ABSTRACT
By the early months of 1942, the colonial territories of Hong Kong, Malaya, British North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore had been wrenched from British hands by the Japanese. From the very moment of the British surrender, deliberate efforts were made by the conquering forces to humiliate most Allied nationals—both military and civilian—who had fallen into their hands. A range of methods were also deployed by the invaders to demonstrate that the Japanese had overthrown the racial order previously dominated by Europeans. Some British expatriates in Hong Kong were ordered to clear up rubble from the battle or to clean filthy buildings with their bare hands. Over the following months, the bulk of the British and other Western civilians in these territories were interned by the conquering forces in camps such as Stanley in Hong Kong, Changi and Sime Road in Singapore and Lintang in Borneo (Archer 2004: 5; Emerson 2008: 36; Horne 2004: 77–8; Snow 2003: 131). In these camps, several key elements of colonial society were thrown into close, fettered proximity for three and a half years: British colonial administrators, business chiefs, wealthy taipans (owners of foreign mercantile establishments), missionaries and the wives of high-ranking colonial officials were forced to co-exist with policemen, prostitutes and clerks. The Japanese had originally decreed that all European ‘enemy aliens’ (such as British and Dutch civilians) should be held captive in internment camps. However, as the war progressed, these prisoners were joined in various stages by other colonial minorities such as Eurasians and Baghdadi Jews whom the Japanese increasingly came to perceive as a threat to their new order, partly as a result of their part-European backgrounds or pre-war connections ( Nathan 1986 : 189). 1
