National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague
Following their surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese forces unleashed offensives in the Philippines, Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies, which they completely occupied by spring of 1942. Key Dutch colonial personnel were evacuated to Australia, while those remaining behind were interned by the Japanese or put to work on the Burma-Siam railroad. At first, the Indonesians saw the Japanese as anticolonial liberators and nationalist leaders like Sukarno were willing to take positions in the Japanese administration. The Japanese set up various organizations of Indonesians, most importantly the PETA (Sukarela Tentara Pembela Tanah Air), a volunteer military force to help them defend Java against an allied invasion. The PETA was to form the nucleus of nationalist forces in the revolution against the Dutch after the war. It soon became apparent, however, that the primary Japanese aim was to exploit the resources and population of Indonesia for their own war effort and the program of forced labor (the romushas) they established claimed many victims among the Indonesians.
When the war began to go badly for the Japanese they began to promise the Indonesians independence in order to secure continued support. As the war was drawing to a close in August 1945, the nationalists leaders Sukarno and Hatta were called to Saigon by the supreme Japanese commander in Southeast Asia, who offered immediate independence. Back in Jakarta the two leaders were put under great pressure by nationalist youth (the pemuda), who even kidnapped them for a day, to proclaim independence unilaterally, which they did on 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender. The Dutch refused, however, to recognize the Indonesian republic and attempted to restore their rule.
With the return of the Dutch colonial regime an investigation into the Japanese occupation was launched with the aim of prosecuting war crimes committed during the occupation. A key institution in gathering material on the occupation was the Office of Japanese Affairs (Kantoor voor Japanse Zaken), which had been set up as early as 1922 in Batavia (now Jakarta) to advise the Netherlands-Indies government on all matters relating to Japan and the Japanese living in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1932 the office was incorporated into the Service for Chinese and East Asian Affairs, whose name was changed in 1935 to Service for East Asian Affairs (Dienst der Oost-Aziatische Zaken = DOAZ). This was not an executive body itself, but rather gathered information to support the work of other government departments. As a result of Japan’s prewar expansionist tendencies, the DOAZ developed into a specialized intelligence agency to combat Japanese espionage in the Netherlands East Indies. By decision of Lieutenant-Governor-General van Mook on 20 June 1945, the Office of Japanese Affairs was split off from the DOAZ (which fell under the Department of the Interior) and put under the direct authority of the General Secretariat of the Netherlands East Indies government.
Its duties included providing advice and information to the government and to judicial and administrative bodies on matters connected to the Japanese occupation and measures to be taken with regard to Japan and Japanese subjects. In particular its activities were focused on the prosecution of Japanese war criminals in which it usually worked together with the Procureur-Generaal and other authorities investigating war crimes. For this purpose it employed Japanese interpreters to translate the writs of prosecution and other documents concerned.
Gathering data and translating texts were among the foremost duties of the Office of Japanese Affairs and consequently the archive has a documentary character. Besides documents with a direct relevance to the prosecution of war crimes, many others that indirectly had to do with these proceedings came into the office’s possession. Thus many documents were sent to the office for identification by other government departments and remained in its archive because they were subsequently of little importance for the prosecution, but nevertheless shed light on various other aspects of the occupation. Much of the material thus assembled is in the Japanese language. There are also documents in Indonesian, Dutch and English, including translations of Japanese documents. Under the 50-year rule the archive has been opened for research in 2000 and micropublished by MMF in early 2001 with the exception of the personal dossiers of suspected or convicted war criminals themselves, which are under embargo until 2025 for reasons of privacy. The archive has been completely inventoried in 1990 by archivists of the National Archives of the Netherlands.
Part I: The Archive of H.J. van Mook, 1942-1948
Part II: The Archive of P.J. Koets, 1946-1949
Part III: The Archive of C.O. van der Plas, 1941-1949
Part IV: The Archive of J.H. van Roijen, 1946-1962