by | 20 October 2026 · 4:43 am

Balkan Wars Before World War

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 42-45:

At the end of September 1911, only six months after the foundation of Ujedinjenje ili smrt!, Italy launched an invasion of Libya. This unprovoked attack on one of the integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire triggered a cascade of opportunist attacks on Ottoman-controlled territory in the Balkans. A loose coalition of Balkan states – Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece – mounted parallel assaults on Ottoman territory, thereby starting the First Balkan War (October 1912–May 1913). The result was a momentous victory for the Balkan allies over the Ottoman forces, who were driven out of Albania, Macedonia and Thrace. In the Second Balkan War (June–July 1913), the belligerents fought over the spoils of the first: Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Romania fought Bulgaria for territories in Macedonia, Thrace and the Dobrudja.

The impact of these two wars is discussed in more detail in chapter 5. For the moment, it suffices to note that their most conspicuous beneficiary was Serbia, which acquired central Vardar, including Ohrid, Bitola, Kosovo, Štip and Kočani, plus the eastern half of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (the western half fell to Montenegro). The kingdom’s territorial extent increased from 18,650 to 33,891 square miles and its population grew by more than one and a half million. The acquisition of Kosovo, the mythscape of Serbian national poetry, was a cause for great rejoicing, and since the kingdom now shared a border with Montenegro to the west, there was the prospect that Serbia might, through a political union with its neighbour, secure a permanent access to the Adriatic coast. Moreover, Serbia’s conduct of the war appeared to show that the years of military investment financed by French loans (there was another big one from a consortium of French banks in September 1913) had not been in vain. Three hundred thousand troops had been put into the field within three weeks of the first mobilization order. The Serbian army was now, as one foreign observer noted, ‘a factor to be reckoned with’, and Serbia itself a major regional power. Dayrell Crackanthorpe, the British minister in Belgrade, reported on the mood of public elation: ‘Serbia feels that she has, so to speak, attained her majority and [. . .] can pursue a national policy of her own.’ The kingdom’s political elites were currently ‘passing through a phase of extreme self-satisfaction’; everywhere in the press and in public debate, Serbian successes in the field were contrasted with ‘the failures of Austrian diplomacy’.

For many of those in the territories newly conquered by Belgrade, the imposition of Serbian rule brought harassment and oppression. The freedom of association, assembly and the press guaranteed under the Serbian constitution of 1903 (Articles 24, 25 and 22) were not introduced into the new territories; nor was Article 13 revoking the death penalty for political crimes. The inhabitants of the new areas were denied active or passive voting rights. In other words, the conquered areas acquired, for the moment, the character of a colony. The government justified these decisions on the grounds that the cultural level of the new territories was so low that granting them freedom would endanger the country. In reality the chief concern was to keep the non-Serbs who constituted the majority in many areas out of national politics. Opposition newspapers such as Radičke Novine and Pravda were quick to point out that the ‘new Serbs’ had actually enjoyed better political rights under the Turks than they did under Serbian administration.

On the Serbian side, this was a war in two kinds, fought not only by regular army units, but also, as so often in the past, by partisan bands, comitatjis, and other freelance fighters. In the newly conquered areas, the collusion between official authorities and informal groups had appalling consequences. There was much arbitrary destruction of Turkish buildings, such as schools, baths and mosques. British consuls managed to limit the damage in some instances by persuading the local Serbian military commanders that this or that building dated back to the empire of Stepan Dušan and was thus a part of the Serbian national patrimony; this ruse succeeded, for example, in the case of the beautiful sixteenth-century Turkish bridge in Macedonian Skopje (Üsküb).

In October and November 1913, the British vice-consuls in Skopje and Monastir [now renamed Bitola] reported systematic intimidation, arbitrary detentions, beatings, rapes, village-burnings and massacres by the Serbs in the annexed areas. ‘It is already abundantly evident,’ Vice-Consul Greig of Monastir reported, ‘that Moslems under Servian rule have nothing whatsoever to expect but periodical massacre, certain exploitation and final ruin.’ Eleven days later, he filed a further report warning that the ‘Bulgarian and especially the Moslem populations in the districts of Perlepe, Krchevo and Krushevo [were] in danger of extermination by the very frequent and barbarous massacres and pillage to which they are subjected by Servian bands’. By the end of the month, ‘pillages, murder and outrages of other kinds by bands of Servian comitajis and persons in league with them’ had created conditions of near-anarchy. Albanians and other Muslims, Bulgars, Vlachs and Jews, the vice-consul reported in December, dreaded the prospect of subjection to ‘a penniless state’ that seemed bent on ‘draining every community of its means of existence to an extent unknown in the blackest days of the Turkish regime’. From Bitola in the south, near the Greek border, the British vice-consul reported that the old municipal officials had been replaced by a new cohort of corrupt ‘Servian ex-propagandists’ whose ringleaders were ‘(1) an ex-barber, spy and Serbian agent [. . .] and (2) a local Serboman of unmentionable profession called Maxim’. ‘Nothing,’ Greig concluded, ‘could be more favourable to the enemies of Servia than the reign of terror set up by this clique.’

What is interesting about these reports is not merely their disturbing content, but the scepticism with which they were received by the British minister Crackanthorpe, a man of pronounced Serbophile sentiment. Crackanthorpe, whose most important source on the events unfolding in the annexed areas was ‘a Servian officer of his acquaintance’, accepted the official denials of the Belgrade government at face value and tried to mute the impact of Greig’s dispatches from Monastir by suggesting to the Foreign Office that the vice-consul was the dupe of hysterical refugees and their tall tales. Already, one might argue, the events unfolding in the Balkans were being viewed through the geopolitical lens of the alliance system, in which Serbia figured as a friendly state locked in a gallant struggle with fearsome neighbouring Austria-Hungary. It was only the cumulative detail of the reports emerging from the annexed areas, combined with corroborating accounts from Romanian, Swiss and French officials that persuaded the British Foreign Office that the news of Macedonian atrocities should not be dismissed as Austrian propaganda.

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by | 19 October 2026 · 5:21 am

When Serbia Forsook Austria for France

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 28-30:

In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia, for its part, agreed not to undermine the monarchy’s position in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Article II stated that Serbia ‘would not permit any political, religious or other intrigue to be directed from her territory against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar’. Milan reinforced these agreements with a personal engagement in writing not to enter into ‘any kind of treaty’ with a third state without first consulting Vienna.

These agreements were, to be sure, a fragile foundation for good Austro-Serbian relations: they had no anchorage in the sentimental life of the Serbian public, which was deeply anti-Austrian; they symbolized a relationship of economic dependency which was increasingly unacceptable to Serbian nationalist opinion; and they depended on the cooperation of an erratic and increasingly unpopular Serbian monarch. But as long as Milan Obrenović remained on the throne, they at least ensured that Serbia would not side with Russia against Austria, and that the sharp end of Belgrade’s foreign policy would stay pointed in the direction of Macedonia and the coming contest with Bulgaria, rather than at Bosnia and Herzegovina. A new trade treaty was signed in 1892 and the Secret Convention was renewed for ten years in 1889; it was allowed to expire thereafter, though it continued to be the operative platform for Serbian policy vis-à-vis Vienna.

The change of dynasty in 1903 signalled a major realignment. Austria was quick to recognize the Karadjordjević coup, partly because Petar had assured the Austrians beforehand that it was his intention to keep Serbia on an Austrophile course. But it was soon evident that Serbia’s new leaders planned to push towards greater economic and political independence. During 1905–6, a crisis unfolded in which trade policy, armaments orders, high finance and geopolitics were closely intertwined. Vienna pursued a threefold objective: to secure a commercial treaty with Serbia, to ensure that Serbian armaments orders would continue to be placed with Austrian firms, and to contract a major loan to Belgrade.

The failure to achieve agreement on any of these questions produced a drastic cooling of relations between the two neighbours, and the outcome was an unmitigated disaster for Vienna. The Serbian armaments orders went to the French firm Schneider-Creusot instead of to the Austrian rival, Škoda of Bohemia. The Austrians reacted by closing the border to Serbian pork, triggering a customs conflict that came to be known as the ‘pig war’ (1906–9). But this was a counter-productive measure, since Serbia quickly found other export markets (especially in Germany, France and Belgium) and at last began to build slaughterhouses on a substantial scale, thus emancipating itself from its long-standing dependence on Austro-Hungarian processing facilities. Finally, Belgrade secured a major loan again not from Vienna, but from Paris (offered in return for the placement of armaments orders with French firms).

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the larger significance of this French loan. Like all the emergent Balkan states, Serbia was an inveterate borrower, totally dependent on international credit, most of which was used to finance military expansion and infrastructural projects. Throughout the reign of King Milan, the Austrians remained willing lenders to Belgrade. But since these loans outran the debtor state’s financial resources, they had to be hypothecated against various pledges: for each loan some definite revenue was pledged, or some railway property mortgaged. It was agreed that pledged revenues from railways, stamp and liquor taxes should be paid into a special treasury controlled jointly by the representatives of the Serbian government and the bondholders. This arrangement kept the Serbian state afloat during the 1880s and 90s, but did nothing to restrain the financial profligacy of the Belgrade government, which had managed to accumulate an indebtedness of over 350 million francs by 1895. With bankruptcy looming, Belgrade negotiated a new loan through which almost all of the old debts were consolidated at a lower rate of interest. The pledged revenues were placed under a separate administration run partly by the representatives of the creditors.

In other words, fragile debtors like Serbia (the same applied to the other Balkan states and to the Ottoman Empire) could secure loans on reasonable terms only if they agreed to concessions of fiscal control that amounted to the partial hypothecation of sovereign state functions. For this reason among others, international loans were a political issue of the highest importance, inextricably wound up with diplomacy and power politics. French international lending in particular was highly politicized. Paris vetoed loans to governments whose policies were deemed unfriendly to French interests; it facilitated loans in return for economic or political concessions; on occasion it reluctantly conceded a loan to unreliable but strategically important clients in order to prevent them from seeking relief elsewhere. It pursued potential clients aggressively – in Serbia’s case the government were given to understand in the summer of 1905 that if they did not give France first refusal on the loan, the Paris money markets would be closed altogether to Serbia. Acknowledging this nexus between strategy and finance, the French foreign ministry merged its commercial and political divisions in 1907.

Seen against this background, the Serbian loan of 1906 was an important turning point. French financial relations with Belgrade became, in the words of an early American analyst of pre-war high finance, ‘more intimate and dominant’.66 The French came to own more than three quarters of all Serbian debt. These were vast commitments for the Serbian state – repayment schedules extended forwards to 1967 (in fact Belgrade defaulted on the greater part of its obligations after 1918). The lion’s share of this money went into military purchases (especially fast-firing artillery), most of which were transacted in France, much to the annoyance not just of Austrian, but also of British diplomats and armaments suppliers. The loan of 1906 also enabled Serbia to resist Vienna’s commercial pressure and to wage a protracted tariff war. ‘The undoubtedly successful issue of [Prime Minister] Mr Pašić’s resistance to [Austrian] demands,’ the British envoy in Belgrade reported in 1906, ‘marks a distinct step in the economic and political emancipation of Servia.’

These successes in the field of high finance should not distract us from the parlous condition of the Serbian economy as a whole. This had much less to do with Austrian tariff policy than with a process of economic decline that was deeply rooted in the country’s history and agrarian structure. The emergence and subsequent expansion of Serbia were accompanied by a process of drastic de-urbanization, as the mainly Muslim towns were depopulated through decades of harassment and deportations. What replaced the relatively urbanized and cosmopolitan imperial structures of the Ottoman periphery was a society and an economy entirely dominated by smallholding Christian peasants, a consequence in part of the absence of a home-grown Serbian aristocracy and in part of the ruling dynasty’s efforts to prevent the emergence of such a ruling class by blocking the consolidation of latifundial estates. While the cities shrank, the population grew at an awesome rate; hundreds of thousands of hectares of marginal land were opened up for exploitation by young families, loosening social constraints on marriage and fertility. But this rampant growth in the production of people did nothing to reverse the cycle of underperformance and decline that gripped the Serbian economy between the middle of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Per capita output in farming fell by 27.5 per cent between the early 1870s and 1910–12, partly because the expansion of arable land led to large-scale deforestation and thus to a decline in the pasture lands needed to sustain large-scale pig-husbandry, traditionally the most profitable and efficient arm of Serbian agricultural production. By the 1880s, the beautiful forested wilderness of the Šumadija – perfect pasture land for swine – had all but disappeared.

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by | 18 October 2026 · 5:20 am

Polish Punctuation Peculiarities

As a former copyeditor and proofreader, I found one article of particular interest in this week’s newsletter from Culture.pl: Alicja Zapalska’s (2021) Pen to Paper: Mastering the Quirks of Polish Writing. Excerpts follow.

Periods in unexpected places, paragraphs full of dashes, and mysterious abbreviations abound in Polish writing. Here are a few tips to make sense of the Polish language’s unique style and punctuation (language proficiency not included).

Reading and writing might be the bane of any intermediate foreign-language speaker – now, not only do words have to be spelled right, there’s also a whole new set of writing rules to contend with. The bad news is, there are just enough differences in writing styles between Polish and English that intelligibility is not always guaranteed. The good news? At least it’s the same alphabet (sort of)!

Where’s the Dialogue?

Glancing at a page of Polish dialogue might feel a bit like looking at Morse code. Instead of using a quotation mark at the beginning of speech, you should instead add an em dash (—) on both sides of the sentence. The dash is known as a pauza (or myślnik when relating to dialogue) and it serves a variety of functions similar to dashes in English. But, it also replaces the apostrophes in written conversations.

— Like this — she said.

You may also notice the lack of a comma before the dash. Although you can add other punctuation as needed (exclamation points, question marks), leave the commas out of it! Not all dialogue ends with he said/she said. In cases when a complete sentence follows the dialogue, use a period.

— Like this. — He left the room.

If there is no verb or description after the dialogue, instead of continuing in a new paragraph, there is no need to add a myślnik to the end. The biggest part of getting used to this style of writing dialogue may be more mental than physical. While reading, it’s easy to be pulled out of the world of the story, as the brain is wired to interpret quotation marks as people speaking. This problem goes both ways, however. Polish speakers learning English tend to forget the quotation marks, so if you’re working with or reading the work of a Polish speaker, don’t be surprised to see a stray myślnik here and there.

Unlike the versatile quotation mark, dashes are used for dialogue and not quotes; if you’re looking to quote someone or something, our next rule can help you out with that.

‘Quote this’

In Polish, quotation marks are referred to as a cudzysłów, literally meaning ‘foreign [= someone else’s] words’. That’s exactly the context they’re used in when marking words that come from somewhere other than the original author. However, instead of the hanging apostrophes English speakers use, Polish quotation marks look like this: „ ”

They can be used for titles of books, quotes or to add an ‘ironic’ glance to a word. Not much changes between English and Polish for this, but remember to never use them for dialogue!

The nature of a cudzysłów changes if you are trying to use a quote within a quote.

In that case, it’s most common to use » «, which is known as cudzysłów niemiecki (literally, [German] quotation marks). For example:

Napisała „nie jestem pewna czy wolę »Pana Tadeusza« Adama Mickiewicza czy raczej Wajdy.“

She wrote, “I’m not sure if I prefer ‘Pan Tadeusz’ by Adam Mickiewicz or by Wajda”.

Although these characters may seem foreign to English speakers, at least Polish has the advantage of not being bogged down by a surplus of quotation marks that sometimes occurs in cases of double-quoting.

Abbreviations

English is no stranger to abbreviations but they are most often reserved for casual writing, proper titles (like Mr, Dr, etc.) or Latin words (exempli gratia would be a common one). Polish texts, on the other hand, tend to make use of abbreviations at every turn, most often of their own language. Here are a few abbreviations that you’re likely to come across:

  • tj., to jest – that is
  • tzw., tak zwane – so-called
  • m.in., między innymi – among others (like e.g. but used at the beginning of a list)
  • np., na przykład – for example

Two abbreviations that may be confusing are:

  • itp., i tym podobne – and similar (much like the English etc.)
  • itd., i tak dalej – and so on (also used like the English etc.)

Their translations are very similar, so how do you know which one to use? The slight differences are mostly intuitive, so some reading and practising is the best advice. But if you’re nervous about getting it wrong, good news: you can just use both! When writing out lists of items, adding both itp. and itd. to the end of the list shows that it’s too long for you to complete. For example:

Cały dzień oglądaliśmy filmy Wajdy, Smoczyńskiej, Pawlikowskiego, Holland, itp., itd.

All day we watched movies by Wajda, Smoczyńska, Pawlikowski, Holland, etc., etc.

Crash course in Latin

So, when you open up a Polish-language newspaper, take a look through the pages and see how many abbreviations you can spot! Although these are some of the most common ones, there are plenty more that might require a Google search. Good news is, there are plenty of online resources dedicated to abbreviations (because there really are just that many).

Polish writers, especially of academic texts, tend to use Latin phrases without translation. The Polish-Latin connection goes deeper than just some phrases, however; much like Latin, most Polish words are accented on the penultimate syllable. And Poland is one of the few languages whose word for ‘tea’ doesn’t come from the Chinese cha or te, instead most likely from the Latin ‘herb’.

Both in everyday conversation and writing, Latin phrases are more likely to crop up. Here are a few to get you started:

  • Notabene (literally ‘note well’, which can also be shortened to nb.) is used before providing tangential but important information.
  • De facto is also common in English, and the meaning remains the same in Polish though it is also used to add a rhetorical flourish to a sentence.
  • Ex aequo (pronounced egzekffo) means to tie or place equally in some kind of ranked contest, like a sports match.
  • Sensu stricto, meaning in a narrow sense – it’s also sometimes shortened to just the word ‘stricte’.
  • Vel, the Polish answer to ‘a.k.a’, used when signifying pseudonyms or in similar situations.
  • Pro forma (literally ‘for the sake of form’) is used to denote that something is happening mostly for appearance’s sake.
  • Na cito is used when asking for something quickly or immediately, Poland’s ASAP.

Dates, numbers and numerals

Much like other European nations, Poles write the date in day/month/year order. Instead of slashes, however, it’s most common to use periods between the numbers. Though Arabic numerals are standard, another acceptable form would be to use a Roman numeral for the month, such as 28 XII 1899. With this form, periods are no longer used.

In Polish, always refer to centuries using Roman numerals. Though you may see the year written out similarly to the English method (i.e. ‘1970’), there is also a wordier style that may crop up: instead of 1970, that number would become ‘lata siedemdziesiąte XX wieku’, which literally translates to ‘the 70s of the 20th century’. When writing out just the decade, use Arabic numerals with a period after the number.

W latach 90. wszyscy uwielbiali disco polo.

In the ‘90s, everyone loved disco polo.

Mastering the titles

Unlike the Germanic roots of English, Polish is a Slavic language. A clear difference between the two languages (other than grammar, spelling and everything else) is the way

s titles are written out. English tends to capitalise every word in a title except for articles, conjunctions and prepositions. The exception to the rule would be ‘artistic’ titles that choose to lowercase each word, but that is a deliberate choice. In Polish, only capitalise the first word in the title. The rest of the words, with the exception of names, are lowercase.

For example, Stanisław Lem’s book The Star Diaries is capitalised throughout, while in Polish it is written as Dzienniki gwiazdowe. A wordier example would be Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which becomes Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych.

Another facet of using titles is the ever-important colon. Quick rule: don’t use it! Although colons are fair game in every other part of writing, titles instead use a period to differentiate between a heading and a subhead. The film The Art of Loving: The Story of Michalina Wisłocka becomes Sztuka Kochania. Historia Michaliny Wisłockiej. The first word after the period is always capitalised as well, and in this case is followed by a name, otherwise the remaining words would be lowercase.

Here on Culture.pl, regular readers may notice that we actually tend to capitalise Polish titles and put colons in them, as if they were English titles. We do this to ensure that our English-language readers actually recognise them as titles, since these two rules are anathema to the non-Polish-reading eye and can interrupt one’s reading flow!

Foreign names

When dealing with foreign names of people or products in Polish, changing the required cases can be a little trickier. If you’re reading this article, hopefully you’ve made some progress in differentiating between genitive, accusative and all the other cases Polish depends on.

Foreign words present a certain difficulty with declension, but spelling-wise the rule is simple. If a foreign word ends in a vowel, add an apostrophe before the ending. If the word ends in a consonant, no apostrophe needed! A few quick examples include Nowy film Marvela (a new Marvel movie) or komputery Apple’a (Apple computers).

Here are two renditions of Willy Brandt’s name in a Polish placename: Skwer Willy Brandta, Willy’ego Brandta.

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by | 17 October 2026 · 5:44 am

Wartime Memory Wiped Clean, 1945

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 397-400:

ON AUGUST 17, 1945, three days after the emperor announced on the radio Japan’s total defeat, Prince Higashikuni became the first (and most probably the last) prime minister chosen from the imperial house. It was up to him to disarm the nation, hand over the country to the Allied occupation forces, sign the document accepting Japan’s unconditional surrender, and, most critically, raise the morale of the thoroughly devastated nation.

The prince was a good orator who spoke simply and convincingly. On September 5, addressing a parliamentary session that included American GIs in the audience, Higashikuni insisted that the Japanese not dwell on the question of how the war was started and instead look forward. He proposed that the whole nation of one hundred million was to blame and so the whole nation had to repent. This was the same nation that had been told, until very recently, to fight until the bitter end, armed only with spears and helmets of bamboo. Higashikuni’s argument had some merit, especially in the late summer of 1945, when so much work lay in front of the Japanese people. But his words set the tone for Japanese leaders as well as those who followed them to overlook the most basic question of responsibility: Who was responsible for starting the war? The suggestion that the war might have been unnecessary was too difficult for any Japanese to accept, having lost so much and so many in the war. But this neglect, legitimized as a matter of official policy, in turn encouraged the general temptation to do away with various other kinds of responsibility, such as coming to terms with its war crimes and remembering the war after it was over.

This, of course, does not mean that people could forget what they had lived through. Contrary to received opinion, some serious attempts have been made in Japan to examine aspects of the country’s wartime past. Soldier U, who lived to be eighty-four, had enough time to reflect, discreetly and quietly, on his experiences. Though he never discussed any of them in his lifetime, he cared enough to leave a written record, unbeknownst even to his family.

Yet by claiming that every Japanese was to blame for the war, Higashikuni implied that nobody was to blame, fudging and diluting the real responsibility of the leaders who brought Japan to that momentous decision. Prince Konoe, who resurfaced as a public figure in Higashikuni’s cabinet, was doubtless the first to support this line of argument. Conservative politicians, in power for most of the postwar period, were only too happy to inherit such a partial and incomplete rendering of Japan’s past. Despite the efforts of some individual citizens, academics, and journalists to have a more honest debate, it is difficult to deny that Japan’s official impulse has been to look away from what is undesirable and unpleasant in its history. And this pattern was perpetuated as much, if not more, by what Kafu had so astutely noted on the eve of Pearl Harbor as the fundamental indifference to politics among many Japanese, absorbed as they were by their “primary pursuit … to pass one day at a time without encountering too much trouble,” as by the misplaced desire of some politicized right to impart glory to Japan’s lost war.

In 1952, Gone with the Wind was finally released to general audiences in Japan, and it became a huge box-office hit. Many Japanese identified with the spirited, impetuous, and indomitable southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, who remained determined to rise above any obstacles, even after having lost almost everything that mattered to her. Her celebrated last words, “After all, tomorrow is another day,” resonated with the generation of postwar Japanese trying to glimpse a better future through the wreckage of war. That was exactly what Japan opted to do—and that is why the past, with its improbable story of how the war came to pass, became another country.

I remember seeing two U.S.-made war films during my youth in Japan. The first was in 1959 or so in Aomori, where my brother and I went (by ourselves by train) from Kyoto to visit another missionary family with boys our age. The film was about the Korean War, maybe Pork Chop Hill, and I remember wondering whom the Japanese audience members might have felt more sympathy for: the Americans, the South Koreans, the North Koreans, or the Chinese. In the mid 1960s, I remember seeing The Bridge Over the River Kwai in a Japanese theater in Kobe, where I was in high school. I wondered how many survivors of the wartime generation, if any, were in the audience. Among my very earliest wartime-related memories in Japan was the sight of Japanese army veterans dressed in white but wearing their green field caps (略帽), perhaps missing a limb, begging from passersby in inconspicuous sheltered places, like pedestrian underpasses. Japan’s veterans who survived their wars in Asia and the Pacific received very little public support. See my blogpost on Rehabilitating Japanese War Veterans.

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Filed under democracy, economics, education, industry, Japan, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by | 16 October 2026 · 6:36 am

Japan’s Homeland Disasters in 1944-45

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 394-397:

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1944, the anticipation of worse things to come on the home front led to a new policy. The government, still under Tojo’s leadership, announced an evacuation program for primary schoolers from thirteen metropolitan cities. The children, ranging in age from eight to twelve, were moved to the countryside, where they lived in large groups; for many, it was the first time away from their parents. They were usually put up in extremely rudimentary and overcrowded rooms of Buddhist temples or traditional inns. In all, about eight hundred thousand city children experienced this collective evacuation, characterized by perpetual hunger, homesickness, and spartan living. It would form a major part of their generational memory.

Newspapers and magazines saw the evacuation program through rose-colored glasses; they reported that the children were enjoying fresh country air and featured photos of their smiling—though clearly undernourished—faces. One photo showed a group of small boys squatting on the bathroom floor in a big circle, each scrubbing the back of the boy in front of him. They look to be having fun, but their astonishingly skinny naked bodies make one wonder how they had any energy left for smiling, let alone back scrubbing.

Without access to food other than whatever little was given them, the evacuated children suffered from hunger first and foremost. The greatest pastime for them was to draw food. “Sponge cakes, dumplings, pastries, shortcakes, caramels, rice crackers … we drew them all—absolutely every snack in this world one could remember,” one woman recalled. “Then we showed them to one another and enjoyed discussing how wonderful they would taste if we really were to eat them.” Complaining, unhappy letters home were systematically discouraged, and their teachers checked all mail before it was sent out. State censorship and confiscation of correspondence, legalized in October 1941, were exercised even at this level voluntarily.

This haphazard evacuation program was a direct response to the threat of a U.S. landing on the Japanese mainland, which seemed especially likely after the United States captured Saipan, fifteen hundred miles south. The island fell on July 7, 1944, and more than 55,000 Japanese, including civilians, died there. (Made a Japanese mandate by the League of Nations in 1920, Saipan had a Japanese population, including colonial Taiwanese and Koreans classified as Japanese, of 29,348 in 1943.) Vice Admiral Nagumo and other navy commanders ordered their soldiers to “die a hero’s death” and to become the “Pacific seawall” against the United States. Nagumo set a precedent by committing suicide on July 6, before the island’s conquest. The same “ultimate sacrifice” was also expected of civilians in the absence of any protection offered by the military. Too many chose death over surrender, sometimes coaxed by the remaining Japanese soldiers, who made sure that nobody was to suffer the shame of being taken captive.

The haunting proof of patriotic allegiance was captured on film by the U.S. Marines. Civilians, many of them women and some with babies and children, stumbled toward the edge of volcanic cliffs to make their final leaps. One can feel their slight hesitation and momentary fear as they looked down into the abyss of black seawater. But by sheer force of determination, they overcame their fear and jumped. “Banzai!” (“Live forever!”—or, more accurately in this case, “Long live the emperor!”) was often the last word of those loyal subjects of the empire. More civilians would commit suicide on the islands of Tinian, Guam, and Okinawa in the face of the U.S. advance. Japanese losses in the Pacific were so great that they could not be kept a secret any longer. The Saipan calamity was reported to the Japanese nation on July 18, 1944, along with the resignation of the Tojo cabinet. Two days after Tojo’s fall, on July 20, Operation Valkyrie, the most nearly successful of all the assassination attempts on Hitler, was carried out. With renewed fanaticism, the Führer would continue to lead Germany until his suicide.

…

Meanwhile, life had to carry on, and children continued to be evacuated. On August 22, 1944, about seven hundred children, in transit from Okinawa to Kagoshima, perished at sea. The U.S. submarines were already that close. The ill-orchestrated evacuation program ended in March 1945, and city families were urged to make individual arrangements to ensure the safety of their children. Family reunions were often brutally short-lived. Many children from Tokyo were sent back home just in time to experience the worst (but not the last) air raid unleashed on the city: the one in the early-morning hours of March 10, …

With the destruction of almost every Japanese city and the constant announcements of soldiers’ deaths, Japanese morale could not have been lower. Surviving death—from disease, hunger, or the incendiary bombs that grilled alive newborns and old people alike—had become the utmost national priority. A distraught mother who embraced her baby to the point of suffocation while seeking shelter during a bombing raid, a schoolgirl trying to float her way to safety down a river filled with dying people clinging to her, people navigating heaps of charred bodies as they looked for their missing family members—stories like these were becoming all too common. The Meiji Palace, where the imperial conferences had taken place, was burned down in May 1945, forcing the leaders to hold the final two imperial conferences before Japan’s unconditional surrender in an air-raid shelter.

Life in the countryside was less pressed, though things were scarce. Toddlers innocently competed with one another to collect plant roots, a substitute staple for rice, and grasshoppers, an invaluable available source of protein and calcium for growing children. Students were sent into the forests for pine sap to make gasoline (which never quite worked), and all households were ordered to turn in their metal, including buckets and ladles, to make airplanes. “We must be losing the war,” said one farm boy at the time, deducing that the government wouldn’t otherwise sink so low as to take utensils from poor people’s kitchens. But uncomplaining, and with a degree of fatalism, the nation endured the horrid times as if it were dealing with a series of relentless natural disasters rather than man-made ones.

In the midst of all this, a very select group of Japanese, mainly military officers but also some filmmakers, university students, and other civilians, had a rare chance to see films that the British had left behind in Southeast Asia. One of them was Gone with the Wind. The Japanese were amazed by the quality, technical superiority, and glamour of the nearly four-hour-long saga. They wondered how they could possibly defeat a country that had managed to produce such an astonishing film. (Another film left behind was Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose quality far surpassed that of Japanese animation technology.)

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by | 15 October 2026 · 5:00 am

Japan-U.S. Prisoner Exchange, 1942

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 385-387:

On the night of June 18, 1942, the Gripsholm of the Swedish American Line set sail from New York with a group of Japanese nationals aboard who had been detained in various makeshift camps, including one on Ellis Island. The Japanese government, in return, had dispatched the Asama Maru from the port of Yokohama, and later the Italian ship Conte Verde from Shanghai, carrying North and South American nationals home. Some of the notable faces among the Japanese group were Nomura and Kurusu. On the day of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the two men endured the most unnerving public humiliation imaginable for any diplomat. To ensure the success of the military operations in Hawaii and Malaya, the Japanese government kept the two ambassadors completely in the dark about its decision to go to war. They were notified of Tokyo’s intention to terminate diplomatic relations only hours before the attack.

The Japanese embassy’s inability to cope with the last-minute nature of Tokyo’s instructions did not help Nomura and Kurusu in their final mission of communicating to the White House the end of diplomacy, either. Tokyo had ordered Nomura and Kurusu to see Hull at 1:00 p.m., shortly before the first bomb was to be dropped on Pearl Harbor. Because the diplomatic communication, consisting of fourteen parts, was late in being typed up for delivery, the two Japanese diplomats were shown into Hull’s office at 2:20 p.m., utterly unaware that their country had already attacked the United States.

…

IN THE MONTHS that followed the opening of the war in the Pacific, Nomura, Kurusu, and other Japanese nationals awaited deportation in cramped resort hotels that had been turned into temporary detention camps (luxurious lodgings compared with the internment camps that many Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent were forced to live in). In Hot Springs, Virginia, and then in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Kurusu had ample time to reflect on what had gone wrong in his last-minute quest to secure peace between the two countries.

…

It was not until the summer of 1942 that Kurusu learned what had really been going on during those last ten days before Japan’s attack. In Japanese-occupied Singapore, where the Gripsholm made a brief stop, Kurusu heard army officers recount how difficult it was for them to prepare for attacks in the run-up to the war since the military leaders in Tokyo had not decided to go to war until November 26.

ON JULY 20, 1942, the Gripsholm, having picked up and crammed aboard even more detained Japanese in Rio de Janeiro, entered the port of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) in Portuguese Mozambique. Two days later, the Asama Maru and the Conte Verde, flying Japan’s Rising Sun flag, anchored at the same port in the Indian Ocean. It was there that the actual citizen exchange between the warring parties took place. The Japanese from North and South America quietly organized themselves and resettled on the two ships coming from Japan. There was no direct contact between the people from the Allied and Axis camps. But while waiting at the port, Nomura and Kurusu both spotted the tall figure of Ambassador Grew in the other group. He recognized them, too. Kurusu immediately recalled his interview with Grew the night before his departure for Washington in early November of the previous year. The uneasy physical distance between them was ample proof of the peace that had eluded them. The three men took their hats off in silent acknowledgment of one another.

The ships carrying the Japanese nationals reached Yokohama, Kurusu’s hometown, on August 20, 1942. By then, Japan’s preponderance at sea was declining precipitously. The balance of power had been tipped. From June 4 to 7, the Imperial Japanese Navy fought one of the most devastating naval battles in modern history, the Battle of Midway. The same men who planned the Pearl Harbor attack conceived of the Midway strategy, hoping to eliminate the United States from the Pacific once and for all. The operation ended in disaster for Japan. By this time, the Japanese military code had been broken by the United States (whereas at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, only the diplomatic code had been broken). The Japanese navy was dragged down from its glorious pinnacle only six months after it had reached it.

All this was unknown to most Japanese.

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by | 14 October 2026 · 5:59 am

Ambassador Kurusu Profile

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 337-340:

DESPITE HIS UNQUESTIONED INTELLECT and experience, Kurusu was an unfortunate choice in a public relations sense. To the outside world, Kurusu was known only as the man who signed the Tripartite Pact, having been photographed next to Hitler at the height of German-Japanese friendship. He was actually strongly opposed to the pact but was obliged to sign it as Japan’s ambassador to Germany in the autumn of 1940. Kurusu never wanted the Berlin job and had turned it down several times. He was ready to retire after his tenure in Belgium, where he was posted from 1936 to 1939. His time in Brussels coincided with the outbreak and intensification of the China War under the first Konoe government. He tried in his capacity as ambassador to initiate a settlement of the China conflict through the mediation of the Belgian and French governments. He knew that Japan lacked any coherent plans for that war and, more damningly, an effective leader. The escalation, in his words, came about because “the government always allowed itself to be dragged along by the faits accomplis in the field without any prospects of long-term solution.” Worse, there was “no coordination within and between the army and the navy” and everyone was “preoccupied with saving face and evading responsibilities.”

Kurusu could not have envisioned that things would get so bad so fast when he and his family, along with a crowd of enthused spectators, welcomed the record-setting Kamikaze aviators at the Brussels airport in April 1937. Kurusu accepted the ambassadorship to Berlin in 1939 only in the hope that he might prevent Japan’s diplomatic course from going further astray. Once in Berlin, he continued to seek ways to settle the China War through the third-party intervention of Germany. But just as things seemed to be moving in the right direction, Konoe, in his second premiership, recognized Wang Jingwei’s China, thereby alienating Chiang Kai-shek forever.

Kurusu was soon left out of all key communications between German and Japanese officials. Hitler’s government judged that Japan could not be wooed sufficiently through Kurusu, and the agreement on the Tripartite Pact was hastily reached between Matsuoka and a German envoy visiting Tokyo. Nonetheless, because Kurusu was photographed standing side by side with Hitler, his reputation became forever tainted.

Kurusu was so disgusted by that and other experiences in Germany that he requested to be relieved of his post and was allowed to leave Berlin in February 1941. Back in Japan, he led the life of a recluse, turning down government appointments, including a position in Tojo’s cabinet. Kurusu, however, could not reject the emergency call to Washington. A peaceful settlement of U.S.-Japanese differences was something he truly desired. He was pro-Anglo-American at heart. Perhaps as the son of the successful industrialist who had developed the cosmopolitan port of Yokohama, he had the appreciation of mercantile liberalism in his blood. The port town served as the window to the world during Japan’s rapid modernization and was known for its unsentimental, practical people like Kurusu.

Kurusu also had a personal stake in the future of the United States and Japan. He was married to an American from New York City born to British parents (her father was an Anglican clergyman). Kurusu wanted to do everything in his power to avoid a war between the two countries that meant the most to his family. It was to be a perilous mission. There were some on the Army General Staff who openly said they wished Kurusu’s plane would crash. With such ill wishes behind him, he departed for Taiwan in the early morning of November 7.

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by | 13 October 2026 · 6:41 am

PM Tojo & FM Togo, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 299-300:

Upon leaving the palace, Tojo directed his car first to the Meiji Shrine, then to the Togo Shrine (built in honor of the Russo-Japanese War hero Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who defeated the czar’s Baltic Fleet), and finally to the Yasukuni Shrine (where the souls of soldiers who died in the empire’s past wars were enshrined). After an hour or so of hopping between shrines in central Tokyo, Tojo returned to the army minister’s official residence. The news of his appointment had already reached the members of his staff, who congratulated him. But Japan’s new prime minister was in no mood to celebrate. He realized the enormity of the task he now faced. That evening, in his absurdly principled way, he ordered that no one from the army should enter his office, which he now declared to be purely civilian territory. He made telephone calls in an effort to fill ministerial positions. He appointed himself army minister and home minister. Then he tapped Togo Shigenori, the veteran diplomat who had served as the ambassador to the Soviet Union, to be his foreign minister.

Togo, a sixty-year-old dandy with copious graying hair, was married to a German woman and had once wished to become a German literature scholar. He was averse to Nazism; his brief tenure as an ambassador to Germany from 1937 to 1938 was terminated partly because of his frosty relationship with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Neither pro-Anglo-American nor pro-Axis, Togo was a genuine Japanese patriot. He wore his patriotism on his sleeve perhaps because he felt that no matter how successful he was in his professional career, he was vulnerable to being labeled an outsider. Born as Park [= Boku] Shigenori in Kagoshima, a southwestern city on the southern island of Kyushu, he came from a long line of Korean potters who were forcibly brought to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century and had remarkably preserved their language and culture over many generations. His father, a successful businessman, bought the Japanese family name Togo when Shigenori was five. (Contrary to popular belief, Togo was no relation to Admiral Togo, the Nelson of the East.)

On the whole, Togo was a much more reasonable and sensible choice than [Admiral] Toyoda, the departing foreign minister, had been. He was an experienced diplomat whose skills could be put to good use. Togo had his reservations. Before midnight, he went to see Tojo and asked whether the would-be premier was ready to make difficult concessions to avoid war. The stiff army man responded to the suave diplomat that things were very different now. “I do not have any problem reexamining the issue once again,” Tojo said. The reexamination implied extracting concessions from the army, including the withdrawal of already mobilized troops, in order to give the new foreign minister more room for diplomatic maneuver with the United States. Upon this pledge of honor, the unlikely Tojo-Togo team was born.

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by | 12 October 2026 · 5:07 am

Japan’s Wartime Censorship, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 286-287:

On January 11, 1941, the government issued, as a supplement to the National Mobilization Law, a set of regulations concerning newspapers and other media. Sensitive matters of military, diplomatic, and fiscal policies could no longer be officially written or spoken about, and there were detailed instructions regarding the coverage of resource shortages, weather forecasts (because of their potential strategic sensitivity), family problems (such as adultery committed by wives of soldiers fighting in China), and many other social topics that might obstruct successful mobilization on the home front. Though these rules certainly restricted newspaper reporting, freedom of the press in Japan was, and had been, nonexistent for some time.

As noted earlier, from the Manchurian Incident onward, major newspapers had been especially blatant in their support of state policies, appealing to patriotic fervor to compete in a fierce circulation war. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria, military men and journalists actively cultivated one another, drawing closer as more and more journalists were dispatched to the battlefront. Objective reporting was abandoned. The policy of selective reporting, concentrating on Japanese victories, continued after the outbreak of the China War, and by 1941, it had become impossible for the Japanese media to disentangle themselves from their dangerous liaison with the military.

The national radio monopoly NHK had always surpassed the newspapers in its self-conscious role as the mouthpiece of official policy. One day in May 1938, it aired what it touted as the first-ever live broadcast of a battle, from an unnamed site in Xuzhou in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu in China. The announcer’s excited voice echoed all over Japan, describing what was developing in front of him as “the hell of victory.” In reality, the enemy forces had quickly retreated, and there had been little combat. But that was not what the listeners were told. “The fall of Xuzhou! The fall of Xuzhou! Dear listeners on the home front, it is, however, premature to hear your joyous cheers. The joy of victory still awaits us. Our greatest search-and-destroy mission goes on as I speak. So please, everyone back home, stay up all night tonight and pray for Japan’s greatest victory!” Under the spell of this adrenaline-filled call, many gathered at the Yasukuni Shrine, forming a long line to say midnight prayers. This was a dress rehearsal for the greater radio announcement of the morning of December 8, 1941.

Not all media had been as overtly uncritical as NHK or the major newspapers. The so-called general magazines, appealing to middlebrow and highbrow audiences and usually published monthly, featured political commentaries as well as literary pieces. They now were especially vulnerable. Their publishers were given the names of banned liberal contributors and were made to submit a list of subscribers, in addition to the detailed outlines of upcoming issues, to be approved by the Information Division of the government. Magazines for children were no exception. Japan’s young audience was dispirited in the fall of 1941 when a hugely successful ten-year-old cartoon serialized in a boys’ magazine came to an abrupt end; the tales of the adventures and exploits of the stray-dog soldier Norakuro were deemed disrespectful to the military not so much because they were critical of Japanese militarism but because the soldiers were all animals.

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by | 11 October 2026 · 6:44 am

Demise of Polish Social Media

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter offers retrospectives on its 25-year history of reporting on cultural developments in Poland. Here are some excerpts from a 2025 retrospective by Patryk Zakrzewski, translated in 2026 by Agnieszka Mistur, offering A journey to the graveyard of Polish social media – before Meta products took over the world.

Before the word ‘selfie’ became established in the Polish language, the Fotka.pl service was launched (the portal was inaugurated on Valentine’s Day – 14 February 2001). According to the INNPoland portal, the beginnings of the website were entirely analogue – its creator, Rafał Agnieszczak, had to register the domain by sending an appropriate application to the Research and Academic Computer Network by regular mail and paying a 200zł fee. The inspiration was an American website, Am I Hot or Not? We can learn about the beginnings of Fotka from Bartek Świderski’s review of the website, ‘Żylety i pasztety (Bombs and Hags; the website sexy.onet.pl was also rated), which he published in Machina in 2001.

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The development of these types of portals was coupled with the dynamic development of the digital camera market – in 2005 alone, 900,000 such devices were sold in Poland. Meanwhile, the number of people using the Internet in Poland between 2001 and 2005 doubled thanks, among other things, to the Neostrada service offered by Telekomunikacja Polska.

On the other hand, the massification of the Internet sparked a response from the network elitists (this is when the term ‘Neo kids’ was coined), and photos from Fotka (as well as from NK or Grono, which will be discussed below) became fodder for mocking blogs, such as ‘Białe Kozaczki’ (White Boots) – with women’s outfits considered ‘embarrassing’ or ‘Pobożni Chłopcy’ (Pious Boys), where photos of young men flexing their muscles were displayed against the background of first communion pictures, images of St Mary’s girls and portraits of the Pope.

Incidentally, Fotka – the only dinosaur of Polish social media – is still alive and well (albeit under the more global domain .com). However, it has changed its profile a bit: today, it functions primarily as a dating site.

…

In the article ‘Świat jest mały, czyli Grono.net’ (The World Is Small, or Grono.net) by Agata Krzewińska, published in Życie (Life) in 2004, we read:

The fact that the world is small was proved by an American social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in his experiment. In a simple way, the scientist demonstrated that two random people living in two distant locations are connected by a chain of only about six people. This means that only these six people (and not several hundred, as was initially expected) would have to shake hands for each of us to be able to shake hands with the Pope or the president of the United States. The Milgram experiment from the late 1960s has once again become popular thanks to experimental internet websites, such as ‘Social Networking’ […]. Grono.net is the first website of its kind in Poland.

In line with this assumption, anyone visiting the portal could check how many handshakes away they were from another Grono (Group) user. The creators of the website – Piotr Bronowicz (Bronek), Tomasz Lis (Czarodzic) and Wojciech Sobczuk (Sopel) – came from the community centred around the Radiostacja (Radiostation) discussion forum. The people who gathered on Grono were initially ‘alternative warsawites [warszawka]’. That’s what they were called by Piotr Cichocki’s interlocutor in his book Sieć przyjaciół. Serwis społecznościowy oczami etnografa (Network of Friends: A Social Networking Site Through the Eyes of an Ethnographer), which was the result of several years of research into the portal’s community. At that time, the website was semi-closed (only people who received an invitation from someone they knew could join), which fuelled interest – at one point, invitations to join Grono even became the subject of auctions on Allegro. In an article in Przekrój (Cross-Section) from 2004, Izabela Szymańska explained:

The fact that only ‘friends of our friends’ become part of Grono makes you feel that no one unwanted will get in, that you’re among your own. […] Grono’s popularity is based on being part of something which cannot be joined by everyone. As a chosen one, you can show your graciousness to those who are not in Grono but would like to be.

Over time, the elitism of the portal began to decline (and invitations were no longer required). At the end of its life, when the ‘the young and the creative from big centres’ had already moved on to Facebook, it was considered a totally uncool service for gimbusy – unsavvy young teens.

Let us return, however, to the time of its prosperity. Discussions took place in a grono (group) – a thematic forum (to create and moderate your own grono, you had to buy the status of a grono–master via text message). Membership in a grono was displayed on the user’s profile, so the right choice of groups was an important element of self-creation. When creating a profile, the user had to answer the question ‘What am I looking for?’ – they could select: a partner, friends, an adventure or nothing (in which case the profile was not visible in the search engine). Compared to today’s social media, the service was characterised by greater transparency of activities; for example, you received a notification informing you who viewed your profile or removed you from their friends list.

Over time, new functionalities were added: the option to add an mp3 to your profile or change its background; a git button, which is the equivalent of the Facebook ‘like’ button (the most popular photos were added to the Grono greatest hits list, i.e. the ‘top gits’ category visible on the homepage); and, after some time, a kit button to express disapproval.

In 2006, Grono won the Nocne Marki (Night Owl) award from the magazine Aktivist in the category ‘Zajawka 2006: Najlepszy serwis Web 2.0’ (Clip 2006: Best Web 2.0 Service). Other nominees were Moblog (a service for blogging from mobile devices, sponsored by Nokia), Smog (a website for presenting ‘funny stuff’) and Wrzuta.pl (a service for sharing mp3 files).

As recently as 2008, Grono.net was the most popular social media platform in Poland. At that time, all of Central and Eastern Europe was a colourful mosaic of local social media: in the Czech Republic, the most popular service of this type was Lide.cz; in Lithuania, One.lt; in Latvia, Draugiem.lv; in Hungary, Wiw.hu (which, as the founders of Grono said in interviews, was an inspiration for them when creating the website). Parenthetically, Grono made an attempt at foreign expansion – English and Spanish language portals Grapeo.co.uk and Bago.es were created – but failed.

As early as 2009, the website began to lose the competition for the hearts and minds of users to Facebook, which was also due to changes made to the website, such as the introduction of a new layout and additional paid services. The popularity of the thematic group called ŻĄDAMY STAREGO GRONA!!! (WE DEMAND THE OLD GRONO!!!) was skyrocketing, and the profile pictures showed graphics made by the users in Paint with slogans such as ‘Grono has sold itself’ or ‘The new Grono is shitty’ (see illustrations from the abovementioned book by Piotr Cichocki). The portal was closed in 2012.

According to the Megapanel/PBI Gemius study Dzieci aktywne online 2007 (Children Active Online 2007), young people in the 15-24 age group constituted the largest group among Internet users (33.76%). Of these, 85% were active users of social media. At that time, 42% of Poles had access to the Internet.

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People with similar interests joined so-called clubs – the equivalent of discussion forums, which also had their own galleries and guestbooks. The online newsletter Pulsik was an original idea – an information portal created by Epuls users for Epuls users. There was also a scoring system for active users of the platform. A feature that originated from Fotka was the ‘Epuls mascots’ tab, which displays users whose profile pictures received the highest ratings from other users.

The platform’s internal currency were called pulsars. They could be used to buy additional emoticons, virtual gifts for friends, features such as quizzes for friends or access to a premium account, a so-called Divine Puls. Another lesson in capitalism was the internal sales platform, where the more entrepreneurial and talented Epuls users, in exchange for pulsars, sold their graphics, which were used as profile photos. The website also collaborated with mBank; Epuls was connected to the electronic banking service called izzyBank – ‘the first virtual bank for young people ages 13 to 18’.

Predatory monetisation, user dissatisfaction with the new website layout and changes to the portal, and of course the expansion of Facebook contributed to a slump in Epuls’s popularity – the portal lost more than 700,000 users within a few months in 2010. A slow decline then began, and the site was finally shut down in 2017.

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We have already mentioned portals with a distinctly youthful profile, so it’s time for an intergenerational service, which for many older users was something like a ‘gateway to the Internet’ – a place where they gained their digital skills and took their first steps in building online relationships.

It was founded in 2006 by Maciej Popowicz, then an IT student at the University of Wrocław, together with Michał Bartoszkiewicz, Paweł Olchawa and Łukasz Adziński. Nasza Klasa (Our Class), because that is what we are talking about, was modelled on the American website Classmates.com, and the name of the portal was taken from a song by Jacek Kaczmarski. The idea was simple – to create a platform that would enable people to find their school friends after many years, and it hit the spot. You could escape from school memories to an imagery faraway space, Neverland, where fictional schools could be created. Hogwarts, of course, attracted the largest group of people.

Over time, the original function of the portal began to be expanded with other services and tools. Nasza Klasa offered a whole range of browser games, including something for those seeking something bucolic (‘Wiejskie życie’ [Rural Life] or ‘PGR’ [Agro-Commune]) or thrills (‘Miejskie gangi’ [Urban Gangs]), and fishing fanatics (‘Na ryby’ [Gone Fishin’]) were not forgotten. In 2009, the website introduced its own internal currency – the euro-sponge. You could use it to buy new emoticons (referred to as ‘super faces’), virtual gifts for your friends, an extra transfer for photos in your gallery or – just after the Smolensk disaster – a black ribbon for your profile photo. The currency was named after the website’s mascot – Pan Gąbka (Mr Sponge).

Since there were also many young users on the portal, Nasza Klasa initiated an educational campaign for children that taught the rules of online safety. Its faces were a pair of superheroes – Sekurion and Protekta.

…

In 2010, over 11 million people had accounts on this website – more than half of all internet users in Poland at that time. Soon after, however, the portal underwent rebranding and began to lose its character in competing with foreign social-media giants. Many of the new changes were met with resistance from users – this was the case, for example, with the introduction of śledzik, i.e. the equivalent of Facebook’s newsfeed. People unfamiliar with internet slang – much to the amusement of jokesters – spread a chain letter saying that, to get rid of the hated function, you should enter the code 5P13RD4L4J 5L3D21U (can be read as ‘f**k off śledzik, ed.). However, the real outcry was caused by the new website regulations (operating under the abbreviated name nk.pl since 2010). The main issue was that all content added by users was the property of the portal and could be used, for example, for marketing purposes. Ironically, users generally moved to Facebook, a service that, as we know, does not care much about user privacy and has similar provisions in its terms and conditions. The website only had about one million users in 2020, and it was closed on 27 July 2021 at 11:59pm.

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The Polish response to Twitter was BLIP – the name of the service is an acronym of the slogan ‘Bardzo Lubię Informować Przyjaciół’ (I so like keeping my friends informed). Its launch caused controversy in the Polish blogosphere, although it was not actually to blame. The problem was that shortly before this, Grono had started promoting its service with an almost identical name (Blimp) and functionality (although the launch of Blip had been announced earlier), preceded by an aggressive marketing campaign which involved spamming the most popular Polish blogs with comments …

…

Blip users could share short messages of up to 160 characters and attach photos, links or voice messages. ‘Blip weighs nothing, Blip is everywhere’ – a woman’s voice assured us in an advertising spot. On 22 October 2009, the website proudly announced on its blog that 10 million messages had already been sent via Blip. Zakład Ubezpieczeń Społecznych (the Social Insurance Institution, ZUS) had a Blip account, as did the editorial offices of national media (Radio Zet, TVN24, Przekrój), football clubs (Legia Warszawa, Widzew Łódź) and city offices (Radom, Kraków). All the same, it remained a niche service, as the number of Blip users that year was just over 300,000. In 2013, the service was closed, and users were encouraged to migrate to Wykop.pl, which is still in existence today. Other platforms, such as Flaker.pl, Pinger.pl and Spinacz.pl also tried their hand in the microblogging market.

The most popular Polish messenger of the time, Gadu-Gadu (Chit-Chat) (which became the owner of Blip at one point), also tried to promote its social-media platform. The MojaGeneracja.pl portal, which was launched in February 2007, offered the possibility of creating a profile, rating other profiles or running a blog. An original feature was the option to leave voice comments. In addition to the typical set of tools, other branches of MojaGeneracja (MyGeneration) were developed over time, such as the educational portal EduNacja or Muzango, where artists could create their profiles and share mp3 files. The latter was probably an attempt to respond to MySpace.

Official blogs on the portal were also kept by public figures: the band Łzy, Tede, Gosia Andrzejewicz, Doda, Joanna Senyszyn and Lech Wałęsa (at mojageneracja.pl/1980; the former president also received a special number in the Gadu-Gadu messenger – 1980)….

Moja Generacja is a prime example of rapid growth and equally abrupt decline in user numbers. In 2008, there were 5 million registered accounts on the platform, but by 2012, this number had dropped to less than half a million. Despite protests from people attached to the portal, the decision to shut it down was made in November 2012….

In the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, domestic social media were already basically an endangered species – and those that survived were a mere shadow of their former popularity.

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