Dear reader,
Holiday shopping with Jom. Last chance for you to grab Jom merch before we go on break. Get our new print issue No. 3, print issue No. 2, and/or our tote. All orders received by December 18th will be shipped by the following weekend.
Today we’ve published:
- “Singapore This Week”, by Jom
- “Waxwork wars”, by Paul Rae
The Albatross File, a series of documents relating to Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965, has been in the news this week, after the launch of a new exhibition and book on it. Faris Joraimi, Jom’s history editor, will respond to the issue in next Friday’s “Singapore This Week”.
On Wednesday, we also learned that not all is well at Singapore’s Law Society (LawSoc). Disgruntlement over the election of its new president led to a requisition for an EGM; which then spilled out into social media after the LawSoc council failed to respond to said requisition. “I posted on social media because an uninformed Bar cannot vote,” wrote Luo Ling Ling on LinkedIn, with a detailed timeline of events. “If one lawyer's ‘disgust’ [about publicising the affair on social media] is the price I pay for ensuring 6,000 lawyers know what is going on, so be it.”
On a related note, TOC revealed how The Straits Times (ST) completely reframed its narrative about LawSoc in a day—without any disclosure to readers. The headline “Former Law Society leaders call for EGM to protest election of new president” was quietly switched to “Law Society members strike compromise over election of new president”, in line with changes to the corresponding story. (At the time of writing, the original headline is still available on ST’s “Evening update” page for Wednesday, linking you to the new story—pity the poor propagandist tool who missed this.)
It’s fairly common here, and sometimes bizarrely defended under the guise of “updates”, but really just bad journalistic practice. Even as one bit of the establishment revels in the supposed declassification of 60-year-old events, another bit indulges in the erasure and remaking of history that autocrats find irresistible.
Finally, this week we also learned that Singapore now has 55 billionaires living here, whose combined wealth of US$258.8bn (S$334.3bn) is the third largest in Asia, behind only China and India, and ahead of Australia, a country with a GDP three times ours, and more than four times the population. There’s a link here to the preceding story: one reason the global rich are moving to Singapore is because we don’t have pesky tabloids or (many) investigative reporters monitoring their activities, whether they’re trading in art, property or scams.
Below are the stories we chose to explore in more depth.
- A scathing report in the FT about GIC and Temasek
- How worried should we be about antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”?
- Is Australia’s new social-media ban for youth a good thing?
- Singapore’s skateboarders soar
- Why are young people so fascinated by perfumes?
- The architectural evolution of Singapore’s playgrounds
- A safe and Sinophone year for the Cultural Medallion
- What is the relationship between live performances and their archival recordings?
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Essay: “Waxwork wars”, by Paul Rae
Nuremberg meets Madame Tussauds. That’s how I felt when I read this expansive, intriguing exploration of the Japanese surrender waxworks in Sentosa, by Paul Rae, a professor of theatre studies at the University of Melbourne (who previously lived here).
It’s been precisely 80 years and two months since General Seishiro Itagaki surrendered to Lord Louis Mountbatten in the City Hall Chamber. The waxworks exhibit of the scene opened in 1974, and since then scores of Singaporeans have seen it as part of our national and historical education. It’s something many of us take for granted, really, and Paul’s contemplation of the issue has today offered us a chance to think more deeply about what it represents, and what it means for us as a people.
What were the socio-political considerations of the moment, and why was there so much disgruntlement in the early 1970s about plans to memorialise the event? What’s lost in our historical reckoning and understanding when a complex event is depicted in the stillness of wax? How has our relationship to the exhibit evolved over the years? And what does it mean for us as a people, for our identity, that a seminal story in our national history is one without any Singaporeans?
Paul brings a theatre practitioner’s eye to these questions, and I could finally feel much meaning emerging from those hitherto cardboard figures in my mind. At a broader level, the essay prods us to think simply about the ways in which we remember—whether through wax or melodramatically-presented books about the declassified Albatross File. I’ll leave you with a bit of the personal.
“Previously, I’d been alone with the waxworks, so the novel experience of looking at them alongside other living beings was quite unsettling. A stranger and I stood next to each other, staring at an inanimate object that invited us to invest in its lifelike qualities. I grew self-conscious, in a way I would not in an art gallery, say. I felt compelled out of embarrassment to state the obvious: that I knew the figures weren’t real, that they were mainly objects that just happened to take human form. I kept my mouth shut.”
Read Paul’s piece. And please consider a paid membership today so we can continue supporting the work of people like Paul and Diva (see below).
Jom ingat,
Sudhir Vadaketh, editor-in-chief
Jom
Behind Jom’s art with Charmaine Poh
Artist Diva Agar’s 3D illustrations have made their appearance several times on Jom, from our 2023 essay on the awkwardness of “resilience” in political discourse to the one on conspiracy theories, published exactly a year ago. Often using visual satire to reveal the charades of the systems around us, Diva’s illustrations this week similarly probe at the uneasy ways Singapore has dealt with the wax war memorial. The header image reveals the way history is told multiple times, each time a recursive spiral into the past, revealing not just the story but much about the storyteller. The spot image goes on to show how such memorials often have their original contexts disregarded in favour of commodified tourist photo-ops. Perhaps it is through the abstraction of satire that we are able to cast a critical eye on ourselves and the environment around us.
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