H-ASIA
February 26, 2005

Book Review (orig. post H-US-Japan) by Bill Sewell on Ken'ichi Goto.
_Tensions of Empire: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and
Postcolonial World_. Edited with introduction by Paul H. Kratoska

(x-post H-US-Japan)
************************************************************************
From: Yone Sugita <madison@uwalumni.com>

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-US-Japan@h-net.msu.edu (February 2005)

Ken'ichi Goto. _Tensions of Empire: Japan and Southeast Asia in the
Colonial and Postcolonial World_. Edited with introduction by Paul H.
Kratoska. Research in International Relations, Southeast Asia Series.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. xxiv + 349 pp. Map, tables, index.
$24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8968-0231-0.

Reviewed for H-US-Japan by Bill Sewell Department of History, Saint
Mary's University

Ties That Bind

Not to be confused with the volume edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann
Laura Stoler, this collection of essays addresses the imperialist ties
that bind--or in some cases sought to bind--Japan and Southeast Asia in
the twentieth century, especially those between Japan and the Netherlands
East Indies/Indonesia.[1] Like that earlier volume, however, rather than
provide a comprehensive history, this volume offers insights into both
colonial and postcolonial relationships through a consideration of some of
the cultural ramifications of empire, even if it tends towards a more
political discussion than that edited by Cooper and Stoler.

Goto Ken'ichi is a distinguished professor of international relations at
Waseda University--one of Japan's major research centers focusing on
Southeast Asian studies.  His work focuses primarily on Indonesia,
including a fair amount recently on East Timor.[2] Although much of the
work published in this volume has been published elsewhere (all but one
of the essays in the 1990s, in English), the combining of Goto's work into
one volume and its attendant revisions will likely benefit any library
that deals with Southeast Asia and Japanese foreign relations.  His views
are particularly useful in that, like other recent scholars, he does not
dismiss entirely the published views of prewar and wartime Japanese
leaders as mere propaganda.  Instead, taking them seriously--though
critically--Goto instructively recalls views once common in the colonial
world, views that prewar Japanese leaders sought to use to their
advantage, views that resonate even today.[3]

Paul Kratoska's introduction lays out the significance of Goto's work
plainly, situating it between passionate perspectives.  On the one hand
are the Allies who have typically tended to view the war against Japan as
a war against fascism.  On another is Japan's "vocal right-wing minority,"
that emphasizes Japan's goal of liberating colonial peoples (p. xiv).  On
still another are Southeast Asian histories recounting struggles for
independence that tend to skim over Japanese activities in the region.
For Kratoska, Goto correctly takes a holistic approach, noting that yes,
liberation was a key Japanese goal, but at the same time the Japanese
sought to dominate Southeast Asia after its "liberation."  As such,
Goto's work serves a useful role for Japanese, former Allies, and
Southeast Asians, rebuking right-wing Japanese while pointing out that
they are not entirely wrong, and reminding Southeast Asians that their
independence did not come as simply as is commonly thought.[4]

The book is divided into three sections with four essays in each: "Japan
and Southeast Asia, 1930s-1945," "Japan and Indonesia" (covering roughly
the same time span as the first), and "Japan and Postwar Southeast Asia."
The first is the most wide-ranging, exploring several different aspects
of this complex experience.

Goto's first chapter seeks to provide a general overview of prewar
Japanese perspectives of Southeast Asia.  It follows, briefly, the
usually accepted contours, emphasizing diplomatic history, Japanese
migration patterns, and alternating Japanese interest in Asianism or in
distancing Japan from Asia, the latter of which sometimes involved ugly,
contemptuous views of fellow Asians.  Establishing these general
parameters is important because Goto relates to them in later essays.

The second chapter deals with a relatively unknown story in the road to
the Pacific War, "Japan and Portuguese Timor."  Here Goto details the
attempted Japanese encroachment before the war and Japan's occupation of
the colony.  Intriguingly, he also shows how Portuguese and Japanese
diplomacy managed to maintain Portuguese sovereignty in a manner that
behooved postwar relations between the two states.

The third chapter considers the pivotal role of Tojo Hideki in his
capacity as wartime Prime Minister.  Although Goto accepts that Tojo did
genuinely seek to establish a new order, he insists that it was not to be
a truly liberated order.  Rather, it was to be a patriarchal order, in
which Japan stood at the head of an Asian family.  Goto then goes on to
address some of the repercussions that followed from Tojo's efforts to
implement that goal, to the detriment of Japan's war effort.  The fourth
chapter considers the relationship between Japan and Southeast Asian
nations from a wider perspective, reaching similar conclusions and
prompting Goto to comment that "the wartime cooperation between Japanese
and Southeast Asian nations was a complex relationship in which the two
parties were in the same bed with different dreams, as an old Japanese
saying goes" (p. 79).

The second section of the book plays to Goto's strength, focusing on
Japanese interactions with Indonesians.  Two chapters deal with
alternating Indonesian interests in and distaste for Japan as a potential
role model for the Netherlands East Indies, especially among students.
The second two chapters consider more confrontational interactions, the
Semarang Incident of 1945 and the activities of Abdul Rahman (aka Ichiki
Tatsuo).  Together they tell the high-profile stories most pertinent to
Japanese-Indonesian relations today, those that abetted the growth of
Indonesian nationalism and those that seemed to quell it.  As such, even
if some of this has been described elsewhere, they indicate well the
tangled nature of Japanese-Indonesian connections in the middle of the
twentieth century, connections that have been papered over but remain
unraveled today.

The final four essays consider postwar experiences.  While the first
demonstrates how Japanese occupational policies contributed to the
divergent paths to independence in Malaya and Indonesia, the second
explores more deeply the legacies of the era of Japanese rule in
Indonesia, comparing that experience briefly with that of the Philippines.
While the former indicates differences in Japanese occupation strategy,
the second indicates more the differences inherent in the two prewar
colonial situations.  While colonial arrangements in the Netherlands East
Indies were eminently exploitable by Japanese--not that they
succeeded--those in the Philippines were much less so.

The final two chapters address more contemporary milieus.  This is a
logical addition because even if the Japanese occupation was short, it
was pivotal, marking the termination of the colonial era and the
formation of something new.  The penultimate chapter notes this well
through the study of something unimaginable only a few years previous to
their occurrence, the regional international conferences held to promote
postcolonial autonomy, prosperity, and cooperation.  Cumulating in the
Bandung Conference of 1955, together they represent the first hesitant
steps towards nationhood taken by some former colonies, steps made
stronger by being taken in conjunction with already independent states
and with colonies on their way towards independence.  This regional
perspective notes that individual drives for independence were made
stronger even if some of the colonies and states participating, like
Indonesia, differed with others over issues like dealing with postwar
Japan.

The final chapter--and the last page of the previous chapter--returns to
a consideration of Japan's relations with Southeast Asia, though from the
vantage point of today.  Surveying shifts in Japanese diplomacy, popular
culture, and school texts, Goto concludes that Japanese and Indonesians,
in particular, are still learning to deal with the historical legacies
they have been bequeathed.  He acknowledges that resurgent nationalism
in particular is destabilizing, not only because it ruptures relations
but also because it questions identities.  Here Goto is particularly
concerned with Japanese nationalism, because while resurgent nationalists
tend to argue that Japanese actions in Southeast Asia were positive, his
overriding goal has been to argue "that the true purpose of the Japanese
occupation of Southeast Asia was to control the whole of the region
because it was a major source of the raw materials and human resources
needed to carry out Japan's war aims.  The liberation of Southeast Asia
from Western colonial rule was only a facade" (p. 291).  He then muses
that in the era of the weakening of nation-states, it is high time to
develop alternative perspectives for post-national histories, and that he
hopes that this volume may help someone take one step in that direction.

Each of the twelve essays here is well conceived and articulated, using
sources in a variety of languages.  Not only does Goto conduct primary
research in Japanese and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), his grasp of
secondary sources includes those written in English.[5] Perhaps the only
failure here is one of length--more can be said about many of the milieus
and issues that Goto explores here.  Fortunately, that detail can be found
in his other works.

Notes

[1]. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., _Tensions of Empire:
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World_ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997).

[2]. Goto's university homepage can be found at
http://www.wiaps.waseda.ac.jp/Bin/PS_Main.asp?Lang=EN&ID=7, and a
research profile at http://www.wiaps.waseda.ac.jp/user/goto/pro/pro.htm.
Paul Kratoska adds in an appendix to the volume under review here that
Goto has received several awards and has served in a number of
distinguished academic positions.

[3]. One work that focuses on these connections more explicitly is Ian
Buruma and Avishai Margalit, _Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its
Enemies_ (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

[4]. Thus, for Kratoska, Goto's work is daring:  "it can be difficult
even to raise the question of a Japanese perspective of the war, for the
suggestion that prevailing understandings are incorrect seems in the West
to be slightly subversive, while in Japan it can suggest sympathy with
right-wing causes or trigger right-wing hostility.  For this reason, the
publication of these articles is an act of personal courage and integrity,
even though they are not written in a partisan spirit and provide balanced
and nuanced judgments that do not conform to the prejudices of either
side" (p. xxii).

[5]. It may be the case that Professor Goto also reads Chinese and Dutch,
but it is unclear from the sources cited here.


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