Home » History » East Asian History » The Sook Ching Massacre

The Sook Ching Massacre

© John Walsh

In 1961, the first evidence of the human remains of those civilians murdered by the Japanese during the occupation from 1942-5 were unearthed. Japanese sources admit that some 5,000 civilians were killed during the 'Sook Ching' or 'purging' of anti-Japanese sentiment. Some estimates put this figure at closer to 50,000. The truth is unlikely ever to be known until all of the human remains are unearthed across the island and nearby Malaysia - an obviously impossible task. The Japanese occupation had initially been received with equivocation - no one wishes to be invaded by armed soldiers but at least they had defeated the colonist British and were promising a 'Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.'

It is said that, when they arrived, many people welcomed the Japanese but, by the time the war ended, everyone hated them. Why the change? The occupation was brutal and miserable for the Singaporean and Malaysian people. Prices rose enormously as allied shipping slowly took a stranglehold over the seas and denied the Japanese the opportunity to resupply their conquests. Secondly, social order was maintained by increasingly brutal and repressive measures, notably including the Japanese secret police - the kempetai. In the jungles, resistance forces formed, including many Chinese who fought in the name of Malaya for the first time, even though they were largely fighting in support of a state that they hoped would embrace communism. The Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) was largely dominated by communist-influenced Malayan Chinese, while the Anti-Japanese Union (AJU) was composed of a variety of refugees and migrants from China, who lived already on the fringes of the jungle. The British army created Force 136 as a covert force to help supply both anti-Japanese forces.

The Japanese were already hostile towards the Chinese, owing to the long war between them - the Japanese troops in Malaya and Singapore were mostly veterans of the invasion of China. They were also hostile towards Communism in general and that professed by the MPAJA and AJU. As a result, any form of antagonism by Chinese in Singapore - and people of other ethnicities too - resulted in violence, often lethal violence. There are many reports of civilians being cut down in the streets and some instances of the kind of outrage which took place in China, notably at the still-disputed Rape of Nanking - disputed by some Japanese, that is.

A memorial to the Sook Ching massacres stands in central Singapore. It provides an opportunity to remember some of the many, unnamed thousands of Chinese who have given their lives to build the city state.