Voices and Silences of Memory: Civilian Internees of the Japanese in British Asia during the Second World War

Abstract

W hen invading Japanese forces seized most of Southeast Asia and the western half of the Pacific during the Second World War, some twenty thousand British civilians were incarcerated in numerous internment camps in the region. Since the end of the war, the experiences of these internees of the Japanese have occupied a marginalized position in public memories of the conflict. In postwar Britain, public images of captivity in the East have been largely dominated by recollections of prisoners of war (POWs) of the Japanese, particularly those who were subjected to brutalities on the Burma-Thailand Railway. While the private memories of Japanese-held civilians have received increasing public attention in recent decades as a result of some film