Lee Kuan Yew had just turned 19 when he learned the most important political lesson of his life. The young man who would later rule Singapore with an iron hand said he saw "the meaning of power" when Japanese troops crushed British-led forces to seize the supposedly impregnable island on February 15, 1942.
"One day the British were there, immovable, complete masters," Lee said.
The next day, the Japanese "whom we derided, mocked as short, stunted people with short-sighted squint eyes" were suddenly in power, looting houses and slapping the locals, including Lee, at the slightest provocation.
Tens of thousands of Commonwealth troops were taken prisoner and it would take three and a half years before the Japanese were driven out and British administration was restored, but by then the equation had changed.
"The local population was supposed to panic when the bombs fell, but we found they (the British) panicked more than we did. So it was no longer the old relationship," Lee said in an authorised political biography.
Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill called the fall of Singapore the "worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history" and its repercussions went far beyond the military sphere.
Japan's spectacular early victories undermined European colonialism and boosted nationalist movements in Southeast Asia by shattering the myth of western superiority, according to historians and Japanese occupation survivors.
Chin Peng, the former leader of the Communist Party of Malaya who collaborated with British military intelligence against the Japanese, said the war "jolted (the British) from their gin and tonic stupor."
"Colonialism was past its expiry date. The idea of British superiority was dashed the year the Japanese cycled down the roads of Malaya and began a rout that would climax in the battering of Churchill's 'Fortress Singapore'," he wrote in his memoirs.
"The British were using us because they had no choice. I thought we could use them too. For both sides it was a deal with the devil," he said of the collaboration that would fall apart after the war and turn into a guerrilla conflict that came to be known as the Emergency.
Indonesian historian Taufik Abdullah said Japan's early victories destroyed the belief that the West could not be defeated.
"Among independence fighters, there was a new confidence that they too could do the same thing," he said.
He said the last 10 years of Dutch occupation in Indonesia were marked by a crackdown on anti-colonial activism, with independent leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta exiled and political parties disbanded. But Japan's battlefield exploits revived anti-colonial vigor. The Dutch colonial forces put up little resistance when the Japanese invaded the then Dutch East Indies in 1942.
Sukarno and Hatta declared independence for the new Indonesia on August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender marked the end of World War II.
In Malaysia, historian Ooi Keat Gin said the Japanese occupiers helped nurture a "pan-Malay consciousness" by portraying themselves as patrons of the majority Malays in the multi-ethnic society with large ethnic Indian and Chinese minorities.
"The Malays had more confidence during that time because they were accommodated by the Japanese and acknowledged by the Japanese as the true administrators or the true rulers of the country," said the associate professor at the University Sains Malaysia in Penang. "Several Malay nationalist leaders commented in the post-war years that they gained a lot of experience from the Japanese period. They also realised that they were also capable of being administrators, because in the past they had felt it was always a white man running the show," said Ooi.
The easy defeat of the British by the Japanese particularly in Singapore contributed to the confidence felt by Malays in their own abilities, said Ooi.
In Vietnam, the Japanese landed in 1940 but allowed the French colonisers to stay put in Indochina.
On March 9, 1945, they ended the arrangement with the pro-German Vichy French and took full control of the colony. Two days later, they incited emperor Bao Dai, who had been in retirement, to declare Vietnam's independence and collaborate with Japan.
In the following months, confusion reigned. Vietnamese nationalists, especially the communists, gained ground.
The emperor abdicated on August 25, two days after Japan capitulated. The void was filled by the communists led by Ho Chi Minh, who declared independence on September 2.
Despite fighting the communists from 1946 to 1954 to regain control of its former colonies in modern day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, France had lost its foothold in the region for good.
During their occupation, "the Japanese allowed nationalism to develop and even encouraged it, basing on their theory of 'Asia for Asians'," says Hugues Tertrais, a historian on Vietnam at the university of Sorbonne in Paris.
In the case of the Philippines, the United States had already pledged to grant independence with the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934, seven years before the Japanese invasion.
The law turned the islands into a self-governing commonwealth, with a 10-year transition period to independence.
"The outbreak of the war in 1941 derailed Filipino preparations for independence," the late historian Teodoro Agoncillo wrote.
Philippine independence did come after the war on July 4, 1946.
As in Malaya, members of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines, founded in 1930 to campaign for the overthrow of the US colonial government, joined the armed resistance during the Japanese occupation. In 1942 these guerrillas named themselves the Hukbalahap and became one of the country's most effective rebel units. But after liberation in 1945 the Hukbalahap was disarmed and many of its leaders arrested by the US Armed Forces of the Far East as the Cold War began.
In the 1960s, the Hukbalahap spawned the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People's Army, which continue to fight the Manila government with "US imperialism" as one of its sworn enemies.
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