Appealing to Asia: Nation, culture, and the problem of imperial modernity in Japanese-occupied Java, 1942--1945 (Indonesia)

In March 1942, Japan captured the Dutch East Indies and began a military occupation that lasted until August, 1945. More than in most military occupations, occupier and occupied had strong practical reasons for cooperation: Both shared a common Western enemy. Japan had an acute shortage of manpower, and it needed Indonesian products such as oil. Indonesians sought military training, cheap Japanese commodities, and above all independence from colonial domination. Yet Japanese and Indonesians encountered one another not only as members of an occupying army and as representatives of nations, but also as individuals, and as members of social groups and classes often at odds with one another. For certain members of the nation-building sub-elites of both sides in particular---including the civilian members of Japan's Sendenhan or Propaganda Unit, and members of various Indonesian nationalist groups who worked with them---the encounter was about more than pragmatic calculation. In a time of a global crisis of modernity and modern institutions, against the background of a stalled, costly Japanese war in China and an Indonesian society divided and adrift after years of foreign colonial rule, these two sub-elites also sought from the mutual encounter the means for a new way forward for themselves and their (would-be) nations. In their own ways and for their own reasons, both saw this moment as heralding the possibility of a new Asian order that might combine the material advantages and scientific rationalism of Western modernity with the cultural advantages of an imagined, revitalized Asian tradition, thus transcending Western modernity and its associated social ills. All too soon, however, the appealing possibility of true Asian brotherhood began to recede amidst cultural frictions, power imbalances, economic dislocation, and resurgent social tensions driven by conflicting needs and interests not only between occupiers and occupied, but also between different social, political, and administrative groupings within each community. The experience revealed the deep contradictions inherent in the dream of Greater Asia, and its character as a modern, transnational class ideology. Even before the extreme exploitation and economic deprivation of the late occupation, the process of Japanese-Indonesian disenchantment was already well underway. Yet shorn of its Japan-centrist aspects, Asianism in different forms proved of continued appeal to Asian elites, far outlasting Japan's short-lived, ultimately disastrous Southeast Asian imperium to re-emerge in various alternative national guises and settings up to the present day (C. F. Indonesia's Pancasila and the "Asian Values" discourse).