Japan Focus
(2008-3-10). Fair use may apply.
Japanese propaganda claimed that the Japanese were the liberators of Asia from Western colonialism. While the appalling conduct of the Japanese Army in China and elsewhere put the lie to this claim, there were significant numbers of Asians who were willing to take seriously the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (Daitoa Kyoeiken). As a result, the Japanese were able to establish collaborationist governments in most of the conquered territories.
Origins of the
concept. The notion and terminology went back at least as
far as September 1940, when Matsuoka Yosuke, the Japanese Foreign
Minister,
declared that Japan's policy was to establish a Greater East Asia
Co-prosperity Sphere that would include French Indochina and the Netherlands East Indies.
On 24 January 1941, Prince Konoye, the Japanese Prime
Minister, stated that:
I am convinced that the firm establishment of a Mutual Prosperity Sphere in Greater East Asia is absolutely essential to the continued existence of this country.
The Yomiuri,
a prominent Japanese newspaper,
stated that:
Japan must remove all elements in East Asia which will interfered with its plans. Britain, the United States, France and the Netherlands must be forced out of the Far East. Asia is the territory of the Asiatics...
On 27 January 1941 Matsuoka gave a speech in which he said:
The Co-Prosperity Sphere in the Far East is based on the spirit of Hakko Ichiu, or the Eight Corners of the Universe under One Roof.... We must control the western Pacific.... We must request United States reconsideration, not only for the sake of Japan but for the world's sake. And if this request is not heard, there is no hope for Japanese-American relations.
(All quotes from Prange 1981.)
While some Japanese pan-Asians, such as the diplomat Shigemitsu Mamoru, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, and possibly even Prime Minister Tojo Hideki, were sincere in their motives, most Japanese leaders believed the Japanese were racially superior to other Asians, and they viewed the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere as simply a euphemism for the Japanese Empire. This became increasingly clear as the war turned against the Japanese and the Japanese, in turn, began making greater demands upon the resources of the conquered areas. By the time the war ended, "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere" had become a pejorative throughout Asia, and even the most ardent Asian nationalists, such as those in the Netherlands East Indies, had turned against the Japanese. Thus Japan in Asia, like Germany in Russia, squandered a valuable political opportunity because it contradicted a defining racist ideology.
Military occupation. The tone of the Japanese occupation of southeast Asia was set even before war broke out in the Pacific. At a liaison conference on 20 November 1941, Sugiyama gave his support to an Army policy document calling for military government of all occupied territories in southeast Asia, overriding the objections of Foreign Minister Togo:
Economic hardships imposed upon civil livelihood as a result of acquisition of resources vital to the national defense and for the self-sufficiency the occupation troops must be endured, and pacification measures against the natives shall stop at a point consistent with these objectives.... Native inhabitants shall be so guided as to induce a sense of trust in the Imperial forces and premature encouragement of native independence movements shall be avoided.
On 12 December 1942 the Army proposed to split the
occupied territories into Area A, composed of the Netherlands East
Indies, Malaya, the Philippines, and Borneo, and Area B, composed of
French Indochina, Burma, and Thailand. Area A was to be under
direct military government while Area B would be ruled by puppet
governments.
Much of the exploitation of the Greater East Asia
Co-prosperity Sphere took place under the Asia Development Board or Kōain,
which was originally established as the China Board in October 1938.
the Board was composed of senior Army and Navy
officers and had power to issue military scrip without restrictions.
This was equivalent to confiscation of whatever material and property
the Japanese wished to take.
Greater East Asia
Ministry. On 1 November 1942 Tojo took the administration of
the occupied territories completely out of
the hands of the Foreign Office with the creation of the Greater East
Asia Ministry. This move had been protested by Foreign Minister Togo
Shigenori at the Cabinet meeting of 1 September, when he pointed out
that the establishment of the Greater East Asia Ministry would divide
Japanese foreign policy and create distrust in the people of the
occupied territories. Togo and Tojo ended the meeting by challenging
each other to resign. That night, the Emperor
intervened to force Togo to resign rather than bring down the whole
Cabinet.
Because the Greater East Asia Ministry was
effectively
controlled by the Army, this gave the Army complete control of the
occupied territories. Area army
commanders had almost complete freedom to run local military government
as they saw fit, a tradition going back at least to the Sino-Japanese
War of 1894.
At this time Korea and Formosa were administered by governors-general selected from the leadership of the Army and Navy; Manchuria was nominally ruled by the puppet state of Manchukuo, but the real power was with the commander of Kwantung Army; China was nominally ruled by puppet states controlled by China Expeditionary Army; and the newly captured territories of southeast Asia were under military government. Efforts were later made to establish puppet states in India, Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, Malaya, and the Philippines, while French Indochina was nominally still under French administration, though this was closely watched by the Japanese occupation forces.
In November 1943 the Greater East Asia Ministry held a conference of representatives from the occupied territories. The representatives were carefully chosen and made many favorable speeches that Tokyo exploited for their propaganda value. However, Tojo could not resist chiding the gathered delegates (Hoyt 1993):
While constantly keeping their own territories closed to us, the people of Asia are denying us equality of opportunities. Impeding our trade they sought solely their own prosperity.
This had long been a complaint of the Japanese,
going back decades, and its mention here could not have helped make a
success of the conference.
Japanese Exploitation. In the spring of 1942, the zaibatsu (Japan's industrial cartels) established the Economic Federation of Japan to plan the exploitation of the occupied territories. This was initially given a friendly face, with Fujiyama Aichiro, president of the Japan Chamber of Commere, opening a Dai Toa Club to welcome important visitors to Japan from throughout Greater East Asia. However, the insatiable demands of the Japanese wartime economy led to increasingly ruthless economic exploitation.
To assist this exploitation, the Japanese set up
political parties in each occupied territory modeled on the Japanese
Imperial Rule Assistance Association. Religion, language, and culture
were increasingly turned towards Japan. Attempts were made to outlaw
English and Dutch, but were largely abandoned when it was found that
this made administration almost impossible. Each territory was required
to be self-sufficient while maintaining large exports to Japan, an
imbalance of trade that could be sustained only through increasingly
draconian measures.
Japanese demands on French Indochina, which
included the conversion of rice
patties
to production of fiber crops and the commandeering of much of the
remaining
rice crop for export, resulted in a famine in 1944-45 that killed at
least a million persons. Other harsh policies produced an overall death
toll in southeast Asia estimated at five million persons. By August
1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 excess deaths were taking
place monthly among Asian noncombatants in Japanese-occupied
territories.
The Japanese planned to aggressively colonize their conquests. The Ministry of Health and Welfare projected that, by 1950, there would be 2.7 million Japanese in Korea, 400,000 in Formosa, 3.1 million in Manchuria, 1.5 million in China, 2.38 million in other Asian territories, and 2 million in Australia and New Zealand. These emigrants would constitute 14% of the Japanese population. Rigid segregation would be enforced, including a ban on intermarriage with the local population.
Japanese contempt for other Asian cultures was
manifest in other ways. One Japanese historian noted that "More than a
million Japanese soldiers served in China, and not one of them troubled
to learn its language" (quoted in Hastings 2007). The China Affairs
Board is
alleged to have controlled a $300 million per year traffic in opium,
both to raise cash and to weaken the Chinese. At least part of this
opium was obtained from the Chinese
Communists, and it was distributed by Mitsubishi in Manchuria and Mitsui in north China.
The Japanese conscripted
large numbers of slave laborers, or romusha,
from occupied territories. Figures are uncertain, but one authority
(Frank 1999) estimates that the Japanese impressed a total of 600,000
laborers, of whom 290,000 perished.
The fear of a genuine pan-Asian movement taking
root, and proving hostile to Western interests in Asia, lay behind much
of the American emphasis on
keeping China in the war. The Americans
also put considerable pressure on the British to make concessions to
Indian nationalists,
which likely hastened the postwar independence of
India and Pakistan.
References
Hoyt
(1993)
Hsiung and Levine
(1992)
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