Until 2022, when the book The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory was published, it was widely thought in Singapore that there were no Singaporean "Comfort Women" who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military. None had come forward to give their testimony and demand justice and compensation, as other former "Comfort Women" in Asia had done. So, it was taken that this meant that they did not exist. It was generally assumed that the "Comfort Women" in Singapore during the Japanese Occupation were Korean and Japanese women as well as some women from China, Taiwan, and Indonesia. There was acknowledgement that women from other Southeast Asian countries had been sexually enslaved, such as women from Indonesia, the Philippines, and even Singapore’s neighbour, Malaysia. But no Singaporean women. Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had articulated these perceptions in the 1990s when he was Senior Minister in the Singapore Cabinet. Although no longer Prime Minister, his views still carried considerable weight in Singapore. These perceptions have shaped the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery in Singapore. This article seeks to explain their origins and how they have influenced thinking and action over the "Comfort Women" issue in Singapore. It will also reflect on how the "Comfort Women" issue is at present in Singapore and how it could develop in the future.

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* The above book is accessible at the Research Institute on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery and Archive 814.
Link : https://www.archive814.or.kr/

Documenting a Silence

The reason I wrote The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory was that I felt that unless I proved these women existed their silence would be taken to mean they did not exist. But how to document a silence? Etched in the memories of every Singapore woman who lived during the Japanese Occupation of 1942 to 1945 is the fear of rape and being taken away to be sexually enslaved at what the Japanese military euphemistically called ‘comfort stations’. When I was doing mass oral history interviews in the community with my students at the National Institute of Education in the early 2000s, I realized that local "Comfort Women" did exist but would never give their testimony. Only their intimate female friends, sisters, cousins, and close neighbours would describe what happened — and only after the woman they knew had died. They would describe how girls and young women raped and abducted by Japanese soldiers and sent to comfort station for sexual enslavement. So, 20 years later and after most of these women would have passed on, I felt the time was right to reveal their existence and their lives. In the early 2000s, I could never have ensured that any woman who came forward in Singapore would get justice and compensation. The Malaysian women never did. They passed on without it. Encouraging anyone to tell their story presented unresolvable dilemmas. The Singapore government in the 1990s appeared unsympathetic and preferred it to be that these women did not exist. Its position seemed to be that it was the Koreans and Japanese who were "Comfort Women" in Singapore. The "Comfort Women" controversy was an issue that the government did not want imported into Singapore as it was thought a contentious historical debate that did not concern Singapore. This was illustrated in 2013, when the Singapore government forbade the Korean "Comfort Women" erecting a Statue of Peace at a former comfort station in Singapore.

There is no testimony from Singapore "Comfort Women" in the vast collection of oral history testimony on the wartime Japanese Occupation of Singapore amassed by the national Oral History Centre at the National Archives of Singapore, which began to be collected in 1981 and is still ongoing. Yet, oral history practitioners know that such women survived the war and have taken their secret to their graves. Mass oral history projects, such as one done by 200 students at St Andrew’s Secondary School in 2014, have discovered former "Comfort Women", but these women have declined to give interviews about their experiences. Journalists, too, such as Phan Ming Yen of the English Straits Times, Hani Mustapha of the Malay Berita Harian, Huo Yue Wei of the Chinese Lianhe Zaobao in the 1990s have also sought out these women but they have faced the same wall of silence. The impression is that these women do not want to come forward publicly and be identified as "Comfort Women". They want to keep their privacy in a patriarchal society and not have their sexual past examined for public judgement.

Despite this silence that the local former "Comfort Women" of Singapore maintained until to their deaths, there are ways that historians can piece together the history of the sexual enslavement of local "Comfort Women" in Singapore. In the National Archives of Singapore, there are eyewitness accounts of the "Comfort Women" by people who saw them and remember them. There are horrifying eyewitness oral history accounts of young women being raped, taken away from their families, and later sexually enslaved in comfort stations. From the oral history collection at the National Institute of Education, there is an account by Wong Wai Kwan, who was a 25-year-old housewife when Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942. She had two children and was living in a terrace house in the Serangoon area, and described the shocking incidents:

Those ‘Japanese Ghosts’ were inhumane. They would just barge into people’s houses to search for young girls. They would even grab a girl away when they come across one on the streets. I heard they would rape the girls like they did in China. Some fortunate ones got home after a few days, looking very dazed. Some never came home because they were brought to army quarters to be "Comfort Women". However, they seldom took married women. We were very worried for my sister-in-law as she was only 18 and was still young and attractive. We arranged for her to get married to the boy staying next door to prevent her from being arrested by the Japanese. The poor girl had to marry so hurriedly and to a boy whom she knew very little about and she had to make do with a very simple wedding ceremony.

However, there is an account from a woman who successfully resisted being taken away, but at a cost. The oral history testimony of ‘high class’ Cantonese prostitute Ho Kwai Min tells how the Japanese military led by a Chinese collaborator came around to her brothel in Chinatown and demanded that she and another ‘high class’ prostitute consent to become "Comfort Women" for the Japanese military. She refused. Ho enlisted the help of her ‘madam’ brothel-keeper who persuaded two ‘low’ class prostitutes to take their places. The two later returned to Singapore after an explosion occurred at the military base that their comfort station served in Malaya. They escaped in the confusion. In Chinatown, a large group of 50 Cantonese ‘high class’ prostitutes were coerced into becoming "Comfort Women", with 20 sent to Taiping in Malaya and 30 sent to Thailand. Other oral history interviews from other local people document the location of the comfort stations where the "Comfort Women" were sexually enslaved. Local accounts can be corroborated by testimony from Japanese veterans published in their memoirs.

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The Legacy of the Silence of the "Comfort Women" of Singapore

How the silence of the local Singapore "Comfort Women" began is documented in the early postwar records. When the war ended, the Korean and Japanese "Comfort Women" of Singapore were repatriated back to Korea and Japan. Many were able to hide their past as they integrated back into their own patriarchal societies. Their oral histories give testimony to their varying success at doing so. For the local Singapore women, they were in a much more difficult position. They could not easily hide their past. N.I. Low and H.M. Cheng in their early book on the Japanese Occupation, This Singapore (Our City of Dreadful Night) in 1947, described the fears of local Singapore "Comfort Women" returning to Singapore after being taken from their families and sent to comfort stations in Indonesia:

On 6 March, 1946, six months after the collapse of Japan, a party of fifteen girls landed in Singapore. They had served as ‘'comfort girls'' in Java for nearly four years. Said one to the man whose duty it was to receive them at the wharfside, ‘Will my father have me back?’

For local "Comfort Women" who served the Japanese military, these fears meant that many stayed on in prostitution. Thus, a larger group of women worked in the postwar sex industry than before the war. A number turned to streetwalking, which was very noticeable. The colonial government acted by rounding many of them up and placing the younger girls into a Girls' Training School so they could learn to be seamstresses, maids, or housewives. Colonial records of the British Military Administration and the early years of the Social Welfare Department document this process. ‘Rehabilitation’ seems to have succeeded, as the women kept quiet about their pasts and reintegrated into the patriarchal society that would ostracize these women if they spoke about their pasts. By 1950, the local "Comfort Women" had disappeared from public debate and the records of the colonial government and its Social Welfare Department.

However, after December 1991, when the "Comfort Women" became an international controversy, they re-entered public debate. In Singapore, journalists began to ask whether there were local "Comfort Women". However, none were able to find and convince Singapore "Comfort Women" to come forward and tell their stories. In February 1992, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister and still a member of cabinet, told an audience in Japan that it was the Korean "Comfort Women" who 'saved the chastity of Singapore girls’, implying that no Singapore women were "Comfort Women". Singapore was unlike South Korea, and other countries, where "Comfort Women" did come forward to demand justice and compensation. In South Korea there were strong feminist movements and non-governmental organizations that were prepared to assist and support the demands of justice and compensation of the Korean "Comfort Women".

In Singapore, there was little sympathy in either the ranks of the government or in society for these women. The weak civil society dominated by a strong state offered little support in terms of strong feminist organizations and other non-governmental organizations that could have also offered support. Any "Comfort Women" that came forward would have to face the stigma surrounding being associated with sex work that was very strong in patriarchal Singapore. The attitude of Singapore government organizations towards the "Comfort Women" issue was demonstrated when the non-governmental organization known as the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and Korean "comfort woman" Kim Bok-dong proposed to establish a second Statue of Peace in Singapore after the first that was erected outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. It was to be erected at a former comfort station in Singapore where Korean women were known to have been sexually enslaved. Fearing the "Comfort Women" issue would provoke protest and division in Singapore’s tightly controlled civil society, the Singapore government flatly refused permission for a statue to be erected. It was the government body overseeing Singapore’s state heritage organizations, the Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth, that made this announcement on 30 January 2013. It gave no reason. But it is clear that the Singapore government never wanted what was perceived to be the highly contentious and emotive issue of the "Comfort Women" to enter Singapore civil society.

Yet, despite the Singapore government wanting to avoid the "Comfort Women" issue entering Singapore civil society, in popular culture and in heritage activities there was an emerging interest in the local "Comfort Women" of Singapore after the 1990s. In 2001, local "Comfort Women" were first depicted on state-controlled Singapore television in the TV drama, <War Diary>. The main local "comfort woman" character was played by up and coming Singapore star actress Fiona Xie. In 2002, Dr Cheong Pak Yean was able to get his clinic and onetime family home at Jalan Jurong Kechil gazetted for conservation as it had been a former comfort station. This aspect of the row of shophouses his family built in the 1930s was prominent in Dr Cheong’s representations to heritage bodies. This was perhaps the first time that a building was conserved because part of its past as a comfort station. In 2002, the highly praised Malay language play Hayat Hayatie depicted the life of a local Malay "comfort woman" in what was the first play about a local "comfort woman".

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Into the 2010s and 2020s, as almost all of the local "Comfort Women" most likely passed on, public interest has been sustained and this had been reflected in the literature on them. In 2019, Jing-Jing Lee wrote an acclaimed and well received novel about local "Comfort Women" entitled How We Disappeared. In 2023, my own book, The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory won the national book prize at the annual Singapore Book Awards for Best Non-Fiction Title.

Singaporeans do take an interest in the sites of the comfort stations in Singapore, particularly Dr Cheong’s one time family-owned row of shophouses at Jalan Jurong Kechil. Well-known heritage tour guide, Chris Ng conducts tours of the "Comfort Women" sites that include Dr Cheong’s shophouses. Ng specializes in heritage tours that deal with the ‘dark tourism’ of Singapore’s once considerable sex industry and guides overseas visitors and locals around Singapore’s historical prostitution areas and red-light districts. As well, Singaporeans do travel to "Comfort Women" sites in other countries, such as the well-known House of Sharing just outside Seoul. It is foreseeable that in the future in Singapore, as interest grows and more local information is available, that there will be a Statue of Peace, although never in a public place. Such a statue will be like the small one at the House of Sharing in a quiet corner for commemoration. This will be most likely in a privately owned building, such as Dr Cheong’s row of shophouses at Jalan Jurong Kechil. It certainly will not be like the statute outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, which is the focus of weekly protests. With increased interest and research, it may be possible to establish a "Comfort Women" museum, or have existing museums include more about the "Comfort Women" story than the current absence and silences. At the moment, Singaporeans have to travel overseas to experience these things, and they do.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery in Singapore has presented a paradox, which is difficult to unravel and equally difficult to explain. There is an abundance of historical sources regarding the "Comfort Women" of Singapore and enough evidence to demonstrate the presence of local Singapore "Comfort Women". Their presence in the historical record has been reflected in local Singapore culture and heritage since the 1990s. Yet, the paradox has been that none have come forward to give their testimony, as others have done so in other Asian countries that the Japanese military occupied. This has wrongly been taken by too many people to mean that they did not exist. This is not the case, and their silence can be explained by the patriarchal society in which they have lived and the Singapore state not wanting the international "Comfort Women" controversy to disrupt its tightly controlled Singapore civil society. There was never going to be any support or help for Singapore "Comfort Women" coming forward demanding justice and compensation. Keeping quiet about their pasts has meant they have kept their social standing in their patriarchal families, communities, and society. It is highly likely that if any Singapore "Comfort Woman" had ever come forward to give her testimony and demand compensation that she would have received no support and would have been ostracized because of the stigma associated with sex work. These women have chosen to remain silent and that has to be respected. However, their experiences can be honoured in popular culture and in heritage activities, such as novels, dramas, heritage tours, and in representation in museums. This trend is developing in Singapore.