The fate of the Dutch Empire was the same. Because of oil, the territory was especially attractive to Japan. The first Japanese landing in Indonesia had taken place on 6 January. On 6 March, Batavia, its capital, fell, and the formalities of the Dutch surrender were completed on 12 March, six days later, at Bandung in Java. A large-scale naval battle had been fought between 27 and 29 February and resulted in the destruction of five Dutch cruisers, and of the few British cruisers which were still afloat in these waters. Throughout the archipelago, pockets of resistance remained, but by April all significant resistance had come to an end.
The experience of the Dutch was generally similar to that of the British. They had a considerable Army in Indonesia; 98,000 men surrendered, almost without fighting, and were interned. Apparently the Dutch could not rely sufficiently on their Indonesian troops to risk combat. A feature of Dutch colonialism was the far greater number of Dutch residents in their colonial territories. The number of civilian internees was therefore greater.
The impressions formed by the Dutch of the victorious Japanese Army were interesting, since they come from people who formerly had less to do with the Japanese than the British or Chinese. Their first feeling was one of unwilling admiration. The Japanese marched in, in perfect discipline. For whatever reasons, the disorders of the Japanese occupation, which had been reported in the Philippines, Malaya and Burma, were avoided. There was no deliberate relaxing of discipline while the troops ran wild. Plundering and unlawful high-handedness by the soldiers were prevented. Before long, these first impressions were found to have been much too favourable but in the early days were unquestionably widespread.
The Dutch noticed that the Japanese carried very little impedimenta, and went without demur wherever their officers ordered them. It is usually reckoned that, in modern armies of the West, for every fighting man there are eight supporting soldiers; among the Japanese the ratio was said to be as low as one to one. The Japanese continually demonstrated before the eyes of the Dutch that no obstacle could deter them. And there was no sign that the Japanese private soldier, or junior officer, murmured against the savage discipline which was used against them.
With these conquests, there came to an end the extraordinary hundred days of Japan. The Army and Navy had raced ahead, and, after a period of rattling and shaking down the Empires of Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, they needed time to rest, and to make new plans. The extent of the territory which had fallen into their hands bewildered, while it excited them. They had to provide for its administration. They had also to fill out the contents of the extremely vague and propagandist plans for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which had come into being long before it was planned as a reality.
Meanwhile the Japanese population would have been more than human if it had not given itself up for the time to the spectacle which was fed to it by all the propaganda machines of the modern state and was meant to generate a profound mood of self-wonder. The streak of exhilaration came after a long and anxious period which preceded Pearl Harbor, a period of grave economic anxiety, of regrets over the interminable war with China, of fears that Japan was getting out of its depth in international relations, and of perplexity over the disorders in its political life.
The great outburst of Japanese victories had lifted the reputation of the Japanese soldier to unexampled heights. He was suddenly regarded as superhuman and invincible: his military virtues were so stupendous that it seemed astonishing that they had not been noticed adequately before. It seemed to be useless to struggle against them: they had eclipsed the virtues of the white man, until then incontestably the most formidable in the imagination of the Orient. As the Japanese Army went to war in 1941 it sang a song called ‘Umi Yukaba’. One of its verses, in translation, goes as follows:
Across the sea.
Corpses in the water;
Across the mountain.
Corpses heaped upon the field;
F shall die only for the Emperor,
I shall never look back.
No British or American troops ever sang such lugubrious or unsophisticated words. But the Japanese sentiment was precisely that of the song. It epitomises the difference in attitude to the war between the western world and Japan; Japan found it hard to understand the cryptic, quizzical, and somewhat ambiguous songs of the Western Allies: the simplicity of the Japanese view gave them strength.
The downward turn in Japan’s war fortunes set in in the autumn of 1942, and thereafter its way was steadily towards disaster. Day after day there was only bad and worsening news; nowhere, either in its own fortunes or by rescue through possible triumphs of its European Allies, did there appear any rift in the clouds.
Meanwhile, in the brief moment of joy in Japan, it is vain to look for any lasting monument of Japanese achievement in art, music or letters. The Japanese spirit remained strangely barren. No works of poetry, philosophy, architecture or painting during this time have come to the notice of the international world of cognoscenti, or have won sympathy for the civilization which was about to endure such ravage and destruction. No sounds of natural gaiety appeared to come from Japan: it seemed a world now devoted to material advance: devoid of lightness, wit, romantic lyricism, the cultivated intelligence of women. In politics there was no originality: in science, having borrowed from abroad, Japan was ingeniously adaptive, but was without a creative impulse; in sociology, it was unimaginative. The Japanese pursued their war in a grey atmosphere of the human spirit.