Month: October 2018

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Kejawen

Kejawen is the name I’ve given to the millisphere in south central Java which spreads from Cilacap, in the south-west, to the holiest place in ancient Hindu Java, the Dieng plateau, in the north-east.

I’ve passed through the “rice basket of Java” twice. The first time from Yogyakarta to Bandung by train. It appeared densely populated and highly productive.

Kejawen is differentiated from the north coast of Java by a line of volcanoes running east west. In the Indonesian language Kejawen means “Javaism”, and along with Yogyakarta and Surakarta, Kejawen is the essence of the Javanese culture which is described as having Animist, Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic layers.

On the east fringe of Kejawen and at the heart of “Javaism” are, the world’s largest Buddhist complex (Borobudur), and the world’s largest Hindu complex (Prambanan), both built of carved stone. Buddhist/Hindu competition is part of Kejawen history, and is retained in rituals, fasting and meditation.

Islam has only been in Java since 1500. It came in on the north coast, not long before the Portuguese arrived. The arrival of Islam did lead to the collapse of the old dynasties, to be replaced with sultanates, but the music, dance and art remained the same and the old gods lived on in Kejawen culture.

On the second trip we went the other way. Starting at the beach at Pangandaran we chose to travel on the day when millions of Indonesians travel home to their family for the festival of Idul fitri, at the end of Ramadan.

After a couple of hours of rat-running in an SUV through bad back roads we were dropped at a station, somewhere north of Cilacap, which is the only deep water port on the Java’s south coast.

Cilacap is where the Dutch fleeing the Japanese invasion launched from. Australia gave them a better welcome than today’s boat people receive.

Cilacap has a geothermal power plant, cement works and a huge oil refinery. The beaches are polluted and tourists are steered to nearby Nusa Kambangan (the Alcatraz of Indonesia). Tourist resorts on pristine tropical beaches share the island with a maximum security prison, where capital punishment is carried out.

Kambangan is where the Bali bombers and other terrorists met their maker, and foreign drug traffickers from Australia, the Netherlands, Philippines and Brazil have been executed. There is an American currently on death row there.

Originally built by the Dutch, Kambangan was one of the harshest in Asia, and is now used to keep political prisoners as well as murderers and drug gangsters. Tommy Suharto, the son of a past president, was detained there for masterminding the murder of a judge who had sentenced him for corruption.

The ticket seller looked nervous as our minder set us up in an air-conditioned waiting room. Hundreds of Indonesians waited outside. When the train pulled in I couldn’t see how any more people could get in, but somehow we were shoehorned in.

Because there were no seats, we stood in the aisle with our baggage, and a lot of other people. Food sellers worked the aisle, which they regarded as their territory, and standing passengers had to get out of their way, regularly. A trio of buskers came through just like it was an ordinary day at work. They were memorable because they had a girl singer in western style – no hijab. Busking is tough and usually only for the boys. A boy with deformed legs, shuffled through at floor level picking up the rubbish, which he later threw out an open window into a paddy field.

Five hours later we disembarked at a crowded siding. At the nearest warung I celebrated being able to sit down with a kopi susu and an Indonesian clove cigarette as school kids practiced their English language skills on us.

A student from the warung joined us on the bus to Wonosobo up in the hills. She wore a uniform and a white hijab and as the bus climbed a forested ridge she asked earnest questions about Zeelandia Baru (New Zealand). Yes we have volcanoes in New Zealand too, I told her. In the distance pale blue silhouettes of volcanoes disappeared into a smoky tropical sunset.

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Semarang

A New Zealand friend recently returned from Semarang, Indonesia, after searching for the bridges her father had built in the Dutch East Indies after WWII.

She had visited the Tawang Semarang railway station where her father’s drawing office had been. This European architectural conception of the Orient expressed in twentieth century materials is still used to this day. When I had passed through Tawang to catch the train to Surabaya in 2012 a small orchestra filled the heritage station with middle-of-the-road Javanese music. The station might have been sinking but it was doing it in style.

The old Dutch port area of Semarang (metropolitan population 6 million), is slowly sinking into the Java Sea. Build on quaternary volcanic deposits which are still consolidating, subsidence is accelerating because of groundwater extraction.

It is estimated that half a million cubic litres of water were pumped up in 1900. By 1975 it was one million, in 1990, nine million and in 2000, thirty-eight million. The ground is now sinking at around 10 cm per year.

Within walking distance of the station stand many heritage buildings including Toko (Cafe) Oen, pretty much unaltered since the day the Dutch owners left. Periodically buildings were inundated by seawater and services broke, further polluting the canals. There were changes of canal drainage flows and buildings cracked and deteriorated. The only good news was that North Semarang was not subsiding as fast of North Jakarta – also because of groundwater extraction.

I too had come to Semarang followinging family history. During WWII, when the Japanese occupied Java, my grandmother had been interned at the women’s camp there.

As a child, you were protected from stories of what happened in Java during the war, but you could tell by the tone when adult conversation strayed into those times when visitors brought back memories of “the Indies”.

First the men were taken away by Japanese soldiers and the women and children were left on the plantations. Some Javanese were friends and loyal staff, others allied with the Japanese. My grandmother rounded up the girls, cutting their hair and dressing them to look like boys, and they, and the other children, started walking. Accounts vary as to where they thought they were going, but soon they were rounded up and taken to Semarang.

This small group was luckier than some. The Japanese concept of “comfort women” extended to the Dutch and sometimes women were taken without their consent. There was an infamous incident early in occupation where a household of women, and their daughters, spent two weeks as sex-workers in their own home, serving passing Japanese soldiers, before an officer put a stop to it.

In the camps the conditions were hard, shelter was primitive and food was short. The women in Semarang camp were interviewed one at a time and offered work as comfort women. Naturally they would get paid, they were told, and a few took up the offer, or came under the protection of an officer by becoming his concubine. Mostly it was the Javanese and Chinese women who had been prostitutes before the war who worked as the comfort women. After the war some of the Japanese who carried out sexual violations in Java were summarily executed by Dutch husbands.

Both my grandparents were shaped by their experience in the camps. By all accounts my grandfather barely survived. My grandmother took on a leadership role; organising, working hard and surviving.

In a tower block in Gouda in the Netherlands I once met a an elderly man who had been a boy in the Semarang women’s camp. “We were lucky,” he told me. “The Japanese didn’t distinguish between us Jews and the other prisoners. In Holland, the rest of my family didn’t survive the war.”

We had dropped into the coastal heat of Semarang from the cooler Dieng Plateau. An elderly ukulele player in a batik shirt and capo made from a pencil and rubber band laid down some Arabic sounding riffs, collected a small contribution from every passenger and hopped off the bus at an intersection. We passed dusty slums, built on steep slopes, where, during the rainy season, landslides sometimes took homes, possessions and lives.

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Surakarta

The Surakarta metropolitan area (population 3.7 million) is on the Bengawan Solo river whose upper catchment climbs the volcanoes which mark the boundary of the millisphere I call Surakarta – a bit under seven million.

Surakarta is where Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo is from, and where he ran his furniture manufacturing business. Commonly known as Jokowi he was the mayor of Surakarta from 2005 to 2012 before moving on to be governor of Jakarta in 2012 and president of Indonesia in 2014, becoming Indonesia’s first president who did not come from an elite political or military background.

At the age of twelve Jokowi started work in his father’s workshop, experiencing three evictions during his childhood. As mayor he initiated an interactive relationship with the people of Surakarta, making regular, unannounced visits (Blusukan) to markets and slums. Surakarta (the city that does not sleep) included “informal” flood-prone settlements along the Solo river, which the city wanted to turn into parks.

We had stayed a few days in Surakarta in 2007. In the shade of the Sultan’s palace, in the middle of town, I’d escaped the heat and sketched an elderly gamelan orchestra playing on brass gongs, from big to small, and tapping with hammers on wooden xylophones, each with their own rhythmic part. A few middle-aged dancers practiced their moves. It was more restful than being hauled through the batik fabric markets.

In the hot crowded market a woman with a headscarf and a microphone was haranguing a crowd. I picked up the words “America” and “Satan.” New York’s twin towers were still  fresh in all our memories. Back at the backpackers I sat drawing tropical fish in an ornate aquarium with carved teak surrounds, while drinking Kopi Susu (local coffee with sweetened condensed milk, in a glass), and smoking Indonesian cigarettes. Ten large goldfish glowed under the fluorescent light, and a few, mostly Dutch, travellers came and went.

It was in Surakarta that we first started using warungs on our own. These informal, roadside restaurants with oil-cloth covered tables and rough benches, presided over by a cook, with a wok and an LPG burner, turned out mouth-watering classic dishes that were cheaper than at the “real restaurants”.

Surakarta has undertaken a “more participatory” resettlement approach than other Indonesian cities. Slum dwellers were issued with city resident cards before being forced to give up their central sites and move to locations without services, and some unauthorized squatter settlements were brought under city control. Under Jokowi, street vendors were relocated to new markets, and he renovated old ones, freeing up traffic. Jokowi brought some of these policies with him to Jakarta.

Corruption is legendary in Indonesia. It is estimated that the Indonesian government that left power in 2014 stole as much as US$ 12 billion. Jokowi came in with a promise to fix Indonesia’s failing infrastructure and to pay for it he initiated a tax amnesty in which Indonesians declared US$ 366 billion of previously undeclared assets.

In Surakarta, a decade ago, you got by with cash, now, with phones and apps the informal economy is being moved into the taxable economy.

In 2007 we took a tour up a volcano to where tea was grown, ostensibly to visit an ancient Hindu temple. The brilliantly variegated Javanese coleus, now know as Solenostemon scutellarioides, grew beside the road. The gardens lining the rain-fed rice paddies on the fertile volcanic slopes were a “permaculture” mix of coconut, cashew, cloves, tobacco and vegetables, tended by small kampongs (villages). Down below lay the Surakarta metropolitan area under a heat haze of burning plastic.

We found Indonesians remarkable secular, animist even, but in a country of 260 million, and climbing, there will always be extremists. In 2016 a suicide bomber, riding a motorcycle, blew himself up at the gates to the Surakarta police station, chanting ISIS slogans, and there are fundamentalist Indonesians who have as many children as possible, because “God wants a world of muslims.” It might be what God wants but it is not what, already crowded, Java needs.

On September the 11th 2018, thousands of anti-Jokowi protesters walked down the main streets of Surakarta under the #2019ChangePresident banner.

Jokowi faces many challenges. Population growth is number one. Corrupt families and religious fanatics are other challenges Indonesia faces in the 2019 election.