7 Mar 2016

Japanese POWs - David Hill

From Afternoons, 1:34 pm on 7 March 2016

Two kilometres north of Featherston on State Highway 2, there is a roadside memorial carved in stone that reads "Behold the summer grass; All that remains of the dreams of warriors". These are words from a seventeenth-century Japanese haiku. The memorial marks the site of a former Japanese prisoner of war camp where a riot broke out in 1943, in which 48 Japanese prisoners of war and one guard were killed. The story of what happened at Featherston is told in a new book for young people called Enemy Camp. It's written by David Hill, whose won numerous awards for his Junior Fiction.