[4] Three days later after the fall on 18 February, the occupying Japanese military began mass killings of a wide range of "undesirables", who were mostly ethnic Chinese, influenced by the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War that was raging simultaneously as far back as 1937.

Japan alleged that no more "than 6,000 deaths" had occurred, while Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who was himself almost a victim to Sook Ching, stated that verifiable numbers would put it at "about 70,000", including the figures in Malaya.

The Japanese referred to the Sook Ching as the Kakyō Shukusei (華僑粛清, 'purging of Overseas Chinese') or as the Shingapōru Daikenshō (シンガポール大検証, 'great inspection of Singapore').

[13][14][15] Hirofumi Hayashi, a professor of politics at a university and the co-director of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, writes that the massacre was premeditated, and that "the Chinese in Singapore were regarded as anti-Japanese even before the Japanese military landed".

Sometimes, hooded informants identified suspected anti-Japanese Chinese; other times, Japanese officers singled out "suspicious" characters at their whim and fancy.

[10]According to the A Country Study: Singapore published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress: All Chinese males from ages eighteen to fifty were required to report to registration camps for screening.

The Japanese or military police arrested those alleged to be anti-Japanese, meaning those who were singled out by informers or who were teachers, journalists, intellectuals, or even former servants of the British.

[19]The ones who passed the "screening"[16] received a piece of paper bearing the word "examined" or have a square ink mark stamped on their arms or shirts.

In a quarterly newsletter, the National Heritage Board published the account of the life story of a survivor named Chia Chew Soo, whose father, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters were bayoneted one by one by Japanese soldiers in Simpang Village.

[20] At the behest of Masanobu Tsuji, the Japanese High Command's Chief of Planning and Operations, Sook Ching was extended to the rest of Malaya.

Lacking sufficient time and manpower to organise a full "screening", the Japanese opted instead to conduct widespread and indiscriminate massacres of the Chinese population.

Further massacres were instigated as a result of increased guerilla activity in Malaya, most notably at Sungei Lui, a village of 400 in Jempol District, Negeri Sembilan, which was wiped out on 31 July 1942 by troops under a Corporal Hashimoto.

[1][2] According to Lieutenant Colonel Hishakari Takafumi, a newspaper correspondent at the time, the plan was to ultimately kill about 50,000 Chinese, and half that (25,000) had already been achieved when the order was received to scale down the operation.

It is alleged by Singapore that the total number of innocent Chinese and Peranakan civilians killed was forty or fifty thousand; this point needs further investigations.

[31]Chinese film pioneer Hou Yao had emigrated to Singapore in 1940 to work for the Shaw brothers as well as to largely avoid the Japanese invasion of China.

Because Hou had directed and written a number of patriotic Chinese "national defence" films against that invasion, he was targeted by the Japanese immediately after Singapore fell and killed at the beginning of the massacre.

Seven Japanese officers: Takuma Nishimura, Saburo Kawamura, Masayuki Oishi, Yoshitaka Yokata, Tomotatsu Jo, Satoru Onishi, and Haruji Hisamatsu, were charged with conducting the massacre.

Staff officer Masanobu Tsuji was the mastermind behind the massacre, and personally planned and carried it out, but at the time of the war crimes trials he had not been arrested.

Besides, the Japanese military headquarters' order for the speedy execution of the operation, combined with ambiguous instructions from the commanders, led to suspicions being cast on the accused, and it became difficult to accurately establish their culpability.

The British authorities allowed only six members of the victims' families to witness the executions of Kawamura and Oishi, despite calls for the hangings to be made public.

[39] When Singapore gained full self-government from the British colonial government in 1959, waves of anti-Japanese sentiments arose within the Chinese community and they demanded reparations and an apology from Japan.

Actions such as these, among others, was what resulted in many of the local populace of all ethnic groups feeling that the British were no longer competent in Singapore's administration and defence after the war.

In September 1963, the Chinese community staged a boycott of Japanese imports by refusing to unload aircraft and ships from Japan, which lasted for a week.

As a result, he took the position that the commemoration activities must be aimed at paying tribute to all civilian victims of the Japanese occupation, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

[8] Due to the fact that only a few remains of Sook Ching victims were found during the occupation and in the first post-war years, the families of the murdered did not have the opportunity to commemorate their relatives while respecting Chinese traditions.

On the initiative of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, search and exhumation work began – also in other alleged Japanese crime scenes.

They were among tens of thousands who lost their lives during the Japanese Sook Ching operation to purge suspected anti-Japanese civilians among Singapore's Chinese population between 18 February and 4 March 1942.

Tanah Merah Besar Beach, a few hundred metres south (now part of Singapore Changi Airport runway) was one of the most heavily-used killing grounds where well over a thousand Chinese men and youths lost their lives.— National Heritage Board.

Lee Kuan Yew said on the Discovery Channel programme, "It was the catastrophic consequences of the war that changed the mindset, that my generation decided that, 'No ... this doesn't make sense.

Coupled with the secret and sudden evacuation of British soldiers, women and children from Penang, there was the uneasy realisation that the colonial masters could not be relied upon to defend the locals.