Commemorating and
commodifying the
prisoner of war experience
in south-east Asia:
The
creation of Changi Prison Museum; Kevin
Blackburn
"This article originally appeared in the
Journal
of the Australian War Memorial,
issue 33, 2000, and is
reproduced here with permission".
{1} From the 1970s to the 1990s, south-east Asian
countries, principally Thailand and Singapore, received an increasing
number of visitors interested in seeing historic sites associated with
the experience of the prisoners of war (POWs) captured by the Japanese
during the Second World War. This has resulted in the construction of
several major museums in the region representing the POW experience -
the Jeath Museum (opened in 1977) and Hellfire Pass Museum (1998) along
the Burma-Thailand Railway, and Changi Prison
Museum in Singapore (1988). Individuals visiting these historic
sites have included ex-POWs on personal pilgrimages of commemoration,
but most visitors have been tourists drawn to the locations by curiosity
about Japanese atrocities committed against the POWs.
Their interest has stemmed from the prominence of the POW experience in
popular consciousness in the West and in east Asia. Stereotypical images
of the POWs as human skeletons toiling under poor conditions, supervised
by brutal Japanese guards, became etched in the public imagination
during the post-war period and produced a perennial interest in a human
tragedy. Critical studies of the lives of the POWs
under the Japanese, however, have long suggested that conditions varied
according to what camp the POWs were held in. The popular image of
"horror camps" never accurately represented conditions at
every one of the POW camps in south-east Asia.
{2} These studies raise an intriguing question about
how the POW museums of south-east Asia have narrated the experiences of
the POWs. Have the museums commemorated the variety of individual
experiences, or have they reproduced public stereotypes in an attempt to
commodify the past? In order to investigate how these conflicting
interpretations may have shaped the public representation of the POW
experience in these museums, it is best to examine Changi Prison Museum
as a case study, because the creation of this museum has been the
best-documented in government records.
{3} David Lowenthal has suggested that historic sites
of human tragedy frequently become commodified by being turned into
atrocity exhibitions which are meant to pander to the preconceptions of
the tourists. The central thesis of Lowenthal's work is that the past
cannot be re-created. All that modern re-creations of the past do is
produce a representation of history that is shaped by present-day
concerns. If tourists want to see a gallery of horrors, that expectation
will influence those who attempt to re-create the past for the
tourists. John Urry and other writers on cultural
tourism have corroborated Lowenthal's thesis. Theorists on cultural tourism have noted that both tour operators and
owners of tourist attractions who try to re-create the past do so
according to what they think tourists want to experience or what they
believe their intended audience thinks might have happened there. They
deliberately package the past for their visitors' brief stay. The visit
becomes a non-durable consumer commodity, if an intangible one, in which
the tourists pay for the time they spend surrounded by exhibits
selected, packaged and presented for them. This process means that, in
representing the past, aspects of it are emphasised, while other events
may be downplayed or left out entirely of the narrative presented for
the visitors' consumption.
Kanchanaburi as a "commodified-tourist site"
{4} Museums and historic sites in south-east Asia that have been built
on the POW theme offer good case studies in which to test Lowenthal's
thesis. Work done by Annette Hamilton on the Kanchanaburi historic site
along the Burma-Thailand Railway suggests that the area has become what
she has called "a commodified-tourist site". The Kanchanaburi site, which has come to mark the beginning of the
Burma-Thailand Railway for tourists, has been manipulated by the local
community to attract tourists to the small town in order to show them
the past that they want to see. The 1957 film Bridge on the River
Kwai (based on a novel of the same name by Pierre Boulle) had, by
the 1970s, brought many tourists to the town, all wanting to see the
"real bridge on the River Kwai"; they met disappointment
because both film and book were fiction. Ronald Searle, who worked on
the Burma-Thailand Railway as a POW, wrote in his recollections:
"as for the Bridge on the River Kwai, it crossed the river only in
the imagination of its author", because the two "big
bridges" were viaducts that did not cross the river, but hugged the
impassable cliffs along the river's east bank.
{5} In his novel Pierre Boulle took "Kwai"
from the name of the Kwae Noi (meaning "little tributary"),
which ran alongside the Burma-Thailand Railway. There was close to the
Kwae Noi both a wooden bridge and a steel bridge, but these bridges were
over the Mae Khlaung, a river that the Kwae Noi flowed into. Both these
bridges over the Mae Khlaung were part of the Burma-Thailand Railway
built by the POWs. The surviving steel bridge was the only remaining
fixture that the locals could have designated as the "bridge on the
River Kwai" to satisfy the demands of the mass influx of tourists
to see the "authentic" bridge. How this was done had more to
do with artifice than a regard for historical accuracy. Kevin Patience,
an amateur British military historian, writing after he visited the
location in 1979, noted that "although the film title was incorrect
(there was never a bridge constructed over the
Kwae Noi …) the locals not wanting to disappoint the booming
tourist trade created by the movie, soon adopted the little-used name of
Kwae Yai (Big Kwae) for the Mae Khlaung. Thus there is now a bridge over
the River Kwae!" The impact of tourism and
fiction had overwhelmed historical and geographical truth.
{6} Annette Hamilton, studying the site in the early
1990s, has critically assessed the intensive commercial activities
taking place near the bridge. There are numerous souvenir shops which
sell every conceivable commodity that can be connected with the historic
site, from T-shirts to miniature bombs and bridges. There are also
festivals, such as the "River Kwai Bridge Week", with its
fireworks display over the bridge, held every November-December to
simulate Allied bombing of the bridge during the war. Ice-cream and
drink stands and hawker food stalls dot the area to cater to the
busloads of tourists and guests staying in the nearby luxury hotels,
such as the "River Kwai Hotel". There are even "Bridge on
the River Kwai" restaurants on rafts flanking the bridge. From
this, Hamilton concluded that "the conversion of 'history' to
tourist attraction is carried here to its extreme: the site of the
famous bridge is a monument to consumption, against which the narratives
and relics that give it meaning are trivialised into mementos, souvenirs
and snapshots".
{7} At Kanchanaburi, amid the hawker stands and
souvenir shops, and conveniently alongside the river, stands the Jeath
Museum, which narrates the POW past. Its name has been sometimes taken
by tourists for a misspelling of "Death", but its operators
insist that "Jeath" came from "J" for Japan,
"E" for England, "A" for Australia and America,
"T" for Thailand, and "H" for Holland.[10]
Nonetheless, this convenient confusion adds to tourist curiosity. The
museum, which is a replica of the long bamboo sleeping huts that the
POWs slept in, uses gruesome artefacts and pictures to convey the
horrors of the POW experience. When it was established in 1977 by a
local Buddhist monastery, a ticket costing the equivalent of fifty
British pence bought visitors the sight of a re-creation of the miseries
of the POWs as they walked down the bamboo hut, which was dimly lit to
create an eerie atmosphere. Ticket-holders could gaze at a long gallery
of gruesome images. Hamilton has noted that such has been the
unrelenting nature of the depiction of human horrors that sometimes the
eagerness of the tourists in seeing the atrocity exhibition has led to
their curiosity turning into shock and tears.
{8} Even less has been left up to the imagination at
the Hellfire Pass Museum further up the Burma-Thailand Railway. This
museum was opened by the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, on
Anzac Day 1998. The project had been funded by the Australian-Thai
Chamber of Commerce. In the dimly-lit chambers of the Hellfire Pass
Museum, life-size dummies representing the POWs as living skeletons move
the wooden ramparts of the railway. This museum has had the blessing of
the Australian government and ex-POWs. In comparison with Kanchanaburi,
the Hellfire Pass Museum appears to be more a site of commemoration than
a site for tourists. This is perhaps because not so many tourists are
willing to go far up the Burma-Thailand Railway beyond the more easily
accessible Kanchanaburi.
{9} The Jeath Museum and the Kanchanaburi site have
provided a reference point for the development of other POW historic
sites in south-east Asia. When Changi Prison Museum was created, Harold
Payne, President of the Federation of the Far Eastern Prisoner of War
Clubs in Britain, referring to what had occurred at Kanchanaburi,
remarked: "I am all for having a museum provided it doesn't turn
into a commercial playground with native stalls. That's one of my
biggest moans about a certain bridge in Thailand, which has turned into
a tourist fairground with light and sound shows".[12]
These sentiments, also expressed by other representatives of ex-POWs,
hint at their desire to preserve historic sites associated with their
life histories as places of commemoration rather than as tourist
attractions manipulated by tourist businesses.
{10} The commodification of the Kanchanaburi site in
the 1970s invites questions about how Singapore tourism authorities in
the 1980s handled the Changi Prison historic site, which had
Kanchanaburi as an obvious example to follow if commodification of the
place was desired. Did the tourism authorities of Singapore in the 1980s
set out to commodify the POW experience by perhaps trying to create an
atrocity exhibition of horrors that would draw tourists? Before
examining this question, it is necessary to outline how the Changi
Prison site had been used before the Singapore tourism authorities
intervened to create the Changi Prison Museum. The prior uses of the
site may well have exercised considerable influence over their
decision-making process.
{11} When vacant land next to Changi Prison was chosen
by Singapore tourism authorities to be transformed into the location of
a POW museum for tourists, the prison already had a long history as a
site of commemoration, dating back to the end of the Second World War.
At Changi, in contrast to Kanchanaburi, the ex-POWs and their military
units had exercised considerable control over what happened to the site.
Changi Prison was surrounded by British military bases until the British
withdrew from Singapore in 1971. These have since been occupied by
Singapore Armed Forces personnel. These bases housed ex-POWs still
serving in the armed forces, as well as military units who had members
imprisoned in Changi by the Japanese. Prison
authorities, even after Singapore's independence in 1965, still included
former colonial officers who had been interned at Changi as civilians
and POWs, or, in the closely-knit British expatriate community of the
time, mixed with individuals who were ex-civilian internees or
ex-POWs. William Goode, Singapore's Chief Secretary, who help dedicate Changi
Chapel as a POW commemorative chapel in 1957, had been incarcerated at
Changi and had worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
{12} Soon after the war Changi Prison functioned as a
site of commemoration at which former civilian internees and ex-POWs
returned regularly to remember a common experience. The prison chapel,
originally meant for Christian prisoners and constructed inside the
prison in 1953, was made into a chapel for commemorating the POW
experience by returning ex-POWs, who began placing the plaques of their
military units on its walls in the 1950s. Ronald Searle, a popular
cartoonist and artist, who had been a POW at Changi and on the
Burma-Thailand Railway, donated some illustrations for the chapel. The
prison authorities sent Searle's personal secretary a letter of thanks:
"we only wish Mr Searle could make a trip out here to Singapore and
visit the Chapel. ... I'm sure he would be pleased with the setting of
his work".
Changi as "POW Heaven"
{13} The occasions for commemoration of the POW experience at Changi in
the post-war years were not grim affairs at which only the horrors were
remembered. There was a good reason for the ex-POWs not to commemorate
such horrors: atrocities did not occur at Changi. Out of the 87,000 POWs
who passed through the camp, only 850 died. Many
of the fatalities at Changi were the result of battle wounds the men had
suffered before being taken prisoner in 1942, not because of conditions
at the prison. Compared with other POW camps, Changi did not have a high
death toll. Instead of marking atrocities, in the early post-war years
the ex-POWs celebrated the friendships they had made there. In January
1948, Brigadier Frederick J. ("Black Jack") Galleghan,
Australian commander at Changi, on the way to take up a military post in
Europe, stopped off at Singapore to meet former POWs who had been under
his command. At the airport he was met by three former members of his
2/30th Battalion, who jokingly presented him with his former Changi
rations as dinner with a note on which was written, "Memo: Black
Jack - your ration, sir". His "rations" were one egg,
soya, a tin of bully-beef and two "doovres". They then had two
"quick drinks" at the airport before taking him on a tour of
Changi Prison. Ex-POWs visiting Changi in the post-war
period were conscious that, while Changi brought back pleasant thoughts
of their old friends, it was other places, particularly the
Burma-Thailand Railway, that evoked painful memories of death and
loss.
{14} Ex-POWs themselves have not seen Changi as a site
of horrors. Some have expressed bemusement at such descriptions in the
media. In the introduction to his published POW diary, Stan Arneil
wrote: "the portrayal of the 'dreaded Changi' camp brings a smile
to the faces of many former prisoners of war who longed for Changi as
almost a heaven on earth compared to some of the dreadful places to
which they were taken". Likewise, Lionel De
Rosario, a Eurasian POW who was imprisoned at Changi and worked on the
Burma-Thailand Railway, concluded: "when compared with the life and
working conditions on the Siam-Burma railway work camps and other camps
in the East Indies, Changi Camp was more like a low budget holiday
camp". Writing fifty years after the POWs were freed, De Rosario
looked at the reputation that Changi had gained in the public
imagination and assessed it in light of his own experience as a POW:
Changi became known as the most notorious camp in Asia,
and in the minds of many people in England, Australia, and America,
the Changi prisoner-of-war camp would invoke visions of atrocities,
starvation, bad living conditions and emaciated men. It was the place
where prisoners-of-war were reduced to a physical state more looking
like living skeletons. As a prisoner-of-war, not only in the Changi
Camp but in various camps in Singapore and Siam [Thailand], I cannot
understand how Changi had earned such a reputation. My memories of
Changi have never been unpleasant. Prisoners-of-war in Changi did
suffer deprivation and loss of self-esteem, but conditions were not
appalling. Although food was rationed, it was provided every day. The
camp was also provided with amenities, such as electric lights and
piped water, which contributed to our cleanliness and good healthy
conditions.
{15} Ex-POWs' descriptions of their time in Changi as
relatively pleasant are so numerous that the conception of Changi as a
"horror camp" seems untenable. Even ex-POWs with an abiding
hatred of the Japanese have recalled that their time at Changi was
pleasant. Hank Nelson's and Tim Bowden's collection of interviews with
ex-POWs conducted in the early 1980s revealed that most of those
surveyed did not view Changi as a place of atrocities. In this
collection, Russell Braddon, an Australian ex-POW who particularly hated
the Japanese, described Changi, like De Rosario, as a "holiday
camp".] Changi was semi-autonomous and run day
to day by the prisoners' own military commanders, not by the Japanese.
This relative autonomy meant that the prisoners could arrange many
leisure activities. POWs held concert parties, had a library, and even
conducted educational courses at an educational centre referred to as
"Changi University". In Nelson's and
Bowden's collection of interviews, Fred Stringer described Changi as
"like heaven" when he expressed how he felt about coming back
to Changi after being on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Nelson and Bowden felt that this feeling was representative enough to
have it as the title of a chapter dealing with Changi. This image has
not been a recent development as the passage of time has mellowed the
ex-POWs' antagonism towards their captors: a similar impression is
recorded in Rohan Rivett's Behind bamboo (1946), the first
account published by an ex-POW. Rivett noted that after coming from the
harassment and persecution of the tightly controlled POW camps in the
Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies, "Changi appeared to us like
POW heaven".
{16} Despite the perception of Changi as a "POW
heaven" among ex-POWs, this has not been the image of the place
held by tourists, who began to visit the site in growing numbers during
the 1980s, when Singapore was promoting itself as a stop-over point for
flights between Britain and Australia. The differing perceptions of the
tourists and the ex-POWs visiting the site from the 1980s to the 1990s
can be gauged by examining their responses in visitors' books and on
cards that they left behind. These comments, recorded for over a decade,
reveal that tourists have erroneously perceived Changi as a place of
human horror, while the ex-POWs themselves have seen it as a place where
enduring bonds of friendship were made. Even close friends and relatives
of ex-POWs visiting the site have believed that Changi was a place of
atrocities. A card from 1997 reads:
To our friend and mate, Jimmy Anderson, who tried to
beat Changi and its horrors, but lost his leg but not his life thanks
to Dr Weary Dunlop. You all were the greatest. Your mates from Auburn,
Australia, 1997.
The card suggests a perception in the public
imagination that the harsh experiences of the POWs on the Burma-Thailand
Railway can be assumed to have occurred at Changi as well. This
conflation is illustrated by the mistake made by the writers of the card
in stating that "Weary" Dunlop was a medical doctor at Changi:
he was on the Railway, not at Changi. Another common response from
tourists at the Changi site is represented by a message from L.A.
Whalroos of Finland made during a visit on 14 February 1993:
As a young person I am thankful that I have not had to
experience such suffering. I have great respect and compassion for
those who did, especially those who held onto their humanity despite
facing inhumanity in others.
The writer mistakenly assumed that crimes against
humanity were committed at Changi by inhuman captors for no reason other
than because it was a Japanese POW camp in south-east Asia.
{17} A comparison can be made between messages left by
tourists and those left by ex-POWs. In contrast to impressions of the
tourists, the comments made by ex-POWs do not indicate that harsh
treatment by their captors took place at the POW camp. They recall
dreadful experiences on the Burma-Thailand Railway and in the Indonesian
POW camps, but none has mentioned that Changi was where many of their
comrades perished. A common remark is that of P. Klassen of Bridlington,
England, who wrote during his visit on 17 June 1988: "In memory of
all our comrades who perished on the Thailand/Burma Railway 'For your
tomorrow, we gave our today'." The ex-POWs have also emphasised the
importance of the bonds of friendship formed at Changi. Lieutenant P.G.
Symington of the Scottish Gordon Highlanders, during a visit on 23 April
1990, simply wrote that his return was an occasion for "remembering
comrades who stayed here". Despite differing perceptions over
whether Changi is a place of atrocities or a place where life-long
friendships were made, it is clear that Changi has had strong emotional
resonance for both the ex-POWs and tourists.
{18} For the tourists, however, the attraction to the
site has been to engage with the ambience of Changi as a place with a
terrible wartime past. Research done by the Singapore tourism
authorities in early 1987 confirmed that this was what drew tourists to
the place. They found that tourists were excited when visiting the
chapel inside Changi because "visitors had to go through an army of
guards and a large gate to visit the Chapel".
The large, ominous dark metal gate through which visitors had to pass to
enter the prison featured prominently among the photographs of
attractions found in tourist guidebooks to Singapore.
Going into Changi provided a satisfyingly eerie atmosphere, much like
the dimly lit bamboo hut of the Jeath Museum, that tourists wanted on a
visit to what they imagined was a place of "unspeakable
horrors". For the tourists, the experience of
being inside Changi was more important than having an accurate knowledge
of the history of the site or even being aware that (because of major
renovations) little remained as it had been during the war. In March
1987 Robbie Collins, the consultant who had originally appraised the
Changi site for the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board (STPB), observed:
"there was a certain amount of novelty about getting admitted
through the array of guards and large gates, but the visitors saw little
else of the prison and the Chapel was not authentic".
King Rat and re-creating Changi's past
{19} By the early 1980s the practice of taking visitors inside the
prison had been turned into a lucrative activity by bus tour operators
because they were bringing not just small groups of returning ex-POWs,
but many paying tourists. Individual tourists could not just turn up at
the prison gates and walk in; they had to arrange a visit inside Changi
Prison through the tour operators, who charged a fee for their bus
tours. The increasing commodification of the site was highlighted when
tour operators expanded their schedule to include a visit to the roof of
the prison complex, where according to their brochures, "from
here", Lord Louis Mountbatten addressed freed POWs after the
Japanese surrender.[29] In 1986 Changi Prison was
being visited by an average of "two hundred tourists or five coach
loads" of people each day, but in late 1986 "prison
authorities had found it increasingly difficult to handle the large
volume of tourists going through its prison gates, as it affected its
security". The chapel was then moved into a
modern building in the prison area, but outside the gates of the prison
complex. Tour operators immediately reported to the STPB that many
tourists were unhappy with the new arrangements because they could no
longer experience the atmosphere that being inside Changi Prison
evoked.
{20} Collins' report mentioned that
"international visitors" were "disappointed and a bit
angry". He noted that the new chapel outside the prison in a modern
building did not conjure up the images given in James Clavell's novel, King
Rat. This was originally published in 1962 and has never been out of
print. In 1965 the novel was taken as the basis for a dark suspense
movie, shot completely in black and white to emphasise the bleakness of
conditions at Changi. Both the book and the movie showed the POWs at
Changi as having lost their humanity because of the poor conditions
provided by the Japanese. POWs were depicted as obsessed with surviving
death and starvation in the camp, even at the expense of their comrades'
welfare. Others killed fellow POWs who broke the rules that governed the
camp's food supply.
{21} Clavell's fiction has been the text which has had
the most influence in shaping public perceptions of Changi. The novel
represents the prison camp as a chamber of horrors. Clavell himself
spent almost all of his time as a POW at Changi and was not sent to
places like the Burma-Thailand Railway, where conditions were far worse.
Many POWs who only experienced Changi have felt unease at being spared
the terrible conditions on the Burma-Thailand Railway, while their
comrades were taken away and often worked to death.
They have tried to rationalise their guilt. Clavell did this by
portraying Changi in a harsher light than those who experienced a
variety of camps have described it. The frequent blurb on the cover of King
Rat has perpetuated the myth of Changi as "the most notorious
prisoner of war camp in Asia", where "only one man in fifteen
had the strength, the luck, the cleverness to survive". Clavell himself always maintained that his book was fiction, although it
had a historical setting.
{22} Collins' appraisal of Changi in March 1987
concluded that "this stop is a failure" and "worse, it
fails to tell a truly moving story of an internationally known incident.
This is the locale of the novel 'King Rat' of James Clavell … and
numerous other novels and personal memoirs". The reference to King Rat illustrates how fiction has had a greater
impact on shaping popular perceptions of Changi than historical truth.
When the STPB intervened to re-establish Changi as an attractive tourist
stop for Singapore's tour operators, Collins proposed that the site be
completely refashioned according to the novel. Just as Kanchanaburi was
changed to follow Pierre Boulle's story, Collins' proposals for Changi
reflected the same line of thinking: that the site should cater to
public perceptions in order to make it a more attractive tourist
destination.
{23} Collins outlined how the atmosphere tourists
wanted could be restored by creating a spectacular audio-visual show
under a big army tent seating up to 120 people. He suggested that the
tourists in their buses "drive on by the main gate" in order
to "let them photograph the entrance arch, then walk out over the
grass area to the tent for the show, then go to the display area and
exit through the salesroom to their buses". Collins added:
"this way we can tell the Big Story in the audio-visual show and
then can be more specific with the displays". He wrote that the
STPB should do everything possible to create the attraction that the
tour operators wanted. "These men know the subject and we are
merely there to help them make the best possible presentation of their
story," he urged. In his report, Collins asked a question which
indicated his intention of completely commercialising the Changi site:
"Do we sell a 'Prisoners' Tea' with prison plates and forks?"
Other consultants on the Changi site also unsuccessfully proposed a
thorough exploitation of its tourist potential with T-shirts for
purchase at the salesroom. The proposed T-shirts had captions such as,
"My goal is to get out of gaol". A T-shirt with a picture of a
cake carried the caption, "If only he had put the file in, I
wouldn't be in the jam". The consultant also proposed a white
T-shirt "with or without [a] collar" and "in front, there
will be a small drawing of bars, with a silhouetted figure behind the
bars" whose "hands are wrapped around the bars". The
caption was to read, "I made it from Changi Prison".
{24} Collins was alone in believing that Changi could
attract the large numbers of people that would warrant the cost of a
"high tech" re-creation of the past that he desired. The
management of the STPB thought that the Changi site was frequented
mainly by British, Australian and New Zealand ex-POWs and their
relatives, and it appears to have been unaware that Kanchanaburi was
experiencing a tourist boom. The decision
reflected STPB's priorities in developing Singapore's tourist
attractions. Changi was considered a marginal tourist attraction, even
though it was one of the projects that came under the billion dollar
Singapore Tourism Product Development Plan, approved by Cabinet in 1986.
Peggy Teo's and Brenda Yeoh's research on cultural tourism in Singapore
during the 1980s and 1990s has demonstrated that the STPB was focussed
on addressing what it felt was a perception among tourists that, because
Singapore had modernised so rapidly, there had been a "loss of
oriental mystique". Singapore tourism authorities were prepared to
spend over $53 million to turn Haw Par Villa, a Chinese heritage centre,
into "Singapore's answer to Disneyland", with its laser shows
based on Chinese myths and its water dragon rides.[
Such concerns were a brake on the commercialisation of the Changi site
that several consultants to the STPB advocated. Without the finance,
little could be done.
{25} The principal members of the STPB project team on
the Changi site, Robbie Collins, Pamelia Lee, and Bajintar Singh, still
saw a re-creation of the POW past at the Changi as the most viable way
of restoring the place as a tourist attraction. The opportunity of
cheaply re-creating the past came when the prison chaplain, the Reverend
Henry Khoo, showed them pictures from Lewis Bryan's, The churches of
the captivity in Malaya (1946). According to
Collins, the prison authorities "showed us a book on Chapels in
Malaya during the war put out in 1946", which contained photographs
of makeshift chapels constructed in Changi prison exercise yard and
outside the prison's walls. The members of the project team were
particularly struck by the rustic simplicity of the outdoor chapels. The
chapel that most caught their attention was one that had "just a
small corrugated zinc roof shed just over the altar area while the pews
are in front in the open". Collins then proposed that "the
chapel as shown in the book be re-created in the open field"
outside the prison walls. The prison authorities completely endorsed
this proposal, and offered the use of prison labour to build the replica
chapel in order to make the project affordable. The proposed chapel went
ahead because it cost very little-only $18,500.
{26} A museum was planned to complement the chapel.
The modern building that housed the chapel was to be converted into a
museum, but because of the limited budget, the tourism authorities found
that they had nothing to put into the museum. The STPB project team then
decided to appeal to ex-POWs for mementos and photographs.
Paradoxically, the commemorative functions of the Changi site were
strengthened by the attempts of the tourism authorities to re-create the
past for tourism. The STPB project team envisaged that the proposed
replica of the Second World War POW chapels would be used by ex-POWs for
religious services to remember their fallen comrades. Establishing a POW
museum by asking ex-POWs to contribute mementos entailed greater
significant involvement of the ex-POWs in how the past was represented
at Changi. The development of the Changi site contrasted strongly with
Kanchanaburi, where ex-POWs were largely left out of the decision-making
process, and they have since resented local tour operators for being
primarily interested in making money from tourism.
{27} The members of the STPB project team were able to
get the endorsement of ex-POWs for construction of Changi Prison Chapel,
which began in August 1987. They received many letters of thanks from
ex-POWs for building the chapel; one Australian ex-POW wrote: "I
know I speak with the support of all ex-POWs when I say we are pleased
to learn of this effort to record a dark period of our lives for
prosperity". At this time Australian ex-POWs
were erecting one of Changi's outdoor chapels, which had been salvaged
and brought to the Australian War Memorial in 1946, in the grounds of
the Royal Military College, Duntroon. They supported the STPB's parallel
efforts to re-create an outdoor chapel at Changi itself. The STPB
project team asked Ian Gollings, National Secretary of the Returned
Services League, to present the views of the ex-POWs at the meetings
which determined the details of how the chapel should appear, as well as
the landscaping of the grounds around the chapel. Gollings had only been
passing through Singapore, but he was kept informed of the major
decisions made about the finishing of the chapel.
{28} In September 1987, after completing the chapel,
the STPB turned its attention to the museum that was planned to be next
to the chapel. Because it was operating on a small budget, it was forced
to rely heavily upon the contributions of ex-POWs in establishing the
museum. The tourism body made a public appeal "to servicemen and
prisoners of war, most of whom are now in Britain or Australia, to
donate mementos of their years of imprisonment in Changi Prison during
the war". The STPB mentioned that it was "looking for
photographs, personal letters, old uniforms, rationing cards, medical
records, utensils and other relevant artefacts". A spokesman for
the board added that "these items will be properly displayed and
credit will be given to the donors".
{29} Approaches to the ex-POWs by Singapore's tourism
officials were warmly received. Asking the ex-POWs for objects
associated with their personal experiences made the ex-POWs feel that an
important part of their lives was at last being recorded for prosperity.
One British ex-POW, who volunteered his army kit bag and its contents
for the museum, commented: "it has been in my mind for some time to
approach a military museum in this country but interest in the Far East
campaign and our imprisonment is not great and perhaps it should go back
to Singapore where I found it".] A statement
by T.H. Stede, an Australian ex-POW, when he came to Singapore to donate
his POW memorabilia to the museum, embodies similar sentiments:
After I've passed on, these mementos will have no
meaning for anyone else. They would just end up on the rubbish dump. I
have brought them here because part of me remains here .
Stede, like many of the ex-POWs who gave the museum
pieces from their memorabilia, donated simple objects. He gave some of
his letters when he was a POW, old insignias and a piece of Perspex,
taken from a Japanese plane at Changi, out of which he had carved a map
of Australia.
{30} The high level of involvement in the creation of
the museum by ex-POWs meant that many of them became active promoters of
the new chapel and museum. In contrast with Kanchanaburi, at Changi a
good rapport was established between ex-POWs and the tourism officials.
H.K. Mawby, of the Burma Star Association, wrote to the STPB project
director, Pamelia Lee: "I feel we are old friends." Mawby
informed the STPB that he had "tried to promote the project as much
as possible via public relations work with Ex-servicemen's organisations
I belong to in Australia and the U.K".[46][ Ken Joyce,
Vice-President of the Burma Star Association of New South Wales, also
wrote to the STPB representative in Sydney, stating that "you can
be assured that none of our members will visit or pass through Singapore
without visiting the Changi Chapel and Museum".
Representing a masculine POW experience
{31} The selection of objects to be put on
display by the creators of Changi Prison Museum reflected the
infatuation of the Singapore tourism authorities with the image of
Changi, largely deriving from King Rat, as a place where only the
fittest men survived. They decided to make George Aspinall's
photographic collection the central feature of the museum's displays.
These photographs, which had been published as a popular book, included many showing the very bad conditions on the Burma-Thailand
Railway, as well as those of the POWs at Changi. In the display the
experience of the Burma-Thailand Railway was thus mixed up with that of
Changi, suggesting that conditions in the two places were much the same.
The second most prominent display at the museum was Max Haxworth's water
colours of the male section of the civilian internment camp. From 1942
to 1944 civilian internees occupied Changi Prison, while the POWs were
kept outside the prison walls in camps surrounded by barbed wire. In May
1944 the POWs were moved inside the prison, and the internees were moved
to another camp in Singapore. The male image of Changi was strongly
projected in these two displays. Haxworth's water colours, painted while
he was an internee, depicted male figures tackling the problems of very
basic living conditions inside the grey prison walls. The collection
reinforced the images of King Rat. The seven hundred women and
children in the civilian internment camp in Changi Prison were ignored,
despite the availability of material to depict their experience.
{32} Because the images presented by the creators of
the museum did represent Aspinall's and other POWs' experience from
Changi to the Burma-Thailand Railway, many ex-POWs saw the museum as
their very own museum. Aspinall praised the efforts of the STPB project
team:
I think about the work that was put into Changi Prison
Museum and Chapel, and your group should be very proud of what you
have achieved in this project.
It is unique in itself, although we in Australia have a large War
Memorial and Museum at Canberra which covers a large number of places
around the world with only brief reference to specific areas, whereas
the display at Changi is very detailed and shows a true and precise
record of the events that occurred in the lives of the P.O.W.s in the
Asian areas, and also the Chapel itself is more like what we as
P.O.W.s built and used for religious worship and to many of us our
religious beliefs were an element in our survival. …
I cannot help thinking about the feeling I experienced when I first
walked up to, and entered the Chapel. For a brief moment, my mind was
taken back some forty odd years, and it appeared to be very
real.
{33} Ex-POWs such as Aspinall warmly embraced the
chapel because it was an obvious indication that the refurbished site
was meant for commemoration rather than a money-making tourist
enterprise. The STPB gave the ex-POWs clear signs that they wanted the
site to have a religious and commemorative role for their return visits.
An elaborate religious dedication ceremony on 15 February 1988 marked
the opening of both the chapel and the museum. Present were tourist and
prison officials, as well ex-POWs. Aspinall was specifically invited,
though unable to attend because of health problems. Soon after the
opening the commemorative function of the site became prominent.
Visitors to the chapel were invited to pick a flower from the garden
around the chapel and place it on the altar of the chapel. Cards for
messages to be placed on a notice board in the chapel were also
provided. "As the messages pinned on a small notice board show it
has quickly become a place of homage," a reporter from the British
press noted only two months after the chapel had been dedicated.
{34} The lack of representation given to the seven
hundred women and children among the civilian internees in Changi from
1942 to 1944 was one area where several representatives of the ex-POWs
and the tourism officials did not agree. Harold Payne, President of the
Federation of the Far Eastern Prisoner of War Clubs in Britain, lobbied
the STPB on behalf of Mrs Freddy Bloom, a representative of the former
female internees, who wanted a corner of the museum be devoted to the
women's experiences. Bloom made several offers of material, and Payne
protested on Bloom's behalf, but these offers and complaints appear not
to have been taken up by the STPB officials working on the project.
In the mid-1990s Bernice Archer, a historian working on civilian
internment in east Asia, on a visit to the museum with a group of
British war widows, noticed that there were women in wartime Changi but
that they appeared to have been deliberately left out of the displays.
Archer thought that the reason for this was the stereotype that
"prisoners of war and wartime internees are a still predominantly
masculine concept in the minds not only of the general public but also
of museum creators who are, among other things, the keepers and
exhibitors of the public memory". The
omission suggests that Singapore's tourism authorities wished to convey
to the tourists the images found in King Rat.
{35} Archer's point has been confirmed by the
occasional use of the King Rat theme in publicity promotions by
the STPB; in these, wartime Changi is presented as a hard masculine
world where only the strongest men could survive. In April 1989 the STPB
invited Geoffrey Venning to the museum; he was one of the doctors who
parachuted into Changi immediately after the Japanese surrender to
attend to the POWs. When Venning visited the museum, he was given the
title of "King Rat Doctor" in a publicity exercise
which included a quotation from the novel describing a young doctor's
appearance in front of the POWs. The episode climaxed with a lone
doctor, smartly dressed in a green uniform, beret and parachute boots,
looking bewildered at the ravaged bodies of the POWs. The bodies of the
POWs at Changi were definitely emaciated, but this was usually not
because of their time at Changi, but because of their labour on the
Burma-Thailand Railway. The impression given in the publicity shots was
that the POWs' time in Changi had been responsible for their condition.
Venning became the fictional doctor of King Rat. Press accounts
of the media event described how "this flamboyant character stepped
out of the pages of James Clavell's best-selling first novel King Rat
last week to revisit the scene of his wartime adventure, Changi
Prison". The images of the museum, shaped by
themes found in King Rat, proved to be a draw card. Within a year
of the museum's opening, a total of 108,000 visitors, at an average of
seven busloads a day, had visited the new site.
Both the Kanchanaburi and Changi sites illustrate
how works of fiction (in these cases Pierre Boulle's Bridge over the
River Kwai and James Clavell's King Rat) have shaped public
perceptions to the extent that the re-creations of the past at the sites
have reflected such fictions. The sites confirm David Lowenthal's point
that when tourism authorities go about re-creating the past they try to
represent what they think their visitors want to see. The STPB's work at
revamping the Changi site demonstrates that both commodification and
commemoration of the past can proceed together, though not without some
difference of opinion. By involving male ex-POWs in the process of
representing the POW experience, the Singapore tourism authorities won
support from many ex-POWs, who saw the Changi Prison Museum as their
own, one that embodied their own experiences. On the other hand, the
creators of Changi Prison Museum appear to have decided not to include
female civilian internees in the process of creating the museum because
such images would conflict with the themes of King Rat. The
result has been that while male ex-POWs have had little problem with the
museum's main theme - a hard masculine world-former female internees
have felt that the selection of material has excluded their experiences.
The author
Kevin Blackburn is Lecturer in History at the School
of Arts, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is currently
researching the conflicting national memories of mourning the war dead
from the fall of Singapore.
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