Alaska blogger Ben Muse has an interesting post about an Alaskan ghost village on King Island off Nome in the Bering Sea that includes links to an absolutely priceless photographic travelogue from the time when the town was still a thriving community.
A Pacific Islands eyebrow flash to Geitner Simmons of Regions of Mind
Filed under U.S.
Shortly before Christmas, three Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) missionaries were slain in Palau. The Republic of Palau is as close as anywhere in Micronesia to two hotspots of radical Islamist guerrilla violence against Christians: the southern Philippines, where Abu Sayyef has “kidnapped foreigners for ransom, often killing them in grisly fashion” since the 1990s; and eastern Indonesia, where the Laskar Jihad waged holy war against the numerous Christian communities there during 1999-2002. (Laskar Jihad reportedly disbanded in the wake of the Bali bombing, but it appears to have simply relocated to West Papua.)
Do these killings mark the spread of terrorist groups into Palau? Apparently not. Instead they signal the spread of another scourge already well-known in urban parts of Asia and the Pacific: crystal meth. Palau has an ice problem, and the killing seems to fit the all too typical pattern of a crackhead burglar surprised in the act.
More on international borders: The DePaiva family members killed were SDA missionaries from Brazil by way of Andrews University in Michigan. Their memorial service was held in Texas, where DePaiva relatives live. Justin Hirosi, the person charged with the killing, is a Palauan whose surname comes from the Japanese given name of one of his paternal ancestors (a pattern common in Micronesia). Audy MacDonald Maldangasang, the fugitive “ice” dealer wanted in Palau who was just arrested in Saipan had arrived there from South Korea in 2002 after fleeing Palau in 2001.
More on international religions: The Micronesian states allow admirable freedom of religion. The State Department’s latest Religious Freedom Report gives the following breakdowns for the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM: Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Yap), and the Republic of Palau.
In round numbers, about 55% of the population of the RMI belongs to the United Church of Christ (formerly Congregational), and about 25% belong to the Assembly of God. Fewer than 10% are Roman Catholic, about 2% are Mormon, and fewer than 1% each are SDA, Full Gospel, and Baha’i. Just under 3% belong to another Assembly of God church, Bukot Nan Jesus. There is a large Marshallese community in Arkansas, where the Assembly of God is “over-represented” and its adherents are more likely than others to migrate between Arkansas and the RMI.
In the FSM, most Protestant denominations, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, are present on the four states of the country. On the island of Kosrae, 99 percent of the population are members of the United Church of Christ. On the island of Pohnpei, clan divisions mark religious boundaries in some measure. More Protestants live on the Western side of the island, while more Catholics live on the Eastern side, and most immigrants are Filipino Catholics. There is a small group of Buddhists on Pohnpei. On Chuuk and Yap, approximately 60 percent are Catholic and 40 percent are Protestant.
In Palau, there are 19 Christian denominations. The Roman Catholic Church is the dominant religion, and approximately 65 percent of the population are members. There are Bangladeshi Muslims in the country, and a primarily Catholic Filipino labor force (approximately 3,700 persons).
Filed under Indonesia
Mori Koben was born in 1869, the son of a samurai from Tosa (now Kochi) in Shikoku, Japan, and died “King of the South Seas” in Chuuk (Truk), Micronesia in 1945.
It is said that as a young man, Mori was a fervent admirer of his fellow Tosa countryman, Itagaki Taisuke, the melodramatic champion of the People’s Rights Movement of early Meiji and an early advocate of an aggressive Japanese influence on the Asian continent, particularly in Korea. If true, this may explain how Mori in his youth became criminally involved in the so-called Osaka incident of 1885. In brief, this dramatic political scandal centered on the plans of Japanese political dissidents, frustrated by their government’s abandonment of the reformist cause in neighboring Korea, to cooperative with the members of a Korean reform party for the overthrow of the Korean government and its replacement by a “progressive” regime. The leader in the conspiracy was Oi Kentarô, a former samurai, in whose person was combined an explosive mixture of explosive liberalism and unrestrained chauvinism…. Young Mori was caught up in a police dragnet, but, as a minor, was quickly released.
After further misadventures, he signed on to become the Micronesian trading representative of the Ichiya Company. In 1892, he arrived in Moen, Chuuk [Truk] aboard the Tenryû Maru after a stop in the Bonin Islands. He was 22, all alone, and armed only with a sword and two daggers.
Perceiving that the islands, particularly Moen, were in a continual state of internecine warfare, Mori soon offered his services as military advisor to Manuppis, the most important chief on the island. Armed only with a spear, Mori led the complete rout of an opposing Trukese clan, a victory that earned him the lifelong friendship of Chief Manuppis and, eventually, the chief’s daughter in marriage.
They prospered and had twelve children. When the Germans took over in 1900, Mori was the only Japanese trader in Chuuk to escape expulsion for trading in guns and liquor. A Japanese trading ship ended his isolation in 1907.
By the time Japanese ships dropped anchor there in the huge lagoon at Truk in the autumn of 1914, Mori, by character and exploit, was already a legend among the small Japanese community there.
By 1940, the Japanese press was referring to him as “King of the South Seas” and the government awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure. However,
Mori had little use for the aggressive bombast of Japanese propagandists, and he genuinely feared the coming of the war. Yet, fiercely loyal to his country, he had actively assisted in the military preparations and had drawn upon decades of goodwill among Trukese relatives and friends to help muster labor and support for the war effort. But he was an old man with failing powers, and by the time the war broke out he had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side and left him unable to walk. He became a convalescent at his home on Tol, cared for there by his family. In the summer of 1943, he began to have hallucinations in which he saw his country’s utter defeat. His mind began to wander and, by the time American planes roared over the reefs to launch their devastating attack on Truk in 1944, Mori had slipped into senility.
By August 1945, he had slipped into a coma. He died on the evening of the 23rd, 8 days after Japan had surrendered.
SOURCE: Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Micronesia (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1988), pp. 26-33, 195-197, 299-300.
Filed under Japan
I’d say that in the Michiana area — we’re really close to Michigan, so we’re called Michiana for MICHigan and indIANA — there’s close to about 100 Korean families. Many of the Korean families come together through the two churches, Michiana Korean Church and Korean Grace Baptist. A lot of families and students come and go because they’re either students or professors at the University of Notre Dame. To give you an idea about my life among Koreans … I don’t have one. In my high school graduating class of 700, I was the only Korean. But although I mostly hang out with non-Koreans, my two best friends are Korean. Outside of organized gatherings, such as church, there really isn’t a large youth and teenage or adult community of Koreans.
The focus of this post is not entirely in jest. The article linked here makes a few points worth emphasizing about the current Korean diaspora in the U.S., which just finished celebrating its centennial in 2003. While the first Korean immigrants came in groups to work on Hawaiian plantations, and later waves filled the Koreatowns of big cities like LA, NYC, or Honolulu, many are scattered across small-town America, arriving as G.I. wives, individual adoptees (who now have their own magazine, Korean Quarterly), or the relatively isolated families of academics at small, rural colleges or pastors of small, rural, “entry-level” churches. It’s a different story now, of course, at large American universities, like Indiana University, where Korean and Korean American students are amply represented.
The other reason for the focus on Indiana is that it provides an excuse to profile a dear departed friend, K.C. Kim, a doctor who spent most of his career at Indiana University Hospital before retiring to Hawai‘i, but who was born in the far northeast (near Ch’ôngjin) of a unified but Japanese-occupied Korea, close enough to Russia that the words for ‘bread’ and ‘matches’ were borrowed from Russian rather than from Japanese. K.C.’s first memorable glimpse of European women swimming (not in the nude!) was near the resort run by the Russian emigres named Yankovsky not far from where he grew up. His father was a merchant who was able to send his son to the Japanese medical school in Taegu, in the southeast, where he boarded with a rich family that not only had many servants, but treated them in a high-handed manner that scandalized K.C. The class structure was far more rigid in the south than it was on the northeastern frontier. He also found the kimchee rather hot for his taste. (Just as in the U.S., Korean food is blandest in the northeast and hottest in the southwest.) After 1945, he fled into the mountains, but was shot at, captured, and escorted north. He finally managed to escape south during the Korean War, and then find refuge in the U.S., where he not only completed medical school a second time in a third language (in Chicago), but also acquired a Ph.D. (in anesthesiology, IIRC).
K.C. showed up one day at the Korean studies center where I used to work, offering to help organize the periodicals in its small library. He and I quickly became friends. To a certain extent, we had shared the experience of growing up “in Japan”–although in vastly different eras and circumstances. But he has been educated in Japanese, not Korean, and he read Japanese newspapers and magazines with greater interest and facility than he did those in his “own” language. I would often watch the (subtitled) Japanese news on a local TV channel, and we would discuss current events in Japan and Korea, arguing regularly about one of his favorite topics, “Asian values”–which, like “family values,” I saw more as a political agenda than a uniquely possessed value system). Both us shared a distaste for traditional Confucian class structure and for excessive nationalism. I preferred rice for lunch, while he would always opt for a ham or turkey sandwich with mustard–no doubt conditioned by his many years of eating in hospital cafeterias. He was amazingly devoid of false pride–especially for a Ph.D. or an M.D.–and never hesitated to help with whatever menial task we were doing. Although he and I both suffered many indignities and insults at the hands of the nasty secretary there at the time, he never retaliated or complained to her boss (as I regularly did). Even when stricken with pancreatic cancer, he managed to take a detached scholarly as well as intense personal interest in an experimental new treatment program run by colleagues in LA.
At K.C.’s memorial service, his son remembered how on weekends during his childhood in the 1960s, K.C. would get the kids up early, bundle them into the family car, and drive all the way to Chicago to enjoy dim sum. I wonder how far you’d have to drive from Bloomington nowadays.
Filed under Korea
Dean Jorge Bocobo’s Philippine Commentary has an interesting take on a national hero.
JOSE RIZAL is a strange kind of national hero. He … was basically a highly educated Spaniard of the late 19th Century. He was born and raised in the Philippines to a prominent indio family who were nevertheless tenants of a land-owning religious order near Calamba, an old Spanish colonial town on the southern shores of Laguna de Bai, south east of Manila. He was educated by Jesuit priests of the Ateneo de Manila (a Catholic school and university still considered among the creme de la creme of Philippine education; and by Dominicans of the famous Royal Pontifical University of Santo Tomas–established a decade before Harvard University, though slightly less, err, endowed)….
Jose Rizal was freed by his mastery of the Spanish language, and several other modern languages, from the purposive obscurantism of the colonial friars and their dogmatic theocracy. He escaped the intentional benighting of the Philippines and her people by absorbing the best of Western culture and civilization to finally see Spain and the Philippines in the total context of the past and present, and also, of future possibilities. That is what made Rizal dangerous, and sealed his fate at the Spanish Taliban’s hands–he had become a Prometheus for a people that had long suspected the existence of fire, from ancestral memories and sentiments inherent to the human genome.
Almost all of Rizal is in Spanish, though he also competently wrote in French, German, English, Italian, though his output in these languages was minimal compared to his obras Español. But even in translation, Rizaliana surpasses every other Filipino who calls himself a writer. BAR NONE! … And Rizal wrote all the time, about everything. Like an obsessive blogger in the Nineteenth Century with the only blogspot in the archipelago–the only one who could read, write and publish with panache and nobility and courage and surpassing mastery of the tools available to him.
Rizal’s two most famous novels are Noli Me Tangere (Latin for ‘touch me not’) and El Filibusterismo (Spanish for ‘subversion’, but a word of many etymological twists and turns; scroll down at the link). The links at the titles are to a website containing the 1987 English translation printed in the Philippines of a 1983 work in German by an Austrian wartime exile about Ferdinand Blumentritt, another Austrian who was “Jose Rizal’s closest friend and companion.”
Ein Handkuß zu El Filibustero Wretchard at Belmont Club.
Filed under Spain
The cash economies of small Pacific Island states these days are generally based on MIRAB, that is, a combination of Migration, Remittances (from those migrants), Aid (from donor nations), and Bureaucracy (salaries funded by that aid). However, this was not always so. A photo essay added in December 2003 to the Micronesian Seminar‘s splendid website provides a glimpse of The Era of Big Business, when the government of Micronesia was self-supporting.
It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when the islands had a favorable trade balance and turned a sizeable profit. In the 1930s, under Japanese administration, Micronesia was doing a booming business. There was the giant sugar industry and phosphate mines, but its exports also included katsuobushi [dried bonito flakes], starch, pineapples, and marine products like shell and pearls. This was a period when island exports paid the cost of running the colonial government. Thousands of Japanese immigrants provided the bulk of the labor, while islanders watched the marvels worked on their islands.
There was a high price to pay, however. Micronesians ended up Strangers in Their Own Land. Most of the immigrants to Micronesia came not from the main islands of Japan, but from the Ryukyus (Okinawa).
After 1925, the Okinawans came to constitute not merely the largest bloc within the Japanese colonial population, but an absolute majority of Japanese settlers, whose growth outran even the ballooning rate of overall Japanese immigration into Micronesia.
Most of the Okinawans worked in the sugar industry on Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas, where by 1940 they constituted about 90% of the population of nearly 50,000. Immigrants also accounted for about two-thirds of the population of Palau, where the phosphate mines were. By 1940, the population of Micronesia was less than 50% of Micronesian origin. As war approached, large numbers of Koreans also arrived in labor battalions to fortify the islands against attack.
SOURCES: [above] Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988). [below] Lin Poyer, Suzanne Falgout, Laurence Marshall Carrucci, The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).
EPILOGUE: Some Palauans “credit their reputation as hard-working entrepreneurs to what they learned from watching Japanese business success” (p. 345), but on a larger scale a whole generation of Micronesian leaders educated under the Japanese was sidelined.
Those who came of age in 1940 looked forward to participating in a thriving economy and a global network as part of the Japanese empire. By 1945 … many discovered they were too old to participate in the new order: too old to learn English in the new schools, too old to be selected for the programs the U.S. Navy set up to train leaders who would identify with American interests and turn to American culture as a guide to how they wanted to live. It was a difficult time for these mature and ambitious men and women who were approaching the peak of their productive years. [p. 326]
About a decade ago, Donald N. Clark, a former Presbyterian missionary kid who grew up in Pyongyang, published a fascinating chapter entitled “Vanished Exiles: The Prewar Russian Community in Korea” in a fairly obscure book of conference papers. A couple of current Russian exiles in Korea and Australia have made that poignant tale available on the web. (The chapter later ended up in Clark’s book entitled Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience, 1900-1950 (Eastbridge, 2003).
[The] nineteenth century wave of railroad development brought many kinds of Russians to East Asia: officials, railroad workers, miners, laborers, adventurers, pensioners, priests, and hunters. They represented various ethnic backgrounds: some were Caucasian, while others were Mongol, Siberian, and even Turkic. Beginning in the 1890s, a certain number of them migrated via Manchuria into northern Korea, where they turned up in small provincial towns supporting themselves by whatever trade they could find. In fact, throughout the history of their community down to World War II, the thing that distinguishes them most dramatically from other Westerners in Korea (if a Turkic Russian can be called “Western”) was their complete lack of any institutional support: they had no medical plans or pensions or access to special schools for their children and were entirely dependent on whatever opportunities they found wherever they happened to settle. They were truly “displaced persons,” at the mercy of the international political currents in the early twentieth century….
The Bolsheviks had not yet appeared in the Far East when Sergei and Natalya Tchirkine reached Seoul, and the Russian compound there was still in Czarist hands. The Tchirkines were assigned an apartment next to the Orthodox Church, alongside several other stalwarts of the congregation. Sergei found a desk job in the Bank of Chosen. Natalya took a diamond ring which Sergei had bought in Bukhara, sold the stone, went to Harbin for a course in hairdressing, and opened a parlor in Chôngdong. Twin sons, Cyril and Vladimir, were born in 1924, and Natalya adjusted by working at home giving music lessons and running a dressmaking studio. Sergei moved to the tourist bureau to handle foreign-language correspondence and edit publicity. He later began teaching languages at Keijo Imperial University and Seoul Foreign School. These combined labors earned enough to maintain a dignified existence as leaders of the Russian community in Seoul….
Without a doubt, the most remarkable pocket of Russians in prewar Korea was a place called Novina, a resort near Ch’ôngjin [Jp. Seishin], maintained for more than twenty years by the White Russian exile George Yankovsky, sometimes called “Asia’s Greatest Tiger Hunter.” George Yankovsky’s father Mikhail Jankovskii originally was a Polish nobleman who was exiled to Siberia by the Russians when they crushed the Polish rebellion in the 1860s. In Siberia Jankovskii remade himself as a Russian named Yankovsky, found his way to the Bay of Posset south of Vladivostok, a rugged and unoccupied seacoast where he established himself in what might be called a feudal fief, which he named Sidemy, the “Sitting Place.” There he set about building up a herd of the little Sika deer whose antlers were so prized by declining Chinese men. His neighbors were mainly wolves and bandits, the notorious Manchurian honghuzi, or “Red Beards,” so Yankovsky also recruited a private army–of Koreans, as it turned out, because he mistrusted all Chinese as potential honghuzi. With his Korean “subjects,” as they called themselves, he hunted–in no particular order–bandits, wolves, tigers, leopards, and boar, becoming a first-class naturalist in the process. In fact, items in the flora and fauna of the Ussuri country still bear his name: the swan Cygnus jankowskii, the bunting Emberiza jankowskii, and the beetle Captolabrus jankowskii, among others….
Novina lasted nineteen years, from 1926 to 1945, during which White Russian communities all across East Asia used it as a prime vacation spot. The Yankovskys drummed up business with a brochure, which they mailed to Harbin, Tianjin, and Shanghai. Ironically, however, few Westerners within Korea ever paid much attention to Novina or even knew of its existence. This was partly because most of them used English, spoke no Russian, and preferred their own resorts at Sôrae and Wonsan. It was also because the Yankovskys started out regarding Novina as an “invitation-only” place for their far-flung relatives and friends and not a public place. As years passed it became more commercial, with rental cabins on the hillside, but it never lost the family flavour. It remained George Yankovsky’s homestead, first and foremost: his farm, his deer and horse pasture, and his hunting base. On a cliff above the river he built the family’s main house, an interesting building constructed around the trunk of a great tree that appeared to be holding it in place. Above the house he built a “Tower of the Ancestors,” a replica of one of the Sidemy towers, and next to this a lodge that was partly in a cave that the family used as a kind of Great Hall. Below, he stretched a chain bridge across the Chuûl [Jp. Shuotsu] River, and farther down he built a row of huts for his servants and farmhands. There were orchards for apples and pears, fields for vegetables, and hives for honey, all tended by Novina’s Korean workers, while the mountain forests furnished unlimited venison, pork, and pheasant. Evenings at Novina often featured dinners with as many as twenty people seated at the dining table, followed by vodka and storytelling by the fireplace in the cave.
George and Daisy Yankovsky’s children–daughters Muza and Victoria, and sons Valerii, Arsenii, and Yuri–grew up at Novina. As part of their Swiss Family Robinson existence the Yankovskys maintained a surprising standard of civilization. Educating children was the duty of Novina’s “home gymnasium” teacher who came from Harbin to teach in the camp’s Great Hall. Sunday services also took place there, with especially memorable observances for Easter. And summer was Novina’s theater season: Daisy’s family, the Sheverdloffs, had some stage background and her relatives in Shanghai were connected with White Russians in the entertainment business there. Many of these sought the coolness of Novina in the summer and amused themselves by organizing dramas. The cast depended on who was present and was filled out by ordinary guests and Yankovsky family and retainers….
When the Soviet Red Army swept into north-eastern Korea at the end of the war, they happened on the Yankovsky colony at Novina. The Reds had several grievances against the Whites, the most recent of which was the Yankovskys’ collaboration with the Japanese army. The Japanese had treated Yankovsky preferentially, letting him own land, trade supplies, run tourist resorts, and trek through military areas, all in return for supplying the Japanese army, paying taxes, and helping keep order among the Koreans. At first it was only interrogation: George and his son Arsenii were taken to headquarters and then released. Son Valerii returned to Novina from the homestead in Manchuria to work with younger brother Yuri as a “volunteer” interpreter for the Red Army, while Arsenii interpreted for the Southern Naval Defense Area (Yuzhnii Morskoi Oboronitel’nii Rayon, or YUZHMOR) at Ch’ôngjin and for the Kontrazuedba (military intelligence, also known as SMERSH, for smyert shpionam, “death to spies”). The motives of the Yankovsky brothers in working for the Reds were simple: as SMERSH explained the situation to Arsenii, the entire family would be punished unless they cooperated. So for survival’s sake the brothers went against their family’s strong anticommunist tradition and agreed to work for the Reds….
What traces remain of this almost-forgotten Russian community in prewar Korea? Though members of the community continued in South Korea through the Korean war and after, I know of only one who remains in place, if the rumours are correct, as an underworld figure in Namdaemun Market. In 1984, Father Boris Moon of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, now moved to Map’o and calling itself “Greek” Orthodox, told me there was one prewar Russian communicant left, a woman named “Tatiana,” but she would not grant me an interview.
The Yankovskys are scattered: Valerii is a poet in Moscow; “Andy Brown” [Arsenii, who worked as a spy] and Yuri are dead; and Muza and Victoria live in the California bay area. In 1991, Victoria and her son Orr Chistiakoff were invited by the local government in Vladivostok to rendezvous with Valerii at Sidemy, on the Bay of Posset, to unveil a statue of Mikhail Yankovsky and restore him to the status of pioneer and hero.
Natalya Tchirkine’s sons Vladimir and Cyril graduated with engineering degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and worked all their lives for Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco. Natalya followed her sons to California in time to escape the Korean War, and supported herself as a seamstress, living to the ripe old age of 96.
The best known descendant among these Russian exiles in Korea was the actor Yul Brynner (1920-1985), who told many a tall tale about his early life, some of which have been laid to rest by his son, Columbia University Prof. Rock Brynner, whose image-filled website includes a photo of Yul at 16 with dark, wavy hair (scroll all the way to the bottom).
Several of these exiles ended up in Japan, like the founders of the Morozoff chocolate dynasty, but many of their progeny ended up in California, like the journalist and sci-fi writer Alexander Besher.
UPDATE: The Marmot adds:
I have long been fascinated with the history of the Far East’s Russian exile community — they were as remarkable a group of individuals (and not always in a positive sense) as there has ever been in modern times. Coincidentally, one of these refugees, Victor Starfin, eventually ended up on the Japanese island of Hokkaido as a youth. Starfin grew up to become one of Japanese baseball’s greatest all-time pitchers, amassing a career record of 303-176 with a life-time ERA of 2.09 — mostly with the Yomiuri Giants. In 1939, he set Japan’s single-season win record was 42. Now, this wasn’t enough to prevent the Japanese from putting Starfin under house arrest during WW II on account of his Russian heritage, but they did make it up to him in the end, eventually enshrining the pitcher in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, where he joins career home-run leader Sadaharu Oh — who for reasons beyond my ken still carries a Taiwanese passport to this day, apparently — as the only two foreign players in the Hall. Of course, this assumes one doesn’t count Masaichi Kaneda, the greatest pitcher in Japanese history (the man holds Japan’s career win record despite playing much of his career for a shitty team) who just happened to be an ethnic Korean (and quite proud of it, it’s said).
The American Civil War reached into every major ocean. After the most successful Confederate raider of U.S. merchant shipping, the CSS Alabama, was sunk by the USS Kearsage off Cherbourg, France, in June 1864, The C.S. Navy hurriedly and secretly commissioned the CSS Shenandoah to attack merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Yankee whaling fleet in the Pacific. The Shenandoah sailed from Glasgow in October 1864 under the command of James Iredell Waddell of Pittsboro, NC (no apparent relation to Scott Waddle, the commander of the nuclear sub, USS Greenville, that sank the Japanese training ship, Ehime Maru, off Honolulu in 2001).
Although she was a steam ship with a retractable propeller, almost her entire voyage would be under sail. Her general mission was to capture and destroy American merchant ships. Her specific orders were to find the American whaling fleet operating in the Arctic Ocean and destroy it. It was hoped that this action would propel the owners of the vessels to lobby President Lincoln for an end to the war. The Confederacy was in a difficult position by this time and its leaders were looking for options other than a complete surrender. In order for the Shenandoah to locate the whaling fleet, she first had to secure whaling charts. These were the highly prized charts kept by whaling ships showing the location of whales sighted and hunted. The charts changed as the whales changed routes and new locations of whales were found. Captain Waddell knew he needed to locate current whaling charts to pinpoint the location of the whaling fleet.
Sailing into the Pacific, the Shenandoah learned that several whaling ships were at anchor in Pohnahtik Harbor, Pohnpei, Caroline Islands. The Shenandoah immediately sailed to Pohnahtik, arriving there April 1, 1865. There were four whalers at anchor when the Shenandoah arrived. All were headed for the Arctic whaling grounds and had stopped for reprovisioning and repairs. The Shenandoah sent boarding parties in small boats to each whaler, capturing all four vessels, and set about stripping the ships of anything of value including the coveted whaling charts. The four ships were burned between April 1 and April 15 and with the whaling charts the Shenandoah left the harbor and sailed to the Arctic Ocean. She located and destroyed 40 vessels, nearly the entire American whaling fleet out that season. All of these ships, including those at Pohnahtik, were captured after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, signaling the effective end of the Confederate States of America. It was not until August, 1865, that the crew of the Shenandoah learned of the capture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the official end of the war. Rather than surrender in some American port, Captain Waddell decided to return the ship to England and sailed around Cape Horn, thus circumnavigating the globe.
The extract above is from the website of the L.J. Skaggs and Mary D. Skaggs Foundation, which funded an “off-beat grant” to archaeologists at the University of Hawai‘i to salvage the ships sunk in Pohnpei. (The latest off-beat grant is to the University of Iowa to support the production of The Devil’s Rope, a documentary video on the history and development of barbed wire. Take it away, Regions of Mind!)
MacKenzie J. Gregory and the Naval Historical Society of Australia have fuller accounts of the exploits of the Shenandoah and other Confederate merchant raiders, the French Cannings genealogical website has extracts from the ship’s logs and other documents pertaining to the Shenandoah, and the Hawaii School Reports website has an essay on the impact of the Civil War on the whaling and the sugar industries in Hawai‘i, citing Mark Twain’s reports published in the Sacramento Daily Union in 1866.
Twain points out that Louisiana plantations produced at most 1,500 pounds of sugar per acre, while in Hawaii the average production was 10,000 pounds per acre. Writing in 1866, Twain also noted how much money was spent on customs duties to import sugar into the U.S.
The Civil War sealed the fate of the American whaling fleet, and threatened the economy of Hawaii. That war also sparked a demand for sugar and Hawaiian planters responded. Sugar growing rapidly replaced supplying the whaling fleet as the business of Hawaii. The high duties on sugar also created a reason for planters to want Hawaii to become part of the United States.
Hawai‘i sugar production soared from 5 to 10 to 15 to 27 million lbs. from 1863 to 1866, while the number of whaling ships wintering in Hawai‘i dropped from as many as 400 during the 1840s to fewer than 100 in 1866. Although Twain doesn’t mention it, the long-term decline of the whaling industry owed less to the temporary effects of the War and more to the rapidly growing supply of petroleum after the War.
Japanese interest in Africa is often depicted as a relatively new development, a result of the dramatic expansion of Japan’s trade with every corner of the world over the past few decades. In fact, Africa’s share of Japanese exports reached its peak of more than 17 percent during the late colonial era, while its share today [c. 1992] has dropped to less than 2 percent. The growth of Japanese influence in Africa over the last decade has clearly taken place in spite of a relative decline in Japan’s economic interest in the continent….
Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War … resulted in its acquisition of the colony of Taiwan and greater influence in Korea. As a new imperial power, Japan looked to European colonialism in Africa for both administrative ideas and ideological justification for its rule. Books about British colonial administration and British imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes were translated and read by Japanese colonial administrators, businessmen in China, and the general public. Interest in Rhodes peaked following the Boer War at the turn of the century, but even as late as the 1920s a number of prominent Japanese businessmen in China fancied themselves as Rhodes-like characters, struggling to expand Japanese influence in China as Rhodes had expanded British influence in southern Africa.
The Boer War also helped to bring Japan and Britain into alliance. While European newspapers grew increasingly hostile to Britain, Japanese newspapers displayed a strong bias in favor of the British throughout the war. The war highlighted Britain’s need to end its “splendid isolation,” and immediately after the end of the war Britain concluded an alliance with Japan in 1902. Japanese leaders who favored the conclusion of this alliance argued that the prospect of increased Japanese trade with Britain’s colonies around the world was an important consideration.
Japan’s emerging textile industry had already begun to import cotton from Egypt before the turn of the century and, until the outbreak of World War I, Japan’s balance of trade with Africa was very unfavorable, in large part because of Japan’s growing demand for cotton. This balance of trade shifted dramatically in Japan’s favor during the war, as the supply of European goods to African markets was temporarily interrupted. For the first time, Africa became an important market for Japanese exports….
The Japanese had developed particularly close political and economic ties with Ethiopia, however, and were reluctant to see their influence diminished in this nominally independent African state. Japanese superpatriots reacted with anger to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s and called for Japanese intervention on the side of Ethiopia. Instead, however, the Japanese government came to an accommodation with Italy, by which Italy recognized Japan’s position in Manchuria in exchange for Japan’s recognition of Italy’s position in Ethiopia. This helped to pave the way for the conclusion of Japan’s alliance with Italy prior to the outbreak of World War II, during which Japan’s trade with Africa was temporarily interrupted.
SOURCE: “Japan and Africa: An Historical Overview,” Swords and Ploughshares [Bulletin of the Arms Control, Disarmament & International Security (ACDIS) Program of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign], Summer, 1993.
For more on Japan’s post-WWII relations with Africa, including South Africa, read: Richard Bradshaw, “Review of Jun Morikawa, Japan and Africa: Big Business and Diplomacy,” H-Africa, H-Net Reviews, August, 1997. URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=2716877366765
Notice how virtually no news originates in Myanmar (Burma) unless it involves human rights battles? But here’s a fascinating online travelogue by a writer/philanthropist, with helpful maps, beautiful photos, and the English translation of a recent (2002) German book on the reclusive country. An excerpt from the introduction follows.
I first went to Indochina early in my life, to Cambodia before the war and the Killing Fields, to Laos during the “secret” war, and to Viet Nam during the early phase of an already unwinnable war. Myanmar was a different story. Although it had remained apart from the power struggle going on in Indochina, it had entered into a prolonged civil war and isolated itself from the international community. In 1965, my request for a tourist visa for Burma (Myanmar’s name at the time) was denied, but I was able to get in through the back door from Thailand with some smugglers. Although I stayed almost ten days in the Kengtung (now Kyaing Tong) district, I saw only a small part of the country.
Today the governments of Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are making major efforts to attract foreign tourists. The choices are ours. But to visit more than one country on one trip is not advisable. The good traveler knows that less is more. Having to choose to visit one of the four interesting and attractive countries is not an easy task. All four went through a period in the latter part of the twentieth century of devastating wars that left them poor and underdeveloped. And the current political news from Myanmar is troubling. The country is led by a military junta that shows little willingness to reintroduce democracy to the inhabitants; the opposition appears to be disheartened, weakened, and divided. Any sort of national reconciliation seems years away. However, in February 2001 Aung San Suu Kyi confirmed to foreign visitors that secret talks between her and members of the military junta had begun in October 2000. Whether such meetings will eventually bring about national reconciliation and power sharing is impossible to predict. Then there is the drug problem regarding opium and heroin. Myanmar’s northeast is part of the infamous Golden Triangle, and the country remains the second largest heroin producer in the world.
The causes of Myanmar’s problems are several: the devastating effects of World War II; a failed democracy thereafter; the economic ruin caused by Gen. Ne Win’s policy of socialism, nationalization and isolation; the civil war between the Burmese military and the many insurgent groups and feudal lords; and, last but not least, the emergence of heroin as a valuable export commodity. After Gen. Ne Win took over the country and closed it, the outside world followed developments in Burma with some interest for a while, but because all foreigners were banned from the country and little news found its way into the Western press, over time the rest of the world seemed to lose interest in this isolated country. Several years ago, in the 1990s, the military reopened the country to foreign visitors. Today visas can easily be obtained, and a tourist industry is gradually developing. However, not all areas of the country are open to foreign visitors–only those that the government considers safe to visit.
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Far Outliers 