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83 years ago around this time, my grandparents were 9 and 7 years old when British forces lost Singapore to the Japanese, after the British confidently declared that those Orientals could never defeat them.
The Japanese crossed into Singapore on a fleet of bicycles, bypassing British naval power.
What followed was 3 years of occupation as Singapore was renamed Syonan-to. My grandparents remember singing the Japanese anthem.
3 days after the Japanese won, they began a purge of mostly ethnic Chinese people in Singapore as retaliation for perceived overseas Chinese assistance to China, a few years earlier. 50 000 people died.
My grandparents never wanted to eat a single sweet potato or yam or tapioca ever again later in their lives, because that’s all they had to eat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Singapore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapore
“The Fall of Singapore has been framed as Britain’s worst military disaster – but what did occupation really mean for people in Singapore?”
From the important wealth of oral history interviews conducted about the occupation
“I found that the Japanese Occupation state was actually less present the further down you were on the socioeconomic ladder.… I did start to get a sense that the Japanese were far more interested in co-opting and controlling the elites of Singapore, and that marginalized peoples (whether by race or socioeconomic status or gender) had a peculiar sort of anonymity in the occupied city. Some might not consider these people to be ‘significant,’ but their experiences provide an important corrective to standard narratives of the war.”
https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-1/apr-jun-2017/voices-that-remain/
@skinnylatte as soon as you posted this, my instinct tells me #Taiwanese soldiers are involved Sook-Ching, as I had many relations at my grandparents generation who went to 南洋 .
yes, the sad sad brutality of imperial power is to drive people even the subjugated to commit atrocity 
as shameful as I am feeling, let's learn from this.
"Prominent among the invaders’ henchmen was Wee Twee Kim (Huang Duijin, 黃堆金), an interpreter-turned-enforcer"
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2023/03/30/2003796982
@skinnylatte Thank you for sharing this story. When I was in Singapore in 2024, I had to read about the Japanese occupation after seeing this mural that was in the top of the Faber mount. The project of saving the oral histories is extremely valuable, specially if it considers a wide cross-section of Singaporean society.
The Japanese crossed into Singapore on a fleet of bicycles, bypassing British naval power.
A fleet of knights on bicycles defeating the British military might is one of the last plot points in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, btw.
@skinnylatte Mark Twain also predicted MAD decades before the Manhattan Project.
@skinnylatte They didn't bypass British naval power. They sank it.
Gracious woman, hope she's still on the planet somewhere. She also told me about marrying a US soldier and continually being embarrassed / having problems with her birth certificate because it has swastikas on it, and having to retell the story every time.
The billionaires fomenting the same conditions that led to WW2; they want us all to forget what famine & military invasion was like.
Trade wars and isolationism lead to global recessions, then to world war.
Over 3% of the global population died in the last war.
Who knows how many will suffer as a consequence of Trump, Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman plotting against democracy?
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-announces-first-meeting-vladimir-putin-in-saudi-arabia/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact
@skinnylatte TIL, thanks for posting this!
my pop was in the WW2 Pacific Theater, but not any of this!
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io My grandfather was there. He was captured, somehow survived everything between there and the Death Railway, and somehow came home ... physically. Mentally, he died in those POW camps. It just took him thirty years to finish dying. He committed suicide in 1975.
️ 
️ @skinnylatte yet one more episode of world history this white midwestern girl had never heard about until today at age 53...
@skinnylatte oh wow this is tough to read but still great reading I love story time
@skinnylatte
In the exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore they show a video of the negotiations between the British and the commander of the Japanese forces. Even without sound or subtitles, it is a chilling object lesson in body language, with the Japanese commander completely dominating the discussion.
In contrast, Taiwan's cordial relationship with Japan always surprises me. Singapore and the rest of Asia have a very different view of 1937-45. Chiang Kai-shek's five years in Japan (1906-11) led to a completely different relationship between two nations. History is weird sometimes.