Monthly Archives: June 2004

by | 18 June 2004 · 6:19 pm

Japaniizu Beesubooru, Hittingu

More creative Japanese baseball terms of English origin: Hitting Terms

abekku hoomu ran ‘back-to-back home run’ (lit. ‘dating home run’, from Fr. avec ‘with’ although most abekku are likely to be vis-à-vis, not dosey-do)

endo ran ‘(hit) and run’

ueetingu saakuru ‘on-deck circle’

oobaa ‘hit over the head of an outfielder’ (thus, reefuto oobaa, raito oobaa, sentaa oobaa)

kushyon booru ‘ball hit off the (cushioned) outfield fence’

jaasto miito ‘just meeting the ball, contact hitting’

shooto rainaa ‘line drive to short’ (cf. fuasto rainaa ‘line drive to first base’)

suitchi hittaa ‘switch hitter’

goro ‘ground ball’ (SANRUI goro ‘ground ball to third’)

hoomu in ‘run, reaching home to score’

tsuubeesu ‘two base hit, double’

taimurii ‘a timely (clutch) hit that scores a run’

taimurii eraa ‘a timely error that allows a run to score’

nokku ‘fungo’ (knocking balls into the field for fielding practice)

MANRUI hoomu ran ‘full-base home run, grand slam’

ranningu hoomu ran ‘running home run, inside-the-park home run’

fuoa booru ‘four balls, a walk’

SOURCE: A Slightly Askew Glossary of Japanese Baseball Terms by professional translator Steven P. Venti

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by | 18 June 2004 · 5:53 pm

Herbert Nicholson, Grandfather Goat

One of the near-saints in the lore of the family I grew up in was an old man we called Yagi no Ojiisan ‘Grandfather Goat’, a Quaker missionary whose principal contribution to postwar Japan, Okinawa, and Korea was organizing the delivery of goats to farmers who had lost their means of livelihood in the wake of the horrible destruction of that war. The Goat Farmer (“The largest circulation goat magazine in the world”) mentions one of his exploits:

Goat soup is traditionally served at various festive events, and served raw–as sashimi–it is considered a delicacy. Goat soup is often served before or after the athletic events as the meat is high in energy, and it is said to be the best cure for a hangover and thus served after drinking parties. However, most Okinawans are not so familiar with its milk.

People in their 50s and older may have some hazy memories from the past of drinking goat milk as children. Many doctors say that, for small babies, goat milk is far better alternative to cow’s milk when mother’s milk is not available. Right after the war, U.S. military provided many Okinawan children goat milk because of its high nutritional value.

After WWII in 1947, Pastor Herbert Nicholson of LARA (Licensed Agencies for the Relief in Asia) introduced about 200 goats to Okinawa. Over the following years another 2,615 goats were brought in by LARA to produce goat milk. The Okinawans popularly called those goats “LARA goats.”

Okinawan associations in Hawai‘i also played a big role in providing relief for their ravaged homeland.

The various relief efforts spanned four years (1945-1949), during which time 150 tons of clothing, hundreds of small appliances, toys and sundry items were collected. But the relief efforts didn’t end there: Hawaii Uchinanchu [Okinawans] and other compassionate individuals and organizations sent $20,000 in medicine and medical supplies, collected $50,000 to purchase and transport 550 pigs and 750 milking goats, and demonstrated their foresight by assisting in the effort to build the University of the Ryukyus. These relief missions revived efforts to establish a unified organization of Okinawan individuals, clubs and groups.

After that concerted effort, the fractious associations from separate villages, towns, and islands of Okinawa finally managed to form the Hawaii United Okinawa Association in 1951.

The only other thing I knew about Yagi no Ojiisan as a kid (human, not goat) was that he was a Quaker and had a cabin at Karuizawa, in Nagano prefecture, where he kindly allowed us to stay for a few weeks during the summer of 1957, when the current Japanese Emperor Akihito met the current Empress Michiko on the tennis courts of the same resort. (My father was raised a Quaker, and it was by virtue of Quaker cronyism that Nicholson allowed us to use his cabin. It certainly wasn’t any connection to royalty.)

But I wasn’t aware of his earlier history:

Historians have acknowledged the important, even heroic, role of former missionary Herbert Nicholson in providing material aid to Japanese Americans from the Los Angeles area interned at Manzanar. Nicholson made literally dozens of trips to the camp, bringing news from home, personal belongings from storage, and gifts from friends, and handling numerous business transactions…. But others also combined opposition to removal and internment with concrete acts of service to improve conditions for the interned Japanese Americans.(27)…

(27) Betty Mitson, “A Friend of the American Way: An Interview with Herbert V. Nicholson,” in Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation, ed. Arthur Hansen and Betty Mitson (Fullerton, Cal., 1974), 110-42; Michi Weglyn and Betty Mitson, eds., Valiant Odyssey: Herbert Nicholson In and Out of America’s Concentration Camps (Upland, Calif., 1978) [the latter being “Interview and personal stories of Herbert Nicholson, pastor of the West Los Angeles Japanese Methodist Church in 1941, who traveled to many of the internment camps during the war” according to the Go for Broke Educational Foundation]

Confirmation that Nicholson was a Quaker, not a Methodist, comes from testimony by Victor Okada of Los Angeles:

After 25 years as a missionary in rural Japan, Rev. Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker was asked to take over the Japanese Methodist Chruch in Pasadena. Nicholson and his wife visited Manzanar, Poston and Gila River camps. “While the majority of people on the outside kept their distance, we were fortunate that people like Reverend and Mrs. Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker missionaries who had served in Japan, would visit and bring a truckful of item like baby cribs, blankets, newspapers and magazines. Through his church in [Pasadena] other churches regularly donated things for the internees. P 105 Muts Okada”

UPDATE: A website on Quakerism in Japan indicates that Herbert and Aladeline Nicholson were among the Quaker missionaries near Mito (a conservative Tokugawa stronghold) during the early decades of the twentieth century. My father says we first crossed paths with Nicholson when we lived in Kokura, Japan, just across the straits from war-ravaged Korea during the early 1950s. Although Nicholson was ojiisan ‘grandfather’ to us kids, he was known as Yagi no Ojisan ‘Uncle Goat’ to Japanese school children at the time. Apparently Nicholson and Albert Schweitzer were among the few, if not the only, model foreigners profiled in Japanese schoolbooks in those days.

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by | 17 June 2004 · 8:46 pm

Naipaul on the Imperialism of Universal Religions

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

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

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

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by | 17 June 2004 · 8:31 pm

Naipaul on Sacred Places

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by | 16 June 2004 · 8:20 pm

New Missionaries to Japan, 1950

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

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

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

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

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by | 16 June 2004 · 5:32 pm

Evacuation Day from Korea, 1940

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by | 15 June 2004 · 8:30 pm

Japaniizu Beesubooru, Riigu endo Chiimu

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

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

Teams and schedule

se riigu ‘Central League‘: Giants, Dragons, Carp, Swallows, Tigers, Bay Stars

pa riigu ‘Pacific League’: Hawks, Lions, Marines, Fighters, Blue Wave, Buffaloes (the last two about to merge)

DAI (= meejaa) riigu ‘Big (Major) League‘ (North American MLB)

shiizun ofu ‘off season’

naitaa ‘night game’

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

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

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by | 15 June 2004 · 5:22 pm

Conservative Pyongyang vs. Liberal Seoul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by | 14 June 2004 · 1:31 pm

Pyongyang, "Jerusalem of the East"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by | 13 June 2004 · 4:58 pm

Afghanistan’s Dicey Opium Poppy Near-Monopoly

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

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

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