Having achieved sovereignty, Indonesians were faced with the task of building a state and nation, but Pramoedya Ananta Toer, reflecting on the fate of the poor, was right to ask if anything had been done to improve their lives. Colonial rule had created institutional structures that could be converted to Indonesian needs, but had also created massive inequalities and an economic system that drained resources and sent profits overseas. The Japanese period and the Revolution left legacies of dislocation, division and death, and it would take a huge effort to rebuild broken lives and industries lost in scorched earth campaigns. Coming out of the Revolution, some Indonesians like Pramoedya expressed deep bitterness about the effects of the tumult, but others felt a great optimism that, free at last, they could form their own destinies.

Presidents, Vice-Presidents and Prime Ministers

sukarno (1901–70), son of a Javanese teacher from the lower aristocracy and a Balinese woman. Educated in Surabaya, where he met many of the nationalist leaders, and then Bandung, where he studied engineering. In 1921 he married Siti Utari Cokroaminoto, whom he divorced in order to marry Inggit Gunarsih in 1922. His subsequent wives were Fatmawati (m. 1943), Hartini (m. 1953), Kartini Manoppo (m. 1959), Ratna Sari Dewi, or Naoko Nemoto (m. 1962), Haryati (m. 1963), Yurike Sanger (m. 1964) and Heldy Jafar (m. 1967). Founded the General Study Club in 1925 and the PNI, or Indonesian Nationalist Association (later the Indonesian Nationalist Party), in 1927. Arrested in 1929 for his nationalist activities, he was tried and imprisoned until 1931, then rearrested in 1933 and sent into exile to Flores and then in 1938 to Bengkulu. Freed by the Japanese in 1942, he headed a number of bodies established by them, including the committee to prepare for independence. In June 1945 he declared the Five Principles of the nation of Indonesia and took part in the drafting of the first constitution. At the end of the war, Sukarno and Hatta were kidnapped by a group of activists in an attempt to force them to declare independence, which they did on 17 August 1945. Sukarno became president and head of a republican government. He remained in this position except for the period 1948–9, when he was a prisoner of the Dutch. In November 1949 he became president of the Republic of the United State of Indonesia and on 17 August 1950 president of the Republic of Indonesia. Subject to seven assassination attempts, he declared martial law and Guided Democracy in 1957. After the ‘coup’ of 1965 he was under military pressure to hand over power to Suharto, which he did provisionally through the Letter of Command of 11 March 1966.

muhammad hatta (1902–80), from Minangkabau in Sumatra, studied in the Netherlands, where he became leader of the Indonesian Association in 1922. Arrested in 1927 but tried and acquitted in 1928, he joined Sukarno's PNI on return to Indonesia and subsequently took part in the Indonesian National Education body (PNI-Baru, or the New PNI) with Syahrir. Both were arrested and sent into exile to Boven Digul in 1934, and subsequently moved to Banda in 1936.

Blora, in the teak forests of northern Central Java, is an undistinguished country town located in a regency of the same name. It lies on the Lusi River and, besides teak, is known for its limestone cliffs. The dusty streets are lined with mainly typical Javanese houses, small wooden dwellings with a welcoming veranda leading on to a front room, where there are chairs ready to receive visitors. Generations in Blora have studied the Koran and other holy works of Islam, woven striped cloth, performed puppet theatre, danced, grown rice or gone off to the sugar mills to find work. The Dutch did not leave much there, a post office – later destroyed in the war – a pillar commemorating forty years of Queen Wilhelmina's rule and the railway.

Yet despite its ordinariness Blora has had more than its share of fame and upheaval. In 1925 writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born there and, before him, Raden Mas Tirto Adhi Suryo (1880–1918), an aristocrat who was to become the father of Indonesia's modern press, founder of the nationalist movement and hero of Pramoedya's novels describing colonial society. In Blora Regency is the grave of Indonesia's foremost feminist, Raden Ajeng Kartini, another member of the aristocracy.

EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA cannot be studied in isolation, as though separated from international forces. European colonialism, while sporadic and uneven, cumulatively exerted a profound impact on the region. While local histories remained important, colonialism brought with it new forms of economic production and exchange, as well as new forms of political organisation. It was via the medium of colonialism that the industrial revolution and capitalism were exported from Europe. Colonialism also brought, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the ideology of nationalism and the concept of the nation-state. These European imports had a dramatic influence on the people of East and Southeast Asia. Their lives were profoundly altered by their incorporation into a world increasingly interrelated through the mechanism of international markets and the logic of a world dominated by states.

Ways of living altered as the external world progressively intruded; with it came a changed consciousness. No longer was the world limited to the village or township, for the boundaries that had defined the geography of local community were now breached and the certainties of traditional existence challenged. This made possible a shift to a spatial vision in which one's place and community were linked to other places, both near and far, and in which for the first time the world could be imagined as a whole. Imagining the world in turn suggested the possibility of being part of it, interacting with it, being mobile in it, learning about it and, importantly, adapting aspects of it into local cultures.

ONE OF THIS BOOK'S major themes is how external factors have affected East and Southeast Asia. In the two previous chapters we looked at the family and religion as evidence of how modernisation, a process that first emerged in Europe, has influenced the traditional societies of this region. While some aspects of the family and religion have changed, others have not. The societies of East and Southeast Asia appear to be a mixture of tradition and modernity. What is the relative importance of each?

Consider the effect of Western (and in particular European) colonialism. Many historians of East and Southeast Asia conclude that it is impossible to understand the region in the present without an understanding of the impact of the West on Asia during the colonial period. While in general terms this conclusion is justified, it leaves open the more specific issue of the extent of the influence of the West on East and Southeast Asia. Was the domination and influence of European colonialism so great that local histories and cultures became insignificant in comparison? Should the history of East and Southeast Asia, from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, be understood primarily in terms of Western impact and Asian response? Imperial history claims colonialism was the decisive factor, not the internal histories of the colonies themselves. An alternative view is that colonial control was sporadic and incomplete, and never able to supplant local cultures and societies as the dominant historical force. The societies of East and Southeast Asia had their own histories prior to colonisation, and these stubbornly persisted despite the attempt by European powers to dominate and remake Asian societies in their own (European) image. How else, this perspective asks, can one explain the continuity of indigenous, non-Western, traditions into the post-colonial era, and their subsequent significant political and cultural influence?

MANY OF THE READERS OF THIS revised second edition, and also the original book, will have travelled or lived in East and Southeast Asia, perhaps as backpackers, students studying a foreign language or tourists enjoying a few weeks in an exotic location. When arriving in an Asian country, the initial feeling often is one of being overwhelmed by new sensations and ideas as the familiar gives way to the unfamiliar. Sights, sounds, smells and tastes are usually different, and often very different, from those with which we are familiar. Things are organised in different and sometimes seemingly bizarre ways. Our expectations of how things should be are frequently proved faulty, and this can be a disorienting experience. For some, one brush with the unfamiliar will be sufficient. Others, and we number the readers of this book among them, will find the initial confusing contact with Asia a challenge. They will want to move beyond first impressions to discover what lies beneath the surface. The tourist's passing interest in the quaint and exotic gives way to a desire to understand how peoples from other cultures live and think, to discover the ways in which their societies are different from and the same as our own.

THE WORDS MOST FREQUENTLY encountered when studying Asia or listening to media reports on Asia are ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’. One assumption is that we cannot understand Asia without knowing something about its traditions; another is that the influence of tradition in Asia remains particularly strong. It would seem from what we read in many scholarly and journalistic accounts that the influence of tradition is more powerful in Asian societies than it is in Western societies. There is often a sense that the ‘real’ Asia is the traditional Asia. The social and economic practices and institutions that have been imported from or heavily influenced by the West are not really ‘Asian’, regardless of how much they have been influenced by their Asian context. For example, an evening spent watching Beijing Opera would be seen by many as getting in touch with the ‘real’ China, the traditional China that existed before the West intervened and supposedly changed China. However, to go night-clubbing would not be seen as particularly ‘Chinese’. Dress is another obvious example. ‘Tradition’ is often equated with forms of dress that are non-Western. We might not regard the Japanese executive's business suit as ‘traditional’, but we would the dress of the samurai or geisha. There are similar examples from all of the societies of East and Southeast Asia. Western tourists (and increasing numbers of tourists from Asia itself) pay to see local people dressed in traditional costumes participating in traditional cultural activities, such as music, dance and theatre, believing this puts them in touch with the ‘real’ Asia, the Asia of ‘tradition’.

But what does the concept of ‘tradition’ mean and how important is it in understanding continuity and change in the societies of East and Southeast Asia? In this chapter and the next, we will respond to this question by examining two of the most important social institutions of a traditional society: the family and religion. We will investigate the nature of these institutions, and evaluate what changes have occurred to them as a result of Western influence and the process of modernisation. Comparisons will be made to the family and religion in Australia.

DEFINING ‘THE REGION’

BEFORE WE BEGIN to study something called ‘Asia’ we have to decide what it is we are studying. We have to decide what we include and what we exclude; we need to explain and justify our definition of ‘Asia’. This is important because, conceived extensively, Asia can be defined as all of the land mass on the continent of Asia east of the Mediterranean Sea, plus the islands of Japan and Southeast Asia. Map 1 provides a visual representation of this very extensive idea of Asia. We would face a difficult task if we employed this definition of Asia, as we would have to cover the following regions:

• Asia (or the sub-continent of Asia – India, West and Southwest Asia (often called the Middle East – Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries)

• South Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka)

• Northern and Central Asia (Russia, the Central Asian states such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and so on)

• East Asia (China, Japan, North and South Korea. See Map 3.)

• Southeast Asia (mainland Southeast Asia – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar [Burma], Malaysia; and island Southeast Asia – parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, and East Timor. See Map 4.)

The reader can see at a glance that if we attempted to cover such a huge geographical area, we could only do it very superficially. Rather than attempting this, we will make a judgment about what we mean by the term ‘Asia’, one that will define our field of study and limit it to more manageable proportions. It is possible to make this sort of judgment as the concept of ‘Asia’ is not a fixed one, and its meaning and significance are not universally agreed. ‘Asia’ is a construction, invented and used by human beings to describe something they think exists in reality. For our own convenience, and for reasons relating to the Australian perspective adopted in this book, the construction of ‘Asia’ we will use will be limited to the region occupied by those countries in the last two dot points listed above, and visually represented in Maps 2, 3 and 4.

AS WE HAVE OBSERVED in earlier chapters, ideas about East and Southeast Asia's modern history and development have been shaped by a variety of international forces ranging from colonial occupation and the Cold War to the economic, cultural, and political impact of globalisation. But, as also has been noted, the forces that shape our perspectives on the region's history should not only be understood in terms of Western influence, since the identities, values, and aspirations of the various societies and peoples of East and Southeast Asia have also played a major role in shaping their current circumstances and possible future paths, sometimes in ways that have generated influence and change far beyond their own region. One important example of this is Japan's rapid modernisation and rise as a regional power during the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, which later led to Japan becoming a colonial power in its own right and finally suffering defeat and occupation by the US and its allies in 1945. By 1968, however, Japan had established itself as the world's second largest economy, and, therefore, also a major actor in world affairs. Another is China's steady decline as the region's traditional centre of political and economic influence, which, unlike Japan, failed to modernise in response to growing European interest and power in Asia, followed by its post-war ascendancy to again become a major influence on regional affairs.

Both China and Japan have played central roles in East and Southeast Asia's history, and their contemporary influence is, perhaps more than ever, a major driver of economic and political developments throughout the region and beyond. However, China's rapid modernisation over the last three decades has resulted in two major indigenous powers co-existing in East Asia for the first time, creating a situation that has presented both opportunities and problems. In terms of trade and economic relations, Sino–Japanese relations appear to be at an all-time high. China has replaced the US as Japan's largest trading partner (Japan–China trade had already outpaced Japan's trade with the US in the January–June period of 2004), with total trade between Japan and the People's Republic of China (PRC), including Hong Kong, comprising 23.4 per cent of Japan's total trade in 2009.

IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, we examined the concept of tradition and compared it to the idea of modernity. We suggested that it was useful to think about tradition in relation to community, and in particular the notion that in a traditional society people had a much stronger bond of affinity to place and family than they do in modern society. Pre-modern societies were based on agriculture, and most people lived in villages with little contact with the outside world. There was little mobility, either geographically or socially. People lived and died in the village and class into which they had been born. Traditional societies therefore tended to be rather static, although not completely unchanging. Patterns of behaviour – rituals, customs, the habits of daily life – were passed on from one generation to the next, and things were done in a particular way for the simple reason that they had always been done that way. Behaviour became habitual. The lack of outside influences strengthened the force of habit that was a hallmark of traditional societies. Modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation changed the structure and function of the family. In particular, the extended family and stem family gave way to the nuclear family; people gained greater choice in the selection of their marriage partner; families became smaller; and the role of women changed (although more so in some societies than others). In some complex, developed societies with ageing populations, such as Japan, South Korea and Australia, the nuclear family is now in decline, its central position eroded by an increase in single-person households and single-parent families.

AUSTRALIA'S RELATIONSHIP WITH ASIA, and particularly the East and Southeast Asian region, is normally conceived in terms of foreign policy and trade. From this perspective, Asia is external to Australia, and Australia's relationship with Asia is managed, particularly at a governmental level but also by the world of business, as though it is ‘out there’, separate and distinct from Australia. This undoubtedly mirrors the perspective of the bulk of Australia's population, which remains overwhelmingly of European origin and predominantly Anglo–Celtic. However, this conception of Asia as ‘out there’ sits awkwardly with Australian government rhetoric about the importance of Asia to Australia. Asia is vitally important, we are told, because so much of our trade is with Asia, particularly with China and Japan. Australian governments of different political persuasions have also expressed an interest in being included in regional forums on such issues as trade and security. The proportion of East and Southeast Asian-born people in Australia's population remains fairly low at 6.2 per cent, although this figure does not include the Australian-born children of migrants. People from East and Southeast Asia accounted for 30.7 per cent of the foreign-born population of Australia in 2009 (ABS 2010a: 46). This has contributed to the changing ethnic and cultural composition of Australian society, and has made it less and less credible to talk of Asia as though it is ‘out there’.