World War II Singapore: The Chōsabu Reports on Syonan

During World War II, the Japanese government created a research bureau, the Chōsabu, to study occupied Singapore. The bureau’s reports on Singapore’s economy and society, reproduced here in translation, covered population and living standards, prices, wages, currency and inflation, rationing, labour usage, food production and supply, and industrialization.

Syonan’s military and civilian administrators drew on Chōsabu research in formulating social and economic policy. The research takes on added importance because the Japanese destroyed most records of their wartime administration.  That leaves the Chōsabu reports as one of the few first-hand Japanese sources to have survived the war.