War Memories
Battles in perspectives
During the months running up to the visit of the Japanese emperor and empress to the Netherlands, the Pacific War had been a prominent issue in the Dutch newspapers and, to a lesser extent, in the Japanese media. The commemoration of 400 years of relations between the two countries could not pass over this dismal episode in silence and, as usual, bringing up the war issue has stirred up public emotions.
By REMCO RABEN
The main event concerning the wartime past took place last year when, on the 7th of August, an exhibition opened at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam entitled 'Dutch-Japanese Indonesians: The Japanese occupation of the Netherlands Indies remembered'. Jointly organized by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) and the Rijksmuseum, and adopted by the Organization for the Commemoration of 400 Years of Dutch-Japanese Relations, the principle aim of the exhibition was to present testimonies of personal experiences and memories of men, women and children from the three countries alongside each other providing as an addendum to the personal recollections a survey of postwar collective images from the three countries in films, comic books, as well as on book jackets and monuments.The official opening of the exhibition on the 6th and 7th of August, 1999, gathered together an international party of scholars at the NIOD and the Rijksmuseum to discuss the processes of crystallization and collectivization of memories and images. The aim of the exhibition was to connect different levels of remembering and representing the history of the Japanese occupation. Several lectures, as well as additional articles, were published in the book Representing the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia (Waanders Publishers, Zwolle).
Tensions between personal memory and historical reconstruction were illustrated by the reactions to the project. Hardly anyone with personal memories of the war was satisfied with the presentations, and most missed an accurate rendering of their own specific experiences. For many Dutch former camp inmates, the horrors of internment were not displayed strongly enough, while those Dutch people who had not been interned - actually a majority of the Dutch in the Netherlands Indies - found themselves underrepresented. There were few reactions from the Japanese and even less from the Indonesians. Among the Japanese veterans who had inspected the exhibition in Amsterdam, some concluded that the exhibition was too one-sided, and had rendered a Dutch interpretation of history. They demanded attention for their own fates after the capitulation of August 1945, having been interned and submitted, in their view, to unjust tribunals, heavy punishments and harsh labour. Finally, the news that the exhibition will travel through Japan in late 2000 triggered reactions from somewhat politically influential and predominantly right-wing veterans groups who perceive any representation of Japanese overseas war activities as a threat.
Strangely enough, while various communities in the Netherlands and Japan are up in arms about the war past, Indonesian voices remain remarkably muted. For Indonesia, the case is a far more complicated one than those of the two former colonizing countries. On a national level, memories of the Japanese period are ambiguous and tend to be overshadowed by the subsequent struggle for independence and the horrors of civil unrest during the 1950s and 1960s. For Indonesians, the complicity of many of their own intellectuals and politicians during the Japanese period makes a simple crystallization of memory impossible. However, on a personal level, memories of the war are as much alive in Indonesia as they are in the Netherlands and Japan, only they are far less politicized. Victims groups, such as those of forced labourers, ex-soldiers and sex slaves, have recently started to raise their voices, but failed to get even the slightest bit of recognition from either their own or the Japanese governments.
The submerged memories of the war in Southeast Asian countries illustrate the fact that, in a sense, the memory business deals in luxury commodities and victimhood is the brand most easily purchased. All three nations have developed their own particular varieties of it. For the Dutch, it is one of being discriminated against and interned; for the Japanese, one of the A-bomb attacks on their home and of harsh post-war treatment by the Dutch abroad; and for the Indonesians, one of being starved, as well as of being forced to labour and give sexual services to yet another foreign ruler.
Whatever the legitimacy of such comments, they make clear that the memory of the war and occupation in Indonesia is still a contested issue, not only from the standpoint of a comparison between national perspectives, but also perhaps more strongly so - within the respective communities themselves. Often overlooked is the fact that nations and individuals are perfectly capable of commemorating and remembering on different levels and in different forms: in art, official memorial ceremonies, monuments, or through interest groups and reunion committees. Each commemorative medium or art form creates its own idioms and clichés embedded in evolving national cultures and political circumstances. *
Remco Raben is Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), Amsterdam.
E-mail: r.raben@oorlogsdoc.knaw.nl