Category Archives: Japan

by | 16 March 2007 · 5:43 pm

Peleliu D-Day + 1, 16 September 1944

Bloody Nose Ridge dominated the entire airfield. The Japanese had concentrated their heavy weapons on high ground; these were directed from observation posts at elevations as high as three hundred feet from which they could look down on us as we advanced. I could see men moving ahead of my squad, but I didn’t know whether our battalion, 3/5 [3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment], was moving across behind 2/5 and then wheeling to the right. There were also men about twenty yards to our rear.

We moved rapidly in the open, amid craters and coral rubble, through ever increasing enemy fire. I saw men to my right and left running bent as low as possible. The shells screeched and whistled, exploding all around us. In many respects it was more terrifying than the landing, because there were no vehicles to carry us along, not even the thin steel sides of an amtrac for protection. We were exposed, running on our own power through a veritable shower of deadly metal and the constant crash of explosions.

For me the attack resembled World War I movies I had seen of suicidal Allied infantry attacks through shell fire on the Western Front. I clenched my teeth, squeezed my carbine stock, and recited over and over to myself, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me….”

The sun bore down unmercifully, and the heat was exhausting. Smoke and dust from the barrage limited my vision. The ground seemed to sway back and forth under the concussions. I felt as though I were floating along in the vortex of some unreal thunderstorm. Japanese bullets snapped and cracked, and tracers went by me on both sides at waist height. This deadly small-arms fire seemed almost insignificant amid the erupting shells. Explosions and the hum and the growl of shell fragments shredded the air. Chunks of blasted coral stung my face and hands while steel fragments spattered down on the hard rock like hail on a city street. Everywhere shells flashed like giant firecrackers.

Through the haze I saw Marines stumble and pitch forward as they got hit. I then looked neither right nor left but just straight to my front. The farther we went, the worse it got. The noise and concussion pressed in on my ears like a vise. I gritted my teeth and braced myself in anticipation of the shock of being struck down at any moment. It seemed impossible that any of us could make it across. We passed several craters that offered shelter, but I remembered the order to keep moving. Because of the superb discipline and excellent esprit of the Marines, it had never occurred to us that the attack might fail.

About halfway across, I stumbled and fell forward. At that instant a large shell exploded to my left with a flash and a roar. A fragment ricocheted off the deck and growled over my head as I went down. On my right, Snafu let out a grunt and fell as the fragment struck him. As he went down, he grabbed his left side. I crawled quickly to him. Fortunately the fragment had spent much of its force, and luckily hit against Snafu’s heavy web pistol belt. The threads on the broad belt were frayed in about an inch-square area.

I knelt beside him, and we checked his side. He had only a bruise to show for his incredible luck. On the deck I saw the chunk of steel that had hit him. It was about an inch square and a half inch thick. I picked up the fragment and showed it to him. Snafu motioned toward his pack. Terrified though I was amid the hellish chaos, I calmly juggled the fragment around in my hands—it was still hot—and dropped it into his pack. He yelled something that sounded dimly like, “Let’s go.” I reached for the carrying strap of the mortar, but he pushed my hand away and lifted the gun to his shoulder. We got up and moved on as fast as we could. Finally we got across and caught up with other members of our company who lay panting and sweating amid low bushes on the northeastern side of the airfield.

How far we had come in the open I never knew, but it must have been several hundred yards. Everyone was visibly shaken by the thunderous barrage we had just come through. When I looked into the eyes of those fine Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester veterans, some of America’s best, I no longer felt ashamed of my trembling hands and almost laughed at myself with relief.

To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn’t experienced it. The attack across Peleliu’s airfield was the worst combat experience I had during the entire war. It surpassed, by the intensity of the blast and shock of the bursting shells, all the subsequent horrifying ordeals on Peleliu and Okinawa.

SOURCE: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E. B. Sledge (Oxford U. Press, 1990), pp. 79-80 (reviewed here: “A biology professor after the war at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, Sledge brings an academic style to the text that flows easily from chapter to chapter.”)

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by | 16 March 2007 · 5:18 pm

Souvenir Hunting on Peleliu, September 1944

During this lull the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead for souvenirs. This was a gruesome business, but Marines executed it in a most methodical manner. Helmet headbands were checked for flags, packs and pockets were emptied, and gold teeth were extracted. Sabers, pistols, and hari-kari knives were highly prized and carefully care for until they could be sent to the folks back home or sold to some pilot or sailor for a fat price. Rifles and other larger weapons usually were rendered useless and thrown aside. They were too heavy to carry in addition to our own equipment. They would be picked up later as fine souvenirs by the rear-echelon troops. The men in the rifle companies had a lot of fun joking about the hair-raising stories these people, who had never seen a live Japanese or been shot at, would probably tell after the war.

The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes. It was a brutal, ghastly ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed a profound mutual hatred. It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn’t simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.

While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near me. He wasn’t in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath.

The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar [knife] on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.

Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman’s war. Our code of conduct toward the enemy differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP.

SOURCE: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E. B. Sledge (Oxford U. Press, 1990), pp. 118, 120

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by | 15 March 2007 · 5:05 pm

Birth-order Names in Japan and Papua New Guinea

Most people familiar with Japan are aware of the Japanese birth-order naming system for males, whereby first sons are often called 一郎・太郎 Ichirō/Tarō; second sons 二郎・次郎 Jirō; third sons 三郎 Saburō, and so on. In theory, it would be possible to keep going up to at least the tenth son: 四郎, 五郎, 六郎,七郎, 八郎, 九郎, 十郎. However, I’m not sure how to pronounce the characters for fourth son, can’t find it in my dictionaries, and suspect that it would be an extremely unlucky name because Sino-Japanese shi ‘four’ sounds like shi ‘death’. (Japanese high-rises often lack a 4th floor, for the same reason that my high-rise condo in the U.S. lacks a 13th floor.) [See the correction below.]

Another thing I’m not so sure about is whether this system marks order of issue or order of survival. Back in the old days, many more children died very young. That might account for the naming of Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, whose name (東郷 平八郎) suggests he might have been his mother’s eighth son, even though he had only three brothers as an adult. (My farm-raised father’s eldest brother and eldest sister also died very young, but he still ended up with five brothers and one sister.)

Birth-order naming systems are also very common in the coastal languages of the Huon Gulf of Papua New Guinea. The naming system in Numbami accommodates up to seven sons and six daughters, and without incorporating any numerals. The order-of-issue names for sons are Alisa, Alinga, Gae, Alu, Sele, Dei, Ase Mou; and for daughters are Kale, Aga, Aya, Damiya, Owiya, Ase Mou. Notice how the names for the seventh son and sixth daughter are the same? That’s because both translate as ‘name none’, or No-Name. My host mother during my fieldwork had seven sons and four daughters, all of whom survived thanks to postwar improvements in public health. The youngest son was called Ase Mou ‘name none’, or Ase ‘name’ for short. Of course, as the kids get older, they tend to go by their baptismal names (often of Biblical origin) or traditional names, depending partly on whether they remain in the village or move to town.

Another coastal language for which birth-order names have been recorded is Labu, which is the only surviving coastal member of the Markham subgroup, which stretches far inland up the Markham River valley. The Labu names for the first five sons are Aso, Amoa, Aŋgi, Aŋgu, Ôlôndi; and for the first five daughters are Ami, Hiya, Aya, Êta, Hênamu. (My source seems a little bit confused about the names farther down the line.) If you compare the Numbami names to the Labu names, only the names of the third daughter match. (However, I’m guessing that Labu Asôlô for both males and females toward the bottom of both lists is the etymological equivalent of Ase Mou ‘name none’, even though the current Labu word for ‘name’ is apaŋa.)

This is typical of the Huon Gulf Sprachbund: the structures match but the sounds often don’t. That facilitates translation, but not lexical retention. Fortunately, human memories can retain enormous amounts of lexical clutter; while human brains are much less efficient at quick translation between languages. (Human RAM far exceeds human CPU capacity. The rise of transformational grammar seems to have been predicated on the opposite assumption: People had to derive one semantically related structure from another; they couldn’t memorize both and then analogize between them.)

UPDATE: For Japanese kanji jocks (or kanji bandits), Matt of No-sword offers some interesting observations of how people have simplified characters by employing ditto marks (or means very similar). Sort of a calligraphic compression algorithm.

CORRECTION: (Slaps forehead.) Matt corrects me (and not for the first time). 四郎 Shirō is neither unlucky nor uncommon. Well, it’s less common than 三郎 Saburō but more common than 五郎 Gorō for the same reason that third sons are more common than fourth, and fourth more common than fifth. Instead of puttering around in my kanji dictionaries, I should have googled up likely names like Suzuki/Tanaka/Yamada Shirō.

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by | 14 March 2007 · 8:52 pm

Japan’s Forgotten Self-Abductees

The Marmot’s Hole cites a new study by ANU professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki on North Korea’s forgotten victims, the Koreans who “returned” to North Korea from Japan between 1959 and 1984, with much encouragement from the Japanese government. Read the whole thing.

Between 1959 and 1984, these few were among the 93,340 people who migrated from Japan to North Korea in search of the new and better life. There were several particularly ironic features of this migration. First, it took place precisely at the time of Japan’s “economic miracle”. Secondly, although it was described as a “repatriation”, almost all those who “returned” to North Korea originally came from the south of the Korean peninsula, and many had been born and lived all their lives in Japan. Third, the glowing images of life which tempted them to Kim Il-Sung’s “worker’s paradise” came, not just from the North Korean propaganda machine but from the Japanese mainstream media, supported and encouraged by politicians including key members of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The Marmot adds:

PS: Obviously, this whole affair, if true, is not exactly analogous to Operation Keelhaul [Wikipedia], when thousands of anti-communist Eastern Europeans (many of whom were Nazi collaborators) in Allied-occupied Europe were handed over to the Soviets and Yugoslavs after the war. But it’s a tragedy nevertheless. One famous survivor of the repatriation, of course, is defector Kang Chol-hwan [Wikipedia], the author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang who spent his first years in Japan before his parents returned to North Korea. He spent much of the rest of his childhood in Yodok Prison Camp [Wikipedia], thanks to North Korea’s humane practice of incarcerating entire families [New York Times].

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by | 6 March 2007 · 8:16 am

Propaganda Battles in Bougainville, 1943

Early in January, the native situation began to take a turn for the worse. The people of Ruri really believed my propaganda that the death of their chief was caused by his wearing the armband of Nippon. They spread the story far and wide, and consequently many Japanese armbands were thrown away.

The natives of Sorem Village, three miles south of the [Buka] Passage, were very much pro-Japanese. They considered themselves very important people. They fraternized and drank whiskey with the Japs and were gullible to enemy promises of intermarriage after the war was over. Enticements such as these were standard Japanese methods of currying native favor.

The Sorem residents lured several Ruri men to their village, where they were captured and turned over to the Japanese as being pro-British. The prisoners were flogged and interned at the Passage. I quickly realized that unless this sort of thing was stopped, the Japanese sphere of influence would grow too rapidly and would soon interfere with our coast watching activities. I sent a message to Station KEN asking for Sorem Village to be bombed.

Mackenzie arranged for the attack to take place on the night of January 13. The plan called for a team of my boys to make their way under cover of darkness to the outskirts of town where daylight aerial reconnaissance had revealed a certain grass hut near the village. My men were instructed to lie in wait until they heard a plane approaching, then to set fire to the shack as a guide for the aircraft and to run as fast as possible away from the target area. The natives, led by Sergeant Yauwika, showed a lot of courage in volunteering for the mission, and it was executed to perfection.

A Catalina carried out the raid. The pilot made three runs over the village at 1,500 feet, dropping two 500-pound bombs, a cluster of incendiaries, and a couple of depth charges. This probably sounds like a powerful discharge of explosives on a small native settlement, but fortunately only one person was slightly wounded. However, the gesture and resulting shock value served our purpose.

Much to our astonishment, the surprise bombardment even unnerved the enemy. A few days after the attack on Sorem, the Japanese commander at the Passage summoned all the area native chiefs to Sohano where they were addressed by the commandant. He informed the people that U.S. forces were expected to invade northern Bougainville and that his troops might have to retreat for a few days until they could launch a counterattack.

In case of such an eventuality, the natives were ordered to assist and feed the Japanese soldiers. Beach villages were instructed to institute a system of constant vigilance—reporting anything unusual to Sohano immediately. The chieftains were also warned against sending any information to me, and that henceforth the airfield and all fortified positions were off-limits. Finally, the chiefs were advised to protect their people by building air raid shelters.

While the speech did not enhance Japanese prestige in the eyes of the natives, fear of the consequences weighed heavily on the minds of the village leaders. More importantly, however, was the fact that this display of panic on the part of the enemy was the first intimation to the islanders that their conquerors were not the invincible beings they professed to be. The stern lecture and warnings certainly contradicted earlier Japanese assertions that the war was over and they had won it.

Frightened natives, in the vicinity of the Passage, now tended to migrate toward Soraken and away from the threatened danger. For the moment, at least, we were afforded a breathing spell.

SOURCE: Coast Watching in WWII: Operations against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, 1941–43, by A. B. Feuer (Stackpole, 2006), pp. 120-122

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by | 5 March 2007 · 5:55 pm

Redskins Trapped in Bougainville, 1942–43

The Japanese remained at Tinputz for three days before embarking for Kieta. Apparently their objective had been to carry out a beach reconnaissance for construction materials and anything else that might be of value to them. After the enemy departed, we resumed the journey to Porapora and reached Lumsis the first day. Besides the Aravia natives, the people of Lumsis remained loyal to us until the very end. I decided to set up a base in the mountains behind Lumsis—a place to fall back on in case Porapora became untenable.

While we were at the village, another problem presented itself. Natives living on the island who were foreign to Bougainville—such as people from New Britain and the other islands, were known locally as “Redskins.” The term derives from the fact that their pigmentation is somewhat lighter than that of the average Buka and Bougainville native. There were a hundred or so of them working in northern Bougainville when the Japanese invaded the islands. The subsequent departure of their employers left the Redskins more or less stranded, and the local natives did not want them hanging around the villages. It was a drain on the food supply and invariably became a cause of domestic strife. The people turned to me to solve their dilemma.

The Aravia and Lumsis natives were very amiable. I was able to purchase a block of fertile land from each community and settled the Redskins on the property. However, in return, I asked them to serve me as carriers or laborers whenever called upon. They willingly agreed to the proposal. Incidentally, practically all my police boys were Redskins.

SOURCE: Coast Watching in WWII: Operations against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, 1941–43, by A. B. Feuer (Stackpole, 2006), p. 119

Some resentful Bougainvilleans like to observe that the Papua New Guinea flag represents their relationship to the rest of PNG, with black on the bottom and red on top.

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by | 4 March 2007 · 8:19 am

Okinawa D-Day + 1, 2 April 1945

On 2 April [1945] (D + 1) the 1st Marine Division continued its attack across the island. We moved out with our planes overhead but without artillery fire, because no organized body of Japanese had been located ahead of us….

During the morning I saw a couple of dead enemy soldiers who apparently had been acting as observers in a large leafless tree when some of the prelanding bombardment killed them. One still hung over a limb. His intestines were strung out among the branches like garland decorations on a Christmas tree. The other man lay beneath the tree. He had lost a leg which rested on the other side of the tree with the leggings and trouser leg still wrapped neatly around it. In addition to their ghoulish condition, I noted that both soldiers wore high-top leather hobnail shoes. That was the first time I had seen that type of Japanese footwear. All the enemy I had seen on Peleliu had worn the rubber-soled canvas split-toed tabi.

We encountered some Okinawans—mostly old men, women, and children. The Japanese had conscripted all the young men as laborers and a few as troops, so we saw few of them. We sent the civilians to the rear where they were put into internment camps so they couldn’t aid the enemy.

These people were the first civilians I had seen in a combat area. They were pathetic. The most pitiful things about the Okinawan civilians were that they were totally bewildered by the shock of our invasion, and they were scared to death of us. Countless times they passed us on the way to the rear with fear, dismay, and confusion on their faces.

The children were nearly all cute and bright-faced. They had round faces and dark eyes. The little boys usually had close-cropped hair, and the little girls had their shiny jet-black locks bobbed in the Japanese children’s style of the period. The children won our hearts. Nearly all of us gave them all the candy and rations we could spare. They were quicker to lose their fear of us than the older people, and we had some good laughs with them.

One of the funnier episodes I witnessed involved two Okinawan women and their small children. We had been ordered to halt and “take ten” (a ten-minute rest) before resuming our rapid advance across the island. My squad stopped near a typical Okinawan well constructed of stone and forming a basin about two feet deep and about four feet by six feet on the sides. Water bubbled out of a rocky hillside. We watched two women and their children getting a drink. They seemed a bit nervous and afraid of us, of course. But life had its demands with children about, so one woman sat on a rock, nonchalantly opened her kimono top, and began breast-feeding her small baby.

While the baby nursed, and we watched, the second child (about four years old) played with his mother’s sandals. The little fellow quickly tired of this and kept pestering his mother for attention. The second woman had her hands full with a small child of her own, so she wasn’t any help. The mother spoke sharply to her bored child, but he started climbing all over the baby and interfering with the nursing. As we looked on with keen interest, the exasperated mother removed her breast from the mouth of the nursing baby and pointed it at the face of the fractious brother. She squeezed her breast just as you would milk a cow and squirted a jet of milk into the child’s face. The startled boy began bawling at the top of his lungs while rubbing the milk out of his eyes.

We all roared with laughter, rolling around on the deck and holding our sides. The women looked up, not realizing why we were laughing, but began to grin because the tension was broken. The little recipient of the milk in the eyes stopped crying and started grinning, too.

“Get your gear on; we’re moving out,” came the word down the column. As we shouldered our weapons and ammo and moved out amid continued laughter, the story traveled along to the amusement of all. We passed the two smiling mothers and the grinning toddler, his cute face still wet with his mother’s milk.

SOURCE: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E. B. Sledge (Oxford U. Press, 1990), pp. 192-193 (reviewed here: “A biology professor after the war at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, Sledge brings an academic style to the text that flows easily from chapter to chapter.”)

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by | 27 February 2007 · 8:48 pm

Robert Lang: An American Master of Extreme Origami

The New Yorker this week profiles an American master of extreme origami.

One of the few Americans to see action during the Bug Wars of the nineteen-nineties was Robert J. Lang, a lanky Californian who was on the front lines throughout, from the battle of the Kabutomushi Beetle to the battle of the Menacing Mantis and the battle of the Long-Legged Wasp. Most combatants in the Bug Wars—which were, in fact, origami contests—were members of the Origami Detectives, a group of artists in Japan who liked to try outdoing one another with extreme designs of assigned subjects….

Lang is accustomed to being surprising. Some years ago, he was the mystery guest on the television game show “Naruhodo! Za Warudo”—the Japanese version of “What’s My Line?”—and he amazed the audience and the contestants, because they couldn’t believe that an American could be an origami expert. People who know him as a scientist are flabbergasted when they hear that he is one of the world’s foremost paper-folding artists, and are often surprised that such a thing as a professional origami artist even exists. People expecting him to be kooky—or, at the very least, Japanese—find his academic accomplishments and his white male Americanness puzzling. Recently, he was commissioned by Lalique, the French crystal company, to demonstrate folding at a launch for its new collection of vases, which are rippled and creased in an origami-like way. The launch was at a Neiman Marcus in Troy, Michigan, on a cold night just before Christmas. It was intended for Neiman Marcus’s favorite customers, and there was music playing and waiters offering hors d’oeuvres and glasses of wine. Lang was set up in the china-and-crystal department, behind a Regency-style desk. On one side of the desk was a stack of thin, square sheets of Japanese origami paper, as brightly colored as a roll of Life Savers. He had with him a laptop computer, and during a break he showed me software that he was designing with his brother, a botany professor, which simulates the growth of cherry trees and will allow farmers to test pruning and fertilizing techniques on a computer, rather than in their orchards. Lang is now forty-five. He is tall, with slim, fine-looking hands, a tidy Silicon Valley-style beard, and the clean, comfortable good looks of a park ranger….

Lang was, by all accounts, good at his science jobs: he wrote more than eighty technical papers and holds forty-six patents on lasers and optoelectronics. All the while, he was plotting how he would find time to write origami books. He published several while he was still in the laser world, starting with “The Complete Book of Origami,” in 1989, but he knew that it would require all his time to write the one he had in mind, which, instead of providing patterns for folders to follow—the typical origami book—would teach them how to design their own….

Something about origami’s simplicity and its apparently endless possibilities appeals to people. In 2003, the Mingei International Museum, in San Diego, mounted an exhibition called “Origami Masterworks,” which included several of Lang’s pieces. It was supposed to run six months, but attendance was so robust that the show was extended for six months, then for eight more. In Japan, the “Survivor”-style show “TV Champion” has often featured contestants engaging in extreme origami—folding with their hands in a box, or while balanced on stools with the paper suspended above them, or while snorkelling in a fishtank. A surprising number of countries have origami organizations; the Origami Society of the Netherlands has more than fifteen hundred members—probably the highest per-capita membership in the world. There is a soothing element in the monotony of folding and unfolding. In fact, origami as therapy has its proponents: in 1991, at the Conference on Origami in Education and Therapy, a mental-health professional presented a paper detailing her origami work with prisoners. “The most rewarding of experiences,” she wrote, “was that of observing the effect that Origami had on psychopathic killers.”

via Arts & Letters Daily

My middle brother used to be able to fold a whole train—from locomotive to caboose—from a single, long piece of butcher paper.

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by | 19 February 2007 · 7:57 pm

Origins of the South Pacific Coastwatching Network

The idea for a coast watching network originated in the year 1919, beginning as a defensive measure to protect the long, and virtually unprotected, coastline of Australia. At that time, the country’s population was concentrated primarily in the southeast section of the continent; in the event of war, an enemy could launch a surprise air attack on this area by crossing a wide expanse of desolate territory. To counter this threat, a plan was developed to use civilian spotters as coast watchers. They were equipped with telegraph and radio sets and were expected to act as an early warning system to report unidentified aircraft.

In September 1939, Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt, Royal Australian Navy, was stationed at Port Moresby, New Guinea, and placed in charge of intelligence gathering operations. The coast watching organization comprised about 800 people—the majority positioned along the Australian shore. A Solomon Islands screen, to the north, consisted of a few hundred plantation owners and managers. This group of spotters was spread very thin along the coasts of Buka, Bougainville, New Georgia, and other islands of the Solomons chain.

Lieutenant Commander Feldt gave his Solomon Islands watchers the code name FERDINAND, after the storybook character Ferdinand the bull, who preferred to sit under a tree and smell the flowers rather than fight. Although FERDINAND comprised a small group of spotters, its intelligence-gathering network covered more than a half million square miles of islands and ocean. The nickname not only suited this band of observers but also reminded them of their assignment as lookouts, not fighters. During World War II, however, there were many times when the Solomon Islands coast watchers, with their backs to the wall, were forced to battle the Japanese.

SOURCE: Coast Watching in WWII: Operations against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, 1941–43, by A. B. Feuer (Stackpole, 2006), pp. xvii–xviii

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by | 8 February 2007 · 5:19 am

Australia–Japan Security Agreement to Be Signed

Japundit‘s Iron Chef reports that Australia and Japan are on the verge of signing a joint security agreement (that carefully avoids the word “treaty”) when Australian Prime Minister Howard visits Japan next month. Although some Australian veterans of World War II still hold bitter feelings toward Japan, the Returned and Services League (RSL) has apparently come out in support of the treaty agreement.

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