World War II was experienced very differently in Asia than it was in Europe. There were parallels: both regions suffered enormous brutality and fearful occupations, devastating destruction and mass displacements. Yet there were also many differences: Asia had long-standing European colonial regimes, resulting in ongoing independence movements, and was in conflict with non- European aggressors. While there are many popular media representations of the war in Europe – films, songs, memoirs, and histories that circulate globally – there are relatively few about how the war was experienced in Asia. This has led to only limited recognition of the parallels and differences between the two.

World War II also brought some shared and some different experiences to the three Asian countries considered in this book: India, Indonesia, and Australia. The most important difference was whether the country experienced face-to-face engagements with the Japanese. Indonesia was invaded and occupied; India and Australia were threatened and attacked, but not invaded. Both had troops dying in conflicts with the Japanese. At the same time, India was grappling with the implications of long-term occupation by the British and Australia, with its British-derived settler majority itself divided over the desired attitudes to Britain, vacillated over the future of the region. Powerful feelings were generated in each case, but these varied widely and changed over time.

Though each event had roots in earlier periods, World War II reshaped each of the three countries. The war drastically interfered with what had been slower, longer processes: sometimes destroying them, sometimes accelerating them, sometimes holding them up only to release them with greater energy once the war had formally ended.

This chapter can give no more than glimpses of the complex histories of these three countries, but it aims to identify both the differences and common themes in the events of this time. Perhaps even more important, this chapter points out why the activists in any one country failed to realise just how differently the same events were viewed in other places nearby. This meant that their transnational interactions in the postwar period – even when in solidarity – were distorted by misunderstandings.

The changes brought about by the war in Asia were sometimes felt when people were at home in their own countries, and sometimes when they were outside their homes, serving as soldiers, working as forced labourers, or fleeing as refugees.