Why I make this web                                                      Pilah Ren

As a child growing up in Kuala Pilah town, I heard many heinous stories about how Japanese soldiers brutally murder innocence men, women and children as told by adults. Atrocious story like how they kill by throwing live baby into the air, and bayonet as they fall, throwing children into well while alive, bury men and women alive or splicing open pregnant woman's abdomen etc.

We lived with those stories but it was passed by mouth and ear and it will be silenced after few generations. No serious action taken so far at state level to document the atrocities. Yet it is a page of Malaysian history that should not be forgotten.

Why things went so wrong in the Second World War was quite incomprehensible. It is a page of history that Japan choose to erase. A Japanese informed me that talking about Japanese aggression during WWII is a taboo in Japan. Many Japanese still think there is nothing wrong with what they did. Some intellectuals and politicians go as far as saying Nanjing massacre where by at least 300,000 Chinese were raped and slaughtered, did not occur. I suspect as time goes by, Japan will portray themselves as victim rather than aggressor.

The book by Chinese Assembly Hall has no doubt formed an important milestone for the collection of the atrocities committed. The Nanjing massacre is well researched and documented but what occurred here was no less shocking. In the state of Negeri Sembilan alone, the known number of people killed is over 4,000. There are those unaccounted for like the British soldiers, anti-Japanese resistance group, non-Chinese people and foreign workers etc. There are 13 states in Malaysia, each with their own encounter with the aggressor. Outside Malaya, thousands more were killed in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and North Borneo like Sarawak.

History is event which already happened, it cannot be changed. A bad piece of history cannot be decorated to make it look pretty. To date Japanese history text book refuses to print the truth about what their army did to the people of South East Asia and Asia Pacific. And not surprising, many young Japanese just miss learning the missing pages!

By placing this introduction on the web, I hope more people will come to know about the massacre. The Japanese today should not be blamed for what their past generation did but the truth must be made known to them. And for those who choose to bury their head in the sand, look into the eyes of history and say never, never again let this happen!

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