The Battle of Singapore concluded on 15 February 1942 when Britain surrendered the besieged island to Japan. Singapore was renamed Syonan-to (Light of the South) and incorporated into the Japanese Empire. Five days later, the Straits Times, the official newspaper of the British Straits Colonies, was renamed the Syonan Times (Shimbun) and remade as a device for pro-Japanese propaganda directed at the Singaporean people. This wartime newspaper continued until the Japanese surrender in 1945, at which point the Straits Times was resumed to herald the Allied victory. However this was more than simply a revived newspaper. On its cessation in 1942 the Straits Times was an advertising broadsheet, a relic of nineteenth-century commercial printing. What appeared in September 1945 was a publication in a different mode: a modern newspaper, driven by ideas of journalism and celebrating the stories of the day. The different character of these two papers is apparent in their visual presentation: what had once been dominated by the stock illustration of consumable goods had become text-driven.

Official histories of the Straits Times tend to ignore the period of the Japanese occupation, seeing the Syonan Shimbun as a separate publication and a product of oppression. I take a different approach, seeing the three distinct phases as a continuous production. Looking at the visual language and editorial content of these newspapers over the period 1942–1945, I argue that the Syonan Shimbun redefined the parameters of newspapers in Singapore, allowing the Straits Times to take up its more serious post-war position. Despite the Japanese newspaper being a heavily controlled vehicle for propaganda, it ironically established the image of what a free journalistic press could be in Singapore, suggesting the newspaper’s political role in rebuilding the country. When control of the printing press was returned to Singaporean hands, they continued in this mode of discussion, rather than the private economic imperative of their earlier publication. In this paper I look at a transitional period for the Singaporean newspaper, accounting for its revitalised character through the influence of Japanese wartime propaganda in South East Asia. This suggests one way that Japan’s material production in its occupied territories influenced the later development of these places after the war.