Origin of the Yokozuna Rank in Sumo

On the occasion of the opening of the November Grand Sumo Tournament, here's an account of the origin of the highest rank, yokozuna, usually translated 'grand champion' to distinguish it from the former highest rank, ozeki 'champion'.

The conventional genealogy of yokozuna begins with Akashi Shiganosuke in the early seventeenth century, but there is no record that such a wrestler ever existed, much less that he was made a yokozuna. Instead, the institution of the yokozuna has its origins in the licenses Yoshida Zenzaemon granted to two wrestlers--Tanikaze Kajinosuke and Onokawa Kisaburo. In November 1789 he authorized each of them to perform a solo ring-entering ceremony while wearing a white rope (the yokozuna) around their waists. This innovation was part. of the efforts by Yoshida and the other leaders of professional sumo in Edo to increase the status of the sport, efforts that culminated with the 1791 sumo performance before Shogun Tokugawa Ienari. [Sumo was previously considered too low-brow for noble tastes.]

Yoshida's innovation was not immediately adopted as standard practice. In fact, for nearly forty years, no further licenses to perform the solo ring-entering ceremony while wearing the decorative rope were granted. The license was revived in 1828, but by the end of the Tokugawa shogunate only nine such licenses had been awarded. The institutionalization of the practice in the early twentieth century involved a series of innovations beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in the official recognition of the yokozuna as the highest rank in sumo.

For a century after Yoshida's grant to Tanikaze and Onokawa, the highest sumo rank continued to be ozeki ['champion']. During this time, the word "yokozuna " still referred merely to the rope worn by the wrestler licensed to perform a solo ring-entering ceremony. In fact, Tanikaze did not even hold the highest rank of Ozeki in the tournament after which he was awarded the yokozuna license; he was at the second-highest rank of sekiwake. Shiranui Dakuemon, awarded the license in 1840, was subsequently demoted to sekiwake for a tournament.

It was not until May 1890 that the word "yokozuna" appeared in the banzuke (the table of rankings printed before each tournament). Ironically, the motive for printing the term was to placate rather than to reward, and the consequences were entirely unintended. For the first time there were more than two ozeki listed on the banzuke. Two new ozeki had just been promoted, but the two reigning ozeki were left in place. This unprecedented situation was dealt with by writing the two extra names on tabs protruding from the top sides of the printed banzuke. The ozeki with the weakest record in the previous tournament, Nishinoumi, was one of those listed on the tabs. Since he had just been awarded a yokozuna license, he felt slighted and complained to the Sumo Association that a wrestler as honored as he deserved better treatment. To pacify him, the association put the characters for yokozuna next to his name. Once the precedent was established, it became the custom to write these characters alongside the names of ozeki with the license, but there was still no official yokozuna rank.

Shortly after the term "yokozuna" entered the banzuke rankings, a private campaign was started to distinguish ozeki with the yokozuna license from those without it. Jimmaku Kyiigoro had received a license, the ninth issued, in 1867. In 1895, he started a campaign to erect a monument to wrestlers who had been honored with the license. The monument was erected in 1900 without the involvement of the Sumo Association or the Yoshida family (which still claimed sole authority to issue the yokozuna license).

The Sumo Association finally recognized yokozuna as an official rank in 1909, the pivotal year in which the Kokugikan was opened, the referee's costume was redesigned, and the newspaper Jiji shinpo started regularly designating tournament champions. The Yoshida house, however, which continued to award the yokozuna license, refused to accept the association's interpretation of the yokozuna as a rank. It was not until 1951 that the Yoshida family finally agreed that the yokozuna was indeed a rank. In short, the lofty status that is now widely perceived as the very symbol of sumo's "two-thousand-year history" emerged only in the nineteenth century and was finally accepted as an official rank around fifty years ago.

SOURCE: Japanese Sports: A History, by Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2001), pp. 143-145

Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985

[Cultural Survival's Report]

When [Peter] Niggli, Bonnie Holcomb, and the research director of Cultural Survival, Dr. Jason W. Clay, arrived in Sudan in February 1985 to interview the Tigreans and others who had escaped over the border, the resettlement issue was an interesting sideshow to the main famine story. Western journalists and diplomats in Ethiopia had caught glimpses of people being herded onto trucks and airplanes. One U.S. diplomat went so far as to say that "the selection process recalled Auschwitz." From the little that could be discerned, resettlement appeared to be yet another indication, if any was needed, of the Marxist regime's insensitivity to its own people. But there the issue ground to a halt for lack of evidence. Resettlement areas simply were off limits to almost all foreigners, except those on prearranged tours to model camps. The government denied that the program was not voluntary or that it was motivated by any factor besides the humanitarian desire to relocate drought-stricken peasants to more fertile areas in the west and southwest of the country. Western relief officials stationed in Addis Ababa, whose presence depended on the good will of the local authorities, tended to back up the regime's assertions....

Cultural Survival, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, came to Sudan with especially impressive credentials. Founded in 1972 by a group of social scientists at Harvard University, its reports on endangered ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have criticized right-wing and left-wing governments alike and have been utilized by the World Bank, USAID, and foreign governments to judge a country's human rights record and need for development assistance. Clay's team interviewed 277 Ethiopian refugees at six sites in eastern Sudan ... using local translators who were not connected with the TPLF [Tigrean People's Liberation Front]. (Bonnie Holcomb, who speaks Oromo, helped with some of the translations.) All interviews were taped and then translated a second time by other translators back in the United States. More than half those interviewed were selected at random and, in almost all cases, involved more than 5 percent of the total population of each camp. This was a statistically huge sample. (Harris Polls, for instance, rely on .0004 of 1 percent of the U.S. population.) As Clay told me in a letter, "Methodologically, you cannot touch [criticize] the data that we collected" about conditions in Ethiopia ''as it relates to the refugees in Sudan." ...

To my knowledge, no study of the Great Leap Forward in China or the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was as well packaged as was Cultural Survival's Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985, a 250-page monograph, served up with an array of attractive maps, whose results--if you could wade through the overwhelming details (few could)--were absolutely devastating.

"All those interviewed insisted that they had been captured by government troops and forced to resettle.... Ten percent of all those interviewed reported that they witnessed people being killed who tried to escape." More than 40 percent said they were beaten. More than 85 percent said they had been separated from at least one member of their immediate families; 70 percent were separated from all members of their immediate families. Amete Gebremedhin, a Tigrean in her early forties, stated that after she and a group of other captured women protested to the militia about being separated from their husbands and children, "the soldiers laughed and said: 'What do you care about your children, you will find new ones in Asosa.'" ...

Everyone interviewed said people had died en route to the resettlement sites; 60 percent said they actually saw people die. Clay's analysis of the death figures was the most comprehensive and the most controversial part of his research.

The death rates reported by the refugees ranged from 33 deaths per 10,000 people per day to 270 deaths per 10,000. These rates are extremely high given that the camp populations were comprised almost entirely of adults. Such figures were consistently reported from a number of different refugees from different areas. Furthermore, they were relayed by people who did not know each other.... Some of the resettled people were undoubtedly malnourished as a result of declining agricultural production in their homelands, but many had not experienced famine until they were captured for resettlement....

These figures raise ... the question of how many of the 400,000 people who were resettled by June of 1985 are still alive. If even the most conservative estimates of the death rate (33 per 10,000 per day) are halved and then halved again (i.e., reduced by 75 percent), then 50,000 to 100,000 of those resettled in this massive program may already have been dead by July 1985.

[Diplomat and NGO Reaction]

The figure of "50,000 to 100,000" dead set the aid communities in Khartoum and Addis Ababa ablaze. It was a higher death rate than that at the emergency feeding camps on the Sudanese border at the height of the famine, and most of the Ethiopians who perished in Sudan were children and old people--of which there were very few in the resettlement program. Father Jack Finucane, the head of Concern, an Irish aid group in Addis Ababa, saw the death rates in an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal about Cultural Survival's report and told a group of sixty foreign aid workers assembled on October 19, 1985, at the RRC headquarters, "I've read it and I don't believe it." Finucane said that in visits he and other members of Concern made to the resettlement area, there were no indications of any such horrors. But as it turned out, one month earlier, at a private meeting at the Hilton Hotel where only Western ambassadors and some aid officials were present, Finucane told a different tale; about a half million people were being displaced in "horrible conditions." Of seventy-seven resettlement areas, only two or three had succeeded, he had said. In a July 29, 1985, letter to his home office, Finucane wrote it was safe to assume that 25 percent--or 125,000--of the settlers had died.

Finucane's reversal, whereby he independently confirmed from the Ethiopian side the main points of Cultural Survival's Sudan-based research, only to deny it all at a public forum in the presence of Ethiopian officials, was laid out in a November 3, 1985, article by David Blundy in the Sunday Times (of London). When Blundy, then one of the paper's leading foreign correspondents, asked the chair of the Band Aid coordinating committee in Addis Ababa, Brother Augustus O'Keefe, about the discrepancy, O'Keefe replied, "That was a private meeting [the meeting between Finucane and the ambassadors]. I won't talk about it. The press have done a lot of damage here. I have never heard about any problems with resettlement."

It was a familiar pattern: back up the research of Cultural Survival and Berliner Missionswerk in private, but condemn it in public. The Red Cross League, for example, did a study on resettlement in the summer of 1985 that corroborated much of what Clay's resettlement study had found, including the death rate. But the report was kept secret. (Oddly enough, the Canadian Embassy in Addis Ababa was a true believer in resettlement, even in private. One Canadian diplomat actually told me that the West had to get involved in a big way in resettlement, in order to have "influence here." When I mentioned to another Canadian official, whom I met in Sudan, that Canada was assisting resettlement through funding to private agencies involved in the program, he got very angry and proceeded to launch a tirade against U.S. human rights abuses in the Third World. At the time I knew of no other country about which the views of the Canadian and U.S. governments were as divergent as on Ethiopia. Officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council had been extremely critical of Canada's policy toward resettlement. In Addis Ababa, the two embassies literally represented opposing camps. Some of the Canadians I met appeared absolutely driven about proving that--at least as far as Ethiopia was concerned--they had a foreign policy truly different from that of the United States. In Canada itself this policy was criticized. This was one of the stranger aspects of the famine emergency.)

The spinelessness of the aid community in Addis Ababa was demonstrated a few months later, in December 1985, when the inevitable happened--one of their own went public about the appalling consequences of resettlement. Medecins sans Frontieres [MSF] published a report entitled, "Mass Deportation in Ethiopia," alleging that with a death rate of 20 percent, as many as 300,000 people were likely to die in the resettlement program, of which up to 100,000 already had. The report noted that "one of the most massive violations of human rights" was "being carried out with funds and gifts from international aid." The French group quickly was expelled from Ethiopia, while the rest of the aid community chastised the group for getting involved in "politics" when it should have been keeping its nose to the grindstone of relief work. Apparently, nobody in Addis Ababa was drawing the distinction between "politics" and gross violations of human rights. The kiss of death to the French group's presence in Ethiopia was administered by the United Nations, which publicly defended resettlement by saying that the French organization's charges could not be taken seriously because it was the only group in the field making such accusations....

[U.S. Media Reaction]

In early 1986, MSF took its case to the court of U.S. public opinion, which barely paid attention, even though the United States was providing almost as much aid to Ethiopia as was the rest of the world combined. A Washington press conference, among other activities, got the French doctors onto the front page of The New York Times for a day and into the editorial pages of several important dailies. But the story had difficulty making the evening news on the major networks because there was no footage of the settlers being abused. Also, this was the period of the Challenger disaster. Therefore, the impact of MSF's revelation on the general public was marginal. And as one refugee official in Washington explained to me, "Suzanne Garment of The Wall Street Journal was the only big columnist to write about it, so everyone around here dismissed it as just a right-wing issue." As limited as MSF's effect was, it was still greater than that of Cultural Survival. This was in a way unfortunate because MSF, a relief group whose investigation was not as well grounded academically proved a much softer target for supporters of resettlement than did the Harvard-based Cultural Survival.... The daily news media, by this time obsessed with the southern part of the African continent in place of the Horn, did little to put the findings into perspective or to investigate the matter further. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal was a constant exception to this rule, but like all opinion pages, it didn't have quite the credibility of a hard news section, and the page's conservative slant meant that liberals often distrusted it....

Even after Clay and Holcomb's report was published, journalists tended to write about the skeptical reaction in the relief community, rather than to hunt down the actual victims in order to hear their firsthand accounts....

As I see it, the fundamental flaw in the resettlement story was that it was a foreign news item with no domestic spinoff. Because the United States, despite its generous aid, was not influential in Ethiopia--and had not been for a decade--it was a tragedy for which the Reagan administration bore absolutely no responsibility. Although private donations to certain charities were indirectly assisting resettlement, as were public donations from other governments, USAID always was careful to channel U.S. aid to relief operations unconnected with the program. Thus, there was nothing to dig up against the administration, and the herd instinct in the media never was activated. Even after the MSF visit, journalists almost never raised the matter at State Department briefings. Ethiopia had been "lost" years before, and U.S. interests were not being jeopardized by the inhuman actions of Ethiopia's regime. The country now was part of that zone of darkness where literally anything could happen away from the television cameras. Had the deaths occurred at the hands of a colorful madman, like Idi Amin or Muammar Gaddafi, or even someone less well known but just as crazy, like the former "emperor of the Central African Empire," Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the story could have been rescued from oblivion. But Mengistu was far too efficient a killer to be distracted by buffoonery, so his crimes had little mass-market appeal....

But, again, it wasn't only the media, nor even just the human rights organizations that weren't interested, but Western governments as well.... In fact, as a National Security Council staffer revealed, after the United States got independent intelligence confirmation of the main findings of Clay's report, Secretary of State George Shultz was ready to enter a U.N. resolution condemning the Mengistu regime, but backed down after receiving absolutely no support from the United States' Western allies, who did not want their aid programs in Addis Ababa jeopardized.

SOURCE: Robert Kaplan, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Vintage, 2003), pp. 111-127

Has anything at all changed in the modus operandi of the International Community™ since 1984? Anything?

Vichy Indochina

During the Second World War a pro-Vichy regime, headed by Admiral Decoux as Governor-General, continued to exercise administrative control over the countries of French Indochina. It did so at the pleasure of the Japanese, who permitted this exercise of apparent French sovereignty in exchange for what Tokyo saw as a vital concession to its interests: the unfettered opportunity to move troops unhindered through the countries of Indochina and to use their territory for the stationing of its aircraft. The Japanese aircraft that sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941, leaving Malaya and Singapore without naval protection, took off from airfields in Cambodia. Then, as the tide of battle began to swing decisively against them, the Japanese in March 1945 no longer saw any benefit in allowing the French to exercise even the constrained power they had retained to this point. In a swift and effective coup de force they overturned the Decoux regime and embarked on a belated effort to promote 'independent' states in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, while maintaining effective control over all three countries.

This was a climactic moment, for it was recognised, most particularly in Vietnam, as a sign that French colonialism's days were numbered. From this point on, and with the Vietnamese communists led by a remarkable set of talented individuals of whom Ho Chi Minh was only one, the stage was slowly being set for three decades of bitter hostilities, the years of the First and Second Indochina Wars. First the French and then the Americans sought to stem the tide of communist revolution but, as hindsight has made crystal clear, their efforts failed and the countries along the Mekong that once made up Indochina all finally came under communist control in 1975.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 177-178

Indochina Makeover, 1966-1981

In the space of fifteen years, from 1966 to 1981, the character of the three countries of former French Indochina that bordered the Lower Mekong changed dramatically; Many of the changes were tragic, almost all were irrevocable. In Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam the bitter years of the Second Indochina War ushered in a period of deeply flawed peace before, in the case of Cambodia and Vietnam, former comrades-in-arms became sworn enemies. The communist victories of 1975 were the prelude to a series of events far different from those most observers had predicted as likely to occur. It was not just that the names of cities and countries changed, so that in a unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, while Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea. The changes that took place were much more fundamental than those associated with nomenclature. And in the case of Cambodia what took place was scarcely believable.

The bloodbath that many had thought likely to follow a communist victory in Vietnam never took place. Certainly, there was retribution. Of a million persons singled out for 're-education' because of their links to the defeated regime, more than 100 000 endured harsh conditions as they were locked away for long periods in remote and unhealthy labour camps. There they were expected to reflect on their 'sins', absorb Marxist thought, and open new areas for agriculture. Yet it seems unquestionably the case that the 30 000 or 40 000 Lao sent for re-education--a dramatically higher proportion of the population--suffered even harsher treatment at the hands of the victors than those who were interned in Vietnam. It was as if the Lao communists were determined to show that their country's legendary reputation for gentleness and an easygoing approach to life no longer had a place in the new; ideologically oriented scheme of things. But neither in Vietnam nor in Laos did anything take place to match the tyranny and slaughter that overtook the population of Democratic Kampuchea once Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and the victors began their radical restructuring of society.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 194-195

Asiapages finds that ultra-Maoist Pol Pot's cremation site has turned into a tourist attraction.

Good Soldier Outlier: Two Commanding Officers

During my stint as company clerk of HQ Co., 95th Civil Affairs Group, in Ft. Gordon, GA, in 1970-71, I served under two commanding officers (COs): one white, one black, both former enlisted men.

The white captain was a grizzled, foul-mouthed, unambitious hillbilly who took good care of his men but otherwise wasn't officer material. However, I believe he had received a battlefield commission, which would indicate a capacity for inspirational leadership under extraordinarily dire circumstances--when push came to shoot, to coin a phrase.

I don't remember his name, but I would sometimes get mysterious phone calls from supply sergeants or mess sergeants in other units with whom he had worked out some mutually advantageous exchange of rations or equipment. And on one occasion I became embroiled in his defense of one of his greenest soldiers, a 17-year-old who had bought a ring on credit from a jewelry store in Augusta whose letterhead motto was "Serving servicemen for over 50 years"--or words to that effect.

The owner had written to ask the CO to intervene and force his lowly private to stop defaulting on his ring payments. The CO was not sympathetic, and asked me to draft a letter saying the jeweler should have known better than to extend credit to a minor without an adult cosigner. In my response I included a gratuitous rhetorical slap at the end, asking whether the store's motto might be more accurately rendered, "Serving ourselves at the expense of servicemen for over 50 years." He read it, grunted, and signed it. I posted it, and we never heard anything more about that soldier or his ring.

Capt. Parham was the opposite in almost every respect: all spit-and-polish, demanding yet diplomatic, ambitious for himself and his men, and determined to make a difference. He was an inspiring boss.

In an effort to improve relations with the off-base community, he organized an excursion to Gracewood State School and Hospital for the mentally retarded, just down Tobacco Road a ways. (Tobacco Road runs right into Ft. Gordon.) We were all in uniform and caused quite a stir, with many shouts of "Look at all the soldier boys! Look at all the soldier boys!"

Capt. Parham and I were both taking college courses toward a degree, and I typed up more than a few of his term papers. One of them was about Flannery O'Connor, I remember. I took two extension classes from Augusta College: a physical anthropology course and then a humanities course that was mostly Greek and Roman classics. I remember reading Plato during one all-night shift guarding the motor pool.

It was during Capt. Parham's time that a chess fad passed through the Orderly Room. In fact, he probably initiated it. I've never played much chess, but at that time I happened to know precisely one opening, the Queen's Gambit, which I put to good use the one time I couldn't avoid a challenge. I checkmated my opponent in about 3 moves, acquired a reputation as a chess genius, and no one challenged me again. At least not until Capt. Parham brought in a checkerboard one day, challenged me, and proceeded to wipe my checkers off the board in short order.

Capt. Parham had ambitions for his men, too. And I let him down big time. It wasn't just that I didn't meet his high standards of spit and polish. He recommended me for NCO (Non-Commissioned Officers) school, and I was too stupid to know what I was getting into. It wasn't until I got to Ft. McClellan, AL, and met a few representatives of my prospective cohort that I started getting cold feet, despite their enthusiasm about the presence of so many women on base at the WAC School there. Fortunately, I was asked as soon as I reported for duty whether I really wanted to be there. I replied, "No, sir!" and was on the next bus back to Ft. Gordon.

Iris Chang, requiescat in pace

Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking and other works, has died at the age of 36.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Jonathan Dresner posts a brief assessment of her work at the Japanese history blog Frog in a Well, and re-examines his own reactions at the History News Network's Cliopatria.

Why All Reasonable People Agree

Mark Bauerlein explains in The Chronicle:

The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions....

After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 election, the film critic Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a touchstone among conservatives. "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won," she marveled. "I don't know anybody who voted for him." While the second sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual, the first signifies what social scientists call the False Consensus Effect. That effect occurs when people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way....

The final social pattern is the Law of Group Polarization. That law--as Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of political science and of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, has described--predicts that when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck

Bruce Robison reviews Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, by Eric Enno Tamm (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004) in American Scientist Online:

Ricketts is perhaps best known for having been the prototype for "Doc," the central figure in John Steinbeck's novels Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954). By most accounts the fictional Doc, who loved women, beer and truth, was much like the man who operated Pacific Biological Laboratories on California's Monterey Peninsula from 1923 until his untimely death in 1948.

Ricketts, who supplied prepared biological specimens to schools, was a gifted field ecologist. His coastal collecting trips led to a seminal book on intertidal ecology, Between Pacific Tides (Stanford University Press, 1939). It went beyond taxonomy to describe intertidal animals holistically, placing them in the dynamic context of their habitat and ecology. Concepts that we now take for granted, such as competitive exclusion, and habitat descriptors such as wave shock, were novel then and seemed to threaten the established order. Ricketts was "a lone, largely marginalized scientist" with no university degrees, and he had to struggle long and hard against the "dry ball" traditionalists of the time just to get the book published. Yet today it is widely regarded as a classic work in marine ecology and is now in its fifth edition.

Ricketts's lab on Cannery Row was a magnet for scientists, writers, prostitutes, musicians, artists, academics and bums. Gatherings there included discussions of the interplay of philosophy, science and art, and often evolved into raucous, happy parties that went on for days.

Steinbeck was a frequent visitor, and Ricketts had a strong humanistic and naturalistic influence on the writer's work in the 1930s and 1940s. Ricketts's persona appeared in several of Steinbeck's most powerful novels, including In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Steinbeck occasionally referred to himself as a biologist, and ecological themes run through much of his finest work, as Tamm points out. Tamm also notes that except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's fiction and his literary reputation declined after Ricketts's death.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Prewar Japanese Fantasies of Invading Hawai‘i

Japanese scenarios of a Hawaii invasion were generally episodes within books about imaginary wars with the United States. Such scenarios surfaced in 1913 and appeared from time to time until 1941. Japanese fantasies about a Pacific War, like analogous works appearing in the United States, grew out of deepening tensions and distrust between the two countries after 1905. Offended by anti-Japanese prejudice in California, frustrated by American obstacles to peaceful expansion in the Pacific, writers conjured up consoling victories in the realm of fantasy.

The earliest scenarios, written by authors innocent of technical knowledge about naval warfare, have a whimsical quality. Among these is Nichi-Bei kaisen yume monogatari [Fantasy on the outbreak of a Japanese-American war], which appeared in 1913 under the editorship of the National Military Affairs Association (to all appearances a private group). The book opens with the destruction of the American fleet by a Japanese squadron between Luzon and Taiwan. Japanese forces then take the Philippines and occupy Hawaii (the author noted that Hawaii presented fewer obstacles than did the Philippines). Hawaii's fall prompts the Kaiser, Tsar, and president of France to mediate a peace settlement. The United States cedes Hawaii to Japan, and the islands are incorporated "forever" into the Empire. This book conveys two perceptions that thereafter crop up regularly in Japanese literature about Hawaii: Hawaii is a natural part of Japan, and Americans are not terribly disturbed about losing the Islands.

In 1914 Yoshikatsu Oto brought out a similar fantasy entitled Nichi-Bei moshi kaisen seba [If Japan and America fight] with a preface by a retired admiral, Seijiro Kawashima. Oto echoed the theme of Hawaii belonging to Japan, adding that this was so because doho ['compatriots' of Japanese ethnicity, regardless of citizenship] had developed the local economy. He even suggested that doho already held de facto political power in the Islands. Like the author of the earlier fantasy, Oto assured readers that Hawaii could be captured more easily than could the Philippines. About forty thousand troops, he estimated, should be able to land on Oahu's north shore and deal with the fifteen thousand American defenders. The book then proceeds to describe a successful Japanese assault, followed by formal acquisition in the peace treaty.

A more extravagant scenario unfolded in Nichi-Bei senso yume monogatari [Japanese-America war fantasy] (1921) by Kojiro Sato, a retired army general. Sato portrayed the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet after it has been lured to Midway, an uncanny forerunner of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's ill-fated plan twenty-one years later. Japan then seizes Hawaii and from its mid-Pacific base strikes San Francisco. Building air bases in California, Imperial forces launch bombing missions across the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest. Allies materialize from among American minorities. Ten million blacks revolt, led by Marcus Garvey.* Jews and German-Americans also rise up against the Anglo-Saxons. Eager to rectify past injustices, Mexico invades Texas. Sato brought his tale to a climax with a grand finale in New York at 9:00 A.M. Sunday morning ("when people are still asleep"). Japanese commandos blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and--using dirigibles--land on the Woolworth Building. Washington sues for peace, and Lothrop Stoddard** joins the surrender negotiations.

Footnotes:
* Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). Jamaica-born black nationalist who lived in New York from 1916 until his deportation to Jamaica in 1927.
** Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950). Author of a notorious racist tract, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920).

SOURCE: Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan's Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor, by John J. Stephan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984), pp. 59-60

Collaboration Potential in Hawai‘i: Universal

Collaboration is a pejorative word. Often misused, it is inappropriate for those Japanese-Americans whose circumstances and inclinations led them to serve Japan during World War II. On the other hand in Hawaii, potential collaboration was by no means confined to Japanese-Americans. Any resident of the Islands in 1942, regardless of ethnicity, probably speculated on what life would be like in the event of a successful Japanese invasion. Any rational mind considering that contingency would most likely conclude that a degree of collaboration would be hard to avoid. Unlike the Philippines, Hawaii was physically too small for anyone to avoid contact with occupation authorities. A guerrilla movement would have been virtually suicidal. There is little evidence that either the military or civilians were prepared to fight to the last man should Hawaii have been assaulted. On the contrary, many probably shared the views of a State Department special agent who in a report written several weeks before 7 December 1941 acknowledged: "If the Japanese fleet arrived, doubtless great numbers of them [Hawaii Japanese] would then forget their American loyalties and shout a 'Banzai' from the shore. Under those circumstances, if this reporter were there he is not sure that he might not do it also to save his own skin, if not his face."

These words were not written by a coward. Dying to the last man, woman, and child (gyokusai as the Japanese called it in those desperate defenses of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa) was neither a tenet of American military doctrine nor consonant with American historical experience, the Alamo notwithstanding....

Consequently, if the choice were to collaborate or face suicidal odds, there is little doubt but that Hawaii's residents would have opted, in the British phrase, to "carry on" with as much dignity as possible. The scale and degree of collaboration would probably have depended upon many obvious and subtle factors, among them individual character, the content and style of occupation policies, the conduct of occupation authorities and garrison troops, and the local assessment of Japan's prospects for winning the war or at least for repelling an American counterattack.

SOURCE: Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan's Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor, by John J. Stephan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984), pp. 8-9

Gunboat Diplomacy in Cambodia, 1880s

Between 1881 and 1887 France steadily, and in many cases bloodily, moved to assert its control over the whole of Vietnam.... Yet France's position in Cambodia was only assured after three uncertain years between 1884 and 1887, after French gunboat diplomacy on the Mekong led to a major rebellion against French control.

Ever since the conclusion of the treaty granting France a 'protectorate' in 1863, French officials in Phnom Penh, and their superiors in both Saigon and Paris, had looked on King Norodom with an ambivalent eye....

By the early 1880s French officialdom's patience with Norodom was wearing thin. French troops had had to put down a rebellion led by one of Norodom's half-brothers, Si Vatha, who then retreated to the jungle fastnesses beside the Mekong near the Sambor rapids. In actions that echoed King Satha's attempt to gain support from Manila in the sixteenth century; the king himself had tried unsuccessfully to enter into a secret treaty with the Spanish government. And, against strict French direction, Norodom had allotted the rights to the kingdom's opium farm to one of his court cronies, without consulting his 'protectors'. This last act he sought to excuse as the result of his having been drunk at the time. Two factors finally brought a French decision to act against him in 1884. There was renewed concern that the British were seeking to increase their influence in Siam, a prospect that prompted French officials to tighten their grip over Cambodia. At the same time, the newly appointed Governor of Cochinchina, Charles Thomson, decided to increase French control over the kingdom and that an end had to be put to Norodom's financial profligacy. To achieve this goal Thomson told the king that, henceforth, France would be responsible for collecting the kingdom's customs duties....

The stage was now set for one of the best known tableaux in nineteenth century Cambodian history. On 17 June 1884, Thomson strode into the king's private chambers within the palace in a brusque display of lèse-majesté, waking Norodom with the noise of his entry. He then read aloud the terms of new administrative arrangements for the kingdom which gave France much greater power over Cambodia' s affairs than it had previously exercised. Hearing these terms, Norodom's interpreter, Coi de Monteiro, a Cambodian of Iberian ancestry who had once also acted as an interpreter for [Mekong explorer] Doudart de Lagrée, is said to have cried: 'Sire, this is not a convention, it is an abdication'. Thomson's aides hurried de Monteiro from the room, leaving a furious Thomson confronting a worried Norodom.

At this point, if one of the accounts of this dramatic encounter can be trusted, Thomson pointed to the gunboats moored within sight of the palace. If Norodom refused to sign the new convention, Thomson told him, he would be confined aboard one of the gunboats. 'What will you do with me aboard the Alouette?' the king is supposed to have asked. 'That is my secret,' was Thomson's reported reply.

Literally outgunned, knowing that his half-brother Sisowath was a French pawn, and recognising that Thomson would indeed force him from the throne if he failed to sign the new convention, Norodom buckled under. The gunboats returned down the Mekong and the kingdom seemed, for the moment, at peace. It was an illusion, and within less than a year a full-scale rebellion against French control was in force. Given the fact that gunboats on the Mekong were vital to Thomson's having gained Norodom's acquiescence, there is historic irony in the fact that a French army post sited on the Mekong just below the Sambor rapids was the first target for a rebel attack when the rebellion began. More than two years were required before the French, making major concessions to Norodom, were once more able to claim that their 'protection' of Cambodia was untroubled.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 125-129

Far Outlying Election Reactions

On U.S. election day, Oxblogger Patrick Belton had an article in The Hill on How world capitals see Bush and Kerry. Here's what he had to say about Africa.

Ambassador Princeton Lyman, a former envoy in Nigeria and South Africa, fears a Kerry victory "might spell difficulty in obtaining congressional support for Bush's various initiatives for Africa--President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Millennium Challenge Account--since Republicans in Congress would be less likely to support these for a Democratic Administration at the same level."

Many African leaders, accordingly, prefer Bush. According to an official in the Central Intelligence Agency who studies the region, he has shown greater interest in Africa than its predecessor. Africa policy has been largely guided by energy interests, combined with a need for military support for regional peacekeeping missions such as in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Bush has formed close personal relationships with many west African heads of state, including the evangelical Christian Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Paul Biya of Cameroon, whose invitation to a state dinner in Washington in March 2003 represented a breaking point with his country's traditional alignment with the Elysée. (The shift was reinforced one year later, when Biya visited London and was greeted by working sessions with ministers and a reception by the Queen.) Conversely, there is growing discontent in Nigeria with the increasingly authoritarian and corrupt Obasanjo, whom the same analyst notes in 2003 received from Washington and London "a free pass in a very flawed election." Whichever administration finds itself in power during the next cycle of African elections in 2007 will have to choose whether to side with Washington's friends, or withhold its blessing should elections again result--as in 2003--in massive irregularities and evidence of violence and voter intimidation.

South Africa, which harbors ambitions of a global role via a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council, is in the opposing camp and prefers Kerry as more likely to support the institution, notes Murray Wesson, a South African law researcher at Oxford.

In light of the results, Macam-macam summarizes the reactions of several Southeast Asian leaders, and Siberian Light discusses the prospects for Russian-American relations.

Melville's Model of Madness

BEFORE SHIPPING ON the fictional Pequod, the narrator, Ishmael, was warned that Ahab "was a little out of his mind for a spell" on the passage home from his last voyage. "He's sick, they say," Ishmael admitted in reply, "but is getting better, and will be all right again before long"--at which the prophet who had delivered the advice snorted derisively, "All right again before long!"

Captain Ahab had a brilliant mind and was extremely brave, but was also clearly crazy. Captain Norris of the Sharon was all of these, too--he was sharp-witted, courageous in the boats, and patently deranged. On a whaleship, just as on a southern plantation, a brutal master might whip those under him, but only an insane master would whip any of his hands to death, because he was depriving himself of labor.

The character of Captain Ahab is popularly assumed to be based at least in part on the real-life commander of the Acushnet, Captain Valentine Pease. The novelist noted later that Pease ended up "in asylum at the Vineyard"--and this, it seems, was not all that uncommon. The Rev. Joseph Thaxter, minister of the Edgartown Congregational Church from 1780 to 1827, flatly declared, "Insanity prevails much." Strangely, he attributed it to "the Purity of the air and Water." Whatever the cause, it does indicate that mental instability was not at all unknown in the clannish communities of New England--which also infers that the shipowners might have had an inkling that some of the men they entrusted with their ships were a danger to their own crews. Perhaps, as Melville suggested, they even believed that a half-mad captain "was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales."

However, this is hard to credit where the managing owners of the Sharon, Gibbs & Jenney, were concerned--Jenney in particular. The family featured prominently in Fairhaven whaling, the Jenney name cropping up repeatedly in whaling crew lists. While the Gibbs & Jenney-owned Sharon cruised unhappily about the western Pacific in 1842, no less than nineteen family members were at sea in whaleships. They ranged in rank from greenhand upward: six were boatsteerers, five were either first or second mates, and three were captains. Hardheaded as shipowners were reputed to be, it is scarcely likely that Jenney would knowingly appoint a potential murderer to the quarterdeck of one of his vessels.

The two other Jenney-owned ships that departed from Fairhaven in 1841--Hesper and Columbus--had men of good reputation in command. Captain Ichabod Handy of the Hesperus was well thought of by the missionaries, later on playing a crucial part in the establishment of a mission in the Caroline Islands. He had a very good relationship with the Pacific Islanders he dealt with, going down in history as one of the pioneers of the coconut oil trade. Captain Frederick Fish of the Columbus, as well as being famous for short voyages and good cargoes, was considered "free-hearted" by a whaling wife who gammed [= visited on board] with him, Mary Brewster of the Connecticut whaleship Tiger--a woman who was not known for her charitable opinions of her husband's fellow skippers.

If the firm had known what Norris was doing, they would have wanted him stopped. However, the only man on board with the authority to restrain the captain was the first officer--Thomas Harlock Smith. In fact, it was his obligation. The brutality was bad enough, but the murder was the last straw. According to Section Three of the Seamen's Act, it was Thomas Harlock Smith's duty to arrest Captain Norris, confine him to his quarters, sail to the nearest port with a U.S. consul--Guam--and hand him over for commitment for trial. But he did nothing, and neither did his cousin, Nathan Smith.

SOURCE: In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, by Joan Druett (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 130-132

A Melville Chronology, 1841-51

• January 3, 1841, ships as a foremast hand on the whaleship Acushnet.


• July 9, 1842, deserts ship at Nukuhiva in the Marquesas Islands. Spends a month with the cannibals of the Taipi valley.


• August 9, 1842, escapes by joining the crew of the Sydney whaler Lucy Ann.


• October 5, 1842, placed ashore at Tahiti with ten other crewmen, and tried before the Consul for mutiny. Lightly imprisoned in Tahiti. A beachcomber on Moorea.


• November 1842, ships on whaleship Charles & Henry.


• May 1843, discharged at Lahaina, goes to Honolulu to work for a merchant as clerk and bookkeeper.


• August 17, 1843, enlists on U.S. Navy ship United States. Ship calls at Nukuhiva, Tahiti, and Callao.


• October 14, 1844, discharged from the navy at Boston.


• 1846, very successful publication of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.


• 1847, publication of a sequel, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas.


• 1849, publication of Mardi.


• 1850, publication of White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War.


• 1851, Moby-Dick published to mixed reviews.

SOURCE: In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, by Joan Druett (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 233

An Energetic Norwegian in Lotus Land c. 1900

The presumed riches of Laos ... never eventuated during the period of French colonial control. There were opportunities for minor agricultural development on the Boloven Plateau in southern Laos and some possibilities for the exploitation of timber. But this latter commodity ... was difficult to extract, and the repeated rapids along the Mekong's course plus the major barrier of the Khone Falls made thoughts of floating timber downriver to the ports in Phnom Penh and Saigon dubious at best. It is true that there were occasional efforts to use the river in this way; and these included one heroic effort by a Norwegian commercial adventurer, Peter Hauff.

Unknown by historians until an account of his life was published by his granddaughter in 1997, Hauff was in many ways typical of the Europeans who sought private gain in Indochina at the turn of the century. The son of a sea captain, Hauff began his career in Indochina in 1894 at the age of twenty-one working in a Saigon agency house. Fathering children by both a Lao and a Vietnamese woman during the fifteen years he spent in the region, his diaries reveal him as a man of great energy who was fascinated by the exotic world in which he lived, approaching it with a sympathy frequently lacking among the French officials of the time. In 1902, in a remarkable if essentially meaningless achievement, he succeeded in manhandling a sixteen-metre boat through the Khone Falls from south to north. This involved a notable show of spirit and the capacity to organise and inspire his local crew. It did not alter the conclusion that the falls could not be navigated by boats on any regular, commercial basis. A little later, Hauff undertook a commission to ship a collection of logs from Luang Prabang to a river port in the Mekong Delta. This too was a remarkable effort, involving no fewer than twelve hundred logs assembled in a series of rafts. The fact that the logs finally reached the Mekong Delta was indeed a triumph of determination in the face of endless obstacles. It did not, however, herald any continuing use of the Mekong for the despatch of timber out of Laos. In fact, for most of those who were associated with Laos while it formed part of French Indochina, this lightly populated kingdom was seen as a tropical lotus land for those ready to turn their backs on the more 'serious' aspects of colonial endeavour.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 150-151

Nexus of Nuance: China-Vanuatu-Taiwan

Vanuatu has a uniquely nuanced stance on relations with China and Taiwan. The foreign minister recognizes the former, while the prime minister recognizes the latter--or at least did so on Wednesday.

via Simon World

Rising Sun in the NBA

Among the new foreign-born players on the NBA rosters as the season opened this week was 5-foot, 9-inch Yuta Tabuse of the Phoenix Suns, the first Japan-born player in NBA history. However:

The first NBA player of Japanese descent was Wataru Misaka. A 5-7 Japanese-American guard [who] was born in Ogden, Utah, Misaka attended Weber Junior College (now Weber State University), and was drafted by the New York Knicks in 1947. He played in three games in the 1947-48 season before being cut.

Tabuse also has a Utah connection of sorts. He played two seasons for Brigham Young University--Hawai‘i in 2001-2002.

Raging Waters Flood Hawai‘i's Largest Library

A torrential downpour over the Halloween weekend caused normally placid Manoa Stream to overflow its banks, overturn cars, and fill nearby buildings with layers of mud. Among the worst-hit was the University of Hawai‘i's main graduate research library. The whole Manoa campus was shut down for several days.

According to a widely circulated email from Southeast Asia librarian Yati Bernard, "the basement of Hamilton Library, which housed the Government Documents, Map Collection, Cataloging Dept., Acqusition Dept., Serials Dept., Gifts and Exchange is gone."

"We were informed that approximately 80% of the government documents were completely destroyed, 70% of the maps are gone, all newly arrived materials were destroyed," she added. About 3,000 books on Asia that were waiting to be shelved "are gone forever."

"Hamilton library is closed indefinitely, because there is no electricity, and the air is not healthy."

According to a KITV report on 5 November, the University "has hired one of the largest cleanup companies in the world" (BMS Catastrophe, not Halliburton) to help the campus recover. Cleanup costs could exceed $5 million.

A 10-minute slideshow of the library damage and cleanup efforts was online but was inaccessible when this report was posted.

Rip Van Winkle Jenkins Sentenced in Japan

The New York Times reports on the low-key trial and sentencing of a U.S. Army deserter, flying beneath all the flak of the U.S. elections.

CAMP ZAMA, Japan, Nov. 3 - Charles Robert Jenkins, the Army sergeant who left his soldiers and walked into North Korea in 1965 to avoid combat duty in Vietnam, received a light sentence Wednesday after pleading guilty in a court-martial here to desertion and aiding the enemy.

After hearing bleak testimony about his harsh life in North Korea, an Army judge seemed to accept a defense lawyer's argument that Sergeant Jenkins, 64, had "already suffered 40 years of confinement." The judge, Col. Denise Vowell, then demoted him to private, stripped him of four decades of back pay and benefits, and gave him a dishonorable discharge and a 30-day jail sentence.

The prosecutor, Capt. Seth Cohen, had called for a tougher sentence, evoking, in a veiled way, the need for military discipline while American soldiers are fighting in Iraq. Referring to noncommissioned officers like Sergeant Jenkins, he said, "We can't have soldiers going into the field fearing that their N.C.O.'s will abandon them, especially given the state of the world today."

But the trial and sentencing seemed to reflect American political needs to mollify Japanese public opinion, which has been moved by the drama of the American defector from North Carolina and his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga Jenkins, whom he met in North Korea a few years after North Korean agents had kidnapped her from a Japanese island in 1978.

Apparently to minimize American media attention, the one-day military trial took place as votes were being counted in the American presidential election.

I think this whole affair has been handled with an admirable mixture of punctiliousness and compassion.

Deprived of books, Sergeant Jenkins said he had so treasured a banned copy of the historical novel "Shogun" that he read it 20 times.

I'd say that's punishment enough (with its hotel bar-influenced mediaeval Japanese). But perhaps he could be further sentenced to his wife's hometown on Sado Island, off Niigata. "It is one of Japan's largest minor islands and served as an exile place for important figures since mediaeval times."

Appreciating Solzhenitsyn

I grew up reading more works by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn than by any other Russian author: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, August 1914. In fact, I've probably read as many pages of Solzhenitsyn (in English translation) as I have any of my other high page-count favorites: Barbara W. Tuchman, V. S. Naipaul, Robert D. Kaplan, and Tom Wolfe.

So I was pleased to come across a recent retrospective in First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life entitled "Traducing Solzhenitsyn" by Daniel J. Mahoney, from which I'd like to quote a few excerpts.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great souls of the age. He is also among its most maligned and misunderstood figures. It is hard to think of another prominent writer whose thought and character have been subjected to as many willful distortions and vilifications over the past thirty years....

Some of his critics soon reasoned that if Solzhenitsyn was not a conventional liberal, then he must be an enemy of liberty. The legend grew that he was, at best, a "Slavophile" and a romantic critic of decadent Western political institutions, and that he was, at worst, an authoritarian and even, perhaps, an anti-Semite and a theocrat....

Serious, informed, and measured engagement with Solzhenitsyn's writing is all too rare in America. Some of Solzhenitsyn's critics are content to sneer at him without bothering to produce quotations that would support their characterizations of his thought....

Solzhenitsyn has meditated on this problem of conjugating Russia and the West, liberty and the moral contents of life, with great penetration and finesse in the various volumes of The Red Wheel. These books include profound reflections on the character of political moderation and the requirements of a statesmanship that would unite Christian attentiveness to the spiritual dignity of man with an appreciation of the need to respect the unceasing evolution of society. Solzhenitsyn takes aim at reactionaries who ignore the inexorability of human "progress," at revolutionaries who take nihilistic delight in destroying the existing order, and at "false liberals" who refuse to explore prudently the necessarily difficult relations between order and liberty, progress and tradition.

In nearly all of his major writings, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the indispensability of the spiritual qualities of "repentance" and "self-limitation" for a truly balanced individual and collective life. But he never turns the classical or Christian virtues into an antimodern ideology that would escape the reality of living with the tensions inherent in a dynamic, modern society. He is not, however, unduly sanguine about the prospects for these virtues in the contemporary scene. As he writes in November 1916, "In the life of nations, even more than in private life, the rule is that concessions and self-limitation are ridiculed as naïve and stupid." Solzhenitsyn thus has no illusions about repentance and self-limitation becoming the explicit and unchallenged foundation of free political life. His more modest hope is to claim a hearing for the Good amidst the cacophony of claims that vie for public notice. Neither genuflecting before progress nor irresponsibly rejecting it, Solzhenitsyn insists that we must “seek and expand ways of directing its might towards the perpetration of good." Solzhenitsyn's moral vision has too often been politicized in ways that mistake his rejection of progressivist illusions for a reactionary refusal to admit the possibility of progress.

Solzhenitsyn is, in truth, a conservative liberal who wants to temper the one-sided modern preoccupation with individual freedom with a salutary reminder of the moral ends that ought to inform responsible human choice. Like the best classical and Christian thinkers of the past, he believes that human beings should not "neglect their spiritual essence" or "show an exaggerated concern for man’s material needs." Thus, while he displays a rich appreciation of the limits of politics, he also recognizes that "a Christian must ... actively endeavor to improve the holders of power and the state system." And when Solzhenitsyn addresses specifically political questions he does so as a principled advocate of political moderation. His portrait in August 1914 of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin's efforts to establish a constitutional order that would be consistent with Russia's spiritual traditions and that would keep Russia from falling into the revolutionary abyss contains some of the wisest pages ever written about statesmanship.

The shamefully one-sided journalistic and critical reception too often accorded to Solzhenitsyn's work thus serves as an unintended confirmation of the difficulty of pursuing what he has called the "middle line" in the service of human liberty and human dignity. Solzhenitsyn has used his literary gifts and moral witness to teach us, as he says in The Gulag Archipelago, "that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but through all human hearts." Today, though he is eighty-five years old and has had some physical setbacks, he remains committed to his writing. Moreover, his stature and moral authority remain high where it most counts: in his native Russia. In response to the recent awarding of the Solzhenitsyn Prize to the actor and the director of the television series that brought Dostoevski's The Idiot to the screen, the popular writer Darya Dontsova commented that "the great Solzhenitsyn is in reality a very modern man, and young of heart." Most importantly, amidst the corruption and moral drift of the post-Communist transition, he has never ceased to remind his compatriots that they "must build a moral Russia or none at all." He remains an intrepid defender of a freedom that is worthy of man and has thus maintained faith with the best in both Russian and Western traditions. He merits our continuing gratitude, respect, and admiration.

via Arts & Letters Daily