gave credibility to the idea . By ten p . m . all was dead silence except for a burst or so in the distance . We came out of the shelter , talked of possibilities for hours until fatigue broke up the gathering and all wen t to rest .
' The eclipse was total .'
In the aftermath of the surrender there was universal fear and uncertainty . The streets were filled with Allied soldiers who had nowhere to go . There was some looting going on . Mrs de Sa ' s shop in Waterloo Street was looted , butStjoseph ' s lnstitution was not touched . This was because the school was taken over very soon as a temporary barracks for Japanese soldiers . And the Brothers left the air-raid shelter in the Canteen and returned to their quarters .
Their memories of what they had been through were never to be effaced . Forty-four years afterwards Brother Philip O ' Callaghan would write :
' War experiences are very coloured things . But the rows of dead and wounded along the corridors when the school was used as a Red Cross Centre will always be tragic memories . I remember through curiosity lifting back the soiled blanket from the face of what I thought was a sleeping soldier , to find that it covered the shattered face of a nineteen-year-old Australian soldier .
' There was the afternoon , too , when I watched the orderly carrying out two bucketfuls of arms and leg stumps to bury them in the little garden in the front ; and the other equally sad day when , after a shelling session , they buried the Indian soldiers killed in the football field .
' There was the other sad day when we watched the vast army of Allied Prisoners of War march into captivity after the surrender and I will always remember the cries of despair and desolation from the truckloads of young girls whisked off to the Japanese Army brothels . That was a sad scene viewed from the Waterloo Street end of the building .' In the newly named city of Syonan the Japanese
Military Administration appointed a municipal government which was headed by a Mayor , Shigeo Odate . This new city government parcelled out its duties between four bureaux , of which the Public Welfare Department was one . The schools came under this bureau , and , to organise education under the new dispensation , the Japanese authorities chose Mr Mamoru Shinozaki . He was a humane man , but he had had no previous connections with teaching whatever . He had , in fact , been interned by the British as a spy when he was a Press Attache at the Japanese Consulate prior to hostilities . His was one of several spy trials at the time , after which he had been shut up in Changi until he was liberated by his
own people .
The new administration found itself under pressure from all sides to do something about re-opening the schools . Crowds of young people were wandering about the streets , so it was primarily to restore order that Shinozaki began his work . Certain schools were designated to serve a particular locality . St [ oseph ' s Institution was re-named the Bras Basah Boys ' School and initially admitted boys from Standards VIto IX , buton 1May 1942itwas converted into a Primary School and Brother Ioseph noted that the enrolmentwasjust258on that day . Senior pupils had to leave until classes for older boys started . Z
The little school that now occupied the SJI buildings had no more identity as SJ1 . It was organised
2 . Addendum by Goh Sin Tub . During the Japanese Occupation St Joseph ' s Institution also became the Institute of Education with two courses for trainee teachers , one called Hon-Ka , or the main course , designed to take three years , and the other , the Yosei-Ka , which was a six-month compressed course . The faculh ) comprised Japanese teachers , some of whom were kind and understanding , but not all . Physical Education was conducted by the short but very physical Mr lshii . He used to hammer his lessons into his students-literally . The methodology was questionable but he got results . along ethnic lines . There were three Malay classes , two Indian classes , five Chinese classes and two mixed . However , Brother Joseph remained as Director until 14 December 1943 , when he and the other Brothers who had not been interned left Singapore . Then a Mr Jing of Raffles Institution took over the running of the school . The attendance gradually increased un til1944 but in the last year of the war it was sometimes as low as 68 out of an enrolment of 233 .
The curriculum of the new school consisted of singing , gymnastics , drama , handicrafts , drawing and Japanese language . Later , for urgent reasons , gardening was added .
From the first the teaching was supposed to be conducted in Japanese . To this end , every afternoon , the teachers and Brothers had to attend a language course in which they learned the rudiments of the tongue and the outline of the lesson that they too would teach their pupils on the next day . Brother Philip remembers his lessons well .
' Who among the older teachers will ever forget the Japanese classes conducted in what are now the Science Labs outside the chapel ? The pleasant and witty Mr Hyami , and the bull-like Mr ISM and the sly little Mrs Suzuki and our charming Mrs Sakai who used to teach at St Anthony ' s before the war , and who came back from India after internment to teach Japanese to the teachers . Her sympathy and understanding and the fact that she knew the teachers and was such a charming lady was enough to take away our fears of the Japanese .
' I had a particular brush with Mrs Suzuki who used to be a little girl attending St Anthony ' s Girls ' School before the war . Ihappened to be in her class and we got on one another ' s nerves and I was frequently stood up in class for not knowing my lessons . At all times she picked on me while Ichatted under my breath to an HI } sister during our lessons . She saw the fire in my eyes and was determined to get the better of me . However , one day Brother Patricius absented himself from her class ,
SJ ! in the War 37