Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [248]
In the new colonies, the Japanese attitude to life was far from laissez-faire. Both Taiwan and Korea had in their different ways long been parts of China’s sphere of influence, and had their own systems of education in place; but the Japanese policy was gradually to undermine the locally run schools that had survived from the previous era, and to replace them—at local cost—with Japanese-language institutions. In Micronesia, where literacy and urban life were far more recent acquisitions, the aims were more modest, and years of schooling shorter: nevertheless, they remained aimed at basic literacy in Japanese. Although the attitudes of the Japanese to the colonial peoples increasingly emphasised their natural solidarity as fellow members of a potential ‘Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (Dai-Tō-A Kyōeiken), the effective pressure on them all to become members of the Japanese language community only heightened.
This was having its effect when the Second World War placed the whole empire in jeopardy. It is estimated that in 1942 62 per cent of the Taiwanese population could understand Japanese, and 20 per cent of the Korean.68 But when it first took control of Taiwan in 1895, Japan had elected to follow characteristic French, rather than British, advice and aim at total integration of the territory into Japan.* This policy had then been followed, essentially without debate, as the other colonies were taken. Over the early twentieth century, this counsel proved disastrous in the large developed colonies, especially in Korea: the emperor’s new subjects were never sufficiently trusted to allow them to contribute directly to policy-making in Tokyo, but they had no means to assert at least partial control of their fate locally. This became abundantly clear in the militant demonstrations by Koreans in 1919, bloodily put down by the Japanese; looking back in 1925, the Japanese analyst Aoyagi Tsunataro noted: ‘nearly all educated Koreans, even those who were fluent in Japanese—even those who had studied in Japan—rejected Japanese rule’.69
It became wryly accepted among the rulers that for Koreans, ‘to be educated was to be anti-Japanese’. A fresh rash of Korean student strikes, against Japanese assumed superiority, occurred in 1929-30. There was less trouble, and apparently less resentment, in Taiwan, even as their education became increasingly Japanese. Chinese studies were made optional there in 1922, and dropped in 1937; ironically, they continued on the curriculum—along with Korean—in the schools of Korea.
Meanwhile Micronesia, with no tradition of developed literacy to be effaced by the Japanese, was far more receptive to the new education. Moreover, its 50,000 indigenous population were rapidly joined by an equal number of Japanese settlers, arriving to grow sugar. Plantations were established in the 1920s; by the early 1930s they accounted for over 60 per cent of government revenues there. If it had not been for the Pacific war, it is probable that Micronesia would have been overwhelmingly Japanese-speaking to this day.*
However, Japan’s Imperial Plans for its Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and by implication for the spread of the Japanese language, were decisively disrupted by the political triumph of militarists, and the Pacific war into which they joyfully led Japan. Any hearts and minds that may have been won through fifty years of (relatively) peaceful colonialism were definitively lost in the terminal rampages of the Japanese army through East and South-East Asia. Although they briefly gained the whole western littoral of the Pacific Ocean, Japan ended 1945 confined to the islands it had controlled in 1868, even losing the outlying Kuriles in the north and the Ryukyus in the south. Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule, and Korea became independent. The more scarcely populated Sakhalin and Micronesia were placed under