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Adventures in Wiki Epistemology: Architects

Wikipedia has been making a big push to cite published sources to support the content people have added online. This year, I have been adding a lot of new content to Wikipedia after finding published sources to cite. Unfortunately, sloppy citations and unsupported speculation are just as common in print as they are online. Here are three examples from my recent, rather intense research into aspects of architectural history relating to the National Register of Historic Places listings on Oahu.

Punahou School's Pauahi Hall: architect(s) and date completed?
A. ?, 1896 (Punahou School website)
B. ?, 1898 (NRHP #72000419, Alexander & Dodge 1941)
C. Ripley & Dickey, 1896 (Neil 1975, HJH)
D. Ripley & Reynolds, 1896 (Cheever 2003:98)

Ripley's architectural partners were Dickey (1896-1900), Reynolds (1910-), and Davis (1913-). So the latest publication, with contributions by most of the major architects in Honolulu (Cheever 2003) seems the least reliable in this instance. Contributor Nate E. Smith, Associate AIA, was probably thinking of Ripley's work on the University of Hawai‘i's Hawaii Hall (1911), while Ripley was in partnership with Reynolds.

Judge Henry E. Cooper House, Manoa Valley: architect(s) and date completed?
A. Ripley & Dickey, 1897 (Neil 1975, HJH)
B. Ripley & Dickey, 1898 (Jay 1992:67)
C. Traphagen, 1898 (Cheever 2003:153)

Once again, the latest publication, with contributions by most of the major architects in Honolulu (Cheever 2003) seems the least reliable in this instance. Contributor Joseph J. Ferraro, AIA, was probably thinking of Traphagen's work on the Punahou School President's Home (1907).

The name of the junior architect who finished up much work contracted by Bertram Goodhue before the latter's untimely death was:
A. Hardie Phillips (according to Honolulu sources)
B. Hardie Phillip (according to sources elsewhere)

"Hardie Phillips" sourced in Honolulu: Gaspar 1996; Haines 2009; HawaiiHistory.org: Territorial Architecture - The Golden Age; Honolulu Star Bulletin, 1 September 1997, 28 September 2003; Localism: Territorial Style Elegance in Honolulu. Historic Buildings Tour 1.0; NRHP #80001272; Smith 1996:359; Wilcox 1972:22; www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com.

"Hardie Phillip" in Wikipedia and elsewhere: C. Brewer Building; Anna Rice Cooke; Bertram Goodhue; Honolulu Academy of Arts; Lihiwai; Mayers Murray & Phillip; Penkiunas 1990:145-182; Sakamoto 2008:34.

Once again, the received wisdom of nearly every architect in Honolulu, and every published source based on that received wisdom, has perpetuated a minor error that every Wikipedian seems to have avoided. There is no "Hardie Phillips" in Wikipedia.

Bibliography

• Alexander, Mary C., and Charlotte P. Dodge (1941). Punahou, 1841-1941. University of California Press.


• Cheever, David (2003). Pōhaku: The Art & Architecture of Stonework in Hawai‘i. Editions Limited.


• Haines, Frank S., FAIA (2009). Exploring Downtown: A Walking Tour. Honolulu Chapter, American Institute of Architects.


• Jay, Robert (1992). The Architecture of Charles W. Dickey: Hawaii and California. University of Hawaiʻi Press. (out of print)


• Neil, J. Meredith (1975). "The Architecture of C.W. Dickey in Hawai‘i." Hawaiian Journal of History 9:101-113.


• Penkiunas, Daina Julia (1990). American Regional Architecture in Hawaii: Honolulu, 1915–1935. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia. (Printed by UMI, Ann Arbor, 1993.)


• Sakamoto, Dean, ed. (2008). Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff. Yale University Press.


• Smith, George Everard Kidder (1996). Source Book of American Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press.


• Wilcox, Gaylord (1972). "Business and Buildings: Downtown Honolulu's Old Fashioned Block." Hawaiian Journal of History 6:3-27.

China-Korea-Japan Trade Boom, 1100s

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 94-96:

Commerce grew to become a vibrant sector, primarily because Japan was located next to the most dynamic economy on earth: that of Sung China. Sung Chinese invented gunpowder, the compass, and mass printing. The country also had advanced carbon-stoked iron furnaces producing high-grade ferrous products and a cotton industry producing everything from ships' sails to military uniforms. The population grew by leaps and bounds during the Sung period, as the "rice bowl" of southern China was more intensively cultivated and regional craft and trade specialization took place as never before.

Trade between China and Japan, exclusively for the archipelago's elite, was already underway in the tenth century. By the late eleventh and twelfth centuries huge Chinese junks called even more regularly at Hakata, Kamizaki, and other Kyushu ports. By 1100, a community of overseas Chinese took up residence in northern Kyushu cities such as Hakata. They held rank at the Japanese court and some even attended the funeral of an important official in northern Kyushu in 1097. In 1151, two samurai attacked the overseas Chinese there, and the fleeing merchant families numbered more than sixteen hundred. Archaeological evidence also points to a dramatic increase in commerce with China during the twelfth century, as the number of sites in Japan containing shards of Chinese porcelains grew exponentially. Besides Kyushu, Chinese traders also called on ports along the northwestern coast of Honshu. By 1180, some daring Japanese captains attempted the passage to southern China as well.

Chinese merchants traded their silk, spices, and porcelain for northeastern Japan's furs and gold. The Chinese especially coveted gold; a Chinese trader wrote in 1118 "the country of Japan ... in its earth has a wealth of precious products." Perhaps for this reason, the dynamic Sung state, populated by wealthy consumers, ran a balance of trade deficit with Japan. Piles of Sung cash were soon helping to remonetize the Japanese economy. By 1150 there were signs that the outflow of Sung cash was causing the economic giant problems. In 1199, the Chinese government tried to ban the use of its coins in trade with Korea and Japan. A significant increase in the amount of Sung coins in Japanese sites took place beginning in the 1170s. People wrote of a "cash sickness" in 1179, and then the court banned the counterfeiting of Sung coppers. These proscriptions were apparently ineffective, because the court repeated them in 1187, 1189, and 1192. Along with the cash came an inflationary price spiral, beginning in the 1170s, helping to further destabilize an already teetering social pyramid.

The Ise Taira built a trading empire in western Japan during their tenure as the military arm of the court from 1159 to 1180. They controlled bases such as Fukuhara in modern Kobe, Itsukushima along the Inland Sea, and Kamizaki in northern Kyushu. The Taira made allies of the seafaring families in western Japan. They were so involved in the Sung trade that in 1180 ex-emperor Takakura, born of a Taira mother, was induced by Kiyomori to sail from Fukuhara to Itsukushima aboard a Sung junk.

In addition, the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1258) exchanged goods frequently with Japanese merchants. Following the collapse of the Silla kingdom, relations between the Japanese court and Korea improved. Between 1050 and 1090, Japanese merchants visited Korea in sixteen trade missions, bearing weapons, screens, and precious metals for the Koryŏ court.

This strong external stimulus, combined with the modest demographic recovery, led to a rebound in Japanese domestic commerce between 1050 and 1180. As had occurred during the eighth century, the capital and Kinai constituted the core of commercial activity, because that region had a large number of consumers and the remnants of an advanced transportation system. Commerce was more dynamic in western Japan and probably less important in eastern Honshu. Long-distance exchange, however, enabled the elite to acquire the marvelous products of northern Japan, such as gold and wild horses. The elites also still received most commodities in kind from their on-site landlords and tax farmers, and peasants bought and sold at markets only occasionally, yet demographic and economic recovery supported and was assisted by the return of a more vital market system.

China vs. Turkey over Uighurs

The East-West Center has just published a policy study with an interesting, big-power-rivalry take on the Uighur unrest in China: Ethno-Diplomacy: The Uyghur Hitch in Sino-Turkish Relations, by Yitzhak Shichor. Policy Studies 53. Honolulu: East-West Center, 2009. xii, 72 pp. (Available free online.) Here's the abstract:

Beginning in 1949, China responded to so-called Uyghur separatism and the quest for Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) independence as a domestic problem. Since the mid-1990s, however, when it became aware of the international aspects of this problem, Beijing has begun to pressure Turkey to limit its support for Uyghur activism. Aimed not only at cultural preservation but also at Eastern Turkestan independence, Uyghur activism remained unnoticed until the 1990s, despite the establishment in 1971 of Sino-Turkish diplomatic relations. It has gathered momentum as a result of China's post-Mao opening, the Soviet disintegration, increased Uyghur migration, the growing Western concern for human rights, and the widespread use of the Internet. Until the mid-1990s Turkey's leaders managed to defy Chinese pressure because they sympathized with the Uyghurs, were personally committed to their leader Isa Yusuf Alptekin, and hoped to restore Turkish influence in Central Asia. By late 1995, however, both that hope and Alptekin were dead, and China was becoming an influential, self-confident economic power. At this time Ankara chose to comply with Beijing's demands, which were backed by increased trade, growing military collaboration, and China's veiled threats of support for Kurdish nationalism. Consequently, Turkish Uyghurs suffered a serious blow, and some of their organizations had to relocate abroad, outside Beijing's reach. Nonetheless, Uyghur activism continues in Turkey and has become even more pronounced worldwide. Possibly less concerned about the Uyghur "threat" than it suggests, Beijing may simply be using the Uyghurs to intimidate and manipulate Turkey and other governments, primarily those in Central Asia.

This adds a bit more historical background to the especially harsh reaction from Turkey: "Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said Friday genocide was being committed in China's northwest province of Xinjiang and called on Chinese authorities to intervene to prevent more deaths." (via boingboing)

Wordcatcher Tales: Two Teas, A Bug, OMG

Anybody who's paid attention to my latest batch of Flickr photos will know that I took a short trip to Korea in June. Unfortunately, the rudimentary Korean I had learned before my last visit there on a wonderful junket in 1995 had faded to the point that I felt rather frustrated by my inability to say very much, despite my ability to read and sound out far more words in hangul than I can understand. However, I did manage to pick up a few new Korean words for things I ingested, plus one new Chinese expression that showed up repeatedly in the subtitles of an in-flight movie too silly to listen to.

This time I learned the names for two new Korean teas, one of which I'm sure I sampled during my last visit back in 1995.

오미자차 omija cha (五味子茶) 'five flavor berry tea' is made from Schisandra chinensis (Ch. wǔ wèi zi, Jp. gomishi), whose flavor, as its common name implies, is supposed to be sweet, tart, salty, bitter, and aromatic all at once. I found it very refreshing.

솔잎차 'pine leaf (= needle) tea' (松葉茶) is written sol ip cha but is often romanized solnip cha and it sounded to me like sollip cha (and not sorip, as it would normally be with an /l/ between two vowels). This tea was was also refreshing, mildly aromatic, not sweet, and only slightly bitter. The native Korean root for 'pine' is sol- in 'pine needle' (솔잎 sol-ip) but is truncated to so- in 'pine tree' (소나무 sonamu). The Sino-Korean root is song-, as in 'pine flower/pollen' 송화 song-hwa and 'pine dumplings' song-pyeon (served at Chuseok). It is cognate with (Mandarin) Chinese sōng and Sino-Japanese shō (as in shōchikubai 'pine-bamboo-plum').

UPDATE: In a comment at my wordpress blog, Doc Rock clarifies something I suspected.

Your juxtaposition of the Hangeul 솔잎차 followed the Chinese equivalent in Hancha (松葉茶) seems to imply that the characters are read 솔잎차 in Korean. They are not, they are read 송엽차 [song-yeopcha]. 솔 [sol] is the pure Korean for pine as in 솔나무, while 송[松] is the reading of the Sino-Korean loan word. What is confusing, perhaps, is that in the compound 솔잎차 the native Korean 솔잎 [pine leaf/needle] has the Sino-Korean loan word 차 [茶] appended to it.

My only evidence for this distinction between native Korean and Sino-Korean readings for 'pine' was the gloss for 松 in my little Hanja dictionary: 솔송 [sol-song] in the usual Korean manner of combining native Korean plus Sino-Korean words for the same meaning. The paragraph above has been revised accordingly.

번데기 beondegi 'chrysalis, pupa' (borrowed into Jp. as ポンテギ pontegi) - In 1995, I got the chance to sample fried grasshoppers, thanks to a little old lady selling them by the parking lot at Sokkuram Grotto in Gyeongju. This year, I came across cooked silkworm pupae on sale by the footpath to Jeondeungsa temple complex on Ganghwa Island. I was surprised that several others in the group I was with sampled them. They're more chewy than crunchy, high in fat, fiber, and calcium, and not too salty. They used to be a very popular snack in Korea—for kids as well as adults. They were also eaten in China. Nowadays, they're much more commonly used to feed koi (carp), turtles, lizards, and chickens.



我的天 wǒ de tiān 'OMG' (lit. 'my heaven') seemed to be a signature opening dialogue tic in the Chinese subtitles of Bride Wars, an in-flight movie I tried hard to sleep through on the long flight back via Narita. (I won't blog about my trip to Narita-san Temple during my long layover, since I've already put so much effort into enhancing its Wikipedia article. Wikipedia and Flickr have been soaking up most of my blogging energy these days.)

A Costly Victory in Sri Lanka

Writing in The Atlantic, Robert Kaplan offers an awfully grim retrospective on how Sri Lanka won its 26-year war against the Tamil Tigers.

Though it was only a one-day news story in the United States, a momentous event occurred last spring, with worldwide military significance. After 26 years of heavy fighting, the Sri Lankan government decisively defeated an ethnic insurgency, killing all of its top leadership, whose bodies were displayed on national television. Massive victory parades followed.

The Tamil Tigers were no ordinary insurgency. Built on the ethnic hatred of the minority Hindu Tamils against the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, the movement was among the best organized and most ruthless to have emerged anywhere since the Second World War. The Tigers boasted their own air force and navy to go along with their unconventional ground troops. They helped pioneer the use of suicide bombers. (Recall that it was a female Tiger suicide bomber who killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.) They regularly embedded their fighters among noncombatants, using them as human shields. In other words, they were as organized and heartless as any insurgent group in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Tamil Tigers, moreover, had a brilliant, charismatic leader by the name of Vellupilai Prabakharan, who was venerated by many ethnic Hindu Tamils to the same extent that radical Muslims have venerated Osama bin Laden. His following was cult-like and was largely responsible for the war that killed 70,000 people since 1983, in an island of only 22 million people. Compare that to the deaths of 3,000 in the World Trade Center out of a population of 300 million in the United States. So when the Sri Lankan government displayed Prabakharan's body on television last May, it represented the culmination of a counterinsurgency campaign that the U.S. could only dream about....

The war was won using techniques like the following, which the United States could and should never employ.

The insurgents are using human shields? No problem. Just keep killing the innocent bystanders until you get to the fighters themselves.... The Sri Lankan military indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians—as many as 20,000 in the final months of fighting, according to the United Nations.

Bad media coverage is hurting morale and giving succor to the enemy? Just kill the journalists.... No journalist I met in Colombo was willing to cross the line and publicly attack the government.

The international community disapproves of your methods and cuts off military aid because of the human rights violations you've committed? Again, no problem. Get aid from China, whose assistance comes without moral lectures. That’s just what the Sri Lankan Government did. In return, the Chinese got the right to help construct a deep water port in Sri Lanka, close to world shipping lanes....

via RealClearPolitics

Kaplan adds a few other harsh observations in an interview with Michael J. Totten.

The Sri Lankan government was elected in 2005 to win the war. And it has done that. Extremely brutally. It’s a government that’s very nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist. These are not the Richard Gere’s "peace and love" Buddhists. These are the real blood and soil Buddhists, where Buddhism is like any other religion when it’s threatened and it’s defending a piece of territory. It can be very brutal....

In Sri Lanka you have a majority Sinhalese Buddhist population that thinks like a minority. They have a minority sense of oppression. Although they have 75 percent of the population while the Tamils have only about 18 percent, there are 60 million more Tamils nearby in southern India. So they’re kind of like the Iraqi Shias and the Serbs, other majorities who feel like minorities, and can be twice as brutal because of it.

Japan's Puppet States in China

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 481-483:

Japanese atrocities may have played some part in the refusal of Chiang's government to contemplate a negotiated peace after 1937, despite German efforts to broker a truce. Of more importance was probably the manifest inability of the Japanese to inflict a decisive defeat on Guomindang forces, despite the poor leadership, low morale and appalling under-equipment that afflicted the latter.* Although the Japanese armies continued to advance steadily westwards in the course of 1938, capturing Canton, Wuhan and Xuzhou, they suffered increasingly heavy casualties as their lines of communication became overextended. At Taierhchuang [sic] in March 1938, for example, the 10th Division found itself all but surrounded and ended up losing 16,000 men in days of intense house-to-house fighting. Eighteen months later the 11th Army was heavily defeated at Changsha (Hunan). The invasion of Guangxi at the end of 1939 was short-lived; by the end of the following year the Japanese had been forced to abandon Chinhsien, Nanning and Pinyang. By 1940 they had more or less reached their limits in China and the location of the front line did not significantly change again until 1944. The effect of all this was to strengthen the hand of the more extreme elements within the Japanese military, the so-called ‘Control Faction’, who advocated ignoring the existing Chinese authorities and dealing with puppet regimes, as they had done in Manchuria.

Here, it might be thought, the Japanese had miscalculated. Who in China would want to lend his support to invaders capable of such terrible atrocities? As in other theatres of war, however, the key to securing collaboration turned out to have little, if anything, to do with the cruelty or kindness of the invading forces. The decisive factor was the extent to which the invaded people were divided among themselves. The Japanese invasion did not elicit national unity, as some Chinese Nationalists had hoped it might. It boosted support for the Communist Party, which under Mao Zedong's leadership now committed itself to a campaign of protracted guerrilla warfare. At the same time, Japanese incursions tended to widen divisions within the Guomindang. The more recruits the Communists were able to find among impoverished and disillusioned peasants, the more tempted some Nationalists were to compromise with the Japanese. The further Chiang retreated to the west – and he did not stop until he reached Chongqing in the province of Sichuan, 800 miles from his starting point, Nanking – the greater the incentive for those left behind to make their peace with the Japanese.

Already by 1937 the Japanese had established three puppet regimes, in Chinese territory: the ‘Empire of Manchukuo’, the supposedly autonomous Mongolian regime of Prine Te [sic; = Prince Te(h), De Wang, Demchugdongrub/Dam-chukdangrub) and the East Hebei Autonomous Anti-Communist Council. By the middle of the following year, two more had been added: the Provisional Government of the Republic of China set up in Peiping by the North China Area Army, and the Reorganized Government of the Republic of China established in Nanking by the Central China Area Army. In March 1940 the Japanese pulled off a major diplomatic coup when they succeeded in persuading the former Nationalist leader Wang Jingwei to become the figurehead in charge of the latter. After renewed attempts to negotiate some kind of peace with Chiang had foundered, Wang's regime was officially recognized as the legitimate government of China. Wang himself had been duped; he had been led to expect concessions like a definite date for Japanese troop withdrawals and a unification of the various puppet regimes under his authority. He ended up having to recognize the independence of Manchukuo, to allow the indefinite stationing of Japanese troops in China and to accept joint control of the maritime customs and other tax agencies. This meant that by 1940 the Japanese and their puppets controlled virtually the entire Chinese coast and a large proportion of the country's eastern provinces. These were by far China's most prosperous regions. Wang alone was nominally in charge of half a million square miles of territory and around 200 million people. Many Chinese agreed with the economist T'ao His-sheng [sic; = T'ao Hsi-sheng, Tao Xisheng], a leading collaborator in Wang's regime: ‘China is a weak nation. In adopting a policy of being “friendly to distant countries and hostile to neighbours” [she] will inevitably bring about a situation which is summed up in the proverb: “Water from afar cannot extinguish a fire nearby.”’ Collaborationist slogans such as Tong Sheng Ghong Si [sic] (‘Live or Die Together’) were not wholly empty of meaning.

*The fighting strength of the Chinese army was around 2.9 million, divided into 146 divisions and 44 independent brigades. However, each division had just 324 machine-guns between nine and a half thousand men. In all, the Chinese army had little more than one million rifles and just 800 pieces of artillery.

Ferguson's handling of Chinese names and terms seems very sloppy. If the slogan he mentioned is 同生共死 (lit. ‘same live both die’), a closer rendering might be Tong sheng gong si ‘Live together, die together’.

Aristocrats Corrupt the Clergy, 800-1050

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 74-75:

The Buddhist clergy continued to serve as an adjunct to the aristocracy, not only performing state rituals but also helping the privileged gain salvation. During these centuries, however, several changes overtook this class and Japanese religion in general. Buddhism and the native cult, already starting to meld in the 600s, became amalgamated and local gods and goddesses turned into protectors of the Buddhist law and then manifestations of Buddhist deities. Buddhist temples and shrines combined into powerful religious complexes, such as Kasuga Shrine and Kōfukuji, and helped the religious class acquire even more wealth and power.

The gender and class composition of Buddhist devotees also began to change. The state all but stopped ordaining women and banned them from some sacred sites because they might be a temptation to sin. Still, some women, especially of aristocratic birth, continued to accept unofficial ordination. The class origins of powerful monks began to shift as rank holders with many sons and no other outlets for them started to place them in high positions at famous temples. For example, between 782 and 990, ninety-seven percent of these powerful monks were of commoner background, studying for and attaining ordination. Between 990 and 1069, however, that proportion slipped to fifty-two percent. In other words, the crowded aristocratic class began to seek religious appointment as a way to produce an income for their children. Temples no longer followed rules of seniority but instead rewarded their aristocratic patrons, despite loud protests from well-qualified ordinands.

The increased role of aristocratic offspring in administering the daily affairs and extensive estate lands of these temple complexes helped to politicize these institutions and increase factionalism. By the mid-tenth century, violence occasionally broke out among factions within and between religious complexes. These confrontations could cause considerable damage, as when more than forty buildings were destroyed on Mount Hiei in a factional dispute in 993. Many monks of minimal education were there merely for the tax exemption—and readily took part in scuffles. These same clerics engaged in all sorts of behavior once banned by monastic rules, including eating meat, drinking rice wine, and engaging in homosexual and heterosexual liaisons. Some abbots such as Ennin (794–864) condemned these violations of religious conduct, but until 1050 the anticlericalism implied in terms like "evil monk" (akusō) [悪僧] was not yet widespread.

Ryōgen (912–985) was a powerful monk of this time. Born to a poor commoner family, he ascended Mount Hiei at the age of eleven, found a suitable teacher, and was ordained in the Tendai sect at sixteen. Lacking a powerful sponsor and ambitious for a career that included more than just performing everyday ceremonies, Ryōgen succeeded in attaching himself to more powerful monks and showing off his knowledge in a series of religious debates. This attracted the attention of court aristocrats, especially members of the northern branch of the Fujiwara. In exchange for his expertise at various esoteric rituals employed when Regent Fujiwara no Tadahira died, Ryōgen became a protege of Tadahira's son Morosuke. Morosuke obtained a series of important appointments for Ryōgen and cemented his alliance with the monk. Eventually, Ryōgen was appointed to the headship of the Tendai sect. In that post, he strengthened monastic discipline and helped rebuild many structures on Mount Hiei after the disastrous fire of 966. He also expanded Tendai power into the provinces and aided in the ordination of women. He remained the head of the Tendai sect until his death.

WW2: National Armies vs. Imperial Armies

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 516-518:

The Axis powers were fighting not only against the British, Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men fielded by the various parts of the British Empire were immense. All told, the United Kingdom itself mobilized just under six million men and women. But an additional 5.1 million came from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Victories like El Alamein and even more so Imphal were victories for imperial forces as much as for British forces; the colonial commitment to the Empire proved every bit as strong as in the First World War. Especially remarkable was the fact that more than two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the British Indian Army during the war – more than sixty times the number who fought for the Japanese. The rapid expansion of the Indian officer corps provided a crucial source of loyalty, albeit loyalty that was conditional on post-war independence. The Red Army was also much more than just a Russian army. In January 1944 Russians accounted for 58 per cent of the 200 infantry divisions for which records are available, but Ukrainians accounted for 22 per cent, an order of magnitude more than fought on the German side, and a larger proportion than their share of the pre-war Soviet population. Half the soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad were not Russians. The American army, too, was ethnically diverse. Although they were generally kept in segregated units, African-Americans accounted for around 11 per cent of total US forces mobilized and fought in all the major campaigns from Operation Torch onwards. Norman Mailer's reconnaissance platoon in The Naked and the Dead includes two Jews, a Pole, an Irishman, a Mexican and an Italian. Two of the six servicemen who raised the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima were of foreign origin; one was a Pima Indian. More than 20,000 Japanese-Americans served in the US army during the war....

The Germans, as we have seen, had made some efforts to mobilize other peoples in occupied Europe, as had the Japanese in the Far East, but these were dwarfed by what the Allies achieved. Indeed, the abject failure of the Axis empires to win the loyalty of their new subjects ensured that Allied forces were reinforced by a plethora of exile forces, partisan bands and resistance organizations. Even excluding these auxiliaries, the combined armed forces of the principal Allies were already just under 30 per cent larger than those of the Axis in 1942. A year later the difference was more than 50 per cent. By the end of the war, including also Free French* and Polish forces, Yugoslav partisans and Romanians fighting on the Russian side, the Allies had more than twice as many men under arms. Fifty-two different nationalities were represented in the Jewish Brigade formed by the British in 1944. They followed an earlier wave of 9,000 or so refugees from Spain, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who had joined the so-called Alien Companies, nicely nicknamed the ‘King's Own Loyal Enemy Aliens’.

The best measure of the Allied advantage was in terms of military hardware, however, since it was with capital rather than labour – with machinery rather than manpower – that the Germans and the Japanese were ultimately to be defeated. In every major category of weapon, the Axis powers fell steadily further behind with each passing month. Between 1942 and 1944, the Allies out-produced the Axis in terms of machine pistols by a factor of 16 to 1, in naval vessels, tanks and mortars by roughly 5 to 1, and in rifles, machine-guns, artillery and combat aircraft by roughly 3 to 1.

*It is seldom acknowledged that for most of the period from 1940 until D-Day, black Africans constituted the main elements of the rank and file in the Free French Army. Even as late as September 1944, they still accounted for 1 in 5 of de Gaulle's force in North-West Europe.

I did not quote the immediately preceding section that compares the mismatch in purely economic terms, but I cannot resist quoting the footnote appended to the end of it (on p. 516):

‘We must at all costs advance into the plains of Mesopotamia and take the Mosul oilfields from the British,’ declared Hitler on August 5, 1942. ‘If we succeed here, the whole war will come to an end.’ But three-quarters of total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, compared with just 7 per cent from the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.

Wordcatcher Tales: Kawaigaru = Itaburu

In most contexts, Japanese 可愛がる kawaigaru means 'to dote on, to fondle, to caress', but for novices in a sumo stable, kawaigaru is a synonym of いたぶる itaburu 'to torment, to harass, to tease', as Mongolian ozeki Harumafuji explains in an interview that appeared in the Taipei Times.

Harumafuji, who last month won Japan’s major tournament, recalled the pain and tears that toughened him up in the nine years since he arrived from his native Mongolia with no money and not a word of Japanese....

In sumo, kawaigari means “crying, then being forced to stand, then being beaten again. It’s not simple to express with words because it’s a physical experience,” he said.

But it’s not just the beatings that steel the wrestlers in the quasi-monastic life of the sumo stable, where the fighters forfeit much of their personal liberty and embark on a grueling daily routine.

The younger wrestlers start the day at 3am cleaning the stable, washing their seniors’ loincloths and preparing meals. They are banned from watching television and using cellphones, and receive only modest pocket money.

Harumafuji said he found it toughest to get used to a diet heavy on fish — which has sent some of his mutton-eating compatriots running to the Mongolian embassy to escape Japan — served in huge quantities of 10,000 calories a day.

“Everyone says going on a diet is hard, but I think gaining weight is so many times more difficult,” he said. “Eating was the scariest, and my most painful experience.”

“I’m thin by nature, so I really had a hard time to eat in the beginning. I ate and I vomited. Ate and vomited. Your stomach expands when you do that, so I was forced to eat until I vomited,” Harumafuji said. “When I vomited, there would be someone already waiting with food, and I was forced to eat again.”

The force-feeding helped boost the 1.85m athlete’s weight to 126kg from 86kg — still about 30kg lighter than the average top division wrestler....

As fewer young Japanese sign up for the harsh life of the sumo stable, the sport’s 700-strong elite now include men from China, South Korea, Eastern Europe and as far away as Brazil and the Pacific island state of Tonga.

Geez. That seems to shed new light on the after-sumo career of another diminutive rikishi, Mainoumi, which included a stint as a traveling gourmet as well as general TV personality.

(I hope the Brazilian and the Tongan make it to the upper ranks soon! Surely the Tongan won't have to get used to eating fish.)

Early Evolution of the Samurai

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 81-82:

Since the Tomb era, an aristocracy had ruled Japan. It grew and became more elaborate over the centuries, but the essential idea of a hereditary class of noblemen and women administering the islands had remained unchanged. Beginning about 1050, however, the aristocracy—now exclusively civilian in function—was joined by two other elites: the clergy and the military. Each class had its own function, clientele, geographical base, and relation to the sovereign, which in conjunction provided legitimacy for the system. Further, members of each branch formed alliances with the others, and joined together in political factions. These three functionally distinct but politically and socially intertwined elites held sway in Japan until about 1300.

The military was the newest group to attain elite status, but the roots of the samurai lay in the Tomb age. Around 450, the horse had been introduced to Japan from Korea, and when men combined riding the animal with the Jomon technology of archery, a deadly new form of combat was born: mounted archery. Even the small, unneutered horses of early Japan (about one hundred thirty centimeters at the shoulder) made armies more mobile; equestrians could annihilate lightly armored foot soldiers. The two major drawbacks to this form of battle were the great expense of buying and feeding a horse and the large block of time required to learn to ride and shoot from a galloping animal. Typically, a horse cost five times the annual income of a peasant, and would-be mounted archers had to have time to practice. They needed to learn to release the bridle, and guide the on-rushing beast with their legs or voice, all while taking aim and firing arrows. The cost and time invested in mounted warfare meant that it was an occupation limited to local notables and certain members of the service nobility.

Under the Yamato monarch, around 600, armies fighting in Korea or Japan included forces supplied by approximately one hundred twenty local magnates allied to the sovereign, as well as smaller contingents led by the service nobility or from the royal guards. Altogether, these armies may have numbered ten to twenty thousand fighters. The first riders wore iron helmets and slat armor, in which iron pieces were sewn together with leather into flexible sheets. Wielding straight swords, these elite warriors fought alongside foot soldiers employing spears or swords and protected by a cuirass or other armor. During battles, infantry formed lines behind walls of wooden shields.

Beginning in the early 600s, the court feared invasion from either Tang China or Silla and hurriedly adopted a version of the impressive Chinese military system. The main element was a draft of common soldiers, determined through the census and then posted to the local militia. During the winter, these commoner draftees were to drill as units to engage the enemy in the same coordinated way that Tang forces did. Because fighters were responsible for supplying their own weapons, the new system was inexpensive for the government but burdensome for the draftee. Nearly a quarter of adult males were called for service, and the duty was so onerous that there was a saying that "if one man is drafted, the whole household will consequently be destroyed."

Despite the adoption of the draft from China, the Japanese court retained two crucial elements originating before 650. They designated local notables, at that time usually district magistrates or their kin, to lead armies as cavalry. Even in the late seventh century, the Kanto region was home to the largest number of daring and skillful mounted archers. In addition, certain court families—the Ōtomo, Saeki, and Sakanoue among them—gained reputations as military aristocrats, holding high rank and office.

As described in chapter 3, the Chinese-style army met its stiffest challenge during the wars against the emishi between 774 and 812. The residents of northeastern Honshu were expert mounted archers fighting as guerillas. During the long conflict, the court discovered how inadequate peasant conscript foot soldiers were against the emishi cavalry; there was a dictum that "ten of our commoners cannot rival one of the enemy."

These long wars helped lay the foundation for the classical samurai way of doing battle. From these small bands of emishi riders, the court learned that leather armor was better suited to mounted warfare and soon abandoned iron. The emishi also wielded a curved sword, instead of the straight one employed by government soldiers. The emishi curved sword was probably the predecessor of the vaunted samurai slashing weapon. Because most engagements involved mounted archers, there were many opportunities for the government's equestrian elite to hone its skills. In other words, these long wars constituted "practice for becoming samurai." With the cessation of hostilities in 812, the technology of the samurai had come together: they were lightly armored mounted archers wielding curved swords.

Why China Props Up North Korea

In a New York Times op-ed last week, North Korea-watcher and Korea Times columnist Andrei Lankov explains quite starkly why China will continue to prop up North Korea.

International sanctions, introduced after the first nuclear test in 2006, have not had any noticeable effect — in part because they have not been seriously implemented. It is clear that no “stern warnings” from the United States or the United Nations Security Council will have any effect on Pyongyang’s behavior.

With all other approaches failing, one last hope is often cited — China. Today, some 45 percent of all North Korean trade is with China, and between 30 and 50 percent of China’s entire foreign aid budget is spent on this one small country. So, the reasoning goes, Beijing must have tremendous leverage over Pyongyang....

Nonetheless, there are compelling reasons why China is unlikely to press North Korea hard.

North Korea accepts Chinese aid, but it has shown no inclination to heel to Beijing’s advice. The North Korean regime is such that it is largely immune to foreign pressure. It has been tried before, but when the pressure is only moderate — such as a partial reduction of aid or less favorable trade conditions — North Korean leaders have simply ignored it.

That may lead to a further deterioration of living standards, but the well-being of the population has never been among Pyongyang’s major concerns. North Koreans have no influence on the state’s policies, and are unlikely to rebel. If deprived of food, they starve and die quietly. So in order to influence Pyongyang’s behavior, it has to be hit really hard — in China’s case, that might mean cutting all aid and stopping all shipments of fuel.

Such drastic measures, which approach a land blockade, would likely destabilize the fragile domestic situation inside North Korea, with regime collapse being a probable outcome.

For China, collapse of the North Korean state would mean millions of refugees, many of them armed soldiers, crossing into China. That would increase instability in some of China’s major industrial and population centers. Finally, it would result in a loss of control over North Korea’s stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium, as well as chemical and biological weapons.

The longer-term consequences of a North Korean implosion are also unwelcome to Beijing. It would probably lead to the unification of the country under Seoul, depriving China of a strategic buffer and, even worse, creating a large U.S. ally. The alternative — military intervention — is a costly and risky option that Beijing would prefer to avoid....

China will make gestures of condemnation and, contrary to what some China-bashers believe, they will be sincere. But Beijing will not go much further: It will do nothing that might jeopardize the internal stability in the North. Like any rational player, China prefers to stick with a lesser evil.

via the Marmot's Hole

Japan's Worst Century, the 700s

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 36-37:

Between 698 and 800, there were at least thirty-six years of plagues in Japan, or about one every three years. The most well-documented epidemic—and to judge by the mortality and its social, economic, and political effects, the most significant—was a smallpox outbreak during 735–737. It started in northern Kyushu, a certain sign of its foreign origin, but by 737 the virus had spread up the Inland Sea and on to eastern Honshu, aided, ironically enough, by the improved network of roads linking the capital and provinces. To its credit, the court tried to apply pragmatic principles to treat the symptoms of the disease, but to little effect. Statistics from various provinces scattered from northern Kyushu to eastern Honshu suggest that mortality was about twenty-five percent, meaning that a million or more persons may have succumbed. As a result of the depopulation, an entire layer of village administration was abolished. Another irony was that the death rate among the exalted aristocracy—living crowded together in the capital at Nara—was even higher, a full thirty-nine percent. At the end of 737, chroniclers wrote,"Through the summer and fall, people ... from aristocrats on down have died one after another in countless numbers. In recent times, there has been nothing like this." In the wake of the epidemic, government revenues plunged by more than twenty percent, even more draconian measures were implemented to stem cultivator flight from the land, and a guilt-ridden [Emperor] Shōmu approved large expenditures for Buddhist temples, statues, and other religious icons.

Epidemics certainly helped to reverse the long demographic expansion of the last several centuries, but two other factors contributed to population stasis. The first was crop failure and widespread famine, occurring about every third year between the late seventh and eighth centuries. Causes for bad harvests were complex, but various climate data indicate that the eighth century was one of the hottest and driest in Japanese history. In Western Europe, where there was a "medieval warm" at this time, the effect was to dry out water-logged soils and encourage the expansion of agriculture; in Japan, where farmers often depended upon rainfall as the only way to irrigate their paddies, the result was frequent crop failure and hunger. At ten to fifteen percent, mortality from a severe famine was lower than an epidemic, but, like pestilence, malnutrition also reduced fertility. Even in years when the harvest seemed adequate, the populace frequently went hungry in the spring when their supplies of grain were exhausted. More sophisticated means of watering rice paddies may have remedied the problem, but they were either unavailable or not applied.

A second factor leading to population stasis was the ecological degradation besetting the Kinai, the richest and most financially important region in the eighth century. Altogether, the government sponsored the construction of six capital cities and countless temples, shrines, and aristocratic mansions from 690 to 805. All these structures were built from timber harvested in the Kinai and adjacent provinces, and most had roof tiles requiring baking with charcoal in a kiln. During the second half of the eighth century, the shortage of lumber became so critical that planners began to recycle used timbers and roof tiles from older capitals, such as Fujiwara and Naniwa. When the court left Nara for Nagaoka in 784, for example, they used recycled lumber and tiles almost exclusively.

By the late eighth century, tile bakers were relying upon red pine to fire their kilns, a secondary forest cover that typically grows in nutrient-poor soil. Furthermore, the government began to note that the bald mountains in the Kinai and vicinity produced less rain and more erosion. In essence, the stripping of the forests throughout central Japan exacerbated the effects of the hot, dry climate and encouraged farmers to give up cropping altogether and flee to the seashores and mountains to forage as of old.

Iran: It All Depends Who You Talk (and Listen) to ...

Stratfor's George Friedman weighs in on what's going on in Iran in his characteristically hard-nosed way. Here are some excerpts from his take on the situation as of 15 June (via RealClearPolitics).

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than those in the first group.

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran....

Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans [at least their elite classes—Joel] to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war....

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then preceded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression....

What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.

I suspect he's right, unfortunately. And that's why I don't put much stock in analysis by either international media twits or high-flying professional diplomats, both of whom tend to talk too much with fellow elites, and then just repeat what they hear, as if their interlocutors deserve to speak for everyone else. (I'm waiting for a noncomprehending elitist like Thomas Frank to write What's the Matter with Iran?)

UPDATE: One also has to ask, Who does Friedman listen to? The same types of status-quo-favoring spooks who failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989?

Doug Muir at Fistful of Euros has two interesting, well-informed (and pessimistic) posts about future prospects in Iran: From Yerevan to Tehran? notes the close historical and economic ties between Armenia and Iran, as well as the close personal ties between Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian/Sargsyan and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Why Ahmadinejad will win compares factors that affected the outcomes of similar protests in Armenia, Burma, China, East Germany, Georgia, the Philippines, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. (via Randy MacDonald)

Civil Wars on the Eastern Front, 1940s

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 455-457:

Collaborators could be found not only in countries that allied themselves with Germany – Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria – but also in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union, countries the Germans invaded and occupied. Some were undoubtedly motivated by a hatred of the Jews as violent as that felt by the Nazi leadership. Others were actuated by envy or base greed, seizing the opportunity afforded by German rule to steal their neighbours' property. Self-preservation also played its part. There were even Jewish collaborators, like the uniformed men of the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering who policed the Warsaw ghetto, or the leaders of the various Jews' Councils who helped organize the liquidation of the ghettos, or the concentration camp prisoners who accepted a measure of delegated authority in the (usually vain) hope of saving themselves.

The experience of Jedwabne typifies the way German rule also fomented civil war. It was as if even the approach of German troops encouraged conflict to erupt in multi-ethnic communities. Poles were not the only killers, Jews not the only victims. Germans themselves could fall victim to this kind of violence. Between four and five thousand ethnic Germans were murdered in Poland in September 1939 as Poles took revenge for their country's invasion. They then retaliated by forming ‘self-protection’ groups, which were ultimately subordinated to SS leadership. By the time that had happened, however, these groups had already massacred more than four thousand Poles. As a philologist, Victor Klemperer was struck by the way the Nazis delighted in euphemistic neologisms like Volkstumskampf (ethnic conflict) and Flurbereinigung (fundamental cleansing). This daily subversion of the German language, he believed, was far more effective than the more overt kinds of propaganda. Sanitized language also made the cycle of ethnic violence easier to live with.

The Ukraine was perhaps the most blood-soaked place of all. In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), egged on by the Germans, massacred between 60,000 and 80,000 Poles. Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted....

Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish teenager who escaped from a German labour camp and joined a Polish ‘Peasant Battalion’, was just about to rape a girl when he realized he knew her family and remembered her as a child. As another Pole recalled, ‘Stories abounded of Polish mothers being held by the Ukrainian Nationalists and forced to watch as their families were dismembered piece by piece; of pregnant women being eviscerated; of vivisected pregnant women having cats sewn into their bleeding abdomens; of Ukrainian husbands murdering their own Polish wives; of Ukrainian wives murdering their own Polish husbands; of Ukrainian fathers murdering their own sons in order to prevent them from murdering their own Polish mothers; of sons of Polish-Ukrainian heritage being sawn in half because, the Nationalists said, they were half Polish; of children being strung up on household fences; of helpless infants being dashed against buildings or hurled into burning houses.’ Here was ethnic conflict not merely between neighbours, but within families. The internecine war in the Ukraine only grew more ferocious as the war progressed, with some Ukrainians fighting for the Axis, some for the Allies and others for an independent Ukraine.

In the Balkans, too, there were multiple civil wars along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Yugoslavia had fallen apart in the wake of the German invasion of April 1941. Seizing the moment, the Croatian leader Ante Pavelic had pledged to side with Hitler. In the ensuing chaos, his Ustašas waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against their Serbian neighbours in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of them. The populations of entire villages were packed into their churches and burned to death, or were transported to be murdered at camps like Jasenovac.

Serbian Četniks and Partisans repaid these crimes in kind. Of the million or so people who died in Yugoslavia during the war, most were killed by other Yugoslavs. This included nearly all of Bosnia's 14,000 Jews. In Greece the German occupation was the cue for bitter conflict. There, as in Yugoslavia, a three-cornered war raged – between the foreign invaders and nationalists, but also between nationalists and indigenous Communists. When Bulgaria annexed southern Dobruja from Romania, tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes on either side of the new border.

Most empires purport to bring peace and order. They may divide in order to rule, but they generally rule in pursuit of stability. The Nazi empire divided the peoples of Europe as it ruled them – though, ironically, the divisions that opened up in Central and Eastern Europe generally had as much to do with religion as with race (most obviously in the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians or between Croats and Serbs). But the ‘skilful utilization of inter-ethnic rivalry’ the Germans consciously practised did not lead (in the words of one German officer) to the ‘total political and economic pacification’ of occupied territory. On the contrary, in many places their rule soon degenerated into little more than the sponsorship of local feuds; the institutionalization of civil war as a mode of governance.

Effect of Economic Sanctions on Japan, 1941

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 487-488:

The sole obstacle to Japanese hegemony in South-East Asia was America. On the one hand, it was clear that the United States had scant appetite for war, in Asia or anywhere else. On the other, Americans had little desire to see Japan as sole master of China, let alone the whole of East Asia. But those who ran US policy in the Pacific believed they did not need to take up arms to prevent this, because of Japan's dependence on trade with the United States and hence its vulnerability to economic pressure. Around a third of Japan's imports came from the United States, including copious quantities of cotton, scrap iron and oil. Her dependence on American heavy machinery and machine tools was greater still. Even if the Americans did not intervene militarily, they had the option to choke the Japanese war machine to death, especially if they cut off oil exports. This was precisely what made it so hard for American diplomats and politicians to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor. As normally risk-averse people, they could not imagine the Japanese being so rash as to gamble on a very swift victory when the economic odds were stacked so heavily against them. They assumed that the partial sanctions imposed after the Japanese invasion of Indo-China would send a clear enough signal to deter the Japanese. The effect was precisely the opposite.

The path to war in the Pacific was paved with economic sanctions. The Japanese-American Commercial Treaty of 1911 was abrogated in July 1939. By the end of the year Japan (along with other combatants) was affected by Roosevelt's ‘moral embargo’ on the export of ‘materials essential to airplane manufacture’, which meant in practice aluminium, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten and vanadium. At the same time, the State Department applied pressure on American firms to stop exporting technology to Japan that would facilitate the production of aviation fuel. With the National Defense Act of July 1940 the President was empowered to impose real prohibitions on the exports of strategic commodities and manufactures. By the end of the month, after a protracted wrangle between the State Department and the Treasury, it was agreed to ban the export of high-grade scrap iron and steel, aviation fuel, lubricating oil and the fuel blending agent tetraethyl lead. On September 26 the ban was extended to all scrap; two months later the export of iron and steel themselves became subject to licence. No one knew for sure what the effect of these restrictions would be. Some, like the State Department's Advisor on Far Eastern Affairs Stanley Hornbeck, said they would hobble the Japanese military; others, like the US ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, that they would provoke it. Neither view was correct. The sanctions were too late to deter Japan from contemplating war, since the Japanese had been importing and stockpiling American raw materials since the outbreak of war in China. Only one economic sanction was regarded in Tokyo as a casus belli and that was an embargo on oil. That came in July 1941, along with a freeze on all Japanese assets in the United States – a response to the Japanese occupation of southern Indo-China. From this point, war in the Pacific was more or less inevitable.

Kim Jong Un: Apollo of the Amnok, Titan of the Tumen, ...

Whenever I wonder what Romania might be like now if Nicolae Ceauşescu had somehow managed to survive long enough to pass his kingdom on to his son, Nicu (alas, poor Nicu!), I just turn my gaze to the royal succession in the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea, which fits Tony Judt's characterization of Ceauşescu's Romania only too well.

Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea's Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.

But now it looks as if the heralds of the Kim dynasty are preparing for another royal succession by echoing the epithets of the Genius of the Carpathians in describing a Brilliant Comrade, the Grandson of the Sun, the Dauphin of Dokdo, the Titan of the Tumen (or Dionysus of the Duman), the Apollo of the Amnok, the Priapus of Paektusan, the East Sea of Ecstasy, the Yorik of the Yalu, the Need-shaper, the Wisen Heimer, the Un, etc.

Blitzkrieg: British Theory, German Practice

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 386-387:

Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning ‘lightning war’. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart's view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more ‘indirect approach’, he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike. Liddell Hart defined the secret as lying

partly in the tactical combination of tanks and aircraft, partly in the unexpectedness of the stroke in direction and time, but above all in the ‘follow-through’ – the way that a break-through is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating independently.

The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany, With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller,* senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that ‘the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars’, dismissing motorized weapons as mere ‘accessories to the man and horse’. Haig's brother concurred: the cavalry would ‘never be scrapped to make room for the tanks’. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart's work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of ‘a new type of warfare on the largest scale’ that he learned the importance of ‘the concentration of armour’. Moreover,

it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army's communications, and [who] also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas, I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army ... I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.

Guderian – who was happy to describe himself as Liddell Hart's disciple and pupil and even translated his works into German – had learned his lessons well. In September 1939 his panzers were unstoppable. The Poles did not, as legend has it, attempt cavalry charges against them, though mounted troops were deployed against German infantry, but they lacked adequate motor transport and their tanks were fewer and technically inferior to the Germans’. Moreover, like the Czechs before them, the Poles found Anglo-French guarantees to be militarily worthless. At the Battle of Bzura they mounted a desperate counteroffensive to hold up the German assault on Warsaw, but by September 16 their resistance was crumbling. By the 17th the Germans had reached the fortress at Bresc (Brest) on the River Bug. On September 28 Warsaw itself fell. Eight days later the last Polish troops laid down their arms. The entire campaign had lasted barely five weeks.

The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite was true. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a ‘strange defeat’. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign.

* Fuller had been the mastermind behind the British tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917. His frustration with the British Establishment led him to support Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

Effects of Tang Imperialism on Its Eastern Neighbors

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 28-30:

In 631, [Tang Emperor] Taizong decided to resume the Sui policy of attacking the warlike state of Koguryŏ by sending an expedition to gather the bones of Chinese troops who had perished during earlier campaigns. Tang soldiers also pillaged Koguryŏ villages, throwing that kingdom into an uproar. The presence of massive Chinese armies on Koguryŏ soil also profoundly affected the political outlook in Paekche, Silla, and Yamato. When the Tang assaulted Koguryŏ again in 641, the elites in Paekche, Koguryo,Yamato, and Silla panicked. Between 641 and 647, militaristic, centralizing coups rocked each kingdom, as conspirators hoped to assemble the resources and troops necessary to fend off the coming Tang invasion.

In Japan, what is known as the Taika Reform took place in 645, concentrating leadership in the hands of a coterie of disenchanted royals (Princes Naka and Karu) and nobles (Nakatomi, later Fujiwara, no Kamatari). After killing off the Soga before the eyes of a startled monarch during a banquet, the rebels announced their intentions to take control of all the land and human resources of the islands, using institutions modeled after successful Chinese precedents. In other words, the best way to repel the Chinese was to copy their advanced political system and use it against them. Members of the cabal moved immediately to secure all weapons and arsenals, especially in the Kanto, home to the majority of mounted fighters. For the next fifteen years, the leaders of the Taika palace revolution struggled to play local leaders off against each other so as to concentrate power in their own hands.

The conflict in Korea, however, kept forcing its attention on the Taika leaders. After all, Paekche was a Yamato ally and a source of invaluable materials, ideas, and immigrants. Between 621 and 650, Yamato's long-time enemy, Silla, sent envoys to the Tang court, and eventually the two cemented an alliance. Tang wanted the accord because its direct assaults on Koguryŏ were proving no more effective than those of the Sui, and the court needed an ally located at Koguryŏ's rear. Finally, Tang and Silla decided that the best way to destroy Koguryŏ was to first conquer Paekche, a feat accomplished in 660 with an army of more than one hundred thousand. Most of the Paekche royal house fell into the hands of the alliance, but some escaped to Japan.

Beginning in 661, the Yamato court sent flotillas of small vessels to join Paekche guerillas fighting to revive their fortunes. By 663, more than twenty-five thousand Yamato troops were on erstwhile Paekche soil. At this time, a Yamato embassy was visiting the Tang court, but Taizong decreed that he had "determined ... to take administrative measures in regard to the lands east of the sea, and you, visitors from Wa, may not return." The envoys were locked in prison for months to prevent them from giving away Taizong's plans. Later that year, the Tang navy and Silla army crushed the Yamato troops and Paekche partisans at the Battle of the Paekch'on River. It was one of the most decisive engagements in Japanese history.

Prince Naka and his supporters were now faced with a true emergency. Naka ascended the throne as the monarch Tenji and ordered beacons and Korean-style mountain fortifications erected from northern Kyushu, up the Inland Sea, to the Kinai. He withdrew his court to Otsu, guarded by mountains and safer from the looming threat. Meanwhile, the Tang-Silla alliance advanced from victory to victory, smashing Koguryŏ in 668. It is amazing that, although Tenji's centralizing policies had met resistance from the beginning and he was now branded as a loser for the defeat in Korea, he managed to reform the bureaucracy and attempted to implement a census in 670.

When Tenji died in 671, he was unpopular with most local notables because they had lost men in Korea. He pressed his son Prince Otomo to succeed him, but Tenji's brother, Prince Oama, secluded in the Yoshino Mountains to the south, had other ideas. In a brief civil war, Oama routed his nephew and took the title of Tenmu, "the Heavenly Warrior Emperor" (tenno). Born in 631, Tenmu had witnessed the Taika coup as a boy and the Battle of the Paekch'on River as a youth. He knew that to resist an invasion he had to have a strong, stable government capable of calling on the material and human resources of the entire archipelago. If Tenmu needed any further persuasion, Silla, which had implemented modified Chinese institutions, unified the peninsula, and then terminated its alliance with the Tang and chased the Chinese armies out of Korea. Fear of invasion consumed the Japanese court for several decades, and relations with Silla (668-935) were hostile for most of the 700s.

Early Japan's Peaceful Foragers, Violent Farmers

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 13-14:

Yayoi society was constantly at war, as historians have known from brief citations about the islands in Chinese annals. For example, of the five thousand skeletons surviving from the Jōmon era, practically none suggests a violent death, whereas among the one thousand skeletons preserved from Yayoi times, about one hundred betray signs of gruesome ends, including beheading and piercing with a dozen or more arrowheads. Iron and stone arrowheads are among the most common finds in Yayoi sites, and by the middle and late Yayoi, iron arrowheads were heavier and more deadly than ever.

Settlement location and structure also imply that Yayoi society was violent. Scattered throughout upland areas, highland settlements for just a few people probably served as lookouts for attackers. Some of these hamlets have pits containing ash, which suggests a system of smoke signals. On the flatlands, one and sometimes two moats with a V-shaped cross section encircle large settlements; as of 1998, about eighty moated villages have been found for the Yayoi period. At Ōtsuka in the Kanto, a trench measured twenty by one hundred thirty meters and was two meters deep. At Ōgidani near Kyoto, there were two ditches one kilometer in length; it is estimated that it would have taken one thousand ten-ton dump trucks to haul away the earth. Many moated settlements also used stakes, twisted branches, and earthen walls as barricades.

Why did the Yayoi resort to war so frequently? The reason is probably related to the importation of agriculture, which, even though it diffused slowly over the archipelago, soon produced classes of haves and have-nots. Villagers resorted to violence when their harvest was inadequate or when they wanted to take over a neighbor's surplus grain and the lands that had produced them. The discovery of similar moated and walled settlements around the world from an analogous period, when agriculture was just underway, also supports such a view.

The invention of war went along with famine to comprise new ways for agrarian peoples to die. Malnutrition had been a problem under forager regimes, of course, but with the advent of agriculture and the consequent population growth, many more people were dependent on a new subsistence system and liable to starve to death. Known as the "spring hungers," famine usually beset a family or village whose crop had failed or whose reserves of grain had been exhausted by the late winter. Along with the greater chance of extensive famine came war, which was really just theft organized on a village-wide scale. Every system of subsistence has its advantages and disadvantages.