Category Archives: Hawai’i

In June 1950, Pfc. Susumu Shinagawa of Able Company, 34th Infantry, found himself heading north from Pusan, at the southern end of Korea, to stop the North Korean troops advancing south.

The train chugged to a stop just before daylight at Pyongtaek. There was a light, steady drizzle as we got off the train and waited in the muddy streets for our orders. Without a poncho, I was soaked to the skin. When the orders came, Able and Baker Companies were to set up blocking positions on two hills about 2 miles north of the town. Charlie Company was designated the reserve company somewhere behind us.

The rain stopped when we started the 2-mile hike to our objective. When we got to the hills Able Company veered left and occupied the hill to the left of the road and Baker Company peeled off to the right of the road. Separating us were rice paddies, a rail line, and the road. I could see a small bridge several hundred yards farther north. Five hundred yards separated our company from Baker Company.

We paired off and dug our foxholes. I can’t remember who my foxhole buddy was at the time. About this time we were sloshing around on the hillside, slipping and falling, which made it difficult to dig our holes.

The 3d Platoon was on our left and the 1st Platoon was in the rice paddies to our right. My platoon, the 2d, was in the middle. There were no friendly units to the left of the 3d Platoon.

From my position I could see refugees moving south on a road to the left of the 3d Platoon. My squad leader came by and told my buddy and me to camouflage our position with some branches and leaves. Then it began to rain. It rained for about an hour. I was already soaking wet from the earlier rainfall when we first arrived at Pyongtaek.

Nothing happened that night except that it rained all night. My steel helmet kept my head dry—the only part of my body that wasn’t wet. Within a couple of hours there was more than a foot of water in our foxhole. My feet were sloshing in my oversize boots. In July the weather was very, very warm and, despite being soaking wet, I wasn’t cold. I got out of the foxhole and sat on the edge of the foxhole. My buddy was asleep, curled up in over a foot of water. When I gazed north into the darkness I asked myself, What am I doing here? How can events turn so drastically in such a short time from one of ease and comfort to this miserable situation that I am now in?

Sometime after midnight I was startled by several explosions coming from the north. I didn’t know what caused them but later someone explained that a patrol from one of the other companies had gone to destroy the small bridge just north of our positions.

Just before daylight, a light morning fog settled on the hill but did not affect our visibility. Then I heard a loud bang. I peered through the fog and saw three tanks making their way toward us on the road near the blown-up bridge. We knew that Task Force Smith, which was north of us, didn’t have tanks so we knew the tanks were North Korean. Then puffs of smoke appeared from the enemy tanks and a split second later we could hear the sharp blast of their guns.

To the back and left of the tanks I could see more tanks, followed by North Korean infantry. Then another line of tanks and more infantry came into view on the right side of the road. Our mortars located in the rear started firing and I could see the rounds exploding among the North Korean tanks and infantry. Our mortars had no effect on the tanks. When the line of tanks was about 300 yards away, a few of the men opened fire. I fired my M-1 rifle for the first time in more than a year. My right shoulder got sore after emptying a few clips at the North Koreans.

Then enemy tanks turned their big guns on our hill, the bursting shells showering the area with shrapnel, dirt, and rocks. The fog had now dissipated and I could clearly see the North Korean infantrymen as they ran past the blown-up bridge and fanned out on both flanks. We were in danger of being surrounded.

“Pull out! Pull out!” came frantic shouts from the top of the hill. I was only too damn happy to obey the order. I grabbed my gear and hauled ass with several other men to the top of the hill and down the reverse slope. We headed for the village behind the hill. There were no officers around to give us any instructions.

While we were retreating, several shots rang out. No one knew where the shots came from but this meant the North Koreans were probably very close. Before we got to the village, we were fired on by North Koreans who somehow got abreast of us on our left about 200 yards away. Not only were they behind us, but they were in a position to surround us. We dove to the ground and fired back. I emptied a clip, firing blindly, when my rifle jammed. I tried kicking the bolt free but it wouldn’t budge. The North Koreans stopped firing, so we decided to move again.

We came to a granary that was just outside the village and stopped to rest. While we were deciding what to do, a Korean civilian ran toward us and told us the North Korean soldiers were coming. We hurried inside the granary and hid behind some bundled rice straws.

The North Koreans knew where we were and threw hand grenades into the granary. They also just shot it full of holes with their burp guns. Wood splinters and rice straws filled the air above us. My rifle was still jammed so I couldn’t return fire. All of a sudden, I felt my right arm being thrown back. I tried to move it but could not feel a thing. I thought, Good God, my right arm is blown off! I turned my head and reached out with my left arm to find out what was wrong and saw my right arm bent back in an awkward position. Instinctively, I pulled my right arm back in place. Through all of this I don’t remember feeling any pain. I was relieved to know that I had not lost my arm and stuck it in my shirt like a sling. We didn’t have a chance to fire back. Someone yelled, “We may as well surrender or we’ll all be killed. Okay?”

For a brief moment no one said anything. Finally, during a lull in the firing, one of the guys yelled, “We surrender! We surrender!” The firing from the outside stopped, and he got up and walked to the door. We all followed him out of the granary.

For the first time I came face to face with North Korean soldiers. Man, they looked mean. One had a uniform different from the others and I guessed he must have been an officer because he had red epaulets on his uniform. Gesturing with their weapons and blabbering in Korean, which none of us understood, they herded us in a single file on the road and pointed north.

I really felt terrible having to surrender and I thought this day would be the last day of my life.

As we were walking out, I realized that I was also shot in the thigh just above the right knee. It was a clean wound where the bullet passed through and I felt little pain. With wounds on my right arm and right leg, I wondered what was going to happen to me. But both wounds bled very little so I was lucky in a way. While our captors were deciding what to do with us, one of our guys opened up my first aid kit and helped me apply sulfur and bandages to my wounds. For the next five or six days, that was all the treatment I had.

We were taken to a village, where we joined about a dozen captured Americans, including a couple of ROK soldiers and a lieutenant from our company. There were now a couple dozen of us and about a dozen North Korean soldiers.

They questioned us and wanted to know why we had come to Korea and all that bull. After they were done, we were marched to the rail line, where we thought we were going to be shot. At this point I really didn’t care much and accepted whatever they were going to do with us. No one cried or complained. I guess we were too numb to realize the seriousness of the situation. Instead, they lined us up by the color of our hair. Those with red, blond, and brown hair were put in one column and those with black hair in another column. “You are all Japanese,” a North Korean said, pointing to us with black hair, “and you are all Americans,” he said, pointing to the light-color-haired men. No one tried to explain we were all Americans. It wasn’t funny then, but recalling that incident later in the prison camps made me laugh.

Except for me, because of my injured right arm, all the prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs with commo wire. I was allowed to keep my hands under my shirt to support my injured arm. We were then marched north along the rail line. It was dark when we arrived at a small village after about four hours of walking. We were all crowded into a jail house that had wooden bars, just like the ones I saw in Japanese movies back home. My arm and leg didn’t hurt too much that night and I was grateful for that.

SOURCE: A Foxhole View: Personal Accounts of Hawai‘i’s Korean War Veterans, edited by Louis Baldovi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002).

The Japanese word shibai ‘performance, drama’, as in Okinawa shibai or Ikari ningyo shibai ‘Ikari puppet theatre’, now seems well established in at least one regional dialect of English as a way to denote an empty political performance.

It has been used for a long time in Hawai‘i political talk, and someone recently (after 1999) submitted the following entry to the OED.

political shibai – (Hawaiian, from the Japanese) political shamming

Here’s an example of its usage in a column by David Shapiro in the 5 May 2004 Honolulu Advertiser headlined “What reform? It’s all shibai” about typical political sleight-of-hand by the Hawai‘i State Legislature.

With great fanfare, the 2002 Legislature voted to make Hawai’i the only state in the nation to impose price caps on gasoline.

Senators and representatives ballyhooed the new law in that year’s election, congratulating themselves for bold action to reduce the crushing burden of high fuel prices on Hawai’i’s consumers.

The problem was that the law was an illusion, a political sleight-of-hand that did absolutely nothing to regulate gasoline prices–not in 2002 or 2003 or now, it seems, even 2004.

That’s because the Legislature, while saying consumers needed relief “now,” delayed implementation of the caps for two years to study how to enforce lower prices.

Key agencies couldn’t make the deadline, partly because the Legislature’s misguided capping formula could have increased local gasoline prices by 10 cents a gallon.

So the Legislature is now delaying implementation again, from July 2004 to September 2005. The 2005 Legislature will have yet another chance to tinker or delay before the law takes effect.

HawaiiAnswers.com cites more examples from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (attesting usage dating back to the 1960s) and Linkmeister titled a 7 January 2003 blogpost “Shibai, crap and nonsense” but I haven’t been able to turn up any convincing examples of political shibai used by people without Hawai‘i connections.

The more common synonym elsewhere seems to be kabuki, as in:

• “Outrage Kabuki: When bloggers attack” by Julian Sanchez in reasononline on 5 April 2004 (“That means ritual outrage isn’t just fun; it can be politically efficacious.”)
• “The Elephants in the Kabuki Theater” on Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal on 22 April 2004 (“the elephants in the kabuki theater: … long-time Republican hawk Richard Clarke and … bipartisan long-time security hawk Rand Beers”)
• “Energy Kabuki: House to repass energy bill to vex Democrats” by Amanda Griscom in Grist Magazine on 15 June 2004. (“The whole thing is a sham,” said Jim Waltman, director of refuge and wildlife programs for the Wilderness Society. “It’s just an elaborate Beltway blame game.”)

The earliest online usage I turned up in a quick Google search is by AP reporter Ron Fournier quoting John McCain in an article in the Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News on 1 September 1999.

[McCain] called the congressional tax-cut plan an “exercise in political kabuki,” criticizing GOP leaders for a bill that gives immediate tax cuts to special interests and delays reductions to taxpayers.

On 10 November 2000, during the legal maneuverings in the wake of the U.S. presidential elections in 2000, Bill Baker of Election Watch accused Al Gore of allowing “this outrageous and bizarre political kabuki theatre to continue.”

On 10 August 2001, Jake Tapper writing in Salon slathers Kerry with the same face paint.

Kerry clearly is taking nothing for granted, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t recognize what essentially right now is political kabuki theater. I cannot even hint that I want anything other than my Senate seat, lest they resent me for it.

In a retrospective published by the Japan Times on 23 September 2003, Japan-resident foreign correspondent David McNeill applied the same term in an imaginary story he wished he could have filed in 2001.

Koizumi wins political kabuki show

Bumbling Yoshio Mori has finally been replaced by the more media-friendly Junichiro Koizumi in a contest for leadership of the LDP that nevertheless leaves Japan’s sclerotic political structure intact. Politicians in Japan have, in any case, very little power to influence policy in comparison to the bureaucrats who write it.

By now, political kabuki seems well entrenched, not just as a twisted borrowing from Japanese, but as a hackneyed meme, like most political reporting itself.

UPDATE: Semantic Compositions assembles some googlestats on (political) kabuki.

One of the near-saints in the lore of the family I grew up in was an old man we called Yagi no Ojiisan ‘Grandfather Goat’, a Quaker missionary whose principal contribution to postwar Japan, Okinawa, and Korea was organizing the delivery of goats to farmers who had lost their means of livelihood in the wake of the horrible destruction of that war. The Goat Farmer (“The largest circulation goat magazine in the world”) mentions one of his exploits:

Goat soup is traditionally served at various festive events, and served raw–as sashimi–it is considered a delicacy. Goat soup is often served before or after the athletic events as the meat is high in energy, and it is said to be the best cure for a hangover and thus served after drinking parties. However, most Okinawans are not so familiar with its milk.

People in their 50s and older may have some hazy memories from the past of drinking goat milk as children. Many doctors say that, for small babies, goat milk is far better alternative to cow’s milk when mother’s milk is not available. Right after the war, U.S. military provided many Okinawan children goat milk because of its high nutritional value.

After WWII in 1947, Pastor Herbert Nicholson of LARA (Licensed Agencies for the Relief in Asia) introduced about 200 goats to Okinawa. Over the following years another 2,615 goats were brought in by LARA to produce goat milk. The Okinawans popularly called those goats “LARA goats.”

Okinawan associations in Hawai‘i also played a big role in providing relief for their ravaged homeland.

The various relief efforts spanned four years (1945-1949), during which time 150 tons of clothing, hundreds of small appliances, toys and sundry items were collected. But the relief efforts didn’t end there: Hawaii Uchinanchu [Okinawans] and other compassionate individuals and organizations sent $20,000 in medicine and medical supplies, collected $50,000 to purchase and transport 550 pigs and 750 milking goats, and demonstrated their foresight by assisting in the effort to build the University of the Ryukyus. These relief missions revived efforts to establish a unified organization of Okinawan individuals, clubs and groups.

After that concerted effort, the fractious associations from separate villages, towns, and islands of Okinawa finally managed to form the Hawaii United Okinawa Association in 1951.

The only other thing I knew about Yagi no Ojiisan as a kid (human, not goat) was that he was a Quaker and had a cabin at Karuizawa, in Nagano prefecture, where he kindly allowed us to stay for a few weeks during the summer of 1957, when the current Japanese Emperor Akihito met the current Empress Michiko on the tennis courts of the same resort. (My father was raised a Quaker, and it was by virtue of Quaker cronyism that Nicholson allowed us to use his cabin. It certainly wasn’t any connection to royalty.)

But I wasn’t aware of his earlier history:

Historians have acknowledged the important, even heroic, role of former missionary Herbert Nicholson in providing material aid to Japanese Americans from the Los Angeles area interned at Manzanar. Nicholson made literally dozens of trips to the camp, bringing news from home, personal belongings from storage, and gifts from friends, and handling numerous business transactions…. But others also combined opposition to removal and internment with concrete acts of service to improve conditions for the interned Japanese Americans.(27)…

(27) Betty Mitson, “A Friend of the American Way: An Interview with Herbert V. Nicholson,” in Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation, ed. Arthur Hansen and Betty Mitson (Fullerton, Cal., 1974), 110-42; Michi Weglyn and Betty Mitson, eds., Valiant Odyssey: Herbert Nicholson In and Out of America’s Concentration Camps (Upland, Calif., 1978) [the latter being “Interview and personal stories of Herbert Nicholson, pastor of the West Los Angeles Japanese Methodist Church in 1941, who traveled to many of the internment camps during the war” according to the Go for Broke Educational Foundation]

Confirmation that Nicholson was a Quaker, not a Methodist, comes from testimony by Victor Okada of Los Angeles:

After 25 years as a missionary in rural Japan, Rev. Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker was asked to take over the Japanese Methodist Chruch in Pasadena. Nicholson and his wife visited Manzanar, Poston and Gila River camps. “While the majority of people on the outside kept their distance, we were fortunate that people like Reverend and Mrs. Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker missionaries who had served in Japan, would visit and bring a truckful of item like baby cribs, blankets, newspapers and magazines. Through his church in [Pasadena] other churches regularly donated things for the internees. P 105 Muts Okada”

UPDATE: A website on Quakerism in Japan indicates that Herbert and Aladeline Nicholson were among the Quaker missionaries near Mito (a conservative Tokugawa stronghold) during the early decades of the twentieth century. My father says we first crossed paths with Nicholson when we lived in Kokura, Japan, just across the straits from war-ravaged Korea during the early 1950s. Although Nicholson was ojiisan ‘grandfather’ to us kids, he was known as Yagi no Ojisan ‘Uncle Goat’ to Japanese school children at the time. Apparently Nicholson and Albert Schweitzer were among the few, if not the only, model foreigners profiled in Japanese schoolbooks in those days.