by Chew Yong Jack

Despite the brevity of Singapore’s existence, its history is an under-explored and one which occasionally does throw up a few surprises and interesting facts even for people who count themselves to be rather well-read. As an avid reader of history books, I had the good fortune to have experienced just such a surprise.

The surprise? Singapore’s role in Japan’s infamous biological weapons programme before and during the Second World War. The fact that Japan had a biological weapons programme during the war has been widely-known, primarily through various Chinese-produced documentaries, and the Unit 731 Museum located near Harbin, the provincial capital of Heilongjiang - which brings to life the various grisly details of vivisections, frost bite experiments, exposure to pathogens on life human subjects. However, Japanese military scientists’ activities in Singapore have been largely unheard of.

My first knowledge of Singapore’s connection to the Japanese military’s horrifying enterprise was through reading A Plague Upon Humanity by Daniel Barenblatt (Harper Collins, 2004). Delving into the history of Japan’s biological weapons programme, the book contains passing mentions of Singapore (in pp. 37, 47 and 206) which could be summed up by the following:

Unit 731 ran a network of secret facilities throughout its wartime empire including one in Singapore. Leading researcher Naito Ryoichi was at one time in charge of the unit’s activities in Singapore.

From then on, I was hooked. I wanted to find as much details about the subject as I possibly can. My search began with the Internet where I discovered that Unit 731’s branch in Singapore was designated as Oka (the Japanese word for steel) 9420. Thereafter, I came upon another juicy snippet in the unlikeliest of places – the National University of Singapore Library’s website (www.lib.nus.edu.sg).

In one of the pages covering the history of the library (see “Saved by a seal”) was a short write-up on the seal of the Oka 9420 unit found stamped on some of the books in the library. It reads:

Legend (as passed down verbally) has it that a Japanese officer had all the books in the Medical Library stamped with his troop’s seal [see below]. As a result, no other Japanese dared to destroy or damage them. This act on the officer’s part kept the Medical Library collection intact through World War II.

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By far the most interesting detail I uncovered from my Internet search was that Singapore’s former Minister of Social Affairs, Mr Othman bin Wok, had unwittingly worked for Oka 9420 on a part-time basis to supplement his family’s income. The far-out idea of attempting to get an interview with Mr Othman then sprang in my mind. My thought process went roughly from “He’s an important person” to “Who the heck am I to disturb him?” and finally to “What the heck! I’ll just do it to see what happens!”

Once again scouring the net, I had found Mr Othman’s office address and proceeded with writing a letter to the former minister to say that I was thinking of doing a master’s dissertation on this particular topic and would like to seek his help (which was genuinely a thought I hopefully nurtured – particularly if substantial information could be obtained from this interview). So, I mailed the letter on 15 February 2006.

To my utmost surprise, I received a letter about a week after from Mr Othman himself saying that I could liaise with his secretary to meet him for an interview. Admittedly, the only thing in my mind then was, “Wow! I’m meeting a former-minister? What are the odds?” After reality sunk in, I immediately set myself towards the task of compiling a list of questions in which I wanted to ask him. Subsequent to that, I excitedly counted down to the day of my appointment sometime in March 2006 to meet the man in the flesh.

When I finally met Mr Othman, it was a mixture of great joy and disappointment. Before the start of my interview, Mr Othman provided me with his own collection of press clippings on Japan’s biological weapons programme. They contained almost everything I wanted to know and I was very surprised that Mr Othman had gone through the trouble of reproducing them for my benefit. Among these clippings was a Straits Times exposé based on an interview with Mr Othman regarding his work with Oka 9420 (the story appeared on 19 September 1991).

My job of interviewing him was thus made that much easier – so easy in fact that my questions were restricted to finding out details which were not covered by the Straits Times exposé. Therein laid the mixture of my emotions — While I was certainly glad to have found out more details about Oka 9420, I could not help but feel a bit disappointed that the Straits Times had beaten me to it by fifteen years!

Notwithstanding my disappointment, my experience from this was mostly a positive one. For one, I learned that it does not hurt to try to seek out interviews with individuals no matter how important and highly-placed they might be. The crucial thing perhaps is that we should always try to convince our prospective interviewees of the seriousness and sincerity of our requests. I hope that by sharing my experience here, other hobbyist and serious historians might be similarly encouraged to pursue their interests without regard for preconceived notions of what is do-able and what is not.

Currently working in the government, the author graduated with honours from the Department of History, National University of Singapore in 2003.

Tags: Japanese biological weapons research, Oka 9420, Othman Wok

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Researching History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.