by Mark Felton
Rebecca Neufeld, Former child internee Lunghwa Camp, Shanghai
Some of the released internees ended up virtually penniless back in Britain after surviving the camps. Joan Bulley, four years old when her family was interned by the Japanese, recalled what happened when her mother took her children back to Britain after liberation, homeless and widowed. ‘She wrote to the War Department to say she was penniless, but they did not put her in touch with any organisation which could help. She was widowed at 39, she worked until she retired, and when she went into an old people’s home she had to live off income support.’1 Bulley confirmed that the experiences of Japanese internment deeply affected the children who were thrown into the camps. ‘I still suffer from depression. I think we all buried it. You were told not to talk about it, and if you did talk about it, people didn’t understand.’2
Fifty-five years after British internees were released from the camps, the British government finally granted the survivors, many of whom had been children at the time of their captivity, a paltry compensation for their sufferings. The money had to come from the British taxpayer because none of the former Allied governments has managed to win proper and fair compensation from Japan and they never will.
The convoluted and inglorious story of individual compensation for both military prisoners and civilian internees captured by the Japanese has brought little credit to either Japan or the Allied nations that defeated her in 1945, and this stands in direct contrast to the attitude of Germany. The Germans have paid out a staggering US$45 billion in reparations to the nations and individuals affected by Hitler’s empire building and the events of the Holocaust. Japan, on the other hand, though equally culpable for all the death and destruction it caused between 1937 and 1945, has not paid its victims even one tenth of the German figure. The reason why the Japanese have paid virtually nothing is political expediency and geopolitics. Even before Japan surrendered in August 1945, the attention of the Western Allies had turned to the reoccupation of lost territories and how best to counter the growing threat of the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain. This ideological conflict quickly became the paramount concern for American and British leaders as Japan’s defeat became inevitable once nuclear weapons had entered the battle.
The United States recognized soon after Japan’s defeat that the nation could be used as a bulwark against the spread of communism within Asia. By creating a democratic and economically strong Japan, America and its close ally Britain would checkmate Moscow’s exportation of Marxism and protect the free world. It is no coincidence that this policy of creating a strong Japan was proved right within only five years of the Japanese surrender, when American and British troops were fighting in Korea. Japan was the main base for United Nations forces in Korea and a new policy of entente with the Japanese was politically desirable. Talking about ‘the war’ to the Japanese was actually counterproductive and was likely to erode pro-Western goodwill, just when the Americans and British desperately needed Tokyo’s cooperation.
The state of war that existed between Japan and the Western Allies was formally ended with the San Francisco Treaty in 1951. The American government deliberately softened its approach to the Japanese, particularly over the issue of reparations payments to former prisoners, fearing that forcing the Japanese to pay huge sums in compensation to nations and individuals who had suffered at the hands of the Emperor’s army would have seriously weakened the Japanese economy at a critical juncture. Japan’s economy was just beginning to recover from the devastation wrought by the American strategic air offensive and submarine campaign, helped by massive injections of mainly American capital; jeopardizing this, as well as Japanese goodwill towards General Douglas MacArthur’s Army of Occupation, was seen by many Western politicians as a negative strategy. The fear of communist encroachment appeared very real in the first few years after the Second World War, and America and Britain had watched with horror as China, formerly their wartime ally, had become a People’s Republic under Mao Zedong in October 1949.
Everyone recognized that some symbolic gesture towards compensation had to be made by Japan to appease the bad press the nation was receiving in the West. The 1951 treaty did this, even as it made sure that Japan was protected from having to pay crippling reparations. The by-product of this ‘softly-softly’ approach was that it would later encourage successive Japanese governments, and many of its ordinary citizens, to temper their memories of Japanese wartime behaviour, and in some cases to entirely rewrite history to portray Japan as a victim of the war, rather than as a prime aggressor. It would also encourage a revisionist culture in Japan whereby wartime atrocities, such as the infamous Rape of Nanking in 1937–38, have either not been taught to successive generations of schoolchildren or, and perhaps worse, are portrayed as ‘communist propaganda’ emanating from China.
An important effect of the 1951 treaty was the limiting of the legal rights of former Western prisoners-of-war and civilian internees to make claims for compensation against the Japanese government. Some payments were made from seized Japanese assets shortly after the war ended, and, for example, the British government made ex gratia payments that totalled 1.5 million pounds to former British employees of the Shanghai and Tientsin Municipal Councils in China who had been interned. Former British POWs received a one-off payment of £76 10s to cover their entire horrific detention, worth today only about £1,200. Civilian internees had received even less, just £48 10s. Even by the living standards of the day such sums were paltry. The Americans, who led the 1951 treaty negotiations, decided that these payments would be the absolute limit of the Japanese government’s responsibility to its wartime victims, and they inserted into the San Francisco Treaty the statement that ‘all reparations claims of the Allied Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers, and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan and its nations in the course of the prosecution of the War’ be waived. In plain English, this meant that never again would Japan have to pay a penny to a single former British POW or civilian internee. The slate of Japanese responsibility was to be wiped clean at San Francisco, and the hand holding the eraser was American. There was, however, sufficient resistance to this high-handed American decision from nations such as the Netherlands and the Soviet Union, that John Foster Dulles, the American chief negotiator, drafted a new article that was inserted into the treaty to appease the outrage of many other Allied governments. Article 26 stated that ‘should Japan make a peace settlement or war claims settlement with any State granting that State greater advantages than those provided by the present Treaty, those same advantages shall be extended to the parties to the present Treaty’. Article 26 has never been invoked by the American or British governments, because from the very beginning it was kept secret from the people it was meant to help – the victims of Japanese imperialism. In the case of the British government, they have always stated that the issue of compensation was settled under the 1951 ex gratia payments scheme, and Article 26 of the 1951 Treaty was never used on behalf of British citizens. The British government deliberately suppressed victims’ access to legal compensation by hiding the files in the National Archives at Kew, under a closure order that remained in force for decades. In 1951, the Marquess of Reading, Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, had written across the front of the secret file the following statement: ‘We are at present unpopular enough with the Japanese without trying to exert further pressure which would be likely to cause the maximum of resentment for the minimum advantage.’3
It was only in 1998 that historians stumbled across documents at Kew that had been routinely declassified, and which provided insights into the cover-up perpetrated by Sir Winston Churchill’s Conservative Government in 1951. Once the press got wind of this find, it was widely reported, and it reinvigorated veterans’ efforts to apply pressure on the government of the day to reopen the case for compensation from Japan. It was embarrassing for the British government that Canada swiftly agre
ed to pay compensation to all its former prisoners and internees of the Japanese and this decision by a fellow Commonwealth nation added further pressure on the British to do likewise.
Led by the Royal British Legion, and the Association of British Internees Far East Region (ABCIFER), as well as gaining from some renewed public and press interest in internment, Prime Minister Tony Blair came to an agreement on compensation in November 2001. The so-called ‘Debt of Honour’ ex gratia scheme was created by the government to settle once and for all the issue of compensation. The British government agreed to pay all living former POWs and civilian internees of the Japanese, and the living spouses of those who perished in the camps, the sum of £10,000 each. This money would originate from the British taxpayer, and not from the Japanese government, prompting one former British POW and Chairman of the Japanese Labour Camp Survivor’s Association, Arthur Tithrington, to remark: ‘Better late than never … The British Government has shown that it has fully understood the importance of these issues to today’s society. My only disappointment is that the real culprit, that is the Japanese Government, has got away scot-free.’4
The British government estimated in November 2000 that 16,700 claims would be made under the scheme, including 3,700 former civilian internees or their surviving spouses. This would prove a considerable underestimation, as by February 2005, 29,288 claims had been submitted and 23,963 payments made. It was estimated that the total number of claims to be made by surviving spouses would eventually be over 15,000. Unfortunately, the scheme was not well-run from the beginning, leaving it open to legal challenges and investigations, and it was further undermined when, three weeks into the payments being made, the government suddenly introduced the ‘blood link’ criterion. To be eligible under the scheme, a person had to have been born in Britain, or had to have a parent or grandparent born in Britain. At a stroke, hundreds of applicants suddenly were not eligible, even though they had been imprisoned by the Japanese precisely because they were ‘British’. This ruling led to legal proceedings being enacted by many of those who suddenly found themselves disqualified from the scheme. The High Court, in its ruling, expressed sympathy ‘for those who were British enough to be interned by the Japanese in the Second World War because they were British citizens at the time … but do not have a sufficient blood link connection to qualify for an ex gratia payment under the scheme.’
An investigation launched by the Parliamentary Ombudsman discovered that the payments made in the new scheme were based to a significant extent on evidence of payment of compensation made under the 1951 scheme. The Ministry of Defence, which ran the new scheme, recognized in May 2001 that eligibility for the 1951 payments had been widened during the 1950s to include persons who had been married to British citizens, wherever the spouse had been born. Therefore, in early 2001 the government had no way of knowing, without a detailed scrutiny of all the papers in each case, whether a recipient under the 1951 scheme had a blood link to Britain for the purposes of the current scheme. Eligibility for the 1951 scheme had been based on being a British national normally resident in the United Kingdom prior to internment and who had also lived in Britain after the war. Under the legislation then in force, however, being a ‘British national’ at that time and being resident in the United Kingdom, would give no indication as to whether that person had a blood link to Britain – this was not a requirement when those applications were made. Thus, eligibility for the 1951 scheme was an insufficient basis on which to assess eligibility in 2001. Blair’s government had already made 14,000 payments under the new scheme, before they suddenly introduced the blood link requirement.
The whole business appeared ill-conceived and rushed. Officials had been given only two weeks to design the scheme before it was announced in the House of Commons. This did not give the government sufficient time to iron out the details properly, leading to a lack of clarity and a lot of very angry former internees. The Court of Appeal commented in its judgement that the Prime Minister had been ‘unwise’ to have announced the scheme ‘when it was apparent that the details still had to be worked out.’ It had given a misleading impression to prospective applicants, because at the time no mention was made of any blood link criterion. The Parliamentary Ombudsman considered this lack of clarity to ‘signal a departure from standards of good administration to the extent that it constitutes maladministration.’5 The Court of Appeal said that the ministerial announcement ‘was less clear than it should have been’ and ‘many civilians had their hopes of compensation raised by Dr. Moonie’s announcement’ only to be ‘extremely disappointed, and indeed angered.’6
The conclusion of the Parliamentary Ombudsman was scathing. He stated that the way in which the scheme had been devised, announced and operated constituted maladministration. He also concluded that the scheme constituted an injustice to the survivors of Japanese prison camps, based on his examination of several cases where applicants who had devoted their lives to the service of the United Kingdom had been refused compensation based on the blood link criterion. For example, there was Squadron Leader ‘X’, who had been repatriated to Britain shortly after the war as a civilian internee and had then been conscripted for National Service in the RAF. He had pursued a permanent career in the RAF, and retired at fifty-five years of age. Also, Doctor ‘Y’, who had spent his whole life following his internment by the Japanese working at the government’s Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. ‘These are people who have given public service to the UK,’ commented the Ombudsman in his report to Parliament in 2005. ‘Many others who are ineligible under the clarified terms of the scheme can also demonstrate a close link with the UK: by having taken up UK citizenship, through long residence here, or by having brought up a family here.’7
Another pertinent example of the way in which the blood link criterion has caused an injustice is the case of Diana Elias. She came from a very prominent Iraqi-Jewish family famous as traders in the Far East and her father was a close friend of Sir Victor Sassoon, whose enduring legacy of fine buildings can be seen throughout Shanghai and whose company, Sassoon’s, was one of the leading foreign-owned businesses operating in China before the war. Elias’s father was also friendly with the fabulously wealthy Kadoorie clan, a family that still owns the famous Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. Elias’s father and grandfather held British citizenship, as did Diana herself, though none of them had been born within the United Kingdom. Diana Elias, aged seventeen when the war in Asia started, along with her entire family, were judged British enough to be roused from their beds one night in December 1941 by bayonet-toting Japanese soldiers and sent to Stanley Internment Camp in Hong Kong for the duration of the war. The MOD, based on the fact that only those who had at least one parent or grandparent born in Britain would be deemed eligible, ruled that Diana Elias was not British enough to be compensated. In response, she launched a legal action against the British government. ‘I do feel bitter about my treatment by the British government,’ said the 83-year old in an interview in 2006. ‘It has taken six years for me to prove that I was not a second-class British citizen, yet I have still not even received so much as the courtesy of a written apology.’8 The Elias family, no matter how wealthy they may have been before the war, nonetheless had their lives shattered by the experience of Japanese internment. ‘My mother had a nervous breakdown and was never the same again,’ said Diana Elias. ‘She just could not cope with the stress of trying to fend for her children. My father spent much of the time in hospital with dropsy, beriberi, typhoid and diphtheria.’9 Elias’s father died soon after liberation, aboard a hospital ship that was steaming its way to Australia.
The blood link criterion has been a particularly misguided piece of legislation, for it ignores the basic realities of Britain during the Second World War. The size of the British Empire meant that in some cases whole generations of British citizens were born, lived and died outside of the mother country, in colonies like Hong
Kong or Singapore. It did not mean that these expatriate Britons felt any less ‘British’ than their compatriots who lived in London or Manchester, and in many cases the opposite was true. ‘We had pictures of the King and Queen on the wall and we were all very conscious of the fact that we were British and proud of it.’10
Rebecca Neufeld emerged from Lunghwa Internment Camp in Shanghai aged six, after she and her family had been incarcerated for the duration by the Japanese. She possessed a British birth certificate that had been issued by the Consul-General in Shanghai in 1938. Her father was a British citizen, but he had been born in Bombay in India. Her mother was Russian. Neufeld’s paternal grandfather was also British, though he had been born in Baghdad in Iraq. The family moved to Britain in 1949, after the communist takeover of China. Her family history was typical of many ‘British’ families living in Shanghai before the war, where residence in the United Kingdom had not occurred, but citizenship had been proudly maintained. In a similar case to Diana Elias, Rebecca Neufeld found herself ineligible for compensation in 2001, deemed not ‘British’ enough under the blood link regulations. ‘How British do I have to be?’ asked the 62-year-old Neufeld in 2001. ‘I have lived in Britain for 52 years, paid taxes to the state all my working life. My husband was born and bred in London and I have lived in London since I got off the boat from Shanghai.’ An angry Neufeld echoed the sentiments of many other former internees, a considerable number of whom were children during their confinement, when she commented: ‘We were in Lunghwa precisely because we were British … Where my parents and grandparents were born has nothing to do with my Britishness, nor anyone else’s.’11
The courts in England ruled that the actions of the Blair government were incorrect. In 2006, the Court of Appeal in London ruled in favour of Diana Elias’s case, undermining the government’s position. Lord Justice Mummery said that the MOD’s actions were in breach of Section 41 of the Race Relations Act. ‘For those concerned with sound standards of administration, prudence in the handling of taxpayers’ money and State compliance with principles of equal and fair treatment of individuals, some aspects of this affair are troubling.’12Lord Justice Mummery continued: ‘The result of inadequate preparation has been an embarrassing administration and legal muddle, personal pain, charges of incompetence, costly litigation and political apologies, accompanied by inquiries, investigations, reports, hearings and reviews.’13 Mummery awarded £3,000 compensation to Elias, and although initially the government rejected the court’s ruling and appealed against the decision, ministers eventually realized that they had to change the blood link criterion. In 2006, the MOD duly abandoned the blood link rule, and replaced it with a rule that said that only applicants who had been resident in the United Kingdom for 20 years would be eligible for compensation under the scheme. This change, although it allowed many applications to be processed and compensation paid out to thousands more people who would otherwise have been denied anything, has not resulted in a complete resolution of the issue. Hundreds of people interned as ‘British’ by the Japanese still do not qualify for compensation under the new 20-year residence rule because they moved to other settler colonies, like Canada and Australia, after the war. It is expected that further costly legal actions and campaigns by veterans’ groups are likely to attempt to create full equality in the scheme.