Category Archives: Japan

by | 2 February 2004 · 7:54 pm

A Female Empress in Japan? Why Not?

The Japanese Diet appears to be moving ahead at its normal, glacial pace to provide for the possibility of a female empress. The Guardian reported the story soon after Princess Aiko’s second birthday in December.

Japan is preparing to revise its succession law to allow women to ascend the 2,600-year-old Chrysanthemum Throne for the first time in more than two centuries.

The change could see Princess Aiko, the two-year-old daughter of the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Naruhito, become only the ninth female to head the world’s oldest monarchy.

“We are planning to accept a reigning empress in our final report,” Taro Nakayama, who chairs a parliamentary committee on constitutional issues, said in an interview published yesterday in the Sankei Shimbun newspaper.

Mr Nakayama said the revision could be made as early as next year. “Since Japan had eight reigning empresses in history, succession by a new empress would not be strange,” he said.

Now the Associated Press has gotten around to reporting the same story. Perhaps we’re just seeing a slow release of trial balloons.

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by | 1 February 2004 · 8:08 pm

The German Pacific "Gutpela Taim Bipo"

Germany acquired its colonial empire in the Pacific beginning in the 1880s and lost it abruptly in 1914. Conventional wisdom usually assumes that one colonial administration was as bad as another and that colonial transitions usually made little difference to the indigenous population. However, the new military administrators who took over from the Germans in Micronesia, Samoa, and New Guinea ran so roughshod over their new territories that the inhabitants of all three regions soon began to look back on German times as the good old days–at least according to a meticulously researched revisionist history of that transition entitled The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I, by Hermann Joseph Hiery (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1995).

While Germany’s African colonies were governed by aristocrats, often with the aid of sizable contingents of Schutztruppe (colonial troops), the farflung Pacific colonies were governed by administrators drawn from the middle class, with the aid of tiny police forces.

In New Guinea they replaced the “Perpetuum Bellum Melanesicum” with a Pax Germanica, which attracted more and more unpacified Melanesians. But they also generally let Melanesian villagers settle their own disputes in traditional ways, often by compensation for damages rather than by the trial and conviction of offenders before German courts. This was in marked contrast to the later Australian administration, under whom flogging, the pillory (“Field Punishment No. 1”), and public executions became not only far more common, but far more arbitrarily applied. The Australians also began to dispossess indigenous plantation owners and to impose new restrictions on native dress and education. (For instance, New Guineans were prohibited from speaking proper English and from wearing nonnative garments on the upper half of their bodies.)

In Micronesia, the laissez-faire attitude of the German administration gave way to the much more hands-on approach of the Japanese, who modernized the island economies with unprecedented force and speed. By 1921, the value of exports from Micronesia had already exceeded the value of imports. (And by 1940, the population of Micronesia was over 50% of foreign origin.) The islanders were forced to assimilate to Japanese norms in every respect.

Perhaps the most incompetent new administrator, however, was Col. Robert Logan, New Zealand’s military governor of German Samoa. Whereas Wilhelmine Germany and oligarchical Samoa had shared basic values about social hierarchies and ritual forms of behavior, “the Samoans perceived the ‘democratically’ undifferentiated behavior of New Zealanders as an insult and expression of open disregard for Samoan mores” (p. 250). During the war years, New Zealand bled dry the Samoan treasury, and the fiercely anti-Chinese and anti-American Logan also issued discriminatory edicts against their representatives in Samoa. Worst of all, Logan allowed an influenza-infected ship from New Zealand, the Talune, to dock in 1918, then stubbornly refused either to implement strict quarantines, as the American administrator had done in eastern Samoa, or to accept American medical aid. “Rarely would anti-American prejudice have more disastrous consequences than in Samoa under New Zealand occupation” (p. 174). As a result, about 20% of the population of western Samoa died, while eastern (American) Samoa escaped virtually unscathed. (New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark issued an apology to Samoa in 2002.)

Among the many other gems Hiery’s archival research unearths is a dispirited quote from Woodrow Wilson recorded in the minutes of a meeting at Versailles on 28 January 1919: “the question of deciding the disposal of the German colonies was not vital to the world in any respect.” He seems to have anticipated by exactly half a century Henry Kissinger’s alleged comment about Micronesia in 1969: “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”

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Filed under Germany, Japan, Micronesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Polynesia

by | 17 January 2004 · 9:35 pm

Asian Acronyms: Did you teach at GWYX or at Guangwai?

Discriminating linguists sometimes distinguish between acronyms pronounced as if they were a word, like NATO and UNICEF; and initialisms pronounced as a series of letters, like IBM or the UN. This distinction breaks down in orthographies that write whole syllables at a time, like Chinese.

In Chinese, for instance, acronyms are composed of the initial syllabic characters of (usually) two-syllable words. So, Peking (= Beijing) University, or Beijing Daxue [lit. ‘NorthCapital BigSchool’] becomes Beida [lit. ‘NorthBig’]. In Korean, Korea University, or Koryo Taehak [lit. ‘HighBeautiful BigSchool’] becomes Kodae [lit. ‘HighBig’]. In Japanese, it’s a bit more complicated. Chinese characters can be pronounced not just in their Chinese loan forms, but as native Japanese words that mean (more or less) the same thing. This is what makes Japanese far and away the most complex, least efficient writing system on earth. In either case, each character is usually pronounced as two syllables, since Japanese had to add final vowels to one-syllable Chinese roots in order to pronounce any final consonants, most of which have been lost in modern Mandarin Chinese. (The same thing happens to current Japanese borrowings from English: ranchi < lunch, setto < set, beisubouru < baseball, and so on.) So the acronym for Hiroshima University, or Hiroshima Daigaku [lit. ‘WideIsland BigSchool’] becomes HiroDai [lit. ‘WideBig’]. The name Hiroshima is native Japanese (the Sino-Japanese pronunciation would be Koutou = Ch. Guangdao), but Daigaku is Sino-Japanese [= Ch. Daxue].

After China adopted the supplementary Latin-based alphabetic pinyin writing system, which is increasingly used in computer input, you could begin to see alphabetic abbreviations, some of them rather alarming and most of them quite unpronounceable. Very few Chinese syllables start with vowels: a- is not uncommon, but e- and o- are rare, and i- and u- are nonexistent. Even worse, initial q-, x-, y-, and z- are way too common.

So, if you were to take the first pinyin letter of each syllable, Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute would be abbreviated GZWGYYXY < GuangZhou WaiGuo YuYan XueYuan [lit. ‘WideState OutCountry SpeechTalk LearnYard’]. You would do better to take the first letter of each two-syllable word rather than the first letter of every single syllable, in which case the same school would end up as GWYX < Guangzhou Waiguo Yuyan Xueyuan [lit. ‘Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute’]. However, most Chinese acronyms are more economical than that. The common name for this particular school was equivalent to “GuangFor” (Guangzhou Foreign), namely, GuangWai [lit. ‘WideOut’]. (It has now merged into GDUFS, the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, which would still qualify for the acronym GuangWai in Chinese. The unfortunate English acronym must certainly be guh-doofs.)

These syllabic acronyms aren’t unique to Chinese. Indonesian (or Malay) uses a Latin-based alphabetic writing system, but is chock full of syllabic as well as alphabetic acronyms (and initialisms). Acronyms seem to proliferate under big bureaucracies–especially if the military has a free hand. Examples of syllabic acronyms in Indonesian include the names of provinces like Sulsel < Sulawesi Selatan [‘south’], Sulut < Sulawesi Utara [‘north’], and Sulteng < Sulawesi Tengah [‘central’] on the island of Sulawesi (Celebes); schools like UnHas < Universitas Hasanuddin in Sulawesi and UnPatti < Universitas Pattimura in Maluku (Molucca); and terms like tapol < tahanan politik [‘political prisoner’].

UPDATE: Like Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese used to be written in Chinese characters and has lots of Chinese loanwords. Judging from the website of Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese seem to abbreviate by taking the first letter of each separately written syllable. Thus, (ignoring diacritics) Dai hoc Quoc gia Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh [lit. ‘University National City Ho Chi Minh’] is abbreviated DHQG-HCM. Ho Chi Minh City is also abbreviated TP.HCM, which I’m pretty sure is often pronounced Saigon. Otherwise, I don’t have a clue how these abbreviations are pronounced.

FURTHER UPDATE: Korean usage of taehak seems to be diverging from that of its cognates in Japanese (daigaku) and Chinese (daxue). While each term applies to a variety of institutions of tertiary education, Korean now distinguishes between taehak ‘college’ and taehakkyo ‘university’ very much long the lines of American usage. Taehakkyo indicates a larger institution that offers graduate education. So Kodae now stands for Koryo Taehakkyo, as the Chinese characters and Korean title on their homepage shows. I don’t think the cognate forms, Jp. daigakkou and Ch. daxuexiao, even exist, much less serve a similar function.

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by | 15 January 2004 · 3:41 pm

The Bonin Islanders: Ethnogenesis and Exodus

A lot of people have heard of Iwo Jima, the subject of a recent bestseller by James Bradley about one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific War. But far fewer people know much about the Bonin (or Ogasawara) Islands, the next cluster to the north in the chain of volcanic islands that comprise Japan’s Nampo (‘southward, austral’) Islands, which stretches between Tokyo and Tinian. (See map). However, Bradley wrote an earlier book, Flyboys, about the air war over Chichi Jima [‘Father Island’], the main island in the Bonins. According to the Book of the Month Club blurb:

As the U.S. prepared for the final assault on Japan one key to success was knocking out the heavily fortified monitoring station on Chichi Jima, an island about the size of Central Park. But in the course of their daring mission, eight flyboys were shot down. Only one pilot could be rescued–his name was George H. W. Bush. His fellow fliers were not as lucky. They were captured and subjected to a fate so horrible that the records had been sealed until now.

Another recent book, Sorties into Hell: The Hidden War on Chichi Jima, is rather more explicit about that horrible fate.

In October 1946, Colonel Presley Rixey arrived by destroyer at Chichi Jima to repatriate 22,000 Japanese who had been bypassed during the war in the Pacific. He discovered that the downed flyers had been captured, executed, and eaten by certain senior Japanese officers. This is the story of the investigation, the cover-up, and the last hours of those Americans who disappeared into war’s wilderness and whose remains were distributed to the cooking galleys of Chichi Jima.

There also appears to have been a long-running cover-up involving U.S. nuclear weapons on Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima during the 1950s and 1960s. But I’d like to focus on the what happened to the first permanent settlers in the Bonins. (The Sino-Japanese characters for Bonin–actually Bunin, now usually pronounced Mujin–mean ‘absence [of] people’.) Here’s one rough summary that bobbles a few details.

The Bonin Islands might have been an American possession if President Franklin Pierce’s administration had backed up Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry. Chichi Jima was first settled from Honolulu in 1830 by two New Englanders — Aldin B. Chapin and Nathaniel Savory — a Genoese [Matteo Mazarro], and 25 Hawaiians [more accurately, Pacific Islanders mostly unnamed on the ship manifest], who made a living raising provisions for sale to passing whalers. Commodore Perry called at Port Lloyd on 14 June 1853, next day purchased for fifty dollars a plot of land on the harbor, stocked it with cattle brought over in U.S.S. Susquehanna, set up a local government under Savory, promulgated a code of laws, and took possession for the United States. He intended to make Chichi Jima a provisioning stations for the United States Navy and American mail steamers. But this action was repudiated by the Pierce administration in Washington. Thus, in 1861 Japan was able to annex the Bonin Islands without opposition. The government did not disturb the American colony, and serious colonization of the group by Japanese did not start until the arrival of Japanese fisherman and sulfur miners in 1887. Kazan Retto was formally annexed by Japan in 1891 and administered as part of the Tokyo prefecture….

Following the loss of the Marianas (Guam, Saipan, Tinian, etc.) in June 1944, Iwo Jima was heavily fortified as part of Japan’s inner ring of defenses. The Peace Treaty of 1951 recognized Japan’s “residual sovereignty”, but the United States maintained its occupation and control from 1945 to 1961 [actually 1968] when the island were formally returned to Japanese control.

The lengthiest, but still sketchy, account of the earliest years is by the Rev. Lionel Berners Cholmondeley, an Anglican prelate whose book bears the quaint, 19th-century title, The History of the Bonin Islands from the year 1827 to the year 1876 and of Nathaniel Savory, one of the original settlers, to which is added a short supplement dealing with the islands after their occupation by the Japanese (London: Constable, 1915). (Kudos to Tom Tyler at the University of Denver for mounting complete Project Gutenberg editions of this and many other early 19th-century nautical works, including Melville’s Moby Dick and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.)

In June 2003, an Asian studies conference in Japan devoted a panel to Exploring the Rich History and Culture of the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands. A sampling of the abstracts follows.

Daniel Long (Tokyo Metropolitan University), The Unknown Linguistic Heritage of the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands – The Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands are unique throughout not only Japan (of which they are part) but indeed throughout the world. They were settled in the early 19th century by a mixed band of settlers speaking European, Polynesia and Micronesian languages (among others). The descendents of these settlers remain on the islands today and speak English (ranging from Standard English to a more local variety) and Japanese as well as a Japanese-English Mixed Language. These linguistic abilities play a large role in the formation of the Bonin Islander identity, and in turn this sense of a unique identity reinforces language usage.

Robert Eldridge (Osaka University), The U.S. Naval Administration of Ogasawara Islands, 1945-1968 – The United States occupied and administered the Ogasawara, or Bonin, Islands from 1945 until 1968, when the islands were returned to Japan…. While the occupation was undertaken for strategic reasons, much like that over Okinawa, there were several differences in the way that the administration was organized. Firstly, the actual direct administration did not begin until 1951. Secondly, the Navy was in charge. Thirdly, only islanders of Western descent were allowed to return to the islands and former residents of Japanese descent were denied permission to return throughout the period. Fourthly, education and local government was undertaken in English (and not Japanese as was the case in Okinawa). Finally, there was a strong effort by some U.S. Naval officials to encourage the permanent separation of the islands from Japan and the adoption of U.S. citizenship by the islanders.

Junko Konishi (Shizuoka University), The Adoption of Micronesian Song and Dance by Ogasawara Islanders – It was the Oubeikei [‘Euro-American heritage’] Islanders of Ogasawara who brought the Micronesian-Japanese songs and the Nanyou odori [‘South Seas dance’] to Ogasawara. The original forms of these songs and dance were the product of a cultural syncretism between Japanese and Micronesian cultures under the Japanese administration (1914-1945). Oubeikei-Ogasawarans adopted these cultural forms, which reflected the ambiguous identity of the Japanese-educated Micronesians. Soon after it was introduced into Ogasawara in the 1930s, the Nanyou odori spread among Japanese-Ogasawarans as well, and was transformed into its Japanese form with respect to melodic movements, the pronunciation of the lyrics, and body movements. The Micronesian-Japanese songs, on the other hand, were sung mostly in private by some Oubeikei-Ogasawarans until 1988 when a cassette tape of island songs (including these) was released to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Ogasawara’s return to Japan. Songs on the tape, distributed among the villagers, maintained their distinct forms, especially in melodic movements.

If I had presented a paper there, my imaginary abstract would read something like this:

The Bonin Islanders: Ethnogenesis and Exodus – Before the Japanese administration took over the Bonins in 1875, the 70-odd residents there were a motley crew of diverse heritage tracing back to Europe, North America, Africa, and various Pacific Islands ranging from Hawai‘i and Tahiti to Guam and Pohnpei. But, vis-à-vis the Japanese, they abruptly became Bonin Islanders, an ethnic minority subject to the Emperor, like the Ainu in Hokkaido. It was a classic case of ethnogenesis. Until 1945, it behooved the Islanders to identify themselves as Japanese, to intermarry with Japanese settlers, to move to the main islands to pursue educational or business opportunities, even to serve in the military. But when the Americans took over after the war, residual English language skills and non-Japanese heritage conferred more advantage. When the Americans offered them the opportunity to choose U.S. citizenship when the Bonins reverted to Japan, more than a few grabbed the chance and joined the exodus to Guam, Hawai‘i, or California, where they dissolved into the larger population, as did those who remained behind as Japanese. Only subtle traces now remain of their unique, but ephemeral, common heritage.

UPDATE: Prof. Daniel Long of Tokyo Metropolitan University, perhaps the world’s foremost Boninologist, was kind enough to suggest a few corrections and elaborations, which have been incorporated into the text above. He assures me that the farflung former Bonin Islanders hold worldwide reunions every year or two.

I should also have mentioned that Tom Tyler credits Danny Long for his electronic text and reproductions of photographs from Cholmondeley’s work. Prof. Long has also compiled a website on Bonin language and culture that includes a very extensive bibliography of sources (at least when the TMU server is working, which seems to be every other week).

Amritas notes an earlier novel by Hank Searls (author of Overboard) inspired by Bonin history, Kataki: A Novel (McGraw-Hill, 1987), sort of a “Chichi Jima Candidate” tale:

The descendants of 19th century American settlers on one of Japan’s Bonin Islands are caught up in WW II. Though loyal to the emperor, they are suspect. When 12-year-old Matt Bancroft’s mother is killed by a strafing American plane, he vows kataki (revenge). In the confusion of Japan’s collapse, Matt assumes the identity of a dead son of missionaries and is “repatriated” to America. Forty years later, he is manipulated by a rabid Japanese secret society into thinking that Vice-President Bush was the “murdering” pilot.

Gotta watch out for those missionary kids.

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by | 14 January 2004 · 8:42 pm

Kobayashi Kiyochika: Woodblock Print War ‘Photographer’

I can’t leave the subject of woodblock print artists without mentioning Kobayashi Kiyochika (surname first), a woodblock print artist trained in Western art and photographic techniques. After fighting as a low-level samurai for the Tokugawa shogunate against the successful restoration of the Meiji emperor, he found himself at loose ends after the fighting stopped.

In the beginning he tried to keep his neck above water-level with some odd jobs. Later from about 1875 on, he tried his luck as self-taught painter. He had met Charles Wirgman, an English painter, cartoonist and correspondant for a British newspaper in Yokohama. Kobayashi studied arts with him for a short period. He also met Shimooka Renjo, a photographer, from whom he learned the principles of photography.

From 1876 on Kobayashi Kiyochika created his first woodblock prints, scenes from Tokyo. Although his prints were basically kept in traditional Japanese style, [he] used Western elements like perspective, the effect of light and the graduations of shadows. By that time he probably had read about the French impressionists and seen photographs of their works in newspapers.

After 1880 [his] style became more traditional. He also turned to satirical cartoons and illustrations for newspapers and magazines. During the Sino-Japanese war the artist made about 80 war prints. War prints were like a last commercial resurgence of the old ukiyo-e business. Kobayashi’s war prints are regarded as among the best in this genre – with a masterly play on the effects of light.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts mounted an exhibition of late Meiji prints in 2001, and still has many such prints online. Among the most striking of Kobayashi’s prints are:

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by | 13 January 2004 · 10:19 pm

Karhu and Jacoulet – Foreign Japanese Woodblock Print Artists

The two most famous exponents of the art of the Japanese woodblock print in [the 20th] century are not Japanese. Clifton Karhu, whose views of Kyoto’s traditional architecture can be seen on the walls of European galleries and American museums, was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1927. Paul Jacoulet, creator of a gold and platinum Asia that existed mostly in the artist’s fantasy-filled imagination, came to Japan at an early age from France.At first glance, other than being foreign woodblock print artists, these two men would seem to have little in common. Karhu carves his own blocks and adheres to the relatively new Sosaku Hanga (Creative Print) school. Jacoulet, on the other hand, adopted the style of the Shin Hanga (New Print) movement, whose members followed in the footsteps of such ukiyo-e (floating world picture) masters as Utamaro and Hiroshige, who designed and directed the production of their prints, leaving the carving of blocks and pulling of paper to master craftsmen.

For me, Jacoulet the Liar is the more interesting, for the following reason.

Jacoulet earned himself a place in history not just as an artist but as a source of information on Micronesia under Japanese rule. He was one of very few foreigners trusted enough by Japanese officials to be allowed to travel through a vast area of mandated territory in the Western Pacific which the Japanese military was fortifying illegally in preparation for war. Jacoulet’s disdain for the real world of political and economic forces seems to have been well known. As Yun Hwa Rah put it, “The sensei [master] made a point of not reading any newspapers. He said they were full of lies.” In contrast to his postwar prints, which are almost entirely the product of fantasy, his pre-World War II work is grounded in real experiences. In his 1928 watercolor, Talaos Boy, Jacoulet meticulously records his young fisherman subject’s sunken chest and distended belly, signs that life in the South Seas fell far short of the paradise depicted by Gaugin and other European painters.

These quotes are from an article by Andrew Horvat entitled Karhu and Jacoulet: Western Artists Working in an Eastern Medium, a revised version of an article that appeared in the 40th anniversary issue (October-December 1994) of The Japan Quarterly, published by Asahi Shimbun. Jacoulet’s depictions of Yapese will illustrate his blend of accuracy, especially in props, and fantasy, especially in colors and faces.

  • Belle de Yap et orchidees, Ouest Carolines (1934) accurately depicts a traditional woman’s hairdo, tattoos, betelnut-stained lips, grass skirt, and neckcord indicating a woman who has passed puberty, but goes a bit overboard on the decorative cloth strips.
  • Un homme de Yap, Ouest Carolines (1935) accurately depicts a traditional Yapese man’s hairdo, three-pronged comb (or pick), pierced and distended earlobe, betelnut-stained lips, and starfruit hanging in the background, but goes overboard in the necklace decorations.
  • Femme tatouee de Falalap, Ouest Carolines (1935) accurately depicts tattoos, shells, Ulithian lavalava patterns, and even windswept hair, but the face is right off the kabuki stage.
  • Fleurs violettes, Tomil, Yap (1937) accurately depicts a woman’s hairdo, neckcord, betelnut-stained lips and teeth, and hanging flowers. (This is my personal favorite. Tomil is where I first learned to chew betel nut.)
  • Sur le sable, Rhull, Yap (1937) accurately depicts a married woman’s sitting posture, neckcord, and possibly even bracelet, but makes the woven frond basket look too much like canvas, and the grass skirt look too much like vinyl.
  • Yagourouh et Mio, Yap, Ouest Carolines (1938) accurately depicts the grass skits, lack of neckcord, and perhaps unruly hair of two pubescent girls, but makes the faces look too much like the Japanese moga (‘modern girl’)
  • Le betel, Yap (1940) accurately depicts a man’s loincloth, decorative comb, leaf armband, bamboo betel lime dispenser, and pepper betel leaf, but makes the hair look too much like a Japanese moga.

After the war Jacoulet progressively loses touch with reality. It’s not just that memories of Micronesia fade, because certain aspects remain remarkably accurate.

  • La jeune chef Saragan et son esclave Forum, Tomil, Yap (1948) accurately recognizes the caste system of Yap, but fakes the colors and the decorative carvings.
  • La tresseuse de paniers, Remoue, Yap (1948) fairly accurately depicts a woman weaving basketlike objects, but fakes both the color and the weave, so she looks like she’s weaving giant peapods.
  • Le fille du chef, Mogomog [Ulithi] (1953) is almost as much pure fantasy as his mermaid (1951).

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by | 13 January 2004 · 10:17 pm

Order Read to the Dutch at Edo Castle, 1677

For generations it has been ordered that the Dutch shall trade with Japan, and that every year they shall land at Nagasaki. As before we order that under no circumstances shall you be in contact with the Portuguese and their Christian sect. Should we hear from any country that you are on intimate terms with them, we will stop you coming to Japan. Consequently, you shall under no circumstances bring anything of their sect to Japan and, of course, you shall not carry any objects of the sect on your ships.

If you want to continue to cross the seas and trade with Japan, you must report anything you hear about the Christian sect. You must report to the Nagasaki magistrate if there is a new location where the Portuguese sect has entered and also anything you see or hear on your routes crossing the seas.

You must not capture any Chinese ships crossing over to Japan. If among the countries frequented by the Dutch there is one where you meet the Portuguese, you shall under no circumstances communicate with them. You must write down in detail the name and location of any country where you meet the Portuguese, and the Nagasaki magistrate must be informed annually by the kapitan when he arrives.

Addendum: The inhabitants of the Ryukyus are people that submit to Japan, and you shall not capture them regardless of where you come across them.

Empo 5 [1677], the year of the serpent, 2nd month, 25th day

SOURCE: Beatrice Bodart-Bailey, ed. and tr., Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1999), p. 231.

Study question: Did the Dutch VOC [East India Company] compromise itself as much to maintain access to Tokugawa Japan as CNN did in Saddam’s Iraq?

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by | 3 January 2004 · 11:03 pm

Mori Koben, Japanese Pioneer in Chuuk (Truk)

Mori Koben was born in 1869, the son of a samurai from Tosa (now Kochi) in Shikoku, Japan, and died “King of the South Seas” in Chuuk (Truk), Micronesia in 1945.

It is said that as a young man, Mori was a fervent admirer of his fellow Tosa countryman, Itagaki Taisuke, the melodramatic champion of the People’s Rights Movement of early Meiji and an early advocate of an aggressive Japanese influence on the Asian continent, particularly in Korea. If true, this may explain how Mori in his youth became criminally involved in the so-called Osaka incident of 1885. In brief, this dramatic political scandal centered on the plans of Japanese political dissidents, frustrated by their government’s abandonment of the reformist cause in neighboring Korea, to cooperative with the members of a Korean reform party for the overthrow of the Korean government and its replacement by a “progressive” regime. The leader in the conspiracy was Oi Kentarô, a former samurai, in whose person was combined an explosive mixture of explosive liberalism and unrestrained chauvinism…. Young Mori was caught up in a police dragnet, but, as a minor, was quickly released.

After further misadventures, he signed on to become the Micronesian trading representative of the Ichiya Company. In 1892, he arrived in Moen, Chuuk [Truk] aboard the Tenryû Maru after a stop in the Bonin Islands. He was 22, all alone, and armed only with a sword and two daggers.

Perceiving that the islands, particularly Moen, were in a continual state of internecine warfare, Mori soon offered his services as military advisor to Manuppis, the most important chief on the island. Armed only with a spear, Mori led the complete rout of an opposing Trukese clan, a victory that earned him the lifelong friendship of Chief Manuppis and, eventually, the chief’s daughter in marriage.

They prospered and had twelve children. When the Germans took over in 1900, Mori was the only Japanese trader in Chuuk to escape expulsion for trading in guns and liquor. A Japanese trading ship ended his isolation in 1907.

By the time Japanese ships dropped anchor there in the huge lagoon at Truk in the autumn of 1914, Mori, by character and exploit, was already a legend among the small Japanese community there.

By 1940, the Japanese press was referring to him as “King of the South Seas” and the government awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure. However,

Mori had little use for the aggressive bombast of Japanese propagandists, and he genuinely feared the coming of the war. Yet, fiercely loyal to his country, he had actively assisted in the military preparations and had drawn upon decades of goodwill among Trukese relatives and friends to help muster labor and support for the war effort. But he was an old man with failing powers, and by the time the war broke out he had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side and left him unable to walk. He became a convalescent at his home on Tol, cared for there by his family. In the summer of 1943, he began to have hallucinations in which he saw his country’s utter defeat. His mind began to wander and, by the time American planes roared over the reefs to launch their devastating attack on Truk in 1944, Mori had slipped into senility.

By August 1945, he had slipped into a coma. He died on the evening of the 23rd, 8 days after Japan had surrendered.

SOURCE: Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Micronesia (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1988), pp. 26-33, 195-197, 299-300.

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by | 1 January 2004 · 8:36 pm

The Era of Big Business in Micronesia

The cash economies of small Pacific Island states these days are generally based on MIRAB, that is, a combination of Migration, Remittances (from those migrants), Aid (from donor nations), and Bureaucracy (salaries funded by that aid). However, this was not always so. A photo essay added in December 2003 to the Micronesian Seminar‘s splendid website provides a glimpse of The Era of Big Business, when the government of Micronesia was self-supporting.

It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when the islands had a favorable trade balance and turned a sizeable profit. In the 1930s, under Japanese administration, Micronesia was doing a booming business. There was the giant sugar industry and phosphate mines, but its exports also included katsuobushi [dried bonito flakes], starch, pineapples, and marine products like shell and pearls. This was a period when island exports paid the cost of running the colonial government. Thousands of Japanese immigrants provided the bulk of the labor, while islanders watched the marvels worked on their islands.

There was a high price to pay, however. Micronesians ended up Strangers in Their Own Land. Most of the immigrants to Micronesia came not from the main islands of Japan, but from the Ryukyus (Okinawa).

After 1925, the Okinawans came to constitute not merely the largest bloc within the Japanese colonial population, but an absolute majority of Japanese settlers, whose growth outran even the ballooning rate of overall Japanese immigration into Micronesia.

Most of the Okinawans worked in the sugar industry on Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas, where by 1940 they constituted about 90% of the population of nearly 50,000. Immigrants also accounted for about two-thirds of the population of Palau, where the phosphate mines were. By 1940, the population of Micronesia was less than 50% of Micronesian origin. As war approached, large numbers of Koreans also arrived in labor battalions to fortify the islands against attack.

SOURCES: [above] Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988). [below] Lin Poyer, Suzanne Falgout, Laurence Marshall Carrucci, The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).

EPILOGUE: Some Palauans “credit their reputation as hard-working entrepreneurs to what they learned from watching Japanese business success” (p. 345), but on a larger scale a whole generation of Micronesian leaders educated under the Japanese was sidelined.

Those who came of age in 1940 looked forward to participating in a thriving economy and a global network as part of the Japanese empire. By 1945 … many discovered they were too old to participate in the new order: too old to learn English in the new schools, too old to be selected for the programs the U.S. Navy set up to train leaders who would identify with American interests and turn to American culture as a guide to how they wanted to live. It was a difficult time for these mature and ambitious men and women who were approaching the peak of their productive years. [p. 326]

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by | 31 December 2003 · 9:00 pm

The Prewar Russian Community in Korea

About a decade ago, Donald N. Clark, a former Presbyterian missionary kid who grew up in Pyongyang, published a fascinating chapter entitled “Vanished Exiles: The Prewar Russian Community in Korea” in a fairly obscure book of conference papers. A couple of current Russian exiles in Korea and Australia have made that poignant tale available on the web. (The chapter later ended up in Clark’s book entitled Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience, 1900-1950 (Eastbridge, 2003).

[The] nineteenth century wave of railroad development brought many kinds of Russians to East Asia: officials, railroad workers, miners, laborers, adventurers, pensioners, priests, and hunters. They represented various ethnic backgrounds: some were Caucasian, while others were Mongol, Siberian, and even Turkic. Beginning in the 1890s, a certain number of them migrated via Manchuria into northern Korea, where they turned up in small provincial towns supporting themselves by whatever trade they could find. In fact, throughout the history of their community down to World War II, the thing that distinguishes them most dramatically from other Westerners in Korea (if a Turkic Russian can be called “Western”) was their complete lack of any institutional support: they had no medical plans or pensions or access to special schools for their children and were entirely dependent on whatever opportunities they found wherever they happened to settle. They were truly “displaced persons,” at the mercy of the international political currents in the early twentieth century….

The Bolsheviks had not yet appeared in the Far East when Sergei and Natalya Tchirkine reached Seoul, and the Russian compound there was still in Czarist hands. The Tchirkines were assigned an apartment next to the Orthodox Church, alongside several other stalwarts of the congregation. Sergei found a desk job in the Bank of Chosen. Natalya took a diamond ring which Sergei had bought in Bukhara, sold the stone, went to Harbin for a course in hairdressing, and opened a parlor in Chôngdong. Twin sons, Cyril and Vladimir, were born in 1924, and Natalya adjusted by working at home giving music lessons and running a dressmaking studio. Sergei moved to the tourist bureau to handle foreign-language correspondence and edit publicity. He later began teaching languages at Keijo Imperial University and Seoul Foreign School. These combined labors earned enough to maintain a dignified existence as leaders of the Russian community in Seoul….

Without a doubt, the most remarkable pocket of Russians in prewar Korea was a place called Novina, a resort near Ch’ôngjin [Jp. Seishin], maintained for more than twenty years by the White Russian exile George Yankovsky, sometimes called “Asia’s Greatest Tiger Hunter.” George Yankovsky’s father Mikhail Jankovskii originally was a Polish nobleman who was exiled to Siberia by the Russians when they crushed the Polish rebellion in the 1860s. In Siberia Jankovskii remade himself as a Russian named Yankovsky, found his way to the Bay of Posset south of Vladivostok, a rugged and unoccupied seacoast where he established himself in what might be called a feudal fief, which he named Sidemy, the “Sitting Place.” There he set about building up a herd of the little Sika deer whose antlers were so prized by declining Chinese men. His neighbors were mainly wolves and bandits, the notorious Manchurian honghuzi, or “Red Beards,” so Yankovsky also recruited a private army–of Koreans, as it turned out, because he mistrusted all Chinese as potential honghuzi. With his Korean “subjects,” as they called themselves, he hunted–in no particular order–bandits, wolves, tigers, leopards, and boar, becoming a first-class naturalist in the process. In fact, items in the flora and fauna of the Ussuri country still bear his name: the swan Cygnus jankowskii, the bunting Emberiza jankowskii, and the beetle Captolabrus jankowskii, among others….

Novina lasted nineteen years, from 1926 to 1945, during which White Russian communities all across East Asia used it as a prime vacation spot. The Yankovskys drummed up business with a brochure, which they mailed to Harbin, Tianjin, and Shanghai. Ironically, however, few Westerners within Korea ever paid much attention to Novina or even knew of its existence. This was partly because most of them used English, spoke no Russian, and preferred their own resorts at Sôrae and Wonsan. It was also because the Yankovskys started out regarding Novina as an “invitation-only” place for their far-flung relatives and friends and not a public place. As years passed it became more commercial, with rental cabins on the hillside, but it never lost the family flavour. It remained George Yankovsky’s homestead, first and foremost: his farm, his deer and horse pasture, and his hunting base. On a cliff above the river he built the family’s main house, an interesting building constructed around the trunk of a great tree that appeared to be holding it in place. Above the house he built a “Tower of the Ancestors,” a replica of one of the Sidemy towers, and next to this a lodge that was partly in a cave that the family used as a kind of Great Hall. Below, he stretched a chain bridge across the Chuûl [Jp. Shuotsu] River, and farther down he built a row of huts for his servants and farmhands. There were orchards for apples and pears, fields for vegetables, and hives for honey, all tended by Novina’s Korean workers, while the mountain forests furnished unlimited venison, pork, and pheasant. Evenings at Novina often featured dinners with as many as twenty people seated at the dining table, followed by vodka and storytelling by the fireplace in the cave.

George and Daisy Yankovsky’s children–daughters Muza and Victoria, and sons Valerii, Arsenii, and Yuri–grew up at Novina. As part of their Swiss Family Robinson existence the Yankovskys maintained a surprising standard of civilization. Educating children was the duty of Novina’s “home gymnasium” teacher who came from Harbin to teach in the camp’s Great Hall. Sunday services also took place there, with especially memorable observances for Easter. And summer was Novina’s theater season: Daisy’s family, the Sheverdloffs, had some stage background and her relatives in Shanghai were connected with White Russians in the entertainment business there. Many of these sought the coolness of Novina in the summer and amused themselves by organizing dramas. The cast depended on who was present and was filled out by ordinary guests and Yankovsky family and retainers….

When the Soviet Red Army swept into north-eastern Korea at the end of the war, they happened on the Yankovsky colony at Novina. The Reds had several grievances against the Whites, the most recent of which was the Yankovskys’ collaboration with the Japanese army. The Japanese had treated Yankovsky preferentially, letting him own land, trade supplies, run tourist resorts, and trek through military areas, all in return for supplying the Japanese army, paying taxes, and helping keep order among the Koreans. At first it was only interrogation: George and his son Arsenii were taken to headquarters and then released. Son Valerii returned to Novina from the homestead in Manchuria to work with younger brother Yuri as a “volunteer” interpreter for the Red Army, while Arsenii interpreted for the Southern Naval Defense Area (Yuzhnii Morskoi Oboronitel’nii Rayon, or YUZHMOR) at Ch’ôngjin and for the Kontrazuedba (military intelligence, also known as SMERSH, for smyert shpionam, “death to spies”). The motives of the Yankovsky brothers in working for the Reds were simple: as SMERSH explained the situation to Arsenii, the entire family would be punished unless they cooperated. So for survival’s sake the brothers went against their family’s strong anticommunist tradition and agreed to work for the Reds….

What traces remain of this almost-forgotten Russian community in prewar Korea? Though members of the community continued in South Korea through the Korean war and after, I know of only one who remains in place, if the rumours are correct, as an underworld figure in Namdaemun Market. In 1984, Father Boris Moon of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, now moved to Map’o and calling itself “Greek” Orthodox, told me there was one prewar Russian communicant left, a woman named “Tatiana,” but she would not grant me an interview.

The Yankovskys are scattered: Valerii is a poet in Moscow; “Andy Brown” [Arsenii, who worked as a spy] and Yuri are dead; and Muza and Victoria live in the California bay area. In 1991, Victoria and her son Orr Chistiakoff were invited by the local government in Vladivostok to rendezvous with Valerii at Sidemy, on the Bay of Posset, to unveil a statue of Mikhail Yankovsky and restore him to the status of pioneer and hero.

Natalya Tchirkine’s sons Vladimir and Cyril graduated with engineering degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and worked all their lives for Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco. Natalya followed her sons to California in time to escape the Korean War, and supported herself as a seamstress, living to the ripe old age of 96.

The best known descendant among these Russian exiles in Korea was the actor Yul Brynner (1920-1985), who told many a tall tale about his early life, some of which have been laid to rest by his son, Columbia University Prof. Rock Brynner, whose image-filled website includes a photo of Yul at 16 with dark, wavy hair (scroll all the way to the bottom).

Several of these exiles ended up in Japan, like the founders of the Morozoff chocolate dynasty, but many of their progeny ended up in California, like the journalist and sci-fi writer Alexander Besher.

UPDATE: The Marmot adds:

I have long been fascinated with the history of the Far East’s Russian exile community — they were as remarkable a group of individuals (and not always in a positive sense) as there has ever been in modern times. Coincidentally, one of these refugees, Victor Starfin, eventually ended up on the Japanese island of Hokkaido as a youth. Starfin grew up to become one of Japanese baseball’s greatest all-time pitchers, amassing a career record of 303-176 with a life-time ERA of 2.09 — mostly with the Yomiuri Giants. In 1939, he set Japan’s single-season win record was 42. Now, this wasn’t enough to prevent the Japanese from putting Starfin under house arrest during WW II on account of his Russian heritage, but they did make it up to him in the end, eventually enshrining the pitcher in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, where he joins career home-run leader Sadaharu Oh — who for reasons beyond my ken still carries a Taiwanese passport to this day, apparently — as the only two foreign players in the Hall. Of course, this assumes one doesn’t count Masaichi Kaneda, the greatest pitcher in Japanese history (the man holds Japan’s career win record despite playing much of his career for a shitty team) who just happened to be an ethnic Korean (and quite proud of it, it’s said).

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