Labor under Military Occupation: Allied POWs and the Allied Occupation of Japan

Abstract

The above recollection from a former Australian POW of the Japan’s, Bill Wharton, invokes not just an image of the moment of Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War in 1945; it demonstrates the centrality of labor to the performance of power under conditions of war and military occupation. While it has been widely acknowledged that ‘labour was a central feature of colonialism’,² it is less recognized in the scholarly literature that labor also has an intimate relationship with military occupation. Occupation, like colonialism, cannot function without access to local labor through various levels of coercion. Labor is not just an economic relationship or structure, but a social act and practice, and it is primarily through sexual relations or work that the occupier and the occupied interact most closely with each other. Perhaps even more important is that labor is a site for the enactment of occupation power, as demonstrated in the epigram, and for its subversion. The primary aim of this chapter, then, is to explore the role of labor in the enactment of power at a grassroots level under conditions of war and military occupation, in the spirit of Foucault’s concept of power as (re)produced and disseminated throughout society, not just as an omnipotent force imposed from above.

I was with a work party near Changi collecting barbed wire to be used for fencing when the news [of surrender] came over a secret radio … The barbed wire was then used to fence the Japanese in. They immediately became the POWs and we no longer had to work for them. It was lovely [emphasis added].¹