Tawau Japanese War Memorial ( ja, タワウ戦争記念館; ms, Tugu Peringatan Perang Jepun Tawau) is a former

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

cemetery A cemetery, burial ground, gravesite or graveyard is a place where the remains of dead people are buried or otherwise interred. The word ''cemetery'' (from Greek , "sleeping place") implies that the land is specifically designated as a buri ...

Tawau Tawau (, Jawi: , ), formerly known as Tawao, is the capital of the Tawau District in Sabah, Malaysia. It is the third-largest city in Sabah, after Kota Kinabalu and Sandakan. It is located on the Semporna Peninsula in the southeast coast of t ...

in the Malaysian state of

Sabah Sabah () is a state of Malaysia located in northern Borneo, in the region of East Malaysia. Sabah borders the Malaysian state of Sarawak to the southwest and the North Kalimantan province of Indonesia to the south. The Federal Territory o ...

which now has been transformed into a memorial.

History

Following the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, many Japanese businessmen began to settle in the surrounding area of Tawau. On 19 January 1916, a Japanese Nippon Industrial Company bought a 240 acres for

rubber plantation A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The ...

and another 607 hectares of adjacent land. The plantation known as "''Kuhara Estate of Rubber and

Manila Hemp Manila hemp, also known as abacá, is a type of buff-colored fiber obtained from ''Musa textilis'' (a relative of edible bananas), which is likewise called Manila hemp as well as abacá. It is mostly used for pulping for a range of uses, inclu ...

''" was established under the name of the owner, Fanosuke Kuhara. Another Japanese plantation known as "''Kubota Estate''" belonged to Kubota Umeme, specialises in coconut and has operated since 1916. According to statistics from 1921, 191 Japanese resided in Tawau, while before the outbreak of the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

there were 1,175. Due to the growing number of the Japanese, the cemetery was built before the Second World War and used by the Japanese community as a burial site. The vast majority of the people buried here died before the Second World War.

Location

This site is located on the road of Tanjung Batu Street, in the west of Tawau golf course. The site is fenced on three sides. Only a few relics recall its original function as a cemetery. One of the grave listed five Japanese names such as Sadatoshi Ohta, Ryoichi Muromoto, Isao Ohtomo, Koji Matsuo and Takeshi Kusumoto. On the back of one of the monument built after the Second World War, several rows of

Japanese characters The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese wo ...

can be seen whose translation as follows:

References

External links

* {{Malaysian historical architectures and sites World War II memorials Monuments and memorials in Sabah Japan–Malaysia relations

History

Location

References

Further reading

Literature

External links