On February 15, 1942, the British surrendered and Singapore became a part of Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, part of the Japanese Empire. The Argyll regiment blew up the causeway connecting the island to the mainland as they went. Pushed down the peninsula by a lightning quick Japanese force of about 60,000 men, many of them riding bicycles, the much larger British army, supplemented by “colonials,” dropped back in disarray on the great British redoubt of Singapore, second only to London in its importance to British global strategy. British Malaya fell to the Imperial Japanese 25th Army on January 31, 1942. New Syonan came from a particular historical chronotope: the Japanese occupation of Singapore. Japanese Singapore: The Conditions of Possibility
