OCCUPIED ASIA
In one way, Korea is the Austria of Asia: it was the first country overrun and exploited by the Asiatic aggressor. In other ways the parallel fails. The Japs are far more afraid of Korea than the Nazis are of Austria. To the Japanese, the Koreans are "inscrutable," as the Japanese themselves are to westerners. Ever since Japan took Korea in 1904, its Korean policy has wavered between uneasy placating and frantic terrorism. Grapevine news reaching the Korean National Front Federation in the U.S. last week showed quite clearly that Japan, however busy it might be elsewhere, could not turn its back on inscrutable Korea for a moment.
On Quelpart Island, off the Korean peninsula's southern tip, the Japs had an air base. In March—according to last week's reports—Korean workers suddenly attacked the base, set fire to four underground hangars, destroyed two big fuel tanks and 69 airplanes, killed 142 of the Jap crew and wounded or scorched another 200. Trembling with rage and fright, the surviving Japanese butchered every Korean on the island, some 400 in all.
This was not an isolated incident. It followed reports of other Korean uprisings—power plants dynamited, warehouses, mills, bridges, ammunition supplies, fishing boats and tankers destroyed or damaged, police stations overwhelmed, Japanese houses burned. The rumble of some of these doings reached the Chinese mainland. The Japs explained that it was just a big earthquake. Seismologists in the U.S. found nothing to confirm the claim.
Other news of Co-Prosperity, from Japanese and non-Japanese sources.
In Malaya the Japs set up monopolies in salt, tobacco, matches. To get more money, they sold chances on a million-yen lottery to the Malays. At Singapore, a college of colonial administration was established for aspiring Jap administrators. Also opened in Singapore was a tourist bureau extolling the beauties of Nippon.
In the Philippines the Japs burned to the ground the national library at Manila, ordered expunged from all textbooks any mention of the U.S., Great Britain, democracy or Anglo-Saxon culture. Eight Filipinos were executed for printing and distributing anti-Japanese pamphlets.
In the Dutch East Indies Japanese-language schools were opened, and the Japs announced that already Indonesian traffic policemen were giving orders in Japanese. All "aliens" (Europeans) aged 17 or over were required to register and make a declaration of loyalty to the Son of Heaven. The fee charged for the privilege of making this declaration was 250 guilders to men, 80 guilders to women. All European-owned land was confiscated. Two Hollanders accused of "spreading rumors based on false radio news" were executed.
China. The Jap grew daily more fierce in the occupied provinces of China. Bloodcurdling stories of mass massacres seeped out of newly occupied Chekiang Province. In the northern Hopei-Shantung-Shansi triangle the Japs tried a scorched-earth policy of burning out villages and frightening civilians from whom guerrilla bands receive food and shelter. But in Shanghai the Japanese had been busy trying to make the Chinese like their puppet government.