ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 begins with sobering accounts of contention within the Japanese military-government leadership over policy regarding “independence” during the initial months of the war, specifically over Burma. Then the author points out that while a significant portion of Japan’s military and government leadership, including Tojo Hideki, was more willing to accommodate the vision held by collaborating nationalists of Southeast Asia, the “independence” they imagined Japan granting was largely thought to be similar to that conferred on Manchuria, premised on Japanese military presence and political guidance, under which the principles of state sovereignty and equality were not considered to be integral ingredients. Southeast Asian nationalist leaders collaborating with Japan, on the other hand, imagined and pursued independence (without quotation marks) based on those very principles of sovereignty and equality. This chapter goes on to discuss how the worsening of Japan’s war effort helped the latter to exert more agency on such occasions as the Assembly of Greater East-Asiatic Nations of November 1943, showing Japan’s inability to force the occupied to conform to the Greater East Asia new order as defined by the Japanese leadership.
