The Significance of the Japanese Military Model for Southeast Asia

Abstract

S UHARTO, NE WIN and Park Chung-hee all have something in common. All three are Asian leaders who head military bureaucracies in Indonesia, Burma and Korea, but they have another bond, much less well known though equally significant. The three were all trained before and during World War II in Japanese-fostered military units and schools. They were part of a far-flung series of independence and volunteer armies organized and trained by the Japanese during the Pacific War, primarily in Southeast Asia. This training has affected a whole generation of leadership in Southeast Asia. The imprinting of the Japanese military model on the military bureaucracies of Southeast Asia is a highly significant phenomenon which this article attempts to delineate. Two Japanese-trained armies, the Indian National Army and the Burma Independence Army, were especially significant in size and in wartime and postwar impact. In Indonesia, the Army of Defenders of the Homeland, or Peta (Sukareia Tentara Pembela Tanah Air), has had a powerful influence on political leadership and on the Army of the Republic of Indonesia. In other areas volunteer armies were organized and trained which have had varying degrees of influence on postwar leadership in Sumatra, Malaysia, Indochina and the Philippines. The Indian National Army, though not Japanese-trained, received Japanese encouragement and assistance throughout the war.' These Japanese-trained armies have become agents of revolution and modernization in several postwar nations. They have stimulated new leadership groups which guided their nations toward independence. This result was partly fortuitous from the Japanese, and even from the Southeast Asian, standpoint. The ramifications of the creation of these armies went far beyond their original goals and have become a kind of time-bomb in Southeast Asia.2 Today the officer corps in many Southeast Asian nations is the major