Approaching Suharto's Indonesia from the Margins.

The last in a series of four, this volume of translations of contemporary Japanese scholarship on Southeast Asia focuses on Indonesia.

Editor Takashi Shiraishi acknowledges that the new order brought enormous changes to Indonesia but suggests that - at least by 1979 when his paper was originally published in Japanese - change at the village level was not so marked. In the Javenese village which he studied, control over village land continued to be the central issue in village politics despite the change from PKI to Golkar leadership. Yoshinori Murai's essay records observations of village politics in West Java in the late 1970s, local officials in Sulawesi in 1984, and middle-class frustrations in Jakarta as revealed in political cartoons published in the Kompas newspaper. The link is provided by the essay's title, "The Authoritarian Bureaucratic Politics of Development." Originally published in 1988 after the fall in the price of oil, the author concludes that "the regime now finds itself in dire straits."

This conclusion is rejected in Yuri Sato's outstanding study of business groups during the new order up to 1989. Sato accepts the usual view that the new order big business groups were founded with crucial assistance from foreign capital and state patronage but argues that those that continued to expand in the 1980s depended largely on their own commercial acumen.

Hiroyoshi Kano's 1982 study confirms the usual estimates of landlessness in Indonesia. While admitting the inadequacies of the sources, he suggests rates of about 30 percent for Indonesia and 40 percent for Java. His conclusion that landlessness is related to population pressure is hardly surprising but notes that there are subsequent variations between villages, indicating that other factors are locally important. He also makes the interesting observation that the landlessness rate in Java may well have been just as high at the beginning of this century (although absolute numbers are of course much higher today).

The fifth chapter, by Yosuke Fuke, traces sea trade patterns in Eastern Indonesia and finds that among the goods traded are used clothes from Japan. The story is told in anecdotal style and gives the reader an interesting picture of the lives of these "sea peddlers."

Overall, this collection creates a mixed impression of "Suharto's Indonesia from the Margin." Sato's essay makes an important contribution to understanding the regime at the centre while the others illuminate various aspects of the rural and regional "margins."

HAROLD CROUCH Australian National University, Canberra