Asian independence the ironic legacy of a brutal invasion

Throughout the wartime building of its empire from the Pacific to India, Japan had claimed it was trying to help Asians break the shackles of their European and American colonial masters. The view is still held among right-wing Japanese and is one of the contested points in controversial school textbooks approved earlier this year.

Rather than speaking of 'invasion', the books refer to an 'advance'. Instead of referring to the resources stripped and taken back to feed Japan's military machine, they highlight the building of economies and funding of groups struggling for independence. While it can be readily argued that the books avoid the brutality of the military occupation, they are not wholly wrong in claiming Japan helped Asian nations towards independence.

The surrender 60 years ago was the dawn of a new era for Asians. In the next five years, the region's political map would be redrawn in ways that would have been unthinkable before July 1940, when Japanese prime minister Konoe Fumimaro established the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

His idea was an extension of expansionist aims that had been growing since 1876, when Japan signed a trade agreement with Korea. A new constitution in 1889 was already referring to the 'Empire of Japan'.

When the second world war began, Japan was already firmly locked in conflict with China's nationalist government. Germany's gains in Europe meant wins for Japan in Asia: invasion of the Netherlands and France allowed enactment of Fumimaro's plan in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, and French colonial Indochina, which comprised Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

Japanese military expansion began in earnest with the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, in December 1941. That led to the invasion of the US colony of the Philippines, American and British islands in the Pacific, Hong Kong, Singapore and Burma.