Kurokawa Chimaki
Managing Director The Toyota Foundation, Tokyo

First, I would like to express, on behalf of the Toyota Foundation, my pleasure at being associated with this Congress as one of its sponsors and secondly, I wish to thank the organizers for the opportunity to address a few remarks to this distinguished gathering.

The Toyota Foundation is a small, private grant-making foundation that was founded in 1974 with an endowment from the Toyota Motor Corporation. The foundation is, however, run and managed independently from the Motor Corporation, I should point out here. The foundation has almost a twenty-five year history of grant-making in Indonesia, and I would like to refer to this, to our current interests, and to our concerns for the future of our grant-making in Indonesia briefly today, before explaining our presence here as Congress sponsor.

We have three programs under the rubric of our Southeast Asia Program. The first, with the acronym “SEANRP”, which stands for Southeast Asian National Research Program, provides financial assistance to Southeast Asian scholars to carry out research or related projects under the broad theme of “Cultural Issues in Contemporary Southeast Asia.” The program started in 1976 (when it was called the “International Grant Program”), and from early on the Foundation has focused on helping researchers in the humanities and social sciences—especially for projects that were not purely “development”—focused and where thus not likely to have access to funds from other donors, national or international. I should give a few examples.

Interestingly enough, one of the first such grants, in 1980, went to Dr. Edi S. Ekadjati at Padjadjaran University, one of the Congress organizers, to carry out an inventory and to preserve Sundanese manuscripts. This resulted in the publication of a manuscript catalogue in 1988, and led him to carry out a larger project in the 1990s to survey and microfilm thousands of manuscripts in West Java. At around the same time, the early 1980s, we also gave two other Sunda-related grants to Ajip Rosidi and Dirman Surachmat for research on Sundanese literature and history, respectively. Of course, we did not only focus our grants on West Java or Sunda, and the list of our grants includes such famous names as Dr. Sartono Kartodirdjo (on Javanese aristocratic culture), Dr. Mukhlis Paeni (on Messianism in Goa and later a long project on coastal societies in South Sulawesi), Prof. Dr. Anak Agung Gde Putra Agung (on traditional historiography in Bali), Dr. Usman Pelly (on pluralism in Medan), Taufik Abdullah (on Islam in Indonesia), and Tenas Effendy (on oral literature in Riau). The list could go on; these are just a few examples. In our most current grant year, fiscal year 2000, twenty years later, we are still supporting projects in such fields as history, literature, archaeology, or performing arts, and although the current researchers may be younger (with some older names, like Edi Ekadjati again, too!), but they will become equally famous, we predict: Stanislaus Sandarupa (on Torajan oral literature), Heru Nugroho (on social protest in Central Java), Ninuk Kleden (on mamanda theatre in South Kalimantan), Mona Lohanda (on the history of the Chinese in Indonesia) and Nanik Harkantiningsih (on the early history of Gresik), to name a few. We are pleased to be associated with work of excellence by such hard-working scholars.

Another subprogram under our Southeast Asia Programs is the “Know our Neighbors” program, which (in the case of Indonesia) provides funds to translate and publish books into Indonesian about other Asian countries. Again, there is a long list of publishers and translators who have received grants, and important titles that they have published, but 1 don’t have the time here to be more specific. I believe you will remember the series of titles of Japanese fiction and books about Japan that have been published by Yayasan Obor, for instance, and there are many, many others. In recent years, for instance, we have given grants to translate James Scott’s important sociological work in Malaysia, Weapons of the Weak; the Thai novel. Monsoon Country; Anthony Reid’s Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680;

Robert Hefner’s Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalism; and William Malm’s Japanese Music and Musical Instruments; [We have also supported Japanese scholars’ works on Japan such as Tsuchiya Kenji’s Democracy and Leadership, The Rise of the Taman Siswa Movement in Indonesia, Kurasawa Aiko’s Mobilization and Control, and Goto Ken’ichi’s Japan-Indonesia Relations in the Prewar Showa Period}. We were very honored to receive and award in 2000 from 1KAPI, the Indonesian’s publisher’s association, that recognized our work over the last decades in the area of support for publication and translation in Indonesia.

A third subprogram is an initiative begun in 1995 to encourage the development of Southeast Asian studies by Southeast Asians in Southeast Asia. This program is called SEASREP, for Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program. It grew out of a recognition, brought to our attention by four distinguished Southeast Asian scholars, that Southeast Asian studies in the post-World War II period has really developed as a field of study and area discipline in university centers outside the region—think of Leiden in Holland, or SOAS in the UK, or Cornell in the US, or the ANU in Australia, for instance—and that it was time for Southeast Asian studies to “come home,” as it were . The program has had exciting response—from scholars, universities (8 major universities have sign an MOU to cooperate together in developing SE Asian studies regionally), students, applicants, and even other donors. After initially being started by our foundation, the newly-created Japan Foundation Asia Center has also begun to provide an amount of support equal to ours. We hope that other donors will also eventually become interested in helping to sustain this program. An unique feature is that SEASREP is managed by an indigenous SEASREP Council, which has its secretariat headquarters in Manila. Our hope is that we in Japan are helping to create a new regional institution, one which holds promise for Indonesia, of course, as the largest nation in the region. In addition to regional collaborations, SEASREP also supports study of Southeast Asian languages other than the applicant’s own; cross-visits of distinguished professors in various fields; and support for M.A. and Ph.D. research for those researching a topic in a country other than their own, or a topic with a regional focus. All projects are submitted for consideration under an open application system and are evaluated by a Selection Committee of Southeast Asian scholars and two outside advisers from Japan and the US.

Finally, to complete the list of subprograms under our SE Asian Programs rubric, there is the Young Indonesian Researchers Program. This program began in 1988 and continued through 2000. Since 1993, it has been run in close collaboration with the Yayasan Ilmu-Ilmu Sosial in Jakarta, which handles the application process, including convening a Selection Committee of Indonesia professors and one Japanese professor. The purpose of the program has been to nurture young Indonesian researchers; since 1997, it has been given grants exclusively to those undertaking research in the social sciences and humanities who are enrolled in M.A. or Ph.D. degree programs. For a while in the mid-1990s, it also included support for non-degree applicants, including those from NGOs, for instance. During the past year and throughout the current year, we are undertaking to comprehensively evaluate this program, and we are considering various options for how it might be changed and made more effective. In the meantime the program has been temporarily suspended, but we expect in the next year to begin a series of pilot project experiments to address a certain number of problems that have been identified in the program.

It is at this point, having mentioned the evaluation of the Young Researchers’ Program and having referred obliquely to certain problems with it, that I feel I should turn from a mere description of the Toyota Foundation’s work in Indonesia—and what may seem a self-congratulatory description— to a more critical and self-critical examination of some problems we see in our work here in Indonesia.

Indonesia has seen extraordinary changes in recent years: there was a time in the “heyday” of the Suharto New Order that, with rising incomes, a drop in poverty levels, a seemingly unstoppable economy, and increasing access to health care and basic education, people were led to think that Indonesia had become a kind of “model of success” for the developing world, at least in Asia. Of course, this was both true to some extent, but also illusory in many others. Success in “economic development” masked a host of social, political, and human problems of great magnitude. And many people wondered if the price that Indonesians were paying for the country’s spectacular development—measured in economists terms—was not altogether too high. With hindsight, of course, it is easy to see where many problems lay and where they would eventually lead; it was more diffucult at the time to mobilize people to address them. Now, the task often seem. insurmountable and the pace of change and reform that is necessary to address them utterly too slow.

But I didn’t mean to come hear to lecture about Indonesia’s various problems. I mean only to refer to one special one, which I think all would agree is crucial, and that is education, especially higher education. It is an unfortunate and paradoxical feature of the boom years of the late New Order that higher education seemed to be healthy—millions of dollars were pouring in from various foreign sources, for instance—but, in fact, many problems were lurking beneath the surface. I am not in a position to analyze these, and would not presume to do so here. But, since the Toyota Foundation has been supporting research for these many years, we, too, could not avoid noticing the symptoms of serious problems within the general context of social science and humanities research in the last several decades. And these problems persist, 1 would venture to guess. Humanities have often been left out of the “development” equation, and have been undervalued relative to the “hard” sciences, or to career-enhancing fields such as economics, engineering, or law. The social sciences, meanwhile, did have a role to play in the New Order period, but that role seemed unfortunately to have been to help keep the development engines running, to keep the great machine of “pembangunan” rolling: thus, anthropologists and sociologists were often not supported to carry out research because of their own intellectual curiosity—or even because of real social need—but because the government had well-funded contract projects to hand out to them. And in many cases, the conclusions of these quasi-research projects were already determined before the research was even carried out! The answers had to support the State’s current policy, or the State, as main donor, would be displeased. To be fair, not all the research carried out under government contract then or now is necessarily bad or useless—far from it. But from what I have learned from those critically analyzing the situation, in Japan and in The Foundation has long recognized in its work the importance of strengthening local identity—often aiming to strengthen the identities of groups that have been marginalized or left out of national-government-led priorities. With the recent changes in Indonesia after the fall of the Suharto regime, and the recognition of the importance of regional autonomy and democratic participation by all groups within the rich cultural mosaic of the country, Indonesians have become increasingly interested in local cultural traditions, of which the Sundanese is a notable example. Therefore, we hope that the Congress will be useful not only in West Java, but can serve to encourage and provide a model for other efforts at preservation and promotion of local culture in Indonesia. These were some of the reasons that convinced us of the importance of providing Foundation support to the Congress.

At last, may I extend our Foundation’s best wishes for the success of this Congress. Thank you.