From: cdb100620@aol.com (CDB100620)
Subject: Re: questions about singapore 1942
Date: 26 Apr 1996

After the capture of Singapore, the Japanese arrested some 70,000 ethnic
Chinese, who were accused of subversive activity, usually on the basis
that they had sent funds to relatives in China (which had been, of course,
at war with Japan  for some years).  Several thousand were almost
immediately executed.  The method of execution was simply to tie groups of
Chinese together, load them onto barges which were taken to sea, where the
Chinese were simply dumped overboard and left to drown.

This episode is chronicled in "Asahi Toa nenpo, Showa 17-nen ban." (Asahi
East Asian Yearbook for 1942).

Events in Singapore under Japanese occupation are treated in Volume 3 of
"Hiroku dai Toa senshi" (The Great East Asian War).  See particularly the
articless"Maregun tsuiho" (Removing the Malay Army) and "Singaporu no
yuhi" (Singapore Sunset)

Another worthwhile source is "Ayukawa Nobuo senchu shuki" (Wartime Notes
of Ayukawa Nobuo).  See particularly, the articles "Koheibo no hanashi" (A
Veteran's Story) and "Heishi no hanashi" (A Soldier's Story).
Ayukawa was a well-known literary critic best known for his book "Bungaku
no setsuri" (The Providence of Literature)  and passive resister to the
authoritarian/totalitarian Japanese government.  Part of his resistance
consisted of  secretly collecting accounts of Japanese who were as
horrified as he by the actions of the evil regime that had taken over his
country.

A quote from "Singapore Sunset"  will give a suggestion of what these
sources contain:

"The pompous English were replaced by the rough, vulgar Japanese.  Simply
a change from bad to worse.  The Raffles Hotel was renamed the Shonan
Ryokan, the Adelphi Hotel became the Nanto Hotel, and the Singapore
residents were permited to use neither.  The Japanese military took the
Katon Seaview Hotel and pool for their own use.  All the best theaters,
the Cathay and others, were reserved for Japanese only.  Forms of racial
descrimination never practiced by the British were imposed."

According to these sources:

 Singapore boys schools were closed and converted to Japanese army
barracks, the students becoming servants of the Japanese.  Girls' schools
became brothels for Japanese.  Students and widows were compelled to work
in them.

Arrest, torture and execution were arbitrary.  All women lived in fear of
abduction, rape and murder.  It was routine to see female corpses dumped
along roadsides, often horrifically mutilated.

All men lived in fear of attracting the notice of Japanese soldiers, who
might kill them for a suspected slight, or for no reason at all.
Frequently, groups of men were rounded up to be used as living targets for
bayonet practice.

"Koheibo" contains a reference to Japanese soldiers "covered with blood
after a crazy orgy of beating and killing prisoners," and the quote, "The
way our army operates against these people just makes them hate us more
and more," attributed to an unnamed Japanese civilian working for the
Japanese occupation government of Singapore.