User:Donald Trung/Japanese occupation of Vietnam

The Japanese occupation of Vietnam (Vietnamese: Thời kỳ Nhật Bản chiếm đóng Việt Nam), commonly known as Annam (安南, Annan) to the Japanese, began

Indochinese Communist Party and the Việt Minh
In Hanoi on 15–20 April 1945 the Tonkin Revolutionary Military Conference of the Việt Minh issued a resolution that was reprinted on pages 1–4 on 25 August 1970 in the Nhân Dân journal. It called for a general uprising, resistance and guerilla warfare against the Japanese by establishing 7 war zones across Vietnam named after past heroes of Vietnam, calling for propaganda to explain to the people that their only way forward was violent resistance against the Japanese and exposing the Vietnamese puppet government that served them. The conference also called for training propagandists and having women spread military propaganda and target Japanese soldiers with Chinese language leaflets and Japanese language propaganda. The Việt Minh's Vietnamese Liberation Army published the "Resistance against Japan" (Kháng Nhật) newspaper. They also called for the creation of a group called "Chinese and Vietnamese Allied against Japan" by sending leaflets to recruit overseas Chinese in Vietnam to their cause. The resolution called on forcing the French in Vietnam to recognise Vietnamese independence and for Charles de Gaulle's France (Allied French) to recognise their independence and cooperate with them against Japan.

Looting and plundering
On 17 August 1970, the North Vietnamese National Assembly Chairman Truong Chinh reprinted an article in Vietnamese in Nhân Dân, published in Hanoi titled "Policy of the Japanese Pirates Towards Our People" which was a reprint of his original article written in August 1945 in No 3 of the "Communist Magazine" (Tap Chi Cong San) with the same title, describing Japanese atrocities like looting, slaughter and rape against the people of north Vietnam in 1945. He denounced the Japanese claims to have liberated Vietnam from France with the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere announced by Tojo and mentioned how the Japanese looted shrines, temples, eggs, vegetables, straw, rice, chickens, hogs and cattle for their horses and soldiers and built military stations and airstrips after stealing land and taking boats, vehicles, homes and destroying cotton fields and vegetable fields for peanut and jute cultivation in Annam and Tonkin. Japan replaced the French government on 9 March 1945 and started openly looting the Vietnamese even more in addition to taking French owned properties and stole watches, pencils, bicycles, money and clothing in Bac Giang and Bac Can.

The Japanese spread false rumours that the French were massacring Vietnamese at the time to distract the Vietnamese from Japanese atrocities. The Japanese created groups to counter the Viet Minh Communists like Vietnam Pao ve doan (Vietnam protection group) and Vietnam Ai quoc doan (Vietnam Patriotic Group to force Vietnamese into coolie labour, take taxes and rice and arrested ant-Japanese Vietnamese with their puppet government run by Tran Trong Kim. The Viet Minh rejected the Japanese demands to cease fighting and support Japan, so the Japanese implemented the Three Alls policy (San Kuang) against the Vietnamese, pillaging, burning, killing, looting, and raping Vietnamese women. The Vietnamese called the Japanese "dwarfed monsters" (Wa (Japan)) and the Japanese committed these atrocities in Thai Nguyen province at Dinh Hoa, Vo Nhai and Hung Son. The Japanese attacked the Vietnamese while masquerading as Viet Minh and used terror and deception. The Japanese created the puppet Vietnam Phuc quoc quan (Vietnam restoration army). and tried to disrupt the Viet Minh's redistribution and confiscation of property of pro-Japanese Vietnamese traitors by disguising themselves as Viet Minh and then attacking people who took letters from them and organizing anti-French rallies and Trung sisters celebrations. Japanese soldiers tried to infiltrate Viet Minh bases with Viet Minh flags and brown trousers during their fighting. The Japanese murdered, plundered and raped Vietnamese and beheaded Vietnamese who stole bread and corn, while they were starving according to their martial law. They shot a Vietnamese pharmacy student to death outside of his own house when he was coming home from guard duty at a hospital after midnight in Hanoi and also shot a defendant for a political case in the same city. In Thai Nguyen province, Vo Nhai, a Vietnamese boat builder was thrown in a river and had his stomach stabbed by the Japanese under suspicion of helping Viet Minh guerillas. The Japanese slit the abdomen and hung the Dai Tu mayor upside down in Thai Nguyen as well. The Japanese also beat thousands of people in Hanoi for not cooperating. Japanese officers ordered their soldiers to behead and burn Vietnamese. Some claimed that Taiwanese and Manchurian soldiers in the Japanese army were participating in the atrocities against the Vietnamese but Truong Chinh said that even if it was true Taiwanese and Manchurian soldiers were committing the rapes and killing, their Japanese officers were the ones giving the orders and participating along with them. Truong Chinh said that the Japanese wanted to plunder Asians for their own market and take it from the United States and Great Britain and were imperialists with no intent on liberating Vietnam.

Rape, comfort women, and other sexual violence
The Japanese forced Vietnamese women to become comfort women and with Burmese, Indonesia, Thai and Filipino women they made up a notable portion of Asian comfort women in general. Japanese use of Malaysian and Vietnamese women as comfort women was corroborated by testimonies. There were comfort women stations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea. A Korean comfort woman named Kim Ch'un-hui stayed behind in Vietnam and died there when she was 44 in 1963, owning a dairy farm, cafe, US cash, and diamonds worth 200,000 US dollars. 1 million Vietnamese were starved to death during World War II according to Thomas U. Berger.

Nguyen Thi Thu and fathered multiple children with the Vietnamese women who remained behind in Vietnam while the Japanese soldiers themselves returned to Japan in 1955. The official Vietnamese historical narrative view them as children of rape and prostitution.

Famine
In the Vietnamese Famine of 1945 1 to 2 million Vietnamese starved to death in the Red river delta of northern Vietnam due to the Japanese, as the Japanese seized Vietnamese rice and didn't pay. In Phat Diem the Vietnamese farmer Di Ho was one of the few survivors who saw the Japanese steal grain. The North Vietnamese government accused both France and Japan of the famine and said 1-2 million Vietnamese died. Võ An Ninh took photographs of dead and dying Vietnamese during the great famine.

On 25 March 2000, the Vietnamese journalist Trần Khuê wrote an article "Dân chủ: Vấn đề của dân tộc và thời đại" where he harshly criticized ethnographers and historians in Ho Chin Minh city's Institute of Social Sciences like Dr. Đinh Văn Liên and Professor Mạc Đường who tried to whitewash Japan's atrocities against the Vietnamese by portraying Japan's aid to the South Vietnamese regime against North Vietnam as humanitarian aid, portraying the Vietnam war against America as a civil war. changing the death toll of 2 million Vietnamese dead at the hands of the Japanese famine to 1 million and calling the Japanese invasion as a presence and calling Japanese fascists at simply Japanese at the Vietnam-Japan international conference. He accused them of changing history in exchange for only a few tens of thousands of dollars, and the Presidium of international Vietnamese studies in Hanoi did not include any Vietnamese women. The Vietnamese professor Văn Tạo and Japanese professor Furuta Moto both conducted a study in the field on the Japanese induced famine of 1945 admitting that Japan killed 2 million Vietnamese by starvation.

Property damage
2 billion US dollars worth (1945 values) of damage, 148 million dollars of them due to destruction of industrial plants was incurred by Vietnam. 90% of heavy vehicles and motorcycles, cars and 16 tons of junks as well as railways, port installations were destroyed as well as one third of bridges. Some Japanese soldiers married Vietnamese women like Nguyen Thi Xuan and

Japanese war crimes against Vietnamese people in Laos
Large numbers of French officials in Laos were then imprisoned or executed by the Japanese. The staunchly pro-French King Sisavang Vong was also imprisoned and forced by the Japanese, and at much urging from Prince Phetsarath, into declaring the French protectorate over his kingdom over while accepting the nation into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere on 8 April 1945.

The Japanese tried to play the Vietnamese against the French and play the Laotians against the Vietnamese by inciting Lao people to kill the Vietnamese as Lao murdered 7 Vietnamese officials in Luang Prabang and Lao youths were recruited to an anti-Vietnam organization by the Japanese when they took over Luang Prabang.

Aftermath


The Japanese coup d'état had, in the words of diplomat Jean Sainteny, "wrecked a colonial enterprise that had been in existence for 80 years."

French losses were heavy. 15,000 French soldiers in total were held prisoner by the Japanese. Nearly 4,200 were killed with many executed after surrendering - about half of these were European or French metropolitan troops. Practically all French civil and military leaders as well as plantation owners were made prisoners, including Decoux. They were confined either in specific districts of big cities or in camps. Those who were suspected of armed resistance were jailed in the Kempeitai prison in bamboo cages and were tortured and cruelly interrogated. The locally recruited tirailleurs and gardes indochinois who had made up the majority of the French military and police forces, effectively ceased to exist. About a thousand were killed in the fighting or executed after surrender. Some joined pro-Japanese militias or Vietnamese nationalist guerrillas. Deprived of their French cadres, many dispersed to their villages of origin. Over three thousand reached Chinese territory as part of the retreating French columns.

What was left of the French forces that had escaped the Japanese attempted to join the resistance groups where they had more latitude for action in Laos. The Japanese there had less control over this part of the territory and with Lao guerilla groups managed to gain control of several rural areas. Elsewhere the resistance failed to materialize as the Vietnamese refused to help the French. They also lacked precise orders and communications from the provisional government as well as the practical means to mount any large-scale operations.

In northern Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh started their own guerilla campaign with the help of the American OSS who trained and supplied them with arms and funds. The famine in Vietnam had caused resentment among the population both towards the French and the Japanese (although US bombing played a part). They established their bases in the countryside without meeting much resistance from the Japanese who were mostly present in the cities. Viet Minh numbers increased especially after they ransacked between 75 and 100 warehouses, dispersed the rice and refused to pay taxes. In July OSS with the Viet Minh—some of whom were remnants of Sabattiers division—went over the border to conduct operations. Their actions were limited to a few attacks against Japanese military posts. Most of these were unsuccessful however as the Viet Minh lacked the military force to launch any kind of attack against the Japanese.

Japanese soldiers in French Indochina after 1945
After 1945 a number of Japanese soldiers would stay behind in French Indochina, several of them took Vietnamese war brides and would sire children with them (Hāfu). Many of these leftover Japanese soldiers would work with Hồ Chí Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party after the war to fight against French colonialism.

In 1954, the Vietnamese government had ordered the Japanese soldiers to return home. They were “encouraged” to leave their families behind effectively abandoning their war children in Vietnam.

Việt Minh takeover
In Hanoi on 15–20 April 1945 the Tonkin Revolutionary Military Conference of the Việt Minh issued a resolution that was reprinted on pages 1–4 on 25 August 1970 in the Nhan Dan journal. It called for a general uprising, resistance and guerilla warfare against the Japanese by establishing 7 war zones across Vietnam named after past heroes of Vietnam, calling for propaganda to explain to the people that their only way forward was violent resistance against the Japanese and exposing the Vietnamese puppet government that served them. The conference also called for training propagandists and having women spread military propaganda and target Japanese soldiers with Chinese language leaflets and Japanese language propaganda. The Việt Minh's Vietnamese Liberation Army published the "Resistance against Japan" (Khang Nhat) newspaper. They also called for the creation of a group called "Chinese and Vietnamese Allied against Japan" by sending leaflets to recruit overseas Chinese in Vietnam to their cause. The resolution called on forcing French in Vietnam to recognize Vietnamese independence and for the DeGaulle France (Allied French) to recognize their independent and cooperate with them against Japan. Truong Chinh wrote another article on 12 September 1945, No 16 in Liberation Banner (Co Giai Phong) which was also reprinted on 16 August 1970 in Nhan Dan. He commemorated the August revolution against the Japanese, after the Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945 then the Việt Minh started attacking and slaughtering Japanese and disarming them in a nationwide rebellion on 19 August 1945. The Japanese had already disarmed the French and the Japanese themselves lost morale so the Việt Minh managed to seize control after attacking the Japanese. Việt Minh had begun fighting in 1944, when the French were attacked on Dinh Ca in October 1944 and in Cao Bang and Bac Can French were attacked by Viet Cong in November 1944 and the French and Japanese fought each other on 9 March 1945, so in Tonkin the Viet Cong began disarming French soldiers and attacking the Japanese. In Quang Ngai, Ba To, Yen Bai and Nghia Lo political prisoners escaped Japanese were attacked st din Son La by Meo (Hmong) tribesmen and in Hoa Binh and Lang Son by Muong tribesmen. Việt Minh took control of 6 provinces in Tonkin after 9 March 1945 within 2 weeks. The Việt Minh led a brutal campaign against the Japanese where many died from 9 March 1945 to 19 August 1945. Truong Chinh ended the article with a quote from Sun Yatsen, "The revolution is not yet won, All comrades must continue their al out efforts!"

On 26 September 1945 Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter calling for struggle against the French mentioning they were returning after they sold out the Vietnamese to the Japanese twice in 4 years.

Japan surrendered when Emperor Hirohito announced the capitulation on 16 August. Soon after Japanese garrisons officially handed control to Bảo Đại in the North and the United Party in the South. This, however, allowed nationalist groups to take over public buildings in most of the major cities. The Việt Minh were thus presented with a power vacuum, and on the 19th the August Revolution commenced. On 25 August, Bảo Đại was forced to abdicate in favour of Ho and the Việt Minh - they took control of Hanoi and most of French Indochina. The Japanese did not oppose the Việt Minh's takeover as they were reluctant to let the French retake control of their colony. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam's independence on 2 September 1945.

Allied takeover
Charles de Gaulle in Paris criticized the United States, United Kingdom and China for not helping the French in Indochina during the coup. De Gaulle however affirmed that France would regain control of Indochina.

French Indochina had been left in chaos by the Japanese occupation. On 11 September British and Indian troops of the 20th Indian Division under Major General Douglas Gracey arrived at Saigon as part of Operation Masterdom. After the Japanese surrender all French prisoners had been gathered on the outskirts of Saigon and Hanoi and the sentries disappeared altogether on 18 September. The six months spent in captivity cost an additional 1,500 lives. By 22 September 1945, all prisoners were liberated by Gracey's men and were then armed and dispatched in combat units towards Saigon to conquer it from the Vietminh. They were later joined by the French Far East Expeditionary Corps (which had been established to fight the Japanese), having arrived a few weeks later.

Around the same time General Lu Han's 200,000 Chinese National Revolutionary troops occupied Indochina north of the 16th parallel. 90,000 arrived by October, the 62nd army came on 26 September to Nam Dinh and Haiphong. Lang Son and Cao Bang were occupied by the Guangxi 62nd army corps and the Red River region and Lai Cai were occupied by a column from Yunnan. Lu Han occupied the French governor general's palace after ejecting the French staff under Sainteny. Ho Chi Minh sent a cable on 17 October 1945 to American President Harry S. Truman calling on him, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Premier Stalin and Premier Attlee to go to the United Nations against France and demand France not be allowed to return to occupy Vietnam, accusing France of having sold out and cheated the Allies by surrendering Indochina to Japan and that France had no right to return.

French Permanent Military Tribunal in Saigon
The French Permanent Military Tribunal in Saigon, also known as Saigon Trials, was a war crimes tribunal which held 39 separate trials against suspected Japanese war criminals between October 1946 and March 1950.

On 9 March 1946, the French Permanent Military Tribunal in Saigon (FPMTS) was set up to investigate conventional war crimes ("Class B") and crimes against humanity ("Class C") committed by the Japanese forces after the 9 March 1945 coup d'état. The FPMTS examined war crimes committed between 9 March 1945 and 15 August 1945. The FPMTS tried a total of 230 Japanese defendants in 39 separate trials, taking place between October 1946 and March 1950. According to Chizuru Namba, 112 of the defendants received prison sentences, 63 were executed, 23 received life imprisonment and 31 were acquitted. Further 228 people were condemned in absentia.

Its scope was limited to war crimes committed against the French population of French Indochina after the Japanese coup d'état in French Indochina. Unlike other war crime tribunals in South East Asia no persecutions were made for war crimes against Indochina's native population. FPMTS served as an instrument of French foreign policy, aiming to highlight France as a victim of Japanese aggression while simultaneously showcasing the ability of the colonial authorities to govern the region.

Shifts in French foreign policy during the Cold War and disruptions caused by the First Indochina War caused the number of convictions to dwindle. As judges opted to discontinue criminal charges against the defendants or commuted their sentences.

Wives and children of Japanese soldiers after the war
The half-Japanese children left behind in Vietnam after 1954 were subjected to harsh discrimination, meanwhile these children were often raised by single mothers who were harshly criticised for sleeping with Japanese soldiers during the war.

In 2017 the Japanese Emperor Akihito and his wife Empress Michiko visited Hanoi as at the time Japan had become the largest donor of aid to Vietnam and a top investor into the country. As a part of the official visit Emperor Akihito met with a number of war children that were abandoned after the war ended. After listening to the tearful stories, Emperor Akihito said that he understood that the abandoned families of the Japanese soldiers had suffered many hardships after the war. One half-Japanese war child named Tran Duc Dung noted that his father trained Vietnamese troops during the war.

Tran Duc Dung said that he was eager to forget the troubles he and his families went through. Stating "It’s time to close all that happened in the past", and hoping is that after the visit by the Imperial couple that he will be recognised as a citizen of Japan.

Infobox draft page

 * User:Donald Trung/Japanese occupation of Vietnam/Infobox.

Sources to use

 * https://archives.org.vn/gioi-thieu-tai-lieu-nghiep-vu/thanh-lap-khu-giai-phong.htm


 * https://archives.org.vn/gioi-thieu-tai-lieu-nghiep-vu/quoc-ca-viet-nam-qua-loi-ke-cua-nhac-si-van-cao.htm


 * https://archives.org.vn/gioi-thieu-tai-lieu-nghiep-vu/dac-trung-cua-cach-mang-thang-tam.htm


 * https://www.cia.gov/static/a0c34085dfe487b73cc90c8a92bb077d/oss-ho-chi-minh.pdf


 * http://m.thanhniennews.com/arts-culture/horrific-photos-recall-vietnamese-famine-of-1945-37591.html


 * https://www.academia.edu/29874654/French_Indochina_and_the_postwar_trials_of_war_criminals


 * https://books.google.nl/books?id=jg1QAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA27&dq=Coins+discovered+China&article_id=4058,2339787&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwja2uOJ7L6AAxUB6qQKHQRyDFc4ChDoAXoECAYQAw#v=onepage&q=Coins%20discovered%20China&f=false

Images to use

 * https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:B%E1%BA%A3n_d%E1%BB%A5_s%E1%BB%91_1_-_Ng%C3%A0y_m%E1%BB%93ng_b%E1%BB%91n_th%C3%A1ng_hai_n%C4%83m_B%E1%BA%A3o_%C4%90%E1%BA%A1i_th%E1%BB%A9_hai_m%C6%B0%C6%A1i_(17-03-1945)_-_B%C3%B9i_Quang_Tu%E1%BA%A5n_(16_August_2020).jpg&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile