Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

• 1. Introduction

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  The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was one of the most ambitious and cynical political projects of the twentieth century. Japan's Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita coined the name on the 29th of June 1940, giving a radio address that rebranded an earlier proposal into something vast and ideologically charged. The declared aim was pan-Asian solidarity, freedom from Western colonialism, economic self-sufficiency, and a coalition of Asian races working together against imperial exploitation. The reality was something else entirely. A secret government document, An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus, laid out Japan's actual position without ambiguity: the other nations of Asia existed beneath Japan, not beside it. Japanese spokesmen openly described the Sphere as a device for the "development of the Japanese race." What remains to be understood is how this contradiction between rhetoric and practice shaped every corner of the project, from the conference halls of Tokyo to the railway lines of Burma.

• 2. A Monroe Doctrine for Asia

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  In the autumn of 1872, United States minister to Japan Charles DeLong told General Charles LeGendre that he had been urging Japan to occupy Taiwan and "civilize" the Taiwanese indigenous people, just as the U.S. had done with Native Americans. LeGendre, the first non-Japanese person hired as a foreign policy advisor by the Japanese government, went further. He encouraged Japan to declare its own sphere of influence modeled on the Monroe Doctrine, adding that if the peoples of Asia resisted, Japan should "exterminate them or otherwise deal with them as the United States and England have dealt with the barbarians." Japan began invading Taiwan in 1874 and fought Russia for control of Manchuria starting in 1904.

  President Theodore Roosevelt later privately reiterated the same message. He envisioned separate American and Japanese zones of military and economic dominance across the Pacific Rim, told the Japanese they were racially closer to Americans than Russians were, and encouraged Japan to take its place among the great powers by dominating Korea and Manchuria, with one condition: Japan must not touch the Philippines. This mutual recognition was secretly encoded in the Taft-Katsura Agreement of July 1905, partitioning the Western Pacific between the two powers.

  Prime Minister Katsura, speaking to the press shortly after, described Japan's regional ambitions as being in "exact accord" with England and the United States, and pledged to force upon Korea and China "the same benefits of modern development" that had once been forced upon Japan. The language of civilizing and developing weaker neighbors, which Japan had absorbed from its contact with Western powers, would flow directly into the propaganda architecture of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

• 3. Propaganda and Contradiction

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  "Asia for the Asiatics" was the slogan, but its application was far more selective. Japanese propaganda pamphlets were dropped by airplane over the Philippines, Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, Singapore, and Indonesia, urging local populations to join the movement. Multi-lingual leaflets depicted many Asians marching or working together in happy unity, with flags of all member states and a map of the intended sphere. Mutual cultural societies were founded in every conquered territory, designed to ingratiate Japanese administrators with local populations and to replace English with Japanese as the common language.

  A network of Japanese-sponsored film production and exhibition companies spread across the empire, collectively referred to as the Greater East Asian Film Sphere. These centers mass-produced shorts, newsreels, and feature films encouraging Japanese language acquisition and cooperation with colonial authorities. The booklet Read This and the War is Won, distributed to the Japanese Army, presented Western colonialism as an oppressive elite living in luxury by burdening Asians. Because racial ties of blood connected other Asians to the Japanese, the argument went, Japan was uniquely positioned to "make men of them again."

  In Thailand, a street was constructed as a physical demonstration of Co-Prosperity progress, filled with modern buildings and shops. The buildings turned out to be false fronts. The gap between presentation and substance was not incidental; it was the structure of the entire enterprise. When the Greater East Asia Conference convened in Tokyo on the 5th and the 6th of November 1943, the delegates spoke in English, the common language among representatives of an ostensibly Japanese-led bloc. Their gathering produced speeches praising Asian spiritual values and condemning Western colonialism, but no practical plans for economic development or integration.

• 4. The Conference in Tokyo

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  Seven delegations arrived in Tokyo for the November 1943 conference: Hideki Tojo of Japan, Zhang Jinghui of Manchuria, Wang Jingwei of China, Ba Maw of Burma, Subhas Chandra Bose of the Provisional Government of Free India, Jose P. Laurel of the Philippines, and Prince Wan Waithayakon as envoy from Thailand. It was referred to both as the Greater East Asia Conference and the Tokyo Conference.

  Tojo greeted the assembled heads of state with a speech contrasting the "spiritual essence" of Asia against the "materialistic civilisation" of the West. The rhetoric of solidarity and anti-colonialism dominated the proceedings. But there were no military representatives present, so the conference carried no military value. And the leaders in the room were not there as equals: in practice, the representatives of the attending countries were neither independent of Japan nor treated as its peers.

  Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, who served in that role during 1941-1942 and again in 1945, had been candid about the endpoint. If Japan succeeded in building the Sphere, it would emerge as the undisputed leader of Eastern Asia, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere would become synonymous with the Japanese Empire itself. The conference made this structural reality vivid: Bose's Free India had no actual territory; Laurel's Philippine Republic operated under Japanese tight control declared only in October 1943; Wang Jingwei's China was a puppet state. The Wilsonian rhetoric and pan-Asian framing, applied simultaneously, was designed to improve Japan's international image. It served that purpose, but only partially.

• 5. Economic Reality in the Philippines

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  As Stanley Karnow writes, Filipinos "rapidly learned as well that 'co-prosperity' meant servitude to Japan's economic requirements." A Taglish joke circulating during the occupation proposed renaming the Sphere "prosperity-ko," since ko is a pronoun meaning "mine."

  The Japanese Army had planned to transform the Philippine islands into an agricultural base for its industry. Japan held a surplus of sugar from Taiwan and faced a severe shortage of cotton, so planners decided to convert sugar lands to cotton cultivation. The scheme collapsed: there were no adequate seeds, pesticides, or technical skills to grow cotton on those fields. Jobless farm workers flooded into cities where there was minimal relief and few jobs. The army also attempted to use cane sugar as fuel, castor beans and copra for oil, Derris as a quinine substitute, and abaca for rope. Each attempt ran into the same obstacles: limited skills, collapsed international markets, bad weather, and transportation shortages. The program delivered almost nothing to Japanese industry and diverted resources away from food production.

  Living conditions throughout the Philippines deteriorated sharply during the war. Transportation between islands was constrained by fuel shortages. Food became scarce, and sporadic famines combined with epidemic disease to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Japan formally declared the Philippines an independent republic in October 1943, but the Second Philippine Republic under President Jose P. Laurel proved ineffective and unpopular under such tight Japanese control that independence was a legal formality with no practical weight.

• 6. The Scale of Planned Conquest

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  In December 1941, the Research Department of Japan's Ministry of War completed a document known as the Land Disposal Plan in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was assembled with the consent and direction of War Minister, and later Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo. Its territorial ambitions were extraordinary: the plan projected Japanese control or influence across virtually all of East Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and substantial portions of the Western Hemisphere, including South America and the eastern Caribbean.

  The plan divided future territories into two groups. One group would be governed directly by Japan or incorporated into it. A second group would become tightly controlled pro-Japanese vassal states on the model of Manchukuo, nominally independent but answerable to Tokyo. Among the territories envisaged for direct Japanese governance were Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, Alaska, the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, Alberta, and Washington state. Australia and New Zealand were specifically designated to accommodate up to two million Japanese settlers. Plans for Hawaii even considered re-establishing the defunct Kingdom of Hawaii on the Manchukuo model, given that the local Japanese community had constituted approximately 43 percent, around 160,000 people, of Hawaii's population in the 1920s.

  The Government-General of Central America would have covered Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, among others. Japan's proposed boundary with Nazi Germany's Lebensraum was plotted along the 70th meridian east longitude, running from the Arctic estuary of the Ob River southward to just east of Khost in Afghanistan and into the Indian Ocean just west of Rajkot in India. Parts of the plan depended on Axis victory and negotiations with Germany; no formal agreement on dividing the Western Hemisphere was ever reached.

• 7. Collapse and Reckoning

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  The Co-Prosperity Sphere collapsed with Japan's surrender to the Allies in September 1945. Ba Maw, the wartime head of state of Burma under Japanese sponsorship, offered one of the most direct post-mortem assessments. "The militarists saw everything only from a Japanese perspective," he wrote, "and, even worse, they insisted that all others dealing with them should do the same. For them, there was only one way to do a thing, the Japanese way; only one goal and interest, the Japanese interest; only one destiny for the East Asian countries, to become so many Manchukuos or Koreas tied forever to Japan. This racial impositions... made any real understanding between the Japanese militarists and the people of our region virtually impossible."

  Ba Maw went further, arguing that Japan had missed a genuine historical opportunity. If Japan had proclaimed and actually acted on "Asia for the Asiatics" from the start of the war, he contended, no military defeat "could then have robbed her of the trust and gratitude of half of Asia or even more." Willard Elsbree, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio University, examined the nationalist movements that did emerge during the period, some of which cooperated with Japan to a degree, and concluded that the Japanese government and these nationalist leaders never developed "a real unity of interests between the two parties," and that there was "no overwhelming despair on the part of the Asians at Japan's defeat."

  The human cost inside the Sphere was severe. Under Japanese occupation, an estimated 100,000 Burmese and Malay Indian laborers died constructing the Burma-Siam Railway. A cabinet member's directive on occupied economies was unambiguous: "There are no restrictions. They are enemy possessions. We can take them, do anything we want." Japanese politician Nobusuke Kishi had announced via radio broadcast, upon the conquest of Southeast Asian territories, that vast resources were now available for Japanese use. Within a few years, those resources, the labor, the oil, the agricultural output, had largely failed to sustain the war effort that the Sphere was designed to fuel.