Category Archives: Southeast Asia

by Joel | 2 August 2023 · 3:15 am

Two Old Opium Smokers in Vietnam

From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle pp. 162-164:

Grandpa Pham smelled of plum candy and Chinese medicine.

It was an odor that made me nauseous and hungry all at once.

His opium smoke.

I served as the footman of Grandpa’s opiate dreams. As his family went through the process of closing doors, shutting windows, keeping the confidence, I knelt at the door of Grandpa Pham’s study, a servant awaiting his wishes, witnessing the rite that came to be the center of his existence. In the seasons before Saigon fell, Grandpa was many years into his pipes, his grown children’s wages keeping him in the habit. I brought him the accoutrements of his ceremony and he arranged them on the straw mat: an oil lamp, matches, crisp unwrinkled newspaper, a bowl with a spoonful of steamed rice, a kettle of lotus tea, porcelain cups, a water-smoke pot, and old-fashioned Chinese brick pillows. He produced a cough-drop tin rattling with loose nuggets of black opium.

He smoked with an old friend, both of them Hanoi expatriates so wizened and emaciated it was difficult to tell them apart in the gloom of their conspiracy—hovering over their opium, their instrument of sedition from the world. Those Nationalist bastards, one cheroot figure said to the other, sold nine American bullets out of ten, no wonder we are still fighting this war. The other figure protested, though without much passion, It’s good for the economy, all the foreign money pouring in. Impotent to the world, they were still supreme patriarchs of their extended families. This, their War Room: two ancients sipping tea in cement air. Saigon is too hot, too corrupt, nothing but barbarians, said one. Yes, yes, Hanoi is the true soul of Vietnam, agreed the other. Shirtless in the heat, they sat on a handwoven straw mat, propping themselves with one arm locked at the elbow like a tent pole, a knee up near their chins. The room was bolted tight against ill winds. Their liver-spotted hide, the texture of week-old tofu-skin, did not sweat but drooped, flaccid on their chests and bellies, stretched taut over the ridges of their spines. The Americans are generous with their aid, but the French, they knew how to live well, one observed. True, the other nodded, true, they built the most beautiful mansions in Hanoi. The two jurors reached into a bowl, clawed a few grains of leftover rice, and wedged these between their gum and cheek like chewing tobacco. The newspaper was smoothed out, folded, and torn into two perfect squares. Starting with one corner, they rolled the papers into tapered pipes, overlapping the layers tightly. They took the moistened rice out of their mouths, pressed it into a paste, and glued the pipes. With tinker deftness, they fit the pipes to the water-smoke pot. Every practiced motion carried the serene precision of a ritual even as they talked. The Japanese were the true bastards, weren’t they? All that killing and the famines. Yes, yes, but that was war and so is this. No, for the Northerners, it is war. For the Americans, it is politics. For the Southerners, it is business. A precious opium nugget was placed on the pot they shared. Ah, but wasn’t Hanoi beautiful in winter? Yes, persimmon winters. They lay their bones down on the mat, on their sides facing each other, heads on brick pillows, the opium between them. Don’t you remember that one hot summer, so hot catfish died and floated in the creek? Yes, but wasn’t the monsoon wind blowing off Ha Long Bay magical? They worked themselves back through the years to the good memories, and when they were ready, they touched the flame to the opium and, with great sighs, began to feed from their paper pipes. They perfumed the air with opium sweetness, making it wet and soft, filling it with the watery gurgle of two old men drowning.

Once they slipped far into their refuge, a pair of goldfish dying on the floor, I moved the oil lamp out of the reach of their limbs and left them to their slumber. Their smoke swarmed the house, announcing that their spirits were temporarily on a journey, yet everyone tiptoed past the room as though fearful of waking a baby.

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Filed under China, economics, France, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, opium, U.S., Vietnam, war

by Joel | 1 August 2023 · 6:17 am

A Vietnamese Fishsauce Baron

From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle pp. 52-53:

My step-grandfather Grandpa Le was a fishsauce baron, born into a sea-heritage that dated back before the Japanese and the French occupation. He used to claim that his ancestors invented fishsauce. The whole town was built on this industry. Everyone knew how it was made and at one time most people in town, when they weren’t dragging the ocean for fish, were putting fresh fish, unwashed and ungutted, into salt barrels to ferment. While they waited on the decomposition process, all they ever talked about was fishsauce. Which fish produced the best-tasting extract? How to mix various types of fish to make a balanced bouquet. Indeed, there were many varieties of fishsauce, each suitable for a certain style of cooking. The finest batches were flavorful enough to be savored directly from the bottle. In a few weeks, a smelly black ooze seeped out the bottom of the barrel. Fisherfolk diluted and bottled this black gold and sold it all over the country. Blend masters—like Grandpa Le—guarded their secrets zealously and made fortunes. In the old days, the village folk prized bottles of fishsauce concentrate as great gifts, the equivalent of fine wine and cash.

Uncle Long said these days people treated it like an illicit narcotic, hiding their production from the tax collectors, squirreling bottles of it away for bartering. Liberated into Communism or not, Vietnamese needed fishsauce the way we needed air. For us, it was salt and a thousand other spices, the very marrow of the sea to a country of coastal people. It was a good thing Grandpa left us a stockpile of fishsauce when he died.

Grandma Le’s house and sundry shop sat five yards from the main road, the national highway. The bus dropped us at the front door. Grandma, Auntie Dung, and all my siblings—Chi, Huy, Tien, and Hien—came out to greet us. Grandma took me into her shop and said I could eat as much candy from her store as I could swallow on account that she hadn’t had chance to spoil me as she had my siblings. They had been living with Grandma when we came back from prison. While I was locked up in Saigon, they were running wild with the local kids.

Auntie Dung took all of us out for milkshakes. We walked down the shady avenue, holding hands, singing, our sandals scrunching on sand—this a beach town—to a kiosk that had been in the same spot under a tamarind tree since I could remember. The vendor, whose laughs were as fresh as the sweet fruits she served, hand-shaved ice for us until her arms ached. Huy and Chi had durian milkshakes made with shaved ice and condensed milk. Tien had his favorite, a breadfruit milkshake. I had soursop.

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Filed under economics, food, migration, Vietnam, war

by Joel | 10 July 2023 · 5:19 am

How Long Did the Asian War Last?

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 283-284:

The question of how long the war in the Asia Pacific lasted can also be put to the historian. The conventional answer is that it spanned less than four years, the time that passed between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. A slightly more unconventional reply would argue that it began in 1937 with the onset of all-out conventional hostilities between China and Japan. Recently, the Chinese government and some Chinese historians have asserted that the actual beginning of the war with Japan was in 1931, with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Obviously, the further back in time the start of the war is pushed, the more central becomes the role of China.

There is less controversy about the end of the war, as most agree on 1945 as marking the natural conclusion. Still, the conflicts which harrowed the region for the next three decades could in many ways be seen as consequences of the larger conflagration of the early 1940s. The internecine war that would lay waste to Korea only five years into the future came about partly as a result of the division of the peninsula into a Soviet-backed north and a US-supported south after the end of the Japanese occupation. Likewise, the numerous struggles against the Western colonial masters might be seen as having been kindled by the examples set by the Japanese. It could, therefore, be argued that the Japanese-American war of 1941 to 1945 was part of a much larger half-century-long narrative stretching from the civil wars of China of the 1920s all the way until the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. Perhaps it will take another century of writing about the conflict, and the sobering effect of time passed, to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.

Whether now or in the distant future, one of the main objectives of history will be to learn from it. Some of the participants in the vast conflict began learning as soon as the weapons fell silent. On August 14, 1946, the first anniversary of Japan’s decision to accept unconditional surrender, emperor Hirohito met with Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru as well as Suzuki Kantarō, who had headed the government at the end of the war. The emperor expressed regret at the way the war had developed but pointed out this had not been the first time Japan has suffered abject defeat. Events had come full circle. In the battle of the Paekchon River in 663, Japan had met China in battle for the first time in history, and it had been beaten and forced to withdraw to the home islands. “After that, political reforms were pushed forward, and the result was a major turning point in the development of Japanese civilization,” Hirohito said. “If we bear this in mind, we can naturally understand the road that Japan needs to take after this new defeat.”

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, military, nationalism, U.S., USSR, Vietnam, war

by Joel | 9 July 2023 · 5:06 am

Japan’s Defeat Hits Southeast Asia

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 278-281:

Even many years after the war, Mustapha Hussein remembered his reaction when he heard that Japan had surrendered: “I cried.” A political radical in the former British colony of Malaya, he had hoped that the peninsula’s separatist movement would seize the opportunity and declare independence during the brief period that offered itself while Japan was fatally weak and the Allies had not yet declared victory. Now that Japan had formally capitulated, the reimposition of British rule was just a matter of time. The chance was wasted. “I regretted the matter deeply as Malaya would once again be colonized and gripped by Western power.”

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, some activists did try to exploit the brief interregnum between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the Western victors. In the East Indies on August 17, two days after the Japanese had accepted their defeat, the head of the separatist movement, Sukarno, declared independence, creating “an electrifying effect on the mass of Indonesians,” according to an observer. In Indochina two weeks later, on September 2, the day of the surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the US-backed guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh did the same for Vietnam. “Today we are determined to oppose the wicked schemes of the French imperialists, and we call upon the victorious Allies to recognize our freedom and independence,” he told a jubilant crowd in Hanoi.

Both attempts were squashed within weeks as the old imperialists returned, battered but determined to pick up where they had left off. It would seem that it was now back to colonial business as usual, and that the Western empires would be resurrected to their former grandeur. Nothing could be further from the truth. The European colonies, some dating back centuries, only returned for a brief interlude before evaporating forever. This also meant that the peace that was heralded by Hirohito’s speech in August 1945 was not peace at all, but more war by new means. This went for virtually all of Southeast Asia. For every society in the region except Thailand, the first two decades after the war that ended in 1945 brought new mass-scale violence, whether in the form of war, civil war, or revolution, or a combination of the three.

It came as completely unexpected to most Europeans. B. C. de Jonge, governor general of the Dutch East Indies in the 1930s, had confidently signaled that his country’s control of the Southeast Asian archipelago was essentially for eternity. “We have ruled here for 300 years with the whip and the club and we shall still be doing it in another 300 years,” he had said. In fact, counting from the time they returned to the East Indies in 1945 trying to reinstate their authority, the Dutch had only four years left as colonial masters. The Dutch had shown in 1941 that they could be beaten, fast and decisively, and the aura of superiority which had enabled them to control a country many times larger than their own was gone forever.

The genie of independence was out of the bottle, and it could not be put back in. Often it had horrifically violent results. Dirk Bogarde, the future actor, was on the island of Java with British forces and saw how Dutch internees, returning from the camps and trying to start their lives anew in their looted homes, often were murdered by frenzied mobs. In one instance, an elderly Dutch couple had been hacked to death in their small villa: “The woman… had put up a desperate fight, her hands shredded by the knives, her blood sprayed in elegant arcs across the tiled walls. The man lay face downwards in the sitting room, his balding head almost severed from his body.”

The inability of the Western colonial powers to deal efficiently with social problems that the colonized people, left to their own devices, had occasionally proven better at solving further contributed to the Western loss of prestige in the former colonies. An example was the famine in Indochina, which was alleviated after the French authorities had been ousted in the spring of 1945 and replaced with an indigenous regime propped up by the Japanese. Immediately after assuming power, the colony’s new rulers introduced new measures to reduce speculation on the pricing of scarce rice supplies while improving the transportation of grains to the hunger-stricken provinces. “Brutal measures that we ourselves would not have ventured to take bring a momentary abundance,” a French writer reluctantly acknowledged, adding that the people of Indochina “have come to think very seriously that they are ripe to be a great nation.”

This was only reinforced when the Japanese left and handed back Indochina to the Western powers. Despite the improvement made in the spring, the food situation quickly turned desperate again. “Hanoi with a population of 200,000 inhabitants is literally dying of hunger,” a foreign observer wrote. “The worst situation is that of feeding the infants.” This was only partly the result of Western mismanagement. More importantly, Indochina experienced devastating flooding, with river levels in Hanoi reaching a historical record, but the prestige of the colonial authorities suffered yet another blow.

As in the East Indies, a protracted guerrilla campaign followed in Indochina, fueled by the population’s thirst for independence, and French determination to hold onto its prized possession. If France let go of this “admirable balcony on the Pacific,” it would no longer be a great power, a leading French politician said. The result was long years of bloodshed which gradually evolved into a full-scale conventional war, and only ended with the withdrawal of the French colonial rulers and the division of Indochina into two in 1954.

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Filed under Britain, France, Japan, military, nationalism, Netherlands, Southeast Asia, war

by Joel | 8 July 2023 · 5:50 am

Indochina, 1945: Famine & Coup

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 200-202:

The famine lasted for five months in early 1945 but its causes could be traced back to the year before, and similar to the mass starvation that had struck British-ruled India earlier in the war, it was the result of both natural calamities and official policies. Drought and insect attacks caused the spring harvest in 1944 to drop steeply below expectations, and the following autumn devastating typhoons cut down the agricultural output dramatically. The worst effects of the hunger disaster could have been mitigated if rice had been sent to the north from southern regions, where the crops were more plentiful. However, American bombing had destroyed bridges, railroads, and other infrastructure, and anyway both the Japanese army and the French colonial authorities, who were still in charge despite the presence of large Japanese forces, prioritized the transportation of their own military forces over vital food supplies for the civilian population. Between one and two million people died as a result of the 1945 mass starvation in Indochina. This overall figure covered vast regional variations, and in the worst hit areas of northern Indochina, society teetered on the brink of collapse.

…

The food scarcity also affected those inhabitants of Indochina who were not directly pushed to the limit by starvation, but still saw a precipitous drop in the standard of living due to steep prices in rice. The result was that the French colonial authorities became even more unpopular than before. The fact that the French administration had helped prevent the kind of mass conscription of forced labor that had happened in other parts of Japanese-controlled Asia mattered less. To many Indochinese it made a much deeper impression to see sharply dressed Japanese officers walk the streets of the major cities, in humiliating contrast to the often flabby-looking French colonial troops.

Therefore, there was widespread anticipation of better times when on March 9, 1945, the Japanese Army in Indochina took over control from the French colonial authorities in a swift coup. French officers were taken into custody, and their soldiers ordered to lay down their arms. Those who resisted were met with trademark brutality. A few French garrisons opposed the Japanese move, and in some cases extended firefights took place. At the end of the battles, French prisoners were bayoneted or beheaded. Defeated foreign legionnaires were forced to watch as Japanese soldiers hauled down the French flag, tore it to shreds, and stamped it into the ground. Rapes of French women were commonplace. Duong Thieu Chi, the official who had witnessed instances of cannibalism, was shocked to see a senior French colonial official be thrown to the floor by a Japanese captain and then beaten bloody with the hilt of a sword.

The new Japanese rulers took steps to improve the food supply, for example by handing out grain from public granaries under much publicity, and also ensured a fairer distribution of rice where it was needed. However, they were less enthusiastic about nationalistic sentiments in the population, who suddenly believed that colonialism might be a thing of the past, resulting in mass gatherings and strikes. “The defense of Indochina against the enemy outside the country will be completely ineffective if domestic order is not perfectly maintained,” the Japanese military authorities warned in a statement. The people of Indochina gradually came to understand that their new masters were perhaps not all that different from the old ones.

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Filed under Britain, food, France, Japan, Laos, military, U.S., Vietnam, war

by Joel | 5 July 2023 · 5:52 am

Labor Unrest in Java, 1944

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 84-88:

In the summer of 1944, the region of Indramayu on the East Indies island of Java exploded in violence. A student at an Islamic boarding school who was known only by the name of Mi’an began distributing holy water among the peasants in the area, telling them it would make them invulnerable to attacks from non-Muslims. They needed it, for they were preparing an uprising against their Japanese-supported rulers over grain levies that made life almost unbearable. A couple of low-ranking Javanese officials in the village of Bugis were the first to feel the wrath of the peasants. Angry mobs attacked them in their homes, beating them up and destroying everything inside. The Japanese military police rushed to the scene and confronted the protesting crowd. After attempting to threaten the peasants to disperse, the soldiers opened fire, mowing down the men and boys, who were carrying only sticks and machetes. About 200 people died on that blood-soaked day.

Many had expected a clash sooner or later. Tensions had been building up in this part of the former Dutch East Indies since the spring, as village after village had protested at the rising grain acquisitions, and some had openly rebelled. “We would rather die in battle than die of hunger,” they shouted when officials tried to convince them to go home. Instead, the desperate villagers went on rampages, hunting down tax collectors and others who acted as the face of the regime at the grassroots level. One was stabbed to death by a crowd wielding sharpened bamboo sticks, another was killed along with his son.

Anger was directed as much at local officials as at the Japanese, but it was the Japanese who had the power to enforce the unpopular decisions on the poverty-stricken people of Java. Few protesters were killed on the spot. Most individuals deemed to be the ringleaders of the riots were simply driven away, never to be heard from again. Still, even the Japanese did not have the power to rein in the escalating chaos following the riots during the summer months, and as roving bandits moved through the unpoliced countryside, attacking ordinary people and looting their homes, everyone suffered.

The unrest in Java reflected larger problems afflicting the Japanese throughout their vast empire by the middle of 1944. In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese had ostensibly been attempting a policy of unifying the various ethnicities. On Java, this philosophy of a “fraternal order,” bringing together Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese, Arabs, and Eurasians, was propagated, in direct opposition to the “divide and rule” tactics that the former Dutch colonial masters had carried out, with significant success. In most Asian areas, Japan made the pretense of supporting indigenous government of some form, in conformity with its stated objective of ridding the region of western imperialism. The one exception until the end of the war was Indochina, where the French colonial administration remained in place.

In some cases, regular friendships had evolved between Japanese and representatives of the local population. An Indonesian journalist later explained his relationship with one of the Japanese officials, who had a genuine concern for the fate of the East Indies. “He was a frank and sympathetic friend, almost like a brother to us. His Indonesian was excellent… and we had many discussions with him about politics, Japan’s objectives and Indonesian independence. He helped us in a lot of ways; for instance, sometimes if articles we had written did not pass the censor, he would somehow try to get them in print.”

The reality, however, was often the reverse of the rosy images of inter-racial harmony described in the Japanese illustrated magazines. Since the early days of the occupation in 1942, the requirements of the local population had to yield to the demands of the Japanese military. After all, access to the rich natural resources of the East Indies had formed the entire basic rationale for Tokyo’s decision to unleash the Pacific War. “I had only to know how much exploitation the native population could endure,” said Major Miyamoto Shizuo, an officer in charge of logistics planning.

It was highly ironic that by 1944 Japan was reaping extraordinarily little actual gain from its possessions in Southeast Asia. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Japanese planners had calculated with Indonesian oil meeting most of their 7.9-million-ton oil requirement per year, but Allied sinking of Japanese transport shipping had caused the amount actually shipped to other parts of the Japanese empire to gradually dwindle, and for the fiscal year beginning April 1, 1944, no oil at all was transported from the East Indies. The output of other strategic materials such as rubber and coal also dropped to a fraction of their prewar levels, meaning essentially that the entire war had been in vain, insofar as it had started out as a grab for vital resources.

Only one resource was plentiful and could be exploited directly on the spot: labor. Young men known as romusha or “work soldiers” were recruited, often forcibly, and set to work at various large-scale projects under the supervision of Japanese engineers. They were often promised good treatment before their departure, but many never returned. Of 300,000 from Java who were sent off to islands elsewhere in the huge Indonesian archipelago, only 77,000 made it home again. What happened to the others is clear from an eyewitness account of the scene at a remote mountainside, where hundreds of workers hacked out a tunnel with adzes and hammers. “Their bodies were thin and parched—bone wrapped in skin,” the testimony reads. “Corpses were just like rubbish—walking skeletons no longer shocked people.” Another account detailed the abuse they were subject to: “Because of their weakened condition, they almost did not have enough strength to walk, so that they staggered on their feet like drunkards. To rest for a moment meant running the risk of getting abuse and blows.”

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Filed under economics, Indonesia, industry, Japan, labor, military, nationalism, religion, war

by Joel | 4 July 2023 · 6:23 am

Chinese Troops in Burma, 1944

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 51-53:

General Tanaka Shin’ichi, commander of the Japanese Army’s 18th Division, was on a mission in northern Burma in early 1944 directly linked to the attempt at Imphal and Kohima to cut through the British lines and reach the Indian border. With his battle-hardened men, he was to cover the right flank of the Japanese forces engaged in the main offensive and tie down as many Allied forces as possible. At the same time, he was to pursue a separate and arguably more important objective, penetrating as deeply into enemy territory as possible. For him, too, the ultimate objective was to disrupt the supply lines between India and China.

Like the Japanese further south, Tanaka was up against a multinational enemy, but of a different kind. Facing him in the north Burmese hills and jungles were the products of one of the most precarious and unwieldy alliances of the entire war—that between China and America. He was an experienced officer who had taken part in most of Japan’s conflicts since the early 1930s, but he had never before confronted the Chinese in battle. When he finally had the opportunity in the spring of 1944 near the village of Yupang Ga, he was surprised. “The unexpected stubbornness of the Chinese troops in the fighting around Yupang Ga,” he wrote in post-war comments, “led the Japanese to believe the troops that faced them were far superior in both the quality of their fighting and in their equipment to the Chinese troops they had been fighting in China for years.”

The Chinese troops fighting at Yupang Ga were from the New 38th Division, the result of long months of Sino-American cooperation following the US entry into the war. The most visible sign of this cooperation was the trademark M1 helmet worn by the Chinese soldiers, as well as the many examples of state-of-the-art equipment and weaponry they were carrying into battle. More importantly, the soldiers had been through months of US-led training at camps in India and had been instructed in the methods of modern warfare. The hard work was not wasted and the Chinese pushed the Japanese back at Yupang Ga. To the young Chinese soldiers, it was an immense morale boost, and likewise to their officers, who still remembered the first humiliating battles with the technologically superior Japanese during the preceding decade. “The Chinese soldiers talked of it over and over again,” according to the official history. “The first victory is never forgotten.”

The Japanese, under pressure from the Chinese divisions, retreated back south. In this situation, General Joseph Stilwell, the senior US officer on the Asian mainland, decided to bring to bear what American forces were available to him, in the shape of the newly formed 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional). Dubbed “Merrill’s Marauders” after its commander, Brigadier General Frank Merrill, it was the first major US Army unit to go into combat in Stilwell’s area of responsibility. The Marauders represented an attempt to beat the Japanese at their own game, as its members were trained to infiltrate through enemy lines and roam deep inside hostile territory.

The British had pioneered this effort on the Allied side with their Long-Range Penetration Groups, known unofficially as the Chindits, under the command of the unorthodox Major General Orde Charles Wingate. The Chindits had first been placed into battle in 1943, and by 1944 they had built up enough skill and experience to arguably have an impact on the overall conduct of the war. Elements of two Japanese divisions were engaged in fighting the Chindits, and Japanese General Mutaguchi, who led the offensives against Imphal and Kohima, argued that if either division had been able to release just one regiment from these operations, it “would have turned the scales at Kohima.”

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Filed under Britain, Burma, China, Japan, military, nationalism, South Asia, U.S., war

by Joel | 15 May 2023 · 11:45 am

Ambonese Musicians in Paducah, KY

The Far Outliers are near the beginning of a major road trip up the center of the U.S. Last night we arrived in Paducah, KY, from Murfreesboro, TN, taking the scenic route through the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. My retired librarian brother, who was born in Japan but has long worked and retired in Paducah, took us to Paducah Beer Werks, which was hosting a Bluegrass Jam with two sets of musicians, Wheelhouse Rousters, a local troupe, and Kaihulu from Ambon, Indonesia. I fondly remembered their hometown from an academic junket in 1990, which I memorialized in one of my earliest blogposts. The two bands connected at a UNESCO Creative City event in South Korea, and Kaihulu came to connect Paducah with Ambon, each now designated a UNESCO Creative City. We had the chance to chat with some of the musicians, who were astounded to meet someone who had visited their hometown and remembered Pattimura University and other places in Ambon. A small world story.

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Filed under Indonesia, language, music, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 23 March 2023 · 7:44 am

Losing Your First Language: Vietnamese

From Face[t]s of First Language Loss, by Sandra G. Kouritzin (Routledge, 1999), pp. 159-160:

Kuong immigrated to Canada from Vietnam when he was 3 or 4 years old, and first lived near Windsor, Ontario because his family’s sponsor lived in a small town there. He attended school there for Grades 1, 2, and 3, and, because he was instructed in both French and English, believed the two languages were just different dialects until he moved out to British Columbia in Grade 4. He remembers absolutely nothing of his primary school classrooms, although he can remember the walk to school, and the fear that he felt when he heard little children screaming in the principal’s office. He thought maybe he didn’t remember the classrooms because he never understood anything during his primary schooling; his first recollections of instruction are from Grade 4 when he was finally able to understand some of the things the teacher said.

Kuong has an older sibling attending college who is fluent in both Vietnamese and English, and whom he envies, and an older sibling attending a School for the Deaf who signs and lip-reads only in English. His younger brother is in jail; apparently there was some confusion about his date of birth when the family immigrated, so the Canadian authorities believe his 16-year-old brother to be an adult, and have imprisoned him accordingly.

Kuong’s parents don’t speak very much English. Because Kuong got mixed up with drugs and crime when he was still in elementary school, he has been in and out of group homes. Because he has therefore been predominantly in English-speaking environments, he doesn’t speak Vietnamese, yet he also knows that he has serious difficulties in reading, writing, and expressing himself in English. Kuong feels that he will never be gainfully employed in Canada. He doesn’t have the grammatical skill necessary for white-collar work, and he doesn’t have the physical strength (because of heroin addiction) for blue-collar work.

His parents have offered to buy him a fishing boat if he finishes Grade 10 (he was 18 years old at the time of the interviews in 1995), but he doesn’t speak enough Vietnamese to communicate with other fishermen. He thinks he’ll probably only live another 10 years because of his lifestyle and because of how he earns a living; however, he reasons that, if he limited himself to legal employment, he wouldn’t even be able to survive for 10 years.

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Filed under Canada, drugs, education, labor, language, migration, Vietnam

by Joel | 11 November 2022 · 2:21 pm

Imperial Japan’s POWs at War’s End

From When the Shooting Stopped: August 1945, by Barrett Tillman (Osprey, 2022), Kindle pp. 180-182, 187:

VJ Day also was Survival Day to large numbers of prisoners of war and internees in Japanese hands. In August approximately 150,000 Allied personnel were thought held captive in some 130 camps throughout Asia. However, a complete accounting revealed 775 facilities in the Japanese Empire; 185 in Japan itself.

The prisoners represented not only the U.S. but Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands, and India. Approximately 36,000 soldiers and sailors were sent to Japan itself with most of the balance in the Philippines, China, Korea, Burma, Malaya, Java, and various Pacific islands. Japan also held large numbers of civilian prisoners and internees, as many as 125,000, mainly in the Dutch East Indies and Philippines, with more than 10 percent in China and Hong Kong. That figure excluded Nationalist Chinese personnel. Frequently the Imperial Army killed Chinese prisoners as a matter of policy.

One quarter to one third of Anglo-American prisoners held by Japan had died in captivity, with about 12 percent dying in the Home Islands. In contrast, about 3 percent of Western POWs perished in German Stalags. War crimes investigators later determined that 27 percent of Allied POWs in the Pacific died in captivity – officially seven times the rate of Western POWs in German camps.

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Allied POWs existed in a hellish world of perennial malnutrition during Japan’s food shortage amid disease and routine brutality. Postwar investigators often referred to ritual or informal executions but the killings were largely extrajudicial or, to put it bluntly – murder.

Though Tokyo had signed the Second Geneva Convention in 1929, the government had never ratified the agreement regarding treatment of prisoners of war. After a qualified pledge to abide by the convention in early 1942, Japan quickly reverted.

Prisoners endured horrific conditions in captivity, eventually subsisting on 600 calories per day. What few Red Cross parcels arrived often were confiscated by the captors. The situation could hardly have been improved in the final months of the war, however, because in mid-1945 virtually all Japanese civilians were also malnourished.

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Almost lost amid war’s end was the residue of its origin: Japan’s conquest of the Dutch East Indies’ petro-wealth. In 1940 Tokyo had requested half of the Dutch oil exports, but officials in the capital Batavia replied that existing commitments permitted little increase for Japan. That response set the Pacific afire. With only two years’ oil reserves on hand, and denied imports from the U.S. and Java, Tokyo’s warlords launched themselves on an irrevocable course.

The Japanese had to sort out a large, diverse population of some 70.5 million. Upwards of 250,000 were Dutch, mostly blijers, Dutch citizens born in the East Indies. Around 1.3 million Chinese had enjoyed preferred relations with the Netherlands’ hierarchy, but there was also a small Japanese population.

Conquest of the archipelago only took 90 days, ending in March 1942. Japan pledged Indonesian independence in 1943 but never honored it. And despite the Asia for Asians theme of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Indonesians suffered terribly under Japanese rule. The new rulers interned all Dutch military personnel and 170,000 civilians. Conditions were appalling: approximately 25,000 died in captivity. Estimates range between 2.5 and 4 million total deaths, more than half of whom perished during the Java famine of 1944–45.

Additionally, millions of Javanese were pressed into servitude elsewhere, notably on the Burmese railroad.