“If these barbarians had been able to replace the old colonial authority, why had that authority been necessary at all?”1 With these words, Sutan Sjahrir conveyed how he perceived the impact on his compatriots of the rapid fall of the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese, whose own approach to governance they saw, he claimed, as crude and ignorant. At the same time, the opportunity the Japanese afforded indigenous elites to move higher up the administrative ladder than before served to bolster their confidence in their ability to run their country themselves.