The world as Lee Kuan Yew knew it came to an end on the moming of Dec 8, 1941. A brave new world was about to begin. But at that very moment when the old one crumbled and its replacement burst from the sky bearing the emblem of the Japanese air force, there was only terror and destruction.
Japanese war planes struck with impunity on an unsuspecting city that quiet morning to shatter 123 years of unchallenged British rule.
Raffles College"On Dec 8, early in the morning, when the bombs dropped, I was in Raffles College in the hostel and we were in the middle of it. Then a few days later, the two battleships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, were sunk. That was a disaster that jolted us. Then they kept on advancing and advancing. And we were recruited into the MAS, Medical Auxiliary Services, the students in Raffles College, and we volunteered. We ran around with an ambulance, collected injured people after air raids; towards the end we collected injured people after shelling. And they were, I think from the beginning of February or late January, filing into Singapore. Next thing, they were in Singapore."
By Feb 1942, the triumphant Imperial Army was in Singapore. Lee met his first Japanese soldier at his maternal grandfather's home in Telok Kurau.
"I looked at this strange person with flaps on his cap. It took me a moment to realise he was a Japanese. That's that."
For the first-year undergraduate from Raffles College, it was the biggest shock of his life. His world had turned upside down and from this unexpected perspective, he would receive what he now regards as the political education of his life.
"The dark ages had descended on us. It was brutal, cruel. In looking back, I think it was the biggest single political education of my life because, for 3½ years, I saw the meaning of power and how power and politics and government went together, and I also understood how people trapped in a power situation responded because they had to live. One day, the British were there, immovable, complete masters; next day, the Japanese, whom we derided, mocked as short, stunted people with shortsighted squint eyes."
Tumultuous changes were taking place everywhere as the old order on which the British Empire was firmly rooted collapsed. The German and Japanese armies were on the move throughout Europe and Asia. For the people of Singapore, as it was for those of Malaya, Indo-China and Indonesia, the unthinkable had happened. The great white colonial masters of Great Britain, France and the Netherlands were being overrun by the bow-legged, squat and squint-eyed yellow terror from the Land of the Rising Sun. English would be replaced by Nippon-go, God Save the King by Kimigayo and the civil, orderly ways of the Anglo Saxon world by the raw brutality and stoicism of the samurai.
Lee Kuan Yew saw all this in the raw. But he was no mere spectator. It was raw politics itself, and he was right in the middle of it. To understand Lee today, what he is, what he believes in, why he does certain things and what he stands for, it is necessary to understand the temper of those tumultuous years and how they seized and shaped him.
For the story of Lee Kuan Yew and modern Singapore, this beginning was as brutal as it was unexpected. But it did not take place in a vacuum. It burst out of the old world with an impatience that Lee would epitomise later. To understand why it happened, it is necessary, too, to understand the old world, a world which Lee inhabited for 18 years before those Japanese fighter planes put an end to it.
Extract from Lee Kuan Yew: The Man And His Ideas
First published in The Sunday Times, Sept 28, 1997
Copyright © 1998 Singapore Press Holdings. All Rights Reserved.
