No region has been so deeply shaped by the external forces of the various big powers of the world as Southeast Asia. In Asia such forces are China, India, and Japan; beyond Asia are Europe, the United States, and some countries of the Middle East. Unlike the Western powers, Japan’s serious interest in Southeast Asia started as late as the mid-1930s and the Japanese occupation of only three and half years was rather short lasting. Yet its political and social impacts were so profound that Southeast Asia was tremendously and suddenly reshaped. Even today the Japanese legacy remains a source of public controversy both in East and Southeast Asia. Unlike China’s interaction with Southeast Asia, which was dominated, at least in modern times, by elements from below through massive migration (beyond government control) from the Southeastern China coast, Japanese relations with Southeast Asia were characterized, coerced, and implemented from above by the imperial establishment. For the field of professional Japanese history, the book under review is an important contribution to the better understanding of Japan and Southeast Asia in the colonial and postcolonial world. For outside readers who have no access to Japanese publications, this book by Ken’ichi Goto, a leading historian of Southeast Asian at Waseda University, is a welcome account balanced between the Japan-centric approach and the Allied viewpoints of the West.

Rather than a monographic study as originally projected, Tensions of Empire is a collection of articles written mainly in the 1990s and the early part of this century. Yet the book is well-structured and amazingly integrated as a cohesive whole. In line with the time frame, Goto begins with the changing Japanese perceptions of Southeast Asia in the prewar 1930s and ends with Japanese views of the occupation of Southeast Asia in the postwar period up to the 1990s. Centering on the thematic linkage of Japan and Southeast Asia, Goto contextualizes his presentations within the wider settings of international hegemony on the one hand and the Japanese Northward Advance in East Asia on the other. The book consists of twelve chapters and is divided into “three sets of understandings of the war and occupation, those of the Japanese, the Allied powers, and the countries of Southeast Asia” (p.xxii). Specifically, Goto focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia. Going a step further, Goto grounds his book in a cluster of well-structured case studies at various levels, such as Portuguese Timor, key Japanese and Southeast Asian elites, student associations and training programs, and decolonization. Special attention is paid to the actions of ordinary people on both sides, but not viewed as a conflict fought against enemies. As Paul Kratoska beautifully summarizes in the introduction

The present volume makes no attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the period, or of Japan’s relations with Southeast Asia as a whole. Rather, it offers insights into relations between Japan and Southeast Asia at various levels and at different times between the 1930s and the postwar era. The author says little about the large issues that drove the conflict – Japan’s need for natural resources and outlets for trade, the struggle to control large parts of East and Southeast Asia, and the clash of ideologies – but focuses instead on individuals, looking at the ideas that motivated them, the goals they hoped to achieve, and the success or failure that attended their efforts. The essays discuss famous figures of the period, including Tōjō Hideki, Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta, Ba Maw, and Jose P. Laurel, but also consider the lives and activities of Southeast Asian students in Japan before and during the war, and of ordinary Japanese in Southeast Asia. The author is often critical of the Japanese, highlighting hypocrisy and betrayals on the part of various officials, overly ambitious plans, failures to understand or respect the peoples and cultures of Southeast Asia, and racial arrogance, but he also shows something of the thinking that lay behind Japanese actions as well as the relentless logic of the situation. (p.xx)

Until 1936, Japanese foreign policy had been dominated by the Northward Advance, in which the neighboring countries of Korea and China were the top priority. Hence in Southeast Asia, even on the eve of the war, the Japanese community was relatively small, less than 50,000 people in total, and more than half was concentrated in the Philippines. This is in a sharp contrast with the immigrant communities of Chinese and even Indians. And unlike Japanese immigrants in East Asia, who often had official backgrounds, most Japanese in Southeast Asia came “from the lower strata of Japanese society: prostitutes, farmers, fishermen, commercial immigrants, and workers who labored at various industrial sites” (p.10). The author argues that following the southward-advance policy of 1936, when Japan first showed serious interest in Southeast Asia, Japanese perceptions were dominated by “the concepts of political dominance and complementary economic relations and a sense of cultural supremacy. More concretely, Japan viewed Southeast Asia as an area possessing great wealth in the form of unexploited resources that Japan needed, as a region politically suffering under the harsh rule of Western colonialism, and as an area where the people had only reached a very low stage of cultural development” (p.23).

In the context of Western colonial rule in Southeast Asia and of the Japanese quest for equal treatment in the Western family, the relationship between Japan and Southeast Asia was very complex, characterized by alternating cooperation, suppression, submission, and resistance. Or, as Goto characterizes them, “the two parties were in the same bed with different dreams” (p.79). This was typically manifested both in the perceptions of Tōjō Hideki, concurrently Japanese prime minister and war minister, and in the strategies of the Southeast Asian local elites highlighted here. It therefore resulted in the different patterns of Japanese rule in Southeast Asia during World War II: joint administration with the former colonial state in French Indochina; alliance with the nominally independent state of Thailand; and direct military governments for the rest of Southeast Asia.

Goto continues to examine such patterns of relations in depth in subsequent case studies of student associations and exchanges in prewar and wartime Japan, the Sumarang Incident/Battle, the story of the Japanese “Abdul Rahman,” and the decolonialization process. It should be pointed out that, due to the author’s own expertise, most case studies are concentrated on Indonesia, which consists of about six chapters and 60 percent of the content of the volume. Nevertheless, such sharp though imbalanced focus on the specific Japan-Indonesia relationship seems to complement the overall Japan-Southeast Asia coverage.

Although Japan justified its occupation of Southeast Asia in terms of Asianism and liberation from the Western colonialism and emphasized the existing cultural, ideological, racial, and colonial conflicts “between Asia and Europe, of colored people versus white, and of non-Christian nation versus Christian” ( p.11), Goto’s argument, throughout the volume, reflects the fact that

the true purpose of the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia was to control the whole of the region because it was a major source of the raw materials and human resources needed to carry out Japan’s war aims. The liberation of Southeast Asia from Western colonial rule was only a façade used to lend respectability and legitimacy to this effort. Some of the measures taken in Southeast Asia during the occupation incidentally did prove beneficial, but that was only incidental, and due respect must be given to the political skills and social capabilities of the occupied peoples, who used the opportunities created by the Japanese invasion to further their own national interests (p.291).

Tensions of Empire is a well-written and solid piece of scholarship grounded in formidable research. Goto has admirably mastered the skill of narrative; his account delivers highly readable clarity within a sophisticated structure. It touches upon various fields of interests, including Japan, Southeast Asia, East Asia, international relations, colonialism, decolonialization, and nation-building and should be of interest to a wide range of readers.

Wu Xiao An is associate professor in the Department of History, Peking University. He is the author of Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882-1941, which was published by RoutledgeCurzon in 2003. He can be reached at wu2@pku.edu.cn.

Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 8 (March 2007)
© Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University