Language: English

Title: Scenes from a Slow Departure: Archival Visuals of Japanese Surrendered Personnel in Southeast Asia

Speaker: Sandeep RAY (University of Nottingham Malaysia / CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar)

Abstract: The chaotic aftermath of Japan’s surrender in World War Two has been extensively documented and discussed in the literature. While most of these works have taken the form of military histories, the recent opening of digital archives around the world creates an opportunity for a renewed visual history of that era. What remains relatively understudied as a collective theme is the fate of the tens of thousands of Japanese military personnel in Southeast Asia. Their experiences varied: some were repatriated quickly, some forced into labor, some actively aided returning colonial powers in the process of reoccupation, and many were executed. This presentation will explore these divergent outcomes with reference to primary sources from film and photographic archives.

Bio: Sandeep Ray is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He studied at Hampshire College, the University of Michigan, and the National University of Singapore. A practitioner/academic, he specializes in the intersection of colonial history, nonfiction film, and Southeast Asian cinema. Ray is the author of Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia, which was a finalist for the EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize 2021, and the historical novel A Flutter in the Colony (Harper Collins, 2019). Ray has published in leading journals, including the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, positions, and the American Historical Review. He serves as a peer reviewer for multiple academic publications and has been invited to film festivals as a jury member and curator. Ray has directed several documentaries, including The Sound of Old Rooms (2011), which won the Grand Prize at the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival. In June 2025, he was elected to the Council of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) for a 4-year term. He will be a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies from June to September 2025.

Chair: Hiroyuki Yamamoto (CSEAS)