Born Then1942–1945
Life during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, Burma and Vietnam
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Japan replaced the European colonial rulers in 1942, requisitioning rice and drafting millions of labourers. Famine followed in Java and in northern Vietnam in 1944–45; the occupation also opened the way for independence movements.
Deaths: about 2–4 million in Indonesia including forced labourers and famine, and about 1–2 million in the 1945 famine in northern Vietnam.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Third plague pandemic 1855–1930
- Sixth cholera pandemic 1899–1923
- Korea under Japanese rule 1910–1945
- Great Migration of Black Americans 1916–1970
- Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917–1922
- Turkish War of Independence and population exchange 1919–1923
- Irish War of Independence and Civil War 1919–1923
- Great Depression 1929–1939
- Dust Bowl 1930–1939
- Holodomor 1932–1933
- Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia 1935–1941
- Great Purge 1936–1938
- Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
- Second Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945
- World War II on the Eastern Front 1939–1945
- World War II in Western Europe 1939–1945
- World War II for the United States, Canada and Australia 1939–1945
- The Holocaust 1941–1945
- World War II in Japan 1941–1945
- Japanese occupation of the Philippines 1941–1945
- Japanese occupation of Indonesia, Burma and Vietnam 1942–1945
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Bengal famine of 1943 1943–1944
- Indonesian War of Independence 1945–1949
- Chinese Civil War 1946–1949
- Partition of India 1947–1948
- Apartheid 1948–1994
- Division of Germany 1949–1990
- Korean War 1950–1953
- Italian economic miracle and the move north 1950–1970