Clay Eaton

CLAY EATON is a historian of Japanese imperalism in Southeast Asia. A post-doctoral fellow at Yale-NUS College at the time of this interview, he is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore.

In this conversation, we discussed:

the evolution of the historiogaraphy of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore
the "historical turn" in public discourse in Singapore
the unlikely story of how Clay and I met in New York City

This conversation was conducted in 2019 and has been lightly edited for clarity.

JY 00:00

Hi, everyone, welcome to Lecture Theatre. The new podcast aims to bridge the Singaporean academy with the wider public sphere. With us today we have Clay Eaton, a postdoc in history at Yale-NUS College. Clay studies the history of Japanese Empire, and more specifically, the Japanese occupation in Singapore. Welcome, Clay.

Clay 00:24

Thank you, Jun Yan, I'm excited to be here.

JY 00:26

So tell us more about your life story. How did you become an academic?

Clay 00:31

Well, it's a bit of a long story. I am a US citizen. But as a child, I lived in Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Hawaii before moving to Seattle with my family. And so I'm a TCK—Third Culture Kid. I grew up in many different cultures, cultures and countries, learning different things that really affected how I view the world and my interests.

As a historian, I always liked history. I was always into the different stories of different places in the world; lives different from my own that I could try to understand. And that's what attracted me to doing a project on World War Two in Singapore. Now, five years of my childhood I spent in Indonesia. But when I moved to Seattle, there was not a chance of studying Bahasa Indonesia at the schools there. And so I started studying Japanese and ended up in Japanese Studies in undergrad. I taught English in Japan for a while. But I was interested in going into history as an academic, and wanted to bridge my childhood experiences in Southeast Asia with my adult experiences in Japan. And so I was interested in Japanese-Southeast Asian relations, and decided to look at the war first, because it is such an important period in this relationship. A traumatic period for many, but I felt like I needed to understand it to understand the relationship as it has developed over the last couple of centuries.

JY 01:53

So as a kid in Indonesia, did you see any trace of Japanese influence and of the Japanese invasion?

Clay 02:02

Of the Japanese invasion, not so much. But one of the reasons I was so interested in the Japanese-Southeast Asian relationship is that there were many Japanese kids around my age in Surabaya when I was living there. My time in Jakarta, I was much younger, not really attending school yet, so I have less memory of this. And so I knew that there was this deep connection between Japan and Southeast Asia. And looking into it more, I was sort of drawn to the wartime period, because it's this time of intense interaction. Another reason I'm interested in the war is because like many families, my family was directly affected by the war, but not by the Southeast Asian experience. So it was something that was important to my family history. But outside of that family history, it was something I wanted to investigate and know more about.

JY 02:50

So tell us more about your dissertation, which you are revising into a book project. What's the title? Give us the 30-second summary.

Clay 02:58

Alright, so the title is Governing Syonan: The Japanese Administration of Wartime Singapore. And it is looking at, specifically, the Japanese administration and its approach to the city of Singapore, which was renamed Syonan during the war. I looked specifically at the relationship between low-level Japanese administrators and locals, either business elites or community leaders, whom the Japanese approach and in many ways compelled to help them govern the city during the war. And it's this relationship that I felt was really important to emphasize. I'm interested in imperial history, and imperial histories that bridge the gap between the story of the colonizers and the story of the colonized. Now, that can be very difficult to do because sources often speak to one experience and not the other. And it's in that actual daily interaction between these two groups that I saw these two types of history coming together.

JY 03:58

So, why Singapore specifically?

Clay 04:01

Well, there are a number of reasons for that. One is that Singapore was a very important center for the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia. It's one of the few places that had its name changed; one of the only places with a new Japanese name. There was apparently an effort to turn Penang into Tojo Island, but that was shut down, actually. But Singapore became Syonan. And the Syo in Syonan we all translate as Light of the South. But the Syo is the same character at the beginning of Showa, the reign name of Hirohito, so the name itself is creating a direct connection to Japan and the Japanese Empire. And it's pretty clear looking at Japanese documents from the period that they were building Singapore into a new imperial center through which they could control, or in their words, help construct the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the South. There are plans from very early on to give a form of independence to different territories around Southeast Asia, but Singapore would be the hub through which they could direct economic and political policy in other parts of the region.

JY 05:09

So you're arguing that Singapore is probably the most important part of the Japanese Empire in Southeast Asia.

Clay 05:17

At least in the minds of many of the Japanese occupiers who were working here in Singapore. In the end, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere didn't really come into being, it was sort of an imagined project for the Japanese. But because Singapore is the center for the Japanese administration, you have this enormous concentration of Japanese—not only soldiers, but also civilians, working to construct Singapore as the center. And so that is defining how they are looking at their work in Southeast Asia, the types of policies that are creating in Southeast Asia. For the people of Singapore, the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the construction of it became very important for their daily lives, because much of Japanese policy was geared toward the construction of this sphere. So this isn't the only important story, but in understanding the new imperial formation that the Japanese were trying to create—and ultimately failed to create—[we see that] it still changed many people's lives. Singapore was particularly affected by this thinking about the construction of the Co-Prosperity Sphere and by this concentration of Japanese administrative power.

JY 06:30

So how does your argument challenge what we know about the Japanese Occupation?

Clay 06:35

Well, I think for a number of reasons. There has been—many times for linguistic reasons—less attention to Japanese-language sources of the occupation period. And I think it's important to bring these sources into the conversation and get the Japanese perspective. Now I want to make clear right away that in looking at the Japanese perspective of this new imperial formation they're making, I'm not saying we should sympathize, understand, excuse. I totally do not believe in doing things like that.

But I do think it's important to understand how these Japanese administrators were thinking, to understand the policies they created and how that affected everyday life. Now, a couple people have done this, but I think there's so much more to do, to sort of tease apart the complexities of the Japanese administration here. For instance, personal conflicts between the mayor and the head of the military administration. Ōdachi Shigeo, the mayor, is working in City Hall, and Watanabe Wataru, the head of the military administration, is working in the Fullerton building. They were not friends with each other, and their personal conflict actually affected the types of policies and attitudes that different Japanese administrators were bringing to their work with local residents.

JY 07:56

So what was the research process? What were your sources? Where did you find them?

Clay 08:01

Well, the war presents a bit of a challenge, because the sources are spotty. This is pretty well known, though: the idea that there are no Japanese language sources of the administration period is a little incomplete. It's not quite the truth. So there are number of Japanese language sources, from the occupation period—official documents that were preserved by individuals who were involved with the administration, who brought them back to Japan with them, and preserve dthem. And then very important Japanese historians like Akashi Yoji, who has done a phenomenal amount of work to collect these sources. He worked with these individuals to get these various sources donated to the Japanese archives, or to the National Defense Research Institute and organizations like that. So there's quite a bit of material out there, but it is incomplete because often it was preserved by these individuals. So what you have to do when looking at the war, is really try to broaden the source space that you use. So in the end, I use these official Japanese documents, but I also use the wonderful oral history archive that the National Archives of Singapore has; I use the propaganda papers like Syonan Times, but also the Malay language, Chinese language [newspapers]. I don't understand Tamil, but there are a couple of Tamil sources that I hope to get translated at some point. These different types of sources are all imperfect and incomplete in some way. A propaganda paper— you can't believe 100% but they still allow you to piece together the history of this period.

JY 09:49

So you were travelling to Japan, Singapore, Malaysia during your research?

Clay 09:53

Exactly. So I was in Singapore, I was in KL. And I was in Tokyo. Actually, you might think it's a project on Singapore, what might there be in KL? Actually? Well, there are a lot of people who lived in Singapore during the occupation and moved to Malaysia later on in their lives. And so for instance, the archives of one Malay educator and linguistic reformer— they're in the National Archives in KL. And they include a number of Malay language periodicals that were published in Singapore at the time.

JY 10:30

So I want to linger on the idea of the involvement of local elites in the Japanese Occupation, whether through coercion, compulsion, or some other form of engagement. The question of resistance and collaboration poses all sorts of moral complexity. So how do you deal with the question of moral judgments and moral ambiguity in writing this history?

Clay 10:59

It's important to address these issues, especially working in Singapore and meeting people whose families have direct connections with the wartime experience. These are charged moral questions we're asking. The occupation starts right away with the Sook Ching massacre. And this is a massive moral error of the Japanese administration at the very get-go. And so I think it's difficult to completely divorce morality from this question. That said, I think it's important to really dig into the nuance and understand the decision making process for people. Just one example. Shinozaki Mamoru, a name that people probably know, a Japanese civilian who was working for the military administration in the very beginning. He gave these passes out to allow people to sort of be led out of the detention centers during the Sook Ching massacre, but he also worked with Lim Boon Keng to set up the Overseas Chinese Association, a link between the Chinese community in Singapore and the administration. Shinozaki, from his records, I believe, believed in what he was doing; he believed that he was helping people and was helping to mitigate the worst things that the administration was doing. At the same time, he is also deeply embedded in that administration. So for instance, the very small Jewish community that was still here in Singapore—many of the Jewish community had fled as the Japanese were coming. But there was still a small group of Jewish people here. And they were ordered to register with the Japanese and would end up interned. And the office that they registered with was Shinozaki's office in the Toyo hotel. So his office was also involved in registering the Jewish population, who by the end of the war, were all in various internment camps.

JY 12:51

Registration never ends well.

Clay 12:55

So I don't find particular reason to doubt that Shinozaki felt he was doing the right thing in protecting people from the Sook Ching massacre. But at the same time, he was still involved in what was ultimately an imperial project. And so there is a moral question here. And it's a complex story. But we should still think about these moral issues. Because in the end, I do not take the position that imperialism is a neutral thing, I think that it was a very negative experience for the people who lived through it, particularly in the Japanese Occupation period.

JY 13:30

So let's pivot for a moment and talk a bit more about the state of the field in which you engage. Among other things, your work fits into the rubrics of Southeast Asian history, East Asian history, imperial history. How have these fields changed in the time they started a research? And where do you see these fields going?

Clay 13:53

That's an interesting question. Because when I first started research for this dissertation project, there were people who suggested that I might want to look at Thailand or Indonesia instead of Singapore, which is such a small country, after all. And I think this is coming from a paradigm that was important in the Cold War—of thinking within a national framework, and the framework of the nation state . That framework is important. But when you're thinking in that framework, and you just look at the map, you have the whole Little Red Dot narrative that comes out. But if you look at Singapore in other ways, it is clear the importance of the city here lies within the larger history of Southeast Asia.

And so the way that I look at Singapore is not necessarily as a nascent nation state, which would be a little bit anachronistic in the wartime period anyway, but as a port city is a way that say Tan Tai Yong, or economic historian Greg Huff, are talking about looking at Singapore. If you look at Singapore as a city in this period, then immediately before the war, it's this port city. That's part of a network of very cosmopolitan port cities across Southeast Asia that connect the economic hinterlands of Southeast Asia to the capitalist world economy. Singapore is this sort of crucial node, along with other port cities in the region. And I think that it's a much better framework for understanding the economic and social history of Singapore at this time.

I'll just say, growing up in Indonesia, I'm interested in Indonesian history, Malaysian history and Singaporean history. And it turns out, these countries have a lot of connections to each other, even though that might not seem as much the case on a day-to-day basis living in any of them. And so these connections transcend boundaries. And looking at the port city allows you to see these sorts of connections, to see a different kind of story. And I think just over the time that I was working on my dissertation and doing this research, people have been more interested in looking at these alternate ways of conceptualizing the region. So I think there's a little bit more openness to looking at it this way. And I think that there is a chance that in the field, we will continue to rethink the way we understand different types of relationships in a region like Southeast Asia. Yeah, so that's kind of how I see the field developing as we go.

JY 16:29

The turn to the transnational.

Clay 16:38

I would say I'm more of a imperial historian, working on Japanese Empire, but I try to ground my history very locally. I have friends who do transnational and international history, and a trend that I noticed is, you are able to tell a more comprehensive story if you really sort of narrow down and look at one spot. By going deeper into one location, say a city like Singapore, I am able to talk about the Arab diaspora here, or the Jewish diaspora here, the Eurasian diaspora, connections with the nationalist movement in China, connections with politics in India. By rooting yourself in one spot, you able to tell the story with all these connections. And so I get a sense that it can be very helpful to go deeper—and then out—with this sort of historical perspective.

JY 17:33

So how about chronology? Traditionally, the Japanese occupation has been seen as this major turning point in Singapore and Southeast Asian history—the Big Bang theory of how it precipitated all sorts of changes post-war; led to independence and the rise of nationalist movements. How does the Japanese Occupation fit into a wider imperial history of British rule and Chinese imperial influence in the region? How can you understand that as part of a wider chronology?

Clay 18:10

Yeah, interestingly, there's a big debate a couple decades ago about whether the Second World War in Southeast Asia was change or continuity. In the end, I mean, it's a little bit of both. So I do think it's an incredibly important period—it shifted very different aspects of Southeast Asian history. Economic networks were severed by the destruction of the war, social linkages were also severed by it. Political history was completely scrambled by the different changes that are happening in the 1940s.

But there are definitely continuities going on as well. Of course, there were nationalist movements before the occupation period. So in some ways, the experience of the war hypercharged some changes that were already taking place. At the same time, there were aspects of the war that represented a total break from the past. So for instance, one of the arguments of my dissertation is that many of the people who were coerced to work with the Japanese still approached their work as envisioning themselves as protectors, representatives of their community, speaking to imperial power, in order to protect their community's interests. And in this way, even though it is a completely different context, the approach of presenting representatives to imperial power—of accommodation with imperial power—is not 100% dissimilar from how different community leaders were approaching the British before the war.

And in fact, it's many of the same figures that will approach the Japanese and tell them, "I speak for my community. We just want to sort of live in peace. Let us try to work out a relationship." The Japanese, however, treated these figures in a completely different way than the British had. While the British had offered them a sense of autonomy as leaders of their separate community organizations, under the Japanese regime, all communal associations were placed hierarchically under the purview of the Japanese administration. So the Overseas Chinese Association, which is many of the same leaders of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce from before the war, the members of the Eurasian Welfare Association, Arab Welfare Association, Malay Welfare Association, Indian Independence League. Even though there were some people who were definitely sort of anti-colonial figures before the war, many of the leaders of these associations had been closely aligned with the British before the war. So there's this continuity, and an idea that the best way to protect our community's interests was to accommodate ourselves to imperial power. But with the Japanese not allowing any sense of autonomy, by the end of the war, many of their people turn. And there's this rejection of this idea of accommodating with imperial power, as with how the elections go in the late 1940s, early 1950s. You see people consistently backing people who are willing to aggressively represent their interests to the powers that be. And so I think that this is a major break, even though there are continuities between the pre-war and the post-war periods. For the Singaporean experience, at least, this is a break between how people sort of conceived themselves as members of communities and who the natural leaders of these types of political communities might be.

JY 21:34

So the disillusion is not so much with British colonial rule, as popularly believed, but with a mode of nationalist accommodation to imperialism.

Clay 21:47

Yeah, I wouldn't quite say nationalist, because many of these communities were not necessarily nationality-based or race-based; it could be religion-based. For instance, an interesting fact about the occupation is at the very beginning, there's a larger Muslim representative body that sort of presents itself to the Japanese. And it's unclear what happened to this body that represented South Asian, Malay, and Arab Muslims in Singapore, but it disappears very quickly. And by the end of 1942, the same people who are members of this body reappear, but instead of being part of a larger Muslim consultative organization, they're in charge of different nationalities and race based communities like the Arab Welfare Association, the Malay Welfare Association, things like that. And I don't want to say this was true, 100%: there were certainly people who were very invested in this idea that the British were taking care of the security concerns of Malaya, and who certainly felt a great amount of disillusionment after the British defeat. But just based on my work with the oral history interviews, it is the people who felt most closely aligned to the British that seem to feel a greater amount of disillusionment. There are other people, who in their daily lives didn't necessarily even interact with the British administration or individual British people, who didn't seem to have thought that much about the British. They were more upset with their communal leaders, who were then seen as working with the Japanese.

JY 23:26

I did read one of your articles, Mabel's Life Goes On. For Mabel, who was an Eurasian woman—and presumably for many other Singaporeans—the end of the Japanese Occupation had very little impact on their lives. They were poor one day, poor the next.

Clay 23:33

Yes. And that was the surprising thing about Mabel de Souza's interview. She says she didn't even have a clear understanding of when the occupation ended. She says she's working at a restaurant close to Orchard Road, living in Bencoolen Street, so not very far away from her place of work. Her world ended up becoming very small, defined by going back and forth from home to work, and she was taking care of her ailing mother. She spent a lot of time at home taking care of her, not making a lot of money, relying on tips. And she was saying that she only started really understanding that this was over when the Japanese customers disappeared from the restaurant, and the British started showing up. And so there's this clear sense that there wasn't as much of a change. Aside from the material want experienced in Singapore, the people most affected by the Japanese Occupation were the ones who were at the top of the social ladder, whom the Japanese were approaching, in many ways compelling, to work with them. Whereas the people that the Japanese do not see as particularly significant to local society.—while they didn't have security, it was still a very dangerous time—they had a sense of anonymity. A lack of direct attention from the Japanese state that I found fascinating.

JY 24:32

So let's turn to life as an academic more generally. We first met when you were a graduate student in Colombia. And do you want to say a bit more about how we met?

Clay 25:26

So at the time, I was giving historic walking tours in New York City, and you were on one of those tours of the Lower East Side, the eating tour? So I worked with a firm called the Big Onion that was started by graduate students from Columbia, in the 1990s. And all of the tour guides were graduate students who worked in history or related fields. And in the 1990s, the people who founded the company—Seth Campbell, my former boss, was one of them—did so because there was competitive funding for PhD candidates in the history department. So you weren't guaranteed an income necessarily. That has changed. Now, there is a five year funding package that comes with being a PhD student in the history department and the East Asian Languages and Cultures department that I was a part of.

JY 26:13

At Columbia, but not in many places.

Clay 26:15

And so working as a tour guide did help to pad out the bank account a little bit. And I believe it was summer 2017. You were on that tour. That summer, I didn't have research funding for that summer and tour guiding paid my rent. Yeah, but I also loved the work, I tend to be a little bit more extroverted. And so getting out from the library and from writing my dissertation, interacting with people, talking about locally grounded history, was a way to remind myself that the outside world existed. And I enjoyed giving walks in New York, because I saw so many connections to the different sort of historical concerns that I was seeing in Singaporean history. I mean, the immigrant experiences is key to that. And the neighborhood that you were taking a tour of was the Lower East Side, the traditional immigrant neighborhood in New York. That's changed a little bit now. And I think even on the eating tour—did we have bar kwar when we were going through Chinatown? Talking about the Chinese diaspora was also something that I could bring to my tours. So I loved doing it. But my favorite part, I think, was being able to sort of demonstrate to people the presence of history everywhere, even in places that don't necessarily seem important, or terribly influential. You can really talk about how history informs everything around us. And it helps us to sort of understand the present and where we come from.

JY 27:55

It was a great tour. 10 out of 10 recommended.

Clay 27:59

Big Onion Walking Tours. Not working there anymore, but I recommend it to anyone going to New York.

JY 28:05

So now that you have moved to Singapore, living and working here full time at Yale-NUS, how do you think being in the site of your study has influenced your writing and research?

Clay 28:18

Well, it's certainly helpful to be here. I've always thought that when working on history, it's helpful to go to the site where it happens. And so I've actually traveled all around the island to sites associated with my dissertation, just to get a sense of the space. These are the spaces that people were living in, in the period I'm writing about. And I came to Singapore regularly while I was doing my dissertation research, but it is nice to be back with such an availability of sources. And to be honest, I was in a workshop yesterday. To not have to point out Singapore on a map when talking about what I work on— that's nice, too. Yeah, there's a lot of context that I can sort of bring in. The talks can be a little bit more rich, because people have this background knowledge that I can draw on as I'm talking about the period I work on.

JY 29:18

And what does it mean to be studying the history of Singapore as someone who's not originally from Singapore?

Clay 29:26

I think in history, any unique perspective is valuable. At the same time, I understand that there are pitfalls that someone can fall into, while working on a period of history that's not "their own." For instance, my family was very affected by World War Two, but not directly by what was happening in Southeast Asia and in Singapore. And I have met people who, from their family experiences or their lived experiences, were very affected by this period of Singaporean history. So for instance, I have met people whose grandparents were in the Indian National Army, a very important part of their conception of their history in Singapore. I have met people who lost relatives, either in the Sook Ching massacre or because of interrogation by the Kempeitai. These are very personal stories. And so something that I constantly remind myself of, is that I need to sort of listen as well. As we talked before, there are these moral and emotional issues tied up in this period. Keeping an open mind and really listening to anyone who wants to share things with me, is the best way to go about this in a way that I think is consistent with how honest to the past I want to be.

JY 30:54

So there's been a lot of interest in and controversy around history in Singapore lately. Most notably, most recently, that's been the debate around the commemoration of the Bicentennial of Raffles's lending in Singapore. So why do you think that is? And how do you think historians, both yourself and your colleagues, have responded to this?

Clay 31:21

I've actually been very excited by the conversations that have been have happening around the Bicentennial, just since the year began. As someone who has studied the history of Singapore, I have come across Raffles quite a bit. And with the Bicentennial coming up, I was a little apprehensive, because we've all heard a lot about Raffles. And so that's why I've been, as a historian, pretty delighted that this has actually sparked a larger conversation. I feel that over the past 10 years or so, there's been a sort of growing dialogue about history and heritage, that has been fascinating. And I get a sense that people are thinking a little bit more about the history of Singapore, both as a country and before it was a country, thinking more about their personal connections to this history. And I think one of the reasons why there seems to be a palpable desire to sort of look beyond Raffles and at the other things that were going on, is because as people get more interested in their own heritage and history, they look at Raffles and don't really see a reflection of themselves in this British guy. And as a historian, I think that that dialogue is productive and fascinating. Because this is rooted in many ways to people's personal connections with this history and this heritage. Sometimes temperatures rise, but the conversation is productive, I think, and it's been really heartening to see a deeper conversation coming out of this sort of commemoration.

JY 33:13

So one final question, what do you think you might be working on in 10 years time?

Clay 33:19

That's a good question. I thought that for my next project, because I'm interested in the Japanese-Southeast Asian relationship, I'd look at a different time period. But at the moment, I'm working on writing something about the war again—Japanese uses of uniforms during the war, and people who are put into uniforms, the different effects that that had.

JY 33:38

Do you mean police uniforms?

Clay 33:41

Well, a whole variety of things. Interestingly enough, there was a large Japanese community in Singapore before the war, as many of us know. Many of them were interned by the British as soon as the war started and brought to India. There was a prisoner exchange a couple months into the occupation, where British citizens were exchanged for Japanese subjects abroad. And so many of those in the former Japanese community in Singapore came back, but were immediately informed that they could not go back to their former department stores, their barbershops, their photography studios, that there would be no private enterprise allowed under the military administration. And so they had to work for the military administration in some capacity. And if you're a civilian working for the administration in any capacity, you had to wear a type of civilian uniform. And what this technology does is it presents outside the administration a sense of unity that the Japanese are unified in a particular mission.

But these different types of uniforms reinforce the hierarchy within the administration, that these civilian employees are at the bottom of. But interestingly enough, you see in a lot of the oral history interviews that people would say, "Oh, I ended up during the occupation seeing this person that I had a good relationship with before the war. He was Japanese and he was in a uniform. So he must have been a spy all along." And that's not necessarily the case. As a result of looking deeper into how uniforms work, I also want to talk about how various "allies" of the Japanese were wearing armbands. For instance, the people sent out to gather this $50 million forced donation [from the OCA]. The first encounters that many people had with a representative of the OCA, was with someone wearing an armband that said OCA, and who was asking them for money. At the same time, you had different individuals who had to wear armbands because of their identity. So the Jewish population, for instance, were wearing armbands in Singapore. So clothing was being used by the administration in a variety of different ways that I'm trying to tease out.

But I am also interested in this longer relationship between Japan and Southeast Asia. I am interested in looking into Japanese communities in Southeast Asia before World War Two. A figure that I have been interested in the past—and he's getting a little bit of attention these days—is this doctor named Ando Kozo, who was born in Malaya, and medically trained here. Bbut he also worked for the Japanese administration and ended up retiring halfway through the occupation to Japan, where he was not born and had not lived before. So he's an interesting figure because he was very involved in colonial society, he was a big member of the Rotary Club, helped form a golf club. But at the same time, while he's sort of actively participating in this larger sort of colonial society, he is hosting a lecture at the Rotary Club about why the puppet state of Manchuria is a good thing, right? So you had these interesting, I would want to say, tensions, because they're tensions in my mind, but they were not tensions in the minds of the people before the war, who were happy to be part of British colonial society, but still supporters of their own Empire and its actions.

So these sorts of layered positions is something that I am looking into, and not just in Singapore, but in other parts of Southeast Asia, too. I know that some people are working on this, and I hope that there's more attention to it. But one of the largest Japanese settlements in Southeast Asia was in Davao province in the Philippines, sort of the furthest of the furthest away part of the Philippines in many people's minds, but very close to Japanese territory in the Pacific. And so there's a fascinating sort of community that builds up there. That's very different from the Japanese community here in Singapore. But it's one of many different places that you can look at to try to understand how these relationships are developing in the modern period between Japan and Southeast Asia, and various different types of Japanese people with various different peoples and communities and cities in Southeast Asia.

JY 37:54

So I shall look forward to your forthcoming book, as well as the many other books and articles to come. Thank you. Thank you very much for being with us today. Clay Eaton is a post-doc at Yale-NUS College. If you enjoyed this episode of Lecture Theater, please tell your friends about it. You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, and all the other usual places.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse