Hounded by the Kempeitai

Hounded by the Kempeitai

Sook Ching massacre: How I escaped

As many as 100,000 may have been killed in the massacre, it was estimated after mass graves in Siglap, Punggol and Changi were exhumed.

SOON after the Japanese soldiers left my house, word went around that all Chinese had to go to a registration centre at the Jalan Besar stadium for examination.

I saw my neighbour and his family leave and decided it would be wiser for me to go also, for if I were later caught at home, the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, would punish me. So I headed for Jalan Besar with Koh Teong Koo, our gardener.

As it turned out, his cubicle in his coolie-keng, the dormitory he shared with other rickshaw pullers, was within the perimeter enclosed by barbed wire. Tens of thousands of Chinese families were packed into this small area. All exit points were manned by the Kempeitai. There were several civilians with them, locals or Taiwanese. I was told later that many of them were hooded, though I do not remember noticing any.

After spending a night in Teong Koo's cubicle, I decided to check out through the exit point, but instead of allowing me to pass, the soldier on duty signalled me to join a group of young Chinese. I felt instinctively that this was ominous, so I asked for permission to return to the cubicle to collect my belongings. He gave it. I went back and lay low in Teong Koo's cubicle for another day and a half. Then I tried the same exit again. This time, for some inexplicable reason, I got through the checkpoint. I was given a "chop" on my left upper arm and on the front of my shirt with a rubber stamp. The kanji or Chinese character jian, meaning "examined", printed on me in indelible ink, was proof that I was cleared. I walked home with Teong Koo, greatly relieved.

I will never understand how decisions affecting life and death could be taken so capriciously and casually. I had had a narrow escape from an exercise called Sook Ching, meaning to "wipe out" rebels, ordered by Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the staff officer who planned the Malayan campaign. He had obtained the agreement of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the commander of the Japanese forces, to punish the Chinese in Singapore for collecting funds to support China's war effort against the Japanese, and for their boycott of Japanese goods.

He had another account to settle -- with Dalforce, which was part of the 1,000-strong Overseas Chinese volunteer corps organised by local community leaders in Singapore to resist the Japanese. Put together by Colonel John Dalley of the Malayan Special Branch, it brought together Chinese from all walks of life, supporters of Chiang Kai-shek's national ist Kuomintang (KMT) and of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), including notably some 500 communists freed from prison by the British at the eleventh hour.

Once armed, the volunteers were sent to hold the ground east of Kranji River on the flank of the 27th Australian Brigade. They fought ferociously. Many died, but so did many Japanese. They made Dalforce a legend, a name synonymous with bravery.

On Feb'18, the Japanese put up notices and sent soldiers with loudspeakers around the town to inform the Chinese that all men between the ages of 18 and 50 were to present themselves at five collection areas for inspection.

The much-feared Kempeitai went from house to house to drive Chinese who had not done so at bayonet point to these concentration centres, into which women, children and old men were also herded.

I discovered later that those picked out at random at the checkpoint I had passed were taken to the grounds of Victoria School and detained until Feb 22, when 40 to 50 lorries arrived to collect them. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were transported to a beach at Tanah Merah Besar, some 10 miles away on the east coast, near Changi Prison. There, they were made to disembark, tied together, and forced to walk towards the sea. As they did so, Japanese machine-gunners massacred them. Later, to make sure they were dead, each corpse was kicked, bayoneted and abused in other ways. There was no attempt to bury the bodies, which decomposed as they were washed up and down the shore. A few survivors miraculously escaped to give this grim account.

The Japanese admitted killing 6,000 young Chinese in that Sook Ching of Feb 18-22, 1942. After the war, a committee of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce exhumed many mass graves in Siglap, Punggol and Changi. It estimated the number massacred to be between 50,000 and 100,000.

In theory, the Imperial Army could justify this action as an operation to restore law and order and to suppress anti-Japanese resistance. But it was sheer vengeance, exacted not in the heat of battle but when Singapore had already surrendered.

Even after this Sook Ching, there were mopping-up operations in the rural areas, especially in the eastern part of Singapore, and hundreds more Chinese were executed. All of them were young and sturdy men who could prove troublesome."

I DECIDED it would be better to get out of Singapore while things were still calm, and I could resign from the Hodobu, the Japanese information department where I worked as a translator, without arousing suspicion over my motives.

I applied for leave and went up to Malaya to reconnoitre Penang and the Cameron Highlands, to find out which was the safer place. I travelled from Singapore to Penang and then to Tapah by train, but from Tapah to the Cameron Highlands I got a lift in a vegetable lorry and sat next to the driver.

After two nights in the Camerons, I went back to Tapah by the same means. It was a scary ride.

To save petrol, the driver switched off the engine and freewheeled for the better part of two-and-a-half hours down the steep, winding road.

In Penang, I stayed with Hon Sui Sen. In 1942, some four months into the occupation of Singapore, Hon had sent his wife and baby daughter back to Penang and boarded with my family in Norfolk Road as a paying guest.

We shared a room and became friends, but after nine months he decided it was not worth staying in Singapore. He was the best science graduate of his year, and one of the two annually recruited into the Straits Settlements Civil Service. (He was later to become our minister for finance.)

But his government pay was paltry, his rations were inadequate, and he could not earn enough to keep his family. So he joined them in Penang.

Although I saw little military activity as I wandered around Penang, I ruled it out. It would be a logical stepping stone for the British forces on their way down to Singapore. There would be street fighting, building by building.

So I went on to the Cameron Highlands where Maurice Baker, my friend at Raffles College, had his home in Ringlet village at 3,200 feet. He and some friends were living off their savings, planting vegetables and root crops.

I paid for my whole trip by selling at an enormous profit half a dozen steel hoes purchased in Singapore. The farmers needed them badly. On my return journey I bought a basket of beautiful vegetables unobtainable in Singapore, and spent a day and a half guarding them on the train.

Once back, I discussed the next move with my mother. We decided it would be best to move to the Cameron Highlands. As a first step, we sold the tenancy of the house at Norfolk Road to a group of Japanese men who worked for a kumiai or guild.

They paid us the handsome sum of $60,000 in banana notes for vacating this rent-controlled property and handing it over to them. Then I gave one month's notice to the Hodobu.

As I took the lift down in Cathay Building the day before I stopped work, the lift attendant, whom I had befriended, told me to be careful; my file in the Kempeitai (the Japanese military police) office had been taken out for attention.

I felt a deep chill. I wondered what could have provoked this, and braced myself for the coming interrogation. From that moment, I sensed that I was being followed. Day and night, a team tailed me.

I went through all the possible reasons in my mind, and could only conclude that someone had told the Kempeitai I was pro-British and had been leaking news that the war was going badly for the Japanese, and that was why I was leaving.

At least two men at any one time would be outside the shophouse in Victoria Street where we stayed after moving from Norfolk Road. My father had obtained the tenancy of this house from his employers, the oil authority in Alexandra Road.

To discover if I was indeed being followed, I asked my brothers Dennis and Fred to station themselves at the upstairs windows and watch the two Chinese men at the corner of Bras Basah Road and Victoria Street with two bicycles parked nearby.

Then I cycled around the block.

When I came back, they confirmed that the moment I left, so did the men. and when I returned, so did they.

My heart sank. I told my mother, and decided that it would be best if I did not leave Singapore after all. If I attempted to do so, the Kempeitai would probably pull me in for a nasty interrogation.

If I stayed behind and acted openly, leading a harmless life operating on the black market and making gum to get by, they might leave me alone. I endured this cat-and-mouse game for some eight weeks.

At times, in the quiet of the early morning, at 2 or 3 am, a car would pass by on Victoria Street and stop near its junction with Bras Basah Road.

It is difficult to describe the cold fear that seized me at the thought that they had come for me. Like most, I had heard of the horrors of the torture inflicted by the Kempeitai.

They wore white armbands with the two Chinese characters in red for Kempei, military police, and their powers of arrest and interrogation could not be challenged, even by high-ranking Japanese officers.

They had their headquarters in the YMCA building in Stamford Road, and branches in Oxley Rise, Smith Street and the Central Police Station in South Bridge Road.

People living nearby reported hearing their victims' howls of pain, sounds calculated to fill their hearts with dread, and their fears were spread by word of mouth.

It was a deliberate method to terrorise the locals; a cowed population was easier to control.

I had no links with any underground or any network for spreading Allied news.

I had no reason to listen secretly to any radio broadcast because it was anyway my job to deal with Western news reports.

I made up my mind that if I were arrested, I would tell them what I feared: that after clearing Burma, the British would re-invade Malaya and push their way down to Singapore with the Japanese fighting to the last man.

I had therefore planned to leave the island to plant tapioca, sweet potato and vegetables in the Cameron Highlands, which would not be in the path of any military invasion.

I would provide proof of my visit to Penang and the Camerons, which was followed by that of my mother and my brother some two months later to confirm my assessment that it was the best area for the family to move to.

But one day, two months after it began, the surveillance ceased. It was an unnerving experience.

SEP 20 1998