ABSTRACT
Indonesia is quite a long way from Japan, geographically speaking (though not as far as it is from Madagascar, to which Indonesians migrated in prehistoric times). But it is even more distant in the world-view – the ‘mental space’, to use a term employed below – of most academics. To argue that there was a very close and important connection between Indonesia and Japan in the past seemed to many of them bizarre and unthinkable, since ‘everyone knows’ that this is not the case. Yet this is exactly what this book will argue. In this chapter I begin by outlining the powerful academic myths which cause scholars to reject the very idea of such a connection, and go on to explain the observations and juxtapositions that made me think that the basis of these myths had to be re-examined.
