Biography

The listed four articles constitute part of my ongoing research project on the impact of WWII on Indonesia. All of them were produced as a result of personal invitations by scholars overseas who had read my earlier writings. The first article was drafted when I was a visiting fellow at the NIOD. I was appointed as a visiting fellow five times by three Dutch institutions: twice by the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden, once by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and twice by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. The second article was written in response to an invitation by the editor of the book (Robert Cribb then the director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen and now at the ANU) who is familiar with my work. The third is based on a paper presented to a conference on WWII in Southeast Asia to which I was invited by the organizer (Paul Kratoska now the publishing director of the Singapore University Press), and was sponsored by the Toyota Foundation. This book took ten years to be published after I submitted my manuscript but it has been reviewed very favourably (Mark Peattie at Stanford University called it a landmark work.) The fourth is also produced for a conference held in Avignon, to which I was invited by the conference organizer (Gwyn Campbell then at Avignon University and now the director of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, Montreal) who had known my work. These four articles also attracted other scholars' attention and I was invited to attend more conferences and to contribute to more edited works. As a result two articles were published in 2007 (one on daily life in wartime Indonesia, published by Greenwood, and the other on forced labourers and their resistance, published by Routledge). I was also invited to attend another conference on slavery and sexuality held in Montreal in April 2007, to which I presented a paper on the forced prostitution for the Japanese armed forces during WWII. All the publishers of my articles mentioned above are well esteemed internationally: Cambridge University Press, RoutledgeCurzon, Routledge, M.E. Sharpe, Greenwood, Frank Cass, Singapore University Press. Based on these published works I was appointed as a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in The Pacific War, which is to be published by Brill (Leiden and Boston) online first in 2008 and then in book form. My publications listed above are being read not only by academics but widely by the general public. The article number one, for instance, has been distributed to a large group of Dutch people who were in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation (distributed by Mrs Elizabeth van Kampen whose father was executed by the Japanese Military Police in Java). I have received several inquiries from people in various parts of the world, including a Dutch man, Mr Schoonheijm, who was born from a Dutch woman and a Japanese man during the war and is searching for his Japanese roots, an Indonesian academic who is working in a related field (S. Nawayanto at the University of Jember who had earlier asked me to write a preface to his book, The Rising Sun in a Javanese Rice Granary, Galang Press, 2005), and an American postgraduate student (Georgetown University) and an undergraduate student (Rhodes College) who are writing a thesis or a major paper on related issues.

Qualifications

• PhD, Griffith University

Research

Research keywords

• Asian Studies

Research expertise

World war II in Asia. Japanese expansionism and its social and economic impact on other Asian countries, particularly Indonesia and Vietnam. Forced prostitution for the Japanese armed forces during WWII. Labour mobilisation. The economix policies by the Dutch colonial authorities before the Japanese invasion, 1939-1942. Japanese language teaching in the Japanese-occupied Asian territories. Daily life in wartime Indonesia, 1939-1949.

Languages

• Dutch
• Indonesian
• Japanese

Fields of Research

Centres and Groups

Centre

• Humanities Research Institute
• KCTR Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies

Administrative

Administrative expertise

I have acted as the japanese section representative, research officer, and library liaison officer in the Department of Modern Languages, 1992-2000.

Teaching

Teaching keywords

• Japanese Studies

Teaching expertise

Japanese language teaching from the introductory level to the master's level. Japanese history. Transformation of Japanese society as reflected in fiction and statistics. Origin of the Japanese people (their pre-historic migratory patterns and the relationships with the peoples in the other parts of the world, based on genetic, archaeological, and linguistic evidence.) Japanese literature, particularly fiction and poetry, both classical and modern.

Courses

• JAPN2110 - Intermediate Spoken Japanese 1
• JAPN3101 - Advanced Integrated Japanese 1
• JAPN3702 - Contemporary Japanese Literature
• JAPN2120 - Intermediate Spoken Japanese 2
• JAPN3102 - Advanced Integrated Japanese 2
• JAPN3103 - Japenese Society in Transition
• JAPN6001 - Business Japanese
• HIST3133 - China from the Opium Wars