Japan proclaims Burmese independence

On 1 August 1943 in Rangoon the Japanese military administration of Burma formally ceased to exist, and Ba Maw, until then head of the administration subordinate to the Japanese, proclaimed the independence of the State of Burma (Bama Naingngandaw). He took the title of Naingngandaw Adipadi – supreme leader of the state – and at the same time the office of prime minister. That same day Japan recognised the new state and concluded a treaty of alliance with it, and Burma declared war on the United States and Britain. The common formula that it was Japan that “proclaimed” Burma’s independence captures the essence of the matter, even though formally the independence was proclaimed by the Burmese themselves: the whole act had been prepared in Tokyo, and its terms were laid down by the Japanese.

It was independence of a peculiar kind. The country remained the rear base of the Japanese army fighting the British on the Indian frontier, and a secret military agreement, signed together with the treaty, left Japanese commanders complete freedom of action throughout Burma.

Background: from colony to occupation

British Burma had been separated from India only in 1937 and given limited self-government. Its first prime minister was none other than Ba Maw, a lawyer and nationalist leader who in 1940 was sent to a British prison for speaking out against Burma’s participation in the war. At the same time a group of young radicals from the Thakin movement, centred on the Dobama Asiayone organisation, made contact with Japanese intelligence. Colonel Keiji Suzuki trained them on the island of Hainan, and in December 1941 in Bangkok they formed the Burma Independence Army, headed by Aung San. The Burmese volunteers entered the country alongside the Japanese Fifteenth Army when the invasion of Burma began.

By May 1942 the Japanese had driven the British and Chinese out of Burma, and the campaign ended with the longest retreat in the history of the British Army. Tokyo, however, had no intention of keeping the promises Suzuki had made to the Burmese volunteers. The local committees set up by the Independence Army were replaced by a military administration, the volunteer army was cut down and in the summer of 1942 converted into the smaller Burma Defence Army, and on 1 August 1942 Ba Maw, who had escaped from prison in Mogok in April, was placed at the head of a central civil administration. This administration was to run the country’s day-to-day affairs, but every decision depended on the Japanese military.

The decision in Tokyo

It was the turn of the war that decided the acceleration of “independence”. After the defeats at Midway and Guadalcanal the Japanese leadership concluded that the peoples of conquered Asia had to be won over to the common cause before the Allies went over to the counter-offensive. On 28 January 1943 Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō announced in the Diet that Burma would gain independence within a year, on condition that it entered the war on Japan’s side. A similar promise was made to the Philippines. In March 1943 the Japanese Imperial Headquarters and government adopted guidelines on Burmese independence, and a delegation including Ba Maw and Aung San travelled to Tokyo, where it received detailed instructions. The members of the delegation were received by Emperor Hirohito.

On 8 May 1943 an Independence Preparatory Committee chaired by Ba Maw and made up of well-known politicians of various persuasions was set up in Rangoon. It drafted a constitution that concentrated almost all power in the hands of the head of state. In March 1943 the Japanese had also created a new command in Burma – the Burma Area Army under General Masakazu Kawabe – which showed that the country would remain above all a theatre of war.

1 August 1943

On 1 August the Japanese command announced the dissolution of the military administration. An assembly convened by the Preparatory Committee entrusted Ba Maw with the office of head of state, and he read out the declaration of independence. The Japanese ambassador, Renzō Sawada, signed with him in Rangoon a treaty of alliance between Japan and Burma, which constituted Japanese recognition of the new state. The declaration of war on the United States and Britain, announced by radio, was a condition set by Tokyo. The State of Burma adopted a tricolour flag with a peacock, the song of the Dobama movement as its anthem, and Burmese as its official language.

In his first government Ba Maw tried to bring together the old colonial elites and the young nationalists. Aung San, promoted to major general, became Minister of Defence and commander of the armed forces, renamed the Burma National Army on independence. The foreign minister was Thakin Nu, later prime minister of independent Burma as U Nu, and the agriculture portfolio went to the communist Than Tun. The only permitted party was the Dobama-Sinyetha, formed by merging the Thakin movement with Ba Maw’s former party. Rangoon saw celebrations, parades and services in the pagodas, and many Burmese, especially in the towns, greeted the proclamation with genuine hope. In his memoirs, Breakthrough in Burma, published in 1968, Ba Maw defended his decision as the only way to free the country from British rule, while at the same time sharply describing the arrogance and brutality of the Japanese military with whom he had to deal. Ba Maw himself behaved like a monarch: his office issued detailed rules on how to bow to him and how to withdraw from an audience.

The new state was recognised by Germany, Italy, Thailand, Manchukuo, the Wang Jingwei government in Nanjing and several Axis satellites in Europe, including Croatia, Slovakia and Bulgaria. Neutral states did not recognise it, and for the Allies it remained a Japanese puppet. The British government regarded Burma as its colony temporarily occupied by the enemy, and the Governor, Reginald Dorman-Smith, carried on in exile at Simla in India.

Independence under supervision

The limits of Ba Maw’s sovereignty were set by the secret military agreement. The Japanese army, which according to Japanese figures numbered some 200,000 men in Burma, could freely use the country’s roads, railways, ports and resources, and for the duration of the war the Burmese army and police were in practice placed under its command. The Japanese ambassador and the Burma Area Army command remained the real masters of the government in Rangoon. At the same time Japan handed part of Burma’s territory to its ally Thailand: under a treaty of 20 August 1943 Bangkok received the Shan principalities of Kengtung and Möngpan, while the remaining Shan States were handed over to Burma only on 25 September.

For ordinary Burmese the change of flag meant little. Requisitions of rice and cattle for the army continued, Japanese occupation banknotes lost their value, and the Kempeitai arrested and tortured those suspected of sympathising with the British. Tens of thousands of Burmese were recruited, often by force, into the so-called Sweat Army, which built the Burma Railway from Thailand to Burma; many of them died of exhaustion, hunger and disease. Allied air raids on Rangoon and the lines of communication were also becoming ever more severe. In the spring of 1943, moreover, the first Chindit expedition had shown that the British had no intention of giving up Burma. A few weeks after the proclamation, at the Quebec Conference, the British and Americans decided to create a separate South East Asia Command under Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose main task was to be the recovery of Burma.

A model for other “independences”

Burma was the first of the states to which Japan granted formal independence in 1943 within the framework of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Earlier, Tokyo had used other forms of dependence: a state headed by an emperor in Manchuria and a collaborationist Chinese government in Nanjing, while it was linked to formally independent Thailand by an alliance. On 14 October 1943 the Second Philippine Republic was established with José P. Laurel as president, and on 21 October in Singapore Subhas Chandra Bose announced the formation of the Azad Hind government, the Provisional Government of Free India. At the beginning of November 1943 Ba Maw, Laurel, Wang Jingwei, representatives of Manchukuo and Thailand, and Bose as an observer came to Tokyo for the Greater East Asia Conference. There Ba Maw spoke of the “call of Asiatic blood” that had united the nations of Asia against the West.

All these creations had the same features in common: their governments had no foreign policy of their own and no real control over the army, and the economy served the Japanese war effort. For some Asian nationalists, however, it was their first experience of state power, of their own army and administration, which after the war mattered in the struggle for independence.

Disillusionment and a change of sides

In Burma itself the illusions were soon dispelled. As early as 1943 Aung San and his comrades were making contact with the communist underground, and in August 1944 on their initiative the clandestine Anti-Fascist Organisation (AFO) was formed, bringing together communists, socialists and officers of the Burma National Army. Through the communists and Burmese units in Arakan, the AFO made contact with the British Force 136, a sabotage organisation operating from India. The defeat of the Japanese offensive against India in 1944, at Imphal and Kohima, opened the way to an Allied counter-offensive. Some Japanese officers, dissatisfied with Ba Maw, even thought of replacing him with U Nu, and in April 1944 a plot against his life was hatched in circles close to the Burma Area Army; it was foiled by his guards.

On 27 March 1945 the Burma National Army, marched out of Rangoon supposedly to the front against the British, turned against the Japanese. The Burmese still mark the day as Armed Forces Day. After talks with Mountbatten, Aung San’s units fought on as the Patriotic Burmese Forces. The State of Burma collapsed as the Japanese withdrew. In April 1945 Ba Maw fled to the south of the country and, after Japan’s surrender, via Thailand to Tokyo. The British recaptured Rangoon at the beginning of May 1945.

Significance

The proclamation of 1 August 1943 did not change the balance of forces in South-East Asia: Burma remained a Japanese springboard against India, and its government had no influence on the conduct of the war. It did, however, have lasting political consequences. The army and administration created under Japanese supervision became the nucleus of forces capable of resisting the return of British rule after the war. Aung San, a minister in Ba Maw’s government in 1943, went over to the Allies in 1945 and after the war led the negotiations with London. He did not live to see their outcome: he was assassinated on 19 July 1947, and Burma gained full independence on 4 January 1948 – outside the Commonwealth. Japan’s “independence” for Burma remained an example of how, in the second half of the war, Tokyo tried to give substance to the slogan of liberating Asia from colonialism with which it justified its conquests: it created states that were formally sovereign but in practice wholly dependent on itself.