Butterflyblue on Japanese Name Trivia

Butterflyblue has a fascinating post on Japanese surname trivia. Compared to China, and especially Korea, Japan has a huge number of surnames.

Compare these numbers: China only has about 500 surnames. Korea only has 249. Japan has about 120,000....

The possibility of the same kanji (Chinese character) having multiple readings makes it imperative when exchanging business cards in Japan to have a little dialogue about the pronunciations of the characters on the respective cards. For example, 熊谷　can be "Kumagaya," "Kumagai," "Kumatani," or "Kumaya" (all meaning 'Bearvalley')! Here are some more examples Butterflyblue lists under Weird Names.

• 子子子　is pronounced "Nejiko" [Kinderkidson?]
• 林林　is pronounced "Rinbayashi" [Woodgrove?]. This is just crazy. You will notice they are the same character.
• 谷谷　is "Tanigaya" [Valleyvale?]. Again, they combined two readings for the same character.

Apparently, most Japanese didn't have surnames until about 1875.

Some people at that time must have thought "soy sauce" [醤油　'shoyu'] and "tabacco" [煙草 'smoke grass'] made good names, I guess. Others went to the village chief or someone else they trusted and got themselves a name based usually on where they lived [in a rice field = Tanaka, in a forest = Morinaka, above the well = Inouye] or what they did for a living ("Watanabe" means "ferryman"; "Kodama" means "jeweller").

I wasn't aware that given names in olden times were often scatological.

Yes, in the Heian period and after, it was common to use "Kuso" in names, which means just what you think it means.... Names like "Kusoko" [Shitchild] and "Oguso" [Littleshit] were in vogue among the nobility [as well they should be!].

via Language Hat

Danny Yee's Wombats

Danny Yee reviews The Wombat: Common Wombats in Australia, by Barbara Triggs (UNSW Press, 1996).

Anyone who has spent much time in the bush in south-eastern Australia will have encountered the signs of the common wombat Vombatus ursinus: the entrances to their burrows are obvious and their cubical scats are the most distinctive of any Australian mammal. Being nocturnal, however, wombats are rarely seen -- most commonly crossing roads at night, or as road-kill -- and have not been as well studied as Australia's other iconic mammals. In The Wombat Barbara Triggs gives an entertaining and informative presentation of what is known about them.

She begins with an overview of wombat evolution and taxonomy and distribution. There are two rarer species of hairy-nosed wombats, found in Queensland and South Australia, as well as the common wombat covered here, which is found in south-eastern Australia and Tasmania. Other related species are now extinct; the closest living relative of the wombat is the koala....

There are some fascinating and sometimes surprising details in here. One question prompted by scats found high on ridges is how wombats can survive so far from water.

"Grassy creek and river banks are popular feeding areas at all times, but a wombat rarely drinks from the stream or any other free water, except when all the grass has yellowed and lost most of its moisture. ... Adult wombats rarely urinate."

Wombats are, however, efficient swimmers over short distances.

Well, that answers at least three questions I've never asked myself.

China : Taiwan (now) :: U.S. : Canada (then)

Econoblogger Brad DeLong suggests an interesting parallel between manifest destinies on two continents.

A hundred and fifty years ago it was our "manifest destiny" to own the entire North American continent. Today the desire to annex Canada is limited to us left-of-center Democrats desperate to turn the marginal voter from a guy outside of Nashville with a hound dog to a guy in suburban Toronto with a Greenpeace card. May an analogous process take place between China and Taiwan.

via Simon World

Asashoryu Now 24-0

It's now just over halfway through the Osaka Grand Sumo Tournament, and Asashoryu has taken sole possession of the lead, but Fukuoka favorite Kaio is just one loss behind.

OSAKA (Kyodo) Yokozuna Asashoryu unleashed his fury on Kokkai to maintain his lead with an unblemished record at the Spring Grand Sumo Tournament on Monday.

Asashoryu had little problem absorbing the burly fourth-ranked maegashira's charge before slapping him forward onto the ring's surface to improve to a spotless 9-0 at Osaka Municipal Gymnasium. Kokkai, who hails from the Soviet former republic of Georgia, slipped to 5-4.

Asashoryu, who is the odds-on favorite to win his 11th Emperor's Cup after taking the New Year's title with a perfect 15-0 record, improved his winning streak to 24. Ozeki Kaio stayed hot in pursuit of the yokozuna at 8-1.

Last year, the Mongolian grand champion won five of six tournaments and appears to be on another roll in 2005.

UPDATE, Day 13 - Ozeki Tochiazuma ended Asashoryu's winning streak at 27-0 and postposed the yokozuna's chance to clinch the Osaka Grand Sumo Tournament for at least one more day. He would have to lose the final two bouts for anyone else to have a chance to tie his record and force a deciding match-up.

UPDATE, Day 14 - Sure enough, Asashoryu won his very next bout to clinch the tournament at 13-1. His next closest competitor was Tamanoshim, at 11-3. His final bout won't matter--except to start another winning streak. Russian rookie Roho has made a very respectable showing at 10-4, but the Bulgarian Kotooshu was a lousy 3-11 going into the final day, while the Korean Kasugao had a nightmare tournament, managing only one win in 14 days.

Huge Japanese Submarine Discovered Off Hawai‘i

Sunday's Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports on a new undersea discovery in waters off Hawai‘i.

During test dives Thursday, the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory's Pisces submarines found the remains of the Imperial Japanese Navy's I-401 submarine, a gigantic underwater aircraft carrier built to bomb the Panama Canal.

"We thought it was rocks at first, it was so huge," said Pisces pilot Terry Kerby. "But the sides of it kept going up and up and up, three and four stories tall. It's a leviathan down there, a monster."

It is not the first World War II-era "monster" that the HURL scientists have found. Last year, off Pearl Harbor, they located the wreck of the gigantic seaplane Marshall Mars, one of the largest aircraft built and used as a transport plane by the U.S. Navy. Two years earlier in the same area, the HURL crew also found the wreckage of a Japanese midget sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941.

The latest HURL discovery is from the I-400 "Sensuikan Toku" class of submarines, the largest built prior to the nuclear ballistic missile submarines of the 1960s. They were 400 feet long and 39.3 feet high, could reach a maximum depth of 330 feet, and carry a crew of 144.

Each carried three fold-up bombers inside a watertight hangar, plus parts to construct a fourth airplane. The bombers, called Seiran or "Mountain Haze," [but see note below] could be made ready to fly in a few minutes and had wing floats for return landings. Fully loaded with fuel, the submarines could sail 37,000 miles, one and a half times around the world. Three were captured at the end of the war, as well as a slightly smaller test design called the I-14.

Their first mission was called "Operation PX," a plan to use the aircraft to drop infected rats and insects with bubonic plague, cholera, dengue fever, typhus and other diseases on American West Coast cities. When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the target was changed to the Panama Canal.

I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. The commander committed suicide and the huge submarines' mission was never completed.

For much, much more on the sub's mission, see this site.

NOTE: The Combined Fleet website consistently translates Seiran (晴嵐) as 'Mountain Haze', ignoring the meaning ('clear, not cloudy') of the first character, but staying truer to the usual Chinese meaning of the second character. However, the Smithsonian's National Aerospace Museum's website translates it as 'Clear Sky Storm', which captures the most common Japanese senses of both characters (hare 'clear skies' and arashi 'storm') and strikes me as a more natural name for a surprise attack submarine-carried bomber, perhaps implying something like 'Bolt from the Blue'.

The Funatsu Aviation Instrument Museum's website gives a guide to the naming conventions of Japanese naval warplanes. Fighters were named after strong weather (-fuu/-puu '-wind', -rai '-thunder'); (high-altitude) bombers after constellations (-sei '-star'); reconnaissance planes after clouds (-un); attack (dive?) bombers after mountains (-san/-zan); patrol planes after seas (-kai); transports after skies (-kuu); trainers after plants (-giku 'chrysanthemum', -gusa 'grass'), and others after scenery. This is helpful except that Seiran appears under the Other category in one listing, and under the Attack Bomber category elsewhere.

Pictures after the Earthquake in Fukuoka, Japan

David A. Johnson, a Southern Baptist missionary in Fukuoka, has posted an interesting photo exhibit of the damage caused by the 20 March 2005 earthquake there. Among the other things, it popped a pipe out of the pipe organ in the Seinan [Southwestern] Gakuin Seminary chapel and turned cobbled streets to mud by liquefaction.

Christian Missionaries in North Korea

Speaking of missionaries sneaking into a hermit kingdom, Asia Times OnLine has posted an article by Andrei Lankov on the role of Christian missionaries in North Korea.

SEOUL - Churches are opening in North Korea, a country long known for its hostility to any religion, and especially Protestantism. But it is not the handful of officially sanctioned churches that are interesting so much as reports of a revival of the North's "catacomb church".

Given the privation and suffering in North Korea, it's not surprising that the masses would find solace in the opiate of the people.

North Korean defectors to South Korea recently were asked about the fate of those escapees who were apprehended in China and sent back for interrogation in North Korea. Their treatment is harsh but they are not necessarily doomed. If an arrested escapee does not make some dangerous confessions while subjected to relatively mild beatings, he or she is likely to be set free very soon (not very nice, but still it's a vast improvement over the situation that existed two decades ago). This correspondent asked, "What do interrogators see as dangerous activity?" The answers were virtually identical across the board: "Contacting missionaries and bringing religious literature to North Korea."...

Once upon a time, relations between early Korean communism and Korean Christianity were much closer than either side is willing to admit nowadays. Kim Il-sung himself, the founder of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), was born into a family of prominent Protestant activists. His father graduated from a Protestant school and was an active supporter of the local missions, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent Protestant activist. This was fairly typical: it seems that a majority of early Korean communists had Christian family backgrounds, even though Christians were few and far between in the general population....

Nonetheless, left-wing Christianity was not a success in North Korea. Most Protestant preachers and activists were enemies of the new regime. There were a number of reasons for this. Most pastors came from affluent families and were not happy about the redistribution of wealth during the land reforms of 1946 and subsequent nationalization of industries. As well, many Christians had personal connections with the West and admired the United States as a beacon of democracy, and thus were alienated by the regime's intense anti-American propaganda. The increasingly harsh and repressive policies of the new government did not help either.

Thus in 1946-50 Protestants formed one of the major groups of the refugees who moved to the South. When the Korean War began, these Protestants often helped the advancing United Nations troops. Such incidents once again demonstrated to the Pyongyang leaders what they believed anyway: that Christians were politically unreliable....

By the mid-1950s, not a single church was left functioning. As usual, the Korean Stalinists outdid Stalin himself: even in the worst days of Josef Stalin's rule a handful of churches remained opened in Soviet cities, and some priests avoided the gulag (more often than not through cooperation with Stalin's secret police).

Some North Korean believers continued to worship in secret. The precise scale of the North Korean "catacomb church" is likely to remain unknown forever. Serious research is made impossible by the secrecy of the church, and in the post-unification future (if there is one), the picture is likely to be distorted by exaggerations and myth-making to which religious organizations are usually so prone. A lot of martyrdom stories are certain to emerge in post-unification Korea, and some of them are certain to be true, but none of these stories should be taken at face value without careful checking. Nonetheless, the existence of the Protestant underground is beyond doubt.

via NKZone

A Tropical Melting Pot in the Frozen North

The New York Times on 18 March ran a cheery little sketch of a community of tropical immigrants in northern Alberta.

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta, March 13 - Forty below zero isn't so bad once you get used to it. At least that was the message of a seminar at Keyano College called "We Love the Winters Here," attended by 30 new immigrants from warm-blooded places like Venezuela and Nigeria, drawn here by the promise of hefty salaries in an oil boomtown....

Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez fired more than 5,000 employees at the state oil company after a failed general strike, has been particularly fertile recruiting ground for energy companies.

"When you are in Venezuela and you read the word 'cold,' you don't really know what that word means," said Cesar Mogollon, an electrical engineer with Suncor Energy who arrived from Venezuela in November....

But Mr. Mogollon said that once he found that local supermarkets carried the white maize flour dough used to make arepas and empanadas, "I was O.K." He and his wife have adjusted, he said, and his 9-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son are snow tubing and skiing with gusto.

At least 4,000 foreign-born immigrants now live in Fort McMurray, and the number is growing fast. Local supermarkets carry halvah from Saudi Arabia, mango nectar from Egypt, jarred yellow cherries from Guatemala, rice sticks from the Philippines and marinating sauces from South Africa. There are cultural organizations for Latinos, Hindus, Filipinos and Chinese. The first Islamic school opened last year.

Mushtaque Ahmed, a 54-year-old engineer at Syncrude Canada, who was born in Bangladesh, has worked previously in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. He says that 10 families from Bangladesh arrived here in the last three years, and that they now get together to celebrate Bangladeshi holidays with potluck dinners that mix their native cooking with Canadian fare: typically roast turkey and assorted biryanis....

"I like the friendliness of the people here," Mr. Ahmed said, although he admitted to one misgiving that has nothing to do with the weather: "I can get uncomfortable with what's on television. There's a lot of tolerance to things I am not accustomed to."

via OxBlog

Doris Duke's Islamic Art Shangri-La

Here's an interesting perspective on Doris Duke and her Shangri-La residential tribute to Islamic art, which I recently had the chance to visit. It's by Sharon Littlefield, the Consulting Curator of Islamic Art for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation/Honolulu Academy of Arts.

While the American heiress Doris Duke (1912-93) succumbed to an elite desire to collect, display, and donate, her chosen field of Islamic art and architecture was at odds with the legitimacy her social circle sought in their collecting. Moreover, relocating such art to her private home in Hawaii effectively estranged her from all established patterns of art collecting. Likely, her motivation to both acquire Islamic art and create an Islamicate estate for its display was driven, in part, by the very need to dissociate herself from her peers and her inherited lifestyle. But, profoundly drawn to Islamic aesthetics, she continued to collect right up to her death. She did not simply reject her own culture, but actively embraced Islamic ones. Despite being intensely private, Duke decreed that her estate, baptized Shangri-La, should be opened to the public following her death. Scheduled to open in October 2002, Shangri-La stands as a significant Islamicate monument, a fact which has, and will likely continue, to perplex those who cross its threshold.

I managed to check my cynicism and class resentment at the door and came away thoroughly fascinated. It's well worth a visit. The virtual tour is also first-rate.

Multinational Coalition Invades Japan, 1643

In the summer of 1643, a multinational coalition of Jesuit missionaries arrived in fiercely anti-Catholic Tokugawa Japan, just three months after another group of nine had been tortured to death in Nagasaki.

The leader of the second group was the Jesuit Pedro Marquez (1575-1657), born at Mouram, in the archbishopric of Evora, Portugal. After his training and admission into the Society of Jesus at the age of seventeen, we find him in 1627 in Tonkin and in 1632 on the island of Hainan. In 1636, he was in Macao, where he cosigned the order expelling [infamous Jesuit renegade Christovão] Ferreira from the Society for his apostasy. At the time of Marquez' capture, he was sixty-eight years old and had just received his appointment as Provincial, or head of the Roman Catholic Church in Japan.

His three European companions were: Alonzo de Arroyo (1592-1644), fifty-one years old, from Malaga in Andalusia, doctor of philosophy and former priest of the Spanish settlement of Cavite in the Philippines, where he had arrived in 1621; Francisco Cassola (1603-1644), forty years old, a mathematician and astronomer who had been in Manila in 1636 with Mastrilli, later to become famous as a martyr in Japan; and Giuseppe Chiara (1603-1685), an Italian, also forty years old and recently coming from Manila as well. These four Jesuits were accompanied by six Asian converts: one lay brother (iruman) and five supporters (dojuku). The lay brother was Andreas Vieyra (1601-1678), forty-two years old, who had been born in Mogi and brought up in Nagasaki. He was later named Nampo, and had been educated in Macao and Manila. The supporters included two Japanese men: one from Imabashi Itchome in Osaka, known to the Europeans as Julius and to the Japanese as Shiro'emon, fifty-one years old; and one from Mototsuchimikado machi in Kamikyo of Kyoto, known as Kassian and Mata'emon, also fifty-one years old. These three men had left Japan in the early 1620s and were coming home, pathetically, to certain torture and death.

Then there was Lorenzo Pinto, thirty-two years old, whose father was Chinese and whose mother was of mixed Japanese and Portuguese descent. Even though his parents lived in Macao, Pinto had many friends and connections in Nagasaki. The last two supporters were a twenty-year-old Chinese man from Canton, called Juan and later Saburozaemon, and a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese man from Tonkin, known as Donatus or Nikan. These men were the last of the group to die, in 1697 and 1700 respectively.

The captives freely confessed they had come to Japan to preach Christianity, or as the Japanese put it: "to spread the Evil Doctrine in order to snatch away [authority in] the country of Japan." They had disguised themselves as Japanese because the shogun had forbidden foreign priests to proselytize. Nevertheless, they were put to the water torture to make sure they were holding nothing back.

SOURCE: Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Diplomacy, by Reinier H. Hesselink (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 51-53

I'm surprised there wasn't at least one Irishman in the group.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Princeton emeritus professor of philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt has published a book On Bullshit (Princeton U. Press, 2005).

With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

The Press's website also includes video clips of an interview with the straight-talking bullshitologist. Here's my transcription of clip 7.

Q: You mentioned democratization as a function of bullshit. What about education? Are more highly educated people more likely to engage in bullshit just because they have the faculties to do so? I mean, are we more likely to be twits here at Princeton University than in some other part of the country?

A: I think it's not only that highly educated people have the linguistic and intellectual gifts that enable them to create bullshit. But also I think that a lot of people who are highly educated acquire a kind of arrogance that leads them to be negligent about truth and falsity. They have a lot of confidence in their own opinions, and this may also encourage them to produce bullshit.

Nick Kristof on Environmentalists Gone Wild

I enjoy Nick Kristof's political unreliability. In the New York Times of 12 March, he takes on environmental car-alarmists.

When I first began to worry about climate change, global cooling and nuclear winter seemed the main risks. As Newsweek said in 1975: "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend ... but they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century."

This record should teach environmentalists some humility. The problems are real, but so is the uncertainty. Environmentalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.

Likewise, environmentalists were right to warn about population pressures, but they overestimated wildly. Paul Ehrlich warned in "The Population Bomb" that "the battle to feed humanity is over. ... Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." On my bookshelf is an even earlier book, "Too Many Asians," with a photo of a mass of Indians on the cover. The book warns that the threat from relentlessly multiplying Asians is "even more grave than that of nuclear warfare."

Too many Asian men, and not enough Asian women. Now that's the real problem in Asia. Meanwhile bald eagles multiply and malaria just gets worse and worse.

UPDATE: The Belmont Club has much more about efforts both to ban DDT and to resist banning it, with follow-ups here and here.

Dutch Bathing Practices in Kupang, Timor, 1792

In 1792, American Lieutenant Amasa Delano spent some time in Dutch West Timor with the British McCluer Expedition.

A river of clean, clear water flowed through Copang [= Kupang, West Timor] to the sea; and a short distance from the mouth of the river was the bathing resort of the well-to-do residents of Copang. The families of the government officials of account and of the merchants in profitable business composed pretty much all the well-to-do people of the port. On fine days, and most days in tropic Timor were fine, they went in for bathing en masse. The bathing scene was a delight to Amasa:

"The bank of the river where they bathed was shaded with rows of fragrant trees, and under the trees were small dressing cabins. The Dutch, men and women both, donned a Malay garment for the bath, a sort of petticoat, which was tied high up on the breast, but so tied as to leave the arms free. Some of these bathing garments were of extremely fine texture, and with beautiful designs woven into them."

Amasa and his brother officers were furnished with the same sort of bathing robes of extremely fine texture and beautiful design. "Men and women bathed together, picking out a spot with their backs to the current, and allowed the swift running water to rush over their heads, or flow around them." Amasa was always among those present at the bathing hour. His choice of place was between two rocks; and there, with a stone against which to brace his feet, he sat in secure enjoyment of the current, without incurring danger in an absent-minded moment of being swept down-river and put to the labor of swimming back against the current. He liked to swim, and these days in Timor were for relaxation after the wearying passage from New Guinea.

While the favored people bathed, Malay slaves were setting the tables and laying the lunch in the shade of the wide-spreading, handsome trees on the bank of the river. It was the life for a sailor ashore--that is, when the sailor was an officer.

"There was the river foaming over the rocks below gently in some places, sublimely in others; and the river was on the opposite shore spreading itself out like a transparent lake with lovely scenery reflected in its calm surface."

Amasa and his bathing brother officers would work up grand appetites while observing the tables being loaded deep with the wide variety of savory dishes. There were also oceans of fine wines. Amasa had not yet had the experience of sitting in at a party when English officials took on the job of entertaining Dutch rivals in trade; but certainly the Dutch in Amboyna and here in Timor were setting a warm pace against the day when it came the turn of the English to do the entertaining. For the prestige of that Royal Navy to which his officer shipmates belonged, he hoped said officers would rise to the occasion when it came their turn to play host. They would have to log the good knots to do so. The Dutch in Amboyna had done them well; the Dutch governor's widow in Timor and her official aides were doing them even better:

"The Dutch in Timor gave us altogether too good a time. It may have been the too frequent bathing, and staying too long at it that brought on intermittent fevers, from which several of our officers died. These deaths from the bathing in Timor were not the first of their kind, which I have known from personal observation."

... Not long before the McCluer visit to Timor, Lieutenant Bligh of the Bounty mutiny episode had arrived there [in 1789]. Timor was still lauding the seamanship and fortitude of Bligh and the men who had survived that long passage in that open boat, and Amasa thought the laudations well deserved. But shortly after Bligh's departure from Timor another boat's crew arrived there from a more perilous and far longer voyage than Bligh's; and they made the passage with only a chart and a compass for their navigation. While McCluer's officers were still at Timor that boat's crew of the more perilous passage were being held in ignominy in Copang.

Inoculating Islanders with Kinepox in 1807

In 1807, Captain Amasa Delano of the China-trader Perseverance, was keenly aware of the deadly effects of smallpox on Pacific Islanders--and he knew how to prevent it.

Before leaving home forehanded Amasa had stuffed his medicine chest with whatever specifics the Boston doctors recommended. He had added several specifics on his own account, one being for inoculation against smallpox. He had seen the ship's doctors of the McCluer expedition inoculate island natives against smallpox, and why couldn't he do the same now? Why not?

Canton was notoriously a smallpox-ridden port, and, arriving off there, Amasa got out his kinepox from the medicine chest, stood his five Kanakas (Sandwich Islanders) in a row, and inoculated them. He had faith in his technique, but there remained a doubt of the efficacy of the kinepox after lying up in the medicine chest since he had left home.

Fresh kinepox would make him feel better; and certainly it would do no harm to his Kanakas to inoculate them again. Sailing up the Canton River he made inquiries of ships he met along the way, and from an American captain whose ship he hailed he procured "a kine pox which would answer all the purpose of a preventive, and at the same time would be attended with no dangerous consequences to the patient."

Amasa inoculated his five Sandwich Islanders with the new kinepox and awaited results. They all lived, as did others of his crew whom he then treated with full confidence. After that he was all set to deliver lectures to other ship captains wherever met on the virtues of the new kinepox.

"All captains, who are employed on voyages, where they may take the natives of these islands on board their ships, should provide themselves with the kine pox matter, which may be easily procured, and preserved in such a manner as to be carried to any part of the world, and have them inoculated with it before carrying them to places where they would be exposed to take the small pox, which most generally proves fatal to them, and the distress and sufferings of the poor creatures have been beyond description; many scenes of which I have been an eye witness to, that would excite the compassion of any man possessed of the least particle of humanity."

Edward Jenner had published his work on cowpox and coined the term "vaccination" in 1798.

Hirahara Zenmatsu, the First Japanese in Hawai‘i

Hirahara Zenmatsu was a Japanese seaman who lived among the people of the island of O‘ahu for about three and a half months in 1806. Zenmatsu was a native of the province of Aki, now Hiroshima prefecture, during the reign of the Tokugawa feudal government (1603-1867). He and seven others aboard the Inawaka-maru, a small Japanese cargo ship, were shipwrecked off Japan and remained adrift in the Pacific Ocean for more than seventy days....

On March 20, 1806, a foreign ship appeared. The crew of the Inawaka-maru climbed onto the deckhouse roof and signaled the ship by waving a mat and shouting for help. At first they seemed not to have been seen, but finally, the ship came closer and lowered her sails. Four foreigners, including one carrying a sword, who seemed to be the captain, came up on deck as the ship circled around the Inawaka-maru. Upon realizing that the Japanese vessel was disabled, they came aboard. Two sets of Japanese swords that belonged to the two officials from Iwakuni were found in a closet at the stern and were confiscated.

The captain asked the Japanese something, but they could not understand English. The Japanese asked for food by putting their hands on their stomachs, pointing to their mouths, and bowing with their hands together. The captain touched each one's stomach and took a look around the galley. When he realized that they had no food or water, he took all eight Japanese on board his ship, assisting them by taking their hands and putting his arms around them. Personal belongings of the Japanese were also transferred.

The rescuing ship was an American trading vessel [returning from China], the Tabour, commanded by Captain Cornelius Sole. The Japanese had been rescued after being adrift in the Pacific for more than seventy days.

Aboard the Tabour, the Japanese were served a large cup of tea with sugar. It tasted so good that they asked for more, but the captain did not allow them to eat anything more on that day. On the following day, they were given two cups of sweetened tea followed by a serving of gruel. This was repeated for another three days. On the fifth day, when everyone gradually became well, they were served rice for breakfast and dinner and bread for lunch. The bread, tasted by the Japanese for the first time, was described by Zenmatsu as similar to a Japanese confection called higashiyama, which is shaped round like a cross-section cut of a thick daikon (radish).

The Japanese had no words to express their gratitude, and they were deeply touched by the kind treatment received from the foreigners.

It sounds as if Capt. Sole had prior experience reviving starving, dehydrated sailors.

On May 5, 1806, the Tabour arrived in Hawai‘i after forty-five days of sailing following the rescue.... On August 17, 1806, all eight Japanese left Hawai‘i with [Captain Amasa] Delano aboard the Perseverence.

They arrived in Macao in October, then were transferred to a Chinese ship bound for Batavia (now Jakarta), where five of the eight Japanese contracted various tropical diseases, so that only three survived by the time the crew reached Nagasaki in June 1807 aboard an American vessel flying a Dutch flag.

Unfortunately, one more died soon after returning to Nagasaki, and another committed suicide during the official interrogation there. Zenmatsu was jailed and underwent severe interrogation by the officials as he had violated the sakoku edict, which prohibited Japanese subjects from leaving the country. Zenmatsu was kept at Nagasaki for five more months before being allowed to return to his village on November 29, 1807. Soon after his return, he was summoned by Lord Asano of Aki to report on his overseas experiences. He died six months after his return.

SOURCE: Observations of the First Japanese to Land in Hawai‘i, by Hideto Kono and Kazuko Sinoto, in The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 34 (2000), pp. 49-62

The account by Kono and Sinoto was based primarily on Japanese and Hawaiian sources, and makes no mention of an interrogation of the Japanese crew recorded in chapter XXI of Delano's Voyages and Travels, orginally published in 1817 but now available online as Master Mariner: The Life and Voyages of Amasa Delano, by James B. Connolly.

On arrival at Canton, Amasa hunted up a linguist who knew Japanese. He found one of a sort, a Chinese, and through him he questioned the Japanese, being curious to get their story of the wreck. The Japanese could not understand the Chinese linguist's Japanese speech, but they could read his Japanese writing, and he could read theirs; so it was question and answer on pieces of rice paper, which Amasa took over and kept for his own information later:

QUESTION: What place did you leave last, previous to your being shipwrecked?
ANSWER: The town or city of Osaca, on the island of Niphon.
QUESTION: How many men were there of you on board, when you left Osaca?
ANSWER: Twenty-two.
QUESTION: What happened to the other fourteen?
ANSWER: Some were washed overboard in the gale of wind in which we lost our masts, rudder, and were otherwise materially injured, and a number were killed and eaten for food to save life; all of which died by lot, fairly drawn.
QUESTION: How were you treated by Captain Sole?
ANSWER: We acknowledge him as our saviour. He not only took us away from that death which stared us in the face; but he gave us victuals, and carried us safe to land; after which he befriended and provided for us.

Erazim V. Kohák's "Requiem for Utopia"

In the context of reviewing the book, Legacy of Dissent, invisible reader Mithras the Prophet posts "a long excerpt from Erazim V. Kohák's "Requiem for Utopia", written after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Kohák went into exile from Czechoslovakia in 1948, and continues to write and teach at Boston University and Charles University in Prague."

[Dubcek and his colleagues] were determined to be humane authoritarians, respecting the rights of their subjects. In their seven months in power they discovered that the idea of a humane authoritarianism, the standard illusion of well-intentioned rhetorical revolutionists, is an illusion, a contradictio in adiecto. A humane authoritarianism would respect the freedom of its subjects, and so inevitably create the possibility of dissent and opposition. Faced with opposition, the human authoritarian faces the choice of ceasing to be authoritarian — or ceasing to be humane. Repression, whatever its overt aim, can be humane only in rhetoric — in practice it necessarily means breaking men. Czechs and Slovaks, including Dubcek, were too familiar with the logic of terror to opt for the latter alternative. After seven months, the program which started out as a program of humane communism became a program of social democracy....

The ideals of human freedom and social justice remain valid. Democracy — democracy for blacks as well as whites, in economics as well as politics, at home as well as in remote reaches of Latin America or Eastern Europe — remains valid. Socialism, the ideal of social justice and social responsibility in industrial society, remains valid. Human and civil rights, the right of every man to personal identity and social participation, all remain valid. But the utopian myths of self-proclaimed rhetorical radicals do not advance these ideals. The detour on which too many socialists embarked in 1917 is over, finished, discredited, revealed as an exhiliarating, aristocratic, and ultimately reactionary social sport, not the radical social progress it claimed to be. The task that remains is the work of social progress — not the aristocratic sport of revolution, but the solid work of redical, deep-rooted transformation of society. Men may still demand their daily dose of illusion, the exhilaration of revolution or "confrontation" rather than the down-to-earth facts and figures of a Freedom Budget; but those who cater to this demand can no longer do so in the name of social progress — or in the name of socialism.

Utopia is dead. Czechoslovakia has been a graveyard of illusions.

And not just Czechoslovakia, about which I've posted once or twice, and intend to post again. For me, a long winter--including a Dean's December--in Ceausescu's Romania first began turning shovelfuls of earth into a graveyard of illusions.

Andres Gentry on Foreign Policy Oceans Apart

A few days ago, China-based blogger Andrés Gentry reacted to a post by Belgravia Dispatch on foreign policy disagreements across the Atlantic.

Belgravia Dispatch has a nice (and sharply worded!) summary of the foreign policy discussions happening on both sides of the Atlantic. While I appreciate the amount of time he spends on talking about French and German foreign policy aspirations, at the end of the day it all sounds more like a coda for an era past than anything else....

Well, here's one indicator of the future: in discussions about East Asian international relations I have never, not once, read anyone ask what France's, much less Germany's, opinion is....

Anyways though, the world stage moves more and more away from the European peninsula. The Economist has recently run a survey on India and China, the US and Japan have just released a joint statement declaring they will work together to safeguard Taiwan, the 6-nation group trying to deal with North Korea includes no European nations [except Eurasia-spanning Russia], the democratic changes sweeping the Middle East owe to a Coalition that Old Europe deliberately cut itself out of, and in last December's Indonesian tsunami it was the US, Japan, India, and Australia working together to help those affected by the natural disaster. These are the contours of the new world that is being made.

I wouldn't be too quick to write off the EU in Asia. It now wants in on the six-party talks and is likely soon to resume arms sales to China.

Acts of War, 60 Years Ago

The Marmot reminds us that today marks the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Tokyo, as a BBC report notes.

People in Tokyo have been marking the 60th anniversary of a massive US night-time bombing raid which destroyed much of the city in 1945.

Several memorial services have been held across the city to remember the more than 100,000 people who died.

The raid was part of an American strategy to try to wear down Japanese morale ahead of a possible invasion.

Last month, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Dresden.

An aspect of the Dresden bombing that remains a question today is how many people died during the attacks of February 13/14, 1945. The city was crammed with uncounted refugees and many POWs in transit when the raids took place. The exact number of casualties will never be known. McKee believed that the official figures were understated, and that 35,000 to 45,000 died, though "the figure of 35,000 for one night's massacre alone might easily be doubled to 70,000 without much fear of exaggeration, I feel."

The battle of Iwo Jima began 60 years ago, shortly after the fire-bombing of Dresden, and didn't end until after the fire-bombing of Tokyo.

The battle for Iwo Jima began Feb. 19, 1945, but didn't end until March 15, with nearly 7,000 Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese killed. After years of retaking soil conquered by a Japanese military machine, America was knocking on the enemy's door by taking Iwo Jima. It was the first invasion of Japanese soil since Pearl Harbor. Iwo Jima was heavily entrenched with a network of caves, tunnels and pillboxes. The brilliant Japanese commander defending the island, Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had been told to fight to the death -- no Japanese survivors -- hoping high American casualties would deter further attacks against Japanese territory.

And in April, we will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the battle of Okinawa.

Okinawa was the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific campaign and the last major campaign of the Pacific War. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, more naval guns fired against shore targets than any other operation in the Pacific. More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle.

The battle of Okinawa proved to be the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. Thirty-four allied ships and craft of all types had been sunk, mostly by kamikazes, and 368 ships and craft damaged. The fleet had lost 763 aircraft. Total American casualties in the operation numbered over 12,000 killed [including nearly 5,000 Navy dead and almost 8,000 Marine and Army dead] and 36,000 wounded. Navy casualties were tremendous, with a ratio of one killed for one wounded as compared to a one to five ratio for the Marine Corps. Combat stress also caused large numbers of psychiatric casualties, a terrible hemorrhage of front-line strength. There were more than 26,000 non-battle casualties. In the battle of Okinawa, the rate of combat losses due to battle stress, expressed as a percentage of those caused by combat wounds, was 48% [in the Korean War the overall rate was about 20-25%, and in the Yom Kippur War it was about 30%]. American losses at Okinawa were so heavy as to [elicit] Congressional calls for an investigation into the conduct of the military commanders. Not surprisingly, the cost of this battle, in terms of lives, time, and material, weighed heavily in the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan just six weeks later.

Japanese human losses were enormous: 107,539 soldiers killed and 23,764 sealed in caves or buried by the Japanese themselves; 10,755 captured or surrendered. The Japanese lost 7,830 aircraft and 16 combat ships. Since many Okinawan residents fled to caves where they subsequently were entombed the precise number of civilian casualties will probably never be known, but the lowest estimate is 42,000 killed. Somewhere between one-tenth and one-fourth of the civilian population perished, though by some estimates the battle of Okinawa killed almost a third of the civilian population. According to US Army records during the planning phase of the operation, the assumption was that Okinawa was home to about 300,000 civilians. At the conclusion of hostilities around 196,000 civilians remained. However, US Army figures for the 82 day campaign showed a total figure of 142,058 civilian casualties, including those killed by artillery fire, air attacks and those who were pressed into service by the Japanese army.

The only TV news that I can sit through for more than 15 minutes without channel-surfing away (usually in response to commercials or "celebrity justice" stories) is The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which ends each broadcast with a photographic listing of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq (no other individuals killed in Iraq or elsewhere). I view them all, with a mixture of sorrow and respect. Can you imagine how long The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer would have to be to list onscreen the names and photos of just the U.S. military personnel killed during World War II? It would have to be NewsWeek 24/7 with Jim Lehrer. I remind myself of that when I get too depressed about the state of the world 60 years later.

An imaginary Jim Lehrer Sr. in 1945: "And now, in silence, are 7,000 more ..."

UPDATE: Tokyo-based White Peril has much more.

Indonesia and Malaysia at Odds

Malaysia and Indonesia had a naval stare-down recently over an oil-rich area in the Sulawesi Sea. From a Singapore Angle (formerly "Singapore Tsunami Relief Effort" blog) covers the story in four parts, with a lot of background about effects on ASEAN and other regional relationships.

Meanwhile, Colby Cosh (on 7 March) covers another angle of dispute between the two states, the huge number of illegal (and indispensible) Indonesian workers in Malaysia.

Recognizing the perceived need for cheap Indonesian labour, the Malay government decided to seek a middle course: give the workers an amnesty period to return to Indonesia, have their status regularized and documented, participate in classes that would instruct them in the distinctive cultural sensitivities of their Malay masters, and return to Malaysia to get back to the saw and the scrub-brush.

What the Malaysians didn't foresee was that once the workers had returned to Indonesia with their Malaysian savings, they might not be allowed back over the border so easily. Indonesian officials, it appears, have jumped at the chance to hold their rich neighbour's workforce hostage, or at least to squeeze it for every penny they can get.

An Afghan Woman Contemplates Exile, April 1980

The country's conditions had become even worse. Several months had passed since I applied for a passport and I still didn't know whether I would be able to make the planned trip to India, because the report from the secret police had not been made yet. With great sorrow I resolved to leave the country--for who knew how long?--the country to which I owed my entire life, the country my husband took such pride in serving [in the Afghan military], the land we cherished, treasuring its memories deeply, the one we always felt homesick for when we traveled.

This day, on my way home, I reviewed the situation carefully and these were my conclusions: It had been two years since my husband had gone missing, with no word about him or the reason for his disappearance. I didn't know whether he was alive or not. I had a sick child and was not permitted to have her admitted to the only hospital that had proper facilities, even though I was willing to pay the entire cost up front. We had lost not only the benefits of health insurance but also Saleem's social security and the retirement money he had paid into the fund directly out of his paycheck every month.

Many young students had disappeared lately without a trace. The schools were getting dangerous. I could not send my children to school without worrying about them all day long. I'd had them stay home several times during the past two weeks because of student demonstrations and the brutal efforts of the police to repress them. Omar and Ali both complied with my orders but didn't understand my position. They thought I was paranoid.

I did not have security at my job. Any minute, I thought, they would come and arrest me. There were no guarantees of safety for any one of us anymore. In fact, circumstances were forcing me to leave as soon as possible--not for myself but for the safety of my family. It was the hardest decision I ever made in my life. To assuage my agony, I promised that I would return when conditions became right. Surely the Russians would not last very long.

The day I decided to leave, I cried all the way home from the office. A searing pain shot through my heart when I looked at the Aliabad Mountains behind the university. I remembered the times in college when we frolicked and played games among those steep rocks. We even tried one day to climb a large boulder but didn't get very far before one of our classmates got stuck between two rocks. The rest of us tried to rescue her and the whole class missed a lecture. The dean didn't let us make up the test we missed that day; he never understood the pleasure we derived from going up there.

All night long my head was full of unanswered questions. What was I going to do in a foreign country with no money, all by myself with three children? How would I be able to earn money for their food and education? Would I be able to provide the comforts they had here at home? What if my husband was released and I wasn't home? Would he understand? Was I doing the right thing? What about the promise I'd made to him: "In bad times as well as good, in sickness and in health, I will stay by your side until death parts us"?

I had applied for a passport, but then my idea had been to return home after my daughter's medical treatment. Now I must change the plan and I needed more money. I couldn't sell our real estate because of the uncertainty concerning my husband; and even if he were no longer living, it could not be sold till all the children had passed their eighteenth birthday. I dare not sell the household goods because that would attract attention. Even if I did, they would realize only a small fraction of their original price. So I would have to give away everything we had accumulated and saved bit by bit over the years. My heart broke when I remembered that Saleem had sometimes saved money by canceling a movie or a trip in order to have enough to build our house.

Could I keep my plan secret? I certainly could not tell my husband's family that I was leaving. The very few whom I trusted could not keep the news to themselves, especially my mother-in-law, who would begin to cry, and then others would know. Would our departure be too hard on her, especially at this time when my husband was missing too? What would happen to my mother and brothers and sisters? Would the government arrest them because I had left the country? Many close relatives were arrested and questioned if one family member left the country. Yet how could we all leave with our children, twenty-six of us, without being noticed? The more I thought, the more questions appeared in my head which called for answers--answers that I did not have. In fact, everything seemed impossible, out of reach.

Finally, early in the morning, I decided to put all the negative and all the positive points of my plan on the two sides of an imaginary balance. On the left side went all the negatives, such as lack of money, trouble finding a decent job, starting all over again from zero, leaving all my property behind; on the right side were the positive points, such as having a safer life for my sons and not being afraid of losing them, having proper health care and a good education for my children, not having to worry about spies and false reports. I still was not able to decide. In fact, it seemed I might lose a whole lot more than I gained in the deal. The future lay ahead of me as a somber blur.

At last I realized that what I would really gain from leaving would be freedom. The thought of freedom grew larger and larger in my mind until it completely weighed down the right side of that imaginary balance. It would be well worth fighting for. I thought, I can trade everything in the world, all the luxurious and elegant things in my life, in order to earn freedom for my family and for my mother, my brothers and sisters, and their families. The idea of achieving freedom for all of us gave me the peace of heaven.

SOURCE: An Afghan Woman's Odyssey, by Farooka Gauhari (U. Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 171-174