WHEN DID THE PACIFIC War begin? The first Sunday of December 1941, when the Empire of Japan conducted a series of coordinated, surprise attacks in the Far East? Or was it 1937, when Japan initiated its eight-year war with China? Or earlier still, in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, China’s great northeastern province?
These are certainly all major events in World War II’s Asia-Pacific time line. But the roots of the war stretch back even further, all the way to the mid-19th century when Japan was an isolated, almost medieval nation, living much the same way it had for centuries.
Japan received a shock on July 8, 1853, when an American commodore named Matthew Perry sailed a group of warships into Tokyo Bay. On a mission from US president Millard Fillmore, Perry pressured the Japanese government to sign several agreements designed to increase trade between Japan and the United States.
Japan had little choice. Some of its leaders insisted on immediate vengeance: a declaration of war on the United States. Others suggested Japan learn from Western nations, then retaliate when they could meet them as equals.
Japan decided on the second option. They sent their best students to Western universities, where they gained valuable knowledge on how to modernize the country. The result was transformation: within three decades Japan had a parliamentary system, industries that exported goods throughout the world, and 6,000 miles of railroad tracks. Its military was also modernized; the Japanese army received instruction from the Germans, and its navy from the British.
But when the Japanese used this new military to seize Far Eastern territory, Western nations tried to discourage them. This seemed extremely hypocritical to Japan: these nations had colonized much of the Far East. Why were they uncomfortable when Japan tried to do the same?
Still, Japan fought on the West’s side during World War I. At the postwar Paris Peace Conference, Japan was rewarded for its loyalty with Chinese territory previously controlled by now defeated Germany.
Japan appreciated the gift but was deeply offended by one incident at the conference: the Western nations refused to sign Japan’s Racial Equality Proposal, which would have granted the Japanese equality to the Westerners within the League of Nations. Why? Too many Western nations considered all Asians racially inferior; they wouldn’t make an exception for their ally.
Then Japan was pressured to sign a series of treaties with the United States and other nations interested in Far Eastern territory. These agreements severely limited the size of the Japanese navy—especially when compared to the navies of the United States and Great Britain—and made Japan promise to honor China’s borders.
Japan had been hoping to expand into China in order to offset its own sinking postwar economy—made worse by the worldwide Great Depression of 1929—and to provide extra living space for a postwar population boom. How could Japan fulfill its growing sense of being Asia’s greatest nation if it couldn’t provide adequately for its own citizens?
The Japanese began to rethink their association with the West. They searched their own history for answers to their current problems. Before Matthew Perry had sailed into Tokyo Bay, they had lived within a strict feudal social system. The samurai warrior nobles had been at the top.
As the Japanese developed an increasing nostalgia for the once powerful samurai, a group of Japanese military extremists took center stage. While unemployment and political confusion raged, these militarists assassinated prominent politicians in a series of attempted coups. The perpetrators were usually punished, some even executed. Yet they also won the admiration of many Japanese people, gained power, and gradually transformed Japan into a single-party, fascist state, intolerant of opposing political views. The Communist Party was outlawed, and Communists who refused to recant were imprisoned or killed.
The new educational system prepared students for their roles in the emerging nation. Girls were prepared for marriage and motherhood, while boys received premilitary instruction: they learned how to use weapons and were lectured on Japan’s racial and cultural superiority and its destiny to rule over the Far East.
Once these young men finished school and entered their required period of military training, they found it differed from that of the samurai in one major point: the military was now a place of equal opportunity. The sons of poor men could rise as quickly as the rich, but only if they survived the first year of what was always brutal training. Random and excessive beatings ensured the trainees—those who were not killed or driven to suicide—emerged as cruel but effective weapons of war, willing to obey any command.
Only one Western ideal now remained at the forefront of the Japanese government: seizing another nation’s territory was a sure way toward economic prosperity.
A major cause of Japan’s political chaos in the 1930s was its army’s controversial seizure of Manchuria, China’s large northeastern province.
Even during Japan’s 19th-century Westernization, it viewed the once great China in the same way European nations had for decades: as a tool for their own gain. All these nations wanted—by way of forced trade agreements and territorial seizures—a slice of what they called “the Chinese melon.” China, ruled from the top by an ancient and corrupt dynasty, and locally by equally corrupt regional warlords in constant strife, was powerless to stop these external assaults.
But in 1911, China threw off its centuries-old dynastic rule through a revolution led by physician-turned-political-leader Sun Yat-sen, who became the first president of the new Republic of China. His eventual successor was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who set up a government in Nanking in 1928, claiming that he and his party, the Chinese Nationalists, now controlled all of China. Although this wasn’t true—most of the nation was still run by local war lords in an uneasy alliance with the generalissimo—Chiang’s talk of Chinese unity troubled the Japanese, who planned to continue their seizure of Chinese territory.
In 1931, they did so in a big way: the Japanese army invaded Manchuria, claiming they were there to quell a disturbance they had secretly created themselves. The Japanese army was there to stay, and Manchuria became a Japanese colony—renamed Manchukuo, Japanese for “Country of the Manchus.” Japanese people moved there by the thousands, causing great resentment among the Chinese people.
Chiang, realizing his army was not nearly strong enough to challenge this invasion, endured criticism—especially from the growing and armed Chinese Communists—but he secretly prepared his army for an eventual showdown with Japan.
In December 1936, the Nationalists and the Communists (led by Mao Zedong)—now vying for control of China—put aside their differences in order to defeat their common enemy.
Japan, alarmed by this sudden unity, fearing it might cause trouble in Manchuria, and desiring still more Chinese territory, knew it was time to strike quickly before their enemy became too strong.
On July 7, 1937, Japanese and Chinese soldiers exchanged fire in a northern Chinese village that housed a famous landmark: the Marco Polo Bridge. The Japanese were determined to fan the Marco Polo Bridge incident into a flame. The Chinese were just as determined to take a stand and resist. Hostilities in this full-scale (but never officially declared) war soon began in earnest.
Certain it could conquer all of China, the Japanese army invaded as much of the enormous country it as it could reach. Western journalists, such as Theodore H. White, who arrived in China in 1939 and became aware of the sad state of most of the Chinese troops, were amazed Japan couldn’t win this war. But China seemed to devour the more than one million Japanese troops sent to defeat it. By 1941, approximately 300,000 Japanese fighting men had been killed in China. Yet victory was nowhere in sight; no matter how much territory Japan overran, Chiang Kai-shek refused to surrender. And now other nations threatened to stand in Japan’s way.
Many in the United States, including President Franklin Roosevelt, became increasingly horrified by reports of Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians. Starting in 1938, he initiated a series of economic sanctions against Japan designed to pressure it to end its war with China.
Japan responded to these sanctions with more aggression. Its leaders seized the opportunity provided by Adolf Hitler’s military conquest of much of Europe, including the defeat of France. Without resistance from the new profascist French puppet government, Japanese forces occupied French Indochina a few months later before signing the Tripartite Pact, an agreement with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that was a deliberate warning to the then neutral United States to remain so: in addition to granting Japan “lordship” over the Far East, each nation involved in the Pact promised to help the other in case any were attacked by a nation not currently in the war.
During the following summer, the United States cut off all trade with Japan, including an embargo on much-needed oil. Great Britain and the Netherlands then did the same.
With no intention of backing down, the Japanese government decided to get its materials elsewhere—by force. Some of the colonies in the Far East—British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, especially—were rich in natural resources. If the Japanese could imitate Hitler’s example of conquest, they could help themselves to the rubber in Malaya and the oil in the Dutch East Indies.
On the first Sunday of December in 1941—December 7 on one side of the International Date Line, December 8 on the other—Japanese planes bombed the US Navy stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; the US Air Force stationed in the Philippines; the British fortress at Singapore; the Dutch East Indies; and multiple other locations. These were all surprise attacks; Japan had not officially declared war on any of the nations who controlled these territories. In fact, the Japanese ambassador to the United States was in Washington, DC, discussing Japanese-US relations when the Japanese bombs hit Hawaii.
In Japan this new aggression was greeted with public enthusiasm. The war with China had dragged on for four long years. Suddenly, on a single day, their military had scored not one but multiple victories, transforming the national depression into euphoria. The Japanese people eagerly awaited news of complete victory over the Western imperialists in the Far East. However, many of them, knowing it was dangerously unpatriotic to voice their doubts, wondered silently how many more Japanese men would have to die before this war was won.
But for the present, Japan seemed unstoppable. Their motivation, they claimed, was to implement their idea for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, “Asia for Asians”: defeating the Westerners in order to return control of the Far East to the people who had lived there first. Many Asians (the Chinese excluded, of course) initially believed Japan had their best interests at heart. Western domination of the Far East was based on the racist principle of Caucasian superiority. Surely the Japanese, their fellow Asians, were there to liberate them.
It became immediately obvious this had never been Japan’s intention. The Japanese were just as racist toward their fellow Asians as the Westerners before them, and far more cruel. The Japanese government forced hundreds of thousands of civilians into slavery: men into manual labor and women into sexual slavery. Others became the subjects of horrific, secret medical experiments. Then the conquerors plundered all natural resources for themselves.
The Japanese were also unusually cruel to their prisoners of war. The Western military men who had been stationed in the Far East to guard their nation’s colonies were shocked to find themselves defeated by an enemy to whom they had once felt superior. They were horrified to discover the Japanese had no intention of honoring the Geneva Convention’s code for humane treatment of prisoners of war (POWs); while a representative of the Japanese government had signed it, it had never been officially ratified in Tokyo, Japan’s capital city. And because Japanese soldiers were ordered to fight to the death no matter what the circumstances, they had no respect for any military man who laid down his weapon and expected mercy.
The brutal Japanese occupation initiated another war in the Far East, a secret one. Some occupied Asian nations contained large areas of jungle where young men banded into “guerrilla” units (groups of soldiers not part of a regular military) in order to fight the Japanese and their local collaborators by surprise raids, assassinations, and any type of harassment they could manage.
Anyone caught assisting these fighters faced arrest and interrogation by the dreaded Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, who were stationed throughout the conquered Far East. Their gruesome methods for gaining information from anyone suspected of resistance became legendary.
The women featured in this book are Asians whose nations were invaded by the Japanese or non-Asians who, for one reason or another, found themselves in the Far East during the war. Few of them had previous experience in, or specific training for, the particular circumstances into which the war plunged them. Yet they rose to the challenge: some rescued victims of Japanese aggression; others nursed the wounded in the midst of combat; some created networks to secretly feed starving POWs; others endured torture instead of betraying their fellow resisters; and still others simply survived in desperate circumstances while inspiring those around them to do the same.