| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Paul H. Kratoska. The Japanese Occupation of Malaya: A Social and Economic History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1997. Pp. viii, 404. $35.00.

This history of wartime Malaya opens with intimations of a grand treatise that will overturn both scholarly and popular perceptions of a critical, controversial period in the region's history. Scholars have long treated the Japanese occupation "as a major watershed, an event that put an end to the old order and created a new." This view, Paul H. Kratoska argues, rests on assumptions unsupported by historical fact. "Popular understanding is . . . full of misconceptions," notably that the war ended British colonialism; the Japanese ruled by terror; the Chinese were hostile to Japan; the Malays collaborated; and the Indians were won over by the crusade for Indian independence (pp. 1–2). 1

By the end of these 400 pages, it is clear that Kratoska's aim is, in fact, more modest. "Stories of the occupation often highlight dramatic events," he tells us in his concluding pages, "but for many . . . it was a dreary time when they got along with their lives as best they could" (p. 347). In his careful documentation of this dreariness, the author eschews even mid-range theory. Social historians such as Zainal Abidin b. Abd. Wahid and Cheah Boon Kheng have argued that the war gained a perverse significance as Japanese officials pitted Malay police against Chinese guerrillas, leaving a persistent legacy of communal division. Although Kratoska does not dispute their conclusions, even this modest attribution of significance seems to impose too much coherence on a period that was marked, in his view, by the social fragmentation, even confusion, of small lives divided in a mundane search for survival. . . .

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