By the end of March 1942 in most places across Southeast Asia and in the Philippines – except Bataan and Corregidor – the echoes of the sounds of war had faded. The jungles, villages, and cities were noiseless. These sounds had moved eastward to Kokoda and Guadalcanal. The British, Dutch, Australian, and American defenders of the prewar status quo who had survived were waking up in prison camps – in Southeast Asia or Japan, or even in distant Manchuria. The indigenous people of these formerly colonial lands were waking up to a new routine with their new colonial master.
Before the war, men such as Prince Fumimaro Konoe, Yosuke Matsuoka, and like-minded visionaries had spoken theoretically of a vast empire based on the idea of Hakko ichiu, the notion of “the eight corners of the world under one roof,” which, for them was defined as East Asia under Japan’s roof. In June 1940, Japanese Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita had articulated his idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as a self-sufficient bloc of Asian nations led by Japan and free of Western powers. Now, two years later, it existed. By June 1942, there were 100 million indigenous people, spread across 2.8 million square miles, living beneath the Japanese roof.
In that booklet which every Japanese soldier had been given, entitled Read This Alone: And The War Can Be Won, they had been told that they had come as liberators. Those 100 million people who had been brought under Japan’s roof in the space of half a year would “trust and honor the Japanese; and deep in their hearts they are hoping that, with the help of the Japanese people, they may themselves achieve national independence and happiness.”
The pamphlet waxed colorfully that “Money squeezed from the blood of Asians maintains these small white minorities in their luxurious mode of life – or disappears to the respective home countries.”
Of course, it was well known to all that the new master was no more altruistic than the former master. The war in the Dutch East Indies, for example, had been fought so that the oil wealth of that colony would disappear across the horizon, not to Europe, but to Japan.
As for “national independence and happiness,” there were definite changes. With regard to “happiness,” much was written immediately after World War II, and rediscovered in recent years, about the cruel Japanese occupation. There was the brutality of the Kempeitai, the military secret police analog of the Gestapo, who terrified Europeans. Then too, there were the armies of forced laborers, unhappily uprooted from their homes to build great engineering projects, such as the Burma Railway, to serve the “prosperity” of the Japanese vision of their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In recent years, the enormity of the recruitment of brigades of “comfort women,” to serve the “happiness” of the Japanese troops, has been revealed.
The notion of “national independence,” in the context of the Sphere has received somewhat less attention in recent years. In 1940, Germany set about reorganizing Europe around Hitler’s prewar vision for a Greater German Reich, a new reality designed for “a thousand years,” by redrawing borders, erasing Poland, annexing smaller countries, dividing France into zones, etc.
In 1941, the vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at it applied to Southeast Asia had been just that, a vision. In 1942, Japan began to actually formalize this vision into a political and economic reality. New forms of yen-oriented occupation currency were introduced, new constitutions were imposed, and Japanese administrators assumed prominent roles in governments at every level. British and Dutch executives and administrators were entirely displaced and Japanese became the official second language in each of the former colonies – including Singapore. Under the Asia for Asiatics doctrine, the new and Asiatic colonial master was being institutionalized.
In 1932, the Japanese had installed a puppet government in Manchukuo, complete with Puyi, the last emperor of China’s Manchu (Qing) dynasty, as its puppet potentate. This arrangement had lasted for ten years and seemed permanent, so it was adopted as the template for parts of Southeast Asia. Indeed, it was only in Burma and the Philippines that Japan conceded to grant even a puppet form of “national independence,” and this did not come until 1943. Of course, also within the Sphere, the Kingdom of Thailand had been a puppet of Japan, and a treaty-obliged ally, since its surrender on December 8, 1941, the first day of the war in Southeast Asia. Thailand would be repaid for its loyalty when Japan redrew the map to transfer the Malay states on Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis, and Terengganu to Thai sovereignty.
In Burma, the Japanese puppet leader was Ba Maw, a man whose anti-British credentials included not only prewar agitation, and prominence within the independence movement, but the fact that the Japanese had had to release him from a British prison when they occupied Burma.
A man with a similar background, and a similar dislike for the British, was Subhas Chandra Bose, a British-educated Indian attorney who had been an outspoken advocate of Indian independence since the 1920s. A member of the Indian National Congress, along with Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, he was much less inclined toward the non-violent tactics which became Gandhi’s signature policy. In and out of jail in British India, Bose left the country in 1941 and made his way to Berlin, where he dined with Hitler and was the toast of the town for his outspoken anti-British rhetoric. In 1943, he relocated to Japan, transported by German and Japanese submarines, where he became the face of the Japanese effort to “liberate” India from the British.
In the early years of the occupation, the Japanese had considered unifying all of Malaya into a puppet state under Sultan Ibrahim II of Johor, the man from whose palace Tomoyuki Yamashita had studied Singapore on the eve of his attack. However, as the war progressed, more pressing concerns consumed the Japanese administrators and this project was never implemented.
In the Philippines, the political situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that the Americans had already set a date – July 4, 1946 – as the moment when they would end their colonial rule and grant full independence to the commonwealth. A two-chamber national assembly had already been established, and in 1935, in a national election, the Filipinos had elected Manuel Luis Quezon as president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. He had fled the Philippines in 1942, and he died in exile in the United States in 1944 before the Philippines were liberated.
Shortly after the surrender of Manila, even as Americans and Filipinos were still fighting in Bataan, General Masaharu Homma disbanded the Commonwealth of the Philippines and set up the Philippine Executive Commission under Manila Mayor Jose Vargas. The puppet Republic of the Philippines was formed in 1943, heading off the American-promised independence date by three years. As president, the Japanese picked Yale-educated attorney Jose Paciano Laurel, late of the prewar Supreme Court, while Vargas became ambassador to Japan. Vargas later was quoted as having effused that “Japan is destined for sure victory and prosperity for ages to come.”
While Burma and the Philippines were being granted quasi-independence, a sort of “dependent independence,” based on the Manchukuo model, Hideki Tojo’s headquarters in Tokyo made the decision to annex Malaya and the Indies to the Japanese Empire based on the Korea and Taiwan model. This clarification of status was implemented in May 1943, a year after the IJA’s rampage of conquest.
As they settled into postwar reality as part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the former Dutch East Indies were ruled by three regional rulers. Sumatra was ruled from Singapore by Lieutenant General Yaheita Saito, Tomoyuki Yamashita’s successor as commander of the IJA 25th Army. Java was ruled by its conqueror, General Hitoshi Imamura, until November 1942, when he was succeeded by Lieutenant General Kumakichi Harada, who took command of the IJA 16th Army, now an occupation force. Borneo and Celebes were administered by the IJN.
In the Indies, there was a great deal more support for the Japanese and the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere because there had been a more active prewar independence movement here than nearly anywhere else in Southeast Asia. According to historian Tom Womack, the Indonesians dutifully welcomed the Japanese with shouts of “Japan is our older brother,” and helped the occupiers by eagerly betraying the hiding places of ethnic Europeans. Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in The Mute’s Soliloquy, writes that “with the arrival of the Japanese just about everyone was full of hope, except for those who had worked in the service of the Dutch.”
The lack of interest in talking about an independent Indonesia was perhaps because of the prewar independence movement. The zealous revolutionaries were interested in real independence, and the Japanese understood that the Indonesian leaders would never be satisfied as puppets, and could not be trusted not to bite Japan’s hand if put into power.
Nevertheless, the Japanese did reach out to co-opt the would-be revolutionaries. The most important among these were Kusno Sosrodihardjo, who went by the single name, “Sukarno,” and Mohammad Hatta. As students, both had developed strong nationalist convictions and had dabbled in a broad spectrum of ideologies from Islamic to communist. In 1927, Sukarno was a founder of the pro-independence Partai Nasional Indonesia. By 1942, he was well known in anti-Dutch revolutionary circles, and was on the list of people in whom the Japanese had an interest. It was mutual. Sukarno saw the Japanese as his ticket to eventual independence.
As William Frederick and Robert Worden write in Indonesia: A Country Study, published by the Library of Congress Federal Research Division,
Sukarno and Hatta agreed in 1942 to cooperate with the Japanese, as this seemed to be the best opportunity to secure independence. The occupiers were particularly impressed by Sukarno’s mass following, and he became increasingly valuable to them as the need to mobilize the population for the war effort grew between 1943 and 1945.
In July 1942, Sukarno sat down with Hitoshi Imamura and struck a deal. In exchange for a public forum to promote his ideas, Sukarno was willing to delay independence and help the Japanese recruit forced labor. As noted in Chapter 24, the Indies became an enormous source of workers which Japan conscripted for infrastructure projects across Southeast Asia. Documents in the Library of Congress, cited by Frederick and Worden, note that at least four million Indonesians were conscripted as roumsha, or slave laborers. The two authors add that Sukarno’s reputation was “tarnished by his role in recruiting roumsha,” but the tarnish apparently wore off quickly after the war as Sukarno became the signature figure in the independence movement, and eventually he served as independent Indonesia’s first president.
The Japanese never gave Sukarno the sovereignty that he craved, but in April 1945, Kumakichi Harada did create the Badan Penyelidik Usaha Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia (Committee for Preparatory Work for Indonesian Independence) as a step toward giving his Indonesian subjects the sort of independence that the Japanese had allowed in Burma and the Philippines. This plan came only four months before the end of the war, and was therefore overtaken by events.
As the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere became a reality, the Japanese sought to institutionalize this Shintaisei, or “new order,” into a formal, permanent structure, just as Germany was doing within the redrawn borders. As in Germany, it was imagined that this new order would last for centuries.
In November 1943, to help give legitimacy to the new order, Hideki Tojo personally hosted an unprecedented pan-Asia economic summit conference. The two-day colloquium, known as the Greater East Asia Conference, looked a great deal like the later economic summits, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conference, held annually since 1976, and the East Asia Summit (EAS), a forum convened annually since 2005. Many of the territories occupied by Japan as part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were founding members of the contemporary organizations, although the present ASEAN embodies cooperation generated from within, rather than imposed from the outside. Tojo went to great lengths to make his puppet show seem as if it was not, but with him so obviously pulling the strings, there was no doubt that the conference existed only to project the legitimacy of Japanese regional dominance.
The conference was a who’s who of Japanese-installed Asian governments. Zhang Jinghui, the prime minister of Manchukuo, attended. So too did Wang Jingwei, who had been installed as president of the Reorganized National Government of China. Naturally, both Ba Maw and Jose Laurel came, attempting to legitimize their rule on an international stage.
Thailand, as the only independent country in the region before the war, was unique among the participants. Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram, who had underscored the independence of his country by “resisting” the Japanese invasion for half a day on December 8, 1941, decided that to attend personally would cast him in too subservient a role. It would make him appear too much like Ba or Laurel, a mere puppet. On the other hand, Phibun did not want Thailand to be left out entirely, so he sent Prince Wan Waithayakon, who was a grandson of King Mongkut, and who functioned as a sort of diplomatic ambassador at large for the Thai government. After the war, Prince Wan landed on his feet, serving as Thailand’s ambassador to the United States, and later as Thailand’s foreign minister, and as president of the United Nations General Assembly, only 13 years after being part of Tojo’s earlier international gathering.
Also present at the conference was Subhas Chandra Bose, the prewar Indian revolutionary, who had spent the previous few years in Berlin and Tokyo, and who was now the president of the Provisional Government of Free India (Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind). While Ba and Laurel each presided over a country – albeit one that existed only because of the largesse and muscle of Japan – Bose’s “Free India” was merely a conceptual country. India was still entirely under British control, so the presence of Bose at the Greater East Asia Conference manifested the desire by both Bose and Tojo for an unobtainable future ideal.
As with most multination summit conferences, it concluded with a joint declaration. It is no surprise that this incorporated the “Asia for Asiatics” rhetoric that Japan used to justify its conquests, or that the Allies, in their role as colonial powers, thoroughly condemned. The declaration read:
The United States of America and the British Empire have in seeking their own prosperity oppressed other nations and peoples. Especially in East Asia, they indulged in insatiable aggression and exploitation, and sought to satisfy their inordinate ambition of enslaving the entire region, and finally they came to menace seriously the stability of East Asia. Herein lies the cause of the recent war.
The attendees agreed that through “mutual cooperation” they would “ensure the stability of their region and construct an order of common prosperity and well-being based upon justice.”
At the same time that the Japanese were conscripting forced labor and comfort women from among the residents of the attending nations, the conferees agreed that
the countries of Greater East Asia will cultivate friendly relations with all the countries of the world, and work for the abolition of racial discrimination, the promotion of cultural intercourse and the opening of resources throughout the world, and contribute thereby to the progress of mankind.
Today the Greater East Asia Conference is largely forgotten by history as being an anachronism long on irony, but short on substance. It was, after all, a delusional exercise by newly formed countries which would cease to exist within less than two years – which was sponsored by the Japanese Empire, which would, itself, cease to exist within two years. On the other hand, it provides a priceless insight into how the Japanese, especially Tojo, imagined the postwar world and the postwar reality within their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
It took place in 1943, that critical year when the IJA had advanced as far as it was going to advance, and before the Allies had really begun to roll back Japanese territorial gains. It took place within an environment where it was still reasonable for Japanese planners to assume that the fantasy represented by the conference and its participants would continue indefinitely as the face of postwar Asia.