South Korea in the Year of the Tiger

 

 Chinese New Year wishes: Many South Korean nationalists contend that the peninsula resembles a tiger; hence this Year of the Tiger, it should exude the same strength and ferocity.

ACCORDING to the Chinese zodiac, the year 2022 is the Year of the Tiger. Although the younger generation in Korea is perhaps no longer interested in the zodiac, it still counts for the older generation. The zodiac says that those who are born in the Year of the Tiger are bold, courageous, and confident. At the same time, however, they tend to be impetuous, overindulgent, and unpredictable.

The shape of the Korean Peninsula has invited some interesting debates. Some people argue that the shape of the Peninsula resembles a rabbit. Others maintain that it looks like a shrimp. Yet there are also those who contend that the Peninsula resembles a tiger.
`
The rabbit is the image of a weak, docile, and peace-loving animal, and the shrimp may have the connotation of being a victim in the midst of a fight between whales. On the contrary, the tiger is the image of strength and ferocity.
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Those who lived through Korea’s turbulent history over the last several decades support the rabbit or shrimp theory, whereas nationalists prefer the tiger image.
`
Lee O Young, South Korea’s former Culture Minister, presents an interesting theory. He contends that the Korean Peninsula resembles a trophy that strong nations want to possess. Since competitors constantly arise to challenge each other to win the trophy, Korea has always been vulnerable to the rise of a new power in the international community.
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In the Year of the Tiger, South Korea should be “bold, courageous and confident,” when dealing with neighbouring countries when and
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if they act like bullies or are hostile and threatening. At the same time, Korea should not be “impetuous, overindulgent or unpredictable,” in her relationship with friendly nations.
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If we stand up to bullying nations, they would not dare to offend us anymore. When we are consistent and predictable to friendly nations, they will remain our faithful allies. If we act otherwise, we will be hopelessly bullied by hostile countries and lose respect and trust from friendly nations.
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Some time ago, a group of Korean political science professors gathered at a roundtable meeting to discuss the future of Korea in the ever-intensifying conflicts between China and the United States. They unanimously insisted that South Korea should not choose one of the two. Disappointingly, however, they did not come up with any specific tactic of managing this dilemma.
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Perhaps, not choosing a side is what “politics” is all about. Nevertheless, we expected some concrete guidelines from them in dealing with the compelling issues that will directly affect the future of Korea.
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In the Year of the Tiger, the final hours for Korea to choose between the two options will come. We can no longer defer our decision and continue an opportunistic posture between the two. This Tiger year, we sincerely hope that our politicians choose wisely, so our country will continue to prosper and thrive. If our representatives make a wrong decision by any chance, our country would suffer the consequences and the future of our country would be grim. Besides, South Korea would lose respect in the international community. That would be equally fatal for the future of Korea.
`
The problem is that it is extremely difficult to find a solution to the dilemma we are now facing. Perhaps one way to get out of the quagmire is that we build a nation that is strong and has precious things the two conflicting countries urgently and desperately need.
`
Among others, semiconductors and electric batteries come to mind. Then, the two rival countries would treat us with greater respect. Currently, Samsung and Taiwan’s TSMC manufacture 70% of semiconductors of the world. Since Samsung’s main strength lies in semiconductor memory, which occupies a relatively small portion of the market, it should expand its manufacturing capacity to other semiconductors.
`
In the Year of the Tiger, the Korean people will have to make another choice. In March’s presidential election, Koreans will choose the person who will run the country for the next five years. It will be a choice not only between conservatism and progressivism, but also between capitalism and socialism, or liberal democracy and a people’s democracy. Our choice on that fateful Election Day will decide the destiny of Korea.
`
Indeed, Korea will be at the crossroads in the Year of the Tiger. If we choose the wrong road, we will be lost and doomed. If we choose the right road, however, our future will be bright and prosperous. Therefore, it is imperative for us to choose the right leader who can steer our country in the right direction in a perfect storm.
`
In the Year of the Tiger, we wish South Korea to become the tiger that poet William Blake described in his celebrated poem, “The Tyger.” It begins with, “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/ In the forests of the night;/ What immortal hand or eye,/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
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We hope South Korea will emerge as a healthy, strong tiger roaring loudly and proudly on the peak of a mountain, not as a wounded, depressed tiger hiding in the jungle. – The Korea Herald/Asia News Network

By KIM SEONG-KON Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College.
` 

 

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Can the great powers avoid war?

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The Rise and Fall of Great Powers? America, China, and the Global Order

 

When the meek are weak, they suffer because they must. But when the strong are insecure, that is when war begins.

AS tensions over the Taiwan Strait mount, everyone needs to think through whether war is inevitable.

Leon Trotsky once said: “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

And if we slip into war by what World War I historian Barbara Tuchman called the “March of Folly”, can the great powers step back from mutual nuclear annihilation?

When the world’s unipolar power incurred more pandemic deaths (at last count 752,000) and got defeated in Afghanistan by tribal warriors, no one should be surprised to ask whether America (and by extension Western civilisation) is in a decline.

The prestigious US magazine Foreign Affairs devoted three issues this year to: “Can America Recover?”, “Decline and Fall – Can America ever Lead Again?” and “Can China Keep Rising?”

For those reading the endless barrage of invectives against America’s rivals, it certainly feels like the Cold War has returned with a vengeance.

However, for Greta Thunberg and fellow climate activists, surely the world leaders’ priority is to work together to address our looming climate disaster.

Why are alphas fighting in a burning planet? Shouldn’t we call “time out” to see how to address collectively the urgent and existential issues of human and planetary distress?

Next month, the World Economic Forum is meeting in Dubai with an agenda to move from a Great Reset to a Grand Narrative Initiative “to shape the contours of a more prosperous and inclusive future for humanity that is also more respectful of nature.”

Grand Narrative may sound like a media story but the reality is that the masses are unlikely to buy an elite-driven dream until they are part of the conversation.

Take Harvard historian Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” narrative. Written in 1996, Huntington seemed prescient in predicting the clash between Western civilisation and the rest, namely, Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic and Latin American.

He asked poignantly: “The central theme for the West is whether, quite apart from our external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal process of decay. Can the West renew itself or will sustained internal rot simply accelerate its end and/or subordination to other economically and demographically more dynamic civilisations?”

Huntington basically reflected the worry of British historian Arnold Toynbee (18891975) that since civilisations are born out of primitive societies, the key is whether the elites can respond effectively to new challenges, internal or external.

Toynbee saw clearer than other Western historians like Gibbon (Decline and Fall of Roman Empire) that collapses are not necessarily due to barbarian invasions but whether the ruling elite can overcome their own greed or interests to address the new challenges.

In pure economic, financial, technology and military terms, few question that the West remains superior in almost all aspects, except in population numbers.

According to the Maddison projections of population and GDP, the rich countries (essentially Western Europe, plus Western offshoots (the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and Japan would be 947 million people and 36.3% of world GDP by 2030, whereas Asia (China, India and other parts of Asia) would have a population of 4.7 billion and 49.6% of GDP.

This reverses the 2003 position when the West (including Japan) accounted for half of world GDP, compared with one-third for Asia.

The dramatic reversal is due to the rise of China, India and the rest of Asia to higher-middle-income levels by 2030, mainly through trade and catch-up in technology.

In the coming decades, roughly one billion rich West must contend with the rising powers of China (1.4 billion), India (1.3 billion) and Islamic countries (1+ billion), which have cultures and ideologies very different from the West.

If the planet heats up as expected, expect more Latin Americans, Africans and Middle East poor arriving on the West’s borders to migrate.

At the same time, with the American demonisation of Russia and China pushing them closer together, the United States is confronting at least three fronts (including the Middle East) amid a fractious domestic arena, where political polarisation prevents policy cohesion and continuity.

This current situation reminds Islamic countries following their great historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 AD) of the cycle of dynastic and empires that Islam went through.

When the social cohesion or bonds (asabiya) is strong, there is state legitimacy and empires rise. When it is weak, dynasties fall and empires are lost.

After the Jan 6, 2020 insurrection in Washington DC, many are inclined to believe that fratricidal tribalism is happening now inside America.

Similarly, Chinese macro-historians Sima Qian (Records of the Grand Historian, 146-86 BC) and Sima Guang (Comprehensive Mirror for Governance, 1019-1086 AD) also recorded that empires fall not so much from external invasion but internal decay.

In Yale, historian (Rise and Fall of Great Powers) Paul Kennedy’s terminology has the United States arrived at the point of “imperial over-reach”, when the country’s global ambitions and responsibilities exceed its financial and industrial capacity.

After all, the US government debt has reached as high as the end of World War II level without even starting World War III.

But all historians know that rise, decline or fall is never pre-ordained. The past is not a scientific linear predictor of the future. The unipolar order has weakened, without any grand bargain between the great powers on what the new order should even begin to look like.

Any grand bargain requires the incumbent hegemon to admit that there are equals and peers in power that want the rules of the game reset from the old order.

This does not mean that anyone will replace the United States soon because everyone wants to buy time to set their own house in order after the pandemic.

In short, before any Grand Narrative, we need a whole series of conversations with all sides, from the weakest to the most powerful, on what individually and collectively the post-pandemic order should look like.

There can never be one Grand Narrative by the elites until there are enough dialogues between the many.

When the meek are weak, they suffer because they must. But when the strong are insecure, that is when war begins.

By ANDREW SHENG. Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.

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Remembering the legacy of Bandung, Sandakan death and Hiroshima bombing

THIS year marks the 60th anniversary of the historic Bandung Conference and the 70th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

A copy of the final “atomic bomb” leaflet, I think? I don’t read Japanese, but this was attached to the above memo. If you do read Japanese, I’d love a translation. Please ignore my thumb in the corner — it’s hard to photograph documents that are bound like these ones were.  http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/04/26/a-day-too-late/

In order to commemorate the past, a series of conferences and events have been held, the most recent being the Afro-Asian Conference hosted by Indonesia President Jokowi this week. The first Bandung Conference was called by the first Indonesia President Sukarno in April 1955 among newly independent Asian and African nations, beginning what was later known as the Non-Aligned Movement against colonialism. Twenty-nine countries participated, representing 1.5 billion people or just over half of the world’s population. It was the first time that leaders of these countries met to discuss their future after the end of colonialism.

The conference was historic because it was attended not only by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but also Egyptian President Gamal Nasser, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Muhammad Ali Jinnah of Pakistan, U Nu of Burma, Nkrumah of Ghana and Tito of Yugoslavia, all giants not only in their countries, but makers of history in the 20th century.

The United States did not attend because it was not sure whether it sided with the European colonial powers or its new role as an ex-colony liberating the world.

The Bandung Conference was a conference of hope that the newly independent nations would build themselves into a zone of peace, prosperity and stability. On the whole, despite some failures, they succeeded. By 2013, these countries together have a GDP of US$21.2 trillion or 28.1% of world GDP, significantly improved compared with their share of less than one-fifth of world GDP in 1955.

Aug 6, 2015 will also mark the 70th anniversary of the horrific atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which led to the end of World War Two on the Pacific side.

Lest we forget, World War Two was a horrific period, since the world lost between 50 million and 80 million people or 3% of world population. Japan lost 2-3 million during that war, but the rest of Asia suffered estimated losses of up to 10 times that number.

Even though memories are fading, there is still a generation who remembered the hardships and atrocies of war, from personal experience of family being killed, bombed or flight as refugees. Even a remote country like Australia could not escape that war. Australian soldiers fought heroically in Kokoda Trail to repell the Japanese invasion of Papua New Guinea in 1942. If not stopped, Australia could have fallen to Japanese hands, changing the course of history.

But the 625 Australian deaths defending the Kokoda Trail paled in comparison to the Sandakan Death March, in which 2,345 Australian prisoners of war died marching from their prisoner of war camp in Sandakan across primitive jungle in Sabah. Only six Australians survived those marches in early 1945, only because they escaped. One in 12 of every Australian who perished in the war died in that death march.

My impressions of this incident are indelible, growing up in Sandakan and following the trail across Sabah on a road built by the Australians to commemorate their dead. It fascinated me that man could be that cruel to other human beings to send them across the virgin jungle without food to certain death.

On June 9, 2014, when Japanese Prime Minister Shintaro Abe addressed the Australian parliament, he did mention Kokoda and Sandakan. In it, he did not offer an apology, but he did sent his “most sincere condolences towards the many souls who lost their lives.” This was very Japanese English, because one gives condolences to the living, not the dead.


In the Afro-Asian Conference this week in Bandung, he rephrased his words as follows, “Japan, with feelings of deep remorse over the past war, made a pledge to remain a nation always adhering to those very principles (of Bandung) throughout, no matter what the circumstances.”

We note that he is already shifting the official Japanese view on the war from his predecessors Murayama and Koizumi, who offered “deep remorse and heartfelt apology,” in their statements about the war in the 1995 and 2005 anniversaries respectively.

I always thought that the difference between remorse and shame is one that differentiates Western and Asian values. A remorse is a feeling of regret that something has happened but there is no sense of guilt. Shame is a feeling you have injured someone else and you feel guity about it, and you want to make amends.

There is a sharp difference between the German and Japanese attitudes. Seventy years after the war, the German courts are going to try the 93-year old “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, whereas the Japanese are still revising their history books on what really happened.

What makes Abe’s “deep remorse” poignant is that he is a leader of a faction that wants to re-arm Japan by changing its constitution and he regularly visited or sent ritual offerings to the Yasukuni shrine, which contains the shrines for 14 class A war criminals. Even the Japanese emperor has not visited Yasukuni after these enshrinements.

Most Asians like myself have great respect for Japan, but feel uneasy that the Japanese are beginning to whitewash their role in the war. The Yasukuni shrine has an accompanying museum that seems to suggest not only that the Nanking massacre did not occur, but that US actions to deny Japan energy resources pushed it into war. But these do not explain why Japan invaded China in 1937.

On the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, will the US leader express an apology or remorse for bombing Nagasaki or Hiroshima? If the Japanese want to understand how the rest of Asia feels about its actions during World War Two, just changing the history book will not solve the deep sense of injustice that war brought to the region. Could those who died or suffered during that period appeal to the rule of law that Abe-san so proudly proclaim today?

All of us want to move on, but not through denying the past. As the philosopher Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Think Asian by Andrew Sheng

President of Fung Global Institute
http://ineteconomics.org/people/andrew-sheng

Sheng is Malaysian Chinese. He grew up in British North Borneo (today Sabah, Malaysia). He left Malaysia in 1965 to attend the University of Bristol in England, where he studied economics.
Datuk Seri Panglima Andrew Sheng (born 1946) is a Distinguished Fellow of Fung Global Institute, a Hong Kong based global think tank. He started his career as an accountant. He served as Chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) before his replacement by Martin Wheatley in 2005.
 
THE AUTHOR IS CHIEF ADVISOR TO THE CHINA BANKING REGULATORY COMMISSION, A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF MALAYSIA'S KAZANAH NASIONAL BHD AND A MEMBER OF THE INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY PANEL TO THE AUSTRALIAN TREASURY'S FINANCIAL SYSTEM INQUIRY

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Why not abolishing wars, seeking peace in the 70 years after WW2 & inception of the UN?

Why should an organisation devoted to saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war” make it its business to authorise war? 

Why not abolishing wars, seeking peace in the 70 years after WW2 & inception of the UN?

Why should an organisation devoted to saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war” make it its business to authorise war?

In the 70 years since the inception of the UN, the world has unfortunately witnessed many theaters of conflict. 

SEVENTY years ago, the Charter of the United Nations solemnly proclaimed that the people of the UN were determined to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and to “establish conditions under which justice … can be maintained”.

Peaceful resolution of disputes was the over-arching ideal of the Charter. However, the Charter permitted two exceptions under which recourse to war was permissible:

> Under Article 51, a nation can defend its sovereignty against an armed attack.

> Collective use of force can be undertaken under Chapter VII of the Charter under a resolution of the UN Security Council.

In the euphoria of the establishment of the UN, these two provisions were regarded as just and fair exceptions to the prohibition on the use of force.

But with the tragic misuse of UN authorised interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, one is made to wonder why an organisation devoted to saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and securing peace and justice should make it its business to authorise the revolting actions that necessarily flow from war. It is therefore timely to demand that the provision relating to collective use of force under Chapter VII be reviewed or repealed.

Spiralling wars: In the 70 years since the inception of the UN, the world has unfortunately witnessed many theatres of conflict. In a nuclear age, the savagery of war has become even worse. The grounds on which war can be waged have expanded.

Anticipatory self-defence: Some powerful nations like the US and Israel have interpreted the Charter to read into it the right of pre-emptory attack or anticipatory self-defence.

Humanitarian intervention: A new ground of “humanitarian war” without the authority of the UN has been established extra-legally by the American-European Union Alliance.

Regime change: Wars for the purpose of regime change were and are being waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Proxy wars: Many rich and powerful states are fomenting civil wars and supporting armed mercenary forces for the purpose of subverting the sovereignty of other states. Tragic examples are Yemen, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

Privatising torture: Since the 90s, wars, incarceration in overseas prisons and torture have been privatised. This is a wicked way of avoiding accountability under national laws.

Terrorism: Unspeakable horrors are being committed by terrorist groups like the IS. However, it must be stated that all terrorism, whether by private groups or state actors, is an abomination. On the pretext of combating terrorism, many states are committing atrocities both within their territory and abroad.

Targeted killings: Extra-judicial assassinations of the officials of other states or national liberation movements are being carried out by drone attacks, special-forces units or covert operations.

Humans as guinea pigs: Some nations are developing, deploying and testing their new weapon systems in countries that they invade or occupy – countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza whose population has become a guinea pig for testing deadly weapons.

Threat of missile attacks: Threats of missile and nuclear attacks have become standard language of foreign policy. This is a violation of international law.

Selective sanctions: In the name of human rights, sanctions are being enforced but in a very selective way by the Security Council and by individual nations against their opponents. This is despite overwhelming proof that sanctions hurt innocent civilians and cause untold misery and deprivation to the weakest members of society.

The ICC: The International Criminal Court has gone into operation. But nations like the US and Israel refuse to join it. The UN Security Council and the ICC have brought to book a few war criminals. Sadly, the work of the ICC shows a terrible ethnic bias against Africa. Mass murderers from the USA, EU and Israel remain immune.

Cold War reignited: The Cold War has become reignited and with it new theatres of conflict as in Ukraine are causing massive loss of life.

Merchants of death: The arms trade continues unabated and ignites and fuels regional wars and retards the search for political solutions to international disputes. All arms traders are merchants of death but enjoy a prestige and wealth unknown to many other professions.

Western exceptionalism: Western unilaterism is a sad reality of geopolitics today. In the last decade itself, there were full scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on trumped up charges plus bombing of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria. In Yemen, Libya and Syria, western proxies are in the forefront of the so called civil war.

US drones blow up “enemy combatants” in many parts of the world with sickening regularity. Despite its professed belief in democracy, Washington has a sorry record of collaborating with right-wing military officers to overthrow elected leaders who do not do Washington’s bidding. The latest victims are Morsi in Egypt in 2013 and Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014.

On July 3, 1988 the United States shot down an Iranian Airbus killing 290 passengers. The Western world expressed only muted regret.

Genocide in Palestine: US and European complicity with Israel in the 67-year old genocide of the Palestinians is an undeniable fact. As I write, Israel continues to butcher children, women and civilians in Gaza.

Srebrenica: Dutch complicity in the massacres in Srebrenica is well documented.

Structural violence: Add to these military atrocities, the structural violence and oppressive economic systems of the West. There is a desire to consolidate an uncompromising version of corporatism that seeks total economic hegemony over Asia and Africa.

Environment: An environmental catastrophe is awaiting the world unless we take adequate measures to control the threat. Needless to say that part of the ecocide is contributed by the use and misuse of weapons of mass destruction.

In sum, it is a pretty grim situation in the world today. What can be done to bring about a more peaceful and just world? There are obviously no simple solutions. A comprehensive, holistic approach is badly needed.

Reflecting On The Law by Shad Saleem Faruqi

Shad Faruqi, Emeritus Professor of Law at UiTM, is a passionate student and teacher of the law. He can be reached at prof.shad.saleem.faruqi@gmail.com. The views expressed here are entirely his own.

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German Chancellor: Japan needs honesty to improve relations with victims of World War II

 

Angela Merkel: I think history and experience tell us also that peaceful means of reconciliation have to be found

TOKYO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel waded into the fraught area of wartime forgiveness during a visit to Japan, saying that “facing history squarely” and “generous gestures” are necessary to mend ties.

Merkel was speaking in Tokyo on March 9 2015 ahead of the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, in which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative views on Tokyo’s war crimes are under scrutiny, and as China and South Korea continue to call for more contrition.

“Germany was lucky to be accepted into the community of nations after the horrible experience the world had to meet with Germany during the period of National Socialism (Nazism) and the Holocaust,” she said.

“This was possible first because Germany did face its past squarely, but also because the Allied Powers who controlled Germany after WWII would attach great importance to Germany coming to grips with its past.

“One of the great achievements of the time certainly was reconciliation between Germany and France ... the French have given just as valuable a contribution as the Germans have.”

Relations between Japan and its wartime victims China and South Korea are at a low point, with Beijing and Seoul both calling for Tokyo to do more to atone for its past.

Nationalists in Japan say Tokyo has apologised enough and that the constant references to WWII are covering flak for governments in China and South Korea seeking to direct popular anger elsewhere.

There were “great minds and great personalities who said we ought to adopt a policy of rapprochement ... and without these generous gestures by our neighbours this would not have been possible,” Merkel told her audience.

The public lecture came on the first day of a two-day trip to Tokyo, her first in seven years.

Abe visited Germany last year.

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi on Sunday said Abe would be welcome at Beijing’s commemorations of the end of WWII if he was “sincere” about history.

Beijing has not given a specific date for the parade but it regards Sept 3, the day after Japan signed its formal surrender to Allied forces on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, as victory day.

“It’s difficult for me as the German chancellor to give you advice on how to deal with part of your neighbourhood. But I think history and experience tell us also that peaceful means of reconciliation have to be found,” Merkel said in response to questions.

Merkel’s visit to Japan is part of her swing through G7 member nations before Germany hosts the group’s next summit in June. She has already visited the other five nations.

The visit, her third to Japan in almost 10 years in office, is seen as a balancing act between Germany’s ties with Beijing and Tokyo. She has been to China seven times during the same period.

Thanking Japan for joining Western powers in imposing sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Ukraine, Merkel said: “Japan and Germany share common interests whenever the strengthening of the international rule of law is to be brought about.” — AFP

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Japanese Occupation survivors tell their stories

IN 1942, the Japanese invaded Malaya, and thus began three-and-a half years under the rule of a nationalistic and iron-fi sted army. This year is the 70th anniversary of the fall of Malaya to the Japanese. Stories abound of how Malayans at that time were treated and how many escaped the suffering and torture under the Japanese. MICHELLE CHUN speaks to four people who lived to tell their stories. 

Chye ... I will never forgive the Japanese>>

Seow ... my mother’ssacrifi ce saved my life 

HE was only six years old when the Japanese came. Now, 70 years later, Seow Boon Hor remembers clearly what happened the day the Japanese came to his village in Parit Tinggi, Negri Sembilan in search of informers.

His entire family was massacred that day but he managed to survive, all because his quickthinking mother – who was heavily pregnant at that time – shielded him with her body.

It was her act of sacrifice that saved his life. “My mother threw herself on top of me, and as the soldier stabbed her, the knife went through her and into me too. After the third stab, which was to my side, I fainted.

Zainul ... did not suffer much from the occupation

 “When I woke up, an old man from the village who had found me told me to follow him, so I turned to my mother and pulled her arm, telling her it was time to go.

 “But the old man said, ‘Your mother is dead, we must leave her’,” he said with glistening eyes.

Clad in a patterned shirt and black trousers, Seow sat on a plastic stool next to his mixed rice stall in Section 19 as he recalled the events as if they had happened just yesterday. Of the 600 villagers bayoneted that day, only five survived.

 “We wanted to make a run for the hills, but suddenly heard the footsteps of Japanese soldiers, and quickly played dead until they left.”

 Tay ... hid in a jungle for three months.

Another survivor who lived to tell his tale is Chye Kooi Loong, who was 12 years old when the war broke out.

“It seemed like a dream when we heard the Japanese had reached Malaya, we always thought the war would stay in China. My father was an accountant, a rare profession in those days, so we were evacuated to the hills of Kampar,” the 83-year-old said in a phone interview.

He attended a Japanese school because all students who attended were given weekly rations of rice, sugar, and coconut oil.



“In school, we were taught that people from the Land of the Rising Sun were very courteous, but it was the exact opposite – there was a lot of violence and killing. One thing I cannot forget is when a village ‘aunty’ objected to Japanese soldiers taking her chickens, and was killed. Killed over chickens!” he said.

However, not all Malayans experienced the hardship Chye and Seow faced at the hands of the Japanese. One of them is Datuk Zainul Aziz, who worked as an assistant at the Japanese Naval Hospital in Penang.

“At that time, all of us had to attend Japanese school, and everybody had to work otherwise there would be no food on the table.

“I went for an interview at the hospital, and even though I was 13 the doctors employed me to help treat the wounds of Japanese soldiers and learn about medicine,” the 84-year-old said in a phone interview.

Zainul said that he has no ill-feelings towards the Japanese because he did not suffer much at their hands, having been given food and rations while working in the hospital.

“My family members also did not suffer much as they went to work for the Japanese,repairing ships and such.”

Another survivor, Elijah Tay, 79, also did not bear the brunt of the Japanese army’s violence throughout the occupation period.

“The Japanese invaded Malaya when I was about eight; we hid in a rubber estate for three months before coming out,” he told the Sun in his Malacca home on Feb 4.

“My mother would play the piano in my father’s Chinese school, which had closed down, and a Japanese soldier heard her playing one day and came in to listen.

 “He became a friend of my father’s, helping him to open a private school in Labis, where my mother taught the students Japanese songs for the annual concert,” he said.

When the Japanese army heard the students sing, Tay recalled, they were so impressed the captain ordered that no one was to enter the school without his permission.

 “Elsewhere, the Japanese were killing, looting and raping.

“What happened to us was nothing less than a miracle,” Tay said.

 It is because of the atrocities committed by the Japanese that forgiveness is difficult for many survivors, even today.

 “I will never forgive the Japanese; I cannot be friendly with them because I cannot forget what they did,” Chye said.

Seow, on the other hand, said today’s eneration cannot be blamed for the acts of those in the past.

 “I have forgiven them, I suppose. We cannot blame the Japanese today for what was done before, and many have shown remorse. When I visited Japan, four ex-soldiers who were part of the Japanese army to Malaya knelt in front of me and begged for forgiveness,” he said.

But for Chye and many others, an official apology from the Japanese government is a necessary first step towards closure.

 “The Japanese need to formally acknowledge and admit they committed atrocious crimes during the Japanese occupation of Malaya, and not that we were treated well as is currently written in their history books,” he said.

 For the first time ever, eyewitness accounts of the events that occurred in Malaya during Japanese rule have been preserved in a video documentary, produced by History Asia in conjunction with FINAS, Novista and Primeworks Studio. The documentary, Rising Sun over Malaya, will premiere on History Channel (Astro Channel 555) on Feb 15 at 10pm.

NEWS WITHOUT BORDERS

theSun ON MONDAY | FEBRUARY 13, 2012

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