A JAPANESE SONGBOOK

from Te Kupenga

by Massey University Press

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SE Á N M C MAHON

DESCRIPTION Japanese songbook, crafted at the Featherston prisoner-ofwar camp, c. 1943

MAKER / ARTIST Maker unknown

REFERENCE Donated by Bruce Thomson, Wellington, 1973 (MS-1079_59_ object-view)

The collection of 52 cards, including covers, is bound by thread and has an index of titles. Each prisoner received cigarettes as part of their rations.

DESCRIPTION Smoko, Featherston prisonerof-war camp, 1943

MAKER / ARTIST John Pascoe (1908–1972)

REFERENCE PA-Group-00197 (1/4-000774-F) A Japanese prisoner of war lights up during a break from loading shingle onto a truck near the Featherston prisoner-of-war camp, 1943. The photo was taken by John Pascoe on a visit to the camp to document it as part of his work as an official wartime photographer.

This beautiful and unique manuscript was found on the body of its maker, killed in a massacre of prisoners at the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Featherston during the Second World War. It is a songbook handmade from cigarette packets, with a song in elegant cursive Japanese script inscribed on the reverse side of each opened-out carton. There are 50 songs altogether, obviously recorded from memory and mostly popular in, or from films of, the 1930s and 1940s. They concern love, Japanese places, travel stories, melancholia and soldiers’ letters home from the Japanese colonies, among other things.

The Featherston prisoner-of-war camp was established in September 1942 to accommodate soldiers and sailors from the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, along with their Korean labourers, who had been captured by Allied forces during the Battle of Guadalcanal. The camp housed more than 800 prisoners in four compounds.

By 1943, tensions were running high between the prisoners and their New Zealand guards. At issue was the work that the prisoners were expected to undertake, including clearing gorse, gardening, cooking and clearing the compounds. Along with the dishonour of capture, many of these ex-combatants felt deep shame at having to participate in such daily labour.

On 25 February, 240 prisoners went on a sit-down strike. Eventually, a confrontation between the two groups erupted after a guard fired a warning shot. As the prisoners armed themselves with stones and approached the guards, the latter opened fire with pistols, rifles and sub-machine guns. During the melée, 49 people died—48 Japanese prisoners and one New Zealand guard.

Both labour and creativity continued as part of camp life. Some prisoners produced elaborately carved artwork as well as furniture in traditional Japanese styles in the onsite workshop. Others fabricated items for New Zealand’s burgeoning state house construction industry. Chimneys, fireplaces and washtubs, all made from concrete, were produced at the camp.

At the end of the war, the camp was closed and all remaining prisoners were repatriated by ship to Japan. Today, a grove of cherry trees, popularly known as the Peace Gardens, acts as a memorial to those who died at Featherston. A plaque there quoting a haiku by the seventeeth-century poet Matsuo Bashō commemorates those killed:

Behold the summer grass All that remains Of the dreams of warriors.

(‘Bride ’ Niizuma Kagami ‘ The song on this page, same name, the 1940 film of comes from a Mirror’), love story about a new wife and the travails of her a after marriage. Reads top to bottom, right to left. life

REFERENCE MS-1079_47_p-39