Legitimate Collaboration: The Administration of Santo Tomás Internment Camp and Its Histories, 1942–2003

Abstract

During World War II the Japanese Imperial Army concentrated several thousand Allied civilians at the Santo Tomás Internment Camp in Manila, the Philippines. Internee and Japanese administrators subsequently collaborated extensively to run the camp. Since its liberation in 1945, however, the camp's English-language historians have tended to tell the camp experience as a resistance story. This article explores both the history of the camp and its historiography through archival and published sources. It argues that the tendency to recast collaboration into resistance stems from an understanding of collaboration as inherently illegitimate. By conceiving of collaboration as a behavioral category within which lies a spectrum of moral and political legitimacy, the historian can work against this inclination to misunderstand the past.