• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4351 0

and created a small ‘Japindo’ community.91 In Malaya estimates of the numbers of Japanese who crossed over to the MPAJA vary from 200 to 400. Many drifted away when it became clear that the guerrillas would not fight the British, but the hardcore remained, scattered in squatter villages, where it was comparatively easy to disguise them. The largest concentration, at least twenty or thirty of them, were in the Kuala Kangsar area of Perak, the remnants of a larger group of a hundred or so. After the demobilization of the MPAJA they were suddenly conspicuous and a burden on the Chinese families who sheltered them. The problem was referred to Lai Teck. The reply came back: ‘eliminate the Kuala Kangsar Japanese’. On the pretext of a training exercise they were moved from the squatter villages in twos and threes, taken into the jungle and executed. Chin Peng would later claim that Lai Teck needed to hide their existence from the British, but he also found it hard to believe that, even in the unsettled conditions in Malaya in late 1945 and early 1946, the British could not have known about the Japanese, or been told of them by Lai Teck.92 This incident, like so many others surrounding Lai Teck, remains obscured by shadows. But a handful of Japanese remained with the Communists, and in the years to come they would be remembered for their usefulness with machinery; one of them worked in the Party’s arms factory. In 1990 two Japanese members of the MCP – Shigeyuki Hashimoto, aged seventy-one and Kiyoaki Tanaka, aged seventy-seven – were finally repatriated to Japan – the last of the Japan’s wartime stragglers. The ashes of one of them were returned, at his request, to be scattered in one of the Party’s final encampments in southern Thailand.

BUSINESS AS USUAL IN MALAYA

In Malaya, at last, the war seemed to be receding slightly, if only for a time. On April Fool’s Day 1946 the British Military Administration officially came to at an end, although at the handover most men merely removed the insignia from their uniforms and carried on working in the same jobs. British troops remained in Indonesia. Singapore was still a massive military base, and gripes about army requisitioning rumbled on. Mountbatten left Singapore and SEAC on 30 May 1946. At a final parade he presented the people of Singapore with a Japanese gun and a Union Jack. The city fathers named a road after him. On 1 July the Singapore Cricket Club reverted to civilian use, and business began to resume as usual. British civil servants began to return from their recuperation leave, some of them prematurely perhaps. But, as O. W. Gilmour reflected after the fall of Singapore, ‘Malaya seemed to have instilled an extraordinary loyalty among those who had lived and worked there and looked on it as their country.’ He saw this, as many others did, as something quite unique about the colony. For these exiles, the lurid press reports after the fall of Singapore of ‘whisky-swilling planters’ and ‘Blimp civil servants’ with no roots in the country had been hard to bear.93

The source of this special attachment to Malaya was hard to define. There were a number of families who could trace their ancestry back over several generations. Roland Braddell, who acted as private adviser to Sultan Ibrahim and later as legal adviser to UMNO itself, was one such. A succession of scholar-administrators invested their lives in the study of the customs, language and history of Malays. For many of them, Malaya was a picturesque refuge from the industrial world. Then there was the landscape itself; luxuriant tropical tones infuse colonial belles lettres and memoirs. But perhaps more than this, for those who knew Malaya before the war, what bound them to it was its wealth and ease: a sense of electness, of the sharing of a unique, irrecoverable idyll. ‘All golden ages are legendary’, wrote Victor Purcell, ‘and some are entirely mythical, but all the same I feel that Malaya’s “Golden Age” of between the wars had a firm foundation in fact.’94 But Malaya had entered a new era. ‘It is very different