by Jan Morris
The Japanese had said they would incorporate Hong Kong into their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone. They pointedly set up their administrative headquarters in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building (Isogai had the chairman’s flat on the ninth floor), and ship after ship of booty sailed home to Japan, taking most of Hong Kong’s cars with them – an American journalist,1 crossing the harbour that January, counted twenty-six ships with deck-loads of cars. But as it turned out Hong Kong brought few other benefits to the Co-Prosperity Zone. It was not much use to the Japanese militarily, either, and in the long run was probably far more a nuisance to them than an asset. On orders from Tokyo it was not incorporated into the administration of Japanese-occupied China, which held sway up the river in Guangzhou, and it was never offered to either of the two puppet Governments which now ruled so much of China under Japanese auspices. It remained a military governorate, ‘The Captured Territory of Hong Kong’.
They did very little with it. Even their monuments of conquest were few. Government House was rebuilt by a twenty-six-year-old railway engineer, Seichi Fujimura, redecorated by a firm from Osaka, re-landscaped by a gardener from Kyoto, and Nipponized with a tall eaved tower. On the summit of Mount Cameron, above Central, the foundations were ceremonially laid of a crowning victory memorial, the Temple of the Divine Wind. Shinto priests presided, and a sacred sword was embedded in the masonry of the monument, which was to be eighty feet high, supported on twelve concrete legs, and engraved with fifteen feet high Chinese ideograms meaning ‘Heroic Memorial’. Otherwise the new rulers of Hong Kong built practically nothing, but merely used what they found as if it had always been their own: Japanese wrestling teams were awarded medals engraved, as it might be with depictions of their club-house, with a bas-relief of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building.
By and large the conduct of the Japanese in Hong Kong was despicable. During the battle they repeatedly bayoneted prisoners, after binding them hand and foot, and murdered doctors, nurses and patients in military hospitals. Immediately after the surrender they deliberately let their troops run wild, raping and looting everywhere. Their treatment of prisoners, military and civilian alike, was cruel, dishonest and apparently capricious – poor General Maltby was once beaten for allegedly having dirty fingernails. If the Japanese regular army, and more often the Japanese navy, sometimes behaved honourably, the unspeakable Kempeitei, the military police, tortured victims as readily and as brutally as any Gestapo.
Inasmuch as this ugly occupation had any logical aim, it was to replace one empire by another, and the Japanese did their best to discredit their predecessors. They deliberately destroyed British records, and replaced the British administrative system with a hardly less elaborate bureaucracy of their own. But there was no consistency to their methods. On the one hand the Chinese population was treated with vicious arrogance – for example passers-by who failed to bow to Japanese sentries were at best slapped on the face or hit with a rifle-butt, at worst thrown into jail. On the other hand the Japanese tried hard to win Chinese cooperation. Which was the better, they used rhetorically to ask, the corrupt alien way of the British, decadent, materialist and selfish, or the Kingly Way of the Imperial Army, the Confucianist way common to Japanese and Chinese alike?
Throughout the occupation the Japanese printed an English-language newspaper, the Hong Kong News, which had belonged to Japanese owners before the war. In retrospect the files of this publication give a chill insight into the life of the captive colony – so recently dominated by Stubbses, Pattersons and Lady Southorns, now in the hands of Isogai and the Kempeitei.
Of course it was a propaganda sheet, presumably intended to circulate among those who could read neither Chinese nor Japanese – the few neutrals left in the colony, collaborating Indians and the prisoners in their camps. One of its concerns was to give an impression of normality. Its language remained quite literate English. Its tone, at least in the early years, was jaunty. ‘The Onlooker’, for instance, in his column ‘Looking at the World’, offered the familar bottom-of-the-page quips, perhaps left over from stock (‘Many a man today is living by the sweat of his frau’), while the column called ‘About Town’ tried to maintain an air of soigné gossip (‘In contrast to the days immediately after the local hostilities, many pretty girls are now seen in town, beautifully dressed and generally without male escort’).
The small advertisements also exude an everyday air. There are cameras for sale, rooms to let, a Japanese tutor is required by English-Speaking Neutral, Chinese Gentleman Requires Japanese Partner in Enterprising Import Business. Jimmy’s remains The Place to Eat. Though the Hong Kong Hotel’s snack-bar has been turned into a tempura grill, George Pilo-Ulski the Accordion Virtuoso plays during tiffin. Harry Roy’s Tiger-Ragamuffins may still be heard on the radio and Frau A. Steinschneider, former member of the Vienna State Opera, continues to offer singing lessons.
But gradually a sinister strain surfaces even in the Hong Kong News. Though the form was familiar, and the style assiduously maintained, day by day the paper became a reminder that Hong Kong was utterly at the mercy of its conquerors, utterly beyond the reach of friends. What could be more depressing for the imprisoned British, than to learn that ‘high German and Italian officers’ had been ‘inspecting’ their colony? The news from Europe came only from the neutral countries, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, or from Vichy France, and as the years passed Britain was portrayed more and more dismissively as a vassal of the United States. Allegations of Japanese atrocities were dismissed with a cynicism hardly worth disguising, since everybody in Hong Kong knew the truth: they had been invented by the British propaganda machine, a Tokyo spokesman was reported as saying, and were ‘utterly fantastic’.
Even Britain’s supposedly loyal subjects, the newspaper constantly suggested, had deserted her. Leaders of the Chinese Rehabilitation Committee have sent a message to the Emperor, on behalf of the population of Hong Kong, congratulating him on Japanese victories. The Chinese Representative Council decrees that, the next day being Navy Day, commemorating the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905, all business firms and residences must fly the Japanese flag. Mr P. A. Krishna, chairman of the Indian Independence League, has handed over 20,000 Yen to the New War Weapons Fund …
And sometimes the sense of cold triumph was more frankly revealed. ‘Woe to all those who break the law!’ an editorial warns, and every now and then hard chill decrees are printed in full. Heavy penalties would be inflicted on the owners of dirty premises, said the News one day in 1942, after the coming inspection of all residents’ houses. Readers are warned that while English may have been the dominant tongue when Hong Kong was British, Japanese was the most important language now; and there was a daily Japanese language lesson in the paper, together with a selection of Old Nippon Proverbs, sometimes rather gnomic.
The impression meant to be given by the Hong Kong News was of an occupation assured, efficient, stern but generally benign. It is true that the Japanese administration had a few merits. Its delegation of responsibility to local elders theoretically took the people closer to self-government than the British ever had. In the towns its merciless house inspections did keep disease in check. Its engineers extended the airport and put the first electric cable under the harbour, to restore the island’s power (ships kept dragging it with their anchors, though, and it was not renewed until the 1980s).
But in general the three years of the Japanese presence were utterly wasted years, and the conquerors showed themselves only at their worst. The British were paragons by contrast. Pompous the old Governors may have been, but at least you were not thrown into the cells for failing to stand stock still at their passing. The British police were sometimes bullies and often crooks, but they were angels compared with the men of the Kempeitei, with their terrifying network of informers and their torture cubicles erected contemptuously on the verandahs of Sir Aston Webb’s Supreme Court.
Much of the Japanese energy went into changing the fo
rms of the place. Superficially at least everything was Nipponized, the stores, the banks, the hotels, the Jockey Club and even its horses, which were renamed with Japanese names, and supplemented with Japanese ponies. Lane Crawford’s became Matsuzakaya, and its staff were photographed, just as they had been in the old days, grouped formally outside the front entrance around their Japanese managing director. The Peninsula Hotel became the Toa, Jimmy’s Kitchen became the Sai Mun Café, Queen’s Road became Nakameiji-dori. The military governor did not in fact move into his newly orientalized Government House, preferring requisitioned quarters at Repulse Bay, but Japanese sentries stood at the old guardhouses on Upper Albert Road, and the Rising Sun flew largely, of course, above the new tower. The Star ferry-boats were requisitioned, and some of them were used on the Guangzhou run – the first time they had ever sailed outside the harbour. All the royal statues were eventually removed from Statue Square (‘a logical step’, observed the News obsequiously), and were shipped to Japan to be melted down.
What was it all about? The Japanese must surely have sometimes wondered, as they kept guard on their prisoners down the years, and watched Hong Kong decline into misery at their hands. For bombed, shelled and burnt during the fighting, the place certainly did not recover under the auspices of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone. The New Territories became more or less anarchic, fought over by gangs of bandits and pirates, by Communist liberation groups, by supporters of the Nanjing puppet Government, riddled with agents of the Kuomintang, the Communists, the absent British and the Japanese themselves. The towns became dingier, poorer, emptier, sadder. The schools emptied. Food and fuel became desperately short, and the Japanese resorted to all-but-compulsory evictions, packing as many Chinese as possible back into mainland China, and sometimes it is alleged dumping old people, women and children on barren islands or unfrequented Chinese shores. They aimed to reduce the Chinese population by a thousand a day, and they managed a figure of 23,000 a month throughout the occupation.
How nightmarishly sudden, how sterile, and as it turned out how brief, was this metamorphosis! It was as though all the century of Hong Kong’s colonial history had been negated at a stroke. The famous exuberance of the place was all quashed, and gradually its vitality too wasted away. As the fortunes of war turned against the Japanese, and perhaps it dawned upon them that Hong Kong was proving a perfectly useless acquisition, the third port of the British Empire sank into destitution. Money lost its meaning and a black market, run by Triads, virtually took over the feeding of the populace. By 1945 the twin cities of the harbour were half-deserted.
Even the News, as the months dragged on, came to reflect this sense of abject failure. A whining, self-justificatory note crept into its prose. The Japanese had not been fighting for themselves, said an editorial in May 1945, but for the thousand million inhabitants of Great East Asia. ‘Around Town’ had long lost all its cockiness, and was reduced to a string of bureaucratic handouts – a forthcoming inspection of bicycle licences, a rise in telephone charges. Hitler was still glorified from time to time, and Mädchen in Uniform, a UFA all-women production, was advertised at the Meiji Theatre, but now there were reports of German defeats in Europe, and even references to the horrors of the concentration camps. When the nuclear bomb fell on Hiroshima the news led the paper; ‘the Enemy’s Last Card’, the News called it, but not with much conviction.
The final issue, almost at the moment of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, contained an editorial entitled ‘Health is Wealth’, about Japanese medical achievements in Hong Kong, an essay about factors in the formation of the Japanese national character, a report headed Sumatra Appreciates Japan’s Benevolence, a Want Ad for a ‘lady golf set’, and the last, and not the least enigmatic, of the Old Nippon Proverbs (‘An east wind to the horse’s ears’).
When the British military prisoners were marched off to their camps, at the start of the occupation, they found that Chinese bystanders were perfectly ready to carry their bags for them, and throughout the occupation Chinese hawkers managed to sell foodstuffs and the odd luxury through the wire to the European prisoners. Sometimes their prices were outrageous, but often they were willing to accept cheques or IOUs redeemable only when the war ended, if it ever did, in a return to normal circumstances. It was only to be expected that in these wretched times, as in all others, they would display their usual commercial buoyancy; what was more surprising was their frequent genuine loyalty to a colonial Power which had not always been, as we have seen, very considerate to them.
Many, of course, were compromised. The Fifth Column which guided the 38th Division in its swift advance was mostly Chinese, and after the defeat the Japanese found their inevitable quota of collaborators. There were three principal puppet bodies, the Rehabilitation Advisory Committee, the Chinese Representative Council and the Chinese Co-operative Council, and some of the best-known Chinese citizens joined them, abandoning their British titles to do so; Sir Robert Kotewall, before the war the senior member of the Executive Council and one of the best-known men in the colony, became Lo Kuku-wo. In the New Territories there was the Asia Prosperity Institution, whose members were known colloquially as shing lei yau, ‘victory fellows’. Some Chinese, at least in the beginning, supported the Japanese simply as fellow-Asians, and some believed in the puppet Government in Nanjing, which was in fact truly dedicated to Chinese traditional interests – it was said to include more poets than any other Government in the world – but saw the Japanese as less of a threat than the Kuomintang or the Communists. Some became informers and agents of the Kempeitei as they had been of the British colonial police before.
But in general they were not traitorous. If in those days there was hardly such a thing as a Chinese Hong Kong patriot, most people undoubtedly felt a loyalty towards China, so barbarically assaulted by the Japanese, and many revealed a staunch personal affection for the British. ‘It may be assumed,’ said an American intelligence report of the time, ‘that the British must have rather a strong hold on many of these people,’ and it was true that many Chinese ran terrible risks to help their colonial masters. They smuggled messages and medicines to the prisoners, they helped escapees, and they maintained a constant link with the British military forces in unoccupied China. Agents who worked for the British included a former chauffeur to the Governor, a garage assistant at Government House, a hospital cook, a dockyard clerk and several students. One of the great heroes of the war was a medical student, Ha Chan, who escaped to China when the Japanese invaded but repeatedly returned to Hong Kong, though twice arrested by the Kempeitei, on terrifying intelligence missions for the British – a slight bespectacled figure, like thousands one sees in Hong Kong today.
Even some of the more prominent collaborators may have thought they were morally justified – Kotewall and several others claimed that before the surrender they had been specifically asked by senior British officials to cooperate with the Japanese in the interests of the Chinese community. For the rest, they were seldom politically motivated, but were simply concerned for their own survival. For the vast majority of the population the alternative was no more heroic, but was simply to plug along as best one could, looting a deserted European house if the occasion arose, or taking its timbers for firewood, making full use of the black market which was active in every locality, and depending as always upon quick wits and family connections.
Almost all the British and their imperial soldiers were imprisoned, but some were freed and a few were left at large. Chinese servicemen were soon released, while many Indian prisoners-of-war opted to join the Indian National Army, the independence force sponsored by the Japanese, and served the occupying authorities as guards and auxiliaries. During the first months of occupation a number of bankers and their families were put up at one of the obscurer hotels in Victoria, so that their expertise would be available to the Japanese, and a Government doctor, Selwyn Clarke, was also retained by the military. (The University’s Professor of Pathology, instructed to co
ntinue his work at the Bacteriological Laboratory, killed himself instead.)
Inevitably a few adventurers managed to keep their freedom, by pretending to be neutral subjects, or just by lying low. A handful escaped to China, and some of these, led by the University’s Professor of Medicine, the Australian Lindsay Ride, were formed into an intelligence unit, the British Army Aid Group. Among its sponsors was John Keswick, formerly of Jardine’s, now an intelligence agent at the British Embassy in Chong-ging. The BAAG operated from unoccupied Chinese soil, but sent emissaries frequently into Hong Kong, and kept in contact with the prison camps. At one time it cherished an epic plan for a mass escape of all the prisoners, and it remained throughout the one direct line of contact between the British held in Hong Kong and the world outside.
Inside the wires things went on very Britishly, though with decreasing conviction as malnutrition and sickness weakened authority and enterprise alike. Several thousand of the soldiers were sent as labourers to Japan (but more than a thousand of them died when their ship was torpedoed by an American submarine), and many of the others were made to work on projects like the extension of Kai Tak airport. There were sporadic attempts to escape to unoccupied China, a few of which succeeded, and several officers and men were shot because of their contacts with the British Army Aid Group. Otherwise their long period of imprisonment followed the standard pattern of misery, common to all prisoners-of-war in Japanese hands – boredom, hunger, ill-health, sporadic cruelty and constant humiliation.