Author Archives: Joel

by Joel | 23 August 2008 · 2:09 am

India’s Rise: Sick Mills vs. Powermills

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 88-89:

In the years of the Great Depression, the Indian textile industry was partially protected under the regime of imperial preference, Production for the home market expanded, but there was hardly any investment in new machinery. Moreover, India had no textile machine industry of its own. During the Second World War, no machinery could be imported, but the mills worked around the clock under the regime of government procurement. By the end of the war, spindles and looms were worn out and mill-owners would have liked to have invested in new machinery. However, foreign exchange was scarce as India had no immediate access to its reserves accumulated in the Bank of England. At this stage something happened which had terrible consequences for the future of the Indian textile industry. Mahatma Gandhi had compelled the Indian government to abolish the food-grain controls introduced during the war. Prices fell after the controls had been abolished – as Gandhi had predicted. His followers then tried to apply the same rule to cotton texiles, which had also been subjected to controls. The mill-owners warned the government that they would not be able to cope with the rising demand with their decrepit looms. Nevertheless, the controls were abolished and prices rose. Controls were then re-imposed in August 1948. At the same time positive discrimination in favour of the products of handloom weavers was introduced. These weavers were dear to Gandhi as he regarded them as the paragon of the type of cottage industry which he preferred to the mills. The well-meaning protectors of the handloom weavers did not notice that these weavers had to a large extent been replaced by powerloom weavers, whose rise will be described below. The mills were now prevented from modernizing their equipment and expanding their production. They were turned into living fossils. The mill-owners continued production half-heartedly. There seemed no longer to be any future for this industry. Some mills were closed down as early as the 1950s and 1960s. To make matters worse, a prolonged strike of textile labour in Mumbai in the 1980s sounded the death knell for the industry in this metropolis.

It was quite natural that textile labour should be frustrated under these conditions, but resorting to a strike in an industry which was already doomed proved to be counterproductive. The workers turned to Dr Datta Samant, an independent labour leader who had organized a very succesful strike for the workers of the Premier automobile factory in Mumbai. This strike ended with a substantial increase in wages, which were tied to a productivity index. Samant was a medical doctor who knew nothing about economics and thought that his recipe would work in the textile industry just as it had done in the automobile industry. He was a charismatic leader and inspired the workers to continue their strike, which started in 1982, for eighteen months. (His life ended tragically when he was openly gunned down by gangsters in 1997.) The result of the strike which he had led was perverse: the workers shifted to the powerlooms in order to earn a living and the mill-owners procured cloth from these power looms and marketed it. By the time the strike ended the powerlooms had taken over most of the production and the mills were ‘sick’.

The phenomenon of a ‘sick mill’ can only be understood in the Indian context. Elsewhere a sick mill would go bankrupt and close down. In India, however, where there are no unemployment benefits, laid-off workers are politically dangerous and therefore the government will nurse sick mills to keep them alive even if they cease to produce anything. The mill-owners soon learned to make a profit out of being sick. The Reserve Bank of India sanctioned favourable loans for such sick mills. Clever manipulators could siphon off enough money from such loans and use it for other purposes. The production of mill-made cloth declined steeply under such conditions, from about 3.4 to 2 billion metres in the decade of the 1980s. In the same period the production of powerlooms increased from 5 to 11.4 billion metres.

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by Joel | 21 August 2008 · 6:37 am

African-Soviet Parallels before and after 1989

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 378-379, 385-387:

By the end of the 1980s, not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power. They included Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, after twenty years in office; Cameroon’s Ahmadu Ahidjo, after twenty-two years in office; and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, after twenty-three years in office….

Out of a list of fifty African countries in 1989, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships. Opposition parties were illegal in thirty-two states. Elections, when held, served mainly to confirm the incumbent president and his party in power. In twenty-nine countries, over the course of 150 elections held between 1960 and 1989, opposition parties were never allowed to win a single seat. Only three countries – Senegal, the tiny state of Gambia and Botswana – sustained multi-party politics, holding elections on a regular basis that were considered reasonably free and fair. Botswana, in particular, stood out as an example of a liberal democracy, tolerant of opposition activity, where the rule of law was held in respect and where economic development proceeded apace.

Yet a new wind of change was stirring across Africa. It was driven in part by widespread discontent with the corruption, incompetence and stifling oppression of Big Man rule, in part by resentment over rising unemployment, falling living standards and austerity measures that African governments were forced to implement in return for international assistance. Students were at the forefront of a wave of protests that erupted in one country after another, but other urban groups – businessmen, professionals, churchmen, labour unions and civil servants – soon joined in, demanding not just redress of economic grievances but political reform.

Events abroad, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, affected the clamour for change. From the mid-1980s, as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’, the Soviet Union began to retreat from Africa, no longer willing or able to sustain client states that had relied upon Soviet largesse for survival. With the demise of Marxism-Leninism in Europe came its demise in Africa. When Ethiopia’s Mengistu went to Moscow in 1988 to ask for more military hardware, Gorbachev turned him down, telling him he needed to reach a negotiated settlement to the wars in Eritrea and Tigray. Having lost Soviet sponsorship and confronted by rebel advances, Mengistu renounced Marxism-Leninism and embraced the idea of a multi-party system in the hope of avoiding defeat at the hands of the rebels. The outbreak of mass street demonstrations in Eastern Europe starting in the spring of 1989 and culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the departure of European dictators like Ceausescu in Romania and Honecker in East Germany provided potent examples of what ‘people’s power’ could achieve. One-party regimes now looked outmoded, in Africa as much as in Europe. Even Julius Nyerere, the most articulate spokesman for one-party systems in Africa, felt obliged to modify his support. ‘To view a one-party system in almost religious terms is wrong; he said in February 1990 after visiting Leipzig in East Germany. ‘We Tanzanians have one party as a historical necessity. But this is not a kind of divine decree. It is not proper to treat a person who floats the idea of a multi-party system as someone who has committed treason.’

The end of the Cold War, moreover, changed the West’s attitudes towards Africa. Western governments no longer had strategic interests in propping up repressive regimes merely because they were friendly to the West. Along with the World Bank, they concluded that one-party regimes lacking popular participation constituted a serious hindrance to economic development and placed new emphasis on the need for democratic reform.

In June 1990 Britain declared that the distribution of its aid programme would henceforth favour countries ‘tending towards pluralism, public accountability, respect for the rule of law, human rights and market principles’. At a Franco-African summit at La Baule in June 1990, attended by thirty-three African delegations, twenty-two of which were led by heads of state, President Mitterrand stated that French aid would be dependent on efforts towards liberalisation. He warned: ‘French eagerness to offer development aid is bound to cool off in the case of authoritarian regimes which fail to heed the need for democratisation while regimes prepared to embark on the courageous path of democracy will continue to have our enthusiastic support.’

Previously, Franco-African summits had been known as lavish, back-slapping family gatherings, full of empty talk.

It seems clear in retrospect that Soviet models of governance and Soviet models of “development” were just as effective in strangling civil society and hollowing out the private sector in postcolonial Africa as they were in the ostensibly postimperial Soviet Union, leaving failed states awash in Kalashnikovs and ruled by gangsters to deal with the new expectations, dilapidated infrastructure, and diminished foreign subsidies of the 1990s, during which Africa experienced more than its share of Bosnias and Chechnyas (though with less artillery and more machetes than in their northern counterparts).

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Filed under Africa, Britain, democracy, Eastern Europe, France, USSR

by Joel | 18 August 2008 · 5:39 pm

Tanzania’s Economic Breakdown, 1970s

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 256-259:

The disruption caused by the ‘villagisation’ programme nearly led to catastrophe. Food production fell drastically, raising the spectre of widespread famine. Between 1974 and 1977 the deficit recorded in cereals was more than 1 million tons. Drought compounded the problem. The shortfall was made up with imports of food, but the country’s foreign exchange reserves were soon exhausted. In 1975 the government had to be rescued by grants, loans and special facilities arranged with the assistance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and by more than 200,000 tons of food aid. Far from helping Tanzania to become more self-reliant and to reduce its dependence on the international market economy, Nyerere‘s ujamaa programme made it dependent for survival on foreign handouts. Nor did the idea of communal farming take root. Although by 1979 some 90 per cent of the peasantry had been moved into ujamaa villages, a mere 5 per cent of agricultural output came from communal plots.

Other aspects of Nyerere’s socialist strategy were no more successful. His programme of state control spawned a multitude of state corporations that were inefficient, incompetently managed, overstaffed and mired in debt. By 1979 some three hundred parastatal organisations had been set up – state industries, state banks, state farms, state marketing boards, state shops. They were controlled by managers who acted more like bureaucrats than businessmen and ran their domains as civil service bureaucracies, exercising considerable patronage. Workers came to regard their jobs as guaranteed by the socialist state. In a candid speech in 1977 entitled ‘The Arusha Declaration Ten Years After’, Nyerere complained bitterly of the inefficiency, indifference and laziness of managers and workers in state-run enterprises. ‘It is essential that we should tighten up on industrial discipline. Slackness at work, and failure to give a hard day’s effort in return for wages paid, is a form of exploitation; it is an exploitation of the other members of society. And slackness has undoubtedly increased since the Arusha Declaration was passed.’

But state enterprises continued to operate in the same manner, incurring huge losses. Among the most notorious were ten state-owned crop authorities. The pyrethrum board, for example, spent more on its administrative costs in 1980 than the total value of the crop it purchased; the sisal board’s overheads in 1980 were higher than the amount Tanzania earned from exporting sisal. Farmers meanwhile were offered inadequate prices and faced long delays in payment, sometimes lasting up to one year, and eventually they resorted to using the black market or growing subsistence food. The production of export crops like sisal, cashew nuts and pyrethrum fell drastically in the 1970s.

By the end of the 1970s Tanzania was in dire straits. Its trade deficit was widening all the time: in 1980 exports covered only 40 per cent of the value of imports; its foreign debt had soared. With sharp increases in world oil prices, its terms of trade were constantly deteriorating. Oil imports, which used only 10 per cent of the value of exports in 1972, took 60 per cent in 1980; a ton of exported tea in 1970 bought 60 barrels of oil, but in 1980 only 4.5 barrels. The shortage of foreign currency hampered the running of factories and farms. For want of spare parts and materials, machinery and trucks were idle. Inflation and drought added to the toll. A shortage of basic commodities like soap, sugar and cooking oil and other consumer goods produced black markets, petty corruption and smuggling – magendo, as it was called. Manufacturing output in 1980 was reduced to less than one-third of capacity. Agriculture declined by 10 per cent between 1979 and 1982. National output between 1977 and 1982 declined by about one-third. The average standard of living between 1975 and 1983 fell by nearly 50 per cent. In a broadcast in December 1981 to mark the twentieth anniversary of Tanzania’s independence, Nyerere admitted: ‘We are poorer now than we were in 1972.’

Whatever difficulties Tanzania encountered, however, Nyerere held fast to his socialist strategy, dismissing all suggestions that the strategy itself might be at fault. He acknowledged that the country was neither socialist nor self-reliant, but he argued that government policy had prevented the worst excesses of capitalism, in particular the emergence of a rich and powerful elite. Comparing socialism to a vaccine, he said in 1977: ‘We are like a man who does not get smallpox because he has got himself vaccinated. His arm is sore and he feels sick for a while; if he has never seen what smallpox does to people, he may feel very unhappy during that period, and wish that he had never agreed to the vaccination.’ At a ruling party conference in 1982, Nyerere admitted that Tanzania had many ‘very serious’ and ‘very real’ problems, but socialism, he said, was not one of them. ‘We have good policies. We have good plans. We have good leadership.’

Throughout Nyerere’s tenure as president, few in Tanzania questioned the course on which he had embarked. It was held to be a matter of ideological faith. Indeed, no serious political discussion of any kind occurred. Under Tanzania’s one-party system, parliament remained impotent; the press muzzled. Real power lay in State House in Dar es Salaam, in party committees and with a ruling class of bureaucrats, all of them intolerant of opposition. Nyerere himself was by no means averse to using Tanzania’s Preventive Detention Act to silence political critics, and Tanzania for many years remained high on the list of African countries with political prisoners.

Much was achieved as a result of Nyerere’s efforts, notably in the fields of education, health and social services. Primary school enrolment increased from one-quarter of the school-age population to 95 per cent; adult literacy from 10 to 75 per cent; four in ten villages were provided with clean tap water, three in ten had clinics; life expectancy increased from forty-one years to fifty-one years.

Yet what progress was made was financed largely by foreign aid. During the 1970s Tanzania received no less than $3 billion, mostly from the West. In 1982 the annual level reached $600 million. Without such funds, Tanzania would have plunged into penury. Nyerere’s achievement, therefore, was related not to the success of his strategy, but to his ability to persuade foreign sponsors that his objectives were sincere.

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by Joel | 17 August 2008 · 12:33 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Gorin = Orimpikku

Japanese video reports about the Olympics often show the screen label 北京五輪 ‘Beijing Olympics’. I had assumed that the Japanese news media were simply following Chinese usage, with 五輪 gorin (‘5 rings/wheels’) being a clever and concise sound-symbol translation of the word Olympic, which is otherwise rendered more lengthily in Japanese katakana オリンピック. A Google search on 五輪 returns 18,600,000 possible results, while a search on オリンピック returns 27,000,000 results.

Well, it turns out that this usage of 五輪 for ‘Olympics’ is restricted to Japanese. The official Chinese homepage for the Beijing Olympics uses four characters strictly for their sound values, 奥林匹克 (ao-lin-pi-ke), a string that Google finds on 17,500,000 pages. Korean usage also relies on a phonetic transcription, 올림픽 (ol-lim-pik), with 23,300,000 Google results.

Beijing Olympics logo So it looks as if the Japanese may have coined the term 五輪 for ‘Olympics’, probably on the occasion of its 1964 Olympics. That headword shows up in my father’s battered old New Pocket Japanese-English Dictionary (Kenkyusha), which was revised in 1964 after first appearing in 1958. (Does anyone have an earlier edition?) It’s a clever coinage, with several positive allusions, but first I’d like to note that the Beijing Olympics logo also incorporates a bit of clever usage of Chinese characters. The stylized image of a runner strongly evokes the character 京 jing (‘capital’) of Beijing (‘north capital’), and the logos for the various event types also evoke the old Chinese seal scripts widely used in decorative engraving from as early as the Han dynasty.

I emailed Matt of No-sword about this, and he suggested that one positive association of 五輪 is Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings (五輪書), which involves competitive strategy and tactics and is sometimes translated as The Art of War. Indeed, many of the Chinese-language search results for 五輪 referred to that book. Other Chinese results referred to “5-wheel” (off-road 4WD) vehicles, the 5th round of 6-party talks, and the popular Japanese singer Itsuwa (‘5-rings’) Mayumi (also known as Wulun Zhengong in Chinese). Just about the only Chinese-language usage I could find of 五輪 for Olympics was by a Chinese blogger in Japan.

A more spiritual association of 五輪 occurs in 五輪塔 (gorintō), the 5-element pagoda. And 五輪 is also homophonous with 五倫 (Jp. gorin, Ch. wǔlún), the essential 5 relationships of Confucianism.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been watching far more of the Olympics than I had planned, and I must say that I am most impressed by the good sportsmanship of the athletes from both the host country and the largest guest country. It’s a big improvement over the behavior of both such parties during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. (And congratulations to Constantina Tomescu-Dita! Her gutsy move paid off.)

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by Joel | 15 August 2008 · 10:50 pm

Stalin Reinstates the Church, 1942-43

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 233-236:

Unlike Stalin, who suffered a mental collapse when the reality of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union penetrated his state of denial, on the very day of the attack metropolitan Sergei sent a message to every Orthodox parish. It reminded the Russian faithful of the heroic deeds of their ancestors, and of the saints Alexander Nevsky and Dimitri Donskoi, who had rescued Holy Russia in past crises: ‘Our Orthodox Church has always shared the fate of the people. It has always borne their trials and cherished their successes. It will not desert the people now … The Church of Christ blesses all the Orthodox defending the sacred frontiers of our Motherland. The Lord will grant us victory.’ … When Stalin did finally address the nation on 3 July, he spoke in the uncharacteristic tones of ‘Brothers and sisters! My dear friends!’ whose religious accents were unmistakable. He may have mentioned Lenin, but the radio address was much more like a simple priest sounding the village tocsin. In October, patriarch Sergei wrote a further address, as the Germans came within sixty miles of the capital. He condemned clergy who had defected to the enemy, notably metropolitan Voskresensky who had been despatched to the Baltic States before the war as part of a wider attempt to exploit Orthodoxy to integrate the newly acquired states into the Red Empire. On 11 November, Stalin harangued troops on Red Square as German troops battled their way towards suburban Moscow, invoking Nevsky, Donskoi, Suvarov and Kutusov, realising that common or garden patriotism and religion had greater mobilising potential than Marxist-Leninism. Typically, patriarch Sergei had been dragged from his sickbed a few days before and deported to Ulyanovsk.

Of the other two remaining Orthodox hierarchs, metropolitan Nikolai was brought back from the Ukraine to Moscow, where he became the regime’s main clerical foreign policy propagandist, while metropolitan Alexei rallied the faithful during the terrible siege of Leningrad. The regime made a few cautious and parsimonious concessions to a Church that played a major role in maintaining wartime morale. It tolerated rather than encouraged religion. Overt anti-religious propaganda may have ceased for the duration, perhaps in rueful recognition of Pius XII’s leading role in persuading sceptical US Catholic bishops of the legitimacy of their government’s Lend-Lease aid to the Russian people despite his predecessor’s comprehensive damnation of Communism, a stance that militates against the notion that anti-Communism was the overriding obsession of his pontificate. Sunday was restored as a day of rest, and artists were allowed to repair damaged icons. In 1942 the presses of the almost defunct League of the Militant Godless were used to produce a tome called The Truth about Religion in Russia, in which the weary remnants of a Church the Soviets had tried to destroy were displayed for foreign consumption. Beyond this there were no concessions. At Easter 1942 churches in Moscow were allowed to hold candlelit processions as the curfew was raised for a night. This was a meagre gesture given the enormous role that the Churches had played in the war effort. Starting with Alexei in Leningrad, sermons became appeals to donate money to the war effort. By January 1943, over three million rubles had been raised in Leningrad alone. Another five hundred thousand rubles funded a tank column named after Dimitri Donskoi. By the end of the war, the Church had contributed 150 million rubles.

In November 1942 metropolitan Nikolai became the first cleric since 1917 to have an official function, when he joined a government commission to investigate Nazi war crimes on Soviet territory. That included putting his name to accusations that the Germans had carried out massacres at Katyn for which the NKVD had been responsible. In January 1943, patriarch Sergei sent a telegram to Stalin requesting permission to open a central bank account where the Church could deposit such monies. When Stalin assented, relaying the gratitude of the Red Army, the Church effectively received corporate legal recognition for the first time. It was a sign of the times that in the same month a senior party official in distant Krasnoyarsk formally received a bishop, who was also a brilliant surgeon, the man still being a prisoner at the time. In September, the exiled Sergei was surprised to find himself brought back to Moscow and installed in the former residence of the German ambassador. At 9 p.m. the following night, he and metropolitans Alexei and Nikolai, were driven to the Kremlin for a session with Molotov and Stalin. The former improbably asked what the Church might need. Recovering from the shock of this request, Sergei said the reopening of churches and seminaries, a Church council and the election of a patriarch. As if it had nothing to do with him, Stalin gently inquired: ‘And why don’t you have cadres? Where have they disappeared to?’ Rather than pointing out that most of these ‘cadres’ had died in camps, Sergei quickly joked: ‘One of the reasons is that we train a person for the priesthood, and he becomes the Marshal of the Soviet Union.’ This set Stalin off on a monologue about his days as a seminarian which went on until 3 a.m. Stalin helped the elderly Sergei down the stairs, saying, ‘Your Grace, this is all I can do for you at the present time,’ although he also appointed Georgi Karpov as the regime’s liaison with the Orthodox Church. Karpov was the NKVD official who had arrested and shot most of the clergy, though Stalin added, ‘I know Karpov, he is an obliging subordinate.’ At some point in the course of that night there was oral agreement regarding the future status of the Orthodox Church. Within four days nineteen bishops were found who elected Sergei patriarch, successor to patriarch Tikhon who had died in 1925. They issued a joint exhortation to Christians around the world to unite against Hitler.

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by Joel | 15 August 2008 · 2:17 pm

Vichy, 1940: ‘Heaven-sent’ Defeat

From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 239-240:

Vichy used much of the moralising rhetoric that had been favoured by the French Catholic Church in the century since the Revolution. The regime denounced the ‘esprit de jouissance’ (pleasure-seeking) that was allegedly responsible for the defeat, promising ‘moral recovery’. This resonated with a Catholic tradition of moralising major events, as in 1789, 1870, and 1914….

The Catholic hierarchy converted a complex national disaster into a moralising myth, which suited what the Jesuit Henri de Lubac called the ‘masochistic’ spirit of those times. Victory, some senior ecclesiastics argued, would have led to further moral degradation; defeat afforded a ‘heaven-sent’ opportunity for regeneration. Victory in 1918 had proved a wasted opportunity; perhaps 1940 could be different? The Catholic writer Claudel regarded defeat as a form of deliverance, confiding in his diary: ‘France has been delivered after sixty years from the yoke of the anti-Catholic Radical party (teachers, lawyers, Jews, Freemasons). The new government invokes God … There is hope of being delivered from universal suffrage and parliamentarism.’

Similar attitudes seem quite prevalent in the West these days, especially among our hordes of jet-setting Jeremiahs, but one wonders how many Japanese citizens felt the same way on this day 63 years ago. How many members of the ruling elite of Imperial Japan felt let down by their masses and determined to teach them a lesson? Certainly a good many ordinary citizens were ready to sacrifice their elites in return for peace.

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by Joel | 10 August 2008 · 10:10 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Kabure, Hamanasu

Sometime during my high school years in Kobe, Japan, I heard the term 西洋かぶれ seiyō kabure used to describe Japanese people who were ardent Westernizers. I never learned the real etymology of kabure, which I thought came from the verb kaburu (被る) ‘to wear (on one’s head), cover one’s head’, so that seiyō kabure suggested to me people who donned their Western thinking caps rather than their Eastern (東洋 tōyō) ones.

It wasn’t until I decided to blog about an extremely seiyō kabure establishment at the top of Mt. Hiei, one of Japan’s leading early centers of tōyō kabure (when it was importing Buddhism from China 1200 years ago), that I discovered a more direct source for kabure. It’s from kabureru ‘to break out in a rash; be (noxiously) influenced by (lacquer, poison ivy, communism, Western goods/values, etc.)’. However, I suspect that kaburu ‘to cover one’s head’ and kabureru ‘to be covered (with rash)’ might ultimately be related etymologically, even though one can obscure the connection by writing kabureru with an unrelated kanji combination, 気触 lit. ‘feeling+touch’. Perhaps the native Japanese root kabu in both forms even relates to the now various kabu that mean ‘head’ (頭), ‘stump, stock’ (株), or ‘root, turnip’ (蕪).

The place that set me off on this etymological goose-chase was the Garden Museum Hiei, which I visited because I wanted a view of Lake Biwa and because I enjoy botanical gardens. It was well worth the serendipitous visit. (I attended 2nd grade at Camp Botanical Garden in Kyoto in 1956-57, the last year before the U.S. Army closed the base and the land reverted to its earlier use, at which point several missionary families ordered Calvert School materials and started up Kyoto Christian Day School, the predecessor of what is now Kyoto International School.)

The Garden’s Rose Gate faces the Kyoto side of the mountain and the Eizan Ropeway station. The Provence Gate at the other end faces the Lake Biwa side and the parking lot and bus station. I entered through the rose garden, but never made it as far as the herb garden and the Provence Gate. I was especially entranced by the water lily pond with bridges and arbors designed to replicate scenes painted by Claude Monet, one of the most Japonisme-kabure of French Impressionists. It was a Japanese tribute to French Japonisme. Carefully placed throughout the garden are large replicas on easels of famous paintings by Monet and Renoir (above all), but also Manet, Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh, and other masters of Impressionism.

It was nearly noon and I was hot and hungry, so I soon repaired to the Café de Paris for a leisurely lunch, where I ordered a bowl of Renoir’s favorite cold turnip (kabu!) soup, a plate of surprisingly familiar “European-style” curry rice, and a half bottle of imported chardonnay. I was the only seiyōjin ‘Westerner’ in the place, but perhaps not the most seiyō kabure. A nice selection of bread rolls and a spaghetti ratatouille were the only other foods on the menu.

On my way back out, I dawdled in the rose garden, where I noticed a sign for Rosa rugosa, the Japanese rose with the incongruous name hamanasu (浜茄子) lit. ‘seashore eggplant’. Not only was the plant itself awfully far from the nearest seashore, but the kanji for the ‘eggplant’ part of its name is another case where the kanji has no relation to the native Japanese reading (nasu or nasubi), only to the Chinese (Mandarin) reading qiezi (茄子), which shows up on so many Chinese restaurant menus in 魚香茄子 yuxiang qiezi lit. ‘fish-flavor eggplant’, usually translated as ‘garlic eggplant’ (one of my regular favorites).

UPDATE: I queried Matt of No-sword about the likely etymologies of the various kabu-. He confirmed that the various nouns kabu that mean ‘head; stump, stock; root, turnip’ are generally thought to come from the same etymon, but that the verbs are not likely related.

Ono Susumu says that /kabureru/ is related to /kabi/ as in mould, which kind of makes sense, but I can’t find anyone who backs him up. (The Nihongogendaijiten does list a couple of unreliable sources claiming it’s from 蚊触, ‘mosquito-touch’, which is pretty amusing.) 香触 [‘fragrance-touch’] is also common.

/kaburu/ is originally from /kagafuru/ -> /kaufuru/ -> /kaburu/ … but that was Nara-Heian times, and I don’t think /kabureru/ is attested pre-Edo, so I suppose there could be a connection … although, I can’t really see how ‘come out in a rash’ could come out of ‘cover one’s head’.

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by Joel | 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.

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’).

I 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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by Joel | 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 Joel | 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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