Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941-1945

4. Inside the Gate: The Nature of the Japanese Administration of the Civilian Internment Camps

Inside the Gate The Nature of the JapaneseAdministration of the Civilian Internment Camps When Ethel Chapman got down from the truck at Silliman, when Alice Bryant and her husband heard the gates shut behind them at Bacolod, or when JayHill, Grace Nash, and others found themselves dumped unceremoniously in the dusty center of Santo Tomas, where was it exactly that they found themselves — and more important, in vjlnail Neither a POW nor a temporary transit camp, the internment camps almost defied official classification. Even today, if one tries to locate documents relating to civilian internees in the Philippines during World War II, the researcher usually finds records indexed with those of prisoners at Camp O'Donnell or Cabanatuan, as if the civilian internees were some form of honorary 108 4 Inside the Gate 109 POW (see, for example, Paul S. Dulls The Tokyo Trials: A Functional Index).1 Although it may seem a niggling point to arrive at a sound classification for the kind of internment civilians suffered, such legalism can have tremendous ramifications. Depending on its title, under which rules or international conventions would the camp supposedly operate? Did, for example, the Hague Convention or provisions of the International Red Cross or even Geneva apply to those who were clearly not combatants? Did the requirement that prisoners receive an Imperial Japanese "soldiers ration" seem adequate for nursing mothers, children under twelve, Spanish-American War veterans in their seventies, or teenagers? Should middle-aged couples be forced to do field labor, exist in jail cells, or suffer interrogation? Obviously, ordinarystandards of militaryreciprocitywouldn't suffice. Neither would ordinaryrulesof administration. Administration on its surface seems a dusty, tedious subject filled with, perhaps , management techniques, accounting procedures, and chains of command . Examined more closely, however, administration assumes a vital importance , because it ordinarily outlines the procedures any captor uses to decide such things as food allotments per person, personal square footage, rules affecting movement in and out of camp, and punishment for offenses. The nature of the civilian internment camps' administration, then, becomes a transitional but important subject in this work—somewhat similar to a gate that leads from the early chapters dealing with civilian life before and at the beginning of the war to the later chapters that describe life in the internment camps and, ultimately, rescue. Only by understanding the rules, regulations, and orders (or specific lack of any or all of these) can anyone begin to understand the reasons for the necessity of repeatedly bowing at a correct angle on every occasion to guards, for having only camote tops, fish heads, and rough rice for a meal, or indeed why over 7,000 people of various ages found themselves languishing in camp at all (Waterford, 146). Administration guided and limited, allowed or disallowed, and shaped and changed every concrete aspect of the internees' lives, and it helped to shape their hope as well. As there is difficulty definingan internment camp, it is obviouslyeven more difficult to define the nature of that camps proper administration.What can be said tends initially in the broadest classification to be a negativedefinition. Civilian internment camps were not set up or administered like the POW camps in the Philippines, nor were they equivalent in nature or administration to the infamous Nazi concentration camps. Ultimately, they even differed significantly from the civilian internment camps for the Japanese in the United States, especially in terms of the waythey were run. UO Captured As noted earlier, the first misapprehension comes, perhaps, by confusing the civilian internment experience in the Philippines with that of the POWs there. Though POWs and internees were both generally badly fed, the degree of suffering differed markedly in the Philippines in terms of medicines available , physical torture, slave labor, and punishment. (Amuch more likely comparison would be with those civilian internment camps of mostly British and Dutch in Sumatra, Malaya, and Java, where treatment and conditions were brutal enough to resemble the conditions of the POWs [Waterford, 32-45; Russell, 205; 209]. The farther south the camp was, the worse the conditions.) Unlike Cabanatuan or O'Donnell or Davao Penal Colony (the largest POW camps in the Philippines), Santo Tomas and the other civilian camps were partially administered by the civilian internees themselves to a much greater degree than was true at the POW camps. Perhaps this wasbecause, measured by that Japanese national yardstick,the code of Bushido, any militaryprisoner who disgraced...