It will be for ever remembered as a Day of Infamy. Without warning Japan’s bombers rained down terror on a Sunday morning in Hawaii. Lasting just two hours their attack on Pearl Harbor would bring the United States into World War II. Days that Shook the World: Attack on Pearl Harbor, PBS 2003
For the last year the United States has been secretly decoding Japan’s diplomatic signals. ibid.
The Americans have always considered Pearl Harbor to be invulnerable to attack by torpedo bomber. ibid.
It is not the death blow to the US Navy Japan had hoped for. ibid.
In the history of modern warfare one day stands out above all others – the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Days that Shook the World: Hiroshima
08.16 a.m. 5TH August 1945: a bomb that will change the world for ever. ibid.
The bomb, named Little Boy, is wheeled out of its hangar. ibid.
Over 100,000 people and 47,000 buildings are quite literally obliterated. ibid.
‘This is the greatest thing in history’. ibid. President Truman
By early 1943 the Japanese empire was at its height. The country had occupied Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. World War II in Colour e11: The Island War, Discovery 2009
In January 1944 America’s naval offensive in the Pacific moved on to the Marshall Islands. ibid.
Japanese losses had been even greater. ibid.
On this shore just after midnight on 7th December 1941 Japanese troops invaded the British colony of Malaysia. The Pacific War had begun. The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal, BBC 2012
Japan’s crowning victory – the fall of Singapore, symbol of British power in the East. ibid.
It was the British who gave the Japanese the know-how to take out Pearl Harbor and capture Singapore ... through a mole who was a peer of the realm known to Churchill himself. ibid.
Within two years [William] Sempill and his military missionaries had given Japan’s naval air service a potential world-wide reach. ibid.
Rutland’s paymasters then revealed they had a much more important job for him: they would increase his salary if he agreed how to show their pilots how to fly off and on to the decks of carriers. ibid.
Sempill was passing on a whole range of secret information. ibid.
MI5 was appalled by Sempill’s behaviour. ibid.
Japan now had the means to realise her imperial ambitions. She set her sights on South East Asia. The ultimate prize was Singapore. ibid.
Sempill maintained his secret links with the Japanese. ibid.
Sempill was never prosecuted. ibid.
Rutland was deported to Britain where he was interned for two years. ibid.
A history of foreign invasion, smouldering racial tension and violent struggle against imperial power. After more than a hundred years of colonial rule in 1941 the flames of independence were lit when Japan bombed Singapore. Singapore 1942: End of Empire I, BBC 2012
It was a call to arms that echoed within the ranks of the British army, causing 20,000 British Indian army soldiers to switch sides and fight for the Japanese. ibid.
Singapore: the bastion of the British empire fell in just 70 days. It was Japan’s greatest victory and Britain’s most humiliating defeat of World War II. The fall of Singapore changed the face of South-East Asia for ever, and heralded the beginning of the end for the British empire. ibid.
Many local Malays began to help the Japanese. ibid.
The bicycle brigades were a vital asset of the Japanese army, and the routes were planned long before they invaded. ibid.
Penang fell unopposed to the Japanese. ibid.
There were less than a hundred Argyles who hadn’t been killed or captured. ibid.
On 8th December 1941 with World War II raging in Europe, Japan seized the opportunity to launch a brutal campaign to expand its empire and expel the white colonials from Asia. Singapore 1942: End of Empire II
Many deserted under fire. The so-called impregnable fortress had been breached. ibid.
The fanaticism of the Japanese soldiers shocked the empire troops. ibid.
Those left stranded on the wharf were left to face the fearsome occupying force now at the gates of their city. ibid.
Over three years in captivity. 30,000 British, 15,000 Australian and 40,000 India troops joined 30,000 POWs already taken in Malaysia. ibid.
The Japanese promised the Malays independence but it never came. Instead they increasingly behaved like a harsh new Colonial power. ibid.
Britain finally granted Malaysia independence on 31st August 1957. ibid.
Among the local Singaporeans, what little respect remained for the empire forces would quickly be dispelled. ibid.
An estimated 50,000 Chinese-Singaporeans were executed by the Japanese. ibid.
On 12th September 1945 the British returned to Singapore. It was the Japanese’ turn to be marched through in the streets in front of the locals. ibid.
For the people of South-East Asia things had changed. ibid.
Twenty-six similarities in technique and motif on pottery from Japan and Valdivia. Who Really Discovered America? Discovery 2010
More than a million civilians dead – the Japanese fought on. ibid.
Hiroshima August 6th 1945 ... more than 100,000 killed, 40,000 injured, 20,000 missing. Burns, blindness, radiation sickness. It took only nine seconds. The Day After Trinity, KTEH 1980
For three times as many people died in the five-year period after the bomb fell on Hiroshima than on the day of the explosion, most of them from the effects radiation ... Film of what really happened to the victims was suppressed. John Pilger, The Truth Game
Japan is a nation of masks. Learning to live behind a mask is a prerequisite of much of Japanese civilisation ... Behind perhaps the most impenetrable mask of all the subtle yet forceful way the Japanese establishment is today reclaiming a nationalism denied them since the Second World War. John Pilger, Japan: Behind the Mask
Under the American occupation of General Douglas MacArthur a new constitution was formulated which gave the defeated Japanese new freedoms. But who today are the beneficiaries of these new freedoms? The ordinary people of Japan who had suffered so terribly, or the great reborn companies like Mitsubishi which had formed the industrial and financial base of the war? ... In 1946 General MacArthur cancelled the right of public workers to strike ... The legacy of MacArthur’s ban was the weakening of real trade-union opposition in Japan, thus today the outside world sees only the mask of a docile workforce and a consensus society. ibid.
Women who work for less than £2 an hour, six days a week, no sick pay, no pension, and three days holiday a year if they are lucky: 40% of Japan’s labour force are women, who receive less than half the pay and none of the fringe benefits of the men. ibid.
Today the face of Japan is strong and confident, but the cracks reveal that many working people are quite unlike the happy stereotypes, and living conditions are poor compared to the nation’s wealth, and the young are trapped in a moulding process which too often leads to tragedy. ibid.
The Japanese island of Okinawa is occupied by thirty-two military installations: from here the United States has attacked Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq … Okinawa is the front line of a beckoning war with China. John Pilger, The Coming War on China *****
These fences run like great ribbons across the islands. And the bases themselves cut swathes across Okinawa. But all around them are people with this continuing demonstration, this continuing resistance. ibid.
This is the centre of an empire that never speaks its name, whose power is represented in this extraordinary world-map of American military bases. 4,000 bases in the United States, almost 1,000 bases spread across every continent. ibid.
March: On 11th March at 2.46p.m. earthquake warnings flashed across Japan ... Tsunami travelling at over five hundred miles an hour, the wave takes just minutes to reach the coast of Japan ... Nuclear radiation ... Four of the reactors were destroyed through overheating. The Year the Earth Went Wild, Channel 4 2011
Just after lunchtime on March 11th the most powerful earthquake ever measured in Japan shook the country. It was big enough to shift the Earth on its axis. It sent a tsunami ten metres high racing towards the mainland. Professor Iain Stewart, Japan Earthquake: A Horizon Special, BBC 2011
The tsunami then triggered a near-meltdown in one of the country’s nuclear power stations. The disaster has claimed over ten thousand lives. Over twice as many are still missing. ibid.
Aftershocks are a daily occurrence – so far there have been over seven hundred. ibid.