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DAVID FAURE
Wong Keng Tei, his village, where his family continued to live. In 1944, the rules were changed so that only he himself would receive the ration. He then resigned to return to the village. But the village did not produce enough rice even before the War. Life was very hard without the supplement from the city income, and they lived on sweet potatoes and even leaves plucked from trees.94
However, in the last few months of the occupation, city people went out even to villages as remote as Tai Long to buy sweet potatoes. This must be an indication that food was even more short in the city than in the villages.95
To some extent, food shortage was imposed on Hong Kong by external circumstances beyond the control of the Japanese authorities.
The greatest failure of the Japanese Government in occupation, the single factor that alienated it most from the local population, was brutality, and its apparent inability to restrain its soldiers.
Mr. Chau T'in Shang's first exposure to the Japanese Government when its forces returned to Sai Kung after the fall of Hong Kong was when he was taken with a number of other people to a house in the Market, and made to squat on the floor, while the soldiers singled out those who were supposed to be guerrillas. These men were taken to a jail in Kowloon. Some never returned. Those that did told horror stories of torture. Mr. Uen Tak Faat's father was beaten cruelly by Japanese soldiers when they came to Mok Tse Che after one of them was killed by the bandits (or the guerrillas). He was punished not for the killing, for which he was not responsible, but for speaking rudely. He finally died of his wounds. In Wong Mo Ying, on an expedition to find the guerrillas, the Japanese tied two men to a tree and tried literally to burn them alive, killing one and seriously wounding the other. Sai Kung villagers retain very vivid memories of these acts of brutality that they saw or heard about. Nevertheless, it seems to be the general impression that the most brutal were not the Japanese nationals, but the Koreans and Taiwanese working in the Japanese forces.96
Villagers also remembered the tension during the curfew that was imposed on Sai Kung Market when two interpreters