Returning to Asia: Japan-Indonesia Relations, 1930s–1942 by Got Ken’ichi, The Doomed Empire: Japan in Colonial Korea by M. J. Rhee (review)

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 23, No. 2,1999, pp. 311-314 Book Review Got Ken'ichi, Returning to Asia: Japan-Indonesia Rela­ tions, 1930s-1942 (Tokyo: Ryukei Shyosha, 1997), pp. xxvi, 496. M. J. Rhee, The Doomed Empire: Japan in Colonial Korea (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1997), pp. ix, 178. Despite the considerable energy that historians of East Asia have brought to the study of Japanese colonialism of late, the Japanese colonial empire has remained a largely ignored aspect of modern imperialism as a global phenomenon. These two works, though quite different in terms of subject matter, aims and results, attest to the historical, linguistic, and conceptual complexities that tend to scare off historians of European colo­ nization. In doing so, these works provide further evidence of the necessity of bringing Japanese colonialism into discussions of modern imperialism. It is hard to imagine a more useful addition to the compara­ tively underdeveloped literature of Japanese activity in South­ east Asia than this translation of Got Ken'ichi's 1986 work, Shwaki Nihon to Indonesia. There is no other work in English of similar scope and richness. It is odd to state this when Got's focus, the Japanese thrust into Southeast Asia in 1941, could hardly be more central to the many narratives about the origins of the Asia-Pacific War on both sides of the Pacific. Got's work exam­ ines strategic planning and intellectual ruminations on the sig­ nificance of such a move to Indonesian nationalism in the decade or so before the outbreak of war. His presentation is multilateral and multi-archival. The larger, first section of the work considers the rise of the idea of an aggressive "southward advance" of Japanese influence into the Netherlands East Indies. After examining "southward advance" thinking in the Japanese military, he considers the activities of Japanese journalists and intellectuals operating in Japan and in the Netherlands East 312 Michael A. Schneider Indies. Section two describes Indonesian responses to this Japanese gaze, as both the intellectual proposition of "Asianism" and a realistic challenge to Dutch overlordship. Got does not shy away from the argument, though he fre­ quently leaves it to the reader to work it out, that Japanese thinking about Indonesia shows serious gaps of foresight, sophistication, and integration. Economic expansion into South­ east Asia was a major thrust of Japanese expansionist thinking during the first boom of interest in Southeast Asia during the 1910s and 1920s, and yet Got's research reveals startlingly ad hoc and fanciful thinking about the economic potential of the region in the late 1930s. Nationalism, the single most important topic of conversation in Japan when considering other countries, faded strangely from the scene when Japanese looked at Indone­ sia. His discussion of Indonesian nationalists' views of Japan shows the sharp disappointment of Indonesian nationalists in Japan's ability to match its rhetoric to its approach to the region. In sum, Got gives extensive evidence of a sharp rise of interest in Southeast Asia occasioned by the European war, especially after the fall of the Netherlands. Thus his research supports the con­ clusion that the reactive posture of Japanese foreign policy by the late 1930s was the source of, but also a constraint on, the brief and intense cultural encounter with Indonesia. "Returning to Asia” is a complex and dense book with a daunting degree of detail for non-specialists. Non-specialists should also know that the translators have opted for a fairly lit­ eral rendering of the Japanese version, with occasionally awk­ ward translations of easily compacted Japanese expressions ("the 'crisis comes in 1936' theory," p. 17), unidiomatic phrasing ("fan the air," instead of "fan the flames," of anti-Japanese senti­ ment, p. 230) and infelicitous word choice. Specialists may grumble at the curious and unfortunate omission of macrons for long vowels throughout. Students of nationalism, however, will find so much of value here, that they should persevere in the face of these obstacles. The question of nationalism is similarly central to M.J. Rhee's The Doomed Empire, a work of considerably smaller scale and with substantially more modest empirical research aims. At 150 pages on Japan's most important colonial possession, Korea, the...