The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (9 page)

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.