A Clash of Colonialisms: Sports Culture in Hong Kong Under the Japanese Occupation
After a brief but bloody military campaign‚ the invading Japanese forces occupied Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941. For the following three years and eight months, the Japanese military administration tried to impose a new social order through the ‘Japaniz
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A Clash of Colonialisms: Sports Culture in Hong Kong Under the Japanese Occupation Brian Bridges and David R. Phillips
Introduction Christmas in 1941 was celebrated far from normally by the local and expatriate communities in Hong Kong. Barely 18 days after the Japanese had launched an invasion of the British colony, the British Governor was forced to surrender in the early evening of Christmas Day. Almost devoid of air and naval support, out-numbered and out-manoeuvred by the fast-moving and well-supported Japanese forces, the surviving British and supporting Commonwealth troops, laid down their arms and were marched off to spend the remainder of the war in prisoner of war (PoW) camps.1 The victorious Japanese announced the end of British colonialism and the start of
B. Bridges Department of Political Science, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun‚ NT, Hong Kong D.R. Phillips (*) Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, NT, Hong Kong © The Author(s) 2018 J.A. Mangan et al. (eds.), Japanese Imperialism: Politics and Sport in East Asia, https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-981-10-5104-3_9
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a new era under Japanese guidance. Yet, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong was to last just three years and eight months, before the defeat of Japan allowed the British to return to administer the territory. The Japanese entered Hong Kong in 1941 convinced that they needed to ‘cleanse’ the colony of British—and Western—influences in order to make it a valuable and confirmed member of the new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere being promoted by the Japanese leaders. Once the horrors of the immediate fighting and post-victory excesses had passed, the newly installed Japanese administration tried hard not just to control and administer the territory, but also to convince its residents, who overwhelmingly were Chinese, that they should conform to and indeed welcome this new system. As will be shown, the various political, economic and sociocultural policies that were implemented, even if unevenly organized and occasionally haphazard, were designed to inculcate pro-Japanese ideals (albeit frequently disguised under the rhetoric of pan-Asianism) and anti-Western attitudes. Sport was to be used as one tool in the new armoury of socio-cultural policymaking. Although sport has been famously described by George Orwell as ‘war minus the shooting’, and the interchange between sporting and warlike metaphors continues to feature in everyday discourse and media analysis,2 sport during war might seem at first sight to be a contradiction in terms. Yet, despite the horrors of wartime deprivation and military conflict, sport, albeit in attenuated forms, has frequently continued to be played within countries at war.3 The existing literature suggests two motivations that have been at work within wartime governments in allowing, even encouraging, some form of sporting activity to continue despite ongoing conflict. One would be to use sport as a means for the government to demonstrate to it
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