The prisoners-of-war were tired hiding their lathe every time they might be searched, that they hung up a sign "workshop" above one of their huts, and timed it so that the new round of guards thought it had always been there.
The book is set in the same Changi PoW camp where the author was held during WWII. The character Lieutenant-Colonel Larkin is based off Lieutenant-Colonel E. E. "Weary" Dunlop who was the real life surgeon using these tools for creating artificial limbs amongst other things and whom Clavell knew and presumably Bradley too.
It's not exactly a cheery read but very much an inspiring one in terms of survival, ingenuity, and moral complexity.
I recommend King Rat to people who need to get back in to reading books.
The elites in those societies had a clear interest in carving out special privileges for themselves, which is why officers receive preferential treatment.
The 1929 Geneva convention has other things you may find objectionable, such as Section II, article 9 (paragraph 3)[1]:
Belligerents shall, so far as
possible, avoid assembling in
a single camp prisoners of
different races or nationalities.
1. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/geneva02.asp#art9
That's still the case today. Here in Germany, after 2015 there were often issues in temporary housing (e.g. sports halls converted to improptu shelters) when refugees from different backgrounds collided. Say you had two ethnic groups fighting a civil war, and members of both would flee to Germany, and continue their conflict here. Or religion - shiite and sunni muslims each view the other groups as infidels.
Or go back two decades prior, to the aftermaths of the Yugoslavian wars and their refugees that mostly came to Germany (due to a strong diaspora tradition), with the only thing anybody would have agreed upon is that beating a Serb takes precedence over any other internal fight. Balkan ethnic conflicts can even be confusing for people living there, it's madness - but thankfully it has (mostly - excluding BiH/Kosovo...) died down by now.
That Geneva Convention rule makes sense in the end, it aims to prevent conflict from stirring up in camps.
The 1929 Geneva convention is talking about the segregation of POW's who before capture would have been part of the same organized armed forces.
The only reason to specify that POW camps should be divided by nationality and race is to e.g. ensure that black French colonial troops aren't going to be using the same proverbial bathrooms as white continental French troops.
In the 1949 version of the Geneva convention this clause was eliminated, and replaced by wording which presupposes racially integrated armed forces, or alternatively makes it deliberately ambiguous as part of "customs". From Article 22[1].
The Detaining Power shall assemble
prisoners of war in camps or camp
compounds according to their
nationality, language and customs.
[...], except with their consent.
Also, you want valuable information from officers, so you treat them better and wear them down with soft power (often used in Vietnam, I've read whole book how they gradually befriended some officers treating them nicely, and then one day an officer reads how US is evil into the camera).
Also, you project how you want the other side to treat your higher ranks, there is often quid pro quo mentality.
I can go on and on. To think that people 100 years ago creating Geneva charter were clueless idiots and warfare changed dramatically is... unwise, this worked for millennia and I see no change.
The quid pro quo part makes sense, to some extent allowing the ranking to carry forward behind enemy lines out of respect and to ease post-war tensions as higher ups can segue into positions of political power.
Officers and men live separately -- have separate dining halls, quarters, clubs, &c -- to some degree even when they're not in camps. This is generally seen to contribute to the ability of officers to maintain order among the enlisted. The separation helps officers to remain coordinated with each other as well as allowing things to be somewhat less personal between officers and enlisted. It may not sound nice to us, outside the military; but it's not something the people writing the convention came up with and it's not something they had it in their power to do anything about. They were trying to bring some order to the treatment of prisoners of war, not reorganize the militaries of the world on egalitarian lines.
So it's not so much about people on the side of the detaining power who "...can only think in hierarchies..." as it is about the social system that prisoners are a part of immediately before they are captured, and respect for that social system, as offering both continuity and a semblance of order for prisoners. A commentary maintained by the ICRC puts it this way:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949/ar...
...leaving the hierarchy of the battlefield intact in prisoner-of-war camps serves the interests of both the Detaining Power and the Power on which the prisoners depend. Retaining a functioning command structure among prisoners of war of one Party will usually have a positive effect on camp order and discipline, which can be an important factor in ensuring the best possible conditions of internment for all prisoners of war. Differential treatment involving privileges for higher-ranking prisoners is one way of maintaining this structure.
Actually, signs were also written right-to-left horizontally during that period but it's likely that someone showing them how to write on a piece of paper would have written vertically, so they would probably not even have the knowledge to know the correct order of the text.
One of these signs is written right to left:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdiwLY...
https://auctions.afimg.jp/h1085974646/ya/image/h1085974646.2...
Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail?
While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order.
While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
Can we agree that it seems improbable that they fooled anybody about who drew the sign and also agree that they got to keep their workshop and their tools and have an amazing (and true) story?
I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time.
A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.
Look at this image for example: https://www.ideastream.org/community/2022-09-01/making-it-ol...
That is clearly a hand painted letter but is using a printed style (as opposed to a cursive one)
Japanese writing has the same distinction. These letters on the sign are in printed style: https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanesepod101/3706680254/
The shapes are simplified and regularised. Compared with these caligraphy style letters: https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/70734240/in/photo...
Besides, even if it was written down like that it will still be incredibly obvious. It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing. It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
Copying a shape exactly is absolutely possible. (Any shape.) Yes most people doesn’t have the skills to pull it off, but then again they are also not making lathes in captivity (or at all).
> It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
Then you make a stencil.
> There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway.
It will be hard to convince me about that when my eyes can see it. You can choose to not understand what I’m saying.
> Presumably you are referring to 明朝体
I assure you it is not called that in English.
Your knowledge of Japanese orthography gives you an interesting perspective. I'd be fascinated to know, given the obstacles you note, how exactly the prisoners overcame them. Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography? Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure? Were the guards generally illiterate, and therefore not notice the errors? All of those would be spurs to further research, which your reflexive dismissal of the premise would preclude. An open-minded approach to historical texts usually generates more-interesting questions and answers than a closed one.
So much is unknown about the situation to make the claims made above.
I mean, it's a great feel-good story and we want to believe it. Americans oh-so-smart, their Japanese captors as dumb as Darth Vader's henchmen, the perfect setting, and the machine shop was used to produce prosthetics. It's so saccharine my teeth hurt.
This is definitely a possibility, but even then...
> Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure?
This would be unlikely to work, because the characters would be written on paper using a pen or pencil, which produces quite different strokes that a brush, which is what you would have to use for a sign. Even if you know how brush strokes should look like, I can't really say how difficult it would be to produce brushwork that credibly looks like what someone would produce who has been doing it all their adult life, if you lack the experience.
Chinese is not 1:1 with Japanese so that’s not surprising.
Yet another one: maybe some of the prisoners actually knew basic Japanese? It would be a very useful skill in their situation, and learning the basics of how to write kanji is not that hard. It wouldn't be calligraphy, but it just needs to look good enough that it might just be sloppy writing.
Or someone who is not a professional wooden sign carver, perhaps? I'm natively familiar with English writing, but if I carved 'workshop' I'm not sure it would look any better than someone imitating me, nor obviously like I'd used correct 'stroke' order.
> You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it.
And that might not be suspicious at all anyway?