World War II Singapore: The Chōsabu Reports on Syonan - Hard Cover

Author: Gregg Huff  & Shinobu Majima
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9789814722629
Weight: 0.928 kg
Pages: 579pp
Year: 2018
Price: RM170

During World War II, the Japanese government created a research bureau, the Chōsabu, to study occupied Singapore. The bureau’s reports on Singapore’s economy and society, reproduced here in translation, covered population and living standards, prices, wages, currency and inflation, rationing, labor usage, food production and supply, and industrialization. Syonan’s military and civilian administrators drew on Chōsabu's research in formulating social and economic policy. The research takes on added importance because the Japanese destroyed most records of their wartime administration.  That leaves the Chōsabu reports as one of the few first-hand Japanese sources to have survived the war.

           The translation allows a fuller understanding of the impact of the war and occupation than hitherto possible. Introductory chapters by the editors analyze the reports in light of wartime events in Singapore and Japanese occupation policies and discuss the Chōsabu authors and their place in the history of Japanese economic thought.