In the absence of Asashoryu, who has been under suspension, the junior and better-behaved Mongolian yokozuna, Hakuho (12-3), won his 5th Grand Sumo Tournament, while the smallest Mongolian, Ama (10-5), won his 2nd Outstanding Performance Award; the giant Estonian, Baruto (11-4), won his 2nd Fighting Spirit Award; and Fukuoka native Kotoshogiku (9-6) won his 2nd Technique Prize. I think they should hold the Natsu Basho (in May) in Ulan Bator instead of Tokyo each year. There are now seven Mongolians in the Makuuchi ranks and five in the Juryo ranks.
Category Archives: Japan
Multilingual Name Changes in the Bonin Islands
From English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long (Duke U. Press, 2007; Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 91; Supplement to American Speech, vol. 81), pp. 125-128
There is something of a misconception among Japanese—or at least among that minute percentage of the population that has any knowledge of the subject—that the Westerners of Ogasawara acquired Japanese family names when they were naturalized as Japanese citizens back in the early Meiji era. This is not true….
When the original inhabitants of the islands began to be naturalized in 1877, only a few took Japanified names. Among these was the almost legendary German figure Frederick Rohlfs (1823–98), who settled on Hahajima and aided subsequent Japanese arrivals when they were on the verge of starvation. He was commonly called “Rose,” probably because this is how his name sounded to Japanese listeners when pronounced by English speakers. His legal Japanese name was composed of five kanji (Sino-Japanese) characters chosen strictly for their pronunciation. Although they convey no coherent meaning, when combined the characters (pronounced as Rōsu Rarufu) sounded something like the two pronunciations of his family name. Rohlfs was in the minority, however; most of the Westerners (referred to as kikajin ‘naturalized people’ in those days) used katakana renderings of their own Western family names as the official names in their koseki, or Official Lineage Registries. These were not Japanese family names, nor Japanified versions of their Western names, but simply adaptations of them to the Japanese phonology and representations of them in the Japanese script (e.g., Gilley became Gērē, Savory became Sēborē, Webb became Uebu, Washington became Washinton, Gonzales became Gonzaresu).
The usage of kata[ka]na names continued for a couple of generations. It was not until the Sōshi Kaimei (創氏改名‘Establishment of Family Names and Alteration in Given Names’) law that people with non-Japanese surnames were forced to change them. This 1940 law is mainly known for its effect on the millions of colonized people in Korea, but it also affected the Bonin Islanders. Elderly islanders today recall choosing their own last names, often hurriedly and quite randomly….
Some of the islanders chose kanji characters that either sounded like their original names or expressed some significant meaning. The Savorys became Sebori (瀬堀[‘rapids-ditch’]), and the Ackermans, the Akaman (赤満 [‘red-full’) family. The Webbs chose characters that could be read as Uebu (上部 [‘upper-part’]) (though the name is pronounced Uwabe today). Other families decided on a name with some symbolic value. The Gilleys, proud of the “South Sea Islander” part of their roots, chose the name Minami (南 ‘lit. south’). Other families abandoned the idea of names in which either the sound or the meaning of the kanji held significance. In most cases, different family names were chosen by distant branches of the family tree, so that the Gonzales family descendants became either Ogasawara (小笠原 [‘little-hatshade-field’]) or Kishi (岸 ‘shore’).
During the war years, Westerners gave their children Japanese names. Children born after World War II (during the U.S. Navy period) were given only English names, and they use these today—written in katakana—as their official Japanese names.
Following the reversion to Japan, Westerners adopted the practice of giving Japanese names—written in kanji—to their children, but even here, we find cases of islanders identifying with their cultural roots. One case of this is Nasa Sēborē (セーボレー那沙), born in the 1980s, whose name, although written in kanji, is an homage to his ancestor Nathaniel (pronounced “Nasanieru” in Japanese).
Some of the Westerners legally changed their surnames back (from Japanese ones forced upon them in 1941) to their older katakana names following the changes in the Japanese law in the 1980s.
In many cases, a single individual has possessed four legal names in the span of his or her life. A case in point is Able Savory. He was born Sēborē Ēburu (in katakana, セーボレーエーブル), was forced to changed his name to Sebori Eiichi (in kanji, 瀬堀栄一) at the start of the war, and used Able Savory (in the Roman alphabet) during the Navy Era. After the 1968 reversion, he reverted to his wartime kanji family name, but used the katakana “first name” given to him at birth, resulting in the name Sebori Ēburu. In the 1980s, when some of the Savory clan changed their surname back to the katakana Sēborē, he decided four names in one lifetime were enough and retained the kanji surname.
In Ogasawara today, one finds many interesting name-related phenomena. Nicknames—in both Japanese and English—are the norm. Then, most of the Westerners have two names; many have both Japanese and English surnames and given names, which means there often are at least five or six ways to refer to most Westerners.
This reminds me my favorite comment thread ever on Language Hat, in reaction to a post about a poem entitled Peaches in Cluj.
Filed under anglosphere, Japan, Korea, language
Wordcatcher Tales: Katatsumuri, Otamajakushi
Which word is more poetic? Snail or tadpole? Escargot ou têtard? Melc sau mormoloc? Schnecke oder Kaulquappe? (Jeez!) Much depends on the poetic traditions of the language in which one is writing—whether rhyme and meter are important, for instance.
What got me wondering was the original Japanese version of that famous haiku by Kobayashi Issa:
かたつぶりそろそろ登れ富士の山
katatsuburi soro-soro nobore fuji no yama
‘Snail, slowly climb Fuji’s mountain!’
(You may prefer R.H. Blyth‘s translation: “O snail / Climb Mount Fuji, / But slowly, slowly!”)
The more common form for ‘snail’ is katatsumuri, so in Japanese the choice offered above is: Katatsumuri ka? Otamajakushi ka?
One thing katatsumuri has going for it is its five syllables (or moras), perfect for an opening or closing line of haiku. (Snails feature in 53 out of Issa’s 8000 haiku.) But snails seem to lack any specific seasonal association, at least according to Yamamoto Kenkichi’s The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words.
Otamajakushi ‘tadpole’, on the other hand, has good seasonal associations. But its six syllables can only fit well into the middle line of haiku, with the help of a filler particle like ya. Maybe that’s why Issa wrote 166 haiku about frogs (… tobu kawazu ‘jumping frog’, … naku kawazu ‘croaking frog’, kawazu kana ‘frog …’ etc.), but apparently none about tadpoles. It’s not really that hard. Here’s one I made up.
羹にお玉杓子や蛙哉
atsumono ni / otamajakushi ya / kawazu kana
In the broth / Is it a tadpole / Or a frog …
Regardless of their poetic qualities, these two words have interesting etymologies.
お玉杓子 otamajakushi literally means a ball (otama) ladle, scoop, or rice paddle (shakushi), which well describes the shape of a tadpole. Well, okay, a giant tadpole.
蝸牛 lit. ‘snail-cow’ can be pronounced kagyū in its Sino-Japanese reading, but the kanji have no relation to the several native Japanese words for ‘snail’: katatsumuri, katatsuburi, dedemushi, dendenmushi. When I was a kid, I learned dendenmushi, but I had forgotten whether it meant ‘snail’ or ‘caterpillar’. If I had to guess at the native Japanese etymologies for the two principal words for ‘snail’, I would propose that dendenmushi comes from dandan ‘little by little’ + mushi ‘bug’ (i.e., a slow-moving creepy-crawly); while katatsumuri comes from kata- ‘hard’ + tsumuri ‘head’ (i.e., a hard-shelled creepy-crawly).
I await further instruction from Matt of No-sword.
UPDATE: And Matt comes through with a much more thorough and enlightening post! He finds support for the same etymology for katatsumuri (‘hard head’), but explains that de(n)de(n)mushi comes from a recent song appealing to the snail to come out (hence 出 de-) of its shell. Better yet, the latter term, the only one I had heard, seems to have arisen in Kyoto, where I spent my elementary school years.
UPDATE 2: Matt of No-sword follows up with a wonderfully clarifying post on one of the murkiest issues in contemporary herpetological poetics, the difference between two types of frogs in Japanese: the poetic kawazu and the aquatic pedestrian kaeru.
Before I repeat Matt’s far more poetic conclusion (which Language Hat has already done, dammit ribbit!), I should add that Japanese kaeru has been borrowed into at least one language in Micronesia: Yapese kaeyruu, where it seems to refer mostly to the decidedly prosaic and invasive marine toad (Bufo marinus), a species more fit for senryū than haiku.
Only three amphibians are native to the [Polynesia-Micronesia biodiversity] hotspot, and all are ranid frogs of the genus Platymantis. Two species are endemic to Fiji, the Fiji tree frog (Platymantis vitiensis) and Fiji ground frog (P. vitiana, EN), and one, the Palau frog (P. pelewensis), is endemic to Palau. All three species are related to other Platymantis species in the Solomon Islands and in New Guinea.
This explains why, of all the Micronesian dictionaries I consulted, I could only find a native word for ‘frog’ in the Palauan Dictionary: bechébech, where the unaccented e represents a schwa (uh, er sound) and the ch represents a glottal stop. (By the way, the E[uro]speranto words for ‘frog’ and ‘toad’ are rano and bufo, respectively.)
So here’s the enlightening conclusion to Matt’s follow-up frog post, which cites one of the most famous haiku of all by perhaps the most famous haiku poet of all.
古池や かはづ飛び込む 水の音
Furuike ya/ Kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto
Old pond/ Frog jumps in/ Sound of waterBonus fact: Bashō was actually consciously playing with the kawazu tradition here by attributing the sound to the water rather than the frog. The frog’s implied silence, after centuries of naku kawazu [‘croaking frog’], is a crucial part of the stillness that allows the sound of water to make its impact.
Hawaiian Words in Bonin (Ogasawara) Speech
From English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long (Duke U. Press, 2007; Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 91; Supplement to American Speech, vol. 81), pp. 65, 67:
Many words in use in the Bonins even in the late twentieth century are thought to be derived from the contact with Pacific Island languages that occurred from the 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century. Today these lexemes are used not only in the English of the Bonins, but in Ogasawara Japanese and the Ogasawara Mixed Language as well. Hawaiian words form the majority of the Oceanic-language words we find in the Bonins. Since Polynesian migration to the islands occurred only in the early history of the settlement, it seems clear that most of these words came to the island during the first half of the nineteenth century.
I’ll list some of the most straightforward examples, where the meanings and the sounds correspond most closely. The following list presents the Hawaiian word first, then its various derivatives in the Bonins, where the pronunciation has been influenced not just by Japanese and English phonology (and the lack of orthographic standards), but by varieties of Hawaiian that are now nonstandard (for instance, those that retained t in place of King Kamehameha’s k).
- Haw. kamani, tamani ‘hardwood tree, Calophyllum inophylum’ > Bonin tamana, tamena, tremana
- Haw. lahaina ‘type of sugarcane’ > Bonin rahaina ‘sugarcane’
- Haw. lau hala ‘pandanus leaf’ > Bonin rawara, rawarawa, rauhara, rowara, rohara, roharo, rūwara, rohawo, lohala ‘pandanus tree’
- Haw. moe ‘sleep’ > Bonin moe-moe, moi-moi ‘sex, copulation’
- Haw. puhi ‘moray eel’ > Bonin puhi
- Haw. uhu ‘parrotfish’ > Bonin ūfū, uhu
- Haw. wiliwili ‘leguminous tree, Erythrina sandwicensis’ > Bonin biide-biide, bari-bari, uri-uri, ude-ude ‘Erythrina boninensis’
The 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments in the Pacific War
I have heard endlessly about the exploits of the Japanese American units during World War 2, the 100th Battalion and 442d Regimental Combat Team, but I had never heard about the 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments. Here are a few excerpts from a much longer account at the California State Military Museum website.
The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 treated the Filipinos in the U.S. as aliens. Although the Philippine Commonwealth Constitution permitted the United States to draft Filipinos in the Philippines to defend American interests there, Filipinos in the United States, quite ironically, were exempt from military service.
Thousands of Filipinos had petitioned for the right to serve in the U.S. military immediately after December 7, 1941. On January 2, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a law revising the Selective Service Act. Filipinos in the United States could now join the U.S. Armed Forces and they were urged to volunteer for service. President Roosevelt quickly authorized the founding of a Filipino battalion, which would be organized for service overseas. It estimated the number of available Filipino volunteers between 70,000 and 100,000.
The 1st Filipino Battalion was formed on March 4, 1942 and activated in April 1 at Camp San Luis Obispo, California. Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Offley, who had served in the Philippines and spoke passable Tagalog, volunteered to be assigned to the unit as its first commander. He assumed command in April 8, 1942. The War Department also directed Philippine army officers and soldiers who were stranded in the United States at the start of the war to report to the unit. An unusual point is the designation of the unit. Previous Filipino units in the U.S. Army had been designated “Philippine” such as the Philippine Scouts. All units raised in the U.S. during the war were designated “Filipino.” Also, it would not be until the end of the war that the Filipino military units would carry the designation “Infantry” in their title although their regimental colors from the very beginning were displayed on a blue field, the traditional color of the infantry branch of the army.
A number of wounded Philippine Army and Philippine Scouts had escaped to Australia from the Philippines on board the USS Mactan in December 1941. Some remained in Australia to form the nucleus of what would eventually become the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, but the rest were sent to the United States for further medical treatment. These men eventually reported to the 1st Filipino Battalion.
Contrary to popular belief, the 1st Filipino Battalion was not established as a result of the American policy of social segregation. Only Filipinos who volunteered for assignment to the unit were sent to it. Many others, such as Eutiquio V. “Vic” Bacho, served with distinction in “American” (white) units in the European theater of operations during the war. Doroteo Vite wrote in a national magazine that Filipinos should take the opportunity to serve in all-white units to educate them so that at the end of the war, white Americans would support the Filipino American agenda of equality….
In April 1942, Lieutenant General John L. Dewitt, Western Defense Commander, ordered the Japanese on the West Coast into concentration camps. Miguel Ignacio, secretary of the Filipino American community of San Francisco, called attention to several American-born Japanese women, citizens of the United States, who had Filipino husbands, and Filipino-Japanese children who were U.S. citizens by birth. Despite the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union, Dewitt ordered the women and children to spend the duration of the war in the internment camps. Many of these Filipino husbands went on to serve in the 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments, defending the nation whose racist policies held their families hostage.
In September 1942, the first group of qualified Filipino enlisted men was sent to the Officer Candidate School, Fort Benning, Georgia. Upon graduation, they were commissioned second lieutenants in the U.S. Army. The War Department planned to have Filipino officers eventually command the majority of the combat units in the 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments. Events beyond the control of the military planners in Washington, D.C. intervened to prevent this from being fully implemented.
So many Filipino volunteers came from all over the United States that the 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiment was formed at Fort Ord, California on November 22, 1942. In January 1943, the 1st Regiment was reassigned to Camp Beale, near Sacramento and the 2nd Regiment to Camp Cooke, near Santa Maria. The two regiments were to be joined by a third regiment consisting of Filipinos from the Hawaiian National Guard. However, the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Association argued successfully with the martial law commanders in Hawaii that not only was cheap labor on the plantations necessary to support the war effort, the Filipinos in Hawaii were forbidden by the Tydings-McDuffie Act from going to the continental U.S. The men could not leave the sugar plantations and were paid substandard wages for the duration of the war. This would have serious consequences in 1946 when the militant Filipino labor unions shut down the islands until their demands for wage increases and better working conditions were met.
As a result of a May 1942 Gallup Poll showing strong support for the naturalization of Filipinos, the Filipino Naturalization Bill was passed. Pinoy GI’s were urged to apply for U.S. citizenship. A mass swearing in of over 1,000 soldiers was held at Camp Beale on February 20, 1943. Many of the men, however, resisted becoming citizens. T-5 Julius B. Ruiz stated that although he had lived in the United States for many years and was now serving in the U.S. Army, his goal was to liberate his country, the Philippines. by the time the 1st Regiment left for the western Pacific in May 1944, over half of the men in the unit were U.S. citizens….
Before the 1st Regiment departed for the western Pacific in May 1944, Colonel Offley had a major dilemma on his hands. Even though his regimental chaplains were prepared to perform marriage ceremonies between the Filipino soldiers and their white girlfriends, the strict anti-miscegenation laws in California prevented the men from applying for marriage licenses. Colonel Offley solved this by sending his soldiers and their sweethearts to Gallup, New Mexico on chartered buses that soon came to be called the “honeymoon express.”
Meanwhile in New Guinea, the 1st Regiment quickly integrated its first batch of replacements consisting of Filipino Americans from Hawaii. Colonel Offley gave Lt. Col. Leon Punsalan
g, a West Point graduate, command of the 1st Battalion. This was the first time in the history of the U.S. Army that Asian Americans commanded white troops in combat.
Filed under Japan, Philippines, U.S., war
Yap’s Role in the Saipan Campaign, June 1944
When I was looking up stuff about Yap, Micronesia, for a recent post, I came across a very informative website, with both photographs courtesy of the Micronesian Seminar and the National Archives—and even video—about the bombing of Yap during the Pacific War, about which I heard many stories during my time there in 1974. I have corrected obvious spelling errors in the following extract.
At dawn, on the 15th of June 1944, American amphibious forces swept into Saipan to begin the hard ground fighting that was to bring the Japanese homeland within range of our Superfortresses. For more than two weeks prior to the landings, Thirteenth Air Force Liberators, based on Los Negros, had been pounding Truk to neutralize the strategic Japanese base and to prevent the enemy from reinforcing Saipan by air.
A large Japanese task force, estimated at 40 ships or more, was sighted some distance north of Yap Island, on the 19th of June 1944. Carrier planes from this task force lashed out at the powerful units of the United States Pacific Fleet which were then supporting Allied ground forces on Saipan. The conflict that followed was the first major battle between elements of the Japanese and United States fleets in nearly two years. As at Midway, two years earlier, all of the offensive action was by carrier-based aircraft. By the time the Japanese fleet broke off the engagement, U.S. Task Force “58” had destroyed nearly 400 enemy aircraft and had sunk or damaged 14 Japanese ships.
Liberators of the Thirteenth Air Force were called upon to reach out more than 1,000 statute miles from their Los Negros base to hit Japanese warships that might seek refuge or fuel in Yap Harbor. On 22 June, 33 Liberators were over Yap in the longest mass mission the Thirteenth had yet flown. Trained eyes peered down on the harbor far below. There were no warships to be seen. The heavies wheeled and made their run on the secondary target, Yap Airdrome. Their 33-ton bomb load struck the runway and the dispersal areas with devastating effect.
View a large Yap Area MapThe Japanese were caught completely by surprise; not a single one of the more than 40 planes on the ground was able to take off and fly into the air. Nineteen enemy planes were definitely destroyed, and 15 were damaged; the runway was cratered and rendered unserviceable.
For six consecutive days after the raid of the 22nd of June, the Liberators blasted Yap, keeping the runway unserviceable and preventing its use in ferrying planes from the Philippines to the Marianas to aid the hard-pressed defenders of Saipan.
Filed under Japan, Micronesia, U.S., war
English as an Indigenous Pacific Island Language
From English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long (Duke U. Press, 2007; Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 91; Supplement to American Speech, vol. 81), pp. 3, 9-10:
IT IS A LITTLE KNOWN LINGUISTIC FACT that among a group of Western Pacific islands English is maintained as a community language of the indigenous population. These are the Bonin Islands. Today, these islands (also called Ogasawara Islands) are part of Japan and their population, Japanese citizens, but the English language has survived there, as both a tool of communication and a marker of their unique identity. This book attempts to provide an outline of the English of the Bonin Islands in its various forms and incarnations from 1830 to the present….
The Bonin Islands appear to have lain completely uninhabited until Pacific Islander women and European and American men of widely varying linguistic backgrounds began to settle there in the early 1800s (see sections 2.1 and 2.2). Evidence from a variety of sources indicates that a Pidgin English (with a substratum formed from the other settlers’ native languages) developed as the community’s common tongue. Later the children born and raised in this language environment are thought to have acquired this as their native language (i.e., creoloidization occurred).
In the 1860s and 1870s, Japan laid claim to the islands and they experienced a huge influx of Japanese settlers. The Japanese established the first-ever schools on the islands, initiating bilingual (English and Japanese) education. Increasingly intense bilingualism initiated the processes of SYNTACTIC CONVERGENCE, leading to the development of a second contact language (a Mixed Language) comprised of a Japanese substratum and a lexicon supplied by the earlier English-based creoloid.
After World War II, the linguistic situation on the islands took another sharp turn when the U.S. Navy took control, allowing only those islanders of “Western” ancestry to live on the islands and subsequently establishing a school conducted in English. This period of American occupation and absolute isolation from Japanese ended abruptly in 1968 when the islands were returned to Japanese rule and the displaced Japanese islanders (living then in mainland Japan for a quarter century) were allowed to return home. The Ogasawara Mixed Language and Ogasawara Creoloid English have long coexisted with Japanese and English acrolects, but increasing mobility and improved communication technology seem to be accelerating decreoloidization and (dare I say) “de-mixed-language-ization.”
In the 170-year linguistic history of the Bonin Islands, the dominant language has shifted from English (from 1830) to Japanese (1876), back to English (1946), and back again to Japanese (1968).
Lumpy Japanese Diaspora in a Well
Jonathan Dresner has a tantalizing post about lesser-known participants in the Japanese diaspora at Frog in a Well. Here’s the introduction.
I’m always interested in interesting tales and connections regarding the Japanese diaspora. Here’s a couple that I’ve run across: New research on Japanese settlers in Korea; Jorge Luis Borges, the great surrealist, married a Nikkei Argentinian woman late in life; Japanese post-WWII settlers in the Dominican Republic abandoned by both governments. I love being part — a small part, but nonetheless — of the diaspora studies movement. We’re complicating the history of the world, chronicling the wonderful diversity of seemingly simple things.
I followed Konrad’s note about Sayaka’s new blog and the post at the top points me to this Asahi report about a new research conference about “Japantowns” in colonial Korea. The tendency of Japanese migrations to be … lumpy? maybe there’s a better word… anyway, they often involve a lot of people from the same region ending up in the same place. It happened in the Hokkaido settlement, it happened in the migration to Hawai‘i, it was deliberately built into the Manchurian settlement program.
Filed under Caribbean, Japan, Latin America, migration
The Fall of the Ming and the Rise of the Dog Shogun
From The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, by Beatrice Bodart-Bailey (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), p. 67:
Japan’s leadership was confronted with serious questions [after the fall of the Ming dynasty]. Northern China had more or less peacefully capitulated to the invading Manchu forces, abruptly ending the supremacy of the nearly three-hundred-year-old Ming dynasty. From Shoho 3 (1646) onwards over some forty years the bakufu received requests for military assistance from the supporters of the beleaguered Ming holding out in South China. These served as a constant reminder of the fallen giant. Chinese scholars seeking refuge in Japan readily pointed out that the Chinese imperial house in no small way had been brought down by misgovernment and the discontent of the commoners. The question of how Japan would stand up to a Manchu threat could not be ignored. We know that the senior councilor Matsudaira Nobutsuna probed Kumazawa Banzan on this topic. The latter feared that last-minute preparations for battle would create enormous logistical problems with regard to food supplies. Shortage of rice would cause mutiny and riots, making it easy for the invaders to conquer Japan. Even if the invaders were repelled, the social and economic havoc resulting from the attempted invasion would leave Japan in a state of anarchy and civil war.
A solution in accord with Confucian concepts was to better the lot of the commoners so that they would rally behind their government. This was to be achieved by Confucian-style benevolent government (jinsei), where the commoners were administered with increased expertise, efficiency, and dedication on the part of samurai officials. Education brought enlightenment and reduced violence. Yet education and appointment commensurate with performance challenged the inherited birthright of the samurai. Moreover such benevolent government often required financial sacrifice. Especially at times of natural calamities, the military was expected to forgo tax collection and contribute to relief funds.
In opposition stood the resolve to maintain the political status quo by consolidating the privileges of the ruling class. This strategy meant adherence to Ieyasu’s maxim that farmers were to be taxed so that they barely retained enough grain for seeding and burdened with corvee leaving just enough energy to produce good crops. Education encouraged insubordination. As Sakai Tadakiyo had advised Ikeda Mitsumasa, in these troubled times expenditures on military and public duties were more appropriate.
From the publisher’s blurb:
Tsunayoshi (1646–1709), the fifth Tokugawa shogun, is one of the most notorious figures in Japanese history. Viewed by many as a tyrant, his policies were deemed eccentric, extreme, and unorthodox. His Laws of Compassion, which made the maltreatment of dogs an offense punishable by death, earned him the nickname Dog Shogun, by which he is still popularly known today. However, Tsunayoshi’s rule coincides with the famed Genroku era, a period of unprecedented cultural growth and prosperity that Japan would not experience again until the mid-twentieth century. It was under Tsunayoshi that for the first time in Japanese history considerable numbers of ordinary townspeople were in a financial position to acquire an education and enjoy many of the amusements previously reserved for the ruling elite.
Wordcatcher Tales: Dawasi, Kousapw, Sakau
Three words from the Micronesian language Pohnpeian (aka Ponapean) that surfaced in my background reading about the church shootings in Neosho, Missouri, tell stories of distant connections across time and space.
Dawasi – When I first heard about the Neosho church shooting, I assumed the Micronesians involved were from the Marshall Islands, because I know that many Marshallese work for Tyson Foods in nearby Springdale, Arkansas. But one key term (which I’ve italicized) in the following passage cited in a posting on the Marshallese YokweOnline network hinted that the Micronesians involved were from the state of Pohnpei, not the Marshalls. (They were actually from the outer islands of Pingelap, not the main island of Pohnpei.)
Kernel [Rehobson] owns a retail store that is a gathering place for Micronesians from dozens of miles around since he stocks his store with the type of down-home items that are so difficult to find in the US: the large plastic combs that women wear in their hair, zoris, dawasi and brushes for showers, and island-style skirts with embroidered hems.
Dawasi ‘scrub brush’ (made of coir bristle) is the official Pohnpeian spelling for a word borrowed from Japanese before the Pacific War. The same word was borrowed by Palauans, who spell it tauas(i). In current Japanese, tawashi (束子) can refer to scouring pads made of acrylic yarn, but the bristle brush variety is such a Japanese cultural icon that tiny replicas dangle from cellphones and backpacks.
The passage above cited on YokweOnline comes from the article on Micronesians Abroad by Francis X. Hezel, S.J., and Eugenia Samuel, that I blogged about earlier. The two words italicized in the next passage from the same article tell of very different connections.
Our team intended to visit Kansas City, home of a growing Micronesian community, largely Pohnpeian, that sprang from students who attended Park College during the 1970s and 1980s. Small colleges, once well attended by Micronesian students, have frequently served as the seedbeds for migrant communities in the US, accounting in part for the seemingly odd locations of Micronesian strongholds. Kansas City is said to have been constituted a kousap by a Pohnpeian chief not long ago when he paid a visit to his compatriots who had settled in that city. He was feted with sakau—the type made from powder rather than pounded—and left a week or two later with several thousand dollars, which had been collected as tribute from Pohnpeians who are now living 8,000 miles from their own island.
Kousapw – The kousapw (sapw means ‘land’) is a Pohnpeian land unit—translated ‘section’ below—intermediate between a farmstead and a district (or “municipality”). According to Douglas Oliver’s (1988) Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands, p. 983:
Most sections extended from coast to island center, and consisted of from fifteen to thirty-eight farmsteads. Each section had a meeting house of its own, and was headed by an official known as a kaun or soumas, who was usually the senior male member of the section’s senior sub-clan. The section functioned mainly as an administrative subdivision of the district.
This raises several questions. (1) There seem to be many old cultural connections between chiefly high-island Polynesians (possibly from Samoa) and Pohnpei. Is it just coincidence that the kousapw in Pohnpei usually runs from seashore to mountaintop, like the ahupua‘a of Hawai‘i (and presumably other large islands in Polynesia)? (2) Which of the major districts on the island of Pohnpei was the Kansas City kousapw assigned to? (3) Does this mean we now have a third Kansas City to contend with: one in Missouri, one in Kansas, and one in Pohnpei?
Sakau – One strong indication of old Polynesian influence on Pohnpei is the cultivation and use of Piper methysticum, known in Pohnpei as sakau, in Hawaiian as ‘awa, and in Samoan as ‘ava. In fact, the Pohnpeian word sakau derives by regular sound correspondences from the earlier Polynesian article+noun combination *te kawa.
Filed under Japan, language, Micronesia, Polynesia, U.S.
