Naipaul on the Imperialism of Universal Religions

The overthrow of the old religions--religions linked to the earth and animals and the deities of a particular place or tribe--by the revealed religions is one of the haunting themes of history. Even when there are texts, as with the ancient Roman-Christian world, the changeover is hard to follow. There are only indications. It can be seen that the earth religions are limited, offering everything to the gods and very little to men. If these religions can be attractive now, it is principally for modem aesthetic reasons; and even so, it is impossible to imagine a life completely within them. The ideas of the revealed religions--Buddhism (if it can be included), Christianity, Islam--are larger, more human, more related to what men see as their pain, and more related to a moral view of the world. It might also be that the great conversions, of nations or cultures, as in Indonesia, occur when people have no idea of themselves, and have no means of understanding or retrieving their past.

The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people--the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet--a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 63-64

Naipaul on Sacred Places

My first eighteen years were spent two oceans away, on the other side of the globe, in the New World, on an island in the mouth of one of the great South American rivers. The island had no sacred places; and it was nearly forty years after I had left the island that I identified the lack.

I began to feel when I was quite young that there was an incompleteness, an emptiness, about the place, and that the real world existed somewhere else. I used to feel that the climate had burnt away history and possibility. This feeling rnight have had to do with the smallness of the island, which we all used to say was only a dot on the map of the world. It rnight have had to do with the general poverty and the breakdown of the extended family system that had come with us from India. It might have had to do with the wretched condition of India itself; and with the knowledge at the same time that we who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped quite abruptly with a father or grandfather.

Later, years after I had left--knowledge of things never corning all at once, but in layers--I thought that the place was unhallowed because it hadn't been written about. And later still I thought that the agricultural colony, in effect a plantation, honored neither land nor people. But it was much later, in India, in Bombay, in a crowded industrial area--which was yet full of unexpected holy spots, a rock, a tree--that I understood that, whatever the similarities of climate and vegetation and formal belief and poverty and crowd, the people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of their earth were different from us.

There would have been sacred places on the island, and in all the other islands to the north. On the tiny island of St. Kitts, for example, there were--hidden by sugarcane fields--rocks with crude pre-Columbian carvings. But the aboriginal people who knew about the sacred places had been destroyed on our island, and instead of them there were--in the plantation colony--people like us, whose sacred places were in other continents.

Too late, then, I remembered with a pang a story I had heard about when I was a child, and later read another version of (in Charles Kingsley's At Last, 1871). Every now and then, according to this story, groups of aboriginal Indians in canoes came across the gulf from the continent (where remnants of the tribes still existed), walked to certain places in the woods in the southern hills, performed certain rites or made offerings, and then, with certain fruit they had gathered, went back home across the gulf. This was all that I heard. I wasn't of an age to want to ask more or to find out more; and the unfinished, unexplained story now is like something in a dream, an elusive echo from another kind of consciousness.

Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness--which is more than the idea of the "environment"--that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness--rather than history and the past--that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover.

So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries--lran, Pakistan, Indonesia--the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 51-52

New Missionaries to Japan, 1950

We left for Japan from Winchester, Virginia, in August of 1950. We travelled from Martinsburg by train. We had one child who was one year old and 17 pieces of baggage. We traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, where we had to change trains for the three day trip to San Francisco where we would debark for Japan. Our cabin was a small one with barely enough room for us to sit or lie down. Joel had problems with being cooped up so long in such a small space. Edith was pregnant and often sick from the motion of the train. It was not the most pleasant trip of my life.

We finally arrived in San Francisco where we stayed in a hotel for two days until the ship left. The several new missionaries who met there took turns baby-sitting each other's children so that they would have some chance to tour the city and make final preparations for departure. We embarked on the President Cleveland on or about August 12 for the two weeks voyage. Our accommodations were great and the ship provided us plenty of space to move around, laze about, play shuffle board, horseshoes, deck volleyball, and take walks around the ship. Joel had just learned to walk and could not understand why the surface on which he walked kept bobbing around. The food was exquisite. Our waiter complained, "A banquet every meal" and he was right! We could order as many appetizers, entrees and desserts as we wanted. Mealtime was sometimes quite an experience with a one year old and a pregnant, seasick wife, but I mainly remember how good the food was.

We arrived in Japan on August 23, 1950. Japan was a long way from home in Southampton County, Virginia. Except for the trip on a cattle boat to Europe in 1946, including a brief few days in Poland, this was my first experience outside of the United States. I really knew very little about the land which would be my domicile for most of the next twenty years or so. I knew even less of the Japanese language for it was the philosophy of the Foreign Mission Board that foreign languages were best learned in the country where the missionaries would work. A Japanese actress who had spent most of her life in the United States and was on the President Cleveland returning to her native land to play a leading role in Madame Butterfly took the time to teach those of us who were interested a few phrases in Japanese. So, as I have so often in my life I embarked on an adventure for which I was ill prepared.

I did not at that time fully realize that all those Japanese were not the foreigners but we were. Americans often feel that natives of other lands are the foreigners rather than ourselves when we travel to their countries. Everything seemed so "foreign" to me. The language sounded like nothing I had ever studied or heard. Signs in Japanese had no appearance of familiarity as would have Spanish or German for instance. The many unknowns gave the whole experience an aura of excitement but the predominant feeling was one of awe and uncertainty about what lay ahead. I remember seeing an American flag flying on a ship in Yokohama harbor and feeling a sense of security that we would be living under an occupation which would provide some measure of safety in this strange land to which I have come to live. This proved to be true but I do not remember feeling any anxiety about being mistreated by the Japanese even after the Occupation was over. The Japanese people welcomed us and were gracious to us. They were often rude but not more so to us than to each other it seemed. In fact, they treated us better than they treated each other. We learned soon that an outward politeness was often a cloak for negative feelings but on the whole we were pleasantly surprised that these people who not so long ago had been America's bitter enemies were now so very friendly to Americans and so eager to learn all they could about their former enemies.

Evacuation Day from Korea, 1940

During the Korean War, the rapid UN retreat from northern Korea in the face of massive intervention by the "Chinese People's Volunteers" in late 1950 was known as the Big Bugout. Almost exactly ten years earlier, many Westerners in Japanese-occupied parts of Northeast Asia staged their own Big Bugout.

On September 12, 1940, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew cabled Washington from Tokyo with his famous "green light message," switching his support to the hard-liners in the U.S. government who wanted to punish Japan for its aggression on the Asian mainland. Yet punishment was hardly advisable as long as thousands of American civilians, all potential hostages, were living in the Japanese Empire. It was time to put out the signal that war was getting closer by evacuating "non essential" American civilians from East Asia. The number to be evacuated from China, Japan, and Korea was estimated at over a thousand, making it necessary to charter several passenger ships to make the rounds and pick them up. The SS Washington was sent to Shanghai, the SS Monterey to Shanghai and Yokohama, and the SS Mariposa to Shanghai and Ch'inhuangtao in northeast China, Jinsen (Inch'ôn) in Korea, and Kobe, Japan.

The State Department's evacuation order went out to embassies and consulates during the second week of October. When it reached Seoul, Consul-General Gaylord Marsh quickly wrote up a notice and passed it to American community leaders for distribution....

He had no legal power to order anyone to leave Korea. However, the American community reacted with something bordering on panic. An immediate casualty was Pyeng Yang Foreign School. At the time, PYFS was one of the best international boarding schools in Asia with a history of more than forty years. It had started the 1940-41 school year in September with new teachers from the United States and 105 students, 55 of them from outside Korea, and everything had functioned normally through the middle of October. But over the weekend of November 1, PYFS simply ceased to exist. When the evacuation order came from Consul-General Marsh, the school board held an emergency session and voted to suspend classes without delay. The boarding students were put on trains within hours, and three days later, on Tuesday; November 4, the school closed forever....

The withdrawal of American civilians from Korea touched off withdrawals by British subjects also, including Canadians and Australians who were essential to the Protestant missionary effort. In Seoul, Horace and Ethel Underwood were appalled by the stampede. After fighting off the Presbyterian Mission's attempts to remove them from Chosen Christian College, they were in no mood to obey the consul-general's alleged order. Horace was angry at the way Gaylord Marsh had frightened the expatriate community....

The evacuation "order" caused consternation in Japan. In Tokyo, the Japan Advertiser gave the official Japanese view that "Evacuation in principle is all wrong and a retrograde move. Even at the cost of some personal and temporary difficulties it should be stopped, if not by governments, as far as possible by individuals." A columnist in the Miyako described the U.S. government as "trembling at phantoms" while the Tokyo Nichi Nichi said that the evacuation was one of a series of moves meant to intimidate Japan and wondered what subsequent moves might be. Other Japanese papers welcomed the withdrawal as a chance to move in on American privileges and markets in China and Korea. While expressing amazement that Washington could think its citizens in danger, the departure of American and British "fifth columnists" was seen as a boon to the future of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

On November 15, 1940, the Mariposa crossed the Yellow Sea and anchored at Inch'ôn.... For the Americans on shore, the next morning brought Evacuation Day. From all parts of Seoul by car, Korean kuruma cart, and on foot, more than two hundred Americans converged on the railroad station for the 22-mile trip to Inch'ôn. Porters carried trunks on chigye A-frames, enough to create a mountain of baggage on the platform. Korean friends braved police surveillance to come and say good-bye, and there were enough empty seats on the special evacuation train to permit many of them to travel all the way to Inch'ôn for their last farewells....

Toward dusk, the Mariposa weighed anchor and headed for the open sea, the Americans aboard feeling reassured by a rumor that the cruiser USS Augusta was out in the darkness standing watch. Life on the Mariposa then took shape as people settled into their cabins. The ship was not full, so the captain did away with the class system--after making sure that the Foreign Service families had the best cabins. The crew organized games and parties for the 196 children on board. Religious services were organized and a room was set aside for daily meditation. And there were the ship's usual amusements: tea dances, movies, and band concerts. On Thanksgiving Day there was a turkey feast. In fact, everything wonderful about America seemed to be contained on the Mariposa. "The Mariposa is a little bit of Heaven," wrote one evacuee. A tea dance menu carefully preserved by another bore the notation "This boat is a luxury ship, and no mistake--everything about it is superb."

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 250-257

I have similar fond memories of being "evacuated" to Japan aboard the SS President Cleveland and SS President Wilson as a kid.

Japaniizu Beesubooru, Riigu endo Chiimu

This past weekend, I had the pureejaa of watching several critical innings of a 3-game series between the Tokyo Giants and the Hiroshima Carp. (I always root against the Giants, who have dominated Japanese baseball for as long as I can remember.)

The broadcasts were not subtitled, but they hardly needed to be for those who know a little bit about baseball and can recognize English terms in Japanese pronunciation. So I thought I might share some of those terms with readers who know more baseball than Japanese. My principal source is A Slightly Askew Glossary of Japanese Baseball Terms by professional translator Steven P. Venti, but I'll concentrate only on the terms of foreign origin written in katakana, the Japanese syllabary primarily used for foreign terms (somewhat like italics in English). (See also Latham's Guide to Japanese Baseball.) I'll use uppercase to render portions written and pronounced as Chinese characters.

Teams and schedule
se riigu 'Central League': Giants, Dragons, Carp, Swallows, Tigers, Bay Stars
pa riigu 'Pacific League': Hawks, Lions, Marines, Fighters, Blue Wave, Buffaloes (the last two about to merge)
DAI (= meejaa) riigu 'Big (Major) League' (North American MLB)
shiizun ofu 'off season'
naitaa 'night game'

See Frank Liu's Far East Heroes page for Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese players in MLB.

Next up, in the ueetingu saakuru ('on-deck circle'): hitting terms.

Conservative Pyongyang vs. Liberal Seoul

New missionaries learned many of their most useful lessons about Korea from their seniors within the mission rather than from Koreans. The seniority system had its advantages. The senior missionaries in P'yôngyang were gifted leaders and planners whose skills had everything to do with the spectacular success of the Presbyterians as a mission. Their character and commitment inspired fierce loyalty in their understudies....

The P'yôngyang "team's" strict conservatism, however, sometimes led to conflicts with other missionaries. A prime area of disagreement was the Presbyterian Mission's educational policy. A working document entitled "Our Educational Policy" had been adopted by a majority vote of the mission in 1890, defining the purpose of missionary education as "the gospel for the heathen and education for the Christians." The mission agreed to support schools for the children of Christian parents, to train them as the church's next generation of leaders and to give them the social advantage of a modern education. The policy explicitly rejected "general education" as a means of attracting non-Christians to the atmosphere of Christian schools. As the paper's author put it, "The missionary teacher should be primarily a manufacturer of evangelists, and in so far as he has failed to do this he has failed as a missionary teacher, however successful he may be as an educator."

This was the policy that was challenged in 1915 when the Government-General of Chosen excluded religious instruction from the curriculum of any school that wanted its graduates' diplomas recognized by the government for purposes of future employment. At that time, the Northern Presbyterians had voted to close their schools rather than give up religious instruction (a step that turned out to be unnecessary because of the subsequent liberalization of the rule under Governor-General Saito). The vote came in the midst of a bitter dispute between "conservatives" in P'yôngyang and "liberals" in Seoul over what kind of postsecondary education was appropriate in the mission's program of Christian schooling....

The Seoul faction, led by Horace G. Underwood (Won Du-woo), argued that by maintaining a single college exclusively for pastoral training in P'yôngyang, the mission was neglecting its responsibility to reach the Korean upper crust in the capital. If the brightest young Koreans were so hungry for a modem education that they were willing to leave home, where there was as yet no college, in order to study in Japan, then the church in Korea should take the opportunity to offer instruction in modern subjects under a Christian faculty in the context of Christian college life. If these were to be Korea's future leaders in secular occupations, Underwood argued, it was important that they be offered Christian college educations. Severance Union Medical College, an institution that taught science, had already succeeded in attracting top Korean students to study medicine in preparation for careers in the Christian occupation of healing. Why not a college to train Korea's future Christian professionals in other areas as well?

The Seoul college proposal threatened the P'yôngyang missionaries for political reasons as well. As a union institution run by a combination of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Canadian missions, the new college would be beyond their control. This was clear from the way Horace Underwood was going about promoting his project. His brother John was a member of the Board of Foreign Missions in New York, and between them the Underwood brothers had many powerful friends in the homeland's church hierarchy: Having made a fortune in the typewriter business, John Underwood was dangling before the Board a designated gift of $25,000 of his own money to purchase the college campus in the Seoul suburb of Yônhi Village. He had recruited allies on the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Canadian mission boards in North America to form an interdenominational consortium that would oversee the Seoul college through an interdenominational Field Board of Managers would answer to New York and not to the missions in Korea.

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 128-132

Pyongyang, "Jerusalem of the East"

By the 1920s, the Presbyterian Mission station in P'yôngyang had become the most conspicuous Western installation on the Korean peninsula. The city, which had been called "pagan" and "filthy" by the earliest Western travelers thirty years earlier, had become a beloved hometown for more than a hundred foreigners, from pioneer missionaries to children in the dormitory at Pyeng Yang Foreign School. To the Presbyterians it was a new "Jerusalem," the queen city of Christianity in Korea. Some of the greatest triumphs of the missionary effort were associated with P'yôngyang. It had been a center of the Great Revival of 1907 that is said to have set the tone for Korean Protestantism for the rest of the century; and by 1925 it was the center of the fastest-growing Christian community in all of East Asia and, some said, the whole world.

Situated on a majestic S-curve of the Taedong River halfway between Seoul and the Manchurian border, P'yôngyang had a distinguished history. Korea Kids at Pyeng Yang Foreign School grew up hearing that it had been founded in the time of Israel's King David by the Chinese nobleman Kija (Chinese: Ch'i-tzu), whose temple and tomb were among P'yongyang's prime historical sites and a favorite spot for picnics.... With nearly a hundred men, women, and children, the P'yôngyang Presbyterians outnumbered the city's Methodists and Catholics and completely overshadowed the city's foreign business contingent comprised of Russian merchants, a Portuguese trader and his family, and the American employees of the Corn Products Company's beet sugar refinery across the river.

The story of P'yôngyang as a missionary station began in 1890, when the newly arrived Samuel A. Moffett paid a two-week visit to investigate the possibility of opening evangelistic work there. The following spring, Moffett and his colleague James Scarth Gale visited P'yôngyang again while on a three-month exploratory journey by foot and horseback. They held services in the city but found that people were still "suspicious of foreigners and afraid of Christian books" because of the government's recently lifted prohibition against Christianity. P'yôngyang remained impenetrable for several years, receiving occasional visits from Seoul-based missionaries who invariably found the local authorities inhospitable. The Presbyterian Mission assigned Samuel Moffett to P'yôngyang as a full-time missionary in November 1893, and, after a rocky beginning that included attempts on his life by neighbors intent on killing the "foreign devil," he succeeded in buying property and founding a proper mission station in January 1895.

Forty years later, near the end of Moffett's distinguished career, the 120-acre Presbyterian campus in P'yôngyang boasted a formidable array of modern institutions. These included Sungsil College (also called Union Christian College) and the Anna Davis Industrial Shops where Sungsil College students worked to pay their tuition; the Lula Wells Industrial School for vocational training of abandoned wives and widows; the Presbyterian Theological Seminary training the denomination' s pastorate for all Korea; Bible institutes for women and men in the laity; secondary academies for boys and girls; Pyeng Yang Foreign School (PYFS), the Union Christian Hospital, and the West Gate Presbyterian Church. Interspersed throughout the compound were Westem-style residences, the homes of the missionaries themselves. Each day; hundreds of people, foreigners and Koreans, worked and studied in the various mission buildings. At intervals, hundreds more converged from the countryside to participate in special meetings, conventions, and church services. All year long, P'yôngyang station teemed with energy; and in many years the entire Northern Presbyterian Mission converged on P'yôngyang from the faraway stations of Taegu, Andong, Ch'ôngju, and Seoul, and the nearer-by stations of Chaeryông, Sônch'ôn, and Kanggye, to have their annual Mission Meeting and, incidentally, to admire the formidable successes of their P'yôngyang brethren.

The vitality of the missionary establishment in P'yôngyang, a medium-sized city of no more than 180,000, made the missionary campus a most conspicuous feature. For the missionaries, life revolved around "the Work," and everyone in sight was somehow related to it, whether as co-workers, servants, and employees, or potential converts. P'yôngyang was different from Seoul, where there was social contact outside the missionary and church circles. It had fewer diversions, and people tended to talk to each other. The station's early arrivals had brought theological and cultural beliefs that were part of the revival sweeping American Protestantism in the late nineteenth century. These became the basis for their own teaching and example for the Koreans. And inasmuch as the missionary calling was the ultimate expression of those beliefs, they understood that their own work was of earthshaking importance. As one missionary put it, "Among the full-time professions, the missionary call was often viewed as the highest. This related in part to the degree of personal sacrifice: anyone who would leave home, family, friends, and country to go to a 'heathen' country to serve Christ was looked upon with a kind of holy awe usually reserved for saints."

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 121-125

Afghanistan's Dicey Opium Poppy Near-Monopoly

OxBlog's intrepid Afghanistan correspondent reports on poppies and pesticides. Here's a sample paragraph.

My friend Mumtaz reports that a local commander near Kandahar recently told him: "If Karzai says, 'Don’t grow poppy,' I will still grow poppy. But if Khalilzad says 'Don't grow poppy,' well, then I will be poor." (Zalmay Khalilzad is the American ambassador to Afghanistan). The Americans have hit a number of heroin laboratories and drug markets belonging to warlords, and could presumably knock out a lot more if they chose. It's a dangerous game -- there are some very rich folks out there (including some in the Kabul government) who could start stirring up trouble for the U.S. occupation if it cuts into their opium profits. But I think at this stage, we're better off taking the risk and hitting the traffickers than burdening the farmers with a major eradication program. Give the big donor-funded agricultural projects another couple years to demonstrate alternative cash crops (almonds, raisins, cumin, etc.), set up rural credit and finance institutions, and fix up irrigation structures, so the farmers have genuine alternatives to poppy. Then the government can start enforcing a ban at the farmer level. The U.N. has also suggested scheduling big public works projects to coincide with that labor-intensive opium harvest season, to draw labor away from poppy farmers. It's an interesting idea, which to my knowledge hasn't been tried, but deserves to be.

Naipaul on Imaduddin, a Sumatran Fundamentalist

In his book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), V.S. Naipaul profiles an Islamic fundamentalist from Sumatra. The profile concludes thus:

Near the end of our talk that Sunday morning I asked him again about his outspokenness in the late 1970s and his troubles then with the government.

He said, expanding on what he had learnt in jail in 1978 and 1979 from the former foreign minister, Subandrio, "Never criticize Suharto. He's a Javanese. Young people shouldn't criticize older people, especially big people." For Imaduddin--not so young in 1977: forty-six to President Suharto's fifty-six--this went against the grain. "I was trained in the Dutch way and then in the American way, where criticism is O.K. And I was born in Sumatra: I can argue with my father. I had to learn the Javanese way."

The Sumatran way, which came naturally to Imaduddin, was the forthright, religious way, the fundamentalist way. For Imaduddin it had historically been a source of Sumatran strength.

He had told me earlier, "The Dutch when they came could conquer Java relatively easily, but they couldn't conquer Aceh and Sulawesi because the people were very religious."

Mr. Wahid had spoken of the new steamship travel that had from the thirties of the nineteenth century made Mecca more accessible for pilgrimage and study. Out of this there had developed, in colonized Java, the new Islamic village schools, like the one run by Mr. Wahid's grandfather.

In the independent kingdoms or sultanates of Sumatra, however, the effect of these journeys to Mecca had been more violent. Just as one hundred and fifty or sixty years later colonial students, often the first in their families to travel abroad for university degrees, were to go back home with borrowed ideas of revolution; so these Sumatran students and pilgrims in Mecca, influenced by Wahabi fundamentalism, and a little vain of their new knowledge, were to go back home determined to make the faith in Sumatra equal to the Wahabi faith in Mecca. They were determined to erase local errors, all the customs and ceremonies and earth reverences that carried the taint of the religions that had gone before: animism, Hinduism, Buddhism. There had followed religious wars for much of the century; it was what had drawn the Dutch in, at first to mediate or assist, and then to rule.

This was the missionary faith that lmaduddin had inherited. Java, rather than Sumatra, was rich in the monuments of the pagan past. But nothing outside or before the faith was to be acknowledged, not even a great Buddhist monument like Borobudur, one of the wonders of the world. One of Imaduddin's criticisms of the government in 1979 was that the Indonesian embassy in Canberra looked like a Hindu building. As for Borobudur, that was for the international community to look after.

I asked him about that. He said--like a man whose position now required him to be more statesmanlike--that I had misunderstood. What he had said or meant to say was that money that could be used to feed "hungry Muslims" shouldn't be used on Borobudur.

In spite of the statesmanlike softening intention, the old Sumatran unforgivingness showed through. For the new fundamentalists of Indonesia the greatest war was to be made on their own past, and everything that linked them to their own earth.

Changing Names: Thailand, Laos

Thailand

The polity now known as Thailand was generally referred to as "Siam" for many centuries. Nationalists renamed it in 1939 in an attempt to be more inclusive of people, particularly in the north, northeast, and south, who had never considered themselves "Siamese" (i.e., indigenous subjects of the state centered on Ayutthaya or Bangkok) but might be persuaded to think of themselves as "Thai." After World War II "Siam" briefly was restored as the country's name in 1946, but little more than a year later "Thailand" became permanent.

The term itself is a neologism, combining the traditional ethnic identity "Thai" with "land" (prathet in Thai). As the word "Thai" also means "free," some people translate the country's name as "Land of the Free," but it is unlikely that that was the original meaning. Many other peoples speaking closely related languages live nearby in Myanmar, China, Laos, and Vietnam; for purposes of convenience, linguists and other scholars sometimes label all of them, along with the Thai, as "Tai" (without the "h").

There is wide variation among systems of transliteration of Thai into the Western alphabet, but in general place-names in this book follow those adopted by the Board on Geographic Names, as used on most published maps.

Laos

The word "Laos" was first used by European missionaries and cartographers in the seventeenth century to pluralize the word "Lao," the name of the country's predominant ethnolinguistic group. In the Lao language, which is closely related to Thai, there is no orthographic distinction between plural and singular nouns. In Lao, Laos is known as pathet lao or muang lao, both meaning "Lao country" or "Lao-land," along the lines of prathet thai (Thailand).

The French used the term "Laos" as the name for their protectorate in the colonial period. After independence in 1954, the country became known as the Kingdom of Laos. In 1975, when the communists came to power and the monarchy was abolished, it was renamed the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)

Thai Dentists Perform Elephantine Root Canals

Australia's Herald Sun (12 June 2004) reports on advances in treating elephantine root canals.

VETERINARIANS and dentists in northern Thailand have adapted human root canal techniques to treat elephants suffering from potentially fatal tusk infections, it was reported today.

Doctors at Chiang Mai University developed the technique to mend the infected stumps of tusks sawn off and sold for their ivory by unscrupulous elephant handlers, according to [Thailand's] The Nation newspaper.

Tusk infections could threaten local pachyderm populations, elephant welfare organisations said.

Handlers often fill the severed tusks with soil and bark, which can cause tetanus and lead to death, the newspaper reported, citing research by dentists and veterinarians from several Thai elephant protection organisations.

Veterinarians throughout northern Thailand will be trained to care for elephants using the new technique, which employs the same material used to fill human cavities.

Then they cover the stump with a gold crown?

Changing Names: Malaysia, the Philippines

Malaysia

The name "Malaysia" is derived from the term "Malay," long applied by locals and foreigners to the Malay Peninsula in recognition of the predominance there of Malay-speaking peoples (whose geographic extent, however, also includes much of Sumatra and other islands of the archipelago). The peninsula became widely known from the late eighteenth century simply as "Malaya" and, in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when its individual states fell under British colonial rule, as British Malaya. British Malaya also included the three Straits Settlements on the fringe of the peninsula: the islands of Penang and Singapore and the small west coast state of Melaka (Malacca). When the Malay states (including Penang and Melaka but not at that time Singapore) became independent in 1957, they did so as the Federation of Malaya. In 1963 a larger federal unit called Malaysia was formed, bringing together the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, and the British-ruled protectorates of Sarawak and Sabah in northern Borneo. The oil-rich protectorate of Brunei, situated between British North Borneo and Sarawak, declined to join Malaysia, and Singapore was expelled in 1965.

Much of Malaysia has been the recipient during the past two centuries of immigrants of other than indigenous stock (which is held to include local Malays, the aborigines or orang asli ["original people"] of the peninsula, the tribal peoples of the Borneo states, and immigrants from Java, Sumatra, and elsewhere in Indonesia). The largest immigrant group was "Chinese," a term used for individuals hailing originally from many different parts of south China, often speaking distinct local languages. Those immigrants referred to as "Indian" included Muslims as well as Hindus from Tamilnadu in south India, Bengalis, and others, in addition to many from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). One political result of the large immigrant influx has been the coining of a term that seeks to distinguish between Malaysians who are of Malay or other local descent and those who are not (no matter whether locally descended or long resident): bumiputera ("son[s] of the soil"), which confers constitutionally derived advantages of various sorts. The Malay language, now the national language of Malaysia, is known either simply as Malay or as Bahasa Melayu.

The Philippines

The Philippines was named by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century for the prince who would become King Philip II of Spain. The national language, adopted from Tagalog in the twentieth century and spoken by most inhabitants of the capital city, Manila, has been called at various times Pilipino or Filipino. All of the indigenous languages are linguistically related to Malay, although many Spanish, Chinese, and English loan words have been incorporated.

The Spanish called most of the indigenous inhabitants indios (Indians) using the term "Filipino" only as an adjective or to describe Caucasians born in the archipelago. These were white-skinned, not brown: creoles, of European ancestry but born in the empire rather than on the Iberian Peninsula. Since the late nineteenth century the term "Filipino" has been transformed to describe any person born in the archipelago who chose to owe allegiance to the Philippines, while the term indio is generally considered derogatory. "Mestizos" (literally people of "mixed" ethnic ancestry) may have Caucasian and indio blood, Chinese and indio heritage, or a combination. In sharp contradistinction to many other places throughout Southeast Asia and the world (where the comparable term "half-caste" is a pejorative), to be mestizo in the Philippines carries no negative connotation or constraint.

There are many Hispanic names in the Philippines, but after the United States took over, most Filipinos began to abandon the use of accent marks on these names. We will follow this practice and omit accent marks on the names of persons living after 1898.

The Spanish referred to the various Muslim peoples of the south, such as the Tausug and the Magindanao, as "Moros" (Moors), a term they brought with them from their long encounters with the Muslims of North Africa. This term, which was originally rejected by Filipino Muslim communities as a slur, has recently been embraced by them as a marker of their separatist dream.

SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)

Island Archetypes: Coastal Slickers vs. Orang Utan

Where is your archetypal cultural dividing line? Is it rural vs. urban, north vs. south, east vs. west, the West vs. the Rest? For traditional cultures tied to large islands, the archetypal division is often sea vs. mountain, coast vs. inland, which often equates to civilized vs. barbarian, cosmopolitan vs. isolated, believers vs. heathen, or--from the opposite point of view--corrupt vs. pure, deceitful vs. honest.

Traces of these oppositions show up in English borrowings: Boondocks from bundok 'mountain' in Tagalog and other Philippine languages. Orangutan from the Malay words orang 'person' + hutan 'forest', a derogatory term for 'forest dweller' or 'aboriginal peoples of E. Sumatra'. Hutan is related to Hawaiian uka 'inland, upland', as in the cardinal directions every newcomer to Hawai‘i has to master: mauka 'toward the land' and makai 'toward the sea'. However, as far as I know, uka doesn't have any derogatory connotations in Hawai‘i, where traditional land divisions (ahupua‘a) ran from coast to mountaintop.

The following excerpt from a book review in Oceanic Linguistics provides more detail about how these archetypes play out in Northeast New Guinea. The book under review (not online) is Children of Kilibob: Creation, cosmos, and culture in Northeast New Guinea, edited by Alice Pomponio, David R. Counts, and Thomas G. Harding Pacific Studies Special Issue, vol. 17, no. 4 (Institute for Polynesian Studies, Brigham Young University--Hawai‘i, 1994).

One of my most memorable, and intellectually challenging, conversations during my fieldwork in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), in 1976 was a discussion of how the huge disparity between the relative political and economic status of Europeans and Papua New Guineans came about. My interlocutor, a good-hearted, elderly Numbami church leader who shared my penchant for moral philosophizing, suggested an explanation along Biblical lines: Europeans descended from Jacob, while Papua New Guineans descended from Jacob's elder twin brother Esau, who lost his birthright to his deceitful younger brother. (My own attempts at an explanation along the lines of specialization and increasing technological complexity were not entirely satisfactory either.) Children of Kilibob (CK) puts that conversation in a much broader perspective.

Kilibob and Manup are the names (as rendered in Peter Lawrence's seminal work Road Belong Cargo) of two hostile brothers who feature prominently in the mythology of Northeast New Guinea. Kilibob is the trickster, the traveler, and the creator (like Jacob) who always seems to come out on top, while the more stolid and sedentary Manup (like Esau) regularly loses out. The trickster/creator hero goes by many different names depending on the peoples involved in the events described (variations of Mala, or Aragas, Ava, Titikolo--perhaps even Jesus), with some storytellers consciously changing the names of the protagonists as locales change within a single story (115). (This recalls the shared mythology of Latins and Greeks, wherein Zeus = Jupiter, Aphrodite = Venus, Ares = Mars, and so on, not to mention rougher Germanic equivalents in Woden, Freya, Tiw, etc.)

Among the non-Austronesian (NAn) Waskia and Austronesian (An) Takia who share residence on Karkar Island in Madang Province, Kulbob is said to be "a fine hunter and carver" and "tall and fair in contrast to Manub, an industrious fisherman of stocky build and dark complexion" (15). This opposition harks back not just to the most recent one between innovative, intrusive Europeans and traditional, indigenous Papua New Guineans, but also to the earlier one between An and NAn forebears, for "the [NAn] Waskia claim their descent and language from Manub, while the [An] Takia claim theirs, with their culture (ultimately widely adopted in Waskia), from Kulbob" (14). Similarly, the equivalent of Kilibob in the islands of the Vitiaz Strait (where he is called variously Mala, Male, Namor, or Molo) is considered a progenitor and culture-hero among the An Siassi (53–91) and a visiting benefactor by the An Sio (29–51), but an interfering outsider (a "city slicker"?) by the NAn Kowai of Umboi Island (93–107). The swift incorporation of newly intrusive elements of Judeo-Christian ritual (like churchgoing) and of European material culture (like rifles) into this mythological narrative is one of many indications that the traditional cultures of Papua New Guinea were far from static. In fact, Dorothy Counts stresses the role of mythology in exploring tensions with the outside world: "The myths explore the difference between Us and Them and ask what kind of relationship is possible between Us and the Others with whom we must interact, trade, and marry if we are to survive" (115).

For me, the most intriguing aspect of this collection is what Alice Pomponio calls the use of "mythical metaphors to chronicle historical realities" (in contrast to Marshall Sahlins’s characterization of Hawaiian accounts of Captain Cook's reception and demise as "historical metaphors of mythical realities") (61–62). She finds that many of the "legendary events mirror real episodes in Siassi genealogical and migration histories" (74). For instance, in the Mandok Siassi account, "the villages Mala visits [on Umboi Island] are [NAn] Kowai communities known to the Mandok to be safe havens among otherwise hostile [Kowai] 'bushmen' [farther inland]" (74). This hints that the biggest cultural divide is between coastal peoples and inland peoples rather than between An and NAn peoples.

There is apparently a similar distinction between "forest" and "grassland" peoples at higher elevations (in Eastern Highlands Province), where the lowland grasslanders are characterized as politically and culturally dominant and more sophisticated, while the highlanders are characterized as more knowledgeable about their natural surroundings (according to James B. Watson, in his chapter "Other people do other things: Lamarckian identities in Kainantu Subdistrict, Papua New Guinea" in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990).

Cambodians Profiled in Rocky Mountain News

The Rocky Mountain News is running a 12-part series called The Healing Fields about a Cambodian family in Denver who are trying to help Cambodians back home. Here's the editor's introduction. It seems a good example of making the global local, or vice versa.

As you know, the Rocky Mountain News is a local newspaper. The motto we use on our advertisements is "Closer to home," because we feel it expresses the core of our identity, that we cut closer to your lives and that our emphasis is what happens here, where you - and we - live.

So when Assistant Business Editor Jane Hoback approached me late in the summer of 2003, I have to admit I was somewhat dubious of the value of making a major commitment to Randa and Setan's story. Many people from this area, after all, help others around the world, as Randa and Setan do.

But then I met them.

As Jane says, "they're not saints," but in a visit to my office they struck me as remarkable souls whose story could change the lives of others.

I was struck right away by how their Christian faith would play such an important role in any story we did. We in the secular press are often criticized, even rejected, for our perceived denial of the importance of religious beliefs. I believe in the value of taking seriously what motivates people, why they act and think the way they do. I believe if we can bring understanding, we have done our job well.

And so we began our journey. Jane rarely writes stories for the Rocky. She normally helps polish the work of others. But this story gripped her, and she was determined to tell it herself.

One of our challenges was that so much of this story is history. It is the retelling by Randa and Setan of their ordeal and escape from Cambodia. They were alone. This is what they remember, and the memories are painful. As Jane listened, and we learned more, the more it seemed worth traveling to their homeland, where we could witness Randa and Setan's program to free women who had been sold or forced into prostitution and give them the chance for a new life.

Jane was joined on that journey by Ellen Jaskol, a talented photographer whose work often graces our Spotlight section.

I had come to see that although we needed to travel halfway around the world to tell it, this was a local story. Not just because Randa, Setan and their extended family live among us, but because it is just such stories that show us how connected we are to a world that is growing smaller and smaller.

This is especially the case in an open Western city such as Denver, where so many of us come from somewhere else.

That doesn't mean it's easy for us to cross the cultural barriers in a strange land. But try we must. Jane and Ellen traveled for two weeks with a driver and a translator, following Setan through his past and observing his struggle in the present.

When they returned, the question we faced was how to tell such a sweeping story. The way we approach big projects at the Rocky is to form a team that works together from the start. Nothing is more satisfying than working with a group of people who complement each other's strengths.

And that's what happened in this case.

The story starts thus:

At first, 18-year-old Setan Lee didn't notice the trucks full of armed soldiers rumbling into the Buddhist temple square in his hometown of Battambang.

On this final day of the Cambodian New Year, music and noisy celebration filled the packed square in Cambodia's second largest city. Children played in the warm afternoon air. Revelers sprinkled perfumed water onto the temple statues in a blessing ritual intended to bring good luck, long life and happiness.

"We were celebrating," Setan says. "We were having fun."

Setan didn't understand when he saw the grim, black-uniformed soldiers pouring out of the trucks, aiming their rifles wildly and shouting "enemy" over and over.

Setan's best friend didn't understand, either. He approached one of the soldiers.

I'm not your enemy, he told the soldier. Why do you call me your enemy?

The soldier's response was swift and irrevocable.

"Just like that, they shot him and killed him."

Setan froze in disbelief and terror. He went numb.

"Right away, I know he's not going to make it. He's already dead."

It was April 17, 1975, and in one terrifying moment, Setan Lee - son of a wealthy businessman, youngest student in his medical school class - lost a world of promise and possibility.

via Santepheap - The Cambodia Weblog

Changing Names: Cambodia, Vietnam

Cambodia

"Cambodia" is the English-language rendering of a Sanskrit word usually transliterated as "Kambuja" and pronounced "Kampuchea" in modern Khmer. The word, which means "born of Kambu," a mythical, semidivine forebear, was part of the name Kambujadesa (Cambodia-land), which the empire of Angkor, centered in what is now northwestern Cambodia, gave itself after the tenth century C.E. The nomenclature remained in use after the abandonment of Angkor in the sixteenth century.

Under the French colonial protectorate (1863-1954) the kingdom's name came to be written "Cambodge" in French but was still written and pronounced in Khmer as "Kampuchea." The transliteration "Kampuchea" reappeared briefly in documents written in French in March 1945, when Cambodia was told to declare independence by Japanese forces occupying the region, and it renamed itself the Kingdom of Kampuchea. By November 1945, when the French returned to power, the kingdom's name in French had reverted to Cambodge (Cambodia for English speakers).

In 1970, following a coup against Norodom Sihanouk, the country named itself the Khmer Republic. When the Republican regime was defeated by local communists five years later, the Marxist-Leninist government that took power called the country Democratic Kampuchea. A Vietnamese invasion in December 1978 drove this regime from power and the newly established, pro-Vietnamese government came to office under the name of the People's Republic of Kampuchea. When the Vietnamese withdrew their forces in 1989, the ruling party remained in power, but its leaders renounced Marxism-Leninism and renamed their country the State of Cambodia. This name lasted until 1993, when Sihanouk, who had abdicated the throne in 1955, became king for a second time, and the country restored its pre-1970 name, the Kingdom of Cambodia.

The word "Khmer" refers to the major ethnic group in Cambodia, comprising perhaps 90 percent of the population, and also to the language spoken throughout the country. The etymology of the word is obscure, but it has been in use to describe the inhabitants of the region for over a thousand years. In general the terms "Khmer" and "Cambodian" are interchangeable, and in conversation most Cambodians refer to their country as sruk Khmer (Khmer-land).

Vietnam

"Vietnam" is a relatively recent name for the kingdom of the "Viet" people. ("Viet" is cognate with the Chinese "Yue," a generic term for ethnic groups in what is now southern China and beyond.) Its official use began only in the nineteenth century. From the eleventh century to 1800, Vietnamese rulers usually called their country as a whole the "Great Viet" (Dai Viet) domain.

Of the other premodern names for the country, "Annam" is probably the most familiar. This Chinese colonial term emerged in the late seventh century, when the Tang empire named its colony in northern Vietnam the "Pacified South" (Chinese: Annan) protectorate. Vietnam stopped being a Chinese colony in the tenth century, but the Chinese continued to refer to their now independent southern neighbor as "Annam" until the end of the 1800s, rather as if the British were to continue to call Zimbabwe "Rhodesia" for the next nine centuries. Many Westerners picked up on this locution and referred to the country as "Annam" (and its people as "Annamites" or "Annamese"), although Vietnamese generally did not appreciate this terminology. The nomenclature was further confused when the French, in dividing Vietnam administratively into three parts, called the middle one (centered on Hue and Danang) "Annam," as distinct from "Tonkin" to the north and "Cochinchina" to the south.

In the early 1800s the new Nguyen dynasty tried to secure international (i.e., Chinese) recognition of a new name for the country: "Nam Viet." But to the rulers of China the term (Nan Yue in Chinese) conjured up memories of an ancient state of that name, founded by a dissident Chinese general, which had existed in modern Guangdong and Guangxi between 203 and 111 B.C.E. Chinese rulers feared that their acceptance of the term "Nam Viet" might signal approval of resurrected Vietnamese claims to south China. They therefore reversed the components of the proposed new name to detoxify it politically, and thus "Viet Nam" (Vietnam) came into existence. Nineteenth-century Vietnamese rulers, not liking it, privately preferred to refer to their country as the "Great South" (Dai Nam).

SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)

Faubion Bowers: Intoxicated by MacArthur

WWII Japanese translator-interpreter Faubion Bowers recalls his boss during the occupation of Japan:

I am often asked what it was like to work closely with Douglas MacArthur. I was his aide-de-camp. Actually, my official title was Assistant Military Secretary to the Commander-in-Chief. MacArthur never hired anyone and never fired anyone. The people around him just sort of drifted into their jobs. Once, when he was complaining to me about how the press always gunned for him--"It's only me and Patton they pick on "he moaned--I suggested very timidly that, "Perhaps, sir, it's the people around you that cause a critical press. He answered unequivocally, "Major, if it's right at the top, it's right at the bottom."

For the two years I was near MacArthur, I was absolutely intoxicated by him. He had a grandeur, a greatness, a magnificence that doesn't exist anymore. There was a de Gaulle, Churchill, Smuts, Nehru, Stalin and MacArthur, that kind of bigger-than-life, old-fashioned razzmatazz belonging to a past era, another century. Certainly MacArthur belonged to the 19th Century, instead of the 20th. All that invoking of "the Almighty," the grandiloquent vocabulary ("I would be recreant in my duty not to run for the Presidency"), the fulsome references to his "adored wife" (they didn't sleep in the same bed, and she always called him "General," even in private) and his public exaggerations regarding his son, whom he saw only briefly in the mornings and who was asleep by the time he got home in the evenings, were just that, exaggerations. The one and only time the General ever visited a hospital during his 6½ years in Japan was not to visit the wounded but to spend 10 minutes with little Arthur, who had broken his arm....

MacArthur always roused controversy. He brought it all on himself, and then whimpered that everyone was out to get him. His was a nature where pride was mortgaged to vanity. The Japanese liked him, because he kept himself aloof. The Emperor liked him, because he was deferential, excessively polite. MacArthur--a man who delighted in humiliating or trying to humiliate his superiors--was extraordinarily affable to Hirohito, the first time he came to call at the Embassy, September 26, 1945, when I was as terrified of his Japanese as he was scared of my Japanese. After the famous meeting, when the Emperor offered himself, his life, to free all the men in Sugamo Prison, MacArthur was terribly moved. He said to Jean, his wife, and me, "I was brought up in a republic, a democracy, but to see a man once so high now brought down so low, pains me, grieves me." And both Jean and I knew that he was actually speaking of himself. If defeat in war had humbled Hirohito, it took little Truman, with the stroke of a pen, to bring down the mighty, self-consumed MacArthur, who had deliberately insulted the President on Wake Island in 1951.

WWII Japanese Translators: The Hakujin Experience

Faubion Bowers, The Man Who Saved Kabuki, was a Japanese language translator in World War II. He contributed the following memoir to the Japanese American Veterans Association website.

In 1941, the year war with Japan broke out, there were 25 American Hakujin (Caucasians) who could read, speak and write--more or less--the Japanese language. Most of these were older, scholastic men who had spent years in Kyoto among art treasures or were missionaries who had set their minds on converting the Japanese from their heathen ways. Twenty-five is not much of a number when you are planning on an Army and Navy of five million or so against a nation of 100 million. The idea of using Nisei [2nd generation Japanese immigrants to America] or Kibei [Japanese Americans who had returned to Japan (usually for education)] had only begun to glimmer in 1940, and, even then, the idea was roundly rejected by the Navy. It would later use its own method of developing linguists: it would go to the Ivy League colleges, assemble the cum laudes and phi beta kappas and offer them a commission (instead of the draft) in exchange for a year's intensive language training at Boulder, Colorado. The idea was a good one, because it produced, among others, Donald Keene, Ed Seidensticker and Robert Ward, some of the best Japanese scholars in the world today.

The Army was sloppier. Anyone, any White man, who went to Washington in 1940 or 1941, and said "Ohayo gozaimus," ("Good morning") or said he had been to Japan as a missionary's son or businessman or whatnot, was immediately given a commission in Military Intelligence. I had spent the year from March, 1940, to March, 1941, in Japan and, since there were no other tourists, and foreigners were scarce in that country which had been ostracized for the Shina Ji[k]en (China "Incident") since 1937 and the capture of all of China's main cities, I had no alternative but to learn Japanese or die of loneliness. I learned it so well, thanks again to the absence of English speakers in the country that, when I left Japan (reluctantly, but it had become impossible for an American to remain there, as war was drawing near), and I continued my travels on down to Indonesia, the Dutch there assumed I was a Japanese spy and put me under armed guard until a ship could be found to send me back to America.

Back in America, by September 1941, I was drafted. I didn't know about that trick of going to Washington and saying "Ohayo gozaimus." At the induction center, I filled out all the forms, and, when it came to languages, I noted that I knew well French, Russian, Japanese and Malay (as Bahasa Indonesia was known in those days). The Army was so screwed up then, that my language ability went unnoticed. I was a private, trained in the Artillery, and, when Pearl Harbor exploded, I was in basic training in Fort Bragg, given a quick leave and readied to be sent to Africa for eventual landing in Italy.

However, mirabile dictu, when I reported back to camp, a Major Dickey appeared out of nowhere and said "Ohayo gozaimus" to me. I immediately answered in astonishment, rather homesick for the language, the people and the country I had come to love. My Japanese was better than Dickey's, and we continued in English. From then on, Army life was more pleasant. I was instantly transferred to the Presidio in San Francisco, and was surrounded by Nisei and Kibei. All of us were privates, or at least none of us was an officer.

Then, we were sent to [Camp] Savage in cold Minnesota. Savage had been an Old Folks' Home before the Army took it over, and it was a mess. All of us worked long and hard to clean it out. Then, as our military training continued -- long hikes with full gear on our backs, PT, tattoo and taps -- we began, rather continued, our studies in Japanese. If the hikes had been John Aiso's idea, he was so conscientious, the Japanese lessons were an antidote. The instructors were marvelous. There was Tusky Tsukahira, a civilian. There was Tom Sakamoto, a staff sergeant, if I remember correctly, and others. Our classes consisted of Japanese-Americans and about 5 or 6 Hakujin--Matt Adams, Jurgenson, Charlie Fogg--I can't remember the rest. Some of the students were simply marvelous in Japanese. Others were simply awful.

The Hakujin officers, aside from Colonel Rassmussen and Major Dickey, were splendid men; those Hakujin who had gotten their commissions by going to Washington ahead of the hot pursuit of the draft, well, their Japanese was terrible, to put it politely. Trouble began to brew. Here were the Nisei, brilliant in Japanese far beyond the ken of the Hakujin officers. They were drafted privates or PFCs at best. Their parents were confined in camps, their worldly goods and homesteads sold at fractions of their value. And here they were, serving their country in the most invaluable way possible--intelligence.

Rasmussen and Dickey were alarmed at the growing resentment. They were, in addition to being regular Army officers, experienced men of the world, having been military attaches at various embassies throughout the world, notably Japan. It became imperative that some--the best--Nisei be commissioned. However, the Army moves on precedent, and never in its history had anyone ever been commissioned on the basis of language. Further complicating matters was the prejudice against the Japanese-Americans, who had yet to prove themselves in battle.

So, Rassmussen decided to make me a test case. I was the best of the Hakujin linguists, and he reasoned with the authorities in Washington, that, to keep this poor private a private was a grave injustice. So, I was commissioned on the basis of language and given my little gold bars. Rank mattered a lot in those days, and I well remember having a little tiff with Paul Aurel, one of those Washington "Okayo gozaimus" officers. He barked at me, "Look here, Faub, I'm a first lieutenant, and you're only a second lieutenant." That taught me a lot about human nature and the importance--to some--of having a rank. At any rate, Rassmussen championed me, and, once I was an officer on the basis of language, it became possible for the first time in the U.S. Army for all the more deserving, far better than I, Nisei and Kibei to be commissioned. And a rather sticky moment in Army history passed without incident.

I also remember in Australia, it became urgent for a Nisei to be given a medal of some sort. Morale, again, was low. Their work was so invaluable that it had to be recognized in some public way. Finally, in New Guinea, my friend Kozaki was wounded. He was strafed while ducking in a boat, as a Japanese plane flew over. We were all assembled in formation, and the citation--Purple Heart and Silver Star--for bravery for Kozaki was read out loud to all of us. He was wounded in the Hopoi sector of New Guinea, it said, and for the duration, "Hopoi" and "ass" were synonymous at ATIS.

D. Yee on Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!

Danny Yee reviews a book with an irresistible title: Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!, by Robin Gill (Paraverse, 2003), "a collection of a thousand haiku about sea cucumbers (namako), given both in Japanese and in translation, and with extensive commentary."

An introduction places namako in Japanese culture, defends the use of "sea slug" for what are actually sea cucumbers rather than nudibranchs, surveys their taxonomy, and touches on some issues in defining and translating haiku. The bulk of the book divides up the haiku by aspects of sea slugs: frozen, featureless, protean, do-nothing, agnostic, mystic, scatological, helpless, meek, ugly, lubricious, just-so, tasty, slippery, chewy, drinking, silent, melancholy, stuporous, nebulous, and cold, with a large "sundry sea slugs" chapter for everything else....

And Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! offers a different perspective on Japanese culture, with insights into history, literature, mythology, food, and more. These take the form of scattered details rather than substantial analysis, but they are given context by the haiku they help explain.

"'Mountain' and 'ocean' are formal antonyms in Japan, where one may still be asked whether one plans to vacation in the former or the latter."

Gill's tone is relaxed and informal and he doesn't take himself too seriously or struggle for academic respectability, but he is still precise in his own way, and insanely erudite.

Kids in Micronesia used sea slugs as water pistols--by picking them out of the water, aiming, and squeezing. The Chinese appetite for sea cucumbers (and sandalwood) brought many Pacific islands into world trade networks. The bêche de mer ('sea cucumber') trade gave rise the name of the lingua franca of Vanuatu, Bislama. There's definitely room for a book by Mark Kurlansky on Sea Cucumber: A Biography of the Slug that Changed the World.

The Venusian Space Race in Asia and the Pacific, 1760s

The Economist ran a feature on earlier attempts to view the "transit of Venus." Such transits in 1761 and 1769 caused the transit of Mason, Dixon, Cook, Le Gentil, and others through remote sites in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Insignificant though it may seem, this rare celestial event, a "transit of Venus", was once thought a key to understanding the universe. Two and a half centuries ago, countries dispatched astronomers on risky and expensive expeditions to observe transits from far-flung points across the globe. By doing this, they hoped to make a precise measurement of the distance to the sun and thus acquire an accurate yardstick by which the distance to everything else in the solar system could be measured....

What followed was the 18th-century equivalent of the space race. Wealthy nations took up the challenge and competed for scientific prestige. The rivalry was especially intense between Britain and France, which were engaged in the Seven Years War at the time of the transit of 1761.

Among the British expeditions was that of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were sent to Sumatra (and who would later achieve immortality through the name of a line they surveyed between the northern and southern American colonies). Shortly after embarking from Plymouth, eleven of their shipmates were killed during an attack by the French. Mason and Dixon wanted to cancel the voyage, but in a famously nasty note, their Royal Society sponsors warned this would "bring an indelible Scandal upon their Character, and probably end in their utter Ruin". Faced with this, they carried on. Unfortunately their destination was captured by the French before they arrived. They ended up observing the transit from Cape Town instead.

The French had their share of troubles, too. The most pathetic of these were suffered by Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisiere. He was aiming for Pondicherry, a French colony in India, but he learned before arriving that it had been captured by the British. When the transit occurred, he was stuck on a pitching ship in an imprecisely known location, rendering his observations worthless. Undeterred, he decided to wait for the 1769 transit. He spent eight years on various Indian Ocean islands before making his way to Pondicherry, which had by then been returned to the French. On the day of the transit, however, it was cloudy. He then contracted dysentery, was shipwrecked, and finally returned home to find his estate looted.

By contrast, the weather was splendid in Tahiti (not then a French territory), where Venus's path in 1769 was timed by the party of James Cook. The transit had been the main impetus for Cook's first voyage of discovery. Once this official mission was accomplished, Cook explored the south Pacific, achieving, among other things, the first accurate maps of New Zealand and the first European awareness of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (this was obtained the hard way, by ramming into it and nearly getting wrecked).

via Oxblog, who may have found the site where the Economist reporters did some of their research.

Origin of the Name "Indonesia"

The term "Indonesia" was first used in 1850 by the British anthropologist J. R. Logan to designate islands called the "Indian Archipelago" by other Western writers. For Logan, "Indonesia" did not designate a political unit but a cultural zone that included the Philippines. The forebears of today's Indonesians had no term for the region or concept of a single political unit linking communities across seas. From ancient times Java had been known by that single name, but most of Indonesia's islands derive their names from European labeling. Early European traders at the port of Samudera named the entire island Sumatra, and visitors to the sultanate of Brunei called the whole island Borneo.

The Dutch named their colonial possessions Indië (the Indies). Initially the Indies meant Java and a few ports scattered across the archipelago. Between 1850 and 1914 Dutch power engulfed over three hundred separate sultanates and communities, and welded them into a single administrative unit called the "Netherlands Indies." Subjects were called "Natives," a legal category alongside "Europeans" and "Foreign Orientals" (local Chinese and Arabs), replacing the terms "Moor," "Christian," and "Heathen" used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Associations in the early years of the twentieth century identified themselves by geography and generation, such as "League of Sumatran Youth" and "Ambonese Youth." As ideological identities developed, parties took the colonial unit as their geographic marker but opted for Logan's "Indonesia" instead of the Dutch "Indies." The first to do so was the Communist Party of Indonesia, founded in 1921. Opponents of the Dutch understood "Indonesia" as both a political and a cultural entity; they adopted as a common language a variant of Malay spoken in Sumatra, already widely used as a lingua franca, and called it the "Indonesian language" (Bahasa Indonesia). The political unit they eventually won was the Dutch colony stretching from Sabang Island off northern Sumatra to Merauke on the border with Papua New Guinea, but many wanted the cultural definition of "Indonesia"--Islamic and Malay-speaking--translated into a state that would include Malaya, southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, all of Borneo, and Portuguese East Timor.

Following independence Indonesian place-names were substituted for the Dutch. Batavia became Djakarta; Buitenzorg, Bogor; and Borneo, Kalimantan. Indonesian spelling was revised in 1972, making Djakarta Jakarta and Atjeh Aceh. In this book Indonesia designates the state established by Sukarno on 17 August 1945; for the period before 1945, it is used as a shorthand for the islands constituting today's republic.

SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)