Category Archives: Japan

by | 1 July 2007 · 10:03 pm

Japan, Korea, Manchuria :: Torso, Arm, Fist

THE YEARS BETWEEN the collapse of the United Front in the fall of 1931 and the outbreak of the war with China in 1937 brought colonial Korea’s ironies and contradictions into sharp focus. While the fall of the United Front meant the collapse of overt nationalist resistance, what emerged in its place was a more violent anti-Japanese movement represented by the guerrilla movement in Manchuria and the Red Peasant Unions in the far northeast of the peninsula. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931 altered Korea’s position in the empire, for Korea then became a middleman in the empire’s development of northeast China’s vast untapped resources. The subsequent, seemingly anomalous industrialization of North Korea provided new jobs for peasants, but at the price of dislocating them from the densely populated south and moving them to the north; furthermore, Korea’s industrial labor force expanded simultaneously with the deepening immiseration of the Korean countryside. Finally this period witnessed the flowering of a capitalist mass culture in Korea’s cities, a popular culture providing the façade of a modernity that had evolved unevenly in the colony. The alluring consumer culture and glittering nightlife in the cities contrasted with abject poverty in the countryside, symbolizing each end of the economic spectrum of a dual economy—dual in the sense that parts of Seoul were as modern as anything in Tokyo, yet in rural backwaters profound poverty and wretched material conditions remained unchanged from the nineteenth century.

The addition of Manchuria caused large-scale shifts within the Japanese Empire. Increasingly isolated in world affairs and threatened by economic isolation as trading nations erected tariff barriers to protect their own economies, Japan began to create an autarkic economy formed around its colonies. The main axis of this system ran from Japan proper through Korea and Manchuria, with Taiwan playing an important, but less crucial role. Because Korea was more firmly integrated politically, had a more developed infrastructure, and was labor rich—not to mention its being geographically central—Japan began to industrialize Korea in order to exploit the raw materials of Manchuria. The state-led industrialization of Korea in the 1930s was an anomaly in colonial history. No colony had ever before been industrialized to the level of Japan’s Korea colony, a process that shifted labor from the densely populated south to the sites of huge new factories in northern Korea and Manchuria and spurred urban growth as well.

The increasing economic importance of Korea within the empire motivated Japan to intensify its efforts to spread Japanese values, language, and institutions within the colony. By the mid-1930s Japanese authorities were demanding active Korean participation in Shinto ceremonies, stepping up the pressure within the education system to spread Japanese language use, and trying to eliminate the last differences in legal and administrative practices that distinguished the Japanese naichi (inner lands) from the colonial gaichi (outer lands). The goal in the minds of colonial officials was a seamless cultural, legal, and administrative assimilation of Korea, and where this could not be accomplished in reality, cosmetic fiction would do. This was especially true in the dark years of the Pacific War (1941–1945), when the Japanese assimilation policies became increasingly hysterical and unrealistic.

By the end of the colonial period in 1945, Korean society [like Japan—J.] was suffering under a cripplingly harsh mobilization for total war. It was no consolation that the Japanese Diet had recommended the complete elimination of the distinction between naichi and gaichi, or true Japanese from their imperial subjects on the periphery. [One might say the same for the distinction between soldiers and civilians—J.] Becoming assimilated meant that Koreans would be allowed the same privileges to sacrifice for the emperor granted the citizenry of the main islands—namely, to be conscripted for the military and labor forces, to render their rice and precious metals to the imperial treasury, and to be forcefully moved wherever manpower was needed. Of course while distinctions disappeared in theory, Koreans and other colonials still carried identity cards designating their ethnicity.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 76-77

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Filed under China, industry, Japan, Korea, war

by | 30 June 2007 · 3:01 pm

Changing Roles of Katakana (and Italics)

A recent post on Language Hat about the official name of Iwojima changing back to its prewar form, Iōtō, sparked a bit of discussion about the reason for the change to Iwojima in the first place. That prompted me to take another look at Japanese military communications, the changing role of katakana in Japanese writing, and then the changing role of italics in western writing. In each case, current usage misleads us about usage in other times and places. Here is a small collection of corrective lenses on the past.

Origins of italic type and its shrunken role

Italic type originally served very different roles. It wasn’t invented just to set off words that were emphasized or foreign.

The humanist spirit driving the Renaissance produced its own unique style of formal writing, known as “cursiva humanistica”. This slanted and rapidly written letter, evolved from humanistic minuscule and the remaining Gothic current cursive hands in Italy, served as the model for cursive or italic typefaces….

Surviving examples of 16th century Italian books indicate the bulk of them were printed with italic types. By mid-century the popularity of italic types for sustained text setting began to decline until they were used only for in-line citations, block quotes, preliminary text, emphasis, and abbreviations.

Origins of the kana syllabaries

In A History of Writing in Japan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), Christopher Seeley describes the origins of the kana syllabaries (p. 59).

The two Japanese syllabaries known to us today as hiragana and katakana came into being as the result of a process of simplification to Chinese characters used as phonograms [purely for sound, not meaning]. The phonogram principle was known in early China, where it was sometimes utilised to represent foreign words in writing, as for example Sanskrit names and terms in Chinese translations of the Buddhist sutras. In Japan, too, Chinese characters were employed in this way from an early date, at first only to represent proper nouns, but subsequently in an increasingly extensive manner. This gradual trend towards the wider use of phonograms provided a strong incentive to the development of simplified forms.

Hiragana developed through a process of cursivization—linking, blurring, and eliding separate strokes in order to write whole characters more rapidly (a bit like cursive script and its derivative italic type in Europe). Katakana developed through a process of writing just one key part of a whole character.

Early roles of the two syllabaries

Nowadays, hiragana is the more basic of the two syllabaries, in that respect more akin to roman type; while katakana is used to represent foreign words and names, onomatopoeic sounds, or emphasized words, in those respects more akin to italic type. However, the earliest common usage of katakana was to gloss Chinese characters with their native Japanese translation in kuntenbon, Chinese texts marked for reading as Japanese, dating from around the tenth century. In those glosses, katakana indicated the native Japanese reading (kunyomi), not the foreign reading (onyomi for Sino-Japanese). This style of reading Chinese texts, called kundoku, required the reader to translate each Chinese sentence not just into native Japanese word order, but into native Japanese words, even adding Japanese honorifics. Readers in the ondoku style, by contrast, would render the Chinese text in Chinese order and Sino-Japanese (onyomi) pronunciations.

While monks and learned gentlemen decoded Chinese texts with the aid of katakana glosses, noble court ladies employed the more elegant and flowing hiragana to compose Japanese-style letters, poems, and prose fiction. In fact, cursive hiragana was referred to in those days as onna-de ‘women’s hand’ (the term hiragana is not attested until 1603); while otoko-de ‘men’s hand’ denoted a blockier script heavily dependent on Chinese characters (Seeley, pp. 76-80). This doesn’t mean that men never wrote in hiragana, or that women never employed kanji or katakana, only that cursive hiragana was considered more feminine, and blockier kanji and katakana was considered more masculine.

Kata the mechanical kana

As Japan opened up and began industrializing in the mid 1800s, the relative simplicity and efficiency of katakana gained it many new applications, most notably in semaphore, where the flag positions represent the shapes of katakana strokes (requiring 1, 2, or 3 positions per character); and in telegraphy, where Japan’s Wabun kana-based Morse code was far more efficient than China’s character-based code, even though it requires twice as many dot-dash combinations as Oubun ‘European’ Morse code. The two superscript dots in Japanese kana that indicate voicing (dakuten) are efficiently coded by an extra dot-dot, but the superscript circle that turned h into p (handakuten) is coded far less efficiently by an extra dot-dot-dash-dash-dot! In both semaphore and telegraphy, the receiver transcribed the message in katakana and telegrams were delivered in katakana.

As a result, military communications were overwhelmingly rendered in katakana. Bill Gordon’s very impressive website, Kamikaze Images, even includes a replica of a kamikaze pilot’s final letter to his children written almost entirely in katakana. And former RAAF wireless operator A. Jack Brown, who spent World War II transcribing Japanese military broadcasts, even titled his recently published memoir Katakana Man.

Instead of a flying career, Jack found himself in top secret RAAF wireless units. There he worked to intercept radio transmissions sent in the Japanese katakana code, which were then analysed to produce the highly reliable intelligence that helped General MacArthur in devising his strategy for the allied campaign in the South-West Pacific.

(Also see the U.S. Naval War College Review article about American code-breakers in the Pacific.)

In some ways, katakana also played a role similar to that of the Courier typeface that was the official standard for U.S. government and diplomatic documents for decades until 1 February 2004. Government reports were often published in kanji and katakana, rather than kanji and hiragana as would be customary today. So was Japanese imperial propaganda (translated here). Ease of carving also made katakana much more common in official seals and on woodblock prints than it is today.

I suspect the wholesale abandonment after Japan’s defeat of so much katakana usage was partly motivated by Japan’s attempt to wash away the stains of its military and imperial legacy.

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by | 28 June 2007 · 10:23 pm

Korea’s Cultural Renaissance, 1920s

At least for Korea’s middle-class intellectuals, the early 1920s marked a time of hope and renewed cultural and political activity…. Renaissance is an apt description of the outpouring of essays, commentary, literature, and political analyses that fueled the reemergence of a Korea press after 1920….

The magnitude of the 1920s publishing boom was enormous in relative terms. The Japanese had issued permits for only forty magazines and journals during the entire 1910–1920 period, but in 1920 alone, they granted permits to 409 different magazines and journals, not to mention the coveted “current events” (sisa) permits to two daily newspapers, the East Asia Daily and the Korea Daily (Chosŏn ilbo), and almost half a dozen politically oriented journals. In 1910 the combined circulation of Korean daily papers and important journals probably did not exceed 15,000; by 1929 the circulation of the two Korean newspapers alone had increased tenfold to 103,027. The sisa permit allowed discussion not only of current events, but also of political and social commentary. Moreover, no cumbersome change in the legal system that governed publishing had been necessary. Suddenly permits that for the most part had been denied Koreans for a decade were forthcoming. There was no lag between policy and practice, and given the youth and energy of the new publishers—the founder of the East Asia Daily, Kim Sŏngsu, was only thirty and his reporters were in their twenties—new publications hit the streets weekly in the early years of the 1920s.

In the early 1920s the new publications were poorly financed; there was plenty of patriotic enthusiasm but little business sense. With journals it did not matter; the goal was to get ideas and plans into the open for discussion. Many of the political journals were supported by donations, and they almost always lost money. The newspapers did not make money for several years, but they were sustained by investors’ patriotic fervor. By the mid-1920s, however, increasing advertising revenues (ironically from Japanese commercial sources) brought them into the black, and by the early 1930s each was publishing successful entertainment monthlies aimed at segmented audiences such as youth, women, sports fans, and children. Publishing was becoming a profitable business that competed with other enterprises for a share of the expanding market for entertainment. This called forth lamentations from political activists, who decried the commercialization of the press and the corresponding enervation of its political commitment….

Perhaps even more startling than the outpouring of publishing after the Cultural Policy thaw was the mushrooming of organizations of all types. In 1920 there 985 organizations of all types registered with the Colonial Police. These were local youth groups, religious organizations, educational and academic societies, and social clubs. Two years later this number had swelled to almost 6,000. These included occupational groups, tenant and labor associations, savings and purchasing cooperatives, temperance unions, health and recreational clubs, and groups clustered by Japanese statisticians into a vague category called “self-improvement.” The Cultural Policy clearly set loose an enormous pent-up demand for associational life in the colony. And while most groups restricted their activities to politically innocuous social, enlightenment, or self-help projects, even a cursory glance at their charters reveals that many linked their goals to national self-strengthening. There were, however, many groups who forsook nationalism altogether in order to promote social reform among Koreans themselves, most notably, early feminist groups and the movement to eliminate discrimination against the traditionally low-status paekchŏng [comparable to Japan’s outcaste burakumin]. In the short term the Japanese chose to ignore the potential for nationalist mischief that these organizations represented, but they were very keen to monitor and selectively suppress what they saw as class-based—and therefore more dangerous—tenant and labor organizations….

Another important feature of the organizational boom was the increasing participation of women in public life. Women’s clubs and educational associations had appeared on the heels of the Independence Club’s activities in the late 1890s. Thereafter aristocratic and middle-class women took the lead to establish schools for women and to reform oppressive customs such as child-marriages and the prohibition of widow remarriage (some of these customs had been outlawed already by the Kabo social legislation of 1894–1895). Before annexation, women in the Christian churches had formed groups around a number of social reform issues. Soon the number of patriotic women’s associations (aeguk puinhoe) burgeoned, and they played an important role in the largest private campaign mounted in Korea before annexation—the National Debt Repayment Movement. After March First [1919] the term “new woman” (sinyŏsŏng) became standard usage in the press to describe modern, educated women who had become a very visible part of public life. By the 1920s more radical demands for a true liberation of women emerged in Korea’s first avowedly feminist journals, Kim Wŏnju’s New Woman (Sin yŏsŏng) and Na Hyesŏk’s Women’s World (Yŏjagye). In these publications women’s issues were not justified by merging them with the agenda of national self-strengthening. Instead, for the first time, Na and Kim directly confronted the inequity and oppression of Korean patriarchy. Radical feminism, however, was ultimately marginalized, while the less confrontational agenda of Christian-dominated, reformist women’s groups found favor within the male-led nationalist movement.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 56-61

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by | 11 May 2007 · 5:37 pm

Northeast Asian Maritime Trade Networks, 800-1000

Maritime trade in East Asia began to flourish in the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. It was jump-started by Persian and Arab merchants, who traveled to and settled in ports as far from home as Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China. Later, commerce spread eastward and northward along the coast to Quanzhou, Fuzhou, Mingzhou (Ningbo), and finally Hangzhou, where merchants could gain access to the Chinese interior via the Grand Canal. Foreign trade thus became integrated to a certain extent with China’s domestic economy. Although pioneered by Arabs and Persians, this route soon fell under the domination of ethnic Chinese. Meanwhile, Korean merchants established their own trade networks connecting the west coast of Silla with Laizhou, Haizhou, and other ports in north China and entering the canal system through the mouth of the Huai River. In the early ninth century, semiautonomous communities of Korean traders were scattered along much of the north China littoral.

These northern routes were further extended to Japan under the direction of the Korean tycoon Chang Pogo. Chang himself is said to have visited Kyushu in 824 and met with the governor of Chikuzen, although the validity of this account has been questioned. In any case Chang, acting by authorization of the king of Silla, was in charge of maritime defenses at the Ch’ŏnghae garrison on Wan Island by the late 820s or early 830s. It is probably no coincidence that the first Japanese record of “Silla merchants” in Hakata dates from 831.

However, Korean domination of the Hakata trade was short-lived, to say the least. Merchants from Tang make their first known appearance in Hakata in 842, and soon thereafter they completely replace their counterparts from Silla. Chinese merchants bypassed the Korean coastal route entirely, traveling directly across the East China Sea from locations such as Fuzhou and Mingzhou. These same ports continued to supply the bulk of foreign merchants visiting Japan after the demise of Tang (in 907), when they fell under the control, respectively, of the Wu Yue kingdom and then (after 978) the Song empire.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 111-112

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by | 7 May 2007 · 10:22 pm

Japanese Loanwords in Pohnpeian

During the period of Japanese rule (1914–1945) the islands of the Marianas, Palau/Belau and Ponape/Pohnpei were the most intensely colonized areas of Micronesia. By 1938, about nine out of ten people in the Marianas were Japanese colonists (many of them from Okinawa or Korea), and the same was true for about two out of three in Palau and about one out of three in Ponape. As a result, Pohnpeian adopted many words from Japanese, some of which are have fallen out of use or been replaced by words from English as the prewar and wartime generation passes from the scene.

The following lists are presented in my rendition of the current standard Pohnpeian spelling. My linguistic source cites the same forms in a phonemic transcription, but I want to give my readers a feel for the workings of one of the most successful orthographies in Micronesia.

Standard Pohnpeian distinguishes 7 vowels, but only 5 are needed for the Japanese loans, and vowel length is indicated by a trailing h. (The language has no glottal consonants, neither h nor glottal stop.) Palatal glides are written with i, but labiovelar glides are written with w. Pohnpeian makes no distinction between voiced and voiceless obstruents, which are written p, d, t, s, k. Note that d is a dental stop and t is a laminal stop (which sounds a bit like ty to me).

Domestic articles

  • aisara ‘ashtray’
  • asi ‘chopsticks’
  • dama ‘lightbulb’
  • dawasi ‘Japanese brush’
  • dompwuri ‘bowl’
  • kadorsingko ‘mosquito coil’
  • kama ‘sickle’ or ‘pot’
  • manaida ‘cutting board’
  • parikang ‘hair clipper’
  • samusi ‘rice paddle’
  • sarasi ‘bleach’

Food items

  • aiskehki ‘popsicle’
  • ansu ‘star fruit tree’
  • dakuwang ‘pickled radish’
  • kasuwo ‘skipjack tuna’
  • kiarameru ‘caramel’
  • kiuhri ‘cucumber’
  • pihru ‘beer’
  • ramen ‘noodle soup’
  • ramwune ‘marble’
  • samma ‘mackeral’
  • sasimi ‘sashimi’
  • saida ‘soda’
  • soiu ‘soy sauce’
  • sukiaki ‘sukiyaki’

Game/Sports terms

  • anaire ‘marble game’ (sometimes araine)
  • apadopi ‘long jump’
  • damaski ‘pool, billiards’
  • deng ‘score’
  • iakiu ‘baseball’
  • iakumehda ‘hundred meter dash’
  • iohidong ‘ready, set, go’
  • iranai ‘to pass in a card game’
  • kesso ‘to run or swim the final lap in a race’
  • kurop ‘baseball glove’
  • lepdo ‘left field’
  • masuku ‘catcher’s mask’
  • pahsdo ‘first base’
  • rensuh ‘to practice for an athletic event’
  • sahdo ‘third base’
  • sakura ‘hanafuda card game’
  • sandangdopi ‘hop-skip-jump’
  • sansing ‘to strike out [in baseball]’
  • sensuh ‘athlete’
  • suhdo ‘judo’

Personal articles

  • angkasi ‘handkerchief’
  • asmaki ‘headband’
  • kamidome ‘barrette’
  • kapang ‘bag’
  • pwundosi ‘loincloth’
  • sarmada ‘underwear’ (now women’s vs. pirihp ‘men’s underwear’)
  • sohri ‘thongs’ [‘rubber slippers’]
  • depwukuro ‘gloves’

Others

  • aikiu ‘to ration’
  • amimono ‘knitted object’
  • anapi ‘fire cracker’
  • apwunai ‘watch out!’
  • adasi ‘to go barefoot’
  • iddai, eddai, edai ‘ouch!’
  • daidowa ‘World War II, old times’
  • dekking ‘concrete reinforcing bar’
  • dempoh ‘telegram’
  • dengki ‘electricity, light’
  • denso ‘ceiling’
  • dendenmwosi ‘large land snail’
  • dopas ‘quickly, fast, speedy’
  • kairu ‘frog’
  • kakko ‘showing off’
  • kampio ‘to care for an invalid in the hospital’
  • kasdo ‘movie’
  • kenkang ‘porch’
  • kisingai ‘crazy, mad’
  • koiasi ‘fertilizer’
  • kona ‘toothpaste’
  • kukusuh ‘air gun’
  • kuruma ‘cart’
  • makunai ‘unskillful, not tasty’
  • mangnga ‘cartoon, character’
  • mai ‘skillful, good’
  • mwohso ‘appendicitis’
  • ompwu ‘to be carried on another’s back’
  • pariki ‘to go fast’
  • paiking ‘infection’
  • pangku ‘flat tire, broken slipper’
  • pampei ‘security guard’
  • pwohsdo ‘post office’
  • pwuhseng ‘balloon’
  • pwuraia ‘pliers’
  • rakudai ‘failure’
  • sahpis ‘service’
  • sidohsa ‘automobile’
  • sirangkawe ‘to ignore’
  • sohko ‘warehouse’
  • suhmwong ‘to order’

Archaic terms

  • dampwo ‘rice paddy’
  • dane ‘seed’
  • dengwa ‘telephone’
  • deriuhdang ‘hand grenade’
  • impiokai ‘agricultural fair’
  • kansohpa ‘copra drying shed’
  • kikansu ‘machine gun’
  • kinsipakudang ‘atomic bomb’
  • osime ‘diaper’
  • passai ‘to cut grass’
  • pwohkungko ‘air-raid shelter’
  • sendohki ‘fighter plane’
  • simpung ‘newspaper’
  • skohso ‘airport’
  • windeng ‘to drive’

SOURCES: Kimi Miyagi. 2000. Japanese loanwords in Pohnpeian: Adaptation and attrition. Japanese Linguistics 7:114–132. Mark R. Peattie. 1988. Nan’yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945. Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 4. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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by | 3 May 2007 · 8:55 pm

Hakata: Japan’s First International Border, 663

The war of 663—known in Japanese as Hakusuki-no-e-no-tatakai [白村の江の戦い ‘Battle of the White Village River’] or the “Battle of the Paekchon River,” after the old name for the Kŭm River—has long attracted the attention of historians and laymen alike in Japan….

In Kyushu … the effects of the war were immense and long lasting…. It is no exaggeration to say that the events of the 660s and early 670s created an international boundary where none existed before. Prior to the war, there was no clear line between “us” and “them,” and traffic between the Korean Peninsula and Kyushu was relatively free (although never tremendously frequent, given the dangers and the distances involved). Within a decade after Japan’s defeat, such a line had come into existence (in the Korea Strait between Tsushima and Silla), and Japan had a fortified border with a single designated gateway. The gateway was Hakata, and the gatekeeper was Dazaifu, the command center south of the bay.

Of course, Yamato had long had a significant interest in northern Kyushu, and in particular Hakata, because of the area’s strategic location. The most sensible way to get from Yamato to the Korean Peninsula was to go down the Inland Sea, follow the northwest Kyushu coast to Hakata, and then cut across the Genkai Sea via the islands of Iki and Tsushima. To control Hakata was thus to control access to the continent—the key to hegemony in early Japan. This is why the Iwai “rebellion” posed such a threat in the 520s, and why the court moved so swiftly to put it down. After Iwai was killed, his son offered territory near Hakata to the court (in order, according to the chronicles, to save his own skin). Soon afterward, in 536, Yamato established a line of granaries (miyake, probably best understood as supply depots) up and down the Inland Sea. Much of Fukuoka Plain was also converted into a granary at this time. In 1984, remains of sixth-century storehouses and office buildings, presumably part of this “Nanotsu Miyake,” were uncovered by archaeologists working on a salvage operation near Japan Railways’ Hakata Station in Fukuoka.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 23-25

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by | 2 May 2007 · 6:01 pm

The Tang Chinese Predecessors of Matthew C. Perry, 664

Once upon a time, residents of a fishing village in Japan watched with trepidation as a fleet of foreign warships appeared in the offing beyond their own little harbor. The main concern was their lives. What knew what strange creatures might be on board or what nefarious plans had brought them to Japan?…

The year was 1853 and the place was Uraga, situated near the tip of the Miura Peninsula at the mouth of Edo (now Tokyo) Bay.The foreign vessels were under the command of Matthew Calbraith Perry, an American naval officer charged by President Millard Fillmore to induce Japan to establish trade and diplomatic relations with the United States. (Not incidentally, Fillmore wanted Japan to open its ports to American whaling vessels, whaling being one of the great American industries of the era.)…

What few people realize is that Perry’s arrival was not the first time that such a scenario had played out upon Japanese soil. The events of 1853 were a close replay of an equally momentous occasion some twelve hundred years earlier. The year was 664, and the location was Tsushima, a mountainous isle (actually, two isles separated by a narrow strait) about 50 kilometers south of the Korean port of Pusan and 150 kilometers west of Hakata on the Kyushu mainland.

On that earlier occasion, the visitors had been Chinese, not American. Their large junks, bearing flags of the Tang empire, had first been sighted on an early summer’s day in the fourth month of the Japanese lunar calendar. The ships were slowly approaching Tsushima across the Korea Strait from the general direction of Paekche, a kingdom on the west side of the Korean Peninsula. They seemed to be making directly for the village—or more precisely, for the small harbor below, where the villagers’ fishing ships lay at anchor. Those watching the approach were worried—and with good reason….

Only the previous year—663 by the Western calendar …—a vast fleet had come from Hakata on its way to “rescue Paekche,” so they said. Woe be to them! Not long afterward, some of the tattered remnants of Yamato’s once-proud navy limped back to Tsushima. Few of the war veterans tarried long; they seemed afraid of who might follow in their wake. The same was true of the many refugees from Paekche—some of them members of the royal family—who accompanied the Japanese survivors. Before long, almost all the new arrivals had departed for the Kyushu mainland, or for Yamato.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 11-14

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by | 26 April 2007 · 6:29 pm

Disloyalty: Japan’s Second Greatest Defect in the 1500s

From The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, by Beatrice Bodart-Bailey (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 10-11:

Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) has gone down in history as one of Japan’s great unifiers, the third and last of three generals who ended over a century and a half of sporadic local warfare and ushered in some two and a half centuries of unbroken peace. Yet while in hindsight we recognize in Ieyasu the first of an unbroken line of fifteen Tokugawa shoguns, the future of Tokugawa rule looked much less certain to his contemporaries.

“His Majesty … has reasons to fear for his life, for there is the example of his predecessors. This kind of empire is only acquired by force of arms and is retained by the use of tyranny,” mused the Spaniard Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco (1564-1636) when he visited Ieyasu at his retirement seat at Sunpu. The future viceroy of Mexico, who had been shipwrecked in Japan en route to his appointment, marveled at the strength of the fortifications of Ieyasu’s castle, only outdone by those of Edo, where Ieyasu’s son, Hidetada, was conducting the government. In Edo some twenty thousand men were, in de Vivero’s estimation, assigned to duty between the outer defenses ringed by the moat and the inner palace of the ruler, but he noted that Ieyasu at Suruga had a larger contingent of troops stationed nearby.

Life had presented Ieyasu with plenty of opportunity to observe the dangers befalling a ruler. Born as the son of a minor feudal lord in a period known as the “Warring States,” he had spent his youth as hostage to a neighboring clan. Though the emperor was still residing in unbroken lineage at his capital of Kyoto, political authority was split between a large number of military houses, attempting to enlarge their sphere of influence or simply to survive. The bond between lord and retainer was feudal in character, but considerations of loyalty were all too often eclipsed by strategic interests. This lack of loyalty was so prominent that the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606) considered it one of the two greatest defects of the Japanese. He ranked it second only to their sexual promiscuity. Hence the period is characterized by the phrase gekokujou, “inferiors overthrowing superiors.”

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by | 24 April 2007 · 9:11 pm

Did Leopold & Loeb Inspire Myles Fukunaga?

Just as the immense publicity surrounding Harris and Klebold‘s shooting rampage at Columbine in April 1999 explicitly inspired Cho Seung-hui‘s copycat massacre at Virginia Tech in April 2007, the “Trial of the Century” of Leopold and Loeb for kidnap and murder in Chicago in May 1924 seems to have inspired Myles Fukunaga‘s copycat crime in Honolulu in September 1928.

Antiquarian bookseller and publisher Patterson Smith links the two plots:

In 1924 two precocious University of Chicago students, the sons of very wealthy Chicago families, planned the perfect crime. In 1924 Richard Loeb and his close friend Nathan Leopold selected a younger boy at random from the student body of an upscale private school in their neighborhood. They lured Bobby Franks into their rented car, bludgeoned him with a chisel, suffocated him with chloroform, and left his naked body in a marsh. They notified the Franks family by telephone that their son was in their hands and would be returned unharmed if the kidnapers’ instructions were followed and the police not notified. Loeb and Leopold then sent the Franks family a special-delivery letter detailing how $10,000 in ransom should be prepared.

So far everything had gone according to plan. But the plan proved faulty. The site for disposing of the victim had been ill chosen, and the body was discovered and identified before any ransom was paid. Worse, Leopold had dropped his eyeglasses at the site. The police traced them to their owner, uncovered his connection with Loeb, and interrogated the two young men separately. Their loosely prearranged alibi fell apart and both confessed. Only ten days had passed between the commission of the perfect crime and its solution. The perpetrators were indicted on separate murder and kidnaping charges, either of which subjected them to the death penalty for which the public clamored.

Enter Clarence Darrow for the defense. He elected to have the case be heard without a jury and their guilt or innocence be decided by the judge. The prosecution had over one hundred witnesses, the confessions of the accuseds, and an airtight case. The only hope for the defense seemed to rest on an insanity plea. Darrow had his clients interviewed by psychiatrist after psychiatrist in what looked like a search for congenial experts. But Darrow had been planning an altogether different course which he kept secret until the very last moment, even from his clients. In one of the most astounding ploys in an American courtroom, Darrow changed the plea of his clients from Not Guilty to Guilty on both counts of murder and kidnaping. The prosecution was thunderstruck; as the cliché has it, reporters raced for the telephones.

Darrow’s stroke had shifted the contest from guilt or innocence to the question of the punishment. The sentence was within the judge’s discretion—death or life imprisonment. By pleading his clients guilty to both counts, Darrow had prevented the prosecutor from retrying the case on the second count should the prisoners escape hanging on the first….

Another demented kidnaper who did not escape the death penalty was Myles Fukunaga, a Japanese-American who in 1928 abducted Gill Jamieson, the ten-year-old son of a bank vice-president in Honolulu. Fukunaga, aged 19, employed the familiar call-at-the-school tactic and drove the boy away in a cab. The next day a messenger delivered to his father a rambling letter signed “The Three Kings.” It demanded $10,000 in ransom, which the father paid.

The day after that a newspaper received a note from The Three Kings saying that “Gill Jamieson, poor innocent lad, has departed for the Unknown, a forlorn Walking Shadow in the Great Beyond, where we all go when our time comes.” Shortly thereafter the body of the boy, who had beaten to death, was found in a shrubbed area. It lay on a couch formed of burlap and sand surmounted by a cross. A cardboard containing a misquotation from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” lay on the boy’s chest.

The story of Fukunaga is told in The Snatch Racket, published by Vanguard in 1932 and written by Edward Dean Sullivan, a Depression-era author of two other crime books. In addition to dealing with the celebrated cases I have discussed above, it provides a good picture of many lesser-known abductions, including those of underworld figures preying on their own kind.

UPDATE: The photo shows Myles Fukunaga’s jarring, pseudonymous grave marker in Mo‘ili‘ili Japanese Cemetery in Honolulu. The jagged red upright stone is engraved with 因果塚 ingachou ‘karma gravemound’ or ‘heap of misfortune’. Only Fukunaga’s posthumous name is given (釈祐寛信士 Shakuyuukan shinshi lit. ‘explanation/Shakyamuni-help-leniency honorific.title’), but the date of birth and death corresponds to his own: b. Meiji 42 (1909) February 4, d. Showa 4 (1929), November 19.

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by | 20 April 2007 · 8:51 pm

How Korea Became Illegal in 1907

In the summer of 1907, the world declared Korea illegal. The previous autumn, Emperor Kojong of Korea sent three representatives on his behalf to the Second International Conference on Peace at The Hague. Their mission was to register the emperor’s protest against Japan’s 1905 protectorate agreement over Korea. According to the well-known account of their travels overland to Europe, Yi Sangsol, Yi Jun, and Yi Uijong reached the Netherlands in late June 1907, during the second week of the conference. They carried a letter from their emperor detailing the invalidity of the protectorate and demanding international condemnation of Japan. Although the three young men appealed to diplomats from countries that had long-standing relations with Korea, none except the Russian envoy gave them more than a passing notice. Not coincidentally, of course, Japan’s shocking military victory against Russia two years earlier made St. Petersburg eager to support any protest of Japan.

On arriving at The Hague, the Korean emissaries confronted a belief system to which even the Russians had acquiesced. According to the terms of international law—the same ones used to script the conference at The Hague and legitimate the participant states—the Koreans could not legally attend the forum. The Portsmouth Treaty of 1905 secured peace between Japan and Russia, granted Japan the privilege to “protect its interests in Korea,” and garnered a Nobel Peace Prize for President Theodore Roosevelt, who orchestrated the negotiations. Shortly thereafter, the Second Japan–Korea Agreement named Korea a Japanese protectorate and gave international legal precedent to Japan’s control over Korea’s foreign affairs. As a result, the Koreans could not conduct their own foreign relations. Instead, all of Korea’s foreign affairs would be conducted by Tokyo. According to international law, without Japan, Korea no longer existed in relation to the rest of the world.

At The Hague, the Koreans’ appeal was collectively shunned by the delegates sent from the forty-three countries discussing world peace. The Koreans’ attempt to protest—to tell their story—interfered with the world order that the delegates sought to legitimate. According to anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, some historical moments run so deeply against prevailing ideologies that they are “unthinkable.” In these situations, Trouillot notes, “worldview wins over the facts.”

Because the Korean envoys demanded rectification in the very terms that oppressed them, they were unable to bring the international community to recognize Korea as an independent country. As a result, their story was “unthinkable” to the organizers of the conference. Conversely, recognition of the Koreans’ claims to independence would have dismantled the worldview that not only determined Korea’s dependence on Japan but also legitimated the conference’s claim to define the meaning of international peace. In practice, of course, this definition of peace meant that certain countries legally controlled and colonized others.

SOURCE: Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power, by Alexis Dudden (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 7-8

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