Small wonder they turned their backs

Even 80 years on, the inhumane treatment meted out to Allied captives during the Second World War by the Japanese remains hugely controversial

- By Prof Michael Snape

’TWAS a silent, poignant protest. Spurning an appeal from then Prime Minister Tony Blair, hundreds of British veterans of the Second World War pointedly turned their backs on the Japanese Emperor Akihito as he visited London and Cardiff in 1998. In a previous state visit in 1971, Akihito’s father, Emperor Hirohito, met with a similar response. At Claridge’s Hotel in London, the son of a prisoner of war who had died at Japanese hands barracked him — and a tree Hirohito planted at Kew Gardens was found cut down the following day, with a sign declaring: “They did not die in vain.”

The source of such bitter hostility lay decades earlier, in the war in the Far East.

In the months after Japan’s attack on America’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Philippines (then a US protectorate) fell like dominoes.

As a result, around 300,000 Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen fell into Japanese hands as prisoners of war (POWs). And many more civilians too, including women and children. This was a Japanese victory on a stupefying scale and, in the Far East and the Pacific, the course of the war was largely set by the need to halt and reverse this spectacular tide of conquest.

But the resentment shown in these state visits did not arise from the shame and humiliation of the vanquished - but from the treatment they received as POWs. While large numbers of Indian soldiers were cajoled or coerced into joining the pro-Japanese, pro-independence Indian National Army, the bulk of prisoners were treated as a vast and expendable labour force — put to work, regardless of the human cost, in consolidating Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.