Abstract
On February 15, 1967, the 25th anniversary of the Fall of Singapore, the city state’s official memorial remembering the local victims of the Asia-Pacific War was unveiled. This memorial is officially named the Memorial to the Civilian Victims of the Japanese Occupation and is, ostensibly, a national one. Yet this was not the first attempt to build an official memorial commemorating the experiences of Singapore’s civilian population during the Japanese Occupation (February 15, 1942–September 12, 1945). The first attempt to memorialize local victims of the war and occupation was in 1948, when the Singapore Cenotaph that honored the war dead of World War I was rededicated as a World War II memorial. This was Singapore’s national war memorial until the last official wreath was laid there by a Singaporean minister on Remembrance Day in 1968. After that year, official commemorations shifted to the Memorial to the Civilian Victims of the Japanese Occupation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
K Blackburn, ‘The Collective Memory of the Sook Ching Massacre and the Creation of the Civilian War Memorial of Singapore’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 73 (December, 2000): 71–90.
H Muzaini, ‘Producing/Consuming Memoryscapes: The Genesis/Politics of Second World War Commemoration in Singapore’, Geo Journal 66 (2006): 211–22.
J Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 98.
See A Brett-James, Ball of Fire: Fifth Indian Division in the Second World War (Aldershot: Gale & Polden Ltd, 1951), Chapter XXXI ‘Singapore Reoccupied, September–October 1945’.
I Ward, The Killer They Called a God (Singapore: Media Masters, 1992), pp. 273–4.
PH Kratoska, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya, 1941–1945, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998), pp. 15–16.
See K Blackburn, ‘Nation Building, Identity and War Commemoration Spaces’, in R Ismail, O Ling and B Shaw (eds.), Southeast Asian Culture and Heritage in a Globalising World: Diverging Identities in a Dynamic Region (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 101–2.
Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story (Singapore: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 86.
Lee Geok Boi, The Syonan Year: Singapore under Japanese Rule 1942–1945 (Singapore: National Archives of Singapore and Epigram Pty Ltd, 2005), p. 211.
Aw Yue Pak, ‘The Singapore Overseas Chinese Salvation Movement’, in Foong Choon Hon, The Price of Peace: True Accounts of the Japanese Occupation (Singapore: Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Asiapac, 1997), pp. 221–7.
K Blackburn and D Chew, ‘Dalforce at the Fall of Singapore in 1942: An Overseas Chinese Heroic Legend’, Journal of Chinese Overseas 1, No. 2 (November 2005): p. 240.
P Jowett, Chinese Civil War Armies 1911–1949 (New York: Osprey Publishing Oxford, 1997), pp. 21–2.
Wang Gungwu, ‘Memories of War: World War II in Asia’, in P Lim Pui Huen, and D Wong (eds), War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), p. 17.
The Passive Defence Force was an umbrella term for volunteers in the auxiliary forces before and during the war. Some 6,000 locals had volunteered for these organizations. See Lee, The Syonan Years, and B Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940–1942 (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), p. 33.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 John Kwok
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kwok, J. (2015). Memories of the Japanese Occupation: Singapore’s First Official Second World War Memorial and the Politics of Commemoration. In: de Matos, C., Caprio, M.E. (eds) Japan as the Occupier and the Occupied. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408112_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408112_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-68115-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40811-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)