ABSTRACT
Dutch who were held captive by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945 are entrenched in public memories of the war. The history of colonisation, World War II in Asia, and the retreat from empire, are well represented in school curricula and textbooks, which invariably mention the experience of Dutch nationals in Japanese prison camps.1 There are also several dozen monuments in the Netherlands devoted to the experience of imprisonment under the Japanese, and famous Dutch novelists have written about the Japanese occupation of Indonesia and its aftermath.2
