Prisoners of war of the Japanese: War and memory in Australia

In the almost 70 years that have passed since the end of World War II, war has become more, rather than less, central to articulations of Australian national identity and nationalism. In the last 20 years, especially, attendances have soared at Anzac Day (April 25), Australia’s annual national day of war commemoration. Visitors flock to the Australian War Memorial, a museum devoted – a word that is apposite rather than overstated – to the memory of Australia’s involvement in conflicts around the globe. State-sponsored commemorative activity abounds, as does the memory work of civil society (websites, battlefield pilgrimages, fundraising for memorialisation) alongside immensely popular non-fiction books and television series on the topic of Australian participation in wars since the late nineteenth century. This is a development that has puzzled commentators and scholars alike, who anticipated that the anti-war sentiments of the Vietnam era and the passing of time would lead to fading interest in the military exploits of earlier generations and a diminution of the nationalism attendant upon them. One of the more intriguing aspects of this phenomenon is the emergence of the incarcerated soldier, the prisoner of war (POW) of the Japanese in World War II, as a figure to rival the iconic centrality of the original Anzacs, an acronym that refers to members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), formed in World War I (Beaumont, 2005; Reed, 2004). In a culture obsessed with the valorisation of military service, how has it come to pass that a defeated and abused soldier has emerged as a character of such import? What can this tell us about the memory work of late modernity in a settler-colonial nation such as Australia?

This article examines the return of the POW as a central figure in Australian memory of World War II. While historians have been alert to the political dimensions of the reinvigoration of war memories in contemporary Australia, they have less carefully tracked the central place of the damaged, broken or abused veteran within them. Memories of imprisonment by the Japanese in World War II, that is, need to be placed within the context of the cultures of trauma that were facilitated by the memory boom from the late 1970s onwards. Recognising POW memory as an example of traumatic memory allows us to move beyond an analysis bounded by the nation state, and to argue that instead of seeing it as emerging in competition with other contemporary memories focused on the suffering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it shares some elements in common with them.

Imprisonment by the Japanese has been suggested as ‘the single most distinguishing fact of World War II as far as Australians were concerned’ (Nelson, 1993: 23). Of the 22,000 Australian military personnel the Japanese captured in the course of the Pacific War, one-third did not survive the experience. This constituted over a quarter of all Australian combat-related deaths in World War II. Significant numbers of those who returned suffered lingering psychological and physical problems, for many years, from the after-effects of enforced labour, inadequate medical treatment facilities and poor nutrition during their captivity (Adam-Smith, 1992; Garton, 1996; Henning, 1995; Kenny, 1986; McKernan, 2001; Nelson, 1985). Ostensibly, these experiences might seem unpromising material for incorporation into Anzac nationalist mythology, which focused on the distinguishing characteristics of the performance of Australian soldiers in war. Yet, in contemporary popular nationalism, a ready explanation for the equivalence between Anzacs and POWs seems to lie in the mythical qualities each is meant to share: mateship, resourcefulness, egalitarianism and courage. While Anzacs distinguished themselves on the battlefield, POWs are now believed to have exhibited similar characteristics as they endured a gruelling captivity between 1942 and 1945. Despite this popular logic, the apparent continuities between Anzacs and POWs mask more complex cultural processes at work.

Several historians have shown that despite POWs’ ultimate embrace within the mythology of Anzac, the trajectory of their inclusion has been rather more complicated than a simple focus on mateship might suggest. That is, POWs also inspired a deep ambivalence, as defeated soldiers incarcerated by an enemy long constructed as racially inferior to them. In the early post-war period, particularly, the confinement and passivity of incarceration, states more often linked with the feminine, when combined with the physical emaciation and degradation of POWs, also raised questions about these soldiers’ manliness (Beaumont, 1988; Garton, 1996; Gerster, 1987; Sobocinska, 2010; Twomey, 2007). Defeat, emasculation and shattered pride of the White race made commemoration of the war experiences of POWs in the 1940s and 1950s a difficult task and one that the state, at least, refused to countenance (Inglis, 1998: 327). The 1960s and 1970s were decades of relative quiet in terms of new narratives about imprisonment. Yet, the memories of captivity were ever-present in the families, homes and communities where former prisoners lived, and the memoirs of an early period continued in print (Bomford, 2010; Hamilton, 2010). The public presence of POWs faded; as Australia’s relationship with Japan became normalised, the question of compensation appeared closed (by being declined), and the war to be talked about became Vietnam, not World War II.

Since the 1980s, there has been an extraordinary rise in eyewitness accounts of the POW experience, from television and radio documentaries to an ever-increasing number of personal memoirs and newspaper feature articles on individual survivors. This was a development that took even former prisoners by surprise. In 1984, when launching a collection of photographs taken on the Burma-Thai Railway and in Changi, former POW Dr Lloyd Cahill commented that he had ‘been intrigued by the resurgence of interest in the fate of P.O.W. in the Far East’ (Cahill, 1984). Two years later, a major metropolitan newspaper ran with the headline ‘Anzac Day calls back memories of horror’, and featured several former POWs, a headline and focus unthinkable for a story about Anzac Day for most of the previous 40 years (Age, 25 April 1986: 3). Prior to that time, POWs occasionally appeared in Anzac Day reporting rather more in the guise of stoic survivors than war’s victims. By the 1990s, POWs had become a strong presence in significant commemorative events, in contrast to their previously muted appearance. ‘Australia Remembers’, a well-funded federal government programme to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ending of World War II in 1995, chose a returning POW (albeit one from Europe) as the central photograph on its logo. That year, the Australian War Memorial marked the fall of Singapore with a POW commemoration that was addressed by the Prime Minister and attended by 1200 surviving prisoners and their families. Developments in psychiatry, most particularly the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980, and the narratives of trauma it at once unleashed and legitimated, recast former POWs in a sympathetic light as the traumatised survivors of an earlier war. The cultural cachet attendant on the status of being a former POW manifested itself in astonishing circumstances in 2009 when Rex Crane, the President of the ex-POWs Association of Australia, was exposed as having fabricated his entire wartime history. Mr Crane had never been a serving member of any defence force, let alone enduring a long and difficult war as a prisoner of the Japanese.

In many ways, the proliferation of memory about the war experiences of POWs was typical of developments elsewhere, which saw an outpouring of memories about past events deemed traumatic or damaging to either the individual or the nation. Historians, sociologists and cultural theorists have debated the confluence of factors that resulted in the memory boom of this period, which range – although this is not an exhaustive list – from the factors linked to the undermining of narratives of progress, such as the crisis in Western cultures occasioned by the Holocaust, total wars and genocides, the legacies of movements for social change in the 1960s and the subsequent turn to identity-politics and histories of oppression and repression, to the impact of mass media and digital technologies (Ashplant et al., 2004; Bell, 2006; Olick et al., 2011; Winter, 2006).One of its features, as Jeffrey Olick has argued, was a ‘politics of regret’, which he has defined as the practices through ‘which many contemporary societies confront toxic legacies of the past’ (Olick, 2007: 122). In the case of POWs, this has most frequently been cast as overdue recognition of the profound trauma they had suffered, resulting in a significant compensation payment in 2001 and a ‘POW Recognition Supplement’ to their pensions from 2011, which is expected to cost approximately AUD$27 million by 2015 (Prime Minister of Australia Press Office, 2011). While in some respects the memory boom, and its particular focus on traumatic or regrettable episodes, has been associated with the decline of nationalism, in Australia, it has been accompanied by an explosion of interest in Australia’s military heritage, which is nationalist in its orientation and expression.

The resurgence of Anzac-inspired nationalism, which has the memory of participation in wars of the twentieth century at its core, has been temporally coincident with intense political and cultural debates about the historical treatment of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. These apparently contradictory features of the memory boom in Australia – the fascination with, and veneration of, Australians’ experiences of war and a growing awareness of the historical injustices suffered by Australia’s Aboriginal people – have led several scholars to reflect on the relationship between them. Mark McKenna (2010) argued that a focus on war, and most specifically on Gallipoli as the ‘foundational moment’ of the Australian nation, has been embraced as a positive counter-narrative to the extensive public debate, since the 1980s, about dispossession. Thus, war-centred nationalism (of which POWs are undoubtedly a part) is constructed as having a political imperative because it has the capacity to sidestep the problematic relationship between Australia Day, which commemorates the declaration of British sovereignty over an already-peopled continent, and colonisation. Instead, it substitutes participation in an international conflict as emblematic of both nationhood achieved and national characteristics distinguished. This complements Ann Curthoys’ earlier suggestion that white Australian historical consciousness has a distinctive ‘victimological narrative’, centred on convicts, pioneers who battled the harsh environment, sporting heroes struck down by jealous overseas rivals and brave soldiers sacrificed owing to the incompetence of British generals. ‘The emphasis in popular white Australian mythology on the settler as victim’, she writes, ‘works against substantial acknowledgement and understanding of a colonial past, and informs and inflames white racial discourse’ (Curthoys, 1999: 4).

The implication that a focus on war, and on the suffering of white Australians, competes with other narratives about the historical injustices suffered by Indigenous people echoes some work undertaken in the American context, which suggests that the embrace of Holocaust memory in the United States effaces a cultural space that might also be occupied by acknowledgement of the racism perpetrated within the United States and directed towards black people and native Americans, for example. Michael Rothberg proposes that such analyses tend to work with a ‘competitive model’ of memory. ‘Many people assume’ Rothberg (2009) writes, ‘that the public sphere in which collective memories are articulated is a scarce resource and that the interaction of different collective memories within that sphere takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for pre-eminence’ (p. 3). Rothberg instead offers, as an alternative to a competitive model of memory, the idea that memory is ‘multidirectional’. Building on Freud’s concept of ‘screen memory’ – that memory is an ‘associative process that builds through displacement and substitution’ – Rothberg (2009) suggests that conceiving of memory as multidirectional has the advantage of underscoring the point that the content of a memory takes on meaning ‘precisely in relationship to other memories in a network of associations’ (p. 16).

This conception of memory as enmeshed in a complex series of associations is a useful way to begin to think about the relationship between Australian war memories, debates about Indigenous suffering and dispossession and more globalised memories of the Holocaust. Rather than seeing the renewed focus on POWs since the 1980s as somehow seeking to compete with the memories of colonialism and dispossession, a more fruitful way forward may be to investigate the ‘imaginative links’ that produce the relationship between them and to see them both as related to the dominance of Holocaust memory models. To put Indigenous suffering and POWs in the same frame, it is necessary to refuse an empiricist rendering of comparison, which often results in the employment of a yardstick to measure like with like and thereby creates the implication of hierarchies of suffering. Rather, the analysis might be thought of, again in Rothberg’s (2009) words, as an investigation into the ‘mutual constitution and ongoing transformation of the objects of comparison’ (p. 18).

One small example can be taken from the deployment of the words ‘stolen’ and ‘trauma’ in late-twentieth-century Australia. The state’s removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their parents in Australia has come to be known, most especially since the 1990s, as creating a ‘stolen generation’. ‘Stolen’ is a powerful phrase. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) Report into this practice was officially published in 1997 as Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. ‘Stolen’ was never in the official title of the report, but it now has a central place in the cultural memory of child removal and has been adopted by the Commission on its website. The masthead page for the report now refers to Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report (1997). ‘Stolen’ in the case of Indigenous children clearly refers to the act of removal, but it also has a temporal implication – that the children lost their parents, and the period of childhood that they might otherwise have spent with them and the connections to land and culture that accompany the ties of a birth family.

It is this temporal meaning of stolen that has been adopted in the construction of public narratives about the experience of imprisonment in war. In the early 2000s, the Australian War Memorial created a mobile exhibition about Australian POWs and called it ‘Stolen Years’. It travelled throughout the country, and continues as an online exhibition on the War Memorial’s website and as a coffee-table book, published in 2002, called Stolen Years: Australian POWs. One reading of this title would be enough to see it as an appropriation of a term made popular through public debates about Indigenous suffering, and thereby in direct competition with it in the realm of public memory. Alternatively, this use of the term ‘stolen’ might be read as one of the ways in which the public memory of POWs was of a piece with contemporaneous moves to transform a legacy of doubt to one of greater compassion. This requires recognition that POWs did indeed once inspire ambivalence, a response long established by historians working in the field, but one overlooked in contemporary commemorative events, which erase the distance between past and present and assume that there has been continuity in a sympathetic response to them.

The memories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island suffering in the past, on the one hand, and the new prominence accorded to the traumatised survivors of war, on the other, are also manifestations of the trauma cultures that have been a feature of late-twentieth-century Western life. Their broader cultural resonance stems from international developments around the rise to cultural prominence of the eyewitness to trauma. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009) argue that it is important to recognise that trauma is a ‘historical construction’ and that it is only since the 1980s that it has been widely accepted that ‘a person exposed to violence may become traumatized and so be recognised as a victim’ (p. 22). Prior to that time – and more particularly before the creation of the category of PTSD in 1980 – the traumatised individual had been the subject of suspicion and doubt (that they were either malingering, angling for financial gain or constitutionally weak). Fassin and Rechtman (2009) have further argued that trauma has two genealogies – the first, psychiatric and psychological, in accordance with the medical definition (pp. 22–28). The second, which is more nebulous but equally significant, lies in the realm of the moral and metaphorical, whereby a broader acceptance of trauma, of the idea of the ‘tragic event’, ushered in new understandings of victimhood and of history. The past is thus reconfigured as a ‘painful scar’, and the trauma survivor provides the most authentic account of that past and thereby becomes ‘the witness to the horrors of our age’ (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009: 22). These shifting perceptions of the meanings of trauma, its metaphorical dimension and the rise to cultural prominence of the traumatised individual coincided exactly with the reinvigoration of war memories in Australia and with the prominence of public discussion around traumatic aspects of Indigenous history such as the child removal policies that led to the creation of a ‘stolen generation’.

‘Traumatic’ was a word used with reference to both the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and POWs from the 1990s. In both cases, media reports referred to some individual survivors of these quite distinctive historical events as suffering from ‘post traumatic stress disorder’ (Australian, 29 December 2001: 18; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January 1998: 9).The metaphorical language of trauma had been prominent in publicity surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Singapore, in 1992. Journalists described both the broader cultural impact of defeat and imprisonment, and the individual responses of Australian service personnel taken prisoner by the Japanese as traumatic. The ‘residual fear and trauma from that POW experience’ was inherent to the experience of defeat in the region (Sydney Morning Herald, 8 February 1992: 36).A similar logic was on display in the late 1990s in response to the inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. ‘The effect of the forced removal of children was as traumatic as a denial of native title rights’, Aboriginal social justice commissioner Mick Dodson declared in anticipation of the publication of the Bringing Them Home report (Australian, 2 May 1997: 4).Upon its release, editorials declared that the removal of Aboriginal children ‘constituted one of the most tragic and traumatic episodes in our history’, with ‘traumatic and destructive personal, social and cultural effects’ (Age, 22 May 1997: 14; Sydney Morning Herald, 22 May 1997: 14).

The adoption of the language of trauma in both cases reflected shifting understandings of history as a ‘painful scar’. From the 1990s, coverage of POW reunion tours and pilgrimages to the sites of incarceration included reference to the ‘traumatic’ impact of revisiting the scenes of suffering (Twomey, 2011). Reporting on the POW commemoration ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in 1995, in an article entitled ‘50 years on, but the painful memories linger’, one journalist recounted that he experienced the ‘same reaction’ from almost every ‘old Digger’: ‘The scars will always be there … I came to terms with it twenty years ago, but it will never go away’ (Age, 16 February 1995: 1). The ongoing suffering of Aboriginal families and communities was also a central feature of reporting on the stolen generations issue in the 1990s and 2000s. As one headline put it in 2000, ‘Stolen children, stolen history’ (Sunday Age, 16 April 2000: 18).

In adopting both the medical and metaphorical language of trauma, the memory of imprisonment by the Japanese in World War II exhibited features of other difficult memories in the post-war world. There are parallels here with the discourse surrounding the nature of Holocaust memory. Sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2002: 103) have argued that globalisation has transformed rather than erased national and ethnic memories, and that in the process these become subject to a ‘common patterning’. The ‘common patterning’ they attribute to a phase of modernity radically transformed by knowledge of the Holocaust, which leads to ‘mutual recognition of the history of the “Other”’ and a subsequent desire for reconciliation and recognition of a shared past. This choice to ‘incorporate the suffering of the “Other”’ thereby constitutes what Levy and Sznaider (2002: 103) dub ‘cosmopolitan memory’. By the 1980s and 1990s, the most obvious ways in which ‘cosmopolitan memory’ cultures informed POW memory in Australia was the way in which trauma narratives permeated the reporting of POW issues, thereby granting them greater legitimacy and a sympathetic hearing. Discourses about human rights and their abuses also influenced the engagement of POW groups in reparation and compensation claims submitted to the United Nations (Queensland Ex-POW Association, 1990). These claims were unsuccessful but ultimately prompted the nation state itself to provide its own ‘belated’ reparation, in the form of a AUD$25,000 one-off payment to surviving POWs and civilian internees of the Japanese in 2001. In response, one newspaper declared, ‘$25,000 eases the trauma’ (Australian, 26 September 2001: 2).

While Holocaust memory does not always tend in the ‘liberal direction of transcultural understanding’, a critique of Levy and Sznaider’s position that Dirk Moses (2011) has argued persuasively in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, in Australia, the cosmopolitan language of trauma and human rights violations that was attendant upon it, re-vivified and re-energised campaigns for recognition by former POWs. In the late 1940s and in 1950s, POW groups had campaigned unsuccessfully for compensation from the Australian government, a marked contrast to the success of their efforts by 2001. Contemporaneously, cosmopolitan memory cultures also influenced the narrative surrounding the historical and present day treatment of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. For instance, the Bringing Them Home report declared in 1997 that child removal constituted a crime against humanity and could be considered ‘genocidal’.

It is possible therefore to see the renewed attention to both war veterans and Indigenous people as a consequence of cosmopolitan memory cultures that draw attention to human rights abuses and the traumatised individual. Still, the different fate of campaigns for restitution and compensation for former prisoners and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people demonstrates Rothberg’s (2009) point that not all articulations of memory are equal, and ‘powerful social, political and psychic forces articulate themselves in every act of remembrance’ (p. 16). The increased public visibility of the memory of traumatic pasts for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, while generating new levels of sympathy from the broader culture, has also frequently been accompanied by controversy and debate, as was in evidence around the use of the term ‘genocide’ in relation to the practice of child removal and the refusal of a coalition-led federal government to apologise for it. In contrast, the renewed public attention devoted to memories of POWs is relatively uncontroversial, as long as it does not stray too far into territory that imperils the relationship with Japan, a significant trade partner. The ‘stolen generation’ finally received a formal apology from the Rudd government in 2008, but by then, former POWs had received a AUD$25,000 one-off payment in recognition of their wartime suffering, a financial recompense from the federal government that has not been forthcoming for the ‘stolen generation’ (Burns, 2008).

There are differences too in the responses to affective testimony. The idea of history as a ‘painful scar’ has fostered a concomitant desire to hear an authentic voice that attests to the power of the wound. A key feature of the return of POW memory, as with traumatic memories elsewhere, has been its emphasis on eyewitness testimony and affect. The explosion in the number of memoirs, the dominance of the individual story and photographs in newspaper accounts of the issue and in Department of Veterans’ Affairs publications is testament to that. The stolen generations issue has been similarly saturated with affective testimony; indeed, the inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families heard over 500 case histories and accepted 1000 written accounts. Yet, one former minister criticised this methodology on the grounds that administrators and welfare workers were not called to give evidence to the inquiry and charged that the history thus produced was unbalanced (Sunday Age, 16 April 2000: 18). In contrast, the veracity of POW memories is rarely questioned; there is almost never a call to hear the voice from the other side, from the camp guards, the prison officials and the Japanese overseers.

Yet, the privileging of the authentic voice poses its own issues. Our deep familiarity with the suffering described in POW testimony and in the photographic images of emaciated bodies means that they no longer shock but are in fact fully anticipated and therefore have come to possess their own aesthetic. Here, I draw on the work of Amos Goldberg, who has developed a critique of the use of victim testimony in the work of historian of the Holocaust, Saul Friedlander. ‘In our current culture’, Goldberg (2009) argues,

the excessive voices of the victims have exchanged their epistemological, ontological, ethical and revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the unimaginable, which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure. (p. 229)

A similar process has been underway in Australia in relation to the testimony and photographic images of the suffering POW. Each time there is a feature article about POWs, which since the mid-1980s has happened routinely in key anniversaries, and in Anzac Day media coverage, the ‘horror’ of POW experiences is presented to the reader as if they were reading or learning about it for the first time from the authentic voice of experience. However, such narratives have been in circulation for at least 25 years, and the capacity of this testimony to change what we know about the experience of captivity is now almost negligible.

The anticipation of ‘unimaginable horror’, which is in fact entirely imaginable because it is so familiar, via words and photographic images, induces what Amos Goldberg (2009: 229) has described as ‘melancholic pleasure’, and heightens rather than dulls the appetite for such narratives. Life as a POW of the Japanese is certainly outside the experience of those who have not been within a POW camp, but it is, in a cultural sense, familiar to us. And because it is familiar, and because it bears the marks of trauma and suffering, listening to or reading POW testimony, and looking at images of the suffering POW body means that we anticipate, before we read or look, how we might feel. This induces the pleasure, albeit melancholic, of repetition.

The rise to cultural prominence of the eyewitness to trauma is one way that we might begin to explain the resurgence of interest in Australians’ experiences of war. Undeniably, there are important political and domestic contexts for this development, which are largely about displacing anxiety about dispossession and occupation of the continent. However, there are also other developments, common to other Western liberal democracies, which have seen the traumatised individual emerge as the bearer of history and which unite, rather than bifurcate, the contemporaneous attention paid to the suffering of Indigenous Australians and traumatised war veterans. The cultural fascination with the tragic event, with an understanding of history as a ‘painful scar’ has seen a scramble for authentic accounts of those who have suffered in the course of those events. The emphasis on the traumatised individual runs the danger of becoming another form of entertainment, another aesthetic, that does very little to develop the historical imagination. While the memory of POWs’ wartime experiences received significant new attention from the 1980s, and ultimately resulted in significant monetary compensation by the 2000s, a question remains about the radical potential of the testimony it generated.