Arita proclaims a new order in East Asia

On the afternoon of 29 June 1940 the Japanese foreign minister, Hachirō Arita, gave a radio address entitled “The International Situation and the Position of the Empire” (国際情勢と帝国の立場). A week earlier France had signed its armistice with Germany, the Netherlands had been occupied for a month and a half, and Britain was awaiting a German invasion. The colonies of these countries in South-East Asia, rich in oil, rubber, tin and rice, had suddenly lost the backing of their mother countries. Arita declared that the countries of East Asia and the regions of the South Seas were closely bound together “geographically, historically, racially and economically” and should be united in a single sphere of coexistence and co-prosperity, and that Japan, as the “stabilising force” of East Asia, had a “grave interest” in the fate of these lands.

It is often written that Arita announced the creation of a bloc of Asian nations under Japanese leadership, “free of the Western powers”. The text of the speech was more cautious. Arita did not call for the removal of Europeans from Asia, nor did he use the name “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, which is often attributed to him. He did, however, declare publicly for the first time that the notion of a Japanese sphere of influence, hitherto confined to Japan, Manchukuo and China, also embraced Indochina, the Dutch East Indies and other lands to the south.

From the “new order” to the South Seas

The slogan of a “new order in East Asia” (東亜新秩序) was not new. On 3 November 1938, after the capture of Guangzhou (Canton) and Wuhan, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe announced that the aim of the war in China was to build a new order based on cooperation between Japan, Manchukuo and China. Arita, who a few days earlier had taken over the Foreign Ministry for the second time, replied on 18 November to an American note on the “open door” in China that the ideas and principles applied before the war no longer fitted the “new situation” in East Asia. Japanese and Western historians regard this reply as Japan’s formal departure from the Washington system and the Nine-Power Treaty.

Until the spring of 1940, however, this “new order” concerned only East Asia in the narrow sense. The Japanese army was bogged down in China, where, despite the capture of Nanning and the bombing of Chongqing, it could not break Chiang Kai-shek, and the Wang Jingwei government in Nanjing, set up on 30 March, did not change the situation. Chongqing received outside aid by three routes: by rail from Haiphong through French Indochina to Kunming, through Hong Kong, and along the Burma Road. The government of Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, in which Arita had been foreign minister since 16 January 1940, kept to the principle of non-involvement in the European war. Japan was, moreover, dependent on American oil and scrap metal, and in January its commercial treaty with the United States had expired.

The German victories of spring 1940 changed the mood in Tokyo. When Germany occupied Denmark and attacked Norway in April, Arita feared that after the Netherlands it would be the turn of its colonies. On 15 April he told journalists that Japan was closely bound up economically with the Dutch East Indies and had a “deep interest” in any change in their status. The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, replied on 17 April that any change in the status of the Dutch East Indies by other than peaceful means would endanger peace throughout the Pacific. According to the notes of Kumao Harada, secretary to the last genrō, Kinmochi Saionji, Arita explained that he had also wanted in this way to forestall those at home who favoured a “second Manchurian Incident” in the Dutch East Indies. After the German attack in the West, Tokyo demanded guarantees of raw material supplies from Batavia, and in June, as France was collapsing, it demanded that France and Britain close China’s supply routes. On 20 June the Governor-General of Indochina, General Georges Catroux, agreed to halt transit to China and to admit Japanese inspectors. At the end of June the Japanese demanded that the British close the Hong Kong border and the Burma Road and withdraw their troops from Shanghai.

At home pressure for a change of course was mounting. The press, nationalist organisations and some politicians repeated the slogan “Don’t miss the bus” (バスに乗り遅れるな): Japan should draw closer to victorious Germany and reach for the colonies of the defeated before others did. The army was preparing its own programme for “solving the southern problem”, which officials of the War Ministry and the General Staff discussed on 22 June. It also demanded that the government solemnly proclaim a new foreign policy. According to the Japanese press of the time, as summarised by the American ambassador Joseph Grew, an urgent conference of four ministers – the prime minister, the foreign minister, the war minister Shunroku Hata and the navy minister – met on 28 June. Some of them opposed a formal declaration, and it was agreed that Arita would make a radio speech instead.

The speech

The speech opened by recalling that Japan’s ideal since the founding of the Empire had been for every nation to find “its proper place” in the world. Lasting peace was possible only if all nations had such a place. Arita said that it was most natural for nations closely linked geographically, racially, culturally and economically first to form their own sphere of coexistence and co-prosperity (共存共栄) and establish peace and order within it, and only then to arrange their relations with other spheres. The war in Europe, he argued, proved that the existing order had failed to take this need into account and had perpetuated “old irrationalities and injustices”.

It was in this spirit, the minister said, that Japan was building a new order in East Asia. He regretted that there were states which not only failed to understand this but obstructed the establishment of peace by supporting the Chiang Kai-shek regime, and announced that Japan would “leave no stone unturned” to root out all aid to Chongqing. He presented the war in China as a struggle for a just and lasting peace, and the Japanese sword as a “life-giving sword” that destroys evil and makes justice manifest.

The key sentences came in the second part. “The countries of East Asia and the regions of the South Seas are geographically, historically, racially and economically very closely bound together. It is their natural destiny to help one another, to meet one another’s needs for the common good and prosperity, and to promote peace and progress. To unite all these areas in a single sphere founded on coexistence, and thereby to secure its stability, is, I believe, the natural conclusion.” Arita pointed out that the idea of peace being built first in individual regions and then in the world as a whole had “long existed in Europe and America as well”. It assumed that in each region there was a “stabilising force” around which the other nations gathered.

Finally, he recalled that after the outbreak of war in Europe Japan had announced that it would not become involved, and said that it expected the Western powers to do nothing that might adversely affect the stability of East Asia. “I wish to declare,” he concluded, “that the fate of these regions, any changes occurring in them and any disposition of them are a matter of grave concern to Japan, in view of its mission and responsibility as the stabilising force in East Asia.” He did not name Indochina, the Dutch East Indies or any European state. His listeners, however, were in no doubt as to whose colonies he meant.

A speech for two audiences

The speech was a compromise, and it was read as one. To the army and to public opinion Arita showed that the government was looking south. To the powers he made no concrete declaration and announced no rapprochement with Germany or Italy. The Japanese historian Hayato Yukawa, author of a study of the Foreign Ministry’s policy in the 1930s, points out that the text did not make clear what Japan intended to do or what it expected of others. He believes that, like the April declaration on the Dutch East Indies, its main purpose was to calm feelings at home. The liberal commentator Kiyoshi Kiyosawa, however, reproached Arita for carelessly widening the notion of “East Asia”, which opened the way for the advocates of southward expansion.

The day before, 28 June, Arita had rejected an American proposal for an exchange of notes in which Japan and the United States would confirm the maintenance of the status quo in the Pacific possessions of the European belligerents. He told Grew that this would be a “rather delicate” matter, and in conversation with Kōichi Kido he said that Japan could not let its hands be tied over the Dutch East Indies or revive the Nine-Power Treaty. At the same time, as his cables of 24 June show, he was beginning cautiously to seek contact with Germany, hoping that Berlin would help bring about peace with Chongqing and would not lodge claims of its own to the colonies of defeated Holland and France.

Washington received the speech coolly. On 6 July President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s press secretary, Stephen Early, told journalists that the United States would like to see a “Monroe Doctrine” for Europe and for Asia, under which all the nations of a given continent settled its affairs together, rather than “one victorious power”. The Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yakichirō Suma, promptly announced that these words “coincided with the idea of a regional structure” set out by Arita. The State Department had to clarify that the president had meant a ban on acquiring territory by force and freedom of trade. On 11 July Grew conveyed Hull’s position to Arita: a system of regional economic blocs would harm every state that lived by trade, above all Japan itself, which in 1939 had drawn more than 40 per cent of its imports from the Americas. Arita admitted that “great pressure” was being put on the government to change its policy.

Place in the war

The speech did not save the Yonai government. The army considered it a half-measure and wanted a cabinet that would conclude an alliance with Germany. On 16 July the war minister, Hata, resigned, and the army refused to nominate a successor, which under the rules of the time meant the fall of the government. On 22 July Konoe became prime minister for the second time, with Yōsuke Matsuoka as foreign minister. On 1 August 1940, announcing the new government’s policy, Matsuoka used the name “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (大東亜共栄圏) publicly for the first time. The idea was the same as Arita’s, but this time it was accompanied by the will to seize these lands in concert with Germany.

In September 1940 Japanese troops entered northern Indochina, and on 27 September Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Its second article stated that Germany and Italy recognised Japan’s leadership in establishing a “new order in Greater East Asia”. Britain closed the Burma Road for three months from 18 July 1940 but reopened it in October. In July 1941 the Japanese occupied southern Indochina, to which the United States, Britain and the Netherlands responded by freezing Japanese assets and imposing an oil embargo. In December 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Malaya, the Philippines and Hong Kong, and within a few months it had occupied the whole area of which Arita had spoken on 29 June 1940 as a natural community.

In practice, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was a system that subordinated the occupied countries to the needs of the Japanese war economy and army, combined with forced labour, requisitions of rice and raw materials, and brutal repression. The slogan of shared Asian prosperity, first announced in a radio speech by a cautious diplomat who was himself opposed to an alliance with Hitler, served as the banner of this expansion until Japan’s surrender in 1945.