CHAPTER 7 War, Occupation, and Collaboration

“Best Years of My Life”

Auntie Rosie was ten years old and in the fourth grade at the outbreak of the war. As the bombings intensified, she and her family fled to a village a short distance from Pyinmana, though they returned to their home sooner than they had expected. It took the Japanese only a few months to occupy Rangoon and send the British fleeing to India to set up the government of Burma in exile in Simla. By May 1942, the Japanese had also captured Mandalay. The New Burmas returned to Pyinmana after the defeat of the British, relieved to find that the three houses they owned were still standing. Japanese soldiers had occupied two of them but allowed the family to move back into the remaining one. Ahmed returned to practicing medicine, becoming the go-to physician for the Japanese officers in the area.

During our discussion of the japan khit, as the Japanese wartime occupation is known in Burma, Auntie Rosie tells me that if asked when the best years of her life were, she replies: “During the war.” Her life then was extraordinary, as she put it. She had spent much of her childhood in boarding schools, but during the war, she was with her family. All their relatives—from Ma Galay and Ahmed’s siblings to Helen’s sisters, including the youngest, Emma, and her adoptive siblings Freddie and Mary—had fled Rangoon and Insein once the bombings began, seeking refuge with Ahmed and Helen in Pyinmana. There were altogether about fifty people living together, at times in the one house that the Japanese had allotted them, at other times in small villages nearby. The expanded New Burma clan moved to fourteen different places during the war. They formed a large traveling caravan comprising the fifty or so family members; many bullock and horse carts carrying such supplies as rice, ghee, and marzipan; Ahmed’s entire library; and, incredibly, a piano. He had bought it for Helen when she gave birth to Auntie Rosie. It was not the most sensible possession with which to wander around the countryside during a war. But along it went to the children’s delight.

Auntie Rosie reveled in her newfound freedom and closeness to family. Both on the road and back in Japanese-occupied Pyinmana, she spent most of her days playing with her sisters, brothers, and cousins. Though Ahmed’s mother and siblings returned to Rangoon after the final departure of the British, Helen’s relatives lingered. Auntie Rosie played football and climbed trees, neither of which was an activity condoned by Catholic nuns at the boarding school. She read short stories of her choosing and studied what she wanted. Her aunt Cissie insisted on teaching her three sons math during the war, and Auntie Rosie joined them. She fell in love with a thick math textbook belonging to her older brother and raced through the exercises in it with the help of her brother and aunt. The war may very well have catalyzed her lifelong passion for math and science.

Auntie Rosie also attended a makeshift Japanese-language school that the Japanese soldiers had set up in one of the houses they occupied. There was only a dozen or so students, mostly Auntie Rosie’s siblings and cousins. She was given a Japanese name: Mitsuko. She remembered that the few hours spent in school every day were mostly “play” and that the students were taught a smattering of colloquial Japanese.

“But, Auntie,” I probed, “weren’t your parents reluctant to let you and your siblings attend the Japanese school?” She insisted no, explaining that her parents made friends with everyone. They became particularly close with one Japanese officer, Captain Takahara, who was fluent in English and served as an interpreter. When the New Burmas relocated temporarily to Yezin, about fifteen kilometers northeast of Pyinmana, he came on his motorcycle to visit the family every week. Helen and Ahmed reciprocated the affection by preparing meals for his weekly visits. Looking back, Auntie Rosie wondered if he might have harbored romantic interest in Kitty or another of her older sisters, though the thought had not occurred to her at the time. She remembered Takahara as a fatherly person, kind and loving toward her and her siblings. In fact, he had expressed interest in adopting Auntie Rosie.

Not everyone among the New Burmas trusted Takahara and his comrades. Helen’s sisters, both of whom had Anglo-Burman husbands, were scandalized. “You have young daughters—why are you friendly with them?” Auntie Rosie recalled her aunt Julie chiding her parents. Others warned Ahmed that given his tall stature and fair complexion, he might be mistaken for a bo and, therefore, a spy. The bo who remained in Burma during the occupation were presumed to be willing lingerers and, according to the Japanese, enemy agents.

Such concerns for the young daughters and the bo-appearing members of the family were not unfounded, as one incident revealed to Auntie Rosie. While the New Burmas were taking refuge in a remote village, she and her family encountered a group of Japanese soldiers. Ahmed and his two Anglo-Burman brothers-in-law hid while the soldiers inspected the remaining family members, asking if any were spies. Then, one of the soldiers pointed at Auntie Rosie’s sister Angela and yelled, in Burmese, “Meinma! Meinma!” (Woman! Woman!). Alarmed, the family packed up their belongings and left the village that night. The next morning, the soldiers returned, looking for “Biruma onna, Biruma meinma” (“the Burmese woman”: first in Japanese and then in Burmese).

As we wrapped up our conversation about her wartime experiences, Auntie Rosie observed that life during the japan khit for most, even for her family, could not have been as cheerful as her memory suggests. The period must have been a trying one for her parents, who had to manage the day-to-day life of the family. But they always had enough to eat. And her mother, who liked company, was elated to have her children and siblings with her. Auntie Rosie would not retract her memories of violence and intimacy under Japanese occupation.

Remembering Resistance

I was unprepared for her fond recollection of the japan khit, a period that has been memorialized as a reign of terror. Gruesome stories of rape, looting, torture, and purges of suspected anti-Japanese people have become abiding features of the collective memory of the occupation. The following passage from a biography of Aung San by his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi encapsulates the culturally shared, dominant narrative of the japan khit:

Those who had believed they were about to gain freedom from the British were shattered to find themselves ground under the heels of their fellow Asian instead. The soldiers of Nippon, whom many had welcomed as liberators, turned out to be worse oppressors than the unpopular British. Ugly incidents multiplied daily. Kempei [the Japanese military police] became a dreaded word, and people had to learn to live in a world where disappearances, torture, and forced labor conscription were part of everyday existence.¹⁰

Even Ba Maw, who became prime minister under Japanese occupation and is known as the most steadfast Burmese collaborator, acknowledged “the arrogance and brutality of the Japanese soldier.” He described the Japanese, in general, as “domineering and blinded by delusions of their own racial grandeur and Asian destiny.”¹¹

Based on the recollections of well-known collaborators (e.g., Ba Maw), resisters (e.g., Thein Pe Myint), or collaborators-turned-resisters of the Japanese (e.g., Aung San, U Nu) published in ensuing years as memoirs, the japan khit has crystallized into a clear-cut story of Japanese oppression and Burmese resistance.¹² The lawyer, writer, and later attorney general and chief justice for postindependent governments of Burma, Maung Maung (1925–1994), who fought against the Japanese in the resistance force, described the japan khit in a talk broadcast in June 1946 as “those bitter days of difficulty, danger and death when Burma rose as one man against the Japanese to achieve that historic Resistance.”¹³ Upon realizing “their mistake in putting faith in Japanese promises,” he remarked, the Burmese united behind the Burmese army as “the hope of the country”:

The Japanese found some excuses for disbanding the Burma Independence Army but were obliged to keep a skeleton force of a few battalions in order to please the outraged Burmese people. They called the force, “Burma Defense Army” or the BDA. The Japanese trained and controlled the BDA; Japanese instructors treated our boys brutally, slapped them, fed them poorly, worked them like slaves. They did everything to encourage the boys to desert but the boys stuck on. Our boys might be slapped hard but they would swallow the saltish blood that oozed out of their mouths and carry on. They might be starved and their strength grow feeble but their spirit and determine [sic] would be as strong as ever. They knew that a great and noble task was ahead: the battle for freedom was yet to be fought.¹⁴

As the first time since British colonization that Burman Buddhist men, rather than men of minoritized religions and races, were armed as soldiers, the occupation was a moment of profound remasculinization. It has been consecrated as a watershed in Burma’s journey toward decolonization—an “ordeal by fire,” in the words of one historian—out of which the Burmese, though brutalized, emerged stronger and more united and, thus, victorious over the Japanese and the British imperialists.¹⁵

As the scholarship on the Japanese wartime occupation of Southeast Asia (1941–1945) and, more broadly, the Japanese colonial empire has shown, the image of the savage Japanese colonizer is pronounced and pervasive.¹⁶ The description by Aung San Suu Kyi is as applicable to British Malaya as to Indonesia; all one must do is replace “British” with “Dutch.” There too memories of the occupation have become clichéd: bullying and plundering; shortages of food and employment; forced labor, detention, and torture by the kempeitai; “and the virtual guarantee that any attractive young woman would be raped by Japanese soldiers.”¹⁷

Indeed, in narratives of the japan khit, women appear only as victims of Japanese aggression whose violation transforms Burmese men into heroes and patriots. It is as though women lived not only in constant fear of the Japanese but in perpetual hiding from them, never coming into contact with the occupiers unless abducted and conscripted as sexual labor. Or they came into view as the much maligned japan gadaw (the Japanese’s mistress) who followed in the footsteps of the kala gadaw. A description of these “mistresses of the Japanese” by Hla Pe, who held the post of director of press and publicity during 1942–1945, is worth quoting at length:

Ex-prostitutes, by reason of their catches of husbands, and their ability to make use of these catches to make money earned for themselves the right to so-called polite society, and had cabinet ministers and leaders of learned professions at their table. When these women went out shopping, currency notes were carried along in packing cases. People who once upon a time, were so finicky and exclusive, took their children to elaborate social and charitable functions held by these nouveau riche. Wanton women, who showed off their Japanese husbands, did not mind the vulgar wisecracks to which they were subjected, because money could silence wagging tongues and Japanese husbands gave them all the money they wanted.… The morality of Burmese women sank to abject levels. Thousands of girls sold themselves for the love of jewelry and money to become mistresses of the Japanese. Besides these voluntary moral degenerates among Burmese, there were also young women who lost their chastity while they or their relatives were in the vice grip of the Japanese Police.… It is amazing how the very poorly paid Japanese N. C. O. could shower extravagant gifts on young ladies of easy virtue. It would have been an interesting study to trace backwards the original source of ownership of these gems and jewels, with which wartime Magdalenes were loaded.¹⁸

This scornful image of “the mistresses of the Japanese” as “wanton women,” “voluntary moral degenerates,” “ladies of easy virtue,” and “wartime Magdalenes” circulated in postwar Burma in the form of an iconic song about the japan khit that chastised a woman by the name of Sein Kyi for marrying a Japanese soldier:

Oh Sein Kyi … Sein Kyi

so reckless in her spousal choice

to Tokyo he has returned, your Japanese master

left you, he has, rotund with child.¹⁹

In the aftermath of the war, the song gained popularity as a pithy allegory of the dangers of collaboration, one in which the pregnant and deserted japan gadaw symbolized the Japanese betrayal and humiliation of the Burmese. For the postwar generations in Burma, it is often their only reference point for remembering the japan khit.

The “impossible retroactive demands for unequivocal resistance” in nation-centered histories, to borrow Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s words, has left formerly occupied women in Burma with the stark, binary subject positions of either unwilling, innocent victim (sex slave) or willing, guilty accomplice (japan gadaw).²⁰ It has deemed humiliation the only experience of women during the occupation worth remembering. It has portrayed all intimate relationships between Burmese women and the Japanese as shameful.

In contrast, Burmese men’s wartime collaboration with the Japanese have been regarded as strategic, righteous, and necessary for Burma’s national liberation. At the forefront of the Japanese forces that invaded and occupied Burma were Aung San and twenty-six other thakins (masters) who had escaped to the island of Hainan in the South China Sea to receive military training under the Japanese. Known as the “Thirty Comrades,” they had returned to Burma with the imperial Japanese army. Aung San marched into Burma the head of the Burma Independence Army (BIA), which fought against the British and alongside the Japanese. And when the BIA was demobilized, he was made commander of the Burma Defense Army (BDA), consisting of three thousand men selected from among the fifteen thousand former BIA soldiers.

The Burma Civil Executive Administration, a puppet government that answered directly to the commander of the Japanese army and set up by the Japanese military administration in August 1942, was headed by Ba Maw. U Nu served as the foreign minister. Various other leading thakins, including Thakin Than Tun, soon to become Aung San’s brother-in-law, were appointed to other ministerial positions.²¹ Well-known nationalist writers joined the Saye Saya Mya Athin (Writers’ Association), established by the Japanese military administration as the local Burmese counterpart to the southern propagandist writers, and served as editors of the association’s publication Saye Saya (Writers).²²

One of the first Japanese-language schools established in Burma was the Ottama Japanese Language School for girls, named after Ottama (discussed in chapter 5). He had not lived to witness the war, having died in prison in 1939 while serving his sentence for sedition. His death prior to the occupation had allowed the Japanese to appropriate him as an icon of pan-Asian, Burmese-Japanese cooperation. The postwar Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei (1918–1993) credited Ottama with sowing the seeds of Japanese-Burmese understanding, which, he proclaimed, came to fruition during the war in the institution of the Ottama Japanese Language School.²³ In death, the late Ottama could neither confirm nor rebut such attributions. But he had indeed made several visits to Japan after the Russo-Japanese War and published an account of his travels in Japan. And he had befriended Ito Jirozaemon Suketami (1897–1940), the scion of a wealthy family of textile merchants and an influential Buddhist, on whose estate Ottama made a habit of residing while in Nagoya.²⁴ In 1913, Ottama dispatched six young Burmese individuals, including his sister Ein Soe (1894–1978), who was eighteen years old at the time, to Japan for education with the expectation that Ito would look after them. Under his guidance, they became ardent anti-British Burmese nationalists, or so Ito is said to have claimed according to his official biography.²⁵ It was one of these “anti-British” Japanese-educated students, Ein Soe herself, who spent many years living in Nagoya, who founded and ran the Ottama Japanese Language School for girls.

The Japanese, who envisioned Indians as potential key allies and India as a major front in their war effort, also prioritized Burmese-Indian collaboration. Desperate to secure the labor force in Burma as well as the cooperation of the anti-British Indian National Army (INA) and its militant nationalist leader Subhas C. Bose, the Japanese military government deployed its soldiers to rein in anti-Indian violence by the BIA in the first year of the occupation. The India Independence League, an affiliate of the INA, was headquartered in Rangoon, and the Japanese granted it the authority to issue permits to Indians to travel and trade in Burma, and allowed the league to hold in trust the property of Indians in Burma who evacuated until their return.²⁶ Hla Pe recalled that Bose was enthusiastically welcomed in 1943 when he attended the official ceremony celebrating Burma’s nominal independence, declared by the Japanese. “We were to fight together—India and Burma—and the other millions of Asians, forming a formidable army of a thousand million liberated Asians, destroying the evil forces of Anglo-American Imperialism.” Reflecting upon the amicable relationship that developed between the Burmese and the INA soldiers, he mused that “the Indian problem seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth,” erasing “communal troubles between the Burmese and the Indians” that had existed prior to 1942.²⁷

The formal cooperation of leading Burmese political figures with the Japanese—and allies of the Japanese—was not unique. Elites across Japanese occupied territories, from Burma to the Philippines, collaborated with the Japanese, lending their support to the rhetoric of pan-Asianism as well as to controversial policies, such as forced labor impressment.²⁸ One historian describes the likes of Aung San and Ba Maw as “patriotic collaborators” who maneuvered between the Japanese invaders and their former colonial masters in their struggle for decolonization and national independence. “This is why—unlike in Europe—many wartime collaborators in Southeast Asia are now considered national heroes,” he concludes.²⁹ A long list of politicians in the region who held key military and political appointments under the Japanese—including Phibunsongkhram in Thailand; Sukarno and Muhammed Hatta in Indonesia; Jose P. Laurel and Claro M. Recto in the Philippines; and Aung San, U Nu, and Ne Win in Burma—went on to become leading statesmen in the postwar era. Their complicity with the Japanese has been rationalized as an act of fidelity to the nation. The same benefit of patriotism and political calculus has never been extended to Burmese women who have borne a disproportionate weight of the “impossible retroactive demands for unequivocal resistance.”

This gendered narrative of “patriotic collaboration” has cast a long shadow over both popular and scholarly knowledge of the Japanese occupation. While acknowledging its elite bias, historians have continued to recycle it, re-citing the same corpus of memoirs of privileged men—and mostly Burman Buddhist in the case of Burma—in their analysis of the occupation, allowing the experiences and narrations of the same group of men to usurp the history and collective memory of the Japanese occupation. Women like Ein Soe, who established the Ottama Japanese Language School, and their experiences and memories of the japan khit have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

In an essay about Kim Hwallan (Anglicized name Helen Kim, 1899–1970), a pioneer in women’s rights and education in Korea who was widely denounced as a collaborator in the 1990s, Insook Kwon pointedly warned that in the absence of alternative memories and interpretations, masculinist, nationalist narratives of colonialism and collaboration continue to monopolize truth and sweep away colonized women’s realities.³⁰ More recently, Leo Ching has cautioned against judging expressions of intimacy toward the former Japanese colonizers as “the nostalgic yearnings of the formerly colonized or as the illusory fantasies of the feeble-minded” or construing them as evidence of a “pro-Japan” subjectivity.³¹ “Pro-Japan” (shin nichi, lit. “intimate with Japan”) and its constitutive other “anti-Japan” (hi nichi or han nichi) are politically charged designations. They signify, on the one hand, the categorization of Japan’s former colonies and occupied territories into pro-Japan countries (such as Taiwan) that have established “friendly” diplomatic relations with Japan and anti-Japan ones (namely Korea and China) that remain critical of Japan’s imperialist legacy and its deferral of responsibility, apology, and compensation for war crimes. When wielded by Japanese nationalists, “pro-Japan” refers to those perceived to have overcome antagonism and mistrust toward the Japanese rooted in the colonial past. Anti-Japanese nationalists, however, have used it as a term of incrimination and for the purpose of “condemning those who collaborated with Japanese rule and who, by definition, betrayed the nation.”³² Incidentally, and with the exception of Taiwan, there is arguably no country in Asia considered more “pro-Japan” than Burma, the first territory formerly under Japanese colonial rule or occupation to accept war reparations from the Japanese government in 1954.

While acknowledging “the necessary task of holding the Japanese state accountable for its colonial violence and war crimes,” Ching insists on exploring how former subjects of the Japanese Empire come to terms with colonial memories and historical injustices when the geopolitics of patriarchal nation-states render redress insufficient and reconciliation impossible.³³ I join Ching and other scholars who have begun to assess the intimate relationships of marriage, family, and collaboration that have been overshadowed by the better-known violence of Japanese colonialism.³⁴ Rather than respond with incredulity as I initially did to Auntie Rosie’s memories of the japan khit, I turn to such memories that defy the normative expectation of terror to reshape collective understandings of women’s experiences of colonial violence and intimacy and explore changes in interAsian intimacies. I begin by attending to a potent site of memory—“lieux de mémoire” (places of memory), as Pierre Nora called them—of the japan khit for Auntie Rosie as for former Japanese occupiers: the nihongo gakkō.

Occupiers’ Memories of Nihongo Gakkō

Japanese-language education was a defining instrument of Japanese imperialism.³⁵ The poet Jinbo Kotaro (1905–1990), who served as the principal of the Shōnan Nihon Gakuen, the most reputable of the many Japanese-language schools in Southeast Asia during the war, put it this way: the Japanese imperial army “scattered like flower petals” the Japanese language across Southeast Asia.³⁶ The Japanese language was to function not only as the lingua franca but also as the foundation of dōka and kōminka—a means for fostering a sense of community among the ethnically diverse population of the Japanese Empire and way of transforming them into reliable imperial subjects.

With respect to Japanese migrants and settlers in gaichi, even those considered “pure blooded,” Japanese government authorities were convinced that no amount of Japanese-language instruction in the colonies could prevent them from “going native.” Japanese policymakers and education experts generally argued that Japanese children born or bred in the colonies, especially those with native mothers, needed to “return” to Japan for education if they were to become “real Japanese.” This view applied even to those who attended the most well-regarded Japanese schools whose teachers came from the metropole.³⁷

Japanese-language education was supposed to make “real” Japanese out of expatriate Japanese children living in the colonies. Nihongo gakkō were established throughout the Japanese Empire to indoctrinate colonial subjects and make Japanese their mother tongue.³⁸ The first Japanese-language school in Burma, the Gun Rangon Nihongo Gakkō (Army Japanese-Language School of Rangoon), opened its doors on 1 June 1942 with the grand vision of instilling an understanding of “Japanese spirit and culture.”³⁹ The British government in exile observed that within a few months, the Japanese military administration operated no less than forty-four Japanese-language schools in Burma, and “thousands of Japanese language textbooks were translated into Burmese by the Nippon Language Decision Council and sent to Burma.”⁴⁰ Between two hundred and three hundred Japanese teachers had reportedly arrived in Burma by January 1943, with the expectation that many more Japanese schools were to be set up all over the country. It added that “Japanese lessons were given on the Rangoon Radio every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday” and that Japanese soldiers were encouraged to learn Burmese.⁴¹

The British government in exile was impressed by Japanese efforts at language instruction and its commitment “to eradicate all British and American influence and train the youth of the country to become good little Nipponese.”⁴² Yet nihongo gakkō were not set up in the country on the scale the British indicated. In addition to the two schools in Rangoon, one nihongo gakkō was set up by the Japanese army in Mandalay, Bassein, Pegu, Thaton, Moulmein, Maymyo, and Sagaing each and an additional twenty-five throughout the country that Japanese soldiers administered. Within their first year of operation, the nine schools run by the Japanese military administration graduated upward of three thousand students, the majority of whom worked as translators. As of February 1944, there were altogether thirty-nine nihongo gakkō in all of Burma—a figure that may or may not have included the small makeshift schools such as the one that Auntie Rosie attended set up by Japanese soldiers.⁴³

To put these figures into perspective: there were more than three hundred nihongo gakkō in Malaya (including the former Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore). There were also 155 in the Philippines. The Shōnan Nihon Gakuen in Singapore alone graduated one thousand students in a span of six months (1942 May 1942–April 1943).⁴⁴ One estimate of Japanese-language schools on the island of Java in 1943 ran as high as 2,211 (with an enrolment of 1,221,988 students).⁴⁵ While some 270 Japanese-language instructors, many of whom were soldiers, were deployed in occupied Burma before the end of the war, only sixteen had been recruited as late as July 1943, and only eighty had arrived in Burma at the end of the year. The textbooks produced for use in the nihongo gakkō in Burma likewise were not printed until January 1944, making the use of textbooks in the classroom unlikely.⁴⁶

The lofty goals of dōka and kōminka through Japanese-language education floundered. Japanese soldiers and teachers in Burma often expressed their frustration with communicative failure. Unlike in China, where they could achieve perfunctory communication via kanji (the “Chinese characters” ideographic system and one of the three scripts the Japanese used), their language was utterly incomprehensible to the Burmese. Japanese-language school teachers found themselves relying upon the English language as the medium of communication, as revealed in Sekupan: Memories of Japanese Language Schools in Burma, 1942–1945 (hereafter, Memories of Japanese Language Schools): a collection of the memories of sixty-eight members of an association of former teachers who taught at the Japanese-language schools in wartime Burma. The contributors were all men except one woman who taught at the Ottama school and two widows of former Japanese teachers.⁴⁷

Published in 1970, the commemorative volume was part of the Japanese postwar boom in literary and filmic representations of the Japanese experience in the nanpō.⁴⁸ During the second half of the twentieth century, the writings of the aforementioned southern propagandist writers were republished as multivolume compilations. Large numbers of diaries, letters, and memoirs of Japanese men who were deployed as military conscripts or army journalists were published alongside fictionalized accounts or “documentary novels” about their experiences. Some of these were turned into novels or films, such as Takeyama Michio’s Biruma no Tategoto [Harp of Burma, 1946; film version, 1956] and Ōoka Shōhei’s Nobi [Fires on the plain, 1951; film version, 1959] both of which were major international box office successes. Memories of Japanese Language Schools was a product of this cultural industry fueled by Japanese imperial nostalgia and government-sponsored historical revisionism—a systematic state effort to replace the discourse of Japanese wartime atrocity with one of Japanese victimhood and atomic trauma.

Kusanagi Masamichi, a soldier who taught at the army nihongo gakkō in Rangoon from October 1942 until November 1943, saw no alternative to conducting classes in English. Fellow teachers who had little knowledge of English, he recalled, worked hard to learn English rather than Burmese. He complained that with the instructors trying to teach Japanese in English, both students and teachers ended up focusing on the English language. Much to his chagrin, the Japanese teachers who struggled with English ended up “looking like fools.”⁴⁹ Even at opening ceremonies of the nihongo gakkō, speeches by the Japanese teachers were first translated into English and only then into Burmese.⁵⁰ Unsurprisingly, many of the former teachers remembered the schools as precarious sites of Japanese-Burmese interaction that continually put Japanese imperial authority on trial. In their own assessment, the nihongo gakkō was a pitiful attempt at dōka or kōminka. “Teaching a few songs was all we could manage,” rued one teacher.⁵¹

Despite their self-doubt, the schools quickly produced Japanese-speaking Burmese subjects. Some claimed that their students developed fluency in a matter of months, as a result of which the schools churned out interpreters for the army, Japanese corporations, and the nihongo gakkō themselves.⁵² Many teachers credited the linguistic talent of their students, not their pedagogy or curriculum, for the speed and success with which they acquired Japanese. One teacher concluded that the Burmese must be natural polyglots; how else, he wondered, did they manage to learn the Japanese language so quickly and with so much nuance that they could discern various Japanese “dialects”?⁵³

In this respect, Japanese imperial projects of assimilation and imperialization faced challenges akin to those experienced by early Christian missionary endeavors in Asia. Like Christian conversion, dōka and kōminka were predicated on translation, which determined the limits of colonial authority. Translation, which laid the basis for Spanish colonial and missionary incursions, is best understood, Vicente Rafael has shown, not as a straightforward transfer of meaning and intent between the ruler and the ruled but rather as “a near-chaotic exchange of signs” that “cast intentions adrift, now laying, now subverting the ideological grounds of colonial hegemony.”⁵⁴ Similarly, the reliance on English and Burmese translators and translations to teach the original message of Japanese imperialism, pan-Asianism, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere—its ineluctable, multiple reformulations and recodings in English and Burmese—meant that imperial indoctrination and political submission were never assured.

Nevertheless, the contributors to Memories of Japanese Language Schools remembered the schools as special spaces where they realized Japanese-Burmese intimacy. The introduction to the volume stressed that only those who had been in Burma during the occupation could understand “the overwhelming feeling [among the Burmese] of affection and intimacy for the Japanese.” Because the Burmese are brought up to respect their teachers no less than their parents, it explained, the Japanese teachers were treated kindly everywhere they went, allowing the teachers to forge “a true master-disciple relationship” and a natural, genuine bond with the Burmese without a care for the mandates of the military or propaganda campaigns.⁵⁵ The contributors imagined the nihongo gakkō as a sanctuary where they related to the Burmese not as occupiers and colonizers but as teachers and fellow humans, unencumbered by the violence of military occupation. For the former teachers, the nihongo gakkō was a lieu de mémoire that enabled them to forget the colonial relations of domination and inequality undergirding their very presence in Burma.

Emphatic declarations of Japanese-Burmese love and friendship reverberate through Memories of Japanese Language Schools. The intimate bond (shin ai no kizuna) of the Japanese teacher and Burmese student is memorialized as the single most cherished memory of Japanese-language education in wartime Burma. Several contributors had held on to letters they had received from their students during the war—the only mementos of their tender relationships—and reproduced them in a section of the volume titled “Letters from the Students” (seito kara no tegami). The last letter featured was a farewell note written in English by a young woman named May Kyi Shein to “her dearest teacher” Hashimoto when he was transferred from the nihongo gakkō in Taikkyi, just north of Rangoon. Like the other letters, it offered proof of the so-called pro-Japan feelings of the students and their reverence for their Japanese teachers. May Kyi indicates in the letter that she was giving Hashimoto “an East Asia Youth League badge” that she had herself embroidered as a token of her gratitude and love.⁵⁶

The irony of Memories of Japanese Language Schools—and its professions of Burmese- Japanese intimacy—is that the former teachers rarely remembered their students with precision. The section “Letters from the Students” is the only slice of the nearly eight-hundred-page tome in which the students appear as central characters. In one of the longer entries in the volume, Oizumi Yukio, who was a superintendent of the military administration’s Education Unit (bunkyō han), wrote nostalgically that by exchanging language, the teachers built a deep human connection that went above and beyond the immediate goals of the war and occupation.⁵⁷ Yet he does not offer a single description of such teacher-student relationships, and the Burmese students appear as nameless subjects.

Those who have names tend to be “beauties” (bijin). Observations on the beauty of Burmese women punctuate the volume, as do remarks upon the infatuation of the young female students with their Japanese teachers. If we are to believe Memories of Japanese Language Schools, the men welcomed the adulation. Kusanagi, for example, recorded with envy the way his comrades took pleasure in the attention and companionship of their female students, insisting that he never allowed himself to indulge his passions. When a student whom he secretly admired offered to become more than his student, he refused. Not because of a commitment to some professional or ethical high ground, he clarified; his sense of guilt for remaining alive while so many of his friends and comrades had perished kept him from enjoying life.⁵⁸

Kusanagi’s stint as a teacher might as well be summed up as one long and agonizing battle with his desire for his young female charges. Subsequent to his contribution to Memories of Japanese Language Schools, he wrote a memoir under the pseudonym Jikkoku Osamu in which he recounted his experience of being overwhelmed by what he characterized as the “determined advances” of his students.⁵⁹ Barely able to control his yearning for one student, he wrote a diary entry addressed to her. Referring to a “brown cake” that she had given him, he uttered how “sweet and delicious” the inside of the cake was and confessed: “I devoured it all, imagining that the cake was your body.”⁶⁰ Having admitted his sexual desire for his student, he transmitted it to her in an act of sexual assault. Such erotic fantasies of seduction masked colonial power in the ambiguous guise of mutual desire. The nihongo gakkō was not, as the former teachers maintained, a space free of colonial relations of subjugation.

There are two moments in Memories of Japanese Language Schools—cracks in the narrative illusion—that confront, if only briefly and ambivalently, colonial violence lurking beneath its insistence on Japanese-Burmese intimacy. The first appears in an entry by Ishiwara (Ishihara?) Keizo, who taught at the Japanese-language school in Sagaing. He recalled an assistant teacher in her twenties by the name of Khin Mya, whom he described as a highly educated, “exceptional beauty” who was fluent in both English and Japanese. According to Ishiwara, she was quite the sensation among the Japanese soldiers based in the area. Her popularity among Japanese men, he perhaps recognized, must have been the reason for her so-called cool demeanor. As he explained, she might have felt the need to protect herself from the Japanese occupiers.⁶¹

It is unclear if Ishiwara drew a distinction between Japanese teachers and soldiers when he reflected on Khin Mya’s fear of physical harm by Japanese men. In pointing out her popularity among Japanese soldiers, he may have intended to exempt civilian officers and teachers like himself from culpability in the predatory sexual behavior associated with the Japanese army. We can only imagine what Khin Mya thought of such attention, subjected as she must have been to the eroticizing, objectifying gaze of the Japanese teachers. She might have recognized the dangers of humoring, let alone courting, the interest of Japanese teachers and soldiers, who were potentially capable of sexual assault. Though Khin Mya may have had another threat in mind: castigation and reprisal from the Burmese. Their memories of the occupation fixed on the putatively fierce pro-Japanness of the Burmese, Japanese teachers like Ishiwara failed to recognize that women like Khin Mya were vulnerable to gossip about alleged moral degeneracy and “easy virtue” by the Burmese against women who became close with Japanese men.

Occupied Women’s Memories of Nihongo Gakkō

For Auntie Rosie, the nihongo gakkō in Pyinmana was one memorable aspect of the carefree childhood she briefly enjoyed in the comfort of her home and in the company of all her siblings, not an institution fraught with anxiety as it apparently was for the Japanese teachers. Despite her comment that the nihongo gakkō was “mostly play,” and more than seventy-five years after the war, she could recite the Japanese syllables, words, and phrases that she had learned: for example, konichiwa (hello), arigatō (thank you), gohan o tabe nasai (please eat/eat!), oyasumi nasai (good night), ha ha (mother), chi chi (father), watashi wa nihonjin desu (I am Japanese), and watashi no namae wa Mitsuko desu (my name is Mitsuko). She was still capable of reading the katakana syllabary, one of two Japanese phonetic scripts and the one taught most widely during the occupation. To my surprise, Auntie Rosie launched into a gleeful performance of a Japanese song that she had memorized:

I am a sixteen-year-old Manchurian girl.

Oh spring, when the snow melts in March

And the ying chun hua [forsythias] bloom

I will marry into a family in the neighboring village

Mr. Wang, please wait for me, OK?⁶²

She remembered the lyrics of the song but had no idea what they meant or what the song was about. The Japanese teacher had not bothered to explain to the students what he was teaching them.

I heard the song for the first time when Auntie Rosie sang it for me. As it turns out, it was one of the most popular Japanese songs of the late 1930s. Written by a Japanese colonial settler in Manchuria, it became a hit when Hattori Tomiko, a singer in the all-female Takarazuka revue, performed it in 1938. It was one in a string of cheerful musume (daughter or maiden) songs set in exotic colonial locations. The genre featured a female singer expressing the desires of a young girl who awaits longingly for the end of the frigid Manchurian winter when she would marry her lover.⁶³ Under the guise of learning the Japanese language, and without her knowledge, Auntie Rosie—and probably her sisters—had been made to perform the erotic role of the nubile, desiring female. The story left me disgusted and angry, a feeling incongruous with the lightheartedness of her singing.

At the same time, it brought back memories of conversations that I had in the early 2000s with women who had firsthand experience of the nihongo gakkō. One was with a close family friend Amy Po Sein (alias Myint Myint Sein). She was visiting my mother one day when, aware of my interest in the history of the japan khit, she began to recount her experience of learning Japanese. Like Auntie Rosie, Auntie Amy was about ten years old at the start of the war. And like Auntie Rosie, she recited Japanese lessons, phrases, and songs more than half a century after she had first learned them as a student at the Ottama Nihongo Gakkō.

The other conversation took place during a prearranged meeting with a famous Burmese author (to whom I will refer as Daw Nyein) who had written an authoritative book about the women she considered the most important in Burmese history. Her recollection of the japan khit was more sobering; it lacked the liveliness that characterized my conversations with Auntie Amy and Auntie Rosie. And yet it resonated with the stories that Auntie Rosie and Auntie Amy had shared with me. Daw Nyein had also been a student in a nihongo gakkō, but she was a decade older than Auntie Rosie and Auntie Amy. She was living in Lashio in northern Shan State when the Japanese army arrived. A Burmese monk opened a nihongo gakkō there, and four Japanese soldiers, all in their twenties, taught a group of fifty or so Burmese and Shan students. Like Auntie Rosie and Amy, Daw Nyein denigrated the educational value of the nihongo gakkō whose curriculum consisted, she joked, mostly of Japanese propaganda songs. Yet she too had retained some Japanese, as she demonstrated by pronouncing a list of Japanese vocabularies she still understood. She remembered the names of the four heitai sensei (soldier-teacher): Shibata, Fukai, Sawai, and Nagasaki. Prior to their conscription in the Japanese army, they had all been Buddhist monks in Japan. She described them as kind, unlike the lower-ranking soldiers who harassed the local people and robbed them of daily necessities; they shared their precious rations of gasoline. She approvingly pointed out that the former monks were educated and remembered that two were graduates of Oxford University.

Evidently, Daw Nyein had developed something of a friendship with the men who were, after all, more or less her age and class. They taught her Japanese, while she taught them Burmese, for which she received a salary of forty-five kyats per month. She had kept in touch with one of the men, whose address in Japan she shared with me. Perhaps it was one of these heitai sensei who gave the Japanese name “Hideo” to her oldest son, born on 8 December 1941—the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

It is possible to interpret these memories about Japanese-language instruction as assertions of Burmese-Japanese intimacy that support Hla Pe’s accusations that the students of nihongo gakkō were “renegade Burmese who lost themselves in this new process of japonification which took them to the Kempetai or the Japanese firms.”⁶⁴ These women, like the well-known collaborator Ba Maw, refused to condemn all Japanese as brutes. While Daw Nyein identified the violence and criminality of the Japanese imperial army with its lower-ranking members, rendering Japanese aggression a class-specific phenomenon, Ba Maw provided a race-based explanation. According to Ba Maw, the most vicious elements of the Japanese imperial army were “Korea men”: Japanese settlers in Korea or government officials and soldiers who had been stationed in Korea prior to their arrival in Burma.⁶⁵ These “Koreanized” men were portrayed as degenerate Japanese expatriates and settlers who had been diminished by their experiences in the colony.

In redeeming the Japanese—or some among them—from the pervasive postwar image of them as aggressors, Ba Maw invoked a Japanese colonial discourse of “going native” that Todd Henry refers to as “yoboization.” Once a derogatory label reserved for Koreans and used by the Japanese as “a pronoun synonymous with the inherent backwardness, weakness, and inferiority of Koreans,” yobo became associated with Japanese colonial settlers who were perceived to have contracted the “deficiencies” of Koreans, including strong hierarchical sensibilities and lack of hygiene.⁶⁶ Auntie Rosie too referenced this racist theory of Koreanization in her recollection of the japan khit. She recalled that although her family did not suffer in the hands of Japanese soldiers while in Pyinmana, people in town experienced the routine looting and pillaging by Japanese soldiers who, she had been told, were “Korea men.”

These stories seem to be as much about the virtue or vice of the Japanese as they are about the rectitude of the occupied subjects who deny associating or cooperating with “bad” Japanese occupiers. Even as Daw Nyein spoke fondly of her heitai sensei, portraying them as learned, considerate, “good” men, she demonstrated her disapproval of the lower-ranking Japanese soldiers. She did not idolize the Japanese, just as she did not demonize them. Her memories, like those of Auntie Rosie and Auntie Amy, were decidedly not about love or hatred for the Japanese occupiers. They were neither advocates nor antagonists of the Japanese.

What elicited these equivocal memories? The answer lies, I believe, in what their memories leave out. Auntie Amy neglected to mention that her father, Po Sein, a famous artist, had served in the official capacity of “Director of Entertainments” under the Japanese.⁶⁷ All three of his daughters attended the Ottama nihongo gakkō, as I learned from a picture of Auntie Amy with her two elder sisters featured in Memories of Japanese Language Schools (fig. 7.1).

Daw Nyein, on the other hand, was a member of the East Asia Youth League. A voluntary organization established and sponsored by the Japanese in all occupied territories, the league numbered some thirty-thousand members in Burma. It was the most popular youth organization in the country at the time and was known more for its nationalist and pro-thakin orientation than for its “pro-Japanness.” Yet, as the British reconnaissance report noted, its members gave public speeches “containing pro-Japanese propaganda,” and “in June 1944 it is said to have sent a message to the Youth of Japan reaffirming its vow to fight for the liberation of East Asia from the Anglo-Saxon yoke.”⁶⁸

FIGURE 7.1. Auntie Amy and elder sisters at the Ottama Japanese Language School. The caption reads: “Classroom scenery: Ottama Japanese Language School in Rangoon. The female students pictured in the photo are the three daughters of U Po Sein, the greatest Burmese dancer.” Source: Sekupan Kai, ed., Sekupan: Biruma Nihongo gakkō no kiroku, 1942–1945 (Tokyo: Shudōsha, 1970), front matter.

And Auntie Rosie’s parents were, as she suggested, “friendly” with the Japanese. The Japanese occupiers might have liked to construe as proof of “pro-Japaneseness” the consent of the New Burmas to the coercive actions of their new colonial masters—the requisition of their property, their provision of medical care for the Japanese stationed in Pyinmana, and the Japanese-language education of their children. That is to say, the Japanese occupiers may have regarded the New Burmas as with Daw Nyein, and Auntie Amy and her family, as collaborators. And for their perceived cooperation, they were spared the violence and dispossession inflicted upon the less privileged. While it is historically inaccurate to characterize the likes of the New Burmas, Daw Nyein, and Auntie Amy as “pro-Japan,” it is also a historical error to overlook the concessions they won by working within the wartime patronage system.

After all, how did Helen and Ahmed manage to safeguard their large family from the ravages of the war and occupation? How was it that they always had enough food for everyone (and others such as Takahara)? While Auntie Rosie attributed her parents’ relationship with the Japanese to their general friendliness, one has to wonder: To what extent did Helen and Ahmed actually reciprocate Takahara’s affection? Was the relationship one of necessity, that is, of keeping their family safe with the protection of the Japanese? And protection from whom?

As Auntie Rosie’s memory of the japan khit indicates, there were times when the New Burmas felt endangered by Japanese soldiers. But as a family made up of zerbadi, kabya, Karen, Christians, and Muslims—the very groups villainized as enemies of the Burmese Buddhist amyo—Helen and Ahmed had just as much reason to fear harm by fellow Burmese people, not least the BDA, which had set up its base and training center right in Pyinmana. Though feted in nationalist Burmese history as anticolonial resistance fighters, the BDA, like its predecessor the BIA, had a reputation for taking the law into their own hands, as Hla Pe recalled.⁶⁹ They robbed, assaulted, and massacred segments of the population, especially Indians and Karens.⁷⁰ In the most infamous of these acts, which took place in 1942 in the Myaungmya district, an estimated 1,800 Karens were killed and four hundred of their villages destroyed.⁷¹

In some villages, the civilian population turned to the Japanese army as the only force for law and order that could restrain the disorderly conduct of the BIA, BDA, and even of the village headmen, according to the wartime diary of the writer and ICS officer Theippan Maung Wa. What makes his account unique is that he died in June 1942. It is not affected by foibles of historical memory in the ways that memoirs often are. He never had the benefit of hindsight, the temporal distance to view the japan khit through the spectrum of national independence or postwar condemnation of Japanese imperialists. Conspicuously, there is not a single negative account of the Japanese in it. He describes Japanese soldiers as “friendly” with the Burmese, offering protection to those who had become victims of village headmen and thakins looking to extort “war levy.” He also wrote that villagers sought help from the Japanese against dacoits.⁷²

The nihongo gakkō functioned for Auntie Rosie, Auntie Amy, Daw Nyein, and the Japanese-language teachers as a site for forgetting the subtle expressions of power woven into the fabric of everyday life under occupation rule. These women and their families were confronted not just by the question of their complicity in the Japanese military regime, as in the case of the Japanese teachers, but also with the question of their blame for the modest privilege and security they enjoyed as subjects perceived to favor Japan. At the same time, the uncooperative and unfriendly among the occupied sustained an undue toll. And while the memories of Auntie Rosie, Amy, and Daw Nyein may only reveal some of the ways that occupied subjects accommodated or bargained with the Japanese, others are suggestive of how some instrumentalized their intimacy with the Japanese to promote their interests. As one entry in Memories of Japanese Language Schools shows, such covert exercise of power served to routinize coercion, especially against those regarded with disfavor by the Japanese.

Hata Kosuke, who served as the principal of the nihongo gakkō in Maubin in the delta region, recounted a dramatic incident triggered by the report of an abduction of a female student at the school, Khin Khin. Her frantic mother appeared at the school accompanied by her son, a fluent Japanese speaker and an employee of a Japanese trading company, pleading that Hata help them rescue Khin Khin, who had been kidnapped by “a wicked Chinese.” Through her son, she implored Hata: “I am deathly worried about my daughter. As the principal of the nihongo gakkō, you must help your student. Khin Khin is your student. Please find her and bring her home. The Japanese are mightier than the English, so the Chinese will definitely listen to you.”⁷³ When Hata asked about Khin Khin’s age, the mother replied that her daughter was an innocent child only fourteen years old and that she had no relationship to the Chinese man who she claimed was eighteen or nineteen years old. The mother further alleged that the man would stand outside her house at night and call out to Khin Khin in an attempt to entice her. Having no success with seduction, he resorted to abducting her. She was deploying the tried and tested narrative of the lecherous amyo gya who entraps an unsuspecting Burmese girl.

Obliging the mother and son, Hata went to the Chinese quarter of Maubin, armed and in military uniform, to inquire about the whereabouts of Khin Khin and her captor. He was accompanied by a fellow Japanese teacher, likewise dressed in military garb and carrying a sword. Unsurprisingly, he drew the suspicion of the Chinese residents and relatives of the alleged kidnapper, who were all reluctant to speak. His investigation led to an unexpected discovery: Khin Khin was not fourteen, as her mother claimed, but sixteen years old; nor was she a captive as her mother and brother alleged but the architect of her own elopement with her Chinese lover. Hata concluded that had he been more culturally sensitive, he might have recognized from the start that the “kidnapping” was really just “marriage by other means.”⁷⁴ His account closed with a snapshot of Khin Khin, her mother, brother, and captor-turned-husband living together happily under one roof.

Narrated as a tale of comical cultural misunderstanding, Hata’s account of the “abduction” suppresses Khin Khin’s mother’s exploitation of her connection to Japanese authorities and the well-documented anti-Chinese hostility of the Japanese—and their presumption of Chinese lawlessness, savagery, and guilt—to frame and intimidate her daughter’s lover. “The Chinese appear to have been much more ill-treated by the Japanese than any other community,” the British reported, adding that the Japanese considered the Chinese “enemies to be killed out of hand.”⁷⁵ This was no exaggeration. In the years leading up to World War II, the Japanese government surveilled the kakyō (overseas Chinese) population in Burma, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as a fifth column. The Japanese army in Burma, unlike those in Singapore or Malaya, did not carry out sweeping military operations aimed at purging anti-Japanese elements among the local Chinese communities. It nevertheless proved to be violently anti-Chinese. “Chinese,” “communist,” and “anti-Japan” were synonymous epithets for the Japanese soldiers who, almost without exception, described the Chinese in Burma as ruthless communist insurgents thirsty for Japanese blood and Burmese conversion to communism.⁷⁶ In the name of pacifying anticommunist, anti-Japanese insurgency and establishing law and order, the Japanese army detained, maimed, and massacred Chinese and Sino-Burmese people who crossed its path. In one egregious case, three hundred Chinese were murdered in Kayan to the north of Rangoon.⁷⁷ This explains why Hata felt compelled to take a Japanese colleague and arm himself when he went to the Chinese quarter of Maubin, an area of the city that he avoided. He had every reason to anticipate animosity from the Chinese and, though he did not admit it, must have feared that the situation might escalate into a skirmish.

Khin Khin’s mother was taking advantage of this new sociopolitical dynamic that made the Chinese vulnerable. She did more than reimagine the trope of the amyo gya who violated the innocent Burmese Buddhist girl. She appealed to her family’s close relationship with the Japanese and called on the Japanese master to protect his loyal subjects and punish the “wicked” Chinese. Her coercive tactic of managing her daughter’s intimate transgressions ultimately failed. But she succeeded in applying pressure on Hata to act. And while Hata assigned a happy ending to the affair, the local Chinese and Sino-Burmese were no doubt affronted by her scheme to capitalize on the anti-Chinese sentiments of the Japanese. Such everyday forms of aggression predicated on a racialized hierarchy of more or less cooperative colonial subjects structured the micropolitics of intimacy under Japanese occupation.