Four Years in a Red Coat: The Loveday Internment Camp diary of Miyakatsu Koike
‘The rising sun shone through clouds scattered across the blue sky. What a beautiful dawn it was! […] We were absorbed in conversation in our tent all day. Unlike the outside world, we had no job to engage us. We had nothing to do but kill time.’
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Four Years in a Red Coat: The Loveday Internment Camp diary of Miyakatsu Koike
Translated by Hiroko Cockerill | Edited by Peter Monteath and Yuriko Nagata | 2022
More than 40 years after being a civilian internee at Loveday Internment Camp in South Australia during World War II, Miyakatsu Koike published a camp diary based on his records and memories. Four Years in a Red Coat has now been translated into English by Hiroko Cockerill, and it provides valuable first-hand information about internment life.
Miyakatsu Koike was an employee of a Japanese bank in Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies at the time Japan entered World War II. On 8 December 1941, his life changed dramatically when Dutch authorities arrested him, together with other Japanese expatriates. Koike was first held at Sumowono Detention Camp before being transferred to Loveday, where he spent the next four years of his life as a civilian internee. In 1946 he was repatriated and reunited with family in Japan. In 1987, at the age of 82, Koike decided to publish his experiences. In the foreword to his diary he notes, ‘I shall attempt to write an internment camp diary, relying on scant records and on my memory. I hope that it will help children to understand the misery caused by the war and the importance of peace’. (p. 15) With the title of his book, Koike refers to his internment clothing at Loveday – a red dyed army coat that distinguished the internees when they were working outside the camp.
Koike’s diary provides valuable first-hand information about life in the camp, including camp structure, daily routines, work arrangements and entertainment activities. The diary notes are accompanied by illustrative, humorous sketches made by fellow internees. The notes themselves are mainly written in the style of daily memos, giving insights on a range of topics. For example, on 24 March 1942 Koike recorded:
I was on meal preparation duty. I woke at five. It was still dark at half past six in the morning. At a quarter to ten we observed a minute of silence for the spirit of a person from the Ryukyu Islands who died yesterday. Complete sets of clothes were distributed. We changed the straw in our mattresses. Today a Malaysian language course started. (p. 105)
Besides information on the official camp management, the reader also gets insights into how internees organised their tents and took on responsibilities for their immediate camp group, such as requesting equal clothes distributions and equipment for dental surgery and false teeth. Other sections of the diary reveal the emotions and moods of the internees. On 21 February 1942, Koike notes, ‘In the evening, an amateur entertainment show by internees was held […]. We forgot that we were internees and became high-spirited’. (p. 93)
The war-time diary comes with a compact introduction about internment camps in Australia – Loveday in particular – written by Peter Monteath and Yuriko Nagata, who both have published widely on internment themes. Loveday Internment Camp was established in 1941 near Barmera in the South Australian Riverland region. It consisted of groups of camps and was the largest World War II internment camp in Australia, with over 5,000 internees recorded in May 1943. These were mostly ‘enemy aliens’ from countries at war with Australia, in particular men of German, Italian and Japanese descent. In addition, Loveday accommodated prisoners of war. At the end of the war, internees were gradually released from Loveday. The Japanese internees were one of the last groups to be released, in February 1946.
This book offers a valuable source for researchers. It delivers information that official records of internment camps can’t provide – personal, lived experience. The supplementary introduction and photographs from archive collections set the scene for the diary notes and give the reader the necessary background information to put Koike’s experiences into context.
Reviewer: Birgit Heilmann, PHA (SA)
Four Years in a Red Coat: The Loveday Internment Camp diary of Miyakatsu Koike is published by Wakefield Press.