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Module 7
The Japanese Interlude
From 1941 to 1945 the Philippines was under Japanese rule. After bombing
the American Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor at dawn of December 8, 1941, (December
7, Hawaiian time), the Japanese Imperial Forces came to conquer the Philippines.
On December 9, they blasted the American planes of Clark Air Base in
Pampanga and Iba Air Fields in Zambales.
On December 10, they destroyed the American naval base of Cavite, near
Manila.
On December 21, the Japanese major invasion forces under the command of
Lt. General Masaharu Homma landed in Lingayen, Pangasinan.
While in December 24 another heavy contingent of Japanese forces landed in
Atimonan and Mauban, Quezon.
On April 9, 1942, the main Filipino-American forces surrendered Bataan, and
went over to Corregidor Island for their last defense.
On May 6, 1942, Lt. General Jonathan Wainright and 11,000 soldiers, mostly
Americans, gave up Corregidor, with the Japanese now becoming supreme in
the Islands. The Filipino guerillas in the hills remained the only armed forces
of resistance.
Imperialist Goals
To understand Japan’s conquest of the Philippines, one has to go back a little
to history.
In the 19th century the capitalist nations of Europe and the United States
competed among themselves to capture the markets and raw materials of the
underdeveloped countries.
Their imperialist incursions are very clear in the very names imposed on the
conquered countries—
o Belgian Congo o British West Indies
o Portuguese Guinea o French Indochina
o Spanish Morocco o German East Africa
o Dutch East Indies
By the end of the 19th century, only Japan, Thailand, and China remained as
sovereign nations in Asia. Even China had certain parcels of its territory under
foreign control.
Japan was also an object of imperialist cravings.
On July 8, 1853 Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy
came to Japan with an imposing naval squadron. Perry forced the then
reigning Tokugawa regime to open up in part the Japanese market to US
finished products.
Following the American lead, the Western nations one by one extracted
concessions from the hapless Tokugawa. Among others, the Japanese
government could no longer set its own tariff levels to protect its own goods,
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nor could it judge, much less punish foreign nationals within certain areas of
Japan.
To save Japan from foreign economic and military strangulation, a new set of
leaders came over to topple the Tokugawa regime, setting up the so-called
Meijii era from 1863 to 1912. The new leaders reasoned, the only way to save
Japan from the capitalist powers was to make Japan a capitalist power itself.
They saw industrialization as the only way to provide Japan with the economic
wealth and the military power to withstand Western imperialist challenge.
But industrialization led Japan inevitably to expansionism or imperialism.
For, in the first place, it has to be taken into account that the capitalism then
installed in Japan included as one of its pillars the feudal landlords, thereby
making it impossible for landed estates to be liquidated and transformed into
cash for capital.
To get the needed capital for industrialization there was no alternative but to
give the share tenants lesser share of the crops, saving the rest of the money
for the setting up of factories and machineries.
The workers of Japan’s factories on the other hand, were given low wages, in
accordance with the same plan of saving as much as possible for the
capitalization of factories and industries.
In this situation where the Japan masses — peasants and workers – were
poor and, therefore, unable to constitute a viable consumer market for the
products of Japan’s factories, how could Japan’s industrialization progress to
the point of rivaling, or being at par with, the capitalist giants like England and
the United States? For Japan’s ruling class, the only remedy lay in the military
conquest of other nations, whereby these nations would be made captive
markets for Japan’s processed goods.
o The remedy was imperialism
o It is to be borne in mind that Japan is a country poor in natural
resources, and therefore short of raw materials. But to become a big
capitalist power on par with the mightiest powers of the world, it was
imperative that these raw materials be had in abundance. And what
better way of having these in abundance than by conquering the
nations that had them.
Thus we see how Japan as early as 1894 attacked China, and after a war of
18 months took prize for victory a sizeable indemnity in money, the fertile
island of Taiwan, and Chinese withdrawal from Korea.
In 1904, Japan declared was on Russia, whose eastward expansion had
brought it to the shores of the Japan Sea. All the world was astounded when
the Japanese defeated the Russians, capturing in 1904 the impregnable
fortress city of Port Arthur (Dairen) in Russian-held Manchuria, as well as
shattering a little later the entire Russian Baltic Fleet just as it was nearing the
end of a troubled six-month journey from St. Petersburg. The victory made
Japan the master of Korea and Manchuria. Russia also cede half of the island
of Sakhaiin.
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In the 1930s, Japan warred one again against China. Realizing that China,
more unified now under Chiang Kai-shek than at any other time in its history,
was challenging Japanese economic interest in Manchuria which was rich in
iron and coal deposits, Japanese military leaders thought the time was ripe for
a total conquest of China.
In July 1937 Chinese and Japanese forces clashed near Peking and within a
year the Japanese captured almost all the sizeable cities, except Chungking
where the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek remained until Japan’s
defeat in 1945.
But Japan was not content with China.
In September 1940, Japan took over Indochina, taking advantage of the
weakened Vichy France.
For the Western imperialist nations this was the last straw. The United States
could not tolerate further Japanese expansion in Asia, that threatened US
hegemony in the Pacific. The United States retaliated by instituting a crippling
economic blockade of Japan, particularly scrap iron and oil. With the blockade
and the refusal of the Dutch and the Soviets to sell oil to Japan, Japan was
faced with the prospect of being economically choked to death. Rather than
be crippled and die, Japan chose to fight, thereby starting World War II in the
Pacific.
Japan’s Economic Incursions in the Philippines
Japan’s economic penetration of the Philippines started long before World
War II.
In 1907, Kyosaburo S. Ohta formed the Ohta Development Company, which
rented public lands in Davao, and planted them with hemp. Japanese
investments in hemp grew, especially with the demand of hemp in World War
II.
By 1935, Japanese business accounted for 80 percent of the hemp
production of Davao, which was 48 percent of the country’s total production.
The Japanese also engaged in deep-sea fishing, obtaining by 1930 about 90
percent control of the industry, including dummy operations.
There were also Filipino dummy concessionaries in chrome iron and
manganese mines as well as in local manufacturing firms that were
subsidiaries of Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo.
The Japanese also had a retail network of hundreds of bazaars all over the
country.
The extent of Japanese landholdings on the eve of World War II could be
gleaned from the fact that no less than 231,700 hectares of Japanese
agricultural lands, mostly located in Davao, were confiscated, and transferred
by the Americans to the Philippine government at the end of the war.
With the coming of the Japanese Imperical Forces to the Philippines in 1942,
and their victory over the Filipino-American, defenders, Japan endeavored to
exploit to the full the Philippines’ economic potential.
o First, the Japanese authorities forced the cultivation of cotton.
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o Second, the Japanese forces drastically limited the acreage planted to
sugar.
o Third, the Japanese ordered the increase in hectareage for food crops,
particularly rice, corn, and root crops, not precisely to feed the Filipinos,
but to feed the Japanese occupation forces and to ship food supplies to
Japan and other Japanese-occupied regions.
o Fourthly, the Japanese authorities took practically everything that could
be used for their war machine.
Over and above the economic oppression the Filipinos of those times
remember the cruelty of the Japanese soldiers.
We have, for example, these words of the historian Antonio M. Molina,
describing the orgy of cruelty perpetrated by the retreating Japanese soldiers
to the population-south of Manila.
“The southern portion of the capital was for sometime in the hands of
the enemy, who gave vent to their desperate hatred by engaging in a frenzy of
crime. Thousand of helpless innocent civilians were brutally raped, tortured,
and killed, as the Japanese fought the liberating forces from the house to
house”.