The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (8 page)

The military took over the entire college on 10 February as British forces withdrew, and two days later the MAS unit had to disband. At first I stayed at home in Norfolk Road, but as the shelling got closer I joined my family at Telok Kurau. The following day we heard distant rifle shots, then some more, closer to us. There had been no sound of big guns, shells or bombs. Curious, I went out by the back gate to Lorong L, the lane abutting the kampong where I used to play with my friends, the fishermen’s children. Before I had walked more than 20 yards along the earth track, I saw two figures in dun-coloured uniforms, different from the greens and browns of the British forces. They wore puttees and rubber-soled canvas boots, split-toed, with the big toe in a separate section from the other toes. Later I learnt that it gave them a better grip on soggy or slippery ground. Above all, what made them look strange were their soft, peaked caps, with cloth flaps at the back hanging over their necks. They were outlandish figures, small, squat men carrying long rifles with long bayonets. They exuded an awful stink, a smell I will never forget. It was the odour from the great unwashed after two months of fighting along jungle tracks and estate roads from Kota Bharu to Singapore.

A few seconds passed before I realised who they were. Japanese! An immense fear crept over me. But they were looking for enemy soldiers. Clearly I was not one, so they ignored me and pressed on. I dashed back to the house and told my family what I had seen. We closed all the doors and windows, though God knows what protection that could have given us. Rape and rapine were high among the fears that the Japanese forces inspired after their atrocities in China since 1937. But nothing of note happened the rest of that day and night. The British forces were retreating rapidly to the city centre and not putting up much of a fight.

The following day, 15 February, was the Lunar New Year, the biggest annual festival of the Chinese, normally celebrated with new clothes, new shoes and an abundance of traditional dishes and cakes. It was the grimmest New Year since the Chinese came to Singapore in 1819. There
were sounds of battle in the north and near the city, and relatively distant explosions of artillery and mortars, but nothing in the Telok Kurau area itself. The Japanese had swept on towards the town.

That night the guns fell silent. The news soon spread that the British had surrendered. The next day, some friends returning from the city reported that looting had broken out. British and other European houses were being stripped by their Malay drivers and gardeners. This aroused great anxiety in my family. What about 28 Norfolk Road, with all our food and other provisions that would now have to see us through for a very long time? With my mother’s agreement, I took Teong Koo, the gardener, with me and walked back some eight miles from Telok Kurau to Norfolk Road. We made it in just over two hours. I saw Malays carrying furniture and other items out of the bigger houses along the way. The Chinese looters went for the goods in warehouses, less bulky and more valuable. A dilapidated bungalow some two houses from ours was occupied by about 20 Boyanese families. Their menfolk were drivers. But they had not yet gone for our place. There were better pickings in the bigger houses, now empty of the Europeans who were assembling for internment. I had got back in time.

In the two hours that I walked from Telok Kurau to Norfolk Road, I saw a Singapore with law and order in suspended animation. The British army had surrendered. The local police – Chinese and Indian junior officers and Malay rank and file – had disappeared, fearing that the Japanese would treat them as part of the British military set-up. The Japanese soldiers had not yet imposed their presence on the city. Each man was a law unto himself.

Out of habit, most people remained law-abiding. But with the bosses gone, the bolder ones seized the opportunity to loot godowns, department stores and shops belonging to British companies for what they saw as legitimate booty. This lasted for several days before the Japanese restored order; they put the fear of God into people by shooting or beheading a
few looters at random and exhibiting their heads on key bridges and at main road junctions.

The Japanese conquerors also went for loot. In the first few days, anyone in the street with a fountain pen or a wristwatch would soon be relieved of it. Soldiers would go into houses either officially to search, or pretending to do so, but in fact to appropriate any small items that they could keep on their person. At first they also took the best of the bicycles, but they stopped that after a few weeks. They were in Singapore for only a short time before leaving for Java or some other island in the archipelago to do battle and to capture more territories. They could not take their beautiful bicycles with them.

The looting of the big houses and warehouses of our British masters symbolised the end of an era. It is difficult for those born after 1945 to appreciate the full implications of the British defeat, as they have no memory of the colonial system that the Japanese brought crashing down on 15 February 1942. Since 1819, when Raffles founded Singapore as a trading post for the East India Company, the white man’s supremacy had been unquestioned. I did not know how this had come to pass, but by the time I went to school in 1930, I was aware that the Englishman was the big boss, and those who were white like him were also bosses – some big, others not so big, but all bosses. There were not many of them, about eight thousand. They had superior lifestyles and lived separately from the Asiatics, as we were then called. Government officers had larger houses in better districts, cars with drivers and many other servants. They ate superior food with plenty of meat and milk products. Every three years they went “home” to England for three to six months at a time to recuperate from the enervating climate of equatorial Singapore. Their children also went “home” to be educated, not to Singapore schools. They, too, led superior lives.

At Raffles College, the teaching staff were all white. Two of the best local graduates with class one diplomas for physics and chemistry were
appointed “demonstrators”, but at much lower salaries, and they had to get London external BSc degrees to gain this status. One of the best arts graduates of his time with a class one diploma for economics, Goh Keng Swee (later to be deputy prime minister), was a tutor, not a lecturer.

There was no question of any resentment. The superior status of the British in government and society was simply a fact of life. After all, they were the greatest people in the world. They had the biggest empire that history had ever known, stretching over all time zones, across all four oceans and five continents. We learnt that in history lessons at school. To enforce their rule, they had only a few hundred troops in Singapore, who were regularly rotated. The most visible were stationed near the city centre at Fort Canning. There could not have been more than one to two thousand servicemen in all to maintain colonial rule over the six to seven million Asiatics in the Straits Settlements and the Malay states.

The British put it out that they were needed in Malaya to protect the Malays, who would otherwise be eclipsed by the more hardworking immigrants. Many of the Chinese and Indians had been brought in as indentured labour and were tolerated because the Malays did not take to the jobs a commercial and a plantation economy required, like tapping rubber, building roads and bridges, working as clerks, accountants and storekeepers.

A small number of prominent Asiatics were allowed to mix socially with the white bosses, and some were appointed unofficial members of the governor’s Executive Council or the Legislative Council. Photographs of them with their wives appeared in the papers, attending garden parties and sometimes dinners at Government House, bowing and curtseying before the governor and his lady, the women duly wearing white gloves, and all on their best behaviour. A few were knighted, and others hoped that after giving long and faithful service they, too, would be honoured. They were patronised by the white officials, but accepted their inferior status with aplomb, for they considered themselves superior
to their fellow Asiatics. Conversely, any British, European or American who misbehaved or looked like a tramp was immediately packed off because he would demean the whole white race, whose superiority must never be thrown into doubt.

I was brought up by my parents and grandparents to accept that this was the natural order of things. I do not remember any local who by word or deed questioned all this. None of the English-educated had any inclination to take up the cudgels on behalf of equality for the Asiatics. I did not then know that there were many Chinese, educated in Chinese-language schools, who were not integrated into the colonial system. Their teachers had come from China, and they did not recognise the supremacy of the whites, for they had not been educated or indoctrinated into accepting the virtues and the mission of the British Empire. After the war I was to learn more about them.

This was the Malaya and Singapore that 60,000 attacking Japanese soldiers captured, together with more than 130,000 British, Indian and Australian troops. In 70 days of surprises, upsets and stupidities, British colonial society was shattered, and with it all the assumptions of the Englishman’s superiority. The Asiatics were supposed to panic when the firing started, yet they were the stoical ones who took the casualties and died without hysteria. It was the white civilian bosses who ducked under tables when the bombs and shells fell. It was the white civilians and government officers in Penang who, on 16 December 1941, in the quiet of the night, fled the island for the “safety” of Singapore, abandoning the Asiatics to their fate. British troops demolished whatever installations they could and then retreated. Hospitals, public utilities and other essential services were left unmanned. There were no firemen to fight fires and no officers to regulate the water supply. The whites in charge had gone. Stories of their scramble to save their skins led the Asiatics to see them as selfish and cowardly. Many of them were undoubtedly exaggerated in the retelling and unfair, but there was enough substance
in them to make the point. The whites had proved as frightened and at a loss as to what to do as the Asiatics, if not more so. The Asiatics had looked to them for leadership, and they had failed them.

The British built up the myth of their inherent superiority so convincingly that most Asiatics thought it hopeless to challenge them. But now one Asiatic race had dared to defy them and smashed that myth. However, once the Japanese lorded over us as conquerors, they soon demonstrated to their fellow Asiatics that they were more cruel, more brutal, more unjust and more vicious than the British. During the three and a half years of the occupation, whenever I encountered some Japanese tormenting, beating or ill-treating one of our people, I wished the British were still in charge. As fellow Asiatics, we were filled with disillusionment, but then the Japanese themselves were ashamed to be identified with their fellow Asiatics, whom they considered racially inferior and of a lower order of civilisation. They were descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami Sama, a chosen people, distinct and separate from the benighted Chinese, Indians and Malays.

My first encounter with a Japanese soldier took place when I tried to visit an aunt, my mother’s younger sister, in Kampong Java Road, just across the Red Bridge over the Bukit Timah canal. As I approached the bridge, I saw a sentry pacing up and down it. Nearby was a group of four or five Japanese soldiers sitting around, probably the other members of his detail. I was sporting a broad-brimmed hat of the kind worn by Australian soldiers, many of which had been discarded in the days before the surrender. I had picked one up, thinking it would be useful during the hard times ahead to protect me from the sun.

As I passed this group of soldiers, I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. But they were not to be denied attention. One soldier barked
“Kore, kore!”
and beckoned to me. When I reached him, he thrust the bayonet on his rifle through the brim of my hat, knocking it off, slapped me roundly, and motioned me to kneel. He then shoved his right boot
against my chest and sent me sprawling on the road. As I got up, he signalled that I was to go back the way I had come. I had got off lightly. Many others who did not know the new rules of etiquette and did not bow to Japanese sentries at crossroads or bridges were made to kneel for hours in the sun, holding a heavy boulder over their heads until their arms gave way.

One afternoon, sitting on the veranda at 28 Norfolk Road, I watched a Japanese soldier pay off a rickshaw puller. The rickshaw puller remonstrated, pleading for a little more money. The soldier took the man’s arm, put it over his right shoulder, and flung him up into the air with a judo throw. The rickshaw puller fell flat on his face. After a while, he picked himself up and staggered off between the shafts of his rickshaw. I was shocked at the heartlessness.

The next day, I was to learn another lesson at the Red Bridge. A newly captured car drove past displaying a small rectangular blue flag, the lowest of three ranks – yellow flags were for generals, red flags for majors to colonels, and blue flags for lieutenants to captains. The sentry was slow in coming to attention to salute. The car had gone past, but its driver braked and reversed. An officer got out, walked up to the sentry and gave him three hefty slaps. Taking his right arm, he put it over his shoulder and, with the same judo throw I had seen used on the rickshaw puller, flung the soldier in the air. The sentry fell flat on his face, just as the rickshaw puller had done. This time I was less shocked. I had begun to understand that brutalisation was part of the Japanese military system, inculcated through regular beatings for minor infringements.

Later that same day a Japanese non-commissioned officer and several soldiers came into the house. They looked it over and, finding only Teong Koo and me, decided it would be a suitable billet for a platoon. It was the beginning of a nightmare. I had been treated by Japanese dentists and their nurses at Bras Basah Road who were immaculately clean and tidy. So, too, were the Japanese salesmen and saleswomen at the 10-cent
stores in Middle Road. I was unprepared for the nauseating stench of the unwashed clothes and bodies of these Japanese soldiers. They roamed all over the house and the compound. They looked for food, found the provisions my mother had stored, and consumed whatever they fancied, cooking in the compound over open fires. I had no language in which to communicate with them. They made their wishes known with signs and guttural noises. When I was slow in understanding what they wanted, I was cursed and frequently slapped. They were strange beings, unshaven and unkempt, speaking an ugly, aggressive language. They filled me with fear, and I slept fitfully. They left after three days of hell.