ever.

It required a coordination between naval forces, air forces and ground forces that was actually still very difficult.

I was reading stuff in British archives, actually, 1944, 1945.

They were just astonished what the Japanese were able to do, and they were trying to copy some of the landing craft that they had created.

What it does to Western prestige is to completely destroy it.

They show that the military might, the awe for military might was completely gone.

I think that was one element of that.

That's my answer.

Jumping ahead to the end of the war, why was colonial control of India and Indonesia just completely untenable after the war ended?

It was completely untenable, except that the Europeans and the Americans didn't know it yet.

That's one reason why we end up with all these civil wars, anti-colonial wars, independent movements combined with civil wars.

I think after 1945, the number of people who die as a result of warfare, probably in Asia, might be as large as the number of people who died before 1945, if not larger.

The Americans are, of course, anti-imperialist and they want anti-imperialism, but they also come to the conclusion that on pragmatic grounds, they must support the reestablishment of these European empires.

The Asians are not strong enough yet, are not smart enough yet, are not modern enough yet, progressive enough yet to organize their own societies.

But very quickly, it is clear that the people like Sukarno, Mao, Nero, and so on, they're just not going to stand for this.

But you could have a social democratic Asia.

I'm gonna start by going back to the first part of the 20th century and asking how the First World War and the subsequent Paris Peace Conference had different effects on how young people in Europe and Asia thought about nationalism.

Yes.

And I think it's a very interesting question.

And the First World War, of course, is, has, has a complex legacy.

There is Woodrow Wilson's calls for self-determination, freedom, so on, uh, often misunderstood.

Not misunderstood, but interpreted according to local conditions, let's put it that way, across Asia.

There's also, for an elite European audience, the First World War, of course, illustrates how, um, the nation-state...

And then, you know, after Japan was defeated, it was an important base of operations for the, the communists to eventually take control of China.

Is this something that the nationalists in Asia came to regret? Or do you think they genuinely learned something from using the Japanese model as an example?

Well, it, it isn't just the British who are deeply furious, who believe the Japanese are beyond the pale, and there's a lot...

The Chinese are even more so, and it remains politically and geopolitically deeply relevant today, and that is the result of the, you know, the p- things like the Nanjing massacre, the use of germ warfare, live experiments, all, all of the, the, the horror stories just are all over the place.

So there, there is that side, and I don't think anybody is denying that.

To me, this was brought home, and so I tended to write mostly about China, and so that was this impression I had of Japan.

I grew up in the Netherlands.

We have equally negative impression of Japan during the Second World War.

Can you tell us a little bit about that? What happened in the months after the Second World War officially came to an end?

Can you talk a little bit about how it's, is seen in the kind of popular imagination in Asia?

As you say, that's ...

I mean, I can, and it's ...

But, uh, as you say, it's a very broad question.

Uh, there's a lot of diversity.

Um, but with that caveat, I think in China from until the 1980s, um, the Second World War didn't figure in, in public memory.

It was the revolution that was the main ...

Just finally, if World War II had not happened, do you think that these independent nationalist movements in Asia could have formed, or would it have been in a different form? Would we have the modern Asia that we have today?