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The war crimes trials of the Japanese officers involved in the Sook Ching Massacre
Author
Tan, Terence Sian Yeow
Supervisor
Blackburn, Kevin
Abstract
War crimes trials into large-scale atrocities are public events in which collective memories of events espoused by protagonists are analysed, deconstructed and then altered or reinforced by the judgements given during the trial. By carefully examining the transcripts of the 1947 and 1948 Chinese Massacre Trials into the 1942 Sook Ching Massacre and the debate outside the courtroom, this thesis will examine how Chinese and Japanese postwar collective memories of wartime atrocities in Singapore were constructed soon after the war. It will be argued that the Chinese collective memory of the 1942 massacre was shaped by constant interaction between repetition and recollection of wartime suffering. A collective memory based upon the grievances of punishing the Japanese for their brutality resulted because the notion that they had been victims of miseries inflicted upon them by the Japanese, for no other reason than that they were Chinese, strengthened the Chinese community's identity. In contrast, the Japanese counter-narrative to the events of 1942 paralleled the early postwar development of the right-wing nationalist view of Japan's wartin.; past. The Japanese sought to establish, in the course of both trials, that Sook Ching operations were justified by military concerns and the inviolability of their orders.
This thesis will also consider how British officials reconstructed the past from the collective memory of the Chinese and Japanese witnesses called before the courts and "managed justice" so that the trials could be seen as coming to an "objective" account of what happened. It will be argued the British authorities were prompted by a sense of paternalistic sympathy for their Chinese colonial subjects and used the trials as theatre in order to form and shape collective memory out of the sense that there had been some degree of atonement.
This thesis will also consider how British officials reconstructed the past from the collective memory of the Chinese and Japanese witnesses called before the courts and "managed justice" so that the trials could be seen as coming to an "objective" account of what happened. It will be argued the British authorities were prompted by a sense of paternalistic sympathy for their Chinese colonial subjects and used the trials as theatre in order to form and shape collective memory out of the sense that there had been some degree of atonement.
Date Issued
2001
Call Number
D804.J3 Tan
Date Submitted
2001