Slow Departure: Visuals of Japanese Surrendered Personnel in Southeast Asia
Sandeep Ray
Associate Professor and Head of the School of Humanities
University of Nottingham Malaysia
Japan’s surrender in World War Two has been extensively documented and discussed in the literature. What remains relatively understudied as a collective theme is the fate of the tens of thousands of Japanese military personnel in Southeast Asia after the war. Their experiences varied: some were repatriated quickly, some forced into labor, some actively aided returning colonial powers in the process of reoccupation, and many were executed. This presentation will explore these divergent outcomes in Malaya, Singapore an Indonesia with reference to primary sources from film and photographic archives.
Sandeep Ray is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. A practitioner/academic, he specializes in the intersection of colonial history, nonfiction film, and Southeast Asian cinema. Ray is the author of Celluloid Colony, which was a finalist for the EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize 2021, and the historical novel A Flutter in the Colony (Harper Collins, 2019). Ray has published in leading journals, including the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, positions, and the American Historical Review. In June 2025, Ray was elected to the Council of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) for a 4-year term. This study is funded in part by a grant from the Sumitomo Foundation.