Micronesia

• Japanese: 南洋 (nan'you), 南洋群島 (nan'you guntou)

Micronesia, known in Japanese as Nan'yô (lit. "South Seas") or Nan'yô guntô (lit. "South Seas archipelago") was ruled as a Japanese colony from 1914 until 1944. The Japanese first gained control of Micronesia as part of treaty conditions following World War I, taking over colonial control from the Germans; in 1920, Japan was then granted the islands as a "mandate" by the League of Nations in 1920.

The territory included the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshall Islands, with the exception of the island of Guam, which was controlled by the United States since 1898.

Geographically distant from the Japanese mainland, peopled with a population of little ethnic or cultural relation to the Japanese, comprising in total a relatively small land area, and seeing very little active resistance against Japanese rule, Micronesia represents a rather different case within the Japanese Empire from Colonial Korea or Taiwan.

Today, these islands are divided between the sovereign states of Palau, Nauru, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands, with the United States continuing to control Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Early Japanese Activity

In the last decades of the 19th century, Japanese began to venture out into the Pacific in small numbers, most of them acting independently as entrepreneurs, though the Imperial Japanese Navy soon began using the islands and the waters around them for training missions. Journeys to Micronesia by the navy ships Tsukuba in 1875 and Ryûjo in 1884 were among the most significant; in the meantime, some number of Japanese entrepreneurs began sailing to the Ogasawara Islands, Micronesia, and elsewhere, establishing small-scale shops and warehouses, trading in various goods, copra and coconut oil chief among them. Some, such as Mori Koben (1869-1945) established themselves on islands such as Truk, living there for decades, and fathering numerous half-Japanese/half-Micronesian children.

When a number of Japanese fishermen were killed on or near Lae Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1884, a small official mission led by Suzuki Keikun and Gotô Taketarô traveled there to seek a formal apology from the local chiefs. Once there, they planted a flag and claimed the island for Japan, though the Ministry of Foreign Affairs disavowed it very shortly afterward.

By 1908, a number of small Japanese entrepreneurial ventures in the islands combined their resources to form the Nan'yô bôeki kaisha ("South Seas Trading Company"). The group ran a number of retail storefronts, and passenger, mail, and cargo shipping, as well as copra production operations; World War I and Japanese control of the islands expanded commercial opportunities for this cooperative dramatically, and by 1920, the company was not only strong and wealthy, but had managed to secure for itself a monopoly in trade activities in the islands.

History as Colony

The Japanese government saw Micronesia as desirable chiefly for strategic reasons, and for those reasons took advantage of the opportunity to seize them in 1914, joining World War I on the side of the Allies, by attacking this German territory. After the British requested Japanese aid in finding and destroying the German Asiatic fleet, Tokyo instead, above and beyond British expectations, leaped to declare war on Germany, and to launch attacks on German territory in Micronesia as well as on the Shandong peninsula in China. By October 1914, Japan controlled Pohnpei, Truk, Palau, Kosrae, and Angaur in the Carolines, and Saipan in the Marshalls, but only announced having taken the Jaluit atoll; they then began excluding even the ships of their allies - British and Australians - from the territorial waters, and establishing naval garrisons and a military administration across the islands.

After taking the islands with a minimum of effort, Japan began programs of economic development in the islands, which would grow into the most intensive development of any colonial territories elsewhere in the Pacific Islands. Discussions were had with the British as to the future of Japan retaining the islands, but Japanese activities and intentions in the islands were kept secret from the Americans (also WWI Allies) until as late as September 1917. Meanwhile, public voices and private pressures within Japan called for the islands to be annexed outright, with some speaking of the "natural" "destiny" of Japan as a maritime nation to expand southward, a discourse which came to be known as nanshin ("southern advance"), in contrast to the proponents of hokushin, a "northern advance" deeper into northeast Asia.

Japanese laws and education system (including the teaching of the Japanese language) were put into place almost immediately from 1914 or 1915, and local chieftains and elders were brought on tours of the Home Islands, in order to instill in them awe for Japanese modernity and power. Steamships began to travel to, from, and between the islands, and the Nan'yô bôeki kaisha expanded their business, establishing thirty-two branches across the territory, and introducing many aspects of modern/Japanese material culture and lifestyles into the islands.

The naval/military character of the islands' administration began to be lessened in 1918, and by 1921, civil administration was extended across the entire territory. While military affairs were directed by the South Sea Islands Defense Force (Nan'yô guntô bôbitai) based on Truk, civil affairs were now managed from Koror, an island in the Palau grouping.

In 1920, Japan was then officially granted a "mandate" over the islands by the League of Nations, thus securing some formal international recognition and approval for Japanese control over Micronesia. The Class "C" level of the mandate gave Japan wide freedoms in how to administer the territory, within certain obligations imposed by the League of Nations, but British and American representatives at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22 managed to get Japan to agree to a non-fortification clause, an agreement to not turn Micronesia into naval bases, in return for the US and UK agreeing to the same in Southeast Asia and parts of the western Pacific. The navy pulled out from Micronesia almost entirely in 1922, and the territory came to be run by the South Seas Bureau (Nan'yô chô), a purely civilian administration. The heads of this government reported to the Prime Minister's office until 1929, and then from that time until the end of the Pacific War, came under the authority of the Colonial Ministry.

Economic development in the islands had a rocky start, with initial efforts at establishing sugar plantations in the late 1910s ending in failure. However, these efforts were restarted in 1921 by Matsue Haruji (Harutsugu), a graduate of LSU with experience working with the Spreckels Company. He founded the Nan'yô kôhatsu kaisha ("South Seas Development Company"), and after further difficulties in 1922-23, with considerable help from the Nan'yô-chô government, he began building up a set of operations which would soon earn him the title of "Sugar King of the South Pacific." By the 1930s, the company accounted for roughly 60% of the total revenues of the Nan'yô-chô government, and had expanded its operations into Melanesia and the Dutch East Indies, and into other fields, such as cultivation of tapioca and coconut, phosphates, marine products, and warehousing.

As Allied forces invaded the islands in the 1940s, Micronesia became the site of some of the toughest fighting of the Pacific War.

References

• Mark Peattie, "The Nan'yô: Japan in the South Pacific, 1885-1945," in Peattie and Ramon Myers (eds.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton University Press (1984), 172-210.