The Occupation

 

The thing about evil—real evil, not the comic book kind with horns and pitchforks—is that it comes dressed up like necessity. It knocks on your door wearing the uniform of order, speaking in the clipped tones of efficiency, and before you know it, you’ve invited the devil himself in for coffee and cake.

That’s what happened in the Dutch East Indies in 1942, when the Rising Sun cast its shadow across the archipelago like a great dark wing.

The Feeding Frenzy

It started with Pearl Harbor, of course. December 7th, 1941—a date that would live in infamy, as Roosevelt said, though he couldn’t have known just how deep that infamy would burrow into the souls of ordinary people half a world away. By late ‘41, the Japanese war machine was rolling like a juggernaut across the Pacific, crushing everything in its path with the methodical precision of a factory press.

Hong Kong fell. Malaya crumbled. And in Indonesia, through those gray winter months of January and February 1942, the Dutch positions dropped like dominoes in a child’s game—except the stakes here were measured in blood and broken dreams.

The Battle of the Java Sea was over before it really began. The combined Allied fleets—Dutch, British, American—went to the bottom like stones, leaving behind oil slicks that caught the tropical sun and made rainbow patterns on the water. Pretty, in a way. Pretty like a bruise.

When the Dutch finally surrendered at Kalijati airfield on March 8th, something ugly was already stirring in the hearts of ordinary people. You know how it is when the lights go out in a small town—suddenly, all the things that civilization kept buried come crawling up from the basement of the human soul.

The Chinese shopkeepers felt it first. Their neat little grocery stores, with their carefully arranged shelves and hand-lettered signs, became targets. The mob—and it was a mob, make no mistake, not protesters or freedom fighters but a feeding frenzy of desperate people looking for someone to blame—swept through the commercial districts like locusts.

The Harvest of Hate

They called it retaliation, these rioters. Said the Chinese were collaborators, Dutch sympathizers, enemies of the people. But anyone with eyes could see what it really was: envy dressed up in patriotic clothes. Poor folks looking at rich folks and deciding that war gave them permission to take what they’d always wanted.

Benny Setiono wrote about it later, in his book about Chinese politics. Out of 130 sugar factories operating on Java in 1940, only 32 survived the looting. Think about that for a minute. Ninety-eight factories—entire livelihoods, generations of work—wiped out by crowds of people who told themselves they were striking a blow for freedom.

Tjung See Gan lost 370,000 guilders when his textile empire went up in smoke. Hioe Nyan Yoeng lost 280,000. These weren’t just numbers on a ledger; they were dreams dying in real time, families watching their futures burn.

The smartest ones got out early. Loaded what they could onto trucks and fled to smaller towns, places like Cibadak and Sukabumi, hoping the madness wouldn’t follow them. But madness has a way of spreading, doesn’t it? Like a virus, or a particularly persistent ghost.

In Jembatan Lima, nine out of ten shops were gutted completely. In Tanjung Priok, the shopping district looked like a war zone—which, come to think of it, is exactly what it was. Even in the countryside, in quiet places like Karawang, the rice millers couldn’t escape the fury. Seventy to eighty percent of them lost everything.

The Camps

But the real horror—the kind that Stephen King understands better than most—wasn’t the mob violence. It was what came after, when the Japanese military decided to impose their own brand of order on the chaos.

They rounded up the Chinese who hadn’t fled, along with anyone else they deemed suspicious. Mixed them in with Dutch civilians, European colonials, men and women and children who had committed no crime except being in the wrong place when history took a hard left turn.

The camps had names: Cimahi, Bukit Duri, Serang. Places that became synonymous with suffering, though the guards would tell you they were simply processing centers, temporary accommodations for enemy aliens. Evil always speaks in euphemisms.

At Bukit Duri, they crammed three prisoners into cells designed for one. Two meters by one meter—about the size of a coffin stood on end. Imagine trying to sleep in that space, your shins scraping against concrete edges in the dark, listening to the breathing of strangers who smelled like fear and unwashed bodies.

The racial hierarchies continued even in captivity. White Dutch prisoners got bread for breakfast, soup at midday, rice at night. The Chinese got rice and water spinach once a day, if they were lucky. Even in hell, it seemed, there were different circles reserved for different kinds of sinners.

The Testimony of Nio Joe Lan

One man lived to tell the story in detail. Nio Joe Lan, a journalist who’d worked for papers called Keng Po and Sin Po before the world went mad. He spent three years moving between camps—Bukit Duri to Serang to Cimahi—and had the presence of mind to write it all down afterward.

His memoir, Dalem Tawanan Djepang, reads like something from one of those old EC horror comics, except every word was true. He wrote about Chinese businessmen who’d lived lives of luxury suddenly confronted with degradation beyond their worst nightmares. Forced to bathe together in communal showers, their dignity stripped away along with their clothes.

But here’s the thing that would fascinate King: the way human beings adapt, even to the unthinkable. By the time Nio reached Cimahi in 1944, the camp had evolved into something like a functioning town. Prisoners tended gardens, traded goods, formed orchestras. They created their own society within the barbed wire, complete with medical services, technical departments, financial systems.

It was as if they’d said to themselves: if we’re going to be trapped in hell, we might as well make it a civilized hell.

Nearly 10,000 people lived in Cimahi by the end. They read books, played music, buried their dead with whatever dignity they could muster. Some of the Chinese prisoners were Freemasons, and they actually formed an emergency lodge inside the camp—called it De Beproeving, “The Trial.” When their members died, they marked the graves with wooden compasses and square rulers, maintaining their rituals even in the face of annihilation.

Khouw Kin An, the last Chinese Major in Batavia, died there on February 13, 1945. He was buried in the family cemetery in Jati Petamburan, one of the lucky ones who at least got to rest in ancestral soil.

The Reckoning

What strikes you, reading these accounts, is how ordinary it all seems in retrospect. People doing terrible things to other people for reasons that made sense at the time. The mob convinced themselves they were patriots. The guards convinced themselves they were maintaining order. The prisoners convinced themselves they could survive with dignity intact.

Everyone had their story, their justification, their small accommodation with evil.

That’s the real horror King understands: not the supernatural monsters, but the human ones. The capacity we all have to become something we never thought we could be, given the right circumstances and just enough fear.

The Japanese occupation ended in August 1945, and Nio Joe Lan walked out of Cimahi a free man. He went back to Jakarta, restarted his newspaper, tried to pick up the threads of a normal life. But you don’t walk away from something like that unchanged. The camps leave marks on your soul that never quite heal.

And somewhere in the back of your mind, on quiet nights when the wind rattles the windows, you remember that it could happen again. That civilization is just a thin veneer painted over something much older and darker. That given the right push, in the right direction, any of us could find ourselves building camps or filling them.

That’s the truth that keeps you awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, wondering what you would have done if you’d been there when the lights went out and the feeding frenzy began.

The answer, if you’re honest, is probably not what you’d like to think.