscapes, 300–4
Chösabu (Research Department), 147, 218 spaces, 9, 40
Choy, Elizabeth, 198, 199 transnational commemorative practices,
Christians, 74, 87, 208, 270, 312, 323 290, 300–7, 311–12, 316, 318
Christmas, 158–9, 195 commemorative gardens. See gardens
Christmas Island, 337, 339 commemorative practices. See commem-
Chu, Tie Twan, 81 orative ceremonies
churches and chapels. See religious commemorative sites, 7, 13, 180, 230, 272,
buildings 290, 294, 295, 296, 303, 305, 308,
Churchill, Winston, 100, 325 309, 316
Citizens Military Forces, 46, 117 Commission on Wartime Relocation and
citizenship, 1, 8, 15, 16, 18, 36, 83, 234, Internment of Civilians (CWRIC),
235, 238, 245, 265, 282, 288, 290, 30, 283–4, 291
291, 295, 320, 339 Commonwealth Advertising Division, 48
birthright citizens, 11, 12, 19, 29, 36, 41 Commonwealth Department of Works, 118
naturalization, 33, 45, 82, 106, 124, 131, Commonwealth Directorates, 47, 48, 49,
243, 282 52, 84, 88, 116, 117, 118, 330
Civil Aliens Corps (CAC), 129–32 Commonwealth government. See
Civil Constructional Corps, 52, 118 Australian government
civil liberties, 13, 16, 20, 37, 41, 264, Commonwealth War Graves Commission,
291, 318 301, 306
Civil Liberties Act, 37, 287 Commonwealth Works and Housing
civil rights, 265, 268, 283 Department, 332, 334
civil rights movement, 37, 283, 284, 288 communism, 37, 74, 101, 172, 292,
civilian, 125 293, 320
Civilian Assembly Centers. See Assembly Communist Party, 101, 172
Centers community activism, 40, 267, 268, 283,
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 244 285, 286, 288, 296
civilians, 12, 24, 25, 26, 30, 36, 126, 134, concentration camps, 1, 6, 8, 19, 35, 53,
189, 199, 217, 234, 246, 302, 307, 54, 236
323, see also Assembly Centers Congressional Commission, 30, 283–4, 291
and combatants, 36, 63, 181 Connerton, Paul, 305
casualties, 229, 230, 232, 302, 310 conscription
internment, 12, 13, 19, 29, 30, 34, 35, 44, labor, 30, 111, 113, 116, 118, 119, 129,
48, 50, 51, 53, 74, 115, 118, 145, 142, 211, 212, 218, 220, 320,
152, 190, 200, 205, 219, 227, 325, 327
283, 291 military, 35, 52, 131, 173, 212, 293
internment camps, 44, 82, 189, 198, 200, national service, 173, 174, 176
220, 227, 228, 244, 323, 339 contoured sites, 116
Japanese, 63, 189, 211, 222, 227, control centers, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124,
228, 229 135, 141
labor, 20, 118, 125, 327, 332, 334 Cook, John, 225
memorials, 294, 302, 310 Cooper, Jon, 167, 312
Cliff, Matt, 307 cooperative enterprises, 258–9
Cohen, Jean-Louis, 5 Cosmini-Rose, Daniela, 131, 132
Cole, Leslie, 203, 204 Cowra, 99, 307, 320
colonial engineers, 152 and Joetsu City, 307
colonialism, 145, 147, 173, 218, 233, 293 and Naoetsu, 307, 308, 311, 316
Colorado River Relocation Center, District War Memorial Honour Roll,
Arizona, 279 99
comfort women, 212, 326 Cowra Australia-Japan Association, 308
362 Index
Cowra Australian War Cemetery, 302 displaced persons, 7, 32, 37, 143, 292, see
Cowra Breakout, 26, 102, 103, 115, 120, also statelessness
134, 301, 306, 307 displaced persons camps, 320, 338
commemoration, 306 dissent, 74, 104, 110
inquiry, 103 dissidents, 108, 199, 206, 246
public opinion, 99–100 dissonance, 7, 9, 74, 290, 295
Cowra Japanese Garden, 40, 303, material dissonance, 295–6
304–7, 305 Double Tenth Incident, 199
Cowra Japanese War Cemetery, 104, 301, Dower, John, 209
301, 302, 303, 304 DuCane, Edmund, 184
Cowra Municipal Council, 303 Duffner, Hatto Gunther Herman, 57
Cowra POW camp, 91, 102, 123, 301, 303, Duldig, Eva, 77, 78
see also Cowra Breakout Duldig, Karl, 77, 78, 79
commemoration, 88, 301 Duldig, Slawa, 77, 78
design and buildings, 39, 52, 53, 55, 56, Dundie, Alex, 224
57, 58, 91, 100, 102, 103, 104 HMT Dunera, 26, 74, 75, 76, 83, 98, 127,
post-WWII uses, 105, 143, 306 129, 134, 139
Cowra RSL, 303, 307 Dunlop, Edward, 220, 222
Cowra Tourist Development Dutch New Guinea. See Netherlands East
Corporation, 303 Indies
Cowra-Italy Friendship Association, 307
Craddock, Sally, 192 Eather, Maj. Gen., 327
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 18, 33 Eisenhower, Milton, 246
Crimes Act (Aust.), 100 Elderidge, Sears, 156
currency, 128, 129, 186–7 elderly internees, 34, 63, 81, 191, 192, 203,
Curtin, John, 100, 117 239, 249, 262, 269, 300
Elizabeth II, Queen, 175, 206
Dalforce, 144 Embrey, Bruce, 286
Daniels, Roger, 30 Embrey, Sue Kunitomi, 12, 268, 270–2,
Danzig, Felix, 69 273, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287, 296
Darwin, 23, 99, 145, 302 Emerson, Robert, 255, 256
Dean, E.T., 137, 139 Empire of Camps, 11, 207–33, 215,
decolonization, 3, 18, 31, 33, 37, 175, 233, 319, 321
291, 293, 320 dissolution, 227–33
DeFaya, Douglas, 299 expansion, modernization and industrial
Defence Act (Aust.), 100 growth, 208–12
DeMars, Vernon, 249 imperial camp geography, 212–18
Denison, Edward, 210 Empires. See British Empire; Japanese
Dewitt, John L., 242, 244 Empire; Meiji Empire
Dharghalkar, Captain, 170 Endau, 203
Dhurringile Mansion, 38, 57, 59, 64, 66, 88, enemy aliens, 10, 19, 24, 35, 36, 45, 47, 50,
94, 119 67, 131, 139, 142, 237, 243, 252,
diasporas, 6, 32, 42, 43, 44, 63, 75, 76, 77, 265, 288, 292
79, 83, 132, 300 enemy combatants, 19, 25, 44, 92
Dibbern, George, 107 enemy nationals, 4, 36, 43, 62, 84, 106,
Directorate of Architecture, 52 109, 114, 117, 188, 290, 301, 339
Directorate of Prisoners of War and Engel, Paul, 213
Internees (DPWI), 47, 48, 49, 62, Enoggera, Qld, 50, 51, 57, 59
116, 117, 118, 330 Eppenstein, Andreas, 127
diseases, 106, 107, 192, 194, 198, 200, 202, Erambie Mission, Cowra, 105
206, 220, 222, 228, 322 escapes, 84, 86, 93, 94, 116, 124, 141, 183,
dysentery epidemic, 154, 155, see also Cowra Breakout
170 right to escape, 93–8, 154
influenza epidemic, 86, 106 ethnicity, 260
dispatch camps, 28, 214, 216, 217 ethnoculture, 41
Index 363
ethnoracial groups, 148, 291, 294, 306 gardens, 41, 62, 71–2, 134, 140, 151, 202,
ethnoreligious identity, 37 227, 230, 262, 266, 270, 272,
Europe, 3, 8, 20, 21, 24, 37, 75, 86, 152, 273–6, 274, 275, 279, 281, 286, 288,
233, 289, 338 296, 298, 299–300, 304, 305, 334,
Europeans, 37, 45, 48, 62, 63, 83, 90, 105, see also names of particular gardens;
131, 143, 149, 171, 180, 181, 182, peace parks
184, 188, 195, 201, 205, 209, 218, informally developed, 276–9
246, 292, 320 linked gardens and landscaped spaces,
Evacuation Claims Act, 1948, 283 279–81
Executive Order 9066 (EO 9066), 237, postcolonial transnational memories,
238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 251 311–12
Gaythorne camp, Qld, 39, 51, 57, 59, 88,
family camps, 50, 63, 71, 81 89, 122, 123
Fantin, Francesco, 74 Genbaku Dome, 214, 302
Farewell, John, 194 gender, 81, 92, 176, 195, 199, 204
Farm Security Administration (FSA), 243, genealogy, 1, 13, 19, 106, 179, 180, 181,
246, 249–51 315, 320
Fascism, 47, 63, 74, 90, 209, 296 Geneva Convention, 10, 12, 27, 36, 47,
Featherston Japanese Memorial Gardens, 62–3, 71, 84–8, 93, 97, 107, 108,
40, 306, 307, 311 118, 119, 125, 154, 190, 319, 328
Featherston Military Training Camp, genocide, 4, 8, 21
106, 107 geopolitics, 2, 3, 18, 21, 31, 32, 33, 41, 207
Featherston POW camp, 88, 109–15, 112, Germans, 10, 19, 24, 29, 32, 48, 50, 62, 63,
114, 119 66, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 81, 82, 84,
Featherston Incident, 109, 112, 113 86, 87, 88, 90, 94, 95, 98, 105, 106,
Federal Security Agency (US), 243, 107, 108, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120,
246 123, 141, 142, 188, 212–14, 235,
Federated Malay States, 173 238, 246
Federated Malay States Volunteer Germany, 23, 36, 43, 46, 66, 74, 76, 107,
Force, 154 119, 209, 230, 330
Federation of Center Enterprises, 258 Gibson, Alan, 222
feminist sociology, 31, 32 Gillard Labor government, 337
Ferng, Jennifer, 338 Gillies, Midge, 156
Ferry report 1925, 46 Gillman Commission, 1927, 149
Festival of International Understanding Gleiter, Jorg, 232
(1965), 304 Glissant, Eduard, 2, 17, 18, 291
Field Services Code, 87, 102 Gordon, Avery, 32
First Fleet, xv Goto, Wasaburo, 299, 308
First Nations, 6, 21, 22, 43, 46, 81, 92, 225, Government of Australia. See Australian
245, 261, 292, 307, see also government
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Grange, NSW, 59
peoples; Native Americans Great World Amusement Park, 157, 161,
Fitzgerald, Alan, 123 163
Fitzpatrick, Georgina, 319 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,
Formosa. See Taiwan 23, 209
Formosans. See Taiwanese Greta Army Camp, NSW, 52, 57, 122, 143,
Forth, Aidan, 212 292, 320
Foucault, Michel, 1, 15, 16, 17 Greytown, Vic., 57, 60, 64, 113
Fremantle, 50 Griffin, Murray, 157, 158, 164,
Fremantle Prison, 92, 130 191
Friedrich, Josef, 75, 76 Griffith and Company, 239
Fujio, Hara, 203 Gruber, George, 72
Fujito, Enri, 225, 307 Guadalcanal, 110
Fukuoka, 214 Guantanamo Bay, 288
Fullerton Building, 146, 154 Guayule project, 255–7, 256, 257
Furnivall, J.S., 22 Guha, Ranajit, 34
364 Index
Gullion, Allen W, 243 Horiuchi, Lynne, 6, 13, 31

Gunseikanbu (Central Military Howard government, 337
Administration), 145, 146 Hoy, Charles Andrew, 52
Gurkhas, 170 Huang, Shu-Mei, 179
Hudson, Phillip, 69
Hack, Karl, 6, 28, 172 Huff, Gregg, 28, 147, 218
Hague Convention, 145, 213, 323
Hakodate Group, 214 “Ideal City” (drawing, Selenitsch), xv, xvi
Haneston, Knute, 280 Ideal City (Scamozzi), xv
Harris Ranch, 261 Ikeda, Michi, 254
Harris, J. C., 262 Ikeda, Tom, 288
Harrison, J. R., 252 Imamura, Hitoshi, 322, 324, 327, 329, 331,
Hart, T. M., 154 334, 335
Harvey Agricultural College, 141 immigrant detention centers, 336–9
Harvey internment camp, 39, 57, 58, 140, immigrant reception centers, 143, 240, 292,
141, 142, 301 317, 320
Hashii, Aiji, 252 immigrants, 4, 19, 21, 22, 29, 35, 37, 44,
Hashimoto, Shinya, 110, 111, 113 83, 129, 147, 237, 264, 267, 292,
Hastings Park, Vancouver, 246, 259, 260 293, 301, 303, 319, 320, 339, see also
Havelock Road camp, Singapore, 161, 163, asylum seekers; migrants; refugees;
165, 166 White Australia policy
Havers, R. P. W., 28 immigration, 4, 22, 33, 45, 47, 83, 85, 86,
Hawaii, 23, 30, 287, see also Pearl Harbor 87, 105, 130, 211, 238, 291, 292,
Hay camp farms, 132–5, 136 300, 335, 339
Hay Internment and POW Camps Immigration and Naturalization Service
Interpretive Center, 39, 300 (INS), 30, 243
Hay Jail, 94 immigration restriction acts, 45, 105
Hay, NSW, 10, 38, 57, 58, 74, 75, 101, 116, Immigration Restriction Bill, 45
127, 129, 133, 136, 140, 141, 327 Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), 11, 27, 87,
Head, Arthur, 92 145, 146, 154, 159, 163, 171, 179,
Heart Mountain, 282, 287 180, 198, 204, 210, 214, 218, 219,
Helphand, Kenneth I., 272 226, 230, 323, 324, 325, 331
Henshall, William, 127 Imperial War Graves Commission, 313
heritage diplomacy, 299, 301, 303, 306 incarceration histories, 127, 290, 292, 295,
heritage sites, 7, 9, 12, 28, 34, 38, 39, 179, 296, 316, 337
180, 286, 290, 294, 295, 306, 307 India, 118, 120, 209
Hess, Christian, 229 Indian Muslims, 182
Heyler, Patrick, 334 Indian National Army (INA), 33, 169,
Hirohito, Emperor, 210 170, 205
Hiroshima, 214, 230, 232, 302, 310 Indian National Congress, 169
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, 232, 304 Indians, 33, 40, 148, 149, 169, 170, 181,
Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial 186, 203, 219, 231, 324, 326, 331
Promotion Hall, 213, 232 Singapore camps, 169–71
Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig, 79 Indigenous peoples, 4, 23, 244, 245, see also
Hitler, Adolf, 43, 69, 94 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Holdsworthy camp, NSW. See Holsworthy peoples; First Nations; Native
camp, NSW Americans
Hole, Frank, 308, 309 Indonesia, 322, 335
Holocaust, 8, 13, 15, 19, 35 Indonesia National Revolution, 172
Holsworthy camp, NSW, 24, 50, 57, 59 Indonesian Confrontation, 173
Hong Kong, 144, 151, 187, 195, 330 industrialization, 118, 173, 208–12, 216,
Honouliuli Camp, Hawaii, 30 217, 218, 230, 238, 294
Honouliuli National Monument, industry, 28, 122, 123, 135, 141, 147,
Hawaii, 287 173, 211
Hopkins, Eleanor, 194, 197, 206 mining, 209, 216, 261
Index 365
rubber, 211, 218, 255, 265, 288, 327 Japan, 11, 19, 20, 23, 29, 85, 87, 101, 104,
steel manufacturing, 216 144, 146, 209, 211, 213, 214, 231,
war industries, 27, 118, 216 233, 234, 270, 292, 293, 294, 299,
Inglis, Ken, 129 303, 316, 322, 323, 326, 327, see also
Inouye, Daniel, 283 Empire of Camps; Pearl Harbor
interior housing centers, 260, 261, 264 Anglo-Japanese Commercial Treaty
International Red Cross, 49, 71, 86, 1894, 79
198, 216 industrialization, 209, 210, 211, 212,
International Refugee Organization, xvi, 83 329
International War Crimes Tribunal, 226 tripartite alliance, 23, 209
interned children, 194, 195, 197, 204, 205, Japan Co-Prosperity Sphere, 229
249, 261, 267, 268, 271, 281, 282, Japanese, 10, 25, 33, 48, 62, 84, 86, 107, 119,
288, 320, 323, 337, see also women 140, 144, 151, 214, 220, 222, 227,
internees 235, 239, 242, 249, 251, 255, 264
internment camps, 137 Japanese American Citizens League
intersectional sovereignty, 2, 12, 24–31, (JACL), 277, 278, 283, 291
117, 180, 289, 290–317, 318, 339 Japanese American Confinement Sites
Changi Chapel and Museum, 307–17 Grant Program, 287
commemoration background, 291–4 Japanese American Sansei of Tsuru (folded
community-led commemoration, 296–300 cranes) for Solidarity, 288
former wartime camps’ material disson- Japanese Americans, 6, 13, 19, 25, 30, 31,
ance, 295–6 35, 36, 44, 51, 136, 233, 234, 235,
postcolonial transnational memories, 236, 237, 238, 239, 242, 244, 245,
311–12 249, 251, 253, 254, 255, 264, 265,
transnational commemoration, 300–4 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 281, 282,
Cowra Japanese Garden, 304–7 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290,
Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park and 299, 329
Museum, 307–11 gardens, 272–81
intersectional theory, 31, 32 Issei, 242, 264, 267, 272, 274, 276, 280,
intersectionality, 13, 18, 32, 38, 80–3, 282, 283, 288
115, 318 Kibei, 260, 267, 278
Ireito Monument, 284 Nisei, 12, 30, 37, 40, 242, 260, 264, 267,
irrigation, 132, 134, 136, 137, 141, 245 268, 281, 282, 283, 284, 288, 291
Ishiwara Sanyo Kabushiki Kaisha, 227 resettlement issues, 282–91
Ishizuka, Shoichi, 308 Sansei, 12, 267, 268, 284, 285, 288, 291
Ishizuka, Yoko, 308 traditional designs and everyday func-
Italian Fascists, 74, 90, 209 tions, 271–2
Italian National Ossario, 38, 122, 301 Japanese archipelago, 29
Italians, 29, 39, 43, 74, 81, 82, 86, 136, Japanese Canadians, 12, 25, 29, 30, 234,
235, 301 235, 236, 237, 238, 246, 259, 260,
conscription, 131 261, 264, 265, 291, 296, 297, 298
internees, 24, 48, 50, 62, 63, 77, 107, camps, 259–66
108, 109, 119, 130, 132, 137, 188, exclusion and internment, 246
246, 307, 320 Japanese Chamber of Commerce and
labor, 45, 57, 98, 100, 116, 118, 119, Industry, 304
123, 124, 125, 139, 143, 304, 337 Japanese civilians, 33, 63, 228, 229,
POWs, 84, 88, 94, 101, 115, 116, 120, 245
122, 134, 141, 143, 170 Japanese Embassy, 104
activities, 140 Japanese Empire, 11, 33, 63, 207, 211,
Australian relations, 123 235, 326
distribution, 123, 134 imperial expansion, 208–12
living conditions, 122 Japanese internees, 63, 137, 188
resistance, 10 Japanese Memorial Gardens,
racism toward, 46 Featherston, 40
restricted in USA, 238 Japanese Ministry of Health and
Italy, 23, 43, 122 Welfare, 209
366 Index
Japanese Munitions Ministry, 211 Kōnan camp, 217

Japanese POWs, 84, 85, 87, 88, 103, 111, Kootenays region, BC, 12, 237, 246, 298
115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 137, 142, Kordan, Bohdan, 20
214, 231, 234, 301, 302, 307, 331, Korea, 23, 29, 207, 208, 217, 229, 234, 325
334, Koreans, 63, 101, 211, 217, 227, 325, 326,
Cowra Breakout, 98–105, 102, 103 327, 331
literature on, 26, 27, 28 HSK Kormoran, 66, 94
Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSPs), 11, Kovner, Sarah, 28, 207–8, 217
13, 40, 207, 212–14, 226, 227, 230, Krakotska, Paul, 212
231, 319, 321, 327, 328, 328, 329, 331 Kranji, 162
Japanese war criminals, 172, 206, 332, 333 Kranji Camp, 159, 169, 170, 313
Japonism, 299, 303 Kranji Hospital, 159, 162, 169
Jaskot, Paul, 6 Kranji War Cemetery, 40, 230, 294,
Java, 217, see also Indonesia; Netherlands 301
East Indies Kratoska, Paul, 28
Javanese Independent Party, 101 Kunitomi family. See Embrey, Sue
Jews, 32, 35, 36, 46, 48, 63, 74, 75, 76, 98, Kunitomi
188, 200, 269 Kunitomi, Gonhichi, 270, 271
Jinsen (Inchon), 217 Kunitomi, Hideo, 282
Joetsu, 306, 307, 308, 309 Kunitomi, Jack, 282
Joetsu Transportation, 225 Kunitomi, Kinya, 282
John Humes Garden, 299 Kunitomi, Komika, 270, 271, 282
Jurong internment camp, 227, 228 Kunitomi, Midora, 282
Kunitomi, Tets, 282
Kado, Ryozo, 284 Kwantung army, 210
Kamakura Maru, 222 Kyowakai Hall, 262, 272, 297, 298,
Kanegae, Shizuyo, 81 300
Katarapko, SA, 60, 137, 139 Kyowakai Society, 297
Katong, 152, 190
Katsuki, William, 280 labor, 17, 29, 45, 56, 71, 81, 87, 106, 149,
Katsura Palace, 302 159–69, 173, 186, 187, 208, 211,
Kawase, K., 252, 253 216, 217, 224, 226, 229, 230, 237,
Keidanren (Japan Business 238, 239, 244, 246, 252, 253, 318,
Federation), 304 324, 327, 332, 334
Kelly, Ned, 156 agriculture, 327
Kenny, L. B., 334, 335 and land, 116–78
Kenpeitai (Military Police Corps), 145, 146, Civil Aliens Corps, 129–32
172, 187, 194, 198, 199, 324 civilian, 20, 332, 334
Keppel Harbour, 162 forced, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 17, 27, 139, 186,
Kia, Sai Kwie, 81 200, 208, 211, 212, 216, 220, 226,
Kiangwan POW Camp (Shanghai), 217 229, 230, 259
Kibbler, Donald, 304, 308 internee, 116, 119–29, 132
King, Mackenzie, 246 mobility, 334
Klaphake, Maria, 73 POW, 27, 88, 116, 118, 119–25, 130,
Klaphake, Wolf, 73 148, 182, 216, 324
Kluang airfield, 228 salaries, 119, 120, 126, 187, 253
Knee, Arthur, 124 slavery, 21, 22, 214, 244
Knee, Lurline, 124 unguarded scheme, 125
Kobe, Japan, 214, 223 war criminals, 332
Kodani, Masuo, 257 wartime Labor policies, 116–78
Koh, Ernest, 2, 16 labor camps, 27, 259, 327, 331, see also
Kohan Japanese Internment Memorial names of particular camps
Reflection Gardens, 297 Burma-Thai railway, 218–22
Kokoda Track, 294, 322 Hay camp, 132–5
Kokopo Camp, 327 Loveday Group projects, 136–43
Index 367
Naoetsu Camp, 223, 224, 225, Maekawa, Kaori, 208

sugar beet workers, 253–4 Maekawa, Kunio, 210
work camps, 124, 159–69, 220, 261, 308, Majima, Shinobu, 28, 147, 218
317, 320 Mako, Yoshimura, 28
work parties, 11, 156, 161, 163, 165, 168, Malaya, 5, 23, 27, 47, 53, 144, 169, 189,
169, 189, 218, 219, 222, 292, 328, 194, 203, 219, 227, 229, 230, 293
334, 337 The Malayan Architect, 206
labor conscripts, 11, 30, 111, 113, 116, 118, Malayan Communist Party, 172
119, 129, 142, 211, 212, 218, 220, Malayan Emergency, 172, 174, 203, 311
222, 320, 325, 327 Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army, 205
Labor Party Malays, 33, 101, 144, 148, 182, 203,
wartime policies, 116–78 222, 327
Land Lease, 100 Malaysia, 173, 174, 206
Lange, Dorothea, 83, 255 Malcolm, James, 111
Latin America, 30, 37, 289 Manchuria/Manchukuo, 23, 207, 208, 209,
Le Cain, W. J. C., 186 210, 211, 217, 220, 227, 232, 234
Le Corbusier Manus Island, 13, 40, 321, 330, 331, 332,
Radiant City, 177 333, 337, 338
Lee Sam, 187 Manzanar, 239, 249, 271, 276, 281, 288,
Lee, Hyun Kyung, 179 290, 318
Lee, Joy, 308 agriculture, 136, 238, 245, 246–52,
Lee, Kuan Yew, 178 254, 273
Lee, Theo, 308 diet, 253
Leowald, Klaus, 129 historical occupation of site, 244–6
Letzel, Jan, 213 military power in site development,
Leupp Isolation Center, 278, 279 243–4
Lewes Prison, Sussex, 186 preservation, 286
Lewis Bryan, N., 157 riots, 277, 278
Little Guayule Project, 255–7 rural development project, 252–3
Little Tokyo, 269–71 temporary sugar beet workers, 253–4
Liverpool (Moorebank) camp, Australia, Manzanar Cemetery, 284
51, 57, 62 Manzanar Committee, 12, 284, 285,
local communities, 5, 9, 57, 62, 64, 71, 76, 99, 286, 287
102, 122, 126, 203, 213, 290, 295, 308 Manzanar Consumer Enterprises, 258
Locke, John, 244 Manzanar Cooperative Enterprises, 258–9
Loewald, Klaus, 130, 131 Manzanar Free Press, 239
Loh, Kah Seng, 173, 175 Manzanar gardens, 41, 272–81, 274, 275,
Lombrum Point, 332, 337 277, 278, 286, 288
Long Bay, State Reformatory, NSW, 59 Nurserymen’s Japanese Gardens, 273–6
Lorengau, 335, 338 Manzanar Hospital, 257
Los Angeles County Department of Water Manzanar Japanese American Citizens
and Power (LAWPD), 244 League (JACL), 278
Loveday Group, SA, 10, 38, 57, 58, 62, 73, Manzanar Kitchen Workers’ Union, 278
74, 76, 90, 93, 116, 120, 130, 138, Manzanar National Historic Site, 12, 31,
140, 301, 304, 327 268, 274, 286, 288, 289, 295, 296
Loveday Group projects, 136–43 Manzanar Pilgrimage, 284, 285, 286, 288
Lowe, Keith, 233 Manzanar Relocation Center, 40, 238, 239,
Lowe, Lisa, 4, 21, 22 240, 241, 245, 247, 249, 252, 253,
KG Luke and Co, 127 257, 268, 274, 275, 284, 287
Lut, Yin Fo, 175 Little Guayule Project, 255–7
Lyon, Alan B., 232 HMT Marella, 75
Marrinup camp, WA, 39, 57, 58, 88, 90, 98,
MacArthur, Douglas, 38, 47, 52, 171, 229, 120, 123
322, 332 Maryknoll Home for Japanese Children,
Macquarie, Lachlan, 127 Los Angeles, 279
368 Index
Matheson, Dugald, 106 Moorook West, SA, 60, 137, 139

Matiu/Somes Island, 40, 106–9 Morel, Georges, 71
Matsuhiro Underground Imperial Mori, Kannosuke, 299
Headquarters, 325 Morimoto, Clarence, 254
Matsumoto, Lillian, 280 Morris, Narelle, 319, 335
Matsumoto, Mary Ellenor, 81 Motuihe, 106
Matsumoto, Phillip, 261 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 171, 200,
Matsunaga, Spark, 283 205, 227
Mayeda, Sentok, 284 Mudie, Jack, 308, 309
McAllister, Kirsten Emiko, 297, 298 multiculturalism, 26, 132, 293, 306
McCahon, Col. John, 47 Murayama, Shimpei, 81
McCormack, Tim, 319 Murchison camp, 58, 65, 86, 87, 94, 95, 96,
McKenzie, H. E., 191, 192, 193, 204 98, 118, 301
McNair, J. F. A., 182 Murchison Historical Society, 38
Meiji Empire, 23, 179, 208, 209, Murchison Italian National Ossario, 301
210 Murfett, Malcolm, 173
Melbourne, 52 Murphy, Mahon, 19
memory-making, 6, 13, 180, 295, 296, 302, Muslim America, 268
307, 308, 312 Muslim League, 169
Menzies, Robert, 46, 53 Muslims, 37, 170, 177, 182, 287, 288
Merritt Park, 275, 276, 279 Mussolini, Benito, 43, 94
Merritt, Ralph, 275, 276 Muzaini, Hamzah, 28, 315
Middle East, 47, 84, 117, 322 Myer, Dillon, 256
migrants, 83, 106, 300, 335, 336 Myrtleford, Vic., 57, 58, 64, 88
maritime migrant arrivals, 336, 337
Migration Act, 1958, 336 Nagasaki, 222, 223, 230, 232, 302, 310
military barracks, 12, 27, 50, 85, 91, 107, Nagata, Yuriko, 26, 81, 82, 132
108, 143, 151, 152, 154, 155, 163, Nagatomi, Shinjo, 284
170, 177, 213, 216, 217–18, 237, Naka, Takahiro, 299
246, 249, 258, 261, 312, 331, 332 Nakajima, Takeshi (Ken), 304, 305, 306
and WCCA, 246 Namari Tunnel Township, 324
military building, 268–9 Naoetsu
Military Intelligence Service, 282, 289 Kakushin-ji temple, 225, 307, 309
Military Police. See Kenpeitai Naoetsu camp, 40, 207, 303, 307, 308,
military power, 243–4 311
Mineta, Norman, 283 brutality, 225, 226, 232, 309
Minidoka Internment National Monument, journey from Changi, 222–6
Idaho, 287 Naoetsu Harbor Transport Company, 225
Minidoka National Historic Site, 287 Naoetsu Japan-Australia Society, 308
minority populations, 6, 11, 16, 23, 26, 31, Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park and
44, 265, 306 Museum, 307–11, 310, 316
Missingham, Gregory, 303 Narashino camp, 213
USS Missouri, 171 Natenson, Hans, 130
Mitsubishi, 216 National Archives of Singapore, 312
Miyakuni, Cecilia, 81 National Association of Japanese Canadians
Miyatake, Toyo, 270, 274, 278 (NAJC), 291
modernity, 3, 15, 79, 82, 140, 152, 177, National Heritage Board, 315
179, 184, 208–12, 213, 310 National Museum of Australia, 302
Mokutaro, Mark, 254 National Park Service (NPS), 12, 31, 40,
Molonglo camp, 51 279, 286, 287
Monteath, Peter, 20 National POW Memorial for Australia, 313
monuments, 79, 98, 167, 230, 284, 287, National Security Regulations, 47, 119
294, 295, 309, 316 National Transitional Powers Act
Mooney, Tony, 308 (Canadian), 264, 291
Moore, Trix, 69 nationalism, 19, 169, 170, 174, 303
Index 369
nationality, 30, 36, 37, 43, 76, 82, 86, 108, Northam camp, WA, 51, 57, 59, 141, 143,
117, 125, 260 292, 320, 337
Nationality and Citizenship Act, 1949, 46 Northern Territory, 23, 50, 53, 79,
nation-building, 3, 7, 9, 27, 177, 206, 315 120, 307
nation-state sovereignty, 3, 4, 15, 19, 37, Nozaki, Kenji, 255
75, 77, 82, 85, 92, 290, 293, 322, Nurserymen’s Japanese Gardens, 273–6
323, 336
nation-states, 4, 36, 37, 173 Oakes, Colin St Clair, 313
Native Americans, 244, 245, 261, 288, 289 Ochi, Rose, 286
NATO, 173 Ochida, Yoshikazu, 210
Nauru, 322, 337, 338 offshore detention, 16, 37, 321, 338, 339
Nazism, 6, 32, 35, 47, 66, 69, 73, 74, 76, Offshore Processing Centers, 321, 337
77, 85, 86, 95, 98, 129, 130 Ogawa, Shigejiro, 299
Nee Soon camp, Singapore, 169, 170 Ohi, Yoshi, 252, 253
Nelson Ranch, 261 Okamoto, Tetsuji, 308, 309
Nelson, David, 27, 218 onshore detention, 37, 337
Nelson, Hank, 28 Operation Jaywick, 199
Neri, Tito, 140 Operation Sovereign Borders, 338
Netherlands East Indies, 63, 79, 81, 137, Orange, NSW, 51, 59, 73
172, 228, 322 Orchard Camp, New Denver, 261, 297
Neumann, Klaus, 25, 74 Order-In-Council PC 1486, 237, 246
New Britain, 47, 322, 323, 327 Orientalization, 306
New Caledonia, 63, 79 Orientalizing, 269, 271, 304
New Denver, BC, 40, 238, 260, 261, 262, Osaka, 214, 216, 223
263, 272, 298, 316 Otera (Buddhist temple/shrine), 262,
community-led commemoration, 296–300 272, 298
Kohan Japanese Internment Memorial Otsuru, Atsushi, 213
Reflection Gardens, 297 Outram Road Jail, Singapore, 11, 147, 148,
Orchard Camp, 261, 297 171, 179, 182, 183, 183, 184, 186,
Otera, 262, 272, 298 189, 198, 199, 206
New Guinea, 13, 21, 23, 38, 40, 47, 63, 77, incarceration, 198–200
90, 99, 117, 123, 130, 170, 319, Owens Valley Reception Center, 240, 244,
322–30, 325, 328, 333, 335 245, 246–9
“New Migrants,” 292
New South Wales, 50, 100 Pacific Basin, 4, 5, 16, 39, 41, 246, 318, 319
New Villages, 172 Pacific Islands, 45, 46, 63, 81, 107, 209,
New Zealand, 5, 19, 24, 25, 35, 40, 56, 63, 229, 322–30
84, 85–6, 88, 174 Pacific National Exhibition buildings, 246
quarantine camps, 105–15 Pacific Solution, 337
Ngurai-illam peoples, 64 Pacific War, 20–4
Nihonjin Machi, 270 Pahiatua camp, 94, 96, 107, 108, 109
Niigata, Japan, 214, 223, 224, 306, 310 Paiute tribes, 244, 245
Nikkei Australia, 307 Palestine, 63, 77, 79, 83
Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, 291 pandemics, 86, 106, 339
Nikkei Internment Memorial Center Papua New Guinea, 322, 335, 338
(NIMC), 41, 297, 298, 299, PNG Solution, 337
300, 304 Parker Indian Reservation, 244
Ninoshima Island, 213 Parkeston, WA, 59
Nippon, 216, 217, 225 parks. See peace parks
Nishi, Akira, 279 patriarchy, 12, 197
Nishi, Kuichiro, 275, 276, 277, 279 peace parks, 40, 217, 230, 302, 304, 308,
Nishimura, Chotaro, 254 309, 310, see also gardens
Nishimura, Shimpe, 255 Peace Precincts, 40, 303, 306
Nitobe Memorial Garden (BC), 299 Pearl Harbor, 5, 11, 23, 144, 211
Nitobe, Inazo, 299 Pearl’s Hill civil prison. See Outram Road
North Park, Manzanar, 279 Jail, Singapore
370 Index
Pelz, Werner, 132 racism, 45, 46, 81, 82, 85, 226, 234, 292, see
penal processes, 5 also anti-Asian discrimination
People’s Action Party (PAP), 294 Raffles College, 146
Percival, A. E., 144 railroads/railways, 11, 117, 124, 210, 219,
Petawawa, Ontario, 246 222, 245, see also Burma-Thai
Peterson, June, 124 railway
Philippines, 21, 144, 216, 217–18, 229, Ramale camp, 323, 324
326, 332 HMT Ranjitiki, 75
Pleasure Park, Manzanar, 275, 276, 277 Read, Cecil, 100
“Points Concerning the Treatment of Reagan, Ronald, 284
Prisoners of War”, 208 Red Cross. See International Red Cross
Ponzani, Francesco, 124 redress, 37, 237, 267–89, 291, 293, 294,
Port Dickson, Malaya, 169 297, 306, 339
postal services, 93, 168, 213, 219, 244 Refuge Gully, 323
postcolonialism, 23, 37, 171, 311–12 refugees, 4, 24, 46, 83, 109, 143, 144, 188,
postwar reconstruction, 174, 229, 232, 189, 246, 317, 320, 335, 336,
295, 296 338, 339
Potsdam Declaration, 229 Reinhardt, Max, 72
POW Research Network Japan religious buildings, 140, 157, 158, 168, 189,
(POWRNJ), 214, 216 225, 231, 304, 312, 313, 314,
Presidential Executive Order 9066 (EO 323, 334
9066), 237, 238, 239, 242, 243, Rempang Island, 229
244, 251 Ren, Guangyu, 210
prison cities, 12, 234–66, 267, 269, reparation. See redress
288, 290 repatriation, 25, 34, 57, 72, 81, 83, 94, 97,
Prisoner of War Control (PWC) Hostel, 104, 114, 123, 125, 141, 171, 172,
Home Hill, 122 227–33, 282, 292, 302, 321, 329,
Probert, Henry, 27, 149 331, 332, 335
Protecting Power, 66, 74, 86, 93, 107, 119 resettlement, 175, 203, 337, 338
Puckapunyal army training facility, 53 postwar dislocations, 282–91
Pudu Jail, Kuala Lumpur, 219 resistance, 10, 17, 72, 73, 84–115, 154,
Purana Qila (Red Fort), New Delhi, 189, 229 170, 205, 299, 307
Returned Services Association, 307
Qingdao, 213 Reveley, Henry, 92
quarantine, 85, 107, 110, 114, 188, Reverse Lend Lease Aid, 118
216, 339 Ricatti, Francesco, 46
NZ camps, 105–15 riots, 106, 109, 111–13, 277, 278
HMT Queen Elizabeth, 75, 77 River Farm, 135
HMT Queen Mary, 75, 188 River Valley Road camp, 163, 166, 187,
Queensland, 45, 46, 53, 63, 88, 122, 189, 199
123, 130 Riverine Grazier, 129, 134
Queensland Department of Commerce and Roberts Hospital, Singapore, 154,
Agriculture, 123 157
Queenstown, 175, 176 Robertson, A. E., 222, 223
Quota Immigration Law (US) 1924, 235 Robinson, Greg, 30, 265
Rolland, Henry Maitland, 52
Rabaul, 40, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, rǒmusha. See labor conscripts
329, 330, 331, 332, 334 Roosevelt, F. D. R., 243
race, 3, 4, 17, 33, 40, 44, 81, 82, 99, 199, Rose Park, 276
257, 260, 261, 281, 326 Rotary Club, 194
racial covenants, 245, 269 Rottnest Island, WA, 50, 59, 92, 105
racialization, 3, 4, 11, 16, 21, 22, 23, 37, 63, Rowville camp, Vic., 122, 124
86, 181, 182, 186, 188, 207, 211, Royal Air Force (British), 159
212, 226, 242, 244, 264, 265, 270, Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF),
291, 317, 318, 320, 336 47, 141
Index 371
Royal Australian Navy (RAN), 47, 66, Shin-etsu Chemical Company, 223,
332–4, 335 224, 307
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 246 Shinozaki, Mamoru, 227
Royal Engineers, 149, 151 Shinto shrines, 140, 167, 217
Royal Military College, Duntroon, 158, Shintoism, 167
312, 314 Shinya, Michiharu, 110
Royal Navy, 172 Shonien, Japanese Children’s Home, San
Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF), Francisco, 279
84, 109, 316 Siek, Tjauw, 81
RSL, 302, 303, 307 Sikhs, 195
ruins, 38, 214, 232, 302 Silman, H., 155
rural camps, 51, 62, 64, 85, 86, 165, Sime Road Camp, Singapore, 44, 159, 161,
203, 235 168, 180, 193, 196, 200–6, 202,
Rushworth, Vic., 58, 67, 80, 292, 204, 223
320 Simone, Edgardo, 93
Russia, 148, 234 Sing Sing Prison, USA, 186
Russians, 209, 212, 213, 220 Singapore, 5, 21, 22, 33, 144, 174, 224,
Russo-Japanese War, 208, 212, 223 227, 230
camps, 27, 154, 166, 167, 294
Sakakura, Junzo, 210 distribution, 160
Salasia Camp, 335 for Indian POWs, 169–71
Salvation Army, 279 further legacies of encampment,
Salvatore, Angelo, 93 179–206
San Francisco Peace Treaty, 293 typologies, 12, 146, 148
Sandy Creek, SA, 58 commemoration, 7, 27, 316
Saunders, Kay, 30 background, 291–4
Scamozzi, Vincenzo, xv transnational practices, 311–12
Schulz, Hermann, 72 divided history, 146–8, 318
Schuster, Eberhard, 69, 73 divided society, 37, 188–90
Scoto, George, 94 fall of, 10, 23, 40, 116, 144, 145, 146,
Seabrook Farms, 254 147, 209, 227, 312
Seabrook, Charles, 254 housing, 151–2, 163
Seabrook, John, 254 disciplining dwelling, 174–8
Seah & Le Cain, 186 IJA surrender, 171
Searle, Ronald, 222 independence, 37, 173, 175, 293, 294
Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF), labor, 159–69, 230
37, 46, 47, 117, 123, 130, 134, 141, mail, 219
167, 222, 225, 292, 327, 329 military barracks, 151–2
Seeadler Harbor, 332 military geography, 144–78
Seefeld, Gerhard, 76 prison design, 179–206
Selarang, 157 transformed by Japan, 28, 145
Selarang Barracks, 151, 153, 154, 155, war crime trials, 171, 330
168, 170 Singapore government, 175, 227, 293,
Selenitsch, Alex, xv, xvi 315, 316
Seletar, 152, 169, 170 Singapore History Consultants (SHC), 315
Sembawang, 144, 148, 152, 169, 170 Singapore Housing Development Board, 175
Senjinkun field services code, 87 Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), 167,
Seraphim, Franziska, 330 172, 174–5, 218
settler colonialism, 4, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, Singapore Land Authority, 312
226, 288, 320 Singapore Public Works Department
settler-societies, 1, 3, 17, 21, 31, 45, 83, (PWD), 182, 187
180, 211, 291, 318, 319 Singapore Strategy, 148
sexual slavery, 195, see also comfort women Singapore Tourism Board, 313, 315
shack camps, 261, 262 Singh, Mohan, 169
Shepherd, John, 245 Sinixt Nation, USA, 261
372 Index
Sino-Japanese War, 208 Syonan Jinja, 167, 168, 230

Slocan Lake, 261 Syonan-To, 146, 147, 312
Slocan Lake Garden Society, 297
Slocan Valley, 261 Taihoku camp, 217
Smocovitis, Betty, 255, 257 Taiwan, 23, 29, 101, 156, 207, 208, 217,
Soil Conservation Services, 252 234, 324, 325, 327
Solomon Islands, 79, 84, 109, 110, 322 Taiwanese, 63, 79, 81, 88, 130, 227, 331
Solzenitsyn, Aleksandr, 15 Takamura, Kango, 253, 255, 256
Sook Ching purge, 198, 294 Takemura, George Saburo, 279
South Australia Department of Lands, 143 Takeshima, Shizuye, 262
South Seas China Relief Fund Tamura, Yasuji, 167
Committee, 205 Tan Tock Seng Hospital, 198
sovereignty, 5, 8, 16, 21, 114, 265, 295, Tanaka, Hiromi, 329
318, see also intersectional sover- Tange, Kenzo, 232, 302
eignty; nation-state sovereignty Tapiolas, Joanne, 122
cultural, 6, 32, 83, 295 HMAS Tarangau, 332, 335
exceptions, 318 Tatura German War Cemetery, 38, 301
instrumentality of camps, 31 Tatura Group, 38, 44, 55, 57, 58, 62, 64–7,
islands of, 322–30 65, 68, 70, 78, 80, 96, 121, 188, 292
political, 19, 23, 32, 33, 82 camp divisions, 73–80
territorial, 6, 16, 33, 51, 114, 115 culinary traditions, 69–71
Soviet Union, 15, 209, 227, 229, 330 design, 66–7, 69, 72
Speck, Oskar, 76 Dhurringile Mansion, 64, 66, 88, 94
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 34 education and employment, 72–3
Spizzica, Mia, 26, 132 life in the camps, 67–73
Sproat, Frances, 79 Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps
Stace, Mary, 81 Museum, 38, 44, 73, 300
staging camps, 88–90, 123, 218 Tatura Italian Ossario, 122
Stahl, Richard, 127 Tayama, Fred, 277
Stalin, Josef, 15 Tayler, Lloyd, 64
Stanberry, V. B., 244 Teltscher, George, 127, 128
Stanley Camp, Hong Kong, 195 Terminal Island, 270
Stanley, Peter, 326 Tett, David, 219
statelessness, 9, 16, 17, 19, 37, 41, 114, Thanbyuzayat, Burma, 11, 220
282, 319, 320, 336 Thane, C. S., 134
Stibbs, Mathew, 19 Theater of Operations 700 series stand-
Straits Settlements Volunteer Force, 144, 163 ards, 246
Straits Settlements, Singapore, 75, 76, Theodore, Edward Granville, 52
83, 311 Thomas, Gordon, 207–8
Sturrock, G., 186 Thrale, Charles, 325
subaltern studies, 34 Three-Sacks Garden, 275, 276, 277
subalternization, xvi, 11, 13, 34 Tōjō, Hideki, 208
subject populations, 2, 4, 17, 146, 148, 168, Tokushima camp, 213
180, 218, 227, 233, 296 Tokyo, 210, 214, 232, 330
subjecthood, 43, 100, 148 Tokyo Club, 271
Sue Kunitomi, 270 Tokyo Draft Convention 1934, 36, 86
Sugamo Prison, Tokyo, 331, 335 Tokyo Group, 216
Sullivan, James, 71, 79 Tominaga, Jikko, 197
Sumi, Roy (Tomomichi), 299–300, 306 Tomoyuki, Yamashita, 144
Sunahara, Ann, 259 Tonda, Marie, 81
Sunnschien (Sunshine) (kayak), 76 Topaz Museum, 287
Swee Lim, Leong, 294 Totaro, Adachi, 111–13
Sydney, 52, 99 Towner Road Camp, 162, 189
HMAS Sydney, 66 Toyota, Tritia, 284
Syonan Chureito, 167 Trans-Australian Railway, 124
Index 373
transnational spaces, 300–4, 319 US Executive Order 9066 (EO 9066), 237,
Tremewan, Christopher, 174, 175 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 251
Tripartite Pact, 23, 209 US Navy Construction Battalions, 332
Truman, Harry, 283 US New Deal federal agencies, 251
Tsakonas, Athanasios, 313 US Public Law 109–441, 287
Tschurtschenthaler, Tobias, 98 US Public Law 503, 242, 251
Tule Lake Segregation Center, 30, 278, 279 Uyematsu, Francis B., 280–1
Tuna Canyon Detention Station, 287
Tunbridge, J. E., 7 Vagarini, Cesare, 79
Tunnel Hill POW Camp, 324 Victoria, Australia, 63, 64, 66
Turnbull, Mary, 149, 188 Victorian Department of Commerce and
Twomey, Christina, 2, 16, 28, 196 Agriculture, 124
Tyersall Park, Singapore, 169 Victorian State Rivers and Water Supply
Commission, 67
Ueda, Kunitara, 230 Vienna, 69, 77
Ueno, Albert, 79 Vienna Mozart Boys’ choir, 72
Ueno, Harry, 276–9, 281 Vienna Secession, 77, 232
Ukai, Nancy, 288 Vietnam War, 35, 284, 285, 288, 293,
Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Act, 335
1919 (NZ), 105 von Gruenewaldt, Hans-Wolter, 97
United Kingdom, 21, 24, 118, see also
Britain Wakahiro, Soichi, 284
United Nations Convention Relating to the Wakayama Camp, Osaka, 214
Status of Refugees, 336 Wallangara Hostel, Qld, 118
United States (USA), 21, 25, 36, 37, 86, war crimes, 226, 230, 302–3, 309, 310, 318,
109, 117, 118, 123, 209, 216, 223, 326, 331–4
229, 233, 244, 246, 265, 282, 289, War Crimes Commission, 232
see also American Indians; Japanese war-crimes trials, 147, 171, 206, 214, 216,
Americans 292, 319, 330, 331, 335
and Australia, 20, 25, 47, 52, 90, 100, War Crimes Trials Act 1945, 330
145, 146, 296, 322, 324, 326, 338 War Criminals Compounds (WCCs), 13,
and Canada, 29, 237, 238, 262, 263, 264 321, 330, 332, 333
and Pacific War, 20 War Criminals Courts, 331
camp studies, 30, 31 War Criminals Military Prisons, 327, 330–5
citizenship, 235, 282 War Measures Act (Canadian), 246, 291
civil rights, 268, 284 War Relocation Authority (WRA),
military building, 268–9 Australia, 240, 243, 246, 249, 251,
redress, 283, 292, 293 252, 254, 255, 256, 266, 271, 273,
restricted immigration, 22, 33, 84, 237, 274, 275, 278, 279, 281
238 War Relocation Centers, 12, 29, 36, 51,
Uno, Edison, 283 237, 236, 238, 241, 243, 246, 247,
Unrau, Harlan D, 31 251, 271, 282, 287
Upson, Thomas William, 331 Waranga Basin, 10, 64, 65, 67, 71
US Army, 35, 97, 186, 238, 242, 243, 249, Ward, Frank Dorrington, 184, 186–7
251, 281 Wardrop, James, 69
US Army Corps of Engineers, 12, 237, 239, Warren, Stanley, 157
246, 279 Wartime Civil Control Administration
US Army Services of Supply, 118 (WCCA), 240, 246, 249–52, 280
US Census Bureau, 242, 246, 251 Washington Conference, 1920, 234
US Civil Liberties Act, 284 Watanabe, Mutsuhiro, 226
US Congressional Commission on Wartime Watanabe, Walter T., 255, 256
Relocation and Internment of Weiss, Johann Peter, 26
Civilians (CWRIC), 30, 283–4, 291 Wellington, NZ, 106, 107
US Department of Justice, 238 Wembley, WA, 59
US Department of Labor, 261 Western Australia, 39, 50, 53, 57, 66, 88, 122
374 Index
Western Defense Command, 239–42, 245, wooded area camps, 59

246, 247, 260, 279 Woodlands Hospital. See Kranji Hospital
Whitcomb Hotel, San Francisco, 246, 251 Woodman’s Point, 60
White Australia policy, 4, 22–3, 33, 37, Woolenook, SA, 60, 137
45–6, 48, 67, 75, 82, 83, 117, 143, Works Progress Administration (WPA),
234, 291, 292, 335 243, 246
Wiener Werkstätte, 77 World War I, 19, 24, 43, 50, 51, 85, 106,
Williams, Cicely, 192–5, 197–8, 199–200, 212, 214, 293
205, 206 Wyatt, Frederick, 64
Wilson, Keith, 165, 167–9
Winchester, Steward Joseph, 278 Yanco, NSW, 58, 88, 101
Winter, James, 64 Yasukuni Shrine, 230, 303
Wirth’s Circus, 51, 79 Yeoh, Brenda, 28, 315
Woh Hup, 186–7, 206 YMCA, 108, 147, 171, 199
women internees, 123, 152, 169, 176, 191, Yoji, Akashi, 28
193–201, 202, 203, 204, 244, 271, Yokohama Cremation Memorial, 302
297, 320 Yokohama War Cemetery, 225, 302,
and children, 81, 107, 188, 195, 197 307
at Changi, 193–8 Yokomizo, George J., 256
comfort women, 212, 326 Yoneyama, Lisa, 232
conditions, 34, 63, 182, 191, 192, 200, 269 Yong Yit Lin, 187, 205–6
labor, 117, 197, 201, 204 Yura, Shigeru, 302
marital status, 48, 195, 228, 229, 259,
260, 292 Zamperini, Louis, 223, 225–6
Women’s Employment Board, 117 HMT Zealandia, 75

(Studies in The Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) Anoma Pieris, Lynne Horiuchi - The Architecture of Confinement - Incarceration Camps of The Pacific War-Cambridge University Press (2022)

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The Architecture of Conﬁnement

In this global and comparative study of Paciﬁc War incarceration

A full list of titles in the series can be found at:

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of Figures page vii

10 Intersectional Sovereignty 290

Select Bibliography 340

2.1 Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees (DPWI).

quarters (b). Courtesy of Australian War Memorial,

5.2 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and British POWs at

7.1 Koichi Inomata, Naoetsu Tokyo-04-Branch Camp, Niigata.

©Toyo Miyatake MP 0067. Courtesy of Toyo Miyatake

1.1 Map of the Paciﬁc Basin showing locations of key case

4.4 Harvey, WA, Camp 11. Drawn by Zachariah Dahdoule,

2.1 Distribution of POW and internment camps in Australia page 58

The intellectual collaboration underlying this book began in conversa-

Landscapes”, in Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers

I am grateful to Greig Crysler at UC Berkeley’s College of

Pilgrimage. My thanks to Bruce Embrey, Gann Matsuda and the

ACT Australia Capital Territory

NACP National Archives and Records Administration at

Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi

comparative and temporal approach is aimed at globalizing a topic too

Whereas normative expressions of political and cultural sovereignty are

encompass a previously peripheral geography – the Paciﬁc Basin. As the

Approach and Framing

Studies of Nazi architectural innovations – the forced-labor concentra-

war memories, including those linked to commemorative sites, impact

While Holocaust scholars have studied camps as laboratories of totalitar-

materials, or demarcating spaces for recreation or beautiﬁcation modify-

The Shape of the Book

is that the Paciﬁc War’s imperial border contestations were inscribed in

dispossession and immigrant restriction, similar to Australia but on

It examines the construction of physical memorials, cemeteries and peace

Each of the case studies has a similar coterie of memoirs, heritage or

Two tropes circulating in discussions of the types of architecture that

repackaging of sovereign power described by Foucault. Agamben, by

heterogeneity and creolized sensibilities in societies linked by the South

discriminatory systems contribute to create layers of inequality that struc-

found in country-speciﬁc studies that focus in depth on a national con-

War in the Paciﬁc

a still-demanding parent geography to which they are militarily, and in

landownership, leasing or sharecropping by non-European immigrants,

each ethnic community, siloed by language or religion, seemingly experi-

capitulation was an unmitigated Allied disaster. Predominantly British and

Intersections of Sovereignty in Captivity

territories, were placed in eighteen large, purpose-built hutted or tented

remains. Titles like Walls of Wire, Stalag Australia, Marched in and

Studies can be divided into those exogenous to Singapore representing

distributed across the Japanese archipelago.48 Initially located in the

as individuals for speciﬁc prejudicial activities, whereas west coast

introducing this case study.54 Numerous archeological and other studies by

The Instrumentality of Camps

consider the broader cross-border mobilization and suppression of

At many of the sites examined in this study, accommodation for civil-

Guinea, remote imperial obligations were displaced by concerns for

commemorative spaces forming a Peace Precinct and including the

Manzanar site, its gardens and some physical structures is mirrored by

power of empire as exacted through architecture, even in its most

Australia’s internment and prisoner-of-war (POW) camps were built on

was their physical adaptation to accommodate these different prisoner

The Australian Historical Context for Internment

enough to be admitted to Australia . . . [but also] black enough to be