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THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF GREATER EAST ASIA: A DIVINE MISSION

By December 7,1941, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Japan had emerged as a major world power with a formidable military and expansive imperial ambitions that were rapidly being realized. A year later, Japan had taken over Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, parts of Burma and China, the Philippines, and many South Pacific islands; it already controlled Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan. Throughout this “Co-Prosperity” zone—with one exception to be discussed in a moment—Japan's policies were quintes-sentially intolerant.

Tike the Nazis, the Japanese had no interest in winning the hearts and minds of conquered populations. Instead, imperial Japan's goal was to extract local resources, exploit native manpower for the most menial and dangerous jobs, and eventually to use conquered territory as living space for the overcrowded Japa-nese.

In Korea, for example, forced labor was practiced on a massive scale. As many as one million Korean youths were conscripted into hard labor in construction and coal mining and sent far from their homes, even to Japan. Thousands of young Korean females who were promised “administrative positions” were turned into “comfort women” for Japanese troops. The local population was heavily taxed, even as the Japanese took for themselves the bulk of the nation's chief food supply, rice, leaving the Koreans to subsist on barley and millet. Widespread starvation soon set in. At the same time, the Korean language was banned in public schools, Korean surnames were replaced with Japanese ones, and Shinto worship was made mandatory. The Japanese also attempted to eliminate the Korean tradition of wearing white clothes. When their efforts failed, Japanese officials resorted to spattering ink or paint on Koreans dressed in white.21

Things were even worse in Indonesia. The Japanese did not even attempt to “civilize” the native Javanese or Sulawesi. Rather, the Japanese saw Indonesia merely as a pool of resources to be sucked dry. In particular, the Japanese looked hungrily on Indonesia's vast reserves of desperately needed petroleum, timber, and labor.

Ironically, when the Japanese first arrived in Indonesia in 1942, many Indonesians had a relatively positive view of their new overlords. After all, the Japanese had evicted the detested Dutch, Indonesia's colonial master for more than three hundred years. Many of Indonesia's nationalist leaders, including Sukarno, who would later become president, welcomed the Japanese as liberators and bought into Japan's rhetoric of a Pan-Asian unity triumphing over the West. These pro-Japanese sentiments were reflected in slogans like “Japan the Protector of Asia” and “Japan the Light of Asia,” which became popular with Indonesian pro-independence parties at the time. But as with the Germans in Ukraine, the blatant, extreme intolerance of the Japanese quickly turned the Indonesian population bitterly against their new “masters.”22

During their occupation of Indonesia from 1942 to 1945, the Japanese displayed a cruelty and racial arrogance exceeding even that of the Dutch. Public slapping and caning of locals were routine. Devout Muslims were required to acknowledge the Japanese emperor's divinity, in direct violation of their faith. Forced labor was gargantuan in scale and unimaginably harsh; estimates vary, but several millions were probably taken from their homes and put to work in backbreaking conditions that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Deforestation was so extreme that entire villages became floodplains. The commandeering of agricultural lands caused millions to starve. Cloth became so scarce that thousands could not leave their homes because they had nothing to wear. Throughout the occupation, torture—by bayonet, electric shock, forced ingestion of water, or dislocation of knee sockets— was common.

Japan's greatest strategic disaster may have been in Singapore, a British colony since 1819. Before the Japanese arrived