Wordcatcher Tales: Moroheiya tempura, Henohenomoheji sake

A few weeks ago, I came across a food item in my local Japanese grocery store that was new to me. The package of deep-fried, dark green leaves was labeled "moroheya tenpura." Of course, I couldn't resist trying some. The leaves were crispy and oily, stuck together by their own slime, rather than by tempura batter. They tasted oily, slightly bitter—and very healthy!



The Japanese name for the leaves is usually written in katakana as モロヘイヤ moroheiya, ultimately from Arabic muluxīya but probably via some non-Arabic intermediary language with /o/ in place of /u/. The leaves of jute plants (Corchorus spp.), also known as mallow leaves, are widely eaten wherever jute is grown between West Africa and South Asia, and there are many different transliterations of its name in local varieties of Arabic: mulukhiyah, molokhia, mulukhiyya, malukhiyah, mloukhiya. It now shows up in Japanese cuisine, where it's valued for its healthy slimy quality as well as high vitamin content.

The Japanese name for the plant (Corchorus olitorius) is shima-tsuna-so (縞綱麻 'stripe-rope-hemp'), also called タイワンツナソ Taiwan tsunaso 'Taiwan rope plant/hemp', ナガミツナソ nagami tsunaso (possibly) 'long-body rope plant/hemp', or simply ジュート juuto 'jute'.



In Nagoya this past summer, we made a return visit to the exquisite Kyoukamo Restaurant (京加茂), famous thereabouts for its Kyoto-style kaiseki cuisine. You can see photos of what we ate and drank starting here.

Our affable hosts served two award-winning sakes this year, both in the West (Kansai and western Japan) division, where they were ranked like sumo rikishi. The first won the Ōzeki ('champion') prize and the second won the Yokozuna ('grand champion') prize. The latter had such a floral/herbal nose that it resembled an Alsatian Gewürtztraminer. When I asked our hostess for the name of the sake, she said, Henohenomoheji. I asked, "What is that supposed to mean?!" So she showed me the magazine page reproduced here, where the hiragana characters of the name sketch a human face beneath a triangular hat. Each への pair forms an eyebrow and eye, the も forms a nose, へforms downturned lips, and じ delineates the cheeks and chin.

The brewery is Akishika (秋鹿 'Autumn Deer') of Nose Township, Toyono County, where Osaka Prefecture intrudes between Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures. The restaurant owner gave me their address and I decided on a whim to pay the brewer a visit on the last day of our trip, when I had a day to kill on my own and a still-valid JR railpass.

Well, it turned out to be well off the JR lines. I hopped a bullet train to Shin-Osaka, took an express to JR Amagasaki, took the JR Fukuchiyama Line uphill to Kawanishi-Ikeda, then walked over to Kawanishi-Noseguchi, the downhill terminus of the little Nose Dentetsu (owned by Hankyu Railway), where a lady at the ticket window said I would have to take a bus from the rail terminus at Myōkenguchi.

Myōkenguchi, the entrance to Mount Myōken (妙見山), consisted of little more than a parking lot, a post office, and a combination restaurant and souvenir shop. A bus was due to arrive soon, but it would take 30 minutes to get to the brewery and only ran once an hour. So, as a trophy for my misbegotten adventure, I bought a big bottle of Akishika-brand sake from the very friendly shop owners, who threw in a couple of empty バンビカップ 'Bambi cup' glasses as souvenirs, saying they were their bestsellers and not widely available. (I later discovered you can buy them online.) Then I hopped the return train and transferred my way back toward Nagoya, where I left the sake bottle and cups at our hotel's front desk, for them to pass on to the friend who treated us to that wonderful kaiseki dinner at Kyoukamo.

Wordcatcher Tales: Kamigata, Kudarimono, Edokko

Tokyo may be the center of modern Japan. All trains bound for the capital, whether coming from northern Japan or western Japan, are nobori-ressha 'upbound/ascending trains', while those bound for "the provinces" are kudari-ressha 'downbound/descending trains'. But the older Kamigata ('upper') capital region of Kyoto and Osaka still had the upper hand, both culturally and industrially, well into the Edo period. Goods manufactured in Kamigata for customers in the Tokugawa capital were kudari-mono 'downbound/descending goods'. I wonder when the directions were officially reversed. Was it after Edo became Tokyo ('Eastern Capital') during the Meiji era?

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 41-43:

The center of Edo was the shogun's castle. At least until the Genroku period (1688–1704) the city was primarily the capital of the warrior. It was a teeming metropolis, a million strong, with men outnumbering women by more than two to one. Edo bustled with warriors, craftsmen, merchants, and performers from throughout the land. The upper class amused itself at the kabuki or in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters; the activities of the big spenders captured the public imagination.

The shogun, daimyo, and their retainers spent almost all their money in the city; Edo was a center of consumption. Originally, very little was produced there, neither daily necessities nor high-grade cultural artifacts. Instead, articles were imported from Kamigata, that is, from the Kyoto and Osaka area. Such goods were called kudarimono—quality products that had "come down" from Kamigata. Wares that had not "come down" were considered inferior: thus the origin of the word kudaran ("not come down"), meaning uninteresting or worthless. The sale of imported goods netted great profits for Edo branches of stores headquartered in Ise, Ōmi, or other provinces. From around the Genroku period these businesses, known as Edo-dana and located at Nihonbashi, Denmacho, and elsewhere, expanded greatly. This expansion signaled the rise of the Edo chōnin's economic power.

As mentioned earlier, Edo-dana were staffed exclusively by men who had come to Edo only to work. These men even saw to their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Unable to sink their roots in the city, Edo-dana employees remained perennial outsiders. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, a new type of individual appeared: the Edokko, a pure Edo chōnin, who was rooted in the city itself. The first recorded usage of the term Edokko occurs in a senryū [satiric, witty verse identical in form to more serious haiku] of 1771, and thereafter was used by many authors....

One finds no label corresponding to the Edokko in Osaka and Kyoto. No concept of an "Osakakko" or a "Kyotokko" exists; nor is there any parallel in Nagoya, Kanazawa, or Hiroshima. Thus we must ask why the idea of such a native arose solely in Edo. The answer to this question is simple. In Osaka, Kyoto, and other cities, almost the entire chōnin population corresponded to what the Edokko was in Edo. In the capital, however, a huge number of unassimilated provincials remained "outsiders," providing a contrast to the distinctly native Edokko. During the city's early years, this heterogeneous population grew larger and developed evenly; but by the second half of the eighteenth century a marked contrast between natives and nonnatives begins to appear. This contrast was not entirely missing in other large cities such as Osaka or Kyoto, but in Edo a much larger part of the population remained nonnative.

Within Edo there existed yet another distinction: the sharp contrast between the uptown (yamanote) and the downtown (shitamachi) areas. These terms can already be found in the hanashibon (storybook) known as Eda sangoju (Beads of Coral) published in 1690. The yamanote area was a diluvial terrace packed with warrior residences; the shitamachi area was an alluvial area with a concentration of chōnin dwellings. Since the chōnin class was further split between Edokko and a large population of Edo-dana "outsiders," Edokko were constantly confronted with a large number of people unlike themselves. The unmistakable character of the Edokko developed within this social context.

The Edokko's sense of nativeness that emerged during the second half of the eighteenth century fostered the efflorescence of Edokko culture. This unique culture was, however, not created by Edokko alone. Instead, it resulted from the interaction of three groups, each of which complemented the others: the warriors, the provincial chōnin "outsiders," and the Edokko.

My first younger brother was born in Tokyo, and so claims to be an "Edokko." But my other two brothers born in Japan have never been labeled "Kokurakko" or "Kyotokko" after their birthplaces. Until I read the passage above, I had never thought to ask why not.

Remnants of Early Baltic Settlers

From The Baltic: A New History of the Region and Its People, by Alan Palmer (Overlook, 2006), pp. 16-17:

Neither anthropology nor philology is an exact science and few today would follow the nationalistic scholars of the nineteenth century who equated race and language when seeking the origin of a country. But new techniques can revive familiar speculation while mellowing past prejudice. In the early 1980s the Finnish historian Matti Klinge argued that research into hereditary blood groups showed that three-quarters of the Finnish population were of western descent and only a third of eastern origin. He pointed out, however, that the linguistic structure of the Finnish language has remained more markedly eastern in character than western. Is this perhaps because the Finns and their kinsfolk south of the Gulf in Estonia are peoples with traditions of folk epic handed down orally? Their languages were shaped before the coming of written words. Finland's Kalevala and Estonia's Kalevipoeg survived as tales of patriot derring-do in taming both the forces of Nature and the evil spirits conjured up in a primeval wilderness of lake and forest.

By the end of the Scandinavian Bronze Age (circa 500 BC) other migrants felt drawn towards the setting sun, like the Finno-Ugrian before them. They came mainly from the south-east, to form compact units along the Baltic's southern shores, with their communities set apart by forests, bogs and rivers. Among them were Prussian tribes astride the Vistula, the Polame on the Warta (farther inland, around modern Poznan) and a group of Lithuanian tribes around the river Niemen (Nemanus) and its tributaries. Over the following centuries tribal chiefs, seeking effective means to defend their homesteads, created what were in effect embryonic nations across these marchlands. Some tribes, like the Salic Franks and the Burgundians, provided a nucleus for historic kingdoms established after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Others bore names that recur in successive periods of northern Europe's history. Thus the Cours (or Curonians), a tribe who lived in the peninsula between the central Baltic and the Gulf of Riga, survived as a separate people until the late thirteenth century and gave their name to the Duchy of Courland (Kurzeme, or in German Kurland) which between 1561 and 1795 enjoyed semi-independence within the Polish Commonwealth. The Cours' neighbours, the Zemgal tribe (Semigallians), also maintained a distinctive corporate existence until 1290, farming the low-lying region west of the Daugava river that later formed the eastern part of the Courland Duchy.

Both Kurzeme and Zemgale are back on the map in today's atlases: they form administrative divisions in modern Latvia. Three of the Western Slav peoples survive as member states of the European Union: Poland; the Czech Republic; Slovakia. Other tribes, once famed and feared for their fighting qualities, have sunk without trace. Among them were most of the Wends, the Western Slavs who settled between Kiel Bay and the Vistula Spit and may themselves be subdivided into Wagrians, Abotrites, Polabians and Rugians. But two of the 'lost' Wendish peoples are still extant, though few in number: some 50,000 Sorbs of Lusatia now live between the Oder and the Elbe and there is an even smaller community of Kashubs, Pomerania's original 'dwellers by the shore'. Like the people of Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Provence, the Sorbs and Kashubs owe their linguistic survival to academics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who defied the exclusiveness of master nations to fire the embers of a dying culture. By contrast, the Setus, a Finno-Ugrian people who settled around Lake Peipsi, were too isolated to find scholarly champions in the West. No more than 7,000 Setu survive, their communities separated today by the geographically ill-defined border that provides a frontier between Estonia and Russia.

I find two of Palmer's linguistic explanations almost laughable.

(1) Are Finns and Estonians the only "peoples with traditions of folk epic handed down orally," the only peoples whose "languages were shaped before the coming of written words"? Does he doubt that Norse sagas were orally transmitted long before they were written down? Does he realize that legions of illiterates have done far more over the millennia to influence the structures of the languages they speak than literates have?

(2) Were academics the saviors of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Occitan, Sorbian, and Kashubian? Are those languages only spoken in classrooms? If so, then they are not yet saved. Academics may have documented those languages and first reduced them to writing, but they haven't saved them until people pass them on to their children and use them in a wider variety of settings.

As a historian, Palmer depends crucially on written records to construct his view of the world, but his imagination also seems hemmed in a bit too much by that literacy, as if nothing noteworthy exists until it exists in writing.

Westernized Edo-period Woodblock Prints

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 70-71:

Gennai, who was well versed in Western art and painted in oils himself, was surrounded by a cultural group whose role in Edo-period culture can hardly be overestimated. Gennai's coterie included scholars of Western learning, doctors practicing Dutch-style medicine, scholars of Chinese literature, calligraphers, and many others. The interaction of these men led to the creation of a number of ukiyo-e and books.

Nishiki-e were an artistic development that stood in sharp contrast to earlier Japanese prints. In Japanese painting before the age of nishiki-e, empty space was charged with great meaning. Use of blank areas was deeply related to the Buddhist notions of emptiness (kū), to specifically Japanese ideas of space (ma), and to Japanese philosophies of nature. These concepts are in turn related to the idea of nothingness (mu) found in Eastern thought in general. From the time of Harunobu's nishiki-e, however, virtually the entire surface of the picture was filled with color. Moreover, many nishiki-e employed Western techniques of perspective. This denial of the Eastern concept of mu and departure from the design and coloration of previous Japanese pictorial art was in part the result of a familiarity with Western techniques of oil painting and copperplate etching. Not everything was taken from these sources, but the works of Harunobu, Haruaki, Sharaku, Utamaro, and Hokusai unambiguously show such influence. These men (with the possible exception of Sharaku) often attended the daishōkai [calendar designing and printing events] and were good friends with Hiraga Gennai, Shiba Kōkan, and Gennai's outstanding disciple Morishima Chūryō.

The establishment of nishiki-e with perspective within the context of traditional "flat" Japanese painting was an epoch-making event in the history of Japanese pictorial art. Western techniques had here been completely absorbed into Japanese culture. Although the roots of these techniques could be traced back a century and a half to Western influence at the start of the Edo period. Western procedures now reemerged as something entirely new. Nishiki-e met with such unusual acclaim by the Japanese commoner population because Western techniques had been so thoroughly assimilated.

This process of assimilation also led to the nishiki-e fads in Europe and the United States. From the end of the Edo period to the early years of the Meiji era, a tremendous number of nishiki-e masterpieces were sold to foreigners. The works of Hokusai, which were perhaps the most Western in tone, were especially prized and often became the subject of scholarly studies.

Edo-period Sinophilia & Hollandophilia

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 13-14:

There is yet another reason why Edo-period culture has not been properly appreciated: the influence of Chinese culture has not yet been properly understood. During the Edo period Chinese culture was highly venerated. Its deep and lasting influence was important, not just for Japanese Confucianism and Confucian scholarship, but for a whole range of other pursuits as well. The effect of Chinese poetry and literature, or of Ming and Qing dynasty art and scholarship, can hardly be overestimated. For example, the book Tianxia yitong zhi (Records of All the World) greatly influenced the fudoki (gazetteers) produced throughout Japan. This volume was published as Dai Min ittō-shi (Records of the Ming Dynasty) at the beginning of the Genroku era (1688–1704) by a warrior from the Wakayama domain. Similarly, the volumes Gai yu congkao (Gaiyō sōkō in Japanese) by ZhaoYi (1727–1814) were also profoundly influential. The respect for things Chinese lasted until the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), but thereafter the fact that Chinese culture had once been of great importance faded from memory.

Similarly, "Dutch learning" (that is, Western learning, rangaku) was also highly important during the Edo period. Over one hundred times throughout the Edo period, the chief of the Dutch settlement at Dejima in Nagasaki came to Edo to receive an audience and present gifts to the shogun. For some twenty or thirty days during the spring, the chief and his retinue stayed at the Nagasaki-ya, a lodge at Hongoku-chō. From around the middle of the Edo period, a number of cultured individuals made use of these few weeks to engage in unfettered cultural exchange widi the Dutch. Japanese were strictly forbidden to enter the Dutch outpost of Dejima in Nagasaki, but within Edo much free activity was possible. After the Meiji Restoration, however, the diplomatic relations maintained by the Tokugawa bakufu with the Dutch were overshadowed by the Meiji government's policy of strengthening ties with England, France, Germany, and the United States. In turn, much that concerned rangaku was forgotten. Although cultural exchange with the Dutch was once of great significance, its conditions and historical role have only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. Such examples show that Edo-period culture demands reevaluation. The type of historical perspective suggested here should begin to make a correct appraisal possible.

The Strength of Edo-period Culture

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 8-9:

The strength of Edo-period culture is not to be found in extant artifacts of the era. Rather, its strength lies chiefly in its spectacular breadth and diversity. This was a period of unprecedented cultural prosperity. Even the general public took part in leisure pursuits and played an active role in the creation of new cultural forms. The average commoner read books or visited the theater; some even wrote haiku verses and senryū (seventeen-syllable comic verse) or performed musical genres such as gidayū, kato bushi, shinnai, or nagauta. Others went on pilgrimages sponsored by religious associations (kō) and toured distant places. The Edo period saw a rise in the quality of culinary fare that commoners consumed; clothing and housing too showed marked improvement. Even the poor managed occasionally to indulge in the luxury of purchasing a "custom-made" comb or an ornamental hairpin. The demand for such cultural items fostered the development of a highly refined handicraft industry. Never before had there been such an extraordinary variety of hand-made cultural artifacts in Japan.

Even in remote areas in the countryside or on distant, isolated islands, inhabitants cultivated rare varieties of flowers and trees and marketed unusual rocks or curiosities. As Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) noted in his Akiyama kikō (Autumn Mountain Travelogue, 1831), people in every corner of the land were busy manufacturing local specialties. Such articles were being produced, one by one, by thirty million people. By the late Edo period this activity had stimulated an unprecedented development of the transportation network. Mountain roads, waterways, and sea routes were extended in all directions to every nook and cranny of the country. Indeed, the construction of footpaths during the late Edo period can be seen as a kind of symbol of this golden age of handicraft culture.

No doubt, Japan today boasts a high level of culture. But the price has been high as well: severe environmental pollution and the wholesale destruction of nature. Until the end of the Edo period, red-crested cranes could still be seen soaring through the skies over the city; swans and geese flocked to Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park. Foxes and badgers were found everywhere, and cuckoos (hototogisu) flourished in such numbers that their song was considered a nuisance. Even during the late Meiji period the water of the Sumida River was clean enough to be used for brewing tea while boating. Human activity imparted only minimal damage to nature. Viewed in this way, Edo-period culture seems almost ideal.

Certain elements of the Edo-period cultural heritage were vulgar, no doubt, but a more comprehensive view of the period reveals an almost infinite number of admirable qualities. Nevertheless, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, governmental policies of modernization and westernization dictated a wholesale rejection of the preceding feudal era. Even the best elements of Edo-period culture were deemed outdated and vulgar and were thought to require prompt and thorough extirpation. That the true value of Edo-period culture could not yet be properly assessed had much to do with the lack of any inquiry into its origins and actual conditions. Recent research, however, has shown that Edo-period culture was outstanding in its own way and not at all inferior to the culture of earlier or later periods.

Wordcatcher Tales: Birds for Trains

"So what is a shirasagi, anyway?" I asked the JR clerk in Nagoya Station who had initiated our rail passes and booked reservations on the Shirasagi Limited Express to Hida Takayama. "Could it be a white rabbit (shira- 'white' + usagi 'rabbit')?" She had no idea. But I should have known it would be a bird.

Before the advent of the Shinkansen bullet trains in 1964, the most famous limited express train along the Tokaido Main Line was the Tsubame 'swallow'. In fact, the Japan National Railways (JNR, 国鉄) used a swallow logo on its bus system and called its professional baseball team the (Kokutetsu) Swallows. Two other notable limited express trains we rode in those days were the Hato 'dove' and the Kamome 'seagull'.

Most express trains were named for destinations, like the Miyajima Express that I used to ride home to Hiroshima from boarding school in Kobe, but the fastest limited express trains tended to be named for birds. The first bullet trains went for even speedier names: Kodama 'echo' (speed of sound), Hikari 'flash' (speed of light), and the latest, postmodern-sounding Nozomi 'desire'. But regional bullet trains have revived a lot of the old limited-express bird names: Hayabusa 'peregrine falcon', Kamome 'seagull', Toki 'crested ibis', Tsubame 'swallow'.

On our latest trip, we were in the Hokuriku region, off the Shinkansen grid, where the fastest trains are traditional limited expresses, so we encountered several bird-named trains that were new to me. Shirasagi can be translated 'snowy egret' (Egretta thula), although sagi labels the whole family of herons (Ardeidae), as in aosagi (lit. 'blue heron') 'gray heron' (Ardeia cinerea).

Coming back to Kanazawa from Nanao on the Noto Peninsula, we rode the Sandābādo/Thunderbird, whose name left me a bit nonplussed until we paired it with Raichō 'rock ptarmigan' (Lagopus muta), a limited express that runs from Osaka through Kanazawa to Toyama. Thunderbird began operations as Super Raichō (Thunderbird), and Raichō (雷鳥) literally translates as 'thunder bird'. The rock ptarmigan is a symbol of Toyama Prefecture's Tateyama, one of Japan's 三霊山 Sanreizan 'Three Holy Mountains', along with Fujisan and Hakusan. (Doesn't the Rock Ptarmigan sound like a good name for a smaller version of Ford's SVT Raptor?)

Another limited express we rode between Kanazawa and Toyama was the Hakutaka, whose name is always written in kana, not kanji, and whose train cars carry an emblem with the English words "White Wing." The name evokes an old Tateyama legend about a white hawk (白鷹, which would normally be pronounced shirataka), but also evokes the name of a long-distance train, Hakuchō ('white bird' =) 'swan' that used to run all the way from Aomori (where the swan is the prefectural bird) via Ueno and Kanazawa to Osaka. The name Hakutaka was independently used for trains running on the leg between Ueno and Kanazawa until that leg was disrupted by the extension of the Shinkansen toward Nagano and Niigata in 1982. In 1997 it was revived for limited express trains running along the Japan Sea coast between Fukui and Niigata prefectures.

The first Japanese long-distance trains to receive names seem to have been the Fuji and Sakura, which began running between Tokyo and Shimonoseki in 1912, but were not named until 1929.

The first train named Hato 'dove' was an express on the South Manchuria Railway (満鉄 Mantetsu) running between Dalian and the new (in 1932) Manchukuo capital, 新京 Shinkyō (now Changchun). The limited express on that route was named あじあ Ajia 'Asia'.

POSTSCRIPT: The first trains named Hikari and Nozomi were Mantetsu expresses running between Busan (釜山) and Shinkyō (新京). (Japanese Wikipedia offers very detailed coverage of Japanese train systems, past and present.)

And, speaking of Imperial Japan, many of the same bird names were used for Hayabusa-class torpedo boats built between 1900 and 1904 that served so well in the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War.

Wordcatcher Tales: Two Lakes Ōmi, Near and Far

Japan's largest freshwater lake, 琵琶湖 Biwa-ko 'biwa lake', got its current name from its elongated shape, which vaguely resembles that of the biwa, a Japanese lute, sharper at one end, rounder at the other. But the older name for the lake and the land around it (now Shiga Prefecture) was Ōmi 淡海 < awaumi 'light (= freshwater) sea'. (Compare the native Japanese reading for 湖 'lake' mizu-umi lit. 'water-sea' and the Sino-Japanese compound 淡水 tansui 'freshwater').

The older name, Ōmi, still shows up in a host of local place names—Ōmi-Hachiman (近江八幡), Ōmi-Imazu (近江今津), Ōmi-Maiko (近江舞子), Ōmi-Shiotsu (近江塩津), etc.—but nowadays it's always written as 近江 lit. 'near-bay/inlet/river'. (江 is the e of 江戸 Edo lit. 'bay-door'.) What's up with that?

Well, it turns out there was another notable freshwater lake near Hamamatsu in what is now Shizuoka Prefecture. To the Kinki hegemons of the Nara and Heian periods, it was the 遠つ淡海 Tōtu-ōmi 'far freshwater sea', later shortened to 遠江 Tōtōmi 'far waters', which was also the name of the surrounding province.

The lake closer to the capital was distinguished as the 近つ淡海 Tikatu-ōmi 'near lake', shortened in writing to 近江 'near waters', but pronounced simply Ōmi, since it was, after all, The Lake (like 'The City').

Nowadays, the two lakes are no longer sibling rivals. A major earthquake in 1498 breached the narrow shoreline that separated Lake Tōtōmi from the ocean, leaving its waters brackish, though still very productive. It now goes by the rather prosaic name Lake Hamana (浜名湖 Hamana-ko 'shorename-lake'), while Lake Ōmi sports a more poetic moniker, Lake Biwa: 琵琶湖 Biwa-ko 'lute lake'.

On Rewriting While Translating

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 3-4:

In translating I have striven to remain faithful to the spirit rather than the letter of Nishiyama's prose. Some therefore may wish to label this book an adaptation rather than a translation. Nishiyama writing style is stiff and often thrives more on a general tone of enthusiasm for the subject than on logical connections between sentences or paragraphs. Such a style, informed by the conviction that a good point bears repetition and that the relevance of an example need not be clarified until the very end of a section, entirely rules out literal translation. I have thus pruned judiciously, rewritten, rethought sentence and paragraph order, but refrained from adding anything substantially new to Nishiyama's writing. The only exceptions to this rule are a few brief definitions of terms unlikely to be known to a nonspecialist Anglophone readership and, moreover, the endings of Chapters 7, 8, and 9. In the original, these chapters simply stop when Nishiyama has run out of things to say. Such a writing style, common enough in Japanese academic prose, often irritates Western readers, who tend to prefer more synthetic conclusions. In these chapters, therefore, I have added summaries of Nishiyama's major points, thereby bringing the chapter to a smoother close while not adding anything new.

Since the studies translated here were not conceived by Nishiyama as forming one volume, much material is repeated. In some cases I have simply excised such duplication. The largest cut occurs in Chapter 6. Here I have eliminated or moved to other chapters most of the information that is presented in the first half of the original study, which repeats much of what has already been translated as Chapters 1 through 5. All major changes have been discussed with Professor Nishiyama, who himself occasionally suggested alterations and corrections.

Documentation in the original studies is often lacking and sometimes erroneous. In an effort to complete as many references as possible, I have started from scratch. Unless otherwise indicated, therefore, all notes are by the translator. Rechecking sources has allowed me to uncover several errors and misprints, which have been silently corrected after confirmation by the author.

The selection of illustrations and maps, the transcription of musical examples, and the production of the glossary are also my responsibility. Other editorial additions include dates and footnoted biographical information on individuals, details of geographical location of small towns and villages, variant names and performance dates of kabuki plays or musical works, and dates of publication of books. Names of individuals have presented a special problem, since Nishiyama endows the use of pseudonyms (geimei) with a special significance. Edo-period writers, actors, musicians, and artists often assumed a large variety of pseudonyms, forcing the translator to select one of several names for the sake of consistency. I have generally selected the name most likely to appear in biographical dictionaries.

Translating the titles of books or kabuki plays presents yet other obstacles. Titles of novels, plays, or collections of poetry are often the source of cryptic puns—and in cases where a work no longer exists, the exact reading and meaning of the title are anybody's guess. For extant books I have usually followed the reading of titles found in the Kokusho sōmokuroku. Kabuki titles are given in the version most likely to appear in kabuki dictionaries; alternative titles are given in the notes. A rough translation of a title's most obvious meaning follows the original in parentheses; when such a translation appears in italics, this indicates that the book has been published under this title in English. The reader should note that the names of Buddhist temples end with the syllables ji, in, tera, or dera; Shinto shrines often end with sha, gu, or miya.

New Scholarship on Wartime Kabuki, 1931–1945

The latest issue of Asian Theatre Journal (via Project MUSE) contains a review (by UCLA's Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei) of James Brandon's myth-shattering new book, Kabuki's Forgotten War: 1931–1945 (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009). Here are a few snippets to give a flavor of how stunningly revisionist the book is.

It was in 2002, at a conference honoring the work of Leonard C. Pronko, that I first heard James R. Brandon present the extraordinary research he was doing on kabuki during what the Japanese call the Fifteen-Year War, the last four years of which encompass the Pacific War of World War II. I will never forget the shock waves in the room as he showed slides and told us about a wartime kabuki play called Three Heroic Human Bombs. Here were kabuki actors performing in 1932, dressed in modern military uniforms, looking for all the world like realistic film actors, carrying bombs as they slogged through mud and barbed wire toward a glorious suicide during Japan's war in China. And then he told us about other new plays from that period, starring famous kabuki actors performing alongside (gasp!) actresses—not onnagata, but females from shinpa and shingeki. The actors wore realistic, contemporary costumes without a trace of kabuki's makeup or wigs, and there was nary a musician in sight. How could these contemporary propaganda plays about military exploits and home front patriotism be kabuki? We all thought we knew what kabuki was, but suddenly the hard-earned knowledge of about a hundred scholars was totally shattered....

As Brandon correctly notes, the war years have been studied extensively from many cultural and political perspectives, but this is the first book in any language (including Japanese) to focus on the wartime history of kabuki. Despite a few notable exceptions, in most Japanese histories of kabuki, "the war years are simply erased" (p. x)....

The book demonstrates kabuki's often enthusiastic complicity with Japan's militarist and imperialist exploits during the 1931–1945 war years, and also puts the situation of kabuki in clear historical perspective. During the early, successful years of the war, kabuki actors and playwrights were in great demand, and they performed many jingoistic, patriotic works. Nevertheless, most actors chose to remember things differently after the war. Brandon quotes from Ichikawa Ennosuke II's postwar memoir: "The five years of the Pacific War was a dark period, a time of suffering for performers." Brandon then comments:

Like most others, Ennosuke did not see himself as a participant in the war. Forgotten were his morale performances in Manchuria, flying to China to gather authentic war material, and the many heroic-soldier roles he enacted in war plays. In portraying himself as a victim of the war and dwelling only on the horrors of the war's end, Ennosuke (and others) erased the victorious years, 1931–1943, when life was good for kabuki artists because of the war.

During the war, kabuki continued its centuries-long tradition of "overnight pickles" (ichiyazuke), plays based on contemporary events that were written and staged within weeks or even days of the actual occurrence. An early wartime "overnight pickle" (when things were still very good for kabuki) dealt with the 1942 capture of Singapore aided by the daring exploits of a young Japanese man whom the popular press dubbed "The Tiger of Malaya." Brandon notes that more than one hundred kabuki overnight pickle plays were written and set during the Fifteen-Year War....

Brandon argues that official support for such morale-boosting kabuki performances, despite overwhelming evidence that Japan was nearing a disastrous defeat, offers a case study supporting the contention that without the atomic bombing, Japan would never have surrendered. He notes that the Japanese cabinet voted numerous times to continue fighting despite the destruction of nearly half of Japan's urban areas and devastating losses in the Pacific. He offers the bizarre case of playwright Kikuta Kazuo, who wrote many anti-American, prowar plays for both Shōchiku and Tōhō, as further proof that the government was in total denial regarding Japan's imminent defeat. Kikuta described what it was like to be one of the last members of the Japan Dramatists' Association to remain in Tokyo after massive American firebombing began in March 1945. The Bureau of Information considered the Dramatists' Association's purpose to be "to gain victory in the war."

Will Japan Surrender Its Economy This Time?

Japan surrendered 65 years ago today, after decades of initially triumphant and then draining military conflict marked by official denial of any possibility of losing militarily until the very day of surrender. A recent op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor by a financial investment researcher suggests Japan is going to lose its formerly triumphant economic "war" in the same way (with lessons for the U.S. and other debt-ridden economies).

Investors are understandably scared of the sovereign debt crisis unfolding in Europe, but they are ignoring a more definite and significantly larger sovereign debt catastrophe that is about to hit the world's third-largest economy: Japan.

The prelude to Japan's current crisis began in the early 1990s when its housing and stock market bubbles popped, leading to recession.

For the next 20 years, using flashy names like Fiscal Structural Reform Act, and Emergency Employment Measures, and Policy Measures of Economic Rebirth, the government cut taxes, increased spending, and borrowed money to finance itself. Once or twice the government found fiscal religion and raised taxes; however, the economy stuttered and taxes again were lowered and the stimulus story continued.

Today, 20 years into endless stimuli, the Japanese economy is beset by the same rot it was then, except that its debt has tripled – the ratio of debt to gross domestic product (GDP) stands at almost 200 percent, double those of the United States and Germany, and second only to Zimbabwe....

A country that has ballooning debt needs to have an expanding economy to help the country outgrow its debt burden. Economic growth is driven by two factors, productivity and population growth. Though the Japanese economy may continue to reap the benefits of productivity, population growth is not in the cards.

Japan has one of the oldest societies in the developed world; every fourth Japanese person is over 65 years of age, and the population is shrinking. Due to cultural mores, workers are largely compensated not on merit but on seniority. Thus, young adults marry later in life, and have kids later.

This helps explain why the Japanese birthrate is one of the lowest in the world, a meager 1.37 per woman, well below the 2.1 figure needed to sustain a population....

Though debt has tripled over the past two decades, government spending on interest payments has not changed; in fact it even declined a little in the mid-2000s. This happened because the government's average interest rate paid on its debt declined from more than 6 percent in the 1990s to 1.4 percent in 2009.

This is about to change. Historically, more than 90 percent of Japanese government-issued debt was consumed internally by its citizens, directly or through its pension system. In the 1990s, the savings rate was very high, pushing the mid-teens, but as people get older, they retire and start drawing down their savings and pensions. Today, the Japanese savings rate is approaching zero, and will probably go negative in the not-so-distant future.

The Japanese economy operates on the (soon-to-be-proved-false) assumption that the government will always be able to borrow at low interest rates. As internal demand for debt evaporates – and it's approaching this level already – the Japanese government will have to start hocking its debt outside Japan.

When it does, it will face a rude shock in the form of higher interest payments. Japanese 10-year Treasuries now yielding 1.0 percent will not stand a chance against US or German bonds of the same maturities that yield 2.89 percent and 2.59 percent, respectively....

Along with China, Japan is the one of the largest holders of US government debt, and its demand for our fine paper will decline. Most likely, Japan will start selling Treasuries. And to make things worse, Japan will start competing with the US, not just in cars and electronics, but for buyers of sovereign government debt. Japan will export inflation, inflation will rise globally, and so will interest rates.

Had I written a similar article five years ago, I would have been "wrong," as today the Japanese economy is still ticking. Timing bubbles – and Japan is in the late stages of an enormous debt bubble – is very difficult, as bubbles tend to last longer than rational observers expect. But every year that the Japanese bubble doesn't burst and debt swells, the eventual pop just grows more catastrophic.

Japan is past the point of no return; its fiscal and demographic problems were created over decades and will take decades to be resolved. In the meantime, its citizens will pay the painful price. Japan is proof that a country cannot borrow itself to prosperity.

China's Chopstick Threat

Today's LA Times contains an op-ed calling attention to the forests being consumed by China's enormous output of disposable chopsticks, which I suspect have nevertheless played a significant role in reducing the spread of communicable diseases (as have disposable hypodermic needles, which constitute another sometimes nasty environmental threat). China's government is now trying to discourage their use.

The disposable chopstick, made largely from birch and poplar (and, less so, from bamboo, because of its higher cost) begins to look deeply menacing — an environmental disaster not to be taken lightly. Begin with China's 1.3 billion people. In one year, they go through roughly 45 billion pairs of the throwaway utensils; that averages out to nearly 130 million pairs of chopsticks a day. (The export market accounts for 18 billion pairs annually.)...

Calls to abandon the use-and-toss type began more than 10 years ago and have since persisted unabated. By 2006, the activism had become more strenuous: Citizens launched a BYOC (Bring Your Own Chopsticks) movement, which continues to gather momentum....

Yet, more than 10 years later, the targeted disposable remains with us. Why?

First, while we in the West don't give much thought to a chopstick "industry," in China, where 100,000 people in more than 300 plants are employed in the manufacture of the wooden utensils, it's most definitely a flourishing enterprise. And just as jobs trump environmental issues in the West (think the coal, oil and logging industries), the argument that 100,000 jobs are at stake is a refrain that carries considerable weight. As Lian Guang, president of the Wooden Chopsticks Trade Assn., told the China Daily in 2009, "The chopstick industry is making a great contribution by creating jobs for poor people in the forestry regions," adding that melamine-resin chopsticks are hardly a sanitary substitute with their "high formaldehyde content." His mention of melamine resin is an effective touch, I admit.

Then there are the restaurants. The alternative to wooden disposables is sterilizing the tableware (plastic, metal or durable wood chopsticks) after each use. But the cost differential is significant: Disposables run about a penny apiece, while sterilization ranges from 15 to 70 cents. Restaurants, especially the low-end ones, worry about passing the costs on to customers. And the worry would seem to be warranted: Consumer advocacy groups from 21 Chinese cities published an open letter in March arguing that the costs of sterilization should not be passed on to consumers as the food safety law obligates restaurants to provide free, clean and safe tableware.

Are paper shopping bags a threat to North American forests?

Another Holiday Hiatus

We're off to Japan until the end of the month.

UPDATE: I've been very busy since I got back, but I have managed to upload, in small batches of a half dozen or so at a time, several score of the hundreds of photos from our trip, many of them with captions that contain tiny Wordcatcher Tales in their own right. Just click on the images from my Flickr account that display on this blog.

Wordcatcher Tales: Akasuri

At the end of a long day's excursion last summer that included being caught in a downpour in Kyoto's Arashiyama district, my friend and host suggested we visit her favorite local bathhouse back in Osaka. I hadn't been to a Japanese public bathhouse in many years, and this was the fanciest one I have ever been to.

It had a noisy game room below but a large expanse of many different indoor and outdoor pools on the top floor. I sampled most of them during the hour I had until my appointment for a massage: the hot tub, the cold tub, the large outdoor pool under the dark sky, and the line of individual tubs, quickly retreating from the first one I tried, which greeted my entering leg with a mild but unexpected electrical charge. There weren't many of us in the men's side; I often had the tubs to myself. Finally, worried about missing my appointment, I sat marinating in the rosemary herbal pool, which had a clock on the wall big enough for me to read without my glasses.

垢擦り akasuri 'cloth/pumice/loofah for rubbing body' (lit. 'scurf-chafing') – My friend, who went in the women's side, had chosen the basic akasuri exfoliating rubdown, rather than the Swedish or shiatsu or other massage. I had never tried that one, so I chose the same. She had told me that the masseuses on the women's side were middle-aged ethnic Koreans. In fact, I would guess the bathhouse complex itself was owned by members of Osaka's huge ethnic Korean population.

The masseuses on the men's side were also sturdy middle-aged ladies. I didn't ask their age or ethnicity. In fact, I was far too relaxed to be as inquisitive as I often am in Japanese restaurants. There was only one other man on a massage table when I showed up, and a different one on another table by the time I finished. In the meantime, the masseuse abraded every inch of my skin—apart from face and genitals (always carefully covered by a washcloth)—first with an astringent, then with a light oil.

By the end my skin felt as smooth as it ever has in my adult life. Although I was a little bit too raw in a few places, I felt 'grime-free', that is, 垢抜け akanuke 'elegant, urbane'. A proper chafing leaves one more refined, as in 人擦れ hitozure '(person-abrasion =) sophistication', even too refined, as in 悪擦れ waruzure '(bad-abrasion =) oversophistication'. But improper chafing can leave a 擦り傷 surikizu '(scrape-wound =) abrasion, scratch' or a 床擦れ tokozure 'bedsore'.

The more generic term for traditional 'massage' or 'masseuse, masseur' in Japanese is 按摩 anma lit. 'press-rub'. The two kanji for 'rub' and 'scrape' combine in the Sino-Japanese compound 摩擦 masatsu 'friction', as in 摩擦音 masatsuon 'fricative sound'.

Wordcatcher Tales: Noukanshi, Encoffiner

納棺師 noukanshi 'encoffiner' (lit. 'closing-coffin-master') – I learned both a new Japanese word and a new English gloss from watching the Japanese movie, Departures (おくりびと Okuribito lit. 'sender, dispatcher', 2008), about a cellist who became an encoffiner. I initially scoffed at its premise and was not overly impressed by its Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009, but decided to give it a try, as much for its potential musicality as its morbidity.

It far exceeded my expectations on both counts. Although quintessentially Japanese in so many ways, it could be adapted to every other human culture on earth—even Neanderthals, who buried their dead with some indications of ritual. The original cello score by "Joe Hisaishi" (久石 譲 = Kuishi Joe < "Quincy Jones") was an added bonus, as was the interview with the director, so full of surprises. Highly recommended, despite being recent and award-winning!

In Japan, the 納棺師 noukanshi 'encoffiner' is hired by the 葬儀屋 sougiya 'funeral director'. Not so long ago (perhaps even nowadays), anyone who was hired to handle dead bodies, or even leather, would have been of outcast status, although until recently the family of the deceased would more likely have been responsible for preparing the body.

In fact, a more traditional, less exalted, and more sexist term for the same role appears in the 1996 novel by Aoki Shinmon that inspired the film, 納棺夫日記 Noukanfu nikki ('encoffiner diary'). The 夫 fu on the end of 納棺夫 noukanfu literally means 'man, husband' (in the latter meaning usually pronounced otto or fuu) but implies a manual laborer, as in 田夫 denpu 'peasant (field hand)', 農夫 noufu 'farmer (farm hand)', 牧夫 bokufu 'herder (ranch hand)', 漁夫 gyofu 'fisherman', 工夫 koufu 'coolie, workman', or 車夫 'rickshaw man'. As one might expect, the role of encoffiner is often performed by women.

In the film, the encoffiner—in full view of the assembled family—carefully exchanges the deceased's bedclothes for a typical sleeping yukata without ever showing more than the corpse's head, feet, and forearms; then reaches under the yukata to wipe down the body and plug its orifices; then carefully dresses the body in funeral garb, applies cosmetics, arranges the hair, crosses the feet, and clasps the hands to make it ready for placement and viewing in the coffin. After the wake and religious funeral, the body is cremated inside its wooden coffin.

The job title of the noukanshi is not easy to translate into English. Although he prepares the body for public viewing, he doesn't embalm it (out of public view in a morgue), so 'embalmer' is not a good gloss. Although he performs a comforting ritual in the family's presence, he handles only one phase of the death ritual, unlike today's multitasking morticians, undertakers, or funeral directors. Nor does he add any religious message, as would an imam, pastor, priest, or rabbi. So encoffiner seems as good a gloss as any. Even though most of its attestations in cyberspace seem to postdate this film—as does 納棺師 in Japanese Wikipedia—the related term encoffinment (especially premature encoffinment!) has a longer pedigree.

The Making of "Uncle Goat"

From: Comfort All Who Mourn: The Life Story of Herbert and Madeline Nicholson, by Herbert V. Nicholson and Margaret Wilke (Bookmates International, 1982), pp. 137-140:

We sailed for Japan on the Flying Scud with two hundred fifty goats. Dick Clark, an expert photographer, was on board with color movie film to record the trip. When it was over he edited some two thousand feet of film into "Ambaassadors of Peace," the record of our trip with the emphasis on "baa." Besides Dick and his camera there was Al Brower, a ventriloquist with his doll Bill, Les Yoder, a Mennonite young man who came along to help, and Ty Nagano, a Nisei.

We arrived in May, which happened to be kidding time. We started with two hundred fifty goats and landed with two hundred sixty five! Just before we reached Yokohama, I was called from bed in the middle of the night. There was trouble in the maternity ward. I found "Temperance," given by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, in agony. She was having a breech delivery. Everyone was standing around not knowing what to do, so I rolled up my sleeves to help. I managed to get hold of the kid's legs and pulled while Temperance pushed, and out came a beautiful large doe. We named her Kiyoko, which means "pure."

When we landed in Yokohama, there was a welcome meeting for us. On that occasion, I told the story of a young Nisei girl, Satomi Yasui, and her family in America who had raised four goats for our project. The Japanese Vice-Minister for Agriculture who was present at the meeting told me afterward that I should tell the story over the radio for the children's hour. So I went to the NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Company) office in Tokyo, but I was told that getting clearance for me to speak on the air would take six months.

Instead, I told the story to a newsman, a reporter for the women's hour, and to a young man for the children's hour. The young man elaborated on my story in his talk over the air. Another man heard the program and wrote it down for a large children's magazine, adding even more changes. Finally, with more additions, the story was put into a fifth grade reader, and I became known as "Uncle Goat."

In the reader, the story was no longer about Satomi, but about a boy named Harry whose father had been killed in the war with Japan. It was a very touching story about the sympathetic love of a lad who sacrificed to send a goat to the children of the man who had killed his father. In later years the printing of that story in the reader opened the way for me to speak in many schools all over Japan where I might otherwise never have had the opportunity....

At Honolulu [on the way back home to the States] I was "bumped off" the flight for someone of higher priority. It was four days before I could get another flight, so I used the time to tell the people in Hawaii about the goat project. The Okinawans living in Hawaii sent me a total of $35,000 for goats as a result of that visit. With the money, Heifers for Relief was able to send over five thousand goats to both Japan and Okinawa. After four wonderful days I made it back to San Francisco just in time to help send off the next load of goats.

The Heifer Project's First Goats for Okinawa

From: Comfort All Who Mourn: The Life Story of Herbert and Madeline Nicholson, by Herbert V. Nicholson and Margaret Wilke (Bookmates International, 1982), pp. 127-129:

An organization called Heifers for Relief, sponsored by the Church of the Brethren, decided to accept my offer to raise money and take goats to war-torn Japan.

Milk was in desperately short supply overseas and the Japanese children were being severely affected by the shortage. Ordinarily the Heifer project sent only bred heifers to ravaged areas. In this case, goats answered the need more readily, so goats were sent for the first time in its history. Later they sent all sorts of farm animals to many countries and aided poor farmers in the United States as well.*

When I received approval of the goat project I went to work. I raised a good part of the money and bought most of the goats myself. Then I gathered a little group of men to accompany me on the first trip. Sim Togasaki, a Nisei from San Francisco, wanted to come because he needed to make contacts in Japan for his importing business. Although he knew nothing about goats, he was a hard worker and a great help because he spoke fluent Japanese. Ted Roberts, a dairyman who had always been interested in the Japanese, and Paul McCracken, a goat expert, also came with us. Paul was a Quaker, too, so I was glad to have him along. My son Samuel also came. He took color slides everywhere which later were a great help in raising money for more goats.

In October, 1947, we arrived in San Francisco ready to load up for a trip when we found, to our great disappointment, that the Army had decided to send us to Okinawa rather than Japan! The following load would be scheduled for Japan. That disappointment was to become God's surprise for us. What lay ahead was a wonderful adventure.

The Army had built pens for our two hundred goats on the rear deck of the Simon Benson, a small liberty ship which was not in good shape. We had a rough trip across the Pacific and were very relieved when we reached Okinawa safely. Later we learned that on its next trip the ship had split open! It was easy to believe.

Our arrival in Okinawa was an unforgettable experience. The harbor at Naha was full of sunken ships. The city had been completely destroyed. We could only stare in shock and pity.

We received a warm welcome and were greeted by the governor and other dignitaries. It was a delight to discover that Mr. Shikiya, the governor, was a Christian. After the ceremonies, in which we presented a goat to the community, we milked the remainder of our goats and took the milk to an orphanage.

We discovered that we were to be housed at the Military Government Headquarters across the island from Naha. Our escort there was a former missionary to Japan, Everett Thompson, who was in charge of LARA (Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia). The occupation forces did not want to work with a lot of separate relief organizations, so they formed this agency to coordinate all relief efforts. The Heifer project joined LARA, as did the Church World Service, the Friends' Service Committee, and many others.

At the Military Government Headquarters we were taken to the officers' quarters. What a surprise to discover that we goatherds were classed as colonels.

* Nicholson seems to have been unaware that the Heifer project had already been sending horses and chickens as well as cattle to war-torn Europe in 1946.

Sumo: Another Basho, Another Scandal

I was hoping to watch some TV coverage of the upcoming sumo basho while on vacation in Japan later this month, but yesterday's Christian Science Monitor explains why that may not be possible. Japanese sumo scandals threaten to topple Nagoya tournament.

Japanese sumo scandals involving gambling and mob ties could upend an upcoming Nagoya tournament. Friday, public broadcaster NHK made the unprecedented threat to pull coverage of the tournament.

The uncovering of an illegal mob-run gambling ring in sumo has further tarnished Japan's centuries-old national sport after a string of recent scandals and may lead to the first cancellation of a tournament in the postwar era. Sponsors have pulled out of the Nagoya Basho (tournament) – due to start July 11 – after dozens of wrestlers, senior officials, and others involved in the sport admitted gambling on baseball through a syndicate run by yakuza, or mafia.

Japan's public broadcasting network, NHK, added to the sport's woes Friday by announcing it might drop coverage of the event. The network said it had received 8,200 public comments, only about 10 percent of which supported going ahead with airing the Nagoya Basho....

Legal gambling in Japan is restricted to on-site betting on horses, speedboats, and cycling – all government-controlled. In addition there is the huge gray area of pachinko, a kind of vertical pinball game....

Many previous scandals of recent years have been centered round foreign wrestlers, much to Japanese relief. In 2008, three Russian grapplers were expelled for drug use, though a Japanese national also later tested positive. This year, grand champion Asashoryu – the third-most successful wrestler in sumo history and a Mongolian – had to retire after allegedly beating someone while on a drunken night out during the Tokyo Basho (which he went on to win).

But foreigners can't always be blamed: In May, as the betting scandal unfolded, it emerged that stable-masters had given ringside seats to yakuza bosses at tournaments. The mobsters allegedly wanted to be seen by incarcerated gang members on the NHK broadcasts. The JSA took the unprecedented step of disbanding one of the sumo stables involved.

Drosophila spp.: Guinea Pigs with Wings

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 127-128:

Sun filtered down through the trees, rustling in a steady wind: wonderful weather for humans, [David] Foote said, but terrible for flies. "These are the worst possible conditions—I just want to warn you." Of all the Hawaiian insects, the dearest to Foote is the family Drosophilidae, the pomace flies, better known, not entirely correctly, as fruit flies. Included in the family Drosophilidae is the genus Drosophila. Among genetics researchers, Drosophila is the organism of choice. Its chromosomes are few and big and easily extracted from its salivary glands; it reproduces at ten days of age, so genetic changes unfold observably from generation to generation, which means you can wrap up an experiment in a matter of weeks. Also, flies don't eat much—not like mice or lab rats, which will quickly chew a hole in one's departmental budget. Over the past century, the science of genetics has grown up around one drosophila species in particular, Drosophila melanogaster, a tiny red-eyed orange fly so ubiquitous that scientists simply shrug and call it "cosmopolitan." Drosophila melanogaster is a guinea pig with wings. It has been scrutinized and forcibly mutated, crossbred, back-bred, inbred. Scientists have created drosophilas with extra-long life spans (sixty days, instead of thirty), drosophilas with superior maze-navigating abilities, drosophilas dumb as posts; drosophilas with no legs, with legs sprouting from their heads, even—I saw their photograph a few years ago on the front page of The New York Times—with extra, ectopic eyes peering out from where their knees should be. A great deal of what we know about ourselves has been gleaned from monkeying with this pale orange fly.

In contrast, the drosophilas of Hawaii owe their oddity entirely to the whims of natural selection. They are a tribe unto themselves: oversize, with elaborate stripes and colorations and strange and intricate mating rituals. To prove their sexual worth, males of the species Drosophila heteroneura butt heads, which are elongated like those of hammerhead sharks. Males of the closely related Drosophila silvestris stand on their hind legs and grapple like boxers in the clinch. If you want to understand the genetics of colonization, isolation, and speciation in a nonlaboratory setting, the Hawaiian drosophilas are your subject; they are honeycreepers for entomologists. There are some six hundred species of Drosophila in Hawaii, one-fifth of all the Drosophila species in the world—the progeny of flies that tumbled from earlier Hawaiian islands and have been doing so for forty-two million years, ever since the one fly from which they are all descended blew in from somewhere else, to an island that long ago submerged. From one strange and alluring species to the next, drosophila are themselves a sort of archipelago of biodiversity.

And as surely as the honeycreepers are indicators of environmental change in Hawaii, so too are the drosophilas, perhaps more so. Ecologists sometimes describe an ecosystem as a sort of pyramidal hotel of energy consumers, built up of successive trophic layers of feeders and fed-upons: plants, which draw their energy from light; grazers, which draw their energy from plants and span a range of organisms from leaf-mining insects to fruit-eating bats to Jersey cows; and predators, like tigers, feral cats, Tyrannosaurus rex, and bird-eating brown tree snakes. It is a loose schema, with numerous exceptions and outstanding questions. (Which story, for example, do carnivorous army ants inhabit in the Amazonian rain forest pyramid?) The drosophilas occupy a janitoral closet near the base of this building. They subsist largely on decaying plant material-bark, branches, leaf litter. They are composters, thriving on the senescence and misfortune of their fellow hotel guests. Most everything ends with them. The drosophilas are so ubiquitous in Hawaiian rain forests and their microhabitats so varied that their seemingly minor fates in fact closely reflect the spectrum of disruptions and alterations unfolding above and around them-including but not limited to the damage caused, or said to be caused, by feral pigs. If your quarry is the pig, it pays to follow the flies.

"The drosophilas are decomposers in this ecosystem," Foote explained to me one afternoon on the Big Island. "They're responsible for breaking down the organic matter in plants and allowing the nutrients to be cycled up into the forest again. These particular species breed on plants that are some of the most sensitive to disturbance by pigs, cattle, and rats. So we're very concerned about their status."

McWhorter on McCrum's "Globish" English

In The New Republic, John McWhorter reviews Robert McCrum's bass ackwards book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language.

But the central problem is that McCrum’s sense that English is somehow uniquely “direct” and “universal” and therefore well-suited to bestride the world is false. In two ways.

First of all, to the extent that McCrum is taking this from English being light on conjugation suffixes (in the present, just little third-person singular -s) and not having gender (no el sombrero for hat but la luna for moon as in Spanish), you can’t claim that this makes it easier for a language to be universal without looking at the fate of other languages. Russian started as a homely, unwritten Slavic dialect, but is currently spoken by 280 million people, speaking a vast array of indigenous languages natively. Yet Russian is murderously complex – three genders, verbs of pitiless complexity, assorted sounds that are tough to produce, squishy word order, unpredictable accent on words, and on and on. (Of those who have reviewed the book in big venues, I am aware of only TNR’s own Isaac Chotiner as touching on a comparison like the Russian one in his New Yorker review.)

Russians, too, are given to chauvinistic claims about their “great and mighty Russian language,” in which case one could posit that the complexity of the language makes it “mighty” as well as maximally clear. This would make, in the end, about as much sense as claiming that English has gotten around because it’s relatively easy to learn. Both English and Russian have spread the way they have because they were the languages that happened to be spoken by powers that happened to acquire vast amounts of territory.

There is a discussion to be had as to why England (plus America) and Russia have had such lasting influence – but the reasons are about sociohistory and geography, not conjugation. We know this because if there were any meaningful linguistic argument, England and Russia would neatly cancel one another out. Arabs, too, might be perplexed to hear that a language has to be easy – “direct,” as McCrum often has it – to be a vehicle of empire. As anyone who has tried to master it will attest, Arabic is a tough one for foreigners. Yet the region is unrecorded that scoffed “We shall not use this Arabic tongue, as it be too difficult on the tongue to serve as a language of conquest!”

Then McCrum errs in a second way. He misses that to the extent that geopolitical dominance and linguistic structure can be correlated, it’s in that the dominance causes the grammatical simplification, not the other way around. This was even part of English’s history – when Scandinavian Vikings occupied England starting in the eighth century, they produced Old English in a stripped-down fashion just as many of us have produced French and Spanish in classrooms. There were so many of the Vikings that kids heard as much English of this kind as “real” Old English, and in a culture with little schooling or media, this “funny” English became the only English.

McCrum knows this – but misses that it upends his paradigm. The Vikings didn’t pick up English because it was enticingly “universal” – they made it easier by picking it up. To the extent that McCrum may suppose that it was this that kicked off English’s “accessible” phase, we return to Arabic and Russian – universal in their ways despite being un-Vikinged. Sanskrit, Cree, Tagalog and other complex languages also seem to have gotten around – the whole construct McCrum builds just doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, the world over, languages are on the easy side because they happen to have been imposed on a lot of adult foreigners. The lingua franca in Papua New Guinea, for example, is Indonesian, which delights the learner in having no gender, no conjugation, and no Chinese-type tones.

Unfortunately, McWhorter confuses Papua New Guinea, where Tok Pisin is the lingua franca, with West Papua (formerly West Irian), where Indonesian is the lingua franca. Otherwise, he's right on target.

via Rainy Day

Wordcatcher Tales: Ittouhei, Haiboku

I learned my first two Japanese terms for military ranks from watching The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin on Japanese TV during the 1950s. In the dubbed Japanese dialogue, the lieutenant was addressed as 中尉 chuui and the sergeant as 軍曹 gunsou. But I never learned the terms for the lowest ranks until I recently watched an epic film trilogy from the same era, The Human Condition (人間の條件, Ningen no jouken) via Netflix. It is very long and often slow-paced, but fascinating for both historical and linguistic reasons. It starkly depicts both the brutality of Japan's occupation of Manchuria and the deadly and chaotic aftermath of Japan's defeat there. Based on a novel, it also reflects the personal experience of the director, Kobayashi Masaaki (小林 正樹), a university-educated pacifist who refused to become an officer when drafted to serve in Manchuria.

The film chronicles the gradual erosion of socialist ideals in the face of insurmountable realities. The lead character first fails to transform a Japanese mine employing Chinese slave labor into a more humane and efficient enterprise. After being drafted for insubordination and joining a labor battalion, where he takes many a beating without fighting back, he is eventually forced to fire his weapon and kill an enemy soldier when Soviet tanks overrun his hapless platoon. As a prisoner of war, he finds that life under communism falls far short of the egalitarian paradise that he had imagined when he had earlier considered defecting. The Soviets treat him just as brutally as the Japanese imperialists treated their slave laborers. After he escapes, he ends up becoming a leader despite his low rank, forced to make life or death decisions about the fate of starving Japanese soldiers and colonists straggling back toward their homeland.

一等兵 ittouhei 'Private, PV2' – (Japanese Wikipedia offers the most thorough compilation of terms for military ranks in multiple languages that I have found so far.) The rank just below 一等兵 ittouhei (lit. '1st-level solider') 'PV2' is 二等兵 nitouhei (lit. '2nd-level soldier') 'Private, PV1' and the rank just above it is 上等兵 joutouhei (lit. 'upper-level soldier') 'Private First Class, PFC'.

When I faced the draft after dropping out of college in 1969, I had rather pacifist tendencies, which were fortunately never tested in real conflict. I opted for language school rather than Officer Candidate School, and never even had to fire a weapon after basic training. As company clerk, I would just qualify myself on paper. By the time I got out in 1972, I had reached the rank of SP5, a rank abolished in 1985 that corresponds the lowest level of SGT.

敗北 haiboku (lit. 'lose-north') 'defeat, rout' – The Human Condition (人間の條件, Ningen no jouken) set of DVDs from Netflix contains 3 interviews: one not very remarkable one with the director, Kobayashi; a much more recent and interesting one with the star, Nakadai Tetsuya (仲代 達矢), who many years later starred in Kurosawa's classic Ran; and a truly excellent retrospective with Shinoda Masahiro (篠田 正浩), who puts the trilogy in much broader context.

Shinoda uses a lot of contemporary gairai-go, but the word he uses for Japan's defeat is 敗北 haiboku (lit. 'lose-north'), a word that goes back to the Heike Monogatari, about the epic struggle for supremacy in 12th-century Japan between two clans, the Taira (or Heike) and Minamoto (Genji). One of its synonyms is 敗走 haisou ('lose-run').

So what does 北 'north' have to do with fleeing a lost battlefield? Does it suggest retreating to the northern frontier of Heian Japan, that is, northern Honshu? Or does it suggest losing the north at your back, as the imperial palaces were oriented in Kyoto, Seoul, Beijing, Xian, and other capitals within the Sinosphere? In modern Mandarin, the term 败北 bàiběi ('lose-north') is literary, implying it goes back a long way and was not adopted from Japanese (as many modern coinages were). The more common way to write 'defeat' in Chinese is 打败 dǎbài ('hit-lose').

UPDATE: Matt of No-sword has a few observations about the Japanese association of 北 'north' with flight from battle and with death.

U.S. Economic Recovery Prospects, 1934

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007), Kindle Loc. 3321-3353:

Lillienthal and the TVA's engineer, Llewellyn Evans, sailed to Britain to study something new that the United States might copy: what the Britons called their “grid,” which used power from both private and public companies. “The problem of linking public and private companies is similar to that of the Tennessee Valley,” Lilienthal told a reporter in New York at the Hotel Roosevelt before he sailed. In fact the UK grid owed some of its efficiencies to Sam Insull [a Chicago entrepreneur then facing prosecution by the FDR administration, but later found not guilty on all counts], who had advised Westminster repeatedly. The British press saw irony in the fact that Lilienthal of the TVA wanted to have a look at it. Lilienthal, the Electrical Review chuckled, said he was looking for a man of “seasoned specialized judgment, such as [Mr. Lilienthal] regards as essential for determining future policy in the States, but circumstances have deprived the American people of his experience and that of his associates.”

THE BRITISH WERE ON TO something. Another reality was becoming clear that summer of 1934: the drama of the prosecutions and the spring cleanups was hiding something. While the Norris Dam and other New Deal projects might be ahead of schedule, the economy was not, at least not in the sense of being where it had been before. The American Federation of Labor had reported in late spring that 780,000 workers who had been reemployed by the National Recovery Administration in the autumn had been unemployed again by the spring of 1934. William Green, the AFL’s leader, began fighting with Richberg at the NRA over employment numbers: the AFL wanted industry, not relief agencies, to solve the economic problem. The job had to be done, and it had to be partly Richberg’s, since, challenged Green, “We cannot indefinitely support one-sixth of our population on money borrowed against future taxes.” There were still nearly eleven million unemployed. And the Dow was heading in the wrong direction; it would spend the summer below the 100 mark of the preceding winter. Looking up, the New Dealers were taken aback. “The Depression was refusing to disappear,” Tugwell later wrote of the whole period.

Roosevelt now regrouped. Midterm elections were that November. The prosecutions had originally been about punishing financiers for the crash. If Insull’s debentures had lost all their value, then Insull must be guilty. But now the prosecutions and investigations should also be about justifying the New Deal, economically and morally. The Fireside Chats would help. Roosevelt and others had noticed that the medium of radio really did seem to create a new reality, separate from the reality of old politics. If voters focused on the voice and the message, and not the tardy recovery, that might carry the Democrats forward.

It was a hope that the administration concentrated on—for even as government lawyers prosecuted, they were also finding themselves on the legal defensive. The National Recovery Administration, for instance, was under fire in Congress, and from business, as a bureaucracy out of control. A report submitted to the fifty-seventh annual meeting of the American Bar Association noted that by June 25 of 1934, some 485 codes and 95 supplements had been approved by the president and 242 more by the Administrator for Industrial Recovery. In the period of a year, 10,000 pages of law had been created, a figure that one had to compare with the mere 2,735 pages that constituted federal statute law. In twelve months, the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.

To survive, Richberg and the Justice Department warned—accurately—that the NRA must pass review by the Supreme Court, and soon. In any case, the law required renewal by Congress in 1935. Its constitutionality was a big question: could such a large program really be legal under the Constitution’s commerce clause? Marking Constitution Day in September, the New York Times commented that in regard to such legislation, “the winds of controversy over this issue are already rising.” With the election coming up, the New Deal had to score victories in national politics; if it couldn’t win a genuine return to prosperity, then it might succeed with the negative victories of bringing down the villains.

Fumigating the Polynesian Voyagers, 1995

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 65-66:

In 1995 three Hawaiian canoes sailed south to the Society Islands, met a contingent of three other South Pacific canoes, then sailed to the Marquesas and north again to me Big Island of Hawaii, for the first time retracing the original route of discovery of the Hawaiian Islands.

This historic voyage encountered only one significant problem. Three days before the canoes were due to arrive home, the crew radioed Honolulu with news that they were suffering the painful bite of some undetected insect. Entomologists were consulted. The suspects were narrowed to three: the nono, a tiny, vicious blackfly that plagues beaches of the Marquesas and doomed those islands' resorts; the punkie midge, a no-see-um half the size of the nono that also haunts the Marquesas; and a biting midge known in French Polynesia as the white beach nono. The first is native to the Marquesas; the latter two arrived in Polynesia sometime between 1920 and 1950. All three are functionally identical—with mouths like scissors, they bite holes in the victim's skin, producing welts that if scratched can quickly fester. A single nono fly can inflict five thousand bites in an hour. After securing a blood meal, the fly retreats to a crevice in any nearby decaying organic matter—waterlogged wood a coconut husk, the hull of a Polynesian voyaging canoe—to reproduce. Its larvae emerge several days later to begin the cycle anew. With these facts in mind, Honolulu newspapers treated readers to several days of midge coverage, disagreeing only as to whether the midges posed a worse threat to the tourist industry than the brown tree snake, or merely an equivalent one. Cynics whispered of a midge conspiracy, of midges planted aboard the canoes by an environmental group eager to publicize the dangers of alien species in Hawaii.

Riding a strong headwind, a biting midge can cross fifty miles of open ocean. To forestall such an event, and despite prime sailing conditions the six voyaging canoes were ordered to a halt some two hundred miles south-southwest of Hawaii's Big Island, Hawai'i. The following morning, after much wrangling over which government agency should take responsibility for a nuisance insect that is neither an agricultural pest nor strictly speaking, a public-health threat, and which in any event now sat in international waters, a Coast Guard plane dropped thirty-six aerosol cans of pyrethrin, an insecticide made from daisies, into what were now heavy seas. The canoes' holds were emptied, clothes and equipment sprayed with disinfectant, the hulls scrubbed four times with seawater, the sails keelhauled. Everything organic was tossed overboard: religions carvings, palm-frond baskets, breadfruit seedlings wrapped in coconut husks, and traditional foods like sweet potato, taro leaf patties, and poi—which crew members perhaps were happy to see go, as they later confessed a preference for sausage and Spam. Inspectors from the Hawaii Department of Health then boarded the canoes and sprayed everything again. A series of triumphal celebrations had been planned to mark the voyage's end. Instead, the canoes were escorted into Hilo Harbor, sprayed once more, and enclosed in fumigation tents. A crowd of two dozen, including several customs and immigrations officials, greeted them.

Health and agriculture inspectors still do not know what sort of midge they nearly encountered; the cleaning, spraying, scrubbing, and fumigation had left no trace of them. Other survivors were discovered, however, including four species of fly, two species of ant, a cockroach, two spiders, a book louse, a parasitic wasp, a beetle, several snails, some live shrimps, a gecko, two species of eye gnat, and a scale insect that in some parts of the world is considered a serious agricultural pest. Some time afterward the chief of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture was heard expressing nostalgia for the days when state inspectors could walk down the aisles of arriving aircraft and fumigate freely, as they still do in New Zealand. As for the canoes, they reached their destinations. The Hawaiian crews sailed to warm homecomings on Maui, Molokai, and Oahu. The Cook Islanders disembarked, showered, and dried off with one hundred and fifty donated towels. The Tahitian voyagers, though they had a fine canoe, never arrived; in fact, they never embarked. They had failed to apply for U.S. visas, and were gently advised to stay home.

Guam: New Predator, New Prey

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 31:

In simple ecological models, the relationship between a predator and its prey is straightforward, Malthusian. In the classic model, there are rabbits and there are lynxes eating rabbits: the lynxes thrive, reproduce, spawn more hungry lynxes—so many that soon there are fewer and fewer rabbits, fewer lynx meals, eventually fewer lynxes. The lynx population declines, the rabbits slowly recover their numbers, and the cycle of eating and eaten, supply and starvation, begins again. The situation on Guam is altogether different. Even after the forests were emptied of birds, the snake continued to thrive. Its numbers are down: approximately twenty-four snakes per hectare, from a hundred per hectare in the late 1980s. That is a major drop, yet twenty-four snakes per hectare is still four times more dense than even the most snake-infested plot of Amazon jungle. Campbell said, "That's like having a gob versus a big gob." Now the snakes subsist on skinks and geckos. And the skinks and geckos are not disappearing. In fact, because they are no longer preyed upon by birds, they are more abundant than ever. The snakes have found a renewable resource, the gustatory equivalent of solar energy. And there is evidence to suggest that the snakes are reproducing faster too, giving birth at a younger age. Few biological invaders, once they have gained such a solid foothold in their new habitat, subsequently disappear from it entirely. Any hope that the snake would eat itself out of existence appears equally groundless.

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin meditated on the impact that house cats might be having on the surrounding countryside. If there were more cats, there would be fewer mice. With fewer mice burrowing into the hives of their favorite snack, the bumblebee, there would perforce be more bees buzzing about, gathering nectar, pollinating the local blossoms—most notably the blossoms of Trifolium pratense, the common red clover, which depends exclusively on the bumblebee to complete its reproductive cycle. In short, more cats would mean more red clover. "Plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations," Darwin wrote.