Sook Ching

• 1. Introduction

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  Sook Ching, meaning purge or eradication in Chinese, unfolded in Singapore from the 18th of February to the 4th of March 1942. In those two weeks, Japanese forces killed Chinese civilians in large numbers.

  It began three days after the largest surrender in British history, when British and Commonwealth forces gave up the island to a smaller Japanese army. Chinese men aged 18 to 50 were ordered to report to registration camps to be screened for anti-Japanese views.

  At one screening centre, the sorting depended on little more than which entrance a man happened to use. Chinese males who walked through one entrance were taken away in trucks to be shot. Those who took another path were released.

  That detail raises the questions this documentary follows. Was the killing planned before the first soldier landed? Who carried it out, and how did they choose the victims? How many people died, and why does no one agree on the number? And what did Japan admit, and what did it refuse to admit, in the decades that followed?

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• 2. A Plan Before the Landing

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  On or around the 28th of December 1941, the military government section of Japan's 25th Army produced a paper called "Implementation Guideline for Manipulating Overseas Chinese." It said that anyone who failed to obey or cooperate with the occupation authorities should be eliminated. No Japanese soldier had yet landed on Singapore.

  Hirofumi Hayashi, a politics professor and co-director of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, reads the paper as proof of premeditation. In his words, "the Chinese in Singapore were regarded as anti-Japanese even before the Japanese military landed." The same guideline reached Chinese in Malaya too.

  A second thread comes from Onishi Satoru, the Kenpeitai officer in charge of the Jalan Besar screening centre. He said that the chief of staff, Sōsaku Suzuki, told Kenpeitai commander Oishi Masayuki to prepare a purge once Singapore was captured. The instruction was given at Keluang in Johor. Its exact date is unknown, but army headquarters stood at Keluang from the 28th of January to the 4th of February 1942.

  The motives lay in a war already years old. Japan had been fighting China since 1937, and overseas Chinese had raised money for China after the invasion of Manchuria. Japanese planners saw the Chinese of Singapore as the likeliest centre of resistance to their expansion across the Asia-Pacific. Some also thought of the purge as revenge.

  On paper, the targets were Chinese political and social activists, volunteers who had fought alongside the Allies, and representatives of Chinese triads. Postwar accounts name Lieutenant Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, the Chief of Planning and Operations, as the mastermind.

  Hayashi argues that this was not the work of a few wicked individuals. He sees methods sharpened during a long campaign against China, then applied to other Asian countries. In Singapore they served to remove possible opponents and to frighten local Chinese into accepting military rule quickly.

  Putting the plan into practice fell to the Kenpeitai, the Imperial Japanese Army's secret police.

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• 3. Screening and Killing Grounds

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  Two hundred regular Kenpeitai officers and about 1,000 auxiliaries, mostly young peasant soldiers, served under Masayuki Oishi. He ran No. 2 Field Kenpeitai from the YMCA Building on Stamford Road. The Kenpeitai prison stood in Outram, with branches at Stamford Road, in Chinatown and at the Central Police Station.

  Singapore was divided into sectors, each under an officer. Screening centres were set up across the island to gather Chinese males between 18 and 50, and sometimes women and children were sent for inspection as well.

  Kevin Blackburn, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, notes that an order on paper listed who counted as anti-Japanese. The list named communists, volunteers who had served with British forces, businessmen who had funded resistance to Japan's invasion of China, and gangsters. In practice, Blackburn writes, the process proved "little more than a device to prevent Chinese resistance to a general massacre."

  The National Heritage Board describes methods that were indiscriminate and non-standardised. Sometimes hooded informants pointed out suspects. Other times, officers singled out "suspicious" men on a whim. A Library of Congress country study adds that teachers, journalists, intellectuals and even former servants of the British could be picked out.

  Taiwanese soldiers, who were themselves ethnic Chinese, took part in the killings and also worked as undercover agents.

  Those who passed were marked as "examined", with a stamp on the face, arm or clothing, and some received a certificate. Those who failed were stamped with triangular marks, separated, and packed into trucks bound for remote killing sites.

  Changi Beach was the first of those sites. On the 20th of February 1942-66 men from the Bukit Timah and Stevens Road area were lined up at the water's edge and shot by the military police.

  At Punggol Point, about 300 to 400 Chinese were shot on the 28th of February by the Hojo Kempei firing squad. They came from some 1,000 men held after a door-to-door search along Upper Serangoon Road, and several had tattoos, which was taken as a sign of triad membership.

  At Tanah Merah Beach, 242 men from Jalan Besar were killed. The site later became part of the Changi airport runway. At Katong, 20 trenches were dug to bury the dead, and 732 victims from Telok Kurau School were killed in the East Coast Road area.

  Off Sentosa, surrendered British gunners awaiting internment buried some 300 bullet-ridden bodies that washed ashore. The dead were civilians brought from the docks at Tanjong Pagar and killed at sea nearby.

  Chia Chew Soo, a survivor whose life story the National Heritage Board later published, watched his father, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters bayoneted one by one in Simpang Village.

  The film pioneer Hou Yao was among the first to die. He had emigrated to Singapore in 1940 to work for the Shaw brothers and to escape the Japanese invasion of China. Because he had written and directed patriotic "national defence" films, he was targeted immediately after the surrender.

  The orders that sent trucks to Changi did not stop at the edge of the island. They reached into Malaya as well.

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• 4. Spreading Through Malaya

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  At the urging of Tsuji, Sook Ching was extended to the Chinese of the Malayan peninsula. There the population was spread across towns and wide rural districts, so it was less concentrated and harder to survey. The Japanese lacked the time and manpower for full screening and chose widespread, indiscriminate killing instead.

  Most of it took place in February and March, largely in the southern states closest to Singapore. Estimates suggest up to 25,000 Chinese were killed in Johor alone, in places including Johore Bahru, Kulai, Kluang, Batu Pahat and Muar.

  Specific incidents were recorded in detail. At Kota Tinggi in Johore, 2,000 people were killed on the 28th of February 1942. At Gelang Patah, 300 died on the 4th of March. In Negeri Sembilan, 76 were killed at Kuala Pilah on the 15th of March, and more than 100, the entire village, at Parit Tinggi the next day. At Tanjung Kling in Malacca, 142 were killed on the 16th of March.

  On the 18th of March, at Joo Loong Loong near the present village of Titi, 1,474 people were killed. Major Yokokoji Kyomi and his troops eliminated the entire village. In April, Major Higashigawa Yoshimura was responsible for several thousand deaths in Penang.

  Non-Chinese civilians were not spared elsewhere under Japanese occupation. In Burma and Thailand, civilians were brutally subjugated, with estimates of up to 90,000 additional deaths. Many victims were forced to labour on the Siam-Burma Railway, infamous as the Death Railway.

  Guerrilla activity in Malaya brought further massacres. Sungei Lui, a village of 400 people in the Jempol District of Negeri Sembilan, was wiped out on the 31st of July 1942 by troops under a Corporal Hashimoto.

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• 5. Counting the Dead

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  Major General Kawamura Saburo, the Singapore garrison commander, kept a diary. It records that on the 23rd of February 1942, the Kenpeitai section commanders reported a total of 5,000 people killed. That was the third day of the mop-up, when executions were mostly finished.

  A very different account came from Lieutenant Colonel Hishakari Takafumi, a newspaper correspondent attached to the 25th Army. He said senior officers on General Yamashita's operations staff ordered the killing of 50,000 Chinese, about 20 percent of the total. The order came either from Tsuji or from Major Hayashi Tadahiko, the Chief of Staff.

  According to Hishakari, Hayashi told him the full number proved impossible. After half of it, 25,000, had been killed, an order arrived to stop.

  The Japanese wrote down almost nothing about the operation, and many deaths were summary executions with no paperwork. For that reason the official death toll remains unknown.

  After the war, Japan acknowledged the massacre but put the toll at no more than 6,000. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's first prime minister, had himself almost been a victim. He said verifiable numbers would reach about 70,000 including Malaya, and the Singaporean Chinese community has claimed 70,000 to 100,000.

  Historians working from the scale of the mass graves arrive at roughly 25,000 to 50,000 dead in Singapore itself. They add another 20,000 civilians killed on the Malayan peninsula.

  The Japanese historian Hirofumi Hayashi describes Singapore's claim of forty or fifty thousand innocent Chinese and Peranakan civilians as a point that needs further investigation.

  In 1947, British authorities in Singapore put seven Japanese officers on trial to answer for the killings.

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• 6. The Trial

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  Takuma Nishimura, Saburo Kawamura, Masayuki Oishi, Yoshitaka Yokata, Tomotatsu Jo, Satoru Onishi and Haruji Hisamatsu were the seven officers charged. Tsuji, the planner, was not among them. He had not been arrested, because as soon as the war ended he escaped from Thailand to China.

  The prosecution faced a basic problem. The Japanese commanders had passed down no formal written orders for the massacre. Records of the screening and of the disposal of bodies had been destroyed. Headquarters demanded speedy execution while giving ambiguous instructions, and that made it hard to pin responsibility on any one accused.

  The court accepted the defence of "just following orders." Kawamura and Oishi received the death penalty, and the others were given life sentences. The two men were hanged on the 26th of June 1947. British authorities admitted only six members of the victims' families to watch, despite calls for the hangings to be made public.

  Nishimura was later executed in 1951, after an Australian military court convicted him for his role in the Parit Sulong Massacre.

  Tsuji's story ended differently. He reappeared in Japan after the trials and became a politician, then disappeared, and he is presumed to have been killed in Laos in 1961. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, from whose headquarters the order seems to have come, was tried in the Philippines and executed in 1946. Suzuki, the chief of staff, was killed in action in 1945 and never faced trial.

  Mamoru Shinozaki, a former Japanese diplomat who lived from 1908 to 1991, served as a key prosecution witness at the Singapore war crimes trials between 1946 and 1948. He remains controversial. Some call him the "wire-puller" of the massacre, others fault the "self-praise" in his autobiography, and others call him a life-saving "Schindler" of Singapore.

  Kawamura's own reminiscences were published in 1952, after his death. In that book he offered his condolences to the victims of Singapore and prayed for the repose of their souls.

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• 7. Atonement Without Apology

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  When Singapore gained self-governance in 1959, anti-Japanese sentiment surged among Chinese Singaporeans, who demanded war reparations and an official apology. Britain had earlier sought compensation only for damages suffered by Singapore's European community. Its failure to press for Chinese, Malay and Indian losses played a major part in building support for independence.

  In 1963, the Japanese Foreign Ministry declined the request. It argued that reparations with Britain had been settled under the San Francisco Treaty of 1951, and that this covered Singapore as a British colony. Lee Kuan Yew answered that the British colonial government had not represented the voice of Singaporeans.

  In September 1963, the Chinese community staged a boycott of Japanese imports by refusing to unload ships and aircraft from Japan. It lasted a week.

  Lee was a pragmatist, and the boycott worried him. He feared that a tenacious focus on the martyrdom of Sook Ching victims would upset the fragile ethnic balance he was trying to hold together. It could also hurt the free-market economy of the Port of Singapore. So he insisted that commemoration should honour all civilian victims of the occupation, whatever their ethnic origin, since the Japanese had been brutal to every group. He also wanted any compensation to help Singapore's development.

  Hayashi writes that Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs accepted that the military had carried out mass killings in Singapore. Japan also had economic reasons to settle. It feared damage from a boycott or sabotage by local Chinese, and it saw promise in Singapore's future and wanted better relations.

  Singapore became fully independent from Malaysia on the 9th of August 1965 and renewed its request. On the 25th of October 1966, Japan agreed to pay S$50 million, half as a grant and half as a loan. It described the payment as a "gesture of atonement" and avoided words such as "damages" or "reparations."

  Japan still refused legal responsibility, declined to investigate the death toll, and made no official apology.

  For many families, though, the more urgent question was where their dead lay.

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• 8. Remembrance and Legacy

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  In early 1948, thousands of Singaporean Chinese gathered at Siglap, in the east of the island, for a Taoist ceremony to soothe hungry ghosts. The place was known as the Valley of Tears, and mass graves were suspected there. Few remains had been found, so families had been unable to honour their dead according to Chinese tradition.

  That same year, a committee chaired by the local businessman Tay Koh Yat was set up to find the remains. For about a dozen years its results were extremely modest.

  Then, in 1962, mass graves were found by accident at the Valley of Tears in Siglap. The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry took the lead, and exhumations began there and at other suspected sites. Between 1962 and 1966, nearly 100 graves were discovered. The Chinese community called for a cemetery at Siglap and a monument to the victims.

  The Civilian War Memorial at Beach Road was unveiled on the 15th of February 1967, exactly 25 years after the fall of Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew attended. Its four pillars, each 67.4 metres high, stand for the country's four largest ethnic groups. Inscriptions on the pedestal appear in English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. A tomb beneath holds remains found between 1962 and 1966, and ceremonies take place there every year on the 15th of February.

  In 1992, fifty years after the occupation began, the National Heritage Board marked the sites at Changi Beach, Katong, Punggol Point, Tanah Merah and Sentosa as heritage sites. The plaque at Changi Beach Park carries its text in Japanese as well as in Singapore's four official languages. It says tens of thousands lost their lives, and that Tanah Merah Besar Beach, a few hundred metres south, was one of the most heavily used killing grounds, where well over a thousand Chinese men and youths died.

  The effects reached well beyond grief. A Discovery Channel programme noted how local Chinese felt: "They felt the Japanese spilling of so much Chinese blood on Singapore soil has given them the moral claim to the island that hasn't existed before the war." Lee said the war's catastrophic consequences changed his generation's mindset, so that they decided they could run the island as well as the British, "if not better."

  An article on the Singapore Ministry of Defence website describes the British defeat as the fall of what had been regarded as an invincible fortress. Faith in colonial protection was shaken further by the secret and sudden evacuation of British soldiers, women and children from Penang. The Japanese slogan "Asia for Asians" showed many people that Asians were second class in their own country, however kind the masters. Political parties and demands for self-rule followed in the 1950s and 1960s.

  The memories of that period are kept in galleries at the Old Ford Motor Factory in Bukit Timah, the site where the British surrendered on the 15th of February 1942.

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