Arifin Bey

At the age of 16, his public speaking activities had him investigated by the police, his father interrogated, their home searched, and his newspaper clippings confiscated.

The headmaster of the Dutch school he attended recognised his ability saved him from any further escalation of punishment, and arranged for him to continue teacher-training studies in Bandung.

Ironically, Tokyo was thought to be too dangerous for his cohort of Indonesian and other students from Southeast Asia, and they were sent to study at the Hiroshima University of Arts and Sciences.

He went to Japan as a scholarship student during the Pacific War, when Indonesia was under Japanese occupation, and found himself in Hiroshima in 1945, when the city was hit by an atomic bomb.

Of the five hundred students in the university lecture theatre when the bomb exploded, he and Hasan Rahaya (also from Indonesia)[1] survived.

He remained in Japan for some time, and by chance at a railway station, saw a Japanese woman hassled by some American soldiers.

His knowledge of English, gained at the Dutch school, his mastery of Japanese, and his outstanding general ability and social skills led him to the Department of Foreign Affairs when he returned to Indonesia.

He returned to Indonesia, and after serving for two years as assistant to the Director of the Indonesian Institute of the Sciences, was sponsored by the Ford Foundation for a Ph.D at Georgetown University.

During the years of Guided Democracy amid the increasing tensions leading to the attempted coup in 1965, it was an exposed position.

A highlight in this period was acting as interpreter for President Suharto on his state visit to Japan in 1968 when he addressed the Foreign Correspondents Club.

This experience, the knowledge, competence and confidence he gained in speaking and writing Japanese, and his people skills, were to wean him from the world of diplomacy into that of academe.

He received invitations to give seminars, and to teach at the Area Studies Program at Tsukuba University, where he was required to lecture in both Japanese and English.

But despite the quality of his work in Japan, rumours that he had sailed too close to the wind in his editorship of the Indonesian Herald persisted.

The Director, Zulkifli Lubis, who had in fact been imprisoned by Sukarno, decided to appoint a resident correspondent in Tokyo, and chose Arifin.

And it was now that the key words in the title of his Ph.D. thesis for Georgetown, Dialogue and Consensus, concepts which had had so central a place in his mind and thinking, began to bear fruit.

In the same year he resigned from Tsukuba University in 1984, planning to use his unique knowledge and experience of Japan to develop Japanese Studies at tertiary institutions in Indonesia.

Japan called again, and he was appointed visiting professor at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba, where he taught until 1995.

In 1991, he was presented the Japanese Imperial Medal of The Order of Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays and Neck Ribbon.

But by way of a detour was appointed for a three-year term to a position as visiting professor at the University of Malaya, teaching the History of Japanese Thought and the Making of Modern Japan.

Back in Indonesia, he remained active, administering the Kindergarten, lecturing, writing, reading widely, and above all fulfilling with love and care all his responsibilities as head of his large extended family, whether in Jakarta or Padang.

He was a person of total dedication: to his Islamic Faith, to his ideals as an educationalist in the widest sense of the word, and to the family that was always a central part of his life.