War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore

Chapter 1: Introduction

Introduction 3 Chapter 1 Introduction This book addresses debates on ar, memory and heritage, but for us it is more than a mere study of things done and dusted. The themes it tackles have formed a part of the fabric of our lives for nearly two decades. We have encouraged successive cohorts of students at Singapore ’s National Institute of Education to interview their parents and grandparents, and have immersed ourselves in heritage projects: climbing down rusting ladders into old gun tunnels; interviewing the SecretaryGeneral of the Malayan Communist Party in Canberra; listening to memories of the Burma-Thailand Railway while sharing tapioca; and taking in the silence in the Chapel of Changi Prison in its last days before demolition. We have attended ceremonies for anti-Japanese guerrillas at Nilai, with Indian National Army veterans in Kuala Lumpur, for Australian and British soldiers at Kranji, and at Singapore’s Civilian War Memorial. This personal involvement, and participation in commemorative events, befits our topic. For our theme is not just the past per se, but also the ripples on the pond: the after-effects of the battle for Malaya (8 December 1941 to 15 February 1942) and of the Japanese Occupation that followed (February 1942 to September 1945). We examine the relationship between event and memory, and in so doing we look for what is emphasised, suppressed, and reshaped by individuals, communities and states. Our focus on these three levels — individual, community, and state — has in turn emerged naturally from our teaching, research, and publications. As present (Kevin Blackburn) and past (Karl Hack) historians at Singapore’s National Institute of Education (NIE), we have been a part of Singapore’s machinery for educating students about the war. This has given us intimate experience of, and interest in, state attempts 3 4 War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore to shape war memory. We have also been participants in the development of Singapore’s war heritage. In 2001, we led a consultancy which culminated, on 15 February 2002, in the opening of the “Johore Battery” heritage site at Changi. The original Johore Battery had comprised three of Singapore’s biggest, 15-inch, coastal defence guns, two of which turned round to fire at Japanese troops early in 1942.1 The research for that project provided the seed material for our first joint publication: Did Singapore Have to Fall? (2004). Writing that confirmed for us how differently Australians, British, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, and Malays experienced the Fall and Occupation. We saw how their varied community and national preoccupations even fuelled different answers to the questions of whether Singapore had to fall, and of why it did. Hence, Churchill suggested that the island’s fall was an unfortunate, unintended, but ultimately necessary by-product of sending almost all spare aircraft and tanks to save Russia and the Middle East. By contrast, some Asians berated Britain’s failure to better harness the bitter anti-Japanese sentiments of local Chinese.2 In terms of explanation as well as experience, it seemed that there was not one “Fall” and Occupation, but many.3 Our attempts to understand these different national and community perspectives included interviewing individuals from each of them. But as we did so, and as our students conducted interviews with the wartime generation, it also became obvious just how far the memories of some individuals jarred with the wider “collective memory” of the communities they identified with. We realised that these individual experiences and memories needed to be studied in their own right. Hence, after Did Singapore Have to Fall? had been published, we sought out more individuals, not as “representatives ” of wider groups or themes, but for their unique stories. We organised, for September 2005, a public forum with the “Wartime Generation” at the Singapore History Museum, in order to bring as wide a variety of such personal stories as possible to public notice. We continued gathering accounts afterwards, until we had enough to form the bedrock for this book. These stories underpin most of the following chapters, including those on community and state narratives about the war. For it is only possible to fully understand the process of selection and suppression of memory that goes into making such community and state stories, if you first start with the individual. You cannot con- fidently make judgements about how far community or “collective” memories are “representative” or distorting, unless you have a large [3.145...