Book Review

Nan’Yo: The Rise And Fall

Of The Japanese In

Micronesia 1855-1945

By Mark R. Peattie, University of Hawaii Press. Pacific Islands Monograph Series No. 4, US$3O.

Reviewed by JOHN CONNELL 7 JR T a time when Japan is asserting a new presence in the Pacific; when Toyotas dominate island roads, tuna vessels scour the oceans and aid reaches new levels, this important book provides a valuable and detailed account of the quarter of a century when a significant part of the Pacific was an element in the

Japanese colonial empire.

Throughout the inter-war years Japan set out to absorb Micronesia

into the empire, primarily by con-

structing profitable settler colonies

where Japanese and other Asians would eventually come to dominate islanders by a ratio of two to one.

Nan Vo, the South Seas from Saipan to the Marshall Islands, were taken into a new strategic role.

Nan’yo is an account of a small segment of the history of Japan’s imperial

expansion.

ft is not a history of Micronesia, or of Micronesians under Japanese rule but it is nevertheless a significant contribution to both areas. Mark Peattie, a specialist in modern Japanese history, himself states that “I have simply tried to tell the story of the rise and fall of a vigorous, aggressive and enterprising people on distant and far-scattered fragments of land ... a setting that was both exotic and geographically fast”. He tells the story well, and more than 40 photographs (and a rather odd assembly of maps) make this a most elegant production in a fine series.

Japanese interest in Micronesia began toward the end of the 19th century as the navy and merchant marine of an island nation expanded to still poorly known and remote islands: virtually the last phase in the global

scramble for empire. Despite tiny

trading companies and limited capital,

Japan acquired Micronesia surprising-

ly quickly. By the end of World War I, as Japan consolidated its presence in the face of US and British alarm, it had already become apparent that Micronesia had a strategic value that would remain far in excess of its economic value.

Under the League of Nations mandate Japan applied characteristic zeal and energy to public works, education, shipping services and, of course, Japanese language and laws. A huge

Japanese bureaucracy grew a sign of worse things to come under the American trusteeship that was “intensive and dominating” compared with everything that had gone before,

Though the Japanese bureaucracy

was competent, and met with

surprisingly little indigenous resistance

(other than in Palau and Yap), the grafting of this bureaucracy on to small-scale societies necessarily created problems.

There was limited religious freedom, labour was exploited in the Angaur phosphate mine, health programmes could not stimulate population growth and education was segre-

gated and discriminatory. Peattie

points out, however, though they were

prejudiced and perjorative, Japanese

attitudes to Micronesians were no worse than most other colonial outlooks at the time.

Micronesians became subordinate in every way to the Japanese colonial systern, emphasised by a mass immigration of Japanese similar to the influx of Europeans into New Caledonia or Hawaii. The Japanese population of Micronesia reached 62,000 in 1937,

substantially larger than the indige-

nous population, and only recently has the population of Micronesia reached its pre-war level.

Neither encouraged nor actively discourased by the Japanese administration, the flood of migrants threatened to swamp the Micronesian population; Peattie records one American visitor in the 1930 s recording that “the nalives will soon pass on to silence and dust”. Fortunately this was not to be,

though Japanese policy represented

that nation’s most important breach of the League of Nations mandate.

The economic prosperity that followed copra sales, fishing and com merce has long been Micronesians’ one positive recollection of the period.

Having acquired the islands for essen daily strategic reasons, the Japanese government initially had no real eco nomic development policy; yet a combination of vigorous private initiative, government encouragement and subsidies eventually turned Micronesia

into a profitable colony.

At the end of the 1930 s exports of sugar, phosphate, fish and copra dwarfed exports, but it was the end of an era. When Japan left, the produclive economy never revived.

Indeed, Peattie suggests that had the war not scourged the islands, Japanese Micronesia might have become the agricultural showplace of the Pacific” albeit a showplace only for the colonialists. In the economic boom

Micronesians were still largely bystan ders, watching aghast as the islands’ ecological structures were devastated by deforestation, erosion and omni vorous African snails.

Japanese militarisation of Mic ronesia did not begin in earnest until 1939, and Japan’s “invulnerable for tress” in the Pacific was largely mythical; a result both of the mystery with which Japan shrouded the islands and the fevered imagination of the American press. Nonetheless it was from Micronesia that the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Har hour an attack that four years later brought the end of Japan’s colonial empire in Micronesia.

Insensitive and brutal exploitation of the islanders in the war years left only a legacy of tragedy and bitter ness. A few stone foundations are vir tualy all that remain of the Japanese civilian era. Military debris is much more prominent: a clear mark of the strategic arena Micronesia had already become. The effects of direct Japanese colonialism may have been all but obliterated, but modern Japanese eco nomic interests in tourism, construc tion and fisheries provide a massive neo-colonial presence, “exercising power and influence in the Pacific on a scale that pre-war entrepreneurs never dreamed”.

In place of the tidal wave of Japanese immigrants has come one of

Japanese products: the Japanese have

colonised Micronesia more effectively than direct rule could ever achieve, and in this book Mark Peattie has ele gantly recorded the history of what is now almost a forgotten era. □