The Pangs of Empire

OCCUPIED ASIA

In one way, Korea is the Austria of Asia: it was the first country overrun and exploited by the Asiatic aggressor. In other ways the parallel fails. The Japs are far more afraid of Korea than the Nazis are of Austria. To the Japanese, the Koreans are "inscrutable," as the Japanese themselves are to westerners. Ever since Japan took Korea in 1904, its Korean policy has wavered between uneasy placating and frantic terrorism. Grapevine news reaching the Korean National Front Federation in the U.S. last week showed quite clearly that Japan, however busy it might be elsewhere, could not turn its back on inscrutable Korea for a moment.

On Quelpart Island, off the Korean peninsula's southern tip, the Japs had an air base. In March--according to last week's reports--Korean workers suddenly attacked the base, set fire to four underground hangars, destroyed two big fuel tanks and 69 airplanes, killed 142 of the Jap crew and wounded or scorched another 200. Trembling with rage and fright, the surviving Japanese butchered every Korean on the island, some 400 in all.

This was not an isolated incident. It followed reports of other Korean uprisings--power plants dynamited, warehouses, mills, bridges, ammunition supplies, fishing boats and tankers destroyed or damaged, police stations overwhelmed, Japanese houses burned. The rumble of some of these doings reached the Chinese mainland. The Japs explained that it was just a big earthquake. Seismologists in the U.S. found nothing to confirm the claim.

Other news of Co-Prosperity, from Japanese and non-Japanese sources.

In Malaya the Japs set up monopolies in salt, tobacco, matches. To get more money, they sold chances on a million-yen lottery to the Malays. At Singapore, a college of colonial administration was established for aspiring Jap administrators. Also opened in Singapore was a tourist bureau extolling the beauties of Nippon.

In the Philippines the Japs burned to the ground the national library at Manila, ordered expunged from all textbooks any mention of the U.S., Great Britain, democracy or Anglo-Saxon culture. Eight Filipinos were executed for printing and distributing anti-Japanese pamphlets.

In the Dutch East Indies Japanese-language schools were opened, and the Japs announced that already Indonesian traffic policemen were giving orders in Japanese. All "aliens" (Europeans) aged 17 or over were required to register and make a declaration of loyalty to the Son of Heaven. The fee charged for the privilege of making this declaration was 250 guilders to men, 80 guilders to women. All European-owned land was confiscated. Two Hollanders accused of "spreading rumors based on false radio news" were executed.

China. The Jap grew daily more fierce in the occupied provinces of China. Bloodcurdling stories of mass massacres seeped out of newly occupied Chekiang Province. In the northern Hopei-Shantung-Shansi triangle the Japs tried a scorched-earth policy of burning out villages and frightening civilians from whom guerrilla bands receive food and shelter. But in Shanghai the Japanese had been busy trying to make the Chinese like their puppet government.

To find out how well seduction had worked, they sampled public opinion by flashing the faces of various notables on cinema screens. A cinema audience at Blood and Sand was startled when the comely faces of Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth were snatched off the screen and a portrait of the late great Dr. Sun Yat-sen appeared. After a bewildered moment, the audience applauded. When the face of Chiang Kai-shek appeared, the Chinese went wild with joy. Next, Puppet Wang. No go. Boos and hisses.

Everywhere the Japs struggled to redeem the scorched earth left by departing saboteurs. One refugee guessed that so many wells had been wrecked in Burma and the Indies that another six months would go by before the Japs had oil in sufficient quantities. Another estimated that to redrill all the ruined wells would take 18% of Japan's steel production.

Fifty-five ships had been scuttled in Batavia harbor, the Japs themselves announced. They said that "50 days of hard work" had opened the harbor to ships of 10,000 tons or less. In Surabaya harbor they were raising 219 scuttled ships, at the rate of one a day.

The Japanese were glutted with rubber, spices, tin--far & away more than they could use. The Japs now hold 7,500,000 of the world's 8,400,000 rubber-growing acres, many of them unscorched. Of this mountain of rubber they can put, at the most, about 15% to work. The Germans might use some of it, if there were any means of getting it to them.

The Japs are so eager to dispose of their rubber and tin surpluses that, according to one account, they are thinking of trying to sell them, through South American intermediaries, to a well-heeled onetime customer, the U.S.

Everywhere Jap propaganda told the natives how much better off they were now than under white rule, and everywhere the natives looked back on white rule as paradise lost. With occidental markets for their produce cut off, they were thrown out of work by the hundreds of thousands. They starved and grumbled. They saw their rice being snatched for other parts of the "Co-Prosperity Sphere" (i.e. Japan), with Japanese greed heightened by subnormal crops at home. A Japanese problem was to find enough ships to carry the loot.

There was no reason to believe that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was already tottering. It was simply rickety. It would not stand up to a real good earthquake.

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