Category Archives: migration

by Joel | 29 June 2020 · 6:22 am

Crossing the Pacific for School, 1947

From Last Boat Out of Shanghai, by Helen Zia (Ballantine, 2019), Kindle pp. 189-190, 192-193:

In the first weeks of May 1947, American universities mailed their admissions notices to prospective students for the fall. On May 22, Ho received letters of acceptance from both MIT and the University of Michigan for their doctoral mechanical engineering programs. He was ecstatic to be accepted by his top choices, especially knowing that every engineering graduate in China would have applied to both schools. Ho couldn’t decide which school to choose. The University of Michigan would be the less expensive alternative for his family, but MIT had the big name and reputation. As he prepared the documents to apply for his visa, he suddenly noticed that the letter from MIT had no signature. Ho went to the visa authorities to see if the unsigned letter would be accepted. Their answer was an unequivocal no. The hard decision was made for him—he would go to Michigan, home of the American automobile….

After weeks of waiting, Ho received his passport and exit visa on July 19. With his doctoral program beginning in less than two months, he bought a one-way ticket for third-class passage on the American President Lines, the only company carrying passengers across the Pacific to the United States. The cost was 171 U.S. dollars, a large expense already but only a fraction of what his family would have to spend. Those first postwar passenger crossings from Shanghai to San Francisco were made by two converted World War II troop transport ships, among the thousands built by Rosie the Riveters after Pearl Harbor: the USS General M. C. Meigs and USS General Gordon. Ho would sail on the General Gordon, departing August 24. After the sixteen-day voyage, he planned to take a train to Ann Arbor. He’d make it just in time for the start of school on September 13….

THE AMERICAN SHIP OFFERED Ho a first glimpse into his upcoming life in America. To cool off from the heat of the sticky August day, he took a shower—his first experience with such a contraption. Nearby was the water fountain—another first. After a few cautious sips, he quenched his thirst from this amazing device that dispensed a continuous stream of clean water—no boiling necessary. In the third-class dining room, he waited in a long but orderly line for servings of sausages, potatoes, carrots, rice, bread, fruits, tea—and sugar, a precious commodity in Shanghai. The unlimited quantities stunned him, especially the sugar. That night he jotted down a new American phrase: “All you can eat.”

With Ho, more than three hundred of China’s brightest young minds were heading to the United States to continue their educations. Like him, fifty-two were Jiao Tong University graduates, and thirty-three were headed to the University of Michigan. The students held meetings onboard to prepare for life in America, with topics ranging from transportation to their schools to dealing with American culture and cold Michigan winters. Ho attended all the meetings and volunteered to compile a list of everyone’s names to help them stay in touch once they scattered to their respective destinations.

The ocean voyage exposed Ho to another new concept: leisure. He’d brought along some books to study but barely opened them. Instead, he played bridge, watched movies, and spent time with new acquaintances. Most of the students were male, but several were female—including a lady professor. Ho had never gone to school with girls or women—and he was surprised to learn that they had big dreams for their educations too. At some point, Ho realized that he wasn’t practicing much English, in spite of the many American passengers and crew. “I could pass the entire voyage to America speaking only Chinese!” he wrote, resolving to start using more English. It was for this reason that the father of another Shanghai student, Ming Cho Lee, insisted that his son enroll at Occidental College in California—he feared that if his son went to school in the northeastern United States, he would spend his time mostly with other Chinese.

Ho, ever the engineer, eagerly explored the bowels of the ship to understand its mechanics. He admired the genius of a vessel that could cut through the powerful waves as though gliding on ice. The vast beauty of the ocean, with its different hues of blue, gray, and black, mesmerized him.

When they reached the open sea, sick passengers began skipping meals. Ho, too, grew queasy, but he had paid for the meals and was determined to eat them all. He took careful notes on the Americans’ habits. He wondered why people would want to eat bread at every meal but then realized that the rice was just for the many Chinese passengers—it was the only item familiar to most of them. By week’s end, the students grew bored with the bland American food. One of Ho’s cabinmates groaned, “I miss Chinese food more than I miss my wife.”

One thing disturbed Ho: the vast quantities of wasted food. He thought of the starving beggars in Shanghai. “One would exclaim in astonishment at the amount of leftover food at every meal,” Ho wrote in his journal. “The leftovers are all dumped into the ocean, along with countless boxes and bottles.”

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Filed under China, education, food, migration, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 28 June 2020 · 8:43 am

Gramophone in Shanghai, 1948

From Last Boat Out of Shanghai, by Helen Zia (Ballantine, 2019), Kindle pp. 215-216:

Her father’s spontaneous parties presented her biggest challenge. She disliked having to sit, prim and proper, sometimes forced to speak to adults who had no interest in her or what she might have to say, all under her father’s critical eye. Not only was she afraid that she’d irritate him, but she also couldn’t fathom why some of the women, as educated as her mother, spoke in little-girl voices like her ten-year-old sister’s. Or why so many of the men puffed themselves up as though they had the answers to everything. Annuo envied her sixteen-year-old brother, a boarder at his middle school, who didn’t have to endure these dinners. She couldn’t wait to be dismissed and sent upstairs to bed, where she could retreat with her books to a fantasy world far away.

BUT THANKS TO A STRANGE new contraption, Annuo’s attitude toward the parties shifted. On one visit, her father brought home a gramophone. After the adults had finished eating and talking, someone mentioned having “itchy feet.” The servants pushed the furniture aside in the parlor, rolled up the carpet, and talced the floor. Her father cranked up the gramophone and put on some popular band music. Then everyone danced. As if possessed by spirits, the properly formal men and women jumped up and moved about while touching one another. The first time Annuo saw the adults dance, her jaw dropped. Opposite sexes touching in public? Stunned to see even her parents embrace as they danced, she found this utterly contrary to everything she had been taught about acceptable Chinese behavior. To Annuo’s great surprise, her father decided that she and Li-Ning should learn to dance, since there were never enough female partners for his friends. Soon Annuo was dancing the fox-trot, tango, and swing to popular Shanghai band music. American tunes like “Tennessee Waltz” got everyone onto the dance floor. Annuo began looking forward to her father’s surprise visits, hoping for the music to start up after dinner. Her feet were itchy—and she was happier.

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Filed under China, migration, music, U.S.

by Joel | 27 June 2020 · 9:17 am

Reconciling Split Universities, 1946

From Last Boat Out of Shanghai, by Helen Zia (Ballantine, 2019), Kindle pp. 170-173:

At war’s end, two parallel Jiao Tong universities emerged: the returned students from the makeshift Jiao Da in Free China and Ho’s campus in Shanghai.

Over the weeks and months after the surrender, the split grew wider on every campus. Instead of having a joyful reunion, the students who had lived under enemy occupation were now stung by accusations. Ho and the other “fake” students were being called out as puppets and collaborators. Some accusers were embittered returnees seeking targets to blame for their years of misery, while others saw an opportunity to get revenge or to climb over the disgraced.

Ho’s discomfort turned to alarm and dismay as his own academic record was challenged. Living under the Japanese occupation hadn’t been easy. His family, too, had suffered the privations of war. Now, after all his hard work and his family’s sacrifice, everything he had accomplished was diminished, and his loyalty to China was in question. To make matters worse, the students who stayed in Shanghai were academically much stronger than the students from the interior, who had lacked essential tools for a solid education—and it showed.

In 1946, the returned Nationalist authorities imposed a “reconversion” training program on the teachers and students who had remained in Shanghai. They declared that “fake students” like Ho were “corrupted,” just like the collaborators and traitors. They even called Ho and his cohorts “puppet students” who lacked the political understanding of the “real” Jiao Da students. The new Ministry of Education questioned the validity of the academic records of graduates from colleges and middle schools in occupied Shanghai. It created a special program in Nationalist ideology, requiring all such students to take the course. Students and graduates who failed the exam would be considered corrupted, their reputations tarnished and their diplomas and academic credits rendered worthless. Teachers were also to be tested for their loyalty to and knowledge of Nationalist principles.

Ho was horrified—and indignant. Why should he be stigmatized solely because his family hadn’t joined the difficult exodus to the interior? He had been only thirteen in 1937. Neither his elderly grandmother nor his sick brother could have endured the journey. Everyone had personal reasons for the choices they had to make during the long war. How could all of the thousands of students in Shanghai during the eight years of enemy occupation be corrupt puppets? With such accusations of ideological inferiority, Ho worried that his dream was slipping away, falling like a stone into the filthy Huangpu River.

Just as Ho was beginning to lose hope, he saw that some of his fellow students were fighting against the gross unfairness. Campus activists stood on the steps of buildings, arguing that they should not be treated as though they had supported the Japanese enemy. Ho stopped to listen. They hadn’t joined the Wang Jingwei puppets in Nanjing or aided Pan Da’s puppet police at 76, the students asserted. Didn’t the accusers know that many students and teachers in Shanghai had been arrested and executed for their anti-Japanese resistance? Or that students across Shanghai had refused to study the Japanese language?

The protests against the Nationalist sanctions spread like wildfire. Shanghai’s workers, too, called for relief from the years of hardship and repression. The students and workers combined forces in massive citywide demonstrations that seemed to explode with greater ferocity each day as the postwar unrest spread.

Ho found himself pulled into the groundswell. He agreed with the protest organizers. After all, they had been children during the war. It was unfair and outrageous to condemn them as traitors and ruin their lives. It made sense to Ho that he should stand up for his own future and not depend on others to do that for him. When students in his dormitory asked if he would support them, Ho surprised himself by joining the protests in spite of rumors that some of the students were secret Communists. Ho didn’t care. He had to show everyone that he was a student, not a traitor.

A massive mobilization called on all students to gather at the Shanghai North railway station, the major rail terminus in the former International Settlement. Ho fell in step with throngs of Jiao Tong schoolmates as they marched the five-mile distance. He, too, shouted, “Fair treatment for all students and teachers!” and “Punish the real traitors, not the ordinary people!” Along the way, the ranks swelled with men and women from other campuses: Shanghai University, Tongji, St. John’s, Fudan, Aurora, and the many other schools that were an important part of Shanghai’s intellectual life.

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Filed under China, democracy, education, Japan, migration, war

by Joel | 23 June 2020 · 5:36 am

Fates of Foreigners in Shanghai, 1942

From Last Boat Out of Shanghai, by Helen Zia (Ballantine, 2019), Kindle pp. 129-132:

Once Britain and the United States declared war against Japan, life for Shanghailanders—the foreigners—swiftly changed. Immediately after December 8, 1941, all Allied nationals aged fourteen and above had to report to the Hamilton House near the Bund to register with Japanese gendarmes and receive ID numbers, as well as the red armbands they would have to wear at all times when in public.

Worse yet, Japan froze all bank accounts belonging to its enemy nationals. They were allowed to withdraw only two thousand yuan each month—a paltry amount for foreigners accustomed to pampered Shanghai lifestyles, effectively reducing them to the same income level as their Chinese servants. Each day, the Japanese military issued new edicts that further restricted where foreign Allied nationals could go, what they were allowed to do, how they conducted their lives.

Faced with bitter austerity, the Allied nationals were in a bind. Many expatriates worked for American telephone, gas, and electric utilities or the British waterworks, police, port, and customs. Now these entities were controlled by Japan, aiding its war effort. If Allied Shanghailanders quit their enemy-supervised jobs, they’d be stuck in China, destitute. Plenty of British bobbies, former coworkers of Pan Da, stayed on as members of the Shanghai Municipal Police—enforcing the will of Japan to crush all resistance. When their fellow Americans and Britons back home learned of their work for the enemy, they angrily denounced them, accusing them of collaboration, even treason….

At the start of the war in Europe in 1939, after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Denmark had been a neutral country. As a Dane in Shanghai, Kristian Jarldane had expected his Danish passport to shield his family from trouble. Before Pearl Harbor, his household in the French Concession had carried on as if things were normal, in spite of the war outside their home. Bing and Ma watched baby Ole while Elder Sister socialized. Kristian still had his engineering job with the Shanghai Water Conservancy, which paid him in foreign currency—better than gold in the inflationary wartime economy. He joined other Shanghailanders in maintaining the three-hour lunchtime “tiffins,” as well as afternoon high tea. Kristian would return to the apartment promptly at four o’clock for some strong English tea and thick slabs of dark bread from his favorite Russian-Jewish boulangerie, to be served with eel, fish, or some other meat fried in pork fat and onions.

But the expanding world war began to disrupt everything. The first shock hit Elder Sister and her husband on April 9, 1940, when Germany invaded Denmark. The Copenhagen government immediately surrendered to the Third Reich, becoming part of the Axis with Germany, Japan, and Italy. The couple wondered if that would be a plus in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. As a Dane, Kristian wasn’t required to wear an armband, nor was he subject to the mortifying financial restrictions confronting other Shanghailanders. He had plenty of company, for the nationals of other Axis-occupied countries were also exempt, as were the stateless White Russians, Ashkenazi Jews, and Indian Sikhs. But then, one week after all Allied nationals had to register, Kristian received orders from the Danish consular staff. He was required to provide them with the names and contact information of all Danish members of his household. Everyone in occupied Shanghai was to be accounted for….

In early 1943, the Japanese issued the order that Shanghailanders had dreaded: All citizens of Allied countries were to be imprisoned. Kristian and Elder Sister watched helplessly as friends and neighbors were loaded onto trucks and shipped to one of the eight crowded and squalid internment camps on the outskirts of the city. Most of them were British and American men, women, and children. Some were forced to walk for miles and carry their own baggage, like coolies. Because the prominent Sassoons, Hardoons, and Kadoories—wealthy Baghdadi Jewish families who had lived in Shanghai for many years—were British citizens, they, too, were subject to internment. About seventy-six hundred Americans, British, Dutch, and other civilians were imprisoned between January and July 1943 to “prevent fifth-column activities and guarantee stabilized livelihood for the enemy nationals,” according to the pro-Japan Shanghai Times. Ironically, this same rationale was being used by the U.S. government to incarcerate 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in 1942—and duly noted by Japanese propagandists to label critics as hypocrites.

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Filed under Britain, China, Eastern Europe, economics, Germany, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, Scandinavia, U.S., USSR, war

by Joel | 9 June 2020 · 8:39 am

Pakistan: From Haven to Citadel

From Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East, by Kim Ghattas (Henry Holt, 2020), Kindle pp. 112-113:

Pakistan was founded in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, born out of the partition of India, but it was also a home for many minorities. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the nation, was a secular Shia who nominated other Shias and an Ahmadi Muslim to his cabinet. His first law minister was a Hindu, to make clear that laws were to be written by secular jurists, not clerics and theologians. In his first presidential address marking the birth of the nation, at midnight on August 11, 1947, Jinnah told his new compatriots “you are free to go to your temples, free to go to your mosques, or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or case or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” Jinnah had spelled out a vision for religious pluralism in a secular Muslim-majority democracy, where Muslims and non-Muslims were equal citizens. He did not speak of an Islamic state, not even of an Islamic republic. But his vision for tolerant diversity was never fulfilled. He died a year later, and though his successors tried to uphold this nuanced narrative, they soon fell back on the more straightforward raison d’être of the country: Islam.

Pakistan was born amid horrendous violence and indescribable dislocation—around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to Pakistan, while 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs left for India. Activist, revivalist Islam had grown in British India in part as a reaction to colonial rule, but also in opposition to Hindus, the majority. The name Pakistan was an acronym combining the first letters of the different provinces that made up the new country. But in Urdu, the language of the new nation, it also means “the land of the pure,” and there were many who wanted to purify it further. In 1956, Pakistan’s constitution declared the country an Islamic republic and prohibited non-Muslims from holding the office of head of state. In the 1960s, military dictators used religion as a rallying cry against India, feeding further intolerance against Hindus and appeasing Islamists. Social and cultural life continued unperturbed, but some now brandished Pakistan as a citadel of Islam.

The architect of that citadel would be Abu A’la al-Mawdudi, the man who had inspired Qutb in Egypt and Khomeini in Iran. Mawdudi had not always been a religious fundamentalist. Born in 1903 in British India, he was a journalist, a poet, and newspaper editor whose intellectual, mystical, theological journey made him the twentieth century’s greatest revivalist Islamic thinker.

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Filed under India, migration, nationalism, Pakistan, religion

by Joel | 28 May 2020 · 1:36 pm

Why Japanese Migrated to New Guinea

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), pp. 57-58:

Migration in this period reflected Japanese social history. Migrants kept on coming from the rural southwest where underdevelopment continued as industrialisation was entrenched in urban centres. Rural depression intensified, particularly after the Russo-Japanese War, when industrialisation gained momentum with the rapid growth of export-oriented industries such as silk and cotton. The major impact on rural areas was the loss of self-sufficiency as agricultural production was integrated into the development of export commodities. As a result, rural-urban inequality increased, accelerating the tempo of the emigration of the rural people to urban centres and overseas. The statistics verify this. In only 10 years from 1904 to 1914, the number of overseas emigrants increased nearly threefold-from 138,591 in 1904 to 358,711 in 1914. The same tendency was seen in migration to Papua and New Guinea. The number increased from a mere two in 1906 to 109 in 1914, and most came from Kyūshū; 33 from Kumamoto, 28 from Nagasaki, and eight from Saga.

Most migrants were dekasegi-sha (literally ‘people leaving to earn money’) on three-year contracts, the same type of people seen in urban factories. The largest occupational group was artisans: 41 shipwrights, 18 carpenters and 13 sawyers. Many of them were from Goryō and Oniike villages in Amakusa. These villages were famous for boatbuilding from the Edo era, but in about 1907 many shipwrights lost their jobs due to the recession in the shipping industry. Eleven fishermen were another significant group. They came from fishing villages such as Isahaya-chō (Kita-takaki-gun, Nagasaki prefecture) and Jōgashima (Misaki-chō, Miura-gun, Kanagawa prefecture). Fishing villages in this period were also suffering a decline in jobs due to the development of a modern capital-intensive fishery and the resulting decline of small fishermen. Unemployment thus constituted a ‘push’ factor for emigration. It is highly probable that, like the migration to Thursday Island, the high wages in New Guinea became a major ‘pull’ factor.

Moreover the German administration’s different treatment of the Japanese relative to other Asians possibly became a ‘pull’ factor. The granting of European status delighted the Japanese who had been rejected in Australia because they were Asians. The migrants probably felt that the Germans recognised their national identity as subjects of an emerging empire which, they may have thought, was distinctive from other Asian countries. Although in reality the migrants were the victims of empire-building which increased the poverty of rural Japan, the improvement of their status from poor rustics to ‘Europeans’ satisfied their pride. Of course, such pride was merely an illusion which would vanish as soon as they returned to their impoverished villages, but it was a sweet illusion that attracted the migrants to the land of ‘dojin’ [“natives”].

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Filed under economics, Germany, industry, Japan, migration, nationalism, Papua New Guinea

by Joel | 21 May 2020 · 10:16 am

Japanese Status in German New Guinea

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), pp. 47-49:

The main characteristics of German attitudes towards Japanese were leniency regarding legal status and caution in granting land grants. The Germans granted the Japanese European status around 1905. Until then they had no legal status. Granting European status was not confined to the Germans, as the Dutch granted the same status in the East Indies in 1899. Threlfall argues that Komine‘s usefulness to the administration as well as the effect of the emergence of Japan in international politics after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War facilitated the granting of European status.

Indeed the administration recognised Komine’s usefulness when Albert Hahl, the Vice-Governor and Governor from 1896 to 1914, met him. According to Hahl’s diary, in 1902 Komine reached Herbertshöhe from Torres Strait; around this time Hahl had been facing a serious shortage of government vessels to perform administrative tasks. The appearance of Komine solved this problem:

A chance incident helped to solve my dilemma. One fine morning there was a small schooner flying the Japanese flag to be seen riding at anchor in the Herbertshöhe Harbour. The skipper, Isokide [sic] Komine, told me that his water and provisions had run out on his voyage from Torres Strait, where he had been engaged in pearl-fishing. He had no money to purchase supplies and asked me to employ him. I inspected his little ship, found it suitable for my purpose, and chartered the vessel.

Hahl used Komine’s schooner for later trips around the Bismarck Archipelago.

However, Komine gave a different account of the encounter. His story appears in his petition for financial assistance to the Consul-General in Sydney in 1916. According to Komine, he reached Rabaul in October 1901 and accidentally met Governor Hahl who had been under siege by ‘little barbarians’:

Nearly at the end of my exploration I anchored at Rabaul in October 1901. At that time the place was German territory and the natives were strongly resisting German rule. The punitive expeditions were suffering failures. When I arrived there, Govern Hahl and his staff had narrowly escaped the tight siege of the little barbarians and they were holding this small place. Their vessels, which were their only resort, were wrecked on the reef. They tried all measures unsuccessfully and were just waiting to be slaughtered. However, when they found my accidental arrival, they were overjoyed as if my arrival was God’s will and begged me for the charter of my ship. My righteous heart was heating up, seeing their hopeless situation, and I willingly agreed to their request. At the same time I joined their punitive forces. Sharing uncountable hardships with them and applying various tactics all successfully, we finally conquered and pacified the little barbarians.

Apparently Komine dramatised the encounter to his advantage. German records indicate no such incident either at Herbertoshöhe or at Rabaul. Nonetheless Komine’s description verifies two facts: the administration was suffering from a lack of seaworthy vessels; and he accompanied Hahl on his trips to other places. There were mutual benefits: Hahl needed a vessel and Komine needed provisions for his voyage. This circumstance contributed to the development of the two men’s relationship and later led to the emergence of the Japanese community in German New Guinea.

The men’s characters may also have contributed to some extent. Komine’s determined and adventurous nature which had been demonstrated on his arrival may have appealed to Hahl who was, Sack argues, ‘by no means free of the racial prejudices of his time, but … liked people, even if they were black or brown or yellow’. Similarly, Firth claims that Hahl ‘had broader and more humane objectives, though still primarily economic ones … unlike many German governors in Africa’.

The European status given to the Japanese, however, shows German subtlety Hahl pursued strict policies to maintain a racial hierarchy with whites always at the top. He never allowed his personal friendship to undermine this hierarchy. When court cases involving Japanese arose, they were not heard in the European courts but in a separate court constituted only for the Japanese. Similarly, the Germans were cautious about giving commercial advantage. The administration did not grant the right to purchase freehold to the Japanese. Indeed, the administration introduced a discriminatory law to restrict non-indigenous coloured people acquiring land: ‘land could not be purchased from the government by natives or by persons who had not equal rights with Europeans; and land could neither be bought nor leased by persons unable to read and write a European language’. In addition, the Germans limited the land rights of the Japanese, and of the Chinese, to leases only for a term not exceeding 30 years.

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Filed under economics, Germany, Japan, language, migration, nationalism, Papua New Guinea

by Joel | 10 May 2020 · 6:45 am

Early Japanese Interest in South Seas

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), pp. 15-16:

Until the late 19th century the Japanese government had no policies for the South Seas. The government was preoccupied with domestic affairs, while Germany, the United States, Australia, France, Spain, Netherlands, and Britain were involved in the acquisition and exchange of tropical islands. The Japanese government’s primary concern was to centralise governance in order to build a strong empire which could not be colonised. External affairs were secondary concerns in which the government was mainly preoccupied with the removal of unequal treaties imposed by Western nations and the promotion of national prestige. Although Japan’s expansionism was shown in the 1870s in Saigō Takamori‘s claim to invade Korea, Ōkubo Toshimichi‘s decision to send a military expedition to Taiwan and the government’s declaration that the Ryūkyū Islands and Sakhalin were parts of Japan, the expansion was limited to the adjacent region. The government’s involvement in South Seas affairs was marginal and largely confined to matters of national prestige and the rights of citizens abroad.

Japan’s first involvement in the South Seas was an embarrassing episode involving emigrants to Guam. In 1868 about 40 Japanese emigrated as contract labourers to work on a plantation where a Spanish employer treated them harshly. The Japanese were treated no differently from locals and the employer did not pay their promised wages in full. Their complaint to a Spanish administrator was ignored. In 1871, after some had died due to harsh work conditions, three managed to return to Japan to report their plight. The government was astonished and the matter was discussed, but it is unknown whether it took any action to save these migrants or protested to the Spanish administration. In 1868, 153 contract labourers in Hawaii suffered a similar fate. These incidents embarrassed the Japanese government which was acutely sensitive about its national dignity but probably the government, which was just managing to survive by pacifying rebels, chose not to protest in order to avoid conflicts that it could not handle confidently. The government could only ban emigration by enforcing tight regulations to avoid further national disgrace.

However, the issue of sovereignty over the Ogasawara (also known as Bonin) Islands provided an opportunity to stimulate Japanese interest in the South Seas. Although the Tokugawa government hardly resisted when Commodore Perry demanded the opening of Japan and proclaimed US possession of the Ogasawara Islands in 1853, some vocal Meiji officials in 1875 ’emphasised the urgency of return of the islands that could connect Japanese interests to the South Seas’. The report of the Foreign Ministry to the Prime Minister explained that ‘the islands were a strategic point in the Pacific sea route, which was extremely important in Japan’s advancement in the South Sea’. Then negotiations began and the US compromised. The issue signalled the beginning of the government’s awareness of its interests in the South Seas. It was also significant in that the government promoted national dignity by recovering territory.

As the incidents in Guam and Hawaii showed, the government was aware of its weak internal position and tried not to provoke other Western nations in the South Seas until the 1880s.

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Filed under Australia, Britain, economics, France, Germany, Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, labor, Micronesia, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, Spain, Taiwan, U.S.

by Joel | 8 May 2020 · 6:12 am

Early Japanese Settlers in PNG

From Nanshin: Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1890–1949, by Hiromitsu Iwamoto (Journal of Pacific History, 1999), p. 10:

A MASSIVE EXODUS OF PEOPLE WAS A WORLD-WIDE phenomenon during the 19th century. About 50 million Europeans emigrated to the Americas and 47 million Chinese and Indians emigrated to the Asia-Pacific. However, the scale of Japanese emigration was small. Rough estimates of Japanese emigration before the Pacific War are at least 1.6 million: from 1868 to 1941, 776,304 Japanese emigrated to areas other than Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan, and from 1936 to 1940 about 820,000 people emigrated to Manchuria. Comparable figures were 23.1 million from Britain, 4.3 million from France, seven million from Holland, 33.9 million from Germany and 22 million from Italy between 1851 and 1950. The number of Japanese emigrants to Papua and New Guinea was tiny: it was never above 200.

The smallness of Japanese emigration is attributed mainly to Japan’s seclusion policy which prohibited overseas emigration until 1868 and its integration into world capitalism. Destinations for Japanese emigrants were limited, because by the time Japan began to modernise, most Pacific-Asian countries had been colonised by European powers. Although Japan’s rapid modernisation from the late 19th century with colonisation of Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and Micronesia created space for emigration, this was only possible in a short period of 50 years ending with the Pacific War.

Japanese emigration to Papua and New Guinea began around the turn of the 19th century. It was an offshoot from the settlement of Japanese pearl divers on Thursday Island where they were squeezed out by Australian restrictions on migration and by the exhaustion of pearl beds. The migration was also a result of a series of searches for new beds and a place to settle by an adventurous Japanese skipper Komine Isokichi.

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Filed under Australia, economics, Germany, Japan, migration, nationalism, Papua New Guinea

by Joel | 9 April 2020 · 9:10 am

1918 Flu Hits Holy Zamora

From Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, by Laura Spinney (PublicAffairs, 2017), Kindle pp. 79-83, 87:

The Spanish city of Zamora–known as la bien cercada, or well enclosed, due to its impressive fortifications–straddles the River Duero in the north-western region of Castile and León. Deeply religious, it is famous even today for its sombre processions of hooded, barefoot penitents in Holy Week. In 1914, when its citizens learned that they were about to receive a new bishop, the bells rang out for three days. The man himself arrived a few months later, stepping down from a specially chartered train to a railway station packed with well-wishers. Fireworks were let off, and a joyful crowd accompanied him to the cathedral where he took his oath of office. The church-sanctioned newspaper, El Correo de Zamora, promised obedience to the new bishop, and praised his eloquence and youth.

The bishop’s name was Antonio Álvaro y Ballano, and at thirty-eight he already had a glittering career behind him. As a student at a seminary in Guadalajara, he had shone in every subject he had turned his hand to. At twenty-three he had taken up the chair in metaphysics, and after winning a hard-fought contest for the magistral canonry of Toledo, the most important archdiocese in Spain, he had come to the attention of Cardinal Sancha, Primate of Spain. He had been named a bishop in 1913, and prior to his arrival in Zamora, had held the post of prefect of studies at the seminary in Toledo.

…

When the Naples Soldier [the Spanish name for the flu] returned to Spain in the autumn of 1918, it appeared first in the east of the country, but it soon followed the bishop along the train tracks to Zamora. September is a month of gatherings in Spain. The crops are harvested, the army takes on new recruits, and weddings and religious feasts are held–not to mention that most popular of Spanish pastimes, the bullfight. Young army recruits, some from distant provinces, converged on Zamora to take part in routine artillery exercises, and in the middle of the month, the Correo reported nonchalantly that ‘There is cholera at the frontier, flu in Spain and in this tiny corner of the peninsula, fiestas.’ Then the recruits began to fall ill.

Attempts to quarantine the sick soldiers in barracks on the site of the city’s eleventh-century castle failed, and the number of civilian casualties began to rise. As it did so, the shortage of manpower began to interfere with the harvest, exacerbating pre-existing food restrictions. The press began to sound less sanguine. On 21 September, the Heraldo de Zamora–a newspaper that was nominally independent of the church–rued the unsanitary state of the city. Zamora resembled a ‘pigsty’ in which, shamefully, people still shared living space with animals, and many houses lacked their own lavatory or water supply. The paper repeated an old hobbyhorse, that the Moors had bequeathed to Spain an aversion to cleanliness. ‘There are Spaniards who only use soap for washing their clothes,’ it noted severely.

During the first wave of the pandemic, the country’s inspector general of health, Martín Salazar, had lamented the inability of a bureaucratic and underfunded health system to prevent the disease from spreading. Though provincial health committees took their lead from his directorate, they had no powers of enforcement, and they quickly came up against what he described as the ‘terrible ignorance’ of the populace–the failure to grasp, for example, that an infected person on the move would transmit the disease. Now that the Naples Soldier had returned, one national newspaper, El Liberal, called for a sanitary dictatorship–a containment programme imposed from the top down–and as the epidemic wore on, the call was picked up and echoed by other papers.

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On 30 September, Bishop Álvaro y Ballano defied the health authorities by ordering a novena–evening prayers on nine consecutive days–in honour of St Rocco, the patron saint of plague and pestilence, because the evil that had befallen Zamoranos was ‘due to our sins and ingratitude, for which the avenging arm of eternal justice has been brought down upon us’. On the first day of the novena, in the presence of the mayor and other notables, he dispensed Holy Communion to a large crowd at the Church of San Esteban. At another church, the congregation was asked to adore relics of St Rocco, which meant lining up to kiss them.

Also on 30 September, it was reported that Sister Dositea Andrés of the Servants of Mary had died while tending soldiers at the barracks. Sister Dositea was described as a ‘virtuous and exemplary nun’ who had accepted her martyrdom with equanimity and even enthusiasm, who had slept no more than four hours a day, and who had spent much of her time coaxing sick soldiers to eat. The Mother Superior of her order asked for a good turnout at her funeral, and the papers passed on her request. In accordance with tradition, readers were informed, the bishop would grant sixty days’ indulgence to those who complied. Apparently the turnout was not as good as the Mother Superior had hoped, because the day after the funeral the Correo lambasted the citizenry for its ingratitude. The bishop, on the other hand, was satisfied with attendance at the novena, which he described as ‘one of the most significant victories Catholicism has obtained’.
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By mid-November, the worst was over. … Zamora had suffered worse than any other Spanish city. But its residents do not seem to have held their bishop responsible. Perhaps it helped that they had grown up with the legend of Atilano, the first Bishop of Zamora, who in the tenth century had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to repent of his sins and free his city of plague. There are even those who defend Álvaro y Ballano, claiming that he did what he could to console his flock in the face of inertia at the town hall, the real problem being an ineffectual health system and poor education in matters of hygiene. Before 1919 was out, the city had awarded him the Cross of Beneficence, in recognition of his heroic efforts to end the suffering of its citizens during the epidemic, and he remained Bishop of Zamora until his death in 1927.