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INTRODUCTION My interest in the post-Japanese surrender interregnum in Malaya was first aroused while I was an undergraduate at the University of Malaya in 1969. Dr Anthony Reid taught a course on new approaches to the study of Indonesian history and introduced students to John Smail’s stimulating work, Bandung in the Early Revolution: A Study in the Social History of the Indonesian Revolution (1964). Smail attempted to reconstruct the story of the Indonesian revolution based mainly on the oral accounts of Indonesians in Bandung. It inspired me to attempt a similar type of study in Malayan history. The only Malayan equivalent to his Bandung period, it seemed to me, was the post-surrender interregnum. In May 1969, too, occurred the race riots in peninsular Malaysia (or West Malaysia), described by local and foreign newspapers of that time as the worst riots the country had ever experienced. The little knowledge I had then about inter-racial conflicts during the post-surrender interregnum of 1945 led me to believe that there were similarities with 1969. If so, why had the May 1969 riots occurred ? Had people forgotten the lessons of 1945? In 1969 there was the similar phenomenon of the Malay martial and “invulnerability cults” in the countryside. In the urban centres, other racial groups had begun to put emphasis on the martial arts too — karate, judo, and the kung tow. The government did all it could to restrict discussion of the causes of the May 1969 riots in the mass media, on the principle that the less said about the episode the better for the country. When I undertook postgraduate research on the post-surrender interregnum in 1975, I began to realize that my earlier expectations regarding the project were somewhat ambitious. I found I had one year to do fieldwork, which had to be divided between seven months in the archives in London and Tokyo and five months for working in the archives and conducting interviews in Malaysia. While I succeeded in collecting a great deal of relevant archival materials and research data, including private papers in London and Tokyo, I found xx that the five months left for research and interviews in Malaysia were insufficient to do the type of study brilliantly accomplished by Smail. He had spent two and a half years on fieldwork in Holland and Indonesia, and his study on Bandung was based primarily on interviews. Still, given the short time I had left in Malaysia, I selected two areas, one in Perak, the other in Batu Pahat (Johor), for fieldwork . Unfortunately, the political climate in peninsular Malaysia in late 1976 was not conducive to my field investigations. This book is therefore a slightly revised version of my Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Australian National University in 1978. It focuses mainly on race relations and politics in wartime Malaya (that is, the name West Malaysia had before the federation of Malaysia was formed in 1963). When compared to the numbers of people killed and the areas affected during the post-Japanese surrender interregnum of 1945, the May 1969 race riots pale into insignificance. Yet, for some reason, many people in Malaya seemed to have shut their minds off to the 1945 period. Perhaps it was the magnitude of the killing and the terror of the times that shut people’s minds off the subject. It was a time of much violence and suffering, when “the pistol and knife ruled”. It was also notable for the “communist reign of terror”. Only those in authority seemed to remember the 1945 incidents. The Sultan of Perak, in a speech in May 1975, reminded his subjects to support the Malaysian Government’s anti-communist campaign “if you do not want a repetition of communist atrocities experienced immediately after the Japanese occupation”. While many studies of local history pertaining to the postsurrender interregnum in Malaya are beginning to appear, mostly done by Malay undergraduate students, there is as yet no study attempting a Malaya-wide spectrum. It was mainly to fill this gap that I decided to undertake research on the period. The theme is that of social and political conflict, a deadly serious contest for survival and advancement in which the main contestants were Malays and Chinese. The importance of this period has become more obvious than ever to me. Only by understanding what happened in that crucial period, I believe, can a Malaysian truly fathom Malaya’s postwar politics and society. For instance, Malay political primacy...

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