After Japan’s defeat, the Dutch imposed the harshest number of executions on Japanese soldiers in the former Dutch East Indies, driven by resentment over their colonial collapse rather than by actual wartime atrocities. General Hitoshi Imamura noted that the Dutch lacked the “victor’s satisfaction,” fueling revenge trials. The article criticizes so-called “conscientious Japanese scholars” who internalize negative views of their own country, mirroring NHK’s postwar bias. Drawing on Ian Nish’s analysis of Dutch colonial society, it exposes how psychological humiliation shaped postwar trials and distorted historical memory. The piece argues for a more balanced understanding of Japan’s role in Indonesia’s independence.
Indonesia’s Independence and the Netherlands
On March 1, 1942, when the Japanese Army landed on Java Island, the Dutch forces surrendered on March 9 without engaging in substantial combat.
The damage should have been the least, yet in the former Dutch East Indies, the largest number of Japanese soldiers (225) were executed after Japan’s defeat.
Why was that so?
General Hitoshi Imamura, the supreme commander of the Java campaign and later the highest authority of the Japanese military administration in Java, explained this in his memoirs.
The other Allied nations possessed the pride and satisfaction of having defeated Japan.
However, in the case of the Netherlands, the Dutch East Indies had merely been handed back to them by British and Australian forces after the war, and they never experienced the superiority of directly subduing and overpowering the Japanese Army.
Naturally, their pent-up resentment did not dissipate, and their bitterness did not subside.
This national sense of frustration found an outlet in the form of war-crimes tribunals as instruments of retribution.
Thus the nation that had suffered the least damage carried out the most brutal executions.
With the initial defeats of American, British, and Dutch forces, independence movements across the region accelerated.
In Indonesia as well, the indigenous independence movement grew even stronger after Japan’s surrender.
It is not difficult to imagine that the Dutch forces, upon returning and attempting to suppress these movements, held military tribunals in various areas as acts of intimidation.
There were even “conscientious” professors from Japanese mission-based universities who assumed that Japanese atrocities in Indonesia must have been particularly severe, and traveled there to conduct field investigations.
Such scholars believe that being negative toward one’s own country is the very hallmark of a “conscientious Japanese.”
And they assume an attitude as if they themselves were members of some higher intellectual class.
But did this not merely deepen misunderstanding?
According to Professor Ian Nish, a British scholar of Japanese studies, British nationals living in British colonies maintained ties with their homeland—sending their children back to Britain for education, for example.
For that reason, even after the loss of the colonies, returning to their home country was relatively manageable.
By contrast, the Dutch who had long settled in the Dutch East Indies had largely severed ties with the Netherlands and lived in comfort locally.
Because of that, after repatriation, they faced considerable hardship when attempting to resettle in their homeland.
The deep resentment of the Dutch, he says, stems from these circumstances.
Even members of the Dutch royal family reportedly express their grievances to members of the Japanese Imperial Family.
If that is the case, perhaps it is time for someone in the Japanese Imperial Family to gently say to the Dutch side, “Surely it is appropriate that Indonesia became independent, is it not?”