I was asleep in the “E” Block of Raffles College at 4 o’clock in the early morning of 8 December 1941, when I was awakened by the dull thud of exploding bombs. The war with Japan had begun. It was a complete surprise. The street lights had been on, and the air-raid sirens did not sound until those Japanese planes dropped their bombs, killing 60 people and wounding 130. But the raid was played down. Censors suppressed the news that the Keppel Harbour docks, the naval base at Sembawang, and the Tengah and Seletar air bases had also been attacked.
The students at Raffles College were agog with excitement. Those from upcountry immediately prepared to leave by train for home. Nearly everyone believed Singapore would be the main target of the attack, and it would therefore be prudent to return to the countryside of Malaya, which offered more safety from Japanese bombers. The college authorities were as confused as the students. Nobody had been prepared for this. Two days later we heard that on the same morning the Japanese had landed at Kota Bharu in Kelantan. Malaya was not to be spared after all.
Within days, the hostels were nearly empty. Lectures were suspended, and students asked to volunteer for a Raffles College unit of the Medical Auxiliary Services (MAS). I volunteered for the MAS, and cycled daily from my home (in Norfolk Road since 1935) to my post in the college three miles away. We were not provided with uniforms – there was no time for that – but we were each given a tin helmet and an armband with a red cross on it and paid a small allowance of about $60 a month, for which we worked on a roster round the clock. We were organised into units of six. There was no fear. Indeed there was barely suppressed excitement, the thrill of being at war and involved in real battles.
But the war did not go well. Soon stories came down from Malaya of the rout on the war front, the ease with which the Japanese were cutting through British lines and cycling through rubber estates down the peninsula, landing behind enemy lines by boat and sampan, forcing more retreats. Large numbers of white families – planters and civilians with their wives and children – began arriving from across the Causeway. There must have been important Asiatic families too, but they did not stand out. They would have moved into the homes of friends and relatives, or quietly sailed out of Singapore from the Tanjong Pagar wharves, fearing revenge from the Japanese for having helped the British, or for having contributed to the South China Relief Fund supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s resistance to the Japanese on the Chinese mainland.
By January the Japanese forces were nearing Johor, and their planes started to bomb Singapore in earnest, day and night. I picked up my first casualties one afternoon at a village in Bukit Timah. Several MAS units went there in Singapore Traction Company buses converted into ambulances. A bomb had fallen near the police station and there were several victims. It was a frightening sight, my first experience of the bleeding, the injured, and the dead.
At about 8 am on 31 January, Maurice Baker, a fellow student from Pahang, and I were sitting on the parapet of the Administrative Block at Raffles College, on standby MAS duty, when suddenly there was an earthshaking explosion. We were both stunned, and I said spontaneously, “That’s the end of the British Empire!” Professor Dyer, the principal of Raffles College who was just passing by on his way to his office, heard me, looked away, and walked on.
That same morning all British forces withdrew to the island from Johor. Next day, the papers carried photos of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the last to march across the Causeway, to the sound of “Highland Laddie” played on their bagpipes, although there were only two pipers remaining. It left me with a life-long impression of British coolness in the face of impending defeat. The Royal Engineers then blew open a gap in the Causeway on the Johor side. That was the explosion Maurice and I had heard. But they also blew up the pipeline carrying water from Johor to the island. The siege of Singapore had begun.
As I cycled home one morning, still wearing my tin helmet and armband, I passed a line of military lorries parked in Stevens Road. Standing beside them were some tall, very dejected-looking Australian soldiers wearing broad-brimmed Aussie hats. They looked frightened and demoralised. I stopped to ask them how close the front was. One soldier said, “It’s over; here, take this,” and offered me his weapons. I was startled and shaken. Could it be this hopeless? I refused the weapons and tried to comfort him by saying that no battle was lost until it was over. But for that Australian group, the battle was lost. I did not know what horrifying experiences they must have had.
After the war I read that several battalions of Australian troops were sailing to the Middle East when their ships were diverted to Singapore. They arrived just three weeks before the fall of the island, were sent upcountry and quickly beaten back. They had expected to do battle in the deserts of North Africa, probably in Libya against Rommel’s forces. Suddenly they found themselves in tropical jungle, facing the Japanese. It was a tragedy for them, and a disaster for the morale of the British and Indian troops they were supposed to help.
Meanwhile, my father, who was working as superintendent of the Shell depot in Batu Pahat, some 100 miles to the north on the west coast of Malaya, had been told to evacuate it. He had returned to the island in his baby Austin before the Causeway was blown up. We still hoped that Fortress Singapore would hold. I believed there would be many casualties, but that the British would dig in and eventually we would be rescued. But every passing day – indeed, every passing hour after the first week of February – I felt more and more in the pit of my stomach that Singapore was not Malta, and it could not support a long siege.
In the middle of January, the schools were closed. As the shelling got nearer to the city, my mother proposed that the whole family move to her father’s house, which was further out and so less likely to be hit. I supported the move but told her I would stay and look after the house in Norfolk Road while continuing to report for duty at the Raffles College MAS station. I would not be alone as Koh Teong Koo, our gardener, would stay at Norfolk Road to guard the house while I was on duty at the college. He was also the rickshaw puller who had taken my brothers and sister to and from school every day since 1937. We had built an air-raid shelter, a wooden structure dug into the ground and covered with earth, which my mother had stocked up with rice, salt, pepper, soya bean sauces, salt fish, tinned foods, condensed milk and all the things we might need for a long time. Money was not a problem because the Shell Company had generously paid my father several months’ salary when he was ordered to evacuate the oil depot at Batu Pahat.
Amid these darkening horizons I went to the cinema several times when off duty. It helped me to escape the grim future for a couple of hours. One afternoon in late January, I sat through a comedy at Cathay cinema. In one scene a bomb that was supposed to explode fell apart with a small plop. It was a dud. As the casing broke open, a sign was revealed – “Made in Japan”. It was bizarre. For the past two months Singapore had experienced the devastating power of their bombs and their shells, yet here I was watching this film making fun of the Japanese – they were supposed to be bow-legged, cross-eyed, incapable of shooting straight or building ships that would stay afloat in a storm, able to make only dud weapons. The unhappy truth was that in the two months since 8 December they had proved they had the daring, the power and the military skills to stage the most spectacular successes against British forces. Many years later, Winston Churchill, the war-time British prime minister, was to write of the fall of Singapore, “it was the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.
The military took over the entire college on 10 February as British forces withdrew, and two days later the MAS unit had to disband. At first I stayed at home in Norfolk Road, but as the shelling got closer I joined my family at Telok Kurau. The following day we heard distant rifle shots, then some more, closer to us. There had been no sound of big guns, shells or bombs. Curious, I went out by the back gate to Lorong L, the lane abutting the kampong where I used to play with my friends, the fishermen’s children. Before I had walked more than 20 yards along the earth track, I saw two figures in dun-coloured uniforms, different from the greens and browns of the British forces. They wore puttees and rubber-soled canvas boots, split-toed, with the big toe in a separate section from the other toes. Later I learnt that it gave them a better grip on soggy or slippery ground. Above all, what made them look strange were their soft, peaked caps, with cloth flaps at the back hanging over their necks. They were outlandish figures, small, squat men carrying long rifles with long bayonets. They exuded an awful stink, a smell I will never forget. It was the odour from the great unwashed after two months of fighting along jungle tracks and estate roads from Kota Bharu to Singapore.
A few seconds passed before I realised who they were. Japanese! An immense fear crept over me. But they were looking for enemy soldiers. Clearly I was not one, so they ignored me and pressed on. I dashed back to the house and told my family what I had seen. We closed all the doors and windows, though God knows what protection that could have given us. Rape and rapine were high among the fears that the Japanese forces inspired after their atrocities in China since 1937. But nothing of note happened the rest of that day and night. The British forces were retreating rapidly to the city centre and not putting up much of a fight.
The following day, 15 February, was the Lunar New Year, the biggest annual festival of the Chinese, normally celebrated with new clothes, new shoes and an abundance of traditional dishes and cakes. It was the grimmest New Year since the Chinese came to Singapore in 1819. There were sounds of battle in the north and near the city, and relatively distant explosions of artillery and mortars, but nothing in the Telok Kurau area itself. The Japanese had swept on towards the town.
That night the guns fell silent. The news soon spread that the British had surrendered. The next day, some friends returning from the city reported that looting had broken out. British and other European houses were being stripped by their Malay drivers and gardeners. This aroused great anxiety in my family. What about 28 Norfolk Road, with all our food and other provisions that would now have to see us through for a very long time? With my mother’s agreement, I took Teong Koo, the gardener, with me and walked back some eight miles from Telok Kurau to Norfolk Road. We made it in just over two hours. I saw Malays carrying furniture and other items out of the bigger houses along the way. The Chinese looters went for the goods in warehouses, less bulky and more valuable. A dilapidated bungalow some two houses from ours was occupied by about 20 Boyanese families. Their menfolk were drivers. But they had not yet gone for our place. There were better pickings in the bigger houses, now empty of the Europeans who were assembling for internment. I had got back in time.
In the two hours that I walked from Telok Kurau to Norfolk Road, I saw a Singapore with law and order in suspended animation. The British army had surrendered. The local police – Chinese and Indian junior officers and Malay rank and file – had disappeared, fearing that the Japanese would treat them as part of the British military set-up. The Japanese soldiers had not yet imposed their presence on the city. Each man was a law unto himself.
Out of habit, most people remained law-abiding. But with the bosses gone, the bolder ones seized the opportunity to loot godowns, department stores and shops belonging to British companies for what they saw as legitimate booty. This lasted for several days before the Japanese restored order; they put the fear of God into people by shooting or beheading a few looters at random and exhibiting their heads on key bridges and at main road junctions.
The Japanese conquerors also went for loot. In the first few days, anyone in the street with a fountain pen or a wristwatch would soon be relieved of it. Soldiers would go into houses either officially to search, or pretending to do so, but in fact to appropriate any small items that they could keep on their person. At first they also took the best of the bicycles, but they stopped that after a few weeks. They were in Singapore for only a short time before leaving for Java or some other island in the archipelago to do battle and to capture more territories. They could not take their beautiful bicycles with them.
The looting of the big houses and warehouses of our British masters symbolised the end of an era. It is difficult for those born after 1945 to appreciate the full implications of the British defeat, as they have no memory of the colonial system that the Japanese brought crashing down on 15 February 1942. Since 1819, when Raffles founded Singapore as a trading post for the East India Company, the white man’s supremacy had been unquestioned. I did not know how this had come to pass, but by the time I went to school in 1930, I was aware that the Englishman was the big boss, and those who were white like him were also bosses – some big, others not so big, but all bosses. There were not many of them, about eight thousand. They had superior lifestyles and lived separately from the Asiatics, as we were then called. Government officers had larger houses in better districts, cars with drivers and many other servants. They ate superior food with plenty of meat and milk products. Every three years they went “home” to England for three to six months at a time to recuperate from the enervating climate of equatorial Singapore. Their children also went “home” to be educated, not to Singapore schools. They, too, led superior lives.
At Raffles College, the teaching staff were all white. Two of the best local graduates with class one diplomas for physics and chemistry were appointed “demonstrators”, but at much lower salaries, and they had to get London external BSc degrees to gain this status. One of the best arts graduates of his time with a class one diploma for economics, Goh Keng Swee (later to be deputy prime minister), was a tutor, not a lecturer.
There was no question of any resentment. The superior status of the British in government and society was simply a fact of life. After all, they were the greatest people in the world. They had the biggest empire that history had ever known, stretching over all time zones, across all four oceans and five continents. We learnt that in history lessons at school. To enforce their rule, they had only a few hundred troops in Singapore, who were regularly rotated. The most visible were stationed near the city centre at Fort Canning. There could not have been more than one to two thousand servicemen in all to maintain colonial rule over the six to seven million Asiatics in the Straits Settlements and the Malay states.
The British put it out that they were needed in Malaya to protect the Malays, who would otherwise be eclipsed by the more hardworking immigrants. Many of the Chinese and Indians had been brought in as indentured labour and were tolerated because the Malays did not take to the jobs a commercial and a plantation economy required, like tapping rubber, building roads and bridges, working as clerks, accountants and storekeepers.
A small number of prominent Asiatics were allowed to mix socially with the white bosses, and some were appointed unofficial members of the governor’s Executive Council or the Legislative Council. Photographs of them with their wives appeared in the papers, attending garden parties and sometimes dinners at Government House, bowing and curtseying before the governor and his lady, the women duly wearing white gloves, and all on their best behaviour. A few were knighted, and others hoped that after giving long and faithful service they, too, would be honoured. They were patronised by the white officials, but accepted their inferior status with aplomb, for they considered themselves superior to their fellow Asiatics. Conversely, any British, European or American who misbehaved or looked like a tramp was immediately packed off because he would demean the whole white race, whose superiority must never be thrown into doubt.
I was brought up by my parents and grandparents to accept that this was the natural order of things. I do not remember any local who by word or deed questioned all this. None of the English-educated had any inclination to take up the cudgels on behalf of equality for the Asiatics. I did not then know that there were many Chinese, educated in Chinese-language schools, who were not integrated into the colonial system. Their teachers had come from China, and they did not recognise the supremacy of the whites, for they had not been educated or indoctrinated into accepting the virtues and the mission of the British Empire. After the war I was to learn more about them.
This was the Malaya and Singapore that 60,000 attacking Japanese soldiers captured, together with more than 130,000 British, Indian and Australian troops. In 70 days of surprises, upsets and stupidities, British colonial society was shattered, and with it all the assumptions of the Englishman’s superiority. The Asiatics were supposed to panic when the firing started, yet they were the stoical ones who took the casualties and died without hysteria. It was the white civilian bosses who ducked under tables when the bombs and shells fell. It was the white civilians and government officers in Penang who, on 16 December 1941, in the quiet of the night, fled the island for the “safety” of Singapore, abandoning the Asiatics to their fate. British troops demolished whatever installations they could and then retreated. Hospitals, public utilities and other essential services were left unmanned. There were no firemen to fight fires and no officers to regulate the water supply. The whites in charge had gone. Stories of their scramble to save their skins led the Asiatics to see them as selfish and cowardly. Many of them were undoubtedly exaggerated in the retelling and unfair, but there was enough substance in them to make the point. The whites had proved as frightened and at a loss as to what to do as the Asiatics, if not more so. The Asiatics had looked to them for leadership, and they had failed them.
The British built up the myth of their inherent superiority so convincingly that most Asiatics thought it hopeless to challenge them. But now one Asiatic race had dared to defy them and smashed that myth. However, once the Japanese lorded over us as conquerors, they soon demonstrated to their fellow Asiatics that they were more cruel, more brutal, more unjust and more vicious than the British. During the three and a half years of the occupation, whenever I encountered some Japanese tormenting, beating or ill-treating one of our people, I wished the British were still in charge. As fellow Asiatics, we were filled with disillusionment, but then the Japanese themselves were ashamed to be identified with their fellow Asiatics, whom they considered racially inferior and of a lower order of civilisation. They were descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami Sama, a chosen people, distinct and separate from the benighted Chinese, Indians and Malays.
My first encounter with a Japanese soldier took place when I tried to visit an aunt, my mother’s younger sister, in Kampong Java Road, just across the Red Bridge over the Bukit Timah canal. As I approached the bridge, I saw a sentry pacing up and down it. Nearby was a group of four or five Japanese soldiers sitting around, probably the other members of his detail. I was sporting a broad-brimmed hat of the kind worn by Australian soldiers, many of which had been discarded in the days before the surrender. I had picked one up, thinking it would be useful during the hard times ahead to protect me from the sun.
As I passed this group of soldiers, I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. But they were not to be denied attention. One soldier barked “Kore, kore!” and beckoned to me. When I reached him, he thrust the bayonet on his rifle through the brim of my hat, knocking it off, slapped me roundly, and motioned me to kneel. He then shoved his right boot against my chest and sent me sprawling on the road. As I got up, he signalled that I was to go back the way I had come. I had got off lightly. Many others who did not know the new rules of etiquette and did not bow to Japanese sentries at crossroads or bridges were made to kneel for hours in the sun, holding a heavy boulder over their heads until their arms gave way.
One afternoon, sitting on the veranda at 28 Norfolk Road, I watched a Japanese soldier pay off a rickshaw puller. The rickshaw puller remonstrated, pleading for a little more money. The soldier took the man’s arm, put it over his right shoulder, and flung him up into the air with a judo throw. The rickshaw puller fell flat on his face. After a while, he picked himself up and staggered off between the shafts of his rickshaw. I was shocked at the heartlessness.
The next day, I was to learn another lesson at the Red Bridge. A newly captured car drove past displaying a small rectangular blue flag, the lowest of three ranks – yellow flags were for generals, red flags for majors to colonels, and blue flags for lieutenants to captains. The sentry was slow in coming to attention to salute. The car had gone past, but its driver braked and reversed. An officer got out, walked up to the sentry and gave him three hefty slaps. Taking his right arm, he put it over his shoulder and, with the same judo throw I had seen used on the rickshaw puller, flung the soldier in the air. The sentry fell flat on his face, just as the rickshaw puller had done. This time I was less shocked. I had begun to understand that brutalisation was part of the Japanese military system, inculcated through regular beatings for minor infringements.
Later that same day a Japanese non-commissioned officer and several soldiers came into the house. They looked it over and, finding only Teong Koo and me, decided it would be a suitable billet for a platoon. It was the beginning of a nightmare. I had been treated by Japanese dentists and their nurses at Bras Basah Road who were immaculately clean and tidy. So, too, were the Japanese salesmen and saleswomen at the 10-cent stores in Middle Road. I was unprepared for the nauseating stench of the unwashed clothes and bodies of these Japanese soldiers. They roamed all over the house and the compound. They looked for food, found the provisions my mother had stored, and consumed whatever they fancied, cooking in the compound over open fires. I had no language in which to communicate with them. They made their wishes known with signs and guttural noises. When I was slow in understanding what they wanted, I was cursed and frequently slapped. They were strange beings, unshaven and unkempt, speaking an ugly, aggressive language. They filled me with fear, and I slept fitfully. They left after three days of hell.
While this platoon was camping in the house, British, Indian and Australian forces were marched to captivity. The march started on 17 February 1942, and for two days and one night they tramped past the house and over the Red Bridge on their way to Changi. I sat on my veranda for hours at a time watching these men, my heart heavy as lead. Many looked dejected and despondent, perplexed that they had been beaten so decisively and so easily. The surrendered army was a mournful sight.
There were some who won my respect and admiration. Among them were the Highlanders whom I recognised by their Scottish caps. Even in defeat they held themselves erect and marched in time – “Left Right, Left Right, Left, Left!” shouted the sergeant major. And the Gurkhas were like the Highlanders. They too marched erect, unbroken and doughty in defeat. I secretly cheered them. They left a life-long impression on me. As a result, the Singapore government has employed a Gurkha company for its anti-riot police squad from the 1960s to this day.
The Australians were dispirited, not marching in step. The Indian troops, too, looked dejected and demoralised. They must have felt it was not their fight.
Soon after the Japanese soldiers left my house, word went around that all Chinese had to go to a registration centre at the Jalan Besar stadium for examination. I saw my neighbour and his family leave and decided it would be wiser for me to go also, for if I were later caught at home the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, would punish me. So I headed for Jalan Besar with Teong Koo. As it turned out, his cubicle in his coolie-keng, the dormitory he shared with other rickshaw pullers, was within the perimeter enclosed by barbed wire. Tens of thousands of Chinese families were packed into this small area. All exit points were manned by the Kempeitai. There were several civilians with them, locals or Taiwanese. I was told later that many of them were hooded, though I do not remember noticing any.
After spending a night in Teong Koo’s cubicle, I decided to check out through the exit point, but instead of allowing me to pass, the soldier on duty signalled me to join a group of young Chinese. I felt instinctively that this was ominous, so I asked for permission to return to the cubicle to collect my belongings. He gave it. I went back and lay low in Teong Koo’s cubicle for another day and a half. Then I tried the same exit again. This time, for some inexplicable reason, I got through the checkpoint. I was given a “chop” on my left upper arm and on the front of my shirt with a rubber stamp. The kanji or Chinese character jian, meaning “examined”, printed on me in indelible ink, was proof that I was cleared. I walked home with Teong Koo, greatly relieved.
I will never understand how decisions affecting life and death could be taken so capriciously and casually. I had had a narrow escape from an exercise called Sook Ching, meaning to “wipe out” rebels, ordered by Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the staff officer who planned the Malayan campaign. He had obtained the agreement of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the commander of the Japanese forces, to punish the Chinese in Singapore for collecting funds to support China’s war effort against the Japanese, and for their boycott of Japanese goods.
He had another account to settle – with Dalforce, which was part of the 1,000-strong Overseas Chinese volunteer corps organised by local community leaders in Singapore to resist the Japanese. Put together by Colonel John Dalley of the Malayan Special Branch, it brought together Chinese from all walks of life, supporters of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), including notably some 500 communists freed from prison by the British at the eleventh hour. Once armed, the volunteers were sent to hold the ground east of Kranji River on the flank of the 27th Australian Brigade. They fought ferociously. Many died, but so did many Japanese. They made Dalforce a legend, a name synonymous with bravery.
On 18 February, the Japanese put up notices and sent soldiers with loudspeakers around the town to inform the Chinese that all men between the ages of 18 and 50 were to present themselves at five collection areas for inspection. The much-feared Kempeitai went from house to house to drive Chinese who had not done so at bayonet point to these concentration centres, into which women, children and old men were also herded.
I discovered later that those picked out at random at the checkpoint I had passed were taken to the grounds of Victoria School and detained until 22 February, when 40 to 50 lorries arrived to collect them. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were transported to a beach at Tanah Merah Besar, some 10 miles away on the east coast, near Changi Prison. There they were made to disembark, tied together, and forced to walk towards the sea. As they did so, Japanese machine-gunners massacred them. Later, to make sure they were dead, each corpse was kicked, bayoneted and abused in other ways. There was no attempt to bury the bodies, which decomposed as they were washed up and down the shore. A few survivors miraculously escaped to give this grim account.
The Japanese admitted killing 6,000 young Chinese in that Sook Ching of 18–22 February 1942. After the war, a committee of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce exhumed many mass graves in Siglap, Punggol and Changi. It estimated the number massacred to be between 50,000 and 100,000.
In theory, the Imperial Army could justify this action as an operation to restore law and order and to suppress anti-Japanese resistance. But it was sheer vengeance, exacted not in the heat of battle but when Singapore had already surrendered. Even after this Sook Ching, there were mopping-up operations in the rural areas, especially in the eastern part of Singapore, and hundreds more Chinese were executed. All of them were young and sturdy men who could prove troublesome.
When I returned to Norfolk Road, I found the house in the mess that the Japanese soldiers had left it, but it had not been looted and some of our provisions remained. A few days later, my family came back from Telok Kurau. Together, we cleaned up the house. Slowly, we got to know the uncertainty, the daily grind and the misery of the Japanese occupation that was to be the lot of the people of Singapore for the next three and a half years.
Within two weeks of the surrender, I heard that the Japanese had put up wooden fencing around the town houses at Cairnhill Road, which had been vacated by the European and Asiatic businessmen and their families who had left Singapore or been interned. It had been an upper middle-class area. I cycled past and saw long queues of Japanese soldiers snaking along Cairnhill Circle outside the fence. I heard from nearby residents that inside there were Japanese and Korean women who followed the army to service the soldiers before and after battle. It was an amazing sight, one or two hundred men queuing up, waiting their turn. I did not see any women that day. But there was a notice board with Chinese characters on it, which neighbours said referred to a “comfort house”. Such comfort houses had been set up in China. Now they had come to Singapore. There were at least four others. I remember cycling past a big one in Tanjong Katong Road, where a wooden fence had been put up enclosing some 20 to 30 houses.
I thought then that the Japanese army had a practical and realistic approach to such problems, totally different from that of the British army. I remembered the prostitutes along Waterloo Street soliciting British soldiers stationed at Fort Canning. The Japanese high command recognised the sexual needs of the men and provided for them. As a consequence, rape was not frequent. In the first two weeks of the conquest, the people of Singapore had feared that the Japanese army would go on a wild spree. Although rape did occur, it was mostly in the rural areas, and there was nothing like what had happened in Nanking in 1937. I thought these comfort houses were the explanation. I did not then know that the Japanese government had kidnapped and coerced Korean, Chinese and Filipino women to cater to the needs of the Japanese troops at the war front in China and Southeast Asia. They also made some Dutch women serve Japanese officers.
Those of my generation who saw the Japanese soldiers in the flesh cannot forget their almost inhuman attitude to death in battle. They were not afraid to die. They made fearsome enemies and needed so little to keep going – the tin containers on their belts carried only rice, some soya beans and salt fish. Throughout the occupation, a common sight was of Japanese soldiers at bayonet practice on open fields. Their war cries as they stabbed their gunny-sack dummies were bloodcurdling. Had the British re-invaded and fought their way down Malaya into Singapore, there would have been immense devastation.
After seeing them at close quarters, I was sure that for sheer fighting spirit, they were among the world’s finest. But they also showed a meanness and viciousness towards their enemies equal to the Huns’. Genghis Khan and his hordes could not have been more merciless. I have no doubts about whether the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. Without them, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Malaya and Singapore, and millions in Japan itself, would have perished.
What made them such warriors? The Japanese call it bushido, the code of the samurai, or Nippon seishin, the spirit of Nippon. I believe it was systematic indoctrination in the cult of emperor worship, and in their racial superiority as a chosen people who could conquer all. They were convinced that to die in battle for the emperor meant they would ascend to heaven and become gods, while their ashes were preserved at the Yasukuni Shrine in the suburbs of Tokyo.
Day-to-day life had to go on under the Japanese occupation. At first everybody felt lost. My father had no work, I had no college, my three brothers and sister had no school. There was little social activity. We felt danger all around us. Knowing somebody in authority, whether a Japanese or a Taiwanese interpreter with links to the Japanese, was very important and could be a life-saver. His note with his signature and seal on it certified that you were a decent citizen and that he vouched for your good character. This was supposed to be valuable when you were stopped and checked by sentries. But it was safest to stay at home and avoid contact and conflict with authority.
One of my first outings was into town. I walked two miles to the second-hand bookshops in Bras Basah Road that specialised in school textbooks. On the way, I saw a crowd near the main entrance to Cathay cinema, where I had earlier watched the comedy ridiculing the Japanese-made bomb. Joining the crowd, I saw the head of a Chinese man placed on a small board stuck on a pole, on the side of which was a notice in Chinese characters. I could not read Chinese, but someone who could said it explained what one should not do in order not to come to that same end. The man had been beheaded because he had been caught looting, and anybody who disobeyed the law would be dealt with in the same way. I left with a feeling of dread of the Japanese, but at the same time I thought what a marvellous photograph this would make for Life magazine. The American weekly would pay handsomely for such a vivid picture of the contrast: Singapore’s most modern building with this spectacle of medieval punishment in front of it. But then the photographer might well end up in the same situation as the beheaded looter.
I chanced upon this gory exhibition on my way to Bras Basah Road because I had decided to learn Chinese in order to be literate enough to understand such notices. My English was of no value under the new rulers. Learning Chinese would be better than learning Japanese; at least it was my own language, not that of a hated conqueror. I bought Chiang Ker Chiu’s Mandarin Made Easy, a thin booklet of some 30 pages that taught a basic 700 Chinese characters, how they were written, and how they were used in combination with each other.
I devoured this in a couple of weeks and went back for the advanced Book Two. Later, I bought a series of four books published by the Prinsep Street Chinese School that reached a higher standard. Working on them every day, I spent the next few months practising to write between 1,200 and 1,500 characters and trying to commit their meanings to memory. But I never learnt how they were pronounced. In Mandarin, each sound has one of four tones. My books did indicate them, but I did not know how to produce them and I had no one to teach me.
In the face of these difficulties, my resistance to the Japanese language lessened over the months. I discovered that it was not made up of Chinese characters alone. It had a syllabary system, written in two scripts: katakana and hiragana. If the Japanese were to be in Singapore as my lords and masters for the next few years, and I had not only to avoid trouble but make a living, I would have to learn their language. So in May 1942 I registered with the first batch of students at the Japanese language school the authorities had opened in Queen Street. It was a three-month course. The students were of varying ages and abilities, some from secondary schools, some like me from college, and others young workers in their 20s. I passed and got my certificate. I found Japanese much easier than Mandarin because it was not tonal, but more complicated in its inflexions and grammar.
My grandfather, Lee Hoon Leong, had fallen gravely ill in July, and three weeks after I graduated he died. Before the end I visited him many times at Bras Basah Road, where he stayed with his adopted daughter. I felt very sad for him. It was not just that he was sick, but that he had lived to see his world crash: the British and all they had stood for had been humiliated and defeated. The British navy, the British ships’ captains, their discipline, their excellence, their supremacy at sea – these had all been demolished by the strange-looking Japanese. He could not understand how such a slovenly people could defeat straight-backed British officers. How could they have sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, scattered the British fleet, shot down the Royal Air Force, and captured 130,000 troops with only 60,000 of their own after laying siege to Singapore for only two weeks? As I watched him sinking into a coma, I thought it would have been kinder if he had died before it all happened.
His useful pre-war connections in British colonial Singapore had gone, but he did have one Japanese friend, a Mr Shimoda, whom my father looked up a few days after Kung died. The difficulties of the occupation had sobered my father. He became more responsible in hard times. He had a job with the military department in charge of oil supplies, and also got me my first job. At his request and out of regard for my grandfather, Shimoda offered me work in the new world in which the Japanese were now the masters.
I worked in his company as a clerk for a year, copying documents for internal office use and correspondence with other Japanese companies. When Shimoda & Co folded up, I moved to the opposite side of Raffles Place where I got another job as a clerk-typist, in the kumiai or guild that controlled essential foods – rice, oil, sugar, salt – and tobacco and cigarettes. My salary was paid in currency issued by the Japanese military, bills with pictures of coconut and banana trees on them. These “banana notes”, as they were called, had no serial numbers, and were worth less and less every month. The value of my new job lay rather in the payment in kind that went with it – some 10 katis (about 15 pounds) of rice, sugar, oil and, most tradeable of all, cigarettes. These rations were better than Japanese money, for as the months went by they would get scarcer and cost more and more in banana notes.
I worked in the kumiai for about eight months, until late in 1943 when I read an advertisement in the Syonan Shimbun inserted by the Japanese information or propaganda department called the Hodobu, which was located in Cathay Building. It wanted English-language editors. I turned up to be interviewed by an American-born Japanese, George Takemura, a tall, lean, fair-skinned man who spoke English with an American accent and was called Ji-oh-ji by his fellow Japanese. He did not wear the uniform of a Japanese army officer, but of a civilian in the military administration with five blue stars – the equivalent of a captain. He was soft-spoken, and turned out to be a decent man. He was satisfied with my English, and I was relieved to have found a place where it was wanted.
My job was to run through the cables of allied news agencies: Reuters, UP, AP, Central News Agency of China, and TASS. These cables, sent out in morse code, had been intercepted by Malay radio operators. Radio signals were not clear in the late afternoons and early evenings, and because reception was poor, many words were garbled or lost. I had to decipher them and fill in the missing bits, guided by the context, as in a word puzzle. The cables then had to be collated under the various battle fronts and sent from the top floor of Cathay Building to the floor below, where they would be revamped for broadcasting. I worked there for about 15 months until the end of 1944.
It was a strange life. My work would begin at 7 pm Tokyo time, which was 5:30 pm Singapore time and still daylight. Radio reception was poor until about midnight Tokyo time. So the first shift from 7 pm to 12 am was hard work, but one got home early to sleep. The period 12 am to 9 am was broken into two shifts, with a two- to three-hour break in between. Reception was better, and there was less puzzling over missing words or parts of words, but it meant sleeping at awkward hours.
There were two editors on duty at any one time. George Takemura, usually wearing his uniform without the jacket because of the warm and humid weather, would drop in several times in an evening, giving the other editor and me a packet of Japanese cigarettes from his rations. I had to stay awake, snatch some sleep from 4 to 6 am by arrangement with my fellow editor, then work until 9 am, when conditions again deteriorated. Radio reception became hopeless in bright sunshine, so the operators also packed up for the day. I would walk the one and a half miles from Cathay Building to Norfolk Road for brunch, then go off to bed in broad daylight for a few more hours of sleep.
Stranger than its schedule were the psychological implications of the work. For hours my head would be filled with news of a war that was going badly for the Japanese, as for the Germans and Italians. But we talked about this to outsiders at our peril. On the ground floor of Cathay Building was a branch of the Kempeitai. Every employee who worked in the Hodobu had a file. The Kempeitai’s job was to make sure that nobody leaked anything.
From the end of 1943, food became scarcer and scarcer. The Japanese navy had suffered defeats with heavy losses at the battles of Midway and Coral Sea. They had lost control of the oceans and their ships were being sunk by Allied submarines. Even Thailand, a traditional rice exporter, could not get its rice to Singapore, either because the Japanese did not want to pay the Thais for it or because they could not transport it to the island.
Reduced to eating old, mouldy, worm-eaten stocks mixed with Malayan-grown rice, we had to find substitutes. My mother, like many others, stretched what little we could get with maize and millet and strange vegetables we would not normally have touched, like young shoots of sweet potato and tapioca plants cooked in coconut milk. They could be quite palatable, but they had bulk without much nutrition. It was amazing how hungry my brothers and I became one hour after each meal. Meat was a luxury. There was little beef or mutton. Pork was easier to buy and we could raise chickens ourselves, but there were no leftovers to feed them.
My mother’s resourcefulness was sorely tested during the occupation. When the combined salaries of my father, my brother Dennis and myself became negligible because of inflation, she started all manner of businesses. As a daughter in a Straits Chinese family, she had learnt how to cook and bake. Now she made cakes for sale. Wheat flour and butter were soon unobtainable, so she used tapioca flour, rice flour, sago flour, coconut milk and palm sugar. She also made sweetened condensed milk from fresh milk. She was a good cook. Later, when I was prime minister, she filled in her time teaching Straits Chinese cooking to expatriate wives, including wives of the diplomatic corps. She wrote Mrs Lee’s Cookbook, which sold well even after she died.
Everything was in short supply. Motorcars had disappeared, except for those used by the military and important Japanese civilians. The few local people who had their own cars could not get petrol for them. Taxis were converted to run on charcoal and firewood. Stocks of bicycle tyres and tubes soon ran out. Local manufacturers could only produce solid bicycle tyres, which made for bumpy going, but that was better than riding on steel rims. Textiles were scarce, so we converted curtain fabrics and tablecloth into trousers and shirts. All imported goods had become precious. Liquor kept well and was much sought after by wealthy black marketeers and Japanese officers.
Meanwhile, inflation had been increasing month by month, and by mid-1944 it was no longer possible to live on my salary. But there was a solution to this. Although I received the usual rations of rice, oil, other foodstuff and cigarettes, there were better and easier pickings to be had as a broker on the black market. There was a lively trade in ever-diminishing supplies of British medicines, pre-war stocks that had been hoarded, the most valuable of which was Sulphonamide Pyridine M&B (May and Baker) 693. Other profitable commodities were spirits like Johnnie Walker whisky and Hennessy brandy, British cigarettes in hermetically sealed tins of 50, jewellery, landed property and Straits Settlements currency.
The brokers operated mainly in High Street or Chulia Street, off Raffles Place. I joined them in 1944, and learnt how to hoard items, especially small pieces of jewellery going cheap. I would buy them, hold them for a few weeks, and then sell them as prices inevitably went up. It was easy to make money if one had the right connections. At one end were those among the old middle class who were parting with family heirlooms in order to stay alive. My mother knew many women from previously wealthy families who needed to sell their jewellery and properties in a Singapore that was running short of food. Brokers like me would sell them to people at the other end who wanted to sell them to Japanese civilians anxious to convert their banana notes into something of more lasting value, or give them to Japanese military officers who handed out contracts.
The key to survival was improvisation. One business I started changed the course of my life. While brokering on the black market, I met Yong Nyuk Lin, a Raffles College science graduate who was working in the Overseas Assurance Corporation in China Building, in Chulia Street. Nyuk Lin and I both frequented a goldsmith’s shop in High Street run by two Hakkas, another Raffles College graduate and his elder brother. The shop was a meeting place for brokers like myself who traded in little bits of jewellery. I had been asked by Basrai Brothers, Indian stationers in Chulia Street, if I could get them stationery gum, which was in short supply – there was little left from pre-war stock. Could I perhaps make some myself? I asked Nyuk Lin whether he could make gum. He said he could, using tapioca flour and carbolic acid. So I financed his experiments.
Nyuk Lin’s method was to take a big cylindrical pot, fill it with tapioca flour, and place the pot in a big wok of boiling oil. He used palm oil, which was freely available and cheap. He kept the oil at a constant high temperature to heat the tapioca flour, which needed to be stirred all the while until it became a deep golden brown dextrine. It looked and smelt like beautiful caramel. He added water to the “caramel”, which dissolved it into mucilage or gum, and finally carbolic acid as a preservative to prevent mould from setting in. The gum was poured into empty Scotts Emulsion bottles, which I discovered were plentiful and cheap. I marketed the gum under the name “Stikfas”, and had an attractive label designed by an artistic friend with the word in light brown brushwork against a white background.
The gum turned a decent profit, and we made it in two centres. One was my home, with my mother and sister helping; the other was Nyuk Lin’s home, where he was helped by his wife and his wife’s younger sister, Kwa Geok Choo, the girl who had done better than me at Raffles College. I had seen her again when I first looked for Nyuk Lin in his flat in Tiong Bahru, riding my bicycle with its solid tyres. She was sitting on a veranda when I arrived, and when I asked where I could find him, she smiled and pointed out a staircase around the corner. Now we were meeting under different circumstances. She was at home, at a loose end, doing domestic chores as there were no maids. Making gum was one chore that gave her pin money, and my visits to check on production led to a friendship that developed over the months.
By September 1944, we knew each other well enough for me to invite Nyuk Lin, his wife and Geok Choo (now simply Choo) to my 21st birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant at the Great World, an amusement park. It was the first time I had asked her out. True, she was escorted by her brother-in-law, but in the Singapore of that era, if a girl accepted an invitation to a young man’s 21st birthday dinner, it was an event not without significance.
The gum-making lasted for some six to seven months until late 1944. By then, the war was going badly for the Japanese. Few merchant ships came through and trade was at a standstill; business dwindled and offices did not need gum. I discontinued gum-making, but continued to visit Choo at her Tiong Bahru home to chat and keep up the friendship.
By May, the Japanese attempt to invade India from Burma had failed at Imphal and Kohima. This time it was the Japanese who were on the run. They fought tenaciously and ferociously even as they retreated, and I read dispatches of the stubborn resistance they put up as the British advanced towards Mandalay and down the Arakan coast. I felt certain the British would soon push their way down the Malayan peninsula in the same way, and feared that, with the Japanese fighting to the last man, the recapture of Singapore would mean street-to-street and house-to-house fighting to the bitter end, with enormous civilian casualties. It was only a matter of time before it happened – one to two years.
I decided it would be better to get out of Singapore while things were still calm, and I could resign from the Hodobu without arousing suspicion over my motives. I applied for leave and went up to Malaya to reconnoitre Penang and the Cameron Highlands, to find out which was the safer place. I travelled from Singapore to Penang and then to Tapah by train, but from Tapah to the Cameron Highlands I got a lift in a vegetable lorry and sat next to the driver. After two nights in the Camerons, I went back to Tapah by the same means. It was a scary ride. To save petrol, the driver switched off the engine and freewheeled for the better part of two-and-a-half hours down the steep, winding road.
In Penang, I stayed with Hon Sui Sen. In 1942, some four months into the occupation of Singapore, Hon had sent his wife and baby daughter back to Penang and boarded with my family in Norfolk Road as a paying guest. We shared a room and became friends, but after nine months he decided it was not worth staying in Singapore. He was the best science graduate of his year, and one of the two annually recruited into the Straits Settlements Civil Service. (He was later to become our minister for finance.) But his government pay was paltry, his rations were inadequate, and he could not earn enough to keep his family. So he joined them in Penang.
Although I saw little military activity as I wandered around Penang, I ruled it out. It would be a logical stepping stone for the British forces on their way down to Singapore. There would be street fighting, building by building. So I went on to the Cameron Highlands where Maurice Baker, my friend at Raffles College, had his home in Ringlet village at 3,200 feet. He and some friends were living off their savings, planting vegetables and root crops. I paid for my whole trip by selling at an enormous profit half a dozen steel hoes purchased in Singapore. The farmers needed them badly. On my return journey I bought a basket of beautiful vegetables unobtainable in Singapore, and spent a day and a half guarding them on the train.
Once back, I discussed the next move with my mother. We decided it would be best to move to the Cameron Highlands. As a first step, we sold the tenancy of the house at Norfolk Road to a group of Japanese men who worked for a kumiai. They paid us the handsome sum of $60,000 in banana notes for vacating this rent-controlled property and handing it over to them. Then I gave one month’s notice to the Hodobu.
As I took the lift down in Cathay Building the day before I stopped work, the lift attendant, whom I had befriended, told me to be careful; my file in the Kempeitai office had been taken out for attention. I felt a deep chill. I wondered what could have provoked this, and braced myself for the coming interrogation. From that moment, I sensed that I was being followed. Day and night, a team tailed me. I went through all the possible reasons in my mind, and could only conclude that someone had told the Kempeitai I was pro-British and had been leaking news that the war was going badly for the Japanese, and that was why I was leaving. At least two men at any one time would be outside the shophouse in Victoria Street where we stayed after moving from Norfolk Road. My father had obtained the tenancy of this house from his employers, the oil authority in Alexandra Road.
To discover if I was indeed being followed, I asked my brothers Dennis and Fred to station themselves at the upstairs windows and watch the two Chinese men at the corner of Bras Basah Road and Victoria Street with two bicycles parked nearby. Then I cycled around the block. When I came back, they confirmed that the moment I left, so did the men, and when I returned, so did they. My heart sank. I told my mother, and decided that it would be best if I did not leave Singapore after all. If I attempted to do so, the Kempeitai would probably pull me in for a nasty interrogation. If I stayed behind and acted openly, leading a harmless life operating on the black market and making gum to get by, they might leave me alone.
I endured this cat-and-mouse game for some eight weeks. At times, in the quiet of the early morning, at 2 or 3 am, a car would pass by on Victoria Street and stop near its junction with Bras Basah Road. It is difficult to describe the cold fear that seized me at the thought that they had come for me. Like most, I had heard of the horrors of the torture inflicted by the Kempeitai. They wore white armbands with the two Chinese characters in red for Kempei, military police, and their powers of arrest and interrogation could not be challenged, even by high-ranking Japanese officers. They had their headquarters in the YMCA building in Stamford Road, and branches in Oxley Rise, Smith Street and the Central Police Station in South Bridge Road. People living nearby reported hearing their victims’ howls of pain, sounds calculated to fill their hearts with dread, and their fears were spread by word of mouth. It was a deliberate method to terrorise the locals; a cowed population was easier to control.
I had no links with any underground or any network for spreading Allied news. I had no reason to listen secretly to any radio broadcast because it was anyway my job to deal with Western news reports. I made up my mind that if I were arrested, I would tell them what I feared: that after clearing Burma, the British would re-invade Malaya and push their way down to Singapore with the Japanese fighting to the last man. I had therefore planned to leave the island to plant tapioca, sweet potato and vegetables in the Cameron Highlands, which would not be in the path of any military invasion. I would provide proof of my visit to Penang and the Camerons, which was followed by that of my mother and my brother some two months later to confirm my assessment that it was the best area for the family to move to. But one day, two months after it began, the surveillance ceased. It was an unnerving experience.
After I stopped making gum for lack of demand, I teamed up with a Shanghainese called Low You Ling. He was a small contractor in the construction business, in his mid-30s. He had no partners. I could speak Japanese; he could not. Between us we got odd jobs from Japanese companies and from the butai, the regiments that garrisoned Singapore. To increase my contacts in the civilian sector, I teamed up with a Mr Kageyama, a Japanese civilian, also in his mid-30s, who had been employed by the kumiai. When there was little work for him in the kumiai because Japanese ships were being sunk and commodities became scarce, he decided to strike out on his own as a middleman between the big Japanese companies, the military and local suppliers. He and I complemented each other, with Low providing the construction capability and the connections with the subcontractors, carpenters, masons and bricklayers whom we needed. Together, we all made something of a living.
I continued to operate on the black market, acting as a broker for anything and everything tradeable. It was a no-lose situation. Every item was in short supply and getting scarcer. Hyperinflation meant nothing ever went down in price. But one needed capital to get richer. I was able to raise some money and quickly accumulated more. I knew that the moment I had cash, the important thing was to change it into something of more permanent value or it would melt away in my hands. In this mad urge to convert banana notes into assets, I bought myself a full-size billiard table, had it restored and revarnished, the green baize top recovered, and installed it – adjusted and levelled – in the upstairs flat at Victoria Street. In March or April 1945, a friend of my parents had moved out of his flat in China Building and had offered us the use of it. So I was able to use Victoria Street for business and recreation: business, because next to it was a red-brick corner building, a confectionery and bakery, where brokers would gather to exchange information and close deals; recreation, because the billiard table was there. It was an existentialist life, with each day another day nearer to a re-invasion that spelt danger for the locals. Meanwhile, one had to live and carry on as usual.
In May, news came of Germany’s defeat and surrender. Now the whole war effort would be turned against the Japanese. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Japan would be defeated. Having edited the Burma campaign press despatches while I worked for the Hodobu, I was fearful of the price civilians would pay. But there was no way out. For me to leave was still to invite detention and interrogation.
Then out of the blue, on 6 August, a strange bomb was exploded over Hiroshima. The news was only carried in the Syonan Shimbun of 11 August in the form of a masthead report – “Nippon protests against the attack on Hiroshima with a new kind of bomb last Monday” – but those who had listened to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC spread the news that Japan had been hit with a powerful new radiation weapon. We felt the end was close.
On 15 August, the Japanese emperor broadcast to his subjects and announced the surrender. We heard this almost immediately, because people had become bold and many were listening to Allied radio broadcasts, especially the BBC. The news did not appear in the Syonan Shimbun until 20 August, when it published the whole “Imperial Rescript”. The war had come to an end without further fighting. We were spared the fiery ordeal that had been the fate of Rangoon and Mandalay.
For three weeks after the emperor’s broadcast, there were no signs of the British arriving. It was an unnatural situation. It was different from what had happened three and a half years earlier, when the British had surrendered and the Japanese had not yet taken effective control. Unlike the British, the Japanese troops had not been defeated and demoralised in battle. They were despondent and confused, but still very much in charge, and still had the power to hurt us. When locals who could not contain their elation celebrated their defeat, Japanese soldiers passing by would gate-crash their parties and slap the merrymakers. The Japanese army expected to be called to account by the British and punished for its misdeeds, but it was also resentful and apprehensive that the population would turn on its officers when they arrived. Shots were reported to have been heard from Japanese officers’ messes, for several could not accept the surrender and preferred to commit hara-kiri, either Japanese-style with a dagger or, less painfully, with a revolver. But the locals were fortunate. The Japanese did not kill civilians, as far as I know, nor were there ugly or brutal incidents. They left the population alone until the British took over. Their military discipline held.
The three and a half years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life. They gave me vivid insights into the behaviour of human beings and human societies, their motivations and impulses. My appreciation of governments, my understanding of power as the vehicle for revolutionary change, would not have been gained without this experience. I saw a whole social system crumble suddenly before an occupying army that was absolutely merciless. The Japanese demanded total obedience and got it from nearly all. They were hated by almost everyone but everyone knew their power to do harm and so everyone adjusted. Those who were slow or reluctant to change and to accept the new masters suffered. They lived on the margins of the new society, their fortunes stagnated or declined and they lost their status. Those who were quick off the mark in assessing the new situation, and swift to take advantage of the new opportunities by making themselves useful to the new masters, made fortunes out of the terrible misfortune that had befallen all in Singapore.
The Japanese Military Administration governed by spreading fear. It put up no pretence of civilised behaviour. Punishment was so severe that crime was very rare. In the midst of deprivation after the second half of 1944, when the people half-starved, it was amazing how low the crime rate remained. People could leave their front doors open at night. Every household had a head, and every group of ten households had its head, and they were supposed to patrol their area from dusk till sunrise. But it was a mere formality. They carried only sticks and there were no offences to report – the penalties were too heavy. As a result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. That was not my experience in Singapore before the war, during the Japanese occupation or subsequently.
I learnt after the initial shock and drama that life had to go on almost as usual. People must eat; they need medicines and other things like toothbrushes, toothpaste, clothes, shoes, pens, ink, paper. Even razor blades became precious and difficult to get, so that used blades were sharpened and re-sharpened by being pressed and rubbed back and forth against the inside walls of a glass. Tobacco was worth more than Japanese currency. Some professions were reduced in value and earning power. There was little demand for lawyers trained in English law, because there was little commerce, and military law dealt summarily with crimes. Accountancy stagnated because there was little business. On the other hand, doctors and dentists were as essential as ever since people still got sick and had toothache, so they prospered despite shortages of medicines and anaesthetics.
In the first ten months of the occupation, it was not unusual to see British and Australian prisoner-of-war working parties coming to town, with a light escort of Japanese soldiers. Usually they performed tasks like moving goods from a godown to a lorry. They would sneak into the coffee shops looking for food, and the owners and ordinary housewives would pass them bread, canned food and other foodstuffs and money. The Chinese had great sympathy for them. They had grown thin and looked the worse for their confinement. Their uniforms, usually shorts and shirts, were tattered. Towards the end of 1942, they gradually became less visible, and a year later they were seldom seen. People believed they had been sent to work elsewhere, in Thailand, Indonesia and Japan. When they reappeared in Singapore in late 1944 and early 1945, they were just skin and bones, skeletons with ribs sticking out to be counted. They had been working on the Burma railway. Some wore only G-strings, their hip bones exposed. They were pitiful, with sores, ulcers, scars and scabies all over their bodies, especially their arms and legs. Food was scarce, but not so scarce that they could not have been adequately fed. Their sufferings exceeded those of prisoners of war anywhere else in the world.
The switch from English to Japanese as the language of administration and of the bosses put the old at a grave disadvantage. They could not learn Japanese so easily. Those who spoke it, like the Chinese from Taiwan, were at a premium; some were already in Singapore before the occupation, but others followed the Japanese army. Young locals learnt enough Japanese to be employable, but beyond that most people were decent. They did not want to cooperate or collaborate with the enemy. They just wanted to coast along, to give the minimum to the new masters. Only a few dared to oppose them, even secretly.
There were others, the smart and the opportunistic, who went out of their way to ingratiate themselves and to make themselves useful to the Japanese. They provided them with labour, materials, information, women, liquor, good food, and they made fortunes. The lucky ones were contractors whom the Japanese needed to obtain basic supplies, or who were in building construction.
The luckiest and most prosperous of all were those like the Shaw brothers who were given the licence or franchise to run gambling farms in the amusement parks, the Great World and the New World. For a deprived, depressed population facing the prospect of mass destruction and death in one, two or three years when the British returned to oust the Japanese, gambling was a wonderful opiate. The locals patronised these farms to try their luck and punted their fortunes away, while others came to watch and pass the time. It was amazing how much time people spent in these gambling farms and how much money they inevitably lost to the bankers in this simple way. As existence was uncertain, all games of chance were favoured. Life itself had become a game of chance.
But however you made money, the most important thing was how to preserve its value by changing it into tangible goods or the old Straits Settlements dollars. Grains and other foodstuffs were bulky and difficult to store or handle. The items most sought after were those that would retain their value after the British returned, and in the meantime were small and easy to hide. Hence, from 1944, the exchange rate of the British Straits Settlements dollar shot up on the black market with every passing day as more and more banana notes were printed and distributed. The next most desirable asset was jewellery. To deal in jewellery, brokers had to know what was real gold, what was 24 carat and what was only 18 carat, to recognise good diamonds with good colour and few or no flaws, and to learn the virtues of rubies, sapphires, aquamarines, cat’s-eyes and other semi-precious stones.
The bolder ones with big money bought properties, but their value did not escalate as much as gold or Straits Settlements dollars because they were immovable. Transfers required conveyancing by lawyers and registration in the Registry of Deeds. The chances were 50–50 that the conveyance would be repudiated or annulled when the British returned. Meanwhile, there was a likelihood of buildings being bombed and destroyed. As it turned out, there was no invasion, conveyances were not annulled and buildings were not destroyed. In the last stages of the occupation, after Germany had surrendered and Japan’s defeat was certain, it was possible to sell a case of 12 bottles of Johnnie Walker whisky for enough Japanese banana dollars to buy a shophouse in Victoria Street. Those who negotiated such exchanges became wealthy after the war.
I learnt more from the three and a half years of Japanese occupation than any university could have taught me. I had not yet read Mao’s dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, but I knew that Japanese brutality, Japanese guns, Japanese bayonets and swords, and Japanese terror and torture settled the argument as to who was in charge, and could make people change their behaviour, even their loyalties. The Japanese not only demanded and got their obedience; they forced them to adjust to a long-term prospect of Japanese rule, so that they had their children educated to fit the new system, its language, its habits and its values, in order to be useful and make a living.
The third and final stage, which they would have achieved if they had been given time, was to get us to accept them as our new masters as part of the natural order of things. Morality and fairness were irrelevant. They had won. They were on top and in command. We had to praise their gods, extol their culture and emulate their behaviour. But it did not always work. In Korea, the Japanese met resistance from the moment they attempted to govern the country. They tried to suppress the instincts and habits of a people of an old culture, people with a strong sense of pride in their history and a determination to oppose their new barbaric oppressors. They killed many Koreans but never broke their spirit.
But that was one exception. In Taiwan – ruled by the Chinese, the Portuguese and the Dutch before the Japanese came – there was no hatred. Had the Japanese stayed on in Singapore and Malaya, they would, within 50 years, have forged a coterie of loyal supporters as they had successfully done in Taiwan. Malaya was too young, its peoples too diverse and its society too plastic and malleable to resist. There were some Malays who joined the anti-Japanese guerrillas in the Malayan jungle trained by British officers of Force 136. But most of them hoped the Japanese would be their new protectors, just as they hoped the British would be when they in turn ousted the Japanese.
The only people who had the courage and conviction to stand up to the invaders were the Chinese who joined the Malayan Communist Party and, in smaller numbers, the Kuomintang-led resistance. Both groups were fired by Chinese nationalism, not Malayan patriotism, and were to prove as much a source of trouble to the British in peace as they had been to the Japanese in war.
In the confused interregnum between the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945 and the establishment of effective British control of the island towards the end of September, anti-Japanese groups took the law into their own hands. They lynched, murdered, tortured or beat up informers, torturers, tormentors and accomplices – or suspected accomplices – of the Japanese. I remember the thudding of feet as people were chased in broad daylight down the backlanes around our two homes in Victoria Street and China Building. I heard the sound of blows and screams as they were knifed and killed. But in the last days many collaborators managed to melt away, going into hiding or fleeing upcountry to Malaya or to the Riau islands in the south.
The liberation did not bring what everybody wanted: punishment for the wicked and reward for the virtuous. There could be no complete squaring of accounts. Fairness and justice demanded documentation and elaborate investigations. It was not possible to muster the resources to bring every culprit to book. There were too many of them, both Japanese and locals. Justice was meted out to a few, but most went free.
There were trials, but the major Japanese war criminals were not punished. Colonel Tsuji, the man who had ordered the Sook Ching massacre, had disappeared. General Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malaya”, who as commander-in-chief had agreed to Sook Ching, had been transferred first to Manchuria and then to the Philippines, where in September 1945 he surrendered to General MacArthur’s forces. He was tried and hanged in Manila for the senseless sacking of the city, not for his approval of the killing of fifty to a hundred thousand innocent young men in Singapore.
Some 260 Japanese war criminals were tried in Singapore, but only 100 were convicted and sentenced to death although hundreds of people in Singapore, among them my own friends, had been detained and tortured in the Kempeitai centres in Singapore. One of them was Lim Kim San, who later became a cabinet minister, from 1963 to 1980. He gave me this grim account of his experiences in 1944:
“I was detained twice at Oxley Rise, first in January 1944 for a fortnight, second in February 1944 for more than a month. A Chinese youth who had come to my shop in North Bridge Road had pointed me out as one who had given money to him for the communists. When I argued that it did not make sense that a capitalist was also pro-communist, I was flogged with a rope, kicked and manhandled.
“I regained consciousness when water was splashed on my face. I found myself imprisoned in a room about 15 feet by 10 feet, shared by about 30 people, male and female.
“There was a lavatory at one corner of the room, a squatting type with the cistern high above our heads. Repeated flushings made the water ‘clean’ and it was then collected from the gushing outlets in the toilet bowl. It was the water you drank and washed with. If you became sick you would be taken away to God knows where. I was disgusted by the sight of flowing blood from a woman menstruating.
“We were fed with rice gruel mixed with discarded vegetables from an old kerosene tin. I could not stomach it and retched every time I tried to eat. It reminded me of the way we fed our ducks.
“All of us were made to sit on our haunches and we were not allowed to change position without permission from the guards, local boys who were recruited and trained to be cruel.
“One day, an elderly Indian with his leg broken was brought in. He could not sit and he could only move in a prone position, dragging his injured leg along. One of the young gunpo (guards) threw a stick and the injured Indian had to painfully drag himself with his injured leg to fetch the stick and return it to the gunpo. This was repeated until the poor man was exhausted and almost unconscious with pain.
“Among those detained was a young, strapping, jolly Teochew lad of about 17 or 18 years of age. He was a gunpo who was caught after he deserted. One evening, the Kempeitai strapped him bare-bodied to the ceiling. His hands were tied behind him and the rope attached to a beam with his feet barely touching the ground. From time to time you could see him stretching his toes to reach the ground, to ease the weight on his shoulders.
“They left him there the whole night without food and water. He yelled profanities and cursed the Japanese in a strong voice in Teochew.
“The next morning, the shouts and curses turned to piteous wails and moans when a Kempeitai man used a cane to hit the man’s back. It went on for a few hours and the wailings and moanings became weaker and weaker; ultimately, it stopped. He was dead and yet was left hanging for some time before all of us, as a warning to the gunpo and to us.