18. The Japanese were told Japan was in China to free Asians from western domination
By the late 1930s, Japan was involved in a war in China which became a strain on the morale of the Japanese people. The people were told that the war was being fought to bring all Asians under the rule of a single entity – the Emperor of Japan – and that the use of military force against those who opposed such a policy was divinely justified. The Chinese who were fighting were being supported by the western nations who exploited them, according to the Japanese militarists who controlled the government. This included the French in Indochina, the United States in the Philippines, the British in Malaysia, and the Dutch in their Pacific colonies.
The fighting in China was explained to the people through the government-controlled propaganda machinery as a holy war. The ancient concept of hakko ichiu (eight directions) was presented to the people as the necessity of expansion to cover all peoples under one ruler, linked to the divine creation of Japan. The year 1940 was designated by the government to be the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of Japan and the initiation of its destiny to expand to cover all races, beginning with the Asian races. That year Prime Minster Kanoe issued a statement which described Japan’s goal of “world peace in conformity with the very spirit in which our nation was founded”.
