1.1 Colonial Legacies across Southeast Asia

Colonial legacies constitute a dynamic field of interdisciplinary inquiry.Footnote ¹ Social scientists seek to explain the impact of foreign rule upon a colonized people, assessing the weight of history upon the present. How did the imposition of new systems of political governance, economic, and social organization affect a country in the long run? Did colonialism influence the emergence and durability of democracies and authoritarian regimes across the world today? Did extractive institutions built by alien rulers help or hinder economic development? Can past imperial ways of drawing territorial boundaries and categorizing people help explain contemporary patterns of interstate conflict or violence along ethnic, racial, and religious lines? Do memories of past losses of sovereignty and precedents of anti-colonial resistance still matter for people’s identities and the meaning of nationhood?

Southeast Asia represents a rich site for addressing such questions from a comparative perspective. Between the nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, the region was divided among multiple imperial powers that conquered territory, built colonial states, and extractive economies as well as modernizing regimes of knowledge.Footnote ² Cross-empire differences provide opportunity for scholars to explore if and how differences in metropolitan politics and ideologies shaped the design and staying power of colonial institutions. Also, a patchwork quilt-like quality to how colonies were administered generate rich subnational variations that are helpful for mapping how, and explaining why, countries colonized by the same national empire, or different territories within the same country, fared differently over time.

Colonial history has left many imprints upon societies throughout Southeast Asia. Foreign classifications of people by race, ethnicity, and religion linger as official naming practices, invented traditions, and documentation regimes that continue to define and reify group identities, while fiscal and coercive institutions that utilized such colonial categories endure and spur communal tensions, intergroup conflict as well as violence throughout the region (Goscha, Reference Goscha2009; Bertrand and Laliberté, Reference 50Bertrand and Laliberté2010; Saada, Reference Saada2012; Fanselow, Reference Fanselow2014; Manickam, Reference Manickam2014; Menchik, Reference Menchik2014; Tajima, Reference Tajima2014; Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2015; Hussin, Reference Hussin2016; Cheesman, Reference Cheesman2017; Jaffrey, Reference Jaffrey2019; Pelletier, Reference Pelletier2019; Liu and Selway, Reference Liu and Selway2021; Kuipers, Reference Kuipers2022; Masucol, Jap, and Liu, Reference Masucol, Jap and Liu2022). Colonial laws and policies for policing intimacy, regulating familial and religious life, as well as social control have shaped demographic imbalances, gender norms, as well as the nature of, and contestation over, jurisdictional boundaries defining personal, public, and political life, while colonial modalities for organizing and representing space undergird today’s nation-state forms and territorial borders (Edwards, Reference Edwards2006; Loos, Reference Loos2008; Ikeya, Reference Ikeya2011; Walker, Reference Walker2012; Firpo, Reference Firpo2016; Sani, Reference Sani2019). Modernizing projects seeking to mold the minds and bodies of Southeast Asian people through Westernized education, public health interventions, and moral crusades affect present-day attitudes towards medicine, disease, as well as trust in governments (Aso, Reference Aso2013; Edington, Reference Edington, Kim and Singh2016; Li, Reference Li2017; Monnais, Reference Monnais2019; Mendoza, Reference Mendoza2021).Footnote ³

Today’s Southeast Asian economies and state-business relations also bear the weight of the colonial past in the forms of its roads, railways, and other types of large-scale infrastructure that were aimed at resource extraction as well as patterns of migrant settlement and capitalist class formation (Hutchcroft, Reference Hutchcroft1988; Booth, Reference Booth2007; Vu, Reference Vu2010; Pepinsky, Reference Pepinsky2016; Dell and Olken, Reference Dell and Olken2020; Huff, 2020; Rithmire, Reference Rithmire2023). Plantations in former Dutch Sumatra, French Indochina, and the American Philippines for sugar, rubber, teak, and other export-oriented commodities were tied to the postindependence rise of labor unions and squatter movements, trajectories of industrialization, as well as famines, disease ecologies, and environmental destruction (Stoler, Reference Stoler1985; Gunn, Reference Gunn2014; Booth and Deng, Reference Booth and Deng2017; Aso, Reference Aso2018). Corporate entities ordering rich mines and oil fields in former British Burma and Malaya, Dutch-ruled Borneo and West Papua established legal and informational infrastructures that would sustain vexed enclaves, which would at once help propel postindependence national economies while paving the ways for new imperial forms of racial and economic domination (White, Barwise, and Yacob, Reference White, Barwise and Yacob2020; Kusumaryati, Reference Kusumaryati2021; Chao, Reference Ren2023). The city of Yangon retains vestiges of British urban planning schemes for satellite towns, public housing, and land reclamation (Sugarman, Reference Sugarman2018). Dalat, now a major tourist destination, was once a remote highland hill station that the French transformed into a “colonial nursery” and spa town for colonists to escape the taxing lowland climate (Jennings, Reference Jennings2011: 173). The strength of business elites in Vietnam, the weakness of local entrepreneurship and banking sector in Myanmar, and the structure of Cambodia’s real estate market have been associated with the nature of colonial state intervention and protectionist policies that embraced ethnic favoritism, especially towards Chinese capitalists (Brown, Reference Brown2011; Sasges and Cheshire, Reference Sasges and Cheshier2012; Nam, Reference Nam2020).

Moreover, the legacies of colonial rule weigh upon Southeast Asian politics. This is a region with a combination of democratic and authoritarian regime types of varying degrees of strength and durability that scholars have traced back to different colonial institutions for political representation, ways of assimilating ethnic entrepreneurs, dividing and conquering indigenous elites, policing resistance, distributing resources, as well as the experiences of anti-colonial national movements, armed organizations and their leaders (Hedman and Sidel, Reference Hedman and Sidel2000; Sidel, Reference Sidel2008; Slater, Reference Slater2010; Kuhonta and Truong, Reference Kuhonta, Truong, Croissant and Hellmann2020; Weiss, Reference Weiss2020; Mukoyama, Reference Mukoyama2020; Fibiger, Reference Fibiger2023). Southeast Asian states also have varying levels of coercive, punitive and extractive capacity with origins in colonial security apparatuses and fiscal strategies, while the official languages, religions, and various regimes of symbolic knowledge that states adopt today also bear the imprints of colonial pasts (Liu, Reference Liu2015; Hussin, Reference Hussin2016; Leow, Reference Leow2016; Rafael, Reference Rafael2016; Nguyen, Reference Nguyen2017; Laitin and Ramachandran, Reference Laitin and Ramachandranin press). Many of today’s legal administrative categories are inheritances of colonial laws and policies for education, language, religion, migration, mapping, and border control (Callahan, Reference Callahan2003; Chua, Reference Chua2003; Tagliacozzo, Reference Tagliacozzo2005; Edwards, Reference Edwards2006; McCoy, Reference McCoy2009; Vu, Reference Vu2010; Lewis, Reference 58Lewis2012; Amrith, Reference Amrith2013; Cheesman, Reference Cheesman2016; Kim, Reference Kim2020; Sidel, Reference Sidel2021; Dulay, Reference Dulay2022; Ramnath, Reference Ramnath2023).

1.2 Why the Japanese Occupation?

For specialists of Southeast Asia, the Japanese occupation has been long recognized as a watershed moment for the region’s end of colonial rule and turn to independence. Joyce Lebra’s (Reference Lebra1977) pioneering analysis of Japanese-trained armies showed how a new generation of military elites emerged during this period, with lasting repercussions for postcolonial politics and state-society relations, as Mary Callahan’s (Reference Callahan2003) landmark study of the Burmese military authoritarian regime’s stubborn persistence has shown with particular clarity. The birth of modern Malaysia, as Tim Harper (Reference Harper1999) has demonstrated powerfully, can be historically narrated by starting with the aftermath of the occupation and war when “a struggle began for the soul of Malaya” (55). Foundational studies on the origins of Southeast Asia’s anti-colonial nationalisms have highlighted how the shock of witnessing an Asian imperial power defeat American and European rulers helped ignite new forms of political consciousnesses, mobilizational energy, as well as forceful commitments to resistance and revolution on a popular level (Kahin, Reference Kahin1952; Elsbree, Reference Elsbree1953; Benda, Reference Benda1958; Guyot, Reference Guyot1966; Nitz, Reference Nitz1984; Gunn, Reference Gunn1988; Rafael, Reference Rafael1991; Marr, Reference Marr and McCoy1980; Cheah, Reference Cheah2012). “It was not until the Japanese period that nationalism spread deeply into small-town and rural Java,” wrote Benedict Anderson in Java in a Time of Revolution (Reference Anderson2006: 18–19), which presaged his writings on nationalism as an imagined community.

Against this backdrop, there is something strikingly contradictory about how the Japanese occupation figures in our understandings of the long-run legacies of colonialism across Southeast Asia. On the one hand, it is possible to sidestep the occupation altogether by assuming a stubborn continuity to the institutions introduced Western colonial rule. On the other hand, it is also possible to treat this period as a radical rupture that bequeathed a dramatically different terrain from which postcolonial politics, economies, and societies would begin.Footnote ⁴

Such opposing approaches are partly due to the mass destruction of archival records relating to the Japanese empire’s activities in Southeast Asia. In August 1945, with the impending defeat of the Axis powers in World War Two, “the Japanese burnt archives and silenced witnesses to their atrocities” (Bayly and Harper, Reference Bayly and Harper2005: 459). Not only government records and politically sensitive documents but also the papers of individuals who had worked with local Japanese military administrations were destroyed (Anctil, Reference Anctil2018: 298; Kratoska, Reference Kratoska2018: 6). The returning Western colonial powers also contributed to losses of archives relating to occupation-era activities. In Malaysia for instance, the British destroyed surviving Japanese administrative records, and “materials pertaining to banks and estates were taken to the municipal dumping grounds in Kuala Lumpur, sprayed with a chemical to hasten decomposition, and buried” (Kratoska, Reference Kratoska2018: 6–7).

Over the past decades, many alternative sources have emerged to address the absence of official archives. Historians have recovered Japanese propaganda, wartime newspapers, memoirs as well as the intelligence reports of Allied forces and trial records that give partial insight into the inner workings of the Japanese empire, along with the writings of and interviews with Japanese former officers and colonial administrators.Footnote ⁵ The memoirs of Allied force commanders and soldiers, as well as American, Australian, and European prisoners of war form a genre of experience-based observations regarding how occupation unfolded on the ground, while collaborative projects for identifying archives that escaped wartime and postwar destruction had enabled the selective recovery of documents from Japanese Military Administrations (JMA).Footnote ⁶ The writings of national leaders and sustained efforts to bring alive the voices of people in Southeast Asia during the occupation through oral histories, memoirs, travel diaries, and interviews as well as occupation-era newspapers have generated valuable glimpses into the microlevel inner lives of political and social actors (Ba Maw, Reference Maw1968; Lim and Wong, Reference Lim and Wong2000; Kintanar et al., Reference Kintanar, Aquino, Camagay and Arinto2006; Ooi, Reference Ooi2006; Akashi and Yoshimura, Reference Akashi and Yoshimura2008; Dhont, Marles, and Jukim, Reference Dhont, Marles and Jukim2016; Blackburn Reference Blackburn2019; Tsuda, Reference Tsuda2020). Drawing on these sources, a wealth of political, economic, and social histories illuminate the dynamism of state-society relations, political economy, and ideas during the occupation, addressing topics that include, but are hardly limited to, wartime legislative activities under the Japanese, and both top-down policies and bottom-up responses towards official language, education, religion, ethnic relations, industrialization, banking, food supply, and labor mobilization (Ikehata and Jose, Reference Ikehata and Jose1999; Gotō, Reference Gotō2003; Leow Reference Leow2016; Saito, Reference Saito2017; Kratoska, Reference Kratoska2018; Mark, Reference Mark2018; Yellen, Reference Yellen2019; Anamwathana, Reference Anamwathana2020; Huff, Reference Huff2020a; Laffan, Reference Laffan2021; Eaton, Reference Eaton2023; Ramnath, Reference Ramnath2023).

Such enriched archives and histories of the Japanese occupation have not yet been well-integrated into the ways that social scientists study the long-run consequences of colonial institutions in Southeast Asia. For one, recovered records remain partial and seldom contain the type of fine-grained data on variations over time or by place that are necessary for strong quantitative causal analyses. For qualitative approaches to process tracing, which requires reconstructing precise sequences of events, decision-making processes, and discerning actors’ choices and their counterfactuals, the available evidentiary basis is also relatively thin (Collier, Reference Collier2011; Ricks and Liu, Reference Ricks and Liu2018). In addition, while there are many in-depth studies of a single territory that elucidate the context-specific experiences of Japanese authorities, indigenous elites, and local communities, there are relatively few comparative works that systematically describe, let alone explain, patterns of inter- and intra-territory differences and similarities.Footnote ⁷

The Japanese occupation further recedes from scholarly view because it is a complicated historical event that is difficult to categorize succinctly. In many parts of Southeast Asia, but not all, two empires supplanted each other in quick succession (i.e., from British to Japanese rule, and then back to British rule), but at different times through different processes of transferring official authority. These political transitions overlap with World War Two, which as a regional event in the Asia Pacific theater began unevenly across the region, depending on the nature and timing of the Japanese imperial military’s territorial invasion. World War Two was also a global war among empires and states, which ended raggedly as the Japanese emperor’s declaration of surrender in August 1945 blurred into the onset of civil wars and revolutions in some, but not all, eventually independent countries. Wartime Southeast Asia is, in turn, nested within the Japanese empire’s trans-regional reach into East Asia and the broader Pacific World, which both predates and outlasts the years from 1940 to 1945. The Japanese wartime empire’s time in Southeast Asia thus defies both easy periodization and neat categorization. It has been characterized as at once a war, a military occupation, a colonial moment, a new colonial era, an interregnum, a late chapter of Japanese empire, and an interlude within Western imperialism (Benda, Reference Benda1958; Peattie, Reference 62Peattie, Duus, Myers and Peattie1996; Ooi, Reference Ooi1999; Huff and Majima, Reference Huff and Majima2011: 873; Sasges and Cheshire, Reference Sasges and Cheshier2012; Satoshi, Reference Satoshi2018). The occupation as such, is a tricky time for which there is little consensus on whether and how it matters for studying long-run colonial legacies.

1.3 Argument and Approach

This Element aims to bring the Japanese occupation more squarely into the study of colonial legacies across Southeast Asia. It conceptualizes this period as a critical juncture during which a wide range of formal institutions under Japanese purview emerged.Footnote ⁸ Some institutions preserved what already existed under European and American rule and others less so, generating different degrees of connectivity between pre- and post-occupation colonial institutions.

I follow a historical institutionalist approach to a critical juncture as “a situation in which the structural (that is economic, cultural, ideological, and organizational) influences on political action are significantly relaxed for a relatively short period” (Capoccia and Keleman, Reference 51Capoccia and Kelemen2007: 352).Footnote ⁹ The Japanese occupation constituted a brief period of structural fluidity in the world of empires – European, American, and Japanese alike – in which core ideational frameworks, norms, and practices of twentieth-century imperialism were unsettled. As it overlapped with World War Two, the occupation also temporarily loosened imperial capitalist structures that densely connected metropolitan and colonial markets, reconfiguring the globe into a wartime political economy. A heightened contingency colored the years between 1940 and 1945, during which Southeast Asia saw a boom in wartime institutions for colonial governance under Japanese military authority.Footnote ¹⁰ Vast varieties of official projects for organizing political, economic, cultural, and social life were launched.

The workings of such projects during the Japanese occupation can be usefully categorized into three processes: the direct transmission, indirect transmission, and non-transmission of Western colonial institutions in place before 1940. In reality, these processes blurred together, in part because most colonial institutions were multilayered and intersected with other types of institutions. However, by separating them analytically, scholars may gain firmer footing into studying Southeast Asia’s colonial legacies, especially when tracing causal mechanisms over time and grappling with the question of whether, and if so how, the Japanese occupation mattered for the continuity of Western colonial institutions.

Specifically, when direct transmission occurred, an existing colonial institution retained the same form and practices of operation even when radical disruptions to its embedding environment occurred. That is, the Japanese empire’s takeover did not have a transformative impact; and the occupation in this instance constitutes a period of institutional resilience. A weaker counterfactual guides indirect transmission through which the Japanese drew upon but significantly reconfigured institutions that already existed under Western colonial rule. Without the occupation, it is still likely that the latter would have persisted but in different forms, for instance, as less state-directed or with shallower reach into society. Finally, the non-transmission of preoccupation institutions gives reason for scholars to pause and ask whether the legacies of colonialism that manifest in independent Southeast Asia are actually attributable to European rule during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, if new institutions were created by the Japanese, through learning or borrowing from metropolitan Japan, sites of earlier Japanese conquest in East Asia and the Pacific Islands or foreign countries, then it is possible that some colonial legacies in this region are better conceived of as the legacies of Japanese wartime rule or post-1945 return of a Western empire (rather than its preoccupation colonial institutions).Footnote ¹¹

On-site agents of wartime empires – mostly Japanese but also those of the retreating and eventually returning Western powers – helped shape these different processes of institutional transmission (or lack thereof). They exercised what I call “situational autonomy” over the implementation of metropolitan and high-level military orders. While the Japanese wartime empire espoused a sweeping vision of a pan-Asian imperial order in which Southeast Asia’s diverse territories were assigned various strategic and economic roles, high-level dictates on how exactly to realize Tokyo’s visions were often abstract, vague, and contradictory (Lebra, Reference Lebra1977; Duus, Reference Duus1996; Yellen, Reference Yellen2019).Footnote ¹² Locally stationed officers wielded considerable leeway over the management of their respective jurisdictions, running state-like entities and making adaptions according to local conditions and wartime exigencies.Footnote ¹³ To be clear, these were hardly rogue military officers or wayward bureaucrats defying superior orders or procedures for decision-making. They were followers, not pioneers, of imperial doctrine; rule-abiding rather than rule-bending individuals who toed the lines of metropolitan dictates and adhered to clear military organizational and disciplinary hierarchies.Footnote ¹⁴ However, when the voice of the Empire’s center was vague and the imperial military establishment was divided, room for such actors to make choices on the ground opened. And facing strong pressures from superior echelons to make occupation work locally, they turned selectively to the institutions that their predecessors had left behind.

I comparatively describe the three different processes of institutional transmission during the Japanese occupation using several mini-case studies, each of which highlights the situational autonomy of local military and civilian agents of wartime empires. Specifically, I demonstrate direct transmission through the wartime experiences of the Raffles Museum and Library in Singapore and the Commonwealth government system and 1935 Constitution in the Philippines. Indirect transmission is traced through the experiences of youth corps mainly in Vietnam and the Burma Independence Army in Myanmar. Processes of non-transmission are shown through vignettes of transnational institutions for labor mobilization, propaganda squads, and neighborhood associations with a mini-case study of the Endau agricultural settlement in Malaysia. I selected institutions that have been relatively well-studied by area specialists of Southeast Asia and historians of the Japanese empire during World War Two in ways that offer productive opportunities for social scientists to observe how the Japanese occupation may help elaborate causal mechanisms and narratives about long-run Western colonial legacies for this region, especially for outcomes relating to regime durability, coercive state capacity, identity categories, and knowledge production.

Comparative description is a narrative approach aimed at identifying similarities and differences across multiple contexts, by providing detailed accounts of what happened, when, where and how, focusing on the actions, decisions, and likely motivations of actors or entities that are central to theoretically motivated questions. As a type of analytical story-telling, it is especially useful for taming complicated and shifting cross-national, subnational, and multi-scalar variations into a systematic picture, a necessary empirical first step for subsequently developing causal explanations for why such variations occur.Footnote ¹⁵ I narrate mainly from the vantage point of formal institutions operating during the Japanese occupation, which limits the scope of my analysis to official projects of the military and civil administration between 1940 and 1945.Footnote ¹⁶ My evidence draws from the aforementioned recovered documents that historians and archivists have compiled and translated, as well as published memoirs, and digitized collections of oral interviews, while relying on in-depth secondary literature for each country, mainly in English.Footnote ¹⁷ When possible, I incorporate the perspectives of individuals who were proximately involved in designing, redesigning, repurposing, discarding, or replacing what their American and European predecessors had left behind. When such information is not available, I use explicitly speculative language (such as “it is likely that”) to make clear where the absences in evidence are.

This Element is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a region-wide overview of the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia. In doing so, it offers a periodization of the occupation based on the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Navy (IJN)’s territorial entry into and formal exit from the region from 1940 to 1945. That is, it lays out the permissive conditions that define when the critical juncture began and ended.Footnote ¹⁸ Section 3 takes a territory-specific focus to comparatively describe processes of direct, indirect, and non-transmission of pre-1940 Western colonial institutions. In doing so, it centers attention on the role of locally stationed military and civilian agents of the Japanese empire in variably keeping or altering what existed under Western rule, or newly introducing institutions borrowed from metropolitan Japan or other parts of the Japanese overseas empire. That is, it lays out the productive conditions of the critical juncture that enabled varieties of wartime institutional interactions. Section 4 concludes by laying out future research directions for studies of colonial legacies in Southeast Asia.

2.1 A Bird’s Eye View

The Japanese entered the 1940s at a furious pace as a “total empire” at war, entangled in armed conflicts on multiple fronts.Footnote ²⁸ The IJA had been occupying parts of China since the early 1930s, not only bringing the Japanese into conflict with various Chinese armed forces but also spurring border fights with the Soviet Union and Mongolia.Footnote ²⁹ By the summer of 1940, when the Japanese empire’s military incursions into Southeast Asia would begin, the IJA had further taken over parts of central and eastern China, while off the southern coast, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) occupied Hainan and the Spratly Islands.Footnote ³⁰ But the war had since reached a stalemate, not least due to the tenacity of China’s resistance forces, most notably, the Kuomintang (KMT)’s army led by Chiang Kai-shek, in the southwestern provinces of the country.Footnote ³¹ Such parts of China brushed against the northern borders of British-ruled Burma and French-ruled Indochina.

These fault lines of the Japanese empire were embedded within several ongoing seismic shifts in the world’s imperial order. Western Europe’s empires were confronting challenges from anti-colonial nationalist uprisings throughout their colonies that had gained momentum from the First World War’s large-scale mobilization of colonized peoples and fraught processes of demobilization, alongside failed promises of self-determination (Manela, Reference Manela2007; Pedersen, Reference Pedersen2015; Minohara and Dawley, Reference Minohara and Dawley2020). Strident forms of Pan-Asianism that favored the ejection of Western empires were on the rise, marking a shift away from earlier calls for emulating the West and modernizing Asia in its mold (Akira, Reference Akira1965; Peattie, Reference Peattie, Myers and Peattie1984; Aydin, Reference Aydin2007).

Global norms and rules for economic engagement among imperial powers were also in flux. Worried that the worldwide economic crisis of 1929 and its aftermath portended the collapse of a liberal international order, Western empires were turning against free trade and embracing narrower forms of protectionism in ways that heightened great power rivalries in Asia (Duus, Reference Duus1996; Young, Reference Young2017). Not only did industrializing Japan hunger for more natural resources and markets for manufactured goods than its home islands could support, but it also faced heightened barriers to accessing American and European colonial markets in Asia as Japan’s prolonged conflict in China met with weaponed uses of trade interdependence.Footnote ³² The Japanese imperial military’s resolve to move into Southeast Asia sharpened as the United States began to embargo oil, steel, iron, and other exports to Japan that were important for the latter’s industry and war efforts (Tarling, Reference Tarling2001: 49–50; Kratoska, Reference Kratoska2018: 2–3).

The outbreak of World War Two in Europe further destabilized the political holds of metropolitan governments over their colonies. For Southeast Asia, the realignment of once rivaling empires into Allied powers unsettled the ways that the American, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese had long divided control over the region. The early defeats of France and the Netherlands to Nazi Germany created political vacuums, weakening their ability to defend colonial rule over Indochina and the East Indies (de Jong, Reference De Jong2002; Brocheux and Hémery, Reference Brocheux and Hémery2009). For Japan – a major Axis power and empire armed with assertive ideological claims as an Asian savior that could liberate Southeast Asia from Western imperial domination, in need of resources to fight its multifront battles in East Asia, while also weary and wary of its prolonged war in China – the summer of 1940 was an opportune time to begin invading Southeast Asia.

One of the earliest territorial imprints of Japan’s imperial military fell upon Indochina, in today’s northern Vietnam. In July 1940, the Nishihara mission – named after the IJA Major General Nishihara Issaku who led a group of around forty Japanese military officers and diplomatic personnel – arrived in Hanoi to secure a blockade against Chiang’s forces (Yoshizawa, Reference Yoshizawa, Shiraishi and Furuta1992: 18–21). It established six surveillance posts near the border with China and an intelligence network that “soon acquired strong new overtones as a means of paving the way for the military occupation of French Indochina” (Yoshizawa, Reference Yoshizawa, Shiraishi and Furuta1992: 27).Footnote ³³ By 1941, Japanese military presence had reached into the southern half of Indochina, with at least 35,000 men on the ground, commandeering airfields, naval bases, and other strategic infrastructure (Tarling, Reference Tarling2001: 53–54; Raffin, Reference Raffin2012: 395).

Such incursions onto Indochina were possible, in part because the French colonial authorities yielded to Japanese demands in order to prevent the full takeover of Indochina. At the time of the Nishihara mission’s entry, Paris had just fallen and Georges Catroux – the French Governor General of Indochina appointed under the Third Republic – was in a position of weakness. Catroux and his successor Jean Decoux – an appointee of the new Vichy-based government that served as French Indochina’s wartime metropolitan authority – yielded to what Nitz Kiyoko (Reference Nitz1983: 332) calls Japan’s “armed diplomacy,” which took substantive control over wartime Indochina in exchange for recognizing France’s claims to colonial sovereignty. This highly asymmetrical arrangement for joint rule between an existing foreign ruler and the Japanese would persist for most of the war until March 1945.Footnote ³⁴ Although the Japanese ruled much of Indochina, the Vichy French colonial government kept its seat of power and exercised relative autonomy over some policy issues.Footnote ³⁵

Similar approaches to joint rule occurred in Thailand and East Timor, where the Japanese also kept existing rulers in their official capacity. In the case of Thailand, which had escaped formal Western colonization, attacks in December 1941 upon its southern coast and the entry of Japanese troops in Bangkok pushed its government – led by Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkharam, also known as Phibun, who sympathized with a strand of fascist ideology that favored militant forms of irredentist nationalism – to accede to Japanese demands for stationing soldiers and allowing access to Thailand’s railways and roads, airfields, naval bases, warehouses, stocks of fuel and ammunition, and communication infrastructures (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds, Duus, Myers and Peattie1996: 253).Footnote ³⁶ In return, Thailand kept its status as a sovereign nation and Thai wartime leaders gained territorial concessions while retaining official decision-making capacities in domestic and foreign affairs, albeit in a highly limited fashion.Footnote ³⁷ In the case of Portuguese-ruled Timor, which was invaded by Japanese troops in February 1942, the colonial governor, Manuel d’Abreu Ferreira de Cavalho, remained in office and the Japanese allowed some areas to formally remain under Portuguese jurisdiction.Footnote ³⁸

A second type of approach to Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia involved ousting the existing ruler and installing a new governing body headed by a leader among the colonized, a nominally independent government that substantively answered to Japanese military authorities stationed in the country. Such approaches prevailed in today’s Myanmar and the Philippines for part of their occupation. Both experienced full-fledged military invasions by the Japanese that culminated in the surrenders of British and American colonial authorities. Then British Burma fell under the purview of the IJA’s 15th Army; and beginning in August 1943, the Burmese lawyer and politician Ba Maw headed a governing body called the State of Burma, which the Japanese declared as independent, with a Burmese-staffed cabinet and its own armed forces (initially called the Burma National Army or BNA).Footnote ³⁹ In the Philippines, where the IJA’s 14th Army took over, the Filipino judge Jose Laurel sat at the helm of the Second Philippine Republic, inaugurated in October 1943, which had a national assembly with Filipino legislators and their elected speaker.Footnote ⁴⁰

In the official parlance of the Japanese empire at the time, occupied Burma under the State of Burma and the Philippines under the Second Philippine Republic both achieved independence. For the Japanese, the term independence relating to Southeast Asia had several meanings, all of which were deemed compatible with military invasion. Independence could refer to a fictitious sovereign status accorded to a ruler, foreign or indigenous, with autonomous sources of political authority. To be independent could also mean being freed from Western rule, with the Japanese imperial military as a self-avowed liberating force that was only occupying, not colonizing a territory. In this sense, nearly all of Southeast Asia, as it had been under American, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese colonial rule had become independent through Japanese occupation. Yet another meaning of independence was a so-called gift of autonomy over domestic affairs that the Japanese could confer or a relatively elevated status within Japan’s imperial scheme of political hierarchy.

The hollowness of independence in all three senses was evident to those who gained it. “This independence we have now is only a name,” Aung San told Ba Maw, even as the former agreed to serve as War Minister for the State of Burma, what he called “a Japanese version of home rule” (Yoon, Reference Yoon1978: 264). Government policies required the approval of Japanese advisers, with the ultimate assent of Kawabe Masakazu, the head of the Japanese forces stationed in Burma at the time. Labels of puppet state, collaborationist government, pro-Japanese regime, satellite regimes or showcase regime conventionally apply to the State of Burma and the Second Philippine Republic in ways that connote an absence of autonomy on the part of their leaders.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet, as nuanced readings of the writings of such leaders have shown, complicity in power did not directly translate into a cooptation of ideas.Footnote ⁴²

Moreover, the formalities of independence that the Japanese accorded to today’s Myanmar and the Philippines are meaningful as they contrast with countries where such official recognition was not given at all. In today’s Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Singapore, the Japanese took a third type of approach of establishing fully Japanese-run governments under Japanese military authority throughout the occupation. In general, commanders of the IJA’s 16th and 25th Armies and the IJN divided control over three clusters of territory, which did not necessarily follow boundaries drawn under European rule. The 16th Army’s commander headed a JMA for the island of Java, which had been part of the Dutch East Indies.Footnote ⁴³ The 25th Army’s JMA oversaw both Sumatra, another major island of the Dutch-ruled archipelago world, and the formerly British-ruled Malaya and Singapore.Footnote ⁴⁴ The IJN oversaw yet another portion, including the islands of Sulawesi, the western halves of Guinea and Timor, and the southern part of Borneo.Footnote ⁴⁵

Co-ruling with an existing foreign ruler. Indirectly ruling through an indigenous leader-led government. Or directly ruling through a Japanese officer. Consider these three approaches to occupation – which depended on the identity of who formally sat in high-level positions of power – as a first cut, a way to begin making sense of the complexity of occupied Southeast Asia’s institutional terrain.

To be clear, this bird’s eye view has several limitations. For one, the three types do not necessarily depict a territory’s continuous experience under Japanese occupation. Myanmar and the Philippines were initially under JMAs but shifted to Burmese and Filipino-led governments midway through the war. Indochina’s joint rule arrangement between Vichy France and Japan fell apart in March 1945, giving way to full Japanese military rule until the end of the war. Second, a sweeping perspective also lends to simplistic metropolitan-based explanations of cross-country differences that risk overreading a clarity of goals on the part of Japan’s imperial war-makers while positing excess coherence to the military planning of Southeast Asia’s post-invasion governance. For instance, it may seem that the Japanese deliberately chose joint rule arrangements for countries with Axis-aligned or neutral governments, which include Vichy France, Thailand, and Portugal. Many countries with direct Japanese-run governments were those that had been invaded in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It is also possible to view the establishment of “puppet governments” as Tokyo’s decisions based on the economic value of different territories; Myanmar and the Philippines as seemingly less costly sites for granting nominal independence compared with oil-rich Borneo and Java.

There is a cleanness to such explanations that does not align well with the historical realities that specialists of the occupation have identified. Tokyo’s shaky planning for post-occupation governance has been a longstanding theme in histories of the Japanese wartime empire, perhaps best illustrated by high-level confusion over the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (GEACPS).Footnote ⁴⁶ In a nutshell, the GEACPS was the Japanese empire’s vision of a pan-Asian order that wove together Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Micronesia, Australia and New Zealand, parts of Russia, Southeast Asia as well as South Asia into a self-sufficient economic bloc with forms of political organization and legitimation claims in opposition to Western imperialism’s white racial domination.Footnote ⁴⁷ As part of official discourse, the GEACPS was first announced in August 1940 by the Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke and it became professed as the core aim of Japan’s national policy and imperial expansion throughout the war (Lebra, Reference Lebra1975: 71–72). Core ideas included building an Asia for Asians, united as “eight corners under a shared roof” (hakkō ichiu), and a transnational, pan-regional economic order.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet it was only after the attacks on Pearl Harbor that politicians and policy-makers began to seriously grapple with questions of how Japan’s empire would actually operate differently from the white colonizers it had displaced; how to make coexistence and coprosperity work, as well as whither the boundaries of Greater East Asia. As Jeremy Yellen (Reference Yellen2019: 77) underscores, “[v]isions for the future and attempts to institutionalize order in Greater East Asia followed the Rising Sun flag, not vice versa.” Indeed, as late as February 1942, such confusion over the GEACPS prevailed in discussions at the highest level of decision-making that Prime Minister Tōjō would have to ask his equally nonplussed advisors what exactly was the Coprosperity Sphere (Yellen, Reference Yellen2019: 4 and 78–79).Footnote ⁴⁹

Clear lines are also difficult to draw between grand strategy or the wartime value of a given territory and its political organization. The Japanese eventually did invade and occupy Portuguese Timor, a decision that was hotly debated among officers of the army and navy, cabinet ministers, international legal advisors, as well as the prime minister and emperor.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Malay peninsula’s natural resources were not necessarily a key factor in the Japanese decision for invasion and indeed, its “tin and rubber industries were a positive liability because these commodities no longer had a market and the large sector of their economy dependent on their production and export could not be sustained” (Kratoska, Reference Kratoska2018: 1). Japan’s granting of independence to Ba Maw’s Burma went alongside recognition of its valuable oil producing capacities.Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, the Japanese were promiscuous in establishing mimetic forms of quasi-sovereign status or holding out promises of independence. For instance, in Singapore, the Japanese recognized the Provisional Government of Free India led by Subhas Chandra Bose (Sareen, Reference Sareen2004: 83–84). A spate of formal declarations of independence followed before war’s end in 1945, with the Japanese declaring the independence of Laos under King Sisavang Vong (April 8); Cambodia under King Norodom Sihanouk (March 12); and establishing the Empire of Vietnam under Bao Dai and Tran Trong Kim (Raffin, Reference Raffin2005: 194). In Indonesia on August 8, 1945, the Commander in Chief for the Southern Area Army, Terauchi Hisaichi informed the Indonesian nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta that the emperor would grant independence before the end of the month, a promise that was never delivered upon (Sluimers, Reference Sluimers1996: 34–35).

Moreover, transnational histories of the Japanese empire elucidate the multiple loci for occupation-related policy-making across its overseas territories in ways that complicate any notion of a single metropolitan authority. Highlighting the influence of the Taiwan Colonial Governor-General’s office in Japanese imperial expansion into China and Southeast Asia, Seiji Shirane (Reference Shirane2022) writes: “Japan’s military services did not have a master plan to oversee a multi-front war. Instead, the planning was often piecemeal, messy, and advanced by different Japanese institutional actors who were sometimes at cross-purposes” (104). In Kwantung Leased Territory, as Miriam Kingsberg’s (Reference Kingsberg2013) deeply-researched study of the Japanese empire’s opium administration shows, formal authority was split among no fewer than four different “‘heads,’ or branches of government: the Foreign Ministry … the SMR [South Manchurian Railway Company]; the Kwantung Army; and the Kwantung Bureau,” with the latter as operating as a civilian front for the former’s military control” (98). Moreover, the Japanese as subaltern imperialists, to borrow Jordan Sand’s (Reference Sand2014) apt characterization (as latecomers to the great games of empire and challengers to prevalent understandings of whiteness as hegemony), were “unusually preoccupied with the examples of other empires, which provided models, object lessons and justifications for their own policies,” hinting at an inner game of colonial comparisons that complicated the calculations of the imperial war planners (275). Understanding such complexities, and the highly context-specific arrangements for occupying different territories across Southeast Asia, requires a different perspective. Let us now revisit the region from the opposite vantage point, from that of a worm on institutional ground.

2.2 A Worm’s Eye View

The landscape of Southeast Asia from 1940 to 1945 was riddled with projects for colonial military governance. Varieties of formal institutions operated under the purview of locally stationed agents of the Japanese imperial military in charge of performing authority, extracting resources, mobilizing supporters, and repressing dissenters. Commanders of the various IJA field armies, their chiefs of staff and ranking officers of JMA headquarters as well as the leadership of administrative bodies under the IJN oversaw sprawling state-like entities over their jurisdictions. They were tasked with executing occupation policies for education, language, religion, information and propaganda, public works, taxation, transportation, food distribution, labor, agriculture, and industrialization, as well as trade and finance (Huff, Reference Huff2020a). Such work, in turn, relied upon a plethora of lower-ranked officers, soldiers as well as civilian bureaucrats and diplomats – some directly commissioned by the army or navy, others seconded from metropolitan ministries – as well as agents of Japanese corporations, private contractors, and the media. In the employ of a wartime empire, the many individuals that comprised official Japanese presence, as such, blurred boundaries between formal and informal authority, public and private interest drawn during times of peace.

Such actors wielded situational autonomy over the management of an occupied territory. Theirs was a narrowly circumscribed ability that toed the line of metropolitan dictates and followed orders set by superior echelons of the Japanese imperial military. Yet, situations defined as matters of wartime exigency abounded, ranging from worrisome episodes of social unrest – real and suspected – shortages of food and labor, a guerilla attack, or the death of a commander to what the Japanese saw as salutary opportunities for courting elite supporters, mobilizing fighters, raising money, or winning popular hearts and minds. Keeping within the bounds of their formally delegated authority, on-site agents had considerable leeway over the direction and tenor of colonial military governance in their jurisdictions.Footnote ⁵² There are several reasons why.

First, metropolitan dictates on how to govern Southeast Asia were often vague enough to encompass multiple possible approaches to local administration. Not only was the amorphous GEACPS slow to be articulated concretely but also, even when the Imperial General Headquarters (IGH) issued practical guidelines to occupying forces, such orders were not necessarily straightforward to execute. For instance, in March 1941, a working group in the IJA’s General Staff Office sketched out an anticipatory plan for how to manage Southeast Asia’s diverse territories, the basic ideas of which later informed the IGH’s general approach upon the region’s actual takeover.Footnote ⁵³ As much as possible, stressed the army experts, existing administrative structures and government organs should be kept in place. But also, the officers running the JMAs and other Japanese administrative bodies should demonstrate substantive differences from the preoccupation Western colonial rulers. Officers on-site should respect indigenous, folk customs and win popular support but should also reduce contact with the local population and use violence to subdue them. They should appeal to racial, ethnic, cultural, and historical affinities shared between the peoples of Southeast Asia and Japan but also instill respect for status orders and hierarchies that placed the Japanese at the top. Resources should be extracted and markets should be stabilized with minimal effort but also, Japanese control over major industries should be centralized, new currencies should be issued, and financial arrangements restructured. Chinese capital and their socioeconomic networks should be seen warily and coopted but also recognized as essential for the maximization of output for the war effort and thus left alone.Footnote ⁵⁴ Each territory’s economy should strive for self-sufficiency but also contribute to a transnational economic order; Southeast Asia should strive both to be a self-sustaining regional autarky and a proper contributing member to a pan-Asian, trans-regional interconnected sphere for coprosperity. Given such countervailing imperatives, being consistent with Tokyo’s general guidelines allowed for many different specific approaches.

Second and relatedly, the occupation of Southeast Asia was an evolving process nested within the Japanese empire’s military wins and losses in the broader Pacific theater of World War Two. A key turning point occurred in 1943, with shifts in metropolitan strategic and ideological orientations towards the region, following the IJN’s major defeats in the Battle of Midway and Guadalcanal Campaign.Footnote ⁵⁵ Disruptions to shipping and trade that increasingly cut off Southeast Asia from both Japan and the rest of the world intensified tension between pursuits of regional autarky and transnational connectivity (Huff, Reference Huff2020a: 42–47). The official goals of the GEACPS were also adjusted in 1943, shifting away from claims to build a Japan-dominant imperium comprised of varieties of subordinate polities towards professing to foster a new order among politically equal, cooperative Asian nations, while advancing a counter-discourse to the American and British-led Atlantic Charter in the form of a Japanese-scripted Pacific Charter (Yellen, Reference Yellen2019: 142–164). Such ideational and discursive shifts further complicated top-down guidelines regarding the management of occupied territories, which were already struggling with the accumulated stresses of wartime life. For instance, most of Southeast Asia’s preoccupation colonial economies had faced problems of unemployment that continued into the war. This trend was reversed in 1943, from labor surplus to labor shortage, in part because the Japanese needed larger numbers of workers to build large-scale infrastructures for wartime transportation and communication, and also conscripted many Southeast Asians to serve as military auxiliaries (Huff, Reference Huff2020a: 46). Hunger and inconvenience gave way to starvation and destitution as stocks of consumer goods became exhausted, and manufactured Japanese goods were no longer readily available. Black markets for food and prewar industrial machinery grew. “By 1943, things had changed,” remembers the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Vltcheck and Idira, Reference Vltchek and Idira2006: 56).

Third, the imperial military establishment was mired in fissures, most famously between the IJN and IJA but also due to tensions vis-à-vis various ministries and other colonial government authorities throughout the Japanese empire. In occupied East Asia, an “interservice tug of war for public esteem and fiscal appropriations” divided the military between army and navy lines while the multiplication of garrisons and institutional complexity of the armed forces created sub-imperial forces within (Peattie, Reference 62Peattie, Duus, Myers and Peattie1996: 213; Young, Reference Young1998: 47). Such jurisdictional rivalries sometimes extended to Southeast Asia, complicating the work of the local JMAs, which in turn divided over wartime priorities and time horizons for achieving them as well as different interpretations of military doctrine or metropolitan guidelines. Scholars have shown how widely JMA occupation policies could differ based on the personalities of individual commanders, the opinions and networks of their chiefs of staff and other ranking officers, degrees of fidelity to conservative values, factional divides among military personnel, as well as their relationships with the military police (kempeitai), civilian advisors, corporate actors, and local Japanese settler communities (Akashi, Reference Akashi1970; Nakamura, Reference Nakamura1970; Yoon, Reference Yoon1978; Kratoska, Reference Kratoska1998; Tarling, Reference Tarling2001; Melber, Reference Melber2016; Mark, Reference Mark2018; Booth and Deng, Reference Booth and Deng2017; Huff, Reference Huff2020a). Within a single jurisdiction, multiple chains of command could also coexist, each with microlevel mandates and priorities that were held accountable to different principals.Footnote ⁵⁶

A glimpse into situational autonomy at work can be seen in the task of formulating Japan’s approach to indigenous rulers in Central Java in early 1942, as it fell upon a civilian official named Miyoshi Shunkichirō, who had been seconded to the Java JMA from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote ⁵⁷ Miyoshi had a keen sense of the high stakes of the project at hand, which concerned figuring out how to manage populations in ways that minimized social unrest by working through the Javanese princely rulers in four regions that the Dutch had previously recognized as autonomous. “Not only the rulers but the Javanese people as a whole were watching,” Miyoshi recalled (Reid and Akira, Reference Reid and Akira1986: 116).

The Japanese officer traveled to Central Java, collected information on local customs, religion, and precedents of Dutch agreements with the Sultanates of Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Mangkunegaran, and Pakualaman, and brought their ministers to the Java JMA headquarters’ Bureau for Princely Territories. And he drafted two reports: one recommended keeping the self-governing regions, and the other suggested their immediate abolition. Miyoshi’s rationale for doing so offers a helpful illustration of the making of local occupation policy, of how formal decisions relating to projects for colonial military governance could materialize:

Some favored preserving or even elevating the special status of the Javanese rulers, as “similar to that of the pope in the religious arena” (Reid and Akira, Reference Reid and Akira1986: 118). Others argued for change, to end the exceptional treatment that the Dutch had long accorded the Sultanates. For some, the key issue at stake concerned the Japanese empire’s treatment of indigenous history and politics. For others, it was about distinguishing Japan’s imperial approach from that of its Western predecessor. Opinions further divided over the necessity of consistency with other occupied territories. The IJA’s 25th Army in Malaya had opted not to allow special privileges to the Sultan of Johor; and there were over two hundred additional self-governing regions in other parts of the formerly Dutch-ruled East Indies including Sumatra (also under the 25th Army’s jurisdiction at the time) and the Outer Islands (under IJN jurisdiction). Some sought to bring Java in line with Malaya; others did not.

If Miyoshi, by way of treading cautiously among divides within the military establishment, recognized multiple ways to achieve an end, his immediate superior Colonel Nakayama Yasuto, the head of the Java JMA’s General Affairs Department, helped narrow down these possibilities. Nakayama was a forceful advocate of maintaining the status quo, who responded to Miyoshi’s reports “angrily [saying] that abolition [of the indigenous rulers] would be stupid” (Reid and Akira, Reference Reid and Akira1986: 118). Higher authorities in Tokyo and Singapore deliberated. In the end, Japanese occupation policy for Java sided with keeping the four self-governing territories and their rulers, under new formal titles as “Ko” (a term for Prince in Japanese) who ruled over their Kochi (a Princely territory). A set of documents were issued – a general Army order, instructions from the Gunseikan, and an appointment certificate – under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief of the 16th Army, which its then incumbent, Imamura Hitoshi, handed to each ruler during ceremonies of appointment held on different dates in Jakarta, as the Japanese now called the former Dutch-named city of Batavia: “30 July 1942 for the Surakarta ruler, on 1 August for Yokyakarta, and on 14 August for the Mangku Negara and Paku Alam” (Reid and Akira, Reference Reid and Akira1986: 118).

The four rulers seemed relieved but also sometimes disgruntled and confused about their titles, as was Miyoshi who found himself “several times at a loss for an answer when asked by the rulers of Surakarta and Yogyakarta: but, ‘[w]hat does Ko mean?’” (Reid and Akira, Reference Reid and Akira1986: 120). For this agent of the JMA – who in addition to his research and policy drafting capacity, played a crucial role as an interpreter and communication bridge between Japanese army officers and Indonesian elites – there was also an ambiguity about the status of Java’s indigenous rulers vis-à-vis nationalist leaders such as Sukarno and Hatta, which would become a practical problem when gathering all together. Coopting the Indonesian elites was yet another project of colonial military governance, which was not the same as, but linked to, that of placating the indigenous rulers. According to Miyoshi, “we were unable to find a reasonable answer to the question, which of the two parties should stand higher? Thus we had always to arrange ceremonies so that the Princes and the leaders did not side by side” (Reid and Akira, Reference Reid and Akira1986: 120).

Java in 1942 as such, was one moment in a vast constellation of events and decisions that shaped the institutional landscape of occupied Southeast Asia. Situational autonomy captures the ways that figures such as Miyoshi, Nakayama, and Imamura served as local agents that toed the line of metropolitan dictates and followed orders set by higher-ups in the Japanese imperial military, while still wielding much leeway over military colonial governance. When Tokyo’s directives were vague and military superiors were divided, room for their agents to make choices at the margins opened. And to make occupation work, they turned selectively to what infrastructures, organizations, rules and procedures the Western rulers had left behind.

3.1 What They Kept: Direct Transmission

Some Western colonial institutions weathered the Japanese occupation with remarkable resilience. The experience of Singapore’s Raffles Library and Museum illustrates how local agents of the Japanese wartime empire preserved the infrastructures that their predecessors had established. It was first established in 1874, when the British colonial state took over the privately-run Singapore Library and reopened it as a public institution.Footnote ⁵⁸ Into the first half of the twentieth century, the Raffles Library and Museum served as a repository for government archives and copies of major newspapers, while housing rich collections in natural history and archaeology, which George Murray Reith, the author of one of Singapore’s earliest tourist guidebooks, Handbook to Singapore (Reference Reith1892) lauded as “one of the largest and most comprehensive in the East” (Lee, Reference Lee2016: 39). Named after Stamford Raffles – the British official known as the founder of modern Singapore – the Library and Museum became prominently located on Stamford Road and boasted a 90-foot-high dome and striking neoclassical architecture (Lee, Reference Lee2016: 42). For decades, it played important roles in enacting the grandeur of the British empire’s civilizing mission, constructing narratives of the origins and legitimacy of colonial rule, as well as internally socializing European populations residing in or sojourning through the city (Han, Reference Han2009; Luyt, Reference Luyt2009).

This British cultural institution escaped the destruction that the Japanese imperial military wrought upon many other sites of knowledge conservation throughout the wartime empire.Footnote ⁵⁹ While Tokyo’s general orders had been to leave alone the museums, libraries, and scientific collections in occupied territories, metropolitan dictates on how to manage such institutions were vague and looting by Japanese soldiers in the process of invasion was commonplace (Seet, Reference Seet1983: 78). In occupied Singapore however, such damages were forestalled through a project for “conserv[ing] local cultural heritage,” in the words of a Japanese civilian researcher tasked with its oversight, named Tanakadate Hidezo.Footnote ⁶⁰ A geologist at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai, Tanakadate had arrived in Singapore on February 17, 1942 two days after the British surrender to the Japanese.Footnote ⁶¹ The early days of establishing colonial military governance over Syonan-to, as the Japanese renamed Singapore, brought in agents of multiple loci of metropolitan authority, with blurry jurisdictional divisions over administering the new municipality of Syonan-to among the military officers of the 25th Army-led JMA, civilian officials in the offices of the Mayor and Consul-General, as well as administrators within the JMA’s various departments. Tanakadate was among a cluster of Japanese scientists that enjoyed the support of Tokugawa Yoshichika – also known as the Marquis Tokugawa, who was a relative of the Japanese Emperor and would serve as a military adviser for occupied Malaya – and he also had old friendship ties with the 25th Army’s Commander (Corner, Reference Corner1981). Perhaps it was a form of patronage stemming from the personal interests of the royal family in biology; perhaps it was a reflection of an inner power struggle. In September 1942, the Raffles Library and Museum, combined with the Singapore Botanic Gardens, was moved out of the JMA’s Food Control Office and became a sub-section of the Syonan-to Muncipality’s Department of Education, which according to Seet (Reference Seet1983), gave the “Marquis [Tokugawa] absolute autonomy in policy-making, and he was assisted in the area by Tanakadate until the end of 1942” (84).Footnote ⁶² Tanakadate became the first wartime Director of the Raffles Library and Museum.

Continuities between the British colonial institution and its Japanese wartime counterpart were enabled by collaborative ties forged between Japanese scientists affiliated with the military administration and British administrators who remained in occupied Singapore.Footnote ⁶³ Tanakadate worked closely with E. J. H. Corner, a biologist and botanist who had been an Assistant Director for the Botanic Gardens before the war. Together, recalled Corner, he and Tanakadate had hurriedly posted “Do not enter” signs at the entrance of the Library and Museum, which prevented looters and Japanese military officers from destroying its collections. Corner hid copies of newspapers in the Botanic Garden’s specimen cabinets, thinking “the only written record, however propagandist and fallacious it might of the Occupation, would be the newspapers” (Corner, Reference Corner1981: 151). Neither Tanakadate nor Corner were alone in their decisions and ability to sustain the institution. The former, for instance, relied upon the Custodian of Enemy Property, a former employee of the Japanese Embassy in London, for authorization to repair damage to the building’s roof and to collect books from the libraries of evacuated British government offices and private collections, which in turn were transported by military lorry-drivers who “would call sporadically at the Raffless [sic] Library … gesticulating wildly that there were books to be unloaded” (Seet, Reference Seet1983: 82). Other Japanese scientists visiting Singapore also took interest in the Library, Museum, and Gardens, which continued to operate even after Tanakadate left Singapore in mid-1943 under his successor Koriba Kwan, a professor of Botany at Kyoto Imperial University.Footnote ⁶⁴

Microlevel ties between local agents of the Japanese empire and British colonial administrators, as such, helped the Raffles Library and Museum survive the war. To be sure, the institution suffered many losses to its collections.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, the day-to-day operations of this institution continued. In terms of the tasks that the library’s clerks performed, it felt “more or less the same,” according to one man who had worked under both the British and Japanese head librarians.Footnote ⁶⁶ Staff members from the Syonan-to Municipality’s Department of Information (which developed propaganda for the Japanese invasion of India and Australia) utilized the library’s collections. Books were also circulated to civil internees kept at the Customs House and prisoners-of-war in Singapore’s Changi Prison (Seet, Reference Seet1983: 83). The Museum’s central hall became a temporary resting place for the commemorative statue of Stamford Raffles, which was moved off the streets, away from the eyes of Japanese military officers who contemplated its destruction (Corner, Reference Corner1981: 586).

When the occupation ended, the British reclaimed this institution, both the physical site and its symbolic value as a site of colonial knowledge production. The Raffles Library became Singapore’s National Library in 1960, housing the country’s government archives, and the building on Stamford Road houses today’s National Museum of Singapore (Lee, Reference Lee2016: 42)

***

At times, it was the most political of institutions that could remain the most intact. The wartime experience of the Philippines’ commonwealth system illustrates how existing structures of government, personnel, and logics of operation established under Western rule could survive the Japanese occupation.

First established in 1935, the Commonwealth system in the Philippines under the Americans encompassed a bundle of formal institutions for organizing political life in a tutelary fashion, which the colonizing power promised would end after a ten-year period and the Philippines would be granted full independence.Footnote ⁶⁷ While the 1935 Commonwealth system included a Filipino chief executive, a popularly elected legislature, and a Supreme Court with a full-Filipino bench of justices, it was still a colonial democracy with a highly limited franchise in which less than 15 percent of the Philippine people were allowed to vote; and the Americans retained control over foreign policy, trade and defense. The commonwealth system also ushered in a new constitution that accorded strong coercive powers and fiscal prerogatives to the President.Footnote ⁶⁸ The design of such representative institutions embedded many tensions, including an “overdeveloped” and unchecked executive branch capable of threatening to “emasculate the interests of the islands’ dominant social class, an agro-commercial oligarchy entrenched in both houses of the national legislature” that also enjoyed muscular powers of policing, alongside a weakly centralized bureaucracy with limited territorial reach vis-à-vis provincial elites with strong political economic bases of power (Anderson, Reference Anderson1988; Hedman and Sidel, Reference Hedman and Sidel2000: 15–16; McCoy, Reference McCoy2009).

During the occupation, the Japanese erred on the side of keeping, rather than overhauling, the formal political arena that the Americans had instituted. After Manila’s takeover in January 1942, the residence of José Yulo – who would become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the occupation – bustled with meetings among prominent Filipino politicians who had remained in the city.Footnote ⁶⁹ Maeda Masami, Chief of Staff to the 14th Army’s Commander Homma Masaharu, had already reached out to Quintin Paredes (then Majority Floor Leader), Jorge Vargas (then Mayor of Manila), and (then Senators) Benigno Aquino and Claro Recto to compel their cooperation (Ikehata and Jose, Reference Ikehata and Jose1999: 5–7). That substantive power would ultimately rest in the hands of the Japanese military authorities was a foregone conclusion, but these Filipino leaders still led a small group of elites that “grappled with the question of how they would work with Japan” and deliberated possibilities, ranging from the creation of a new Philippine republic that would directly work with Homma’s JMA to relatively lesser forms of collaboration by establishing a civil emergency administration or continuing the commonwealth with an elected president and vice president (Yellen, Reference Yellen2019: 118). What Maeda proffered in turn was a much narrower space for political maneuver, which gave the Philippine leaders only individual choices of whether or not to serve in a collaborationist government. Most chose the former, bringing into the Japanese-sponsored Second Philippine Republic’s governing bodies, many of the same politicians who had occupied high positions in the American colonial commonwealth system.

Such continuity would color Manila’s high politics throughout the Japanese occupation. Outside of the capital, and indeed, for much of the administrative, street-level governance of wartime Manila, much more change occurred. Especially during the last months of the war, scorched earth policies carried out by the soon-to-be-ousted Japanese and the artillery bombing of the returning Americans wrought terrible damage, reducing the city’s infrastructure to rubble. Yet, alongside radical disruptions there was also striking persistence in the structure and workings of the legislature, executive, and courts as well as the people who ran them.Footnote ⁷⁰ In June 1943, drafts for a new Philippine constitution were being drawn-up by a committee led by Laurel in his capacity as soon-to-be President of the Second Philippine Republic, which “used the 1935 charter [Philippine Constitution] as a template and made simple retouches – replacing the word ‘Commonwealth’ with ‘Republic of the Philippines … substituting ‘ministers’ for ‘department secretaries’; and retaining practically the entire ‘Bill of Rights,’ but renaming it ‘Duties and Rights of the Citizen’” (Ara, Reference Ara2015: 178). In addition, the 1943 constitution of the Second Philippine Republic further strengthened the powers of the executive, which according to Shiba Minoru, the Japanese judicial advisor to the Philippine’s JMA at the time, was because the “Japanese military authorities eagerly wanted to vest executive power on the president to facilitate the implementation of Japanese occupation policy” (Ara, Reference Ara2015: 178). While some members of the drafting commission objected to the near-dictatorial nature of the executive branch and undemocratic nature of the government under the new constitution, the final version retained the preoccupation American blueprint for government with an emboldened role for the president.Footnote ⁷¹

After the Japanese left, American colonial institutions for (limited) political representation, (diminished) democracy, and (imbalanced) separation of powers, carried over into the independent Philippines.Footnote ⁷² The enduring sinews of the 1935 commonwealth system and constitution ensured a strong executive office that undergirded the rise of presidential authoritarianism and patterns of political violence and bossism that would define Philippine politics into the second half of the twentieth century. The persistence of an overdeveloped executive branch further entrenched tensions between central and provincial authorities, while also aggravating the zero-sum nature of presidentialism and patronage-based electoral politics (Hutchcroft, Reference Hutchcroft1988; Sidel, Reference Sidel1999; Quimpo, Reference Quimpo2005).

3.2 What They Changed: Indirect Transmission

Many Western colonial institutions changed dramatically during the occupation. The experience of Burma’s national military illustrates how an existing British colonial institution was substantively transformed under Japanese tutelage and indirectly transmitted into post-occupation Burma.

During the early twentieth century, the British in Burma had established a colonial army that relied mainly on soldiers from India and recruits among Karen, Chin, and Kachin groups from Burma’s highland frontier areas.Footnote ⁷³ Although the British in 1937 began to incorporate Burmese members from the country’s lowland Irrawaddy Delta area, this ethnic majority group remained a quantitative minority within the colonial institution. The British Burma Army had narrow territorial reach beyond the capital of Rangoon, with practically no control over the countryside and limited channels for interacting with local populations. The British approach to organizing coercion in Burma at the time was to maintain a “skinny state” with limited contact with society and a colonial army with an imbalanced representation of ethnic groups in favor of the minority (Callahan, Reference Callahan2003: 22).

The Japanese did the opposite, giving official sanction to a Burmese-led armed force that reversed the ethnic imbalance. A key project along these lines was led by an organization with the Japanese army officer Suzuki Keiji at its helm called the Minami kikan, which according to Suzuki, was designed to “stir up disturbances throughout Burma in order to hamper the enemy’s operations and to induce the Burmese to cooperate wholeheartedly with Japan.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Tasked in February 1940 by the IGH with collecting intelligence on ways to close down the Burma Road, Suzuki consolidated the material nucleus and initial membership of the Minami kikan, which included around twenty-five Japanese officers from the army and navy, as well as thirty Burmese nationalist elites seeking to fight for independence from the British (Yoon, Reference Yoon1978: 249–251).Footnote ⁷⁵ The latter gained their first military training from Japanese instructors in mainland Japan, Hainan, and Taiwan, before eventually returning to what was still British-ruled Burma at the time. Led by Aung San, the “Thirty Comrades” or the Thakins, as they were associated with the Thakin Party, Dobama Asiayone, formally established the Burma Independence Army (BIA) in December 1941, which began with around two hundred Burmese recruits and would swiftly expand into a large-scale armed force throughout the country (Lebra, Reference Lebra1977: 62).Footnote ⁷⁶

Born as a Japanese-led volunteer army, the BIA evolved over the course of the occupation. A key promise that Suzuki had held out to the Thirty Comrades was that as soon as British rule in Burma was destroyed, the country would be fully independent, free of the Japanese as well. Initially, the hopeful BIA fought alongside the Japanese to first oust the British from the heartlands of Burma, and in the process, added more Burmese recruits, established a physical presence in territories beyond Rangoon in Central Burma and filled vacuums of lost British colonial governance with a decentralized system of administrative control, marking the first time in decades that “indigenous Burmans emerged as local state builders” (Callahan, Reference Callahan2003: 45).Footnote ⁷⁷ During the spring of 1942, the BIA marched northward into Upper Burma and the frontier areas to further expel the British, as an enlarged force with a Burmese majority of soldiers with shared experiences that contributed to an emboldened sense of group solidarity. The Japanese helped reinforce such ethnicity-based identifications within this coercive institution by appointing Burmese staff officers, while also inculcating Japanese-style military training and discipline, for instance, through the introduction of a Soldier’s Code in Japanese (Callahan, Reference Callahan2003: 55).

The BIA had many reincarnations. It became the Burma Defence Army (BDA) in July 1942. Fearing the BIA’s growing influence in the countryside, the Japanese officially disbanded it and relaunched it under this new name. The restructured BDA further fanned nationalist sentiments premised upon being ethnic Burmese among its members, not least because they were small in number (which facilitated a cohesive military corporate identity); the Japanese introduced an Officer Training School (which created more shared experiences of arduous training and socialization); and the BDA was placed under the purview of a War Office (heavily staffed by Burmese officers). In 1943, the BDA was renamed the Burma National Army (BNA) and then the Patriotic Burmese Forces (PBF) in July 1945 (Callahan, Reference Callahan2003: 74 and 95).

The longer the Japanese remained in occupied Burma, the clearer the hollowness of past promises for true independence became to Burmese nationalist leaders. Disillusioned, many began to turn against the Japanese and aligned with the British, who had been seeking to reestablish a foothold in Upper Burma and were recruiting among Kachin, Karen, and other non-Burmese groups to mobilize anti-Japanese resistance.Footnote ⁷⁸ In this process, a thorny question of how to manage the two groups within the same institution was resolved through a “Two Burma solution,” which agreed to recruit soldiers throughout Burma (which the British favored because it could bring in their minority allies), but establishing separate wings for Burmese versus non-Burmese soldiers.Footnote ⁷⁹ In making this possible, the institutional precedents of a “century-old British principle of colonial army organization: that of ‘class’ (i.e., ethnically homogenous) battalions” were drawn upon (Callahan, Reference Callahan2003: 94–96). This arrangement was formalized between the British and Burmese in September 1945, as the Japanese occupation came to an end.

After the Japanese left, the British returned and stayed until 1948. The Two-Burma solution would undergird the national military of independent Burma, a coercive institution that blended together vestiges of the preoccupation British colonial army with wartime Japanese and Burmese-driven initiatives, as well as those of the post-occupation British. Although it appeared as a balanced multiethnic institution, the two-wing, separate class battalion arrangement was divisive.Footnote ⁸⁰ And it soon became a source of explosive tensions both in the immediate wake of 1945 and for independent Burma in the form of civil war and separatist movements with enduring reifications of its ethnic and colonial origins, as well as the endurance of Burma’s military authoritarian regime, the longest surviving of its kind during the twentieth century (Callahan, Reference Callahan2003; Turnell, Reference Turnell2011; Slater, Way, Lachapelle, and Casey, Reference Slater, Way, Lachapelle and Casey2023).

***

Changes to Western colonial institutions were not limited to territories under direct Japanese military administration but also occurred where the Japanese formally recognized a foreign ruler’s sovereignty. The experience of Indochina under joint Vichy French and Japanese rule illustrates how, within the wartime occupation milieu of the region, local agents of the non-Japanese empire could also substantively reconfigure preoccupation institutions.

The “Youth of the French Empire” was an umbrella organization for Indochina’s many sports and scouting groups, charitable institutions and other initiatives for mobilizing youth, which was established in December 1941 (Raffin, Reference Raffin2005: 81).Footnote ⁸¹ At the time, the shadow of the Japanese imperial army loomed over the nominally French-ruled territory, under the purview of officers appointed by the Vichy-based fascist government of Philippe Pétain. Tasked with realizing Pétain’s political vision of a National Revolution – which stridently advanced conservative values of “work, family, and fatherland” to replace the Third Republic’s liberal, secular model of republicanism anchored in “freedom, equality, and fraternity” – Vichy officers stationed overseas in Indochina worked to translate and adapt metropolitan tenets to local political, cultural, and religious conditions, while also drawing upon and dramatically restructuring Indochina’s pedagogical institutions (Marr, Reference Marr1995; Grandjean, Reference Grandjean2004; Jennings, Reference Jennings2011; Namba, Reference Namba2012). To this end, the “Youth of the French Empire” served as a vehicle for inculcating new forms of patriotism, civic duty, and loyalty in the minds of the colonized through bodily discipline.

Stirring the hearts of colonized youth to serve an imperial nation was hardly a project unique to wartime Indochina.Footnote ⁸² What distinguished the Vichy French from the Third Republic was the former’s explicitly state-directed approach to moral education that aimed to build a “three-layered patriotism”: to France’s empire transnationally, the federation of Indochina regionally, and locally, the five countries (pays) of Laos, Cambodia, and Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina (the latter three of which comprise today’s Vietnam) (Raffin, Reference Raffin2005: 5).

Oversight of this project fell under the purview of a General Commissariat for Physical Education, Sports, and Youth, a position first filled by the French Navy Captain Maurice Ducoroy. Ducoroy introduced sweeping changes to the organization of extracurricular activities and schooling across the colony (Ducoroy, Reference Ducoroy1949). Over 1,100 new stadiums were built, alongside an explosive growth in the number of sports leagues, scout groups, and local youth assemblies; Ducoroy took especial pride in organizing the first Tour d’Indochine cycling race, which traversed across all five parts of Indochina and he also “sponsored a big footrace from Phnom Penh to Hanoi, each part of the federation contributing one hundred relay runners” (Marr, Reference Marr1995: 77–78). The Vichy trained new teachers for classrooms with revised curricula that prioritized physical exercise, hygiene, handicrafts, and choral singing. Such projects aimed at depoliticizing colonized subjects while countering the appeal of the Japanese, not least for fears that their rallying call for pan-Asian solidarity would spur anti-French resistance in Indochina (Marr, Reference Marr1995: 76–77). “In the context of the urgent necessity to distract the Indochinese from the Japanese ‘hype’ and knowing the extraordinary taste of Orientals for big festivals,” explained one Vichy administrator in Vietnam at the time, “I have sponsored sporting events on a federal scale which for months have occupied minds and have found considerable success with millions of enthusiastic and sometimes excited spectators” (Raffin, Reference Raffin2005: 78). In turn, locally stationed Japanese civilian and military personnel also organized “projects designed to convince Indochinese of Japanese superiority and the longer-term merits of participation in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and after the March 1945 coup, the new Japanese Governor’s assistant Iida was tasked with converting the infrastructures that Ducoroy had established into a paramilitary Vanguard Youth organization (Marr, Reference Marr1995: 81 and 133–136, quote from 81).

Local adaptations emerged. Compared with Vietnam where youth corps were organized centrally and trained under the watchful eye of authorities like Ducoroy, Cambodia’s youth corps and scout movements were organized more indirectly under the purview of King Sihanouk, who fostered a royalist form of local nationalism that appealed to people’s allegiance toward the monarchy through activities that “promoted Angkor and the Khmer kings of yore as the embodiment of Cambodge’s past grandeur and future promise” (Edwards, Reference Edwards2007: 232). In Laos, the Lao Nhay movement – created in 1941 under the direction of Charles Rochet, the director of public education for Laos – did not directly mobilize youth through new organizations, but rather focused on cultural, identity building activities, “language formation, redefined political borders, and emotional appeals through songs and hero glorification.” (Rochet, Reference Rochet1946; Raffin, Reference Raffin2005: 133–141, quote from 135). Sports leagues and youth organizations were relatively weaker in Laos, where Rochet focused more attention to restoring monuments and organizing festivals.

Religion played a central role in wartime youth mobilization projects. Agents of both France’s wartime empire and that of Japan favored religions that were seen as embracing hierarchical views of society that could generate obedience and submissiveness to state authority.Footnote ⁸³ Ducoroy’s office ordered the restoration of the temples of Confucius in Vietnam and revived the festival of Van-Thanh, while in Cambodia, the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh became a busy site for state-sponsored religious festivals (Keyes, Reference Keyes, Keyes, Kendall and Hardacre1994: 47–51). The Japanese adopted similar approaches to harnessing the appeal of indigenous religions that they perceived as sources of authentic values in Indochina (Werner, Reference Werner1981; Tran, Reference Tran1996). For instance, the Japanese built ties with leaders of the Cao Dai Church, a syncretic religion strong in southern Vietnam that blended precepts and practices from Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Christianity, while Cao Dai workers and youth received basic military training from IJN personnel (Marr Reference Marr1995, 83–84).

Well after the occupation ended, projects for mobilizing youth and religion in Indochina under Vichy French and Japanese rule would continue to influence the colony’s long road to independence from the returning French as well as postcolonial nation-building endeavors. In Vietnam, wartime schools for youth cadres and instructors strengthened the Viet Minh during the First Indochina War (1946–1954) by supplying manpower and organizational tactics as well as a leadership with shared training experience in Vichy-sponsored youth corps.Footnote ⁸⁴ After independence, Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) initially revived Ducoroy’s approach to centralizing control over youth corps, scout movements and recreational activities, while espousing a vision of a National Revolution reminiscent of Pétain’s in ways that summoned civic duty, sacrifice, and public service ethos.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Cambodia, King Sihanouk would build the Royal Khmer Socialist Youth, which “bore the legacy of the Vichy youth initiative,” while in Laos, wartime institutions for mobilizing youth and religion were instrumentalized by competing forces seeking to politicize the Sangha monks to advance their political causes (Raffin, Reference Raffin2005: 219).Footnote ⁸⁶ The wartime institutions that at once drew upon and reconfigured the French colonial past would leave uneven and lasting imprints.

3.3 What They Created: Non-Transmission

The Japanese occupation was a time of dark creativity during which deeply troubling yet innovative solutions to problems of military governance were introduced across Southeast Asia. Territories once formally divided under multiple Western powers became interconnected through projects for organizing the movement of people under a single Japanese empire.

Against the backdrop of European and American colonial rule, new institutions emerged for transferring men and women to places of Japanese military need across Southeast Asia. The rōmusha, a category of coerced and quasi-coerced laborers, were tasked with manual work building infrastructures for wartime defense and transportation. Although deeply exploitative labor regimes in the service of American, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese colonial interests were already a preoccupation fixture throughout Southeast Asia, what the Japanese introduced anew was a form of centrally coordinated transnational mobility.Footnote ⁸⁷ For instance, between September 1942 and October 1943, the Japanese sent approximately 90,000 rōmusha from Burma and 78,000 from Malaya, and smaller numbers of laborers from Java and Indochina to help build the Siam-Burma “Death” Railway – 400 km of train tracks and 600 bridges, connecting Rangoon to Bangkok – that enabled the IJA to send weapons and manpower to fight land campaigns against the Allied forces (Nakahara, Reference Ara2015: 252; Melber, Reference Melber2016: 169–170). New transnational mobilities also defined the heiho, a category of auxiliary soldiers created by the Japanese.Footnote ⁸⁸ A man from Malaya, summoned to serve as a heiho, found himself first plunged into the depths of the Malay jungles (where he was tasked with “cleaning up” after the 16th Army’s attacks on British soldiers and Chinese communists) and then sent to Burma (where he helped dig trenches for the Victoria airfield and managed paperwork for people crossing the border with Thailand, stamping their forms).Footnote ⁸⁹

Transnational arrangements for satisfying the labor appetites of the IJA also included those exploiting and enslaving women for sexual labor. The Japanese wartime empire’s system of “institutionalized rape,” euphemistically called the comfort women system, linked Southeast Asia to East Asia through the forced transfer of women from earlier occupied parts of the Japanese empire to military brothels in Southeast Asia for purposes of sexual slavery.Footnote ⁹⁰ As early as February 1942, the Southern Army General Command asked the Taiwan Army to “dispatch as soon as possible fifty native comfort women to Borneo” (Nakahara, Reference Nakahara2001: 583); women from Taiwan as well as Korea and China entered so-called comfort stations throughout today’s Brunei, Sarawak, and Malaysia serving officers, soldiers, guards, and staff at Japanese army garrisons and internment camps.Footnote ⁹¹ Korean “comfort women” were found in Burma – from the outskirts of Rangoon to the oil refining town of Syriam (today’s Thanlyin) – as well as in Thailand and Singapore (Morris-Suzuki, Reference Morris-Suzuki2015: 3 and 7). While it is difficult to ascertain the total number of women recruited and transferred throughout the occupation period, historians exploring available records and oral testimonies recognize “the huge geographical extent of the ‘comfort station’ network and of the vast distances over which many women were transported” (Morris-Suzuki, Reference Morris-Suzuki2015: 5). Such trans-regional flows of forced female sexual labor went alongside the movement of Southeast Asian “comfort women” within the region: notable but hardly exclusive flows included women moving from Malaysia to Thailand and Burma – as Nakahara Michiko’s powerful essay illustrates through the figure Ms. X, a Muslim Malay woman “who was taken with her husband to a construction site of the Burma-Siam Railway … [and was] used as a sex slave in the camp” – and from Java to Borneo and East Timor.Footnote ⁹² While military brothels had been familiar establishments in Southeast Asia under European and American colonial rule, the Japanese occupation ushered in novel forms of centrally coordinated pan-Asian connectivity.

Money also knitted together Southeast and East Asia together in unprecedented ways. The Japanese issued military currencies throughout occupied territories, endeavoring to build a quasi-yen bloc in Southeast Asia, which drew upon precedents from occupied China (Nakamura, Reference Nakamura, Duus, Myers and Peattie1996: 185). Into 1942, nearly all European banks across Southeast Asia were shut down and the Japanese sought to integrate hitherto separate monetary systems across the region.Footnote ⁹³ Scrip was issued initially by the military and eventually by the Southern Regions Development Bank, which along with the Yokohama Specie Bank and the Bank of Taiwan, served as Tokyo’s key vehicle for centralizing control over banking throughout occupied territories (Huff, Reference Huff2020a: 86–88). Banana plants adorned the notes for Malaya and Indonesia; pagodas were drawn on Burmese notes, which the Japanese referred to as kyat, a reference to the “old Burmese name for the silver coins issued by King Mindon … of course, the name was deliberately employed to make the new ‘currency’ more acceptable, and a gesture to the fiction that the Japanese had arrived as liberators from colonialism” (Turnell and Bradford, Reference Turnell and Bradford2009: 5).

Many institutions for colonial military governance across occupied Southeast Asia were learned not only from territories under Japanese rule, but also other Axis-aligned countries or metropolitan Japan. For instance, in Java and the Philippines, Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Korps served as a model for ordering cultural life. During a tour of Europe in 1940, Yamashita Tomoyuki had admired what he saw as effective ways of winning the hearts-and-minds of people through the uses of art, music, and widespread dissemination of information (Mark, Reference Mark2014: 1184). At the time, the IJA was already confronting the limitations of its propaganda scheme in China, which relied on an internal Broadcast and Pacification Unit with limited public reach.Footnote ⁹⁴ Ethan Mark’s (Reference Mark2014) penetrating study of the Java Propaganda Squad shows how writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, dramatists from Japan were recruited to design a culture for mass consumption aimed at summoning the patriotic passions of the Indonesian people. In the Philippines, the propaganda squad similarly brought in a diverse group of civilians to tame popular sentiment in ways adapted to local conditions.Footnote ⁹⁵ Radio broadcasts of Domei-dispatched news in English, Tagalog, Spanish, Japanese, and later in Visayan were made (Terami-Wada, Reference Terami-Wada1990: 289). Projects aimed at persuading enemy soldiers to surrender also emerged, with the propaganda squad issuing leaflets denouncing racial discrimination by Americans against Filipino men in uniform, stoking national pride and memories of the Philippine Revolution, appealing to sentimental and sexual desires, nostalgia, as well as by issuing so-called armistice tickets and organizing “good will” missions to assure people in the provinces of normalcy in the capital (Terami-Wada, Reference Terami-Wada1990: 292–299).

Imported from metropolitan Japan, neighborhood associations called tonarigumi became a fresh fixture in many parts of Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁹⁶ As a state-directed institution for clustering ten to fifteen households into a collective unit, the Japanese government had used tonarigumi during the late 1930s to mobilize manpower among its own citizens and organize local defenses against air raids as well as to improve the efficiency of supplying materials to the government and distributing controlled goods. As the empire expanded, this metropolitan institution was extended to Southeast Asia; under the oversight of JMA administrators, members of each collective unit shared responsibility for recruiting labor, collecting foodstuff and war materials as well as mutual surveillance of neighbors.

The role of on-site officers of the Japanese imperial military establishment as conduits for the local adaptation of borrowed foreign or metropolitan Japanese institutions is well-illustrated by agricultural settlements in today’s Malaysia. In 1943, the Japanese relocated at least 300,000 people from Singapore to rural areas in the Malay peninsula in order to build enclaves for self-sufficient food production. This official project was part of a larger initiative to restructure the Malayan economy amidst wartime exigencies. Inflation was rising; the Allied forces were planning a blockade, which would only worsen an already dire food shortage. Politically as well, it made sense from the Japanese perspective to “remov[e] local residents (with their suspect loyalties) to sites that were unlikely to become major battlefields.”Footnote ⁹⁷ There were many agricultural settlements, divided generally along ethnic lines. For instance, the Chinese would move to Endau in Johor (called New Syonan), the Eurasians to Bahau in Negeri Sembilan (called Fuji-go, or Fuji village), and the Malays and Indians to the Riau Islands.Footnote ⁹⁸

A Japanese officer named Shinozaki Mamoru, with the Welfare Department of the Singapore Municipal Administration, was central to the design of such institutions. His orders came from higher authorities in the IJA’s headquarters that ordered local officials in Japanese-occupied Singapore to stabilize the colony. In turn, according to Shinozaki, “[t]he new mayor [of Singapore] placed the burden of the evacuation squarely on my shoulders. ‘You organize it,’ he said” (Shinozaki, Reference Shinozaki1975: 80). Shinozaki had certain precedents in mind. Wartime evacuations of city populations in Tokyo to live with up-country relatives were already ongoing in Japan; and he was familiar with “the story of how Marshal Balboa of Italy had forced Italians to emigrate to the Libyan desert before World War Two” (Shinozaki, Reference Shinozaki1975: 80).

However, occupied Syonan was neither Tokyo nor Italy. “My job,” recalled Shinozaki, was “to force thousands of Syonans to emigrate to Malaya immediately,” unlike the Italian evacuation, which had taken two years. Also, most residents of occupied Singapore did not have kinship ties outside of the city (unlike those in Tokyo). The solution, he decided, was to work through local elites. Shinozaki summoned well-respected leaders from the major ethnic communities to serve as liaisons and create quasi-official organizations, such as the Overseas Chinese Association (OCA) and Eurasian Welfare Association (created in 1942) (Shinozaki, Reference Shinozaki1975: 64).

Endau hosted the largest settlement, large stretches of land carved out of the deep jungle in the shape of a giant bowl (Shinozaki, Reference Shinozaki1975: 85). It received a first wave of 200 Chinese settlers on December 21, 1943 who began cultivating Formosan rice and table vegetables. By the end of 1944, the recorded number of inhabitants rose to 12,000 (Shinozaki, Reference Shinozaki1975: 85). The Japanese treated Endau as an autonomous zone under OCA leadership, which included the influential Straits Chinese leader Lim Boon Keng, that oversaw local administration, policing, and fundraising to sustain the settlement.Footnote ⁹⁹ Swiftly, the Chinese-run enclave gained a tool shop, a paper factory, a sawmill, a school, a bank, barbers, pawnshops, pharmacies, restaurants and hotels, as well as streets with bright gas lights. Entertainment was spare, recalled one former resident, “unless there [was] a special day like for instance, Chinese New Year; they would bring the Chinese wayang [theatre performance] over, Chinese wayang from Singapore … on [a] special day like Emperor’s birthday, a film unit did come out from Singapore to show propaganda films. They put a truck and they got a school hall, they rent the school hall to show the films from 8.00 [pm] to 11.00 pm, and one Chinese film.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The transient economic and social life of Endau settlement ended as a failed project of wartime management. Rice production never reached levels of self-sufficiency, not least because few settlers knew how to grow rice and everyday social order broke down due to attacks from anti-Japanese resistance forces, most often members of the MPAJA (Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army). When the Japanese left, Endau Settlement’s infrastructures were abandoned, just as quickly as they had been erected.Footnote ¹⁰¹