Greater East Asia Conference

The conference addressed few issues of substance, but was intended from the start as a propaganda show piece, to convince members of Japan's commitments to the Pan-Asianism ideal, with an emphasis on their role as the "liberator" of Asia from Western imperialism.

[2] Throughout the 1920s-30s, Japanese newspapers had always given extensive coverage to the racist laws meant to exclude Asian immigrants such as the "White Australia" policy; the anti-Asian immigrant laws by the U.S. Congress in 1882, 1917, and 1924; and the "White Canada" policy together with reports about how Asians suffered from prejudice in the United States, Canada, Australia, and European colonies in Asia.

[3] Most Japanese at the time seemed to have sincerely believed that Japan was a uniquely virtuous nation ruled over by an emperor who was a living god, and thus the font of all goodness in the world.

[4] As such, Japanese propaganda had proclaimed that the Imperial Army, guided by the "emperor's benevolence" had come to China to engage in "compassionate killing" for the good of the Chinese people.

[8] At times, Japanese leaders spoke like they believed their own propaganda about whites being in a process of racial degeneration and were actually turning into the drooling, snarling demonical creatures depicted in their cartoons.

[11] But for all their talk about creating a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere where all the Asian peoples would live together as brothers and sisters, in reality as shown by a July 1943 planning document titled An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus, the Japanese saw themselves as the racially superior "Great Yamato race", which was naturally destined to forever dominate the other racially inferior Asian peoples.

Now, with the tide of the Pacific War turning against Japan, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supporters of the Pan-Asian philosophy within the government and military pushed forward a program to grant rapid "independence" to various parts of Asia in an effort to increase local resistance to the Allies and trigger the latter's return and to boost local support for the Japanese war effort.

[13] Korea and Taiwan had long been annexed as external territories of the Empire of Japan, and there were no plans to extend any form of political autonomy or even nominal independence.

[18] As Korea had been annexed by Japan in 1910, there was no official Korean delegation to the conference, but a number of leading Korean intellectuals such as historian Choe Nam-seon, novelist Yi Gwangsu, and children's writer Ma Haesong attended the conference as part of the Japanese delegation to deliver speeches praising Japan and to express their thanks to the Japanese for colonising Korea.

[19] The purpose of these speeches was to reassure other Asian peoples about their future in a Japanese-dominated Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

[20] The Korean delegates also spoke passionately against the "Western devils", describing them as the "most deadly enemies of Asian civilisation that had ever existed", and praising Japan for its role in standing up to them.

[19] The major theme of the conference was for the need for all the Asian peoples to rally behind Japan and offer an inspiring example of Pan-Asian idealism against the evil "white devils".

[21] American historian John W. Dower writes that the various delegates "...placed the war in the East-versus-the West, Oriental-versus-the Occidental, and ultimately a blood-versus-blood context.

[22] Hideki Tōjō of Japan stated in his speech: "It is an incontrovertible fact that the nations of Greater East Asia are bound in every respect by ties of an inseparable relationship".

[23] Jose Laurel of the Philippines in his speech claimed that no-one in the world could "stop or delay the acquisition of one billion Asians of the free and untrammelled right and opportunity to shape their own destiny".

The countries of Greater East Asia, with a view to contributing to the cause of world peace, undertake to cooperate toward prosecuting the War of Greater East Asia to a successful conclusion, liberating their region from the yoke of British-American domination, and ensuring their self-existence and self-defence, and in constructing a Greater East Asia in accordance with the following principles: The conference and the formal declaration adhered to on November 6 was little more than a propaganda gesture designed to rally regional support for the next stage of the war, outlining the ideals of which it was fought.

[29] Chinese public opinion was unimpressed with this attempt to put Sino-Japanese relations on a new footing, not the least because the treaty did not change the relationship between Wang and his Japanese masters.

Whenever they went, Japanese soldiers and sailors had a routine habit of publicly slapping the faces of other Asians as a way of showing who were the "Great Yamato race" and who were not.