Before the Japanese occupied Borneo in 1942, Agnes Newton Keith was a journalist with a book about life on Borneo recently published, and widely read in Japan. She decided to risk the dangers of occupation in order to stay with her husband, a minor British official. That decision led to her internment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for the next three years. She and her two-year-old son were kept together, with brief contact with her husband in a separate men's camp. She kept hidden notes of her experiences and in 1946 published her story.