7 - Waxwork Wars

Summary

On the Singaporean resort island of Sentosa, two waxworks depict the British surrender to the Japanese in Singapore in 1942, and the Japanese surrender to the Allies in 1945. This essay focuses on the Japanese surrender waxworks, first displayed in 1974. Consideration of what the waxworks represent, how the display came about, and the experience the exhibit offers provides a perhaps unexpected opportunity to examine questions concerning the nature of diplomacy as refracted through post-war Japan-Singapore relations. In both representational and material terms, the waxworks mark a liminal condition. Representing a surrender grants them an ambivalent relation to post-war diplomacy, something crystallised by fraught public debate over their creation in the 1970s as independent Singapore struggled to reconcile its wartime past and commercial present. The chapter then goes on to consider the contemporary experience of the waxworks, which today represent historical curiosities in their own right and present the visitor with a strange and uncanny embodied experience of a moment frozen in time. In light of the events the waxworks depict, and the debates they triggered, the chapter seeks to answer the question of what embodied ‘work’ of history they continue to perform.