Ancient civilizations-2

Japanese occupation

The arrival of the Japanese armed forces in Southeast Asia in 1941–42 did not, however, occasion independence. A few leaders perhaps had been naive enough to think that it might—and some others clearly admired the Japanese and found it acceptable to work with them—but on the whole the attitude of intellectuals was one of caution and, very quickly, realization that they were now confronted with another, perhaps more formidable and ferocious, version of colonial rule. The Japanese had no plans to radicalize or in any way destabilize Southeast Asia—which, after all, was slated to become part of a Tokyo-centred Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere; in the short term they sought to win the war, and in the long run they hoped to modernize the region on a Japanese model. Continuity served these purposes best, and in Indochina the Japanese even allowed the French to continue to rule in return for their cooperation. Little wonder that before long Southeast Asians began to observe that, despite “Asia for the Asians” propaganda, the new and old colonial rulers had more in common with each other than either had with the indigenous peoples.

Japanese expansion in the late 19th and 20th centuries.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Still, for two distinct reasons the period does represent a break from the past. First, the Japanese attempted to mobilize indigenous populations to support the war effort and to encourage modern cooperative behaviour on a mass scale; such a thing had never been attempted by Western colonial governments. Virtually all of the mobilization efforts, however, were based on Japanese models, and the new rulers were frustrated to discover that Southeast Asians did not behave in the same fashion as Japanese. Frequently the result was disorder, corruption, and, by the end of the war, a seething hatred of the Japanese. It was also the case that, both because the war was going against them and because the response to other approaches was unenthusiastic, the Japanese were compelled before long to utilize local nationalism in their mobilization campaigns, again something quite impossible under European rule. The consequences were to benefit local rather then Japanese causes and, ironically, to contribute handsomely to the building of anti-Japanese sentiments.

A second difference between Western and Japanese colonialism was in the opportunities the occupation provided the new educated elite. The Japanese were wary of these people because of their Western orientation but also favoured them because they represented the most modern element in indigenous society, the best partner for the present, and the best hope for the future. Often dismissed as “pseudo-intellectuals” by the Western colonial governments and prevented from obtaining any real stake in the state, the new intellectuals under the Japanese were accorded positions of real (though not unlimited or unsupervised) authority. Nor could Southeast Asians who found themselves in these positions easily fault the policies they now accepted responsibility for carrying out or at least supporting, since many of these policies were in fact—if not always in spirit—similar to ones they had endorsed in earlier decades. In short, the Western-educated elite emerged from the Japanese occupation stronger in various ways than they had ever been. By August 1945 they stood poised to inherit (or, given the variety of political conditions at the end of the war, to struggle among themselves over inheriting) the mantle of leadership over their own countries.

Southeast Asia was changed in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way by the Japanese occupation. Although returning Europeans and even some Southeast Asians themselves complained that Japanese fascism had deeply influenced the region’s societies, there is not much evidence that this was the case. Japanese rule, indeed, had destroyed whatever remained of the mystique of Western supremacy, but the war also had ruined any chances that it might be replaced with a Japanese mystique. There was clearly little clinging to Japanese concepts except where they could be thoroughly indigenized; even the collaboration issue, so important to Europeans and their thinking about the immediate postwar era, failed to move Southeast Asians for long. And, if the general population appeared less docile in 1945 than four years earlier, the reason lay more in the temporary removal of authority at the war’s end than in the tutelage of the Japanese.