Last week I was in Southeast Asia, where I was invited to speak at a panel in Singapore and to give speeches at universities in Indonesia. Despite their differences in size, these two countries have one thing in common. They are two of the four island-nations surrounding the South China Sea.
A visit to the National Museum in Singapore helped me reconfirm a well-known fact: It was a member of the British East India Company who landed on a small island at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula in 1819. The isle at that time was called Singapura, which means a "city of lions" in Sanskrit.
In downtown Jakarta I stopped by the former residence of a young Japanese admiral in the Imperial Navy, Tadashi Maeda. The declaration of independence of Indonesia was drafted in this house. Indonesian soldiers who Japan had trained between 1943 and 1945 went on to form the embryo of the national armed forces.