Some Japanese Sources on Malayan History

Abstract

A brimming reservoir of Japanese materials on South-east Asian history is ready to serve scholars with appropriate research interests and the needed linguistic tools. In this brief paper an introduction to selected sources on Malayan history will be made. Readers will see that the materials to be described are of special usefulness to economic historians working on the 1930's and 1940's, to sociologists and political scientists analyzing the complexities of a plural society, and of course to students of the period of the Japanese occupation of Malaya. To tell the military story of the Japanese conquest, accusations and apologiae have appeared from the British side and Colonel Tsuji Masanobu proundly published the victor's account. Except, however, for books by guerrilla opponents or civilian victims of Japanese rule, the occupation years are an historical blank. Little imagination is required to sense that, in the years bwbween the collapse and the return of the British, the Japanese in Malaya were obliged to face the wide range of administrative problems imposed on a governing authority. Accordingly, studies of Japanese solutions and failures could be highly instructive. Furthermore, as is generally recognized, the terrorist units of the 1948–60 Emergency were direct descendents of elements in the anti-Japanese resistance campaign, and Malayan nationalism itself moved toward maturity under Japanese pressure. Clearly the occupation years form the most dynamic and the most neglected period in modern Malayan history.