Article

Heritage site, war memorial and tourist stop: the Japanese cemetery of Singapore, 1891– 2005

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Heritage site, war memorial and tourist stop: the Japanese cemetery of Singapore, 1891– 2005

Kevin Blackburn’s 2007 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society traces the Japanese Cemetery of Singapore from its 1891 founding through 2005, arguing that the site has simultaneously functioned as a heritage monument to the pre-war Japanese community, a war memorial to Japanese military dead (including executed war criminals), and a tourist destination for Japanese visitors—three roles that generate persistent and unresolved paradoxes.

Summary

Blackburn examines how the Japanese Cemetery, the only surviving built heritage of Singapore’s pre-war Japanese quarter (“Little Japan” along Middle Road), has been shaped by successive phases of Japanese presence in Singapore: the karayuki-san prostitutes of the 1870s–1920s, the interwar commercial middle class, the Japanese Occupation and its militarist legacy, and the post-1970s wave of corporate expatriates. The cemetery’s physical landscape—its tombstones, memorials, temple, and signage—encodes each of these phases, and Blackburn reads the site as a palimpsest in which competing narratives of Japanese identity have been inscribed and, in some cases, deliberately obscured.

A central problem the article explores is the tension between the Japanese Association’s heritage-promotion agenda and the cemetery’s role as a war memorial. The Association, under chairman Kazuo Yasukawa from the 1980s onward, has signposted and published guides that present the cemetery as a site of “Japanese cultural belonging” for schoolchildren and tourists, while downplaying the karayuki-san origins of the community and the wartime connections of the pre-war Japanese elite. Yet the cemetery’s most prominent and frequently visited monuments are those erected by Japanese prisoners of war in 1947 and by the Japanese government in 1955, which commemorate executed war criminals as “martyrs” (junnan)—a framing that mirrors the ideology of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Blackburn draws on the POW recollections of Major Hajime Fujita, Japanese Association publications, British Foreign Office files, and his own fieldwork at the cemetery to show how the militarist narrative was embedded in stone by unrepentant soldiers who believed they had been fighting to liberate Asia from European colonialism.

The article also documents how the cemetery’s function shifted from an active burial ground to a memorial park. After the mass deportation of Japanese residents following 1945, the site was maintained by a Chinese caretaker, Zhang Ya Gong, until his death in 1960. The Japanese Association revived in 1957, rebuilt the Saiyuji temple in 1960 and again in 1986, and in 1987 reached an agreement with the Singapore government to convert the cemetery into a memorial park. By the 1990s, the site had become a stop on Japanese heritage tourism circuits, with the Association organizing bus tours and publishing bilingual guidebooks. The 1995 “Trail of the Vestiges of War” tour and the 2005 ceremony marking the reburial of Otokichi Yamamoto (the first Japanese resident of Singapore, who arrived in 1862) illustrate both the appeal and the political sensitivity of promoting Japanese wartime heritage in Singapore.

Key Findings

  • The cemetery was founded in 1891 by Tagajiro Futaki, a brothel and rubber plantation owner, who secured 6 acres of his own land plus 2 acres of adjacent public land; by 1905, Singapore had 109 Japanese brothels employing 633 prostitutes, and in 1903, 70 per cent of the 949 Japanese residents were involved in the sex industry (pp. 21–22).
  • Between February and April 1947, Japanese POWs under Major Hajime Fujita erected four large stone memorials in the cemetery, including a “memorial to the martyrdom of patriots” whose surrounding ground was consecrated with soil smuggled from Changi Prison, where war criminals had been executed (pp. 30–31).
  • The Japanese government’s Repatriation Board exhumed 135 of the 137 Japanese war criminals executed at Changi Prison in March 1955 and secretly left behind a memorial reading “a memorial to the ashes of 135 martyrs” (junnan nokotsu hyaku sanju go chu), dated 30 March 1955—two decades before minor war criminals were enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine (pp. 32–33).
  • A separate memorial commemorates 79 Japanese war criminals hanged in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Malacca; the Japanese Association’s guide describes this monument as a “memorial of lifelong hatred” (p. 33).
  • The “ashes of 10,000 martyrs” memorial combines battle casualties (approximately 9,500) with Japanese POW deaths in British custody (approximately 1,900), yielding a total of around 11,400, though the POWs’ original claim of 10,000 deaths from British maltreatment was an exaggeration designed to deflect attention from Japanese wartime atrocities (p. 34).
  • The Japanese population of Singapore fluctuated dramatically: from 4,000 in 1939 to 40 in 1949, then to 26,000 by 1995 following the wave of Japanese corporate investment in the 1970s and 1980s (p. 21).

Conclusion

Blackburn’s definitive takeaway is that the Japanese Cemetery of Singapore is a site of irreducible contradiction: it is simultaneously a place where Japanese cultural heritage is celebrated for tourists and a repository of militarist ideology that commemorates war criminals as martyrs. The Japanese Association’s heritage narrative selectively erases the karayuki-san origins and the community’s complicity in Japanese imperial expansion, while the POW-erected memorials preserve an unrepentant militarist framing that remains physically present and ritually maintained. The cemetery thus stands as a material record of how a community negotiates a painful and complex past through the landscape of death.

Context

  • Primary archival sources include the National Archives of Singapore (Public Relations Office files on the exhumation of Japanese war criminals; STPB records on the Syonan Jinja site), British Foreign Office files at The National Archives, UK (FO 371/110523 on war graves; FO 371/105430 on Japanese POW records), and the Japanese Association’s own publications and the POW recollections of Major Fujita published in Nanjujisei: The Southern Cross (1978).
  • Historiographically, the article extends the work of Nelson Graburn and Yuko Shioji on Japanese heritage tourism by applying their framework to a specific Southeast Asian site, and it complements Blackburn’s earlier study of Japanese war memorials in Singapore (1999) by situating the cemetery’s war commemoration within the broader social history of the Japanese community.

References