Contested Memoryscapes

The Politics of Second World War Commemoration in Singapore

Hamzah Muzaini, Brenda S.A. Yeoh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138546936
• eBook ISBN: 9781317160380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book sets itself apart from much of the burgeoning literature on war commemoration within human geography and the social sciences more generally by analysing how the Second World War (1941–45) is remembered within Singapore, unique for its potential to shed light on the manifold politics associated with the commemoration of wars not only within an Asian, but also a multiracial and multi-religious postcolonial context. By adopting a historical materialist approach, it traces the genealogy of war commemoration in Singapore, from the initial disavowal of the war by the postcolonial government since independence in 1965 to it being embraced as part of national historiography in the early 1990s apparent in the emergence since then of various memoryscapes dedicated to the event. Also, through a critical analysis of a wide selection of these memoryscapes, the book interrogates how memories of the war have been spatially and discursively appropriated today by state (and non-state) agencies as a means of achieving multiple objectives, including (but not limited to) commemoration, tourism, mourning and nation-building. And finally, the book examines the perspectives of those who engage with or use these memoryscapes in order to reveal their contested nature as fractured by social divisions of race, gender, ideology and nationality.

The substantive book chapters will be based on archival and empirical data drawn from case studies in Singapore themed along different conceptual lenses including ethnicity; gender; postcoloniality, tourism and postmodernity; personal mourning; transnational remembrances and politics; and the preservation of original sites, stories and artefacts of war.

Collectively, they speak to and work towards shedding insights to the one overarching question: 'How is the Second World War commemorated in postcolonial Singapore and what are some of the issues, politics and contestations which have accompanied these efforts to presence the war today, particularly as they are spatially and materially played out via different types of memoryscapes?' The book also distinguishes itself from previous works written on war commemoration in Singapore, mainly by social and military historians, particularly through its adoption of a geographical agenda that gives attention to issues of politics of space as it relates to remembrance and representations of memory.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Fall of Singapore and the Japanese Occupation […] was a shattering experience for all Singaporeans. Although the event took place more than 50 years ago, younger Singaporeans would have heard stories told to us by our parents and grandparents, of relatives and friends who were brutalized, tortured and killed during that period. […I]t marked a turning point in the history of Asia. It completely destroyed the myth of the superiority of the white man. Without that myth, the British Empire and all the other colonial empires could not hold together. Hence, a direct consequence of the Second World War was the wave of de-colonization around the world. The war also created an indigenous nationalism which in the end gave birth to independent Singapore.

– Brigadier-General (BG) George Yeo, then Minister for Information and the Arts, speech at the launch of The Price of Peace (MITA 1997: 1)¹

A War Forgotten and Then Remembered

In Singapore, the years immediately following 1995 – the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War for the former British colony – were marked by what Wong (2001: 235) calls ‘an orgy of commemorations’ which included official state ceremonies as well as privately-led commemorative events, history exhibitions, book launches, and the setting up of new memorials in various shapes and forms all over the island. Indeed, apart from 15 February 1942, the fateful day when Singapore became an occupied territory of the Japanese, the other salient date in the nation’s war history was 12 September 1945, when Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, accepted the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, represented by General Seishiro Itagaki who signed the instrument of surrender on behalf of General Hisaichi Terauchi, Marshall of the Imperial Japanese Army, at what is now the City Hall (then known as the Municipal Building, also where Singapore’s independence was to be declared two decades later). This marked the end of war conditions and a three-year period depicted as ‘demonic, violent, ruthless, arbitrary, and almost devoid of compassion, consideration and benevolence’ (Murfett et al. 1999: 248). Beyond its immediate significance, and as with other nations in the region seeking independence from (Western) colonial masters – such as Indonesia from the Dutch, and Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from the French – the end of the war was seen as casting the die that would lead to Singapore’s release from foreign (in this case, British) rule, or in Wong’s (2001: 223) words, ‘liberation from the predatory fangs of Western colonialism’.

When the British colonial masters so easily lost the supposedly ‘impregnable fortress’ that was Singapore to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, ‘the myth of the superiority of the white man’, as BG George Yeo indicated above, was shattered. Out of the ashes of bitter disappointment that many locals in Singapore felt arose the awakening of nationalist consciousness and the desire for self-reliance, paving the way for Singapore to sever colonial apron strings, gain its freedom, and become the success story it is today. This storyline has become a historical fact that Singaporeans are told never to forget. As the then Deputy Prime Minister BG Lee Hsien Loong (now Prime Minister) said during a memorial ceremony that was held as part of the anniversary year (The Straits Times 13 September 1995):

Singapore must never forget the war as it was very much a part of present Singapore. Without the war […], there would not have been the period of [Japanese] rule, Singapore’s subsequent independence, and progress to what it is today.

The large-scale commemorative events of 1995 – which was replicated in 2002 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Fall of Singapore – alongside the insertion, over the years, of dominant narratives of the war (and pertinent lessons to be learnt from it) within the school curricula, annual remembrances, and the establishment of museums, interpretive centres, memorials, monuments, historical storyboards and plaques, speak eloquently to how the Second World War has become a significant episode in the ideologically scripted master narrative threaded into Singapore’s historiography (see Chapter 2). The overarching message to be delivered was reflected in the words of the then Minister for Defence, Teo Chee Hean, at the opening of the Memories at Old Ford Factory museum on 16 February 2006 (National Heritage Board 2006):

Singaporeans must know that we should never take our nation’s peace and stability for granted, and that we ourselves must be responsible for our own defence. Without security as a strong foundation, we cannot develop and progress as a nation.

Thus, it would seem that not only is the collective experience of war productively and nationally embraced and etched into the public memory of Singapore, it is from this memory that a grand narrative of national beginning and destiny was birthed.

In this light, one might be forgiven for thinking that the war has always had an important place in Singapore’s national history. Indeed, it would appear that Singapore (along with perhaps the Philippines and what is today Myanmar) is somewhat of an anomaly in Southeast Asia, for the war has been generally accompanied by silence and non-remembrance in most countries in the region, causing historian Anthony Reid (cited by Wong 2001: 218) to note that ‘[t]here is a puzzling discrepancy between what is known to be a profound sea change that the Japanese era represents in the history of Southeast Asia, and the absence of public commemoration of this fact’. However, this observation needs to be tempered by the fact that for a long time after Singapore became independent in 1965, the war was indeed publicly forgotten by the young nation. Acts of memorialising the war, at least at the national level, were so scarce that ‘hardly any traces of the Japanese Occupation can be detected […]; indeed it would seem that its memory has been deliberately silenced’ (Wong 2001: 222). For sure the war became a casualty to what has been referred to as a ‘collective lobotomy’ (Rajaratnam, cited in Kwa 1999: 51) of the nation’s past, characteristic of the early independent years.

This form of national forgetting in Singapore was made starker by the presence of other instances of war commemoration spearheaded by foreign rememberers, such as in the form of the Cenotaph (initially established in the 1920s to honour the dead of the First World War although later symbolically laden with memories of the Second World War dead) (Figure 1.1), and the Kranji War Cemetery and Memorial to collectively remember Commonwealth men and women sacrificed during the two wars, and where regular ceremonies (such as during ANZAC Day) to commemorate the war dead of specific foreign nations were held.² While the Singapore state was involved in the development of Fort Siloso – a battery of guns on the offshore island of Sentosa which played a marginal role in the war – in the 1970s, this effort was not so much a token of remembrance but a means to supplement the stock of tourist attractions in Singapore (see Chapter 6). The only exception in the immediate post-independence years was the setting up of the Civilian War Memorial on 15 February 1967 – led by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce (and with the help of the state which contributed the land and matched donations dollar for dollar) – to honour the memories of locals who died during Japanese-led massacres.³ By and large, however, the newly-minted state in the early decades looked forward rather than backward, favouring the ‘flattening out of history’ in order to frame urban development around a ‘progressive historical narrative’ (Holden 2008: 351). Even so, during these years, the war period of 1942–45 was still very vividly remembered especially by those who lived through the Japanese Occupation (Blackburn and Hack 2012). An example of these non-official efforts is the establishment of a memorial cross in the grounds of the Singapore General Hospital commemorating a group of students from the King Edward VII College of Medicine killed during the Second World War (Figure 1.2).

Even when official war commemoration began to gain momentum in Singapore in the 1980s – primarily in the form of the Changi Prison Chapel and Museum which was set up by the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board (now the Singapore Tourism Board) to remember the experiences of prisoners-of-war (POWs) incarcerated in the eastern part of Singapore – it was still predominantly conceived as a measure of boosting tourism and in response to demands by foreign war veterans and their families for more to be done, materially and symbolically, to recapture the war years (Figure 1.3). In fact, it was not until the 1990s that the Second World War in Singapore entered into the official narration of the identity of the nation as a vehicle to bind the multiethnic population and forge links between people and the place they live in. By the turn of the century, the trauma of Singapore’s war past had become a major plank in the reconstruction of the national self. As the then Deputy Prime Minister Dr Tony Tan, now president of Singapore (cited in The Straits Times 16 February 2002) said, ‘A state without a sense of its past can never become a nation. The nation becomes stronger only when it has a soul, cultural pride and historical memory’.

Figure 1.1 The Cenotaph in Singapore

Source: Photograph by authors.

Figure 1.2 Memorial cross at the Singapore General Hospital

Source: Photograph by authors

Figure 1.3 Changi Prison Chapel, established in 1988

Source: Singapore Tourist Promotion Board collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.

Fast forward to the present and one is brought to a time when the war is now visibly imprinted onto Singapore’s official state agenda, the public consciousness of its people and the surrounding material landscapes. Through an examination of war remembrance in Singapore, as well as the detailed analysis of select memoryscapes that have emerged to accomplish the work of pressing the memories of the Second World War into the service of nation-building in Singapore, this book takes up the challenge of developing an understanding of the genealogy and cultural politics associated with a traumatic war that was first officially forgotten and then remembered in Singapore in the course of the nation-state’s short history of 50 years. To aid us in this task, we first turn to a general review of the burgeoning literature on the subject of memory and the politics of remembering to provide conceptual grounding.

Conceptualising Memory and Constructing Memoryscapes

All experience is individual in that collectivities do not have minds, or memories either, though we often speak as if they did. Yet it is also true that individuals are nothing without the prior existence of the collectivities that sustain them, the cultural traditions and the communicative practices that position the self in relation to the social and natural worlds. That much is obvious. (Kenny 1999: 421)

‘Memory’, at its most basic, is a specific way of looking at the past, a noun for which ‘to remember’ (or the action of producing memory) is the verb, the ‘doing’ (O’Meally and Fabre 1994). Collective memory therefore represents the shared product of individuals – acting as part of groups at different scales such as the global community, the nation, an ethnic group or the family – remembering together. The concept of memory is considered by some scholars to be the product of social processes operating within societies, forged through some common experience shared and sustained among members and thus more than just the individual properties of a subjective mind (see Schwartz 1982). As Maurice Halbwachs (1992: 38) puts it, ‘[i]t is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’. Therefore, facilitated by the sharing of traditions, customs and language, individuals are conditioned to remember only what the society allows. Shared representations of the past that are held by ‘memory communities’ thus provide frameworks around which individual memories are regulated and made to conform (Jedlowski 2001).

Other scholars have argued that such a conception of collective memory has ceded too much to the ability of ‘the social’ to determine recollections (Winter and Sivan 1999). While there is currency in that memories are socially contextualised, and structural pressures do play facilitative and constraining roles to memory-making, it is noted that collectivised memories can never truly subsume personal pasts (see Muzaini 2015). As Olick (1999: 338) says, ‘social frameworks shape what individuals remember, but ultimately it is only individuals who do the remembering’. Thus, ‘memory’ here is a function of both the psychological self that is influenced by personal experiences, and one’s mental and emotional state of mind, as well as social forces that operate within society (Murakami and Middleton 2006). To suggest otherwise is to commit what Birth (2006: 175) refers to as ‘psychological’ or ‘cultural’ reductionism that oversimplifies memory’s complexity. This suggests a midpoint where the extent that collective memory is constituted by the individual or the group is really a matter of degree, where ‘the articulation of personal experience and larger social histories has systematic effects on recall as well as the personal meanings of historical events’ (White 2006: 327, original emphasis).

Integral to understanding the shape of collective memory within the present is the question of why there is the need to remember. Scholars have demonstrated how individuals and memory communities remember for a varied number of reasons, such as to perpetuate identities (Gillis 1994), for political legitimation (Whelan 2002), as loci for collective mourning (Patraka 2001), as tourism attractions (Shackley 2001), or for the critical re-appraisals of the past (Murakami and Middleton 2006). These represent how remembrances are influenced by how they serve our needs today so that remembering attends not just to what has happened ‘but serious matters in the present’ (Bodnar 1992: 38). As Jelin and Kaufman (2000: 106) put it, ‘Memory is, in fact, part of the symbolic and political struggle of each time, of each “present”’. In this paradigm, ‘why remember’ mediates and impacts upon the ‘what’ – shape, colour, and interpretation – of the past. In other words, the past is ultimately contemporarily manifested; it is composed and choreographed in a way as to achieve specific goals in the here and now, where aspects that do not align are modified or, worse, cast off.

Remembering entails recalling a time in history – its people, its geographies, its significance. Yet, as Andreas Huyssen (2000) reminds us, where there is remembering, there is also the tendency to forget, always threatening to undermine memory-work. How then does one avert forgetting? Francis Yates (1966: 12) cites how, during the Renaissance, memory was sustained by classical orators through the humanist tradition of ars memoria, or ‘arts of memory’, of picturing an imaginary space filled with places (loci) and images in their minds in order to help them to remember speeches. Pierre Nora (1989: 13) too cites how memory making in the past tends to reside in milieu de mémoire where the past is perpetuated via ‘unspoken traditions, in the individual body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories’, that is, in the body and mind as veritable storehouses of memory. However, given the decline in historical consciousness, the acceleration of time, and increased media influences, external aids to memory have been ‘enlisted as bulwarks against obsolescence, to counter our deep anxiety about speed of change and ever shrinking horizons of time and space’ (Huyssen 2000: 28). Gillis (1994: 17) claims that remembrance is now difficult to achieve ‘without access to mementos, images, and physical sites to objectify their memory’, and Nora (1989: 13) argues how milieu of mémoires have largely given way to lieux de mémoires to mitigate memory loss, where ‘true memory’ is replaced by ‘modern memory’ which relies on ‘the materiality of trace, the immediacy of the recording [and] visibility of the image’. Young (1993: 5) even went as far as to say that, by privileging externalised memory aids, it is as if we have intently sought to divest ourselves of ‘the obligation to remember’, where the work of ensuring the past is not forgotten has been relegated less to our mental and cognitive capacities, and more to the memory triggers extended by structures of stone and plinth.

Inspired by this, and largely influenced by developments within the ‘new’ framework of cultural geography where ‘landscapes’ are understood as symbolic ‘texts’ to be read for the meanings and ideologies inherent in them (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987), geographers have focused their attention on how the past has been given material form as preserved battlefields, museums, monuments, street-names, plaques, statuaries, and war cemeteries, among others, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Lists of Figures and Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The History of War Remembrance in Singapore
• 3 'Localising' War Representations at the Changi Chapel and Museum
• 4 The Reflections at Bukit Chandu and the Politics of ‘Race’
• 5 'Rescaling' War Memories at the Kranji War Cemetery and Memorial
• 6 Intimations of Postmodernity at Fort Siloso as a Site of Dark Tourism
• 7 Everyday War Memories at the Old Ford Factory Museum
• 8 Memoryscapes of War in Everyday Public Spaces in Singapore
• 9 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index