Overview
Meita’s research investigates the impact of the Japanese occupation in Indonesia, 1942-1945, on the war memories of both Japan as the occupier and Indonesia as the occupied, particularly the ones that are mediated by audio-visual media, such as films. She looks into how Japan and Indonesia institutionalize and politicize war memories and how individual and collective memories represented through films also play a significant role in the construction of war historical narratives. She explores how film functions as linking past and present events into a whole; mediating people's memories of wartime, the first persons who had experienced the war, and the later generations’ memories and perceptions of the war.
She previously received her M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017 with the thesis title The Impact of the Japanese Occupation, 1942-1945: On the Development of Indonesian Cinema. This thesis was presented at the Association of Asian Studies Conference 2018 in Washington D.C., under the panel: Examining the Impact of the Japanese Empire around the South China Sea. Meita is a Japanese Studies, Japan Foundation fellow for the academic year of 2023/2024.