Tapioca Days: Food Scarcity during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore

The Japanese Occupation stands in contrast to much of Singapore’s history because it was a time of food scarcity. The colonial development of Singapore as a free-port and trading post for the British East India Company provided an array of goods for purchase, and food supplies were varied and plentiful, at least for those with the money to buy them. Whilst poverty and disease were widespread among poorer workers in the early Colonial period, the Japanese Occupation was a time of extreme food scarcity for everyone. Without access to imported goods and with limited agricultural land or expertise, the population had to try to sustain itself by scrounging for food, growing vegetables and improvising the most basic of meals. Although occupied for a relatively short period of three years, it remains significant in the national narrative and is used to remind citizens of past adversity and food scarcity and is remembered as a catalyst for Independence.

In the years after Independence in 1965, Singapore was reluctant to tell its national story for fear of exacerbating ethnic tensions but the period of Japanese Occupation continued to be of interest. Many accounts of the Occupation, including state-sanctioned, popular and academic, exist. More recently, attention has shifted to the culinary memories of this tumultuous period. This paper examines the Occupation as experienced by the nuns of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus and their brief, but significant, exodus to Bahau in neighbouring Malaya as part of an ill-fated farming community, to highlight institutional memories of the Occupation. It also examines the National Museum of Singapore’s Wartime Kitchen book and the DVD series it commissioned, Eat to Live: Wartime Recipes, to show how the history of Japanese Occupation has been portrayed in Singapore’s national narrative and used in the service of nation-building.