The everyday life of the people of the Malay Peninsula [c. 1943]. . Kozic
Ando Kozo, a Japanese physician who served as Chief of the Medical Department of Malaya District during the Japanese Occupation, published this account of everyday life in Singapore (referred to in the original Japanese as Shonanto) in the popular nutrition magazine Eiyō to Tōri in 1943. Translated by Josko Kozo and published in JMBRAS in 2021, the article presents a colonial-medical portrait of the Malay Peninsula’s multi-ethnic population, framing their diets, habits, and health conditions through a hierarchy that privileges Japanese standards of vitality and productivity. The overarching thesis is that the tropics are a manageable, even desirable, environment for Japanese settlers provided one attends to specific hygienic precautions, while simultaneously attributing the perceived inferiority of Malay and Indian populations to their food, climate, and disease burden.
Summary
The article is structured around the author’s first impressions upon returning to Japan after more than twenty years in the Malay Peninsula, where he notes the improved skeletal development of Japanese female students compared to the “skinny” male students he left behind (p. 190). He then moves through a systematic survey of tropical life: the monsoon system and its effects on rainfall and disease; the dietary practices of the three main ethnic groups; the utility of the coconut palm; and the public health challenges of the territory. The population of the Malay Peninsula is given as approximately 6 million, of which 700,000 are in Singapore, with 60 percent Chinese and the remainder Malay and Indian (p. 191).
The racial hierarchy embedded in the text is explicit. The Chinese diet, centred on pork and soybean sprouts, is declared nutritionally superior and the source of their “great and strong” vitality. The Malay diet of rice with curry is judged the worst, producing fatigue and “sloth,” a condition the author attributes partly to malaria’s destruction of red blood cells (p. 191). Indians, who also eat rice with curry, are described as having lost all sensory sensitivity to spice, their “lips, tongues and stomachs” having “no senses anymore” (p. 192). The Malay royalty is depicted as leading a “carefree life, only sleeping and eating, keeping around three concubines,” though the author concedes they are “getting used to a more human-like everyday life” under the Occupation (p. 192).
On the public health front, Ando reports that Singapore has not experienced cholera or plague, that typhoid rates are slightly lower than Tokyo’s with over 90 percent vaccination coverage, and that post-occupation fly and mosquito control campaigns have reduced infectious disease below pre-war levels (p. 194). Malaria receives the most sustained attention: the author explains the three-condition transmission model (carrier, mosquito, uninfected human body), distinguishes between strong and weak Anopheles transmitters, and notes that Japanese purchasers of Chinese rubber plantations “instantly started with cleaning” in ways the Chinese had not (p. 195). He concludes that tropical worker efficiency is inherently low because the body exhausts and recovers slowly in the heat, and that “planning any kind of management in the South might take even up to one or two hundred years” (p. 195).
Key Findings
- The Malay Peninsula’s population is estimated at 6 million (700,000 in Singapore), with 60 percent Chinese, the rest Malay and Indian; the Chinese diet is rated nutritionally superior to Malay and Indian diets (p. 191).
- The coconut palm is described as a total resource: leaves for roofing, trunk for pillars, fibre for rope, carbon layers for gas masks, copra for oil, unripe fruit water as a vitamin-rich drink, and fermented sap as “Palm Tree Alcohol” rich in Vitamin B (p. 192).
- The import of approximately 315 pairs of cheap rubber shoes from Japan to Singapore resulted in a dramatic decrease in hookworm patients, confirming the link between barefoot walking and parasitic infection through soil contact (p. 193).
- Post-occupation public health measures included a directive for locals to kill at least fifty flies per day and the daily disposal of two hundred garbage piles, after which fly and mosquito populations fell below those in Tokyo (p. 194).
- Malaria transmission is explained through a three-condition model requiring a disease carrier, a competent Anopheles mosquito, and a susceptible human; the author notes that Japanese plantation managers immediately began mosquito control upon acquiring Chinese-owned rubber estates (p. 195).
- The author concludes that tropical worker efficiency is structurally limited by heat, and that effective management of enterprises in the South “might take even up to one or two hundred years” (p. 195).
Conclusion
Ando’s definitive historical takeaway is that the Malay Peninsula is a benign, even attractive, environment for Japanese settlement—its climate is comfortable, its food supply is self-sufficient, its water is safe, and its disease burden is manageable through disciplined public health intervention. The article functions as a practical guide for Japanese women (the stated audience of Eiyō to Tōri) contemplating life in the tropics, while simultaneously naturalising a racial hierarchy in which Chinese vitality is acknowledged but Malay and Indian “sloth” is attributed to their own dietary and hygienic failings rather than to structural or colonial causes. The text thus operates at the intersection of popular nutrition science, colonial medical governance, and imperial self-justification.
Context
- The article was published in Eiyō to Tōri (Nutrition and Cooking), a popular magazine founded in 1935 by doctors Kagawa Shozo and Kagawa Aya at the University of Tokyo Hospital; it is the only piece in that volume concerning Malaya, and is preserved in the Digital Archives Collection on the Kagawa Nutrition University website (p. 189).
- Ando Kozo’s career in Singapore is documented in contemporary press: his appointment as Chief of the Medical Department of Malaya District in June 1942 and his retirement departure in November 1943 were both reported in the Syonan Shimbun (p. 196, n. 1).