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By Root 4668 0

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.78 For 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