During the Japanese Occupation of Penang, the mere mention of one name was enough to strike fear among the local populace.
Most people are familiar with the terror unleashed especially during the early phase of the Japanese Occupation, but few may have heard of the much-feared chief police officer of Butterworth, Tadashi Suzuki. Of average height, handsome even, he had unusually long hair, reaching his shoulders.
“He was the first real hippy I’d seen,” says an eye-witness, still alive and in his late 80s now. Except that this was no peace-loving flower-power dude. Far from it.
The eye-witness, a teacher in his late teens back then, recalls being stopped one morning while cycling in town and herded towards an open space opposite the present-day Telekom building along Jalan Bagan Luar (see slideshow above). Others had wisely fled the scene. There a small crowd of about a dozen reluctant onlookers had gathered, a short distance away from the gruesome scene that was about to unfold.
Before them, a 17- or 18-year-old youth lay awaiting a public execution. He had been held in a prison at the police garrison in Butterworth. The youth was on the ground crouched, his head in the direction of a pit in the earth, presumably freshly dug by the hapless victim himself.
Suzuki stretched out his hand, swirled his sword down and beheaded the youth. The body slumped and lurched forward into the pit.
The small crowd gasped with shock and horror. They had never seen anything like it.
Later, the severed head was carried solemnly by a Punjabi officer from the police garrison and paraded along Jalan Bagan Luar Road. Another witness, a teenaged girl living along the road, recalls being filled with terror and hiding in her home along that road. At the intersection in Bagan, the severed head was mounted on a four-feet-high stool with a circular hole in the seat so that the neck could be inserted in and the head propped up on the seat for all to see.
This execution was carried out on 31 December as part of a ritual, ahead of the important Japanese celebration of New Year, some time in the middle of the Japanese Occupation (1941-1945).
During the Occupation, beheadings were also carried out in the open space near the present ferry terminal, between the site of the old Barkath Store and the present Butterworth Convent Secondary School, where the clock tower later stood. One schoolboy, now in his 80s, was passing by as Suzuki was about to execute a middle-aged Chinese man at this site. “We were terrified,” he recalls. “The name Suzuki was enough to create much fear among the local people back then.”
He remembers seeing a couple of severed heads, almost blackened, placed on the pontoon bridge (now no longer there) in present day Mak Mandin/Permatang Pauh. Another execution site was on the Prai side of the Prai River, near the chain ferry that used to cross the river to Chain Ferry Road in Butterworth (now replaced by a bridge).
On the island, public executions were carried out at the site of the police headquarters along Penang Road. One local in Penang witnessed 12 heads on spikes at Magazine Road. An historian told me that the Recsam site in Gelugor was another execution site. An officer named Suzuki is also mentioned in the Penang War Museum as an executioner at the fort of the occupied British garrison located on the hillock in Batu Maung.
In the book, The Sara Story, the then editor of the now defunct Straits Echo, Manicasothy Saravanamuttu, noted that Suzuki was known in Tamil circles as Thalaivetty (literally, head-cutter). He had a Ceylonese Muslim interpreter by the name of Mohd Raphay, whose father was a jeweller in Kobe, Japan before the war.
Raphay told Sara that Suzuki believed that anyone who was beheaded by him would go straight to heaven as the sword he had was supposedly given to him by the then Japanese Emperor.
Sara described Suzuki, who was known as a terror in Penang, as having shoulder-length hair and a bristling moustache. In one anecdote, he wrote about how Suzuki, when he became the Penang Fire Brigade chief, forced a Municipal Engineer to eat cement dust for failing to carry out his work satisfactorily.
In another tale, he recounted how Suzuki chased the Japanese State Secretary round and round a table with a drawn sword during New Year celebrations. Presumably, some of the guests may have had too much to drink. Suzuki was believed to have enjoyed some immunity for his actions as his uncle, Count Suzuki, was the Grand Chamberlain of the imperial household in Tokyo, wrote Sara.
Suzuki died on board the ship Awa Maru, which was sailing back to Japan in early 1945 with top officers to prepare for the defence of Japan, when it was sunk by an American submarine.
Have you heard of Suzuki, the executioner? If you have, share with us what you know.
TRULY a brief History Lesson of “Experiences from the Japanese Occupation”
SADLY.. ask 70% of Malaysian F4 students (who are supposed to have learnt Sejarah Dunia by end Oct) will only think that Suzuki is a name of bike.. or perhaps name of a football player like Honda..
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A very interesting account. While I don’t have personal memories, we honeymooned in Penang during the early 1970s and my husband’s grandpa came every morning to take us for breakfast. As we were staying along Penang Road, we would have to walk past the police station and he would recount the various things he had seen there, including the heads on stakes on a number of occasions. Until today, every time I visit Penang and go past the police station the images he drew so graphically come back to me.
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There is a popular podcast (http://penanghokkien.com/) which in one of its Ghost topics mentioned about Chung Ling High School as a place of Japanese terror during WW2. One guest talked about seeing a Japanese executioner in the process of beheading several Chinese with spilled blood flowing all over the toilet wall (the old toilet near the canteen) like a pig abattoir in the dead of night. Was it Suzuki?
Behind the school near the scout camp & Sixth Former building is another ‘hot spot’ of paranormal activities b’cos the back river with lots of bamboo trees was where headless bodies were thrown away. (I was there one afternoon to wait for my son at the scout camp when I wandered around the perimeter of the Sixth Former building which was quiet, empty & foreboding. My sixth sense told me to stay away).
And the school field is one scary place to stroll during full moon of Hungry Ghost Month. I wonder how the Ah Pek security guards who have to go on nightly cycling round would feel or ‘see’?
Any Japanese story about Francis Light School which floor boards would creak (my alma mater)?
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And describe one with long hair as “hippies”, just make me ROFL. The whole stories reveal some matters of cultural ignorance. Japan cultural never relate “heaven” with beheading practice. Even “Seppuku” merely absurd display of “courage” than religious.
Few people really learn that, Japan invasion army march its troops with little to NO SUPPLIES CHAINS. Even so call bicycle troops does not have more than 2 days of food supplies. That’s why pillaging happens on the way. It expose the ignorant and coward of colonial government and seeding the independent movement.
Anyone read the compiled history document will learn that why starvation become a norm in every Japan occupation area. 80% of Japanese soldier killed by feminine. 31,000 death out of 36,000 troops in Guadalcanal perished by starvation.
Yes, Japan Malayan occupation just small part of WWII history. But it never lack of ignorant, absurd, betrayal, from colonial government and also “local rulers” , which the current Malaysia government attempt to sideline it.
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What the Japs did was inhumane and should never be forgiven. It’s easy to say to forgive and move on but if anyone working for a Japanese boss will know …
Once you beheads another human, all bets are off.
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The same goes for the Thais.
They allowed the cycling Japs a direct passage to Malaya in exchange for ‘peace & no-attack by the Japs’.
So they saved their own skins from the cruel Japanese soldiers.
Now they are paying the Karma of natural disasters & insurgencies & terror in South Thailand.
Never forget the ‘Kay Bo’ Thais.
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What happened during Second World War should not have happened. Only when the world allow Mad rulers & tyrant like Hitler and the mad Japanese Emperor and his PM Tojo to exist (he was beheaded by Gen MacArthur for war crime after the war), the whole world suffers. 50,000 male Chinese in Spore were slaughtered by machine gun in 1942 & 50 Million Chinese died from 1903 to 1945 at the hand of the Japanese army. Now are we not glad that modern China could wipe off Japan off the Planet if Japan Inc try anything funny these days? Japanese schoolbooks removed all the atrocities they committed the Japanese Army in China & SE Asia, so that the future Japanese generations are exorcised of their past cruelties committed by Japanese people.The Gov of Tokyo, Ishibara even claimed the massacre of Nanjing did not happened, against overwhelming historical artifacts and pictures. … people like Ishibara should be sent to the Manchurian site where the Japanese Army Unit 703 used chemical warfare on the Chinese population and hundreds of thousand were mutilated alive & killed with deadly chemicals, to pick up the deadly chemicals they left behind after the war. There will be no more future Suzuki …
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Rather than “removed from textboks”, they never added the facts to them. Today, they still adamantly claim an island they conquered around 19th. century from China (This is not excusing the wild territirial claims made by China) and hail their wartime leaders as demi-gods. They have a similar claim on Russia. Unlike Germany in the 1930s which was being squezed by capitalist bloodsuckers, they did not have a starving population, yet decided that other Asians were sub-human. The truth of the mass hysteria that swept the entire West (white superiority, not just in Germany) and Japan has not been written, discussed or learnt.
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We’ve just come back from Nanjing. I would like to go again to explore on my own as it was too short to really see much of what remains after the atrocities there. We did meet a professor from the university though and he still harbours a great hatred towards the Japanese. Even though I don’t understand Mandarin, I could feel the anger and emotion in his words which were confirmed by my companions. There are very few Nanjing-ers left, most of the residents are from outside, but the spirit of the survivors and their descendants is still strong.
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It is worse than that. Today, there are still people in China in their 80s who have limbs rotting slowly due to biological warfare conducted by Japan. I would not have believed it if not for a Nat Geo documentary. It is not a piority issue for the government to take up.
Guess who grabbed the bio warfare centre (in Manchuria), documents, materials and experts?
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A hippy who beheads? That has to be one of the most absurd things I have ever heard. After decapitation, what? The peace sign? Weed? Make love not war? The guy was an out-of-control brute, was all.
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Anil. Can you please refrain from multiple tweets on the same topic? It looks as though you are spamming your followers. Thank you.
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Thanks for the alert. Blog posts are auto tweeted at intervals. I have reset the interval so it doesn’t tweet as often.
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I have an Australian Milatry book called Malaya on WW2 milatry history includes Japam occupation
Ric Francis
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Does it mention Suzuki?
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