Sophie Elizabeth Oldroyd
Sophie's PhD is titled: Collaboration, Condemnation, Reconciliation: How has Japanese collaboration developed Malayan and Singaporean social relations and memory of occupation?
Project Description
This project critically examines BMA’s tribunals of local collaborators post-Japanese occupation in Singapore and Malaya, exploring their connection with post-Independence Malayan film. Previous research has focused on international relations in the aftermath of the war, but scholarship has given limited attention to the impact of Japanese relations on Malayan and Singaporean communities specifically, and how a changing political climate has affected memory of Japanese occupation. Addressing this gap is important because this project will bring attention to the effect of war on a local scale.
This project will analyse film depictions made during early independence (1957), particularly by Malayan Film Production branch of the Run Run Shaw, and how they compare to judicial processing of collaborators and Japanese in the aftermath of the war. I will examine this through an analysis of court cases of collaborators, accessed through BMA government records in the National Archives. Furthermore, I will analyse local press coverage alongside Singaporean and Malayan Peninsula Advisory Council discussions with colonial government, accessed through the National Library Board of Singapore, to observe local opinion in the aftermath of the war. By taking an inter-disciplinary approach to these sources this project will compare immediate post-war responses to Japanese occupation with later representations of the period, exploring the reframing of Japan’s historic ties with the region within context of decolonisation and Cold War political relationships between Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the wider world.
(Funded by Great British Sasakawa Foundation studentship)