Our little trip to the Borneo Cultures Museum reminded us of a couple of things that needed re-exploring.


1.

One of the first places we visited after coming to live in Kuching was the site of the Batu Lintang camp, which held civilian detainees and prisoners-of-war during the period of the Japanese occupation (1941-45). There are some excellent, if harrowing, photos here.

On the first day of 2021, that year that went off so very quickly, we unexpectedly came across this:


I haven't been able to unearth much information about it. This site just notes that it's a Japanese memorial dating back to the occupation, while this one points out that the inscription is incomplete (the first three characters mean "the Japanese", but it's hard to be sure about the meaning of the whole thing when the final characters are missing).

A year and a half on, it's getting even harder to read:


Not far away is the Japanese cemetery, which we visited yesterday.

According to this account of a visit, the "cemetery was started possibly at the turn of the last century, around 1902. The cemetery gate was built in 1940 and in 2016, some upgrading work was done. Most of the people buried there were young people from Shimabara and Amakusa Kyusyu area."

It's a very beautiful place, as you can see:









Robyn Flemming writes: "A plaque in the cemetery describes how a group of teenage boys from Yaizu, in Shizuoka Prefecture, were recruited to help in delivering food supplies to the battlefronts in the South China Sea. As the death toll mounted, they were called up to fight. Between 1942 and 1945, 81 of the Yaizu boy fishermen 'lost their lives in the call of their patriotic duty'." (You can see the plaque here.)

Now I have to confess that we COMPLETELY missed this. Why? Because we were under massive aerial attack...

The air was thick with bity things, which swarmed around us like the spirits of the avenging dead. Our visit was a complete farce, to be honest. I snapped as quickly as possible, while Nigel whooshed the umbrella around, light-sabre-like, in an ineffectual attempt to drive away the vicious hordes... One day, liberally coated in insect repellent, we will return.

2.

I talked about Darul Maziah back in 2020. But the museum mentioned a memorial pillar... A pillar, we thought to ourselves. We don't remember a pillar...

So, on our way past again the other day, we peered over the fence a bit more insistently, and sure enough, there's a pillar:


The Sarawak Heritage Society has this to say: "During the period of unrest before Sarawak was ceded to the British colonial government, the house was the headquarters of the anti-cession movement. To commemorate the group's involvement, a memorial pillar was created in the house's compound."

There's a photo of the anti-cession protesters gathered at Darul Maziah here.