The Syonan Jinja (Light of the South Shrine) was envisioned to be a shrine that commemorated the many Japanese soldiers and military personnel who fell in the Japanese conquest of Singapore. Major Yasuji Tamura, the commander of the Japanese 5th Division's Engineers Regiment and the man in-charge of the design and the construction of the Syonan Jinja, planned that the shrine would be the best Shinto shrine in the whole of the southern areas of Asia (under Japanese occupation). It was also to be the second-greatest shrine of the Shinto faith after the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, Japan.