T

he presence of around 20 Korean eateries, shops and even a school for toddlers tucked away mostly in the vicinity of Blok S in South Jakarta, are telling signs of a burgeoning South Korean community.

Since 1975, the area has become a favorite spot for South Koreans living in Jakarta, particularly the restaurants on Jl. Senayan and Jl. Senopati.

Sprawling head offices of South Korean firms that settled in the nearby business district between the 1970s and 1980s, now known as Sudirman Central Business District, have transformed Blok S into a South Korean town, said Park Eun Joo, owner of the 29-year-old grocery store Mu Gung Hwa.

Blok S and Karawaci in Tangerang are some of the iconic "little Seouls" of Indonesia that mark the ever-growing inflow of South Koreans into Indonesia since the late 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Between January and June this year, the directorate general of immigration issued more than 10,000 six months to one year temporary resident visas to South Koreans, the largest number of temporary visas issued to foreign nationals. Some 3,371 of the visas were issued to new residents.

The immigration office states there are currently around 40,000 South Koreans living in Indonesia, excluding tourists.

Most South Koreans are in Indonesia for business purposes. The South Korean embassy recorded some 1,300 South Korean firms in Indonesia, mostly textile factories.

Bae Eung Sik, a South Korean businessman who has lived in Jakarta since 1994, said the number of South Korean garment producers, for example, had grown from 180 in 1998, to 250 in 2007 and 330 this year. Their factories employed around 3,000 to 5,000 local workers.

"Indonesia is renowned for its labor force. People here are easier to manage than say, people in China... The other factor is Indonesia has more experience in textile exporting, having exported garments for over 30 years, compared to China," said Bae, who has four factories in Cikarang and employs a total of 4,000 local workers.

"Business has been going well despite the crisis. We have more buyers this year than last year. We expect our exports to top US$70 million this year, up by $10 million from last year."

Indonesia's expanding business opportunities and low cultural barriers have also lured more Chinese to the archipelago.

The immigration office issued 9,369 temporary stay visas to Chinese nationals during the first half of this year, 4,909 of those to new residents.

There are an estimated 100,000 Chinese living in Indonesia, exceeding the number of South Korean and Japanese, who explored the country's business prospects first, said Huang Kai, marketing director for China Hua Dian Engineering Corporation, a company working on a hydro power plant project worth $200 million in Sumatra.

Huang, who has lived in Indonesia for three years, said Chinese business groups started placing Indonesia at the top of their list of investment destinations in 2000, when the country's economy started recovering from the crisis.

"Indonesia is a huge untapped market... Many manufacturers build factories here to bypass distribution lines because it's easier for producers to occupy the local market if they make the products here rather than importing them from China."

He said the number of Chinese companies had grown from merely 20 in 1998 to around 1,000 this year, with half of them in the import and export business.

Huang said the anti-Chinese riots in May 1998, which saw hundreds die on the streets, had not deterred them from coming.

"People understand it's all about politics... We don't think the government and the people hold any particular grudges to do with ethnicity."

In Jakarta, the Chinese community tends to blend with the existing Indonesian-Chinese already living here since the Dutch colonial era.

The number of Chinese and South Korean nationals living in Indonesia has overtaken the number of Japanese who had initiated the inflow of foreign investment into Indonesia since the late 1960s.

The immigration office reported more than 120,000 Japanese in Indonesia before 1998. However, the crisis forced most Japanese to relocate their companies overseas.

The Japanese community today is the third largest group of foreign nationals, totalling 7,932 of the temporary stay visas issued between January and June this year. Around 3,324 of the visas were issued to new residents.

According to the Japanese embassy, there were around 1,000 Japanese firms and 11,453 Japanese nationals living in Indonesia last year.

Uchihara Masashi, chairman of Sangyo Betsu Kondankai, the union for the Japanese industry in Jakarta, said the number of Japanese expatriates had not grown significantly because of Indonesia's poor infrastructure, as well as stringent immigration and investment regulations.

"We have to wait for weeks for visas to be issued when we have emergencies, for example when our machinery breaks down and we have to stop production while we wait for engineers to arrive from Japan."