From a Page in a Book
In a collection of Peranakan (Straits Chinese) folk songs and rhymes, I came across a curious children’s rhyme: “Ah ee oo eh oh / Kaki ku bengkok.” It opens with the Japanese vowels a-i-u-e-o, then continues in Malay: “My leg is bowed.”
According to the note, these rhymes were born during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore and Malaya. Each school day began with the singing of Kimigayo, lessons were taught in Japanese, and the language was drilled through song. Children turned that syllabary into nonsense verses to snatch a moment of respite in hard times. The rhymes stayed with the survivors long after the war.
It is a funny rhyme. But if we enter through that laughter, the way Japan has talked about its war memory, and the way cultures are handed down, start to look a little different.
Reading Kakiku as Kaki Ku
The neatest trick is what happens to ka-ki-ku. Divide those three syllables differently and you get the Malay kaki ku, “my leg.” Inside a sequence of sounds forced on them, the children found a meaning in their own language.
The other verses work the same way.
- Kaki ku bengkok / kekok: my leg is bowed, clumsy. The final -kok carries the echo of ke-ko.
- Babi, lu busok: pig, you stink. Lu is the Hokkien-derived “you”; busok is the Baba Malay spelling.
- Saya masak ayer satu teko: I boil a pot of water. Teko rhymes with ne-no and ke-ko.
This is not resistance in any grand sense. It is play: overwriting imposed sounds with one’s own meanings. The a-i-u-e-o recited every morning turns into a joke about bowed legs and smelly pigs. The teacher’s authority keeps the sounds and loses the content.
One small point. The book’s note calls the characters hiragana, but the script shown is katakana. Japanese schools at the time taught katakana before hiragana, and Japanese-language teaching in the occupied territories most likely centred on katakana too. What was katakana in memory may have been generalised during editing into “Japanese script equals hiragana.” It is a small example of memory changing shape as it travels.
Where “Asian Liberation” Falls Apart
When the war comes up in Japan, the conversation tends to centre on Nanjing or on colonial rule in Korea. Bring in the view from the Malay Peninsula, especially Penang and Singapore, and a different picture emerges. At the very least, the ground on which Japan’s ultra-conservatives glorify and justify the war gives way.
The reason is that their justification rests on “the liberation of Asia.” Accounts of Nanjing or Korea can already be waved away as “anti-Japanese propaganda from China and Korea.” But Southeast Asia is exactly where the liberation story is supposed to have taken place. If the people who lived there do not remember being liberated, the foundation itself collapses.
The experience of Malaya and Singapore clashes with the liberation narrative on at least three counts.
- Sook Ching: In February and March 1942, Chinese men in Singapore and Penang were screened as “anti-Japanese elements” and killed. Estimates range from several thousand (Japanese figures) to tens of thousands (Chinese community figures), but that these were organised killings is not in dispute.
- The “gift” and the currency: The overseas Chinese community was forced to hand over a “contribution” of 50 million dollars, and the flood of military scrip, the “banana money,” wrecked the economy.
- Division by ethnicity: Malays and Indians were courted while the Chinese were treated as enemies. The scars of that divide-and-rule left their mark on postwar ethnic relations.
It is true that some Malay nationalists thought well of Japan. But that supports only one facet of the liberation story; it cannot justify the whole. Ask whose liberation it was, and from the Chinese and Peranakan point of view the answer does not hold.
States That Amplify, States That Mute
Set against China, South Korea and North Korea, the picture of wartime sharpens further.
In those countries, war memory is bound up with the legitimacy of the state: the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-Japanese founding myth and its patriotic education since the 1990s; history disputes entangled with South Korean domestic politics; North Korea’s founding myth of Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese guerrillas. Japan’s ultra-conservatives have turned this around, dismissing the memories themselves as “political propaganda, and therefore untrustworthy.”
The memories of Singapore and Malaysia sit outside that loop. What they reveal is how much the methods of occupation had in common.
- Kimigayo and compulsory Japanese in Malaya; imperialisation education and the “national language” policy in Korea
- Screening and execution by the Kempeitai military police
- Forced extraction of resources from local society
When testimony of the same structure comes from several regions with different interests and political contexts, it should be read not as fabrication but as a feature of the system of rule itself.
That said, the memories of Singapore and Malaysia are not apolitical either. They are politicised in the opposite direction. With the Civilian War Memorial erected in 1967, Singapore folded the suffering of the Chinese into a story of “shared suffering of all races” in service of nation-building. In Malaysia, because the main victims were Chinese, the war tended to be pushed to the margins of a Malay-led national story. Both countries settled the “blood debt” with quasi-reparations in the 1960s and chose not to play history as a diplomatic card.
This is not the politics of speaking loudly but the politics of muting and diluting. And in Japanese public discourse, precisely because it never became a political issue, it became a blank.
Memory amplified by the state, and memory muted by the state. Lay the two side by side, and what survives in both is the closest we can get to wartime reality.
Memory Settled in Greetings and Sweets
Outside the national story, where does memory survive? Like the rhymes, it survives in laughter and in the forms of everyday life.
Lee Su Kim’s novel Run, My Daughters, Run draws on her mother’s recollections of the Occupation. Japanese troops go from house to house looking for young women, and a mother disguises her daughters as boys to hide them. For those who see the “comfort women” issue only as “a Korean political issue,” the fact that the same terror existed in Chinese households in Malaya has not reached them.
As life grows harder, the family starts making and selling Nyonya kuih, traditional cakes. The mother allows no shortcuts with ingredients or method, and insists the diamond shapes stay as they are, even if it means selling fewer. Preserving the culture was, in itself, a way of surviving.
A review of the novel touches on the habit among Chinese elders of asking “Have you eaten?” instead of saying “I love you,” and suggests it may come from a generation’s resolve after knowing extreme hunger.
Yet the greeting itself is older than the war. Mandarin has chī fàn le ma, Hokkien chia̍h-pá-bē, Korean bap meogeosseo? In Korea it is often linked to borit-gogae, the “barley hump,” the spring lean season when food ran out. It is most naturally understood as a greeting from agrarian societies where famine was close at hand. Japan, by contrast, has almost no custom of greeting with food; the nearest may be Osaka’s Mōkarimakka?, “Making money?”
So the hunger of the Occupation did not create this greeting. An existing greeting was given new weight by wartime hunger. No new words are born; experience flows into forms that already exist, and their meaning is overwritten. It is the same structure as the a-i-u-e-o rhymes.
Vessels of Culture: Family or Region?
Another difference comes into view. Among the Peranakan, cultural transmission is told as a story of family and lineage. In Japan, it becomes a story of region, society and government.
The Peranakan had no state or territory to carry their culture for them. Under British rule and after independence alike, they were a minority within a minority, fitting neatly into neither the Malay national story nor the Chinese one. The only vessels available were the household and the clan. Cooking, the kebaya, weddings and ancestral rites were handed down inside the home, above all through the women’s line. Lee Su Kim’s novel and Sandra Chua’s Skinny Bibik series are both stories of women across generations: mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers.
In Japan, by contrast, culture is treated as public property, as national culture or regional tradition: the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, intangible cultural assets, preservation societies, municipal tourism promotion. With the abolition of the ie household system after the war, the unit of transmission partly shifted from the family to the community and the state. The iemoto system of hereditary schools keeps the outward form of a “house,” but in practice it works more like an institution with public authority.
This difference becomes a difference in where “correctness” comes from.
- Peranakan: the standard is “how my grandmother did it.” Recipes vary from house to house; authority is personal and allows diversity.
- Japan: the standard is set by associations, schools and government. Authority is institutional and tends to converge on a single right answer.
Family authority can bind too, of course. Charlie, the heroine of Skinny Bibik, is too tall, too skinny and too wild to be considered a proper nyonya. The joke in the title rests on the assumption that a bibik, a Peranakan matron, is plump. For a generation that knew hunger, plumpness was a sign of plenty. The sense that a skinny bibik cannot exist may itself be memory settled in the body.
“Proper nyonya” closely resembles the “correctness” of kitsuke, the codified art of wearing kimono in Japan. Forms meant to protect a culture quietly become walls that keep the young away from it.
The weaknesses are symmetrical as well. Transmission that depends on the household breaks when the family disperses, which is why the Peranakan have lately turned to associations and museums. In Japan, when a region depopulates, festivals and performing arts vanish along with the people who carried them. Each society is beginning to need the vessel it lacks.
Who Remembers
Those who remember the a-i-u-e-o rhymes are not states but the children of that time and their families. Memory does not survive only as words of accusation. It survives as parody songs, greetings, the diamond shape of a kuih, the story of a mother who dressed her daughters as boys.
Memory that does not take the form of anger is hard to dismiss as “a product of anti-Japanese education.” And because almost none of it has been translated into Japanese, it has yet to reach Japan.
Try looking for war memory not in quarrels between states but in family kitchens and children’s games. What appears is a wartime reality with real texture, one that can be neither glorified nor justified. Building a bridge to it is, I believe, part of the work of those who stand between two languages.
References
- Matthew Lloyd Tan, Peranakan Folk Songs & Rhymes, Landmark Books
- Lee Su Kim, Run, My Daughters, Run, Monsoon Books
- Sandra Chua, There’s No Such Thing as a Skinny Bibik, Epigram Books