No public memorial marks the former Shanghai internment camp made famous by JG Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun, where more than 1,800 foreigners were held by the Japanese during World War II.
Ballard’s fictionalized version of his experiences in the Lunghwa camp was published 30 years ago, followed in 1987 by the Steven Spielberg film starring a young Christian Bale as Jim Graham, a boy who comes of age on his own in the facility.
The site is now an elite government-run school in Shanghai’s southern suburbs, where Chinese students are unaware internees once slept in their grey classroom buildings.
Photo: AFP
The only reminder is a small, easily-ignored display in a private campus museum.
“When I studied here, I was not aware of this part of history. It was not mentioned in class,” said Shanghai High School graduate Lucy Zhang.
The Chinese government, embroiled in a territorial dispute with Tokyo, regularly publicizes Japanese atrocities against its people from the 1930s to the end of World War II.
Photo: AFP
A far smaller number of foreigners lived in China at the time, but their sufferings have gone largely ignored.
An American teacher at the school, Sven Serrano, is trying to change that, lecturing on the history of the camp to foreign students in the school’s international section, showing visitors around and developing an online app about the site.
The school demolished the former G Block, where Ballard lived with his family, to make space for a swimming pool, but eight other buildings still stand, including the dining hall and assembly center, Serrano said.
“I’m always concerned that I’ll wake up one morning and the wrecking ball has been taken to one of our precious old buildings,” he told AFP.
“I don’t see any way how we’re going to have any memorial plaque. They just don’t want to make a really big deal of it,” he said — adding one reason for the sensitivity was Japanese students attending the school.
Former internee Betty Barr entered the Lunghwa camp in 1943 at the age of 10 with her Scottish missionary father, American mother and older brother.
Her most vivid memories are blistering summers, freezing winters and an obsession with food.
“I was old enough to know what was happening. I didn’t think it was a picnic,” said Barr, 80, during a return visit.
She still guiltily recalls taking a sip of milk produced by the camp’s only cow from a mug she was taking to her brother in the hospital.
“My father rose to be the manager of the kitchen, though he could not boil an egg, because he could be trusted not to steal vegetables,” she said.
A TIME TO REMEMBER
Japan set up more than 20 internment camps holding around 14,000 people in China and Hong Kong, then a British colony, according to Greg Leck, author of Captives of Empire about the Japanese internment of Allied civilians from 1941 to 1945.
Shanghai, an international commercial city where overseas citizens enjoyed legal privileges and comfortable lifestyles in foreign “concessions,” had 12 camps.
“Hunger and malnutrition, more than anything else, made conditions more severe,” he said. “Medical service personnel were confronted with every type of ailment … aggravated by lack of clothing, poor housing, poor sanitation, over-crowding and the stresses associated with captivity.”
On a vastly larger scale, Japan held both civilians and prisoners of war in 176 camps in its own country and 500 in occupied territories during the war. Japan was also responsible for the deaths of as many as 30 million Asians, including Chinese, his research showed.
Many former China internees have taken issue with Empire of the Sun over factual inaccuracies, uncomplimentary portrayals of recognizable people and the feeling that Ballard appropriated a story belonging to them.
“What upset many former inmates was that his hero, Jim, admired the Japanese,” said Barr, who knew Ballard. “I didn’t mind that but felt that some of what he wrote was not related to the reality. The film was even further removed.”
Ballard, who died in 2009, said his best-known novel was based on memories.
“Some of the events that I described are imaginary, but ... Empire of the Sun is a novel that is firmly based on true experiences, either my own or those told to me by other internees,” he wrote in his autobiography Miracles of Life.
The novel came out 40 years after the events it depicted, but the writer explained: “It took me 20 years to forget Shanghai and 20 years to remember.”
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
With weighty, anxiety-inducing geopolitical topics dominating the headlines, checking in on the wild and weird state of local politics can take some of the edge off. This November’s elections will determine who will be in charge of fixing potholes in your neighborhood, not the potholes in Taiwan’s complicated geopolitical space. Recently, after an online interview with a Taipei-based journalist, I commented that Taipei journalists never go further than the MRT can take them. He laughed and agreed. Naturally, the Taipei mayoral race is eating up much of the press attention. TAIPEI CITY Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) has
As someone who normally steers clear of books with “transcendence” or “metaphysics” in their subtitles, this reviewer — a casual observer of local belief systems since the 1990s — found Fabian Graham’s Money God Temples in Taiwan a challenging read. Those who’ve only dipped their toes into temple culture will likely need to parse several sections with special care if they’re to keep up with the author, a British ethnographic researcher whose previous books have investigated religious practices among ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. This scholarly volume examines a facet of Taiwan’s religious landscape that didn’t exist a century ago, and
RSS