Aim: What long-term effects did World War II have on Asia?

Pacific War: Key Events

• 1931: Invasion of Manchuria

• 1937: Invasion of China

• 1939: Japan skirmishes with Soviet troops on Siberia/Manchuria border

• 1940: Japanese troops enter Vietnam (French Indochina) to halt shipments of supplies to Nationalist Chinese government

Pacific War: Key Events• 1941: US embargoes all exports of scrap iron

• 1941: Japan signs alliance treaty with Germany, Italy (the “Axis”)

• 1941: US embargoes iron, steel, oil shipments, freezes Japanese assets in US (naval blockade)

• 1941: Britain, Dutch embargo all oil shipments

With only a two-year supply of petroleum, Japan either had to give up the war in China or secure its own sources of supply.- Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy

Did the United States “provoke” war by denying Japan access to natural resources?

Possible reasons for embargo:• Japan had simply been too aggressive -

entry into Vietnam was “last straw”• US was fearful that Japanese imperialism

would displace European imperialism and threaten US interests

• President Roosevelt was looking for an excuse to enter WWII - needed to provoke an attack

1910: Japan occupies Korea

1931: Manchuria 1937: China

Chinese Communists’ “Long March”

Japan in China:

Communists and

Nationalists fight the

Japanese - and each

other

1941-42: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; seizes Malaya, Burma, Indonesia, Philippines, Indochina

From “Draft Plan for the Establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”

“Western individualism and materialism shall be rejected and a moral worldview… established. The ultimate object to be achieved is not exploitation but co-prosperity and mutual help… not a formal view of equality but a view of order based on righteous classification, not an idea of rights but an idea of service…”

Note the Confucian undertones; Japan as the “Big Brother”

War in the

Pacific: Japan gets

pushed back

Independence in Southeast

Asia: Indonesians

declare independence in 1945, win it from Dutch in

1949

Independence in Southeast

Asia: Philippines -

granted in 1946

Independence in Southeast

Asia: Vietnamese

declare independence in 1945, win it from French in

1954

Hiroshima

How will western and local ideologies be reconciled in post-war Japan -

and in all post-independence colonies?

Western individualism and materialism shall be rejected

and a moral worldview established

The ultimate object to be achieved is not exploitation

but co-prosperity and mutual help

Not a formal view of equality but a view of order based on righteous classification

Not an idea of rights but an idea of service

Japan under American occupation (1945 - 52)

• Beginning of the American “World Order”• Was the atom bomb dropped in order to

prevent “sharing” Japanese occupation with the Soviets?

• US occupiers allow the Emperor to remain, but write the Japanese constitution – a second attempt to reconcile “Japanese-ness” with “western-ness”