Letters to Tokyo

In 1991, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, concerned Japanese citizens held a conference in Tokyo. Their aim was to petition their government for compensation for former Allied prisoners of war. To this end, a Japanese professor invited the leaders of representative POW groups each to write a letter summarizing their experiences in captivity. This they did, except that in the case of former Dutch East Indies’ POWs who reside in New Zealand, over 200 people wrote letters, which were boxed in university offices in Tokyo for 14 years. Letters to Tokyo reveals the content of the letters and examines the case for compensation and the problem of memory and identity. It discusses notions of cruelty, hope, and forgiveness against the background of Dutch colonization of what is now Indonesia, and opens a window on the lives of these elderly sufferers in their adopted country of New Zealand.