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  • Historical Documents Relating to the Japanese Occupation of Malaya
  • Ibuse Shoji

August 2015 is the 70th anniversary of the end of Japan’s wartime occupation of Malaya and Singapore. The people who experienced the war years as adults have mostly passed away, and the animosities that were a heritage of those years have become muted. Younger generations on both sides of the conflict find the details murky and most are happy not to think about them. Basic information is well-established, and historians have analysed the period from various perspectives by looking at political leaders, subaltern members of society, women, and ethnic minorities, among others. They have also positioned the Occupation in larger contexts, considering how the war changed the course of history and looking for underlying continuities, and they have examined how the period is remembered and commemorated. Yet many details remain unclear, at least in English-language material, including the identity and character of Japanese military and civilian personnel assigned to Malaya, the activities of Japanese companies operating there, details of resistance activity, the working of the black market, and the everyday life of local residents. The Occupation is too complex to permit the writing of a definitive account, and as researchers locate fresh source material, understandings of the period will inevitably change.

The documents reproduced in this section do not lead to a reassessment of the Occupation. They do, however, provide information on some lesser-known aspects of the war years, and are not without interest.

In the first piece, a Japanese journalist describes the re-opening of Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper under the name Syonan Times. The second is an account of efforts to recover pre-war administrative papers taken from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore during the British retreat, papers containing information wartime officials needed to regularize their financial accounts. The third consists of excerpts from logs maintained by submarine commanders of patrols in the Straits of Melaka, and reports of conditions in Malaya based on interrogations of personnel removed from boats the submarines attacked and sank, who were taken to Ceylon for questioning. The final document, prepared shortly after the end of the Occupation, explains what happened to collections held by the former Federated Malay States Museum in Kuala Lumpur during the war. [End Page 87]

The First Days of the Syonan Times

This article appeared on page 12 of Osaka’s Sunday Mainichi on 17 January 1943. The translation is held by the US National Archives under the number RG226 41350. In it the writer, a journalist named Ibuse Shoji who was briefly in charge of the Syonan Times, describes the Japanese takeover of the pre-war Straits Times.

Far Eastern Bureau,
British Ministry of Information,
P.O. Box No. 110,
New Delhi.

Japanese Translation Series No. 49.
July 12th, 1943.

The First Days of the Syonan Times*

By a “culture warrior” in the Southern Regions,
Ibuse Shoji

What struck me most on my return to Japan from Malaya was that there seemed to be a rumour that I had been Manager of an English paper in Syonan city (Singapore). I was no more than a member of the staff of the Syonan Times, working on it everyday together with Interpreter Furuyama Tachi.

Furuyama wore khaki shirt and shorts and cap, and ordinary shoes, with a pistol in his belt and a Japanese-English dictionary in his pocket. I wore a soldier’s uniform with gaiters and military boots and a long sword and carried lunch for the two of us. At first Furuyama used to make do on water and dry biscuits and gave the lunch which was meant for him to one of the local employees. The local employees mostly did not bring their lunch to office and used to idle away the time with a drink of water, so one day Furuyama would give his lunch to local reporter SAVAGE (see note 1) and the next to reporter CHON (see note 2) and so on. Furuyama thought that as so many extra people had come down from up-country to feed at the houses of these employees that they could not spare enough for lunch. This was an...

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