Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia

DAVID KOH WEE HOCK (ed.) 

Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia

Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.  xvii + 212 pp.  ISBN 978-981-328-8. S$39.90/US$29.90

Reviewed by Nicholas J. White, Liverpool John Moores University

This volume of short but incisive essays, written by an impressive team of international scholars, derives from a conference organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore in 2005.  Despite the book’s title, seven of the thirteen chapters are focused on Southeast Asia.  Most of the essays on Southeast Asia regard World War II in Asia and the Pacific as a significant watershed with enduring long-term legacies. This is perhaps not surprising since, as Tim Harper tells us in his masterful overview of ‘the Great Asian War’, the obvious immediate legacy of the Japanese invasion of 1941-2 was the ‘abject humiliation of the Western powers’ (p. 12).  Moreover, an enduring legacy of the Japanese Occupation in post-war economic development has been centralised planning, state intervention and ‘crony capitalism’. 

On the European humiliation dimension, David Chandler points out that the Indo-Chinese experience was slightly anomalous, given that the colonial power – France – was never officially at war with Japan.  Yet, the events of 1945 clearly had a huge impact on Indo-China’s decolonisation – the Japanese coup de force in March led to the sudden removal of French political authority, allowing Ho Chi Minh to fill the power vacuum in August when the Japanese capitulated. Ho’s declaration of inde-pendence was for Vietnam only, leading to the eventual break-up of Indo-China and in which Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia can also be seen as a ‘a creature of World War II’ (p. 27). Moreover, the influx of British, Chinese, French and US military contingents in September 1945 laid the basis for the internationalisation of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian affairs for the following 30 years. For Richard Leirissa ‘the imprints’ of the Japanese Occupation are ‘still a reality’ in Indonesia (p. 37). For example, ‘one of the causes of intellectual degradation among school-children of today’ (especially with regard to foreign language skills), the school system established during the Japanese era, is still largely intact; as is a principal cause of wide-scale corruption, the low-scale salary system in the bureaucracy; while, the anti-westernism of the Japanese Occupation can still be observed in contemporary foreign policy trends and ‘co-prosperity’ rhetoric has easily translated into anti-urbanism and Islamic revivalism. 

Robert Taylor’s excellent essay on Burma/Myanmar reminds us that to the 1990s Rangoon’s political and military elite was dominated by individuals who had cut their teeth during the war years. At the same time, ethnic insurgencies, the parlous state of the economy, the mass departure of the South Asian population,[1] and the way in which the ‘Myanmar story has become conflated with the story of its army’ (p. 71) are all major and enduring legacies of the destructive conflicts of 1941-45. Reynaldo Ileto’s equally thought-provoking piece challenges the notion that the Second World War in the Philippines cemented the relationship with the United States.  Rather, Ileto emphasises a ‘hidden and sometimes proscribed’ (p. 76) alternative narrative of nationalist assertion against the US and a corresponding turn towards Asia. He reminds us of the long-term relationship between Filipino nationalists and Japan which pre-dated 1942, and argues that the shift towards Maphilindo and then ASEAN during the 1960s had wartime roots in the attractiveness of the ‘Asia for the Asians’ concept. For Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Thailand’s post-war political elite had learnt the dangers of ‘neutralism’ from the war-time experience, paradoxically reinforcing prime minister Phibunsongkram’s Cold War alliance with the United States after 1948 (despite Phibun’s earlier flirtation with Japan). At the same time, military-authoritarian rule had been strengthened (notwithstanding a brief foray into liberal democracy after the war) as had an ongoing Thai irredentism in mainland Southeast Asia (albeit today through ‘economic and developmental means’ [p. 111] rather than military ones). 

The chapters by Cheah Boon Kheng and Asad-ul Iqbal Latif on Malaysia and Singapore respectively take a different tack by addressing why it is that governments in both countries have chosen to down-play the horrors of the Japanese Occupation in their post-war discourses. Extraordinarily, as Cheah points out, Japanese atrocities are skated over in Malaysian history textbooks (just as they are in the Japanese equivalents).  But this explicable given that the war period remains a divisive issue in multi-ethnic Malaysia as well as Singapore: as Latif tells us, the ‘racial score-setting’ of the immediate post-war period is hardly ‘a salutary memory’ (p. 95). Meanwhile, both countries were anxious to re-engage with the Japanese economy from the 1950s onwards – in Kuala Lumpur, the ‘Look East’ strategy came to emphasise the Japanese Occupation as a period of awakening Malay nationalism, and, in the pragmatic island republic, prime minister Lee Kuan Yew ‘came to respect [Japanese] solidarity, discipline, intelligence, industriousness and [Japanese] willingness to make sacrifices for their nation’ (p. 97).  

Indeed, these ambiguous legacies in Malaysia and Singapore point to the dangers of exaggerating World War II (and the Japanese Occupation particularly) in bringing about long-term and far-reaching change in Southeast Asia; an issue which is not consistently and fully addressed in this volume. The nationalist awakening, as Harper reminds us, was often ‘transient’ – for example, those women who ‘provided the backbone of nationalist movements …  failed to reap the full benefits of their participation’ (p. 16).  This suggests that current socio-political arrangements in many Southeast Asian states owe more to the post-war struggles for independence and national identity both against the returning imperial powers and within anti-colonial movements themselves. The significance of events immediately after the war rather than during the war are brought out in Chandler’s chapter whereby the Nationalist Chinese occupation of northern Vietnam made a major contribution to the revolution there, whereas the British military aided the re-establishment of French rule in Cochin-China and Cambodia, thus contributing to the splitting of both Vietnam and Indo-China more generally during the 1950s. Pongsudhirak’s bets are hedged, meanwhile, in the argument that ‘the genesis of the current monarch’s immense authority, prestige and popularity [in Thailand] … goes back to the periods during, prior to, and in the aftermath of World War II’ (p. 112). Analytical difficulties aside, however, this remains a fine collection of intellectually stimulating essays and one which I shall be recommending to my students of Southeast Asian decolonisation.

1   Interestingly, the chapters on India and China (by Sunanda Datta-Ray and Huang Jianli respectively) both point to a downturn in the Southeast Asian linkages of those countries as a consequence of the Japanese Occupation and the far-reaching political changes which immediately followed.