The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

Under Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese had become an aggressive imperialist power allied with the Nazis, and were sweeping through much of Southeast Asia, setting up occupation governments. At first, some Indonesians welcomed them, including the leaders of the country’s small independence movement, which had been bubbling up for decades. At least the Japanese were Asians, the thinking went. Their victory had proved whites were not invincible, and they might treat locals better than the Dutch had. The day after their invasion, Francisca’s father came home and announced to the family, “They are our liberators.”3 But young Francisca saw, before most of the country, that this was an illusion. Just days later, the family was going for a walk in their quiet leafy neighborhood, called Menteng, when a Japanese guard nearby started screaming at her father. He, of course, didn’t understand Japanese, and he didn’t know he was supposed to bow. So he didn’t. The guard came up to him and struck him hard, on the face, in front of his whole family. “After that, we hated the Japanese,” Francisca would say later. “We knew their true purpose.” Others got it much worse. By the thousands, Indonesian women were forced into sexual slavery, made to work as “comfort women” for the occupying Japanese troops. The Dutch were put into concentration camps. Francisca was put into a different school.