It wasn't long though before the French lost control of the situation. Later that same year Japan invaded Southeast Asia, quickly occupying all of French Indochina, including Cambodia. The Japanese left Sihanouk on the throne and allowed Vichy French representatives to administrate Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. They also began to reinforce local anticolonialist feelings in the hopes of making the peoples of Indochina simultaneously pro-Japanese and anti-French, despite the fact that the Japanase were a form of colonialists in their own right. Both the Japanese government and their Thai allies supported the Khmer Issarak (Free Khmer) partisans, an anti-French Cambodian guerrilla movement led by Son Ngoc Thanh, a popular Khmer republican and politician. By March 1945, though, Japan recognized that they would soon lose hold of Indochina, yet they did not want to allow France to regain its former position in Southeast Asia. As one of their final acts of occupation the Japanese ordered the kings of Indochina - Cambodia's Sihanouk, Laos' King Sisavang Vong, and Vietnam's Emperor Bao Dai - to declare independence from France. Suddenly the colonies of French Indochina were transformed into fledgling nations