I find it hard to believe that they copied the word for workshop (presumably 工房) convincingly enough that it wasn't obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc. The way that someone would show how a character looks to someone without any knowledge (ie textbook form) and how they would naturally write such a sign is also different. You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it.
Actually, signs were also written right-to-left horizontally during that period but it's likely that someone showing them how to write on a piece of paper would have written vertically, so they would probably not even have the knowledge to know the correct order of the text.
If all signs in the prison camp were written right-to-left instead of vertically, they probably would have noted that before creating the sign. Especially considering their lives depended on it.
If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
This is such a facially bizarre thing to contest. They got a Japanese NCO to write the text, and presumably copied it as he wrote it. Why imagine that the NCO wrote it vertically and the soldiers horizontally? Likewise the article doesn't suggest that anyone thought the sign was written by a native speaker; why even imagine that's a requirement?
I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
Most likely the circumstance they got the Japanese NCO to write the text in was a conversation about learning Japanese and how to write it too. Nobody is deliberately trying to stop them from learning to write, they are most likely in favour of it, the trickiness was just around avoiding the Japanese running the camp from noticing their interest in workshops specifically. If stroke order is important in this context then I expect the Japanese NCO showing them the characters would have told them and explained the proper order.
The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time.
A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.
Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge.
Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail?
While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order.
While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
I already agreed that writing kanji without years of practice would be very hard to make look native. But they said they did it and it worked. Maybe it was obviously not native and it didn't matter. I don't know. But I'm not going to say they lied about making the sign.
Can we agree that it seems improbable that they fooled anybody about who drew the sign and also agree that they got to keep their workshop and their tools and have an amazing (and true) story?
It would be much easier for a random Japanese soldier who actually knows the language to just write on the few necessary signs than trying to direct a prisoner to do so, who will probably end up making mistakes and make it almost illegible. This just sounds like a nice explanation but it's unlikely to be the case.
> obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc.
Or someone who is not a professional wooden sign carver, perhaps? I'm natively familiar with English writing, but if I carved 'workshop' I'm not sure it would look any better than someone imitating me, nor obviously like I'd used correct 'stroke' order.
> You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it.
"Print characters" aren't hand painted on signs and you will rarely see it written in any context outside of extremely old books. There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway. Presumably you are referring to 明朝体 (although that sign you linked is actually 丸ゴシック, which is much more recent).
Besides, even if it was written down like that it will still be incredibly obvious. It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing. It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
> It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing.
Copying a shape exactly is absolutely possible. (Any shape.) Yes most people doesn’t have the skills to pull it off, but then again they are also not making lathes in captivity (or at all).
> It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
Then you make a stencil.
> There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway.
It will be hard to convince me about that when my eyes can see it. You can choose to not understand what I’m saying.
Your knowledge of Japanese orthography gives you an interesting perspective. I'd be fascinated to know, given the obstacles you note, how exactly the prisoners overcame them. Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography? Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure? Were the guards generally illiterate, and therefore not notice the errors? All of those would be spurs to further research, which your reflexive dismissal of the premise would preclude. An open-minded approach to historical texts usually generates more-interesting questions and answers than a closed one.
An alternative possibility is that many other the signs around the camp were made by prisoners over the normal course of their labor and thus this one did not need to hide its authorship. The deception is in acting like it was always there and was supposed to be, not in pretending its was physically written by an official.
Or do the guards just not want to speak out of line or question their superiors. Or do the guards all know but don't care because things are being fixed up around the place. Or are all the signs in the camp created by prisoners?
So much is unknown about the situation to make the claims made above.
Or another (and I think the most likely possibility, given what we know about human nature): one of the guards ran a profitable little side business selling basic machined parts in town made with free labor. In exchange, the prisoners got to make stuff they needed also. Only the high-ranking prisoners were in on the scheme. The rest were told the story about "deception", which is what we see relayed here.
The other explanation is a little too much like a comic book. Real life tends not to resemble Batman storylines.
I mean, it's a great feel-good story and we want to believe it. Americans oh-so-smart, their Japanese captors as dumb as Darth Vader's henchmen, the perfect setting, and the machine shop was used to produce prosthetics. It's so saccharine my teeth hurt.
The camp in this article is located in Changi, in Singapore. Singapore has always had a large Chinese population (it actually was originally in Malaysia upon that country's independence but got kicked out for being too Chinese). It would be surprising if not a single one was familiar with some Chinese writing.
They did, the translator communicates to the prisoners in English, and they pass along in Japanese to the guards. The article says they asked the translator.
Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography?
This is definitely a possibility, but even then...
> Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure?
This would be unlikely to work, because the characters would be written on paper using a pen or pencil, which produces quite different strokes that a brush, which is what you would have to use for a sign. Even if you know how brush strokes should look like, I can't really say how difficult it would be to produce brushwork that credibly looks like what someone would produce who has been doing it all their adult life, if you lack the experience.
I had the same thought, but as the other responses note, there are many possible explanations.
Yet another one: maybe some of the prisoners actually knew basic Japanese? It would be a very useful skill in their situation, and learning the basics of how to write kanji is not that hard. It wouldn't be calligraphy, but it just needs to look good enough that it might just be sloppy writing.
Actually, signs were also written right-to-left horizontally during that period but it's likely that someone showing them how to write on a piece of paper would have written vertically, so they would probably not even have the knowledge to know the correct order of the text.