The Japanese occupation was a safe topic of public discourse-as long as it
remained carefully circumscribed by a script of sacrificial suffering that was
available and widely known.47 People vividly recalled being reduced to eating
corn and other foods fit for animals, wrapping themselves in palm fibers and
banana leaves when cloth was scarce. Detailed descriptions of Japanese soldiers
who forced people to bow, of arbitrary beatings, abuse and brutal death
were frequently and readily offered. Such stories attest to the extremity of those
times, but also indicate the sanctioning of certain kinds of memories of violence.
Accounts of having gone hungry during the Japanese period were enough
to mark one's heroic participation in the nationalist experience. These highly
personalized accounts of suffering are almost dissonant in Indonesian, a language
in which self-reference is assiduously avoided. By contrast, in hushed
accounts of the 1965 coup and its bloody aftermath, that "I" quickly disappeared,
replaced by silences and allusion