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My paper addresses the issue of Japanese influence on Indonesian music during the brief yet highly crucial three year period in the Second World War, 1942-45. Before the war erupted, Indonesian composers were already involved in the struggle of forming Indonesian national identity through cultural means. As early as 1916, Ki Hadjar Dewantara, one of the most prominent nationalist leaders, composed a piece of music for piano and soprano entitled “Kinanthie Sandoong.” This piece posted challenges that could not be solved by musicians who merely have European classical musical background, since it was designed by combining compositional techniques and aesthetics of Javanese gamelan and European classical music. In so doing, Ki Hadjar demonstrated that Indonesian people were as capable as the Europeans in engaging themselves with the idea of progress and modernity. Therefore, they deserved to be treated equally as an independent nation.During the Japanese occupation, this cultural resistance turned into a more direct political expression, as the purpose of seeking Indonesian independence and national identity became an urgent matter. At this moment, many Indonesian composers learned how to compose songs with high revolutionary spirit from Japanese composers, such as Nobuo Iida through their involvement as employees of Keimin Bunka Shidoso, the Japanese cultural center in Jakarta which produced propaganda materials for the war. Among these composers were Amir Pasaribu and Cornel Simanjuntak, two most important Indonesian musicians who significantly contributed to the idea of developing further the concept of Indonesian national music after the end of the Second World War. Pasaribu happened to be trained as a composer, multi-instrumentalist and conductor in Japan before the war broke up.The struggle for grasping this state of the musical endeavor reached its dramatic moment with the emergence of leftist composers associated with LEKRA (Institute of People’s Culture). This gained a significant support from Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party) led by Aidit, a highly intelligent and powerful young politician, in the early 1950s.As a conclusion, I would argue that although the short period of Japanese occupation brought a bitter memory to most Indonesians, its crucial role in influencing the formation of Indonesian national music and identity needs to be acknowledged.

This time, we will show two films on the theme of “female genital circumcision”. The first film is “Moolaade” directed by Ousmane Sembene. The second one is “Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Binding on Women” by Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar. Both films stand in a position to go against the practice of female genital mutilation, but they differ in other positions such as placing women’s subjectivities and perspectives towards the societies, etc. Open discussion will be held with comments by Dr. Oka Mari (Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University), who specializes in discourse analysis and literature on women in the Third World.

Thai population, surveyed in 2006, was 62,828,706 people. There were 6,824,000 elders, 10.86%, defined as age of 60 years old or more. About 90% of them were between 60-79 years old. A Thai elderly person tends to increase to 10.7 million or 15% of the population in the next 15 years.