Despite the gulf in power and the fear that stalked the Japanese, close and friendly relations were established on occasion between ‘occupier’ and ‘occupied’. The KMM member and journalist, Samad Ahmad, spent the war working on the Malay newspaper Berita Malai [Malay News], initially in Singapore and later in its Kuala Lumpur office. After the war he recalled that most of its news was simply drawn from the Japanese press agency Domei, and the remaining material was heavily censored. He noted that most journalists only continued to work because they badly needed the money. Samad Ahmad moved to radio and worked as a Malay presenter, a position he clearly enjoyed. On a personal basis, while noting that the ‘system was not good’, he found his Japanese counterparts in the radio station to be civil and to be seasoned professionals. Samad Ahmad made a clear distinction between these civilians, whom he held in high regard, and the Japanese army, who were brutal and crude. Indeed, he noted that certain of his Japanese colleagues apologised on a number of occasions for the violent and boorish ways of the military.
Even towards the military, relations were far from monolithic. Some British POWs spoke with warmth about certain of their captors, and made clear distinctions between them based on personal qualities. In giving witness at the Small War Crimes Trials, some local witnesses also came forward with positive testimony to support some of the arraigned army officers, prison wardens and hospital staff. In Kuala Lumpur, no Kempetei officers received such support, though at his trial in Penang, the senior commanding officer of the Penang Kempetei received widespread backing from communal luminaries, which resulted in his death penalty being reduced on appeal to a prison sentence. In many cases local witnesses offered the refrain that the accused tried their best, within difficult circumstances, to act against the system and in a civilised way. On occasion, personal characteristics and relationships were able to offer a human counter-weight to systemic repression and brutality.
Relationships seemed to be warmer when there was a common bond. Religion offered one such channel. St Andrew's Presbyterian Church was one of the many buildings looted after the British abandoned Kuala Lumpur. When they arrived, the Japanese stopped the looting and recovered as much of the church's furniture as they could. Thereafter, for about a year it was used as a naval store for the Japanese until a group of Tamil Methodists applied to use the church building for their congregation, to which the Japanese agreed. Several of the Japanese civil administrators and some of their army officers were Christian and were therefore inclined to leniency in dealing with the various churches and Christian orders in Kuala Lumpur. The La Salle Brothers, for example, after an initial period of incarceration were allowed a large measure of freedom during the occupation – perhaps also protected by Japanese Christians.
Kajang – The Experience of a Small Selangor Town
Kajang is a small town to the south of Kuala Lumpur, strung along the main north-south trunk road. Like most towns in British Malaya, it developed on the back of the local tin industry and as a centre for nearby rubber estates and plantations. The surrounding district was dotted with many small Malay kampung but Kajang itself was largely Chinese with some Indian shops, such as the dhobi (laundry) and sundry shops selling Indian fabrics and foods. Local Malays lived in scattered kampung settlements and visited the local wet market on a daily basis. At the edge of the town, a little distant from the ‘Asiatics’, as befitted their colonial detachment, were the local outposts and symbols of British authority; the police station, government offices and a scattering of European bungalows. Kajang was a quintessential small Malayan town.
Sinnadurai, the Chief Clerk of Kajang, later wrote an account of daily life under the Japanese. He noted that in January 1942, as the Japanese army approached the town, thousands of local inhabitants fled to the nearby jungle or sought safety with family and friends in small settlements and villages nearby. This was particularly so for those with young girls, because the ‘threat of rape stalked’ the Japanese army. With properties left empty, the opportunities for looting and theft were enormous, and both Japanese troops and local ‘bad hats’ seized their moment and many houses and offices were plundered. Following this early period of anarchy and lawlessness, a new order established itself. Families slowly drifted back to the town, though Sinnadurai noted that the educated and more affluent burned books and destroyed possessions so that they would not be tarred as being pro-British. Indeed, many of the ‘better off’ chose to wear shabby clothes to ‘escape suspicion’. Schools and places of work gradually reopened, but this only offered a semblance of pre-war normality. Salaries in the government sector had been cut by the Japanese but prices of basic goods and food were rising fast, and this meant that many officials struggled and were forced to take on other, more menial work, to make ends meet. It was a time of social fluidity and respectable salaried men now found themselves struggling in this new, raw world of survival. Those who formerly sat towards the top of the social pyramid, often English-speaking and in salaried positions, were now seeking to downplay their educated status. Corruption and a blackmarket proliferated and opportunists and shysters were able to make a good living from shortages and price inflation.
In July 1942, schools reopened in Kajang, though there was a new and virulent pressure on the teachers to ‘instill hatred of the British’. Some teachers were sent to special training schools, and were expected to use ‘Nippon-Go’ (Japanese) but few succeeded in mastering the language, partly because there was very little in the way of teaching materials but also because of its sheer impenetrability. Food at these training schools was minimal, military drilling formed a major part of the day and any spare time was spent trying to grow food to supplement the meagre rations.
Sinnadurai noted the spread of Indian nationalist sentiment and activity. While acknowledging that many Indians were active and willing recruits to the INA and the IIL, he also argued that many young men volunteered ‘through fear of the prison and its horrors’ and conscription for war projects, adding that many from ‘the coolie class were taken to Thailand where they died after untold neglect’. He recalled, however, that following news of the Japanese failure to take Imphal (on the border between Burma and India), news of which filtered through by clandestine monitoring of the ‘All India Relay’ of the BBC, the mood shifted. ‘The Japanese were beginning to realize that they could not cope with the opposition and therefore adopted a milder policy, hoping to win the people over.’ From 1944, therefore, there was a distinct sense that the tide of the war had changed. The Chinese, who had initially been ‘rounded up’ and ‘suffered daily’, after Imphal found the Japanese seeking a more accommodative approach. But it was too late and instead the Japanese found that they had spawned an ‘anti-Japanese army’. From the early days of the occupation the communists had approached Chinese towkays for money to support their cause and as the war progressed this levy trickled down to all businesses such that by the end of the war ‘every shop contributed secretly’. Sinnadurai portrayed the ‘anti Japanese army’ behaving more like a protection racket; threatening those who would not support them and assassinating policemen and collaborators.
Sinnadurai highlighted the increased stresses in inter-communal relations. He starkly asserted that the ‘Malays helped the Japs from the start’ and noted that ‘the worst were in the police force’. Their pay was so menial that the police (generally Malay or Sikh) regularly ‘resorted to the vilest means to secure money’. Those who resisted might be ‘falsely accused of being communists and were taken off to the prison where they suffered until death mercifully released them’. Sinnadurai saw ‘a Chinese being cruelly kicked and beaten because he forgot to take his hat off when passing the Malay sentry’. These simmering tensions would boil over in Kajang in the period of political vacuum that followed the Japanese surrender and before the British were able to reassert their authority. The targets for retribution were the ‘puppet’ police and local auxiliary forces.
Chapter Fifteen
Wartime Economy<
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The Japanese occupation was a time of economic dislocation and uncertainty, deteriorating towards the end into atrophy. Many established colonial businesses were simply trashed by the looting and turmoil that surrounded the beginning and the end of the Japanese occupation. It is generally difficult to feel sorry for lawyers, but the case of Shearn, Delamore and Co., one of the longer established Kuala Lumpur law firms, elicits some sympathy. Pre-war, the firm had a distinguished and well-appointed city office, complete with a wood-panelled library and a partners’ meeting room. Each of the four partners – Messers Tosswill, Charlesworth, Delamore, and Shearn – had an expansive office, complete with a vast leather-topped desk and comfortable leather chairs. An inventory of furniture and office equipment for the company stretched to over 150 items. On return after the war, therefore, there was much dismay to find that the firm’s possessions comprised one teak chair, an ‘almeirah’ and three metal safes. There was however one, modest, silver lining to this story of loss and destruction. The three metal safes had, rather surprisingly, survived the war intact and when opened in November 1945 many hundreds of wills and legal documents stored inside were found to be in good shape.
Pre-war, the Japanese had been important investors in Selangor and had owned a number of rubber estates and plantations alongside their entrenched position in professions such as photography, dentistry and barber shops. They were therefore well placed to respond to new commercial opportunities offered by sequestering former British businesses. Thus in March 1942, the jewellers Storch Bros. became Dai Toa Shokai and the Borneo Motor Co., which had a large workshop and showroom off Circular Road became Nissan Jidosha K. Kaisha. It continued to sell and repair cars but there was little evidence that the Japanese used their wartime dominance to import their own brands. When the British returned they found no new cars but rather a messy collection of old vehicles, many of them cannibalised, and a yard full of stripped parts and old equipment.
A major problem facing the Selangor economy was that its traditional export markets had been the United States (which had taken over fifty per cent of exported commodities – mostly rubber and tin) and Britain. Japan had accounted for just five per cent of pre-war Malayan trade. Surprisingly, Malaya’s main export commodities were not of particular interest to the Japanese. In a pre-war assessment, the Japanese had identified Malayan bauxite and manganese as being of the greatest importance to them, with iron ore, tin and rubber of secondary interest. While it was useful to deny its enemies these valuable commodities, even at the best of times Japan was never going to replace the United States and Britain as a destination for Malayan products. Thus the twin pillars of Selangor’s economy, tin and rubber, were hugely and negatively impacted by the Japanese occupation. When, later in the war, the steady attrition of Japanese merchant shipping led to a lack of ‘shipping bottoms’ the goose was decidedly cooked for the Selangor economy. Its main export markets had dried up and the small remaining market was now inaccessible.
Tin Mining
The Japanese occupation led to a considerable degradation in the physical state of Selangor’s tin mines. In part the retreating British were responsible, and in no sector more so than tin mining where they had carried out vigorous scorched earth denial practices as they withdrew south. When the British returned they conducted an audit of the industry and found that of the thirty-five British-owned mines (which were generally based around capital-intensive tin-dredging machines) only seven were in ‘fair condition’ with the remainder ‘dismantled, damaged or removed’; only one dredger was in a position to restart work with immediate effect. For the smaller, more labour-intensive Chinese mines using gravel pumps, twelve were found to be in good condition but 107 were under flood water, fourteen had machinery damaged and 24 had been abandoned. This was an incredible legacy of damage and it would take Selangor’s tin industry many years to recover.
During the war the Japanese sought to cobble together businesses from the existing British legacy. The Japanese Iron Manufacturing Co’s factory in Klang was ‘equipped by cannibalising tools and heavy plant, the property of Fleming Bros., United Engineers, Hume Pipe Co., Harbour Board and govt. depts’. One large Japanese engineering operation was the Nippon Seitetsu Kabushiki Kaisya (NSKK) which had its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur and manufactured mining equipment for the tin industry. It was one of the biggest engineering operations in Malaya and was founded on expropriated British businesses. Its Kuala Lumpur main office employed 36 staff and it had a factory at Klang and operations in Ipoh and Taiping. At the time of the Japanese surrender it employed one hundred Japanese staff and over eight hundred Malayans. This was a major undertaking, though quite how it kept going in the last years of war, with minimal shipping available for export and a moribund domestic market, is difficult to know.
Coal Mining
The Batu Arang mine near Rawang to the north of Kuala Lumpur was Malaya’s primary source of coal, operating as both an open cast pit and an underground colliery and during the war was under the control of the Mitsubishi Kokyo Kaisha company. It employed a surprisingly large number of workers, with over 9,000 ‘Asiatic workers’, 600 ‘maintenance staff’ and 55 Japanese managers. By the end of the war, like so many other enterprises, it was operating at well below capacity, with the normal monthly production of 35,000 tons down to 18,000. When the British returned, ‘five cuts’ in the open pit and two underground shafts were still in operation. Large stocks of coal, however, were stored at the mine, suggesting that while production was down, demand was even lower and probably also that the disruption on the railways had undermined the distribution system.
Rubber
Pre-war the Japanese owned and managed a surprisingly large number of rubber plantations in Selangor. During the war, the administration handed sequestered British estates to the Japanese controlled Syonan Rubber Association (Syonan Gomu Kumiai) which offered a central system of rubber buying at controlled prices. Prior knowledge of the sector, and management of large swathes of the industry, however, did not prevent huge disruption and dislocation of the rubber industry caused by a collapse in demand and the departure of thousands of rubber tappers and estate workers to Thailand. On return, the frequent refrain of British planters and estate managers was the extent to which the estates had been damaged and neglected during the period of the Japanese occupation. As noted, vast numbers of young Tamil men, upon whom the estates relied to carry out the back-breaking work of clearing undergrowth, cutting irrigation ditches and tapping the rubber trees in the pre-dawn hours, had been sent to work on Japanese work projects. As a consequence of this and the collapse in markets the estates fell into disrepair. Towards the end of the war, the death rate amongst the old and the very young (particularly girls) still living in the ‘plantation lines’ was notably high, reflecting grinding poverty and food shortages at little short of starvation levels.
Inflation, Fixed-Price Panties and Controls
From mid-1943, as food and other items became increasingly scarce, prices rose and merchants and shopkeepers began to hoard items. The response by the Japanese administration was not to address the underlying problems of supply but rather to impose increasingly onerous controls on shopkeepers and merchants. Red-tape began to proliferate. The owners of bicycles, for example, were compelled to obtain a permit. In September 1943, the range of ‘controlled items’ was hugely extended beyond the earlier staple of basic food items. A two-page spread in the local newspapers detailed a vast range of items now under price control. This introduced some quirky outcomes. For the larger woman with a waist of 34” or over, panties would henceforth cost $1.50, but a slimmer woman with a waist of 32” or less could buy her underwear at half this price – a harsh price to pay for a larger girth. Within the controlled price list there were twenty-two categories of designated bicycle tyres and inner-tubes, each with their own controlled selling price. While compelling traders to sell at published prices, the authorities also forced them to declare their stocks, on pain
of arrest. As an example to others, in early September 1943, Lim Kin Cheok, ‘a dealer… was arrested by an officer of the Military Police while in the act of secretly disposing of his piece goods…’. This snippet of news was followed by the recommendation that ‘Those who possess such commodities and do not report them should do so without delay.’
Food Shortages
In the face of growing shortages and hardship, from 1944 increased domestic food production became a mantra for the Japanese. Salt, sugar and rice were rationed but increasingly the authorities were unable to meet demand and supply the agreed daily ration, which steadily fell towards the end of the occupation. Rice in particular was the staple of all communities but Selangor was not a rice bowl and could not easily convert its plantations and estates into food production. Prior to the war, Thai and Indian rice had been imported into Malaya in considerable quantities. For obvious reasons (not least a famine of its own) Indian rice was not available, but Thai rice was also difficult to come by. The shortage here seemed to be as much a problem of distribution as availability. Thai rice had previously come by railway but the FMS railway system was in disarray, with hundreds of wagons and locomotives scattered across Thailand, Burma and Indo-China. There was simply not the capacity to import rice in the quantities required. The Japanese therefore encouraged small-scale market gardening and the growing of vegetables and other staples. Tapioca was often used as a substitute. Open land was converted to gardening and Kuala Lumpur citizens grew what they could to try to alleviate the hunger and shortages.
Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Page 15