‘Like Pebbles Stuck in a Sieve’: Reading Romushas in the Second-Generation Photography of Southeast Asian Captivity

Abstract

Western depictions of captivity across Southeast Asia during the Second World War are dominated by the images of military prisoners of war who were captured by Japanese forces following the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Much less widely known are the histories of romushas: forced labourers from Java who were recruited in their millions and suffered extreme deprivation and ill-treatment through systems of hard labour and corporal punishment. This article explores how the second-generation work of Dutch photographer Jan Banning retraces the rare stories of some of these romushas, and how — with a lack of public places of remembrance — the boundaries between survival and memorial are blurred through the layered functions of Banning’s portraits.

KEYWORDS:

• romushas
• prisoners of war
• Second World War
• Southeast Asia
• Jan Banning
• photography
• postmemory

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to Layla Renshaw for her thoughtful readings of various drafts.

Notes

1 Death was the result, rather than the apparent aim, of such treatment. Indeed the brutality shown towards romushas on Japanese military work was not always evident elsewhere, such as during civilian projects on Java itself (Sato, 2004).

2 Subsequently there has been a surge of interest in raising awareness of the heritage of Dutch Indonesians in recent years. One of the longest established examples is the The Indo Project, set up in 2009 by a group of second-generation Indo-Europeans to raise awareness of Dutch-Indonesian heritage, particularly among those forcibly removed from Indonesia during the independence movement. See: https://theindoproject.org/.

3 Aside from Banning’s work, examples of the testimonies of former romushas can be found in Poeze (2009); and Baird & Marzuki (2015). These draw on archival documentation related to War Crimes Trials.

4 All of Banning’s portraits can also be viewed as a ‘photo story’ at: http://www.panos.co.uk/stories/2-13-1194-1700/Jan-Banning/Traces-of-War/#.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded through a Leeds Humanities Research Institute/Wellcome Trust ISSF postdoctoral fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Lizzie Oliver

Lizzie Oliver is the Chair of the Researching FEPOW History Group. She completed her PhD at the University of Leeds and Imperial War Museum. Her book Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway: Narratives of History and Memory is due to be published by Bloomsbury later this year.