This Dec. 7 marks 80 years since Japan declared war on the United States and Great Britain after attacking the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, bringing the Asia-Pacific region into World War II. In the United States, we often remember this event as a juncture in a conflict between two great powers, the United States and Japan. The attack on Americans justified full mobilization for war and, eventually in 1945, dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of the war.
But, significantly, the targets of Japan’s surprise strike were not the mainlands of the two nations, but their colonies in the region: British Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, the American Philippines, Guam and Hawaiʻi.
(Native Hawaiian includes an ‘okina in “Hawaii.” This was the common spelling before Hawaiian statehood, and it has recently become more common as a recognition of their sovereignty.)
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.