Everything tagged: Japan

Yoshino Maycock was the wife of John Henry Maycock. She returned to her family in Japan on the outbreak of war and had no news of the fate of her husband or her Hong Kong-born sons. She was finally reunited with her husband and surviving sons in England two years after the war had ended. Her son Tommy, who had been interned in Stanley, had survived the war but had meanwhile died of TB. Yoshino's remains were interred in the grave of her son Arthur in the Protestant Cemetery. The inscription on it is recorded in Patricia Lim's website:

On behalf of Professor Togo Tsukahara of Kobe University, I posted three photos of his grandfather Mr Kichinosuke Tsukahara who had been in Hong Kong a number of times during the Japanese occupation:

Photo 1: 

Mt Grimble is mentioned in A H Potts's diary entry for 12 Dec 1941, when Potts had moved to Shouson Hill:

I slept at Eric Grimble’s bungalow, a charming little place near the top of the hill overlooking Deepwater Bay and Aberdeen.

The exact address is given in the 1941 Jurors List:

DoB from John Black's list, which gives Begg's occupation in 1941 as "Merchant".

Alvena lived in HK 1919-1940 as Alvena Laihovetsky, except for a couple of years in the early 1920s when the family went to Vancouver, Canada chicken farming (unsuccessfully), and 1946-1959 as Alvena Wellstead.

She was born in Japan to Russian parents who happened to be outside Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Her father registered her birth with the outgoing Imperial Russian Consul in Nagasaki, who took the money and ran.

Alvena remained stateless until she was naturalised in 1940 in time for evacuation to Australia via Manila.

Japanese Governor of Hong Kong in 1945.

More details and photos at:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hisakazu_Tanaka
• https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0v83f865p#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xy…

Emily Ritsu Wood (Japanese-German) married an Englishman, Captain Cecil Herbert Wood on April 6, 1910 in Hong Kong.

She was interned in Stanley with her children and grandchildren (the Hamson family and Leilah Wood). She used her native Japanese language to get blackmarket medicine from a guard most of which she gave to Tweed Bay Hospital. She also sold personal items to buy blackmarket food for internees in need.

After the war she emigrated to Canada and became an artist.

Source:

He was head of the Japanese Gendarmerie during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong.

He was the head of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Japanese administration in Hong Kong, from April 1943 to July 1944. (See pages 55-6 of Hong Kong Internment, 1942-45 by Emerson).

His name is mentioned regularly in R E Jones Diary (see "What links here" on this page), suggesting he was a regular visitor to Stanley Internment Camp.

John Charter mentions him in his diary entry for 5 May 1943:

A Japanese Lutheran Minister, present in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. He provided help to the Allied prisoners in the POW and Interment camps, at great personal risk.