The shape of Asia, 60 years after the war
By Seth Mydans International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2005
SINGAPORE The 60th anniversary of Japan's defeat in what is known here as
the Great Asian War marks as well the waning of a century of Japanese economic
dominance of Asia.
Just 100 years ago, in 1905, Japan defeated Russia in another, smaller
war, a victory that helped start it on its drive for regional leadership. Now
China, with its surging economy and diplomatic forays in the region, has begun
to stake a claim on the century ahead.
"What we are looking at now is the end of an era, with China taking the
place that Japan had been in as the overwhelming power in Asia," said John
Dower, the author of "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II."
"That changes the whole complexion of the future," he said. "How will
that power be shared, how will it shake down, what kind of cooperation will
develop given the historical baggage of the last century?"
As the two countries adjust uncomfortably to their new relationship, the
unhealed wounds of the war continue to cause bitterness and to affect
present-day policies.
Similar acrimony continues to poison Japan's relations with South Korea.
In Southeast Asia, the wounds have mostly healed, but the legacy of the
war may be more far-reaching.
These postcolonial nation-states were born and shaped from the ruins of a
war at least as bloody as that in Europe.
About 24 million people died of war-related causes from 1941 to 1945 in
Japanese-occupied Asia, which saw mass killings, mass rape and forced labor on
a huge scale. Three million Japanese died and 3.5 million more people died in
India through war-related famine.
"Look how far Asia has come," said Muthia Alagappa, a political scientist
with the Center for East-West Studies in Honolulu. "Nearly every country was in
the midst of civil war, just out of colonial rule, struggling to find its feet
and then overlaid with the Cold War, with hot wars breaking out in Vietnam and
Korea."
Apart from the poorest countries - Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia - Southeast
Asia has surged ahead. This region of about 500 million people has a combined
gross domestic product of $737 billion and a total trade of $720 billion.
Indeed, the entity known as Southeast Asia is itself a product of the
war, said Wang Gungwu, the chairman of the board of the Institute for Southeast
Asian Studies, at a conference on the war sponsored by the institute here
earlier this month.
Centuries-old ties with the Indian subcontinent were broken, and China
disappeared behind a Cold War curtain.
The war also signaled an end to centuries of colonial domination in Asia
as - some more gracefully than others - France, Britain, the Netherlands and
the United States ceded control of their territories.
This gave rise to what Tim Harper, an expert on the region at Cambridge
University, called "parade-ground nationalism," the central control and
national identity of the modern state.
By recruiting and arming isolated ethnic minority groups, he said, the
war also gave them a sense of identity and began new guerrilla conflicts, some
of which continue today in Myanmar.
As it readjusts its postwar role in the region, "Japan is moving into an
extremely nationalistic phase," said Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan
Policy Research Institute.
It is moving toward rewriting its postwar Constitution to modify its ban
on the international use of force, in effect withdrawing what Johnson said
amounted to an apology for its wartime militarism.
In the past decades, Japan has spent many millions of dollars in what is
known as cultural diplomacy to counter the mistrust of its neighbors, funding
research, education, the arts and historical preservation projects. Now,
seeking to smooth its expansion in the region, China has begun its own projects
in cultural diplomacy.
While China and South Korea still seethe over what they see as Japan's
failure to acknowledge or adequately compensate for wartime atrocities,
memories are more muted in the countries of Southeast Asia.
"The political impact of the war is still being used by some governments
to serve contemporary interests," said Wang of the Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies. "Memories change. You pick and choose what suits you."
The war's impact varied sharply from Thailand and the countries of
Indochina, which almost entirely escaped the fighting, to Myanmar and the
Philippines, which were devastated by it.
The Indochinese countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos lay outside the
main arenas of the war. But the brief Japanese occupation laid the groundwork
for the end of French colonial rule and for Ho Chi Minh's declaration of
independence in 1945, according to David Chandler, an expert on the region who
is now a research fellow at Monash University in Australia.
Thailand is "famous for having emerged from the war virtually unscathed,"
said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University
in Bangkok. But here too, as in Indochina, the war helped shape the future,
giving rise to the military governments that controlled Thailand from 1947 to
1973.
At the other end of the scale, Myanmar, then known as Burma, was ravaged
by the war and has never recovered.
"You can trace back almost everything to the war," said Robert Taylor, a
British expert on Myanmar who is a senior fellow at the Institute for Southeast
Asian Studies. These include the ruin of the economy, the rise of military
governments, isolation from the outside world and, "perhaps the most
destructive legacy of the war, the ethnic minority wars."
"The country's prosperity was destroyed during the war and has not been
restored since," he said at a conference this month.
For the Philippines, the hugely destructive war has become in large part
a heroic memory with sentimental overtones of brotherhood with the United
States, the colonial master that granted it independence once the war was over.
Monuments celebrate the country's liberation from the Japanese by General
Douglas MacArthur, who waded ashore to fulfill his pledge, "I shall return."
For Japan itself, the traumatic and destructive war was nevertheless only
an interruption in its century-long rise in dominance of Asia.
In an interesting historical twist, it was Japan's hunger for the
resources of Southeast Asia and its concern with American interference that led
to its attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the new anti-Communist geopolitics that followed the war, it was the
United States that helped Japan to resume its economic push into Southeast Asia
and to create, in effect, the sphere of economic dominance it had been seeking.
"The Japanese were told Southeast Asia has got to be its arena for raw
materials rather than China," said Dower, the author. "That's pretty ironic,
because that's why they went to war in the first place."
That dominance grew in the following decades in a model some Japanese
economists called "flying geese," with Japan in the lead and its lesser
partners moving forward in its economic slipstream.
By the turn of the century, this momentum had slowed. Japan's economy was
foundering, Taiwan and South Korea were gaining, China was on the move, and the
neat formation of flying geese had been dispersed.
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