The promise of role reversal as dream and nightmare: Japan’s occupation of Java in the second world war as global history

Abstract

For Japanese and Asians alike, Japan’s wartime occupations are generally remembered as nightmares. Yet an exclusive focus on the commonality of Asian suffering at Japanese hands also masks a profound distinction in the occupation experiences of North- and Southeast Asia, prefigured by the prior history of Southeast Asian societies as Western colonies, and their resultant openness, to greater-or-lesser degrees, to imperial Japan’s self-proclaimed role as a force of liberation and as a role model and brotherly leader of ‘Asian-style’ development. Japanese wartime experiences in Southeast Asia were also distinctive in the degree to which the Japanese themselves, seduced by an unprecedented string of early victories against the Western imperialists and by warm ‘native’ welcomes, envisioned their mission as representing a world-historical role reversal for Japan both as Asia’s new hegemon and as an empire that might transcend imperialism. On an ideological level, Japan’s contradictory anticolonial liberationist claims as well as the degree of local receptivity in response mark its southeast Asian occupations as distinctively revolutionary among world war two-era occupations, as such also heralding a global-historical turn to a postcolonial world of nation-states in which the contradiction of colonial occupation as anticolonial ‘liberation’ was to become the global norm.