'Merdeka': Japanese as RI's liberators
'Merdeka': Japanese as RI's liberators
By Eric Prideaux
TOKYO (AP): A major Japanese film distributor on Saturday debuted a movie that critics say falsely suggests Japan helped liberate Indonesia from Dutch colonizers after World War II.
Merdeka - "independence" in Indonesian - tells the story of 2,000 Japanese soldiers stationed on the Southeast Asian country who stay behind after the war to aid local rebels in their struggle against the Dutch.
Distributor Toho's two-hour film, screened nationwide Saturday, portrays the Dutch as sadistic oppressors who revel in torturing their subjects. The Japanese, meanwhile, sacrifice their lives for their Indonesian compatriots - with one soldier hurling himself upon a Dutch tank while clutching a bomb.
"During the war he fought for Japan. Now he's fighting for Indonesia," sighs the wife of one of the main Japanese characters.
The film's creators say their work is based on historical events.
"I don't intend to glorify war at all, but that was the real situation. If people don't learn about this, they won't come to a proper understanding of history," said director Yukio Fuji.
But Syahri Sakidin, councilor at the Indonesian Embassy in Tokyo, said that in reality only "a handful" of Japanese soldiers remained after the war, and that it was unclear from historical records whether they opposed the Europeans to free Indonesia or only to keep the country within their own sphere of influence.
The Netherlands ruled Indonesia for about 350 years until 1942, when the country was taken over by the invading Japanese military. The Dutch regained some power after the end of the war in 1945 until completely withdrawing four years later.
During their three-year occupation, the Japanese subjected the Indonesians to forced labor and sexual servitude, historians say.
"We never, never considered the Japanese a savior from colonial power," Sakidin said.
He said Indonesian Ambassador Soemadi Brotodiningrat was particularly offended by a scene in a prerelease version of the film in which an Indonesian woman knelt and kissed the boot of a Japanese soldier to thank him for defending her country.
Soemadi protested in March and the makers shaved five seconds from the scene. In the final edit she is shown only kneeling before the soldier, said Masahiko Suzuki, a spokesman for Toho.
Merdeka was released amid rising criticism from Asian countries that Japan is trying to cover up its history of imperialist oppression across the region during the first half of the 20th century.
On Thursday, South Korean lawmakers asked a Japanese court to ban the sale of a government-approved school history textbook that they complained fails to mention the hundreds of thousands of Korean and other Asian women forced into prostitution for Japan's World War II soldiers.
Sakidin said many Indonesians keenly remember their own sufferings at the hands of the Japanese.
"Indonesian people would never say they were fighting for us," he said.