Malaya (Japanese)

Japanese-occupied Malaya, with Singapore, ran from early 1942 to 1945. The conquest took seventy days. Japanese forces landed in the north, moved down the peninsula partly on bicycles, and took Singapore from the landward side, where the fortress guns were of least use. Some eighty thousand troops surrendered, the largest capitulation in British military history, and the myth of European invincibility in Asia did not recover. Occupation policy was explicitly racial. The Chinese population was treated as an enemy because of Chinese resistance at home: the sook ching screenings in the weeks after the fall executed somewhere between five and fifty thousand Chinese men, the count still disputed. Malays and Indians were courted, and the Indian National Army was raised from prisoners to fight the British in Burma. Rice imports stopped and people grew tapioca to survive. Currency printed without backing became worthless. The main armed resistance, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army, was overwhelmingly Chinese and communist, and was armed by Britain - the same men and weapons that fought Britain in the Emergency from 1948. Japanese rule ended with the surrender in August 1945, before any Allied landing. Britain returned to a country that had watched it lose, with communal relations damaged and an armed communist movement in the jungle. Malaya became independent in 1957 and Singapore separated in 1965. Singapore was renamed Syonan-to, light of the south. The Malayan currency issued by the occupation is still called banana money for the tree on its notes. Force 136 ran Allied liaison with the jungle resistance. Lee Kuan Yew, later Singapore's prime minister, worked as a translator under the occupation and said it taught him everything about power.

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