Monthly Archives: August 2008

by | 9 August 2008 · 11:27 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Miharashi, Okurina

As soon as I arrived at Kyoto Station, I got maps from the tourist information office, called the Palace Side Hotel to book a room for the night, and found a post office ATM to withdraw cash from my U.S. bank account. Then I headed straight for the top of Hieizan (比叡山), not for the famous Enryakuji (延暦寺) temple complex so much as for the panoramic views and the cooler air.
View of Otsu and Lake Biwa from Mt. Hiei, Kyoto, Japan
To get there I took a bus to the Demachiyanagi (出町柳) Station, where I bought a round-trip (往復 ōfuku lit. ‘go-again’) combined ticket (for about ¥2000) on the Eizan (叡山) Railway to Hiei Sanchō (比叡山頂 ‘Hiei Mountaintop’). The first leg to Yase-Hieizanguchi was by one-car train. (Yase 八瀬 ‘Eight Rapids’ is about where the upper eastern fork of the Kamo River, the Takano River, ceases to be navigable.) The next leg was by cable car to Keiburu Hiei, and the final leg was by ropeway to the “summit”—not actually the highest point, but close enough. The Eizan Railway opened in Taishō 14 (1925), the year my father was born.

(I can recall how much older it suddenly seemed to make my father when I first saw Taishō 14 on his Japanese driver’s license—he was a man from another era! He also happened to be the first foreign driver picked up for speeding down Shirakawa-dōri by the Sakyō-ku police with their newfangled radar gun in the late 1950s, when we still had an American car (a 1956 Chevy) and Shirakawa-dōri was still unpaved north of Kitashirakawa, where the road east went up through the mountains to Otsu City.)

From the top of the ropeway, you could look back down toward Kyoto, but the view of Lake Biwa was obstructed by the walls of Garden Museum Hiei (about which more later). So I paid the ¥1000 fee and walked along a path through a rose garden that offered beautiful views of Lake Biwa to my right. At the highest point on the path was a lookout point labeled 見晴らし on the guide map. Although I discerned the basic meaning from the kanji (‘see-clear’), I wasn’t sure how to pronounce the combination. The trailing kana (okurigana) indicated a native Japanese reading, and I had learned from listening to weather reports as a kid the verb ‘to be clear, to clear up’ (晴れる hareru), usually in the ubiquitous phrase 晴時々曇 hare, tokidoki kumori ‘clear, occasionally cloudy’. But I had not encountered the agentive transitive form, harasu, and I wasn’t sure if the combination of two verbs together was pronounced miharashi or mibarashi.

According to the New Nelson kanji dictionary, transitive harasu means to ‘dispel, clear away (gloom); refresh (oneself)’, and my Canon Wordtank electronic dictionary adds to ‘chase away the blues’ and ‘dispel doubts, clear oneself of a charge’. The nominalized verb combination miharashi means ‘view’ in the sense of ‘the viewer’s ability to see’, as in ‘observation platform’ or ‘lookout point’, and not ‘view’ in the sense of ‘that which is seen’ (景色 keshiki ‘scenery, landscape’).

Dengyō Daishi (Saichō) shrine at summit of Mt. Hiei, KyotoI was enjoying the lovely sights from the 見晴らし and the genuine sounds of real uguisu (Japanese bush warblers)—not the recordings they play in the massive urbanity of Kyoto Station—when I caught a glimpse of a Japanese red maple (momiji) and a Buddhist memorial in a sheltered nook off to the left. When I went down to investigate, I found a stele with the name Dengyō Daishi on it. I didn’t take the time to decipher the explanatory plaque, so I’m not sure about the exact significance of that spot, which was certainly out of place in a Garden Museum that otherwise celebrated French Impressionism.

Dengyō Daishi (傳教大師) was the posthumous name of Saichō (最澄, 767-822), the monk who brought back Tendai Buddhism from China, founded Enryakuji (still the headquarters of Tendai), and convinced the court to recognize Tendai as Japan’s first autonomous Buddhist sect (in 822). He was also the first Japanese monk to be awarded the posthumous title of Daishi ‘Great Master’ (in 866). The native Japanese word for posthumous title is okurina, clearly a compound etymologically, meaning something like ‘bestowal-name’ (贈り名), but it’s written with a single kanji, 諡, which otherwise seems to occur only in the Sino-Japanese compounds 諡号 shigō ‘posthumous name’ or 贈諡 zōshi ‘posthumous title’ (both synonyms of 贈号 zōgō lit. ‘bestowal-number/item/title/name’).

Dengyō (傳教, now usually written 伝教) means ‘transmit-teaching’, but 伝 has a lot of different shades of meaning. It occurs in 伝承 denshō ‘legend, tradition, folklore’, 伝言 dengon ‘verbal message’, 伝馬 tenma ‘post horse’, and 伝声器 denseiki ‘speaking tube’. But one of its most interesting compounds is 伝法 denbō lit. ‘spreading Buddhism’, but also ‘bullying, ostentatious bravado’, perhaps reflecting the behavior over many centuries of too many militant monks from Mt. Hiei.

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Filed under family, Japan, language, religion

by | 7 August 2008 · 8:41 pm

Armenian Merchant Information Networks, 1600s-1800s

The latest issue of the Journal of World History (vol. 19, no. 2) leads off with an article that somehow caught my fancy. Whitman College professor Sebouh Aslanian writes on “The Salt in a Merchant’s Letter”: The Culture of Julfan Correspondence in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Project MUSE subscription required). Here’s a bit of the introduction (omitting footnotes and page numbers).

The crucial role of information flows was particularly important for Armenian merchants from New Julfa, a suburb of the Safavid capital of Isfahan founded in 1605 by Armenian silk merchants forcibly displaced by Shah Abbas I from the town of Old Julfa on the Ottoman-Persian frontier [in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic in Azerbaijan]. These merchants managed a remarkable achievement by coming to preside, within a short time of their forced displacement, over one of the greatest trade networks of the early modern era. By the eighteenth century, the Armenian merchants of New Julfa had branched out from their small mercantile suburb to form a global trading network stretching from Amsterdam in the west to Canton (China) and Manila (Philippines) on the rim of the Pacific Ocean in the east. Their mercantile settlements in the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and northwest Europe and Russia spanned several empires, including the three most significant Islamic empires of Eurasia—that is, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals—as well as several European seaborne empires, including the British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

In the case of Julfan society, information sharing was important not only for merchants for their daily commercial affairs, but also for maintaining the integrity of the Julfan network as a whole. Letter writing connected far away commenda agents to their masters in New Julfa and also unified the trade settlements in the periphery to the nodal center of the entire network in New Julfa….

The sources for this study derive from a remarkable archive of eighteenth-century documents I discovered while doing research at the Public Records Office (PRO) in London. This archive consists of approximately 1,700 Julfan mercantile letters seized in the Indian Ocean in 1748 on board an Armenian-freighted ship called the Santa Catharina. The majority of these letters were carried by Armenian overland couriers across the Mediterranean littoral and Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf port city of Basra, where they were relayed to other merchant-couriers traveling by ship to Bengal with the purpose of being delivered to recipients there and farther east in China. What makes these letters valuable for the present investigation is that their journey was unexpectedly cut short when the ship on which they were traveling was captured as a war time “prize” by a British naval squadron patrolling the waters off the southern coast of India. The letters were confiscated along with the Santa Catharina’s other cargo and shipped to England to be presented as “exhibits” in a high-stakes trial in London. Luckily for us, this event not only ensured their survival, but also transformed them into a kind of Julfan geniza. In addition to relying on this vast trove of documents, I shall also use two other collections of business and family correspondence stored in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (henceforth ASV) and the All Savior’s Monastery Archive (ASMA) in Julfa/Isfahan. Both collections are valuable because they contain thousands of commercial letters sent from Europe and India, many of which are examined here for the first time….

This is the kind of bottom-up, data-rich spadework that I really respect in historians, and many of the observations give one a vivid sense of what life was like as a farflung member of the Armenian (silk) trade network, such as how long it took to get a letter from Isfahan to Venice (often 6 months or so, if it got there at all). Even some of the footnotes are interesting, although the sources cited in Armenian orthography are completely opaque to me. I’ll cite just one example that relates to the language used in the letters.

In general, most correspondents maintained high levels of penmanship, a skill most likely taught to them in a commercial school operating in Julfa in the 1680s. In addition to a solid reputation and competence in the arts of mathematics and commercial accounting, literacy and good penmanship were also attributes merchants sought in a factor. Nonetheless, there are occasional letters that exhibit rather poor levels of penmanship, but, fortunately for the historian, these are rare exceptions. The language of Julfan correspondence is the defunct peculiar dialect of Julfan Armenian that flourished between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries throughout the commercial settlements where Julfans resided, especially in India and the Far East. This dialect is so distinct from other dialects of Armenian and from modern standard Armenian that it was and still is nearly incomprehensible to most Armenians. It was, therefore, an ideal medium for confidential communication in an age when information sharing was regarded as the lifeline of merchant communities and when a merchant could never be certain that his letters would not be intercepted and read by rivals in commerce or politics. Julfan letters, like most writing before the nineteenth century, do not have standard punctuation or spelling and no paragraph breaks except those indicated by the word dardzeal (again). Some letters also had important bills of exchange or notarized powers of attorney enclosed in them.

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Filed under Central Asia, economics, Europe, Iran, language, migration, South Asia

by | 6 August 2008 · 9:48 pm

Mayor vs. Journalist: Evading the Presumption

NYT reporter Matt Bai has a thumbsucker-with-interviews in this coming Sunday’s Times Magazine entitled Is Obama the End of Black Politics? I thought the following passage was the most amusing, and perhaps the most insightful.

I asked [Philadelphia Mayor Michael] Nutter if, during his private conversations with Obama early in the campaign, the subject of race and the historic nature of his candidacy came up. He stared at me for a moment. “Um, I knew he was black,” he said finally. “I’d really kind of picked up on that.”

Later, when I mentioned that it could be hard for a white journalist to understand all of the nuances of race, he looked over at his press secretary, who is black, and interrupted me. “He’s not black?” Nutter deadpanned, motioning back at me. “You guys told me it was a skin condition. I thought I was talking to a brother.” Nutter is known to have a dry sense of humor, but I also had the sense that he was tweaking me in these moments, watching with some amusement as I tried to navigate subjects that white and black Americans rarely discuss together. He seemed to think I was oddly preoccupied with race.

In fact, Nutter seemed puzzled by the very notion that he should be expected to support a candidate just because they both had dark skin. “Look, I never asked anybody to be for me because I was black,” he said. “I asked people to be for me because I thought I was the best candidate when I ran for City Council and when I ran for mayor. I’m proud of the votes I received. I’m proud I received the votes of the majority of the African-American community and the majority of the vote from the white community. But I never asked anybody to give me anything because I was black. I asked people to give me a chance because I thought I was the best.”

For most black Americans, Obama’s candidacy represented a kind of racial milestone, the natural next phase of a 50-year movement. But for Michael Nutter, the reverse was also true: not supporting Obama’s candidacy marked a kind of progress, too. The movement, after all, was about the freedom to choose your own candidate, white or black. In a sense, you could argue that it was Nutter — and not those black politicians who embraced Obama because they so closely identified with his racial experience — who represented the truest embodiment of Obama-ism. Here, perhaps, was a genuine postracial politician, even if that meant being, as John Lewis put it, on the wrong side of history.

I asked Nutter if he found it insulting to have me come barging into his office, demanding to know why he didn’t pick the black guy.

“It’s not insulting,” he answered. “It’s presumptuous. It demonstrates a continuation of this notion that the African-American community, unlike any other, is completely monolithic, that everyone in the African-American community does the same thing in lockstep, in contrast to any other group. I mean, I don’t remember seeing John Kerry on TV and anybody saying to him, ‘I can’t believe you’re not for Hillary Clinton.’ Why?”

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Filed under democracy, publishing, U.S.

by | 6 August 2008 · 8:53 pm

The Vatican as UN/NGO in World War Two

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 218, 220-221:

As an international institution, the Catholic Church had to negotiate every political context, protecting the rights of Catholics in all belligerent countries through the mechanism of concordats; rendering assistance to a much wider range of humanity; and balancing its diplomatic cum spiritual objectives with the role of moral prophecy. Perhaps no one could have performed the multiple roles of pope to universal satisfaction in such circumstances, and the legacy of Pius XII, who faced these challenges, is still disputed, as was that of Benedict XV during and after the First World War.

Nazi racial exterminism has become so dominant in the historiography of the last two decades that it has eclipsed every other aspect of the war, including attempts to prevent, contain or mitigate it. That downgrades most of the activities that were of paramount concern to all Europe’s Churches in the two years before the ‘Final Solution’ started under cover of a war that had raged since September 1939. One of the chief activities of the papacy was to prevent war at all, an activity that sometimes had the support of Mussolini, as well as the European democracies and the US. This papal diplomatic activity is relatively straightforward to understand, while in its sheer unassuming scale the relief and rescue work is difficult to get a purchase on despite the abundance of documentation….

The pope, informed of the invasion of Poland, retreated to his chapel to pray. The war immediately raised urgent humanitarian problems…. He established the Pontifical Relief Commission, whose remit was to provide war refugees with food, clothing and shelter. To take one example, the US Catholic dioceses collected US$750,000 which the bishop of Detroit sent to the pope for distribution among Poles in Poland and scattered throughout Europe. He also revived the Vatican Information Bureau, its aim being to reunite people separated by warfare, including prisoners of war – about whom the families everywhere were desperately anxious. The Bureau received a thousand items of correspondence per day, requiring a staff of six hundred to process it and conduct the ensuing inquiries. Its card index contains the names of over two million prisoners of war whom it helped locate and support. Like the parallel work of the International Red Cross, such labour involved a certain suspension of open moral judgement if it was to be at all effective. Vatican Radio also broadcast nearly thirty thousand messages a month in the search for missing persons.

Vatican documents are quietly eloquent on the papacy’s variegated interventions on behalf of so many victims of the Second World War, whether the despatch of food to Greeks starving because the Italians had made off with all the available food and the British were blocking ships bringing grain; exchanges of sick or wounded British prisoners in Italian captivity in North Africa; or, when the war had reached the Pacific theatre, having nuncio Morella in Tokyo organise medical supplies from Hong Kong for British prisoners of the Japanese. The Greek famine, in which one hundred thousand people starved to death, is instructive. The Germans handed over control of Greece to the Italians in the summer of 1941. Bulgaria had occupied some of the main grain-producing areas, while the Italians had commandeered much of the food stored. The 1941 harvest was poor. The British blockaded Greece, stopping grain shipments from Australia and preventing the arrival of 320,000 tons of grain that the Greeks had bought. Into this extremely complicated set of circumstances, where enemy nations were passing the buck on to their opponents while Greeks died, came monsignor Roncalli, the apostolic delegate to Greece and Turkey who was based in Istanbul. He visited senior German commanders, celebrating a mass for wounded German troops and visiting British POWs, so as to win the confidence of his interlocutors. Simultaneously he urged the Holy See to intervene with the US and British to bring about a temporary lift of the blockade. This persuaded the Germans to allow food to go to Greece via neutral Turkey; they also promised that any future food shipments would go exclusively to the civilian population. The British finally allowed a one-off shipment of eight thousand tons of wheat and flour. Meanwhile, in Athens, Roncalli organised soup kitchens that served twelve thousand meals a day, with supplies purchased by the Holy See in Hungary. Because of these measures fewer people died. It was complicated, undramatic work, in which each side blamed the other for the plight of the Greeks, and it resulted in an agreement between the belligerent powers to put in place mechanisms to ensure that the famine was not repeated.

It seems to me that today’s UN and NGOs, whether secular or religious, are caught in the same moral bind as the Vatican and the Red Cross during World War Two, sanctioning moral ambiguity and complicity in return for whatever good they think they can salvage from absolutely horrific local circumstances over which they have little or no control. After a while, absolutely everything becomes subject to terms of trade.

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Filed under Europe, NGOs, religion, U.N., war

by | 4 August 2008 · 9:31 pm

Baciu’s Early Exile Network

From Mira, by Ştefan Baciu (Honolulu: Editura Mele, 1979 [also Bucuresti: Editura Albatros, 1998], p. iii (my translation):

I dedicate this “Double Autobiography” to our Brazilian friends, departed but always present:

and to those in Hispanic America, just as present:

and to the memory of our friends:

    Grigore Cugler/“Apunake” (d. in Lima)
    Mircea Popescu (d. in Rome)
    Horia Tănăsescu (d. in San Francisco)
    Ion Oană-Potecaşu (d. in São Paulo)
    N. I. Herescu (d. in Zurich)
    Alexandru Busuioceanu (d. in Madrid)
    Aron Cotruş (d. in California)

It is perhaps not too surprising that the Romanian exiles are not well represented in Wikipedia. Baciu himself has a longer biography in Spanish Wikipedia than in either Romanian or English. Exiles tend to fall between the cracks. Who feels responsible for documenting their lives, people in their countries of exile or the ones they left behind? In the case of literary exiles, it depends who reads their work. I believe that Baciu devoted half of his own separate volume of memoirs (Praful de pe toba) to sketches of his old mentors and colleagues precisely in order to ensure that they would not be entirely forgotten.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who just passed away, spent time in both domestic internal and foreign exile. The English translations of his early classics like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and August 1914 had a major influence on my understanding of what the Soviet system was all about, an understanding that was reinforced and enriched by my year in Romania in 1983-84. (I did not read The Gulag Archipelago, but have blogged passages of several books about Gulags more recently.) Solzhenitsyn is not regarded quite the same way in his country of exile as in his country of origin, and his obsessions also evolved differently at home and abroad. He lived more than two lives, perhaps even as many as nine.

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Filed under biography, Brazil, Latin America, literature, migration, North America, Romania, Russia, USSR

by | 3 August 2008 · 9:06 am

South Africa at Its Rebirth, 1994

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 438-440:

It took two years of preliminary skirmishing before multi-party negotiations on the future of South Africa started and another two years of tortuous negotiations before agreement was reached on a new interim constitution, paving the way for national elections. There were many times along the way when it seemed that the whole exercise was doomed. As rival groups competed for ascendancy, South Africa was engulfed in prolonged bouts of violence. A mini civil war broke out between Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha party, a Zulu nationalist movement, and Mandela’s ANC, erupting first in the KwaZulu homeland and Natal, then spreading to black townships on the Witwatersrand, South Africa’s industrial heartland. Elements of the security forces still wedded to the idea of ‘total strategy’ aided and abetted Inkatha, determined to thwart any prospect of the ANC coming to power. Massacres by one side or the other became commonplace. All sides used death squads. Armed groups belonging to the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, an Africanist faction opposed to negotiations, singled out white civilian targets for attack. White right-wing paramilitary organisations, seeking an Afrikaner volkstaat, embarked on their own vigilante action and threatened to wreck the whole negotiation process.

Time and again Mandela and de Klerk clashed over who was to blame for the violence. In public and private their exchanges became increasingly acrimonious. Even on the occasion when the two men were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1993, the friction was still evident. In choosing them as ‘Men of the Year’ for 1993, Time magazine noted that ‘the mutual bitterness and resentments between de Klerk and Mandela are palpable’, and it asked rhetorically, ‘How could these two have agreed on anything – lunch, for instance, much less the remaking of a nation?’ At a political level, however, Mandela recognised how important de Klerk was to the whole settlement. ‘My worst nightmare is that I wake up and de Klerk isn’t there,’ Mandela told guests at a private dinner party. ‘I need him. Whether I like him or not is irrelevant. I need him.’

As the sun rose over the rolling green hills of Natal on 26 April 1994, Nelson Mandela walked up the steps of the Ohlange High School in Inanda near Durban to cast his vote. He emerged from the polling station, his face wreathed in smiles, and spoke of a bright future. ‘This is for all South Africans an unforgettable occasion; he said. ‘We are moving from an era of resistance, division, oppression, turmoil and conflict and starting a new era of hope, reconciliation and nation-building.’

In their millions, South Africans made their way to the polls, black and white citizens alike sharing a common determination to make the election a success. Many walked miles to reach a polling station. Some arrived on crutches and some in wheelchairs; some dressed in their Sunday-best clothes and some wore outfits they had made specially for the occasion. Long queues formed outside polling stations, circling around city blocks and winding back along dirt roads and across fields. Many arriving in the early morning were still waiting to vote late in the afternoon, tired and hungry; some in rural areas had to vote by candlelight. Yet, hour after hour, they remained patient. And when they returned home, having voted, it was with a profound sense of fulfilment, not just from participating in the election of a new government, but from exercising a right which had been denied to most South Africans for so long. Time and again, voters leaving polling stations spoke of how their dignity had been restored.

On each of the four polling days, South Africa was more peaceful than it had been for many years. The fever of violence that had affiicted the country for more than a decade abated. Even the killing fields of KwaZulu-Natal, where political warfare had caused more than 10,000 deaths, fell silent. On the Witwatersrand, members of rival factions found themselves joining the same queues in townships, swapping complaints about the long delays.

For many whites the experience of the election was as moving as it was for blacks. Standing side by side with blacks, waiting to vote, they felt a sense of their own liberation. The feelings of relief that the curse of apartheid had finally been lifted were as strong among the white community which had imposed it as among the blacks who suffered under it. The importance of the occasion was all the greater since for so many years it had seemed that a peaceful end to the apartheid system was beyond reach and that a more likely outcome would be revolutionary war.

The victory of the ANC at the polls in 1994 was as much a personal tribute to Mandela as it was to the movement he led. His ordeal of imprisonment had never been forgotten by the people for whom he spoke and was duly acknowledged when the time came for them to vote. Time and again it was said, ‘He went to prison for us.’ For blacks the election was, above all, about liberation – a celebration of their freedom from white rule – and it was to Mandela ‘s leadership that many attributed that liberation.

The transfer of power was accomplished in an atmosphere of much goodwill. Closing the book on three centuries of white rule, de Klerk chose words of encouragement fitting for such a historic moment. ‘Mr Mandela has walked a long road and now stands at the top of a hill. A man of destiny knows that beyond this hill lies another and another. The journey is never complete. As he contemplates the next hill, I hold out my hand to Mr Mandela in friendship and cooperation.’

The day of Mandela’s inauguration as president, 19 May 1994, was marked by the greatest celebrations ever seen in South Africa. From all over the world, visiting dignitaries – heads of state, royalty and government leaders representing some 170 countries – gathered in Pretoria to mark South Africa’s rite of passage. Taking the oath of office, Mandela promised South Africans a new covenant: ‘We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.’

Mandela seems to be all too rare among political leaders in understanding that even those on the right side of history do well to compromise in order to show respect for and facilitate reconciliation with their defeated foes. And he seems equally rare among heads of state—in many parts of the world, but especially in Africa—in having been willing to step down when his term of office expired.

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