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To find out how well seduction had worked, they sampled public opinion by flashing the faces of various notables on cinema screens. A cinema audience at Blood and Sand was startled when the comely faces of Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth were snatched off the screen and a portrait of the late great Dr. Sun Yat-sen appeared. After a bewildered moment, the audience applauded. When the face of Chiang Kai-shek appeared, the Chinese went wild with joy. Next, Puppet Wang. No go. Boos and hisses.
Everywhere the Japs struggled to redeem the scorched earth left by departing saboteurs. One refugee guessed that so many wells had been wrecked in Burma and the Indies that another six months would go by before the Japs had oil in sufficient quantities. Another estimated that to redrill all the ruined wells would take 18% of Japan's steel production.
Fifty-five ships had been scuttled in Batavia harbor, the Japs themselves announced. They said that "50 days of hard work" had opened the harbor to ships of 10,000 tons or less. In Surabaya harbor they were raising 219 scuttled ships, at the rate of one a day.
The Japanese were glutted with rubber, spices, tin—far & away more than they could use. The Japs now hold 7,500,000 of the world's 8,400,000 rubber-growing acres, many of them unscorched. Of this mountain of rubber they can put, at the most, about 15% to work. The Germans might use some of it, if there were any means of getting it to them.
The Japs are so eager to dispose of their rubber and tin surpluses that, according to one account, they are thinking of trying to sell them, through South American intermediaries, to a well-heeled onetime customer, the U.S.
Everywhere Jap propaganda told the natives how much better off they were now than under white rule, and everywhere the natives looked back on white rule as paradise lost. With occidental markets for their produce cut off, they were thrown out of work by the hundreds of thousands. They starved and grumbled. They saw their rice being snatched for other parts of the "Co-Prosperity Sphere" (i.e. Japan), with Japanese greed heightened by subnormal crops at home. A Japanese problem was to find enough ships to carry the loot.
There was no reason to believe that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was already tottering. It was simply rickety. It would not stand up to a real good earthquake.