- Japanese: 南洋 (nan'you), 南洋群島 (nan'you guntou)
Micronesia, known in Japanese as Nan'yô (lit. "South Seas")[1] 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.
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 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.
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.
- ↑ The term Nan'yô has historically referred ambiguously to a rather large swath of area, from the Ryûkyû Islands and Taiwan to Southeast Asia, to the South Pacific. Even during the 1910s-1940s, when the term could be used to refer specifically and strictly to the colony or mandate of Micronesia, it continued to be commonly used to refer to the South China Sea and South Pacific more generally, and/or to various subsections of that region.