So much noise has been made about the Second World War in Europe that one can be forgiven for not taking much notice about the war in the Far East. There, the Japanese Empire was pitted against the might of both the USA and the ubiquitous British Empire. This war did not end until more than three months after the end of the war in Europe. And people remember it mostly because hostilities here ended with the big bangs caused by the detonation of atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Virtually everybody knows that. But not many know that before the atomic bombs were dropped, some Japanese cities; mainly Tokyo, Nagoya and Kobe had been subjected to a ferocious attack using incendiary bombs which virtually erased them. Shortly after midnight on the night of 9 -10 March 1944, Tokyo was attacked by close to 300 B 29 flying fortress bombers each of them carrying four tons of incendiary bombs made of a mixture of napalm and oil. They started uncontrollable fires, a conflagration so fierce that its oxygen demand caused it to suck out oxygen from the lungs of people, killing them by asphyxiation. The death toll on the ground in Tokyo has never been accurately determined but the figure of 100,000 dead has been more or less agreed upon. However, there are many who think that the real figure is considerably higher.
As with the use of the atomic bomb, the fire bombing of Japanese cities has been suggested to be related to racism. After all, German cities were not nuked neither were they subjected to the level of fire bombing directed at civilians, old people as well as children as was the case in Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In any case, in the struggle between capitalists, racism is always a factor and it was a cogent factor in the war between Japan and the Allied forces. For example, the Overall commander of the Allied forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower was ethnically German. That did not stop him from getting the top job in the United States army during the war against Germany. On the other hand, all Japanese Americans in the USA were simply rounded up and locked away in internment camps throughout the duration of the war. The loyalty of Japanese Americans was forcefully denied whereas the most prominent American soldier was an ethnic German.
Back to those terrible fires. They were supposed to break the fighting spirit of the Japanese, to take them out of the war as quickly as possible. In doing so, it was said that this would help save the lives of American soldiers by shortening the period of the war. But the tactic employed was so cold blooded and inhuman that had the Americans lost the war, LeMay, the author of the fire bombing strategy would most certainly have been put on trial for war crimes, convicted and executed. Fortunately for him, his side won the war and he came out of that mess smelling of roses.
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There is something deeply ironical about Japan and the USA being at war. One hundred years before those flying fortress bombers were dropping their incendiary bombs over Tokyo, the Americans were squeezing the Japanese out of a self imposed isolationism which had lasted two hundred and twenty years. That period known as the Sakoku began in 1624 and was one in which the Japanese allowed partial contact with China, the Netherlands and Korea. All other nations were shut out completely. The initial reason for this isolation was to keep out what the Japanese regarded as the pernicious influence of Christian missionaries particularly those of Roman Catholic persuasion. The rulers were determined to protect their indigenous culture and religion from outside influence and were well aware of the disgraceful antics of both Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in the Philippines close to them and in faraway South America where the indigenous peoples were decimated. The Japanese methods of exclusion were as brutal as they were effective. Christian priests and their converts were summarily executed and all Japanese were required by law to be registered in a Buddhist temple. This is why today only 1% of Japanese are Christian. Even in isolation however Chinese, Korean and Dutch influences in terms of trade and education were allowed to filter in.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century however, the Industrial revolution was in full swing and the relentless search for raw materials and markets had begun. This made the maintenance of Japanese isolation increasingly difficult and ultimately untenable. This became clear when in 1842, a coalition of western powers forced the Chinese to accept opium as an article of trade. If that happened in the Celestial empire of China, it was clear that nowhere else on earth could remain uncontaminated with capitalist contagion. This was the situation when Commodore Perry of the US Navy appeared off the coast at Nagasaki with four ships, all of them bristling with powerful guns. He had come with a proposal for the establishment of trade relations with Japan. That was in 1853 at a time when gunboat diplomacy was in fashion. And Perry showed that he was not afraid to use his guns to get what he wanted. No agreement was reached on that occasion for all the sabre rattling. Undeterred, he was back the following year, this time with eleven ships of the line. In the face of this magnitude of force, a trade agreement was signed and Japan was dragged into the capitalist orbit.
Even during Sakoku, the Japanese were not completely isolated as they continued to study medicine, military science, diplomacy and other aspects of societal development. In the same vein, they did not fling their doors open to all sorts of foreign influences at the end of Sakoku. Perhaps the most important development in this period was the amalgamation of the ruling Shogunates of the time into one Japanese empire under the rule of a divine emperor at the beginning of the Meiji dynasty. Being divine, the emperor became a powerful rallying force to whom all Japanese owed an allegiance. Under the emperor, Japan entered a period of modernisation now referred to as the period of Meiji Restoration. The changes which took place at this time made it possible for her to take her rightful place among the comity of nations. Her race to industrialisation was on.
The first movement towards industrialisation was to change from a feudal society ruled by warlords to one monolithic democratic polity governed by the rule of law emanating from the divine emperor. This was followed by the building of industrial infrastructure; roads, bridges, railroads, power installations and educational institutions with the capacity to produce the intellectual and technical muscle to drive the process of industrialisation. A modern and well equipped was added to this heady mix and Japan was ready to step out into the world of imperial adventures.
With modern and well equipped armed forces, Japan developed a taste for imperial conquests. She cast her eyes over territories within China and the Korean peninsular into which she sent her nascent armed forces with the intention of carving out an empire as all the great powers were doing at the time. This brought her into conflict with the Russian empire which had the same ambition within the same region. Given that situation, a clash between these super powers in the Far East became inevitable and quite predictably, a war broke out between Japan and Russia. Much to the surprise of other countries, the winner of this contest was Japan. When the Russian Baltic sea navy arrived in the Far East to engage the Japanese Navy, it proved to be a bridge too far for the Russians and the Japanese inflicted a crushing defeat on them. For the first time in the modern era, an Asian army imposed her will on a European country on the battle ground. Some saw this as the world tilting on its axis and needing a redress. Fifty years later, Europe came roaring back in those B29 bombers and burnt Tokyo to the ground. The world was put back on track.
A hundred years after the end of Sakoku, Japan had become an imperial power, a roaring lion seeking who to devour. She had gobbled up large areas of China and had annexed much of the Korean peninsular where she ruled with an uncommonly heavy hand. Such was her appetite for further conquests that she turned her eyes on parts of the British empire in the Far East with her ultimate destination being India, the jewel in the British crown. Japan was not able to bring the British to their knees but her success against them in Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong, Borneo and Burma showed the rest of the world that the emperor was actually naked. The British empire did not survive that exposure.