Studies of the Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2019. xi, 288 pp. (Tables, map, B&W photos.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-3554-7.
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (GEACPS), the mercurial vision Japan created for a new kind of regional order, was little more than war and oppression coated in Japan’s imperial dream. Yet, Jeremy Yellen’s study demonstrates that the political elite in Burma and the Philippines shrewdly employed Japan’s imagined Co-Prosperity as weapons to wield against not only their white masters but Japan itself. They thus transformed Japan’s imperial rhetoric into a broader process of decolonization. Yellen presents a different narrative of the demise of Japan’s empire (206) and makes an important contribution to World War II studies.
In part I, Yellen delineates how widely the intent and implementation of Co-Prosperity varied depending on the leaders, planners, and intellectuals involved. When the Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke announced the idea in 1940, he attempted to pursue the sphere-of-influence diplomacy vis-à-vis the Anglo-American powers (chapter 2). Once the Pacific War began and Japan’s military campaign ousted the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia, various brain trusts and research institutes embarked on a project to give an “altruistic” meaning to the sphere such as a new “moral order” and a new system of international law. Under the Tōjō administration, the nature of GEACPS shifted several times. For example, the sphere was crafted into an “organic, hierarchical bloc economy” which expedited exploitation of others by Japan as well as promised regional development (84–85, 88). By 1943, as the war situation became dire, Japan added to the concept of the Co-Prosperity Sphere “a more cooperative and liberal internationalist vision for the region’s future” (102) to counter the Allied propaganda of the Atlantic Charter. Yellen interprets this shift as an opportunistic use of “liberal internationalist value in the service of empire.” However, the Allied nations also did so in a similar manner (165–166).
In the confluence of these unprincipled isms, the Filipino and Burmese leaders saw a chance for their post-war ambitions. In part II of the book, Yellen argues that José P. Laurel, Ba Maw, and other leaders who opted to endorse the Co-Prosperity Sphere were not merely Japan’s collaborators but patriots. They were able to leverage Japan’s rhetoric for their liberation from all imperial rulers—be it Japan or Anglo-America. In chapter 6, Yellen shows how the “patriotic collaborators” in the Philippines and Burma actively used the Co-Prosperity Sphere’s implementation for their state-building projects. Their endeavors included the creation of new governmental institutions; economic, diplomatic, and defense establishments; and the training of local leaders and future bureaucrats. During a period of what many Filipinos viewed as sham independence, the Laurel regime strove to create a foreign policy establishment and began training its diplomatic establishment (188, 202). It also created a central bank with the hope of taking control over the country’s economy.
Yellen offers a symbolic picture of the collapse of the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Burma. In June 1945, following the British recapture of Rangoon, the Burma National Army paraded to celebrate their liberation from Japanese rule. Much to the chagrin of British onlookers, they did so in full Japanese-style military garb through the streets like the Japanese soldiers. Yellen argues that “local leaders took what they could from Japan, using the Co-Prosperity Sphere for anticolonial ends” (200). However, there was an ironic twist to their perfidy. Japan still benefited from their state building because “bequeathing independence was part and parcel of attempts to showcase Japanese benevolence” and a propagandist’s dream (201).
In conclusion, Yellen touches on the ghosts of Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere, which continued to haunt Asia long after the war. As Yellen quotes Shinobu Seizaburō’s argument, there were two Pacific Wars—one that was a war of empires and another being an anticolonial war fought by occupied territories in Southeast Asia (207). Although Japan lost both wars, the concept of Co-Prosperity did not die. After the war ended, the media in the US lamented in response to the nationalistic surge across the South East that the slogan “Asia for the Asiatics” appeared to have won. Then, by the fall of 1949, the US State Department discussed the need to “get Japan back into the old Great East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere” to assist Japan’s industrial rehabilitation and make it a stable US buffer in the Cold War. Precisely because the notion of the Co-Prosperity Sphere was a “moving target” (208) and because the name sounded appealing (more so than the German slogan Lebensraum), it could be employed and manipulated by different people at different times even after World War II.
To attain a more comprehensive view of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, it is desirable to study and compare China and Manchukuo, the Dutch East Indies, and India on multiple levels of analysis. Precisely because the Co-Prosperity Sphere was overpromising, it remains difficult to discern which parts of it remained mere fantasies or became realities in what manners to whom. New works are emerging in Japan that investigate the convoluted relations the regional leaders had with Japan under the Co-Prosperity Sphere and their impact on Asian development after World War II. Studies on Wang Jingwei and other leaders in Japan-occupied territories in China are burgeoning to gauge their overall impact on the Chinese Civil War. There is also growing literature on the role of white Russian collaborators in Manchukuo as cultural intermediaries between Russia and Asia. The place of Islam in the Co-Prosperity Sphere is another area of growing interest. Takeshima Yoshinari’s latest work, DaiTōA Kyōeiken no “Dokuritsu Biruma” (“Independent Burma” in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; Tokyo: Minerva Shobō, 2020) is noteworthy in that it discusses both Japanese compromise and appeasement as well as atrocity and injustice in Burma. Yellen’s study is a welcome step toward a fuller understanding of GEACPS led by international scholars on a truly global basis.
Yukiko Koshiro
Nihon University, Mishima