Although the Dutch forces surrendered shortly after the Japanese landing on Java with relatively little fighting, 225 Japanese servicemen were executed in the former Dutch East Indies after the war.
Drawing on an essay by Sukehiro Hirakawa and the memoirs of General Hitoshi Imamura, this article examines Dutch resentment over the loss of Indonesia, the retributive character of postwar military trials, and the mistaken attitude of Japanese academics and media figures who regard denigrating their own country as proof of moral conscience.

June 22, 2020
Academics of this kind believe that being negative toward their own country is proof that they are conscientious Japanese.
They then behave as though they were members of some superior intellectual elite.
There were still many passages in this month’s issue of Seiron that I had not yet read.
This morning, I was reading the lengthy installment of Sukehiro Hirakawa’s series.
While doing so, I came across a passage that made me think, “This is precisely what China is like today.”
Among the notes Hirakawa compiled and published at the end, there was also a passage proving that my own view had struck the heart of the matter.
In this article, I will introduce excerpts from those passages, together with passages that every Japanese citizen should know.
Hirakawa’s essay is essential reading not only for the Japanese people, but for people throughout the world.
Indonesian Independence and the Netherlands
As soon as the Japanese forces landed on the island of Java on March 1, 1942, the Dutch forces surrendered on March 9 without engaging in any substantial fighting.
The Netherlands should therefore have suffered the least damage, yet it was in the Dutch East Indies that the largest number of Japanese servicemen—225 in all—were executed after Japan’s defeat.
Why was this?
Regarding the Dutch policy of imposing severe punishment, General Hitoshi Imamura, who served as commander-in-chief of the Java campaign and later became the highest authority responsible for the military administration of Java, offered the following explanation in his memoirs:
“The other Allied countries possessed, at any rate, the pride and satisfaction of victory in having defeated Japan.……In the case of the Netherlands, however, it merely received the islands of the Dutch East Indies after they had been recovered by British and Australian forces following the end of the war. It therefore never experienced the sense of superiority that would have come from directly bearing down upon and overwhelming the Japanese forces. As a result, its pent-up feelings remained unresolved, and its resentment was never appeased. This sense of national dissatisfaction found an outlet for its desire for revenge in the form of military trials for war crimes. Thus, the country that had suffered the least damage carried out the cruelest executions.”
Note 3
Following the defeats of the American, British, and Dutch forces in the opening stages of the war, independence movements accelerated throughout the region.
In Indonesia as well, the indigenous independence movement grew even stronger after Japan’s surrender.
It is easy to understand that the returning Dutch forces, seeking to suppress that movement, opened military tribunals throughout the country partly in order to make examples of people.
There was also a “conscientious” professor at a Japanese Christian university who went to Indonesia to conduct an investigation, convinced that atrocities committed there by the Japanese military must have been particularly severe.
Academics of this kind believe that being negative toward their own country is proof that they are conscientious Japanese.
They then behave as though they were members of some superior intellectual elite.
This is exactly the same attitude as that of the people who control NHK’s news division.
However, did this not merely deepen the misunderstanding?
According to the British scholar of Japan, Professor Ian Nish, British people living in British colonies maintained their ties with their homeland, sending their children back to Britain for their education and taking other similar measures.
For that reason, even after the loss of the colonies, returning to Britain was at least comparatively easy for them.
By contrast, the Dutch people who had settled in the Dutch East Indies and had a long history there had lost their ties with their homeland and had lived affluent lives in the colony.
Consequently, after their repatriation, they suffered considerable hardship in attempting to settle in the Netherlands.
It is said that the depth of Dutch resentment arose from these circumstances.
Members of the Dutch royal family also apparently voice such grievances to members of the Japanese Imperial Family.
In that case, perhaps the time has come for some member of the Japanese Imperial Family to greet a Dutch counterpart in gentle terms by saying, “Surely it is a good thing that Indonesia became independent.”
To be continued.