[ESSAY] “Just an Ordinary Photograph: Images of the Japanese Occupation in Singapore and Sumatra” by Nathan Chong
Once you know what to look for, and where to look, pieces begin to fall into place.
What do you see in this photograph?
I see young girls walking hand in hand along a wide gravel path beneath the hot sun. Some smile at the camera, while others concentrate on the path ahead. A glance at other photographs in the collection reveals people relaxing, children playing, and, in some cases, soldiers smiling and laughing.
All these photographs were taken during the Japanese Occupation of what are today Singapore and Indonesia during the Second World War. Set against familiar accounts of carnage, destruction, and death from the Occupation period, the peaceful demeanour of these scenes seems strikingly out of place.
Kinoshita Kuniaki reflects on the wartime period as he looks at photographs of his uncle, Kinoshita Shinobu, and his grandmother, Sute, in Hakusan, Ishikawa Prefecture. (Photograph by Okuda Teppei.) Via
They were the work of Kinoshita Shinobu (木下忍), a photographer with the Japanese 25th Army (第二十五軍) during the Second World War, who carefully curated the collection to be sent to his mother in Japan. What survives is not a complete archive but a selection made by Kinoshita that passed military censorship. Kinoshita himself disappeared shortly before the end of the war. Such visual artefacts are nonetheless rare because most Japanese wartime photographs were destroyed before Japan’s surrender in 1945 in an effort to remove evidence of war crimes.
I first learnt of the existence of Kinoshita’s photographs after encountering an article in the Chunichi Shinbun (中日新聞) about previously unreleased Second World War photographs of Singapore and Sumatra.1 The article claimed that there were close to two hundred photographs in total. My curiosity about these images led me to contact Kinoshita’s family, who generously agreed to share the collection with me and permitted me to use the photographs.
Many of Kinoshita’s photographs present an impression of tranquillity and order, perhaps reflecting how Imperial Japan wished to imagine the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” (大東亜共栄圏) it sought to create. Yet, look closely, and the realities of conflict and occupation are never far away. In the photograph above, a distinctive bridge can be seen behind the marching children. Comparison with surviving historical photographs reveals it to be the bridge leading to Syonan Jinja (昭南神社) at MacRitchie Reservoir. The bridge and shrine were destroyed by Japanese forces before the end of the Second World War to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. Only the foundations of the bridge and remnants of the shrine remain today.
Remains of the Syonan Jinja bridge2
Syonan Jinja was supposedly the grandest Shinto shrine in the world after the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, and a symbol of Japanese power and authority over its Asian conquests. The bridge and shrine were built through the forced labour of Allied prisoners of war. Historical accounts suggest that groups of local and Japanese schoolchildren were often brought to the shrine to pay their respects to Japanese soldiers killed during Imperial Japan’s Malayan and Sumatran campaigns. This is very likely the scene portrayed in Kinoshita’s photograph.
Daitōa Kyōdō Sengen,
Joint Declaration of Greater East Asia3
The image of children marching forwards in the photograph also bears a striking resemblance to common Japanese propaganda portrayals of Asia from the period, as seen on the booklet cover above. Such propaganda sought to promote a narrative in which life under Japanese occupation was characterised by harmonious cultural coexistence following liberation from European and American colonial subjugation.
The reality was harsher, marked by constant shortages, arbitrary violence, and mass killings by the Japanese occupiers. Large numbers of Indonesians who were pressed or recruited into auxiliary military service by the Japanese did not survive. Read in this context, Kinoshita’s photograph becomes an extension of the Japanese imperial gaze, portraying the children as willing participants advancing beneath a new and idealised Japanese order.
Below is a photograph printed on a postcard and preserved in Kinoshita’s collection that appears even more incongruous. It depicts people of European descent in light summer clothing, basking in the sun on the deck of a ship and looking relaxed, almost as though they were on holiday. Yet it is widely known that the Japanese held extremely hostile anti-Western attitudes, which extended even to their allies among the Axis powers. We must therefore ask why these people were reclining on the deck of a ship rather than being incarcerated, as many Europeans from Allied countries were at the time.
To understand the image, we must turn to the setting in which it was taken. Kinoshita has already provided a clue by identifying the location on the reverse of the postcard as the Kamakura Maru (鎌倉丸), which was docked in Singapore at the time.
The Kamakura Maru was used in one of the rare prisoner exchanges conducted between Japan and the Allies. It departed for Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa, present-day Maputo, Mozambique, on 6 September 1942.4 The people pictured relaxing aboard the ship were part of that exchange. They included important diplomats, political detainees, and a small number of wealthy civilians from across Japanese-controlled Asia.
The calm and relaxed demeanour of those aboard the vessel helped Japan create the impression that it did not mistreat prisoners of war. Their favourable treatment may also have been intended to foster goodwill among the foreign nationals on board and encourage sympathy towards Imperial Japan.
The comfort depicted in the image was probably authentic, but so too was its exceptionality. For every person shown aboard that ship, thousands remained confined in prisoner-of-war camps, underfed, overworked, and unable to leave. Originally a luxury liner before the war, the Kamakura Maru was later repurposed as a troop transport and hospital ship. The vessel was sunk by a United States submarine on 28 April 1943, with the loss of more than 2,000 lives.5
The photographs underscore what makes photography such a powerful medium. No matter how carefully a photographer attempts to construct a particular narrative, an image will still contain traces of reality. Once you know what to look for, and where to look, pieces begin to fall into place.
Imperial Japanese Navy records of the search-and-rescue mission from 2 May, when the first survivors were found.6
Yet it is worth remembering that Kinoshita’s photographs present a highly particular vision of Japan, one that converges with more overtly manipulative forms of Japanese propaganda. The images Kinoshita sent to his mother were probably not intended to persuade Japanese imperial subjects and soldiers, or people living in occupied territories, of the need to sacrifice themselves for some vision of national greatness. Nonetheless, they still depict the world through the eyes of someone who appeared to believe in such promises, or who at least wanted his loved ones to think that he did. Perhaps he hoped the photographs would offer his mother some degree of reassurance.
The ambiguity of many of Kinoshita’s photographs is probably what I find most unsettling. They raise open questions and contain clues about Japanese imperialism and its atrocities and abuses, while leaving gaps concerning purpose and perspective. The visual fragments Kinoshita captured leave me wondering whether he was in some way party to the many atrocities and excesses perpetrated by Japanese troops. He was, after all, part of the Japanese war machine.
Perhaps he was a true believer in the imperialist and militarist cause and staged some of the scenes in these photographs. Yet Kinoshita also appears to have been someone keen to document calmer aspects of Japanese rule, even though traces of violence were never far away. Perhaps those traces appeared unintentionally. Perhaps he simply wanted, for a little while, to leave behind the carnage surrounding him. Kinoshita was also a son, part of a family that cared about him and for whom he, in turn, cared. These different aspects of a person can, of course, all be true at once.
Given the unprecedented speed and scale at which images are now created, edited, fabricated, and shared, Kinoshita’s black-and-white photographs from more than eighty years ago offer a useful reminder. It is easy to cast individuals and label their actions as “evil” or “fake”, particularly when they fail to conform to our prior expectations, assumptions, and values. Such impulses are especially visible in contemporary efforts to frame Japan as “remilitarising”.
Improvements in the creation of synthetic images using artificial intelligence have blurred the distinction between reality and fantasy even further. Yet, as with propaganda, there is always a reason such images are created, whether for disinformation or as an outward projection of their creators’ own views. No matter how closely generated images are scrutinised, because they are fabricated from ideas and styles derived from other works, they offer less additional information about context and background, even when they reveal something of their creators’ intentions.
If we look more closely at authentic images, even those created for propagandistic purposes, we may discover details about intention and setting that reveal a more complex and even contradictory reality. This is true both of the twenty-first century and of the middle of the twentieth. Making the effort to recognise such complexity may offer one means of coming to terms with the messiness and tensions intrinsic to societies and individuals and, perhaps, suggest possibilities for mutual accommodation.
Thinking again about the photograph of the little girls, it now seems far less clear what they were ultimately marching towards all those years ago, despite the apparent confidence in their demeanour and the seeming determination on their faces.
Notes
- “【つなぐ 戦後78年】（７）南方従軍写した200枚” [“Connecting: 78 Years After the War, Part 7: Two Hundred Photographs Taken While Serving in the Southern Theatre”]. 中日新聞Web [Chunichi Shimbun Web], 19 Aug. 2023, www.chunichi.co.jp/article/751791 ↩︎
- Wzhkevin. “Remains of Divine Bridge Leading to Synonan Jinja at MacRitchie Reservoir, Singapore, 2 – 2022-07-02.Jpg.” Wikimedia Commons, 2 July 2022, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Syonan_Jinja. ↩︎
- Orr, James, et al. “A 1942 declaration for greater east asian co-operation.” Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, Mar. 2008, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1557466008006128. ↩︎
- 郵船OB氷川丸研究会 [NYK Alumni Hikawa Maru Research Group]. “鎌倉丸とシティ・オブ・カンタベリー号” [“The Kamakura Maru and the City of Canterbury”]. 氷川丸とその時代 [Hikawa Maru and Its Era], 海文堂出版株式会社 [Kaibundo Publishing Co., Ltd.], Tokyo, 2008, pp. 270 to 272. ↩︎
- 郵船OB氷川丸研究会 [NYK Alumni Hikawa Maru Research Group]. “鎌倉丸とシティ・オブ・カンタベリー号” [“The Kamakura Maru and the City of Canterbury”]. 氷川丸とその時代 [Hikawa Maru and Its Era], 海文堂出版株式会社 [Kaibundo Publishing Co., Ltd.], Tokyo, 2008, pp. 287 to 288. ↩︎
- “(May 1943), Philippines Aviation Daily Records 2/4, from 1 May 1943 to 31 July 1943.” JACAR (Japan Center for Asian Historical Records), National Institute for Defense Studies, Ministry of Defense, www.jacar.archives.go.jp/das/image-en/C14061148400. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026. ↩︎
How to cite: Chong, Nathan. “Just an Ordinary Photograph: Images of the Japanese Occupation in Singapore and Sumatra.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 25 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/25/ordinary-photograph.
Nathan Chong is a photographer with a particular interest in capturing fleeting moments and documenting disappearing dimensions of social life. He specialises in close-up street photography. In his free time, he enjoys reading, exploring overlooked aspects of history, and tracing connections between the past, the present, and ideas about the future. His current focus is on issues relating to Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Japan.
