For Indonesians World War Two and their subsequent national revolution started optimistically, kicked off by the enthusiasm of being liberated from the Dutch by the Japanese. Pramoedya Ananta Toer recalled the arrival of the emperor's forces in Blora in 1942. The Japanese had swept rapidly through the Indies early in March, and people came to meet their army, waving flags and shouting their support for their liberators from the Dutch. ‘With the arrival of the Japanese just about everyone in town was full of hope, except for those who had worked in the service of the Dutch.’

But looking back on his experience as a teenager witnessing the arrival of the Japanese, Pramoedya added, with acrimony arising from his subsequent experiences, ‘There was a bad smell about the whole thing, a stench that rose from the bodies of the Japanese soldiers.’ The shouts of ‘Japan is our older brother’ and ‘banzai Dai Nippon’ would soon be replaced by bitterness. Tens of thousands of Indonesians were to starve, work as slave labourers, be forced from their homes or die in brutal hand-to-hand conflict before Indonesian sovereignty could be achieved. It took more than four years after independence was proclaimed in 1945 for the Dutch to transfer sovereignty to the Indonesians, and even then many Indonesians like Pramoedya were not satisfied with the result.