Category Archives: war

by Joel | 29 August 2007 · 9:43 pm

Photodude Debunks Civil War Photog Mathew Brady

Atlanta-based blogger Photodude takes Andrew Sullivan to task by debunking Mathew Brady‘s role as the photographer of the American Civil War. I’ve seen many, many Mathew Brady photographs, but never heard this angle. Did the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War mention this? (UPDATE: I’ve corrected the spelling of Brady’s first name except where quoting Photodude below. More on Brady here and here.)

As someone intimately familiar with both the history of photography and the Civil War, I can tell you that Matthew [sic] Brady was well known as a sour self-promoting character with far more ego than talent. Yes, he did take some famous photos during the Civil War, but he also took the work of talented photographers like Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and others, and proudly presented it as his own. The quote I recall is along the lines of “that photo is so good I’m going to tell the world it’s a Matthew Brady photograph.” He was brazen about it. You might say Matthew Brady invented the concept of “work for hire.”

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Filed under publishing, U.S., war

by Joel | 27 August 2007 · 9:10 pm

Suppression of Piracy in the Philippines After 1848

From Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity, by James Francis Warren (Singapore U. Press, 2002), pp. 345-346, 363-364:

By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the sea war in the Philippines between Spain and the Iranun and Balangingi had taken on a permanent and normal character of a stalemate in which each party recognized the other as an equal with authority generally limited to the territory each controlled. But in 1848 the combined forces of the Spanish navy and army laid waste to the Samal forts at Balangingi, dispersed the survivors, and forcefully relocated the prisoners of war. This was the decisive moment, the turning point in the history of the century-long conflict between Spain and the slave raiders. The Balangingi were on the brink of climbing out of their Samal identity after nearly half a century of constant upheaval, and, according to Frake, “establishing themselves as a different kind of people.” But, in the aftermath of the Spanish devastation of their island stronghold in 1848, they did not succeed. After that event the Balangingi, as ‘notorious pirates’ and a construed single ethnic group, disappeared from the pages of the historical literature and geographical reports. Balangingi fortunes changed in the 1840s and with them the pattern of maritime raiding in Southeast Asia. The destruction of Tempasuk and Marudu by the English in 1845 also forced Iranun groups to relocate on the east coast at Tunku. The loss of these confederate communities made it more difficult for the Balangingi to conduct slave raids in the western sector of the archipelago. This event, coupled with the founding of Labuan by James Brooke and the appearance of steam gunboats on the northwest coast of Borneo, forced them to gradually withdraw from that area and increasingly concentrate their activities on the Dutch possessions.

At the same time, the Spanish adopted a far more aggressive policy in the south. The new governor of the Philippines, Narciso Claveria, understood the strategic importance of the control of Balangingi which became the focal point of a new Spanish strategy. A daring naval attack aimed at the throat of the Sulu, namely Balangingi, was the key to cutting the sultanate in two and stopping slave raiding in the Philippines….

After the destruction of Balangingi in 1848, the Spanish first used the Samal women and children as hostages to force their husbands and kindred to surrender and make peace. The political ploy did not work. So after a short time, the Spanish assembled their steamers and regularly swept the Visayas and the Sulu archipelago from one end to the other. Repeated punitive campaigns ended with a series of major sea battles off the coasts of Samar and Mindanao and attacks on Taupan’s bases to the south. [Julano Taupan was war leader of the Balangingi at Tawi-Tawi.] Hundreds of Balangingi were killed during the six year long war, many of their ships captured, and others destroyed. Taupan sent his raiders to prey on shipping in less troubled waters in the Moluccas, the Banda Sea, the Java Sea, and along the Bornean coasts. But their activities were short-lived. The British and Dutch dealt with the Balangingi menace by joining forces across the region, stationing steamers in all the key straits of the archipelago at certain times of the year when the slave raiders traditionally appeared in those waters. The Dutch navy concentrated on Taupan’s Balangingi operations around Sulawesi and Bonerate, and the British, with James Brooke’s full support, stationed ships at Labuan to protect the Borneo coasting fleets in the South China Sea.

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Filed under Britain, Netherlands, Philippines, piracy, Southeast Asia, Spain, war

by Joel | 25 August 2007 · 3:04 pm

Outburst of Piracy in Southeast Asia, 1754-1838

From Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity, by James Francis Warren (Singapore U. Press, 2002), pp. 53-56:

The Iranun burst quite suddenly into Southeast Asian history in the second half of the eighteenth century with a series of terrifying raids and attacks on the coasts and shipping of the Philippines, the straits of Malacca and the islands beyond Sulawesi. Their primary targets were unprotected coastal settlements and sailing boats that travelled throughout Southeast Asia bringing valuable commodities from China and the West back to the most remote parts of the archipelago. Many of these marauders were sponsored by rulers from the trading states of Cotabato, Sulu, Siak, and Sambas. They were soon described as ‘Lanun’ or ‘Illanoon’—‘pirates’—by those who suffered their depradations or either travelled with or hunted them and wrote about their widespread impact on the Southeast Asian world.

It is estimated that during the last quarter of this century (1774–1798) of maritime raiding and conflict against the Dutch and Spanish, between 100 and 200 seaworthy raiding prahus set out from the Mindanao-Sulu area each year. The sheer size of the vessels—the largest joanga measuring upward of 130 feet in length—and the scale of the expeditions dwarfed most previous efforts, marking a significant departure in the naval strategy of Malay maritime raiding as it had been traditionally understood. The Iranun were far more than mere ‘pirates’ or brigands. The colonial powers and precolonial Malay trading states had to reckon with a dominant force in their own right; a force that was capable of inflicting major defeats on the Spanish and Dutch and toppling local kingdoms. The huge numbers of these skilled sea raiders and slavers that the sultanate of Sulu could mobilize during the heyday of the China trade would henceforth have a profound impact upon Southeast Asia’s history.

The geographical range of Iranun-Balangingi slave raiding activity was enormous, spanning all of Southeast Asia and beyond. Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the joanga of the Cotabato and Sulu Sultanates were more or less integrated into fleets belonging to the respective sultanates, but by the end of the century many Iranun vessels were also operating independently. Iranun prahus sponsored by both states had their own target areas but inevitably, there was some overlap. Cotabato and Sulu raiding vessels cruised between the Visayas and Luzon, and out into the South China Sea. Those from Tempasuk, on the northwest coast of Borneo, harassed shipping to the west of the huge island itself. Samal Balangingi, situated midway between the Iranun communities in Mindanao and those on Borneo, operated vessels throughout the Philippines and in the central and eastern parts of the Netherlands Indies.

Iranun maritime raids affected virtually the entire coastline of Southeast Asia, and even stretches of New Guinea and the Bay of Bengal were not secure from slave raids. In the east, the Iranun sailed down the Makassar Strait to cross the Java Sea and South China Sea to attack the north coast ports on Java and the large tin mining island of Banka. Iranun raided extensively in the Sangir Islands, Halmahera and, to a lesser extent, in the Moluccas. They also pushed beyond the defended limits of the Southeast Asian world, crossing the South China Sea to attack undefended stretches of the coastlines of Thailand and Cochin China. At the opposite extremity they also raided, but failed to dominate, the dangerous coasts of New Guinea. In the 1790s, Iranun slave hunters in search of captives extended the limits of their known world even further, sailing far into the waters of the Bay of Bengal, touching at the Andaman Islands and perhaps exploring the southern coast of Burma. There seemed no practical way for the colonial powers to link their respective ‘dominions’ together in an island-wide network of defense and communication, and consequently the Iranun made the most of the ill-defended seas and ravaged the coastal populations and commerce….

In the second half of the eighteenth century many Philippine ports, towns, shipyards, and monasteries were not adequately defended while others were totally defenseless. From the mid-1750s onward, the scale, ferocity and unexpected nature of the initial wave of Iranun attacks were deeply disturbing. Thousands of Filipinos perished or were seized as captives; the more so as the Iranun were Muslims and recognized none of the accepted conventions and taboos that were meant to protect the property and personnel of the Catholic Church in times of war between Christians…. This terrifying period of Iranun slave raiding activity, which lasted more than 70 years from roughly 1752 to 1832, severely hampered the overall social and material well-being and growth of the Philippine island world and the colonial state.

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Filed under economics, Philippines, piracy, Southeast Asia, war

by Joel | 12 August 2007 · 3:55 pm

Two Schoolgirls in Kabul, 1992

From A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead Books, 2007), pp. 159-161:

IN JUNE OF THAT YEAR, 1992, there was heavy fighting in West Kabul between the Pashtun forces of the warlord Sayyaf and the Hazaras of the Wahdat faction. The shelling knocked down power lines, pulverized entire blocks of shops and homes. Laila heard that Pashtun militiamen were attacking Hazara households, breaking in and shooting entire families, execution style, and that Hazaras were retaliating by abducting Pashtun civilians, raping Pashtun girls, shelling Pashtun neighborhoods, and killing indiscriminately. Every day, bodies were found tied to trees, sometimes burned beyond recognition. Often, they’d been shot in the head, had had their eyes gouged out, their tongues cut out.

Babi tried again to convince Mammy to leave Kabul. “They’ll work it out,” Mammy said. “This fighting is temporary. They’ll sit down and figure something out.””Fariba, all these people know is war,” said Babi. “They learned to walk with a milk bottle in one hand and a gun in the other.”

“Who are you to say?” Mammy shot back. “Did you fight jihad? Did you abandon everything you had and risk your life? If not for the Mujahideen, we’d still be the Soviets’ servants, remember. And now you’d have us betray them!”

“We aren’t the ones doing the betraying, Fariba.”

“You go, then. Take your daughter and run away. Send me a postcard. But peace is coming, and I, for one, am going to wait for it.”

The streets became so unsafe that Babi did an unthinkable thing: He had Laila drop out of school.

He took over the teaching duties himself. Laila went into his study every day after sundown, and, as Hekmatyar launched his rockets at Massoud from the southern outskirts of the city, Babi and she discussed the ghazals of Hafez and the works of the beloved Afghan poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili. Babi taught her to derive the quadratic equation, showed her how to factor polynomials and plot parametric curves. When he was teaching, Babi was transformed. In his element, amid his books, he looked taller to Laila. His voice seemed to rise from a calmer, deeper place, and he didn’t blink nearly as much. Laila pictured him as he must have been once, erasing his blackboard with graceful swipes, looking over a student’s shoulder, fatherly and attentive….

ONE DAY THAT same month of June, Giti was walking home from school with two classmates. Only three blocks from Giti’s house, a stray rocket struck the girls. Later that terrible day, Laila learned that Nila, Giti’s mother, had run up and down the street where Giti was killed, collecting pieces ofher daughter’s flesh in an apron, screech- ing hysterically. Giti’s decomposing right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later.

At Giti’s fatiha, the day after the killings, Laila sat stunned in a roomful of weeping women. This was the first time that someone whom Laila had known, been close to, loved, had died. She couldn’t get around the unfathomable reality that Giti wasn’t alive anymore. Giti, with whom Laila had exchanged secret notes in class, whose fingernails she had polished, whose chin hair she had plucked with tweezers. Giti, who was going to marry Sabir the goalkeeper. Giti was dead. Dead. Blown to pieces. At last, Laila began to weep for her friend. And all the tears that she hadn’t been able to shed at her [Mujahideen] brothers’ funeral came pouring down.

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by Joel | 1 July 2007 · 10:03 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Filed under China, industry, Japan, Korea, war

by Joel | 30 June 2007 · 3:01 pm

Changing Roles of Katakana (and Italics)

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

Origins of italic type and its shrunken role

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

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

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

Origins of the kana syllabaries

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

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

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

Early roles of the two syllabaries

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

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

Kata the mechanical kana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Filed under Europe, Japan, language, publishing, war

by Joel | 7 May 2007 · 10:22 pm

Japanese Loanwords in Pohnpeian

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

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

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

Domestic articles

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

Food items

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

Game/Sports terms

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

Personal articles

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

Others

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

Archaic terms

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

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

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Filed under Japan, language, Micronesia, U.S., war

by Joel | 27 April 2007 · 6:23 pm

Rhodesia, 1940: War, Copper, and Race

There had been strikes by white workers in two of the mines in March over pay and conditions, resulting in pay rises which inflamed already tense relations with African mineworkers, who earned in a month about the same as the whites received in a day and got none of their benefits. The public beating of the wife of a black miner after an argument about rations sparked further discontent, culminating in ugly riots in which police opened fire, killing thirteen Africans and injuring many more. Copper was vital to the war effort and Northern Rhodesia was the Empire’s main producer, so the mines had to be kept operating seven days a week, and Gore-Browne had been called in urgently by the Governor to mediate. Summoning up all his courage, with faithful Henry by his side as bodyguard and interpreter, he had braved thousands of angry black miners brandishing spears and broken bottles, all backed by the menacing thump of tribal drums, to enter the compound of the ringleaders on the third day of rioting. Many were Bemba, and seeing ‘Chipembele‘ they had agreed to speak, but it had taken all his persuasive powers to get them to down arms and return to work, having wrangled them a few concessions and got the Governor’s blessing to promise an official British government inquiry into conditions. I thank the Lord for my gift of getting on with people, he wrote to [his aunt] Ethel.

Now the Commission was under way, and, along with Sir John Forster who had come out from England to head it, and Thomas Sandford, the Secretary for Native Interests, he had been meeting managers and workers, trying to get them to work together, and going underground to see conditions in the mines. Visiting native compounds, known as the ‘locations’, he was shocked by the squalid shacks, describing them in his diary as so different to the neat bungalows with the square green lawns of the white workers. European employees had their own club with swimming-pool, tennis courts and golf course, and during the rainy season their residential area was full of purple bougainvillaea, red flame trees, hibiscus and white frangipani.

Gore-Browne hated the Copperbelt, finding it a queer uneasy place, perhaps because of its mixed population dominated by South Africans. Ndola, which he remembered from before the copper boom as a one street place consisting of six corrugated iron huts, was a pleasant enough town with its neat white bungalows and avenues of mahogany trees, trunks painted white to prevent them being eaten by the white ants which devoured everything in the area, though it was hardly the ‘new Johannesburg’ everyone had predicted when the extent of the copper mines had first been realized. The road to Nkana, following an old Arab slave trail, was lined with beautiful thick teak forest. Mine shafts and derricks dominated the skyline, and there was something about the place that created mutual mistrust and suspicion between all the people—black and white, workers and officials, management and government. Gore-Browne was convinced that the situation would never be properly resolved until African workers were put on an equal footing with their white colleagues, a heretical suggestion for the times, and told Ethel, the whole experience has left me feeling rather Bolshevik—the pettiness and narrow-mindedness of the managers (who deal in millions of pounds) is quite unbelievable. The General Manager of Roan and Mufulira mines for example refused to allow the Trade Unions a phone merely out of spite.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 221-223

This is as opportune a time as any to inflict upon my dear readers the following old chestnut I first encountered in a footnote in African Language Structures, by William E. Welmers, which I read during an introduction to African linguistics course one summer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chibemba, like Kiswahili and most Bantu languages, marks noun classes with prefixes that also mark singular and plural for that class. Thus, bantu is ‘people’, muntu is ‘person’ (for some speakers, this only refers to black people, like kanaka in the Pacific). Similarly, in Setswana, ‘people’ are batswana and ‘a person’ is motswana. The same principle applies to loanwords, so the singular of batenda ‘bartender’ is mutenda, while the plurals of kitabu ‘book’ and kipilefti ’roundabout, traffic circle’ are vitabu and vipilefti, respectively.

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by Joel | 3 April 2007 · 8:53 am

POWs Not Quite Ready for Liberation, 1945

[Robert J.] Body finally got the picture—his planned escape had been trumped by a full-scale rescue. The American Army had beaten him to the draw by no more than a half hour. Yet like many of the other prisoners, Body wasn’t sure where he was supposed to go. Some Rangers were yelling, “Head for the cut fence!” while others were saying, “Head for the main gate!” Not only that, the prisoners were thoroughly confused about what the Rangers meant by the “main gate.” It was a basic orientation problem. For the past three years, the main gate had always meant the gate to the American compound, not the central exit of the entire prison. This ultimate portal to the outside world was generally viewed as a forbidden concept, something one didn’t talk about because it was depressing and futile and could all too easily lead to subversive thoughts that might get a prisoner shot. The area around the main gate was strictly out of bounds, a dangerous piece of real estate, a dangerous idea….

As the precious minutes ticked by, the Rangers became more and more irritated by the strange stubbornness of the POWs. They didn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation. “I was getting annoyed,” recalled Alvie Robbins. “I’d say to them, ‘Listen, I’ve got a job to do here. I can’t spend a lot of time arguing with you. There’s thousands of Japanese just up the road. We gotta get out of here in a hurry.’ ” In some cases, the Rangers actually had to use physical force. “We just turned them around and booted ’em,” said Lester Malone. “We couldn’t fool around and explain nothing. They just didn’t want to believe we were Americans.” One of the prisoners Malone “booted” was Herbert Ott, the camp veterinarian. “I told him, get the hell out of here. I just turned him toward the gate and kicked him on out.”

Dr. Ralph Hibbs was another prisoner who needed a little physical convincing. “What the hell is going on?” Hibbs shouted at three Rangers who came bounding down the path toward him “with their tommy guns blazing” from their hips. “Where’d you come from? Are you guerrillas?”

“We’re Rangers—General Krueger’s boys.”

“What are Rangers?” Hibbs demanded. He was taxing their patience. Finally, one of them picked up the doctor, muscled him around, and gave him “a ten-foot kick squarely in the ass.”

The most recalcitrant prisoner of all was Hibbs’s immediate superior, Colonel Duckworth, the American commander of Cabanatuan. Duckworth was digging in his heels, refusing to go, even refusing to let the Rangers escort others out. The colonel, who’d been suddenly awakened by the shooting and still seemed perplexed by the whole fracas, was strutting through the compound buttonholing Rangers and shouting in their faces. He seemed unwilling to surrender authority to people whose identities and motives had been inadequately explained to him. Alvie Robbins was almost shocked by Duckworth’s belligerence. “He says, ‘I’m Colonel Duckworth, and I’m in charge here! Who the hell are you!’ I said, ‘We’re Americans. We’ve come for you.’ He said, ‘You can’t do this! You’re going to get us killed. The Japanese told us no escapes! No one leaves here until I say they do.’ I said, ‘You go see Captain Prince,’ and I went on about my business.” Duckworth continued storming about the camp, demanding explanations, imploring the raiders to cease and desist. Finally, another Ranger grabbed him by the arm and said, “With all due respect, you are not in charge here, General MacArthur is. Now I suggest you head to the main gate before we kick your ass there. I’ll apologize in the morning.'” Still grousing about the situation, Duckworth shambled out the American gate. Plagued by night blindness like so many others, he promptly fell into a ditch and fractured his right arm.

SOURCE: Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission, by Hampton Sides (Anchor Books, 2002), pp. 276-278

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by Joel | 2 April 2007 · 8:00 pm

POW Camp Interregnum, Philippines, 1945

For a brief period in early January, the men of Cabanatuan camp ate quite well, principally as a result of their having robbed the Japanese stores [after most of the Japanese garrison moved out]. And eating well, they found, could work miracles. The sap of life was returning. Astonishing things began to happen to their bodies. For some, the sharp throbbing aches of beriberi diminished. Their night blindness improved. With stronger immune systems, the men recovered from all sorts of miscellaneous low-grade infections that had persistently tormented them. Tropical ulcers shrank, rheumy eyes cleared up. Odd sounds—whistling, humming, laughter—were heard around camp. Here and there, one could see small instances of wasted motion, the superfluous dips and gesticulations of a spirit that abides in vitamins and calories. Atrophied interests revived. The men began to think about sex, and in the mornings they noticed with some curiosity that they were occasionally waking up with erections again.

Mainly, though, they put on weight, as much as a pound a day. It seemed impossible that a body could accrue mass and girth so quickly, but nursed on a steady diet of canned fish and syrupy Pet milk, everyone in camp experienced almost miraculous gains. Ralph Rodriguez, who ordinarily weighed 150 pounds but had plummeted to 90, was back to 120 in the two short weeks following the storehouse raids.

With new stamina, the prisoners grew bolder. One day a few of the men spotted a Brahma cow grazing in the fields outside the fence. Its Filipino owner was nowhere in evidence, and the Japanese, cloistered in their barracks, didn’t seem to be paying attention. All the guard towers were empty. The large-humped cow quietly cropped what little grass it could find in the dry field, its hide spasmodically twitching to shoo off the flies. With the peculiar malice of the protein-starved, the men strode out the gate, slipped a rope around the animal’s neck, and pulled it into camp. This first step seemed like a move of Promethean audacity: No one had set foot outside the Cabanatuan fence on his own before and lived to tell of it.

Straightaway, Dr. Ott was summoned. The veterinarian looked the animal over to make sure it wasn’t obviously diseased. The cow was stunned with a large hammer and then Ott slit its throat. A bucket was placed under the dying animal to collect every ounce of blood. A large group of prisoners looked on as the Brahma cow was cut open, and some of the men wept with joy as they joined in the butchering. Dr. Ott inspected the condition of the organs to look for infections or other abnormalities. When he sliced open the liver, trematode worms boiled out by the hundreds. These writhing parasites were better known as liver flukes, common in the Philippines and harmless when ingested as long as the meat was thoroughly cooked.

Dr. Ott gave the cow his seal of approval and a feast was planned on the spot. Standing in a circle around the fire, the men cooked and ate the flesh within a few hours. They prepared an immense vat of beef stew. They fried up the clotted blood or simmered it to make a consomme. They sucked the marrow from the bones, and boiled the hooves to make a broth. By the day’s end, every part had been eaten. “We couldn’t imagine it, a whole animal for five hundred people,” Dr. Hibbs wrote. “The soup even had fat floating on top of it.”

Savoring the foreign sensation of full bellies, some of the men spontaneously threw a party. They sang songs and passed around bottles of confiscated sake. Conversation turned appreciatively to women, their shapes and smells and other attributes. Someone brought out a radio that had been swiped from the Japanese side of the camp and they listened to KGEI out of San Francisco. In the glow of good food and drink, the men of Cabanatuan caught glimpses of a life with grace notes. They were surrounded by Japanese who seemed to wish them no harm. The war was radically tilting in their favor. Even as they listened to a radio signal from home, the vast American armies were coming, after long delay, to fetch them. They were drinking a wine made from a grain they hated, the distillate of a culture they hated even more, and yet somehow they found pleasure in it.

Then a news bulletin on the radio confirmed a rumor they’d been hearing for two days—that General Krueger’s Sixth Army had landed on Luzon and was driving south toward Manila. Liberation could be any day. “There were prayers and tears of rejoicing,” recalled Abie Abraham. “Many people danced, or at least they tried to. It was quite a startling sight to see those skeletons stand up and make brave attempts at clogging and Highland flings as the Japanese radio blared through the night.”

The morning after the party, life at Cabanatuan continued more or less as usual. As welcome as it was, the new dispensation left the prisoners acutely suspicious. They sensed that the favorable situation in camp, the seeming beneficence or at least indifference of the several dozen Japanese in residence, was but a temporary aberration to be enjoyed while it lasted.

And they were right: In mid-January, the picture began to change abruptly. The population on the Japanese side dramatically swelled.

SOURCE: Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission, by Hampton Sides (Anchor Books, 2002), pp. 243-245

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