In 1935 Britain had decided to separate Burma from the Raj, and enacted a special constitution. Dr Ba Maw, a skilled politician, became the country’s first (native) prime minister under the British Governor. After falling from power in 1939, thanks to a British-rigged election, he made contact with some Pan-Asianist military lobbyists. In January 1941, Japan’s Prime Minister Tojo announced in the Diet that ‘if the Burmese offer to co-operate with Japan in establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan would gladly grant independence to the Burmese’. The British were driven out of Burma a year later by the Japanese Army, accompanied by a Burma Independence Army mainly recruited from Burmans living in Siam. In July 1943, a treaty of alliance between Japan and Burma was signed in the emperor’s palace, and Dr Ba Maw became the head of state.
Something not too different happened in the Philippines at the same time. The US allowed Manuel Quezon to become the first elected president in 1935, and promised independence in 1946. But when the Japanese Occupation took place and Quezon fled to the US, along with most Americans, Senator José Laurel became president, with the same kind of status as Dr Ba Maw in Burma, and the promise of a speedy independence. Nothing like this happened in Indonesia. In late 1943 Prime Minister Koiso promised independence only ‘some time’, and there was never an Indonesian head of state. With the downfall of Hitler in April 1945, Tokyo realized that Japan was facing total defeat, and officers in Indonesia assumed that they should fight to the death for the sake of the emperor. But there were others, including Maeda Tadeshi, who believed they should fulfil the promise of independence as fast as they could, whatever the cost.
The end came when American atomic bombs obliterated Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki three days later. On August 15 the emperor announced on the radio his immediate surrender. On September 2, he ordered all armed personnel to lay down their weapons.
Maeda was among those who argued successfully that most of the Japanese armaments should be quietly passed to the Indonesian leaders of the PETA, trained from 1943 to fight with the Japanese if and when the Allies attacked (which did not happen). Without an army, the country would relapse into a Dutch colony. He also believed that the country had to have an effective head of state, in the person of Soekarno. But on August 16, a small group of young radicals kidnapped Soekarno and Mohammad Hatta, his respected no. 2. The youngsters believed that the pair had no courage, and would not announce a Republic of Indonesia. It was Maeda who connected with the radicals and persuaded them to release the victims, and further managed to arrange a compromise meeting between all parties in his house. But he retired to bed without interfering. Late on the morning of August 17, Soekarno and Hatta announced the birth of a free Indonesia. Maeda made sure that the army would not make any trouble.
Maeda was quite frank that the war had been a stupid disaster (this was in line with the Japanese Navy view of the folly of the Japanese Army), and that he had seen his role as head of the Kaigun Bukanfu (naval liaison office) in Jakarta as helping Indonesia to become independent, in line with the early idea that Japan should promote the liberation of Asia, not its conquest and insertion into the Japanese Empire.
The best thing about the interviews Maeda gave me was that he spoke in detail about what he had tried to do, failed to do and managed to do, under very difficult circumstances. He was modest about his role in the complicated process whereby Indonesia was able to declare its independence on 17 August 1945. What he did feel proud of was simply that he had intervened to convince the army leaders to let the Indonesians make their own decisions. He had deliberately absented himself from the final discussions about the independence declaration among the Indonesians. Later, when I interviewed Indonesians who had worked with Maeda and the Kaigun Bukanfu, including the soft-hearted communist and independence leader Wikana, I learned that they had great respect for him, even if they hated the Occupation regime.
My talks with Maeda were pivotal for three different reasons. In the first place, he made me start to think about Japan in a more complicated way than before. Kahin had done his best to help the unfortunate Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, but he had been trained to fight against Japan, while I was still a child during the Second World War. This generational and cultural difference showed up in my first academic essay, ‘Japan, the Light of Asia’, which described the cruelty and exploitation of the Occupation regime, but also showed why the Indonesian Revolution was incomprehensible without acknowledgement of the Japanese contribution. In the second place, Maeda made me think, for the first time, about the roles of individuals. Third, and most important of all, he made me gradually change my thesis topic.
Originally I had planned to treat the Japanese Occupation simply as a short self-standing epoch in the series of Late Dutch Colonialism, Japanese Occupation, Revolution, Constitutional Democracy, Guided Democracy. But the more I looked at the evidence, the more I started to rebel against the neat sequences of events, and eventually resolved to break the mould. I had to think about the connections between the Japanese Occupation and the Revolution. This was why my dissertation deliberately bridged the two, looking closely at 1944–46. In those days, when scholarly attention was focused on high-level elites, it was understandable why the Revolution and the Occupation were seen as opposites. But below the elites? It was out of this puzzle that my thesis of the ‘Pemuda Revolution’ (Revolution of the Youth) emerged, which argued, rightly or wrongly, that the tidal force behind the Revolution was neither the nationalist political elite nor a social class, but a generation, formed by its complex experiences under Japanese imperialist rule.
It is a great tribute to Kahin’s affection for his students, his modesty and his intellectual broadmindedness, that he not only strongly supported a student whose dissertation argued against some of his own theses in Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, but also helped to ensure its speedy publication. In fact, both of us were partly wrong because we did not understand Japanese, and had no access to many Japanese documents. Almost half a century later, David Jenkins, a great friend of mine and the leading historian of the Indonesian military, has shown, using countless documents and personal interviews in Japan, that it was high-ranking Japanese officers in Java who made the Revolution actual.
In the course of the Potsdam Conference between July 17 and early August 1945, the zone of MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command was abruptly turned over to Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command (including Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and Indochina). Mountbatten, however, did not have the soldiers, transportation, weaponry or effective knowledge of local political movements necessary to exercise control over the region. Thus it was not until September 15 that some of his officers arrived in Java. In the month between the Indonesian Declaration of Independence and this landfall, the top Japanese commanders had the time to provide secretly to the Indonesian revolutionaries 72,000 light arms, more than a million rounds of ammunition, many mortars and field artillery. Jenkins rightly observes that, without this help, the Revolution would not have been possible, and Mountbatten would not have given up on the idea of occupying all Java and returning the island to the Dutch.
My fieldwork came to an end in April 1964, and I spent the summer in Holland studying the Dutch documents on the Japanese Occupation and the Revolution that finished off colonialism in Indonesia. It happened that just that summer the leftist Provo Movement broke out in Amsterdam. It was the precursor of the militant 1960s movements in Germany, France, America, Japan, the UK and many other countries. The Provos included left intellectuals, students, bohemians, anarchists, the homeless and a few bombers, and they were famous for mocking the government, the monarchy, the police and the big capitalists. For example, they sent a big helium balloon, marked with insults to the powerful, to the top of the vast central railway station. The police had only two options: either climb awkwardly up high firemen’s ladders or shoot the balloon. Either way the crowds coming to work would laugh their heads off. When not doing research, I follow
ed the activities and manifestos of the Provos with interest.
I returned to Cornell in August, just as President Johnson was exploiting the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse for a massive assault on Vietnam in February 1965. From then on, the anti-war movement spread throughout the universities. At Cornell, Kahin himself was a powerful critic of Johnson’s foreign policy, and most of his graduate students followed his path.
Meantime the political and economic situation in Indonesia was rapidly degenerating. The generals controlled the big companies and plantations, and were organizing all the anti-communist groups. The Communist Party was strong, but since 1950 it had been committed to electoral politics and had no armed capacity. Soekarno continued to protect the party, but he was getting weaker. In the early hours of October 1, believing that a coup d’état against Soekarno was near, soldiers led by angry officers killed five top generals, denouncing the top brass as corrupt, sexually immoral and ignorant of the life of ordinary soldiers.
General Suharto took charge of the army and crushed the rebels late the same day. The next day all newspapers and television channels were shut down except those controlled by the military. On October 3, Suharto announced that the killings were the work of the communists. There followed massacres of anyone who was a party member or a suspected sympathizer. The killings went on for three months, carried out by the military but also by thousands of armed Muslims. At least 500,000 leftists died, and many others were tortured and sent to Suharto’s gulags, which covered the whole country.
Three of us Cornellians decided to work together to analyze what had happened. Ruth McVey had been an expert on the Soviet Union before turning to study the history of the Indonesian Communist Party, the oldest in Asia. She had known many communists while doing field-work in Indonesia. Fred Bunnell and I were still graduate students. We were lucky in that Cornell’s library had a mass of Indonesian newspapers and magazines published right up to September 30. We dropped everything else for three months to work on a confidential ‘Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia’, and completed it in the first week of 1966.
Since our analysis provisionally argued that the cause of the ‘attempted coup’ could be traced to internal conflicts in the Indonesian military – and not, as Suharto and his cohorts insisted, the Communist Party – we tried to keep the document secret, except for a few scholars whom we trusted, for fear that Indonesian Cornell graduates or known Indonesian friends of ours would be arrested, tortured, even killed – despite the fact that none of these people knew what we were doing. But the ‘Preliminary Analysis’ leaked out after two months, and both Suharto’s men and the US State Department (who were actively supporting Suharto and delighted by the destruction of the communists) were furious.
It so happened that in the summer of 1965, Ruth, Fred and I had had the idea of creating of a biannual journal about Indonesia. Kahin was very supportive of the project. We used the first issue (April 1966) to publish a long series of documents from all kinds of groups. We did not expect a long life for the journal, but it has lasted for fifty years.
In 1972 I knew the Indonesian Embassy in Washington would never give me a visa, so while on a visit to London I asked for an interview with the ambassador there, General Adjie. After a nice chat about his role in the Revolution, he politely offered to help. When I mentioned the visa he immediately arranged it. Thus I was able to return to Indonesia, although, as it turned out, only very briefly. While there I came across a copy of the Intelligence Agency’s newspaper which denounced four enemies of the country. To my amazement and laughter, they were identified as the Wall Street Journal (which had exposed massive military corruption), Moscow’s TASS, Peking’s Renmin Ribao and Cornell. It took the authorities more than two weeks to find out that I had arrived in Jakarta. When they finally did, I was kicked out, and remained banned from the country for the next twenty-seven years, until the fall of the Suharto dictatorship.
Once expelled, I knew it would be a very long time before I would be let back in the country, so I had to think about what to do next. I seriously considered moving to Sri Lanka, which had caught my imagination from childhood. But then, in 1973, came news from Siam of the fall of the Sarit-Thanom-Praphat military dictatorship, which had lasted since 1958. A civilian government headed by the former rector of Thammasat University, Professor Sanya Thammasak, was installed, which ended censorship, granted trade unions, peasant unions and student associations the right to organise, and set about creating a democratic constitution.
It was a very exciting time, not only for Thais, but for someone who had just been punished by the Indonesian military dictatorship. I had many Thai friends who had studied at or near Cornell, especially Charnvit Kasetsiri, who eventually became, for a short time, the rector of Thammasat. A year’s leave was coming up (the 1974–75 academic year), so I decided to go to Siam to learn the language and start some research.
It was an utterly different experience from being in Indonesia in 1962–64. I was now almost forty years old, and a very busy professor rather than a carefree student. I knew not a word of Thai, and my acquaintance with the history and culture of Siam was quite thin. But it was good to be back learning, not teaching. Every morning I would motorcycle to the American University Alumni (AUA) in downtown Bangkok to take my language lessons with a small group of other foreigners, Japanese, Americans, English and so on. As always, the women learned much faster than the men, because they were said to be much less embarrassed by making mistakes.
In the process, I became very conscious of something that I had barely noticed before: how Americans organized the teaching of Southeast Asian languages. The lessons were entirely focused on useful everyday speech. ‘Where is the post office?’ ‘How much is a haircut?’ ‘Your little son is very cute.’ Learning to read Thai was for later, and optional. You could soon see why. With the exception of a middle-aged Japanese businessman, none of my classmates had ever learned to use a non-Roman writing system, and so Thai orthography seemed exceptionally hard.
The school had no interest whatever in Thai literature, or indeed anything ‘beautiful’ about the Thai language. The contrast with European language-teaching could not have been greater. Classical Latin and Greek were ‘dead’ languages, no longer spoken, so we youngsters at Eton were focused entirely on reading works of very high literary quality. French, German and Russian were taught in the same spirit. I could read and write French very well, but could speak it only in the most primitive way.
I learned a lot at the AUA but always felt deprived. In the end I had to teach myself to read, with the help of friends. I was lucky to be able to stay with (now Professor) Charnvit, his sister, his brother-in-law and his nieces, and they usually tried to help me practise. I think their influence is one reason why, when I came to write In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (1985), my first book on Thailand, it was mainly about contemporary Thai fiction and how it was changing in response to deep social and economic changes, current political conflicts, and the influence of the United States.
I cannot say that in that first year in Siam I did any serious or focused research. My Thai was still too primitive, and the language lessons took up most of my days and energies. What I did manage to do was to read thoroughly almost all the English-language scholarship on Siam (in those days there was still not very much), and to follow and clip the newspapers for the future writing of political science articles.
As mentioned earlier, the country’s politics from late 1973 to early 1975 were exhilarating. The repression imposed by almost continuous right-wing military regimes since 1947 was gone for the time being. Many important left-wing books banned by the dictators were now republished and widely greeted. Political parties mushroomed, and two or three of them were, to varying degrees, left of centre. When the first free elections in almost three decades were held, it was still possible for a very young and poor teacher, who campaigned on his bicycle, to get e
lected. This never happened again. Some of my former Cornell classmates had begun to come to prominence as politicians and, I am glad to say, joined one or other of the progressive parties, including the sociologist Dr Boonsanong Punyodyana. Students were extremely active politically, again in a leftward direction. These were the years when a new kind of popular music was created, the Songs for Life, which we quickly learned to sing.
But there were two dark clouds in the otherwise bright political sky. Far the darkest was the impending American defeat in the Vietnam War. In Bangkok, the CIA station chief was spreading the word that if the Indochina states fell to communism, the next ‘domino’ would be Thailand, where a local communist guerrilla force had been gaining strength from the end of the 1960s. All this created a growing panic among right-wing groups, including the royals, who by the middle of 1975 started to go on the offensive with increasingly violent means.
The second cloud was the huge American presence in the country: almost 50,000 military personnel, stationed at dozens of military bases, set up mainly for the purpose of bombing communist-controlled areas in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia and supporting the right-wing groups in those countries. The social consequences of this presence quickly became very obvious: the novel spread of heroin addiction, unwanted mixed-race children, organized prostitution on an unprecedented scale, the Americanization of popular culture, and so on. Japan’s close (if competitive) association with the US also led to boycott campaigns against Japanese businesses, and against Japanese investment in what was becoming known as ‘sex tourism’, with its ‘industrial-scale’ massage parlours.