Sook Ching


The Sook Ching was a systematic purge of perceived hostile elements among the Chinese in Singapore by the Japanese military during the Japanese occupation of Singapore and Malaya, after the British colony surrendered on 15 February 1942 following the Battle of Singapore. The purge took place from 18 February to 4 March 1942 at various places in the region. The operation was overseen by the Imperial Japanese Army's Kempeitai secret police and subsequently extended to include the Chinese population in Malaya.
Scholars agree the massacre took place, but Japanese and Singaporean sources disagree about the number of deaths. According to Hirofumi Hayashi, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs "accepted that the Japanese military had carried out mass killings in Singapore... During negotiations with Singapore, the Japanese government rejected demands for reparations but agreed to make a 'gesture of atonement' by providing funds in other ways." Officially, Japan says that fewer than 5,000 deaths occurred, while Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's first prime minister alleged that "verifiable numbers would be about 70,000" including Malaysia, although there isn't any evidence to prove this allegation. In 1966, Japan agreed to pay US$50 million in compensation, half of which was a grant and the rest as a loan. They did not make an official apology. The Japanese also killed about 150,000 Tamil Indians in Thailand and Burma.
The memories of those who lived through that period have been captured at exhibition galleries in the Old Ford Motor Factory at Bukit Timah, the site of the factory where the British surrendered to the Japanese on 15 February 1942.
The Japanese referred to the Sook Ching as the Kakyō Shukusei or as the Shingapōru Daikenshō. The current Japanese term for the massacre is Shingapōru Kakyō Gyakusatsu Jiken. Singapore's National Heritage Board uses the term Sook Ching in its publications.

Planning of the big bird initiative

According to postwar testimony taken from a war correspondent embedded with the 25th army, Colonel Hishakari Takafumi, an order to kill 50,000 Chinese, 20 percent of the total, was issued by senior officials on Yamashita's operations staff, either from Lieutenant Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, Chief of Planning and Operations, or Major Hayashi Tadahiko, Chief of Staff.
Hirofumi Hayashi, a professor of politics at a university and the co-director of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, writes that the massacre was premeditated, and that "the Chinese in Singapore were regarded as anti-Japanese even before the Japanese military landed". It is also clear from the passage below that the massacre was to be extended to the Chinese in Malaya as well.
After the Japanese military occupied Singapore, they were aware that the local Chinese population was loyal to the Republic of China. Some Chinese had been financing the National Revolutionary Army in the Second Sino-Japanese War through a series of fund-raising propagandist events.

Targeted groups

The Japanese military authorities defined the following as "undesirables":

"Screening"

After the fall of Singapore, Masayuki Oishi, commander of No. 2 Field Kenpeitai, set up his headquarters in the YMCA Building at Stamford Road as the Kenpeitai East District Branch. The Kenpeitai prison was in Outram with branches in Stamford Road, Chinatown and the Central Police Station. A residence at the intersection of Smith Street and New Bridge Road formed the Kenpeitai West District Branch.
Under Oishi's command were 200 regular Kenpeitai officers and another 1000 auxiliaries, who were mostly young and rough peasant soldiers. Singapore was divided into sectors with each sector under the control of an officer. The Japanese set up designated "screening centres" all over Singapore to gather and "screen" Chinese males between the ages of 18 and 50. Those who were thought to be "anti-Japanese" would be eliminated. Sometimes, women and children were also sent for inspection as well.
The following passage is from an article from the National Heritage Board:
According to the A Country Study: Singapore published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress:
The ones who passed the "screening" received a piece of paper bearing the word "examined" or have a square ink mark stamped on their arms or shirts. Those who failed were stamped with triangular marks instead. They were separated from the others and packed into trucks near the centres and sent to the killing sites.

Execution

There were several sites for the killings, the most notable ones being Changi Beach, Punggol Point and Sentosa.
Massacre sites:Description
Punggol PointThe Punggol Point Massacre saw about 300 to 400 Chinese shot on 28 February 1942 by the Hojo Kempei firing squad. The victims were some of the 1,000 Chinese men detained by the Japanese after a door-to-door search along Upper Serangoon Road. Several of these had tattoos, a sign that they might be triad members.
Changi Beach/Changi Spit BeachOn 20 February 1942, 66 Chinese males were lined up along the edge of the sea and shot by the military police. The beach was the first of the killing sites of the Sook Ching. Victims were from the Bukit Timah/Stevens Road area.
Changi Road 8-mile section Massacre site found at a plantation area contained remains of 250 victims from the vicinity.
Hougang 8 msSix lorry loads of people were reported to have been massacred here.
Katong 7 ms20 trenches for burying the bodies of victims were dug here.
Beach opposite 27 Amber RoadTwo lorry loads of people were said to have been massacred here. The site later became a car park.
Tanah Merah Beach/Tanah Merah Besar Beach242 victims from Jalan Besar were massacred here. The site later became part of the Changi airport runway.
Sime Road off Thomson RoadMassacre sites found near a golf course and villages in the vicinity.
Katong, East Coast Road732 victims from Telok Kurau School.
Siglap areaMassacre site near Bedok South Avenue/Bedok South Road.
Belakang Mati Beach, off the Sentosa Golf CourseSurrendered British gunners awaiting Japanese internment buried some 300 bullet-ridden corpses washed up on the shore of Sentosa. They were civilians who were transported from the docks at Tanjong Pagar to be killed at sea nearby.

In a quarterly newsletter, the National Heritage Board published the account of the life story of a survivor named Chia Chew Soo, whose father, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters were bayoneted one by one by Japanese soldiers in Simpang Village.

Extension to Chinese community of Malaya

At the behest of Masanobu Tsuji, the Japanese High Command's Chief of Planning and Operations, Sook Ching was extended to the rest of Malaya. However, due to a far wider population distribution across urban centres and vast rural regions, the Chinese population in Malaya was less concentrated and more difficult to survey. Lacking sufficient time and manpower to organise a full "screening", the Japanese opted instead to conduct widespread and indiscriminate massacres of the Chinese population. The primary bulk of the killings were conducted between February to March, and were largely concentrated in the southern states of Malaya, closer to Singapore.
Specific incidents were Kota Tinggi, Johore – 2,000 killed; Gelang Patah, Johor – 300 killed; Benut, Johor – number unknown; Johore Baharu, Senai, Kulai, Sedenak, Pulai, Renggam, Kluang, Yong Peng, Batu Pahat, Senggarang, Parit Bakau, and Muar – estimated up to 25,000 Chinese were killed in Johor; Tanjung Kling, Malacca – 142 killed; Kuala Pilah, Negeri Sembilan – 76 killed; Parit Tinggi, Negeri Sembilan – more than 100 killed ; Joo Loong Loong – 990 killed ; and Penang – several thousand killed by Major Higashigawa Yoshimura. Further massacres were instigated as a result of increased guerilla activity in Malaya, most notably at Sungei Lui, a village of 400 in Jempol District, Negeri Sembilan, which was wiped out on 31 July 1942 by troops under a Corporal Hashimoto.

Extension to the Indians of Malaya and Singapore

The Japanese also killed about 150,000 Tamil Indians in Thailand and Myanmar during the war, although it is believed that the true number of deaths is much higher for the Tamil Indians. It excludes the death toll of the Malayali Indians. The Indians came from Singapore or Malaysia under Japanese supervision.
Japanese camp guards frequently killed entire Indian families or the entire Indians population of whole camps every day, sometimes for exterminating Indian families or camps infected with typhus, sometimes for sadistic reasons. Aside from killing the Indians, Japanese soldiers often gang raped Tamil women after which they would force other Indian coolies to rape the Indian women.

Death toll

The figures of the death toll vary. According to official Japanese statistics, the number was below 5,000, while the Singaporean Chinese community initially alleged 100,000 despite having been unproven. Recent research narrowed down the official deathtoll to 10,000 to 25,000 at maximum.
Hirofumi Hayashi wrote in another paper that the death toll "needs further investigation".
Having witnessed the brutality of the Japanese, Lee made the following comments:

Prominent victims

Chinese film pioneer Hou Yao moved to Singapore in 1940 to work for the Shaw brothers. Because Hou had directed and written a number of "national defence" films against the Japanese invasion of China, he was targeted by the Japanese and killed at the beginning of the Sook Ching massacre.

Aftermath

In 1947, after the Japanese surrender, British authorities in Singapore held a war crimes trial for the perpetrators of the Sook Ching. Seven Japanese officers: Takuma Nishimura, Saburo Kawamura, Masayuki Oishi, Yoshitaka Yokata, Tomotatsu Jo, Satoru Onishi, and Haruji Hisamatsu, were charged with conducting the massacre. Staff officer Masanobu Tsuji was the mastermind behind the massacre, and personally planned and carried it out, but at the time of the war crimes trials he had not been arrested. As soon as the war ended, Masanobu Tsuji escaped from Thailand to China. The accused seven persons who followed Tsuji's commands were on trial.
During the trial, one major problem was that the Japanese commanders did not pass down any formal written orders for the massacre. Documentation of the screening process or disposal procedures had also been destroyed. Besides, the Japanese military headquarters' order for the speedy execution of the operation, combined with ambiguous instructions from the commanders, led to suspicions being cast on the accused, and it became difficult to accurately establish their culpability.
Saburo Kawamura and Masayuki Oishi received the death penalty while the other five received life sentences, though Takuma Nishimura was later executed following conviction by an Australian military court for his role in the Parit Sulong Massacre in 1951. The court accepted the defence statement of "just following orders" by those put on trial. The condemned were hanged on 26 June 1947. The British authorities allowed only six members of the victims' families to witness the executions of Kawamura and Oishi, despite calls for the hangings to be made public.
The mastermind behind the massacre, Masanobu Tsuji, escaped. Tsuji, later after the trial and the execution, appeared in Japan and became a politician there. Tsuji evaded trial, but later disappeared, presumedly killed in Laos in 1961. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the general from whose headquarters the order seems to have been issued, was put on another trial in the Philippines and executed in 1946. Other staff officers, who planned the massacre, were Shigeharu Asaeda and Sōsaku Suzuki. But, as Shigeharu Asaeda was captured in Russia after the war and Sōsaku Suzuki was killed in action in 1945 before the end of the war, they were not put on trial.
The reminiscences of Saburo Kawamura were published in 1952 and, in the book, he expressed his condolences to the victims of Singapore and prayed for the repose of their souls.
Mamoru Shinozaki, a former Japanese diplomat, has been described as instrumental as key prosecution witness during the Singapore War Crimes Trial between 1946 and 1948. Shinozaki remains a controversial figure, with some blaming him for saying positive things about the accused ; views on him continue to vary, with opinions ranging from calling him the "wire-puller" of the massacre or criticizing him for "self-praise" in his autobiography to calling him a life-saving "Schindler" of Singapore.
When Singapore gained full self-government from the British colonial government in 1959, waves of anti-Japanese sentiments arose within the Chinese community and they demanded reparations and an apology from Japan. The British colonial government had demanded only war reparations for damage caused to British property during the war. The Japanese Foreign Ministry declined Singapore's request for an apology and reparations in 1963, stating that the issue of war reparations with the British had already been settled in the San Francisco Treaty in 1951 and hence with Singapore as well, which was then still a British colony.
Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew responded by saying that the British colonial government did not represent the voice of Singaporeans. In September 1963, the Chinese community staged a boycott of Japanese imports, but it lasted only seven days.
With Singapore's full independence from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, the Singapore government made another request to Japan for reparations and an apology. On 25 October 1966, Japan agreed to pay S$50 million in compensation, half of which was a grant and the rest as a loan. Japan did not make an official apology.
The remains of the victims of the Sook Ching were unearthed by locals for decades after the massacre. The most recent finding was in late-1997, when a man looking for earthworms to use as fishing bait found a skull, two gold teeth, an arm and a leg. The massacre sites of Sentosa, Changi and Punggol Point were marked as heritage sites by the National Monuments of Singapore in 1995 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Japanese occupation.

Legacy

The massacre and its post-war judicial handling by the colonial British administration incensed the Chinese community. The Discovery Channel programme commented about its historic impact on local Chinese: "They felt the Japanese spilling of so much Chinese blood on Singapore soil has given them the moral claim to the island that hasn't existed before the war". Lee Kuan Yew said on the Discovery Channel programme, "It was the catastrophic consequences of the war that changed the mindset, that my generation decided that, 'No ... this doesn't make sense. We should be able to run this as well as the British did, if not better.'" "The Asiatics had looked to them for leadership, and they had failed them."
Germaine Foo-Tan writes in an article carried on the Singapore Ministry of Defence website: