On 1 July 1946, Lt. Shuzi Murakami stood in the dock of Kuala Lumpur’s central court, where he was charged with Doris van der Straaten’s murder. His case was one of the first to be heard as part of the Kuala Lumpur Small War Crimes Trials. The Court President, Lt. Colonel Culley, pushed the proceedings through with military vigour – the case took just the one day for both defence and prosecution to make their case and for judgement to be reached. The chief prosecution witness was a Kempetei interpreter, Sam Ah Ngaw, who had been present throughout van der Straaten’s ‘interrogation’. He thereby offered eyewitness testimony. Under cross examination Sam Ah Ngaw said that initially Murakami had ‘caught hold of her hair and shook her for about 15 minutes. Later he threw her on the ground and stamped on her body’. Following this she was stripped and ‘when Mrs Van der Straaten refused to answer her questions’ Murakami ‘slapped and kicked her’. This appalling treatment proved all too much for the feisty van der Straaten who, according to Sam Ah Ngaw, shouted ‘tyrant, you can’t do this to me’ and slapped Murakami, reportedly sending him into a frenzy. He then ‘grabbed her by her dress and threw her out the window’. Sam Ah Ngaw concluded his testimony by claiming that Murakami then coerced him into covering up the murder as ‘suicide’.
In response to this devastating testimony from an eyewitness, Murakami’s defence counsel, in a ‘stirring address’, argued that Sam Ah Ngaw had made up the story in order to ‘save face and regain the confidence of the outside public’. The defence counsel also noted that at the time of van der Straaten’s interrogation, Colonel Koda had yet to be arrested and, given his position as Commander of the Western Garrison, it would have been more likely that a junior Kempetei officer would treat Doris ‘leniently and kindly.’ Finally, the defence counsel advanced the argument that Doris van der Straaten, in committing suicide, was simply trying to protect her lover, Colonel Koda. He argued that ‘Mrs van der Straaten had become separated from her husband, she was alone and friendless. She had no means of support and Colonel Koda had taken her in and given her what she wanted in life. He was therefore everything to her – he was like an oasis in the desert to whom she could look for her livelihood’. Following this ambitious line of argument, the defence counsel argued that ‘Suicide was the plan of Mrs Straaten to save Colonel Koda. Murakami might have been morally responsible for her death but not legally and therefore he should be acquitted’.
Following these depositions, the Court President, Lt. Colonel Culley, retired for forty minutes to review the arguments, which largely rested on the credibility of the prosecution’s eye-witness, Sam Ah Ngah and a willingness to accept the ‘suicide to protect a lover’ argument. The next day at 9.00am, in the ‘hushed silence of a crowded court’, Lt. Culley called the proceedings to order and pronounced Murakami ‘not guilty’ of the two charges levelled against him. The Straits Times described the ‘surprise and excitement’ with which the judgement was met, and this outcome must have been highly unexpected. Murakami, however, showed ‘not the slightest trace of emotion’ but rather ‘bowed stiffly to both the officers of the Court and the European officer assisting his Japanese counsel’.
It is difficult to know how, or why, Lt. Colonel Culley reached the decision he did. Sympathy was hardly high with the Kempetei, and this trial was one of the earliest to be heard in Kuala Lumpur. The prosecution would surely have thought that with an eye witness account of her murder, this was ‘one in the bag’. Perhaps Sam Ah Ngah cut an unconvincing figure and the defence raised enough doubts to save Murakami. Or perhaps Lt. Colonel Culley was unwittingly swayed by the thought of van der Straaten as a ‘purple woman’, or perhaps even a femme fatale out to protect her lover. Whatever calculations went into his judgement, it was a highly unexpected and controversial outcome. Lt. Murakami was released a free man to join the other Japanese prisoners then being repatriated en-masse to Japan.
There is no way to assess whether Doris van der Straaten was a willing or forced mistress of Colonel Koda. But the bare bones of her story – a traumatically ‘widowed’ prisoner, straight from surviving a terrible massacre, forced by starvation to forage in the jungle, then imprisoned and suffering from dysentery is offered medical care by a powerful Japanese officer who arranged for her to be delivered to his house in Kuala Lumpur – smacks entirely of coercion and manipulation. Nevertheless, her story left a lasting legacy of shame. A family account noted that ‘Rumours were rife about her alleged scandalous behaviour… was she the willing mistress of a high-ranking Jap officer or did she assume that role to ensure her survival?... The spectre of Aunt Doris haunted the family... forever seeking acceptance and redemption.’
The historic account, however, must exonerate this extraordinarily brave, feisty but ultimately tragic woman. The sad case of Doris van der Straaten is, however, made even worse. Her presumed dead husband, Philip survived the Kampung Toh massacre and spent the war in a Bangkok POW camp. This was known by the time of Murakami’s trial but was not known to Doris while she was Colonel Koda’s mistress. Before he died in 1966, Philip spoke to Doris’ two daughters from her first marriage – though what transpired between them remains a secret. He was, by all accounts, a gentle and generous man so the supposition must be that he held no animosity but rather viewed her as the victim she most surely was. One last mystery surrounds Doris van der Straaten. In August 1973, the La Salle Brother’s Catholic Mission in Kuala Lumpur appealed for news of her Australian relatives. Since the war they had kept in their possession poems written by Doris for her two daughters, reportedly expressing her longing to return to Australia. These almost certainly date from her time incarcerated at Taiping Prison, where she was detained alongside the Catholic missionaries. One of the Brothers seemingly kept her poems safe and many years later sought to find and deliver them to a family member. Alas, it has neither proven possible to track down the family nor the poems.
Chapter Eleven
Communities
In 1941, on the cusp of war, Kuala Lumpur was a city of strategic and economic significance but was barely sixty years old. The early settlement was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century by the Malay Chief, Raja Abdullah, and was then developed and expanded in the late 1880s by industrious Chinese migrant workers who saw in the tin rich soils of the Klang Valley a route to wealth and prosperity. It was a hard-living mining town with a ‘wild west’ reputation, set in the jungles and padi fields of rural Selangor. In 1896, the British settled on Kuala Lumpur as the capital for the Federated Malay States (FMS). On the back of tin and rubber it became a wealthy and valuable ‘colony’ and in quick order Kuala Lumpur added grand colonial quarters and a set of magnificent state buildings - constructed in the unique Indo-Moorish style - to complement and contrast with noisy, bustling, Chinatown.
Pre-war Kuala Lumpur comprised a polyglot and diverse set of communities living and working generally peaceably alongside each other. But it was, nevertheless, a society formed on the basis of deep social and racial cleavages. The colonial British, small in number but influential in all areas, sat at the apex of the economic and political pyramid; thereafter, sat the main communities - Chinese, Malay and Indian. Kuala Lumpur was predominantly a Chinese city, but the two other communities each had numerical weight and clear and defined stakes and roles within the city’s life. The three communities were each internally divided along language or ethnographic lines, but when challenged promptly merged into a defensive communal solidarity. Racial harmony was supported by a British colonial administration that not only managed its relations with the individual communities but also sought to foster sooth inter-racial relations. There was, inevitably, tension and rivalry, and while there was some inter-racial mixing and marriage, on the whole it was a mosaic, not a melting-pot, of religions, languages and peoples. Pre-war prison statistics suggest that the least law- abiding of the communities were the Chinese, but Pudu Prison, designed to take 650 prisoners, generally held many fewer - indicative of a society in which security and law-and-order was
not a major problem. The concept of a broad Malayan nationalism and loyalty had yet to take hold. For these communities it was not a question of being ‘pro-British’ or ‘pro-Japanese’ but rather of being supportive of their own interests.
The experience of war, and the impact of the Japanese occupation, however, would change all this and would polarise differences and communal tensions. Prior to their arrival in Malaya, save for some businessmen and officials, the Japanese had little substantive contact with Indian or Malay communities or politics. They had simply not engaged historically in a significant way with South or South East Asia. In contrast, the Japanese had extensive historic contact with the Chinese; a relationship characterised by conflict and enmity made worse by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. It was this background - ignorance and lack of familiarity with the Indians and the Malays and almost too much contact and knowledge of the Chinese - that informed Japanese attitudes towards the three main communities of Malaya. Differing Japanese approaches, though not deliberately planned, helped stir the racial pot and heightened both intra- and inter-racial tensions.
The Chinese Community
If the colonial districts were stripped out, and the districts of Kampung Baru (Malay), Brickfields and Sentul (Indian) were overlooked, Kuala Lumpur was to all intents a Chinese city. But there were considerable differences between the overseas community and those at home. In Malaya, there were very few Chinese farmers or cultivators, and it was this group that made up the vast majority of the working population in China. Instead, the Malayan Chinese community was dominated by labourers who were employed in mines, plantations and other sectors. At the apex of the community were a numerically small group of traders and businessmen, and they enjoyed a much greater influence than would have been the case in China. What was missing in Malaya was the ‘scholar-administrator’ or Mandarin class, which carried such weight and wielded such social influence in China. The Chinese in Malaya, therefore, were a very distinct and ‘skewed’ community, albeit one which continued to venerate traditional Chinese values, notably kinship and the importance of ancestors. Kuala Lumpur’s richly decorated Chinese temples and clan houses reflected the need by the community to celebrate their Chinese origins and traditions, and in some ways to compensate for the distance from the native land of their ancestors by the wealth and flamboyance of their buildings and architecture.
In 1941, the Chinese population of Kuala Lumpur stood at around 105,000, about sixty per cent of the total. It was about half Cantonese, with somewhat less than a quarter each Hokkien and Hakka and a sprinkling of Teocheow, Haiananese and Hokchia. There was a preponderance of men to women, though this historic imbalance had corrected significantly in the decade leading up to the war. In 1920, 80 per cent of Chinese were first generation immigrants but by 1940 this had dropped to less than half. The age spread, however, was far from ‘natural’ being heavily weighted towards the young and the early middle-aged, a consequence of high birth rates and the relatively recent migration of people of working age from China. On the whole the community was poorly-educated, with only fifty per cent of men and less than one quarter of women literate in their own language. It was also a very insular community, with only a tiny minority literate or conversant in English or Malay.
The Chinese, particularly in the early years of the war, were to suffer brutally from the Japanese. This was not casual, indiscriminate violence but was the result of policy and directive. Malaya and Singapore were governed by the Japanese Gunseibu, or the Military Administrative Department. Initially it was headed by the Deputy Commander of the 25th Army, Major General Manaki Takanobu. Holding both positions proved onerous and the day-to-day leadership fell to his fanatical deputy, Colonel Watoru Watanabe, the architect of the Sook Chin. A ten-year veteran of the war in Manchuria, and a graduate of the Institute of Total War, in February 1942 Watanabe laid down a set of ’Policy Principles towards the Chinese’. A sense of his mind-set can be deduced from his pronouncement that ‘The fundamental principle of my nationalist policy is to require them [the Chinese] to account for their past mistakes and to make them ready to give up their lives and property. Only when they repent their wrongdoings will I allow them to live…’. In a separate announcement, he noted that ‘The Chinese, accustomed to a foreign rule, are prone to maintain a false obedience and they are crafty as anything and hard to control. They ought to be dealt with unsparingly.’
Inevitably, one response to the wave of repression was passivity and the desire not to stand out. One elderly lady still recalls her mother’s anxiety when, as a child, she ever left the family house in the Chow Kit district of central Kuala Lumpur. Her mother’s constant admonishments were for her to stay indoors, but should she venture outside and see a Japanese soldier she was to hide or to move away as quickly as possible. Her mother cut her hair short and kept her appearance as ‘boyish’ as possible, again in an attempt to reduce the dangers of unwanted attention. This appears to have been a commonplace tactic – an attempt to mitigate and manage the risks by avoiding or minimising contact with the Japanese. This elderly lady noted that the stresses of the Japanese occupation reduced her mother to a form of neurotic fatalism, leading to intense mood swings and bouts of depression. No one in her family was to die as a consequence of the Japanese occupation, but many neighbours lost family members and the pervading sense of fear placed such a strain on her mother that, though she was to live until the 1960s, after the war she never quite recovered her mental equilibrium.
A second response to the occuptaion was an uneasy co-operation with the Japanese – an attempt to manage and steer a path to survival through negotiation. After the war, there was an effort by the British to identify collaborators, but this proved to be a difficult area. Clearly those who ended up acting as spies and agents for the Kempetei were at one extreme (though many of these would surely have been coerced into the role) but many others, particularly senior businessmen and community leaders, had little choice and through pragmatic considerations, though no doubt often confronting difficult judgement calls, ended up working alongside the Japanese. Some senior business figures – who tended to support the Kuomintang – for example participated in the ‘Peace and Reconciliation Committees’. During the war, the communists often made their own judgements about who had over-stepped the line, and engaged in a campaign of assassination against ‘collaborators’ within their own community. Finally, the alienation created by Japanese violence also led to more active responses, not least a drift towards armed resistance. It was the communists, and their military wing the MPAJA, that formed the main – indeed almost the only – armed resistance to the Japanese. It was towards this banner that some young men and women, mostly but not exclusively Chinese, were drawn.
The final response to the Japanese occupation was resistance. Staying in the city and running the risk of being rounded up and sent off to the ‘death railways’ persuaded many young men to move across to the communists, or to join groups of ‘bandits’ living in the jungle. The number of active communists is difficult to estimate, and there was a flood of new recruits late in the war, once the British started to support the MPAJA. By this stage the Selangor 1st Regiment of the MPAJA was about 600 strong. This was not an inconsiderable force but given Selangor’s adult male Chinese population of approximately 80,000, the communist flag was clearly not for everyone. The MCP had, however, a large group of civilian supporters known as the Mui Mui and there were also an undetermined numbers of ‘bandits’ and gangs of young men surviving on their wits and trying to avoid contact with the Japanese.
In general, while the MCP was later to emphasise its leadership role in confronting the Japanese, the call to the communist cause was mostly late and never in large numbers. Neither was the MPAJA particularly active in confronting the Japanese. It was able to assert its presence in remote areas of the state, and at night-time and under civilian guise it could move largely at will, but for obvious reasons (it was out-gunned and the Japanese retribution on
nearby communities would have been hugely disproportionate) it tended not to target Japanese troops. Instead its most active operations were assassinations of local collaborators. This limited resistance by the MCP, however, has tended to hide the reality that most members of the Chinese community sought either to manage day-to-day life alongside the Japanese as best they could, or moved to the anonymity and relative safety of shanty communities established along the jungle edge – a feral existence but one considered safer than staying in the city.
Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Page 11