Images from collection on Japanese camps online

THE HAGUE – The local museum ‘Het Museon’ recently exhibited a priceless collection of image material detailing life in Japanese concentration camps in the former Dutch East Indies and beyond. In addition it showed music instruments, tools used by labour conscripts, toys and hand-written cookbooks, all used or even made in those camps. The image material was created by well-known artists but also by unknown amateurs who had been incarcerated by the Japanese for no other reason than being of European origin and belonging to the conquered enemy, which they despised. The museum had already managed this Dutch East Indies collection since 1975 and has now posted the image material online at www.hetjaar2602.nl (the Japanese year for the far more widely known 1942, the year they overran the Dutch colony).