japanese interior design firm singapore
my name is alexander sudarusenen abisheganaden and i was born in 1926. this diary was written when i was 17 years of age during the japanese occupation. in those days the year was called 2603, which could be 1943. 26th of february 1943 - this what i wrote, ‘nowadays there is a great scarcity of food rice can’t be bought
without permits. only now we realise what war is. food unavailable, and sold at terrific rates.’ the japanese introduced a new currency to replace the straits dollar. because of the banana design on the notes, locals called it banana money. but the "banana currency" started to suffer from high inflation and dropped drastically in value
because the authorities would simply print more whenever they needed more money. there was no accounting, there was no serial number, i mean it was just; it was literally just a piece of paper. i am eileen wong, i am 83. prior to japanese occupation,
we had a very comfortable life of course, we were young, we went to school and went home and played our games. but at the japanese occupation, i had to go to work at the age of twelve. i learned japanese for six months and then went to a firm and became a japanese typist with three thousand characters in front of me,
i signed a contract for forty japanese dollars. and at the end of three years, forty japanese dollars could not even buy a chicken. that it was inflation, bad time. i had a friend who had a one room full of notes, but i don’t know how rich they were. they were not worth much, he said. the banana currency became so devalued that a lot of the business done during the syonan years
was barter trade, with rice, sugar and salt. people also preferred to be paid with food. some time when i look back, it was the happiest time of my life. waterloo street was where there was a main japanese school for learning the japanese language. and somehow, the sensei knew that i was a good musician and he asked whether i could be used-
to teaching japanese songs on radio. and i said yes. so there i was singing all the most favorite japanese songs. we were paid with food, and not with money. so i would receive some loaves of bread and some cakes. during the japanese occupation, huge amounts of money chasing shrinking amounts of goods led to hyperinflation. people had to go to the black market for some of their necessities as soon as the occupation started
because their supply chain was broken. the blackmarketeers would set up roadside stalls at sungei road, displaying samples of goods they had on offer. a black market, to put it bluntly, is an illegal market. it’s a market that operates in the absence of just and fair market mechanisms. so the black market, definitely in terms of food, was a direct response to the strict controls on food and the rationing of food that the japanese had undertaken.
it’s an illegal economy that works, and it happens of course because there’s food that scarce and there’s shortage of supplies, which doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t enough for everybody, it’s just that it’s being hoarded right. so you have available food and commodities, but, it is restricted in a few hands. and this again didn’t ensure any kind of equal distribution because only people who had something that
they could trade for the restricted commodities had access to the black market. and in between the work, i used to sell black market things because the salary was so small, i could hardly buy a few bag of beans. so i worked by selling gold, textiles and made a lot of money. if people gave me something, i just add 100 dollars to it, like that, and sold it. if you want real patented medicine,
you have to buy it at the black market, with not the japanese notes. they were inflated, very much inflated. with tiger notes, which is british notes. if you had any you could buy medicine, you could buy razor blades and all the black market things. towards the end of 1942, the military administration began grouping suppliers of various commodities into distribution monopolies called kumiai.
their job was to prevent profiteering and escalating prices, by controlling the flow of goods. producers of various goods had to sell to the kumiai, which in turn licensed a group of traders to deal with the product. my name is lai kok wah. i was born in 1916, november 20th. i was selling fish to japanese as a business one day, a japanese soldier came patrolling the area where our company was located he saw we have good supply of fish, so he asked us if we are interested in supplying fish to the japanese military. well, it was just business and nothing else…
then he said we can make a deal by exchanging fish with food or charge them in cash. the fishermen usually brought it to us at our company, we didn't need to collect them from one fishermen to another… all we need to do was to just put up a sign, and the fishermen will bring and sell it to us. besides the local fishermen… we had fishermen who were from small islands - across indonesia, pulau tekong, pulau merlimau, pulau tembakul, etc… the kumiai system did not improve the food situation in fact, it made matters worse. there was a lot of corruption
and that really exacerbated the problem as well right. so they would first take what they wanted for themselves and then leave the remainders to private traders right, but then the private traders would have to bribe the japanese ok, in order to access these restricted goods, which they would then have to set sell at really escalated prices on the black market, which meant that only some people who had resources
could access them. you buy it with a lot of money. small little fish, like kampung... or what, small fish. we never saw the big fish, the japanese eat all the best fish. there was a lot of seafood for them, but not for the population. it was a mess during the first few weeks, but it slowly calm down and back to normal. there were prawn, fish, chicken, duck, roasted pork and vegetable etc sold in the market.
it was easy as long as you are rich but got a bit costly especially those stuff that are in shortage. even we queue up, you don’t get the meat, you get 2 pieces of dead fish, that smelly dead fish. at 5:30 am you get up, you come back 6:30, my sister would bring 2 dead fish, smelly dead fish back home. but still we have to cook it, we have no food. today we are making sotong or squid, stir fried with pickled mustard greens. this simple dish is taken from the cookery book,
called “cookery book on local foodâ€. which was published in 1946, this was a year after the occupation ended. but the influence of wartime food shortages can still be seen in its economical approach to cooking. so here i have two types of pickled mustard green or 'kiam chye' as it known locally. this type has thick juicy stumps, and this other type has thinner stumps and longer leafs. so i am just gone use some of each of these. i am going to cut into shreds.
now if you had access to salt during the war, pickening and preserving your own vegetable was a great way to keep them to future use. and the flavor from the in fermentation also made them a very tasty condiment, which you could season dishes. because they are preserved with lot of salt, we have to soak them in water before cooking, just to remove the excess salt. so they are not too unpalatable.
so i am just gone let those soak, while i cut up the garlic and the red chili. so i am just going to thinly slice the chili, we don't need very much of it, just a bit, to give it a kick of heat to the dish. and we are going to finely chop the garlic. so now we are going to cut the squid and of course for good food hygiene, always use a separate cutting board and clean knife for seafood and vegetables.
there are couple of ways to cut this. we could simply just slice it into rings. but today i am going to cut it into small pieces that will curl up during frying and they will look quite attractive. i am going to slit the body open. i am going to score it halfway through the flesh, this will help it to cook quicker and will also make an attractive pattern once the squid slices cook and curl up. the sotong has been prepared.
so now i am going to squeeze dry the mustard greens. squeeze them gently to get rid of the extra moisture. and now we can proceed the stir-fry everything together. now i add the chopped garlic and chili. i am just going to fry them for a couple of minutes, until they just start to turn golden and their fragrance rises. next i am going to add the sotong. sotong is the malay word for squid. now you either cook squid for a very short time or very long time
because otherwise it’s going to be tough. so we are going to stir-fry it for maybe a minute. now the sotong is cooked, so i am going to scoop it out of the pan, so i can fry the "kiam chye" separately. next i am going to add mustard green to the pan and fry them for little bit until they dry up slightly. "kiam chye" is the local hokkien name for salted pickled mustard green. now i am going return the sotong to the pan,
and fry everything together for several seconds more, so the flavors can mingle. now i am just going to add a little bit of sugar because its sweetness will accentuate the salty sourness of the mustard greens. and there we have it, a tasty comfort dish that can be served with rice or porridge. one of the advantages of living on an island was that people could turn to the waters around them to supplement their diets.
many learned to catch their own fish or seafood, which was plentiful in the sea, rivers and even the drains. we had no meat, no fish. to supplement our diet, therefore my second uncle han yuan and i spent every evening in the monsoon drain. i used to hold the torch when we were catching eels. but we were very successful... you know. they were actually quite delicious if you knew how to cook it well, with chili and sambal. very nice. we eat a lot of eels.
at that time, our living was not too bad, we had fish, rice, chickens and eggs. we never really starved. of course, it was quite beneficial that i was in the fish business. sometimes i will bring home a "saito fish" (ikan parang) from the company, cut into few pieces and share it with the neighbours. they were very happy. as fish was really expensive at that time even though you can get it from the market. i’m 87 this year. my name is lai kim hong. we would also buy gourds, melons and eggplants to eat. they were very cheap. with some salt and oil, they were very palatable and would make a good daily meal. we would also take home fish heads discarded by the fishmongers. we were not the only ones who picked them up.
other people would pick them up too. we wouldn’t take too much, just three or four each; we wouldn’t take other people’s shares either. we fried it in oil and ginger, which was also picked from vendors, then boiled the fish head and discarded the bones. we would then drink it as a soup. sometimes, we would put vegetables in it too,depending on if we can get it. cabbages, bai cai... making a wholesome meal of vegetable, fish and soup. the japanese tried to exert power over the population of singapore by controlling food and money. the consequence was an unequal distribution of wealth and food supplies.
whether doing business, buying or selling on the black market or rummaging through rubbish, many people were literally fishing for food. it was a game of chance. you never knew what you were going to get, when you “cast your netâ€.