Modern Philippines: A Jigsaw

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 1-3:

In March 1521 three ships under Ferdinand Magellan (Magalhaes/Magallanes), a Portuguese navigator in the service of the king of Spain, landed in the Visayan islands. One ship later completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, an event for the history record books but more importantly it changed that history of the islands, now home to 110 million people. A few decades later, Spain assumed ownership of the archipelago stretching from the Luzon Strait to the Sulu Sea and named it Islas Filipinas. The Spanish left a religion, a few genes and some aspects of culture, but the people were and remain predominantly of Malay/Austronesian race, language and culture, albeit with other influences from America and China.

The Philippines is unique in many ways; its geology, its fauna, in its history of rule by two successive Western powers, Spain and the United States. It has been a political identity with a singular name for nearly 500 years, much longer than many of its neighbours. It is the only predominantly Christian nation in Asia south of the Caucasus and is fervently Catholic. In the nineteenth century it spawned the first modern nationalists fighting Western imperialism.

However, this singularity does not make for an identity which is readily understood even by its own citizens, let alone by foreigners. It is part of the vast Malay Archipelago and shares a basic language and some culture with its Indonesian and Malaysian neighbours but it is separated from them by 500 years of history and itself divided by fragmented geography and regional loyalties. That history explains its current problems as reflected in its weak post-1945 economic and social performance compared with most of its neighbours, and its continuing high levels of violence. Democracy flourishes, elections are regular, noisy and competitive yet little progress is made towards changing a system dominated by dynasties as seen in the contests in the 2022 election. After the grip of two distant empires, Spanish and American, it now lives under the shadow of another, closer one, China.

Geology divides it into more than 2,000 inhabited islands. Regional rivalries and the widespread but not universal use of English have thwarted the acceptance of Filipino (essentially the Tagalog of Central Luzon) as the national language. Regional languages and loyalties remain strong so that imported languages and the Church seem at times the main unifiers. It is also an administrative jigsaw in that power locally lies not with its geographically coherent seventeen regions but with eighty numerous provinces and cities with province-level powers, some very small.

A basic Malay culture has been so influenced by Spain, the Catholic Church and then by America that its identity is sometimes seen as Latin as much as Asian. Indeed, many Filipinos in California, where they are the second largest Asian community, often self-identify as Latino or Pacific islander not Asian. The Catholic Church, as adapted locally, provides some common bond, other than for the Muslims, but faces its own challenge from evangelicals and populist preachers. Religious division is an underlying historical reality exacerbated by the concentration of Muslims in western Mindanao and Sulu and more recently by extremist Islamism from abroad. Yet the cultural roots and language, even aspects of its politics, remain essentially Malay from Ilocos in the north to Sulu in the south. However, fragmented by religion, local languages and quasi-tribal identities, the Philippines is at once identifiable yet hard to define or describe.

The very notion ‘Filipino’ began with local born Spaniards, known as creoles, and only very gradually spread to Spanish mestizos, Chinese mestizos and urbanized indigenous people accepted into the dominant principalia class. The nationalism of the ilustrados (the reformist educated elite) in the late nineteenth century raised national consciousness and the struggles against America and Japan saw mass participation. Independence brought the masses into the Filipino embrace but despite shared urbanization and education, the sense of national identity developed fitfully. Added to the centrifugal forces of geography were the strength of elite links to the US and of many leading businessmen to China. Suggestions to change the colonial name to a Malay one have failed – many late nineteenth revolutionaries preferred ‘Katagalugan’, which became the name of a short-lived Tagalog republic. More recently ‘Maharlika’, a word denoting a Tagalog noble warrior class, has been suggested but attracted little support.

Five hundred years on from the arrival of Spain and Catholicism fissures remain. Muslim Mindanao’s on and off warfare has been about local rivalries as well as opposition to Manila and Christianity. Meanwhile, non-Muslim parts of the island also continue to see conflicts, mainly over land rights between local ethnic groups, particularly in Mindanao and the broader population whose composition has been changed by decades of migration from the Visayas. That internal colonization continues. Visayan languages now predominate in Mindanao. Generally, regional loyalties and in political terms local patron-client relationships remain important. They remain crucial even if weakened by urbanization and the shared identity of the millions of Filipinos now working overseas or brought together via social media such as Facebook or by international beauty pageants. National politics is still partly driven by the regional appeal of particular candidates. Local identity is mostly stronger than national identity, perhaps a reflection of the lack of esteem of the national government.

After years under a backward Spain and the aegis of friars, American imperialism brought education and new legal and administrative systems. Seventy years ago, the then recently independent Philippines boasted higher literacy levels than most of Asia and the highest income levels of populous Asian countries apart from Japan. It had an admired – at least from a distance – US-inspired legal and democratic system. Today, despite two decades of reasonable economic performance, it is widely seen as having failed to match most of its neighbours in income growth and progress in education. It remains better known for natural disasters, flamboyant leaders, political violence and sporadic insurgencies, and for its major export – its own citizens finding work abroad which they could not find at home.

Its social structure has changed only modestly over time, with huge gaps in income and wealth, the dominance of certain families, particularly in the provinces, the preference for the fairer skins of mestizos (European or Chinese) and even place names celebrating colonialists, for example the posh enclaves of Makati – Magallanes, Forbes, Legazpi, Urdaneta and Dasmarinas. Violence is an all too constant ingredient in politics. President Duterte’s so-called War on Drugs killed particularly large numbers. Killings of political rivals, critical journalists and of farmer and worker activists had long been common but accelerated dramatically under Duterte. Lawyers abound but the state of law and order varies widely, ever subject to political and pecuniary influences. The state structure is weak for historical and geographical reasons which partly explain the persistence of insurgencies and of dynastic politics at both national and local levels. Senses of nationalism and civic duty appear weak compared to the demands of kinship and client relationships, blurring lines between public and private spheres. These features have especially flourished under the de-centralized political system and weak central bureaucracy bequeathed by America. Trading and sailing have always been essential elements of economic life and smuggling a natural outcome of attempts to tax it.

However, the nation has strengths too. Filipinos may be divided among themselves at home but in the outside world they have an identity and solidarity that is strong and recognized as such. Gender equality is ahead of most of Asia; Filipino workers are valued overseas for their skills and commitment, and command of English carries global benefits. Its Catholicism is sometimes more about ritual than ideology and society has relatively few hang-ups about racial mixing born of centuries of practice and the more recent impact of migration. It is welcoming of foreigners and renowned for its love of music and fiestas. There is a tradition of free speech – and sometimes gaudy rhetoric – and a media which is often too lively for those in power. In the much longer run, a generation or two away, its high fertility rate, which has long been a burden, will in a generation prove a bonus as most of its neighbours face ageing and falling populations. One day the nation may even acquire a name which reflects its Malay core identity.

Małgorzata Rejmer's Book Bukareszt

This week's newsletter from Culture.pl contains some articles about Polish connections with Romania. Here are some excerpts from an article by Mikołaj Gliński titled "Everyone Remembers Their Own Past Differently: Małgorzata Rejmer on Romania & Albania":

The author Małgorzata Rejmer talks about similarities between Romania and Poland, and reveals the way Poland is perceived from a Romanian perspective. She shares details of the first reactions to her book 'Bukareszt', which is due to be released in Romanian. The writer also reveals the beginnings of her latest project, a book about Albania.

Mikołaj Gliński: When and how did you first find yourself in Romania?

Małgorzata Rejmer: I think it all began with the documentary Dzieci z Dekretu (The Decree Children), which I saw in 2007. It tells the story of a Romania in which Ceaușescu banned access to contraception, and it conveys how the absurd becomes normal, and how the everyday becomes hell, with a constant string of humiliation. It's [shot in] the late 1980s, and factories run gynaecological check-ups of women, with testing material made of frog skin which changes colour in contact with the urine of a pregnant woman. I read all of Herta Muller’s books at the time, but it was only after my trip to Bucharest in 2009 that my curiosity was truly aroused. It was the longing for a city which I associated on the one hand with chaos and crumminess, and on the other hand, with beauty and pathos. For me, in a way it was a 'crooked Paris', an absolute mishmash, the glamorous and the plebeian all in one.

MG: When did you first have the idea of writing about Romania?

MR: In 2010, I began to write my doctoral thesis about Romanian cinema, and I read many books about Romania in a short period of time. And I just couldn’t believe it all. I knew that Romania was a fascinating country for a writer and anthropologist. On the one hand, it’s European and looks up to France and Germany, and on the other hand, it also looks back onto the Balkans and Turkey, it’s a mix of the culturally unique, of the provincial and the peripheral.

MG: Why did you choose reportage as a form of description? Your previous book, Toksymia, was a novel…

MR: I am not too attached to the idea that Bukareszt is a reportage piece. I don’t really consider myself a writer, and even less so a reporter. I am just a person who writes. I don’t have the workshop of a journalist, it’s difficult for me to write about a given subject. Either a subject flows out of me and writes itself, or no one could drag me with horses to sit down by my laptop. My writing is very capricious, and it costs me a lot of energy.

MG: The style in Bukareszt is very rich and diverse. You used different conventions (for example, the chapter about the revolution is written as a play, or even a parody, with acts, etc). You also draw on different cultural texts, (The Ballad of Master Manole, the epic of a lamb) as well as styles. I suppose those are not the typical elements of a reporter’s workshop?

MR: Bukareszt is literary and varied in style, because I had the feeling that this city is eclectic, and and that all of Romania is one big patchwork, and this was something that I wanted to render in the book's language. When I write about a famous Romanian ballad, the language imitates the ballad, and when I write about the chaos of the revolution, I choose the form of a drama. I wanted to adapt the style to the theme, for the polyphony of the book to match the diversity of Bucharest. In the end, if I tried to write all the texts in one style, I would die of boredom. I have to have some fun in my life, to play around with form, and to try out different things. I adore Herta Muller’s reportage from Hunger and Silk, although nobody calls Muller a reporter. Using short sentences, she sketches out touching human portraits and universal stories about humanity. Muller is relentless, she writes with images, doesn't back away from symbols, and she is at the very centre of the texts herself. I prefer this kind of writing to the most meticulous kind of reportage about some incredibly important and pertinent issue of our times.

MG: How did your Romanian friends react to your book? You do write about rather terrifying and shameful things from the country’s history: the terror of the security services, people spying on each other, prisons, the completely inhuman stories of women which resulted from the 1966 anti-abortion decree, and the taboo of a revolution – which perhaps never even took place?

MR: The book was read by a couple of Polish friends who live in Romania, and they were quite enthusiastic.  Some time ago, a Romanian woman wrote to me saying that after reading Bukareszt, she felt proud of her country again, and wanted to get to know its history. This was moving for me. Only the chapter on abortion has been released in Romania so far, and it was well received. I read comments by young people for whom the text was a discovery, because they had become accustomed to an idealised vision of the Ceausescu era.

Bukareszt is my way of seeing Romania, and a certain selection of facts. You can polemicize about this selection, but it would be harder to argue with the facts. The question of memory is a separate issue – everyone remembers their own past differently, and everyone has their own vision of it. Bukareszt would be a collection of these crumbs, but they are all fragments of a shattered mirror, and they don’t reflect a reality but rather convey a mosaic.

Bukareszt will probably get released in Romania this year, and, possibly, there will then be a discussion around it. It’s possible, but not certain. Romanians are not interested in working through the collective memory. Even at book readings in Cluj and Bucharest, the question hanging over me was "Why do you write about such difficult things from the past? If the present is terrible, why would we need to dig into the past, on top of that?”

MG: Was the work on Bukareszt a difficult experience for you, personally? I am addressing the talks that you had to conduct with people who have had some terrible experiences. Almost all of the topics from the first part touch upon some kind of trauma…

MR: I always approached my protagonists with the conviction that I really want to talk to them, and not that I want to do an interview. These talks went on for hours. I had to recover after many of these stories, and I repeatedly returned to some of them. At times, I would cry together with the people who told me those stories. Suffering is inscribed into life, but I am most interested in the way that these people were able to cope with it.  We all strive for normality even in the most abnormal of times.

MG: What was the most difficult thing for you get used to when you lived in Romania?

MR: I didn’t have any problems with getting used to Romania, but for a long time, I live there in house which very much resembled a squat, with parties running on until 5 in the morning. Recently I went to Bucharest once again, and I decided to stay in the old place out of nostalgia. There was a party once again, and this is something that is hard to get used to.

But apart from that, I didn’t have any problems getting acquainted with Bucharest. I spent some time growing up in a small town, and some time in the northern Praga district [in Warsaw], so Bucharest is close to my heart both in terms of the aesthetics and the atmosphere. And when a Romanian friend came to visit me, he even began to mark out [the district of] Grochów in his own way. For him, the Wiatraczna roundabout was evocative of the Fifth Iancului, the Astoria restaurant reminded him of Intermacedonia, and he would call the local kebab place the same way he would in Bucharest: 'Ali Baba'.

MG: While reading your book, one can have the impression that many of these historical experiences and situations are, to a certain degree, similar to Polish history, except for over there, things were somehow… a lot worse, a bit like a nightmare. Is it possible to compare these histories? Where do the parallels end?

MR: I cannot answer your question, because I am not able to define where the limits of these similarities lie. I am not the one to trace them out, let the Polish and Romanian readership do it themselves, in accordance with their own subjective feelings.

But looking at this issue from an objective side, looking at the facts, we could say that after 1965, the Romanian version of communism was completely different to the Polish one. It had the face of one man, Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was the one responsible for the situation in the country, he bestowed all of the important posts upon members of his family, and prepared his son to become his successor. Historians call this 'dynastic communism'. Ceaușescu was Romania. But let’s not forget that in the 1960s and 1970s Romanians led rather good lives, and in many ways, their situation was much better than the one in Poland. It was only the 1980s that brought about a sudden collapse and the fall of the state, as well as a suffering of the people with the complete indifference of the authorities.

The chapters on Romanian communism stir a lot of emotion, but it's enough to read Kolymskoye Stories to see a completely different scale of human suffering. No matter what atrocity we would think of, man is capable of inventing a greater and more effective one. In this place, the book should have some kind of quotation about man being the most cruel of all animals. I agree.

MG: What is the stereotypical idea that Polish people have about Romania?

MR: To put it bluntly, Poles associate Romania with poverty, Gypsies and Dracula. It’s all stems from ignorance. Just go there, visit Transylvania, Bukovina and Maramuresz and your whole stance towards Romania changes. Poles have no idea about the scale of Romanian influence on European heritage. They don’t know what extraordinary intellectuals surfaced in Romania in the interwar period. A majority of the most acclaimed ones emigrated. And very few Poles know that Romanian cinema has been storming European film festivals for more than a decade, it’s the country’s best export commodities.

MG: Was your perspective as a person coming from Poland at all helpful in understanding Romania? Poland is unarguably also a country from the East of Europe, and a member of the former communist bloc. It possibly has a similar cultural and historical background, being a quite big but peripheral country, under foreign rule for a period of time, and one looking up to the West with both admiration and fascination…

MR: Yes, I think that this kind of stance that we are saturated with as Poles – the sense that we have been wronged by history, that we are underappreciated and marginalised in Europe – helped me understand Romanians. I often explained to them that Poles have a very similar inferiority complex, a problem of peasant roots, and that they are terribly sensitive to any outside criticism. But for Romanians, Poland is Europe, and it’s almost Germany. When I told them about the 123 years of history under partitions, about the sense of inferiority, Romanians would cry out: 'But in the Middle Ages you were a superpower! And we never had a period of imperial Romania.' They would also often say: 'we have a common enemy, Russia!' In the area I lived in in Bucharest, I once saw a huge, dirty garbage container with the phrase 'Russia e gunoi', meaning 'Russia is garbage'.

Honolulu FBI vs. Mass Internment

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 160-161:

There was intense pressure to intern the entire Japanese population of the island—160,000 men, women, and children. Hoover and President Roosevelt, fearing an uprising, wanted a crackdown. Surprisingly, the man who stood in their way was the straitlaced conservative Robert Shivers. He fought it tooth and nail, astonishing Hoover and putting his career at significant risk. The close bond Shivers had formed with his Japanese American “adopted daughter,” Sue, had swayed him.

“I couldn’t have let you and thousands of people like you be arrested,” Shivers told her. The thought of Sue and scores of other innocents like her being forced into a camp had fueled a fire within that spurred him to take on the highest levels of the government.

On the west coast of the U.S. mainland, 120,000 Americans with Japanese heritage would be put into camps and not released until the end of the war, with virtually no one ever being charged with a crime.

Even the spy Yoshikawa, who was interned for a short time with Japanese Americans after his capture, saw the irony. “We were taken to a relocation camp full of innocent American Japanese,” he recalled. “They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke. You see, I couldn’t trust them to help me in Honolulu. They were loyal to the United States.”

While most of those held on Sand Island and in internment camps on the mainland were innocent of any wrongdoing, that was not the case with Otto and the rest of the Kuehns. Before it was over, they would have to navigate the ire of an enraged American public, a furious government, and federal prosecutors hell-bent on punishing someone for the heinous crime of December 7.

Dusko Popov vs. J. Edgar Hoover, 1941

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 119-120:

Special Agent Shivers was convinced the Kuehns were spies; he just didn’t know for whom. The payments pointed to the Japanese, but the FBI was getting information that the Nazis also had an interest in Pearl Harbor. That revelation came from another German spy turned double agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6: Dusko Popov.

Popov was a well-educated Serbian who attended law school at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1935. A few years later he was recruited by a former classmate to work for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.

Popov immediately contacted the British diplomatic authorities, who enlisted him as a double agent. Within a short period of time, the Germans had come to trust him implicitly, even fronting him $50,000 to set up a spy ring in London. Popov was supposed to turn the money over to MI6, as part of a plan to fleece the Germans out of chunks of cash.

Ian Fleming, a British intelligence officer who would go on to create the character James Bond, was assigned to watch over Popov and make sure the cash made it back to London. After receiving the money from the Germans, Popov met Fleming in Portugal for the trip back to England. The Serbian, a well-known ladies’ man and gambler, made his way to Casino Estoril, an oceanside casino that was a well-known hangout for spies and other international highfliers.

While gambling at a nearby table, Popov overheard a Lithuanian businessman pompously declare he would match any bet, no matter how high the amount. Popov sauntered over to the table, sat down across from the man, and, without saying a word, dropped $50,000 on the table—MI6’s $50,000, the equivalent of $1 million today. The casino went quiet, and Fleming went white watching Popov potentially wreck the entire operation. The flustered Lithuanian asked the casino if they would lend him the money if he lost. Not unexpectedly, they declined, and the man walked away from the table, red-faced. Popov pulled the money off the felt with a grin, loudly proclaiming that gamblers like that are “an annoyance to serious players.”

Popov was, like Otto, a risk-taker, a bit of a narcissist—and Popov was purportedly Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond. The baccarat scene was even re-created, blow for blow, in his first book, Casino Royale.

In August 1941, the Germans sent Popov to the United States with $58,000 and a directive to establish a network of spies. Then he was to head to Hawaii and gather as much intelligence as possible on Pearl Harbor. Unbeknownst to Otto Kuehn, Popov was to be his replacement.

The Japanese had grown tired of Otto’s flamboyant lifestyle and considered him a growing security risk. Frequent phone calls and visits to the consulate, exorbitant spending, wild parties with military officers that made the local gossip column—Otto was becoming a threat to the operation. Fresh blood was needed, and Japanese intelligence asked Goebbels to replace him.

Arriving in New York, Popov set up a meeting with the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of the double agent, agreeing to let his staff meet with Popov only after the British reassured him. Popov was eventually summoned to the Commodore Hotel, where he showed the agents his orders, written in microdots, a new technology invented by the Germans that reduced entire pages of information down to the size of a period.

Almost half the hidden directives consisted of questions the Germans wanted answered about military operations in Hawaii: the depths of the water at Pearl Harbor, the torpedo nets under the water’s surface, exact locations of air bases at Hickam, Wheeler, and Kaneohe, and locations of submarine stations, along with sketches of the Pearl Harbor piers. “Is the Crater Punchbowl being used as ammunition dump?” read one question.

The warning was clear: The Nazis wanted Popov to gather intelligence the Japanese needed for an attack on Pearl Harbor. That got Hoover’s attention, and the FBI director decided to come to New York and meet with Popov personally. But when the two met face-to-face weeks later, the rendezvous was a disaster. The FBI director could barely contain his disdain for the German double agent. “You’re like all double agents,” he berated him. “You’re begging for information to sell to your German friends so you can make a lot of money and be a playboy!”

Popov brushed off Hoover’s comments and reiterated to the FBI director his warning of an impending attack. “But he just wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say,” he said later.

Hoover had deployed a lot of manpower to the FBI office in Hawaii and stepped up the pressure on Shivers. Yet here was the plan for the entire Japanese assault in front of his face, and he ignored it. While Hoover did notify President Roosevelt that the FBI had discovered a new microdot technology, forwarding a small portion of the text from Popov, he sat on the most important information: The Japanese were planning an attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Abwehr, meanwhile, aborted Popov’s mission to Hawaii. The glaring spotlight thrown on him from Hoover would bring too much attention to Japanese operations there. Otto would remain in place as Japan’s spy. But Germany’s role in the Pacific was now obvious. It was working in concert with Japan toward a common goal of knocking out the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and they were using a network of spies to do it.

German Spies on Oahu in late 1930s

The Far Outliers are back in the Pacific now, as my reading reflects. I've been reading a new book that came out after we left for our academic year in Poland: Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor (Celadon Books, 2025), by Christine Kuehn, the granddaughter of the family of spies. Honolulu Civil Beat author Kirsten Downey read an advance copy of the book and highlights some of its findings in her online commentary on The Secret Life of a Prominent Kailua Family Revealed. Here are some excerpts.

There were indeed spies among us.

A long-running tale of intrigue in Hawaiʻi will get a new twist later this year with the publication of a soon-to-be published book from inside the family of notorious Hawaiʻi spies. Wealthy German nationals Otto Kuehn and his family were paid by the Japanese government to spy on U.S. military operations at Pearl Harbor, and they funneled information to Japan that helped make the Dec. 7, 1941 attack so devastating.

...

In her book Christine — the daughter of Otto’s son, Eberhard — describes the family’s spy history as a secret concealed from the grandchildren. She gradually unspools how she unraveled the story and pressured her relatives into sharing some of the facts, with her own research filling in more of the specifics. Eberhard, sometimes crying, declined to share many details about what his family had done and then developed dementia.

Her account will be new to many people. But the tale has independently survived in Hawaiʻi, amid the whispered reminiscences of kamaʻāina, in published news accounts from the era, inside archival records housed at the University of Hawaiʻi’s War Records Depository and in books about espionage published after the war. It’s been included in a list of the FBI’s most famous cases. All shed more light on how the chain of events unfolded.

Otto Kuehn, a former naval officer in Germany, his wife Friedel and their three charming children made quite a splash in Hawaiʻi in the late 1930s.

Mr. and Mrs. Kuehn had first arrived on the ship Tatsuta Maru in the spring of 1935, stopping in Honolulu for two weeks before heading to Japan, which they visited several other times in the next few years, according to gossipy society news reports at the time.

By 1936, the Kuehns had permanently settled on Oʻahu, where they were mentioned as the hosts of a dance party at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and as guests at a music recital attended by Hawaiʻi’s elite. He said he was in Hawaiʻi to learn Japanese.

The Kuehns became popular hosts at their posh homes in Kailua and Lanikai, frequently hosting the young naval officers who were squiring Ruth, their pretty 22-year-old daughter, around town and on outings. She and her mother operated a beauty salon near the Kāneʻohe Naval Air Station that was a favorite spot for Navy wives. Their two younger sons, Eberhard and Hans, were students at Punahou.

In August 1941, Ruth, then 25, married a widower, retired stock broker, J. Carson Moore, “who was flattered by her interest,” his family later recalled. Moore, 48, was a generous bon vivant who hosted an open bar at his home, with free-flowing booze, that was frequented by service members. Moore called his little saloon the S.S. Rum, according to archival records at the University of Hawaiʻi.

America was at peace at the time, but the Japanese Empire’s expansionist and militaristic ambitions were drawing increasing concern, particularly as Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany.

...

Many details of the Kuehn case were initially concealed because it was a wartime secret, which allowed both Otto and Friedel to vehemently protest that they were innocent of the charges.

In a letter to Otto, Hormann told him they felt misled, because they had considered him “a good Joe,” but that now they had been left hoping “that you were innocent of giving aid to the enemies of our country.”

Otto responded to Hormann in 1947, described the spying allegations as “ugly rumors,” and said his attorney had “demonstrated his innocence.”

“Mistakes will be made in time of national hysteria or danger,” Otto wrote in another letter. He added that his attorney “firmly believes in American justice and is sufficiently confident in a final success regarding my affair.”

In 1962, Friedel sued the U.S. government, saying that the charges against them were “all rot,” and that the allegations were brought against Otto to cover up the incompetence of the American military in allowing the surprise attack to occur. She sought $27,000 in damages from the U.S. government.

The facts, however, when they finally emerged, were damning. The Kuehns had done much more than make friends with amiable American military officers.

Otto had opened a steel furniture company, winning a commission to decorate a cocktail lounge at Pearl Harbor, which enabled him to get access to the base and take photographs of the ships in the harbor. He took pictures of other military installations, including Bellows, Wheeler and Hickam, revealing aircraft configurations. On at least one occasion, Otto took little Hans with him as he conducted his investigations, according to his granddaughter.

A Wikipedia article on the Kuehn family pieces together more sources on the family spy network.

Forster's About the Breadfruit

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 276-278, 282-283:

‘I would be far more useful to the world if I were to embark on another great voyage,’ he told a friend in November 1783, a few months after leaving the Rosicrucians. Weren’t there enough people who could sort, classify and regurgitate what had already been discovered? But if he couldn’t travel to distant continents and islands, he could explore them with his mind and imagination—and in Kassel in early 1784 he published his groundbreaking About the Breadfruit. In what was ostensibly a botanical treatise, he illustrated how the tendrils of botany reached into culture, ethnography, history, linguistics and human migration. A brilliant and original piece of scholarship, About the Breadfruit reveals George’s visionary thinking, the work of a man way ahead of his time.

George had first encountered the breadfruit during the Resolution voyage.* It was a tropical fruit which grew on large trees on many of the South Pacific islands they had visited. He had enjoyed the dishes made with the abundant breadfruit—cooked on hot stones or fermented into a dough which was baked like bread—but he had also noticed that they had been seedless. With no seeds, the breadfruit trees on Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula, George explained in his essay, could only be propagated by cuttings from suckers that grow off the tree’s roots. During the many months they had spent in the region, George had not seen a single wild breadfruit tree—all of them had been planted by humans.

That made him wonder where breadfruit trees originated and how they had arrived on the islands. Searching Göttingen’s vast library, George had then discovered several botanical volumes which contained descriptions of wild specimens with seeds and small fruits with little flesh from Indonesia and the Philippines. If Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula had no indigenous breadfruit trees with seeds, the only explanation was that they must have been exported from Southeast Asia, travelling thousands of miles across the ocean to the South Pacific islands. For George this proved two things. Firstly, the sophistication of the islanders’ agricultural methods—as there was apparently no seedless variety in Southeast Asia, they must have bred and transformed the originally small fruit into the large nourishing crop he had tasted. Just as cereals and fruits had been domesticated through selective breeding in Europe, so the South Pacific islanders had used cuttings from trees with larger fruits to facilitate the slow changes over the centuries—‘bit by bit’.

His second conclusion was even more striking, for the history and movement of the breadfruit enabled George to develop a stunning understanding of Polynesian migration. The breadfruit’s journey, and its cultivation from a small fruit with spiky skin, seeds and little flesh, to the larger seedless variety found in Tahiti, Tanna and the other islands, was proof that the Polynesians had migrated east from Southeast Asia across the Pacific—a theory confirmed more than 200 years later by DNA and archaeological studies. As people had boarded their canoes to travel to distant islands, they had packed their most valuable crops and animals. ‘The breadfruit tree,’ George wrote, ‘could only have been brought eastwards by humans.’

About the Breadfruit also illustrates how differently George thought from other scientists and explorers of his day. During the Endeavour voyage Joseph Banks had also taken note of breadfruit trees but his interest was economic. Struck by the ease of cultivation and rich harvests—‘Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree,’ he had written in his journal during the Endeavour’s stay in Tahiti—Banks lobbied both George III and Parliament to send an expedition to the South Pacific to transfer breadfruit tree seedlings from Tahiti to the West Indies in order to feed the slaves on British sugar plantations. Where Banks saw a nutritious high-yielding food plant that could fuel the engine of the British Empire, George Forster saw evidence of Polynesian migration.

...

The differences George observed in the people of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, compared to those on more easterly islands, was the result of intermingling between the descendants of the first migration wave and later Polynesian settlers. George could have not known the complex details of these migration patterns, but more than two centuries ago he worked out the broad outlines by studying the diaspora of Polynesian languages and the history of the breadfruit tree. He could only guess their reasons—‘oppression by their own people, or foreign conquerors, or superstitious legends, or some other cause’—but he was convinced that these great ancient navigators and their families had set out on purpose to find new islands to colonize and had not drifted there by accident. ‘I cast a glance at a map of that part of the world,’ he wrote in About the Breadfruit, ‘I survey the vast Pacific Ocean, and find that the most distant, solitary, and scattered islands are not only inhabited by people, but occupied by the very same people… I confess, I cannot convince myself that a storm, or a series of similar coincidences, is sufficient to satisfactorily explain this widespread dispersion of one and the same people across such a vast ocean from New Zealand to Easter Island.’

The people of the South Pacific, George realized, were connected rather than separated by the ocean. Where others saw tiny islands spread across the vastness of the Pacific, he brought them together with the threads of migrations. Building on what he had seen as a young man, George had matured into a bold and original thinker. It would take more than two hundred years for the world to catch up with him.

• As the first to publish the botanical description of the breadfruit from the South Pacific islands shortly after their return in 1775, George and Reinhold had their name attached to it for posterity—Artocarpus communis J.R. & G. Forst.

Forster's A Voyage Round the World

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 229-231:

By the end of 1776, less than four months after he had written the first word, the manuscript of A Voyage Round the World arrived at the printer. Publication was eagerly awaited—the naturalist Gilbert White (who was the publisher’s brother) excitedly informed friends and family at the end of January 1777 that publication was imminent. George felt no sense of relief because he had to begin the German translation immediately.

Reinhold had signed a contract with a German publisher who had travelled from Berlin to London in the previous summer. Karl Spener was an ambitious young man who had taken over his father’s firm at the age of twenty-three and who had met the Forsters already before the Resolution voyage when he visited England in 1771. Spener was only five years older than George and would become a trusted friend. George, Reinhold decided, would translate his own book, a daunting prospect given the many years in which George had spoken only English—he didn’t even converse in German with his family (and for the rest of his life, his father would speak and write to him in English). George’s letters to friends and acquaintances in Germany were always peppered with English words and his written German had become erratic. ‘I just have to ask one thing,’ he wrote to Spener with apprehension, ‘can the Berlin printers spell correctly?’ Someone would need to correct the final manuscript.

George was ill, exhausted, and had lost so much weight that even Reinhold Forster had to admit his son might need some assistance. It arrived in the form of Rudolf Erich Raspe, a brilliant eccentric who had fled the German state of Hesse-Kassel after it was discovered that he had been stealing and selling ancient coins from the collections of his employer, Landgrave Friedrich II. With news travelling slowly, Raspe wangled himself onto the guest list of the Royal Society but was soon expelled. He would later write the hugely successful Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia — a whimsical satire in which the eponymous protagonist performs such feats as riding on a cannonball, shooting a stag with cherry stones (the stag subsequently grows a cherry tree between his antlers) and visiting the moon. For the moment, Raspe was to work with George on the German translation of A Voyage Round the World. Progress was woefully slow and Raspe was often ill. Like his fictional character Munchausen, he also had a tendency to exaggerate and lie, coming up with excuses for his failure to deliver and reasons to borrow money from the Forsters. George spent a lot of time merging the voices of two translations into one and the collaboration ended in anger. Raspe, George told Spener, liked only himself and believed that others existed entirely to serve him.

The English edition of A Voyage Round the World was published on 17 March 1777. Six weeks later, Captain Cook’s own Voyage Towards the South Pole appeared, printed in a larger format and illustrated with more than sixty engravings after the drawings by William Hodges, the expedition artist—but the images of animals and plants were copied from George’s drawings which Banks had bought. It was one thing that George hadn’t been allowed to use Hodges’ evocative landscapes and depictions of indigenous people (as his father believed had been initially agreed with the Admiralty), but quite another that he couldn’t use his own drawings after Reinhold had sold them. But to see them published in Cook’s book now was a terrible blow.

Thankfully, the reviews of George’s A Voyage Round the World were mostly positive, with several writers commenting that they felt as if they were actually travelling on the Resolution. George was delighted. Samuel Johnson, one of the great literary figures of the age and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, called the book ‘a great affection of fine writing’. Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell declared that ‘he carries you along with him’. Those who compared the two books favoured George’s A Voyage Round the World. ‘Captain Cook’s own narrative is a mere sailor’s journal,’ wrote one reviewer, but he was disappointed by the lack of illustrations in George’s account. ‘Every page of it abounds with life and character,’ raved the reviewer for The Town and Country Magazine, ‘painted with all the force of language.’ More than a dozen reviews were published in England, several with long extracts.

Rather than wait for the German translation, many German reviewers also read the English edition. Most admired the book, describing it as ‘ravishing’ and ‘admirable’, but there were also critical voices. One took offence at George’s description of the Dutch East India Company as ‘cruel and ambitious spice merchants’, and another disliked the favourable depiction of indigenous people, complaining about his ‘acerbic allusions to the cruelty, harshness and vices of the Europeans’. Confident about his arguments and portrait of the islanders, George sent a public reply to one of Germany’s leading newspapers, asking: ‘Why not deliver eulogies on virtues? They may appear anywhere—in a beggar’s hut or a palace, in Europe or Tahiti.’ He had no interest in repeating tedious prejudices against the indigenous people—‘I therefore show real virtues among savages, where in similar cases vices prevail among civilized people.’

The most glowing German review came from Christoph Martin Wieland, a distinguished writer who declared George nothing less than a poet. In an extensive commentary, published over three issues of the Teutsche Merkur, one of Germany’s most important journals, Wieland pronounced A Voyage Round the World a thrilling book. The descriptions were painterly and humanistic, executed with intensity and enthusiasm. It was a masterpiece. As always, Reinhold attempted to take the credit, insisting that he had shaped his son. ‘I alone was his leader, his teacher,’ he later said to Wieland, ‘who awakened the dormant spark of divinity in him.’

Within six months, pirated French and Swedish translations were available, followed by Spanish and Russian editions, and then even more French editions. None were authorized. Soon the book was declared a classic but it didn’t sell enough copies to support Reinhold’s spending habits, and of course they never received any money from the pirated translations. People loved pictures, George admitted, and at two guineas A Voyage Round the World cost the same as Cook’s generously illustrated and Admiralty-subsidized account. Father and son would have to find other ways to finance their life in London.