Japanese Cemetery Park

The Japanese Cemetery Park (Kanji: 日本人墓地公園; rōmaji: Nihonjin bochi kōen) is a cemetery and park in Hougang, Singapore. It is the largest Japanese cemetery in Southeast Asia at 29,359 square metres, consisting of 910 tombstones that contain the remains of members of the Japanese community in Singapore, including young Japanese prostitutes, civilians, soldiers and convicted war criminals executed in Changi Prison. It was gazetted as a memorial park by the Singapore government in 1987.

A Japanese brothel owner, Tagajiro Fukaki, donated 7 acres (2.8 ha) of his rubber plantation to be used as a burial ground for young Japanese women who died in destitution. The British colonial government officially granted permission for this use on 26 June 1891. Since then, it was used to bury Japanese residents. During World War II, the cemetery was used to bury civilians and soldiers who lost their lives in the battlefield or to illness. After the British repatriated all the Japanese in 1948, no Japanese were allowed back into Singapore or Malaya for fear of their war past. The Singapore government took over ownership of the cemetery and left it disused. This policy towards the Japanese dead in Singapore remained until the Official Peace Treaty was signed with Japan in 1951. In November 1952, Ken Ninomiya, the first post-war Japanese Consul-General to Singapore, was tasked to find out the fate of Japanese war remains in Singapore. Upon locating the remains, the aim was to repatriate the ashes of the dead.

However, the Japanese government eventually decided it would not remove the remains of the Japanese war dead to a separate cemetery nor would they repatriate the ashes. This was because the Japanese surrendered personnel had put so much effort to erect a memorial in the cemetery for their fallen comrades earlier and as such the memorial was a type of a shrine in itself as well as the fact that all ashes had been entombed in one single mound which made any form of identification impossible. In 1969, the Singapore government handed back ownership of the cemetery to the reformed Japanese Association, which oversees the maintenance of the cemetery. Burials continued until 1973 when the Singapore government passed an ordinance preventing the further expansion of the 42 cemeteries on the island.

Yamamoto Otokichi, also known as "John Matthew Ottoson", was born in Onoura Village at Chita District of Owari (now Mihama Town of Aichi Prefecture) in 1818. In 1832, he was a sailor on board the ship "Hojun-maru", which sailed from Ise Bay to Tokyo. The ship drifted out of the sea at Toba in a storm. Otokichi managed to survive the disaster and was washed ashore at Cape Alava on the west coast of the United States after one year and two months. He eventually travelled around the world but Japan's isolationist policy at that time denied his return to his home country. Even after being rejected by his home country, he stayed proud to be a Japanese and helped to promote the opening of the country. He later became a successful trader. In 1862, Otokichi moved from Shanghai and stayed in Singapore with his Malay wife to become the first Japanese resident here. He died at the age of 49 in 1867.

...
Wikipedia