Well Japanese uses Chinese characters and mixes them up with Hiragana, but Singapore and Shin/ho are obviously Chinese and not Japanese. In Japanese it's read shin or ho but could be something else in Chinese. Maybe one of our boards Chinese speakers could help.
From a brief search it looks like the only camp in Singapore itself was the infamous Changi. Changi POW camp - History Learning Site
There was a camp in Manchuria/China called Hoten: Hoten Camp - Wikipedia
May or may not be of use...
Fascinating document to see.
Google translates it as Shonan which was the Japanese name for Singapore during occupation
Thanks so much for finding this lizzieloo
The character is 泰 tai4。It's Chinese for Thailand. And when I look up what it means in Japanese it means Thailand too.
Maybe regnal year of Hirohito?
The bottom right two characters in red 死亡 siwang mean deceased. No real clue as to when/why though.
As with maomao think occupation is something like operator... In simplified characters (because I don't have traditional set up) it's 运转手yunzhuanshou... The first two characters relate to operating/working machinery, the last one just means 'hand'; person proficient at doing something (bit like 'all hands on deck' etc).
Don't get date of capture... It says that year is 17...
) translation, He was obviously captured in the occupation of Singapore (Feb 1942). Presumably then transported to Thailand... I guess 泰 is just a perfunctory notation by an official saying 'look, they sent him to Thailand, now he's dead, how should I know exactly where?' (forgive me for being perfunctory, just imagine that's how it was).
Yes, Shonan is Singapore, I said he was captured in Singapore.
The number of kanji in daily use in the Japanese language was reduced after the Second World War (shinjitai simplification). You only need about 2,000 to read modern Japanese. Before this it would have been more like the 5,000+ you need to be literate in Chinese. I guess that was one of the ones they got rid of.
Yeah... I guess 1926 is '1'. Going by maomao's (e2a: and AS
The dates also line up with the opening of Ban Pong camp in Thailand; august 1942, so exactly at his registration date in the top left <obviously this is all just me googling at this point> which... er... well, it was the first camp for men from Singapore about to be transferred onto the Thai-Burma railway... Construction was ongoing, with one of the most severe periods being autumn 1943. So yeah... I guess that may well be the poor sod's fate.
www.cofepow.org.uk
2163 for the basic stuff by the time you are 18, but there are more than 100,000. My wife reckons that the kanji for Thailand just fell out of popular use as they just call it Thai now, written in katakana (like amerika etc). Even though we are 'Ingurisu' the English kanji is still very popular, though I see it more for language rather than used for a place name, so maybe that's why.
