Kon BambooSchoot

Sukarno, Lee Kuan Yew and Akira Kurosawa
He gave unity to Indonesia, dignity to the downtrodden and anxiety to the powerful, who finally brought him down
Born June 6, 1901 in Surabaya
1927 Founds movement for independence from the Dutch
1945 After Japanese surrender, declares independence and is elected President
1963 Names himself President for Life
1965 Overthrown by military takeover and later replaced by Suharto
1970 Dies June 21 in Jakarta after two years of house arrest
He united his country and set it free. He liberated his people from a sense of inferiority and made them feel proud to be Indonesian--no small achievement, coming after 350 years of Dutch colonial rule and three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation. What Sukarno did on Aug. 17, 1945 was no different from what Thomas Jefferson had done for Americans on July 4, 1776. Perhaps even more: Sukarno was the only Asian leader of the modern era able to unify people of such differing ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds without shedding a drop of blood. Compare his record with that of Suharto, his successor, who killed or imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people to establish his New Order regime.
Equally stunning is that some people seem not to appreciate Sukarno's story. Bung (Brother) Karno, as Indonesians liked to call him, was born in the first year of the new century, on June 6, 1901, the son of a minor Javanese aristocrat and his Balinese wife. Talented in both athletics and academics, he became one of the few Indonesians admitted to Dutch-language schools; it was when his father sent him to Surabaya to attend one such secondary school that he met and boarded with the country's preeminent nationalist, Tjokroaminoto. Through him Sukarno would be inducted into the freedom struggle. With his captivating oratorical skills, however, the younger man would go on to outshine his mentor.

In 1929, two years after helping found the organization that would become the Partai Nasional Indonesia, Sukarno was put on trial by the Dutch. His self-defense, which lasted two days, was a rhetorical masterpiece, and when he was released in 1931 huge crowds turned out to greet their new hero. In years to come Sukarno would use that gift to instill in Indonesians a sense of themselves as a unified people--not Javanese and Balinese and Acehnese and Sumatrans. He put his career, even his life, on the line for the unity and peace of his nation. This is his great heritage, even if today the country is threatened with disintegration as a result of Suharto's policies.

But history has not been kind to Sukarno. These days many in the West remember the glamorous revolutionary as a debauch and a demagogue--the man who told Western countries to go to hell with their aid and pulled Indonesia out of the United Nations. Yet when he and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed independence in 1945, many Western politicians and intellectuals saw Sukarno as a new light shining among the backward countries. Their admiration faded only after a new Satan was found roaming the world: communism.

Sukarno called this the "century of the awakening of the colored peoples," as they threw off the shackles of Western colonialism. He played a leading role in the process, initiating the historic Asia-Africa Conference at Bandung in 1955, after which the Non-Aligned Movement spread to Latin America. Sukarno also called this the "century of intervention," a time when the great powers could interfere at will in the affairs of smaller countries. Often, this intervention was the work of the intelligence community--a power within a power, a state within a state, entrusted with the task of eliminating communism from the face of the earth. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, the strategy was to back military governments as bulwarks against the Red Menace. Repressive regimes like Mobutu's in Africa or Suharto's in Asia received the West's blessing as long as the repression was carried out in the name of democracy and the suppression of communism.

In this climate, Sukarno was no longer seen as another Thomas Jefferson, but instead as someone who might allow communism to expand its influence. The campaign against him began from the slander that he had been a Japanese collaborator during the war. This was followed by the accusation that, in his final years in power, he had become a dictator.

Are these accusations true? Was Sukarno a Japanese collaborator? Even when he was in a Dutch jail in the 1930s, Sukarno wrote to the colonial administration suggesting, in vain, that the Dutch cooperate with Indonesian nationalists to guard against Japanese fascism. Instead, when Japan invaded Indonesia, the Dutch surrendered the country and its people, including Sukarno in his prison.

That he then cooperated with the occupiers is undisputed. But he did so with the backing of fellow nationalist leader Hatta, and he used his influence to the advantage of his country. As he himself admitted, Sukarno did recruit thousands of manual laborers for the Japanese Army, most of whom perished during the war. Yet he also used the Japanese radio network to nurture a sense of nationalism throughout the archipelago. What honest observer can fault Sukarno for taking the opportunity to awaken the consciousness of the people to the struggle for freedom? Under the noses of the occupiers, he used his oratorical skills to arouse people who had been asleep for centuries and to prepare them to fight for independence when the moment arrived. It was thus that the world witnessed the heroism of Indonesian youth when they fought the Allied armies that landed in Surabaya to retake Indonesia for the Dutch on Nov. 10, 1945.

Was Sukarno a dictator? He did not have the character of a dictator. He was motivated and inspired by the ideas of the West, especially democracy, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.

And what about Guided Democracy, the executive-dominated electoral system he instituted in 1959? Sukarno was President for two decades, but he wielded real power only in the last six years of his rule--the period of Guided Democracy. Why did he create such a system? Perhaps because of his commitment to democracy. By this point, Indonesia had no fewer than 60 political parties and faced the prospect of a new government every few months. Sukarno reorganized the 60 parties into 11--all of which retained their independence. It was a political necessity, he said.

Sukarno's critics called it a dictatorship. Yet six years later, when he was removed following a shadowy coup (allegedly a communist uprising gone wrong), he was replaced by a true dictatorship--that of Suharto. Sukarno died in 1970, a man whose dreams of a free and peaceful Indonesia had been hijacked by a violent and stifling military rule.

Lately, Sukarno's reputation has begun to be re-examined. Suharto was ousted in 1998, after three decades in power; earlier this year, Sukarno's daughter Megawati triumphed in the first truly free general election in 44 years. It was, in a way, Bung Karno's triumphant political comeback.

Yet the next months will be crucial for Indonesia. It is time to realize that continuing to rely on military power to "stabilize" the country will only be counter-productive. The solutions to almost all of Indonesia's current ethnic and separatist conflicts--in Aceh, Ambon, Irian Jaya, East Timor--as well as its economic crisis and general political instability all depend on soldiers being just that: soldiers. Indonesia needs no more soldier-politicians. It needs someone who can unite the people, as a charismatic young independence leader did a half-century ago.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer is the author of the Buru Quartet
Lee Kuan Yew
Born Sept. 16, 1923 in Singapore
1947 Begins studying law at Cambridge
1954 Founds People's Action Party
1959 Sworn in as Prime Minister of Singapore
1961 Economic Development Board established to attract foreign companies
1965 Singapore breaks away from Federation of Malaysia
1990 Steps down as Prime Minister and becomes Senior Minister

From sleepy colonial outpost to prosperous high-tech enclave, Singapore owes its rise to the stern, stubborn lawyer who virtually invented the place
Lee Kuan Yew towers over other Asian leaders on the international stage, yet he comes from one of Asia's smallest countries. A champion of Asian values, he is most un-Asian in his frank and confrontational style. Lee loves Singapore but has relatively few close Singaporean friends or confidants. He is a man of great intelligence, with no patience for mediocrity; a man of integrity, with an relentless urge to smite opponents; a man who devours foreign news but has little tolerance for a disrespectful press at home.

What really sets this complex man apart from Asia's other nation-builders is what he didn't do: he did not become corrupt, and he did not stay in power too long. Mao, Suharto, Marcos and Ne Win left their countries on the verge of ruin with no obvious successor. Lee left Singapore with a per capita GDP of $14,000 (it's now $22,000), his reputation gilt-edged and an entire tier of second-generation leaders to take over when he stepped down in 1990. Lee now basks in the wisdom of seniority, a latter-day Doge whose views continue to be sought by statesmen and commentators who travel from all over the world to pay court to him in Singapore.

It is difficult to view Lee on his own, distinct from Singapore. James Minchin, who wrote one of the most balanced biographies of Lee, titled the book No Man Is an Island: A Study of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. But in many ways Lee is the island, embodying in his character all the insecurity, vulnerability, emotional detachment, arrogance and restless energy that also characterize Singapore. His life has shaped and been shaped by the small territory at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula that he made first into a country, and then a rich country. He had few interests outside his work. He did not even keep a diary--"To do so would have inhibited my work," he comments drily in the preface to his autobiography. His legacy is Singapore, no more and no less. He cried at its inception, in a televised press conference the day the enforced separation from Malaysia was announced in 1965. His emotions were more under control the day in 1990 when he stepped down as Prime Minister, but still he could not pry himself loose entirely, and the job of Senior Minister was created for him.

For Lee lives by the conflict theory of management: you either dominate or are dominated. He knows all about being dominated, both under British colonial rule and, more brutally, during the Japanese occupation. In his memoirs he relates how he was slapped and forced to kneel in front of a Japanese soldier for having failed to bow to the man while crossing a bridge. When it became Lee's turn to dominate, he used the full force of his personality, and the law, to fight his opponents. Some ended up in jail or bankrupt. Contradicting Lee became synonymous with being disloyal to Singapore, so hermetic was the identification between man and principality.

His ancestors were Hakka, the Chinese tribesmen who migrated from northern China to Fujian and have a reputation for pugnacity and clannishness. Lee was a third generation Straits Chinese, however, and grew up speaking Malay, English and the Cantonese dialect of his family's maid. Ever the pragmatist, he was later to teach himself Japanese, Mandarin and Hokkien as the political situation in Singapore required. During the Japanese occupation of Singapore he worked for a Japanese government propaganda department--although it has long been rumored that he was secretly passing intelligence to the British.

His education was English, first at Singapore's Raffles College, where he studied English with mathematics and economics. Then it was on to Cambridge, where he learned English law and English self-assurance, deftly taking a double first in the former and a double helping of the latter. He disliked the English while admiring their way of doing things--he had similar if more extreme feelings about the Japanese--and after Cambridge he ditched the Anglicized "Harry Lee" for his original Chinese name, though many of his English friends continue to use it to this day.

This complicated amalgam of Chinese instincts and English training came back to Singapore in 1950 to start practicing law, but he quickly found his true vocation in the tumultuous politics of the time. Fists flying, he immersed himself in a world of communists, labor organizers, gangsters and intelligence operatives, emerging in 1959 as Prime Minister--with his enemies all knocked out of the ring. That was the way he would keep things throughout his political life.

While flooring any political challenger who dared to climb through the ropes, he set about building one of Asia's economic Tigers with relentless energy. He courted multinational investors to upgrade the economy from mass manufacturing to high-tech industry. He built the region's finest infrastructure of airport, port, roads and communications networks. He established a public housing system and the Central Provident Fund savings pool that gave every citizen a stake in the system. He virtually abolished crime--and jukeboxes--and developed Asia's best health and education systems.

Lee's penchant for control extends to his own physical environment. He admits to being very sensitive to heat and humidity, has hailed the air-conditioner as one of mankind's great inventions, and likes to live his entire waking life at 22 degrees C (reduced to 19 degrees C at night while sleeping). On the rare occasions when his grand plans have failed to come off, the circumstances were usually beyond his control. He was one of the first to recognize China's potential under Deng Xiaoping's reforms. But he also learned how treacherous it is to deal with the mainland--his dream project to combine Singaporean know-how with Chinese labor in an industrial park in Suzhou foundered on the very rocks of corruption, nepotism and avarice that he had warned about all his life in other contexts.

But even as he obsessively pruned, trimmed and weeded the Garden City, Lee would never shed his lifelong sense of insecurity, his feeling that it could all be taken away with one uncontrollable spasm of social upheaval or regional chaos. Because of Singapore's size, its paucity of natural resources and the nature of its neighbors, Lee knew he could never fully be master of the island's destiny. Perhaps this in the end is what helped to prevent Lee from becoming too autocratic, providing him with a small taste of humility every time he looked at a map and saw that the creation of one of Asia's most brilliant statesmen was, in the words of a much lesser man, just "a small red dot" in Southeast Asia.

Akira Kurosawa
Born March 23, 1910 in Tokyo
1943 Releases first film, Sanshiro Sugata
1952 Earns international recognition when Rashomon wins Oscar for Best Foreign Film
1954 Reputation confirmed as Seven Samurai wins Silver Lion at Venice film festival
1978 Publishes Something Like an Autobiography
1990 Receives honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement
1998 Dies Sept. 6 in Tokyo

Bigger in the West than in his own Japan, he was the quintessential Asian filmmaker

I knew nothing about cinema before enrolling at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978. The Cultural Revolution had ended, and I had worked in the countryside and in a factory. I wanted to go to college--I even applied to the Xian Physical Education Institute--to change my fate
A year later I saw my first Kurosawa film. It was Rashomon. I was immediately besotted. And a few years after that, from my humble seat in the audience, I actually watched Kurosawa receive a lifetime achievement award at Cannes. There he was, a filmmaker from the East loved and admired by people all over the world. I never met him, although I once had the chance. I was on a business trip to Tokyo when a Japanese friend suggested I meet Kurosawa on the set of Ran. I didn't dare to go. He was, after all, a world-famous dashi (grand master). In the cinema world, I was a very small potato.

Kurosawa was born in Tokyo in 1910, the seventh child of a strict soldier-father. The boy's early loves were oil painting and literature, including the Western writing that was so influential in Japan at the time. These interests would become vitally important throughout his career. The painter's eye is particularly obvious in his films, especially in his sumptuous later ones, and Kurosawa adapted film plots from such disparate authors as Shakespeare (twice), Dostoevsky and hard-boiled detective writer Ed McBain. He stumbled into the movie business as a young assistant director and scenario writer, directing his first film, Sanshiro Sugata, at the age of 33. Five years later, he made Drunken Angel, considered by critics the first true Kurosawa film. It was also, perhaps not incidentally, his first collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, who would work with the master 15 more times. (He was the drunken bandit in Rashomon--one of the most charismatic performances in 20th century cinema--a farmer's son-turned-warrior in Seven Samurai and a Japanese Macbeth in Throne of Blood.)

Rashomon was the film that introduced Kurosawa to the outside world, and that began an uncomfortable relationship with fame that lasted his whole career. Like Stanley Kubrick, he had the artistic strength to resist compromise, either political or commercial. But his own producer on Rashomon didn't understand the film, which gained attention at home only after receiving international accolades. Kurosawa had sporadic commercial difficulties from then on, despite such major hits in Japan as Yojimbo. His last films were produced with Hollywood support--and money--from the likes of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. They were bigger events in the West than in Japan, despite the kimonos and the films' medieval settings. At his death in 1998, four decades after Rashomon, Kurosawa was virtually forgotten in Japan.

The irony is that he was such a Japanese filmmaker. Aside from his superb movies about warriors, including Yojimbo and Sanjuro, Kurosawa also told poignant stories of ordinary, contemporary Japanese, some of them nobodies. High and Low, with Mifune as a rich businessman tormented by a poor kidnapper, is one. These films have influenced me greatly with their realism and concern for the common people. My impression is that through Kurosawa's films all of us can experience the soul of Japan, the inner strength of the Japanese people. Yet his own countrymen, in rather large numbers, accused him of making films for foreigners' consumption. In the 1950s, Rashomon was criticized as exposing Japan's ignorance and backwardness to the outside world--a charge that now seems absurd. In China, I have faced the same scoldings, and I use Kurosawa as a shield. It isn't such an effective one, not yet anyway. Maybe after 20 or 30 years, people in China will no longer see my work in that narrow light.

As a cinematographer, I am awed by Kurosawa's filming of grand spectacle, particularly battle scenes. Even today I cannot figure out his method. I checked our film library and found that he used only 200 or so horses for certain battle scenes that suggest thousands. Other filmmakers have more money, more advanced techniques, more special effects. Yet no one has surpassed him. In 1989, while performing in an action film, I broke a leg and had to be grounded for three months. The director brought me 80 video tapes, including virtually all of Kurosawa's action films. We all crammed into my trailer to watch them, trying to learn how the sensei, or teacher, had achieved his effects. It was a very educational three months for me.

Just a few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with my crew on an action film we are making. We conceived a scene in which several people told their stories from different perspectives, and we realized, "Hey, that's Rashomon." I counsel my colleagues to resist the temptation to imitate Kurosawa blindly; it is impossible to surpass him. But such a strong and lingering impact on filmmakers is very hard to resist.

Whether Kurosawa's world is the real Japan, I don't know. It certainly seems so to me, a foreigner: a country and a people full of strength but depicted, naturally or perhaps inevitably, with a strong artistic backdrop, not just in the filmmaker's eye but in the country as a whole. Kurosawa has set the example of a cinema with a strong national flavor that attracts the interest, and the embrace, of the outside world. I tried to put that lesson to use in my maiden film Red Sorghum and in The Story of Qiu Ju. The world is getting closer and smaller. Kurosawa tells me to keep my own Chinese character and Chinese style. That is his great lesson for Asian filmmakers.

Today, many Chinese directors have gone to Hollywood. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Yet Kurosawa focused his camera on his country. I shall not go to Hollywood. Just like him, I hope to persist in making films that transcend the limits of nation or country, East or West, Japanese or Chinese. Our individual emotions, our thinking and perceptions may differ and will likely become obsolete after, say, 100 years. But the unique character of our films can last forever. My own movies are innately Chinese. And for that, I will always thank Kurosawa for serving as an indelible and inspiring example.

I shall always remember seeing Kurosawa in a documentary about his life and career. He was on location, wearing a pair of sunglasses and a small hat. I saw a man walking in front of the crew with his hands clasped behind his back. A man carrying a stool followed him. It was very funny: Kurosawa stopped. The assistant unfolded the stool for him. The director didn't sit, but kept on walking. When they saw the master coming, all the Japanese actors playing fierce warriors dismounted their horses and bowed to him. He spoke a few words; they listened attentively. Kurosawa looked like a commander, or a father, to them--as he is to my entire generation of Asian filmmakers.

Zhang Yimou is director of Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern