Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking and other works, has died at the age of 36.
Jonathan Dresner posts a brief assessment of her work at the Japanese history blog Frog in a Well, and re-examines his own reactions at the History News Network’s Cliopatria.
Vanuatu has a uniquely nuanced stance on relations with China and Taiwan. The foreign minister recognizes the former, while the prime minister recognizes the latter–or at least did so on Wednesday.
via Simon World
Filed under China
On 5 June 1866, a party of French explorers began heading up the Mekong under the leadership of a distinguished naval veteran of the Crimean campaign, Commander Ernest Doudart de Lagrée (no relation to the fictional Simon Legree). Unfortunately, Lagrée’s health got worse and worse the farther they traveled upriver.
By the time the explorers left Kunming, on 9 January 1868, Lagrée’s condition had worsened markedly, and after five days travel he was no longer able to remain seated on the horses they had with them and had to be carried on an improvised litter. When on 18 January, the party reached Dongchuan, a minor settlement close to Huize, the district capital of this sparsely settled region, it was apparent that Lagrée was gravely ill. He was suffering from severe dysentery, a fever that was probably malaria, and was again troubled by the chronic problem of his infected throat.
So he stayed behind with a naval doctor, Joubert, while his second in command, Garnier, set out to find the Mekong again.
The end came on 12 March. Believing that Lagrée’s body would lie forever in China, Joubert removed his heart and fashioned a lead casket in which to carry it back to France. Conscious of his medical responsibilities, he performed a post-mortem examination and found the second abscess on Lagree’s liver that had escaped his surgical intervention. Then, with Lagrée’s body placed in a heavy Chinese coffin, Joubert supervised its burial in the grounds of a pagoda outside Dongchuan’s walls…. There was now nothing more to do but to wait in the cold, isolated settlement whose only active commerce seemed to be in wooden coffins….
This was both the practical and symbolic end of the expedition…. Determined that Lagrée’s body should be laid to rest in French soil in Saigon, [Garnier] ordered the coffin to be exhumed and carried with the party as they continued northwards. Another thirteen days of slow and exhausting travel were necessary before the party reached the Yangtze and the opportunity to continue their travel down to the coast by boat.
They sailed downriver to Shanghai, then down the coast to Saigon, arriving on 29 June 1868.
Lagrée’s body was laid to rest with funerary pomp in Saigon, with his friend from the time of his posting in Cambodia, Bishop Miche, officiating at the burial service. But this was not the end of travels for his mortal remains. When, in 1983, the local authorities in Saigon, by this stage officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, declared their intention of building over the French colonial-period cemetery in which Lagrée’s remains lay; the French government arranged for the coffin to be transported to France and taken, eventually; to Saint-Vincent-de-Mercuze, to be placed in the family mausoleum.
SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 103-108
The New York Times reports on the tribulations of China’s Guangzhou Crocopark.
China’s Forestry Department eliminated steep duties on imported breeder crocodiles nearly a decade ago. The hope was that low wages, highly skilled farmers and well-developed road and port networks would turn China into a highly competitive producer of crocodile meat, hides, shoes, purses and other goods.
But impotence, obesity, runny noses and finicky palates among the crocodiles have made this dream difficult to realize. Imported by the tens of thousands from tropical Thailand, the crocodiles have had trouble adapting to slightly cooler southeastern China and have been slow to breed, prone to infections and reluctant to eat anything but expensive chicken breasts.
The biggest problem has been that male crocodiles eat more in the late autumn and early winter here than they do in Thailand. They become so plump that they show little interest in sex during the spring mating season, said Li Mingjian, the deputy general manager of Crocopark Guangzhou here, now one of the world’s largest crocodile farms, with 60,000 to 70,000 animals.
“They don’t chase the females,” he said. “They’re very fat guys. They just eat, eat, eat.” …
The next problem did not become apparent for more than a year. Wily Thai crocodile merchants had offered the Chinese buyers a discount if they would accept a mixture of male and female crocodiles of all ages, and warned that it was difficult to identify the genders of young crocodiles.
As the crocodiles grew, it became apparent that the park had far more combat-prone males than it needed, especially as only one male is needed to breed three females.
To make matters worse, many of the larger females proved to be surprisingly old and no longer fertile.
The Thai merchants “would say, ‘This lady laid 40 eggs last year,’ and the next year she would lay none,” Mr. Li recalled. “They were grandmothers.”
Filed under China
Spurred on by the combined enthusiasm of the merchants of Bordeaux, the Catholic missionary lobby, and a navy thirsting for colonial glory; Napoleon III had ordered the invasion of Vietnam in 1857. The initial attack directed against the port of Tourane (Danang) on the central coast of Vietnam failed to do more than leave the expeditionary force exposed to harassment by the enemy and to the depredations of tropical disease. By 1859 the French command had moved its forces to southern Vietnam and besieged Saigon, the one major city in the south of the country and a commercial centre offering much greater potential rewards than Tourane.
The Western world was well acquainted with Saigon before the French forces invested the city in 1859. French mercenary adventurers who had helped the first Nguyen emperor to gain the Vietnamese throne and control of the entire country at the end of the eighteenth century had provided accounts of the city. But among the accounts circulating in Europe none provided a better picture of the city than that written by John White of Marblehead, Massachusetts, a lieutenant in the United States Navy. Published in both Boston and London, White’s A Voyage to Cochin China drew on a sojourn of three months in Saigon, in late 1819 and early 1820, and contains a mass of information about the city, its buildings and inhabitants in the one hundred and fifty pages he devotes to the subject. Some of his history is astray; and he notably failed to recognise that the Imperial Viceroy he encountered in Saigon, Le Van Duyet, was a eunuch, clearly mistaking the females he encountered in the Viceroy’s palace as his ‘wives and concubines’. But, overall, White gives a vivid and accurate picture of a lively city, one that still sheltered under a massive citadel which the Emperor Minh Manh later destroyed in 1835. Despite the admiration White had for Saigon’s buildings, this did not transfer to the inhabitants. ‘It would be tedious to the reader,’ he wrote, ‘and painful to myself, to recapitulate the constant villany and turpitude which we experienced from these people during our residence in the country.’
Once before Saigon, the French forces again encountered strong Vietnamese resistance and could do little more than dig in for a long siege. And, once again, the help from Vietnamese Christians promised by French missionaries failed to materialise. Not until reinforcements arrived in late 1860 was Vietnamese resistance finally overcome in a decisive battle in February 1861 and Saigon seized. The following year a treaty was concluded with the court at Hue that ratified French control of Saigon and of three surrounding provinces. The French now ruled the area of southern Vietnam that they called Cochinchina.
SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 73-74
In its early years, the Japanese Foreign Ministry [Gaimusho] occupied a premiere position among Japan’s new government institutions, in part because it was the chief agency responsible for the relations with the West that were so central to both the domestic and foreign goals of the Meiji state. The institution and its mainstream bureaucrats came to be Western-oriented, founding the tradition of orthodox Kasumigaseki [‘Foggy Gate’] diplomacy, which called for Japan’s cooperation with the leading Western powers: the United States and Great Britain. This foreign policy tradition remained closely identified with the Foreign Ministry both domestically and internationally, even when Axis-oriented diplomats dominated the ministry during Japan’s official defiance of Anglo-American cooperation from 1931 to the end of the Pacific War. Japanese leaders imbued with a belief in an Anglo-American-centered world order reemerged during the Pacific War first to prepare for and then to lead Japan in the new American-centered cooperation that would be the framework of the postwar period. Many postwar leaders were former Foreign Ministry officials.
Such continuity in Japanese worldviews has led Akira Iriye to conclude that the war and Japan’s period of defiance against the “existing order” were aberrations. The spirit of Anglo-American cooperation was thus the stable element that brought about the peaceful postwar order and Japan’s compliance within the framework of the Japanese-American security system. Although this view is valuable for an understanding of the evolution of Japan’s postwar stability, it gives little indication of the reasons for the instability of prewar Japanese institutions, international alliances, and even the career patterns of the Anglo-American-oriented bureaucrats and statesmen.
As an institution, the early Gaimusho [‘Foreign Ministry’], with its view toward the West, was slow to focus on the importance of China policy and China expertise. This is not to say that within its ranks China specialists did not develop but that their advice and concerns had only indirect influence on senior bureaucrats, who were more concerned with Japan’s friendly relations with the West. China service diplomats were also posted primarily to consular roles in China, where their perceptions of international relations were profoundly shaped by the international communities they administered and their close appreciation of the changing Chinese political scene.
As time went by, yet another divergent opinion group opposing enthusiastic pro-Western policy began to coalesce. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, their early views and leadership surfaced and worked to create a new internal division, the Board of Information, that loosely addressed group members’ nationalistic views on foreign policy during the otherwise liberal 1920s. In the 1930s, this opinion group emerged fully formed as the group of Gaimusho reform bureaucrats who were quick to attack their pro-Anglo-American seniors, particularly for their weakness (not just “softness,” but lack of expertise) in China affairs. Thus, the opposition to Anglo-American-oriented or Kasumigaseki diplomacy, if not mainstream until after 1930, nevertheless had a long history and a serious level of support before then.
The fate of China service diplomats over the course of the struggles between these two groups revealed the complexity of prewar politics and diplomacy…. For example, both groups worked hard to bring about tariff reforms for China in the mid-1920s, and both were inclined to early Japanese recognition of the new Nationalist regime under Jiang Jieshi [= Chiang Kai-shek]. However, during the Manchurian Incident, China specialists in the field … were keenly disappointed in the lack of strong opposition in their Tokyo superiors … to the army’s takeover.
Seen from their eyes, Kasumigaseki diplomacy failed on two counts. First, it failed to recognize the crucial importance of China’s sovereignty to maintaining the status quo and Japan’s position in the framework of world affairs. Second, it failed to take a stand against the new institutional adjustments in Japanese administration in China, which set the pace and tone for the continuing process of dismantling Gaimusho jurisdiction in China altogether. Kasumigaseki diplomacy preferred to ignore the contradictions inherent in the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, as did the Western Great Powers when they failed to take significant actions. For the Gaimusho, however, the consequences in terms of national prestige and real jurisdictional powers were far more immediate than for the Great Powers.
In the 1930s, the reform bureaucrats, in seeking to “renovate” their ministry and effect more positive policy in the non-Western world, bestowed more recognition and rank on China service diplomats. In particular, men with long experience in China came to lead the ministry’s Bureau of Asiatic Affairs, which played a crucial role in day-to-day decision-making during periods of conflict in China. Particularly in the Gaimusho, Anglo-American-oriented leaders were deprived of power and influence, if not office, during the 1930s. Resistance to Japanese expansionism came, not from them, but from China service men. Kasumigaseki diplomats could do little else but watch and tacitly support the efforts of China diplomats … who fought to prevent further military action in China and further erosion of Gaimusho authority there. Their efforts failed; both war with China and the replacement of Gaimusho jurisdiction with that of new agencies continued throughout the height of the Pacific War.
This loss of control did not happen overnight. It began with challenges to Gaimusho authority following the Russo-Japanese War, continued throughout the 1910s, and was renewed with great force in the 1930s. The loss by Kasumigaseki diplomats of their roles in decisions about the administration of China affairs stemmed in part from their own lack of concentration on or attention to this significant sphere of their institution’s activities. Mid-ranking bureaucrats, such as the China service men, were vocal in their criticisms during such impasses as the Manchurian Incident and the aftermath of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, but their superiors were not quick to take heed.
The prewar period, then, witnessed a complex shifting of dominance among different policy advocates and among different institutions and branches of government. The Gaimusho’s rise and fall may be compared, for example, to the fluctuating power of the military forces or the rise and fall of party politics. As is often suggested, closer examination of interministry rivalry and shifting power balances across the individual bureaucracies might also reveal much more about the processes and the generally unstable patterns of the Japanese government. To label the 1930s and the war as “aberrant” ignores the systemic instability that seems to have plagued Japan from late Meiji times until the postwar period. The Anglo-American-oriented tradition in diplomacy was only one critical force among many influencing the processes of politics and foreign affairs in the prewar period.
Anglo-American-oriented bureaucrats and statesmen did return to prominence to mastermind Japan’s new cooperation in an American postwar order. Men such as postwar Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru did rely on the prewar Kasumigaseki tradition to bolster their pro-Anglo-American credentials and consolidate power in a time of American intervention in Japanese leadership processes. But circumstances had changed again, much to their advantage and not for indigenous reasons. Yoshida as postwar prime minister did exhibit some institutional loyalties to the Gaimusho. As Chalmers Johnson has described, Yoshida firmly opposed expansion of the power of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry over that of the Foreign Ministry, which still nominally controlled trade. His losing battle to maintain normal diplomatic relations with China in the face of American opposition must have been rooted, in part, in his 1920s experience as a China consul and in his belief, not directly derived from Kasumigaseki diplomacy, in the importance of the Sino-Japanese relationship.
Other orthodox Anglo-American-oriented diplomats who emerged in the postwar period as leaders included … Shigemitsu Mamoru. Shigemitsu, in a curious twist of fate, first received a sentence of seven years’ imprisonment as a Class A defendant in the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, only to be released early in 1950 to enter a life of politics, culminating in his return to the foreign ministership in the Hatoyama cabinets. Aside from Kasumigaseki credentials, these men all had their history of high rank and powerful connections to parlay into new prominence.
China service diplomats had neither of these qualifications. Their record of China service had never given them high position and connections, and during the 1931-1945 period they had remained active Foreign Ministry officials. Many, in fact, had served out the war in Asian posts and were liable to suspicion for their participation in Japanese wartime administrations…. China service men, however, played significant roles as witnesses in the Tokyo war crimes tribunal and helped fashion the prosecution’s interpretation that the Japanese military had primary responsibility for Japan’s expansionist policies…. They had, after all, been eyewitnesses to the abuses of the army in the field in China during the time of the Manchurian Incident and later. Their experiences reconstructing events at the war crimes trial may have motivated some … to immediately write memoirs reflecting this experience. Others … either recorded their experiences prior to the end of the war or later based them in good part on prewar and wartime diaries. In any event, a great many of them wrote to clarify the historical record about Japan’s actions in China, and these memoirs have proved invaluable as sources over the years. Aside from writing, however, China service diplomats seem to have ended their lives quietly in private, not public, capacities.
Finally, the Gaimusho never recovered its pre-1930 status among Japanese governmental agencies. Long after the war, of course, as a former aggressor, Japan had only a limited capacity to play a part in international affairs, and the Gaimusho had rather few posts abroad to fill. When Japan’s international relations opened up again, many of its international agencies and delegations were also economic in nature, promoting the well-known Japanese approach of “economic diplomacy” and giving authority to the more economic ministries. The truth, however, is that diplomatic bureaucracies worldwide have declined in proportion to the speed and ease of modern communications and travel. Today, summit meetings and hotline telephone communications put heads of government in constant touch. Consulates everywhere today are staffed by members of widely varying ministries from home who have their own direct links to host and home country.
The China consuls served in positions defined by a unique, unstable, and temporary system of prewar unequal treaties. Their ministry never quite took stock of the implications of the privileges of this office, nor did it fully recognize the invaluable experience of these diplomats. On both counts, the Japanese Foreign Ministry failed to respond, or when it did, response was too slow and too late. As other agencies of the Japanese government usurped the consular role in China, they also radically altered the nature of the treaty port consul to fit the coming time of war.
SOURCE: Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China, 1895-1938, by Barbara J. Brooks, Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia U. (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 208-213 (Read full H-NET Review.)
Filed under China
NEAR SUNDOWN, interpreter Nakahashi was wandering around a village looking for a horse some artillerymen had asked him to requisition. There were no more than five or six hundred houses in the village and, it became clear after twenty minutes of walking, not a single horse. The horse that had been pulling the cannon had fallen into a creek and broken its leg, creating a difficulty for tomorrow’s advance. The artillerymen gave up on finding a horse and instead suggested getting an ox.
“If it’s an ox you want, I see no problem. A water buffalo! You don’t mind, do you? Off the horse and onto the buffalo!” said Nakahashi, laughing. Still only nineteen, he had volunteered to be an interpreter as soon as the war had started but was rejected as too young. He quickly filed a petition and was allowed to accompany the army. Although high-spirited, he did not yet seem physically strong.
A water buffalo stood tethered in a shed by a farmhouse at the edge of the village. Deciding to take it and go, the interpreter looked in at the rear of the house. A wrinkled old woman was silently bending in front of the oven, kindling the fire.
“Hello, granny,” called Nakahashi from the doorway. “We’re Japanese soldiers and we need your ox. Terribly sorry, but we’ll just take it and go.”
The old woman shrieked in violent opposition. “Don’t talk rubbish!” she screamed. “We finally bought that ox just last month, and how are we to farm without it?!” Furiously waving her arms, she rushed out of the earth-floored house only to see that three soldiers had already pulled the ox out of the stable and were discussing its uncertain merits, concluding it might be of use. In a breathtaking display of hysterical rage, the crone shoved the man holding the rein and sent him staggering, then planted herself in front of the ox and screeched at the top of her voice.
Hesitant to intervene, the soldiers looked on with wry smiles at the vehement exchange between Nakahashi and the old woman.
Suddenly interpreter Nakahashi erupted with peals of laughter.
“This granny is outrageous! The ox is out of the question, she says. She’s got two sons and she doesn’t mind if we take them and put them to work, but not the ox!”
Standing around the placid water buffalo and the woman, whose temples throbbed with indignation, the soldiers burst into loud laughter.
“Maybe we should get her sons to crawl on all fours and haul the cannon!”
But by now the sun had begun to set. The area was still dangerous after dark. The men resolved to take the animal.
“Move!” A soldier thrust the old woman aside and took hold of the rein. “Keep still or you’re dead!”
Wailing and screaming, spittle flying, the woman resisted all the more tenaciously. “The bitch!” Clicking his tongue, the interpreter grabbed her from behind by the nape and knocked her down with all his might. The woman tumbled backward and collapsed into a rice field by the side of the road. A shower of mud washed over the soldiers.
Nakahashi laughed and started to walk off. “You may keep your life but not the ox. We’ll send him back to you when the war is over.”
The ox began to plod along the crumbling, dusty road. The soldiers felt elated. This continent teemed with boundless riches; one merely had to take them. A vista was opening up before them in which the inhabitants’ rights of ownership and private property were like wild fruits for the soldiers to pick as they chose.
The water buffalo exacted its revenge, however. At departure time the next morning when all preparations had been completed and the order to start was being awaited, the ox lumbered off straight into a rice paddy, dragging the gun carriage with it. Forced to heave the cannon out by themselves, the soldiers became coated with muck from head to foot.
SOURCE: Soldiers Alive [Ikite iru heitai, 1938], by Ishikawa Tatsuzo, translated by Zeljko Cipris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2003), pp. 78-80
NKZone notes reports from Japanese and French news agencies that China has deployed either 10,000, 30,000, or 150,000 troops along the North Korean-Chinese border, either within Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture or all along the 1400-km border–or perhaps both.
It’s unclear whether the Chinese troops were deployed to prevent (a) NK troops and/or refugees from escaping into China and causing embarrassing international incidents, (b) NK troops from “foraging” among ethnic Koreans in China, or (c) NK from undermining 6-party talks about NK nuclear ambitions.
Meanwhile, the Marmot reports that South Korea has quietly declared null and void the 1909 Gando [Kanto] Convention, signed between China and Japan.
This is either incredibly bold or incredibly insane – I haven’t decided which yet, but I’m heavily favoring the latter….
What was interesting about this all – aside from the fact that the Republic of Korea has apparently adopted as its official position that a fairly sizable chunk of Manchurian territory belong to Korea – is the way the story was broke[n]….
OhMyNews … says that many scholars in Korea consider much of Liaoning Province south of Shenyang as “West Gando,” so one could interpret the government’s official position as meaning that the whole of what is now southern Manchuria is, in fact, Korean territory….
I don’t know what to say, other than this is a very dangerous game the government’s playing, especially at a time when Seoul’s relations with Pyongyang, Washington and Tokyo are not the best they’ve ever been. Now is probably not the time to poke Beijing in the eye, especially if one holds any hope at all that the Chinese might be helpful in the re-unification process should North Korea appear on the verge of collapse. And if one day, Korean tourists in Shenyang should find Pyongyang included on Liaoning Provincial maps, they’ll understand why.
THE REGIMENTAL SUPPLIES had not yet landed at Shanghai and were only now approaching its harbor. This meant that the front units could not rely on being replenished by the transport corps to their rear but were forced to improvise, requisitioning on the spot whatever they needed.
Rice and vegetables were relatively abundant, but spices extremely hard to find. The shortage was at its most acute during their stay in Wu-hsi.
The soldier in charge of cooking at the regimental headquarters was jealously hoarding a bowl of leftover refined sugar.
“Listen up! This is for the regimental commander, so nobody lays a finger on it!” Lance Corporal Takei wrapped it in paper and put it on a shelf. He used it only when cooking for the colonel, and then sparingly, but even so, the amount dwindled to a mere cupful. “There must be sugar somewhere.”
Whenever free from kitchen duty, he scoured the city for sugar but found none. That evening, planning finally to use the last of the sugar in preparing the colonel’s supper, Takei reached for it, only to discover it gone.
Vegetables were boiling in the pot; table legs and broken boxes blazed steadily underneath. Takei stood gaping in front of the stove.
“Hey! Where’s the sugar I kept here?” Soldiers on duty chorused that they did not know. Some said it was there at lunchtime, some speculated that the wind might have blown it off the shelf. In the end the suspicion arose that the Chinese kitchen workers were most likely to have stolen it. Five Chinese, brought all the way from Chih-t’ang-chen, worked in the kitchen.
The lance corporal’s face flushed with rage. Unable to speak to them, he slapped the Chinese nearest him, a youth of about seventeen. This one seemed to him to have done it. He ordered a subordinate to call the headquarters interpreter.
“Ah, what a lovely fragrance!” Interpreter Nakahashi sauntered in, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Takei quickly explained the situation and asked that he interrogate the boy.
The Chinese, industrious and obedient, had been doing kitchen work ever since Chih-t’ang-chen.
Nakahashi did not think him guilty but went through the motions of interrogating him. The boy said he did not know, perhaps a soldier had taken it.“A soldier would never take it!” thundered Lance Corporal Takei, eyes flashing with rage. They decided to search the boy.
Deep in his pocket they found a crumpled piece of paper, clearly what the sugar had been wrapped in. Not a speck was left; the paper had been licked clean.
Lance Corporal Takei was sputtering with fury. He grabbed the boy and hauled him off to the edge of a reservoir sixty yards away. On the opposite bank First Class Private Kondo was washing rice in his mess tin, preparing to cook his evening meal.
Takei drew his knife and without a moment’s hesitation stabbed the boy through the chest. With a groan the boy toppled into the reservoir, sending waves rippling thirty feet across to the bank where Kondo was rinsing rice. Kondo sprang up in alarm.
“What did he do?”
“That son of a bitch stole the sugar I’d slaved to get for the regimental commander, and licked it up!”
“I see.” Limply holding the mess tin, Kondo stared at the boy’s back as it floated in the water.
The lance corporal stormed off. With a sense of regret Kondo realized he would not be able to wash rice in this pond anymore. A human life could be taken for taking a lump of sugar. Once again, what was human life? Suddenly he recalled the words of Christ: “Though a sparrow be worth less than a penny, yet the Lord has made the sparrow beautiful.” A sparrow’s life was no different from a human’s. Though their lives be worth less than a lump of sugar, yet the Lord has made the Chinese boys beautiful…. Kondo clamped down tightly on his sensibility and resumed his understanding with the battlefield. Dangling the dripping mess tin from his right hand and humming, he strolled back to the campfire.
When Lance Corporal Takei returned to the kitchen, the four remaining Chinese glanced up at him with anxious, searching eyes and began frantically to cook. Takei roughly washed his hands, marched up to the pot filled with boiling vegetables, and stirred them about. Nakahashi was still standing there.
“You killed him?” he asked.
“Yes, I killed him,” Takei answered.
“What did you have to do that for? He was a good, hard-working fellow. Learn to control your temper.”
“Try imagining how I feel!” Takei burst out and averted his face. Nakahashi started: The man was crying! Being robbed of sugar for the regimental commander’s supper had triggered this much sadness. The interpreter silently left his side.
Presently Takei heaped the cooked food onto a plate and took it to Colonel Nishizawa’s room. He had only one dish to serve him.
The colonel was seated at a soiled table, intently studying the list of men killed.
“Tonight we lost our sugar, sir, so the dishes are tasteless,” said Takei, bowing his head. “Tomorrow I’ll be sure to look for some.”
“That’s fine,” replied the colonel without looking up.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
He bowed once again and returned to the kitchen. Squatting before the stove, he stared into the swirling flames.
“Takei, aren’t you going to eat?” called out a soldier. “Later,” replied Takei, not budging.
SOURCE: Soldiers Alive [Ikite iru heitai, 1938], by Ishikawa Tatsuzo, translated by Zeljko Cipris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2003), pp. 123-126
TO BE a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely, especially in the eyes of someone from the metropolitan country. All immigrants and their descendants are colonials of one sort or another, and between the colonial and what one might call the metropolitan there always exists a muted mutual distrust. In England the image of the American is fixed. In Spain, where imperial glory has been dead for so long, they still whisper to you, an impartial outsider, about the loudness of americanos–to them people from Argentina and Uruguay. In an Athens hotel you can distinguish the Greek Americans, back for a holiday (special words in the vocabulary of immigrants), from the natives. The visitors speak with loud, exaggerated American accents, occasionally slightly flawed; the stances of the women are daring and self-conscious. The natives, overdoing the quiet culture and feminine modesty, appear to cringe with offence.
Yet to be Latin American or Greek American is to be known, to be a type, and therefore in some way to be established. To be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside the region. When you think of the West Indies you think of Columbus and the Spanish galleons, slavery and the naval rivalries of the eighteenth century. You might, more probably, think of calypsos and the Trinidad carnival and expensive sun and sand. When you think of the East you think of the Taj Mahal at the end of a cypress-lined vista and you think of holy men. You don’t go to Trinidad, then, expecting to find Hindu pundits scuttling about country roads on motorcycles; to see pennants with ancient devices fluttering from temples; to see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against the usual Caribbean buildings of concrete and corrugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street names of one whole district of Port of Spain; to see the Hindu festival of lights or the Muslim mourning ceremony for Husein, the Prophet’s descendant, killed at the Battle of Kerbela in Arabia thirteen hundred years ago.
To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely. It is, in addition to everything else, to be the embodiment of an old verbal ambiguity. For this word “Indian” has been abused as no other word in the language; almost every time it is used it has to be qualified. There was a time in Europe when everything Oriental or everything a little unusual was judged to come from Turkey or India. So Indian ink is really Chinese ink and India paper first came from China. When in 1492 Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani he thought he had got to Cathay. He ought therefore to have called the people Chinese. But East was East. He called them Indians, and Indians they remained, walking Indian file through the Indian corn. And so, too, that American bird which to English-speaking people is the turkey is to the French le dindon, the bird of India.
SO LONG as the real Indians remained on the other side of the world, there was little confusion. But when in 1845 these Indians began coming over to some of the islands Columbus had called the Indies, confusion became total. Slavery had been abolished in the British islands; the negroes refused to work for a master, and many plantations were faced with ruin. Indentured labourers were brought in from China, Portugal and India. The Indians fitted. More and more came. They were good agriculturalists and were encouraged to settle after their indentures had expired. Instead of a passage home they could take land. Many did. The indenture system lasted, with breaks, from 1845 until 1917, and in Trinidad alone the descendants of those immigrants who stayed number over a quarter of a million.
But what were these immigrants to be called? Their name had been appropriated three hundred and fifty years before. “Hindu” was a useful word, but it had religious connotations and would have offended the many Muslims among the immigrants. In the British territories the immigrants were called East Indians. In this way they were distinguished from the two other types of Indians in the islands: the American Indians and the West Indians. After a generation or two, the East Indians were regarded as settled inhabitants of the West Indies and were thought of as West Indian East Indians. Then a national feeling grew up. There was a cry for integration, and the West Indian East Indians became East Indian West Indians.
This didn’t suit the Dutch. They had a colony called Surinam, or Dutch Guiana, on the north coast of South America. They also owned a good deal of the East Indies, and to them an East Indian was someone who came from the East Indies and was of Malay stock. (When you go to an Indian restaurant in Holland you don’t go to an Indian restaurant; you go to an East Indian or Javanese restaurant.) In Surinam there were many genuine East Indians from the East Indies. So another name had to be found for the Indians from India who came to Surinam. The Dutch called them British Indians. Then, with the Indian nationalist agitation in India, the British Indians began to resent being called British Indians. The Dutch compromised by calling them Hindustanis.
East Indians, British Indians, Hindustanis. But the West Indies are part of the New World and these Indians of Trinidad are no longer of Asia. The temples and mosques exist and appear genuine. But the languages that came with them have decayed. The rituals have altered. Since open-air cremation is forbidden by the health authorities, Hindus are buried, not cremated. Their ashes are not taken down holy rivers into the ocean to become again part of the Absolute. There is no Ganges at hand, only a muddy stream called the Caroni. And the water that the Hindu priest sprinkles with a mango leaf around the sacrificial fire is not Ganges water but simple tap water. The holy city of Benares is far away, but the young Hindu at his initiation ceremony in Port of Spain will still take up his staff and beggar’s bowl and say that he is off to Benares to study. His relatives will plead with him, and in the end he will lay down his staff, and there will be a ritual expression of relief.*
*Cremation is now permitted; ashes are scattered in the Caroni; and Ganges water is now imported.
SOURCE: “East Indian” [1965] in Literary Occasions: Essays, by V. S. Naipaul (Vintage, 2003), pp. 38-41
UPDATE: Andrés Gentry responds with a rumination about “the fantastic effects the British Empire had on the movement of people within it.” See also Global Migration, 1846-1940.
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