Treason doth never prosper

Murray Sayle

Tokyo News that the durable Burmese Dictator Ne Win, after a comfortable quarter- century of power, is thinking of retiring, like any businessman who has made his pile and hears his roses calling, and the equally unorthodox behaviour of the Japanese (Spectator, 21 August) in rewriting history from the viewpoint of the losers, namely their goodselves, calls to mind how capriciously events have dealt with the great figures of Japan's short-lived, mould- smashing empire.

Take, as an example, Ne Win himself. The name, meaning approximately 'Bright Day' is, like Lenin or Ho Chi Minh, a nom de coup, taken when the young man was a clerk in the Rangoon Post Office just before the Second World War, and in the evenings a busy member of the student revolutionary movement who called themselves the `Thakins', 'Masters', a saucy turnabout of the title by which their British rulers wanted the Burmese to ad- dress them. Young Ne Win was spotted by the local chief of the Japanese Secret Ser- vice, a dentist in his spare time, as a suitable candidate for military training in prepara- tion for the forthcoming expulsion of the European colonial impires and their replacement by Japan's own 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'.

With a group of like-minded young men, the 'Thirty Comrades', Ne Win slipped clandestinely out of Berma. In their in- nocence they thought they were headed for the Soviet Union. They wound up on Hainan Island, a part of China controlled by the Japanese, where they took crash courses in minor infantry tactics, Shinto,

'How dare you call me a deviationist?'

swordsmanship and other useful Japanese accomplishments. The 'Thirty Comrades' followed the conquering Japanese armies back to Burma, where they set up ad- ministrations behind the advancing Japanese lines, misgoverning them so badly that the local people were soon sighing for the British back, or even Japanese direct rule. In particular the Comrades' vindictive conduct towards the country's non- Burmese minorities, Shans, Karens, Mons and the rest so alienated these picturesque tribesmen that civil war has smouldered in Burma ever since.

Japanese direct rule meant rule by the Japanese Army, with another of the Com- rades, young Aung San, as front man. On the approach of the avenging British under Gen. Sir William Slim all thirty Comrades began to suspect that they had made a serious error of judgment (a brigade of Gurkhas figured in Slim's order of battle) and in March 1945, five months before Hiroshima, the Comrades declared war on Japan. Aung San negotiated his country's independence from Britain and departure from the Commonwealth, and, still only 34, was himself assassinated by a rival Comrade in July 1947. Aung San has become Burma's national hero, and his portait, sad, proud, forever young (and wearing the uniform of a Japanese major-general) looks out at you from the flimsy Burmese bank- notes to this very day.

That left Ne Win the senior surviving Comrade, and in October 1958, after com- plex manoeuveres, difficult to summarise but involving people with such names as Ba Maw, Tin Tut and U Nu, Ne Win assumed the purple as President and Commander-in- Chief. Burma has slept in the sun ever since, a most agreeable place to visit although I don't know that I would like (or be allowed) to live there. If his retirement goes to plan, Ne Win should, Buddha will- ing, die peacefully in bed, perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of a fascinating career. He still uses Japanese confidants left over from the old days, one of whom has a berth for life at the Burmese Embassy in Tokyo.

History has not, so far at any rate, been so kind to Bung Karmo (`Brother Bung') Sukarno of Indonesia. A pre-war rebel against Dutch rule in the East Indies, and consequently a veteran of Dutch prisons, Sukarno held office under the Japanese when Indonesia was part of a Co-prosperity Sphere and helped with the constitution drafted under Japanese supervision bet- ween May and July 1945. Two days after Japan's surrender the independence of In- donesia was proclaimed, and Brother Bung sworn in as first President by the light of a hurricane lamp in the house of a Japanese admiral in Batavia, by then renamed Djakarta.

A man of immense energy, sexual ap- petite and prophetic ideas, some scatty, some seminal (he invented, for instance the term 'Afro-Asian' and the often-betrayed, but still potent idea of non-alignment) Sukarno eventually schemed himself into a corner and was deposed after a coup, and grisly massacre of local Chinese, in 1965* His successor, the present incumbent, General Suharto, began his military career as a sergeant in the Dutch colonial army and continued as a lieutenant in the Japanese military police, an aspect of his career not stressed in the present Indone- sian school textbooks. Suharto was, however, photographed at a jolly reunion with old wartime (Japanese) colleagues in Tokyo in 1976, a picture not, curiously enough, carried in the Indonesian press., normally obsessively interested in their president's comings and goings.

Sukarno, too, kept up his Japanese con- nections after the war. He was introduced to the most notorious of his wives, Dew', then a bar hostess in the Shinjuku red-light district of Tokyo by one Ryoichi Sasakawa, flamboyant Japanese right-wing publicist, held as a war criminal by the Americans 1946-49, subsequently the boss of the Japanese gambling industry and today one of the richest men in the world. Sasakawa has also been a generous friend to Michael Somare, sometime Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, and many other politician from inside (and outside) the short-lived Japanese empire. Park Chung-Hee; the south Korean strongman assassinated by one of his own henchmen last year, was also in his youth a lieutenant in the Japanese Army — not sur- prising, perhaps, as Korea was officially part of Greater Japan at the time, and young men wishing to embark on a militatY career had the effective choice of donning the Emperor's uniform or taking to the hills. Kim II Sung, dictator of North Korea, followed the latter course, and the North Koreans never wearied of rubbing in Park's record as a Japanese soldier which he serv- ed, according to them, under the quintess- entially Japanese name of Okamoto. Even when he ruled South Korea, Park never quite lived down suggestions that he was far too cosy with Japanese politicians and businessmen of his own generation, the Korean equivalent of an IRA man having once played for an England XI under the name of say, Smith.

Lee Kuan Yew, the present Prime Minister of Singapore, was living in his home town when it was occupied by the Japanese, and naturally enough he had a job. Harry Lee, as he was known in those days, was employed by the Japanese Domle News Agency, although it has subsequentlY been said that he was all the time an under- cover British intelligence agent. Japanese colleagues who worked alongside Harry are still lost in admiration at the skill with which he concealed his pro-British syrn- Pathies, thus, no doubt, making his clandestine work all the more effective. He has in the post-war years, emerged as one of the keenest students in Asia of Japanese in- dustrial methods, which he is doing his best to emulate in his pocket-sized, tightly-run Republic. Domei News has, meanwhile, Changed its name to Kyodo and merged in Japan with the British news agency Reuter, making Harry Lee almost, as it were, a rela- tion by marriage of the Spectator.

Some lucky people, we can see, managed to survive the wreck of the Japanese empire and, profiting by experience, went on to greater things. The people who went down With it are, in a way, even more interesting, Inight-have-beens who have all but disap- peared from the historical records; perhaps an even crueller fate than execration, especially where politicians are concerned.

Who now remembers Wang Ching-Wei, Member of the central committee of Chiang Kai-Shek's party, the Kuomintang, first and only President of the Provisional Republic of China set up under the Japanese in Nanking in 1938? Wang was Persuaded, or persuaded himself, that Japan was to be the dominant economic Power in Asia and that the future of all Asian countries lay in some form of association with the Japanese — exactly What the present Chinese leadership say when they are trying to touch Tokyo for yet another loan. Wang took the next step, and decided that he could best serve his country by taking office under the invader and us- ing an insider's influence to moderate their Policies — a viewpoint that has taken many a man to the gallows, in analogous situa- tions. Wang was, at least, spared the rope or the firing squad, like the last and perhaps the most tragic of all this gallery of losers, Subhas Chandra Bose, first and only presi- dent of the government of Azad Hind, `Free India'.

Bose belonged to the school of spell- binding Bengali orators represented nearer our own time by the gifted, but far less substantial Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh. A brilliant scholar, Bose was the first Indian ever to pass the examina- tions for the Indian Civil Service, which had to be taken in English in London. This suc- cess would have entitled him to one of the best-paid and most prestigious jobs in the British Empire, but Bose elected to devote his life to the struggle for independence.

On the outbreak of WW2 Bose made his way to Berlin and a frosty welcome from the Fiihrer, who had little time for persons of colour, however anti-British they might be. The Germans managed to unload Bose on the Japanese, by submarine, after the fall of Singapore, where Bose set about recruiting from Indian prisoners of war an Indian National Army to fight alongside the Japanese for the liberation of the motherland from the British yoke. Stingy as ever, the Japanese wanted cash for the uniforms and weapons they supplied the INA, and Bose spent a lot of time raising Coin, precious metals and jewellery from the Indian communities of the Asian coun-

tries then members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The Japanese never really trusted either Bose or his INA, with whom they could communicate of course, only in English, and the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs he had recruited were sent in against their com- patriots without proper equipment, rations or transport during the last great Japanese push of the war, the attempt to invade India from Burma in 1944. The INA men were slaughtered and many survivors were, perhaps understandably, shot out of hand as traitors when captured for the second time in their short, unhappy lives.

Its usefulness at an end, Bose's 'Free In- dia' government was cold-shouldered by the Japanese, but in the last days of the war he managed to get two seats aboard a Japanese bomber bound for Tokyo for himself and his aide, a Sikh colonel. Cradl- ed on his knees, Bose clutched a suitcase full of gold and jewellery, the last of the treasury of the Azad Hind Government.

The overloaded, ill-serviced bomber crashed in Tainan, Formosa, on a refuelling stop. His aide was killed outright and Bose, mortally burned, was taken to a local hospital to die. The Japanese colonel in charge of the airport had, however, got wind of the Free India treasury, but was short of manpower to look for it. Improvis- ing brilliantly, he rounded up the pupils of the nearby Chinese girls' high school to search the runway and the wreckage scat- tered along it for the missing metals and jewellery. Guessing that the girls would see little reason to turn in whatever they found the colonel (according to Japanese ac- counts) ordered the elastic removed from their bloomers, thus opening up the most obvious hiding-place. So, while embarrass- ed schoolgirls who had never heard of him scrabbled one-handed in the sand of an obscure airport, a brave and brilliant man ended a sad life.

Not, however, a life without conse- quences. The government of India, still in British hands, decided to put one INA of- ficer from each religious community on trail, on some muddled notion that treason

should not go unpunished. The trial, held in the Red Fort in Delhi, created uproar in In- dia, and is still featured in the Son et Lumiere there. The officers were acquitted and the brilliant advocate who defended them, one Jawaharlal Nehru, made a na- tional repution in the process. His daughter is, as a direct result, in charge of India to- day.

The moral? We might notice, glancing through this gallery of heroes and traitors, that the key question is when, and how often to change sides. As Sir John Har- ington, shortly before inventing the flush toilet, said: Treason doth never prosper; What's the reason?

For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

But a subtler point perhaps, emerges. If the Japanese were, and are, the heavy theatrical nasties now portrayed in the schoolbooks of the various countries once part of the Japanese Empire, how did they manage to get such brilliant, successful and patriotic people to work for them, even in the short term? The answer has, I think, some current relevance. The Japanese arriv- ed when the first great depression had been running nearly a decade. Europeans and Americans were not exactly happy about dole queues and hunger marches but at least, as rulers of the world, they could hardly pass the blame higher up. But the Depression, by ruining the markets for cash crops in the Asian colonies, brought starva- tion and revolt against European rule to many parts of Asia, in particular to Burma, Indochina, Indonesia and Bengal — exactly the places and people who so puzzlingly welcomed the Japanese, and where, later, rebellion against renewed European rule was eventually to triumph. The regions where landlords were murdered and pea- sant soviets were set up in Vietnam in the 1930's were, for instance, the very same areas the Americans were trying to clear of Vietcong in the 1960's.

The old colonial empires in those days were seen as transmission belts, delivering the miseries of the depression to parts of the world which had no part in creating them. The initial attraction of the Japanese was not that they were Asians, who are no fonder of each other than Europeans, pro- bably less, but their promise that they would insulate Asia from the white world's troubles with their Asians only 'Co- Prosperity Sphere'.

We see somthing like the same process starting again, as world depression is, once more, starting to blight the already shaky prospects of the Asian countries which have no oil, Arabs, common agricultural policies or any other way of cushioning the shock. But this time the Japanese are not offering to defend their Asian brothers, or set up a juster economic order. Japan is now acting as the transmission belt, spreading unemployment and misery from America and Europe to her Asian neighbours. Moves to expel Japan from Asia can be ex- pected. Here we go again.