Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire

4. Internment

4 Internment AFTER BEING COMPELLED TO RESIDE temporarily in a sleazy brothel, several thousand disheveled and disarrayed Europeans and Euro­Americans were marched off to what became Stanley internment camp. Even this brothel, otherwise a site of degraded pleasure, was fraught with racial tension. Many Europeans had barely noticed the Indians who resided in Hong Kong before the war, nor were they fully cognizant of how heav­ ily dependent the mighty British Empire was on India itself. Yet, as in­ ternee John Streicker put it, the Indian guards at this brothel had “suc­ cumbed to the glowing promises of life under the Rising Sun, and foresworn the British Raj, so our pleas of hunger merely delighted them.”1 The Europeans, most of whom were accustomed to commodi­ ous surroundings, were not just ignored, they were jammed into small and suffocating rooms, bereft of food and other basic requirements. They could only gape in amazement as the once graceful city they had known was transformed into something alien. Bill Harman, an Aus­ tralian physician residing in Hong Kong, was appalled by the cutting down of so many trees: belatedly he “began to realize what it must be to be so poor that you have to resort to this to get fuel to cook the daily meal.” Looting had stripped the city bare, though he thought that “the worst looting was done by the undisciplined Chinese mobs.” There were “armed robberies all over the place,” as mercantile sentiments and revenge seeking against the Europeans merged neatly. An escape to the mainland—which Dr. Harman was able to execute miraculously— brought no relief, for in so doing he had to run the gauntlet of the Chi­ nese military, and “the chance of evading them and not being robbed of everything was about nil.”2 The missionary, Father James Smith, was struck by the “almost total absence of English signs on streets and over buildings and stores.” As an emblem of their hegemony, the invaders had sought to obliterate 80 INTERNMENT 81 signs of what was now seen as an alien language. In “the lobbies of of­ fice building[s], all the tenant names were in Chinese or Japanese, and it was very difficult,” he moaned, “to find one’s own family doctor”— if one were sufficiently lucky to escape the invaders.3 This was a telling signal of what was to come. The conquered and increasingly unkempt community of Europeans and Euro­Americans had received a bitter foretaste of the racial humiliation that was to follow when they were subjected to the debasing “March of Humiliation” through the mean streets of Hong Kong. Their fate was to turn on racial and ethnic factors, which were once passively accepted as brands of privilege, but now were to be treated much, much differently. Many were worried that their racial privilege had been destroyed for all time. David Bosanquet wondered what the Chinese thought of what they were seeing. “Was it contempt that an Asiatic race had so easily hum­ bled so many Europeans who had long dominated the indigenous pop­ ulation” and would the Chinese ever accept passively the status quo ante after what they had seen?4 The racial reversal was captured by a character in a novel by the U.S. writer Emily Hahn: “They say the Eng­ lish are monkeys in the zoo and this is Pan­Asia.”5 Conditions were abysmal in this “zoo.” The “almost complete ab­ sence of toilet paper” was, perhaps, the least of the problems encoun­ tered. “Some ladies wore little more than natural sun­tans.” The “fight against flies was constant,” while “kitchen staffs were at times defiant in their attitude and abusive to those who dared to advise them.” The “diet in Stanley camp was, without doubt, monotonous and . . . unsuit­ able for Europeans.” The rice internees were fed had “sand, small stones, cigarette ends, insects and their young, droppings, glass and once, at least, rat carcasses.” Some died due to dysentery. A “mild epi­ demic of chickenpox with 57 cases occurred late in 1944 and early 1945.” Some suffered “occasional waves of depression.”6 After they seized control,7 there was a “persistent, continuous and very effective racial and cultural propaganda” unleashed by the “Japanese military.” The European and Euro­American expatriates who had expected deference as a virtual birthright “were treated less con­ siderately than the higher­class Chinese.”8 A “flood of anti­white prop­ aganda poured over the people...