Chapters 4 and 5 quantify Southeast Asia’s wartime economic collapse. In every country except Thailand wartime output drops created probably modern economic history’s greatest macroeconomic collapse (chapter 4). Per capita GDP fell by at least a half in most countries and trade to a fraction of pre-war levels. Chapter 5 describes similar contractions in transport, public utilities and manufacturing. The chapters explore a macroeconomic crisis that brought shortages or the unavailability of new clothing, soap and many basic manufactures. Southeast Asians suffered hunger, famine and an extreme deprivation of material goods.

Chapter 9 appraises the use of Southeast Asian labour by the Japanese. Subjects discussed include forced labour, Japan’s policy of enslaving comfort women and the recruitment of workers for Japanese armed forces. Construction projects, including the Thailand-Burma railway, relied heavily on forced labour and took an enormous death toll among workers, both Southeast Asian and Allied prisoner.

Chapter 7 focuses on food, living standards and population movements in rural areas and outside the main cities. The chapter assesses aspects of the standard of living such as real wages and increased mortality but pays particular attention to the changing wartime availability of food in rural Southeast Asia. Famine claimed 1.0 million lives in Tonkin and North Annam in Vietnam and 2.3 million in Java. These great wartime famines are deciphered in detail greater than ever previously.

The 7 December 1941 attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor by Japan was a gamble. Japan was already entangled in a long-standing, probably unwinnable war in China, which since its outbreak in mid-1937 had cost 185,000 Japanese dead and billions of yen. Pearl Harbor opened a second military front and dangerously committed Japan, with a relatively small population and limited economic capacity, to a full-scale Pacific War. For Southeast Asia, the war brought three and a half years of Japanese occupation from the end of 1941 until Japan surrendered unconditionally on 15 August 1945. During this period, GDP in most Southeast Asian countries fell by half; 4.4 million civilians died prematurely; severe shortages of food and goods affected almost all Southeast Asians; and many lived in fear of draconian military rule. The present book explores why and how this happened.

Chapters 4 and 5 quantify Southeast Asia’s wartime economic collapse. In every country except Thailand wartime output drops created probably modern economic history’s greatest macroeconomic collapse (chapter 4). Per capita GDP fell by at least a half in most countries and trade to a fraction of pre-war levels. Chapter 5 describes similar contractions in transport, public utilities and manufacturing. The chapters explore a macroeconomic crisis that brought shortages or the unavailability of new clothing, soap and many basic manufactures. Southeast Asians suffered hunger, famine and an extreme deprivation of material goods.

Chapter 6 examines how Southeast Asians tried to cope with wartime deprivation. The unavailability of almost all basic goods led to the appearance of whole ranges of substitutes. The chapter looks at many of these substitutes. For example: in Malaya, spoons and forks were fashioned out of sheet aluminium salvaged from the wreckage of downed Zeros and Flying Fortresses. Burmese villagers obtained parachute cloth, literally from the skies, and found it useful. One guerrilla unit in Leyte in the Philippines had to compensate for the lack of a printing press, printing papers and ink with which to print their own currency. They utilized wooden blocks made by local engravers and ink concocted by a resident chemist, and printed on wrapping paper, grade three notebook paper or whatever other paper could be scavenged.

An Epilogue traces the main legacies for Southeast Asia of its wartime occupation. For most of the region, occupation resulted in revolution or civil war and often a fundamental societal shift, opening the way for post-war social and political transformations. Recovery to pre-war levels of per capita GDP was slow for several countries. Only by the 1990s did the long-term trajectory of an outward-looking, export-oriented Southeast Asia reassert itself.

Chapter 10 sets out an overall accounting for both Southeast Asia and Japan of the war’s costs and benefits. The chapter arrives at an approximate total of Southeast Asian civilian loss of life due to the occupation and indicates the extent of wartime physical damage to the region’s cities and infrastructure. Similar data for Japan afford a comparative yardstick. Japan realized few of the natural resource benefits or other material gains which, before the war, control of the Southern Regions was expected to generate.

Chapter 2 is concerned with how Japan administered and effected social control over Southeast Asia’s six main countries of Burma, Thailand (Siam), Malaya (including the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and Malacca), Indonesia (Netherlands India), Indochina (the five French administrative districts of Tonkin in the north, Annam in the centre, and Cochinchina in the south, along with Laos and Cambodia) and the Philippines. It is argued that this depended on a combination of Japanese co-option of elites, terror and Southeast Asians’ sense of self-preservation.

Chapter 3 addresses one of the most fundamental issues in war: how to pay for it. In Southeast Asia, the main Japanese strategy was to print money. That effectively shifted the costs of being occupied onto Southeast Asians. The chapter investigates why rapid monetary expansion caused less inflation than could have been expected and true hyperinflation only near the end of the war.