Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Read online

  A Civilian Prison

  From October 1942 until the British returned in September 1945, Pudu Prison was used solely for civilian prisoners. In October 1943, following a crack-down in Singapore (known as the Double Tenth – it followed a commando raid on the harbour which the Japanese believed had been assisted by spies), the Japanese started to round up possible ‘agents’ and pro-British sympathisers elsewhere in Malaya. In October 1943, for example, nine members of the Talalla family - a prominent Kuala Lumpur family of Singhalese extraction - were rounded up and placed in solitary confinement, where they remained for the rest of the war. Their crime was to have been a family known to be particularly pro-British: two of the older sons were then flying with the RAF in Britain. In Pudu, the father was tortured though he and the rest of the family survived the war. One son, Richard Talalla, later became a prominent High Court Judge and thereby enjoyed the rare experience of sentencing the guilty to the same prison where he had spent his boyhood years.

  As conditions deteriorated in Malaya, and lawlessness increased, the Japanese proved predictably robust in their sentencing policy. Soon the main wings of Pudu Prison were full to overflowing with civilian prisoners. Towards the end of the war, prison numbers escalated hugely, from 876 in April 1944 to 1,165 by October. Mortality rates were also staggeringly high. 74 prisoners died in February 1944, 63 in March, and 74 in April. In January, 1944 there were 108 ‘political prisoners’ held in Pudu, 31 of whom would be dead by April. Death was largely down to communicable diseases - TB, beri-beri, diarrhoea – made worse by starvation. In April 1944, the Food Control Department announced that the prisoner allowance was to be reduced from two to one gangtang per prisoner, per week. This was challenged by the prison authorities and eventually a compromise was reached at one and half gangtang. But by 1945 the Food Control Department was no longer delivering anything like its agreed quota and ‘the prison budget was so low that the prison could not afford to buy anything to take the place of rice’. Food Control Department figures for September 1944 were cited to show that the prison only received 37 per cent of the monthly allowance of rice. In the main blocks of Pudu Prison, starvation and disease rather than torture and execution killed about half the prisoners incarcerated by the Japanese.

  Conditions in the prison revealed such as ‘gross degree of callousness’ that after the war a set of senior prison officers were charged in the Kuala Lumpur Small War Crimes Trials that ‘between 1 October 1944 and 15 August 1945 while holding their posts they were... responsible not only for their own acts of omission but also the general conditions in Pudu gaol’. The five arraigned officials pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the charges levelled against them and sought to exonerate themselves by showing how difficult conditions had become in the last years of the war, and in particular how scarce was food and medicine. From February 1944 until the surrender in August 1945, the Prison Governor was Tobita Shigeo. His defence cited contemporaneous prison records in support of their man, though they hardly reflect well on him or the conditions inside the prison. The ‘Monthly Hospital Progress Report’ for November 1944 noted ‘Health conditions in the Maimuaya (hospital) were fairly satisfactory [emphasis added]... There were 43 deaths compared with 38 for the previous month.’ Given that the average number of inmates at this time was around one thousand, this meant that about five per cent of prisoners were dying each month. Put another way, a prisoner incarcerated in Pudu Prison at this stage of the war with a sentence of over a year stood a less than even chance of surviving. This was deemed ‘fairly satisfactory’. Shigeo only received a three-year sentence, probably because a local warden testified that he had tried to get more food for the prisoners, and even managed to get them a regular supply of soap.

  Two officials, Nakamura Tsurumatsu and Abe Masahiro, however, were to hang, appropriately enough from the Pudu Prison gallows. Both were found to have personally indulged in acts of violence leading to the deaths of prisoners. One local warder, for example, noted that Tsurumatsu was ‘very fond of beating prisoners….[he] caught a Chinese prisoner idling in the rope making yard. The man was weak and could hardly stand and he was beaten by the accused with the sheath sword. He was left lying in the yard till closing time of the prisoners. This prisoner did not come out of his cell the next morning….and died within ten days to a fortnight of that’. The absolute number of deaths linked to Pudu Prison during the war years will never be known, but when European POWs, Kempetei victims and civilian prisoners are all accounted for, the prison must have been centrally involved in the deaths of many hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent victims.

  Chapter Ten

  Comfort Houses and the Case of Doris Van der Straaten

  As with all garrison towns, the Japanese brought with them to Kuala Lumpur the ‘comfort house’ system of military brothels. These were intended to meet the sexual needs of the troops and were an integral component of the Japanese military machine. It was hoped that by offering such facilities that its soldiers would be less likely to rape, and would also keep away from local brothels with the attendant risk of venereal disease. The comfort house system was strictly regulated and run on ‘military’ lines. There were different facilities for officers and men, and different tariffs and rules. On the whole, the officers paid more but were allowed a longer stay and were able, if they wished and upon extra payment, to stay the night. The troops, however, were generally restricted to daytime visits. The administration issued condoms and instituted health checks on the girls. In July 1943, 10,000 condoms were issued to comfort houses in Selangor, though this paled in comparison with the 30,000 condoms issued that month to comfort houses in Penang. Condoms, however, did not prevent a major increase in venereal disease, nor pregnancy amongst many of the girls.

  As early as March 1942, the ‘Southern Army’ had requested the help of its counterpart army in Taiwan to recruit and dispatch women to Malaya and Borneo. Advertisements appeared in Taiwan’s Chinese language newspaper Shonan Nippo seeking ‘hostesses’ from all ethnic groups from the age of seventeen to twenty-eight to work in Malaya, and promising payment of $150 per month. A classified advertisement in the Malay Mail of November 1942, offering unspecified employment opportunities for Malayan girls in Thailand, may have been a similar ruse, this time in support of the Japanese army in Thailand and Burma. Indian conscript workers on the Thai-Burma railway later recalled meeting girls from Malaya working in comfort houses deep in the jungles of Burma.

  Kuala Lumpur, being a major garrison town, soon hosted a large number of comfort houses and while some Korean and Taiwanese women were either lured or coerced to work there, the vast majority of the girls were local. One prominent comfort house was a large villa in Jalan Ampang, which was used as a ‘training’ centre and a place to ‘break in’ new girls. In the centre of the city a single-storey brick bungalow behind the Chinese Assembly Hall and the Tai Sun Hotel opposite Pudu Prison were both used as comfort houses though the largest facility was a set of buildings known as Ngan Ngan off Circular Road. According to one source, by August 1942 sixteen houses had been established in Kuala Lumpur employing about 150 women. Generally the girls came from poor backgrounds but the Japanese recruited or press-ganged selectively. There was little or no compunction in seizing Chinese girls but because of the political sensitivities, there was a greater wariness in recruiting Malay and Indian girls. The majority of girls in Kuala Lumpur, approximately 120, were Chinese. A former comfort house girl noted that in her home ‘we had eight Chinese, three Malays who were from Sumatra, two Koreans and one Thai. I never once saw any Malays from Malaya, nor were there any Indian comfort girls’. In Kuala Lumpur, as in the rest of Malaya but unlike in the Dutch East Indies, no European women were pressed into service for the Japanese comfort house system, though the case of Doris van der Straaten – described later – explores some of the ambiguities of coerced sexual relationships with senior officials.

  A local Chinese girl, who later took the working name of ‘Momoko’, remembe
red for the rest of her life the day – 22 March 1942 – when two truck loads of Japanese soldiers arrived at her village in Serdang on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. She was barely sixteen at the time, and was busy cooking in the kitchen. She was caught unawares, unable to flee to safety in the nearby rubber plantation as Japanese troops, reportedly helped by a local Chinese man, entered the house and seized her brother. She was then raped and in the struggle was kicked in the head by one of the soldiers. Worse still, her mother was raped and then murdered in front of her. Along with several other girls from the village, she was then loaded into one of the military trucks and driven to Kuala Lumpur where she was first kept at the villa in Jalan Ampang. As part of the initiation and breaking-in process, she was held in a room and repeatedly raped for her first month of confinement and allowed no contact with the other girls from her village. Following this she was taken to the Tai Sun Hotel in Jalan Pudu where she was set to work. On a typical day she was expected to service between ten and twenty soldiers and failure to comply was met with beatings.

  Later, ‘Momoko’ was transferred to the larger complex at Ngan Ngan where she continued to work until the Japanese capitulation in August 1945. She later recalled the casual beatings and punching that accompanied the visits of many of her customers. Throughout this ordeal she had no knowledge of her brother, who had been seized and taken away on the same day as her abduction. In an act of some - albeit twisted - clemency, having heard that the Japanese had executed many Chinese youths and left their heads on poles at crossroads across Kuala Lumpur, ‘Momoko’ was allowed out with an escort to see if her brother had met this fate – though her testimony fails to record if she ever found him. This brothel was run by a Chinese madam, Choi Chau, and her husband Ah Yong. When news of the Japanese surrender came, the comfort women reportedly seized this pair and drowned them.

  Following the Japanese surrender all the girls were told to flee, presumably fearful that they would be seen as collaborators. ‘Momoko’ initially returned to her village at Serdang, but was spat upon and chastised by her former neighbours for collaborating with the Japanese. With the help of an uncle she fled to Seremban and anonymity. Others were not so fortunate and one eye-witness account noted that after the MPAJA entered Kuala Lumpur following the Japanese surrender ‘comfort women for the Japanese had their heads shaved, then stripped and beaten. Many were just shot or bludgeoned’. This was a time of revenge, when even innocent victims of Japanese brutality were singled out for further retribution.

  For those comfort women that survived, this was not the end of their trauma. After the war, ‘Momoko’ kept her wartime employment a dark secret until she found some release in the late 1990s when she recounted her story to a sympathetic researcher. By this time she was in her 70s and had held her wartime trauma a secret for over half a century. The testimony of these enslaved women, many of whom were little more than girls at the time, has been little heard. The social stigma of their lives as prostitutes meant that after the war the vast majority preferred to hide and veil their involvement – though often at huge personal psychological cost. Their understandable reluctance to come forward, however, was shaken in the late 1990s when groups of former comfort women in other parts of Asia chose to go public and demand compensation from the Japanese authorities. In Malaysia, the Chinese political party, the MCA, reportedly received many hundreds of letters following an appeal for testimonies but the matter was quietly suppressed by the authorities. Thus the true extent and witness of these many hundreds of women will now never be properly heard.

  Doris van der Straaten - A Coerced Mistress

  It has generally been held that in Malaya, unlike in the Dutch East Indies, European women were not used as the sexual slaves of Japanese officers. The tragic case of Doris van der Straaten, however, questions this assumption while raising the difficulty of determining the fine line between coercion and complicity. In the middle of 1942, Doris became the concubine of Colonel Koda, the commander of the Kuala Lumpur garrison. After the war, and despite the fact that she was eventually murdered by the Kempetei, as a consequence of having been his ‘mistress’ she was viewed by family and friends with shame; someone who brought a slur to the family’s reputation. But once her story is fully explored, far from suggesting that she was an immoral sexual opportunist, she emerges as someone who suffered incredible vicissitude and hardship, including believing – incorrectly as it happens – that her husband had been butchered by the Japanese at the outset of the Malaya campaign. If she did become Colonel Koda’s mistress, it was under far from natural circumstances. Rather, the relationship smacked of manipulation and the exploitation of an extraordinarily vulnerable individual. In contrast to the shame in which she was later held by her family, in her final and very one-sided confrontation with the Kempetei, Doris van der Straaten revealed incredible, if ultimately tragic, bravery and defiance against the odds.

  Doris van der Straaten was an Australian national. She was born ‘Doris’ Patricia Dulcima but on marriage became Doris Heath and had two daughters. It is not clear if she was a widow or divorcee, but in Australia she met and married Philip van der Straaten, a mining engineer and member of the prominent Ceylonese Eurasian Burgher clan. Marriage across the ‘racial divide’ was not common and must have required particular commitment and social bravery. Be that as it may, at the outset of the war Doris had accompanied Philip to the Pinyok tin mine located near Yala in southern Thailand, where he worked as a shift engineer. The mine was in the direct line of the first wave of Japanese assault troops as they pushed inland from the nearby landing beaches. Given that this was in Thailand, the European managers and engineers were amongst the first ‘enemy civilians’ the Japanese encountered. On 10 December 1941, just two days after the invasion, Japanese soldiers and Thai police rounded up the twenty-seven European mine employees and wives and detained them in a bungalow at Kampong Toh, close to the mine site. After one day, six European ‘neutrals’ were removed to a second bungalow but were replaced by eight captured Indian Army soldiers, Hindus from the Dogra Regiment that had been fighting hard to resist the Japanese on the beachheads.

  During the night of 13 December, the Japanese attacked the defenceless prisoners. Two hand-grenades were thrown into the living room and a machine-gun was fired from beneath the raised wooden floor of the bungalow into the living room above. They then burst in, firing and bayoneting indiscriminately. Bodies fell everywhere. L.S. Jones, a New Zealand mine engineer, survived the assault and later recorded that ‘after finishing the Japanese withdrew, piled into a lorry and drove towards the border at Bentong’. Jones noted that ‘strangely enough it appears that about only half the people in the room were killed outright’. But the rest scattered. Philip van der Straaten ‘went off by himself’ and was later, erroneously, reported by local villagers as having died while ‘Mrs van der Straaten played dead and would not answer’. Jones recalled that ‘after the bayoneting and when the Japs had left… Mrs van der Straaten teamed up with another survivor, the Assistant Mine Manager, Mr. Peters’. Together they approached local Malay villagers who took them in and tended to them.

  Following the trauma of the ‘Kampung Toh massacre’, Doris van der Straaten and Peters walked ‘hundreds of miles through the jungle without shoes...’ and then ‘remained in the upper Perak jungles for a total of five and a half months living most of the time with a Chinese squatter who helped them in every way...’. But the conditions were brutal and suffering from ‘the big three’ - beriberi, dysentery and fever - they were eventually forced to give themselves up. Doris was initially incarcerated in Taiping Gaol. Other escapees from the Kampong massacre also found themselves there. These included L.S. Jones, who advised her - on the basis of what he had been told by villagers - that her husband Philip had died in the massacre. This must have been an extraordinary blow after all her suffering and sickness. Doris van der Straaten was the only female prisoner in Taiping Prison and early on she was offered the opportunity to move into a
nearby Convent of the Sisters of Mercy. But she preferred to stay in the prison. She was receiving adequate medical treatment and had been able to take solace and support from a group of Catholic La Salle Brother missionaries who had been detained alongside other European civilians at Taiping Prison.

  Doris eventually came to the predatory attentions of a senior Japanese military officer, Colonel Koda, who arranged for her to be transferred to the nearby Taiping hospital. It was at this point that she became detached from the other internees and prisoners. In July 1942, they were sent to Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur. Doris, however, was not part of this group. At some stage in late 1942, Colonel Koda moved to Kuala Lumpur where he had become commander of the ‘Western Garrison’ and an officer of considerable authority and power. He then arranged for Doris van der Straaten to be delivered to his villa off Circular Road in Kuala Lumpur, where she lodged and became his mistress. To cover his back, Koda claimed publicly that she was Italian, and thereby from an Axis power.

  In Kuala Lumpur, views on Koda varied. Amongst his responsibilities were the POWs housed at Pudu Prison. One senior prisoner, Major Oliver North, viewed him in a generally benign way and noted that after the failed escape attempt, Koda had reassured the remaining prisoners that they need ‘have no fears of general reprisals’ though noting the need ‘to impress upon our troops that other escapes would have serious repercussions’. But another POW, Kenyon Archer of the FMSVF Armoured Car Unit, was told by a Japanese interpreter that Koda was a corrupt and dissolute individual and was held in contempt by his senior officers because he was embezzling money allocated for the prisoners’ rations. This was certainly the view that prevailed because eventually reports of Koda’s criminal behaviour came to the attention of the Kempetei. During their investigation, his ‘mistress’, Doris van der Straaten, came into their focus. Though publicly described as Italian there were clear suspicions that she was not, and once it was established that she was in fact an Australian the Kempetei rationalised that she was most likely a ‘British spy’. In August 1943, she was arrested and taken to the Kempetei headquarters at the Lee Rubber Building where she was handed to Lt. Shuzi Murakami for interrogation. The sequence of events that follow it remain controversial, but what is certain is that after a few hours in Murakami’s hands, Doris van der Straaten’s body lay broken on the ground, having fallen over one hundred feet from an upstairs window.