On the morning of 25 February 1943, the work parties at Featherston Camp marched out after breakfast—all except one compound, whose 240 men sat down on the ground and refused to move. They asked to speak to the commandant. He did not come. Featherston stood on flat farmland in the Wairarapa, north of Wellington, on ground that had already hosted an army training camp during the First World War.

In September 1942, at the request of the Americans, New Zealand converted it into its only camp for Japanese prisoners. The guards were the men the army could spare: some too old for overseas service, some too young, some medically unfit. They had been given only a vague idea of the job, and none had been trained to hold prisoners. The prisoners arrived in two groups.

The first were members of labor units who had been building the airfield on Guadalcanal, and they mostly settled into camp life, planting gardens beside their huts. The second group arrived that November: about 240 officers and men of the Japanese army and navy, roughly half of them sailors from the cruiser Furutaka, sunk off Cape Esperance. They were placed in Number Two Compound, and they did not settle into anything. The immediate cause of the confrontation was a work order.

The day before, the camp had called for 105 men from that compound to go out to work—nearly double what had been previously agreed. The guards saw a refusal to work. The men on the ground saw something else. It would take a court of inquiry to even begin to say what.

The camp adjutant, Lieutenant James Malcolm, was left to handle the situation. He brought two of the prisoners’ officers, Adachi and Nishimura, into the camp office and spoke with them for roughly two hours while the rest of the men waited outside on the ground. Meanwhile, the armory was opened. By most accounts, 46 or 47 men came out with weapons and took up an arc around the compound.

More climbed onto the roof of the latrine block and onto the huts, some carrying submachine guns. Somebody decided that. The official papers never quite answer who. The talks went nowhere.

Malcolm sent the two officers back into the compound to announce that the men would parade for work at once. They would not do it. Malcolm ordered them arrested, and guards moved in among the seated men. That was when the scuffle broke out.

Then a pistol went off. Malcolm fired once, and fired again. Whether the first shot was a warning depends on who is telling it, and so does the second. One version calls the second a warning shot that happened to hit.

Another says it was meant to hit. It struck Adachi in the shoulder. The men in the compound had been sitting still for two hours. Now stones started to fly, and some accounts add sticks.

By the New Zealand account, the men then charged, and that is the version the inquiry accepted, though no account from inside the compound exists to set beside it. Then the fire came. Rifles, submachine guns, pistols. Men on the roofs fired down into the compound.

Bullets glanced off the concrete and came back at their own side. Men shouted for it to stop, and for a while, nobody stopped. It lasted somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds, depending on who is counting. When it stopped, 31 prisoners were dead or dying on the ground.

Seventeen more would die of their injuries in hospital, making 48. On the New Zealand side, Private Walter Pelvin was hit by a ricochet and died three days later, and other guards were hurt by stones. That made 49 dead in all. As for how many prisoners were injured, the accounts give three different totals, and they cannot be reconciled.

The question of who gave the order to fire remains unresolved. The official report said the guards acted in self-defense when the prisoners charged. That explained why they fired, but it was not an order. Historians who have gone through what survives say no order to shoot was ever given.

A guard interviewed in 1991, nearly fifty years later, remembered the first automatic fire coming from a roof, with the rest joining in behind it. That is one man’s memory, and it is not confirmed in the official papers. Those papers had also been handled. In London, the committee that dealt with prisoner of war matters for the British Empire went over the New Zealand report before it traveled further, because of what Japan might do to the Allied prisoners it held.

Details written down by men who were there were lost. The honest answer is that the surviving papers do not show that anyone gave the order. The army sent the injured prisoners to the hospital at Greytown and set up a special ward for them. It blacked out the windows.

Then it replaced every member of staff who had dealt with the men, so that word would not get into the town. It is hard to keep a secret in a country town, and a ward with blacked-out windows is a poor way of trying. The government’s public line came from Prime Minister Peter Fraser, who called it a serious disturbance and said firm action had been necessary to restore order. A court of inquiry sat in early March.

It cleared the guards. It named Adachi and Nishimura as the men who had stirred the prisoners into action. Adachi—who had spent two hours talking in the camp office and left the morning with a bullet in his shoulder—was named among the instigators. One account says that back in December he had argued against a planned uprising.

That detail does not sit easily beside the report. The same report said that neither side had acted with deliberate malice, and it put the root cause down to a fundamental lack of communication between people with widely different cultural and psychological values. A warning shot only works when both sides agree on what it means. That morning, nobody did.

So what were they refusing? On paper, what the men wanted to discuss was the number: 105. Underneath the number was a belief the guards had never been told about. The Geneva Convention of 1929, which Japan had signed and never ratified, allowed captors to put ordinary prisoners to work.

The camp had only a fragmentary translation of it, and the men in Number Two Compound seem not to have known what it said. What many of them did know was the field code issued to Japanese troops in 1941, which treated capture as a kind of death and made working for the enemy a disgrace. Some had given false names when they were taken, hoping to be listed as killed in action. To the guards, the job was cutting gorse and building fences.

To a sailor from the Furutaka, it was helping the enemy. Neither side had a way to tell the other. The inquiry blamed a clash of cultures made worse by the language barrier, and its findings stayed restricted for about thirty years. Japan rejected its conclusion.

The camp stayed open. Number Two Compound went on. The prisoners built a memorial to their dead in front of one of the huts: a block of reddish stone set in concrete with a smooth panel and a Japanese inscription. They carved mahjong sets out of wood.

They leveled ground for a tennis court and made the nets and rackets from scrap. A film was shown about once a fortnight. A year before the war ended, the men told a neutral inspector that they needed some way to go home as honorable citizens. A New Zealand newspaper noted that to their own people, they were considered dead.

On 30 December, the year the war ended, they went by train to Wellington and sailed on two American landing ships through storms and engine trouble on one of them, with a stop at Guadalcanal, where they held a ceremony for their dead. They came ashore at Uraga on 4 February. The ashes of the 48 who died at Featherston were meant to go home with them. They were lost, and were never returned.

In 1974, the first former prisoner came back to burn incense at the site.