Strategic races: understanding racial categories in Japanese-occupied Singapore

ABSTRACT This paper examines Japanese policies toward different races (minzoku) in Singapore during the Second World War. These policies, which victimized the Chinese community and appeared to favor others such as the Malay and Indian communities, fostered inter-racial resentments that would persist long after the war. Drawing on internal occupation guidelines produced by the Japanese state and the accounts of the administrators who implemented them, this paper shows that the treatment of the Chinese community was in fact a direct result of the perceived significance of these groups to the success or failure of Japan’s wartime imperial project in Southeast Asia. Groups whose importance the Japanese initially dismissed, however, had greater freedom to chart their own destinies and demand Japan live up to its promise of an “Asia for Asians” as the war progressed.