Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Read online

  For the vast majority, however, the exchange passed them by and they spent the war behind the wire at Purana Qila. One resilient detainee, Omori Kichijiro - a rubber buyer and merchant based at Port Swettenham - noted that life at ‘Pamakila (sic)… on an Indian diet of curries, lots of beans and gallons of tea was not uncomfortable’. But Omori’s recollection – made many years later – is a singular one, and perhaps he was of a particularly stoical nature, because most reports stress the hardship and the loss of life at the camp. Following the dire conditions and bad publicity of the early months, conditions in the camp improved and from 1943 the death rate decreased, though it remained a harsh and uncompromising environment. Unfortunately, with incomplete records, the fate of the detainees in the last years of the war and their treatment after the Japanese surrender has proven impossible to track.

  Chapter Eight

  The Kempetei, Sook Chin and the Reign of Terror

  Arriving with the Japanese military was the insidious presence of the Kempetei, or the Japanese military security police. The Kempetei was part of the army’s legal department and enjoyed semi-independent status within the military. It was tasked with identifying threats, rooting out subversion and gaining intelligence on Japan’s enemies. It was, in practice, the Japanese Gestapo and was feared by regular troops as well as the civilian population. Individual Kempetei units were relatively small – the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor ‘buntai’ (cadre) was sixty strong – which was on a par with the other main states. But these small detachments had an influence and impact out of all proportion to their size. Indeed, the defining legacy and reputation of the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Kuala Lumpur can be attributed to the often psychotic and brutal behaviour of these men. By introducing a ‘climate of fear’, the Kempetei ensured that the Japanese were rarely troubled or threatened during their occupation of Malaya. Until the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the communist ‘Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army’ (MPAJA) generally held back from attacking Japanese troops (aware of the disproportionate response that would be meted out to the civil population) and contented themselves with a campaign of assassination against collaborators and co-optees. The Kempetei’s strategy therefore permitted a stretched military to avoid a serious internal insurgency, though the terror brought the longer term cost of alienating the vast majority of the people of Malaya, some of whom – had the Japanese been more accommodating – might have offered them positive and proactive support.

  Sook Chin

  The first targets for the Kempetei were Chinese communists and members of Chinese organisations, such as the Kuomintang and the China Relief Fund, that had sent money, men and materiel to support the anti-Japanese forces in Manchuria. The Kempetei arrived with blacklists drawn from pre-war intelligence gathering. Many of the more prominent activists had fled but from March 1942 the Chinese community of Kuala Lumpur, alongside those of the main cities and towns of Malaya, was to feel the full force of Japanese retribution. The campaign took the name Sook Chin, which literally means ‘purification by cleansing’. This sinister euphemism provided a bogus rationale for a campaign of terror designed to cow, terrify and punish.

  The Sook Chin included a huge financial penalty. Across Malaya and Singapore the Japanese government sought to raise a mighty $50 million in reparations from the Chinese community. Each state was allocated a sum to raise. Selangor’s contribution was $10 million, which reflected its wealth and size; it was the highest single sum for a state in Malaya and on a par with Singapore. The job of raising the money was handed to officials of the hapless Overseas Chinese Association, instantly branding them as Japanese stooges and later leaving some of them as targets for revenge killings. The fine hit the conservative business sector the hardest, which was the one part of the community that might, plausibly, have made some accommodation with the Japanese. In practice, such was the resistance that less than half the overall sum was raised. To save face, the Japanese Yokohama Specie Bank stepped in and offered to cover the remainder. This defused the problem but did nothing to restore the damage to relations. In the view of the Japanese police chief, Colonel Keijiro Otani, the fine was the single most counter-productive measure imposed by the Gunseibu (Japanese government) on the Chinese community.

  The Round-Up

  After a few short weeks, the tracking down of those named on early blacklists gave way to a more general trawl for opponents. On the whole, and with good reason, the Japanese focused on young Chinese men and most of their victims were aged 16-35. They were especially anxious to clamp down on gang members, so a tattoo or a gang attribution could be enough to result in an arrest. The most common technique was to use spies and agents within the community to identify hotheads and agitators. Starting in March 1942, and then in successive waves later in the year and during 1943, the Kempetei organised a set of round-ups. Following a pattern adopted elsewhere in Malaya, Chinese districts of central Kuala Lumpur were sealed off by regular troops, and the inhabitants were forced to line the kaki lima sidewalks. Kempetei soldiers then swept through the empty properties looking for those that might be hiding. Meanwhile, the civilian population stood silently by the road side, often for hours, while Kempetei officers walked slowly and deliberately down the middle of the road, stopping to look and question possible suspects. They were usually accompanied by an informant wearing a tall, white, peaked hood, with slits for the eyes, who would move through the silent crowd, occasionally identifying a claimed communist or anti-Japanese militant. These hapless individuals were then seized and thrown into a prison truck. Each trawl could bring in over a hundred detainees who were initially sent to the Kempetei headquarters for preliminary interrogation and thereafter to Pudu Prison.

  The Kempetei

  The Kuala Lumpur Kempetei was based at the Lee Rubber Building in the centre of the city, though they had subsidiary bases elsewhere in the city and throughout Selangor. There was no attempt to hide its use of the building; indeed its central and prominent position seemed almost deliberately designed to flaunt the Kempetei’s importance and inviolability. For the first years of their occupation the Kuala Lumpur Kempetei was led by Major Keiichi Hirati, a Manchurian war veteran. On the whole, it had a much higher proportion of NCOS and junior officers than a regular army unit; the sixty-strong Kuala Lumpur contingent, for example, had 25 NCOs. It had a supporting cast of local staff, including drivers, cleaners, cooks and even a full-time barber. The Kempetei also used Formosans (Taiwanese) to act as interpreters and interrogators; their violence and ‘intermediary’ position between the Japanese and the local Chinese community earning them particular hatred and animosity.

  To provide information, the Kempetei ran a network of sources and agents. A post-war interrogation of a Kuala Lumpur-based officer produced a list of twenty-six ‘agents’, almost all of them young Chinese men aged 18-35 living in central Kuala Lumpur (there was just one Malay - Abu Bakar from Kampung Baru). It is not difficult to see how the Kempetei recruited so easily within the Chinese community – an offer of release and co-operation against the prospect of continued interrogation and torture was, for many, an easy and understandable choice. But the quality of the agents was suspect, and they often brought their own petty dislikes and jealousies to the task of identifying ‘anti-Japanese elements’. Moreover, by September 1945 acting as a Japanese spy had become a decidedly dangerous game. About half of those named on this list were recorded as either ‘killed by bandits’ or ‘missing, presumed dead’.

  Block B Pudu Prison

  After arrest and interrogation at the Kempetei headquarters, prisoners were sent to Pudu Prison where the Kempetei controlled Block B, a self-contained compund at the back of the prison. This was, as later war crime trials would amply testify, a fetid, unsanitary place of horror. The Japanese proved masters of psychological torture. Until their departure in October 1942, nearby British POWs in the main section of the prison would hear Chinese detainees wailing each night in despair. A favourite trick of the Kempetei wa
s to announce that the next morning one inmate from each cell would be taken away for execution – and then to follow through on the threat. The sound of terrified prisoners – each a potential victim – strayed each night across the dividing wall.

  Giving evidence in a post-war trial of prison officials, one local orderly noted that ‘The political prisoners waiting trial in B Block also known as hell block, were only permitted to have a bath once a month, they were allowed no exercise or sunlight and were not admitted into the prison hospital when ill. They were left to die in their cells.’ Another witness, Tan Kan Kun, was a locally-employed warder and a former police inspector who helped keep the records for Block B. He noted that ‘This Block had never been washed out – no washing whatsoever, and the smell in this block was stinking. Whenever I visited this Block I had to tie a handkerchief around my nose and food provided to this block was pushed in through a hole under the door.’ The witness would recall that the Kempetei would ‘tie up prisoners of the prison and then beat them with a stick… lasting two or three hours… some of these who were badly beaten I have seen the dead bodies of these a few days later’.

  The Bukit Jalil Estate Massacre

  Many of those caught in the round-ups survived the hell of Pudu Prison but were then taken away for execution. One witness claimed that ‘several thousand males, mostly Chinese, were taken to the gaol as a result of the Japs house-to-house search on 6th of March 1942. Some were released but more than 1000 detained and nothing has been heard of them’. This claim is backed by evidence uncovered in March 1946 when Captain Grieve of the British War Crimes Unit went to Bukit Jalil Estate on the edge of Kuala Lumpur ‘accompanied by the penghulu and ketuas [headmen] of the neighbouring kampong’. An estate clerk, S.P. Pillai, confirmed that at dawn one morning in mid-March 1942, ‘seven lorries filled with prisoners, some of whom were Chinese, with Japanese guards and accompanied by a staff car flying a yellow flag [a General’s car] drove up to the estate. The estate workers hid inside and the prisoners - estimated at around one hundred - were taken into the young rubber. There were no sounds or shots. Sentries were then posted round the clerk’s bungalow and the estate coolies prevented from approaching the area. After approximately ¾ hour or longer the sentries were withdrawn and the lorries drove off empty except for the Japanese guards and officers’. After the Japanese departed, the estate workers went to the site and collected some wooden sandals and rubber slippers which had been left around the pits. Pillai noted that ‘In all, seven pits had been dug, one for each lorry load. After a few days the graves were smelling badly as they had been insufficiently covered, and labour was sent to cover them with more soil.’

  There is a rare Japanese account from the other side of a mass execution, and from the similarity of the narrative it probably refers to the same mass execution at Bukit Jalil Estate. Private Miyake Genjiro, a soldier of the Japanese 5th Division, was stationed in Kuala Lumpur in mid-1942 during the time of the Sook Chin massacres. In a post-war account, and in an attempt to purge himself of terrible memories and guilt, Miyake Genjiro recalled that his platoon was ordered to ‘go and wake up the Overseas Chinese in the middle of the night. All suspicious people were to be examined. All to be thrown into prison…. After one week the order went out: Come with your trucks to the prison’. Seventy people were loaded into Genjiro’s truck, crammed in and standing up. They had six trucks and in this way could pack 400 people. They drove to a rubber plantation ten minutes away…. The officer in charge said ‘You are about to kill these people by the order of the highest General, the Emperor’. The officer then ‘proceeded to cut off the heads of two of them’ and Genjiro and his colleagues then disposed of the remainder, either by beheading or stabbing them with their bayonets. His impression was that about half were still alive when they were buried. ‘A ghastly stench of blood pervaded the rubber trees.’

  In some ways, the Japanese soldiers who had massacred these innocent Chinese were also victims. Miyake Genjiro concluded that neither he nor his colleagues ‘harboured any hostility’ to their victims, claiming that they had ‘no murderous intentions, they did not want to kill’. He argued that they had no choice or option to withdraw – had they done so, the Kempetei would surely have punished them for failing to follow orders. But though rare and undoubtedly sincerely meant this public contrition would have cut little ice with the four hundred men who died that day, nor their relatives who often enough had no idea of their fate. To this day, an elderly Chinese lady resident in Kuala Lumpur recalls the day when as a young child she saw her father leave home, never to return. The family failed to discover his fate, and had to endure many years of uncertainty before they finally conceded that he had probably been killed by the Japanese. She, for one, still cannot forgive the Japanese for what they did.

  The Kempetei Perspective

  Few Japanese troops, however, appear to have felt the guilt exhibited by Lt. Miyake Genjiro for their participation in war crimes. Amongst the Kempetei, in the post-war trials almost all pleaded not guilty to the charges laid against them. The testimony of the unexceptional Sergeant Yoshinobu Nishi offers an insight into how many Kempetei officers rationalised their work. Yoshinobu Nishi had joined the Kempetei in May 1939 and in February 1942 was an early arrival into Kuala Lumpur, serving there until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Nishi did not dispute that he had engaged in torture; indeed he provided powerful testimony against himself. Instead he sought to argue that what he and his colleagues did was part of the war effort, and was sanctioned from above. There was little or no sense of contrition or remorse evident in his testimony.

  Yoshinobu Nishi’s trial centred on a set of cases dating from mid-1944. The victims - Chinese, Eurasian and Indian - were arrested and tortured by the Kempetei following allegations that they were ‘anti-Japanese’ and were engaged in actions such as listening to foreign radio broadcasts and spreading malicious rumour. None of those cited appeared to have been serious agitators or subversives and certainly none were known communists. During his trial, Nishi explained that the Kempetei would initially start their questioning with an attempt to gain information through a ‘psychological approach’ and through an effort to treat [the victim] with a ‘warm heart’. But if this failed, and in quick order, an ‘interrogation’ would follow. Yoshinobu Nishi did his slim chances of acquittal few favours by stating that ‘as everyone knows, there were not enough Kempeis, it is not possible to let a case drag on for an indefinite period, as it will only obstruct war operations. [The] First action is to beat sometimes all over the body. Then to hang him up against a wall with hands tied up with feet bound and suspended, they would be beaten again. Next step is to administer the water treatment. Cigarette butts to burn the tender parts of the body. The whole process would be started over and over again until its ultimate results are obtained’.

  The practice certainly seemed to follow the theory. The court heard the case of Lal Singh Bull, an Indian Sikh on the run from the Kempetei in Singapore, who was tracked down by Nishi to a hiding place in Klang. The first Lal Singh Bull’s family knew of his fate was when a van arrived outside their property in Singapore and the son was asked to identify his father’s bruised, beaten and broken body. In the separate case of Savarimuthu, Nishi admitted to the court that ‘I hit this man with a stick. I tied him up to the window and then burned his body in many places with a lighted cigarette end…..I then took a long stick and rammed it up his rectum. He became senseless with the treatment he was receiving from me. I let him down on the floor and then poured water over his face and kicked him.’ He too later died of his treatment. Sergeant Yoshinobu Nishi’s rare admission that he had engaged in torture did him little good. He was sentenced to death and at 7.00am on 28 August 1946 he was led by Mr. James Pink, the British hangman, to the gallows at Pudu Prison where he died of ‘dislocation of the neck by judicial hanging’.

  The Kuala Lumpur Kempetei butai [cadre] carried out their role of repression in a perfectly effective way but t
he enduring sense, after reading dozens of post-war trial documents, is that they were simply a drab, dull bunch of thugs. In comparison, the Kempetei in Penang were equally brutal but their violence somehow had greater range and colour. There, for example, one officer would drag victims behind his motorbike for sustained periods around the prison yard, or throw his pet monkey repeatedly at prisoners during interrogations. Another became known colloquially as ‘Thallievety’ (Tamil for ‘head cutter’) after he decapitated a young Indian boy caught pilfering at a wharf in Butterworth. The boy was made to kneel at the edge of the wharf and was beheaded with one smooth cut of the sword; his head rolling into the waters below and his still-kneeling but headless torso eased in afterwards. From being caught for pilferage to decapitation took little more than two minutes. This same officer drove around George Town in an open-top British sports car, his pony-tail flowing behind him; in the evening he would play Bach on his violin, the music wafting across the still, tropical air of the port settlement. In a strange psychotic way, the Penang Kempetei had colour but a reading of the methods of the Kuala Lumpur Kempetei was simply grey and depressing – beatings, starvation and thuggishness.