Ghosts and the Japanese Occupation
Malaysia has long possessed a rich storytelling history and has combined elements of historical memory with narrative traditions centered on the Japanese occupation. One of these traditions is the cerita hantu (ghost story).
Considered a “low-brow” form of entertainment, these stories include simple descriptions of encounters with local supernatural creatures in various settings. An important concept in the Malaysian cerita hantu is the idea of a keras location (roughly translated as a “hard” place) – a place is considered keras if events in its past made it such”.
These stories have never been considered a “low-brow” form of entertainment. They are rich and are believed. I have never heard of, and neither have the locals, a “keras” location.
Many Malaysian ghost stories are set in keras places that have been explained as having once seen the horrors of the Japanese occupation. Usually, the stories do not feature the Japanese imperial army from the Second World War, but include descriptions of crimes that were purported to have occurred on these grounds, creating a sense of unease towards the location.
One example includes a school that was supposedly used as a prison camp by the Japanese. Some visitors to the site have reported hearing the sound of Japanese soldiers’ stomping boots or catching the scent of kerosene. Another tells of encounters with the ghosts of Japanese soldiers who had beheaded their prisoners. Each of the stories points to a subconscious remembering of past trauma.
The survivors of the Japanese occupation in Malaysia are often reluctant to speak of their experiences.
The extent of the horror that was perpetuated by the Japanese imperial army on the collective consciousness of Malaysians cannot be stressed enough. As a point of comparison, the British colonial presence spanned nearly 200 years, yet cerita hantu based on British ghosts do not include the bloodiness associated with the Japanese.
Although there have been recent efforts to document the stories so that these personal anecdotes don’t die with the narrators, the survivors of the Japanese occupation in Malaysia are often reluctant to speak of their experiences. However, there is plenty of archival and archaeological evidence of the crimes that have been committed – an aspect that could be investigated further through cerita hantu.
Despite the lingering ghosts in the cerita hantu, young Malaysians generally view contemporary Japan and its cultural exports in a positive light, which signals a move away from the horrors of the past and the establishment of positive developments in Malaysian-Japanese relations. But this perception of Japan sits side-by-side with the knowledge of the country’s history of brutality. While state-level reactions to Japanese war crimes in Malaysia have tended to under-acknowledge or even ignore this dark chapter, cerita hantu – while macabre – preserve the memory of wartime victims so they are never fully erased from history.
The Ghosts of Japans Occupation of Malaysia
Ikhlas Hadi and Marin Ekstrom
The Interpreter
Lowy Institute
21 October 2024
Tom McLaughlin for BorneoHistory.net