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The Japanese Impact 151 151 CHAPTER 7 The Japanese Impact: From Briefcase to Samurai Sword The role of the Japanese in the creation of modern Indonesia long remained an emotive question, particularly for those who were involved in the events. Since the Dutch attacked the infant Indonesian Republic in 1945 as a Japanese creation, nationalists were initially at pains to show the world that they had no debts to Tokyo. Most Western scholars have been prepared to give the nationalists the benefit of the doubt, but it has not been so easy for the Japanese, some of whom felt wounded by the “ingratitude” of Indonesians. This debate, like many others in modern Indonesian history, has focused on the dramatic events surrounding the proclamation of Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945. It is these events which have drawn the special attention of writers of memoirs, with firsthand accounts from Hatta, Adam Malik, Sukarno and Subardjo on the Indonesian side, and Nishijima and Miyoshi on the Japanese’s. Nishijima, the most prolific of the Japanese participants, explains that he began to write his version of the proclamation out of a sense of injury, when he learnt in 1951 that he could not obtain a visa to revisit his Indonesian friends because of Indonesian official sensitivity on this question.1 In the several books he wrote or inspired, Nishijima insisted that it should not be forgotten that the independence proclamation was drafted in the house of his superior, Admiral Maeda, at a meeting in which both Maeda and Nishijima were seated at the principal conference table with Sukarno, Hatta and Subardjo. Miyoshi also represented the Japanese Army at the meeting, in the hope of implicating the Army in an effective fait accompli.2 In a 1959 publication, a group of Japanese scholars renewed their complaint that these facts had been suppressed by 152 To Nation by Revolution Indonesian writers, and pleaded that “a clarification of this would not soil their national history”.3 Hatta’s subsequent memoir accepted only a part of the Japanese version.4 On the occasion of Admiral Maeda’s death in December 1977, the Japanese concerned were therefore understandably gratified to receive a telegram from Adam Malik, then Indonesian Vice President, but in 1945 a strenuous upholder of the view that independence should be proclaimed in complete defiance of the Japanese. 32 years after the event, Malik could generously acknowledge Maeda’s “great help in the preparatory stage of our independence”, and proclaim that Maeda’s name “will be written in the annals of Indonesia with golden letters”.5 The proclamation question has more to do with personal feelings and national pride than with historical causation. Here, as in the whole question of the Japanese period, it is important to remember that the important actors continued to be Indonesian. It is they who defined the eventual shape of independent Indonesia by responding to whatever political opportunities each period offered, whatever resonances each foreign model set up in their own tradition. The argument of this essay is that the Japanese occupation brought such profound change that it is not inappropriate to regard 1942 as the beginning of the whole revolutionary upheaval which gave birth to modern Indonesia. Nevertheless, these changes were in very few cases the result of deliberate Japanese planning, but rather of Indonesian responses to a radically altered environment.6 There are a number of reasons why 1942 marked a more permanent break with the past in Indonesia than in other parts of Southeast Asia. Some of them have to do with the fact that the Netherlands was not a major world power and could only have maintained its influence in Southeast Asia in conditions of great stability. A few embittered Dutch politicians complained after the war that Anglo-Saxons had deliberately manipulated the post-war crisis to ensure their interests prevailed in Indonesia at the expense of the Dutch. In reality, the dramatic events of the 1940s only telescoped a shift which was inevitable in the long run. The place of the Dutch language was a symptom of this shift. The Japanese officially discouraged English and French elsewhere in Southeast Asia, while in practice frequently made use of these languages for effective communication. By contrast, they had no use whatever for Dutch, and found Indonesian (or occasionally even English) much more practically useful. While the older, Dutch-educated generation of Indonesians naturally found it painful to have to...

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