Foreword

Dr. Masatoshi Iguchi is a distinguished natural scientist who achieved many important discoveries and led polymer fibre science in Japan for decades.

At a certain moment in his life, he became involved with Indonesia. After his retirement from a governmental research laboratory, he was appointed a research fellow at the Bogor Research Station for Rubber Technology, where he engaged in his own research and supervised the study of young members. He sent several of them to universities in Japan for their PhD study.

Once he invited me to Indonesia. On arriving at the Jakarta Airport where he came to pick me up, I was not able to find him until he said to me “Hallo”, because he was completely immersed himself among local people, as if he were an Indonesian native. Then, he took me around various places in Java Island for almost a week and, wherever we visited, he told me about the Indonesian history, culture and religion, not at just the guide book level but at academic book level. He introduced me to professors in several universities as well as his friends of various fields. In fact, fascinated by the long history of Indonesia, Dr. Iguchi had tremendous knowledge about the country already at that time. He was no longer a mere natural scientist but a scholar of Indonesian history, particularly of ancient times.

Even after returning to Japan, he tripped to Indonesia several times to further his research about the country’s history and culture, and authored a book, entitled “Java Essay”, Troubador Publishing, UK, 2015.

  He continued his study about Indonesia and read great many books. In 2021, he published a book, “The Identification of ‘Holotan Country’ recorded in the Chinese Book of Sung with reference to the Wangsakerta Manuscripts”, Jetda, Osaka 2021, by correcting old theories about the mysterious ancient kingdom.

  This book for which I am writing this foreword is another fruit of his study on Chinese Chronicles, viz. The Old and New Books of Tang, in which the “Ho-ling” country was a matter of question, where it was located. He obtained right knowledge by reading the original Chinese text carefully and calculating the data of the shadow of the sun from a gnomon. I hope this book as well will be read worldwide and be added to the collection of National Diet Library Japan as well as Libraries in Europe and United States.

08 October 2024

Prof. Emeritus Kohji Tashiro, Toyota Technological Institute,

Nagoya, Japan.

Preface

The first moment when I was intrigued into the culture and history of Java was thirty years ago when I read an old book, Journey’s to Java [1] , authored and published by Marquis Yoshichika Tokugawa in 1931, and had an idea to translate the travelogue into English in order to present its copy to the participants to the Green Polymer Workshop 1996, held in Bandung - Bogor, Indonesia. [2] Marquis Tokugawa visited the Island of Java twice in the early twentieth century, when Java and peripheral islands were under the administration of Dutch East India Government, firstly in 1921 for changing air for his health and secondly in 1929 for attending, as a historian and biologist, The Fourth Pacific Science Conference, held in Batavia – Bandung, respectively. He wrote all what he saw, heard, read and thought during the voyage from Kobe to Tanjoen Priok and during the travelling in Java. The English translation was revised and published as a proper book from Bandung Institute of Technology Press in 2004[3].

During my stay in Bogor Research Station for Rubber Technology as a research fellow in 1999 - 2002, I became more interested in the history of Java, viz. of ancient times, having spent weekends and holidays to visit several spots within the province of Bogor, where stone monuments of Tarumanagara Era were discovered, as well as some famous relics in Central Java such as Candi Borobudur, Candi Lolo Jonggrang and others.

Retirement made me free to plan and study. I tripped to Indonesia several times to revisit those historical places in Central Java and explore more places in East Java. I visited museums not only in Indonesia but also in Netherlands and England. I read books which wrote about my questions as much as possible and examined the descriptions whether reliable or not. The part of the results was written in the form of an essay and published as “Java Essay” from Troubador Publishing, UK[4]. Other results were written in short articles and uploaded in my own homepage[5] .

A country written in Chinese Book of Sung (宋書) as “呵羅單國” and transliterated as “Holotan Country”, which country in South-East Asia did it correspond to, was an unsolved problem among historians. The result of my study has been written in a book form and published as “The Identification of ‘Holotan Country’ recorded in the Chinese Book of Sung with reference to the Wangsakerta Manuscripts” in 2021[6].

The description about a country written as “訶陵國” in the Old Book of Tang and New Book of Tang and read as “Ho-ling Country”, as well as Queen Sima appeared in the latter, was another question for which number of scholars have tried to identify.

In this work, the Chinese texts have been studied carefully in Chapter 2. Then, a geometrical calculation has been made in order to obtain the latitude from the data in The New Book of Tang and the fact that the direction of the shadow from a gnomon at noon on the day of summer-solstice is “north” without regard to the observation point, whichever in the northern or southern hemisphere, has been confirmed, whilst it was written as “south” in the New Book of Tang. For this mismatch, I have assumed it was because the Chinese at that time still believed the earth was a flat body, as will be detailed in Chapter 3. The Chinese texts have been referred to the Wangsakerta Manuscripts and other literature and the Ho-ling Country has been concluded to have been Keling Country that had existed in the East and Central Java.

This theme had been of my concern of almost fifteen years ever since I was writing my book “Java Essay”[7] but remained in a storage, because some source material about ancient kingdoms in East Java that supposedly exists somewhere was not found in the Internet nor libraries in Indonesia. Nevertheless, I have decided to put a punctuation to this matter now.

21 October 2024,

The author

References