The Japanese in Sarawak
Three decades after Emperor Meiji had begun his industrialisation programme in the 1860s, there was a prolonged period of economic recession in Japan due to a worldwide recession. The new industries, especially textile manufacturing which was a mainstay of Japan’s port trade, were severely affected, resulting in many factories closing and others cutting back production and laying off workers.
The factory workforce was usually recruited from the farming and fishing communities, and workers’ wages helped boost the low-level incomes of their families back home. With the recession, the factory workers and the surplus labour force from the home-based industries could find no new avenue of employment.
In desperation, they sought to leave their country and try their luck elsewhere. The Japanese living in coastal towns and districts, like their Chinese counterparts residing in the coastal province of the South, had a long seafaring tradition. Since ancient times, fleets had put out to sea and adventurous voyagers had the oceans searching for fortune.
From returned adventurers to the South Seas, stories had been told of fabulously rich lands to be found there, in particular islands of the Malay Archipelago, including Sarawak in Borneo, a land ruled by some White Rajah who was opening the country for agricultural development. A small intrepid band, daring to brave the hazards of a long voyage and face further dangers and uncertainties, took a ship from Okinawa sometime in the last decade of the 19th Century and arrived in due course in Sarawak.
Being primarily farmers, they approached Rajah Charles to plant padi (rice). The planting of padi in return for land cession was the cornerstone of his land development strategy. The Rajah allowed them to take up planting as a pre-condition settlement. Unfortunately, little else seems to be known about this first group. Whether they succeeded in the wet padi scheme and stayed, or whether they failed or returned to Japan, is not known.
However, they had blazed the trail and others soon followed. The Japanese immigrants were led by their own leaders, unlike commercially organised Chinese immigrants, who were brought in large numbers by private or government-sponsored agencies.
It was not until the first decade of the 20th Century that financially better-equipped Japanese groups began to arrive, which included representatives from Nissa Shokai Kabushuki Keusha a well-known trading company in Japan.
They purchased land from the Rajah’s government at Samarahan and started a rubber estate there. The Japanese also took up land along Matang Road beyond the suspension bridge, and their holdings extended to Sungai Tengah. The earlier groups consisted mostly of farmers and planters, but as the community grew there soon came to join them as individual professionals such as dentists, doctors and retail shop-keepers to offer much-needed services to a growing community. The Japanese community was grouped in shophouses between India and Khoo Hun Heang Streets. The Japanese Government’s interest in its nationals on Sarawak soil was manifested by the visit of a Japanese cruiser in 1914.
The Japanese community in Sarawak continued to thrive and became socially active. At the time it consisted of first-generation immigrants from the old country and second-generation children, offspring from locally formed alliances or Japanese immigrant wives who had come to join them.
However, young women whose poignant life stories usually remain untold and unrecorded deserve special merit here.
They were the Geijco or professional entertainers courtesans who came to Sarawak, presumably as soon as the first immigrants had established themselves. This is borne out by gravestones of those who had died in Sarawak, showing the dates of their deaths to be as early as the Meiji(1868-1912) period. Their coming was likely influenced by the stories they had heard from those who had returned to Japan from Sarawak. The stories of the good money they could make there, the greater freedom offered in a new country and opportunities to make new lives for themselves. The young women in most cases came from economically marginal families, such as tenant farmers’ daughters and others engaged in low-paid occupations.
For generations in the past, like China, thrived on a tenant-farming system in which landless farmers in Japan traditionally leased land from rich landowners for crop cultivation. In the event of a bad harvest or crop failure, the tenants not only found themselves unable to meet the landlords’ crop quotas but often be obliged to seek loans from them, to tide over difficult periods. The old and new loans plus interest are usually expected to be paid. Should the next crop fail, it would be impossible for the tenant farmers to make repayments. As tenant farmers had few suitable collaterals to secure their loans, it was a common practice for a daughter (or son) of the household to be sent to work as a domestic servant in the landlord’s family to assuage their loan payments.
Sometimes the loans were so large that the tenant family might be compelled to make the sacrifice of “selling” their daughter to the landlord in settlement of their debt. Many such girls indeed remain maids and servants in their masters’ holds, but whose intelligence and good looks were often “resold to geisha schools” while others might end up in pleasure houses to earn their living as prostitutes.
The Geiko who came to Sarawak in the early days undoubtedly had their dream of freedom and opportunity to make money in a new land, and indeed some of their numbers succeeded in overcoming obstacles to gain new lives themselves when they were deemed patrons who were prepared to lead married lives with them. But for others, their dreams remained unfulfilled they found themselves accommodated in the red light of Kuching town to carry their old occupation while remaining in the inexorable grip of an exploitative system that Triad hapless women of Japan since the dawn of time.
In the old Kuching of those days, the large number of pestilences still raged and some Geiko did not survive the sickness of the tropics. In the cemetery are buried several young women, whose gravestones show them to have died in the Meiji period. Three young women, aged between 22 and 26, gave their dates of death given as 22nd, 23rd and 24th June 1902 (35th Year of Meiji). Their deaths had apparently occurred within a day of each other. An intelligent guess is that they were Geiko.
The Japanese community cemetery can be found and is little known to Kuching’s multi-racial population and forgotten by most save for the occasional visits of Kuching’s Japanese residents paying their respects to past pioneers and a number of Japanese tourists among whom there had been descendants and relatives of those buried there. This cemetery has been in quiet existence since before the Second World War. An earlier cemetery and those buried elsewhere (including the Hokien and Muslim cemeteries) had been removed for re-interment, or memorial graves had been erected for them, in the new cemetery when it was ready for use. An earlier burial ground for the Japanese is believed to have been situated some distance away from the present site.
An ordinary road marked with concrete, the stone slab appears to have been cut from a large piece of granite into a broad pointed top like a Roman sword, and carries on its smooth surface, some writing in Chinese or Japanese. It could, for example, be a marker for a Japanese Community cemetery as it is historically known that there already was a small thriving Japanese community living in Kuching and its environs long before World War II.
A careful tour through the cemetery grounds long enough to scrutinise the gravestone inscriptions (at least on those the combined effects of time and weather have not yet succeeded in obliterating or reducing to illegibility) will provide the interested visitor with a fascinating insight into a little known, but important episode of Sarawak’s history when a small but active community of J Japanese immigrants, who had mostly arrived during the period of the Brooke Rajah had worked, lived and died in the country of their adoption of residents of Japanese descent and others show immigration from Japan to Sarawak Road begun as early as the last decade of the 19th century and that the first group had hailed from Okinawa followed subsequently people from Nagasaki, Fukuoka and other districts and places close to the sea coasts.
The Japanese Community Cemetery in Kuching by John M. Chin in the Sarawak Gazette, 1996
