My travels on the littoral of the South China Sea, where I am a guest, have brought me in confrontation (again) with the legacies of Japanese atrocities in East and Southeast Asia during World War 2.
In one particular instance I have been trying to make sense of a type of traumatic bonding between Japan and the Philippines, apparently on the side of the US, which is preparing for its next war, probably against the people of China.
The US has about 130 military installations in Japan and nine in the Philippines. It’s easy to have someone agree with you, I guess, when you have a gun pointed at their head. Or, as Nietzsche once wrote, “whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth”. Never mind.
A week ago, I was sitting on a rock watching the waters of the South China Sea break on Pantai Cahaya Bulan on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. This was the spot, almost exactly, where Japanese soldiers landed on December 8 1941 and began their invasion and occupation of Malaya.
A very conventional account of the Japanese occupation between 1942 and 1945 details the ways the Japanese military carried out brutal atrocities that devastated local communities across Malaya. Local people were subjected to widespread violence, systemic sexual slavery, forced prostitution, mass rape and plunder.
In another theatre of Japanese cruelty during World War 2, the Philippines, the Japanese army force marched an estimated 75,000 prisoners of war over 105km. On the Bataan Death March thousands of people died from heat, physical and mental torture and starvation. Captives on the death march received little to no food or clean water. They were beaten and stabbed, and their weakened immune systems led to widespread malaria, dysentery and severe dehydration.
Some captives were beheaded when they could not keep up with the march. One account detailing such a beheading was by US Lt-Col William Dyess, who survived the death march. His account, published by the New York Times in February 1944, was cold and blunt, and touched with the almost de rigueur racist references about Japanese people.
“Before we could grasp what was happening, the black-faced giant had swung his sword. There was a swish and a kind of chopping thud, like a cleaver going through beef. The captain’s head seemed to jump off his shoulders. It hit the ground in front of him and went rolling crazily from side to side between the lines of prisoners.”
Still in the Philippines. On November 23 1944, Japanese troops invaded the Central Luzon district of Mapaniqui. After torturing and killing many local villagers, Japanese soldiers forced women and girls to march towards the Bahay Na Pula (Red House), where the soldiers were based. For weeks on end, they were repeatedly beaten, raped and abused.
The Japanese had established “sexual slavery facilities” (like the Bahay Na Pula) across many of the countries they invaded and occupied. Japanese cruelty reached its apex with the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, where 300,000 civilians and soldiers were killed in a six-week frenzy of murder, torture, rape, arson and looting.
The battles in those theatres have moved from the somatic. They are, now, battles against remembering. The Japanese government refuses to be held fully accountable, notwithstanding the conclusions of the Tokyo Trials regarding Japanese atrocities, and even celebrates some of the villains of the piece.
For instance, Hideki Tojo, a key architect of Japan’s aggression in Asia, remains revered despite having been sentenced to death for war crimes and executed by hanging in December 1948.
Then there is the curious case of a type of trauma bonding between Japan and the Philippines, inspired by their alliance with the US. I’m not sure if it is completely appropriate — this bonding typically occurs between persons — but deployed here it refers to a kind of attachment (by the Philippines) to its former abusers, Japan and the US, for that matter.
The two countries traded places in invading and occupying the Philippines. This attachment has been shaped over decades by cycles of fear, violence, abuse and reward on the part of the US. Under these conditions it somehow becomes possible for the Philippines, as victim, to side with its former abusers.
Then again, it all goes back to power and submission; it’s easy to have someone agree with you when you have a gun at their head, or you have an estimated 80,000 people attached to the US military on your land, as do the Japanese on Okinawa.
- Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank and the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
Business Day
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