by Amy Chua
As the “master race” (shüjin minzoku), the Japanese believed that they had a moral right and duty to exercise leadership within the Co-Prosperity Sphere. “Asia,” moreover, was defined remarkably broadly. Japanese wartime cartographers showed both Europe and Africa as part of the Asian continent, and Japanese officials described America as Asia's “eastern wing.” In Emperor Hirohito's words, the Co-Prosperity Sphere would “enable all nations and races to assume their proper place in the world”—with Japan, of course, on top.13
By 1945, this lofty plan, like Japan itself, was a smoldering ruin. Intolerance was simultaneously the basis of these dreams of Japanese world domination and the catalyst for imperial Japan's destruction.
JAPAN'S STRANGELY CONTRADICTORY
CONCEPT OF “RACE”
During the early twentieth century, Japanese writers combined Western ideas of race, Confucian philosophy, and Shinto notions of moral and spiritual purity to produce a uniquely Japanese world-view. Japan modernized during a period when social Darwinism and so-called scientific racism were in vogue in the West. Western scientists and social scientists had purported to offer “empirical evidence” demonstrating the biological inferiority of Asians, along with blacks and other “colored” peoples. At the same time, gunboat diplomacy, coercive treaties, and superior Western economic development seemed to confirm Asia's (and Japan's) inferiority. In response, Japanese nationalist thinkers developed an elaborate mythic history that reversed Japan's inferior status by emphasizing the divine origin of the imperial line and the “purity” and superior moral virtue of the Japanese (or Yamato) people.
As a rationale for conquest, mastery, and exploitation, the story the Japanese told themselves was perfect. As Nakajima Chikuhei, a major industrialist and political leader, declared in 1940: “There are superior and inferior races in the world, and it is the sacred duty of the leading race to lead and enlighten the inferior ones.”14
At the same time, Japan's self-serving myths were suffused with ironies and contradictions. To begin with, the Japanese depicted themselves as not only the “purest” of peoples, but physically white. Fair skin had been highly esteemed in Japan since at least the eighth century. A light complexion was associated with personal beauty and high social status (hence the white painted faces of geisha or Noh actors). But by the twentieth century, the Japanese obsession with whiteness had been intensified by a deep inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West. Woodblock prints from the first Sino-Japanese war portrayed the Japanese as not only white-skinned and tall but clad in Western clothes. By contrast, the Chinese were shown as yellow-skinned, stocky, and dressed in Oriental garb.15
Especially with respect to their colonial subjects in the South Pacific, Japanese racism almost perfectly echoed European colonial racism. Official Japanese reports referred to Micronesian islanders as “lazy, uncivilized, inferior people” who could never escape their “lewd customs, barbarity…and debauchery.” According to a Japanese scholar in the 1950s: “Because their life is extremely simple and primitive…their thought is also childish. They do not possess any desire or spirit of self-improvement. Their pleasures are eating, dancing, and satisfying their sexual desires.” As a result, these “tropical peoples” urgently needed Japanese direction.16
With respect to the Chinese and Koreans, however, the Japanese had to tell a more complicated story. After all, many Chinese and Koreans were physically indistinguishable from the Japanese, and the countries shared many cultural traditions. As the newspaper editor and Japanese member of parliament Arakawa Gorö wrote of the Koreans in 1906:
There is nothing especially different about them. They all look just like the Japanese, of the same Oriental race, with the same coloring and physique, and the same black hair…Considering that the appearance and build of the Koreans and Japanese are generally the same, that the structure and grammar of their language are exactly the same, and that their ancient customs resemble each other's, you might think that the Japanese and the Koreans are the same type of human being.
Gorö went on, however, to clarify that these superficial similarities were deceiving:
If you look closely [at the Koreans], they appear to be a bit vacant, their mouths open and their eyes dull, somehow lacking In the lines of their mouths and faces you can discern a certain looseness, and when it comes to sanitation or sickness they are loose in the extreme. Indeed, to put it in the worst terms, one could even say that they are closer to beasts than to human beings.17
Every Japanese virtue was contrasted with a Korean vice. The Japanese were pure and clean; Koreans were “polluted” and “filthy.” Japanese were selfless; Koreans were selfish. Japanese were orderly and modern; Koreans were “barbarous” and “disorderly.” The complex tasks of modern life were thought to be completely beyond Koreans; they lacked the mental capacity even to work as railway station employees because they were “hopeless at adding up how many tickets they had punched.” “Like most barbarians (yabanjin), they cannot understand precise arithmetic.” Worse still, they were prone to lying, “gambling, swindling, stealing, and adultery.”
On the other hand, although lazy by nature, the Koreans had “an absurd degree of endurance” and thus were perfect beasts of burden. As Gorö explained, “The Koreans have great strength for carrying things; indeed, they carry things heavier than a Japanese horse could. I hear that it is not unusual for a Korean to carry a load weighing sixty or seventy kannte [490-570 pounds]. If you encourage them and put them to work under supervision, they are quite useful.”
The solution, then, was clear: The Koreans needed Japanese leadership.18
As with their Nazi allies, the theme of purification—racial, moral, and spiritual—was a constant theme in wartime Japan, finding expression in religion, popular culture, and (quite literally) the color of everyday life. In 1942, a patriotic song called “Divine Soldiers of the Sky” exalted parachuting troops who descended on their enemies like “pure white roses” from heaven. White, the color of Shinto priestly robes, had long been the color of Japanese purification rituals. But red, representing “brightness,” was Japanese as well. A famous article entitled “Establishing a Japanese Racial Worldview,” which appeared in 1942 in one of Japan's most popular magazines, explained that red was the color of blood and life:
The conception of purity associated with Shinto has been thought of hitherto as something pure white…The experienee of the day the war broke out, however, has shown the error of such thinking; and this error is indeed apparent to those who have actually engaged in the rite of purification (misogi). The color of purification is faint red, tinged with the pinkness of blood; it is the color of life itself. It is this very warmth of life which has made the cherry blossom the symbol of the Yamato spirit.
But it was not enough that the Japanese were themselves “pure-blooded” if the world they inhabited was not. In order to attain a “higher state of perfection and purity,” the Japanese were called upon to help purify the whole Asian continent and reform its polluted, beastlike, demonic inhabitants. As an influential group of Kyoto Imperial University professors explained, war was a “creative and constructive” means of advancing the ongoing historical process of “purification of sins.” Giving up one's life in battle, moreover, was the purest accomplishment of all. As the historian John Dower writes, “The ‘sacrifices’ of war were portrayed as truly sacerdotal, a bath of blood becoming the supreme form of spiritual cleansing.”19
But what of the “inferior Asian peoples” who were to be “purified”?
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 in 1942, Singapore was a booming center of international trade. Singapore's prosperity and British rule both came to an abrupt halt in 1942, when the island fell to the Japanese in a bloody battle that resulted in the largest surrender of British-led troops in history. (Some 138,000 British, Australian, and Indian soldiers were taken as prisoners of war.) Japan's objective was to turn Singapore into the economic capital of Japan-controlled Southeast Asia. This plan failed badly.
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 industrialization and had not yet fallen under the sway of its ultranationalist military camp, which would later rise to power in the 1930s. Formosa, Japan's first official colony, not only was of great strategic interest because of its proximity to China; it also represented an opportunity to showcase Japan's emergence on the global scene as a modernizing imperialist force. For whatever reason, Japan's occupation of Formosa differed strikingly from the policies it pursued in places like Burma, Indonesia, and Korea during World War II.
To begin with, in the first decades after taking over Formosa, the Japanese did not actively suppress the local culture. Whereas later the Japanese would ban Koreans from speaking and teaching in their own language, they permitted Formosans to speak their native Chinese dialect, taught Taiwanese children both Chinese and Japanese in Japanese-funded schools, and trained their colonial officers to speak Chinese as well. In 1922, Japanese authorities integrated the island's elite primary schools, allowin
g children of the Taiwanese gentry to study side by side with the children of Japanese colonials.25
One of the most important Formosan institutions that the Jap- anese left in place was the Chinese pao-chia system of local governance, under which groupings of approximately one hundred households were made collectively responsible for wrongful acts committed by individual members. By making use of the pao-chia system and allowing influential Formosan families to maintain their positions of leadership, the Japanese gained the loyalty of local elites. To the same end, Japanese colonial authorities granted business privileges to prominent Formosans, occasionally bestowing on them the rank of “gentleman” (shinsho). At the same time, the Japanese poured money into Formosan infrastructure and agriculture. They modernized Formosa's banking system; built roads, railroads, and hospitals; and vastly improved communications, sanitation, irrigation, and farming productivity. Crop yields increased so much that even after massive exportation of rice to Japan, Formosans ate relatively well compared to Chinese on the mainland.
There was certainly Japanese repression in Formosa, even before World War II. It is estimated that the Japanese military killed as many as 12,000 Formosan resisters during the initial period of Japanese rule. Yet to a surprising extent Japanese colonial authorities won over the local population. Eighty thousand Formosans served voluntarily in the Japanese army in World War II. Even today, many Taiwanese have an affinity for Japanese culture. Some who are old enough to remember the occupation still speak Japanese on occasion and remember the colonizers as people who brought order, modernity, and the rule of law. Had the Japanese pursued similar policies elsewhere in the “Co-Prosperity Sphere,” their bid for imperial hegemony might have been far more successful.26