Category Archives: migration

by | 17 May 2011 · 6:46 am

Cameroon Tales: Two Cooks

For most of his recent sabbatical in Cameroon, my brother stayed in a big hilltop white-elephant of a house overlooking a small village on the busy main highway between Yaoundé, the capital, and Douala, the main port city. The house was the ostensible headquarters of a personal NGO owned by an international businessman from that village, whom my brother had once helped get started in the business of importing cars from Europe into Cameroon. As village benefactor, he had later acquired overseas aid to build and maintain a village well, build a nursery school, and build his own seldom-used mansion.

My brother’s housemates there were three men from neighboring Central African Republic, speakers of a Gbaya language called Suma who were working on documenting their language, on a project funded almost entirely out of my brother’s own pocket. He has known the elder two men (now in their 50s) since the late 1970s, when he was working for the Peace Corps and then USAID in the then Central African Empire.

To feed himself and his team, my brother asked to hire a cook from the local village. The sleazy caretaker of the mansion, a childhood friend of the benefactor now in his 40s, recommended the 16-year-old girl living with him, who soon proved that she neither knew how to cook nor cared to learn, even when an older woman was hired to help teach her.

One day the young cook got a call from her elder sister telling her that the latter’s baby was very sick, and asking for help. My brother offered to give her an advance on her salary, since it was so near the end of the month anyway, so that she could send some money to her sister. But her man (the caretaker) took that money, beat her, and forbade her to visit her sister. The cook then came to my brother and asked for more help, but the caretaker swore that he never beat her (even claiming she had attacked him), and that he never took her money, only “put it aside” in order to prevent her leaving to go take of the sick baby.

Although the cook threatened to leave the caretaker—just as she had earlier infuriated her family by running away from home to be with him—she soon relented, made up with him, and returned to work as if nothing had happened. Nevertheless, her enthusiasm for cooking never improved, and my brother finally fired her a few weeks before we arrived for our visit.

The replacement cook was far from a spoiled brat. She was the devoutly religious, 30-something mother of four young children whose husband had abandoned her in Kribi, on the south coast, whereupon she tried to find her sister, who had married into the village where we stayed. She ran out of cash in the market and crossroads town nearest her sister’s village, but a taxi driver from the latter village was kind enough to give her and her brood a free ride to her sister’s house, which had only one room to spare for her and her four kids.

Lacking land and a husband, she resorted to gathering forest herbs for sale by the roadside to earn a little cash. The village chief’s unmarried son dallied with her for a while, but he was very likely scared off by the prospect of raising her four kids (although she blamed it on his inability to abide by her strict religious scruples). The chance to cook for a household of foreigners was a godsend—except for the jealousy it aroused among the other villagers.

She proved a diligent and capable cook who used her new supply of cash to rent some land and pay a crew to clear a field for planting—all just in time for the start of the rainy season. And she was finally able to pay the village medic to treat her two-year-old boy for worms.

When it came time for my brother and his team to leave the village, he promised her whatever food supplies remained in the kitchen. She didn’t show up for the good-bye party, however. Instead, she waited out behind the kitchen until after darkness fell and all the guests had left—so that no one would see her carry the extra food to her sister’s house, and then spread gossip about the passing good fortune of one of the most destitute women in the village.

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Filed under Cameroon, economics, labor, language, migration, religion

by | 26 January 2011 · 9:06 pm

Common People’s Christianity in Gunma, 1880s

From: American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan 1859–73, by Hamish Ion (UBC Press, 2009), pp. 269-271:

Although many missionaries, unlike their Japanese colleagues, came from rural farming backgrounds (and thus possibly had a better appreciation of the importance of farming to national strength), they were restricted to the treaty ports. Unless missionaries were employed at Japanese schools or obtained leave to go into the interior for health reasons, they were not free to leave the treaty ports. Thus, the rural evangelistic effort had by necessity, to be largely conducted by Japanese evangelists. By 1884 thirteen churches had been established in the Kantō prefectures.” Kudō Eiichi has pointed out that the ten years from 1877 to 1887 saw a tremendous growth in the Protestant movement, much of which came from the creation of new churches in rural areas.” This growth owed a lot to the activities of students who had studied in Tokyo or Yokohama, where they had contact with Christians returning to their hometowns and villages in the provinces Back-up to the activities of returned Christians came from members of the new city churches in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe, joined shortly afterward by students from the Nihon Kirisuto Ichi Kyōkai Shingakkō in Tsukiji and the Dōshisha school in Kyoto.
…
As Christian activities in Annaka and Maebashi reveal, one of the first areas to be opened up was Gunma Prefecture, an agricultural area to the west of Tokyo with strong ties to the silk-exporting trade through Yokohama. The opportunities for rural economic development as a result of the silk trade helped to open this area to Western machinery and Western ideas. It was in Kiryū that evangelists belonging to the Shin Sakae Kyōkai were able to establish their first church among the rural folk in this important region. In its early years, the Kiryū Kyōkai lacked both a permanent worship place and a resident minister. It grew nevertheless because of the energy of visiting evangelists and its own members. In sharp contrast to many of the first converts in Yokohama and Tokyo, who were shizoku (descendants of samurai), the Kiryū Christians belonged to merchant and farming families. Indeed, the first shizoku member of the church, Ishii Yasaemon, became a member in August 1883 and was the 117th person to be baptized in that church. In microcosm, the challenges that the Kiryū Kyōkai faced help to explain how a Christian community was able to take root in a country area and shed more light on what church activity entailed for country Christians. Sumiya has pointed out that Gunma Christians were different from their counterparts in other places where shizoku had made up the majority of converts because Gunma Christianity was the common people’s Christianity (heimin no kirisutokyo). This was certainly true in the case of the Kiryū Kyōkai….

Between 1878 and 1888, twelve churches were established in the prefecture, with a total membership of 1,466. Among them was the independent church Nishi Gunma Kyōkai, Takazaki Kyōkai, established in May 1884 by Hoshino Mitsuta. The evangelistic power and vitality of the young Dōshisha graduates who formed the vanguard of the Kumiai Kyōkai’s endeavour in Gunma is reflected in the ownership of these twelve churches: nine belonged to the Kumiai Kyōkai, and only one each to the Nihon Kirisuto Ichi Kyōkai, the Baptists, and the Methodists. The majority of the churches were on the main road leading west across Honshu toward Niigata, as was the case in Kiryū, Maebashi, Takasaki, Annaka, and Harashi. Some of these also were on the route of the railway – Isesaki, for instance. Ōhama has pointed out that Gunma Prefecture had 985 Christians in its churches in 1888 and ranked fifth in terms of numbers of Christians living in Japanese prefectures or major cities, and, at 14.75, fourth overall in terms of Christians per thousand of population.

This adds new perspective to our visit to international Ota City in Gunma, which is now home to Japan’s largest Braziltown and has the highest proportion of foreign workers of any prefecture in Japan.

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Filed under Brazil, economics, Japan, labor, migration, religion

by | 4 January 2011 · 8:29 pm

Japanese Revolutionaries in Indonesia, 1945-46

From the Introduction by Saya Shiraishi to A Japanese Memoir of Sumatra, 1945-46: Love and Hatred in the Liberation War, by Takao Fusayama (Equinox, 2010), pp. 9-11, 13-14:

I have three namelists in front of me which I acquired during the course of my research on the Japanese occupation of North Sumatra. They were composed by a former Japanese military officer in Medan, East Sumatra, and dated May 11, 1952. The title of the first list reads, in Japanese, “Namelist of the Japanese who died in battle or of illness in/around Medan.” It contains 102 names, each with information concerning the person’s “former military affiliation,” “hometown” in Japan (one, however, is from Korea, one from Taiwan), and a brief record of how and where he died. A certain “Shimada,” for example, “died during the fight against the Dutch in front of Siantar Railroad Station, July 27, 1947. An art college graduate, an excellent painter.”

Three notes at the end of the list inform the reader that there are 88 additional Japanese who reportedly died in the region, among them the 83 who were massacred in Tebing Tinggi in December 1945 (see below, Chapter 8), but their names are unknown. There may have been further deaths which have not been confirmed. With the few exceptions of those who died of malaria or other illnesses, “most are martyrs to Indonesian independence who fell in battle against the Dutch.”

All the deaths took place after August 15, 1945, the date marking the “end” of World War II for Japan. This record provides a basis for the claim that there were more Japanese casualties during Indonesia’s revolutionary war than during Japan’s three-and-a-half year occupation of the tropical land.

The second list contains 97 names of the “members of the Japanese Association in Medan.” It provides such data as birth date, age, former military affiliation, family address in Japan, current address, marriage and children, current occupation. These men were living in Medan with their families (presumably Indonesian-born) as “mechanics,” “automobile repairmen,” “plantation clerks,” “pharmacists,” “blacksmiths,” “judo instructors” etc. Their birth dates range from 1907 to 1923. When the list was prepared in 1952, they were 29 to 45 years old. Some had already lived in Sumatra for ten years since the Japanese landing in the island in 1942.

I was also told in interviews I conducted during my research that, in addition to the names listed here, there must be other Japanese who when they married entered the wives’ families, becoming Muslims, acquiring Indonesian names, and being lost to their fellow Japanese. A few more names would then be mentioned of those who had come to the Dutch East Indies before World War II, had subsequently been recruited to serve in the Japanese occupation government, and then remained on in Indonesia which had apparently become their home.

The third list contains 20 names, with their family addresses in Japan, of people who in 1952 had just been sent back by ship to Japan from Medan. I met some of these returnees in Tokyo in 1974. One said that he was happy that he had been able to come back to Japan, had started life anew, and was planning to write a memoir after his retirement. Indeed, his book was published some years later. Another made it clear that he had been “forced” by the Indonesian government to leave the village in Aceh where he was farming. According to his old friends, he had close trusting relationships with the religious and political leaders in Aceh, among them the charismatic Tgk. Daud Beureueh who was to lead a revolt against the government in 1953. Two others did not want to talk about their experiences. They were working for the Japan-Indonesia petroleum trade and their “past” was currently both an asset and liability It was not an “unforgettable, exotic” experience, but their life was still tied to it.

During the 1970s, large numbers of war-time memoirs were written* and published in Japan. Among them, the “Indonesian experience” of sharing with young revolutionaries their historical moment (the period of the revolutionary war rather than Japan’s occupation of the land) was remembered with unfading enthusiasm. The experience was something too significant for the veterans to let it vanish from their life.

    *The combined figure is significant enough considering the fact that by the end of World War II, (1) in the whole of Sumatra, there was only one division (Konoe-Daini Division) in the north and one brigade in the south; (2) due to the drastic reduction in the numbers of Japanese soldiers, the “division” barely managed to maintain its structure through incorporating the hastily organized Giyu-gun forces of local youths (at least 15 companies and 4 platoons in Aceh, 4 companies and 3 platoons in Medan) into its rank and file. See Saya Shiraishi, “Nihon Gunsei Ka no Aceh [Aceh under the Japanese Military Administration]” Southeast Asia: History and Culture [Tokyo] 5 (1975): 141.

…
The readers of this “documentary novel” written by Takao Fusayama will perceive the zeal with which his story is narrated. It is also his dedication that has brought his recollections across the Pacific. He not only published his memoir in Japanese, but also took the pains to translate it into English himself and search for an English-speaking audience. This unceasing commitment to the memory of the brief period of their youth, during which the lives of some hundreds of Japanese young men actually did change, is the notable feature shared by other memoirs as well. Behind their narratives we find this zeal for life. It is there, because it was their own life. Their own youth. We hear in this book, the voice of hundreds of youths whose “personal” life-stories in a “foreign” land have been edited away.

It is through this voice, however, that we may come closer to understanding the nature of the revolutionary war and the “stateless youth” who fought it. One of the former Japanese “deserters” [!] once answered my question as to why he had not returned home, “Oh, it was just natural for me to stay there.” He did not choose to be sent to Sumatra as he did not choose to be born a Japanese. He found, nevertheless, that his life should belong to Sumatra whose natural beauty he loved dearly. He had had enough of the military, enough of the state’s arbitrary control over his life. He had never forgiven the state, Japan, that had intruded into his life and, upon his graduating from college, sent him out to the warfront. He was a revolutionary youth “himself.”

His story is yet to be written. Takao Fusayama’s account of his own experiences, however, will open up and invite more attention to this unexplored field.

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Filed under Indonesia, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, war

by | 31 December 2010 · 12:45 pm

Winchester, Virginia: My First American Hometown

Fifty years ago this month, I arrived in a snow-covered city I would come to think of as my first American hometown, Winchester, Virginia. I had just spent most of my elementary school years in Kyoto, Japan, which I still think of as my Japanese hometown. My parents were missionaries. I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, where my father was in seminary, and I later attended first grade there during our first furlough while he finished his coursework toward a Th.D. But our two-and-a-half years in Winchester gave me my first prolonged exposure to life in small-town America.

Amherst St. house, Dec. 1960

Mom in front of our house on Amherst St., Dec. 1960

For 7th and 8th grades, I walked to my mother’s alma mater, Handley High School, where I soaped the windows of my homeroom one Halloween, and had a classmate whose parents threw a grand Bat Mitzvah party, for which I learned to jitterbug when other kids were just beginning to dance the Twist. We two oldest brothers were baptized in my mother’s home church, First Baptist, where my parents had gotten married and my father now served as associate pastor during our extended furlough. He would draft us to help shovel snow off its sidewalks along Piccadilly and Washington Streets. My brother and I both had paper routes, delivering the Winchester Star on the way home from school each afternoon. I joined the Boy Scouts, advancing to Life Scout and marching with my troop in the annual Apple Blossom Festival parade. My mother’s two brothers lived a few miles down the Valley Pike, while her sister lived up the Pike outside Martinsburg, West Virginia.

House on Henry Ave., Winchester, Va.

Our house on Henry Ave., c. 1962

My parents resigned after their regular furlough year (partly from burnout), and we moved into a smaller house near Quarles Elementary School, where I had earlier finished the last half of 6th grade. Without a missionary salary, my father supplemented his earnings at First Baptist by substitute teaching at the county high school (James Wood) and serving as interim pastor at a tiny Baptist church in Gore, Virginia (birthplace of Willa Cather and Patsy Cline, I later discovered).

Meanwhile, my mother had her hands full with five kids. Our family car was a Rambler station wagon with an extra rear-facing seat in back. One summer we drove it to Sebago Lake in Maine, where our pastor let us use his summer cabin, where in the evenings my mother would read to her own five children from The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (one of whom—in each family—was named Joel). My mother, who had dropped out of Berea College after her junior year to get married and become a missionary, always felt inferior to the more educated missionary wives, especially the registered nurses at the Japan Baptist Hospital in Kyoto, where my father had served as chaplain. Perhaps she compensated to some extent by being somewhat of a Japanese-style kyōiku mama (at least where I, her eldest, was concerned).

But I remember those years as the least bookish, most outdoorsy era of my life. We went sledding on the slope above our big old house on Amherst St., and built igloos and snow forts behind our smaller house on Henry Ave. One summer, Uncle Bill took us waterskiing on the Shenandoah River. Dad took us oldest boys along for a campout in Monongahela National Forest with a group from his little country church in Gore. With Boy Scouts, I took a 50-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail through the Shenandoah Mountains, and I remember one Camporee that got hit by such a heavy rainstorm that many parents came to rescue their boys and a few boys abandoned their pup tents to spend the night in the scoutmasters’ vehicles.

Sometime during 8th grade, I started to show signs of near-sightedness. I don’t think it was while trying for my rifle-shooting merit badge in the old Winchester Armory. I think I first noticed it when I had trouble reading the blackboard from the back of the classroom during algebra class or my tryout semester of Latin. But Uncle Bill likely noticed it sooner when I accompanied him on trips to Baltimore to bring back a tanker of gas for his filling station. He used to ask whichever nephew accompanied him to be on the lookout for certain road signs, landmarks, or maybe patrol cars, and I don’t think I was as good at spotting them as he was—or as my brother was. I went for an eye exam and got a prescription for contact lenses (newfangled and expensive at the time), which were soon replaced by regular eyeglasses after I lost one down the drain.

Sometime during that same school year, my parents opted to return to the mission field, this time to Hiroshima, which became the Japanese hometown of my three youngest siblings. We two eldest sons went off to boarding school in Kobe, and I began my evolution into the most bookish nerd one can ever hope to become.

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Filed under family, Japan, migration, U.S., Virginia

by | 23 October 2010 · 11:35 am

Thai Language Speakers in South Vietnam

From In Buddha’s Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, by Richard A. Ruth (U. Hawaii Press, 2011), pp. 168-169:

Thai language skills seem to have spread quickly to areas beyond the villages directly surrounding Bearcat Camp. Infantrymen on operations were surprised to find Vietnamese women in isolated villages who could speak some Thai. Yutthasak Monithet, who went to Vietnam with the Black Panther Division’s third phase in July 1970, recalled conducting impromptu Thai lessons for curious Vietnamese: “As for the Bien Hoa market. people in the shops could speak Thai, but they spoke it as if they had [recently] learned Thai. Sometimes they had questions [about Thai], and they would ask, ‘What is this thing called in Thai?’ We would tell them the words that Thai people used for these things.” The market that Yutthasak described is fifteen miles or so from Bearcat Camp.

The other factor that contributed to the spread of Thai was the influence of ethnic Vietnamese who had lived in Thailand and Laos. There is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that some of the Vietnamese refugees who had lived in Thailand in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s returned to Long Thanh District and settled in areas near Bearcat Camp; others found their way to Saigon, Vung Tau, and other R & R towns frequented by Thai troops. Some of the repatriated Vietnamese opened Thai restaurants while others provided Mekhong whiskey and other goods to sell to the Thai soldiers. Many spoke the Isan-Lao dialect, “as they do in Ubon [Ratchathani] and Nong Khai, and others spoke Central Thai, also known as Standard Thai.

A third factor was the role of the Thai-Vietnamese translators. Some of the Vietnamese who were hired to translate for the Thai units had lived in Bangkok before the war. Unlike the Vietnamese who settled in Isan, these Vietnamese learned Central Thai, the country’s official dialect. They lacked Thai citizenship and apparently had been repatriated along with the Vietnamese from the northeast. Their familiarity with Vietnamese and Standard Thai made them a valuable asset to the Royal Thai Army and the Royal Thai Navy as they sought translators for their units.

Repatriated Vietnamese were mediators between the Thai military and the indigenous communities. The Thai volunteers relied on them for items that the US Army would not or could not provide. In market towns such as Long Thanh and Bien Hoa, Viet Kieu (expatriate Vietnamese) restaurants were centers of Thai relaxation and recreation. Chanrit Hemathulin’s unit regularly patronized one of these restaurants near Bearcat Camp because it offered northeastern Thai staples, such as lap (minced-meat salad), som tam, and khao meo (glutinous rice). “It was as if they were Thai restaurants, he recalled….

Mixed in among the population of Vietnamese returnees were Thai women who had married Vietnamese men back in Thailand and then accompanied them to Vietnam when the Thai government had deported them. Like the returnees among whom they lived, these women served as mediators between the two cultures.

The Chinese characters for Viet Kieu must be 越僑: 越 as in 越南 Yuènán ‘Vietnam’; 僑 as in 华侨/華僑 Huáqiáo ‘Chinese Abroad‘.

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Filed under food, language, migration, Thailand, Vietnam, war

by | 23 September 2010 · 10:46 am

Remnants of Early Baltic Settlers

From The Baltic: A New History of the Region and Its People, by Alan Palmer (Overlook, 2006), pp. 16-17:

Neither anthropology nor philology is an exact science and few today would follow the nationalistic scholars of the nineteenth century who equated race and language when seeking the origin of a country. But new techniques can revive familiar speculation while mellowing past prejudice. In the early 1980s the Finnish historian Matti Klinge argued that research into hereditary blood groups showed that three-quarters of the Finnish population were of western descent and only a third of eastern origin. He pointed out, however, that the linguistic structure of the Finnish language has remained more markedly eastern in character than western. Is this perhaps because the Finns and their kinsfolk south of the Gulf in Estonia are peoples with traditions of folk epic handed down orally? Their languages were shaped before the coming of written words. Finland’s Kalevala and Estonia’s Kalevipoeg survived as tales of patriot derring-do in taming both the forces of Nature and the evil spirits conjured up in a primeval wilderness of lake and forest.

By the end of the Scandinavian Bronze Age (circa 500 BC) other migrants felt drawn towards the setting sun, like the Finno-Ugrian before them. They came mainly from the south-east, to form compact units along the Baltic’s southern shores, with their communities set apart by forests, bogs and rivers. Among them were Prussian tribes astride the Vistula, the Polame on the Warta (farther inland, around modern Poznan) and a group of Lithuanian tribes around the river Niemen (Nemanus) and its tributaries. Over the following centuries tribal chiefs, seeking effective means to defend their homesteads, created what were in effect embryonic nations across these marchlands. Some tribes, like the Salic Franks and the Burgundians, provided a nucleus for historic kingdoms established after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Others bore names that recur in successive periods of northern Europe’s history. Thus the Cours (or Curonians), a tribe who lived in the peninsula between the central Baltic and the Gulf of Riga, survived as a separate people until the late thirteenth century and gave their name to the Duchy of Courland (Kurzeme, or in German Kurland) which between 1561 and 1795 enjoyed semi-independence within the Polish Commonwealth. The Cours’ neighbours, the Zemgal tribe (Semigallians), also maintained a distinctive corporate existence until 1290, farming the low-lying region west of the Daugava river that later formed the eastern part of the Courland Duchy.

Both Kurzeme and Zemgale are back on the map in today’s atlases: they form administrative divisions in modern Latvia. Three of the Western Slav peoples survive as member states of the European Union: Poland; the Czech Republic; Slovakia. Other tribes, once famed and feared for their fighting qualities, have sunk without trace. Among them were most of the Wends, the Western Slavs who settled between Kiel Bay and the Vistula Spit and may themselves be subdivided into Wagrians, Abotrites, Polabians and Rugians. But two of the ‘lost’ Wendish peoples are still extant, though few in number: some 50,000 Sorbs of Lusatia now live between the Oder and the Elbe and there is an even smaller community of Kashubs, Pomerania’s original ‘dwellers by the shore’. Like the people of Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Provence, the Sorbs and Kashubs owe their linguistic survival to academics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who defied the exclusiveness of master nations to fire the embers of a dying culture. By contrast, the Setus, a Finno-Ugrian people who settled around Lake Peipsi, were too isolated to find scholarly champions in the West. No more than 7,000 Setu survive, their communities separated today by the geographically ill-defined border that provides a frontier between Estonia and Russia.

I find two of Palmer’s linguistic explanations almost laughable.

(1) Are Finns and Estonians the only “peoples with traditions of folk epic handed down orally,” the only peoples whose “languages were shaped before the coming of written words”? Does he doubt that Norse sagas were orally transmitted long before they were written down? Does he realize that legions of illiterates have done far more over the millennia to influence the structures of the languages they speak than literates have?

(2) Were academics the saviors of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Occitan, Sorbian, and Kashubian? Are those languages only spoken in classrooms? If so, then they are not yet saved. Academics may have documented those languages and first reduced them to writing, but they haven’t saved them until people pass them on to their children in a wider variety of settings.

As a historian, Palmer depends crucially on written records to construct his view of the world, but his imagination also seems hemmed in a bit too much by that literacy, as if nothing noteworthy exists until it exists in writing.

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Filed under Baltics, Finland, Germany, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, Scandinavia

by | 17 June 2010 · 1:19 pm

Fumigating the Polynesian Voyagers, 1995

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 65-66:

In 1995 three Hawaiian canoes sailed south to the Society Islands, met a contingent of three other South Pacific canoes, then sailed to the Marquesas and north again to me Big Island of Hawaii, for the first time retracing the original route of discovery of the Hawaiian Islands.

This historic voyage encountered only one significant problem. Three days before the canoes were due to arrive home, the crew radioed Honolulu with news that they were suffering the painful bite of some undetected insect. Entomologists were consulted. The suspects were narrowed to three: the nono, a tiny, vicious blackfly that plagues beaches of the Marquesas and doomed those islands’ resorts; the punkie midge, a no-see-um half the size of the nono that also haunts the Marquesas; and a biting midge known in French Polynesia as the white beach nono. The first is native to the Marquesas; the latter two arrived in Polynesia sometime between 1920 and 1950. All three are functionally identical—with mouths like scissors, they bite holes in the victim’s skin, producing welts that if scratched can quickly fester. A single nono fly can inflict five thousand bites in an hour. After securing a blood meal, the fly retreats to a crevice in any nearby decaying organic matter—waterlogged wood a coconut husk, the hull of a Polynesian voyaging canoe—to reproduce. Its larvae emerge several days later to begin the cycle anew. With these facts in mind, Honolulu newspapers treated readers to several days of midge coverage, disagreeing only as to whether the midges posed a worse threat to the tourist industry than the brown tree snake, or merely an equivalent one. Cynics whispered of a midge conspiracy, of midges planted aboard the canoes by an environmental group eager to publicize the dangers of alien species in Hawaii.

Riding a strong headwind, a biting midge can cross fifty miles of open ocean. To forestall such an event, and despite prime sailing conditions the six voyaging canoes were ordered to a halt some two hundred miles south-southwest of Hawaii’s Big Island, Hawai’i. The following morning, after much wrangling over which government agency should take responsibility for a nuisance insect that is neither an agricultural pest nor strictly speaking, a public-health threat, and which in any event now sat in international waters, a Coast Guard plane dropped thirty-six aerosol cans of pyrethrin, an insecticide made from daisies, into what were now heavy seas. The canoes’ holds were emptied, clothes and equipment sprayed with disinfectant, the hulls scrubbed four times with seawater, the sails keelhauled. Everything organic was tossed overboard: religions carvings, palm-frond baskets, breadfruit seedlings wrapped in coconut husks, and traditional foods like sweet potato, taro leaf patties, and poi—which crew members perhaps were happy to see go, as they later confessed a preference for sausage and Spam. Inspectors from the Hawaii Department of Health then boarded the canoes and sprayed everything again. A series of triumphal celebrations had been planned to mark the voyage’s end. Instead, the canoes were escorted into Hilo Harbor, sprayed once more, and enclosed in fumigation tents. A crowd of two dozen, including several customs and immigrations officials, greeted them.

Health and agriculture inspectors still do not know what sort of midge they nearly encountered; the cleaning, spraying, scrubbing, and fumigation had left no trace of them. Other survivors were discovered, however, including four species of fly, two species of ant, a cockroach, two spiders, a book louse, a parasitic wasp, a beetle, several snails, some live shrimps, a gecko, two species of eye gnat, and a scale insect that in some parts of the world is considered a serious agricultural pest. Some time afterward the chief of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture was heard expressing nostalgia for the days when state inspectors could walk down the aisles of arriving aircraft and fumigate freely, as they still do in New Zealand. As for the canoes, they reached their destinations. The Hawaiian crews sailed to warm homecomings on Maui, Molokai, and Oahu. The Cook Islanders disembarked, showered, and dried off with one hundred and fifty donated towels. The Tahitian voyagers, though they had a fine canoe, never arrived; in fact, they never embarked. They had failed to apply for U.S. visas, and were gently advised to stay home.

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Filed under Hawai'i, migration, Polynesia, science

by | 31 March 2010 · 5:18 pm

South Moluccans: Teachers before Soldiers

From: Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 173-176:

Migration to other territories within the vast Indonesian archipelago was also part of a general pattern in the Moluccas. From the letters of the Neumann family, we gain a unique picture of an Ambonese family that became widely scattered. The letters also offer an occasional glimpse of the poorer relatives who sent their children to study in Batavia in the hope that they would gain an acceptable job as office clerks. Family members who emigrated remained in contact with each other, forming a small colony in the city of Batavia and maintaining their links with Ambon. Relations with home were maintained, and presumably this held true for all the Moluccans who left their native islands and ranged out across the Indonesian archipelago. According to the 1930 census, about 16 per cent of Moluccan Christians lived outside their home islands. Traditionally, the highest status an Ambonese Christian could attain would be Burghership, and a position as clerk or teacher. In contrast, a position in the army was generally spurned. This aversion to military service had already been prevalent in the 18th century when village headmen had to furnish young men for the annual patrols guarding the clove monopoly. For those living on the Ambon islands, upward social mobility came through education, missionary work and Burghership, while the army was traditionally considered to be an instrument of economic oppression.

The bases for missionary work and education, also in the Dutch language, were already laid in the 17th century. However, these became gradually eroded in the 18th century, a period of economic decline in the Moluccas. Things began to pick up when the Reverend Joseph Kam, shortly after his arrival in 1815, installed a small printing press at the back of his home; here he produced religious matter for his local readership. Then in 1834 the missionary Bernhard Roskott founded a teachers’ training college, which by 1855 had turned out 82 teachers. Most of them found jobs in the village schools on the Moluccan islands. Although these pupil-teachers in the main received Bible instruction, the missionary background undoubtedly enhanced the status of the elementary schoolteacher. From 1856 on, children of native Christian Burghers had the opportunity of attending a European elementary school without having to pay fees. As on the island of Ternate, so too on Ambon, in most cases a distinction was no longer made between the descendants of Europeans, and Christian Burghers; admission to elementary school, and hence the opportunity of gaining a job as a low-ranking civil servant, became equally possible for them all. However, this was only in principle; the two elementary schools on Ambon could not possibly accommodate all the children of the 8,000 Ambonese Burghers. There were, furthermore, few job opportunities in the Moluccas for these junior civil servants — unlike the encouraging outlook for schoolteachers.

It is doubtful whether the missionary teaching made much impact on Dutch fluency among the Ambonese — the Bible was, after all, translated into Malay. Nevertheless, in the second part of the 19th century the Dutch language spread even to the small villages. The inspector for education. Van der Chijs, reported in about 1860 that the Ambonese were more inclined to regard Dutch as their language than were the Indo-Europeans in Java. The affection for the Dutch language would only grow stronger. After the establishment of the second European school in 1856, the Ambon Burgher School was founded in 1869; this was intended for the native Christians of Ambon and had Dutch on its curriculum. Pupils with the highest marks in their school-leaving exams received the diploma of junior civil servant. It seems that in the 1860s there was enormous enthusiasm among the Ambonese Christians to become teachers. Indeed, they were so keen that it was reported, “If they are not curbed, half the male population would become a schoolmaster”. Not surprisingly, when the government teacher training college opened its doors in Ambon in 1874, there were many applicants. Anyone with a certificate as junior civil servant or schoolteacher who failed to find work in the Moluccas left for Java, for the towns of Surabaya, Semarang or Batavia. Some students found their way to the STOVIA ([School Tot Opleiding Voor Indlandsche Artsen =] college for training native medical doctors) in Batavia, which had been founded in 1852.

Although the army did not enjoy great popularity in the Moluccas, the colonial administrations found it most important to have a sizeable contingent of local Christian soldiers in the army, since it was largely composed of Javanese Muslims. Native Christian soldiers had enjoyed the status of semi-Europeans ever since, in 1804, Daendels had declared that the military from the Ambonese islands, Timor and Minahasa were to be treated as equals of European soldiers. Nevertheless, army recruitment in the Christianised islands proved a very difficult task throughout most of the 19th century. In 1854 the local government began a recruitment campaign to increase the numbers in the military, but at the end of two years the army authorities had to concede that all their efforts had yielded no more than a meagre 77 recruits per year for Minahasa and the Ambon islands combined. In 1860, however, the army managed to recruit 1,308 “Ambonese” — this term was used in army statistics to describe soldiers from both Minahasa and the Moluccas. Half this number came from Minahasa. Midway through the Aceh War, in 1875, the numbers from Minahasa had declined to 498, and those from Ambon were merely 398. When the war started in 1873, the residents of Ternate, Manado and Ambon were exhorted to concentrate on recruiting — especially in the Christian villages; but this had little effect, despite a 50-guilder premium to the village headmen for every soldier they provided. At the beginning of the Aceh War, army recruitment moved at a snail’s pace. In addition, in 1864 the cloves monopoly was rescinded, which not only led to a growing trek towards the towns but also produced an economic revival in the villages, since during the 1870s and 1880s cloves were fetching a very good price. In Minahasa, too, the numbers of Christians from the Manado district remained meagre, despite a large number of conversions to Christianity during the 1850s. Only at the end of the 1870s, when the early losses in the Aceh War had made enlistment in the military even more unpopular, did the army authorities manage to attract more recruits. In 1879, when a school was opened in Magelang, Java, for army children from the Moluccas, Minahasa and Timor, it proved exactly what was needed. And, besides, training for the military was expanded. Thus, the army became a feasible route to social advancement, all the more since employment as a clerk or teacher proved unattainable for most
literate Moluccans.

By 1883 the Ambonese contingent in the Dutch-Indies army had doubled to 801 from Manado and 708 from Ambon. The appeal of the army would increase even more on the Ambon islands in the 1890s, when the prices of cloves fell once again. At last there were sufficient volunteers — and the same was true for Minahasa. Indeed, here the army authorities were even able to select out of the large numbers who applied. Ultimately, the greatest number of soldiers would come from Minahasa; in 1918 there were 6,388 soldiers from Minahasa compared with 3,674 from the Moluccan islands. The increasing majority from Manado can easily be explained: in the 1870s the Christian populations of these two areas were more or less the same size, that is, around 60,000. The figures for the 1900 census, however, are 72,359 native Christians on the Ambon islands compared with 164,117 in the Minahasa region.

The former military became part of the village notables, along with the raja and other village headmen and the schoolteachers, who were on a slightly lower rung of the social ladder. Both in Minahasa and on the Ambon islands it became part of the local pattern of social mobility to enter military service; it also formed a confirmation of the Christian identity of these communities. The army did not, however, initiate the integration of the Christian communities in the colonial world. The image that has evolved in Dutch colonial history of the Ambonese as a martial race is primarily a colonial picture and does not reflect a predilection for the military life on the part of the Ambonese.

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by | 10 March 2010 · 5:54 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Totok vs. Indo-European Dutch

Two books about Indonesia that I’ve recently blogged excerpts from have discussed divisions between newcomers and local-born, assimilated expatriates in the former Dutch Indies.

In Bittersweet: The Memoir of a Chinese Indonesian Family in the Twentieth Century, local-born Chinese are referred to by the Malay/Indonesian word peranakan (< anak ‘child’), whose other meanings include ‘of mixed ethnicity or cultural orientation’ (therefore ‘creole’), ‘hybrid (of cattle)’, or ‘uterus, womb’. By contrast, the newly arrived (F.O.B., Issei, etc.) immigrants are called totok, meaning ‘pure, full-blooded’ in Malay/Indonesian.

The Malay/Indonesian word totok is also used in Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920 to refer to Dutch expatriates newly arrived from the Netherlands. But the contrasting formal term used to designate the local-born Dutch expatriates is “Indo-European” (rather than the perhaps too informal Indo) in the English translation, apparently following later endonymic usage by the same group during the era of rising nationalism during the 1800s.

The following excerpt (pp. 221-222) from a chapter entitled “The Underclass” expands upon upper-class Totok attitudes toward their “Indo-European” inferiors:

The inclusion of the Mestizos and the poor whites in the category “European” was a legal and, to some extent, a cultural question; but despite this incorporation, a vast social gulf remained between rich and poor. Newcomers expressed their discomfort (caused by the lower-class Europeans) by mocking those born in the Indies, particularly Indo-Europeans. Interestingly, just as it had been a century earlier, it was not the Mestizo men but the women who came in for criticism. Johannes Olivier, who travelled in the East between 1817 and 1826, referred — like his 17th- and 18th-century predecessors — to the “loose manners of the female Liplaps [half-breeds]”. At the same time he admitted that “there are some exceptions, and indeed certain of the Creole girls are truly beautiful, with souls as pure as their skin is white”. Skin colour would frequently be related to inner purity. This same Olivier, who was expelled from the colony in 1826 on account of drunken and unseemly behaviour, returned to the Netherlands and became head of a boarding school in Kampen. He saw fit to air his prejudiced views in his own periodical De Oosterling, the oldest journal about the East Indies to be published in the Netherlands. In it he made fun of the garbled Dutch spoken by the “coloureds”.

Olivier was, of course, a colonial snob, horrified (at least, on paper) by racial mixing and contact between European men and Indo-European or Indonesian women. But he was one of many. Feelings arising out of racial prejudice would often be expressed in moral terms, cloaked in arguments of public decency and educational standards. Thus, in 1835 the commander-in-chief of the Dutch Indies’ army Hubert J.J.L. Riddel de Stuers wrote of Indo-Europeans: “They possess the bad characteristics of the European, combined with those of the Indonesians. They take after their fathers in their excessively lascivious ways, and by their mothers they are brought up in idleness. How could they possibly turn out good?” What De Stuers was describing here was the notion of the hybrid, a concept that took firm root in the later 19th century. It had its origins in biology, where it was used co refer to the crossing of two breeds of animal, implying the combining of two pure strains. As used here, it seems to mean the combination of two “pure” racial types. It is striking that the hybrid apparently combines most remarkably all the bad qualities of the two parent races from which it is composed.” Although the term “hybrid” never became part of everyday speech, it was certainly widely used in the Indies and contributed to the racial stereotyping associated with the European underclass. Many expressions came into everyday use ro refer to the poor (Indo-)Europeans, for instance, Liplap, blauwtje (blue-hued), sinjo (for men), nonna (for girls), petjoek (a cormorant), Indo and the accepted “correct” term inlandse kinderen, which means literally, “native children”.

Besides the ever-present prejudices, there also developed a social vision in which the various offshoots of the European clan were deliberately drawn closer to the European community. In this process, the long history of the Dutch presence in the East Indies and the fact that most government jobs were filled by Indies-born Europeans were both highly significant. Indeed, the Indische element in colonial society was so overwhelming that it would have been impossible to exclude on explicit grounds the Europeans born in the Indies.

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by | 27 February 2010 · 10:18 am

Translator Dynasties in Dutch Java

From: Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 115-118:

Despite the concerns of the government in Batavia about the planters in Surakarta, and the occasional uprising of a discontented populace — as in 1855 — things were generally settled and satisfactory for both colonial rulers and landleasers. The lease of land put money in the pockets of the inhabitants of the Principalities, and most of the planters treated the local residents in a less arbitrary manner than did the apanage holders. The European presence became more and more accepted. Indeed, the leaseholders were essential for all parties: for the Dutch officials who thereby increased their influence; for the royal courts, who made money from the system; for the local population, who probably experienced an initial improvement in their living conditions; and, finally, for the business life of Semarang, because the Principalities formed a good market for imported goods. Even Europeans who were not leaseholders profited from the commercial activity in the Principalities. Most of them in Yogyakarta found employment on the plantations, while one-third of the European male population worked in the civil service. A handful of Europeans set up as tradesmen or ran a shop.

There is nothing to support the view that the Javanese and European worlds, like oil and water, refused to mix. Daily life contradicted this notion. Nevertheless, an aspect of colonial ideology chose to emphasise the distinction between the rulers and the ruled. It thus became part of the colonial structure to have translators render speeches into the local language on ceremonial occasions when royalty, colonial civil servants and planters gathered. Translators who were recruited from the local European community were known to be the confidants of both residents and Javanese royalty. Their position was one requiring tact and delicacy. It would seem that many translators saw themselves more as part of the local royal court than as colonial civil servants. This might explain why Johannes Gotlieb Dietrée, interpreter in the residency of Yogyakarta from 1796 to 1825, was Muslim.

In the Principalities, and especially in Surakarta, the study of languages became a family tradition. Best known among these linguistically oriented dynasties are the Winters and the Wilkenses. Carel Friedrich Winter was born in 1788 in Yogyakarta and moved to Surakarta when he was seven years old. There, his father, Johannes Wilhelmus Winter, was appointed a translator for Javanese languages. The young Carel Friedrich did not seem to be learning much at school, so his father taught him at home, and in 1818 the young man became an assistant translator at his father’s side. When his father left for Semarang in 1825, Carel Friedrich remained in Surakarta as a translator. Three years later he assumed the extra task of secretary at the newly established Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. This was followed in 1829 by his appointment as the director of the brand-new Institute for the Javanese Languages in Surakarta. This institute had been set up to teach Javanese languages to employees of the Binnenlands Bestuur [‘Interior Administration’]. When the institute was closed down in 1843, Carel Friedrich lost his position. There had been an inspection of the institute by four residents, who had produced a devastating report on the quality of education there, and on Carel Friedrich as a teacher. His command of Dutch was judged to be very poor, and because he was “a son of the country” (an inlands kind) he failed to gain the respect of the students, who all came from the wealthy Netherlands and Indische bourgeoisie.

Despite all this, when a new training college was set up in 1843 in Delft, the Netherlands, for civil servants to be employed in the Binnenlands Bestuur, they could not do without Carel Friedrich Winter and his proficiency in Javanese. The professor of Javanese in Delft, Taco Roorda, was undoubtedly a great linguist, but he taught a language that was not his own as a medium of daily speech. He benefited greatly from the assistance of Carel Friedrich, who made a large number of translations for him. It would seem that despite Carel Friedrich’s sporadic elementary schooling, his Dutch was not so bad after all. This also appears in the translations he made of official documents, which have been preserved in the archives. The linguistic scholar Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk remarked somewhat maliciously in 1864 that Roorda was not teaching Javanese, but Winterese. Carel Friedrich earned his place in the history books, however, when the susuhunan [ruler of Surakarta] granted him permission to bring out the first Javanese-language newspaper, named the Bromartani, which was intended for the aristocratic circles of Surakarta. The newspaper contained scientific articles, economic reports, announcements of births and deaths, notices about forthcoming public sales of household effects, and advertisements.

In most cases, translators are seen as go-betweens, but they were go-betweens for the government only in their capacity as translators of official documents and for ceremonial occasions. They were not normally required to act as intermediaries when Europeans and Javanese met. In Yogyakarta, in particular, there were close and warm relations between the leaseholders and the sultan.

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