For decades in the early 20th century, the United States and Japan, latecomers to modern empire, competed over natural resources and territories in the Asia-Pacific region, along with British and other European empires. In the process, they each subjugated people deemed by both as “racially inferior,” established regimes of colonial rule and put down liberation struggles.
Japan’s attacks of December 1941, therefore, need to be understood as a dramatic moment in this imperial rivalry. Remembering World War II as an imperial war requires widening our view from the usual nation frameworks to reckon with the damage done to the colonized victims of the attacks and the war. This also asks us to recognize the larger consequences of both U.S. and Japanese colonization in the region, which include racial, cultural, economic and political inequalities that endured long after World War II came to an end. Nowhere was the damage to colonized people and the legacy of imperial clashes more visible than in the Philippines.
Early in the morning on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy Air Service bombed the U.S. naval base at the harbor of Hawaiʻi. But the Japanese empire’s attack on the United States was not limited to Hawaiʻi. In the hours that followed, the Japanese navy raided U.S. bases in the Philippines, which had turned from a Spanish colony into a U.S. colony when the United States vanquished the Spanish in 1898 and then quashed a Filipino rebellion during the subsequent Philippine-American War.
What followed reflected the complexity of U.S.-Japanese imperial competition in the early 20th century. For its part, the United States attempted to erase its own bloody seizing of the Philippines, claiming a mission of “benevolent assimilation” of the Filipinos to U.S. standards, establishing English-language public schools, rewriting property laws and empowering a Christian Filipino elite in the territory. Simultaneously, to promote its own rising imperial power, Japan promoted settler colonialism among its citizens, which sent Japanese people out across the Asia-Pacific region to settle in resource- and land-rich areas. Thousands of Japanese settlers arrived on Philippine shores during U.S. rule. They established families, schools and communities — with some marrying local Filipino women — working key jobs in construction and agriculture and enriching the U.S. empire with their labor, while also fulfilling the aims of the Japanese empire.