Updated Monday, October 19, 2009 10:44 am TWN, By Joe Hung, Special to The China Post

Small Greater Co-prosperity Sphere

Prime Minister Hideki Tojo proclaimed a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere shortly after Japan declared war on the United States after a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. All areas under Japanese military control in Asia were included: China under Wang Qingwei, Manchukuo (Manchuria) under Emperor Henry Pu Yi, the Philippines, Indochina, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma and the Japanese colonies of Taiwan and Korea. Japan, north China and Manchuria were its industrial base. The other countries and areas were to provide raw materials and form part of a vast consumer market, building a degree of economic strength that would enable Japan, first, to meet and contain any counterattack from outside, and then, if all went well, to incorporate India, Australia and Russia's Siberian provinces by further wars at a later date. That greater Japanese empire collapsed with Japan's defeat in the Second World War.

Paradoxically, Japan achieved its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, not by military conquest, but peacefully after the war. It became the undisputable leader in Asia economically. It served as the engine for economic development in Asia until the peaceful rise of China.

As China began to threaten Japan's economic backyards, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi tried to revive the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. He wanted Japan to keep its leadership role in the Asian economy. He failed. Japan had to accept a “co-leadership” role in the Ten-plus-Three free trade zone in Asia, which is expected to come into being in 2011 or 2012. It is an expanded version of the Ten-plus-One zone — the One being the People's Republic — which emerges at the beginning of next year. The Ten are those member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while Japan and South Korea form the other Two of the Three.

Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was voted out of power on August 30 after a little over half century of uninterrupted reign over Japan. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took over. The new DPJ government, headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, has come up with an East Asian community, a miniature Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Japan now wants to keep the industrial base of Tojo's greater Japanese empire.

Hatoyama broached his idea with Chinese President Hu Jintao when they met on the sideline of the U.N. General Assembly in New York on September 22. To his surprise, Hu agreed to work together to bring into being the East Asian community with South Korea as its member. Hatoyama also talked with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak, who supported the Japanese initiative.

The foreign ministers of the three countries that formed the industrial base of Tojo's Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere met later to confirm cooperation in the fields of currency, commerce, finance, energy and the environment to create the community patterned after the European Economic Community, which has evolved into the European Union.

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