From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Japanese writers commonly contrasted Western depravity with Japan’s selflessness. The American-educated poet Yonejiro Noguchi, who fell out with his friend Tagore in the 1930s, published a poem in 1944 rejecting his earlier obeisance to Western ideals as profoundly mistaken:

  America and England in the old days were for me countries of Justice:

  America was the country of Whitman,

  England the country of Browning:

  But now they are dissolute countries fallen into the pit of wealth,

  Immoral countries, craving after unpardonable dreams.6

  Soh summed up the larger rationale for the war that many Japanese sincerely believed in: ‘We must show to the races of East Asia that the order, tranquility, peace, happiness, and contentment of East Asia can be gained only by eradicating the evil precedent of the encroachment and extortion of the Anglo-Saxons in East Asia.’7

  In this programme of eradication, Japan succeeded beyond the most garish militarist fantasy. In about ninety days, beginning on 8 December 1941, Japan overran the possessions of Britain, the United States and the Netherlands in East and South-east Asia, taking the Philippines, Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies, much of Siam and French Indochina, and Burma with bewildering swiftness to stand poised at the borders of India by early 1942. There are few examples in history of such dramatic humiliation of established powers.

  As it progressed, the war also set new standards in brutality. Beginning with the skirmishes in Manchuria in 1931, it lasted for much longer, and was bloodier, than the Second World War in Europe, claiming 24 million lives, including 3.5 million Indians who died in the famine of 1943. It had its own abominations too, such as the killing of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanjing; atrocities of slave labour, torture and mass rape became commonplace across a broad geographical region.

  Revenge for decades of racial humiliation motivated many Japanese in the battlefield. A pamphlet distributed to troops on the eve of the Asian war was titled ‘Read This Alone – and the War Can Be Won’: ‘These white people may expect, from the moment they issue from their mothers’ wombs, to be allotted a score or so of natives as their personal slaves. Is this really God’s will?’8

  The photograph of the Japanese general brusquely demanding the surrender of the commander of British forces in Singapore was widely circulated. This rough treatment was one of the signs that Japan was no longer going to observe the protocol it had accorded to defeated enemies in its pre-1914 wars against China and Russia. As one of the Japanese colonels put it, ‘At the time of the Russo-Japanese War we worshipped the West, but now we are doing things in the Japanese way.’9

  The Japanese set up friendly regimes across almost all of occupied Asia as part of their blueprint for a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which placed Japan at the centre of countries which each had a differing political status. The big words were often meant to give cover to old-style imperial exploitation of local resources with the assistance of native collaborators. Military commanders single-mindedly pursuing war objectives treated local populations with great brutality, making a mockery of the popular slogan ‘Asia for Asians’. What seemed benign forms of imperialism gave way to pure plunder as the war progressed, and Japan’s situation worsened. In Burma, a local uprising by Japan’s own protégés eventually challenged Japanese control of the country.

  Yet many Japanese officials brought sincerity and determination to the liberation of Asia, actively boosting nationalist movements in Burma and Indonesia, besides galvanizing anti-Western feeling in countries such as India, with Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the Indian National Army (INA) against the British briefly becoming the most popular anti-imperialist icon in his country. Colonel Suzuki Keiji, a staff officer at the Imperial General HQ in Japan, who helped train young Japanese in foreign-language schools and was the crucial contact for Asian freedom fighters in Japan, was genuinely motivated to advance what he called ‘racial movements of coloured people against their European masters’. Often called Japan’s Lawrence of Arabia, Suzuki encouraged radical young nationalists such as Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, even before the Second World War erupted in Asia.

  The Japanese trained the first generation of postcolonial Burmese leaders on the island of Hainan. In Malaya, the nationalist journalist Ibrahim bin Haji Yaacob (1991 – 79) set up the League of Malay Youth with Japanese help, and then assisted in Japan’s invasion of the British-held peninsula. In Java, the Japanese promoted young nationalists such as Sukarno (1902 – 70), later Indonesia’s first president. As early as 1904 the Egyptian nationalist Mustafa Kamil had predicted that the Japanese, extending their empire to the Dutch colonies, would be warmly welcomed by his fellow ‘Easterners’ in Java.10 So it happened: the Japanese were initially greeted with enthusiasm in many parts of Indonesia that had previously been under the iron heel of the Dutch.

  As in Vietnam where they discouraged the use of French, the Japanese granted official recognition to the Malay language. During the long occupation from 1942 to 1945, groups of highly motivated and romantic young nationalists in Malaya, Burma and Indonesia, often supported by the Japanese, began to articulate the sense of national community. Before the war, this process was stunted in places like Burma and Indonesia, where, for instance, there was no substantial local bourgeoisie to underpin nationalist politics and the Dutch had easily squashed the smallest steps towards an anti-colonial mass movement by exiling or incarcerating its nascent leaders. In that sense, the Japanese invasion, which placed budding native elites into positions of prominence and power, was the turning point for local nationalisms across East Asia.

  In April 1943, the ‘liberation of Asia’ became Japan’s official war objective; later that year, the Greater East Asia Congress in Tokyo revealed that pan-Asianism was more than a Japanese fantasy.11 Jawaharlal Nehru had spoken often of how ‘we feel as Asiatics a common bond uniting us against the aggression of Europe’.12 Writing from a British prison in 1940, just seven years away from India’s freedom from colonial rule, Nehru said, ‘My own picture of the future is a federation which includes China and India, Burma and Ceylon, Afghanistan and possibly other countries.’13

  In Tokyo, Subhas Chandra Bose, surrounded by adoring Indian students, described the congress as a ‘family party’ where all the guests were Asians.14 The Philippines’ ambassador to Japan claimed that ‘the time has come for the Filipinos to discard Anglo-Saxon civilization and its enervating influence … and to recapture their charm and original virtues as an oriental people’.15 The Burmese leader Ba Maw (1893 – 1977) felt the ‘call of Asiatic blood’.16 ‘We were Asians,’ he later recalled, ‘rediscovering Asia.’17

  Ba Maw later said that the congress of 1943 created the spirit that then went into the Bandung Conference of 1955, where some of Asia’s greatest leaders gathered and subsequently formed the Non-Aligned Movement. What energized this spirit in the 1940s most vigorously was the discovery of European weakness. The slow, frustrating efforts of al-Afghani, Liang Qichao and other first-generation intellectuals and activists across Asia – all those many periodicals with tiny circulations, and late-night conversations in dingy rooms – were finally bearing fruit. The Japanese had revealed how deep the roots of anti-Westernism went, and how quickly Asians could seize power back from their European tormentors.

  Shortly before Singapore fell to the Japanese in early 1942, the Dutch prime minister in exile, Pieter Gerbrandy, spoke to Churchill and other Allied leaders:

  Our Eastern peoples were, for the greater part, still subject to racial instincts and inferiority complexes. The Japanese slogan ‘Asia for the Asiatics,’ might easily destroy the carefully constructed basis of our cultural synthesis … Though a lengthy Japanese occupation of important parts of the Pacific Territories might not necessarily turn the final victory of the Western powers into virtual defeat, it would at least prove a formidable obstacle to a real peace in the Far East. Japanese injuries and insults to
the White population – and these were already being perpetrated by the detestable Asiatic Huns – would irreparably damage white prestige unless severely punished within a short time.18

  This was a shrewd prophecy. After a long and hard struggle, the Japanese were finally ‘punished’, fire- and nuclear-bombed into submission, realizing the dark premonition Tagore had in Japan in 1916 that ‘nations who sedulously cultivate moral blindness and the cult of patriotism will end their existence in a sudden and violent death’.19 Still, in most countries they occupied, the Japanese deeply undermined the European power that kept the natives in a permanent state of submission.

  The Europeans returned to their former colonies in a state of shock and incomprehension; and their first impulse was to circle the wagons. In Vietnam, the commander of French forces, Philippe Leclerc, who had taken part in the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944, warned that ‘any signs of weakness or lack of agreement [among the Allies] would play the game of the Japanese and lead to grave consequences for the future of the white races in Asia’.20 Racial and cultural solidarity were also high in the minds of the British generals who tried, with the help of Indian soldiers, to restore French rule over Vietnam, and hold Indonesia for the returning Dutch colonialists.

  However, everywhere they came up against the new communal identities forged during the long war, when the Europeans were absent or slaving in prison camps. Japanese victories over European powers had crystallized a sharp political awareness among many Western-educated Asians. Soon after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Nehru had spoken of how it had diminished the feeling of inferiority that many of his compatriots suffered from. Two decades after Japan’s defeat in 1945, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s long-serving prime minister, recalled similar lessons freshly learnt by the post-Second World War generation of Asians:

  My colleagues and I are of the generation of young men who went through the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation and emerged determined that no one – neither the Japanese nor the British – had the right to push and kick us around. We were determined that we could govern ourselves and bring up children in a country where we can be proud to be self-representing people. When the war came to an end in 1945, there was never a chance of the old type of British colonial system ever being recreated. The scales had fallen from our eyes and we saw for ourselves that the local people could run the country.21

  Even the Japanese were forced to recognize this sentiment as in a mostly empty gesture they accorded a measure of self-rule to Burma in 1943. In Indonesia in August 1945, they made a show of accepting Sukarno’s declaration of independence, which came two days after Japan’s surrender to Allied Forces. Accustomed to deferential natives, European powers mostly underestimated the post-war nationalism that the Japanese had unwittingly or deliberately unleashed. They also misjudged their own staying power among populations unremittingly hostile to them. This led to many disastrously futile counter-insurgency operations and full-scale wars, many of which still scar nations across Asia.

  Nevertheless, the speed of decolonization was breathtaking. Japan’s conquest of Asia had sapped British will to hold on to India; a catastrophic partition of the subcontinent marked Britain’s half-panicked departure in 1947. Burma became free in 1948, after many an injury and insult to the white population. The Dutch in Indonesia resisted, but Indonesian nationalists led by Sukarno finally threw them out in 1949. Post-war chaos plunged Malaya and Singapore into prolonged insurgencies, but the British withdrawal was never in doubt.

  In 1951, arguing his case for the nationalization of Iran’s British-run oil industry at the United Nations, Mohammad Mossadegh spoke of how the Second World War had changed ‘the map of the world’. ‘In the neighbourhood of my country,’ he said, ‘hundreds of millions of Asian people, after centuries of colonial exploitation, have now gained their independence and freedom.’ Speaking of countries that had ‘struggled for the right to enter the family of nations on terms of freedom and equality’, the Iranian prime minister asserted that ‘Iran demands that right’. He received a tremendous ovation. Even Taiwan, ushered into the UN through the back door by the United States, was moved to remind the British that ‘the day has passed when the control of the Iranian oil industry can be shared with foreign companies’.22

  Two years after this speech, which is still remembered in Iran, Mossadegh was toppled by an Anglo-American coup. Iran would be made to wait longer – and fight harder – for its right to enter the family of nations on terms of equality, like many other Asian countries. Propped up by the United States, French colonialists persisted in fighting a guerrilla war with Ho Chi Minh’s popular Viet Minh. They struggled for nine years, losing their protectorates, Cambodia and Laos, in the process. The comprehensive defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 brought the most powerful country in the world – the United States – into Indochina. But this only bloodily prolonged the inevitable. The United States continued to maintain bases in the Philippines and Japan, projecting a formidable military power across the Pacific. But the last stubborn Western illusion in Asia – the conviction that brute power would provoke obedience and compliance from the natives – was shattered in 1975 with the disorderly retreat from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. Four years later, Iranians overthrew their pro-American despot, storming the American embassy in Tehran and taking the occupants hostage in another symbolic destruction of Western influence over their country.

  By then Japan, economically resurgent under an American security umbrella, had long been in retreat from its pan-Asian ambitions. And the new confrontations of the Cold War in Asia obscured the fact that Japan had changed much of Asia for ever – economically as well as politically. The prominent Malay nationalist Mustapha Hussain spoke for many Asians when he said that, ‘Although the Japanese occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender.’23 In that sense pan-Asianism was important not in what it did for Japan but in what it allowed others to do, and in the unintended consequences that flowed from Japan’s actions, starting with its defeat of Russia in 1905.

  INTELLECTUAL DECOLONIZATION: THE RISE OF NEO-TRADITIONALISTS

  Writing after the end of the war in Asia, a grudgingly self-critical Tokutomi Soh compared Western powers to cormorants that ‘dived into the water and caught fishes big and small’. Japan followed suit, he added, ‘but failed to catch any fish and drowned herself’. Soh attributed Japan’s folly to the fact that

  the history of Japan from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the early half of the twentieth century was not of her own [making] but closely interwoven with that of the world. It shows that Japan was constantly imitating what the senior powers had done, though she might have been clumsy in playing her part compared with the other powers. There is a Japanese saying, ‘People ruin themselves by trying to ape their betters.’24

  But the saying was also applicable to the European imitators of Britain and France. In the twentieth century, the previous century’s logic of expansion for the sake of resources and territory led to new rivalries. Thinkers as varied as Nehru, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt were to observe how by the 1930s, the barbarities inflicted on native populations in Asia and Africa – concentration camps, poison gas attacks, systematic murder – were transplanted to the heart of Europe, and unleashed on Europeans themselves during the search for Lebensraum. However bitter, Tagore couldn’t have been more prescient in warning against the ‘special modern enthusiasm for Western progress and force’: the kind of modernization that inevitably led to a sad mimicry of Western imperialism.

  We have for over a century been dragged by the prosperous West behind its chariot, choked by the dust, deafened by the noise, humbled by our own helplessness, and overwhelmed by the speed. We agreed to acknowledge that this chariot drive was progress, and that progress was civilization. If we ever ventured to ask ‘progress towards what, and … for whom?�
�� it was considered to be peculiarly Oriental … [yet] of late, a voice has come to us bidding to take count not only of the scientific perfection of the chariot but of the depth of the ditches lying across its path.25

  Tagore may seem to be one of the many Western-educated intellectuals trying to find a way to claim moral superiority over their colonial masters, even as they conceded political and economic defeat. ‘The spell of white prestige,’ Kakuzo Okakura had exhorted fellow Asians in 1904, ‘must be completely broken that we may learn our own possibilities and resources … History must be written so presenting our past glories and our present woes that every student shall burn with the longing to avenge and save.’26 This meant that the greater the scale of humiliation by the West, the more intense was the desire to posit an idealized image of the East. Nevertheless, Tagore and Liang Qichao represented a strong early trend, still visible today, of Asian intellectuals defining Western modes of politics, economics, science and culture as inhumanly utilitarian.

  Liang Shuming was typical in his critique of two tendencies of Western culture: individual self-interest, which he claimed both liberal democracy and communism shared, and the Faustian will and hunger for knowledge of nature, which had produced modern science but had also created the Machine, which, following Gandhi (whom he admired), Liang termed the ‘devil of the modern world’.27

  This critique of modernity was widely shared in Asia, often by liberal intellectuals, Islamic modernists and Marxist revolutionaries as well as traditionalists. Growing out of a shared experience of Western domination, it not only responded to the common set of dilemmas posed by the global ascendancy of Western cultural, political and economic norms, but it also rephrased the questions raised by Western philosophers for hundreds of years: What is the good life? What is the nature of authority and of justice and equality? What binds an individual to society? This rephrasing put these questions into a broader human perspective. As Tagore wrote: