Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

WORLD WAR II • 263
Pact was signed in September 1940, and, almost simultaneously,
Japanese troops advanced into northern French Indochina.
Japan did not, however, formally enter World War II until it attacked
Pearl Harbor in December 1941. To be sure, its troops in the
interim remained in the quagmire of their own making in China, and,
in July 1941, advanced throughout the French Indochina peninsula in
its entirety.
The months after it entered the conflict were spectacularly successful
for Japan. It ousted the colonial powers from the Malay
peninsula, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and
the Philippines, all the while threatening Australia, the British in India,
and the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. It also launched an ideological
offensive that espoused the notion of an Asian crusade against the
West. According to this pan-Asian reasoning, Japan was the selfappointed
“liberator” of the region from the yoke of Western imperialism.
This ideological offensive was successful insofar as it gave
rise to revolutionary movements throughout the region that after the
war militated against a return to Western colonial rule. At the same
time, the wide gap between Japan’s professed ideals and its policies—it
clearly prioritized access to the region’s natural resources
over and above independence for those colonies it had recently “liberated”—ensured
that its efforts to win the hearts and minds of the region’s
peoples were largely in vain.
Far more damaging to Japan’s chances of attaining its objectives
in World War II, however, was its inability to turn back the American
counteroffensive. This counteroffensive met with its first notable
success in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, when the
Japanese navy was handed a stinging defeat at the hands of its
American counterpart. Thereafter, Japan sought in vain to maintain
a defensive posture against an increasingly virulent American counterattack,
and, in September 1943, delineated an “absolute sphere of
Imperial defense,” which nominated the Kurile and Bonin Islands,
the inner South Pacific, western New Guinea, and Burma as the line
from which Japan would not retreat. It was to no avail. The United
States, buttressed by its immense industrial strength, was, by this
time, irrepressible. This was brought home with startling clarity
when, in mid-June 1944, American forces undertook an invasion of
Saipan, an island well within Japan’s sphere of defense. Saipan’s