“Japanese Time” and the Mica Mine: Occupation Experiences in the Central Sulawesi Highlands

In modern warfare, mica is truly indispensable. Coordination of combatant units necessitates maintenance of intricate communication equipment, in the construction of which high-grade mica is essential.(1) Introduction During the World War II occupation of Indonesia, Japanese soldiers forced villagers in highland Central Sulawesi to operate a mica mine located near the village of Towulu' in the southern Kulawi district [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The highlanders retain vivid memories of occupation hardships yet they are puzzled why Japanese soldiers enslaved them to extract a shiny mineral that locals used only on ritual occasions to decorate barkcloth blouses [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Questions about the Japanese government's interest in the mine near Towulu' village are clarified by an examination of mica's industrial uses for electronics components and other strategic wartime products. The essential military uses of mica during World War II, the Allies' restriction of mica imports to Japan, and the stringent labour requirements of mica extraction all combined to make the Towulu' mine and its captive, nimble-fingered population important to the Japanese war effort. Japanese military documents on the Indonesian occupation were destroyed in the interval between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of the Allies.(2) Japanese descriptions of the occupation which remain include memoirs such as those by Okada Fumihide, the senior Japanese administrator in Sulawesi, whose claims of native enthusiasm for the Japanese cotton production drive directly contradict statements by local eyewitnesses.(3) Central Sulawesi highlanders report that they loathed these and other Japanese-imposed changes to their farming activities. Therefore, in the absence of extensive or unmotivated European and Japanese reports, indigenous narratives represent a unique source of historical data on the wartime occupation of eastern Indonesia. Eyewitness accounts of Central Sulawesi highlanders, however, do more than simply document Indonesian perceptions of specific occupation events in obscure locations. They also illuminate a process of fundamental identity change among a group of Indonesian ethnic minorities that have spent much of the twentieth century under foreign political, religious, and cultural domination. Villagers' narratives about the Japanese occupation disclose how the collapsing boundaries of colonialism during World War II reoriented a series of encounters between indigenous people and dominant outsiders. Although the occupation was a watershed that raised doubts about the invincibility of Europeans and their God, Kulawi highlanders emerged from the occupation with a greater allegiance to Western Protestantism. Villagers' intensely negative reactions to their wartime experiences contribute to explaining the Protestant focus of their post-war religious and ethnic identities. When discussing the past, Central Sulawesi highlanders classify their local history into a sequence of political time periods. Twentieth-century periods generally are characterized by the names of foreigners who dominated the highlanders.(4) World War II, or the "Japanese time" looms prominently in this progression of foreign sovereignties as the first period when Kulawi district populations were held hostage at gunpoint and forced to drastically alter their farming routines to produce goods for foreign rulers. Oppressive wartime experiences under Japanese dominion catalyzed the religious and ethnic identities of interior Central Sulawesi groups who increasingly turned to Christian devotions and Protestant allegiances following the occupation. The Ethnographic Inquiry In the late 1980s I conducted research on Protestant missionization and conversion in the western Central Sulawesi highlands. I often found that what villagers called the "Japanese time" was discussed more readily than events from the earlier colonial "Dutch time". …