Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [148]
As soon as they occupied the island, the Japanese military banned Singapore's largely Chinese population from engaging in economic activity without state-issued licenses. Monopolies were granted to large Japanese corporations like Mitsubishi and Mitsui, while Chinese retail and smaller manufacturing interests were handed out to Japanese “concession hunters,” many of whom lacked the skills or the commercial networks to run Singapore's economy. Hyperinflation, price gouging, corruption, and severe food shortages wracked the economy.
At the same time, the Japanese took brutal measures to root out Chinese resisters. In what came to be known as the Sook Ching Massacre, Japanese military forces went from house to house in February and March 1942, rounding up all Chinese residents deemed potentially “anti-Japanese,” including many women, children, and elderly. After being imprisoned under horrific conditions and violently interrogated, some of the captives were released. Others, however, were not. Up to 25,000 were herded into trucks, driven to remote sites, and bayoneted or machine-gunned to death. Instead of becoming the hub of the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere, Singapore had by 1945 descended into a welter of disease, malnutrition, and brutal oppression.
The story was painfully similar in other Southeast Asian countries. As with Nazi Germany, it is a grotesque understatement to say that the Japanese did not allow occupied populations to participate, rise, and prosper. Symbolic of the Japanese occupation was the “railroad of death,” a railway line the Japanese constructed from Burma to Thailand (then known as Siam) in the 1940s. To build the railroad, the Japanese conscripted men from all over Asia to labor under slavery-like conditions; an estimated 60,000 people died. In the Philippines, Carlos Romulo, an editor who had escaped from Bataan in 1942, offered the following account on his return to Manila in 1945:
These were my neighbors and my friends whose tortured bodies I saw pushed into heaps on the Manila streets, their hands tied behind their backs, and bayonet stabs running through and through. This girl who looked up at me wordlessly, her young breasts crisscrossed with bayonet strokes, had been in school with my son. I saw the bodies of priests, women, children, and babies that had been bayoneted for sport.23
The response to such atrocities in the occupied territories was a loathing of the Japanese so intense that it persists in many parts of Asia even to the present day. While there were of course collaborators in each of the occupied countries, there was also widespread resistance, sabotage, and rebellion. In Korea, demon- strations and popular uprisings demanded independence from the Japanese. In the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere, underground movements fought Japanese forces with guerrilla warfare.24
It is impossible to prove that Japan's brutal intolerance undermined its own imperial ambitions. It could be argued that the Japanese would have been hated and resisted as foreign occupiers no matter what their policies had been. There is, however, one occupied territory where the Japanese pursued policies of strategic tolerance rather than intolerance, and this one exceptional case provides surprisingly strong evidence that Japanese rule over the conquered peoples of Asia could have been much more effective.
The island of Formosa, today called Taiwan, fell under Japanese control in 1895 after Japan's victory against China in the first Sino-Japanese War. At that time, Japan was still riding the crest of Meiji modernization and