Story of Lion City's occupation lives on

ELIZABETH CHOY, a canteen worker, was tortured with electric shocks in an effort to get her to confess her 'crimes'. To make the ordeal even tougher, her persecutors forced her husband to watch as they drove the current through her body.

Lim Seng, another civilian, was forced to drink gallons of water until her stomach swelled: her tormentors then kicked her until she vomited. The attack was repeated the next day.

Jack 'Crackers' Kyros, an Australian serviceman, was incarcerated in a wooden box 1.5 metres high and about 75 centimetres square. The sentence was meant to last 30 days, but he managed to secure an early release after his comrades duped his jailers into believing he was dead. To ensure that the ruse remained undetected, the corpse of another, unknown man was buried bearing Mr Kyros' military dogtags. The deception worked.

The three tales of systematic brutality - and many more like them - are featured in Singapore's new Changi Museum, which opens this Thursday. It is the first museum dedicated to telling the story of Japan's three-year occupation during World War II and makes a thorough effort to reflect the experiences of Singapore's largely Chinese civilian population, who suffered severely under Japanese administration. Some accounts suggest as many as 25,000 Chinese were put to death in the first two weeks after the Japanese stormed across the Johore Strait.

The project is located in the far east of the island, where thousands of people were interned between 1942 and 1945. 'We wanted something that was human and living, actually an embodiment of everyone's experiences in Singapore at that time: civilian and military,' an official from the Singapore Tourist Board said.

Thursday's opening date was carefully chosen, and underlines the museum's dual function. February 15 marks the anniversary of the Allied forces' surrender of the island. It is also modern Singapore's Total Defence Day, an annual event promoted by the Government as a reminder that all citizens have a role in protecting the city state. The one-storey, white-walled Changi Museum acknowledges the suffering of the past century, while preserving the lessons of that painful episode for the citizens of this century. It is a deft blend of paying homage to the past while keeping an eye on the future.

Both themes emerge at the door, with a nod towards Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew. 'My colleagues and I are determined that no one - neither Japanese, nor the British - had the right to push us around,' Mr Lee says in a quote from his autobiography reproduced on the main wall. 'We were determined that we would govern ourselves and bring up our children in a country where we can be self-respecting people.'