The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

When Total Empire Met Total War

Jeremy A. Yellen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501735561
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

" The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere offers a lucid, dynamic, and highly readable history of Japan's attempt to usher in a new order in Asia during World War II."
? Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy A. Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "total empire" met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions—one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines.

Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.

Part I

THE IMAGINED SPHERE

1

INTO THE TIGER’S DEN

The Tripartite Pact, which was signed to great fanfare in Berlin on September 27, 1940, shook the foundations of global politics. Unsurprisingly, both U.S. ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew and Japanese ambassador to Great Britain Shigemitsu Mamoru could not contain their shock and dismay. Grew had believed that war with Japan could be avoided until Japan signed the Axis alliance. “I saw the constructive work of eight years swept away,” Grew bemoaned to a fellow Foreign Service officer in February 1941, “as if by a typhoon, earthquake, and tidal wave combined.”1 Shigemitsu, too, thought the decision to join the alliance “passed human understanding.” He wrote after the war, “I felt that the alliance placed Japan in an international position from which it could not be saved, and I could not express the depths of despair into which I plunged.”2 This dismay was understandable. The Tripartite Pact constituted a major turning point in foreign policy and hinted at a further estrangement between Japan and the United States. It alerted American public opinion to a looming catastrophe in the Pacific and created the atmosphere in which U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt aligned more closely with the British.3 And it provided the context in which Japan seized an expanded empire in Southeast Asia by force of arms. Moves that would have been impossible without the Tripartite Pact ultimately embroiled Japan in a war for the Asia-Pacific, a war Japan had little chance of winning.

Despite its importance in the road to Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War, the diplomatic history surrounding the Tripartite Pact remains understudied.4 The pact is largely understood as Japan’s trump card against the United States, a means of scaring U.S. leaders away from a confrontation that might lead to a two-ocean war. But a surprising undercurrent in the diplomatic history of 1940 hints at another reason for the Axis Pact: fears of German designs on Asia also influenced Japanese leaders to join the Axis powers.

This may appear puzzling. After all, a cursory reading of the Japanese newspapers, the media, or the intellectual discourse of the 1930s shows that public opinion was highly pro-German. The broader Japanese public admired Hitler and saw in him the symbol of a shared resistance to the Anglo-American international order. Moreover, German intellectuals such as Karl Haushofer, Carl Schmitt, Werner Sombart, and lesser-known theorist Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld exercised a decisive influence on the thinking of Japan’s reform bureaucrats, the planners of Japan’s wartime empire.5 And perhaps most importantly, Japan and Germany shared a virulent anti-communism that led the two rising powers into a diplomatic and political-strategic embrace. Both nations joined together in the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936, which Roosevelt found worrisome enough to issue his famous “quarantine” speech the following year. At first glance, then, the creation of a full-blown Axis alliance in 1940 appears little more than the denouement of a longer process of German-Japanese engagement and cooperation.

Such an interpretation is indeed correct. But there is more to the story. For a brief moment in the summer of 1940, pro-German sympathies were tempered by a strong undercurrent of suspicion and doubt. This chapter sheds light on the impact that fears of imagined German designs on Asia had on the Japanese decision to join the Tripartite Pact. This is not to say that fears of Germany were the primary driver of politics in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Far from it; concerns about Soviet and U.S. intentions toward Asia were more deeply entrenched in the minds of policy makers. Instead, I will show fears that emerged and dissipated in a single historical moment—that of German ascendancy of Europe. In one of history’s little ironies, Japanese distrust of German motives helped bring the Axis alliance to fruition. As Germany gained ascendancy over much of Europe, many within Japan’s foreign policy establishment began to fear that Berlin would seek to control French and Dutch colonies in East Asia. These fears, of course, were not based on any broad understanding of Germany policy. But they nonetheless convinced Japanese leaders to extend their new order to Greater East Asia. In the process, foreign minister Matsuoka declared Japan’s willingness to enter the tiger’s den of an alliance with Germany to capture the prize of expanded influence in Southeast Asia.

In this context, the journey into the tiger’s den of a German alliance also sheds light on the birth of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Although it is unclear whether he came up with the slogan, foreign minister Matsuoka Yōsuke first used it less than two months before concluding the Tripartite Pact. Historian Akira Iriye thus perceptively points to this as a major contradiction in Japanese policy making. At the moment Japan championed the anti-Westernism of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, it was also entering into the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy.6 At first glance, Iriye has hit on one major puzzle of Japan’s new order. Why ally with two Western powers as part of a broader revolt against the West?

This chapter deals with this puzzle. It was the broadening of Japanese interests to “Greater” Asia that led Matsuoka to announce the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in August 1940. Scholars have done excellent research on the long-term trajectory that led to the birth of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the ways in which Japan’s Pan-Asian ideology was oriented at building legitimacy in the region. But focusing on the longer-term trends obscures a shorter-term goal of Japan’s new order. The Co-Prosperity Sphere indeed constituted propaganda, but not only toward Asia. The timing of the declaration—at the height of concerns over German motives toward the region—suggests that the Co-Prosperity Sphere also constituted propaganda aimed at Berlin. In broadening the scope of its sphere of interest to “Greater” Asia, Japanese leaders sought to deny Germany a hegemonic position in Japan’s backyard. Japanese preeminence in East and Southeast Asia served as the precondition for joining the Axis Pact. In this context, the Co-Prosperity Sphere propaganda was utilized to oust competitor colonial regimes from Asia, which was to remain under the aegis of imperial Japan.

Facing West, Eyeing the South

By the late 1930s, expanded German-Japanese political cooperation appeared inevitable. Japan and Germany joined in the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936, owing in no small part to the efforts of the military attaché to Berlin, Ōshima Hiroshi. To many across the Japanese political establishment, the German-Japanese pact represented more than mere resistance to Soviet communism. Most competent observers alike also saw it as a first step toward a shared resistance to the existing Anglo-American—led world order. The Anti-Comintern Pact appeared to herald the birth of a Berlin-Tokyo axis and to initiate a new era of partnership between the two powers.

But the honeymoon was short-lived. Despite the existence of pro-Axis voices across the political establishment, and despite the fact that many saw Japan as creating a new world order with Germany, Japanese leaders sought to avoid any action that risked antagonizing the United States, Great Britain, and France. Accordingly, since early 1939 Japan dragged its feet in negotiations for an all-embracing military pact with Germany and Italy. Foreign minister Arita Hachirō, in particular, was wary of Nazi Germany, and he advanced a “middle-of-the-road diplomacy” (chūdō gaikō) that refused to involve Japan too deeply with Europe’s rising powers.7 In this Arita found support from both Prime Minister Hiranuma Kiichirō and Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa. The only alliance they were willing to sign was one directed solely against the Soviet Union. This attitude frustrated Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, who from March 1939 noted his skepticism “about the possibility of an effective collaboration between the phlegmatic and slow Japanese and the dynamic Fascists and Nazis.”8 Japan’s continued hesitation led Hitler and Mussolini to seek an alternative solution: they abandoned the notion of cooperation with Tokyo and established a bilateral alliance, the Pact of Steel, in May 1939.

Japanese policy makers soon worried about the ramifications of their foot dragging, and they sensed that their desire to avoid antagonizing the Western democracies was leading to a growing estrangement with Berlin. This perceived estrangement began on August 23, 1939, when Hitler broke with the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union and signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Japanese leaders had been warned that this might happen, yet the move still shocked Tokyo. Hitler, after all, signed the pact while Soviet Corps commander Georgy Zhukov’s tanks overran Japanese positions at Nomonhan on the border of Mongolia and Manchuria. Grand Chamberlain Hata Shunroku thus recorded the German-Soviet pact in his diary as a “bolt from the blue,” and Konoe Fumimaro later labeled it one of the two German betrayals that undermined the Axis alliance. Further, the Hiranuma cabinet saw Berlin’s move as a “breach of faith.” Hiranuma publicly decried the situation in Europe as “baffling” and promptly resigned.9

This distrust increased as the German Blitzkrieg began. An internal foreign ministry document completed in late April 1940, as the Third Reich expanded into Norway and Denmark, noted the nonaggression pact as a sign that Germany no longer sought to bind its fate to that of Japan. Strikingly, the report worried that Tokyo “can no longer hope for German sympathy with our New Order in East Asia” and recommended a policy of cooperation to prevent estrangement with Berlin and Rome.10 Foreign ministry suspicions remained unabated in the following months. A May 1940 internal report warned, “If German antagonism toward Japan strengthens, do not be caught off guard and do not allow Germany to take policy that spurs the Soviet Union to attempt to restrain Japan.”11

Germany’s lightning-fast successes only intensified this anxiety. The war soon spread to the Low Countries and France, with the Wehrmacht seizing victory wherever it went. By June 25, 1940, Germany controlled much of Western Europe, and many in Japan judged that it was only a matter of time before Britain fell as well.12 With Germany’s sudden ascent, Japanese policy makers worried not only over a possible estrangement but also over the fate of Dutch and French colonies in Asia. Berlin, after all, could seek to exercise control over both French Indochina and the Netherlands Indies—the very core of Japan’s envisioned empire in East Asia. Thus from mid-May 1940, after the defeat of the Netherlands, the Yonai cabinet began seeking assurances that Germany would respect the status quo in the Netherlands Indies. From late June, after the fall of France, they sought similar guarantees toward French Indochina.13 Even important officials in the army began to fear that if Japan is not careful, then “the Netherlands Indies will fall into Hitler’s hands.”14 On May 17, foreign minister Arita instructed the ambassador to Germany, Kurusu Saburō, to acquire confirmation that Germany’s invasion would not affect Japan’s interests in the Netherlands Indies.15 And on June 21, Kurusu met with German secretary of state Ernst von Weizsäcker to discuss measures toward French Indochina. “Japan,” Kurusu told Weizsäcker, “cannot remain uninterested in Indochina.”16

Much to the chagrin of Japan’s diplomatic establishment, Berlin remained largely silent concerning Southeast Asia. German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop did in fact renounce German claims on the Netherlands Indies on May 20, 1940.17 But he made this statement against the fierce opposition of his ministry, and the German foreign ministry never officially reaffirmed the Third Reich’s intentions to stay out of the region.

Japanese diplomats thus kept seeking reassurance. Special ambassador to Italy Satō Naotake cabled Tokyo that at his July 8 talks in Berlin, Ribbentrop “took an evasive attitude toward Japan’s colonial demands.”18 Ambassador Kurusu also questioned his German counterparts from mid-May but did not find them forthcoming. On July 10, Kurusu sent a telegram to foreign minister Arita lamenting his lack of success. “Germany,” the telegram reads, “does not seem to have a clear attitude regarding [the fate of] the Netherlands East Indies and French Indochina. We cannot secure a definite promise or a pledge—it is very regrettable that Germany seems to be trying to avoid giving a promise on these issues.”19

Why were Japanese leaders so fixated on Southeast Asia? Germany’s extraordinary successes generated fears that Japan was missing a rare opportunity to advance south. Expansion into Southeast Asia was partly viewed as an end unto itself. Expansionist aims into Southeast Asia had increased in size and scope from the end of World War I, with Pan-Asianists such Ōkawa Shūmei drawing attention to the moral imperative of Japan’s regional leadership.20 By the out-break of World War II in Europe, a critical mass had been reached that helped translate the more aggressive notion of Pan-Asianism into policy. It was at this point that the phrase “Don’t miss the bus!” became popular among the government and populace alike. Many believed Japan had a window of opportunity to advance its interests in the region and to extend the reach of Japan’s new order into Southeast Asia as well.

From early May 1940, internal reports began to stress the “South Seas” (Nanyō) and the “South” (Nanpō), terms for modern-day Southeast Asia, Oceania, and the Indian subcontinent, as integral parts of Japan’s new order. This culminated in a top-secret report from May 31 that underscored the necessity of expanding into Southeast Asia. Economically, the South Seas area constituted a resource treasure trove that would help Japanese industry deal with the repercussions of a hardened U.S. attitude. Politically, Japan would expel U.S. influence from Southeast Asia and would forge “relations of co-existence and co-prosperity” with the region.21 Accordingly, from early June, the imperial headquarters sent military planners and spies to the Philippines, Malaya, French Indochina, Thailand, Sumatra, Java, and New Guinea to start planning for military operations against Southeast Asia (a rather ironic measure, as two months earlier the military had planned to start withdrawing troops from China in 1941). And on June 22, Iwakuro Hideo, a section chief in the army ministry’s Bureau of Military Affairs, astounded the army general staff by calling for an immediate surprise attack on Singapore.22

Iwakuro’s call to seize Singapore reflected popular anxieties that Japan might miss out on its golden chance to expand south. In late June 1940 the Mainichi shinbun reported the newfound focus on Southeast Asia, noting, “Calls for a complete change to foreign policy have been elevated to the status of national belief.”23 Without a stronger attitude toward the European war, many feared that Japan might lose out in any redistribution of colonies at war’s end. Minseitō Party president Machida Chūji rode this wave of popular enthusiasm, declaring that Japan must “overhaul its foreign policy” to take advantage of the world’s great turning point. Such an overhaul required Japan “to secure a powerful foothold” in Asia...