The formation of the pribumi business élite in Indonesia, 1930s-1940s

Abstract

pelago and suggested that Japanese companies should contact European, indigenous, and Arab merchant houses. The newspaper stated that, were the Japanese to take natives as their business partners, this would indubit ably stimulate indigenous commercial interest, which would benefit the progress of native society.2 This call for closer Japanese-indigenous business cooperation came at a time when Japan had emerged as the engine of the modern Asian economy (Sugihara 1990). Since the 1880s the industrial heart of the country, the Kobe-Osaka area, had developed into a dynamic, new industrial centre for Asia, redirecting existing trade patterns and commodity flows, and attracting Chinese, Arab, Indian, and local indigenous business groups in the region (Post 1993b). Recently Man Hou Lin (1993) has shown how Taiwanese merchants, who had hardly any experience in direct foreign trade prior to 1895, were able to play an important economic role in Fukien (South China) during the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan. She thereby revised the convential wisdom that the Japanese colonization of Taiwan suppressed indigenous enterprise and that the Japanese Government-General and the zaibatsu monopolized the foreign trade of the colony. The rise of the Korean chaebol, too, was closely related to Japanese economic policy in that country. Human resource development was an important aspect of Japanese policies in Korea and indigenous entrepreneurs were given extensive training in Japanese companies and then enabled to start large