Monthly Archives: March 2005

by | 19 March 2005 · 7:43 am

A Tropical Melting Pot in the Frozen North

The New York Times on 18 March ran a cheery little sketch of a community of tropical immigrants in northern Alberta.

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta, March 13 – Forty below zero isn’t so bad once you get used to it. At least that was the message of a seminar at Keyano College called “We Love the Winters Here,” attended by 30 new immigrants from warm-blooded places like Venezuela and Nigeria, drawn here by the promise of hefty salaries in an oil boomtown….

Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez fired more than 5,000 employees at the state oil company after a failed general strike, has been particularly fertile recruiting ground for energy companies.

“When you are in Venezuela and you read the word ‘cold,’ you don’t really know what that word means,” said Cesar Mogollon, an electrical engineer with Suncor Energy who arrived from Venezuela in November….

But Mr. Mogollon said that once he found that local supermarkets carried the white maize flour dough used to make arepas and empanadas, “I was O.K.” He and his wife have adjusted, he said, and his 9-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son are snow tubing and skiing with gusto.

At least 4,000 foreign-born immigrants now live in Fort McMurray, and the number is growing fast. Local supermarkets carry halvah from Saudi Arabia, mango nectar from Egypt, jarred yellow cherries from Guatemala, rice sticks from the Philippines and marinating sauces from South Africa. There are cultural organizations for Latinos, Hindus, Filipinos and Chinese. The first Islamic school opened last year.

Mushtaque Ahmed, a 54-year-old engineer at Syncrude Canada, who was born in Bangladesh, has worked previously in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. He says that 10 families from Bangladesh arrived here in the last three years, and that they now get together to celebrate Bangladeshi holidays with potluck dinners that mix their native cooking with Canadian fare: typically roast turkey and assorted biryanis….

“I like the friendliness of the people here,” Mr. Ahmed said, although he admitted to one misgiving that has nothing to do with the weather: “I can get uncomfortable with what’s on television. There’s a lot of tolerance to things I am not accustomed to.”

via OxBlog

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by | 18 March 2005 · 8:52 am

Doris Duke’s Islamic Art Shangri-La

Here‘s an interesting perspective on Doris Duke and her Shangri-La residential tribute to Islamic art, which I recently had the chance to visit. It’s by Sharon Littlefield, the Consulting Curator of Islamic Art for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation/Honolulu Academy of Arts.

While the American heiress Doris Duke (1912-93) succumbed to an elite desire to collect, display, and donate, her chosen field of Islamic art and architecture was at odds with the legitimacy her social circle sought in their collecting. Moreover, relocating such art to her private home in Hawaii effectively estranged her from all established patterns of art collecting. Likely, her motivation to both acquire Islamic art and create an Islamicate estate for its display was driven, in part, by the very need to dissociate herself from her peers and her inherited lifestyle. But, profoundly drawn to Islamic aesthetics, she continued to collect right up to her death. She did not simply reject her own culture, but actively embraced Islamic ones. Despite being intensely private, Duke decreed that her estate, baptized Shangri-La, should be opened to the public following her death. Scheduled to open in October 2002, Shangri-La stands as a significant Islamicate monument, a fact which has, and will likely continue, to perplex those who cross its threshold.

I managed to check my cynicism and class resentment at the door and came away thoroughly fascinated. It’s well worth a visit. The virtual tour is also first-rate.

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Filed under art, Hawai'i, Mediterranean, Middle East

by | 17 March 2005 · 5:21 pm

Multinational Coalition Invades Japan, 1643

In the summer of 1643, a multinational coalition of Jesuit missionaries arrived in fiercely anti-Catholic Tokugawa Japan, just three months after another group of nine had been tortured to death in Nagasaki.

The leader of the second group was the Jesuit Pedro Marquez (1575-1657), born at Mouram, in the archbishopric of Evora, Portugal. After his training and admission into the Society of Jesus at the age of seventeen, we find him in 1627 in Tonkin and in 1632 on the island of Hainan. In 1636, he was in Macao, where he cosigned the order expelling [infamous Jesuit renegade Christovão] Ferreira from the Society for his apostasy. At the time of Marquez’ capture, he was sixty-eight years old and had just received his appointment as Provincial, or head of the Roman Catholic Church in Japan.

His three European companions were: Alonzo de Arroyo (1592-1644), fifty-one years old, from Malaga in Andalusia, doctor of philosophy and former priest of the Spanish settlement of Cavite in the Philippines, where he had arrived in 1621; Francisco Cassola (1603-1644), forty years old, a mathematician and astronomer who had been in Manila in 1636 with Mastrilli, later to become famous as a martyr in Japan; and Giuseppe Chiara (1603-1685), an Italian, also forty years old and recently coming from Manila as well. These four Jesuits were accompanied by six Asian converts: one lay brother (iruman) and five supporters (dojuku). The lay brother was Andreas Vieyra (1601-1678), forty-two years old, who had been born in Mogi and brought up in Nagasaki. He was later named Nampo, and had been educated in Macao and Manila. The supporters included two Japanese men: one from Imabashi Itchome in Osaka, known to the Europeans as Julius and to the Japanese as Shiro’emon, fifty-one years old; and one from Mototsuchimikado machi in Kamikyo of Kyoto, known as Kassian and Mata’emon, also fifty-one years old. These three men had left Japan in the early 1620s and were coming home, pathetically, to certain torture and death.

Then there was Lorenzo Pinto, thirty-two years old, whose father was Chinese and whose mother was of mixed Japanese and Portuguese descent. Even though his parents lived in Macao, Pinto had many friends and connections in Nagasaki. The last two supporters were a twenty-year-old Chinese man from Canton, called Juan and later Saburozaemon, and a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese man from Tonkin, known as Donatus or Nikan. These men were the last of the group to die, in 1697 and 1700 respectively.

The captives freely confessed they had come to Japan to preach Christianity, or as the Japanese put it: “to spread the Evil Doctrine in order to snatch away [authority in] the country of Japan.” They had disguised themselves as Japanese because the shogun had forbidden foreign priests to proselytize. Nevertheless, they were put to the water torture to make sure they were holding nothing back.

SOURCE: Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Diplomacy, by Reinier H. Hesselink (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 51-53

I’m surprised there wasn’t at least one Irishman in the group.

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by | 15 March 2005 · 8:36 pm

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Princeton emeritus professor of philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt has published a book On Bullshit (Princeton U. Press, 2005).

With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

The Press’s website also includes video clips of an interview with the straight-talking bullshitologist. Here’s my transcription of clip 7.

Q: You mentioned democratization as a function of bullshit. What about education? Are more highly educated people more likely to engage in bullshit just because they have the faculties to do so? I mean, are we more likely to be twits here at Princeton University than in some other part of the country?

A: I think it’s not only that highly educated people have the linguistic and intellectual gifts that enable them to create bullshit. But also I think that a lot of people who are highly educated acquire a kind of arrogance that leads them to be negligent about truth and falsity. They have a lot of confidence in their own opinions, and this may also encourage them to produce bullshit.

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by | 15 March 2005 · 9:16 am

Nick Kristof on Environmentalists Gone Wild

I enjoy Nick Kristof’s political unreliability. In the New York Times of 12 March, he takes on environmental car-alarmists.

When I first began to worry about climate change, global cooling and nuclear winter seemed the main risks. As Newsweek said in 1975: “Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend … but they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

This record should teach environmentalists some humility. The problems are real, but so is the uncertainty. Environmentalists were right about DDT’s threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.

Likewise, environmentalists were right to warn about population pressures, but they overestimated wildly. Paul Ehrlich warned in “The Population Bomb” that “the battle to feed humanity is over. … Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” On my bookshelf is an even earlier book, “Too Many Asians,” with a photo of a mass of Indians on the cover. The book warns that the threat from relentlessly multiplying Asians is “even more grave than that of nuclear warfare.”

Too many Asian men, and not enough Asian women. Now that’s the real problem in Asia. Meanwhile bald eagles multiply and malaria just gets worse and worse.

UPDATE: The Belmont Club has much more about efforts both to ban DDT and to resist banning it, with follow-ups here and here.

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by | 14 March 2005 · 9:18 am

Dutch Bathing Practices in Kupang, Timor, 1792

In 1792, American Lieutenant Amasa Delano spent some time in Dutch West Timor with the British McCluer Expedition.

A river of clean, clear water flowed through Copang [= Kupang, West Timor] to the sea; and a short distance from the mouth of the river was the bathing resort of the well-to-do residents of Copang. The families of the government officials of account and of the merchants in profitable business composed pretty much all the well-to-do people of the port. On fine days, and most days in tropic Timor were fine, they went in for bathing en masse. The bathing scene was a delight to Amasa:

“The bank of the river where they bathed was shaded with rows of fragrant trees, and under the trees were small dressing cabins. The Dutch, men and women both, donned a Malay garment for the bath, a sort of petticoat, which was tied high up on the breast, but so tied as to leave the arms free. Some of these bathing garments were of extremely fine texture, and with beautiful designs woven into them.”

Amasa and his brother officers were furnished with the same sort of bathing robes of extremely fine texture and beautiful design. “Men and women bathed together, picking out a spot with their backs to the current, and allowed the swift running water to rush over their heads, or flow around them.” Amasa was always among those present at the bathing hour. His choice of place was between two rocks; and there, with a stone against which to brace his feet, he sat in secure enjoyment of the current, without incurring danger in an absent-minded moment of being swept down-river and put to the labor of swimming back against the current. He liked to swim, and these days in Timor were for relaxation after the wearying passage from New Guinea.

While the favored people bathed, Malay slaves were setting the tables and laying the lunch in the shade of the wide-spreading, handsome trees on the bank of the river. It was the life for a sailor ashore–that is, when the sailor was an officer.

“There was the river foaming over the rocks below gently in some places, sublimely in others; and the river was on the opposite shore spreading itself out like a transparent lake with lovely scenery reflected in its calm surface.”

Amasa and his bathing brother officers would work up grand appetites while observing the tables being loaded deep with the wide variety of savory dishes. There were also oceans of fine wines. Amasa had not yet had the experience of sitting in at a party when English officials took on the job of entertaining Dutch rivals in trade; but certainly the Dutch in Amboyna and here in Timor were setting a warm pace against the day when it came the turn of the English to do the entertaining. For the prestige of that Royal Navy to which his officer shipmates belonged, he hoped said officers would rise to the occasion when it came their turn to play host. They would have to log the good knots to do so. The Dutch in Amboyna had done them well; the Dutch governor’s widow in Timor and her official aides were doing them even better:

“The Dutch in Timor gave us altogether too good a time. It may have been the too frequent bathing, and staying too long at it that brought on intermittent fevers, from which several of our officers died. These deaths from the bathing in Timor were not the first of their kind, which I have known from personal observation.”

… Not long before the McCluer visit to Timor, Lieutenant Bligh of the Bounty mutiny episode had arrived there [in 1789]. Timor was still lauding the seamanship and fortitude of Bligh and the men who had survived that long passage in that open boat, and Amasa thought the laudations well deserved. But shortly after Bligh’s departure from Timor another boat’s crew arrived there from a more perilous and far longer voyage than Bligh’s; and they made the passage with only a chart and a compass for their navigation. While McCluer’s officers were still at Timor that boat’s crew of the more perilous passage were being held in ignominy in Copang.

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by | 13 March 2005 · 9:42 am

Inoculating Islanders with Kinepox in 1807

In 1807, Captain Amasa Delano of the China-trader Perseverance, was keenly aware of the deadly effects of smallpox on Pacific Islanders–and he knew how to prevent it.

Before leaving home forehanded Amasa had stuffed his medicine chest with whatever specifics the Boston doctors recommended. He had added several specifics on his own account, one being for inoculation against smallpox. He had seen the ship’s doctors of the McCluer expedition inoculate island natives against smallpox, and why couldn’t he do the same now? Why not?

Canton was notoriously a smallpox-ridden port, and, arriving off there, Amasa got out his kinepox from the medicine chest, stood his five Kanakas (Sandwich Islanders) in a row, and inoculated them. He had faith in his technique, but there remained a doubt of the efficacy of the kinepox after lying up in the medicine chest since he had left home.

Fresh kinepox would make him feel better; and certainly it would do no harm to his Kanakas to inoculate them again. Sailing up the Canton River he made inquiries of ships he met along the way, and from an American captain whose ship he hailed he procured “a kine pox which would answer all the purpose of a preventive, and at the same time would be attended with no dangerous consequences to the patient.”

Amasa inoculated his five Sandwich Islanders with the new kinepox and awaited results. They all lived, as did others of his crew whom he then treated with full confidence. After that he was all set to deliver lectures to other ship captains wherever met on the virtues of the new kinepox.

“All captains, who are employed on voyages, where they may take the natives of these islands on board their ships, should provide themselves with the kine pox matter, which may be easily procured, and preserved in such a manner as to be carried to any part of the world, and have them inoculated with it before carrying them to places where they would be exposed to take the small pox, which most generally proves fatal to them, and the distress and sufferings of the poor creatures have been beyond description; many scenes of which I have been an eye witness to, that would excite the compassion of any man possessed of the least particle of humanity.”

Edward Jenner had published his work on cowpox and coined the term “vaccination” in 1798.

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by | 12 March 2005 · 4:44 pm

Hirahara Zenmatsu, the First Japanese in Hawai‘i

Hirahara Zenmatsu was a Japanese seaman who lived among the people of the island of O‘ahu for about three and a half months in 1806. Zenmatsu was a native of the province of Aki, now Hiroshima prefecture, during the reign of the Tokugawa feudal government (1603-1867). He and seven others aboard the Inawaka-maru, a small Japanese cargo ship, were shipwrecked off Japan and remained adrift in the Pacific Ocean for more than seventy days….

On March 20, 1806, a foreign ship appeared. The crew of the Inawaka-maru climbed onto the deckhouse roof and signaled the ship by waving a mat and shouting for help. At first they seemed not to have been seen, but finally, the ship came closer and lowered her sails. Four foreigners, including one carrying a sword, who seemed to be the captain, came up on deck as the ship circled around the Inawaka-maru. Upon realizing that the Japanese vessel was disabled, they came aboard. Two sets of Japanese swords that belonged to the two officials from Iwakuni were found in a closet at the stern and were confiscated.

The captain asked the Japanese something, but they could not understand English. The Japanese asked for food by putting their hands on their stomachs, pointing to their mouths, and bowing with their hands together. The captain touched each one’s stomach and took a look around the galley. When he realized that they had no food or water, he took all eight Japanese on board his ship, assisting them by taking their hands and putting his arms around them. Personal belongings of the Japanese were also transferred.

The rescuing ship was an American trading vessel [returning from China], the Tabour, commanded by Captain Cornelius Sole. The Japanese had been rescued after being adrift in the Pacific for more than seventy days.

Aboard the Tabour, the Japanese were served a large cup of tea with sugar. It tasted so good that they asked for more, but the captain did not allow them to eat anything more on that day. On the following day, they were given two cups of sweetened tea followed by a serving of gruel. This was repeated for another three days. On the fifth day, when everyone gradually became well, they were served rice for breakfast and dinner and bread for lunch. The bread, tasted by the Japanese for the first time, was described by Zenmatsu as similar to a Japanese confection called higashiyama, which is shaped round like a cross-section cut of a thick daikon (radish).

The Japanese had no words to express their gratitude, and they were deeply touched by the kind treatment received from the foreigners.

It sounds as if Capt. Sole had prior experience reviving starving, dehydrated sailors.

On May 5, 1806, the Tabour arrived in Hawai‘i after forty-five days of sailing following the rescue…. On August 17, 1806, all eight Japanese left Hawai‘i with [Captain Amasa] Delano aboard the Perseverence.

They arrived in Macao in October, then were transferred to a Chinese ship bound for Batavia (now Jakarta), where five of the eight Japanese contracted various tropical diseases, so that only three survived by the time the crew reached Nagasaki in June 1807 aboard an American vessel flying a Dutch flag.

Unfortunately, one more died soon after returning to Nagasaki, and another committed suicide during the official interrogation there. Zenmatsu was jailed and underwent severe interrogation by the officials as he had violated the sakoku edict, which prohibited Japanese subjects from leaving the country. Zenmatsu was kept at Nagasaki for five more months before being allowed to return to his village on November 29, 1807. Soon after his return, he was summoned by Lord Asano of Aki to report on his overseas experiences. He died six months after his return.

SOURCE: Observations of the First Japanese to Land in Hawai‘i, by Hideto Kono and Kazuko Sinoto, in The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 34 (2000), pp. 49-62

The account by Kono and Sinoto was based primarily on Japanese and Hawaiian sources, and makes no mention of an interrogation of the Japanese crew recorded in chapter XXI of Delano’s Voyages and Travels, orginally published in 1817 but now available online as Master Mariner: The Life and Voyages of Amasa Delano, by James B. Connolly.

On arrival at Canton, Amasa hunted up a linguist who knew Japanese. He found one of a sort, a Chinese, and through him he questioned the Japanese, being curious to get their story of the wreck. The Japanese could not understand the Chinese linguist’s Japanese speech, but they could read his Japanese writing, and he could read theirs; so it was question and answer on pieces of rice paper, which Amasa took over and kept for his own information later:

QUESTION: What place did you leave last, previous to your being shipwrecked?
ANSWER: The town or city of Osaca, on the island of Niphon.
QUESTION: How many men were there of you on board, when you left Osaca?
ANSWER: Twenty-two.
QUESTION: What happened to the other fourteen?
ANSWER: Some were washed overboard in the gale of wind in which we lost our masts, rudder, and were otherwise materially injured, and a number were killed and eaten for food to save life; all of which died by lot, fairly drawn.
QUESTION: How were you treated by Captain Sole?
ANSWER: We acknowledge him as our saviour. He not only took us away from that death which stared us in the face; but he gave us victuals, and carried us safe to land; after which he befriended and provided for us.

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Filed under China, Hawai'i

by | 11 March 2005 · 9:28 pm

Erazim V. Kohák’s "Requiem for Utopia"

In the context of reviewing the book, Legacy of Dissent, invisible reader Mithras the Prophet posts “a long excerpt from Erazim V. Kohák’s “Requiem for Utopia”, written after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Kohák went into exile from Czechoslovakia in 1948, and continues to write and teach at Boston University and Charles University in Prague.”

[Dubcek and his colleagues] were determined to be humane authoritarians, respecting the rights of their subjects. In their seven months in power they discovered that the idea of a humane authoritarianism, the standard illusion of well-intentioned rhetorical revolutionists, is an illusion, a contradictio in adiecto. A humane authoritarianism would respect the freedom of its subjects, and so inevitably create the possibility of dissent and opposition. Faced with opposition, the human authoritarian faces the choice of ceasing to be authoritarian — or ceasing to be humane. Repression, whatever its overt aim, can be humane only in rhetoric — in practice it necessarily means breaking men. Czechs and Slovaks, including Dubcek, were too familiar with the logic of terror to opt for the latter alternative. After seven months, the program which started out as a program of humane communism became a program of social democracy….

The ideals of human freedom and social justice remain valid. Democracy — democracy for blacks as well as whites, in economics as well as politics, at home as well as in remote reaches of Latin America or Eastern Europe — remains valid. Socialism, the ideal of social justice and social responsibility in industrial society, remains valid. Human and civil rights, the right of every man to personal identity and social participation, all remain valid. But the utopian myths of self-proclaimed rhetorical radicals do not advance these ideals. The detour on which too many socialists embarked in 1917 is over, finished, discredited, revealed as an exhiliarating, aristocratic, and ultimately reactionary social sport, not the radical social progress it claimed to be. The task that remains is the work of social progress — not the aristocratic sport of revolution, but the solid work of redical, deep-rooted transformation of society. Men may still demand their daily dose of illusion, the exhilaration of revolution or “confrontation” rather than the down-to-earth facts and figures of a Freedom Budget; but those who cater to this demand can no longer do so in the name of social progress — or in the name of socialism.

Utopia is dead. Czechoslovakia has been a graveyard of illusions.

And not just Czechoslovakia, about which I’ve posted once or twice, and intend to post again. For me, a long winter–including a Dean’s December–in Ceausescu’s Romania first began turning shovelfuls of earth into a graveyard for illusions.

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by | 11 March 2005 · 8:17 pm

Andres Gentry on Foreign Policy Oceans Apart

A few days ago, China-based blogger Andrés Gentry reacted to a post by Belgravia Dispatch on foreign policy disagreements across the Atlantic.

Belgravia Dispatch has a nice (and sharply worded!) summary of the foreign policy discussions happening on both sides of the Atlantic. While I appreciate the amount of time he spends on talking about French and German foreign policy aspirations, at the end of the day it all sounds more like a coda for an era past than anything else….

Well, here’s one indicator of the future: in discussions about East Asian international relations I have never, not once, read anyone ask what France’s, much less Germany’s, opinion is….

Anyways though, the world stage moves more and more away from the European peninsula. The Economist has recently run a survey on India and China, the US and Japan have just released a joint statement declaring they will work together to safeguard Taiwan, the 6-nation group trying to deal with North Korea includes no European nations [except Eurasia-spanning Russia], the democratic changes sweeping the Middle East owe to a Coalition that Old Europe deliberately cut itself out of, and in last December’s Indonesian tsunami it was the US, Japan, India, and Australia working together to help those affected by the natural disaster. These are the contours of the new world that is being made.

I wouldn’t be too quick to write off the EU in Asia. It now wants in on the six-party talks and is likely soon to resume arms sales to China.

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