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