Short Abstract

Analysing Singapore’s 2021 Secondary Two history textbook, this paper shows how the Japanese Occupation is taught through managed historical empathy and an emotional regime that recodes wartime memory into nation-building and Total Defence, with implications for Japanese Studies.

Long Abstract

This paper examines how Singapore’s 2021 Lower Secondary History syllabus and Secondary Two textbook narrate the Japanese Occupation (1942–45) and mobilise inquiry tasks to shape students’ affective and emotional orientations. For Japanese Studies, it highlights how “Japan”, as an imperial power and wartime aggressor, is constituted not only through domestic memory politics but also through curricular governance in a former occupied society. Focusing on the chapter “What Did the People in Singapore Experience During the Japanese Occupation?”, I combine discourse analysis of narrative passages with close reading of source-based activities and a diary-writing task that asks students to inhabit the perspectives of a Chinese businessman, a Malay student learning Japanese, or an Indian soldier considering the anti-British Indian National Army (INA). I argue that the curriculum institutionalises a managed form of historical empathy: it foregrounds differentiated wartime experiences yet steers students toward a state-sanctioned repertoire of emotions (fear, hardship, endurance, solidarity) that can be shared across ethnic lines. By embedding the Occupation within the longer arc of “Singapore’s Struggle for Independence (1942–1965)” and linking wartime suffering to civic resilience and Total Defence, the textbook recodes traumatic memory into a nation-building narrative. The extreme compression of the Second Sino-Japanese War to a brief contextual note further prevents the Occupation from being read through a China-centred victimhood frame, re-situating “Japan’s war” within Singapore-centric mnemopolitics. Conceptually, I read these pedagogical designs as an emotional regime that governs which feelings are legitimate and which, including divisive and ethnicised grievance, are marginalised, enabling a postwar positioning of Japan compatible with contemporary regional order and pragmatic bilateral relations. The paper concludes by noting tensions between this emotional regime and postmemory carried in families and minority communities, and it proposes avenues for transregional comparison.