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226 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1943)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0226 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION SOUTHEASTERN ASIA had little interest for the majority of Americans until a lit- tle more than a year ago. About all that most people knew of it was that we de- pended on it for our tin and rubber, and that Singapore was a strong naval base. Knowledge of the Philippines was not much greater. The spectacular con- quests of Japan and their consequences to ourselves have completely changed this attitude. Little reliable information has been available, however, to satisfy the demand which has been aroused. Few Americans had lived in these coun- tries long enough to understand their problems, and practically none of them had ever thought of publishing their knowledge. The same statement could be made regarding most of the British, Dutch, and French residents. The in- digenous peoples were not vocal, and the very few who expressed themselves usu- ally did so in local vernacular newspapers or in the debates of the various legis- lative bodies. The object of this special issue of THE ANNALS is to present an unbiased ac- count of the prewar political and eco- nomic situation, and of the causes of the Japanese victories as far as it is possible to deal with this subject. Very little re- liable and detailed information has been published on the campaigns in the Phil- ippines, Malaya, and other places, and since most of those who took part in them are now prisoners, we shall not learn the full truth until the war is over. The one fact which stands out indis- putably is that every one of the United Nations was dangerously unprepared, and that the Japanese victories were due to this colossal sin of omission far more than to the various mistakes which were committed by the local governments and military and naval leaders. With the wisdom of hindsight it is now clear that southeastern Asia and the Philippines vii were doomed from the day that the Japa- nese opened their attack. The fall of the American and Euro- pean dependencies is not the end of the story, and this description of conditions therefore is far more than an account of a tragic but dead-and-gone episode. The whole question will come up again at the postwar settlement, and will prove to be one of the most complex and difficult problems with which the leaders of the United Nations will have to deal. There can be no return to the world of 1941, but that world will have to be taken into very careful consideration if the new or- der is to be more stable and lasting than the old. The fundamental conditions of political, economic, and social life will not be swept away by Japan's temporary control: they are too deep-seated and too rooted in centuries of historical evolu- tion to disappear so easily. Superficially they may be changed, and they may well prove to be more difficult to deal with. In essentials, however, they will be the same, and any settlement must accom- modate itself to them if it hopes to suc- ceed. SEPARATION OF MASSES FROM RULING GRoUPS Perhaps the most important of these basic factors is the gulf-political, eco- nomic, and racial-which separates the overwhelming majority of the population from the controlling and ruling groups. The average man of southeastern Asia is a small farmer or fisherman whose in- terests are very largely confined to his fields and his village. He is conservative and is strongly influenced by his tradi- tional belief that government comes from above and is not the business of the peas- ant cultivator. This does not mean that he is indifferent to his own well-being- taxes, irrigation works, anything which affects his own land or his village em-

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