Introduction

In 1982, the Japanese Ministry of Education authorised the publication of a history textbook in which some of Imperial Japan’s most controversial acts of wartime aggression were significantly downplayed, if not altogether omitted. The publication of the textbook angered the governments and peoples of many former occupied territories. The governments of China and South Korea, for instance, accused Japan of attempting to rewrite history and thus denying responsibility for the brutalities it inflicted upon colonial subjects during the Second World War. Okinawans denounced the omission of the forced mass suicides which took place during the Battle of Okinawa, the Taiwanese government made representations over the depiction of the colonial administration in Formosa, and activists in Hong Kong organised large-scale protests at which a petition condemning the textbook collected some 400,000 signatures.

In Southeast Asia, voices of discontent were quieter, but nevertheless present in protests which erupted in Hanoi and Bangkok, in the Vietnamese government’s official request to amend the textbook, and in the negative sentiment expressed by newspapers and other publications, the most aggressive of which was in Singapore. Indonesia, however, was an outlier: no diplomatic representations were made by the government, no protests were organised by local activists, and little mention of the textbook’s publication was made by Indonesian media outlets. This response (or lack thereof) is just one example of the kind of indifference Indonesians have long displayed towards a period of history that remains highly controversial elsewhere in Asia.

This chapter considers why Imperial Japan’s three-and-a-half-year occupation of the Netherlands Indies has seldom been a matter of controversy, sensitivity, or consequence in post-war Indonesia. It begins by showing that the Japanese period—which began with the capture of Balikpapan and Kendari in January 1942 and which ended officially with local acceptance of Japanese surrender to Allied forces in September 1945—is largely absent from Indonesian historical consciousness and collective memory. It then draws on oral histories to describe aspects of the Indonesian experience of the war and to deepen existing understandings of Southeast Asian attitudes towards this often-contentious period of history. Lastly, it suggests two ways in which Indonesian memories of the war have been shaped by political agendas, social circumstances, and cultural values.

Historical Consciousness and Collective Memory

What does it mean for the past to be inconsequential or uncontroversial in the present? Here, I suggest two conceptual frameworks which help reveal how the Japanese period is understood in Indonesia today. The first of these frameworks is historical consciousness, which, according to the historian John Lukacs (1968), is a recollection of history which extends beyond the recorded past to include the remembered past. In Lukacs’s view, the remembered past is “something uniquely human, because it is conscious as well as unconscious, because it involves cognition together with re-cognition, because it involves thinking, and because thinking always involves some kind of consciousness” (pp. 9–10). Historical consciousness is therefore not a reflection of historical reality but rather an ever-changing and inherently fallible understanding of the past.

The importance of historical consciousness comes in large part from its role in the creation of identities. Collective identities are underpinned by the acceptance of a shared history, and, as Peter Seixas (2004) writes:

Identity and memory and inseparable because a common past, preserved through institutions, traditions and symbols, is a crucial instrument—perhaps the crucial instrument—in the construction of collective identities in the present… Belief in a shared past opens the possibility for commitments to collective missions in the future. In order to serve these purposes powerfully, memories organised as narratives include a temporal dimension, conveying an idea of origins and development, of challenges overcome, with collective protagonists and individual heroes confronting difficult conditions and threatening enemies. (p. 5)

Based on these conceptions, the Japanese Occupation of the Netherlands Indies is absent from Indonesian historical consciousness. In Indonesia as elsewhere, national identity features heroes and enemies, institutions, and various successes and struggles, but very few of them are associated with the Japanese period by Indonesians today. Instead, the foundation of Indonesian national identity lies in the shared experience of disparate peoples living under Dutch colonial rule. The past struggles of which Indonesians are most conscious are those against Dutch colonists, and it is this history which is kept at the forefront of public consciousness. One such reminder of this struggle are the names of Indonesian airports, many of which come from national heroes who fought against the Dutch. The cities of Bandung, Jakarta, Madiun, Malang, and Yogyakarta, for instance, all have airports named after Indonesian air force personnel who fought during the Indonesian National Revolution. Beyond Java, Manado’s airport in North Sulawesi is named after Sam Ratulangi, a member of the Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence; Ambon’s airport in Maluku is named after Pattimura, who fought against the Dutch in the Ambon Revolt of 1817; and Biak’s airport in Papua is named for Frans Kaisiepo, the only Papuan delegate to participate in the 1946 Malino Conference, where he sided with anti-Dutch nationalists. While the figures after whom Indonesian airports are named represent myriad ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, their point of similarity was their resistance against Dutch colonialism.

The Dutch—much like the Ottomans in Greek historical consciousness or Imperial Britain in the Americas—are the enemy Indonesia had to overcome in order to create the nation that exists today. For several centuries, Dutch colonists exploited the archipelago’s resources, enforced a rigid social structure, and created a trail of bloodshed and destruction. The other enemy of Indonesia’s past is the Indonesian Community Party, which is considered responsible for, among other things, the political turmoil of 1965 and the Madiun Revolt of 1948. Hostility towards both Dutch colonialism and Indonesian communism remains apparent in Indonesia today. It has become relatively common, for instance, to hear Indonesians declare that they were wrongly colonised (salah dijajah). This declaration attributes many of the challenges Indonesia currently faces to the incompetence of Dutch rule and suggests that Indonesia would be far more prosperous if it had been colonised by the British. Anti-Communist sentiment in Indonesia is perhaps more overt again: banners depicting a hammer and sickle overlaid with an interdictory circle and the words Tolak Komunisme (“Reject Communism”) are regularly displayed on prominent buildings and street corners.

Unlike the Dutch and the Communists, however, the Japanese have never been the subject of such disapproval. Instead, Indonesia is one of the foremost cases of successful Japanese cultural promotion in the world today. Japanese culture—cinema, cuisine, fashion, literature, music, and so forth—is popular throughout Indonesia. Gramedia, Indonesia’s largest book retailer, stocks a wide selection of manga and anime. Sushi restaurants and ramen noodle bars are located anywhere from the glitzy shopping malls of Jakarta and Surabaya to the main street of Banda Aceh and the side streets of Kupang and Jayapura. Karaoke bars like Happy Puppy and Japanese reflexology chains like Nakamura are located throughout the cities and towns of Java. The Japanese language is also a popular subject of study among young Indonesians. The Language Training Center at Satya Wacana Christian University in Salatiga, for example, offers tuition in just one foreign language besides English: Japanese. Likewise, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta offers more than thirty Japanese-language courses. (The only languages with a greater selection of subjects are English and Javanese.) Studying Japanese has become so popular, in fact, that Indonesia recently overtook South Korea to become the country with the most Japanese-language learners, second only to China (The Japan Foundation, 2013).

The second conceptual framework which helps reveal how the Japanese period is understood in contemporary Indonesia is collective memory. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992), who was largely responsible for generating broader interest in collective memory, described it as a social construction of the past shaped by the concerns of the present. Much debate about the usefulness of a concept which applies an inherently individual act to a wider population followed, but the value of collective memory for this study lies in its recognition that individual memories are not immune from influence and manipulation. As Remco Raben (1999) explains, individual memories engage with, and respond to, other kinds of memory:

What is called personal memory, as opposed to collective memory, is actually the individual voice in a much larger polyphonic choir. The individual, like the nation or everything in between, seeks reassurance in stereotypes, and contrasts his or her memory with the dominant interpretations in a society. (p. 10)

Personal memory is thus shaped by historical narratives of broader social and cultural significance, and it is narratives of this kind which form the collective memory of a society (Straub, 2005). In post-war Asia, many of the war narratives most significant to their respective contemporary societies are about historical injustice. In China, for instance, stories of the rape and murder of Nanking residents by Imperial Japanese soldiers—an event widely known to English-speaking audiences as “the Rape of Nanking”—remain controversial in contemporary Chinese society and have been the subject of repeated calls for financial and symbolic recompense. Japanese brutalities inflicted upon Indonesians, by contrast, have not entered collective memory in the same way. They have generally not been the subject of calls for recompense, and campaigns for compensation for Indonesian victims of the Pacific War were mostly confined to a brief period in the 1990s, during which local activists sought financial recompense for former so-called comfort women and ex-Heiho soldiers. These calls for compensation, however, were mostly initiated by Japanese activists, rather than by Indonesians themselves (McGregor, 2016).

Although Japanese atrocities inflicted upon Indonesians during the war have generated little activism and comparatively few calls for appropriate recognition and recompense, other historical injustices have caused major controversy in Indonesia. Dutch atrocities of comparable brutality have long motivated activists to campaign for compensation. The 1947 massacre of an estimated 431 Indonesians by Dutch troops in Rawagede, for instance, ignited decades-long battle for compensation from the Dutch government. In 2011, a court in the Netherlands agreed to provide compensation to the widows of nine victims, and the Dutch ambassador to Indonesia issued a formal apology during the annual ceremony which commemorates the massacre (Scagliola, 2014). The Indonesian government, moreover, was consistently supportive of local activism over the massacre in Rawagede. By contrast, when compensation for Indonesian victims of Japanese atrocities was being negotiated in the 1990s, Indonesian government representatives—motivated by a desire to maintain good relations with its largest donor of foreign aid—argued against paying compensation to individual victims.

Furthermore, commemoration and memorialisation in Indonesia appears to have followed a pattern similar to activism over historical injustice: struggles against the Dutch tend to be commemorated extensively, whereas struggles against the Japanese tend to receive very little attention. The site of the Rawagede massacre, for instance, is now a well-kept cemetery of national heroes where an annual commemorative ceremony takes place. Other famous monuments, such as Jakarta’s National Monument, Surabaya’s Heroes Monument, and Balikpapan’s Struggle of the People Monument, further help preserve the narrative of struggle against Dutch colonialism. The memorialisation of the war in Indonesia, however, has primarily been an endeavour of foreign governments. The war monument in Biak, for instance, was built by the Japanese government in 1994, at a time when war memory in Japan had been revived by ongoing debates about compensation for victims; the Ambon War Cemetery, where some 2000 Allied soldiers are buried, is managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is majority funded by the United Kingdom; and the Sparrow Force Monument outside Kupang was built with Australian funds in order to honour “the memory of the men of the 2/40th Australian Infantry Battalion (Sparrow Force) and the Timorese people who died on their mission here in 1942.”

Remembering and Forgetting the Past

Since the mid-1970s, a matter of recurrent discussion within the discipline of history has been the conceptual difference between history and memory. Pierre Nora, the French historian whose work on the subject has been among the most influential, argued that history is an entirely intellectual production which requires analysis and source criticism, whereas memory is the unselfconscious revival of past experiences through present-day customs and traditions. According to Nora (1989), memory makes possible something that history does not: the very notion that the past can be remembered, forgotten, and revived. Since the work of Nora, the idea that we can better understand human societies by observing what is “remembered” about the past and what is “forgotten” has influenced history-writing globally.

A consequence of this conceptual distinction, however, is that it encourages a binary view—the past is either remembered or forgotten—and thus distracts attention from important questions about how and why national histories and official memories conform and confuse personal memories. In the case of the Pacific War in Southeast Asia, historians have argued that the period has indeed been forgotten. Some have suggested the existence of a war “amnesia” in several Southeast Asian countries (Blackburn, 2010), while others have described how important local histories have been forgotten even where the war itself is still remembered (Hovinga, 2005; Isnaeni & Apid, 2008).

The oral history interviews I conducted with Indonesians who lived through the Japanese Occupation suggest that “forgotten” is too general a category. In vivid detail, old Indonesians shared stories of being forced to bow before Japanese soldiers, of being expelled from their homes, of having relatives conscripted into forced labour, and of knowing neighbourhood women committed into sexual slavery. They recounted the trauma and chaos of the Japanese years without distress and without any sense of anger or resentment. Unlike the history of Dutch colonialism in the archipelago, which remains a matter of controversy in Indonesia today, or the political turmoil and mass killings of the mid-1960s, which continue to be a deeply sensitive subject for many Indonesians, the war years have acquired a unique ambivalence in Indonesian historical consciousness and collective memory.

Over the course of several months, I spoke with Indonesians in the provinces of Central Java, Jakarta, Maluku, Nusa Tenggara Timur, and Papua about their experiences of the Pacific War in the Netherlands Indies. In every one of these conversations, the issue of Japanese brutality was raised. During one of my first interviews in Jakarta, a woman in her late eighties recalled being forced “to pay her respects to the rising sun” (“menghargai matahari”), of knowing young women who had been raped by Japanese soldiers, and of observing the grief of widows whose husbands had been killed as a result of Japanese activities. “They were so cruel,” she said, “there was no one crueller than the Japanese.”

Several thousand kilometres away in Papua, Biak Islanders chewed betel nut as they recounted the experiences of labour mobilisation during the Japanese period. One man, also in his eighties, said that he had been spared from enduring the gruelling life of a labourer because he was too young, but that his parents had not been as fortunate. “Everyone had to work,” he said, “because if you didn’t work, you were beaten by the Japanese.” He remembered seeing the hands of his parents bloodied and callused: “They had to do all the work with their hands. There were no tools, there wasn’t anything at all.”

Another Biak Islander, who was ten years old when the Japanese arrived in 1942, remarked: “the Japanese ordered people to work the streets. If anyone didn’t work fast enough, they were killed. The Japanese at that stage were so vicious!” For many local people, however, the most confronting element of Japanese brutality was that people were seldom killed quickly or mercifully. As one man described, victims were often bludgeoned to death:

The Japanese killed us because we used to have older people who wanted sampari, meaning freedom. They didn’t kill people with sharp objects but instead they did it with sticks, with firewood, with things like this [points to a rock on the ground]. We had to resist all of this for three years.

Anyone who escaped the worst of the wartime brutality was nonetheless exposed to the hardships of the war itself. In Central Java, families were kicked out of their homes if the military administration required them to house Japanese soldiers. As one informant explained, “every family that had a clean house had it taken! Taken by the army!” According to another informant from Java, the greatest challenge of the Occupation was the accompanying poverty. Food shortages became the norm: “It wasn’t just that ingredients became expensive, it’s that they didn’t exist. Nothing was sold, so people suffered because they couldn’t buy what they needed.” In West Timor, people told much the same story. They explained that the currency of the Netherlands Indies became worthless, which forced people to exchange what they had—chickens, eggs, sugar, pumpkins, corn, and so forth—for the items they needed. In Kupang, many items had been rationed, so a coupon system was established.

In Java as elsewhere, cloth also became a rare commodity because of the dramatic decline in cotton production. According to one man in his nineties, “people very rarely used cloth; instead, they made clothes from old sacks.” Another recalled that Javanese people made clothes from hemp (baju rami), which often became infested with fleas. So significant was the wartime decline in cotton production that, in 1947, sacks continued to be worn by as much as 80 per cent of the population of parts of East Java (Frederick, 1997).

Although the hardships of war were experienced by most of the population, some participants nonetheless acknowledged that they were exempted from certain challenges because of cooperation and connections. A Chinese Indonesian from Kupang explained that because his father was a cook and his mother a tailor, his family was spared from the more gruelling jobs which other Indonesians were forced to take up. Instead of working in fields or on infrastructure projects, his father cooked food for Japanese soldiers and his mother sewed their uniforms. Likewise, a woman in Biak described how her husband was one of the local men hired to supervise labourers. “He administered the coolies in the field,” she recalled. “He also had a garden, so we were able to pay for the things we needed with food.”

One of the most consistent features of these oral histories, however, is that stories of brutality and hardship are recounted without distress. For some, the Japanese period in Indonesia is an unfortunate history but not an unjust one. As one Biak Islander described, the war was one between Japan and America in which Indonesia was simply “stuck in the middle.” For others, the experience of Japanese occupation never became controversial in Indonesia in the way that it did elsewhere in Asia because of a variety of cultural and religious factors. Many shared the view that their religious beliefs prevented them from feeling antipathy towards others. According to a Timorese man from Nunbees, “we [the Timorese] have been religious for a very long time, and hatred for anyone is not in accordance with our ethical code as human beings.” In both Jakarta and Biak, the absence of any lingering resentment towards Japan was similarly attributed to religiosity. According to one woman who spent the war years in West Jakarta, “our religion compels forgiveness. How can we be religious if we still hate? We cannot believe in an eye for an eye.” Likewise, Biak Islanders, most of whom are Christian, generally believe that those who were spared from bombs, beatings, and diseases during the war were so spared because it was the will of God, and that their Christian beliefs compel them to forgive the wrongdoing of both Imperial Japan and the Allied forces.

In Kupang, one man suggested that the propensity to forgive others for wrongdoing was not necessarily connected to religious beliefs but rather inherent in local culture: “Kupang people are more able to forgive and to forget. We felt scared, but perhaps the culture of Kupang is an unassuming (lugu) one. Kupang people are generally very unassuming, right?” Much the same trope existed in Biak, with one informant noting:

We are not mad at Japan. When we were foolish, there was hatred [for the Japanese], but after we became clever, there was no hatred… at that time, not many people understood, but the character of the Biak people is to think first and only then act.

Existing scholarship has sought to explain why this ambivalence exists among Southeast Asians by emphasising three factors: first, the war was relatively short; second, the necessity for Southeast Asian nations to deal with immediate security and economic concerns reduced their ability to dwell on the past; and third, Japan’s efforts to repair its bilateral relations with nations in Southeast Asia, which included the 1977 enunciation of the Fukuda Doctrine, changed how Japan is viewed in the region (Er, 2015).

These factors, however, do not entirely explain the Indonesian case. The first issue is the idea that the longevity of a period of history determines how important this history will be decades (or centuries) later. In the historiography of the Pacific War, Southeast Asia’s relatively brief experience of Japanese occupation is frequently contrasted with the decades of Japanese colonialism in Northeast Asia. Whereas Japan controlled Taiwan from 1895, Korea from 1910, and Manchuria from 1931 until its surrender in the war in 1945, the former colonies of Southeast Asia (along with Thailand) were either partially or totally occupied by Japan for not more than five years, and in some cases for barely more than two. Although the Japanese Occupation of what is now Indonesia lasted just three-and-a-half years, the experience was not a mild one. It was a period of turbulence during which mass-scale brutalities were inflicted. As one example, nearly 300,000 Javanese labourers were sent to outposts in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, but fewer than half ever returned home (Sato, 1994).

In post-war Asia, overcoming historical injustices has also been less a matter of time than one might expect. In many cases, the intensity of hostility towards Japan over its wartime aggression has increased because sudden social and political changes within former occupied territories have caused memories of the war to reappear. For example, Singapore’s independence from Malaysia in 1965 caused previously suppressed war memories to re-emerge; the construction of the Nanjing Memorial Hall in the mid-1980s reignited anti-Japanese sentiment in China; and the rise of feminist activism in South Korea in the early 1990s caused the “comfort women” issue to resurface. In Indonesia, similarly, controversial periods of history have not necessarily become less controversial over time. More than five decades after the Indonesian killings of 1965–1966, for instance, little has been achieved in terms of reconciliation or public dialogue.

The second issue is the identification of the Fukuda Doctrine as a key turning point for Japan’s relations with the former occupied territories of Southeast Asia. Although the efforts of the Japanese government to improve relations with Southeast Asian nations in the 1970s were broadly successful, they made little difference in Indonesia, where ambivalence to the war had long existed. This ambivalence was in fact widespread in Indonesia long before the birth of the Fukuda Doctrine in 1977. Three years earlier, for instance, anti-Japanese riots broke out in Jakarta, in an event which came to be known as the Malari Incident. In the lead up to Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakukei’s state visit, protestors decried the dominance of Japanese foreign investment in Indonesia but, despite obvious parallels, seldom invoked memories of Japan’s dominance over Indonesia during the war. Although the Japanese government might have suspected that the riots were connected to war memory, it is difficult to find evidence that Indonesians themselves made this connection. In the Indonesian media, coverage of the riots barely mentioned the war. In fact, most references to the war were entirely uncritical of Imperial Japanese brutality, instead applauding Japan for its successful post-war transformation. Kompas (1974), for instance, described “Japan’s rebirth from the ashes of the Second World War” as “one of the most astounding stories of the twentieth century” (p. 5). Likewise, Sinar Harapan (1974) appeared to praise Indonesia–Japan relations, even during this period of intense anti-Japanese sentiment:

Indonesia, the cornerstone of Southeast Asia, is among Japan’s most important friendships. Both countries are dependent on each other: Japan, to a large extent, is dependent on Indonesia’s natural resources and, along with it, has the ability to provide financial and technical cooperation to Indonesia. Relations between the two nations are closer than in the past, especially in the areas of economics and trade. (p. 8)

By late February 1974, following the arrest of more than 800 protestors, the riots had taken on a very different meaning: they no longer had anything to do with Japan, much less the Japanese Occupation, but had instead become associated with political imprisonment, poverty, inequality, and corruption in Indonesia. Despite the Malari incident offering a clear catalyst for the reinvigoration of war memory, there was never any reckoning with Japan’s colonial history in Indonesia, nor was it there three years later when the Fukuda Doctrine was enunciated. As post-war Asia has shown, there is no statute of limitations on how far into the future historical resentment can resurface. Indeed, the Japanese period very briefly gained attention in Indonesia during Emperor Akihito’s first official visit to Southeast Asia in 1991 (Goto, 2003). But it nonetheless appears that the origins of Indonesian ambivalence are much earlier than the 1970s.

Collaboration and Coloniality

In the decades following the Pacific War, two factors specific to Indonesia shaped official accounts of the Japanese period in a way that gave rise to an enduring indifference among postcolonial Indonesians. First, wartime collaboration between Indonesian nationalist leaders and Japanese forces discouraged these leaders from fostering anti-Japanese sentiment and from constructing the period as one of historical injustice when they assumed power in 1945. Second, the sense of coloniality which Indonesia inherited following Japan’s rapid post-war modernisation changed broader views of Japan; it was no longer just a failed empire whose costly war effort had come to nothing but also an aspirational model of Asian modernity.

Sukarno’s Role in Hirohito’s War

Between 1942 and 1945, the Japanese collaborated with many levels of Indonesian society (Hidayat, 2007), but few collaborated as extensively as Sukarno, the foremost nationalist leader of the late colonial period and the first president of the Indonesian republic. As early as 1929, Sukarno had anticipated a war in Asia, hoping that any such conflict would be an opportunity to bring about the end of colonial rule in the Netherlands Indies. Wary of his anti-colonial ideas and rhetoric, the Dutch governor-general in Batavia, Cornelius de Jonge, exiled Sukarno to the faraway town of Ende, Flores, in 1934. Four years later, he was shipped to Bengkulu in Sumatra, where he remained until the Japanese invaded in 1942. Already aware of his nationalist credentials, the Japanese freed Sukarno from exile and moved him to Padang, where he met with the local military commander Colonel Fujiyama. During this meeting, Sukarno remarked, “Yes, Independent Indonesia can only be achieved with Dai Nippon,” further adding that, for the first time, he saw himself “in the mirror of Asia” (Adams, 1965, p. 164). Soon after, Sukarno, motivated by the prospect of independence, and the Japanese, motivated by a need for natural resources and manpower, began to collaborate.

One of Sukarno’s first tasks was to recruit prostitutes. After consulting an Islamic scholar about the issue of facilitating sex outside marriage, he gathered 120 prostitutes and developed a coupon system whereby Japanese soldiers were entitled to one visit per week. Women were often promised lucrative careers as entertainers, only to find themselves working as “comfort women” in bars and hotels. In addition, Sukarno worked to recruit labourers (rōmusha). He gave speeches about the crucial roles these predominantly Javanese peasants played in dismantling Dutch colonial rule, he posed for photographs with tools in his hands, and he even “served” as a labourer for one week in September 1944 in an attempt to boost waning numbers. As a reward for his efforts, the Japanese made important concessions for the Indonesian nationalist cause. They allowed, for instance, the nationalist anthem, Indonesia Raya, to be played at public events. It was the labourers themselves, however, who bore the burden of this collaboration. The Japanese showed little interest in preserving the lives of labourers, many of whom died from malnourishment or from diseases like malaria and dysentery.

On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan’s surrender in the Second World War, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence. The Netherlands swiftly dismissed the new republic as having been “made in Japan” (Gerbrandy, 1950, p. 66). Even Dutch colonial officials who had been sympathetic to Indonesian nationalism spoke out against the legitimacy of Sukarno’s proclamation. The wartime lieutenant governor-general, H. J. van Mook, for instance, denounced the republican government as “a dictatorship after the Japanese model” (as cited in Reid, 2005, p. 179). The basis for these claims was the collaboration issue.

As in other countries where collaborators assumed power at the end of the war in 1945 (or soon thereafter), the years during which Indonesia was occupied by Imperial Japan are generally represented as an endeavour that brought about the end of Western colonialism, rather than as a period of hardship and humiliation. Throughout his presidency, Sukarno only ever presented the view that, during the war, it was his job to “sacrifice thousands to save millions” (Adams, 1965, p. 193). Even during the final months of his presidency, he adhered to the narrative that toppling the Dutch colonial administration was an achievement greater than any of the hardships endured by the local population during the war.

The End of an Empire and the Resurrection of Modernity

The nature of the relationship between postcolonial Indonesia and post-war Japan was largely determined by the very different trajectories on which the two nations were set in 1945. On the one hand, Japan spent the years between 1945 and 1952 under Allied occupation, recovering from a humiliating defeat in the war, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the deaths of more than two million of its citizens. Although Emperor Hirohito had foreshadowed the nature of the Allied occupation by famously declaring that the Japanese people would have to “endure the unendurable,” the period was a major factor in bringing about the economic prosperity that followed. On the other hand, Indonesia exited the Second World War and entered into a bloody national revolution during which republican forces fought against the returning Dutch. In late 1949, with tens of thousands of Indonesians already dead, the Dutch government caved to international pressure and ceded sovereignty, with the exception of West New Guinea, which remained a Dutch territory until 1962.

Japan’s post-war economic recovery was rapid, and by the middle of the 1950s, it was no longer just a failed empire whose expansionist ambitions had come to nothing. Instead, it had become a model of modernity, especially for developing nations like Indonesia. Many Indonesians inherited a kind of coloniality whereby they believed that Japan possessed what Indonesia lacked: impressive infrastructure, freedom from corruption, a booming economy, and so forth. During the 1950s, Japan’s influence in Indonesia was pervasive, partly due to the ongoing reparations negotiations and partly because of the numerous economic ventures its government was pursuing in the archipelago, and by the 1960s Japan was not only a major economic force but also an important player in regional diplomacy.

Indonesia inherited this sense of coloniality from a short-lived Asian colonial power, rather than a centuries-long European one. In its most basic sense, coloniality is a conception of power whereby postcolonial nations lack the modernity of their former administrator. According to the sociologist Anibal Quijano (2000), coloniality takes root in the differentiation of the global population “into inferior and superior, irrational and rational, primitive and civilised, traditional and modern” (p. 342). It typically manifests in a discourse of “lack”—the idea that the “savage, lazy, corrupt and despotic” autochthonous populations of postcolonial nations cannot achieve the same level of modernity as their former colonial power (Ashar, 2015). In the case of Indonesia, discourses of lack are more often conceived in relation to Japan than the Netherlands. This was especially evident in the 1950s and 1960s when Indonesian rhetoric about Japan focused above all on its modernity. In the media, prominent Indonesian writers and intellectuals would routinely applaud Japan’s economic progress. Mochtar Lubis (1969), for instance, called Japan:

A good example for developing countries. Based on the conditions required to foster economic progress, Japan is actually one of the countries that least meets these requirements. Its people are abundant, its natural resources are poor. But Japan is nonetheless moving towards a modern economic realm without the need for foreign assistance or foreign cultivation. (p. 10)

In the political realm, much the same discourse existed. For President Sukarno, Japan was a model of modernity from which Indonesia could learn a great deal. In his own words, Japan “became a great nation [even] after experiencing a war with Russia, a war with China, and two world wars” (Amanat Proklamasi IV, 1986, pp. 209–210). Less than two decades after the end of the war, the story of Japan’s economic success and social transformation had become so entrenched in Indonesian public discourse that Japan’s increased participation in regional affairs, especially in the 1960s, was widely seen as an entirely positive development. In particular, Japan’s role as a mediator in Konfrontasi—a dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia over the confederation of Britain’s territories and protectorates in Southeast Asia—was possible in the first instance because Indonesian attitudes towards Japan had changed so substantially since the war. An important factor in creating the image of mediator rather than aggressor was, of course, the provision of aid and development assistance. During the 1950, Japan had become a major source of Indonesian aid. As part of the Konfrontasi mediation alone, Japan offered economic assistance to Indonesia to the value of USD 234 million (Nishihara, 1976).

Conclusion

Indonesian indifference towards the Japanese Occupation of the Netherlands Indies, as we have seen, is not happenstance but instead a product of the complex interplay between national histories and private memories. Oral histories of Indonesians who lived through the Pacific War indicate not that this period of history is less remembered by Indonesians than it is by Chinese or Filipinos or Solomon Islanders, but rather that memories of the Indonesian experience have been subject to a very different set of influences. In Indonesia, the most important developments in the process of cultivating ambivalence about the war years took place during the subsequent two decades. First, Sukarno and other post-war leaders kept the Japanese period as far away from the forefront of public consciousness as they could, because they had no reason to make an issue of the atrocities which Indonesians were forced to endure. Any such effort would not only have detracted from their narrative of anti-colonial triumph but also have risked revealing the true extent of their collaboration with the Japanese. Second, Japan’s rapid economic transformation in the 1950s allowed it to become not just a provider of Indonesian aid, a consumer of industry, and an active participant in regional affairs, but also a model of the kind of prosperity which could be achieved even after the havoc and destruction of war. Indonesian public and political dialogue, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, reflected the sense of coloniality which Indonesia inherited as a result of Japan’s post-war transformation.

This chapter has attempted to show that the Japanese Occupation of the Netherlands Indies is not just a story of wartime chaos and human suffering. Its legacy in contemporary Indonesia is also a prism through which wider processes of history-making in both Indonesia and the world can be viewed. In Indonesia as elsewhere, memories of the past do not stay the same for long. They are moulded by different sets of political agendas, social circumstances, and cultural values. The historical consciousness and collective memory of a society is thus something very different from historical reality. In Indonesia, the Japanese period is part of a much broader national history in which official histories and personal memories are routinely aligned to form a dominant historical narrative. These narratives are often deeply flawed, but they are almost always consequential.