Breakthrough in Burma
Breakthrough in Burma
The circumstances in which the Burmese and the Japanese met were mostly wrong. No two races could be more different in essential ways, and no alliance was in a sense more ill-timed, because nothing could have brought out the differences more starkly than a total, all-out struggle such as that war proved to be. The fact that they were both Asian meant very much emotionally, but almost nothing otherwise; in fact, it made matters worse by raising too many expectations on both sides.There was, to start with, the hard fact that the Japanese came as a conquering army prepared to fight to the last man, militaristic at the core, convinced that all East Asia lay at their feet. The Burmese, however, had their own notions, one of which was that the Japanese were just Asians helping to liberate Asians and nothing more. So the polarity was complete from the beginning.
Another fact is that both races were in the grip of racial reflexes which were irresistibly shaping their behaviour. The Burmese reflexes were the outcome of their colonial past. For instance, they had no modern war experience; they had not fought a war for generations, let alone a total, world-sized one. All they had actually seen of such a war was what was fought around them by others, including the Japanese victory in Burma within a few quick months. So somewhere deep within their minds the Burmese believed that the rest of the war would be quick and easy too, that while the Japanese fought they could follow in the wake and pick up the gains just as they had done in the first months; also that while the Japanese were throwing everything into the fight, the Burmese need not do so, but could go on living as if the war were already won and over. It was in a sense an infantile view originating perhaps from the fact that the Burmese had not during a whole century of colonial rule been given a chance to grow up militarily; they had as a race been denied every form of military training. But the Japanese, who were very war-experienced and war-hardened and knew its crushing weight, took a completely contrary view and, since they could never forget that they were fighting for their very existence, uncompromisingly put that view before everything else in dealing with the Burmese. They were not sparing themselves, nor had they any thought of sparing others. And so the way was prepared for the future tensions and the final break. . . .
As for the Japanese militarists, few people were mentally so race-bound, so one-dimensional in their thinking, and in consequence so totally incapable either of understanding others, or of making themselves understood by others. That was why so much of what they did during the war in Southeast Asia, whether it was right or wrong, always appeared to be wrong to the people there. The militarists saw everything only in a Japanese perspective and, even worse, they insisted that all others dealing with them should do the same. For them there was only one way to do a thing, the Japanese way; only one goal and interest, the Japanese interest; only one destiny for the East Asian countries, to become so many Manchukuos or Koreas tied forever to Japan. These racial impositions—they were just that—made any real understanding between the Japanese militarists and the peoples of our region virtually impossible.
The case of Japan is indeed tragic. Looking at it historically, no nation has done so much to liberate Asia from white domination, yet no nation has been so misunderstood by the very people whom it has helped either to liberate or to set an example to in many things. Japan was betrayed by her militarists and their racial fantasies. Had her Asian instincts been true, had she only been faithful to the concept of Asia for the Asians that she herself had proclaimed at the beginning of the war, Japan’s fate would have been very different. No military defeat could then have robbed her of the trust and gratitude of half of Asia or even more, and that would have mattered a great deal in finding for her a new, great, and abiding place in a postwar world in which Asia was coming into her own. Even now, even as things actually are, nothing can ever obliterate the role Japan has played in bringing liberation to countless colonial peoples. The phenomenal Japanese victories in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia which really marked the beginning of the end of all imperialism and colonialism, the national armies Japan helped to create during the war which in their turn created a new spirit and will in a large part of Asia, the independent states she set up in several Southeast Asian countries as well as her recognition of the provisional government of Free India at a time when not a single other belligerent power permitted even the talk of independence within its own dominions, and finally a demonstration by the entire Japanese people of the invincibility of the Asian spirit when they rose out of the ashes to a new greatness, these will outlive all the passing wartime strains and passions and betrayals in the final summing-up of history.
Context.
Ba Maw (1893-1977), a lawyer by profession and a student of Burmese Buddhism, gave his life to his country’s independence. He served as Burma’s first prime minister, from 1937-1939 under the British colonial administration, then headed the government under Japanese rule from 1942 onward. In his memoirs, Ba Maw explains why relations between Japan and the Burmese declined so sharply during World War II. Japan had impressed most Burmese when it speedily drove out the British colonial masters early in World War II, then granted Burma formal independence in 1943. But when Japan continued to dominate the government, even as its colonial and military officials were treating their subjects arrogantly and cruelly, the Burmese people turned against their new overlords. Ba Maw’s reflections put Japan’s World War II actions in a unique, more nuanced light, that of one who cared first for his own country’s independence and had little interest in the traditional “enemy narrative” developed by the Americans and British (as well as the Japanese). Ba Maw fled to Japan at war’s end, where he was imprisoned by the Allies for cooperating with the Japanese.
Questions.
1. What, in Ba Maw’s view, was good about Japanese control of Burma during World War II? What was bad about it?
2. What accounted for the “good” actions and policies? For the “bad” actions and policies?
3. What does Ba Maw see as the most important long-term results of Japan’s military involvement in Burma from 1942 to 1945? Evaluate his opinion.
Terms.
Colonial past, white domination. Nearly all of the nations of Southeast Asia, as well as India, had been colonies of the British, Dutch, French, and Americans from the 19th century onward, deprived of independence and governed for the profit of their colonial masters.
Manchukuo, Korea. These, along with Taiwan, were imperial Japan’s biggest colonies. Manchukuo was the name Japan gave to the state it set up in Manchuria in 1932.
Asia for the Asians. One of Japan’s key public slogans after the late 1930s was “Asia for the Asians,” a phrase designed to win support in the region by highlighting—and thus undermining—the imperialist policies of the Western powers in Asia.
Source: Ba Maw. Breakthrough in Burma: Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939-1946. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1968, 183-186.
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