Aim: What long-term effects did World War II have on Asia?

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Aim What long-term effects did World War II have
on Asia?
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Pacific War Key Events

• 1931 Invasion of Manchuria
• 1937 Invasion of China
• 1939 Japan skirmishes with Soviet troops on
  Siberia/Manchuria border
• 1940 Japanese troops enter Vietnam (French
  Indochina) to halt shipments of supplies to
  Nationalist Chinese government

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Pacific War Key Events

• 1941 US embargoes all exports of scrap iron
• 1941 Japan signs alliance treaty with Germany,
  Italy (the Axis)
• 1941 US embargoes iron, steel, oil shipments,
  freezes Japanese assets in US (naval blockade)
• 1941 Britain, Dutch embargo all oil shipments

With only a two-year supply of petroleum, Japan
either had to give up the war in China or secure
its own sources of supply. - Encyclopedia of
American Foreign Policy
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Did the United States provoke war by denying
Japan access to natural resources?

• Possible reasons for embargo
• Japan had simply been too aggressive - entry into
  Vietnam was last straw
• US was fearful that Japanese imperialism would
  displace European imperialism and threaten US
  interests
• President Roosevelt was looking for an excuse to
  enter WWII - needed to provoke an attack

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1910 Japan occupies Korea 1931 Manchuria 1937
China
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Chinese Communists Long March
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Japan in China Communists and Nationalists
fight the Japanese - and each other
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1941-42 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor seizes
Malaya, Burma, Indonesia, Philippines, Indochina
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From Draft Plan for the Establishment of the
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

• Western individualism and materialism shall be
  rejected and a moral worldview established. The
  ultimate object to be achieved is not
  exploitation but co-prosperity and mutual help
  not a formal view of equality but a view of order
  based on righteous classification, not an idea of
  rights but an idea of service

Note the Confucian undertones Japan as the Big
Brother
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War in the Pacific Japan gets pushed back
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Independence in Southeast Asia Indonesians
declare independence in 1945, win it from Dutch
in 1949
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Independence in Southeast Asia Philippines -
granted in 1946
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Independence in Southeast Asia Vietnamese
declare independence in 1945, win it from French
in 1954
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Hiroshima
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(No Transcript)
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How will western and local ideologies be
reconciled in post-war Japan - and in all
post-independence colonies?
Western individualism and materialism shall be rejected and a moral worldview established
The ultimate object to be achieved is not exploitation but co-prosperity and mutual help
Not a formal view of equality but a view of order based on righteous classification
Not an idea of rights but an idea of service
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Japan under American occupation (1945 - 52)

• Beginning of the American World Order
• Was the atom bomb dropped in order to prevent
  sharing Japanese occupation with the Soviets?
• US occupiers allow the Emperor to remain, but
  write the Japanese constitution a second
  attempt to reconcile Japanese-ness with
  western-ness