Britain and Japanese Espionage in Pre-War Malaya

During the second half of the 1930s, as Anglo-Japanese relations gradually deteriorated particularly after the outbreak of the war in Europe British colonial authorities became increasingly concerned about the activities of Japanese citizens resident in the South-east Asian territories. These activities, generally subsumed by the British authorities under the heading of 'espionage', have yet to receive the detailed examination recently devoted by scholars to the broader dimensions of the security of Malaya, and the Singapore naval base in particular. The Japanese population in the Malayan peninsula (administratively divided under the British into the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States and the Straits Settlements) had risen from a single individual in 1871 to over one thousand in the early twentieth century and to over six thousand by the 1930s. Japanese economic interests, though initially focused on the rubber estates, during the inter-war period came increasingly to be concentrated on mining, particularly iron-mining, thereby providing Japan with an increasingly valuable source of raw materials. The impression derived from memoirs by British expatriates and Malayans is of an energetic Japanese community in the inter-war period, engaged in a variety of trades, but mainly as fishermen, barbers, photographers and small shop-keepers, so that 'in almost every town or village of any consequence throughout Malaya there were one or two Japanese shops'. Consequently, the ubiquitous Japanese became the source of 'spy fever', as rumours circulated through the peninsula. The British colonial authorities, over-sensitive to possible diplomatic repercussions from action against nationals of a country still, nominally at least, friendly, obtained sufficient information to substantiate some of the suspicions of Japanese espionage, but generally preferred quietly to deport suspected agents. Nevertheless, occasionally cases did

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