Festivals in a Time of War: Pasar Malam in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia

Abstract

The advent of World War II in 1940 and the occupation of the Indies by the Japanese military for almost three and a half years were great shocks to residents of the Indies and brought about innumerable changes. However, the commonly reproduced cartoonish image of a nation uniformly suffering under the yoke of arbitrary Japanese military overlords from 1942 to 1945 was not particularly apt. The beloved Indonesian pasar malam festival is assumed to have vanished during the wartime years, as has been explicitly claimed in the case of the Pasar Malam Gambir. In fact, while somewhat unstable during the wartime years, the institution of the pasar malam never really disappeared, and 1943 could even be described as the “Year of the Festival” due to the relatively high visibility of pasar malam around Indonesia. Examinations of newspaper articles and published programs help to show how these festivals continued to be socially, economically, and even administratively important in somewhat new ways, foreshadowing postwar changes.