Dr Kozo Ando.
Dr Kozo Ando was a Japanese doctor from Penang whose family was one of the early settlers in Malaya. He became a long-term resident of Singapore and graduated from the King Edward VII College of Medicine at the Singapore General Hospital, Malaya's leading medical school at the time.
As a private medical practitioner, Ando soon found himself the officer-in-charge of the Civilian Medical Department in Singapore. He was noted by several of his local medical contemporaries to be tireless in his attempts to help the local civilian populace. Chief amongst these was the subsequent relocation of Woodbridge Hospital personnel and supplies to the more central Tan Tock Seng Hospital, which made medical access much easier for less mobile patients.
Ando was crucial in the execution of a vaccination drive that inoculated an estimated 650,000 people against malaria and 160,000 against cholera, as well as the distribution of antimalarial quinine tablets to the public. He was responsible for the appointment of local doctors as directors of various civilian hospitals during the Occupation, including the relocation of Dr Ho Boon Liat and his wife to St Andrew's Mission Hospital.
The 27 July 1939 edition of The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884-1942) reported on page 7 that Dr Kozo Ando, a Japanese doctor from Penang whose family was one of the early settlers in Malaya and who became a long-term resident of Singapore, drew the attention of the audience at the Singapore Rotary Club to the existence of male sex workers in Singapore. In a lecture entitled "The Oldest Profession", he said that definitions of "prostitute" in dictionaries had ignored the prevalence of homosexuality and the existence of the male prostitute. He proposed that the definition, as Havelock Ellis, an English physician who studied human sexuality suggested, might be put in a form irrespective of sex, as follows: "a prostitute is a person who makes it a profession to gratify the lust of various persons of the opposite or the same sex for money."[1] This was one year after Inspector-General René Onraet of the Straits Settlements Police Force, in his annual report to the colonial government, pointed out that "male prostitution" was widespread in Singapore.
Ando returned to Japan in November 1943 but his legacy as a civilian medical administrator lives on as a rare light in a dark period of Singapore's history.
See also[]
References[]
- Sandra Khor Manickam, "Andō's Ambiguities in Malaya: The Life of a Japanese Medical Doctor Between British and Japanese Empires", East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 15 July 2022[2].
- "Dr. Kozo Ando Leaves Syonan On Retirement: Great Service To Public Recalled", Syonan Times (Syonan Shimbun), 26 November 1943[3].
Acknowledgements[]
This article was written by Roy Tan.