Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History

Ethan Mark has made a welcome, major contribution to our understanding of the experiences of diverse communities across the Asia-Pacific theater during the Second World War. It will long remain essential reading for students of its subject, especially those exploring the postcolonial, transnational impacts of the conflict.

Ethan Mark’s Japan’s Occupation is a tour de force that grasps wartime Java as the locus of an intense contestation between civilian and military actors engaged in Japan’s southward imperial expansion, the polemics of Orientalism, anti-Western liberation, and Indonesian unification. It deftly maps the colonial structure of rule alongside Japanese-Indonesian cooperation and interaction that aspired to see Java integrated into Japan’s Great Asia, while also considering the cultural and political dynamics that shaped Java’s place prior to Japanese occupation and post-war realities that placed the newly independent nation of Indonesia in Sukarno’s hands.

Well organised and draws upon an impressive number of Japanese, Dutch, Indonesian and English language sources to produce many interesting and original insights. It will appeal to students of the theory and practice of Japanese imperialism and of Indonesia’s journey towards eventual independence.

Mark’s book is without doubt a very well researched and detailed study based on English, Japanese, Indonesian, and Dutch primary and secondary sources. It is a welcome contribution to academic research on World War II, and helps to sharpen the overall picture of Southeast Asia under the rising sun.

[A]s a study of Japanese pan-Asianism and its many formulations among diverse individuals and groups in two societies, this work is a major success that should take a prominent place in the field for many years to come.

Brilliantly researched and compellingly argued, this remarkable book on the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands East Indies should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand both the appeal and the contradictions of the Japanese empire for occupiers and occupied alike as they strove to create a postcolonial and post-Western vision of a Greater Asia.

With clear-eyed recognition of the hypocrisy of Japan’s project to “liberate” Indonesia, Mark brilliantly explores the profound ironies of the Japanese wartime occupation. He identifies the grounds on which Japanese rulers and their local partners forged an ultimately doomed alliance: common enemies and a seductive shared rhetoric of promoting “Asian” culture. He takes seriously the efforts of a wide array of Indonesians to turn wartime crisis into opportunity for their nation and themselves. A pioneering work in the transnational history of World War II in Asia.

Ethan Mark’s deeply researched study on Japan’s occupation of Java gives us an illuminating history of Asianism as lived and breathed. Through its focus on a wide-ranging cast of Japanese and Indonesian characters, the book reveals the tangle of competing nationalist agendas that inspired and informed agents of “greater Asia”: anti-colonial nationalisms, self-determining ethno-nationalisms, imperialist ultra-nationalisms, Occidentalisms, self-Orientalisms, jingoisms, and xenophobias. A major contribution to the literature on wartime Asia.

A powerful new contribution to the field, significantly different from anything else available in print. Unlike most of the literature on the subject in English, it highlights information and opinions from primary sources in the languages of all three principal nations involved: Japan, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. It observes events and, particularly, ideas from perspectives ranging from the local to the international, often pointing out important comparisons; and it demonstrates convincingly the complexity of realities beyond long-familiar military and political narratives. Most importantly, however, Mark’s emphasis on the paradoxes, contradictions, and shifting nuances behind virtually every aspect of the occupation’s history should rescue it once and for all from simplistic or one-sided interpretation.

This is a revolutionary piece of writing. Using Japanese, Indonesian and Dutch sources, Ethan Mark succeeds in doing what nobody did before: explaining the enchantment and disenchantment between Japanese imperialists and Indonesian anticolonialists during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. He succeeds in analysing the intellectual entanglements of the intellectuals of both nations in a compassionate and at the same time carefully balanced and even-handed treatment. The book makes clear why, for a considerable time during the Pacific War, Indonesians and Japanese could believe to have a common agenda. By doing so, Mark’s investigations explain to us the fascinating ambiguities of Japanese imperialism – both liberating and exploitative – and Indonesian nationalism – on which the Japanese charm has exerted such crucial influence. Incisively argued, meticulously documented and beautifully written, this is a masterpiece of transnational intellectual history.