Free A Life Beyond Boundaries by Benedict Anderson Page A

immersion in foreign everyday life.
    Early in 1961, Kahin insisted that I draw up a thesis proposal. As I hesitated, he said, ‘Why don’t you look at theJapanese Occupation and its impact on Indonesian society and politics?’ I knew what he was after. The only weak chapter in his Nationalism and Revolution was the one on the Occupation, because there was almost nothing published on the period when he wrote his dissertation, and he had had to rely mainly on interviews. So I thought, why not? The Occupation only lasted three and a half years, so it must be manageable! Besides, from my teen years I had been (superficially) interested in Japan. My mother and I used to quarrel gently about this – she was strongly pro-China and down on Japan, and as a teenage rebel in the claws of Genji, I had to insist that Japan was more interesting than China.

Chapter 3
Fieldwork
    For most scholars, their first experience of doing fieldwork is decisive. One never again has quite the same sense of shock, strangeness and excitement. Later in my career I spent years studying, and living in, Thailand and the Philippines, both of which fascinated me and both of which I loved. But Indonesia was my first love. I can speak and read Thai and Tagalog, but Indonesian is really my second language, and the only one in which I can also write fluently, and with the greatest pleasure. Sometimes, I still dream in it.
    I arrived in Jakarta late in December 1961 and stayed till April 1964. When my plane landed, in the dark, the rainy season had begun, and I remember vividly the ride into town with all the taxi’s windows open. The first thing that hit me was the smell – of fresh trees and bushes, urine, incense, smoky oil lamps, garbage and, above all, food in the little stalls that lined most of the main streets.
    My senior classmate Dan Lev, before returning to Ithaca, had arranged for me to lodge in the house of the welcoming and kindly widow of a Supreme Court judge.She lived in a large and comfortable house at the end of what was then a ‘high-class’ street named after the national hero Prince Diponegoro. Two of her grown children were still living with her, and her household included a cook, a maid and a young boy gardener and errand-runner.
    The story of Prince Diponegoro goes back to the early nineteenth century. When Napoleon incorporated the Netherlands into France, London decided to seize the Dutch East Indies. Stamford Raffles, agent of the East India Company, ruled Java from 1811–16. When the Napoleonic wars finally ended, Britain returned Java at the price of Dutch holdings in the Cape and Ceylon. Ruined financially by the Continental System, the Dutch government was in a weak position to enforce its power in the Indies. Prince Diponegoro of the little Jogjakarta kingdom took advantage of this situation to rebel and raised a large army to fight the Dutch from 1825–30. But when he was defeated and exiled, he wrote that his aim was to ‘conquer Java’, a fact little known by present-day Javanese.
    The day after my arrival in Jakarta, the late Ong Hok Ham, well known to all Indonesianists, dropped by to visit. He was then still a student in the University of Indonesia’s history department, but had worked for Skinner as a research assistant. He invited me to hang out with three of his Javanese student friends in a dormitory for boys at the University of Indonesia’s old campus in Rawamangun. Any illusion that I was good in Indonesian disappeared immediately. But since the friends knew little English we did our collective best to understand each other. Ong had explained to them that although I was studying in anAmerican university I was Irish. This helped a lot since they knew that Ireland had had to fight for its independence, while, like most Indonesian nationalists at that time, they regarded Americans with suspicion.
    They gave me a delicious, simple dinner, but intentionally did not warn