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Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 4 April 2006 · 10:30 pm

Black American Troops on the Burma Front, 1943

After the Japanese invasion of 1942, the Allies had lost control of the original Burma–Yunnan road which had brought supplies up to the Chinese nationalists. For a year everything had needed to be flown to Chungking from India over the Hump or northern mountains, a dangerous and costly exercise. The Americans decided early on that it was imperative to build a new road from India across the northern tip of Burma into China as part of their support for the fragile nationalist regime….

The plan was to get this road finished before the monsoon of 1944. The task seemed impossible…. Some progress had been made by February 1943, but then the rains washed the embankments away… By September 1943 the whole project had ground to a halt. It had progressed only forty-two miles during the whole year.

Then on 13 October General Lewis A. Pick arrived on the scene. Chosen personally by [Gen. Joseph] Stilwell following an interview in a rain-sodden tent, he had been in charge of flood control works on the Missouri river during the 1930s. Pick drove the project forward at the Chinese end with extraordinary energy. He relied heavily on black troops of the US Engineer Corps and was later acknowledged as having improved race relations within US forces as a whole. He disciplined and organized the fragmented Indian, Chinese and Burmese labour force. he instituted twenty-four-hour shift working. During the night flares were lit in buckets of oil placed every few yards along the road. Pick achieved the extraordinary progress of one new mile of road per day. By New Year’s Day 1944 he had got as far as Shingbwiyang, the ill-fated refugee camp where so many Burma refugees had died the previous year. It was through this route that Stilwell and his Chinese troops were to enter north Burma that year….

As in other sectors of the war front, racial tensions sometimes exploded when Indian, British, American, Free French and Chinese troops were in close proximity. Black American troops, often driving around in large jeeps and sporting larger wallets than even British and Indian officers, were resented by white and high-caste Indians. The black soldiers for their part complained of an Indian and white colour bar. There were occasional scuffles and fights around restaurants and hotels. Meanwhile, even in the crisis of war, many British continued to discriminate against mixed-race Eurasians, the most loyal of the empire’s subjects, who had suffered the most from the Japanese and kept all the major services running even in the face of the Quit India movement.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 280-281, 297

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by | 4 April 2006 · 2:45 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Denchi

How many tales can be spun out of something as small and insignificant as a portable battery? Let’s see.

First, the word itself. In Japanese, ‘battery’ is rendered as 電池 denchi, lit. ‘electricity reservoir’. The second kanji also translates ‘pond’ and (small) ‘lake’, Japanese ike.

Second, where the word turns up. Denchi first lodged permanently in my mind while I was doing fieldwork in Yap, Micronesia, where (1) I was dependent on batteries for my flashlight and portable cassette-radio while living out in a village without electricity (at that time, anyway); and (2) people had managed to borrow a lot of Japanese vocabulary during three decades of Japanese rule (1914–1945), like sikoki ‘airplane’, and sikojo ‘airport’. Some of the more amusing borrowings are now archaic, if not obsolete, in Japanese, like sarumata ‘traditional Japanese men’s underwear’ (now used with reference to adult diapers) (Yapese didn’t need to borrow a word like fundoshi ‘loincloth’), chichibando ‘breast band’ (definitely a foreign concept in traditional Yap), and kachido ‘movie’ (< Japanese 活動大写真 katsudou daishashin ‘moving big picture’).

Third, how the items so labelled are subclassified. The relative sizes of the old familiar cylindrical dry-cell batteries are indicated numerically in Japanese, ranging from largest to smallest: 単１形 tan-ichi-gata (D cell), 単２形 tan-ni-gata (C cell), 単３形 tan-san-gata (AA cell), 単４形 tan-yon-gata (AAA cell). My electronic dictionary requires two 単４形, my digital camera requires two 単３形 (I forgot to bring my recharger), and our gas stove requires two 単１形. I’ve recently had to replace all three sets. At least I don’t have to carry two spares of the largest size around with me. (BTW, Philbert Ono’s Photowords is a great resource for translating photography-related vocabulary, including battery types, between English and Japanese.)

Finally, when I removed the Fujitsu 単１形 batteries from the stove and looked for the size designation, I first thought they were 単０形. After all, the midnight hour in Japanese is 0:00 reiji ‘zero o’clock’. But the characters surrounding the 0 were making a different claim: 水銀０使用 suigin zero shiyou ‘mercury zero use’. When I examined the other replacement batteries I had bought, they all made the same claim, no matter whether the brand was Maxell or Fujitsu (both made in Japan), or Konnoc (made in China). I hadn’t kept up on dry-cell battery technology. Fujitsu Magazine (July 1997) explains.

By using purified materials，a special zinc alloy powder，and a zinc-indium-bismuth-aluminum anode，and by establishing clean production lines，we have been able to develop an alkaline-manganese dry battery that has no mercury．The discharge rate of the battery was improved by remodeling the structure of the cathode．Moreover，by remodeling the anode disc，the battery has been made much safer．

Also，since 1996 we have been producing ferrite cores for the deflection yokes of cathode ray tubes using raw material recovered from spent dry batteries.

There are still a few other products from which mercury needs to be eliminated.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s good that Japan is trying to restrict mercury pollution, which caused Minamata disease. BTW, the Japanese (and general Sinitic) compound for the element mercury 水銀 suigin translates literally as ‘water silver’ rather than ‘quick (i.e., living) silver’. The planet Mercury is 水星 suisei ‘water-star’, and Wednesday is 水曜日 suiyoubi ‘water weekday’, which matches pretty well the Romance-language names for the same day of the week: Romanian miercuri, Spanish miércoles, Portuguese mercoles, French mercredi.

UPDATE: Reader Peter North adds a comment and query:

Sorry, I can’t resist reporting a new usage in Philippine English, not “Taglish” (since 2003). “Low Bat” describing a child lacking energy – needing food or sleep. Presumably derived from abbreviations on cell phone displays – you appreciate how widespread and central to life cell phones have become. Anyone seen this elsewhere?

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by | 3 April 2006 · 1:41 pm

Crescent, Star, and Cherry Blossoms, 1943

The Japanese had promised less to the Malays than they had to the Burmese, but by early 1943 they seemed to be offering a little more. The Marquis Tokugawa’s scheme to reform and diminish the Malay sultanates was abandoned, and the Japanese became more solicitous towards the rulers themselves. The also began to dabble in Islamic affairs. On 5-7 April 1943, the ulama, Islamic religious leaders from across the peninsula and from Sumatra, were summoned to a conference in Singapore…. The mayor even went to the trouble of having a room set aside for the delegates’ evening prayers. The ulama was regaled with a show, a film presentation and speeches on the progress of the war. The Japanese impressed on the Malays that Nippon was the true defender of the faith….

The delegates were each sent home with a white commemorative medal, enamelled in scarlet, embossed with a crescent and a star, surrounded by twelve cherry blossoms. The Malay phrase Sehiduplah dengan Nippon – ‘Live with Nippon’ – was inscribed on the back in Arabic script. The ulama left giving formal expressions of satisfaction at Japan’s commitment to protect Islam and of support for the war.

The gestures were token on both sides. Before the Mufti of Pahang had left for the meeting he had met with his sultan and the Japanese governor of the state. The governor had posed the question: ‘Can the Malay States declare a holy war (jihad) against the British and her allies?’ The question was referred to the Mufti. He quickly answered: ‘Yes, provided that the Japanese emperor is a Muslim.’ And there the matter rested. There was confusion and anger when the Japanese followed through their initiative by thrusting prepared texts on kathis to be included in their Friday sermons and by encouraging prayers for the emperor and the success of the war. On occasion, Japanese officers themselves invaded mosques and interrupted prayers with speeches, even ordering the worshippers to turn their prayer mats 180 degrees away from Mecca and towards Tokyo. This propaganda became more subtle over time, but it generated anxieties. In some areas attendance at the mosque for Friday prayers fell. More generally, religious values were felt to be under threat; divorce rates, gambling and opium use were dramatically on the rise. These were profane times. Like all Japan’s efforts at political engineering, the most important effects of the Islamic conference were unforeseen by its initiators. It realized a long-held ambition of many clerics: the creation of a more unified voice for Islam, outside of the control of the rulers and their courts. This was to have far reaching implications for politics of religious reform in Malaya after the war. The real significance of pan-Asianism lay not in what it achieved for the Japanese Empire but in what it allowed others to achieve for themselves.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 315-316

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by | 3 April 2006 · 11:39 am

Japanese History to Chew on

Here‘s a history course that really gives you something to chew on.

Last semester I gave a course on the historical development of East Asian cuisines and food cultures. While some food history courses take anthropological approaches, this was a conventional history course. We traced a narrative arc from the earliest known foods of the region, examining how political, economic, technological and trade developments affected diet and foodways. So, for example, when we got to the Tokugawa period, we discussed both how sankin kotai, by creating a permanent population of temporary bachelors in Edo, spurred the development of restaurant culture and dramatically increased the popularity of foods suitable for take-away dining, like sushi and noodles, and how the closed country policy meant that Japan experienced a much slower process of assimilating New World ingredients than China did. Plus we had some “cool show-and-tell cultural events.”

via Frog in a Well

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by | 2 April 2006 · 3:29 pm

Muninn on Indian Political Traumas

Konrad Lawson of Muninn is too good a fieldworker to be a historian. Here are a few snippets of his account of a conversation with a Punjabi Sikh convenience store owner in Madison, Wisconsin, where he attended a conference on political trauma.

Hardeep gave me his own ten minute version of the partition [of India in 1947], which I will condense and roughly paraphrase, “The partition led to the unnecessary death of about a million people. It was the fault of three of the biggest fools of the 20th century, Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah. Lord Mountbatten warned them that this partition was crazy. It is like all of the Americans moving to Canada and all of the Canadians moving to the United States. Gandhi was an idiot who did not know the minds of the people. Jinnah was a troublemaker, and he refused an offer of the presidency. You know what I think? I think Gandhi and Nehru should have killed Jinnah, killing one man would have saved a million and there would have been no partition.”

I confessed that I knew close to nothing about Indian history but I was curious why 1) he didn’t seem to blame the English for anything at all. 2) Wouldn’t killing Jinnah have inflamed muslim sentiment and generated even more religious violence? To the former, Hardeep felt that, “The British gave us English and an education. They are the reason why India is so great today and there are Indians all over the world. Why the fuck should I care who is in charge as long as they are a real leader. The British were leaders – a leader can tell when something will be a disaster, Lord Mountbatten knew that partition would be a disaster.” Apologists for the imperial civilizing mission would have approved. In response to the latter issue he said, “Are you kidding me? You don’t understand India. I come from a small village. We didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on in the next village and it is the same all across India. If they had killed him at the right opportunity, most of India would have never known better.”…

I didn’t agree with much of what my new friend had to say but the conversation, which involved much more than what I have reproduced here, was very educational. Even if I found many of his views objectionable, and his generalizations and dismissals problematic, I was fascinated by the interesting combination of views he entertained and a particular kind of logic which he was perfectly at ease in deploying. He was adept at applying his religious and philosophical principles to any and all situations. On the other hand, nothing seemed sacred or absolute to him, and sometimes I couldn’t help getting the impression that he was consciously mocking his own his positions even as he defended them, a highly unusual blend of articulate conviction and perpetually ironic delivery.

Very educational, indeed. And entertaining.

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by | 2 April 2006 · 1:38 pm

An Indian Army Refugee, 1942

With the creation of the Indian National Army, the connections that colonial rule had forged along the [British Southeast Asian] crescent were beginning to resurface. Nor was it just the politics of the Japanese Empire that were doing this, but also a flow of refugees that was beginning to make it across the crescent to territory still held by the British. Among the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons wandering through Burma in the later months of 1942 were a few members of the Indian army who had evaded capture in Singapore. These men bought valuable but disquieting news of the Indian National Army to the British. They included Captain Pritam Singh of 2/16 Punjab Regiment. Having seen Indian officers slapped and beaten by the Japanese in a ‘demonstration of love towards the Asiatic races’, as he put it, he decided to escape north by taxi and train in civilian clothes. He bought a false Japanese passport in Penang and got into Thailand. Further north, he stayed for some time with a Kiplingesque character called Khan Zada. The Khan was a Pathan who had spent twelve years in jail in Calcutta for murder, but ended up as a butcher on the Thai-Burmese border. Now aged seventy, he had recently shot his son in the thigh for some mild misdemeanor. Evading Japanese spies and staying in gurdwaras (Sikh temples), Pritam Singh eventually ended up in Kalewa, where the refugees had recently died in thousands. He shaved his head and beard to be less conspicuous and finally escaped into British India via Imphal.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 258-259

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by | 2 April 2006 · 1:33 pm

Gandhi’s ‘Soul Force’ Turns Violent, 1942

Quit India began as another of Gandhi’s great non-violent displays of ‘soul force’. There were huge demonstrations and sit-ins (hartals) in major towns in the first two weeks of August [1942]. These were put down with police firings and baton charges. Labour unrest was quelled with particular vigour because the government was fearful of its consequence for war production. Within a few weeks this popular movement had taken on a rather different character. An organization began to appear at the grass roots rather than among the homespun-clad leadership, who were by now almost all in jail. By 15 August a new pattern had emerged of a systematic attempt to sabotage Britain’s war effort based on smaller population centres along major lines of communication or near important factory complexes. Telegraph lines were cut, railway lines were ripped up and bridges dynamited. In all 66,000 people were convicted or detained, of whom about a quarter, including most of the Congress leadership, were still in jail in 1944. About 2,500 people were shot dead.

This was undoubtedly a serious revolt, and one that directly threatened the war effort. Armed groups attacked several of the weakest points of the Indian railway network, derailing trains and bombing signal boxes at essential junctions. In one incident two Canadian military officers were pulled off a train and murdered…. Even sixty years on it is still difficult to say whether this month-long campaign was organized to a plan or whether the enraged local political leadership was reacting to British repression on the hoof. The savagery of the British response – police shootings, mass whipping, the burning of villages and sporadic torture of protestors – was testimony to the fact that the Raj was seriously rattled.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 247-248

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by | 1 April 2006 · 10:58 pm

Fruitful English? Or a Dying Language?

This Fruitful English website tells you all you need to know about teaching English in Japan. (I found it by way of an ad at the top of my Gmail inbox.) It looks like an online 自動販売機 jidouhanbaiki ‘(automatic) vending machine’, with instructions entirely in Japanese. Selling One-Cup English. English classes in Japan explain the language; they don’t teach it. As if it were Hittite. Well, at least that won’t be a problem after the demise of English on March 31, 2058 (according to Language Hat).

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by | 1 April 2006 · 4:45 pm

Uncle “Happy” Herman, R.I.P.

Last week my oldest uncle died, leaving my father the eldest surviving member of his seven siblings. (Two more died in early childhood.) As my father tells it, Uncle Herman

spent three years in the first grade and left school after the third grade. He loved to rock and one of his nicknames was Rocking Chair. He was almost always happy, and it took so little to make him happy that we nicknamed him Happy. The pastor said at his graveside, “Wouldn’t it be good if all of us would live with such an attitude that we would be nicknamed Happy?”

Uncle Herman never studied much, never traveled much, and did manual labor all his life, first as a farmhand, then as a service station attendant. He and my father were the only two brothers never to serve in the military. Uncle Herman, born in 1915, was too old for World War II, and my father had a ministerial deferment, graduating from the University of Richmond in 1945.

Like his own father, Uncle Herman spent most all his life within a small radius of the pulpmill town of Franklin, Virginia, home of Union Camp Paper (now owned by International Paper). One highlight of his retirement years was a car trip to Florida and back with my father and my youngest uncle to visit their only sister before she died. (Her brothers just called her “Sister” so she was “Aunt Sister” to us as kids.)

Aunt Bessie kept Herman on a short leash. She was a wonderful cook and a frugal housekeeper. Together they raised two fine, hard-working daughters who took good care of their dad after Bessie died. Their younger daughter, who’s my age, likes to travel when she takes vacation time.

To give an outsider’s view of what life was like in Tidewater Virginia during Herman’s youth, here’s a passage from James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 39-40.

My father was a traveling preacher. He was just like any traveling preacher except he was a rabbi…. [H]e got an offer to run a synagogue in Suffolk, Virginia…. He said, “We’re moving,” and we went to Suffolk, Virginia, around 1929. I was eight or nine at the time.

I still remember the smell of the South. It smelled like azaleas. And leaves. And peanuts. Peanuts everywhere. Planters peanuts had their headquarters in Suffolk. Mr. Obici ran it. He was a big deal in town. The big peanut man. He gave a lot of money out to people. He built a hospital. You could buy peanuts by the pound in Suffolk for nothing. There were farmers growing peanuts, hauling peanuts, making peanut oil, peanut butter, even peanut soap. They called the high school yearbook The Peanut. They even had a contest once to see who could make the best logo for Planters peanut company. Some lady won it. They gave her twenty-five dollars, which was a ton of money in those days.

Suffolk was a one-horse town back then, one big Main Street, a couple of movie theaters—one for black folks, one for white folks—a few stores, a few farms nearby, and a set of railroad tracks that divided the black and white sections of town. The biggest event Suffolk had seen in years was a traveling sideshow that came through town on the railroad tracks, with a stuffed whale in a boxcar. The folks loved that. They loved anything different, or new, or from out of town, except for Jews. In school the kids called me “Christ killer” and “Jew baby.” That name stuck with me for a long time. “Jew baby.” You know it’s so easy to hurt a child.

Tateh worked at the local synagogue, but he had his eye on this huge old barn-type building across the tracks on the so-called colored side of town with the aim of starting a grocery store there. Well, that upset some of the synagogue folks. They didn’t want their holy rabbi going into business—and doing business with niggers, no less!—but Tateh said, “We’re not moving anymore. I’m tired of moving.” He knew they’d get rid of him eventually—let’s face it, he was a lousy rabbi. He had a Jewish friend in town named Israel Levy who signed a bank note that allowed Tateh to get his hands on that old place. Tateh threw a counter and some shelves in there, an old cash register, tacked up a sign outside that said “Shilsky’s Grocery Store” or something to that effect, and we were in business. The black folks called it “Old Man Shilsky’s store.” That’s what they called him. Old Man Shilsky. They used to laugh at him and his ragtag store behind his back, but over the years they made Old Man Shilsky rich and nobody was laughing then.

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by | 31 March 2006 · 3:37 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hata, Hi, Tateito, Yokoito

Ashikaga was once an important center for Japanese textile manufacturing, dating back to the days of silkworm-raising. In the early days of Japan’s industrial revolution, there were waterwheels (水車 mizuguruma) all over this piedmont town. Nowadays, the textile industry has left town, leaving behind a legacy of handicraft artisans, fine textile shops, and a few working pieces of machinery in a “play-learn” emporium (遊学館 yuugakkan), where you can learn how to weave a coaster on a small floor loom. (It costs ¥400 and usually takes 30-45 minutes.) Last week, while my visiting in-laws were trying their hands at weaving, I stood around translating, looking up words in my electronic dictionary, and listening to the two old timers who were demonstrating a braiding machine and a spinning machine that was plying thread from bobbins onto reels (clockwise on one side, counterclockwise on the other). They were excited to have an interested audience for a change.

One of the best things about doing fieldwork in a second language is that you often learn new things in the process, and also get a better command of vocabulary in your primary language. I learned a lot of English fish names a couple of decades ago when I elicited the local names for several hundred fish in a coastal language of New Guinea. Here are a few items of useful vocabulary from my 遊学館 experience.

機 hata, loom – The Chinese character with which Japanese hata is written also indicates all manner of new-fangled machinery, such as 洗濯機 sentakki ‘washing machine’, 飛行機 hikouki ‘flying machine (= airplane)’, and the Japanese ‘machine man’ superhero Kikaida. So now ‘loom’ can also be rendered as 織機 shokki ‘weaving machine’, and ‘power loom’ as 機械機 kikaibata (lit. ‘machine loom’). Worse yet, the same character also occurs in the famous Sinitic compound meaning ‘crisis’: 危機 kiki, danger + something not quite equal to opportunity—more like ‘wit, resource, device’.

杼 hi, shuttle – In sharp contrast to 機 ‘loom’, the character for ‘shuttle’ is rare enough that my electronic dictionary ranks it last among the ten kanji pronounced hi and Microsoft’s Japanese-language input system doesn’t even offer it among its 42 ways to write the syllable hi. I had to go copy the character from unicode.org. In any case, most Japanese are quite familiar with the word adapted from English: シャトル shatoru, as in shatoru basu and supeesu shatoru.

縦糸 tateito, warp thread; 横糸 yokoito, weft thread – The terms that translate ‘warp’ and ‘weft’ render a whole range of similar oppositions: 縦引き鋸 tatebiki nokogiri ‘ripsaw‘ vs. 横切り yokogiri ‘cross-cut saw‘; 縦波 tatenami ‘longitudinal wave’ vs. 横波 yokonami ‘broadside wave, cross sea’; 縦揺れ tateyure ‘pitch (of a ship)’ vs. 横揺れ yokoyure ‘roll (or a ship)’; 縦書き tategaki ‘vertical writing’ vs. 横書き yokogaki ‘horizontal writing’. Finally, the highest rank in sumo is the 横綱 yokozuna (lit. ‘horizontal rope’), who is entitled to wear the ceremonial rope (綱 tsuna) across his waist.

Postscript: Weave : Weft :: Heave : Heft :: Leave : Left :: Bereave : Bereft. Can you think of any more English words that follow this pattern? Aha! Language Hat adds Cleave : Cleft.

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