A passing reference to nearly 3,000 Japanese civilians interned at Delhi’s Purana Qila during World War II in The Shortest History of Delhi, recently published by Australian scholar and former South Asia correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor John Zubrzycki, prompted further online research into what turned out to be a fascinating and largely forgotten chapter in the capital’s chequered past.Few visitors to the Qila today would suspect that this imposing 16th-century citadel had once served as a detention camp for this sizeable number of Japanese non-combatants, among them company managers, shopkeepers, photographers, dentists, bank employees and fishermen, along with their wives, children and even domestic workers.For some 17 months, until early 1943, the fort’s expansive lawns became a sprawling encampment of military tents for the men, while women and children occupied barracks and stone arcades near the fort walls. A closer examination of online historical accounts revealed how this extraordinary episode unfolded, beginning with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 and its simultaneous military offensives across Southeast Asia, including the British-controlled territories of Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. Deoli, India, Miniature Garden. Photo: ICRC Archive.In response, the British colonial authorities rounded up Japanese residents in these territories in January 1942, many of whom had lived in Southeast Asia for years and had little, if any, direct involvement with Imperial Japan, and transported them to the Qila in Delhi for internment. Smaller groups were also detained in Burma and Ceylon and similarly transferred to India, while around 130 members of the community already living in the country were also arrested and brought to Delhi for confinement in the Fort.The prisoners’s arrival at Purana QilaBut the bulk of these Japanese prisoners from Southeast Asia did not journey together to Delhi. Hundreds of Japanese civilians temporarily held at Changi Prison in Singapore were put aboard a ship, without being told where they were being taken. Twelve days later they reached Bombay on January 19, 1942 and were transported by train to Delhi, arriving at Purana Qila around January 21. However, many of their wives and children travelled separately by ship, reaching Calcutta about a fortnight later before continuing overland to Delhi. Accounts record that one child died during the voyage from Singapore, while another was born on the Calcutta wharf.Upon arriving at Purana Qila, the Japanese found themselves in a fortress that Mughal emperor Humayun began building in 1533 as part of his new capital, Dinpanah, or Refuge of the Pious. His hold on the new city, however, was short-lived and in 1540, the Afghan warlord Sher Shah Suri drove Humayun out of Delhi and took over the fort, strengthening its defences and adding several structures, including the Qila-i-Kuhna mosque, which survives remarkably well and remains one of the fort’s most robust and attractive buildings. Note issued to the inmates in Deoli Prisoner of War Camp during World War II. Photo: Facebook: Immersive Trails-Global.Humayun eventually recovered Delhi and returned to the Qila, which he completed, but soon after met an unusual end there in 1556. While descending the steps of the Sher Mandal pavilion in response to the muezzin’s call to prayer, his foot caught in the hem of his robe and he tumbled down its steep staircase. He died of his injuries three days later, prompting the early 20th-century British historian and orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole to deliver a wry and somewhat fitting epitaph for the wayward Mughal emperor: “He tumbled through life, and he tumbled out of it.”Living conditionsHowever, the incarcerated Japanese, accommodated in quarters far removed from the splendour of Humayun’s Mughal court and the legacy of his Afghan conqueror, had little time to contemplate the fort’s imperial past. Some 2,561 males, according to an October 1942 British government tally, cited by Dr Rowena Ward, an Australian Japanese-studies scholar at the University of Newcastle, were housed in 468 military tents pitched across the Qila’s expansive lawns. These had brick floors and thatched coverings and were equipped with cots, mattresses and woollen blankets, but offered scant protection against Delhi’s extremes of scorching heat, bitter cold and monsoon downpours. The 250-odd women and children were packed into makeshift quarters in the fort’s ancient stone arcades and barrack rooms.North gate of the Purana Qila. Photo: Wikimedia commons.Families were allowed to meet during the day but had to sleep separately at night. Conditions inside the camp were otherwise grim: sanitation was poor, overcrowding rife, and the neglected, overgrown vegetation around the fort provided ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Malaria and dysentery consequently spread, while beriberi also took a heavy toll on the inmates.Food was another source of discontent, as it largely comprised local curries, beans and copious amounts of tea, a considerable departure from what Japanese were accustomed to eating. Swiss-born Henry Frei, a scholar of Japanese studies, quotes former internee Kichijirō Ōmori in his book Guns of February as stating that the food the prisoners got was ‘inadequate in quantity, poor in quality and variety, and lacked the seasoning familiar to Japanese tastes’. Consequently, many internees, he added, lost their appetite and became weak and exhausted.The repercussions of these conditions proved fatal.In Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945, British historian and former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings puts the number of internees who died at Purana Qila by the end of 1942 at 106- 55 men, 42 women and nine children. An earlier archival count cited by Anoma Pieris, a Sri Lankan-born architectural historian at the University of Melbourne, in her 2024 study Civilian Internment in India – Omissions and Exceptions, recorded 16 deaths by May 1942, eleven of them women.Max Hastings,In Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945,Published by Vintage (2012).Furthermore, the perilous conditions inside the Qila were serious enough to trigger diplomatic protests. New Delhi’s Consul General of Sweden, who represented Japanese interests during the War, reported on the appalling conditions inside the Qila camp. Tokyo too lodged a formal protest with the British authorities in late 1942, demanding immediate improvements, but the colonial administration remained unmoved, maintaining that the accommodation and facilities were comparable to those provided for Indian troops.Amidst all this misery, the internees attempted to impose some semblance of order on their confinement, organising councils, night patrols, kitchen shifts, a tailoring department and even a barber. They also found time for recreation, with a baseball season getting under way in February 1942, within a month of their arrival, with Fukuda Kurahachi, a Japanese businessman from Singapore, maintaining a diary recording game scores, alongside recording the daily weather meticulously. A baseball prize was also subsequently named in memory of 14-year-old George Sakai, who died of appendicitis at the Qila.Purana Qila was never intended by the British to serve as a permanent internment camp, but merely as a transit centre from which the Japanese internees would be transferred to a more permanent facility at Deoli in Rajasthan. Their removal was delayed by difficulties in preparing accommodation there, including a fire and other logistical problems and consequently what was envisaged as a temporary arrangement turned into a detention lasting over 17 months.RepatriationMeanwhile, some six months after the Japanese arrived at the Qila, UK’s Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden informed Parliament in July 1942 of an agreement to exchange 1,800 Japanese and Siamese civilians held across British territories for an analogous number of British and Allied civilians detained in assorted territories under Tokyo’s control.Under this pact, more than 700 internees from Purana Qila were selected for repatriation and taken via Bombay aboard a British liner to Lourenço Marques, in Portuguese East Africa (present-day Maputo, Mozambique), where the exchange took place. This group subsequently returned to Japan, while the remaining 2,000-odd internees stayed at Purana Qila until March-April 1943, after which they were transferred to Deoli. Those sent to Deoli began returning to Japan after the war ended in 1945, with the final departures completed by May 1946. People entering the Purana Qila (Old Fort) in Delhi, India, likely during the 1947 Partition. Photo: Facebook/Ch Mubeen Khan.In September 1947, following Partition, the Qila was turned into a refugee camp, initially sheltering Muslims displaced by communal violence within Delhi. From 1948, it also accommodated Hindu and Sikh refugees fleeing violence in Pakistan. Like the Japanese before them, these new arrivals were initially housed in tents and makeshift shelters, which gradually gave way to rudimentary tenements and what began as an emergency refuge thus developed into a sizeable settlement within the fort walls that persisted well into the 1950s, till all of them were evicted in 1963. By then, those who had returned to Japan after their confinement at the Qila were making their own efforts to keep its memory alive. Two former inmates founded Indowara-kai, or the Association of Indowalas, in Tokyo in the early 1960s that organised reunions and published a regular newsletter, Indowara tsūshin, from 1966 until 1988, carrying members’ recollections, photographs and accounts of return visits to India. In 1982, it also published a separate illustrated book reproducing sketches made during their confinement at Purana Qila and Deoli and many of these drawings, accompanied by detailed descriptions of everyday camp life, have since become valuable historical records in Japan. Online accounts record that two former internees, Sachio Ōtani and Kichijirō Ōmori, returned to the Qila in 1973 and 1987, respectively. Both wrote about their visits in the Association’s newsletter, remarking that the locals they encountered knew little or nothing about the fort’s wartime use as a Japanese internment camp. The Association gradually dwindled as its members aged and died, and its newsletter ceased publication in 1988 following the death of its editor, Jirō Kimura, and with it, the collective memory of the Qila episode gradually faded from public consciousness, even in Japan.Japanese remains recovery missions This conspicuous neglect by successive Japanese governments stands in marked contrast to Tokyo’s continuing efforts to recover and honour its war dead, even from battlefields thousands of miles from home. Since 1952, Japan has pursued an extensive programme to recover the remains of its estimated 2.4 million war dead who perished overseas during the Second World War. By March 31, 2026, approximately 1.28 million sets of remains had been collected or brought back to Japan, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, leaving some 1.12 million still unaccounted for.Japanese government-sponsored search and exhumation missions have also extended to the hills of Manipur and Nagaland, where teams have sought to locate and bring home the remains of soldiers who perished during the disastrous 1944 offensive into the region, which culminated in the Battles of Imphal and Kohima. The National Army Museum in London puts Japanese Army losses in those brutal campaigns at 53,000 dead and missing from an original strength of around 85,000, with many of the troops having succumbed to starvation and disease during the retreat into Burma. Gurkhas advancing withLee tanks to clear the Japanese from Imphal-Kohimaroad. Photo: Wikimedia commonsA significant development came in February 1974, when retired Japanese Lieutenant General Iwaichi Fujiwara led a delegation of surviving war veterans to Manipur to revisit the battlefields. Fujiwara returned in March 1975, joining a Japanese government mission to find and bring home the remains of soldiers lost in the 1944 campaign.After completing their task, the delegation visited the excellently maintained British war cemeteries at Imphal and Kohima and decided that their own fallen soldiers deserved the exact same honour and respect. Their efforts eventually led to the construction of the India Peace Memorial at Red Hill (Maibam Lokpaching), near Imphal, which was inaugurated in March 1994, marking the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Imphal. A separate Kohima Peace Memorial and Eco-Park, developed jointly by the Japanese and Nagaland governments, was formally opened in November 2025 and, more recently, in July 2026, Japan’s Ambassador to India, Keiichi Ono, presented Nagaland-based community leader Ajanuo Belho with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, in recognition of her decades of work assisting Japanese remains-recovery missions. Belho has been involved in this effort since 1975, working alongside the Kohima-Japan Bone Collection Team to locate and retrieve the remains of Japanese soldiers who were killed during the 1944 campaign. By contrast, the 3,000 Japanese families held behind the walls of Purana Qila have been largely forgotten by history, with even Tokyo making no real effort to honour their memory. There is neither a sign, marker, or plaque acknowledging these nearly 3,000 innocent men, women, and children who were imprisoned there. The Purana Qila’s redoubtable walls have witnessed Mughal splendour, Afghan conquest and the upheaval of Partition, yet the thousands of Japanese civilians once confined within them have somehow slipped through the cracks of history and remembrance.