Seized Hearts: “Soft” Japanese Counterinsurgency Before 1945 and Its Persistent Legacies in Postwar Malaya, South Vietnam and Beyond
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Volume 18 | Issue 6 | Number 2 | Article ID 5380 | Mar 15, 2020 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Seized Hearts: “Soft” Japanese Counterinsurgency Before 1945 and Its Persistent Legacies in Postwar Malaya, South Vietnam and Beyond Vivian Blaxell “Soft” Counterinsurgency Abstract: Counterinsurgency tactics for Persuading rather than terrifying people to winning hearts and minds are key weapons in support the state instead of insurgents remains state efforts to suppress rebellion and the a key weapon of counterinsurgency theory and possibility of rebellion. Always predicated on practice: “soft” strategy. In a 2010Meet the the threat of state violence, hearts and minds Press interview, Gen. David Petraeus, one of counterinsurgency is usually thought tothe lead authors of United States originate in British or French strategies for counterinsurgency strategy and at the time of managing insurgency in their colonies in Asia, interview, commander of the International especially in suppression of the 1948-1960 Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, set communist insurgency in Malaya. However, out a typical hearts and minds counterinsurgency strategy beginning with work with archival data, a genealogical violent clearance of rebels from a defined approach to clear, hold and protect population space, hold of that space, protection of the management, which is a key principle of hearts population in that space, and culminating in and minds strategy, and careful review of successful persuasion of their loyalties. scholarship on Japan’s colonial military and Petraeus concluded: “At the end of the day, it’s governance (especially but not only in Japanese not about their embrace of us, it’s not about us language) indicates that hearts and minds/hold winning hearts and minds, it’s about the and protect counterinsurgency principles have Afghan government winning hearts and minds. origins in imperial management of insurgency This isn’t to say that there is any kind of in Japan’s colonies. It is also possible that objective of turning Afghanistan into elements of imperial Japanese “soft”Switzerland in three to five years or less. counterinsurgency strategy undergirdAfghan good enough is good enough.”1 For American and British hearts and mindsmanagers of hearts and minds counterinsurgency strategies in Malaya and counterinsurgency operations, “soft” tactics South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s. depend on state violence for their success, and success is always measured in terms of what is “good enough”. Keywords: Japanese imperialism; Japanese In popular consciousness (and in the thinking counterinsurgency; legacies of Japaneseof Gen. Petraeus), hearts and minds colonialism; history of Japanesecounterinsurgency descends from United counterinsurgency; hearts and mindsStates and South Vietnamese government counterinsurgency; strategic hamlets;counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam in the Manchuria; South Vietnam; Malaya 1960s and early 1970s. Many professional 1 18 | 6 | 2 APJ | JF historians push the lineage a little further back Modernity and theories of modernity produce to British suppression of communist insurgency hearts and minds counterinsurgency. If James in Malaya in the 1950s.2 Others have tried to Scott is correct that modernity has been a follow it to the British imperial response to project making the illegible legible,6 then insurgency in the Baluchistan region ofhearts and minds counterinsurgency seeks to Afghanistan in the late 19th century3 or to transform the radical illegibility posed to state French counterinsurgency tactics in Tonkin power by rebellion into an extreme and (North Vietnam) and Madagascar, also at the miniaturized legibility. In hearts and minds end of the 19th century.4 What is missing from counterinsurgency the state administers the most of these accounts of the lineage of hearts core goods of modernity — security, rationality, and minds counterinsurgency, however, is regulation, education, capitalization — to a Japan. In a footnote to a seminal study of small and highly concentrated population Chinese politics and Chinese communist contained in a space purpose-built as antithesis governance of the Shaan-Gan-Ning region to the illegibility of insurgency. The bet is that before 1945, Mark Selden remarks, “The the rewards of modernity are more likely to Japanese have not received sufficientsecure loyalty than any goods offered by recognition for the design and implementation insurgents.7 Imperial Japan was almost of counterinsurgency.”5 I think Selden refers missionary in its determination to be modern here primarily to the brilliant savagery of and to impose modernity wherever the Japanese state violence in the JapaneseJapanese state alighted. No 19th or 20th colonies, but “insufficient recognition” also century empire went at its colonies with more characterizes the state of our knowledge of talk and more application of modern forms such Japanese “soft” counterinsurgency about which as centralized government, industrialization, there is scant discussion in any language. Yet, double entry accounting, effective banking Japan’s public commitments to Pan-Asian systems, state-controlled education, programming and benevolent patronage of communications and transport infrastructure, Asian modernization in its imperial ideology, cadastral surveys and the rule of private along with the need to conserve production of property, and formally encoded juridical resources for the imperial effort, meant that procedures enforced by rational, armed managers of the imperial state understood the security forces, than the Empire of Japan. The benefits accruing from forms ofJapanese state and its governments portrayed counterinsurgency that created safe,the realm as beset by threats – illegibilities – productive, and compliant populations. Always best countered by modernization backed up by operating in concert with state violence, Japan military and economic power. At home and in used vestigial and fully realized, formal and the colonies, otherness, disagreement, informal hearts and minds counterinsurgency criticism, heterogeneity and rebellion were met throughout its colonies from the very beginning with implicit and explicit threats of state of its modern imperial project in 1869. What is violence and strategic applications of modern more, in the postwar period, Japanese hearts goods. Resistance could seem like abjuration of and minds methods seem to have persisted and the goods of modernity; submission, a recurred in British and United States’modernizing act. counterinsurgency theory and practice in Malaya and Vietnam. This began early. In colonial Hokkaidō, the army and colonial authorities sought to contain and abolish the disorder posed by Ainu with forced relocation into new communities. It may Seized Hearts have been that relocations in Hokkaidō were 2 18 | 6 | 2 APJ | JF inspired by what Japanese colonial authorities 1920. The army, in collaboration with colonial had learned or heard from American advisors. administrators, Japanese anthropologists at Men with both direct and indirect experience in Taihoku Imperial University in what is now management of Native Americans in the Taipei, and local pro-Japanese leaders, western United States played significant roles developed and refined Japanese hearts and in the early colonization of Hokkaidō. In 1870, minds counterinsurgency to put down a fierce Kaitakushi (Hokkaidō Colonizationarmed rebellion by Formosa First Peoples. In Commission) hired Horace Capron to advise on Hokkaidō, clearance had comprised forced commercialization and eventual mechanization relocation of Ainu into communities where they of agriculture in Hokkaidō. His resumécould be held, protected, and persuaded. In included dispossession and relocation of Native Taiwan, clearance, hold, and protection began Americans from their lands in Texas after it with a modern adaptation of an old Chinese was wrested from Mexico in the Mexican military strategy for defense against American War of 1846-1848 and opened up to barbarians. The Japanese military and civilian large-scale settlement. To work with him in authorities built a guard line of mines, sentries, Hokkaidō, Capron hired men with similar forts, deforestation, and electrified fencing credentials: surveyors, geologists, andwhich bisected the eastern highlands of Taiwan agronomists with experience in management of where most surviving Formosan First Peoples lands taken from indigenous Americans and in lived. On one side of the guard line lived First removal of native peoples to make way for Peoples opposed to Japanese rule or not railroads, mines, and farms.8 Though the Ainu submitted to it: “raw barbarians [seiban]”. On posed little real threat of insurgency inthe other were First Peoples who had Hokkaidō, they did not surrender to Japanese submitted to the imperial Japanese state: rule passively: Ainu did not rebel but they were “cooked barbarians [jukuban]”. This was a often reluctant.9 The Japanese state set about savage space. Traversing it required a using modernity to vitiate Ainu difference and convincing demonstration of submission to the threat it posed to modern order. By the end Japan and its modernizing project. The raw of the 1880s, many Ainu had been forced into could become cooked and cross the guard line new communities on lands often far from only after convincing Japanese authorities and ancestral territories. Here, they were subject to pro-Japanese Formosan First Peoples’ the suasions of the modern state while their community leaders