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WESTERN CIVILIANS who fell into the hands of the Japanese in China, the Philippines and South-East Asia were technically interned rather than imprisoned, often crowded into clusters of former colonial homes. In a few places, notably Shanghai, such communities came through the war worn, strained and wretched, yet almost all alive. In Shanghai’s Chapei camp, the Japanese left families intact. Inmates complained of confinement and lack of privacy, but none starved. It was noted ruefully that deprivation of alcohol improved the fitness of some adults. They enjoyed the doubtful benefit of two pianos. Schoolchildren sat school exams. The Japanese seldom interfered with the monotony of life inside the compound. A British “Judicial Committee” imposed its own rules and punishments. A schoolboy watched curiously as a certain “Mr. M700” scythed grass as a penalty for theft, while “Mr. R” served two weeks’ solitary confinement in a tiny room under a stairwell for “sneaking to the Japanese.”

Such temperate regimes were, however, exceptional. Across most of the Japanese empire, internees suffered almost as grievously as military POWs. Deprivation of food and lack of drugs for medical treatment killed large numbers, especially in the Dutch East Indies. Nini Rambonnet was the daughter of a Dutch colonial official, born in Batavia in 1920 and brought up in consequent comfort and ease. She had a personal maid at the age of thirteen, and as a young woman lived in a social whirl punctuated by a lot of golf and not much work. By the end of 1943, however, her golf clubs had been sold to Japanese naval officers to buy food, her mother tortured as an alleged British spy. Her twenty-two-year-old brother was working in the coal mines of Japan, and her father was dead of starvation and dysentery. She herself was confined among 1,200 women and children in Tijdeng camp, and found it difficult to master rudimentary domestic tasks: washing and ironing clothes, pulling a rubbish cart in shafts designed for an absent horse, sharing a lavatory with thirty others. The Japanese orders at roll call became imprinted on her brain: “Kiotsuke”—“Attention” “Keirei”—“Bow” “Naore”—“Stand at ease.”

They lived on rice, offal and vegetables. One night a fox dumped a half-eaten chicken behind their bungalow: “I cooked it slowly701 and the smell was heavenly,” Nini wrote. “In the morning I took it to the nurses’ houses and we all shared a cupful each. The patients were complaining that they could only smell it, but we told them they were not allowed to eat it as they had dysentery.” Like POWs, internees were victims of sudden Japanese whims. One day at Tijdeng, an order was issued that all dogs must be rounded up and killed. Lacking any other means, boys had to club the pets to death. Infractions of discipline were punished by hours kneeling on the street in full sun: “The hot asphalt was incredibly painful.” When the camp commandant asked for women volunteers to work in his house, the first draft was rejected as insufficiently pretty.

During the original Japanese onslaught in 1942 there were many cases of rape, notably of Allied nurses, and vast numbers of Asians suffered sexual assault by their occupiers. In the camps, few Western women suffered in this way. Faced with starvation, however, a significant minority—estimated at around 10 percent by an Australian nurse on Sumatra—were happy to trade sex for food. Dr. Marjorie Lyon described a bitter fight in her camp on Sumatra when a thousand women forcibly resisted a 1942 attempt by the Japanese to remove some girls “to work for Nippon”—and won. In her later camp at Banginang, “no one was raped702, and no one went to work for Nippon against their will…quite a few women and girls did go out to live with Japanese in their ‘comfort houses.’ But they were anxious to do so to get better conditions, and we could not prevent them. None of our British people did so.”

Guards routinely struck the women: “I had a reputation for being able to handle Japanese, but sometimes it did not work,