Japanese POW Camps Propaganda Film

The Japanese made a propaganda film claiming how good their POW camps were. This film looks at those claims and tears them apart. There is no doubt that the Japanese POW camps were brutal affairs at the absolute best.

The film also has subtitles.

The film starts out with photos showing the actual conditions of the POWs in the camps.

The explains the film. It then introduce the soldiers who provided the truth about what the Japanese were doing to their prisoners.

There are only two females, one an older woman and the other this young girl. This is also an Australian-oriented film, so the males seem to be almost all Australians.

The scenes were from Java as this guy explains. He says they will show a section of the original Japanese propaganda and then tell the truth about what really happened. He says that the only reason any of the prisoners took part was that the Japanese threatened them with reduced food for all the camp and withholding of medical supplies.

This guy says that the Japanese had a hard time finding men who looked fit enough to use in the movie. It's also seems very much that these guys were reading from a teleprompter or something like that.

Even though Japanese soldiers made the film, they tried to make it look like the prisoners were the ones who made it.

The film indicates there were plenty of medicines but there weren't.

They tried to make it look like two guys were having a pleasant, comfortable chat, but it ended right after the scene was shot.

They tried to make it look like the prisoners ate well but the truth was diametrically opposed to that. These scenes were not shot at a camp but at Japanese HQ.

'The food eaten by the prisoners was little better than garbage prepared in filthy conditions' says the Australian narrator of the true parts of the film. This must have been something shot separately after the camp liberation.

The scene then shifts to a camp for women. Then the older woman explains how that was all a sham and we see...

Scenes of the actual camp.

Then the film supposedly shows guys having a lot of fun in the water bathing.

Then one of the former prisoners talks about the actual bathing conditions.

Scenes of a wonderful living room are just a fake as everything else in the film.

He says that in the actual camp there was no radio, and that after 1942 all concerts, lectures and other forms of entertainment were forbidden. He says the living conditions in the camp steadily got worse.

The Japanese also had the prisoners fake a game of tennis. They also fake a cricket match. A doctor who was a prisoner then talks about how the men suffered from various diseases linked to starvation.

Then the film goes into hospital scenes which were, of course, faked.

A scene of an actual hospital for POWs.

Scenes of prisoners playing billiards, etc, were actually filmed at a place for Japanese officers. Some scenes are shown of actual prisoners in real conditions by the Japanese and used as propaganda tools for the Japanese themselves.

There was a fake reunion of Dutch men with their wives and children.

A real camp for Dutch women and children.

The film makes it looks like the guys got paid but they didn't; it's just another fake action.

A fake camp canteen.

The actual food the prisoners were given.

The Japanese even faked a religious ceremony. The cross is actually cardboard and machine guns are hidden, trained on the prisoners.

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