Mitsuo Nakamura is a cultural anthropologist and Professor
Emeritus of Anthropology at Chiba University, specializing in the study of
Islamic social movements in Indonesia. He was born in 1933 to a Japanese
Christian family living in Manchuria, which was then part of the Japanese
empire. Two years after the end of the war, he and his family returned to Japan.
During his high school and college years, he was actively engaged in the left-wing
student movement protesting against the threat of nuclear war and the imperialistic
resurgence of Japan.
He obtained his higher education from
the University of Tokyo; a Bachelor’s degree in Western philosophy (1960), and then
switching his major to cultural anthropology and receiving a Master’s degree
(1965) from the same university. He continued his graduate studies in
anthropology at Cornell University in the USA on a Fulbright scholarship, and
obtained a Ph.D. (1976) on the basis of field observation on the Muhammadiyah
movement in Kotagede, Yogyakarta. The Carnegie Foundation funded his fieldwork.
His PhD work on this modernist Muslim social movement was one of the earliest
in the Western scholarship that witnessed and predicted the rising tide of
Islamization in Indonesia.
During a brief stay at the
University of Adelaide as a senior teaching fellow (1974-75), where he worked on
his dissertation for completion, he was requested by Professor Selo Soemardjan
of the University of Indonesia (UI) to join the Social Science Research
Training Program (PLPIIS) as a research associate for its Jakarta station,
which was attached to the Faculty of Social Sciences (FIS) at UI. The Canadian
International Development Research Centre (IDRC) financially supported his
position at PLPIIS.
After working for the PLPIIS at
UI in Jakarta for two years (1976-77), he moved back to Australia as a visiting
research fellow at the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National
University (ANU), (1978-80), supported by a fund from the Toyota Foundation. He
then met Professor William Graham of Harvard University who came to attend an
international conference held at ANU, commemorating the beginning of the 15th
century in the Islamic calendar. Professor Graham introduced him to join
Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions as a visiting scholar,
1981-82.
While at Harvard, he completed the revision of
his doctoral dissertation for publication, which was issued by Gadjah Mada
University Press, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 1983 under the title, The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree: A
Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town.
Meanwhile, he expanded his
research coverage to Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the traditionalist wing of Indonesian
Islam, upon the suggestion of Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur, NU’s chairperson and
who much later became 4th President of the Republic of Indonesia),
who invited him to attend its 1979 Muktamar (national congress) as an observer.
This experience resulted in an article
entitled, "The Radical
Traditionalism of the Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia: A Personal Account of Its
26th National Congress, June 1979, Semarang," TONAN AJIA KENKYU (Southeast
Asian Studies), 19:2, (CSEAS, Kyoto University, 1981).With his article,
he became one of the earliest among the Western scholars who paid serious
attention to this robust organization of Indonesian ulama (Islamic scholars) established in 1926, which had previously
been dismissed as too backward to be worthy of academic attention.
In 1983, he was granted a Professorship at Chiba University, Japan,
where he taught anthropology, Southeast Asian studies and Islamic studies
until his retirement in 1999. While at Chiba University, he organized the Study Group on Islam in Southeast Asia,
through which he encouraged a number of junior colleagues and graduate students
of Japan to engage in research on Islam and Muslim societies in the region.
During the last decades of the
twentieth century, the emergence of Islamic civil society
organizations in the ‘public space’ of Muslim-majority as well as
Muslim-minority societies in Southeast Asia became increasingly visible. Their
contribution towards democratization and the advancement of social justice in
each country has become real as well as a subject of academic study. In 1999,
he organized an international workshop on Islam and civil society in Southeast
Asia in collaboration with a number of activist-scholars of the region,
including most notably Dr. Nurcholish Madjid of Indonesia, sponsored by the
Sasakawa Peace Foundation. Contributions at the meeting were published later by
ISEAS with the title, Islam and Civil Society in Southeast Asia, edited with
Sharon Siddique and Omar Farouk Bajunid (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,
Singapore, 2001).
The economic and political crises which
hit Indonesia in 1997-98 was a source of great worry for the Japanese
government and the public, which became concerned the future of Indonesia after
the fall of President Soeharto. The Japanese government decided to send an
observation team to monitor the first general elections in the post-Soeharto
era in 1999, in which he participated with his wife Hisako. He was also
entrusted by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) as its senior
research advisor to assess the sovereign risk of Indonesia: from 2001 to 2003,
he carried out this assignment by visiting a number of regions in Indonesia for
field observation and interviewing, and presented a report to JBIC, which was
later published as Religious, Ethnic and Social Problems in Indonesia and Prospects for
its National Re-Integration, (JBICI
Research Paper No.25,
Tokyo, 2003 in Japanese). He emphasized in the report that Indonesia had
ushered in an irreversible process of democratization, to which Japan should
contribute positively.
From 2004 to 2005, during his
tenure as a Fulbright senior visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern
Studies at Harvard University, he and Hisako volunteered to join again an
international observation corps of the 2004 general and presidential elections
in Indonesia. The result was published by the Islamic Legal Studies Program,
Harvard Law School, as a booklet entitled, Islam and Democracy in
Indonesia: Observations on the 2004 General and Presidential Elections, Occasional Publications 6, December 2005.
In more recent years, he has been
concentrating again on the study of Islamic social movements like Muhammadiyah
and NU in the Post-Soeharto era. He re-visited the Muhammadiyah in Kotagede,
2008-2009, for follow-up research, and published his findings as a
revised/enlarged edition of the old Banyan Tree book from ISEAS, Singapore,
with the title: The Crescent Arises Over the
Banyan Tree: A Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town, c
1910s - 2010. The new edition includes Part Two, covering the
development of Muhammadiyah in Kotagede for almost forty years from 1972 to
2010. Together with Part One (reprint of the original Banyan Tree book), the
new book traces the history of Muhammadiyah in Kotagede for about 100 years,
i.e. from 1910s to 2010. He regards this publication to be his personal project
to celebrate academically the centennial anniversary of the establishment of
the Muhammadiyah in the city of Yogyakarta in 1912.
Meanwhile, he organized, together
with Professor Azyumardi Azra, former rector of the State Islamic University of
Jakarta (UIN) and current director of its graduate school, and Dr. Ahmad Najib
Burhani, a young researcher at the LIPI (Indonesian Institute of Sciences), as
well as a number of other Indonesian and foreign colleagues, an international
research conference on the one-hundred years old Muhammadiyah at the Muhammadiyah
University of Malang (UMM), East Java, in late 2012. Contributions to the
conference are to be published in the near future under the general editorship
of Dr. Najib Burhani. The book will be a scholarly, yet sympathetic appraisal
on the Muhamamdiyah movement, which is undoubtedly one of the oldest, largest,
and progressive Muslim voluntary associations engaged in philanthropic
activities in education and social welfare in the contemporary Islamic world.
Mitsuo Nakamura is married to
Hisako, with three children, and three grandchildren.
Home address of Prof. Mitsuo Nakamura:
4-10-20 Josui-honcho, Kodaira-shi
Tokyo, Japan 187-0022
E-mail: mitsuon@za.tnc.ne.jp
HP in Japan: +81-(0)80-5111-3297
(As at
October 2014)
