when you are careless with it.
it was completely Greek to me. My mother told me that my grand father once asked her about the meaning of
the phrase, because he thought it was a Indonesian phrase. Unfortunately, my mother did not understand it either. So, its meaning always remains incomprehensible.
It is said that during the Japanese occupation in West Timor, the Japanese soldiers, who are usually addressed solaul Nipon in Uab Meto (Dawanese language), always rode horses wherever they went. None of them wanted to learn the local language, but forced people to learn Japanese instead. To order labourers, they used their own language mixed up with a very broken Malay that most villagers in my mother�s village, Sunu (a village in South Central Timor from which you can see some parts of Australia), did not understand, because most of them were completely iliterate.
One day, a short tough Japanese soldier dressed in military uniform rode his white horse from his barack to a village nearby. When he was riding across a small river, he suddenly, met a middle-aged man, a villager, who
had just come back from his corn field. Seeing the soldier approching him, the man got ready to run away, but the Japanese waved his hand giving a sign to the man to approch him. As soon as the villager approched him, he said something either in Japanese or broken Malay, but the villager did not understand none of his words. In response, the scared man said, �Satu kocen!� that he himself did not understand. Not understanding what the man said, the Japanese got down from his horse and said, �ha?� �ha?� followed by other words and then slapped the man�s face once.
Being too afraid and not knowing what to do, the villager repeated his previous phrase and added the word �sa�� at the end of the it, so it becomes �satu kocen sa��. The Japanese thought that it was an insult, so he got ready
to attack the man. But, fortunately, the illiterate village managed to run as fast as he could through the jungle. Finally, he found himself safe among his friends and told them the story.
Since that time, the two strange phrases �satu kocen� and �satu kocen sa�� have always been a never-ending puzzle for my grand father, even until he was called by God on 18th August 1996. I am very sorry because I could not help him answer the puzzle. This puzzle is always a funny story and a souvenir of my beloved grand father. Every time we talk about the phrases, we remember him.
In my opinion, the villager was spontaneously trying to save his own life by saying these phrases. He was expecting that his words were comprehensible to the Japanese. On the other, the furious soldier thought that the villager was speaking his language and trying to insult him. The Japanese soldier should have learnt Uab Meto before coming to occupy the land. In this case, the Dutch and Portuguese are much more successful than the Japanese, because they seemed to use more cultural approach than military forces.
Yogyakarta, 10th June, 2002
Copyright @ 2002, Page Design by John Manhitu
(Yogyakarta, Tuesday, 22 July 2002