SOUTH-EAST ASIA 30 YEARS ON 5 to becoming a heavy net importer: South-East Asia supplied a number of primary products which could hardly be obtained elsewhere, and certainly not in North America, such as rubber and tin. The second set made it vital for Japan to break the stranglehold thus imposed, as the markets of East Asia were essential to the Japanese if they were to earn what they required to buy the raw materials of the region, without which in turn the survival of Japanese capitalism, far less its expansion and development, would be impossible.3 Besides these contradictions, there was another of tremendous moment: that between the United States and Japan. South-East Asia provided raw materials vital to both: rubber, oil, tin and tungsten among them. Immediately prior to the outbreak of the Pacific war important new discoveries of oil potential in the Indonesian archipelago were being registered as a result of massive prospecting and surveying with the American companies Galtex and Stanvac well to the fore.4 Between 1924 and 1942 Caltex had spent an estimated 10 million dollars in Sumatra without taking out a drop of oil. Between them the two American companies had sunk 170 million dollars in oil investment there, and had a tantalizingly clear picture of the oil riches to be had for the drilling in central Sumatra but as yet barely touched.5 So, despite the fact that US-controlled oil output in Indonesia constituted at that time but an insignificant fraction of global US-controlled output, the future of Indonesian oil was of major interest to the American oil majors. For the time being however America's most pressing concern as far as - South as - East Asian raw materials go was for access to the region's rubber and tin. In 1940, Mala\a and Indonesia produced 79 per cent of the world's rubber and 65 per cent of the world's tin (of which Canada and the USA took 64 and 82 per cent respectively), while neighbouring Thailand contributed further rubber and tin and French Indochina further rubber. Neocolonialism., US Hegemony For Japan, South-Ea^t Asia represented a vital storehouse of raw materials but one of them predominated in their thinking as the Pacific war loomed: oil. Without it, their industry would falter but. more significantly, their war machine would seize up completely. There is no doubt that it was the American interdiction of oil to Japan on and from 26 July 1941 that formed the immediate goad to war. Japan's stocks could only last at most for two years; less in a war situation. Emperor Hirohito and his military advisers had little option but to take the desperate gamble of war, hoping for quick decisive victories.® Already, in the second half of 1940, Japan had signalled her intentions by concluding agreements with Thailand and the Vichy French regime in Indochina which gave her forces facilities and access. These moves, in the words of an American business journal, "thrust a dagger into the Allied stronghold of South-East Asia", and the American business community as a whole began to rally accordingly to support for confiontation with Japan, including mihtaiv