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By Root 4358 0

assets. There were celebrations that ranged from the quiet consumption of hidden bottles of brandy and whisky in Malaya to outright rejoicing in Burma. In the mountainous forest fringes of Malaya, the Chinese peasants who taken shelter there slaughtered their pigs and fowl. In the towns, Chinese papermakers and tailors prepared flags of the four victorious powers: Britain, the United States, Russia, and Chiang Kai Shek’s China. Then, in a sudden rush of confidence, Malaya burst into light. The blackouts during the Allied bombing had created ‘cities of dreadful night’; but now light bulbs appeared on verandas and the ‘five-foot’ walkways of shophouses.13 The great ‘Worlds’ – the amusement parks where the townsfolk came to play and to trade in one of the great spectacles of local life – turned on their show-lights and resumed their gyre. People went on a spending spree with freshly printed Japanese notes bearing their distinctive ‘banana’ design. But the mood was soon deflated. Inflation spread like a virus. Famine loomed. Everywhere people were anxiously on the move, to reach their families, or to get to the port cities where a sudden bounty of food and clothing was expected. And there were others – Taiwanese auxiliaries, mistresses of Japanese officers, informers, police and profiteers – who took to the shadows, fearing the reckoning that was to come.14

Only slowly were these rumours and portents confirmed by the behaviour of the Japanese themselves. In August 1945 there were around 630,000 armed Japanese across the whole region. Much of the rank and file was too young to have been complicit in Japan’s lurch towards militarism in the 1930s. Many of the over 100,000 Japanese civilians had lived in Southeast Asia before the outbreak of the war, and called it home. They were all victims in a sense. Their conditions varied. Many of the soldiers who had been involved in the fighting in Burma were diseased and malnourished. Those surrendered in Malaya, Indo-China and Indonesia were likely to be relatively healthy and better fed. There were emotional announcements in camps and work places. Many felt humiliated by the terms of Japan’s surrender. In Singapore the regional commander, Lieutenant General Seishiro Itagaki, announced that he would resist the Allies. He had laid plans for guerrilla warfare. His supreme commander, Field Marshal Count Terauchi, stated that he would submit only to a personal order from the emperor. A prince of the ruling house, Haruhito Kanin, flew with it to Terauchi’s headquarters in Saigon on 19 August, and Itagaki was summoned to receive it. Only then was the Imperial Rescript published in the Singapore press, together with Itagaki’s emotional appeal to his men that the imperial command was now ‘absolute and irrevocable’.15

Many Japanese officers – 300 in Singapore alone in one account – saw the surrender as a racial apocalypse, and took their own lives: some in the lounge of the luxury Raffles Hotel where they heard the news from Itagaki.16 Others who submitted to surrender and the prospect of imprisonment were anxious as to whether they would receive the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which Japan itself had not observed. Books on military law were at a sudden premium. The officers disposed of their plundered goods, burnt archives and, in some cases, killed witnesses to their atrocities. In the end the bulk of the Japanese garrison at Singapore marched itself into internment at Jurong, in the west of the island. British and Allied prisoners of war remained concentrated in the east, at Changi. But after the surrender Japanese units were ordered off the island and across the short causeway to the Malay peninsula. At Kranji, where the Commonwealth war cemetery now stands, they first met the Allied forces: Gurkha paratroops from Special Operations Executive. As one local POW observed: ‘It went full circle – we saw the whole lot, thousands and thousands, marching their way to Woodlands, past our camp.’17 These were the beachheads the Japanese had stormed in February 1942. They headed into the desolate,