In the thread about Italian forces in the Far East we discussed how, after the 1943 armistice with the allies, the Italian troops stationed in China went from being valued allies of Japan to being shipped off to Japanese slave labour camps. The Japanese were well-known for their brutality both against 'western' internees and POWs, and also against many native Asiatic peoples, but how did they view, and so subsquently treat, citizens of neutral 'western' states? I'm particulalry thinking of the situation for the inhabitants of Portuguese Macau and Portuguese Timor, when these colonial outposts found themselves surrounded and affectively absorbed into the Japanese Empire but there must also have been many Spanish, Swedish, Swiss, Irish and other neutral nationalities that came into Japanese control. There were also several South American countries that remained neutral or only declared war against Japan towards the very end of the war, and these states often had large immigrant populations of Japanese ancestry, many of them working on merchant ships criss-crossing the Pacific. What I wonder might have been the experience of say a Chilean or Peruvian mariner of Japanese ancestry when his ship was stopped at sea by the Japanese navy?

Were the citizens of neutral states treated any better than those of the US and Commonwealth, or, with the sole exception of their German allies, did Japanese contempt and hatred extend equally to all 'western' peoples?

For much of WWII, French officials were left to administer Japanese-occupied Indo-China.

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of neutral countries and their diplomats ever since I first read Diplomat: Memoirs of a Swedish Envoy in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Washington by Gunnar Hägglöf. Published in 1972 it recounts Hägglöf’s time as someone who, almost uniquely during the Second World War, was able to travel between the capitals of the various protagonists and is highly illuminating for that. Not least because he says that having visited many of Europe’s cities and capitals he concluded that perhaps his favourite city was …. Norwich. As the title suggests, however, Hägglöf wasn’t active in the Far East and so it’s a pity that his colleague in the Utrikesdepartemente (the Swedish Foreign Ministry) Widar Bagge also didn’t write down his memoirs.

Bagge was the Swedish Envoy to Tokyo between 1937 to 1945 and his experiences are only known to us via various official diplomatic records. In one report Bagge mentions that the Japanese military and secret police, the Kempeitai were already widely harassing and arresting British nationals in Japan in July 1940 which included resulting death in custody. This was well over a year before the 2 countries (Japan and Britain) were even at war and also 2 months before the signing of the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Germany and Italy. Article 2 of that pact stated that ‘Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in Greater East Asia’. This was no doubt reference to French Indochina and the vast Dutch East Indies which Germany had no effective control over despite northern France and the Netherlands being under German occupation. Whereas the French authorities in Indochina gave nominal allegiance to the pro-Axis Vichy government, the Netherlands government-in-exile based in London claimed authority over the East Indies (along with the Dutch West indies). The Tripartite Pact, therefore, was a useful way for Germany to spite the London Dutch in the East and at virtually no cost to themselves. Such an overt statement of intent as the Pact implied, however, only served to further alarm the Americans in the Philippines and the British in Malaya vis-à-vis Japan. That said, in 1941 a few months before the attack upon Pearl Harbor, Bagge sent out a questionnaire to Swedish nationals resident in Japan enquiring if any would like to be repatriated considering the heightening international tensions. Of the respondents, however, only about 10% expressed a wish to do so. By all accounts the rest of his time in Tokyo during the war was relatively uneventful.    

The following website (which includes some great photographs) looks at the experience of Camille Gorgé who was the Swiss Minister in Japan from 1940-45 and whose memoirs were indeed subsequently published:

Swiss Legation in Karuizawa

Note how it mentions that the Japanese government evacuated foreign diplomatic missions out of Tokyo and to the countryside in 1944 when Allied bombing of the city became intense.

Green George wrote:

For much of WWII, French officials were left to administer Japanese-occupied Indo-China.

Yes, although after the fall of France and the resulting Armistice of June 1940, while Vichy France was allowed to retain its colonies, for Indochina this control was very tenuous as the colonial administration was almost completely cut off from any outside supplies and reinforcements. Accordingly while the French administration of Indochina continued, it was largely under Japanese supervision and with the French forced to allow the Japanese to set up military bases there. While it was in effect a puppet regime of Nazi Germany, Vichy France never signed up to the Tripartite Pact between German, Italy and Japan, and it continued to regard Japan as hostile to French interests.

In March 1945, with mainland France having been liberated, the war situation looking increasingly grim for the Japanese and with the imminent threat of an Allied invasion of Indochina supported by the French themselves, the Japanese staged a coup d'état to finally overthrow the French authorities. The French forces were caught off guard, all the garrisons were quickly overrun and Indochina came under full Japanese control. With the exception of a few who escaped to Nationalist China where they were harshly interned, all French troops and colonial administrators remaining in Indochina were rounded up and either executed or marched off to brutal labour camps for the remaining few months of the war.