Changes & Chances
Chapter 19 Under the Rising Sun
On 5 March 1942 a light breeze ruffled the mango trees in the church compound. Diagonally across the large field known as the Koningsplein, at the Governor-General's palace, the same breeze caught the Dutch flags as they were hurriedly lowered. The winds of change had been more of a hurricane than a breeze as the Japanese first swept east, destroying the American fleet at Pearl Harbour, then south, conquering Singapore. The conquest of the Netherlands East Indies had been inevitable since the Japanese naval victory in the Java Sea, the gunfire audible in Batavia. Beginning in December 1941 the Japanese forces swept across South East Asia and the Western Pacific carrying all before them. The fiasco of Singapore was soon followed by the collapse of the Netherlands East Indies. The Japanese forces that marched into Batavia under their Rising Sun flags finished over three centuries of Dutch rule by bringing in the greater tyranny of the Greater Asia Co-prosperity Zone, aka the Japanese Empire. At first welcomed by Indonesian nationalists, Japanese rule proved to be tough even for the resilient Javanese. Ricklefs called Japanese-occupied Indonesia “a land of extreme hardship, inflation, shortages, profiteering, corruption, black markets and death", where the population failed to grow significantly for the first time in two centuries.
In what was a brutal era the one bright spot that touched All Saints was the behaviour of an Indonesian congregation that looked after the empty church. As some background, the Japanese occupation was not an environment hostile to the growth of the indigenous churches in Indonesia. There was no desire to enforce conversion to Shintoism. Paying respect to the Emperor of Japan, the symbol of the conquerors, had a cultic flavour, but this was not enforced in such a way as to trigger persecution of Christians, there being in fact Christian officers within the Japanese army. Moreover, the internment of Dutch ministers and missionaries led to a leadership vacuum in the churches that had to be filled by Indonesians, with the effect that the three and a half year occupation saw the Indonesian churches come of age. Although it is unclear when exactly this commenced, it is known that a congregation of the Punguan Kristen Batak (PKB) church occupied the church. The willingness of the Japanese authorities to allow the use of the church for worship and the church house as a headquarters for the Batak mission appears to have been due to the PKB's connection with German missionaries. After the Japanese surrender a British military chaplain commented enigmatically that “there is a reason to believe that the occupants of the vicarage were working hand in glove with the Japanese in some sort of work other than religions [sic].” The minister, Pdt (Pendeta, title for a Protestant clergyman) Hutabarat, and his family lived at the church property until his death in 1944, when the Batak minister, Pdt I Siagian, from the nearby Kwitang Dutch Reformed Church took over the pastoral care of the congregation. The PKB congregation continued to hold services at the church until 1955, when they purchased a site at Jl Cokroaminoto in Menteng, where they still meet. This episode is a good illustration of how in the vacuum of European leadership the Indonesian churches matured and exceeded European paternalistic expectations.
All of the churches in Batavia survived the war years, although not all of them functioned continuously as places of Christian worship, such as the largest Protestant church, then called the Willemskerke and now the Immanuel Church, which was requisitioned by the Japanese as a repository for the ashes of cremated Japanese. Certainly, when the British occupation forces arrived in 1945 they were surprised at the good condition of the church, even the hymnals having been carefully stored and preserved by the PKB congregation, who were keen to point out that the missing piano of the pre-war period had been stolen in 1942 by a Japanese officer named Nomachi.
On 5 March 1942 a light breeze ruffled the mango trees in the church compound. Diagonally across the large field known as the Koningsplein, at the Governor-General's palace, the same breeze caught the Dutch flags as they were hurriedly lowered. The winds of change had been more of a hurricane than a breeze as the Japanese first swept east, destroying the American fleet at Pearl Harbour, then south, conquering Singapore. The conquest of the Netherlands East Indies had been inevitable since the Japanese naval victory in the Java Sea, the gunfire audible in Batavia. Beginning in December 1941 the Japanese forces swept across South East Asia and the Western Pacific carrying all before them. The fiasco of Singapore was soon followed by the collapse of the Netherlands East Indies. The Japanese forces that marched into Batavia under their Rising Sun flags finished over three centuries of Dutch rule by bringing in the greater tyranny of the Greater Asia Co-prosperity Zone, aka the Japanese Empire. At first welcomed by Indonesian nationalists, Japanese rule proved to be tough even for the resilient Javanese. Ricklefs called Japanese-occupied Indonesia “a land of extreme hardship, inflation, shortages, profiteering, corruption, black markets and death", where the population failed to grow significantly for the first time in two centuries.
In what was a brutal era the one bright spot that touched All Saints was the behaviour of an Indonesian congregation that looked after the empty church. As some background, the Japanese occupation was not an environment hostile to the growth of the indigenous churches in Indonesia. There was no desire to enforce conversion to Shintoism. Paying respect to the Emperor of Japan, the symbol of the conquerors, had a cultic flavour, but this was not enforced in such a way as to trigger persecution of Christians, there being in fact Christian officers within the Japanese army. Moreover, the internment of Dutch ministers and missionaries led to a leadership vacuum in the churches that had to be filled by Indonesians, with the effect that the three and a half year occupation saw the Indonesian churches come of age. Although it is unclear when exactly this commenced, it is known that a congregation of the Punguan Kristen Batak (PKB) church occupied the church. The willingness of the Japanese authorities to allow the use of the church for worship and the church house as a headquarters for the Batak mission appears to have been due to the PKB's connection with German missionaries. After the Japanese surrender a British military chaplain commented enigmatically that “there is a reason to believe that the occupants of the vicarage were working hand in glove with the Japanese in some sort of work other than religions [sic].” The minister, Pdt (Pendeta, title for a Protestant clergyman) Hutabarat, and his family lived at the church property until his death in 1944, when the Batak minister, Pdt I Siagian, from the nearby Kwitang Dutch Reformed Church took over the pastoral care of the congregation. The PKB congregation continued to hold services at the church until 1955, when they purchased a site at Jl Cokroaminoto in Menteng, where they still meet. This episode is a good illustration of how in the vacuum of European leadership the Indonesian churches matured and exceeded European paternalistic expectations.
All of the churches in Batavia survived the war years, although not all of them functioned continuously as places of Christian worship, such as the largest Protestant church, then called the Willemskerke and now the Immanuel Church, which was requisitioned by the Japanese as a repository for the ashes of cremated Japanese. Certainly, when the British occupation forces arrived in 1945 they were surprised at the good condition of the church, even the hymnals having been carefully stored and preserved by the PKB congregation, who were keen to point out that the missing piano of the pre-war period had been stolen in 1942 by a Japanese officer named Nomachi.
