The Devil's Garden

THE DEVIL'S

GARDEN

NIGEL BARLEY

Contents

I
NTRODUCTION

Part I

The Fruits of Victory

Part II

The Garden in the Wilderness

Part III

The Wilderness in the Garden

R
OGUE
R
AIDER

I
SLAND
O
F
D
EMONS

I
N
T
HE
F
OOTSTEPS
O
F
S
TAMFORD
R
AFFLES

A
BOUT
M
ONSOON
B
OOKS

A
BOUT
T
HE
A
UTHOR

C
OPYRIGHT

Introduction

Between February 1942 and September 1945, Singapore suffered one of the cruellest occupations of the Second World War as the conquered Japanese territory of Syonanto. Local civilians were subject to arbitrary killing, dispossession, torture and deprivation of the essentials for life and lived in fear of informers and a ruthless secret police force. Some 130,000 Allied POWs were incarcerated in shocking conditions that brought many to their deaths and cost many more irreplaceable years stolen from what should have been the prime of their lives. Allied civilians were imprisoned in the Changi jail and ravaged by disease, malnutrition and neglect. The city itself was extensively looted and destroyed. Yet, in the midst of all this, the Botanic Gardens—linked to the famous Raffles Museum—remained, for some time, a haven of tranquillity and greenery where Westerners, Singaporeans and Japanese continued peaceful co-operation in the service of science and culture and hinted at the possibility of an alternative world. This was not without its tensions and would lead to bitter recriminations after the war but such a phenomenon contradicts some of the received orthodoxies and extreme stereotypes that are still fixed in the popular memory of the occupation. Motivations, loyalties and identities were far more complex and uncertain than those assumed by subsequent history.

The characters depicted here are partly inventions, though events are largely based on those recorded, publicly and privately, by witnesses and actors of the time. Professor Tanakadate, for example, is a genuine character—recalled fondly in a memoir somewhat hesitantly published by a member of staff after the war, at a time of still-strong anti-Japanese feeling—although he was subsequently replaced as a result of being seen, by the occupation authorities, as excessively pro-Western. He has been fused for reasons of literary economy with another real figure, the elegant and scholarly Marquis Yoshichika Tokugawa, who remained a powerful protector of the institution throughout the war years and was an important political and academic figure in post-war Japan after the Allied victory. The character of Alexander Hare, friend of Stamford Raffles, and referred to coyly in his wife's memoir as ‘the eccentric Mr Hare' is painted very much from life and a member of staff of the museum and gardens, Carl Gibson-Hill, was indeed more than a little obsessed with research on both him and the natural history of Cocos-Keeling.

The situation of intercultural understanding is always fraught with difficulty and war is always rich in absurdity as well as suffering and heroism. It will come as no surprise that this story deals in all three and the only apparent contradiction between them, without apology. As has often been noted, one should not make predictions, especially about the future, and none could have guessed, even remotely, what that future held for Singapore after the war—which lends poignancy to the accounts and predictions written with such great confidence at that time. Being a place that was always referred back to another imagined homeland, different for each racial group, it was at a conceptual crossroads, having position but no single location on any political map. The creation of a distinctively Singaporean identity lay yet well in the future but there can be no doubt that the experiences of the war, even the rather unusual ones drawn on here, were an important part of the process by which that came about.

Part I

The Fruits of Victory

Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki ‘Tiger' Yamashita poked distastefully in the dust of the Raffles Museum with the toe of his boot. The pose was like a 17
^th
-century French aristocrat ‘making a leg'. A staff field photographer—recognising his cue—darted forward, bowed, snapped, bowed, darted back. The General looked up at the hole in the dome, the satisfactory product of one of his own, non-photographic Canons—through the aperture you could see the edge of the Rising Sun flapping above—and then back down at the shattered display. ‘The Singapore Stone' he read, scanning the information panel with one finger and moving lips. His English was not good but the Chinese calligraphy was just readable. One of many such ancient stones scattered over the whole archipelago. Possibly 12
^th
century, possibly inscribed in Kawi script, possibly related to the legend of the strongman Badang who flung it there in a competition with a champion of the Rajah of Kling. But possibly none of these. A failed attempt at decipherment by Stamford Raffles. Blown up by the piqued and practical British in 1843 to build a lowly bungalow. Inscription on the surviving main fragment rubbed away by the illiterate backsides of sepoys who used it as a seat. Salvaged by the awed and romantic British as a poignant monument to the tooth of time. Sent to Calcutta. Sent back to Singapore. He bent over the lump of crumbly red sandstone and harumphed skeptically. It hardly seemed worth all the bother. Still no one even knew what the inscription meant. Anyway, it was no longer Singapore but now Syonanto, ‘Light of the South'. History lay not in the past but in the future. The British empire lay in ruins and its monuments were soon to be consigned to museums or erased as if by careless Japanese backsides.

He stepped forward, commander of the 25
^th
Army, lord of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, planted his boot squarely atop the stone, cocked his arm on his waist and ran his hand over his cropped skull and walnut-shell of a face as if smoothing them for the world. The reporter darted forward again, bowed over his instrument, crouched, flashed, bowed and scuttled away. The picture would look good back in Tokyo and with all the political enemies he had there—those toadies of Tojo's—he could use all the public support he could get. He liked to feel on top of things and if you put your foot on a rock, people assumed you had climbed a mountain. It was like the way Chinese made offerings of the snout and tail of a pig and their stupid ancestors simply assumed they had got all the rest in between. As he stepped back, Tiger looked down at his boot and irritation flicked at the corner of his mouth. Dust had stuck to the immaculate toecap. He had complained to his servant about this before. The man had sighed, cringed respectfully, hands clasped to head in expectation of merited blows, and blamed the Australians. Until proper supplies of boot polish from Dai Nippon could be arranged, it seemed the man was forced to use an inferior Australian brand called Vegemite.

Tiger put both hands behind his back and spun on his heel, scattering the officers and municipal officials around him. Across the vestibule stood the bronze statue of Stamford Raffles, his true enemy, now removed from his previous and unacceptable stance, gazing out to sea with visionary eyes from the front of the Victoria Theatre. That Victoria Theatre where the Lautrequish posters, now torn down, had advertised a performance of the scandalous insult to Japanese dignity that was Gilbert and Sullivan's ‘Mikado'. Perhaps it had served him well. The absurd figures of the Mikado had encouraged false British arrogance, now richly repaid. He had ordered the actors shot in a final retrospective review.

Raffles had been facing the wrong way as it turned out, for Tiger had come not from the sea but from the north and no one in the audience had shouted ‘Behind you!'. He walked across to fix Raffles in the eye, like a sergeant he was about to humiliate. Awkwardly, because the statue was mounted on a plinth, he had to look up. He had joined the army principally because it allowed short men like himself to shout and sneer at tall ones. And now that had become the whole of Japanese foreign policy. He noted the bad posture, the severe underdevelopment of the calves and snorted skeptically. An army reject. In Penang, they had manhandled fat-bummed Francis Light off his podium and snapped his sword. Here, the treatment had been more gentle, perhaps misguidedly so. Tiger turned to the museum staff and rapped out instructions. A wooden box was rushed up and set beside Raffles so that the general could climb up, now a wobbly good three inches taller than the statue. The museum staff were nervous. They held their breath. The last encounter between the two sides had ended badly.

The Japanese had seized the obvious photo opportunity of the removal of the statue, under the supervision of a young lieutenant, with staff officers and joyful populace looking on, all hoping for a treat. Accordingly, a band of Western prisoners and Tamil workmen had been whipped up. They had slung a rope round the disgraced imperialist's neck to hoist Raffles off his base with block and tackle and swing him across to the waiting truck as the dignitaries stood around laughing like good ol' boys at a Southern lynchin'. But Raffles had been parsimoniously cast hollow and, being severely wounded in the upper body by Japanese shrapnel during the assault on the city, the fissures had allowed rain to seep into the central cavity. As the men heaved and strained, he had initially swooped angelically enough overhead, then suddenly tipped and sprayed the Japanese staff officers with urine-hued water. It was the sort of pratfall that an Asian audience savours and a British commander—resigned since birth to being thought a silly-arse by foreigners—would have laughed it off, perhaps even played it up for the crowd, stamped and brushed himself down, cheerfully offered to lend the old man a penny, ‘Lucky he tipped forwards not backwards, eh? All things considered, what?' There came a roar of unrestrained hysteria, followed by a terrible silence as it became clear the Japanese were not laughing, then screams as the soldiers unslung their rifles and began beating and stabbing at the crowd, trapped in the narrow space. Several had been killed. All the photographs had been confiscated and destroyed. Officially, it had never happened.

Tiger tottered momentarily atop his box and the onlookers gasped at the prospect of a—to them—lethal pratfall before he steadied himself. He toyed for a second with the idea of drawing his sword, holding it to Raffles's neck in mockery of chortling execution but something told him that would simply not do. Instead he posed, embraced the previous, deluded imperialism in comradely fashion, arm about neck, smiled benevolently as the photographer snapped and flashed below. Looking down, on the top of the plinth, he was surprised to see an outline map of the Straits area. Raffles's foot was stamping on British Malaya.

‘The British pride themselves on their sense of humour,' he smiled at the cameramen. ‘So let me tell you a joke. There was a company of British troops at the Battle of Singapore.' He looked around. They were all listening, pencils poised. ‘They saw a solitary Japanese infantryman shooting at them from behind a rock.' He crouched and pointed, dropped his voice. ‘The British commander sent the whole company to skirt round behind him and waited. There came shots, explosions, screams, then silence. Finally, one of his soldiers crawled back, badly wounded. “Oh my God!” cried the commander. “What happened?” With his dying breath, the soldier replied, “It was an ambush. There were TWO of them!”.' He laughed and stamped his feet on Raffles's. A ripple of laughter ran round the room, a spattering of applause, the loudest from his dutiful ADC, Captain Yoshi Oishi. Tiger bent down to descend, placing his arm on the young man's shoulder and brought his mouth close to his ear.