World War II and Southeast Asia

Historical studies of Southeast Asia during the Second World War tend to focus on the military actions of the Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese. The need to counteract this tendency underpins World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation by Gregg Huff, senior research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Moving away from the military-diplomatic bias of war historiography, Huff has written extensively about the economic dimensions of the Pacific War. World War II and Southeast Asia also differs from other works on war economics by showing the importance of the region's productive capacity to the outcome of Japan's campaign (8).Huff challenges a number of widely held interpretations of the war. One such notion pertains to how the war and occupation are deemed to go hand in hand with effective economic exploitation. Throughout the ten chapters that make up the book, Huff demonstrates how Japan “gained little from Southeast Asia” during the war (21). Prewar Southeast Asia's lack of industrialization made it overly reliant on essential commodities that it imported from their respective metropoles. Although Japan's war machine was quick in occupying an expanse as vast as Southeast Asia, the decentralized economies now under its so-called co-prosperity sphere constrained the sustainability of its imperial design. Worse, it did not provide incentives to stimulate output (15). Such a critique challenges the arguments of Peter Lieberman's Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies and other historical literature associated with this work.1 While Huff maintains that Japan benefited economically from the annexation of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, such did not hold true in its occupation of Southeast Asia. In the final accounting, the costs of war “far outweighed its benefits” (372).This account of the factors behind Japan's failure to capitalize on its Southeast Asian campaign is substantiated with the aid of an impressive array of archival and published sources collated from the archives of seven Southeast Asian nations and five previous colonial powers in the region, including Japan. The costs of the occupation and (largely unrealized) benefits of wartime commodity production in the region are tackled in chapters 2 to 4. Chapter 5, which in my opinion is the strongest part of the book, focuses on the issue of mobility, Japan's lack of which posed a serious challenge due to its rapid geographical expansion in the region. Huff also posits that the region's very geography, especially the north–south transport pattern of the mainland, posed a huge stumbling block to Japan's imperial design, which “needed links that connected Southeast Asia east–west by land” (187), a critical necessity that was the impetus behind the hasty construction of the Thailand–Burma railway. Poor mobility paved the way for “an increasingly Balkanized approach” (46). Such autarkic conditions were compounded by Japan's early military setbacks, such as in Midway and Guadalcanal, and the consequent losses in ships and shipping lanes. The repercussions were huge, one of which was the reversal of Japan's policy to shift from East Asia to Southeast Asia in sourcing large quantities of rice to feed its domestic population (132). Another was the disruption of backward and forward industry linkages, creating an inefficient diversion of resources from target firms and consumers (183).Another widely held notion that the book challenges is the idea that the war supposedly led to deurbanization;2 on the contrary, Huff asserts that the Japanese occupation “confirmed and solidified the region's pre-war urban pattern” (309). This contention is tied to how he analyzes prewar and wartime food production and—to borrow a term from Daniel Doeppers—provisionment,3 topics that are dissected in chapters 6 to 8. Differentiating between urban and rural Southeast Asia, as well as between rice-producing and rice-importing territories, Huff digs deep to uncover the roots of wartime famine. While physical destruction certainly played a role, it was not the only cause of widespread hunger; other factors were also significant, such as the Western-dependent economic structures of the prewar colonies, autarkic conditions, and bureaucratic mismanagement. In the final analysis, famine was “overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon” (313).The ninth chapter focuses on the issue of labor, while the final chapter concludes with what is effectively a balance sheet of the costs and benefits of the war for the Japanese. Ultimately, Japan failed because of its massive missteps, ignoring the reality that in “conventional warfare over a sustained period, superior economic strength is decisive” (371). It could have succeeded with a calculated annexation of parts of Southeast Asia without compromising its mobility, considering that Japan “was economically equipped only for a short war” (13).The epilogue poses the question of “what might have happened if Japan had not decided for war” (415). But more than just presenting counterfactuals, it identifies the lasting legacies of the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia, especially in the economic sphere: “Wartime experience, however, left a strong desire among many Southeast Asians for more industrialization in their own nations” (224). The epilogue, in my estimation, is a good representation of the book's scholarly value: more than just another work on wartime Southeast Asia, it offers a critical assessment of Western colonialism's impact on the prewar regional economy and an insightful starting point for those seeking to contextualize the contemporary sociopolitical foundations of the nation-states that suffered greatly under Japanese rule

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