What Peranakan Memory Reveals About the Blind Spot of Japanese Historical Revisionism
0. What Is Peranakan?
Peranakan is a Malay word meaning “locally born.” It is an umbrella term for the hybrid cultures that emerged when traders and migrants of diverse origins — Chinese, South Indian Tamil, Arab and Indian Muslim, Portuguese — settled in Southeast Asia, married local women, and put down roots there.
The best known branch is the “Baba-Nyonya” (Peranakan Cina), formed from the fusion of Chinese immigrants and Malay culture, and it is this branch that provides the central material for this essay. But the category “Peranakan” extends far beyond it. There is the “Chitty” (Chitty Melaka, Indian Peranakan), a Hindu community of South Indian Tamil origin centred on Malacca; the “Jawi Peranakan,” born of the mixing of South Indian Muslim traders with Malays; and the “Kristang” (Eurasian Peranakan), descended from Portuguese intermixing — multiple lineages differing in origin and faith, coexisting side by side. Geographically, too, such hybrid communities are scattered across Southeast Asia well beyond Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia — the “Baba” of Phuket in southern Thailand, the “Pashu” of Myanmar, and others.
In other words, Peranakan is not the name of a single ethnicity but a concept denoting “a locally rooted condition in which multiple origins are layered upon one another.” The very fact that Chinese, Indian (Tamil), Muslim, and Eurasian lineages all coexist under the single word “Peranakan” already embodies, within a single community, the “multilayeredness of Asia” that this essay goes on to argue.
1. An Encounter in Singapore: Another Kind of Memory
On my first visit to Singapore, what captivated me was neither the skyline nor the Merlion, but the existence of the Peranakan community — above all the Baba-Nyonya, born of the fusion between Chinese immigrants and local Malay culture. Embroidered kebaya, furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a language that is neither Chinese nor Malay. Ever since, out of personal fascination, I have not only read widely but also visited the Peranakan Museum in Singapore, following this community’s history and paying close attention to how it exists today.
Along the way, one thing kept nagging at me. Trace the family histories of Peranakan people and you almost invariably run into a gap — the three and a half years of the Japanese Occupation. And yet I had encountered almost no writing in Japanese that addressed this.
2. Uchida Tatsuru’s Diagnosis: The Left’s Weakness — the Absence of “Laying the Empire to Rest”
The writer Uchida Tatsuru, in a dialogue with journalist Mochizuki Isoko (published as Living Through a World Without Common Sense), points to what he sees as the greatest weakness of Japan’s pro-constitution left. The Japanese soldiers of the wartime generation — those who took part in, or witnessed, acts of violence against China — said almost nothing to their children after the war about what they had done. They spoke, occasionally, of their own suffering; but the memory of the harm they inflicted, even when it belonged to fellow soldiers rather than themselves, they carried silently to the grave. As if waiting for that generation to die out, Uchida argues, historical revisionists then emerged. The left, in his account, threw prewar Japan wholesale into “history’s trash bin,” while the right painted over it with heroic myth — both sides shirking the laborious work of dissecting individual layers of experience and examining each on its own terms.
This is a sharp argument. But hidden within Uchida’s framework is a premise: that the “witnesses” are confined to Japanese-language speakers within Japan.
3. But the Witnesses Are Not Only Inside Japan
The memory of the war that revisionists seek to dismiss is not only that of Korea and China. In places once occupied by the Japanese military — Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia — independent circuits of memory also exist.
The Malaysian Peranakan writer Lee Su Kim, drawing on the lived experience of her own family, published in 2026 the novel Run, My Daughters, Run, set in Japanese-occupied Kuala Lumpur. Told from the perspective of Pei Lin, a seventeen-year-old Nyonya, the novel depicts Kempeitai house raids, Japanese soldiers coming to the door in search of young girls to serve as “comfort women,” and sisters disguising themselves as boys to hide. The novel draws on memories the author’s late mother actually recounted — she was in her early twenties in 1942 when Japanese forces occupied Malaya and Singapore. In writing it, the author has said that in the course of her research she found there was strikingly little literature treating the Japanese Occupation from a local perspective.
A second example, from Indonesia, is worth citing. Queeny Chang, daughter of the Chinese businessman Tjong A Fie who made his fortune in Medan (in what is now North Sumatra, Indonesia), wrote the memoir Memories of a Nonya (1981). Born in 1896, fluent in English, Malay, and Dutch, she left a careful record of a Chinese Peranakan household in the twentieth century under Dutch colonial rule. What makes this family memory valuable is that it traces the era’s great turning points — from Dutch colonial rule through the Japanese military administration to the founding of independent Indonesia — not through national history, but through the eyes of a single household. The memoir has been translated into Chinese in Taiwan (as 娘惹回憶錄) and studied there as source material for the history of overseas Chinese communities, but no Japanese translation appears to exist.
The testimony of these two authors themselves substantiates this essay’s central claim. It is not that witness is absent. It survives as family memory, and it is being actively reproduced, even now, in literary form by a new generation of writers. Nor are these isolated cases — Lee Kip Lee’s memoir Amber Sands and Walter Woon’s The Devil’s Circle, among others, form a substantial body of work touching on the Occupation.
It is worth noting, too, that some works by Singaporean writers engage with Japan even more directly. The Eurasian Singaporean novelist Rex Shelley’s Island in the Centre (1995) traces in careful detail the life of a Japanese engineer, Nakajima Tomio, working in Malaya from the 1920s through to the Occupation. A work that ventures this far into the inner life of the occupier is rare, and it illustrates well the kind of perspective a boundary-crossing community can offer — one that slips past the simple binary of perpetrator and victim.
The narrative of “vanishing witnesses” that Uchida describes turns out to be only a partial truth, one that holds within a single linguistic sphere — Japan’s own.
4. A Double Silence: Present, Yet Unheard
What comes into view here is a different kind of silence from the one Uchida describes.
Uchida speaks of a silence in which the wartime generation did not speak. This is a silence that becomes irrecoverably unbridgeable with the passage of time. The formerly occupied, by contrast, are speaking. But that speech circulates within the English-language sphere, and almost no channel exists to translate and introduce it into the Japanese-language sphere. As far as I have been able to determine, none of the works cited above has been translated into Japanese.
These two silences produce, in the end, the same effect: the reality of the Occupation drops entirely out of the collective memory of the ordinary Japanese reader. But their nature is entirely different. The first is beyond remedy. The second is a gap that could, in principle, be closed even now — and yet it has not been, not by accident, but because the infrastructure of translation, publishing, and education that would build such a bridge has never made this kind of narrative a priority.
5. The Unintended Strength of Being Apolitical
Why has this gap been left unaddressed? One reason lies in the fact that these narratives are, compared with those from Korea and China, relatively “unpolitical.”
Testimony originating from Korea and China — on comfort women, Nanjing, or textbook screening — has remained, throughout the postwar period, a point of diplomatic contention between Japan and its neighbours. Because states have used history as external leverage, memory itself has been treated as a political resource. For Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, by contrast, the primary adversary in their struggles for independence was Britain or the Netherlands, and the Japanese Occupation has been positioned as an episode within that longer story. Postwar Japan, moreover, came to be re-evaluated as an economic partner, and the channel through which memory is mobilised as a diplomatic card is correspondingly thin. As a result, the memory of the Occupation has not been absorbed into a national narrative, but has instead been preserved — as in the Peranakan works discussed here — as family history and private memory.
This turns out, in fact, to work in favour of the critique of revisionism. The stock rebuttal Japanese revisionists deploy against testimony from Korea and China is that it is “anti-Japanese propaganda,” “politically exaggerated.” Unjust as this defence is, it retains a certain persuasive force against testimony that has passed through the mechanics of interstate politics. But it gains no purchase against Peranakan family-historical fiction. A purely family memory, mobilised by no government’s diplomacy, is hard to dismiss as propaganda. It is precisely the unpolitical character of this testimony that protects it from revisionism’s usual weapon of delegitimisation.
6. The Peranakan Perspective: Deepening Japan’s Position in Asia
The very existence of the Peranakan community betrays the map of “Asia” that Japanese people unconsciously take for granted. And because this community is not confined to a single country — spanning Singapore and Malaysia through to Indonesia, and further encompassing the Tamil, Muslim, and Eurasian lineages noted at the outset — it carries even greater significance, straddling multiple former colonies and multiple axes of origin.
In postwar Japanese discourse, “Asia” has tended to collapse into a symmetrical bilateral structure: Japan versus China, Japan versus Korea. Within this simple binary of perpetrator-nation and victim-nations, Southeast Asia has often been marginalised — lumped together as “the rest of Asia,” or spoken of only as a site of economic expansion or tourism.
The Peranakan community embodies the collapse of this very binary. Descended from Chinese migrants yet not citizens of China; having internalised Malay culture yet not Malay; educated under British or Dutch colonial rule yet neither British nor Dutch. They are neither “perpetrator” nor “pure victim,” but have lived in a place where multiple empires, multiple ethnicities, and multiple languages fold over one another in layers.
Adding Indonesia here carries a significance beyond mere geographic completeness. The colonial power the Peranakan of Singapore and Malaysia confronted was Britain, and their independence struggle turned on that axis. The Chinese Peranakan of Indonesia, as seen in Queeny Chang’s family, confronted the Netherlands instead — and in independent Indonesia, ethnic Chinese residents themselves have repeatedly become targets of exclusion and violence, a wholly different complexity. In other words, within the single label “Peranakan” lie distinct layers of colonial experience — one rooted in British rule, another in Dutch — and in both, the Japanese Occupation is positioned as an episode within the larger axis of anti-British or anti-Dutch independence struggle, while afterward it connects to an entirely different tension: the position of ethnic Chinese within the new nation-state.
The memory of the Japanese Occupation was lived and spoken within these many layers of belonging and tension. To take the Peranakan perspective seriously means lifting the question of “what is Asia” for Japan out of a simple framework of bilateral moral reckoning, and into a far more complex, multilayered regional understanding — one where British and Dutch imperial histories intersect with Chinese, Tamil, and Muslim lines of descent. This does not lighten Japan’s responsibility for the harm it caused. On the contrary, it demands that the locus of that responsibility be examined more precisely, at the level of specific social communities. Only by confronting the memory of hybrid, hard-to-name communities — who carried the legacies of British and Dutch colonial rule respectively while living out their own distinct positions within it — rather than abstractions like “China,” “Malaya,” or “Indonesia,” can Japan’s historical position in Asia emerge not as a simplified narrative of atonement, but as something faithful to its actual layered complexity.
It should also be noted that Peranakan literature is not confined to memories of the Occupation. The Singaporean writer Sandra Chua’s debut novel There’s No Such Thing as a Skinny Bibik (longlisted for the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize) follows Charlie, a Nyonya woman living in the present day who works as an undercover agent investigating a wildlife-smuggling ring, even as she was born into a traditional patriarchal household. Borrowing the vessel of adventure and romance fiction, it offers an example of how the Peranakan community is not a culture fixed to past memory, but a living one that continues to change.
This is, in effect, a concrete remedy for the very failure of “dissection” that Uchida diagnoses. Only by abandoning the habit of narrating history at the level of the nation-state, and raising the resolution down to the memory of boundary-crossing communities like the Peranakan — communities that themselves contain distinct British- and Dutch-colonial experiential layers — can Japan come to understand its own position in Asia not through a borrowed story of good and evil, but in its own inherent complexity.
7. In Closing: The Work of a Bridge-Builder
If one can read English, this gap causes no personal difficulty. But that does not mean the gap itself is not a problem. If anything, there is a particular vantage point available precisely to those who can access information without passing through the Japanese language at all.
As long as only the English-reading stratum has access to Peranakan memory, it remains, for the ordinary Japanese reader, effectively nonexistent. The silence of a wartime generation that did not speak, and the silence of testimony that exists but fails to arrive because it never passes through a Japanese-language channel, converge, in the end, on the same place: a gap in Japan’s collective memory.
If that is so, then interpretation and translation are not merely a language service. They are work that bears on the very formation of collective memory — on what a society remembers, and what it fails to.