Patrick Comerford
Carpenter Street with its Chinese shops, restaurants and temples in the centre of Kuching should lead naturally lead west into India Street, with its Indian-owned clothes shops and spice shops.
Instead, however, the Chinese and Indian communities were forcibly divided and separated in the 1940s by the occupying Japanese forces when they used forced labour to build the Japanese Building.
The Japanese Building in Kuching is the only administrative building built by the Japanese Occupational Force in Sarawak during World War II (1941-1945). Located awkwardly between two of Brooke’s buildings, the Japanese Building is the only construction built by the Japanese Army that still exists in Kuching.
The Japanese forces first landed in Sarawak at Tanjung Baram in Miri on 16 December 1941; by late on Christmas Eve they had captured Kuching.
The Japanese imperial forces occupied Sarawak for almost four years, and during that time they the introduced a policy of ‘Japanisation’, forcing local people to learn Japanese language and customs. Despite these policies, few remnants of the Japanese occupation can still be seen in Kuching.
One of those surviving markers is the Batu Lintang prison camp, which was originally the British Indian Army barracks, while the other is the Japanese Building, which divides India Street, which houses many Indian-owned businesses, from Carpenter Street, with its Chinese-owned shops and eateries.
General Toshinari Maeda became the first commander of the Japanese forces in northern Borneo during World War II. Initially, his headquarters were in Miri before he decided to move them to Kuching.
At first, the Japanese used the Old Courthouse as their administrative centre in Kuching, before deciding to build the Japanese Building to link the Old Courthouse and the Treasury Building, which had been built in 1929. Before the Japanese Building was erected, Carpenter Street and Indian Street were one continuous commercial thoroughfare, passing between the Old Courthouse and the Treasury Building.
The Japanese Building was built with the blood and sweat of Prisoners-of-War (POWs) from Sabah and Sarawak who were being held at Batu Lintang Camp. The were forcibly marched each morning for three miles from the camp to the site to provide the labour force needed for building the house, and forced to march back again in the evening.
POWs and male civilian internees were also forced to work at Kuching Harbour, Seventh Mile landing ground and other sub-camps.
Batu Lintang camp was the biggest POW and civilian internment facility in Borneo. It opened in August 1942 and closed in September 1945. The camp commander at Batu Lintang, Colonel Tatsuji Suga, was from Hiroshima and the prisoners and inmates were disturbed to hear he was a Christian.
Batu Lintang was unusual as it housed both Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian internees. The buildings were originally a British Indian Army barracks. It was extended by the Japanese until it covered about 50 acres (20 ha), and it held up to 3,000 prisoners. Life was harsh, with food shortages, disease and sickness, scant medicine, forced labour, brutal treatment and lack of adequate clothing and living quarters.
Most of the POWs in Batu Lintang were officers from the Brooke forces from North Borneo and from the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, British Indian Army personnel and soldiers, and Dutch East Indies soldiers. The civilian internees included Roman Catholic priests, nuns and missionaries as well as British civilians. The 110 Catholic priests, brothers and religious men were mostly Dutch and Irish. initially Mother Bernardine, an English Catholic nun, was the first camp mistress in the women’s compound.
The Japanese paid the men in the work party with ‘camp dollars’. These banknotes were also called ‘banana money’ because of the images of banana trees printed on the $10 notes.
Japan surrendered unconditionally on 15 August 1945. But the camp commander at Batu Lintang, Colonel Suga, waited until 24 August to announce officially to the camp that Japan had surrendered. In the intervening days he had been plotting their mass execution.
The Japanese remained in control of the camp until 11 September, when the Japanese forces in the Kuching area eventually surrendered. When the camp was liberated by Australian troops, its population was 2,024, including 1,392 POWs, 395 male civilian internees and 237 civilian women and children.
A thanksgiving service in the camp on 12 September was led by Bishop Francis S Hollis of Sarawak, who had been an internee, and two Australian chaplains from the liberating force. Repatriation began that day, but some prisoners were still in Batu Lintang a week after liberation. Suga died by suicide on 22 September five days after being taken prisoner by the Australian forces and while he was awaiting trial.
By June-July 1946, the bodies in the cemetery at Batu Lintang had been exhumed and reburied in the military cemetery on Labuan island. But Suga had destroyed all Japanese records at the camp, and a large number of the graves at Labuan have remained unidentified.
The Union Jack that had been draped over the coffins of POWs at the camp and that was raised in the camp when the Japanese capitulated, was placed in All Saints’ Church, Oxford, in April 1946, along with two wooden memorial plaques. The flag and plaques are now in Dorchester Abbey.
The huts have been replaced gradually over the years, although a few remnants of the site remain, including a single hut, the old gate posts, the gate bunker and stump of the Japanese flag pole. A teachers’ training college moved onto the site in 1948.
The Japanese cemetery near the site of camp predates the Japanese invasion of Kuching in 1941, and includes the graves of Japanese immigrants who came to work in Kuching offered by at the invitation of the Brooke administration in 1910s. A separate monument commemorates the 81 teenage boy fishermen from Yaizu who volunteered for the Japanese navy in 1942-1945.
After World War II, the Japanese Building in the centre of Kuching was first used as the court’s library. But for decades, the building continued to totally cut off the connection from Carpenter Street to India Street. That link was only restored in 1989 when a passageway through the building was created.
Over the years, the Japanese Building has had different uses. Part of it housed Little Lebanon, a Middle East restaurant, in the early 2000s, and the building has been a venue for exhibitions during the Rainforest Fringe Festival. Charlotte Hunter held a photographic exhibition, ‘The Tinsmiths of Kuching,’ in the Japanese Building in September-October 2019.
The Japanese Building was revitalised and renovated as a coworking space, iCube Studio, at the end of 2020, providing affordable coworking space for entrepreneurs, freelancers, start-ups, innovators and business owners, with a live studio and meeting rooms. However, the building is not open to the public on a daily basis.
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