Greater East Asia Conference


The Greater East Asia Conference was an international summit held in Tokyo from 5 to 6 November 1943, in which the Empire of Japan hosted leading politicians of various component parts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The event was also referred to as the Tokyo Conference.
The conference addressed few issues of substance, but was intended from the start as a propaganda show piece, to convince members of Japan's commitments to the Pan-Asianism ideal, with an emphasis on their role as the "liberator" of Asia from Western imperialism.

Background

Since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, people in the Asian nations ruled by the "white powers" such as India, Vietnam, etc. and those that had "unequal treaties" forced upon them like China and Korea had always looked to Japan as a role model, the first Asian nation that had modernised and defeated a European nation, Russia, in modern times. Throughout the 1920s-30s, Japanese newspapers had always given extensive coverage to the racist laws meant to exclude Asian immigrants such as the "White Australia" policy; the anti-Asian immigrant laws by the U.S. Congress in 1882, 1917, and 1924; and the "White Canada" policy together with reports about how Asians suffered from prejudice in the United States, Canada, Australia, and European colonies in Asia. Most Japanese at the time seemed to have sincerely believed that Japan was a uniquely virtuous nation ruled over by an emperor who was a living god, and thus the font of all goodness in the world. Because the emperor was worshiped as a living god who was morally "pure" and "just", the self-perception in Japan was that the Japanese state could never do anything wrong as under the leadership of the divine Emperor, everything the Japanese state did was "just". For this reason, Japanese people were predisposed to view any war as "just" and "moral" as the divine Emperor could never wage an "unjust" war. Within this context, many Japanese believed it was the "mission" of Japan to end the domination of "white" nations in Asia, and free the other Asians suffering under the rule of the "white powers". A pamphlet titled Read this Alone-and the War Can Be Won issued to all Japanese troops and sailors in December 1941 read: "These white people may expect, from the moment they issue from their mothers' wombs, to be allotted a score or so of natives as their personal slaves. Is this really God's will?". Japanese propaganda stressed the theme of the mistreatment of Asians by whites to motivate their troops and sailors.
Starting in 1931, Japan had always sought to justify its imperialism under the grounds of Pan-Asianism. The war with China, which began in 1937, was portrayed as an effort to unite the Chinese and Japanese peoples together in Pan-Asian friendship, to bring the "imperial way" to China, which justified "compassionate killing" as the Japanese sought to kill the "few trouble-makers" in China who were alleged to be causing all the problems in Sino-Japanese relations. As such, Japanese propaganda had proclaimed that the Imperial Army, guided by the "emperor's benevolence" had come to China to engage in "compassionate killing" for the good of the Chinese people. In 1941, when Japan declared war on the United States and several European nations which possessed colonies in Asia, the Japanese portrayed themselves as engaging in a war of liberation on behalf of all the peoples of Asia. In particular, there was a marked racism to Japanese propaganda with the Japanese government issuing cartoons depicting the Western powers as "white devils" or "white demons", complete with claws, fangs, horns, and tails. The Japanese government depicted the war as a race war between the benevolent Asians led by Japan, the most powerful Asian country against the Americans and Europeans, who were portrayed as sub-human "white devils". At times, Japanese leaders spoke like they believed their own propaganda about whites being in a process of racial degeneration and were actually turning into the drooling, snarling demonical creatures depicted in their cartoons. Thus, Japanese Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka had stated in a 1940 press conference that "the mission of the Yamato race is to prevent the human race from becoming devilish, to rescue it from destruction and lead it to the light of the world". At least some people within the Asian colonies of the European powers had welcomed the Japanese as liberators from the Europeans. In the Dutch East Indies, the nationalist leader Sukarno in 1942 had created the formula of the "Three A's": Japan the Light of Asia, Japan the Protector of Asia, and Japan the Leader of Asia.
But for all their talk about creating a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere where all the Asian peoples would live together as brothers and sisters, in reality as shown by a July 1943 planning document titled An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus, the Japanese saw themselves as the racially superior "Great Yamato race", which was naturally destined to forever dominate the other racially inferior Asian peoples. Prior to the Greater East Asia Conference, Japan had made vague promises of independence to various anti-colonial pro-independence organisations in the territories it had overrun, but aside from a number of obvious puppet states set up in China, these promises had not been fulfilled. Now, with the tide of the Pacific War turning against Japan, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supporters of the Pan-Asian philosophy within the government and military pushed forward a program to grant rapid "independence" to various parts of Asia in an effort to increase local resistance to the Allies and trigger the latter's return and to boost local support for the Japanese war effort. The Japanese military leadership agreed in principle, understanding the propaganda value of such a move, but the level of "independence" the military had in mind for the various territories was even less than that enjoyed by Manchukuo. Several components of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were not represented. In early 1943, the Japanese established the Ministry of Greater East Asia to conduct relations with the supposedly independent states of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".
American historian Gerhard Weinberg writes about the establishment of the Greater East Asia Ministry: "This step itself showed that the periodic announcements from Tokyo that the peoples of Asia were to be liberated and allowed to determine their own fate were a sham and were so intended. If any of the territories nominally declared to be independent were in fact to be so, they could obviously be dealt with by the Foreign Ministry, which existed precisely for the purpose of handling relations with independent states". Korea and Taiwan had long been annexed as external territories of the Empire of Japan, and there were no plans to extend any form of political autonomy or even nominal independence. Vietnamese and Cambodian delegates were not invited for fear of offending the Vichy French regime, which maintained a legal claim to French Indochina and to which Japan was still formally allied. The issue of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies was complex. Large portions were under occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army or Imperial Japanese Navy, and the organisers of the Greater East Asia Conference were dismayed by the unilateral decision of the Imperial General Headquarters to annex these territories to the Japanese Empire on May 31, 1943, rather than to grant nominal independence. This action considerably undermined efforts to portray Japan as the "liberator" of the Asian peoples. Indonesian independence leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta were invited to Tokyo shortly after the close of the conference for informal meetings, but were not allowed to participate in the conference itself. In the end, seven countries participated.

Participants

There were six "independent" participants and one observer that attended the Greater East Asia Conference. These were:
Strictly speaking, Subhas Chandra Bose was present only as an "observer", since India was a British colony. Furthermore, Thailand sent Prince Wan Waithayakon in place of Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram to emphasise that Thailand was not a country under Japanese domination. He was also worried that he might be ousted should he leave Bangkok. Tōjō greeted them with a speech praising the "spiritual essence" of Asia, as opposed to the "materialistic civilisation" of the West. Their meeting was characterised by praise of solidarity and condemnation of Western imperialism, but without practical plans for either economic development or integration. As Korea had been annexed by Japan in 1910, there was no official Korean delegation to the conference, but a number of leading Korean intellectuals such as historian Choe Nam-seon, novelist Yi Gwangsu, and children's writer Ma Haesong attended the conference as part of the Japanese delegation to deliver speeches praising Japan and to express their thanks to the Japanese for colonising Korea. The purpose of these speeches was to reassure other Asian peoples about their future in a Japanese-dominated Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The fact that Choe and Yi had once been Korean independence activists who had been bitterly opposed to Japanese rule made their presence at the conference a propaganda coup for the Japanese government, as it seemed to show that Japanese imperialism was so beneficial to the peoples subjected to Japan that even those who once been opposed to the Japanese had now seen the errors of their ways. The Korean delegates also spoke passionately against the "Western devils", describing them as the "most deadly enemies of Asian civilisation that had ever existed", and praising Japan for its role in standing up to them.