Why Was Imperial Japan So EVIL? | Lee Kuan Yew Explains

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]I've been occupied by the Japanese three and a  half years. It didn't represent me. There was no human rights. So the Japanese never talk of human  rights because they understand the brutality, the cruelties that they inflicted on fellow  Asians whom they came to so-called liberate.

[00:00:22]Long before he built Singapore into an economic  powerhouse, a young Lee Kuan Yew narrowly survived the horrors of World War II. The trauma of  those years never left him. And in his memoirs, he was famously blunt about his experience  under the brutal Imperial Japanese occupation and uncompromising on the use of the atomic bomb,  stating, "I have no doubts about whether the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were  necessary. Without them, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Malaya and Singapore and millions in  Japan itself would have perished." While Lee would later build a close relationship with Japan,  he admitted that in the aftermath of the war, watching the architects of his countrymen's  suffering navigate defeat left him with a harsh, conflicted duality, stating, "Because of fear and  hate arising from the suffering of the occupation years. I had felt the satisfaction of schadenfreude when I read of their hunger and suffering in their bombed and burnt cities. This feeling  turned into reluctant respect and admiration as they stoically and methodically set out to rebuild  from the ashes of defeat. This is the story of Lee Kuan Yew's experience with Imperial Japan. In 1942,  at just 18 years old, Lee experienced one of the most traumatic experiences of his youth. As a show  of force, the occupying Imperial Japanese Army displayed the severed head of a local man on a  spike outside Singapore's most modern building at the time. The first thing I saw 2 days after they  came in when I went out to sort of buy some food were two human heads on a pole outside the tallest  building in Singapore and Chinese characters to say if you are not well behaved you will end up  here. I thought to myself, if only I had a camera.

[00:02:14]Here was this modern 12 storey building highest  in Singapore then and this medieval scene. But his closest brush with death came during the  Sook Ching Massacre, a brutal cleansing campaign targeting Singapore's Chinese population. Lee  himself narrowly escaped the screening process, but others weren't so fortunate. An estimated  50,000 civilians were systematically rounded up, driven to the beaches, and machine gunned down  in cold blood. About 10 days after the fall, we were told to collect ourselves in  certain collection centers. So they said, "Go there." So I said, "I have left my clothes  behind." I did not feel good. My eldest brother Lee Kuan Yew being the eldest he was then about  18 I think and there were gantry points. Now the gantry points were manned by Japanese  soldiers where they get all the young males together and register them and some of them will  be sent by lorries to be executed in the Sook Ching.

[00:03:32]So I went back and stayed lied low for a few days  with my gardener. He had a labourer's quarters there. So I billeted myself with him. Second time  I went out, they had changed people and they let me through. Well, I was lucky. I was lucky. Those  who went on that lorry were taken to the beach and shot would have been me. Today, the Civilian  War Memorial stands in the heart of downtown Singapore, a permanent reminder of the terror  that shaped Lee's world view. It was these exact horrors that revealed to Lee the terrifying  reality of the Imperial Japanese war machine.

[00:04:12]Those of my generation who saw the Japanese  soldiers in the flesh cannot forget their almost inhuman attitude to death in battle. They were  not afraid to die. They made fearsome enemies and needed so little to keep going. The tin containers  on their belts carried only rice, some soy beans, and salt fish. Throughout the occupation, a common  sight was of Japanese soldiers at bayonet practice on open fields. Their war cries as they stabbed  their gunny sack dummies were blood curdling. For Lee, their fearsome nature wasn't necessarily  due to heroism or their famous samurai code, but rather the total indoctrination of  the population, stating what made them such warriors. The Japanese call it bushido, the  code of the samurai. I believe it was systematic indoctrination in the cult of emperor worship and  in their racial superiority as a chosen people who could conquer all. They were convinced that to  die in battle for the emperor meant they would ascend to heaven and become gods. While their  ashes were preserved at the Yasukuni shrine in the suburbs of Tokyo. Why did they succeed?  Not because of individual Japanese heroism, but because as a group they were a powerful  force and they still are. And the evidence for this was far beyond what Lee witnessed in  Singapore. Even after the war was officially over, Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda spent 29 years hiding  and fighting in the jungles of the Philippines, killing 30 Filipinos in the process because  he refused to believe Japan had surrendered.

[00:05:39]Additionally, nearly 4,000 kamikaze pilots  deliberately crash their aircraft into Allied ships during the final year of the war, sinking 34  ships and killing around 5,000 sailors. Not even the relentless US firebombing campaign, which  leveled entire Japanese cities and killed more civilians than both atomic bombs combined,  could break the regime's resolve. And these weren't isolated incidents. They were symptoms of  a culture that had been systematically programmed to treat surrender as a fate worse than death.  And this is why Lee was convinced that avoiding the atomic bomb would have only triggered a far  greater slaughter. As he wrote, "Had the British reinvaded and fought their way down Malaya  into Singapore, there would have been immense devastation. After seeing them at close quarters,  I was sure that for sheer fighting spirit, they were among the world's finest. But they also  showed a meanness and viciousness towards their enemies equal to the Huns. Genghis Khan and  his hordes could not have been more merciless.

[00:06:38]Allied military planners reached the exact same  conclusion. Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland, was set to be  the largest amphibious assault in human history, dwarfing D-Day. But the true horror lay in Japan's  ultimate defensive response, Operation Ketsugo.

[00:06:55]This strategy called for the total mobilization  of the civilian population with everyone ordered to fight to the death. Lacking modern rifles,  citizens were armed with hand grenades, swords, kitchen knives, and sharpened bamboo spears.  Military officers were deployed to classrooms, even training primary school children in the use  of weapons. That was the fanatical landscape an Allied invasion force would have faced, and it is  exactly why Lee harbored no doubts that the bombs were a horrific necessity. While Lee would go on  to build a strong relationship with modern Japan, what always troubled him most in the relationship  was Japan's refusal to face its past. He said, "Throughout the 50 years since the end of the  war, successive Japanese Liberal Democratic Party governments, the majority of leaders of  all Japanese political parties, most of their academics, and nearly all their media, have chosen  not to talk about these evil deeds. Unlike the Germans, they hope that with the passing of the  generations, these deeds will be forgotten and the accounts of what they did buried in dusty records.  You see, while Germany confronted its past through public memorials and rigorous education,  Japan chose a different path through silence, deflection, and the quiet hope that time  would bury the evidence. Even decades later, Tokyo has actively pressured nations from the  Philippines to New Zealand to dismantle memorials dedicated to comfort women. And even today, deep  geopolitical scars remain over Japan's wartime legacy, most notably surrounding leadership visits  to the Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted class A war criminals are actively honored. Lee argued  that true stability in Asia requires a deeper, more profound reconciliation, stating, "Do what  the Germans have done. Acknowledge what you have done. Say sorry." The problem in Asia is that the  Koreans, Chinese, and many in Southeast Asia do not believe that Japan is really sorry. Japan is  sorry it lost the war. That is the problem. When you say in a ritualistic way, we are sorry,  we apologize and then the leader goes to the Yasukuni shrine, it is a neverending problem.  Is it necessary? So why not close the subject?

[00:09:00]I do not understand this. For Lee, this refusal  to acknowledge history was not merely a moral failure, but a warning sign for the future. As  he concluded, when they refuse to admit them to their neighbors, people cannot but fear that it is  possible for them to repeat these horrors. You in fact believe that it is not impossible that they  may once again be a powerful military force with ambitions that could lead them to war.  Uh I wouldn't say exactly with ambitions, but I'm quite convinced that they can  become a very powerful military force and if cornered again the way the way they  were in 1941 with an oil embargo and no exports rather than curl up and die they'll  fight. is in the nature of the culture of a people