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By Root 4478 0

had been between 500 and 900 persons an acre; now it took ‘tea money’ of $100 to secure a lease for a room, $1,000 for a house. And still more people were arriving, as Chinese fled from ethnic fighting in Johore and Indonesia.19 Soon after his arrival in Singapore, the agent of the government of India, S. K. Chettur, made a ‘hurricane tour’ of the west coast of the peninsula, visiting rubber estates and interviewing Indian labourers by the wayside. After the general collapse of industrial exports Indians had been easy prey for Japanese forced-labour schemes. Of the estimated 72,204 labourers sent from Malaya to Burma and Thailand, 29,634 were reported to have died and 24,626 ‘deserted’; many of this number were lost in the jungle, or disguised in the statistics of fatalities in the camps. The impact on small estate communities was traumatic: over 40 per cent of the labour in rubber areas such as Selangor had vanished, and everywhere Chettur reported the absence of menfolk who either ‘never returned or returned broken men’.20 A ‘citizen’s advice bureau’ in Singapore, staffed by local community leaders, was inundated with thousands of appeals from desperate families; it despatched Chinese businessmen with experience of trading in Thailand to locate refugees. But by the end of 1945 there were still believed to be 6,500 Malayans in South Thailand and another 23,000 around Bangkok.21 Some took years to return.

The missing haunted the post-war years, their suffering unrecorded in the official documents. It is clear that the British were aware of forced sexual slavery in Japanese-occupied Malaya and Singapore: escapees spoke of it, as did reports from local police officers.22 Soldiers began to find more evidence, but the Japanese were covering their tracks. At the hill resort of the Cameron Highlands, for example, some girls were found in a former convent: the Japanese colonel passed them off as convalescent pulmonary tuberculosis cases, but it was clear that they were there under coercion as ‘comfort women’. In cases like this, British soldiers would transport the women to the main towns, but then they often disappeared from view. Press pictures sent home to Britain of Malayan women and their babies liberated in the Andaman Islands had a description of them as ‘comfort women’ excised by the military censor.23 Half a century later, the full story of the ‘comfort women’ had yet to be told. Many of the girls, recruited locally, could not return to their families for shame of what had happened to them and fear of rejection.24 The social welfare officers who arrived with the BMA were aware of these women, but the military were unable to discern the nature of the ‘comfort women’ system, and unequipped to deal with mass rape. They saw the problem as one of ‘rehabilitation’ of prostitutes. But an attempt to use welfare homes run by the Chinese community for the ‘reclamation’ of fallen women, the Po Leung Kuk, collapsed because victims were repelled by the stigma it carried. The British fell back on the view that those who were not going into prostitution had rehabilitated themselves and that the others were already prostitutes.25 This abandoned many young girls to the insidious free market in women. As Victor Purcell acknowledged, ‘the facts, as known, would bring the government into grave disrepute. Girls of 10–15 are suffering from venereal disease.’26

The experience of war was etched in people’s faces. With the collapse of food exports from Burma and Thailand, Malaya’s rice bowl was broken. The British shouldered the massive responsibility of distributing and rationing supplies, through relief in cash and kind and public canteens on the lines of the spartan wartime ‘British restaurants’ at home. But the government failed in one of its most fundamental tasks: it could not import enough rice to feed its people. By December the average individual ration was a mere 4.5 ounces a day, and not everyone received it. The British, like the Japanese before them, campaigned to get people to eat more tapioca and grow more food. But as it was,