Wojtek: >I reply (WS): I am not a historian, but was not the Japanese attack on >Pearl Harbour a response to the US militarism in the region, specifically >the threat of cutting off the Japanese oil supply lines? A decsion to >destroy the US navy was was a logical defensive movement on the part of >Japan's military. ---- Dollar Diplomacy V-J Day: Remembering the Pacific War By Stephen R. Shalom It is often forgotten how much World War II in the Pacific was a war between colonial powers. The United States did not get involved until military bases on three of its colonial territories -- Hawaii, the Philippines, and Guam -- were attacked by the Japanese. The British and their dominions were drawn in by the attack on their colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. And the Dutch declared war on Japan in anticipation of the assault on their colony, the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia). Before Pearl Harbor, Washington tightened its economic sanctions on Japan when it moved into northern Indochina in September 1940, and southern Indochina in July 1941 -- that is, when Tokyo encroached on the colonial domains of Vichy France. The only non-colonies attacked by Japan were Thailand and China. When Tokyo demanded that Thailand allow Japanese troops permission to use Thai soil for attacks on Burma and Malaya, Bangkok leaders allied with Japan and declared war on the United States and Britain, but they didn’t mind the opportunity to regain Thai territory that France and Britain had taken at the beginning of the century and given to their Southeast Asian colonies. China was truly the main victim of Japanese aggression, but that aggression had been going on for ten years before Pearl Harbor with great brutality, though evoking little reaction from Washington and London. Now, it is not nice to seize the colonies of another country, but from the point of view of the colonial peoples the moral distinction between seizor and seizee are not so obvious. In much of Asia there was considerable sympathy for Japan, which was ousting the western colonialists. In the East Indies a nationalist leader acknowledged that a majority of his compatriots "rejoiced over Japanese victories." Before Japan had complete control, many Dutch planters had to "flee for their lives from natives who had been their servants for 100 years or more" in the words of a British officer on the spot. Even Nehru told Edgar Snow privately of his emotional sympathy for Japan. To many Asians it was tremendously inspiring to see other Asians decisively defeating and humiliating their arrogant European and American masters. When Japan had first moved to take over Manchuria in 1931-32, an internal U.S. State Department memorandum expressed concern: "Should Japan succeed in getting her way over the protests of the League of Nations and the United States and despite the admitted interests of Soviet Russia, white prestige throughout Asia would be dangerously shaken; the ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ movement would be intensified; and the difficult position of the British in India would be rendered still more difficult of solution." The memorandum continued: "The United States, the Dominions and the British ruling classes are alike race-conscious, and the underlying instinct of the Anglo-Saxons is to preserve the Anglo-Saxon breed intact against the rising tide of color. Despite emotional appeals and jingo talk, the common British and American attitude towards the people of other colors is a fundamental factor in the present situation." Where westerners hoped to "effectively assert white-race authority in the Far East," to quote British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in 1938, Asians yearned to end western pretensions of racial superiority. Japan had tried to get the principle of racial equality embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations, but the United States and Britain, along with South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, blocked it. In the United States, many laws discriminated against Asians. And when Congress passed the Exclusion Act of 1924 barring Japanese immigration in violation of an earlier U.S.-Japanese "Gentleman’s Agreement," anti-American opinion in Japan was given a great boost. In 1935, the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo recommended against repealing the Exclusion Act. To do so, he warned, would be a sign of U.S. weakness (Americans presumably need to save face) and if Washington were to recognize Japan as an equal on immigration, some Japanese would ask why they shouldn’t be viewed as equals in terms of their navy as well. Back in 1922, the United States, Britain, and Japan had agreed that the Japanese navy should only be allowed 60 percent of the capital ship tonnage of the other two powers -- an arrangement that provoked much resentment in Japan and which was engineered thanks to Washington’s reading of Japanese codes. The rationale given for the larger western navies was that they had distant possessions to protect, which is to say, since they had stolen territory before, they needed more military force to defend their illgotten gains. U.S. racism applied to the Chinese too, who were also excluded from U.S. shores (though as a gesture of friendship to our wartime ally, the immigration laws were revised in December 1943 to allow 105 Chinese to enter per year, over the protests of the American Federation of Labor, the American Legion, and others). And white racism was on display throughout Asia. So Japan’s humbling of the white overlords struck a responsive chord among the colonial peoples of Asia. Of course, Asian hopes that Japan had come to liberate them were soon cruelly shattered. The Japanese were no more interested in Asian self-determination than were westerners, and Japanese racism toward other Asians was also quite vicious. But if there was no reason to welcome the Japanese, there was not much reason to prefer their predecessors. Distinctions are sometimes made between Japanese colonialism and that of western countries. Japan came late to colonialism, and so its conquests were more recent than those of the other powers. As Britain’s First Sea Lord privately acknowledged in 1934, the western powers had "got most of the world already, or the best parts of it" and they sought to "prevent others taking it away." Japanese conquests, however, were no more ferocious than those of earlier colonizers. The U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines at the turn of the century, for example, was particularly brutal, where General Jacob Smith ordered "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me," and where many Filipinos were killed for each one wounded because, as General Arthur MacArthur (the father of the World War II general) explained, "inferior races" succumb to wounds more readily than Anglo-Saxons. The Japanese held their World War II conquests for fewer than four years, and all of these were years of global war, so it is not really fair to compare their record of colonial rule in these countries with those of the West. However, if one looks at those colonies that Tokyo held for a considerable length of time (Formosa and Korea), Japan’s record in terms of economic development is quite impressive, while its political record is poor. Americans are especially proud of their colonial record in the Philippines in terms of education. Few note that when the United States acquired the Philippines, the islands already had the most extensive system of education in Southeast Asia, and that by 1938 they had about the same fraction of the population in school as Japanese Formosa and independent Thailand; 50 percent more was spent per capita on education in Formosa than in the Philippines. The United States, of course, promised in 1934 to give the Philippines its independence ten years hence, and in 1946 it did so. But Tokyo announced in 1943 that it was giving independence to the Philippines, as well as to Burma and Indonesia. Of course, it didn’t take a genius to note that the independence was phony: secret agreements gave Japan the right to exploit Philippine resources and the Japanese military based its forces in the islands. But Washington obtained these same privileges from an "independent" Philippines too. As a U.S. political scientist remarked a few months after formal Philippine independence, both economically and militarily "the United States is actually in a stronger position in the Philippines, although the islands are independent now." At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials following the war, U.S. prosecutor Joseph Keenan asked former Japanese prime minister Tojo Hideki whether all people had a right to self-determination. But if this were the basis for deciding who was a war criminal, the dock would have been rather more multinational in composition. In 1932, at the same time that Secretary of State Henry Stimson (later to be FDR’s Secretary of War) was calling for the non-recognition of Japan’s colonial aggrandizement in Manchuria, he opposed Philippine independence. In 1933, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, signed a hemisphere pledge declaring that no state had the right to intervene in the affairs of another; privately, however, he considered the proposition "more or less wild and unreasonable." And when the United States decided to give the Philippines independence, it was not because of a commitment to self-determination, but out of a desire to end Philippine immigration and eliminate Philippine exports which competed with U.S. agricultural interests. Radhabinod Pal, the Indian justice at the Tokyo trial, asked why, if colonial seizures were now improper according to the western powers, they were permitted to retain and profit from the acquisitions of their misguided past? No good answer was provided. (The complete article is at http://204.181.81.41/zmag/articles/july95shalom.htm) Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
