DISCOVERY

In his function as taalambtenaar (language official) for Sumatra, the Dutch scholar, Petrus Voorhoeve, visited the Sumatran regency of Kerinci in April, and again in July 1941 to survey the Kerinci documents held by the people as sacred heirlooms in private collections. During the first visit, he made a list of 183 items — published only in 1970 — and during the second visit, he copied and transliterated a large amount of manuscripts while others were photographed to be transliterated later. The primary school teacher Abdul Hamid from the school Kota Payang 1 accompanied Voorhoeve to Kabanjahe where he helped to complete and type the transliterations. In the middle of August 1941, he returned to Kerinci, taking with him the new list, which now comprised 252 items, and completed transliterations of about half the texts. By the time Voorhoeve was called up for military service on 8 December 1941, he had completed nearly all transliterations. His secretary made six copies, two of which were sent to Kerinci, one for the Controleur's office in Kerinci, and one for the owners of the manuscripts. “I do not know whether these copies ever reached their destination before the Japanese invasion; those sent to Batavia certainly did not arrive there. Not a single of the transliterations was found after the war”, he wrote in an article entitled “Kerintji Documents” (Voorhoeve 1970, p. 371). A small number of photographs and a few copies made by hand are all that survived; these are now kept in the library of the KITLV in Leiden.

Five years after Voorhoeve wrote his “Kerintji Documents”, the British anthropologist C.W. Watson conducted fieldwork in Kerinci. Armed with Voorhoeve's list of 183 items, he went to a number of villages and tried to persuade the clan or lineage heads to let him see the documents. As a result he was able to transliterate a number of manuscripts with the assistance of Iskandar Zakariah — the same person who now, more than thirty years later, assists me in documenting the sacred heirloom of the people of Kerinci.

The manuscript known as TK 214 found at the village of Tanjung Tanah, Kabupaten (Regency) Kerinci, Jambi Province, has been convincingly dated to the second half of the fourteenth century. The manuscript provides a new and extremely important type of information about ancient Indonesian civilization in general. It is equally significant for efforts to reconstruct the cultural history of the region from which it originates. Kerinci is rather remote from most of Sumatra's twenty-first century centres of population, cultural development, and political power, which are mainly situated along major rivers in the lowland plains, but in ancient times (i.e. before 1500) the distribution of these centres was reversed: most of them were located in fertile highland valleys near mountain lakes. Kerinci was one of them. Other important early historic cultural centres flourished at Lake Ranau in Lampung, on the Pasemah plateau of South Sumatra, in the Rejang Lebong valley of Bengkulu, in the three valleys or Luak nan Tigo of the Minangkabau highlands, and in the vicinity of Lake Toba.

Kerinci's environment is propitious for farming: resources include plentiful water including a large lake (the surface of Lake Kerinci is 783 metres above sea level), rich volcanic soil provided by Mt. Kerinci, minerals, and a healthy cool climate free from lowland tropical diseases such as malaria. Kerinci is connected via the lake's outlet the Merangin River to the Batang Hari river system, the eastern lowlands of Jambi, and the Straits of Melaka. The Batang Hari is the second largest river system in Sumatra, covering 40,000 square kilometres (the Musi River's drainage in South Sumatra covers 61,000 square kilometres) (Bezermer 1921, pp. 528–30). Kerinci's volcano provides rich soil for the Batang Hari's upper tributaries, but the benefits of these do not reach the lowlands of Jambi Province; “the lands of Lower Djambi are poor or bad” (Mohr 1944, p. 437).

Kerinci has long been connected to both the east and west coasts, and to northern and southern mountain valleys, by footpaths (Hoop 1938, p. 200). One of the main sources of Kerinci's importance was its gold, the exploitation of which has traditionally been supervised by local chiefs. In the seventeenth century, Kerinci gold was exported to the British station in Bengkulu, several hundred kilometres to the south.

This book is dedicated to a manuscript of a Malay legal code, the Nıtisārasamuccaya (Compendium of the Essence of Policy), that I saw for the first time in 2002 in a village on the shore of Lake Kerinci, and which later turned out to be the oldest extant Malay manuscript dating back to the fourteenth century.

I still fondly remember my first visit to Kerinci in 1999. My colleague from the University of Auckland, Drs Eric van Reijn, introduced me to Sutan Kari, a prominent figure and member of the local parliament of the regency of Kerinci. Upon my arrival at the bus station of Sungai Penuh, a small town, which is also the capital of the Kerinci regency, 260 kilometres south of Padang, I was picked up by the late Sutan Kari who, on the same morning, introduced me to Fauzi Siin, the bupati (regent) of Kerinci. When I explained to the bupati that I was planning to research the indigenous Kerinci script, he instantly offered me assistance by providing me with a car, and by taking care of my accommodation during my two-week stay in Kerinci.

Sutan Kari and his close friend Amir Gusti continued to assist me during my four subsequent visits to Kerinci between 2000 and 2004. As respected community leaders they were of invaluable help, and it was through them that I was able to gain access to the sacred heirlooms (pusaka) of Kerinci that until today continue to play an important part in the spiritual life of the people.

Iskandar Zakaria is one of the few people of Kerinci who is able to read manuscripts in both the Arabic-Malay as well as in the Kerinci script. The local artist, renowned for creating a monumental piece of religious art — the Koran written on one huge piece of cloth almost two kilometres long that took eight years to complete — became another member of our small team and regularly accompanied us on our journeys to the villages to document the sacred heirlooms of Kerinci.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore in detail several sections of the Tanjung Tanah manuscript TK 214 (TTms) that are rich in Sanskritized vocabulary. I propose referring to these sections of the TTms as “framing sections” and understanding them as playing a role in indexing the TTms to a specific socio-political context, to a centre of power from which authority was transmitted to its geopolitical peripheries through epistolary and documentary means. In this view, the TTms has much in common with the surat cap whose dissemination dominated Minangkabau political discourses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but is composed in a form that reflects an older model of state organization like that described by Lieberman (2003) under the term “charter state”.

The initial hypothesis of this chapter is that the framing sections of the TTms constitute an important means for conferring authority on the compiler of the manuscript, first in terms of his right to participate in the dissemination of a legal document and, following upon this, his right to exercise a degree of political power within a local domain. A major aim of this chapter is thus to elucidate the text-building elements of the TTms that appear to be employed to create a textual basis for a form of political authority, then to begin to understand the nature of this authority. Another aim of this chapter will be to demonstrate how a comparison of the framing and code of laws (TTms 4.2–28.7) sections of the manuscript brings to light the iconic nature of the TTms. This is to say that the order of parts in the manuscript recapitulates the step-wise order of the “great convocation” (sidang mahātmya) that drew up the code of laws, and in that sense represents a copy of the event that directly reflects its character and chronological sequence.

Another important question to be examined in this chapter is the question of how and to what extent the framing sections of the TTms can be considered “Sanskritized”. From the start we should be clear that the framing sections do not reflect the use of Sanskrit as such, either in terms of its being one idiom within a larger configuration of “hyperglossia”, or in terms of a “correct” orthography preserving the spelling conventions of classical Sanskrit.

One can safely say that the Tanjung Tanah manuscript TK 214, originally written in Dharmasraya, some 250 kilometres from Kerinci, owes its existence to the people of Kerinci who safeguarded the manuscript for almost 700 years as one of their sacred heirlooms. It is for this very reason that we find it not only appropriate but necessary to discuss the circumstances that led to the survival of the manuscript and to introduce the amazing collection of manuscripts spread over dozens of villages in the residency of Kerinci.

The tradition of keeping sacred heirlooms is not limited to the people of Kerinci but is widespread in the Indonesian archipelago. Although Islam is now universally embraced as the only religion of the Kerinci people, pre- Islamic customs often survived or were reshaped or reinterpreted to be coherent with Islamic beliefs. A unique blend of adat (customs) and agama (religion) is indeed characteristic of the Indonesian society as a whole. The pre-Islamic religion of at least most parts of western Indonesia was characterized by a syncretism of ancestor worshipping with Hindu-Buddhist and animist elements. This set of beliefs did not automatically vanish with the introduction of Islam, and is especially evident in the veneration for the forefathers that still holds a high place among many Muslim Indonesians. The sacred heirlooms called pusaka are a living manifestation of the glory of the ancestors, and were especially important for the traditional ruling elite for whom they served as a concrete symbol of authority, legitimacy, lineage, and succession.

In Kerinci, pusaka are mainly found within the traditional ruling lineages and are in the possession of the depati. Although leadership is always a matter of the male domain, the title itself is, together with the pusaka items that are innately linked with the depati-ship, inherited through the female line from mother to daughter. Ideally, it is the eldest daughter of the present depati who inherits the pusaka, and whose husband succeeds his father-in-law as the new depati. There are, however, also other considerations such as the capability of the candidate for the depati-ship, and it is not uncommon that the pusaka are entrusted to a younger daughter, or another member of the lineage.

The pusaka collection of Tanjung Tanah contains a total of ten manuscripts (TK 214–23, according to Voorhoeve's Tambo Kerintji, 1941). Six of those are written in a Javanese type of script on lontar (palm leaf) and are difficult to decipher. One of which is the Tanjung Tanah manuscript and the remaining three are documents written in Jawi script on paper. During my visits to Tanjung Tanah in 2002 and 2003, I found only one of the three Jawi script documents, namely TK 215, but at that time I did not pay much attention to this document since my study focused on the Kerinci script and I merely took a few photographs of the first few pages of the manuscript for documentary purposes. When I realized the importance of TK 215 to the study of TK 214, I revisited Tanjung Tanah in the hope that I would again be granted access to the manuscripts. This time, however, circumstances had changed. The woman who was entitled to keep the sacred heirlooms in her house had passed away. Before a successor was elected, her husband could only serve as the interim caretaker and was hence reluctant to let me see the pusaka collection without the explicit permission of the owners. Some of the owners apparently linked the premature death of the woman in whose house the collection was kept with the fact that I had seen the sacred heirlooms.

Realizing that I would not be able to revisit the collection, I asked the caretaker to provide me with photocopies of the text that he took a few years ago. In the meantime, the caretaker had worked on the text himself and had “enhanced” the original text by adding vowel signs. Fortunately these additions did not interfere too much with a clear reading of the text. Eric van Reijn, my former colleague from the University of Auckland, and I corrected Abdul Hamid's transliteration in the Tambo Kerintji, which was later revised again by Jan van der Putten from the National University of Singapore.

Japan's engagement with the outside world in general, and its Asian neighbours in particular, is characterized by large swings. After 250 years of seclusion, Japan opted to go “out of Asia and into the West” in the late nineteenth century. Then, after fighting fiercely with the United States, Japan opted to form a close alliance with its former adversary in 1945. Since opening to the world, Japan's Asian policy has tended to fluctuate from aggressive engagement to indifferent detachment, depending on the available strategic choices the national government faced at each critical moment in time. In fact, consummating the Meiji Restoration in 1868, modern Japan vigorously engaged in an aggrandizing foreign policy under the banner of “a rich nation and a strong army” (Fukoku kyohei). In that spirit, Japan entered the international system through a series of acquisitions of foreign territories — Taiwan, Korea, Manchukuo and Southeast Asia. As an extension of its expansionistic foreign policy many Japanese had unrealistically believed that a modernized Japan would be able to reign over the entire Asian region; that is, they shared the illusory hope for the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.

It is generally construed that the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II was the result of last-minute improvization rather than long-term military planning. Nevertheless, the Japanese fought ruthlessly in the region for their own interest, seeking the region's abundant raw materials. Consequently, as Takashi Inoguchi explains, Japan lost all its credentials in building rapport with Asian neighbours when it wanted to start again from the ashes at the end of the war. The negative consequences of the Japanese war against the West left very deep and wide-ranging scars on the nation. Japan's Asian policy was very difficult to envisage after its defeat in the war and the allied powers’ occupation. Japan's Asian policy was merely a derivative of Japan's American policy for a long time to come, even after it regained independence in 1952. In other words, Japan's Asian policy was long an antidote to its mainstream policy of a security alliance with the United States, free trade, and practice of the free market.

Seen from another angle, post-war Japanese foreign policy in a way displays a unique feature of its own, to wit, being dependent exclusively on the United States in its orientation.

It is almost a cliché that Japan's external behaviour is characterized by profound puzzles. Thus, it is no wonder that to many students of international relations, Japanese foreign policy remains an enigma. For instance, Japan provided the largest financial contribution to the 1991 Gulf War, but was never fully blessed by the United Nations. In a similar vein, despite its status as the second-largest economy (third since 2010) in the world, Japan has never tried to translate its economic power into political influence. Japan's position as the second-largest contributor to the United Nations’ budget has not yielded any matching role in the international community. Most of all, due to these gaps in perception between Japan's significant economic power and its influence on international events, Japan used to be labelled as an “economic giant and political pigmy”. After all these years, have these profound puzzles been resolved to the effect that treating Japan as an enigma is no longer tenable?

The central puzzle in the study of Japanese foreign policy has been why Japan has continued to play a passive role in international affairs, despite its impressive economic and political power. It is no doubt that the study of Japanese foreign policy has advanced remarkably in recent years. Especially noteworthy are the works by Glenn Hook et al. and Michael Green. Hook et al.'s textbook, for instance, is quintessential in the sense that it covers a vast array of information about Japan's diplomacy and economic and security relations in the post-war period. In addition to containing sufficient international relations theory, the works of the four authors offer a unique framework to explain the distinctive style of Japanese foreign policy. The “quiet diplomacy” characterization focuses on a range of consistently low-risk and low-profile international initiatives and is premised on a long-term view of Japan's national interests. In a similar vein, Green's book succinctly explains major changes in post–Cold War Japanese foreign policy. As he stressed, Japanese foreign policy has become more independent from the United States, more strategic towards Asia, and more energetic towards international and regional institutions. Japan's shift towards reluctant realism can be explained by changing international and domestic circumstances, such as the security concerns about China, domestic economic paralysis, and changes in political leaders.