REPRESENTING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF INDONESIA: Personal Testimonies and Public Images in Indonesia, Japan, and the Netherlands
Edited by Remco Raben
Waanders Publishers, Zwolle; Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Amsterdam,1999.

Tracy Steele

Representing the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia was designed as companion to a 1999 exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, that marked four hundred years of relations between Japan and the Netherlands. (The exhibition traveled to Japan in 2000.) A valuable resource for those interested in the presentation and manipulation of war memories, the book is divided into sections on each country that mirror the physical and mental separation of the Indonesians, Japanese, and Dutch who shared the same space, the Indonesian Archipelago, during the time of the Japanese occupation, from 1942 until Japan's surrender in August of 1945. The use of pictures, diaries, memoirs, poetry, literature, and film adds a powerful dimension to the text, one not found in conventional histories, and sets the stage for a side-by-side images of the occupation from each national perspective.
It was during the Japanese occupation that the Indonesian independence movement gained momentum, culminating in a unilateral declaration of independence from the Netherlands two days after Japan's capitulation. It would take another four years before the Netherlands accepted that the sun had set on its colonial empire. Hence, the Japanese occupation was a turning point for all three nations that has shaped each country's national collective memory of the period.

An institutionalized memory of the Japanese occupation has been cultivated by the Indonesian State, which views it as the prelude to Indonesian independence and, as such, as one national experience belonging to all Indonesians regardless of class, education, or ethnicity. The collaboration of Sukarno, an independence leader and first president of independent Indonesia, with the Japanese is notably absent from the official history of the war. Instead, the focus is placed on the harrowing experiences of forced laborers, comfort women, and Indonesian conscripts into the Japanese army. But their stories are not straightforward. As an interview with former conscript Pak Herry shows, it is not clear whether conscripts were forced to serve in the Japanese army or whether they were recruited with promises of good pay and provisions of food in the midst of wartime scarcity. The contributors note that the growth of political freedom since Suharto's fall from power in 1997 may not lead to changes in the official history since few documents and artifacts escaped the notice of Japanese officials who systematically destroyed them as the war drew to a close.
As a defeated nation, Japan had little interest in the distant East Indies. Although several Japanese were executed or imprisoned for war crimes, the majority returned to Japan, and where their primary memory is of their own suffering as prisoners of the Dutch or Indonesians. A significant number of these former soldiers, especially those who have maintained close business ties to Indonesia, continue to view their role in Indonesia as that of liberator, a view reinforced by Indonesia's subsequent independence.
Victimhood is the dominant memory among former Dutch internees of the Japanese. Most remember with bitterness the deprivations in the detention camps, where one-fifth of the approximately 250,000 Dutch internees perished. The victory over Japan, however, was not celebrated in the Netherlands, which had suffered German occupation and then failed to regain control of its colony. Lingering hostility toward Japan from the Indische (Dutch returnees from Indonesia after 1949) has affected diplomatic relations between the countries.
The authors consciously attempt to present a balanced portrayal of the memorialization of the period by giving voice to Indonesians and Japanese as well as to Indische. The book is invaluable for those interested in this aspect of the Second World War and in the portrayal of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in popular culture as well as in official memory.

Tracy Steele, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and is completing a monograph on Anglo-American relations with China, 1953 to 1969.