Shortly before Aung San and his party prepared to fly to Europe to avert civil war, a ceremony was held to commemorate some of the millions of victims of the war just ended. On 18 December 1946 a multifaith memorial service was held at Thanbyuzayat, near the Thai border, for the many thousands who had died working on the Burma–Siam railway.77 Nearly 5,000 British, Australian and Dutch POWs lay buried there in marked graves. Hundreds of American bodies had already been repatriated through India. The graves of more than 8,000 Thai labourers could also be identified. But alongside these 15,000 known victims were the unmarked graves of anything from 30,000 to 80,000 Burmese, Chinese, Indian, Malayan and Indonesian labourers. Most of them had been forced into service. They had died of disease, starvation or as a result of Japanese brutality. In the prevailing swirl of ethnic, religious, political and racial conflict a short moment of perfect peace spread through the jungle. At one end of the commemoration ground a Buddhist tent had been erected over the officiating monks. It faced a flagstaff in the centre on which the Burmese and Allied flags flew. At the other end units of the British, Indian and Burmese armed forces were drawn up in solemn parade. In a rare display of racial and religious unity, the Christian and Buddhist commemoration ceremonies began at exactly the same moment. Alms were given to the monks and sacred libations of water were poured to the souls of the dead. As Christian hymns were played, Sir Hubert Rance presented ceremonial robes to the leading sayadaws or abbots. Hindu and Muslim troops saluted the dead. It was not until the next year, as the British withdrawal from Burma was imminent, that the Japanese were allowed to build a simple memorial to their own dead on the Rangoon racecourse.
In Singapore, the wartime Japanese shrines were in ruins. The sacred ashes of the Japanese war dead had been moved from the war memorial on top of Bukit Batok Hill in the centre of the island to a quiet corner of a civilian cemetery in the north, at Yio Chu Kang, which had been built by the Japanese pioneer settlers in the 1890s. It was visited by those Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSP) remaining on the island, who erected discreet memorials to their fallen comrades. The Chinese community campaigned for them to be obliterated from the landscape altogether and replaced with a memorial to their own slain. The Singapore Chinese had yet to bury their dead. In late March, a Women’s Mutual Aid Association was founded by the wives and mothers who had lost menfolk in the sook ching massacres; it brought together a strikingly broad cross-section of Singapore’s society.78For those who had suffered and lost, the very landscape of the city was full of changed meanings. The Upper East Coast Road, a site of the massacres during the Japanese ‘screening’ of the Chinese, was a telok kurau, a haunted hill.79 The absence of remains was an obstacle to the performance of rites to appease the ‘hungry ghosts’ of the ancestors. An atmosphere of acute psychic crisis arose. Taoist priests, according to a report in the Straits Times, ‘peered into the underworld’ and saw ‘thousands of naked hungry and discontented ghosts roaming about the earth, their wrath threatening calamity to the land’. Shortly before Chinese New Year in early 1948 a high priestess, Miaw Chin, conducted a mass ‘screening’ of the ghosts of the dead at a massacre site, in front of thousands of bereaved relatives. She was, it was said, appointed to this task by the Goddess of Mercy, Kuan Yin. The spirits of the dead were invited to come and be fed and clothed. ‘For three days and nights great piles of food, paper clothing and paper money were offered in sacrifice’ and ‘a thousand women asked: “How did the spirits of our men-folk fare after death?”’80
At this ceremony relatives burnt paper models of naked Japanese soldiers being disembowelled by devils in the court of the King of Hell. For two years after the end of the war the Japanese remained in the region as a reminder of the occupation and its suffering. The repatriation of 6 million Japanese at the end of the war was the largest concentrated population movement in history, and would increase the population of Japan by 8 per cent.81 Yet for many it was an agonizingly slow process. There had been, at the surrender, 482,000 Japanese soldiers in the SEAC area. A year after the reoccupation there were still 116,313 Japanese to be repatriated. In the interim, 11,504 had died or gone missing.82 The British were in no hurry to send them home. The repatriation programme – codename ‘Nipoff’ – was due to wind down in early 1947, but the British attempted to hold on to 80,000 Japanese as military conscript labourers until the end of 1947. This was opposed by General MacArthur, who wanted to dissolve the Japanese army by July. The British protested that repatriation would ‘seriously affect the economic recovery of the countries in which they are now employed’.83 In the event, the last JSPs in British hands were not repatriated until January 1948.
It was a dismal experience for the soldiers. They were left under their own officers, often in remote areas, and set to task building roads and repairing docks and military installations like ordinary labourers. Some units were exposed to much greater danger, being used in Burma to fight dacoits, or bandits, and in Indo-China in the front line in British action against the Viet Minh. The British established a working relationship with the prisoners of war, giving orders through Japanese commanders and holding them responsible for infractions of discipline. Japanese officers were taken time and time again for interrogation by panels investigating war crimes. There was no fraternization and British officers and men regarded the Japanese with cold racial contempt and hatred. Many Japanese testimonies exist to their physical humiliation and moral demeaning by British troops. Japanese soldiers were made to kneel in front of their captors, to beg for food and to carry out filthy jobs on under 1,600 calories a day, half the amount that should have been fed to POWs. They were given a token wage, initially no days off, and no clothing ration. On occasion sand was thrown in their rice as punishment. By the end of 1946, Red Cross reports on Japanese in central Malaya spoke of rapidly deteriorating morale. The men still had no date for repatriation in sight, they had little mail, insufficient rations, and after fifteen months of hard labour were very vulnerable to disease; routinely, only 85 per cent of the men were fit to be sent out to work.84 On one estimate, the incidence of diseases such as amoebic dysentery and malaria was 21 per cent. A recent study gives a total death toll of JSP from various causes of 8,931; more than those who died on combat duty.85 One account from the 9th Railway Regiment, based in Johore in Malaya, spoke of the charity of rural Chinese with whom they worked for rice and cash on their rest days. Like the British POWs before them, they boosted their morale with theatre and literary magazines. They finally embarked for Japan in September 1947. Tatsuo Moroshoshi was a sergeant who had fought in Singapore and Burma, then served along the Burma–Thailand and trans-Sumatran railways. As he finally left for home, his officer gave a final speech: ‘All of Japan, including Tokyo and all the big cities is a wide expanse of burnt ruins… You are the warriors for the reconstruction of our fatherland.’86
Japanese civilians also lingered in the region, principally at the transit camp in Jurong in Singapore. In all some 6,000 civilians passed through Singapore. Mamoru Shinozaki, the former Syonan welfare officer, found new work as an interpreter. He spent a strange period dealing with the flotsam and jetsam of the war, such as local women with children who were married to Japanese and struggled for the right to travel with their husbands. They were quietly allowed to join the camp. At Jurong, Chinese came to visit their old employers, so much so that the British laid on a bus service to the camp.87 The British were even petitioned by Chinese men wanting Japanese wives. One offered the successful lady $59 and a bag of rice. He said he was making the application ‘as it is cheaper for me to marry a Japanese wife than a Chinese one’.88 Then there were the Japanese who were long-term residents of Malaya and who wanted to resume their life in a land which they saw as home. One case, in Malacca, involved a Japanese woman who, before the war, had been the companion of a European rubber planter. Local residents remembered her intercessions for them during the occupation, and with their help she was saved from internment. She was allowed to await the return of her lover, only to find that he had brought with him an Australian wife.89 The prospect of the war-crimes trials hung over all Japanese who had worked for the military regime. The hearings in Singapore began in the middle of 1946 and continued until April 1947: 135 men were executed at Changi and 79 more in Malaya. Their remains were interred in a corner of the Japanese civilian cemetery, with a memorial to ‘sacrificed men of valour’.90
There was a brutal coda to this story. At the end of the war, many Japanese soldiers joined resistance armies. In Indonesia perhaps 780 fought, and many died, in the revolution; but over half of them survived and created a small ‘Japindo’ community.91 In Malaya estimates of the numbers of Japanese who crossed over to the MPAJA vary from 200 to 400. Many drifted away when it became clear that the guerrillas would not fight the British, but the hardcore remained, scattered in squatter villages, where it was comparatively easy to disguise them. The largest concentration, at least twenty or thirty of them, were in the Kuala Kangsar area of Perak, the remnants of a larger group of a hundred or so. After the demobilization of the MPAJA they were suddenly conspicuous and a burden on the Chinese families who sheltered them. The problem was referred to Lai Teck. The reply came back: ‘eliminate the Kuala Kangsar Japanese’. On the pretext of a training exercise they were moved from the squatter villages in twos and threes, taken into the jungle and executed. Chin Peng would later claim that Lai Teck needed to hide their existence from the British, but he also found it hard to believe that, even in the unsettled conditions in Malaya in late 1945 and early 1946, the British could not have known about the Japanese, or been told of them by Lai Teck.92 This incident, like so many others surrounding Lai Teck, remains obscured by shadows. But a handful of Japanese remained with the Communists, and in the years to come they would be remembered for their usefulness with machinery; one of them worked in the Party’s arms factory. In 1990 two Japanese members of the MCP – Shigeyuki Hashimoto, aged seventy-one and Kiyoaki Tanaka, aged seventy-seven – were finally repatriated to Japan – the last of the Japan’s wartime stragglers. The ashes of one of them were returned, at his request, to be scattered in one of the Party’s final encampments in southern Thailand.