Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War : A Transnational History

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis.

Japan's occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter revolutionary in the degree of mutual interests that drew the two sides together, fascinating and tragic in its evolution, and profound in the legacies left behind. Mark structures his study around a diverse group of Japanese and Indonesians captivated by the wartime vision of a 'Greater Asia.' The book is not only the first transnational study of Japan's wartime occupation of Java, but the first to focus on the Second World War experience in transnational terms 'on the ground' anywhere in Asia.

Breaking new ground interpretatively, thematically and narratively, Mark's monumental study is of vital significance for students and scholars of modern Asian and global history.

“[A] rich and illuminating narrative of Japan's occupation of Java, highlighting a range of cultural and military figures to explore the perspectives of both Japanese and Indonesian communities. Based on over two decades of research, this immensely detailed and comparative work helpfully clarifies Japan's concept of a Greater Asianism in the context of vanishing Dutch authority and emerging nationalism.” – Michigan War Studies Review

“Ethan Mark’s Japan’s Occupation is a tour de force that grasps wartime Java as the locus of an intense contestation between civilian and military actors engaged in Japan’s southward imperial expansion, the polemics of Orientalism, anti-Western liberation, and Indonesian unification. It deftly maps the colonial structure of rule alongside Japanese-Indonesian cooperation and interaction that aspired to see Java integrated into Japan’s Great Asia, while also considering the cultural and political dynamics that shaped Java’s place prior to Japanese occupation and post-war realities that placed the newly independent nation of Indonesia in Sukarno’s hands.” – International Convention of Asia Scholars, Shortlisted for the 2019 ICAS Book Prize in Humanities