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G. C. EMERSON
cheques to fellow internees who had extra yen. These cheques were payable after the war and were called ‘duress cheques' as they had been written under duress. After the war the Hong Kong Government announced that people should not feel obligated to honour them. However, as those who signed the cheques had done so willingly and felt that in many cases they had saved them from starvation, almost all the cheques were honoured. As a result, a few of the internee-traders who held many of these cheques became wealthy.
One man was said to have done this:
1st he traded 8 lbs. of rice for a tin of golden syrup
2nd — he sold the syrup for HK$500
3rd — he sold the HK$500 for ¥3000
4th he sold the ¥3000 at ¥10 to £1 for a £300 cheque.
Thus his original 8 lbs. of rice, which before the war was worth about 1 shilling and 4 pence, was eventually turned into 300 pounds sterling!
Food and the Black Market occupied much of Camp "gossip", and another topic frequently talked about was repatriation. For the British, repatriation never occurred, partly because in exchange for them, the Japanese asked for a group of Japanese interned in Australia who had been pearl fishermen there and hence knew the coastline very well. Fearing a possible Japanese invasion of Australia, for which these people would have been invaluable, the British government refused to allow their repatriation. The Americans and Canadians in Stanley Camp were, however, repatriated. On 29th June 1942, the first group, mostly Americans and numbering about 300, left on the Asama Maru for Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, where they met the Gripsholm bringing Japanese from America. Changing ships, the Americans reached New York on 25th August 1942. The second repatriation took place in September 1943, when approximately 140 internees, mainly Canadians, returned home.
One internee, watching the Americans march down to the jetty in Stanley Bay to board small boats which took them out to a ferry for transference to the Asama Maru, wrote:
We sat on the wall of the cemetery and with deep emotion watched them go. We had dreams of good food for them, of