‘Like Pebbles Stuck in a Sieve’: Reading Romushas in the Second-Generation Photography of Southeast Asian Captivity

Western depictions of captivity across Southeast Asia during the Second World War are dominated by the images of military prisoners of war who were captured by Japanese forces following the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Much less widely known are the histories of romushas: forced labourers from Java who were recruited in their millions and suffered extreme deprivation and ill-treatment through systems of hard labour and corporal punishment. This article explores how the second-generation work of Dutch photographer Jan Banning retraces the rare stories of some of these romushas, and how — with a lack of public places of remembrance — the boundaries between survival and memorial are blurred through the layered functions of Banning’s portraits.