As soon as they captured Singapore in FEB 1942, the conquering Japanese began recruiting indigenous workers in Malaya. The vast majority of these were ethnic Tamils. Their homeland was on the southern tip of India and parts of Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka). The British Colonial government had moved thousands of them to Malaya generations before to work the rubber and sugar cane plantations. They found themselves to be little more than slaves. The British called them coolies. They were the lowest of the work force and social class in Malaya. [the history of the Tamil migration to Malaya will be told in Section 20] So, when the Japanese offered them employment in northern Malaya, many thousands packed their meager belongings and eagerly boarded the trains – many with their families in tow.
But those trains did not stop in Malaya, they continued on for a week-long journey to BanPong Thailand. There the frightened and weary ‘volunteers’ were pushed off the trains into a transit camp at Wat Don Toom. This was the beginning of their hellish journey on the TBR.
Meanwhile, back on Malaya, ‘recruitment’ was falling short of quotas, so the soldiers began rounding up young men and loading them onto trains heading north. These follow-on ‘laborers’ arrived with nothing but the clothes on their back. They also transited through BanPong and then walked over 100 kilometers to their appointed camps along the TBR.