The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (12 page)

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.