8 - Food and Living Standards in Urban Southeast Asia

Summary

Chapter 8 focuses on food, living standards and population movements in principal urban areas: Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Surabaya, Saigon-Cholon, Hanoi and Manila. This chapter constructs the first set of World War II population data, and analyzes population trends and fluctuations in Southeast Asia’s main cities. Food scarcity and ways to cope with this and continuously declining Japanese rations are assessed. Some Singapore residents kept chickens and ducks which they fed on the city’s two-inch cockroaches trapped in the sewers at night. Outside central Singapore, grass verges, said once to have been neatly cut, were largely replaced with stringy papaya trees and tapioca plants around which lalang (coarse grass) grew unchecked. Urban cats and dogs, although not always easily caught, afforded an obvious source of high protein. These animals disappeared in sufficiently great numbers to qualify as endangered species.