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
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Notes
SW Silliman, ‘Theoretical Perspectives on Labor and Colonialism: Reconsidering the California Missions’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20, No. 4 (2001): 379.
G McCormack and H Nelson (eds), The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History (St Leonards NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 162.
C Kenny, Captives: Australian Army Nurses in Japanese Prison Camps (St LuciaQLD: University of Queensland Press, 1986), pp. 76–7, 110–12.
See for example B Jeffrey, White Coolies (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957), pp. 30–3; and Kenny, Captives , pp. 42–5. For more recent discussions see D Flitton, ‘Australian wartime sex slave Jan Ruff-O’Hearne [sic] hits out at “hideous” Japanese denials’, Sydney Morning Herald , February 25, 1914, http://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-wartime-sex-slave-jan-ruffohearne-hits-out-at-hideous-japanese-denials-20140224–33d4o.html.
HV Clark, Twilight Liberation: Australian Prisoners of War between Hiroshima and Home (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 18.
See EE Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop: Java and the Burma-Thailand Railway 1942–1945 (Melbourne: Nelson, 1986).
J Wood, The Forgotten Force: The Australian Military Contribution to the Occupation of Japan 1945–1952 (St Leonards NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 80;
R Donnelly, ‘A Civilising Influence? Women in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan 1946–1952’, Hons thesis, Swinburne University, 1994, 11.
WS Kent Hughes, Slaves of the Samurai (Melbourne: Geoffrey Cumberlege Oxford University Press, 1946), p. xvii.
R Rivett, Behind Bamboo: Hell on the Burma Railway (Camberwell VIC: PenguinBooks, 2003), p. 77.
A Sobocinska, ‘“The Language of Scars”: Australian Prisoners of War and the Colonial Order’, History Australia 7, No. 3 (2010): 58.7.
Cited in R Gerster, Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987), p. 234.
Hughes, Slaves of the Samurai; R Whitecross, Slaves of the Son of Heaven: The Personal Story of an Australian Prisoner of the Japanese during the Years 1942– 1945 (London: Transworld, 1973); Jeffrey, White Coolies.
Matsuno Seiso, interviewed by author, Kure (Japan), September 3, 2004. See also C de Matos, ‘The Occupiers and the Occupied: A Nexus of Memories’ in New Voices: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Australia-Japan Relationship 1 (2006): 3.
C Twomey, ‘Australian Nurse POWs: Gender, captivity and war’, Australian Historical Studies , 124 (2009): 267.
RJ Steinfeld and SL Engerman, ‘Labor–Free or Coerced? An Historical Reassessment of Differences and Similarities’, in T Brass and M van der Linden (eds), Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (Bern: Peter Lang Publishers, 1997), p. 109.
RP Behal, ‘Coolie Drivers or Benevolent Paternalists? British Tea Planters in Assam and the Indenture Labour System’, Modern Asian Studies 44, No. 1 (2010): 31.
There was a similar case called the Nikko jiken in Hiroshima in 1949, which I have written in detail about elsewhere, where BCOF was used to protect employers, not employees defending their jobs and labor rights, during the Red Purge. See C de Matos, ‘The Case of Nikko Jiken: Occupation, Reform, Power and Conflict’, in A Vickers and M Hanlon (eds), Asia Reconstructed: Proceedings of the 16th Biennial Conference of the ASAA, 2006, Wollongong, Australia (Canberra: Australian National University, 2006), http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/111/. 69. Cited in Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor , p. 24.
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de Matos, C. (2015). Labor under Military Occupation: Allied POWs and the Allied Occupation of Japan. In: de Matos, C., Caprio, M.E. (eds) Japan as the Occupier and the Occupied. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408112_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408112_4
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