Tenko

In Singapore, a group of British men and women are living a rather posh lifestyle. They are all obviously of the “upper class”, snobbish and bent only on their own pleasures.

They do not take the possibility of a Japanese invasion seriously until it's too late, and the Japanese bomb the city. A group of refugees gets on a ship to sail to Australia, but the ship is sunk and the survivors end up on an island. No sooner does the group find shelter then the Japanese military appears.

Many of the people try to run away. A Japanese soldier yells at them, in English, to stop, but they don't, and one of the soldiers shoots and kills one of those fleeing.

When they end up at a POW camp, they still try to maintain their “better-than-thou” approach to life and make no effort to try to understand the Japanese, even when they are simply trying to explain how to bow properly.

One of the women ends up getting put into a punishment cage for trying to use a crystal radio that the other women had told her to leave alone and not touch under any conditions.

What is incredible is how pompous and sure-of-themselves some of the women can be, making absolutely no effort whatever to adapt to the situation they are in, thinking they are still almost regal people that shouldn't have to share hardship or hard work. I feel no sympathy for them at all. I do feel sympathy for those who are at least trying to make do in the situation, but the ultra-selfish, ultra-self-centered ones are just making a bad situation worse for everyone.

They just can't seem to accept that they are no longer in command, and not everyone is going to bow and scrape to them simply because they have money.

In spite of problems with little food, unsanitary conditions, little water, Japanese soldiers, etc, the women find time to complain about two women who might and might not be having a lesbian relationship. In my opinion, this just shows how unrealistic some of the people are behaving, to get upset about something that might be happening between two consenting adults, when there are almost countless other major problems of real importance for them to be concerned about.

Two of the women escape (despite knowing full well that, if caught, all the others will also be punished), and then are turned in by Marion, the leader of the British group. All the Dutch prisoners can do is to blame the English prisoners for everything that is going wrong when the two women are caught, and almost everyone is blaming Marion and one other woman for telling the Japanese commandant of the escape.

The two sides are finally able to come together (somewhat) for a project they need to do to save an English prisoner from dying, but the animosity is still always there between the two groups.

I have two major problems with this book.

1. Most of the characters are unsympathetic. Yes, you can feel sorry for the women who lose their children, but otherwise most of the women are selfish, nasty people who are more intent on their own selves then on helping others. The Dutch are almost as much at war with the British prisoners as they are with the Japanese. Granted, the conditions they are in are bad, but selfishness, lying, bullying, etc, are not the answers to their problems.

2. The ending of the book. They simply move on to another camp. End of story. They survive the one camp, gradually seem to start to grow closer together at the end of the book, but you know it's all just going to start again, so it's an ending that's not really an ending.

As far as the conditions in the camp goes and how they were treated by the Japanese, the story seems fairly accurate as far as how bad the conditions were. The Japanese camp commander Yamauchi is not totally unrealistic; the conditions that prisoners found themselves under varied considerably, often depending on who was leading the camp, and Yamauchi is one of the most moderate of the Japanese, considering the times.

Note also; this is a review of the book, not the TV series.



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