In comparison with the situation elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Chinese communities in the Indonesian archipelago fared relatively well during the Japanese Occupation. The killings in Malaya and the demands for forced Chinese labour in Thailand had few parallels in the archipelago.1 However, on two occasions in 1943-44 the Naval Police in Western Borneo accused the substantial Chinese community living in the vicinity of Pontianak of planning an anti-Japanese uprising, and executed several hundred people. These incidents form the subject of the present article, which argues that the killings took place because ambitious naval officers fabricated stories about an anti-Japanese plot. (For Western Borneo see Map 4).