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ABSTRACT
During WWII, a number of British, American and Dutch Far East prisoners of war (FEPOWs) held captive by the Japanese in the Kamioka POW camp in Japan are known to have kept secret war diaries. This paper examines the ways in which these six men recorded the state of the body in their diaries, and their preoccupation with detailing their own (loss of) physical and mental wellbeing during captivity. Unsure of their lives, severely undernourished and forced to do hard labour in the local Mitsui mines, the men carved out an alternative identity or persona in their diaries. In this case study of writing the body in times of prolonged and extreme duress, and the relation to textual identity formation, analysis of the diaries shows that there are several bodily themes such as ‘hunger’, ‘illness and pain’, ‘weight’, ‘mental anguish’ and ‘death’ that cut across differences of nationality and background. As the men struggle to survive, they oscillate between identification with, and disassociation from these sufferings of the body and mind. Their position in the camp hierarchy, to whom they write, and their sense of home are other factors that impact upon their corporeal experiences and their diary personas.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Babs Boter, Kristien Van den Brande, Derk Byvanck, Philippine Hoegen, Katinka Jesse, Lulu Ning Hui, Meritxell Simon-Martin, Leonieke Vermeer and the anonymous peer reviewers of Life Writing for their invaluable contributions during the development of this paper. Special thanks also to the families of the men whose diaries feature in the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The camp, which the Japanese initially called the Kamioka Branch Camp, was renamed Osaka 7-B in February 1943, and Nagoya 7-B in August 1945. In this article, I will refer to the camp consistently as the Kamioka camp, which is the name the POWs continued to use during and after the war. For more information on the location of the camp, its history, the camp layout, rosters of POWs and additional information see http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/nagoya/kamioka_1/kamioka.htm.
2 Please see below the section on corpus and methodolgy for detailed information on the diaries and their authors, as well as footnotes 12–14 for precise references.
3 This quote was inspired by an earlier article by Marsden (Citation1946); see Robson et al. (Citation2009), 94.
4 Another, often overlooked factor, were allied attacks on Japanese transport ships (Kemperman and Broers Citation2003, 10; Sturma Citation2020, 520).
5 In Kamioka, at least two diaries were destroyed in this way, one by the aforementioned Honing, and the other by J.P.M. Stouten, see further below.
6 Laqueur Weiss examined diaries written during WWII in German concentration camps. Although I am well aware of the many ways in which both the authors, and the circumstances in which they wrote their diaries, differed to those writing in Japanese captivity, there were also parallels. These include, among others, the mostly Western background of the authors, the hostile environment they found themselves in, the forced labour, the threat of starvation and illness, the lack of news from home and the constant presence of (the threat of) death.
7 Like Laqueur Weiss, Dresden draws on diaries written in German concentration camps. See my earlier note on Laqueur Weiss’ work.
8 Schahadat recounts how this discursive triangle was first applied by Magdalena Marszałek (2003) to her analysis of the Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska’s diaries.
10 Bouman’s original diary is part of the private collection of the Bouman family. A copy of a typed out transcript can be found in the Archives of Groningen, 2553 Bouman family, nr. 19. For Harle’s diary, see Private papers S.R. Harle, Imperial War Museum London, catalogue number Documents.8460, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030010034
11 Pase’s diary, both copies of the original handwritten version and a typscript, can be found at http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/nagoya/kamioka_1/kamioka.htm. Copies of the original diary of Rüphan as well as a transcript were sent to me by his daughter.
12 Wassenaar’s original diary is in Australia. The translation was forwarded to the author with the permission of the Wassenaar family via the Japanese POW network. A transcript of Stouten’s diary can be found in the NIOD Netherlands Institute for war, holocaust and genocide studies in Amsterdam, NIOD 11.24. Stouten’s niece, Hanna Stouten, has published an extensive study of her uncle’s wartime writings (Citation2008).
13 The Dutch troops captured and imprisoned by the Japanese in what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) reflected the pre-war stratifications of society in the Dutch colony. Most of the regular soldiers making up the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL, ‘Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger’) were of Ambonese, Moluccan or mixed Indo-European heritage, and they found themselves on the bottom rung of POW camp society.
14 Examples of other body themes that feature in the diaries are: ‘cold’, ‘what goes into the body (medication)’, ‘personal hygiene’ and ‘sexuality’.
15 For a detailed account of the circumstances in the Kamioka camp, see Hoegen (Citation2020), 57–83.
16 An earlier version of this book appeared in 1965, with the title Lood voor de vloot van de Keizer [Lead for the Emperor’s fleet]. The author uses pseudonyms for all the main characters, and has chosen the form of an autofictional novel. However, all the main events correspond with those described in other life writing to emerge from Kamioka, and for those familiar with life in the camp, it is not difficult to identify the real characters on which those in the book are based.
17 There is circumstantial evidence that Bouman was—at least in some parts—either suppressing any negative or uncomfortable feelings he may have had or deliberately omitting them from his writings. From letters he wrote later in life we know that he asked his brother to return the Kamioka diary to him in 1965. Rereading it left him ‘unmoved’, except for where he sets out his feelings of respect and love for his elder brother. ‘The rest lacks emotion.’ In 1968, after struggling with ill-health, the death of his wife after a complicated marriage and financial difficulties, he took his own life at the age of 59. For a full biography of his and his wife’s lives, see Hoegen (Citation2020).
18 This figure is based on camp rosters, to be found at http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/Nagoya/kamioka_1/kamioka.htm.
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Ernestine Hoegen
Ernestine Hoegen is an independent scholar, writer and translator. After a PhD in criminal law, she pursued a career within the Dutch judiciary and as a sociologist of law before turning full-time to writing. In her research, she focusses on the experiences of prisoners of war and civilians held in Japanese internment camps during WWII, and on the decolonisation of Indonesia. In 2020, she published a biography of Dutchwoman Mieke Bouman, a defence lawyer involved in controversial trials held in 1950s Indonesia. She is an editor of the Yearbook of Women’s History.