A broad smile overwhelms the face of Dominique Yanai. He's just seen a photo of his great-grandfather Morizo for the first time, which has been unearthed by SBS News.
It's one of only two images of him known to exist.
“Wow. That’s amazing. I can't explain what I’m actually feeling right now, it’s a big emotion,” the 42-year-old says. “We’ve never seen that before. I can’t wait to share with all the family."
Seventy-five years ago, Morizo was among about 1,000 Japanese civilian internees forcibly removed from detention centres in Australia at the end of the Second World War and sent to Japan, a country many had left decades before or had never even been to.
Morizo was born in Japan but had spent his life in the French territory of New Caledonia, 1,500 kilometres east of Brisbane, where he went on to have a family.
Morizo Yanai at work in New Caledonia. Source: New Caledonia Archives
Ten years ago, his great-grandson Dominique, who grew up in New Caledonia, moved to Brisbane and started uncovering Morizo's story for his family back home - especially his elderly grandfather, Morizo’s only son, Tan.
“You can feel it when you ask them about Morizo, it’s hurting somewhere and I understand that. It’s really hard," Dominique says.
“It was a good opportunity for me here because I knew he [Morizo] was deported to Australia, so I could find something, and that was the beginning really.”
Morizo arrived in New Caledonia in 1910, aged 22. Like hundreds of people from Japan, he travelled there to work in the nickel mining industry. He went on to have two children from two marriages, one with a French woman and another with a Vietnamese woman.
The only photo the family previously had of him was his mugshot on his New Caledonian internment file showing a well-dressed 53-year-old.
Morizo was one of the many rounded up by the French in New Caledonia and sent to Australian prison camps in 1941 when Japan entered the war.
Morizo Yanai's internment card from New Caledonia. Source: New Caledonia Archives
“For Morizo, he wasn’t part of the war. Like most of them, he was just in New Caledonia doing what they’d been sent to do - working. I think it is not fair,” Dominique says.
The recently unearthed photo shows Morizo on the job in a metal workshop and was discovered thanks to an intensive search by the New Caledonia Archives in Noumea, which responded to a request from SBS.
“He is doing something [in the photo], it’s telling more things about him, that’s so good," Dominique says. "And he looks just like my grandfather. Thank you so much.”
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Rowena Ward from the University of Wollongong is one of Australia’s leading researchers of Japanese internment in Australia during the war.
“Japanese civilians were considered to be enemy aliens, whether they were in New Caledonia or Australia, and with the outbreak of war, considered potential spies and collaborators,” she says.
“Their crime was that they were Japanese - and that is sufficient to justify them being interned.”
Their crime was that they were Japanese. -Rowena Ward, Researcher
With the frontline of the war in the Pacific heading towards New Caledonia, the French authorities shipped the Japanese internees to Australia.
“Although they were interned in Australia they were not under Australian government law. The French authorities had the authority or responsibility to make the decision on what would happen to them,” Dr Ward says.
Dominique is one of the thousands of New Caledonians who descended from those Japanese interns in Australia, most never to return home.
The Cap De Palmas was used to transfer Japanese civilians like Morizo to Brisbane for internment. Source: Supplied
“The Japanese community in New Caledonia, every descendent, they are looking for something, there’s something missing somewhere, that’s the thing,” he says.
“I feel Japanese, [because of] the name I’ve got, Yanai, because we had always this one photo of Morizo.”
Dominique had searched the New Caledonian and National Archives of Australia where basic records exist of Morizo’s detention, transportation and internment until 1946. But there was nothing further.
In Brisbane, he visits the old Newstead wharves where Morizo landed from Noumea before being transferred to the Gallipoli Army Barracks in Enoggera, Queensland.
A detention centre once stood at the barracks to process captured Japanese prisoners of war and Japanese, German, and Italian civilians from around Australia and the Pacific, before they were sent to prison camps in the south.
Dominique outside the Gallipoli Barracks with the internment records of his great-grandfather. Source: Stefan Armbruster/SBS News
“It’s probably the worst thing that happened to [Morizo] in his life, and the others. It [the barracks] doesn’t look like back then but the more I can see, the more I can learn about this,” Dominique says, standing at the gates.
It’s probably the worst thing that happened to him in his life. - Dominique Yanai
The records tell little of Morizo’s life in the camps, but in February 1946 he was among more than 2,000 Japanese civilian internees transported in train boxcars from the Hay and Loveday prison camps to the Melbourne docks.
“Yellow cargo, homeward bound Japanese civilians,” declares a newsreel from the time at the Australian War Memorial.
“The first Japanese repatriation ship to pick up PoWs and Japanese internees, some samples of the master race that wanted to own Australia."
The film shows them being loaded onboard the first of two repatriation ships. The group includes Australian citizens and others with their Australian wives and children, in cramped conditions as they set sail for war-devastated Japan.
The Australian wife and child of a Japanese civilian internee who was being deported in 1946. Source: Australian War Memorial
“An Australian girl married to a Japanese, don’t see much future in that,” the voiceover says.
A photo taken at the departure of the second repatriation ship in March 1946 shows children booing as the internees are loaded.
“Despite some of them wishing to return to New Caledonia, they were forcibly repatriated to Japan,” Dr Ward says.
Children boo as Japanese civilian internees depart from Sydney in 1946. Source: Australian War Memorial
“I’ve been chasing [archival] documents around the world and [discovered that] Australian authorities were saying, 'We have contacted the New Caledonian governor Jacques Tellac, who said, Non, we want them to go back to Japan’.”
“It was obvious, the French authorities never really wanted them back.”
Watching the film, Dominique is wide-eyed, looking for his great-grandfather.
“It’s really moving, it’s touching, my eyes were spinning around, where is he, where is he?” he says.
But he doesn’t spot Morizo in the masses and his trail disappears again until 12 January 1950.
His New Caledonian internment card states that he arrived back home, one of only about a dozen in Australia to do so.
The Japanese repatriation ship Koei Maru in the Port of Melbourne. Source: Supplied
“Japan was under occupation by the allies - American, British and Australians - right through to 1952, so any of those who managed to get out wouldn’t have managed to get an exit permit, but Yanai is one of the ones,” Dr Ward says.
How he managed to get out is unknown.
“That’s part of the big question, if we are thinking of those days, it wasn’t as easy as 'just jump on a plane', it was hard and cost a lot of money, and he managed that, probably for a reason - the family.”
While it might sound like a happy ending, an incident shortly after returning to New Caledonia sealed his fate on 10 March 1950.
“Unfortunately, yes, he died from an accident, that’s what my family told me," says Dominique. "He’s been hit by a car and after a few months, he passed away. Sad isn’t it? Unbelievable.”
Japanese civilian internees aboard the Koei Maru in 1946. Source: Australian War Memorial
He was 61.
It's a tragic ending still shrouded in mystery that Dominique will continue to try and unravel.
Dr Ward says it’s important to tell Morizo's story as it is still relevant today in Australia.
“We are still interning people. If we think of people on Christmas Island and Manus and Nauru,” she says.
“When we think about Japan and the war and the internees, we think of prisoners of war, we have to remember the people here in Australia and other parts of the Pacific were civilians and had been living there for quite some time, and that is no different when we look at people who are being deported from Australia in the contemporary world.”
