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Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945: Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley
by Geoffrey Emerson
Reviewed by Bill Purves
Geoffrey Emerson has collected here and analyzed interviews with some of those interned in the Stanley civilian camp during the war. Emerson was not an internee himself -- he admits that during the war he was imprisoned in a crib in upstate New York -- but Hong Kong Internment summarizes unstructured interviews with 20 women and 3 men who survived. This new book is in fact a re-publication of a thesis Emerson researched in 1970 when, as he points out, few former internees had yet published their memoirs. It is in no sense a first person tale of suffering and survival. For that, Agnes Keith's Three Came Home (in which she makes the astonishing admission that after the war she had at least one of her captors murdered) would make a more compelling read. Indeed, Hong Kong Internment preserves all of the academic accoutrements of the original thesis, but the nature of the interviews makes it a readable and convincing account of life in the Stanley camp.
Emerson makes it clear that the Japanese simply dumped all the internees together in what was in those days a rather remote spot and let them fend for themselves. There were about 2700 of them at the outset, but about 475 were repatriated before the end of the war, (only) 121 died and a few babies were born. Emerson recounts how the fending for themselves proceeded in a wide range of areas from religion, to crime, to diseases and escapes. Indeed, a great many doctors and nurses were interned at Stanley, and they kept copious records, so medical matters get more attention than they perhaps deserve in Emerson's account.
In 1970, the pre-war view was still current that Hong Kong had been founded by and for British merchants, and that they should naturally run the place. Anyone else, Chinese or Western, was free to benefit from their self-interested rule or, if he didn't like it, to return to wherever he came from. This was, of course, also the rationale underlying apartheid in another of Britain's overseas dominions. Foreshadowing our situation in Hong Kong today, the internees from the beginning held elections for a governing council. This council excluded all former civil servants and, as with Legco today, claimed a democratic mandate to direct the running of the camp. As today, the colonial power had every interest in discouraging democracy, and the Japanese insisted on dealing only with the acting Governor. (The official Governor was interned in Manchuria.) The acting governor naturally went along with this and eventually tried to abrogate to himself the power to accept or reject the decisions of the camp council and to implement or overturn the decisions of the camp's judicial committee punishing criminal acts.
This is an academic thesis, but a thesis well worth reading both for its details of life under internment and for its 1970 picture of Hong Kong life and the mores of the 1940s. I would complain only that the original thesis failed to summarize anywhere the regulations defining the Japanese regime. We suddenly come across references to curfews, punishments and censorship without any general picture of what rules the Japanese imposed and how strictly they enforced them. Still, this is a glimpse of camp life well worth having.
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Bill Purves is a Hong Kong-based writer. He is the author of several books, including A Sea of Green: A Voyage Around the World of Ocean Shipping and China on the Lam: On Foot Across the People's Republic.
by Geoffrey Emerson
Reviewed by Bill Purves
Geoffrey Emerson has collected here and analyzed interviews with some of those interned in the Stanley civilian camp during the war. Emerson was not an internee himself -- he admits that during the war he was imprisoned in a crib in upstate New York -- but Hong Kong Internment summarizes unstructured interviews with 20 women and 3 men who survived. This new book is in fact a re-publication of a thesis Emerson researched in 1970 when, as he points out, few former internees had yet published their memoirs. It is in no sense a first person tale of suffering and survival. For that, Agnes Keith's Three Came Home (in which she makes the astonishing admission that after the war she had at least one of her captors murdered) would make a more compelling read. Indeed, Hong Kong Internment preserves all of the academic accoutrements of the original thesis, but the nature of the interviews makes it a readable and convincing account of life in the Stanley camp.
Emerson makes it clear that the Japanese simply dumped all the internees together in what was in those days a rather remote spot and let them fend for themselves. There were about 2700 of them at the outset, but about 475 were repatriated before the end of the war, (only) 121 died and a few babies were born. Emerson recounts how the fending for themselves proceeded in a wide range of areas from religion, to crime, to diseases and escapes. Indeed, a great many doctors and nurses were interned at Stanley, and they kept copious records, so medical matters get more attention than they perhaps deserve in Emerson's account.
In 1970, the pre-war view was still current that Hong Kong had been founded by and for British merchants, and that they should naturally run the place. Anyone else, Chinese or Western, was free to benefit from their self-interested rule or, if he didn't like it, to return to wherever he came from. This was, of course, also the rationale underlying apartheid in another of Britain's overseas dominions. Foreshadowing our situation in Hong Kong today, the internees from the beginning held elections for a governing council. This council excluded all former civil servants and, as with Legco today, claimed a democratic mandate to direct the running of the camp. As today, the colonial power had every interest in discouraging democracy, and the Japanese insisted on dealing only with the acting Governor. (The official Governor was interned in Manchuria.) The acting governor naturally went along with this and eventually tried to abrogate to himself the power to accept or reject the decisions of the camp council and to implement or overturn the decisions of the camp's judicial committee punishing criminal acts.
This is an academic thesis, but a thesis well worth reading both for its details of life under internment and for its 1970 picture of Hong Kong life and the mores of the 1940s. I would complain only that the original thesis failed to summarize anywhere the regulations defining the Japanese regime. We suddenly come across references to curfews, punishments and censorship without any general picture of what rules the Japanese imposed and how strictly they enforced them. Still, this is a glimpse of camp life well worth having.
--
Bill Purves is a Hong Kong-based writer. He is the author of several books, including A Sea of Green: A Voyage Around the World of Ocean Shipping and China on the Lam: On Foot Across the People's Republic.
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