KIYOTSKEI, KEREI, NAOREI

There are two names which, to Dutch survivors of the Japanese occupation of the Indies, are bywords for cruelty and perversion: Ambarawa and Tjideng. The first is a minor town in Central Java, I believe, and the second was a neighborhood in Batavia. Both were where the Japanese interned women and children.

The men were sent to work on the railway at Pakan Bahru in Sumatra, or shipped to Burma and Japan.

Initially, teenage boys were also interned in the "Women's Camps", but as the war went on, more and more of them were pulled out and used as slave-labour by the Japanese, until by the end of the war there weren't even any boys older than nine or ten in the camps.

At Ambarawa, the Japs at one point forced a number of prisoners to become comfort women - the youngest was only fourteen years old.

At Tjideng, in Batavia, the camp area kept getting shrunk, and the number of internees, despite a high mortality rate, kept growing, as the Japanese packed more and more people into the kamp. When the Japanese finally surrendered there were up to twenty women per room - by the end of the war Tjideng contained over ten thousand prisoners.

Both in Ambarawa and Tjideng there were the usual diseases that accompany crowded unsanitary conditions and starvation, plus physical abuse and sadism from the guards. A huge number of internees did not survive the war.
Nothing unusual there.


But Tjideng had one additional horror. A camp commandant who was a wherewolf.


Captain Kenichi Sonei, who considered himself a civilized and cultured man, was a maniac during full moons, and outdid himself in cruelty and perversion on those nights. Under normal circumstances an exceptionally brutal and sadistic man who delighted in the humiliation and torture of his victims, at full moon he went entirely overboard. Everybody describes him as being an absolute madman at that time.

After the war Captain Sonei was tried for war-crimes and executed by firing squad. The number of people who could testify to his bestial nature was so overwhelming that nothing could save him. Even his own men admitted being frightened of him, describing him as a psychopath and a monster.


Many of the Dutch who were interned by the Japanese still particularly loathe everything having to do with Japan. And quite a few of the women, because of Captain Sonei, have mixed feelings about moonlight.

It is probably a good thing that the Netherlands is so often cloudy and overcast.

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I cannot remember any full moons while growing up..... although I'm sure they are not unknown there. It must simply be a gap in my memory.
I was trying to remember last night what full moon nights were like in Valkenswaard, but I cannot picture it in my mind. The different types of streetlights, no problem - clear images, detailed even to the nature of shadows and their boundaries from those lights. But no moon.