A sec of not-so-architectural info: That's my kitten Yoshi
staring at the neighborhood dogs -- there are only 3
households here that keep dogs, and all of them are
Chinese-Indonesians(Tionghoans), since basically the
place is a Muslim compound.
The guitar case belongs to mobile musicians which are
ubiquitous in Indonesia, especially in Java, which in
Indonesian is called 'pengamen' and in Javanese
'wong mbarang'. They make their rounds everyday
from morning until sunset, door-to-door, peddling
listenable songs or exactly the opposite,
for a few coins each time. That's why in many Javanese
and Indonesian restaurants, shopping malls and such,
you's see this sign: "Pengamen
Dilarang Masuk". The last two words mean 'no entrance'.
At some neighborhoods there are the same signs, which
usually have these words added right behind the word
'pengamen': "...dan Pemulung".
'Pemulung' is Indonesian for people whose job is to
rummage through garbage bins and collect whatever
is salable from there. 
The picture above is of downtown Yogya from a bird's view
(or actually from the eye of an Indonesian Air Force captain)
in early 21st century. The active volcano Mt. Merapi
at the background is to us like Mt. Fuji has been to
the Japanese. This volcano erupts from time to time,
or sends some pyroclastic objects downhill, but we're
used to that. Small-scaled earthquakes or tremors are
nearly parts of our lives. It takes a whole lot more
than that for us to start considering to get panic.
A Javanese and Indonesian neighborhood is usually
called 'kampung' (some hybrid English term for it is
written the Malaysian way: 'kampong').
It is the basis (i.e. lowest in the hierarchy) of the
sociopolitical management of the country. Its official
name for the bureaucracy to mind as a territorial unit
is 'Rukun Tetangga', usually abbreviated into 'RT',
and literally means 'gemeinschaft'. Oh, well. There is no
English word for it so far.
A neighborhood is led by an unpaid and overworked
headman (Ketua RT). He (sometimes she) is directly
elected by the families in the area, which usually
comprise of 10 to 30 houses in all.
Since no money is to be gotten in this supposedly
voluntary job (some headmen are actually forced
to be by their neighbors), the compensation is social
luxury -- at least you'd know whose wife runs with
whom last Thursday, whose husband got locked up
in a German mental hospital, whose goats trampled
whose crops, which kid is it that broke whose
windows in a football play, and so forth. So it is a
great job. If, of course, you are such a critter
to bask in such knowledge. A Javanese and Indonesian
neighborhood looks like this: 
At the center of the picture above is......the flag of the most
famous Japanese Christian warlord, Takayama Ukon.
But no Indonesian cares to know about him (but me), so in
the 60th Independence Day this Javanese district flutters
such banners all along its small roads, alternating them with
the national flags. It's August 17th when this snapshot was
taken. It has been a string of no-fuss Independence Days
since 1998. Before that and since 1971, the New Order,
the regime of General Suharto that ruled this tsunami-wrecked
country until ousted in 1998 (oh, I have mentioned
the year before), every Independence Day used to
be a great national.....chaos. People were ordered to
re-paint their houses in certain colors, public spaces
were re-do (or got undone) in some more certain
colors (the regime's political party's flag was yellow).
See History of Indonesia.
All other Independence Day stuff stays the same:
neighborhood like this alley's inhabitants are all
to enter silly competitions such as catching eels
and ducks, climbing oiled poles to reach some presents
hung on top of it, and so forth.
And then, after August 17th, there is always a 'cultural
event held at the neighborhood center (a rather
huge building, an ambitious and rather out-of
proportion project financed by inhabitants of this
sphere, so it took 7 years to finish building it).
At the neighborhood center, on the Independence Day
Celebration Night, we are supposed to contemplate upon
the heroism of 1945 and so on while the neighborhood band,
whose singer and lead guitarists live just next door to
my house, respectfully saturates the evening air with.....
Pearl Jam, Linkin Park, Coldplay and Staind. 
Another alley in the district that I put the pic of here to
show the concrete alleyway it has. The alleyway in
the previous pic is made of stone slabs.
All Javanese and Indonesian neighborhood always
finance their own projects concerning infrastructures
like that; the less-than-unfortunate members of
the neighborhood substitute the money contribution
with sweat. They're the ones working on such alleyways. 
Every Javanese neighborhood, and Indonesians in general
though not so closely situated outside Java and Bali, there is
a grocery shop. The grocer is always one of the people living
there, so the place often becomes an informal meeting-space.
Neighborhood grocers don't sell veggies and fruits and such,
because there are other people from outside the neighborhood
who make daily rounds peddling that sort of merchandise (see
the veggies and fruits sections at other pages).
Sometimes a grocery shop in the neighborhood has a name
put on a small billboard. But 90% of them don't even feel
the necessity of having a name; it is enough that to their
regular customers they are 'Mr Danto's shop' or 'Mrs Diah's deli',
if there are more than one grocer in the neighborhood. If there
is only one, it will get referred to as simply 'the shop'.
Anyway, the 10% of grocery shops that put on some billboards
only did so because major advertisers urged them to -- big
cigarette factories, for instance, usually pay a handsome
amount of cash to grocers who agree to put on a huge
billboard bearing a factory's logo or brand name, on the
lower part of which the name of the shop is emblazoned in
small letters, for free. Five or six grocers nearest to my house
actually made their names up just for this in 1990's, while
they had been open for 15 or 20 years namelessly. 
What they sell is only what their neighbors need. So,
while most are the same merchandise, actually every grocery
customized their stuff. And unless you are a regular customer,
you can't expect the nearest grocery to provide for your specific
needs.
You can get washing soap, bathing soap, cigarettes, candies,
cooking oil, kerosene, factory-produced snacks, instant
noodles (click here for why you might need such a thing),
soft drinks (not always, and not the brands that the
neighbors dislike), mineral water, rice, eggs (to go with
the noodles), salt, sugar, coffee, tea, sachets of traditional
beverages such as ginger tea, pencils, ballpoint pens,
notebooks, gift wrappers, plastic bags, rubber sandals,
and so on. Some of them also has a payphone.
A lot of grocery shops are just private garages. But 'serious'
grocers like Mr. Kardjo of my neighborhood painstakingly built
a separate building for his grocery, right at the edge of his
front yard. 
The all-too-real poverty of a good many Javanese and
Indonesian suburban neighborhoods is impossible to
overlook (actually this is what we mean when saying the
word 'kampung', and not just any neighborhood). Especially
since they exist side by side with obvious and architectural
affluence.
But the roofs in such neighborhood are made of the basically
artistic burnt red clay.
In 'real estate' compounds, the roofs are often made of 'asbes'
(asbetos), some chemical dumpling mixed with unspeakable
materials (as far as we're concerned, that is the definition
of 'asbes'), which generously gives you the taste of the
outdoors even while you are staying in bed: it fries your
head in dry season and forward the water it downloads from
the sky in monsoon right to your bed. 
This is how an ordinary Javanese house looks like when
getting constructed. Real Javanese houses are built with red
bricks. The Javanese name for it is 'boto', and in Indonesian
'bata merah'. It is made of durable clay, dried and put in the oven.
Surreal 'real estate' houses are built with the thing we call
'batako'; some insensibly fragile and unreasonably non-artistic
slabs made of dried concrete (a sprinkle of it) and sand
(a dash of it) and dirt (nearly a whole lot of it). 
The neighborhood of a rural spot like this village on
Mt. Lawu in Central Java seems infinite in geographical terms
compared to urban and suburban clots. But when it comes to
the number of people, the entire inhabitants of this village,
which currently consists of 6 neighborhoods, can barely fill up
ten houses in my district, i.e. not even enough to jam one single
unit that the local government would dub 'neighborhood'.
Rural areas in Java have been stagnant demographically
because everybody there leaves the place after finishing
some basic schooling since 1970.
Houses in villages are not much different from the ones at
lower-middle class suburban neighborhoods. But every
house seems, in the eye of a passersby, something 'historical'.
Until 21st century, villagers usually build their own houses,
with the help of their neighbors, in turns. Some even still
go so far as to produce their own clay bricks and basic
carpentry jobs. 
This is the characteristic compound that you can find in almost
every Javanese town: the 100% Muslim neighborhood,
which we call 'Kauman' ('kaum' is a colloquial term in
Javanese that means anyone 'deep into Islam').
They are usually found at the oldest parts of the towns,
and that means the very center of the towns, since Islam
came everywhere first before 'real estate' agencies. |
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