Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  ‘Intensive Operations’: Anti-Guerrilla Warfare , 1942–1943

  As expected given the military’s attitudes to opposition, Japanese responses to the spread of guerrilla activity in the Islands involved violent methods of suppression. In November 1942, it was announced that having exhausted their patience with these ‘ignorant and misguided people’, the military would employ ‘intensive operations…to the end that these unruly elements may be completely wiped out’. 49 In addressing the difficulties associated with confronting an enemy that was mobile and not easily identifiable from civilians, commanders advised their subordinates not to rely on traditional encirclement techniques. Instead, because ‘punitive action’ was deemed to be the ‘best method of pacification’, these new ‘intensive operations’ were to be focused less on engagement with guerrillas and more on destroying their bases, in addition to severing vital support from local communities, through violent reprisals against barangays (villages) suspected of having harboured them. 50 From then on, areas where there was evidence of guerrilla activity were at risk of bombardment, destruction of property and reprisal massacres . 51 Japanese troops were, nevertheless, instructed to be somewhat restrained in their efforts lest they incite further enmity from the populace. A 16th Division intelligence report documenting operations in Pampanga, for example, had explained that ‘although the burning of houses harbouring the enemy is necessary to prevent their being used during future attacks, wanton burning of houses should be avoided… . Every soldier should realise that the local inhabitants are greatly influenced by his slightest action.’ 52

  However, intelligence reports began to reveal that the guerrillas, far from being ‘wiped out’, had become more audacious over the course of 1943. By this time, their organisation, efficiency and tactical skill had improved, especially with aid from Allied intelligence operatives who helped to coordinate operations, provided useful intelligence and covertly delivered supplies to the Islands. 53 The guerrillas, emboldened by Allied victories in the Pacific, began to supplement subversive acts of sabotage, espionage and dissemination of propaganda with more daring raids and incendiary assaults in areas believed to be collaborating with the Japanese. 54 In mid-1943, at a peak in guerrilla activity , Japanese installations were attacked, soldiers were murdered in daylight and, amid a series of strikes throughout Luzon in June, an assassination attempt was made on José P. Laurel, a collaborator and future president of the ‘independent’ Philippine Republic. 55

  Japanese forces responded to the intensification of guerrilla activities with punitive expeditions enhanced by a practice that came to be known among Filipinos as ‘zonification ’. In a typical ‘zonification ’ operation, Japanese troops would descend on an area, usually between curfew hours of midnight and 5 a.m., blocking all access points. At dawn, soldiers would go door-to-door rounding up all male civilians, and occasionally women and children too, forcing them out of their homes to congregate at a nearby church or school. While they waited, usually without food, water or sanitary provisions, to be ‘investigated’ by the kempeitai, thorough searches of houses (often accompanied by looting) would be carried out. In some cases, investigations involved men passing in front of a ‘magic eye’—a hooded informant—who would point out those who allegedly had guerrilla connections. The kempeitai supplemented this procedure with torture techniques to force confessions and had the power to execute those they suspected of guerrilla affiliation. 56 ‘zonification ’ brought terror to the provinces as they focused anti-guerrilla operations more directly on the civilian population and placed men in particular at greater risk of more systematic violence.

  The implementation of these practices was believed to have been a crushing blow to the resistance movement since there was a lull in guerrilla activity from late 1943 until spring 1944. 57 Of course, this had also coincided with the declaration of Philippine independence on 14 October 1943 and a subsequent period of amnesty during which Japanese forces suspended punitive expeditions to encourage guerrillas to surrender with promises of full pardon. 58 Once the period of amnesty had elapsed, the cycle of violence constituted and fuelled by Philippine resistance and the progressively more systematic responses by Japanese forces over the course of these years resumed in spring 1944. However, a shift in the geopolitical context at that time sparked a further radicalisation of anti-guerrilla strategy and initiated a spiral of violence which would, ultimately, drive the Japanese military into unleashing extreme violence on the Filipino populace.

  ‘Sheer Brutality’: Responding to the American Invasion, 1944–1945

  By early 1944, it was clear that Japan was losing the Pacific War and that an American return to the Philippines was imminent. For the first time, the Islands were to have a decisive role in the war as a final opportunity to thwart American forces before they began their attack on Japan itself. Essentially, the Philippines had become an area of utmost importance in a war that many troops had come to believe would mean ‘national death’ if they should be defeated. 59 There was considerable work to be done in terms of constructing fortifications ready for the coming battle and defence preparations were made all the more challenging by the deteriorating situation in the Islands. 60 In anticipation of the American invasion, guerrilla units put aside their internecine struggles working together to sabotage defence works, stockpile weapons, gather intelligence and, much to the alarm of the Japanese forces, encourage popular unrest. 61 Though initially viewed as potential collaborators, years of hostility and tenacious resistance had contributed to a growing concern among Japanese commanders that the Filipino people were resolutely and irredeemably ‘anti-Japanese’. 62 Efforts to incite unrest as the Americans continued their advance in the Pacific, therefore, became a ‘prime concern’ for occupation forces since it was understood that an uprising would seriously jeopardise the successful defence of the Islands. 63

  In response, a more rigorous anti-guerrilla campaign was launched which, according to intelligence reports, caused Japanese units to be engaged in almost continuous punitive operations from spring 1944, having conducted 939 expeditions in April followed by no less than 1037 separate actions in June. 64 These operations involved even more indiscriminate methods of suppression. For instance, on Panay Island, where the military had limited control outside the main city of Iloilo, it was explained that because the inhabitants were ‘all hostile’, the commander had ‘requested not only that, as is normal when a punitive expedition is sent out, the houses be burnt, but that even the women and children be killed’. 65 However, such efforts continued to be ineffective and after the first American landings at Leyte further added to the precarious conditions in the Islands, Japanese forces, now under the command of the ‘Tiger of Malaya’ Lieutenant-General Yamashita Tomoyuki, employed an anti-guerrilla strategy that saw an increase in the scale and intensity of violence visited on the Filipino populace. 66

  During punitive expeditions in areas known to have a strong guerrilla presence, Japanese forces became much less thorough in their efforts to identify insurgents. Men were often executed en masse. Warrant Officer Yamaguchi Yoshimi, for example, had written in his diary on 28 November 1944 that the new punitive actions had been ‘something to look forward to’ since ‘all men are to be killed’. 67 In Leyte, an island in the Visayas that had been plagued with disorder for much of the occupation, the landing of US troops on 20 October 1944 was accompanied by mass killings of civilians carried out as Japanese soldiers evacuated the region. 68 Operation orders received by the 26th Division Field Hospital, active in the area on 16 November, revealed that the Division Commanding General who had ordered all ‘natives’ be killed had sanctioned such measures. 69 At this stage, commanders’ decisions to adopt more ruthless practices were contingent on their interpretations of local conditions, specifically, the extent of the guerrilla presence and the proximity of US forces. 70 Once the Americans had begun their assault on Luzon in January 1945, however, Japanese forces gave up attempts to identify insurgents and imp
lemented an indiscriminate defence strategy that involved the intentional destruction of villages and the large-scale massacres of Filipinos, including women and children, in areas of military importance.

  The capture of Luzon, as the largest and most strategically important island, would signify a decisive victory in the coming battle. With so much at stake at this time, commanders placed great emphasis on the exigency of the situation, mobilising their troops by reminding them that they were engaged in a struggle for survival in this war. 71 Years of failed attempts to ‘wipe out’ resistance had seen parameters for admissible action continually extended, distinctions between combatants and non-combatants blurred, if not completely disregarded, and taboos in respect to the treatment of civilians serially broken. These past experiences, the appearance of deeply-rooted anti-Japanese sentiment among the Filipino people, and the critical wartime situation facilitated the further radicalisation of Japanese anti-guerrilla strategy at this time. According to an order issued by the Kobayashi group, a unit stationed in Manila for much of the occupation, troops in the city had been instructed on 13 February 1945 that since ‘there are several thousand Filipino guerrillas’ and that ‘even women and children have become guerrillas…all people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians and Special Construction Units…will be put to death’. 72 Survivors later recounted their horrific experiences at the hands of soldiers who shot men, women and children on sight, marched into hospitals to kill patients in their beds, waited by entry points to gun-down those who tried to flee homes that had been set alight, threw hand grenades and other explosives into buildings where crowds had gathered for shelter and placed machine guns along the Pasig River to prevent escape to areas of the city already liberated by the American forces. 73 In the surrounding provinces, Batangas and Laguna in particular, Japanese forces were even more brutal as they engaged in what would be described during the post-war trials as a ‘cold-blooded extermination campaign’. 74 Japanese forces, having adopted a comprehensive scorched-earth strategy that indiscriminately targeted civilians, moved throughout these regions leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Numerous small villages were obliterated and many civilians were massacred in accordance with orders, like those received by a unit operating around Tanuan on 8 March, which had instructed troops to ‘[s]hoot guerrillas. Kill all who oppose the emperor, even women and children.’ 75

  One soldier lamented the ‘sheer brutality’ of spending every day in February ‘hunting guerrillas and natives’. 76 Another, Private First Class Matsuoka Itoji of the 23rd Division, was troubled by the actions of his unit when they took ‘advantage of darkness’ to go out and kill the ‘natives’, writing that, ‘[i]t was hard for me to kill them because they seemed to be good people’. 77 However, having long been told that defeat in this war would mean ‘national death’ for Japan, soldiers came to rationalise such measures as necessary ‘for the country’s sake’. 78 For example, recording his unit’s recent actions in Calamba on 13 February 1945, company commander Fujita Eisuke wrote that ‘for security reasons, all inhabitants of the town were killed and all their possessions were confiscated’. He exposed the reasoning behind such acts in a subsequent entry on 17 February:…because ninety percent of the Filipinos do not feel pro-Japanese but on the contrary are anti-Japanese, Army Headquarters issued orders on the 10th to punish them. In various sectors, we have killed several thousands (including young and old, men and women, and Chinese, in addition to Filipinos). Their houses have been burned and valuables have been confiscated. 79

  At the trial of Fujishige Masatoshi, held responsible for Japanese brutality in Batangas and Laguna, Uehara Zenichi, an adjutant for the 17th Division under Fujishige’s command, represented the military’s rationale when he explained that in order to successfully defend against the American invasion, it had been vital that Japanese forces suppress the insurgency in the Islands and, since previous efforts had failed and the populace appeared to be assisting the guerrillas, more ‘resolute measures’ were deemed necessary. 80 In other words, the large-scale massacres of civilians and the widespread destruction of towns and villages in early 1945 were deemed acceptable methods of conduct, legitimised and rationalised as necessary security measures in the face of a hostile and threatening situation in the Islands and the Pacific more generally.

  Conclusion

  Violence was not initially part of the Japanese military’s imperial pursuits in Southeast Asia. Though they perpetrated widespread atrocities, soldiers were not, as was argued by the prosecution during the Tokyo Trials, unleashed on the peoples of the region with the intention of doing so. In fact, military strategists hoped that their pan-Asian rhetoric and professed goals of liberation would inspire cooperation among the colonial subjects of Western empires. As such, military leaders were more determined to prevent the atrocities and brutalities that had impeded their efforts to win local support in occupied China . Nevertheless, the context and framing of this conflict, far from precluding violence as a method of population control, actually warranted it as a necessary solution to the threat of resistance. Indeed, the insecurities that had driven Japanese interest and fuelled an ambitious strategy of region-building in Southeast Asia, allowed for the use of violent measures against peoples who opposed Japanese occupation. As in other empires, the experience of opposition would prove to be a catalysing factor in the acceptance of violence as a means of maintaining control. The centrality of resistance to Japanese violence in Southeast Asia explains the significant variation in treatment of the populations of this area. In British Malaya, for example, the Malay people (who had welcomed Japanese forces) were treated well in comparison to the Malayan Chinese who, having engaged in anti-Japanese activities and fought alongside the British, became victims of large-scale massacres after the fall of Singapore in February 1942. 81 Much like the extreme violence perpetrated in the Philippines, massacres in British Malaya were rationalised as security imperatives necessary for the establishment of Japanese rule. 82

  Indeed, perceptions of insecurity and threat, though not the sole factors fuelling violence at this time, were highly influential in justifying and legitimising the adoption of methods of population control that appeared to be in contradiction to Japan’s professed benevolent objectives in the region. In the Philippines, resistance from the local populace and Japanese responses to it had constituted and cultivated a spiral of violence, the intensity of which varied over the course of the occupation according to shifts in local conditions. However, it was the heightened sense of insecurity in the Islands, which seemed to necessitate the use of more extreme methods of suppression in 1945. Towards the end of 1944, the Philippines had become important as the site of the last decisive battle before the invasion of Japan itself, a role it for which it was ill-prepared. At the same time, the Japanese faced an impending American return to the Islands within a context of more audacious guerrilla activity and a potential uprising from the Filipino people, believed to be wholly anti-Japanese at this point. Past failures and new pressures derived from a geopolitical context that seemed to spell disaster for Japan in its apparent struggle for survival, laid the foundations for reasoning that large-scale massacres of civilians and destruction of towns and villages in areas of tactical importance were a strategic and justifiable necessity.

  Analysis of the imperial dynamics of Japanese violence in Southeast Asia, then, provides a foundation for understanding violence in the Empire as part of a process of radicalisation triggered by resistance but also contingent on the interplay between multifarious contextual factors and the impact that had on the pursuit of security objectives. While there were different dynamics that underlay Japanese imperialism, violence in the Empire manifested in ways that were not unlike that of other empires. Consequently, the significance of security logics to the relationship between resistance and violence, brought out in the analysis of this chapter, is essential to understanding the role of violence in empire as a whol
e.

  Notes

  1.See for example Tokyo Trial Exhibits, No. 879A: ‘Prime Minister Tojo Hideki’s Address to the 78th Imperial Diet (16 December 1941)’, 4.