[eszed]

And yet it worked....

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.

[icambron]

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.

[nxicvyvy]

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.

[riehwvfbk]

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.

[smabie]

You literally just made this up and you say it's the most likely explanation?

[riehwvfbk]

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.

[bobthepanda]

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.

[CrazyCatDog]

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.

[bobthepanda]

They didn’t know the word which is different from not having any knowledge of how Chinese characters are written.

Chinese is not 1:1 with Japanese so that’s not surprising.

[brazzy]

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.