by | 22 January 2008 · 5:45 am

The Vichy Milice

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 124-125:

Vichy was a neutral government and, except for some confrontations in Algeria, Madagascar and Syria, regular members of the French army did not fight against the Allies during the Second World War. However, some at Vichy did sponsor new agencies, the members of which came to fight alongside the Germans. Some at Vichy also sponsored increasingly vigorous forms of policing, directed especially against the Resistance….

In January 1943 Laval entrusted Darnand with the creation of another body, the Milice. The most important elements of the Milice were the militarized francs gardes, some of which were paid professionals. The Milice marked yet another step away from the Légion, in which Darnand had originated. The Milice, unlike the Legion, explicitly excluded Jews from membership and its members were younger than the legionnaires, having an average age of thirty against the Legion’s average age of fifty. The Milice also drew its recruits from cities to a greater extent than the Legion—the countryside was becoming a dangerous place for anyone likely to be a Resistance target.

The Milice became more and more closely associated with the Germans. Darnand himself was commissioned into the SS in August 1943, and in November of that year the Germans began to give the Milice weapons. This association, however, never meant that Darnand entirely abandoned his anti-German nationalism, and even just before joining the SS he seems to have talked about the possibility of supporting the Free French.

There were about 35,000 miliciens by the liberation, of whom around a quarter were in the francs gardes. Some miliciens, such as Henry Charbonneau or Christian de la Maziere, were upper-class young men driven by anti-Communism and the search for adventure. Increasingly, however, recruits to the Milice had more obviously material motives. Many were young, urban and poor. Some wished to secure exemption from labour service in Germany. Others were attracted by the relatively high salaries paid to full-time miliciens (a member of the francs gardes could earn 2,500 francs per month, at a time when a factory worker earned 1,300 francs) or by the opportunities for pillage. Quite large numbers of miliciens were regarded as suffering from mental instability.

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by | 21 January 2008 · 2:17 pm

Pfalzgrafenweiler, Ancestral Truckstop

On the last Sunday in 2007, the Outliers made a pilgrimage desultory excursion to Pfalzgrafenweiler, in Baden-Württemberg, whence Mrs. Outlier’s paternal ancestors emigrated via Odessa to Russia (now Ukraine) around 1800, then later to the Dakotas around 1890. This devoutly religious and devoutly rural line can be traced back to Pfalzgrafenweiler from as early as the 1500s.

Roadsign, Pfalzgrafenweiler, GermanyPfalzgrafenweiler itself goes back at least to Count Palatine (= Pfalzgraf) Hugo II of Tübingen, whose Pfalzgrafenburg there was stormed and razed by a Welf (= Guelph) Duke (= Herzog) of Bavaria in the 12th century. There is also a Herzogweiler within the Weiler Wald portion of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), which is now a getaway spot for the lumpen as well as the grafen.

Weiler can nowadays be translated ‘hamlet’, something smaller than a Dorf ‘village’, and there are many such placenames stretching far out along both sides of the Rhine, from Basel to Cologne. The equivalent in Alsace and Lorraine is usually spelled -willer (as in Bischwiller, Dettwiller, Ingwiller) or -viller (as in Abreschviller, Guntzviller, Hartzviller). The Alemannisch equivalent is -wiiler. Although related to villa, ville, and village, the term is an early Germanic borrowing from Romance wilare or villare, indicating farmsteads attached to a villa, not the villa itself.

On Saturday, we had made a trip across the Rhine to the Deutsche Bahn (DB) travel desk in Kehl to find out how to get there and buy tickets. (We had not yet initiated our 15-day Eurail Passes.) Despite being just over the border from Strasbourg, France, the DB rep forced his customers to deal with him only in German or English. I chose English after watching the poor Francophone ahead of me struggle along in German no better than mine.

Pfalzgrafenweiler is a bit off the trunklines of public transport. We had to make four transfers to get there. We took the Strasbourg city tram from Langstross/Grand’Rue to the southwest terminus at Aristide Briand, then the old city bus across the river to Kehl. There we caught a tiny Ortenau S-Bahn (OSB) shuttle south over flat farmland to Offenburg, where we caught another tiny OSB shuttle up the scenic hillsides of the Schwarzwald to Freudenstadt, where we hopped a shuttle bus to our final destination. (The DB ticket was good for the bus, too.)

The Kehl to Offenburg leg reminded us a bit of the JR Ryomo line we used to take between Oyama and Ashikaga along the foothills north of Tokyo, while the Offenburg to Freudenstadt leg reminded us more of the scenic Keikoku line running up the upper Watarase River gorge from Kiryu toward Nikko.

Along the way to Freudenstadt (‘Happyville’), the train passed a number of stations whose names ended in -ach (not -bach ‘brook’, but related), meaning ‘watercourse’ and ultimately cognate with Latin acqua: Biberach ‘Beaver Run’, Steinach ‘Stone Run’, Haslach ‘Hare Run’, Hausach ‘House Run’, Wolfach ‘Wolf Run’, Schiltach ‘Shield Run’—but, alas, no Bullach. In the local Alemannisch dialects, the final consonant is lost and the vowel reduced, thus: Biebere, Steine, Hasle, Huuse, Wolfe.

The even more common placenames suffixed with -heim (in High German) suffer a similar fate in Ortenau Alemannisch, where Griesheim = Griese, Meißenheim = Mißne, Ringsheim = Ringse/Rinse; and in Alsatian, where Blotzheim = Blotza, Merxheim = Märxa, Sentheim = Santa. You can see why Baden-Württembergers claim Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch. ‘We can handle everything. Except High German.’

Santa's bathtub, Pfalzgrafenweiler

Freudenstadt is roughly comparable in size to Aberdeen, SD, but is even sleepier on a Sunday. The tiny railway station is on the edge of town and lacks even a public toilet. When I followed the arrows on a wall map, I ended up at a port-a-potty in an isolated (and unheated) area nearly 100m from the station. (At least I didn’t have it as bad as Santa did in Pfalzgrafenweiler, where he had to bathe outdoors.) To its credit, Freudenstadt station had a gift shop full of snacks, souvenirs, magazines, travel info about far corners of the globe, and a very impressive collection of cigars for sale in a specially humidified room.

Traube Pizza + KebaphausWe had left my brother’s house in Strasbourg a little before 9 a.m. The bus dropped us at the Pfalzgrafenweiler Rathaus at 2 p.m., just as the town went into its deepest Sunday siesta. The local pizza delivery shop had finished its last run. Even the local kebap shop had closed.

JakobskircheWe walked the silent, empty streets meandering uphill toward the highway, where we found EverRast, a combination truck stop, restaurant, and internet café that was just about the only happening place in town on a Sunday afternoon. We ordered German-style salad plates and sampled the local Alpirsbacher Klosterbräu. The friendly waitress looked African American and switched easily between English and German.

Seniorenstift, PfalzgrafenweilerIt was already getting dark by 4 p.m. as we meandered back toward the bus stop for the 5 p.m. bus. We had just enough time to snap a few more photos, then stop in at Thome’s Schwanen hotel and restaurant, which was just opening for the Sunday dinner crowd. We asked the gracious hostess for a telephone book and snapped a photo of the handful of listings for Mrs. Outlier’s family name. Most of the telephone numbers had only 4 digits.

It was too dark to enjoy the beautiful scenery on the way back, but we had just enough layover time in Offenburg to explore a few of its cold, empty streets. The only warm, bright spot near the station was the Turkish-run Imbiss Stube. Thank goodness for the Mediterranean work ethic. We ordered hot lentil soups and hot spiked teas. The menu offered not just kebap, pizza, and pide, but also Seele (calzone), which (misleadingly or not) belatedly made the connection for me between Italian calzone and Romanian încălţăminte ‘footwear’.

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by | 19 January 2008 · 9:33 am

U.S.–Vichy Relations, 1940–44

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 70-71:

The single most important country in Pétainist imagination was the United States. The Rue des États-Unis ran past the Hotel du Parc and, unlike some Vichy streets, it kept its name throughout the period from 1940 to 1944. France’s self-image in the inter-war years had often been defined in contrast to America. Pétainists had often seen Americanization as a threat to French traditions. Pétain’s adviser, Lucien Romier, had published a book in 1927 entitled Who Will Be Master, Europe or America? Yet after 1940 Pétainists knew that America mattered hugely to their country. It was the most important of their diplomatic partners. It mattered, first, as a source of food and then as a potential broker of a compromise peace (a few at Vichy continued to believe in the possibility of such a peace until the summer of 1944).

The American embassy in Vichy was a strange place and became all the more so after Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941. Men such as ‘Woody’ Wallner, and ‘Doug’ MacArthur II, the nephew of the general, spent their time swimming, playing tennis or drinking cocktails. Wartime Vichy was excruciatingly dull for east coast patricians who had spent most of their career in European capitals. After April 1942, the embassy was run by Pinkney Tuck, the chargé d’affaires. Tuck, a career diplomat, was a conservative and seems to have been anti-Jewish (he opposed American recognition of Israel). However, like many French anti-Semites, Tuck was appalled by evidence of Nazi atrocities against the Jews in the autumn of 1942 and tried to get American visas for Jewish children in France. His efforts were thwarted by the German invasion of the southern zone. By the time the Germans arrived at Vichy, the American embassy contained only a couple of junior officials who had been left behind to shut up shop before being interned in Baden-Baden.

It is probably wrong to look for much ideological coherence in American attitudes to Vichy. The general tone of American policy can be deduced from the code names that Americans used for French affairs: Pétain was ‘Popeye’, Laval was ‘black Peter’ and France in general was ‘the Frog pond’. American policy was mainly directed towards the practical matter of ensuring that French resources were not deployed against the Allies, and bolstering what the Americans took to be anti-German elements at Vichy. To this end, they sent William Leahy, a sixty-four-year-old admiral, to be their ambassador to Vichy. Leahy was a brisk conservative who spoke almost no French and judged men mainly on whether or not they looked their interlocutors in the eye. Leahy’s particular concern was to prevent the remainder of the French fleet from falling into German hands. The Americans also wished to persuade some eminent French figure to establish an anti-German government in French North Africa and, initially, they hoped that Weygand might undertake this task.

Pétain was believed to have had good relations with American soldiers during the First World War and had been well received during an official visit that he made to the United States in 1931. The only interview that Pétain accorded to a foreign newspaper during his time as head of state, scripted by Du Moulin de Labarthète, was given to the New York Times. His admirers believed that his opinions would still be taken seriously in Washington. An important part of Pétainist thinking revolved around the idea that there was a gap between the British and the Americans and that Pétain would be able to exploit this gap. This belief persisted even after the Americans invaded French North Africa. In his 1943 biography of Pétain, René Benjamin recognized that the Marshal faced many problems, but implied that good relations with America might provide him with an escape from some of these: ‘The Marshal thinks of Admiral Leahy.’

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by | 18 January 2008 · 6:17 am

France, 1940: The Exode

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 29, 38-40 (reviewed here and here):

The dominant French civilian memories of 1940 did not come directly from contact with either French or German troops but from the large-scale flight of civilians away from the advancing German army. Population movement began in France before the German invasion, as civilians were evacuated from threatened areas on the eastern frontier and as factories were moved with their workforces to parts of France that were seen as safe from attack. Private individuals, especially those wealthy enough to afford hotels or lucky enough to have relations in the country, sometimes moved away from cities because they feared air attack, though many of these people had moved back by May 1940….

The exode was not a time of national unity. In the army, officers and other ranks, regulars and reservists blamed each other for the defeat. A generational struggle began during this period as the middle-aged victors of the First World War blamed the young soldiers who had been defeated in the Second. The veterans of the First World War were to become an important part of Marshal Pétain’s support, while young men were to provide the support for both resistance and radical collaborationism….

Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium were Catholic [perhaps Vinen meant devout, as Alsace was confessionally quite mixed] whilst the south-west of France was anti-clerical. Alsatians and Flamands spoke languages that sounded like German, which aroused suspicion in the paranoid climate of 1940. As early as April many claimed that people from Alsace-Lorraine were celebrating Hitler’s birthday or that refugee trains from the east of France had been decorated with swastikas. The de facto annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany in July made the status of people even more uncertain (though, in the long run, people from Alsace-Lorraine who chose not to return home came to be seen as French patriots). The Belgian king’s surrender made the French suspicious of those of his subjects who had fled to France—though many of those subjects were now violently hostile to their own government.

Looting was widespread. Refugees stole things as they moved through deserted towns. Sections of the French army looted on a grand scale in the abandoned areas of eastern France where they were stationed…. Sometimes looting was recognized as necessary for survival when there were no conventional means of obtaining supplies. In Reims, the municipality summoned a locksmith to open abandoned shops. Sometimes shopkeepers left their properties with the doors open and invited refugees to help themselves. Sometimes the privileged took advantage of their positions: the mayor of the village of Epehy in northern France was found to have hundreds of thousands of francs’ worth of ‘requisitioned property’ in his house. On other occasions crimes were committed by people who had no other means of obtaining food. A large proportion of crimes during this period were committed by housewives and also by adolescents, perhaps those who had lost contact with their families. Courts, both those operated under Vichy and those operated after the liberation, seem to have recognized that crimes committed during the exode often involved otherwise ‘respectable’ people.

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by | 18 December 2007 · 6:53 am

Out of Town on a Eurail

The Far Outliers will be on the road again for the next month, traveling by air, shank’s mare, and Eurail pass. Today we fly to Boston to visit our daughter for a week, then fly on to Frankfurt on Christmas Day on our way to Strasbourg to visit my historian brother who’s supervising a study-abroad program there. We plan to visit friends in Brittany the weekend of 4 January and make a return trip to Bucharest the weekend of 11 January, with a stop in Miklósvár in Székelyland, Transylvania, on the way there.

My brother speaks pretty good Central African French, and I’ve been working on reviving and expanding my high school French—il y a quarante ans! (I also passed a graduate reading exam in French.) Mrs. O and I can get around a bit in our high school German, and we will make a pilgrimage to the Black Forest town of Pfalzgrafenweiler from which her paternal ancestors emigrated to Ukraine during the Napoleonic era, only to emigrate to the Dakotas during the third Tsar-Alexandrine era and first or second President-Clevelandic era. I haven’t been working on my Ceauşescu-era Romanian, but I’m pretty sure it’ll come back enough to get around. We had hoped to branch out in more northerly and southerly directions from Strasbourg, but our long east–west jaunts won’t leave us much time.

While we’re away, you can get some interesting perspectives about where we’ll be by exploring Europe Endless (formerly Rhine River), Notes from a Tunnel, and the always entertaining travels of Dumneazu. If you can’t ignore Asia for that long, the latest Asian History Carnival at Frog in a Well should provide you with a lot of good reading.

Auf Wiedersehen, au revoir, şi la revedere.

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by | 18 December 2007 · 6:27 am

Uganda’s Abayudaya

Nathanael of Europe Endless recently posted a few fascinating excerpts from a long interview on Afropop about the Jews of Uganda. Here are a few excerpts of his excerpts.

Now, in contrast to [other Jewish] communities [in Africa], the Abayudaya, which means “Jewish people of Uganda,” proudly reference their conversion to Judaism in the 1920s, stating that they were drawn to Jewish practice by the truth of the Torah, the five books of Moses. Their founder, Semei Kakungulu, was a powerful Ganda leader, and he considered Christianity and Islam, and then according to community elders, said, “Why should I follow the shoots when I could have the root.”

Presently, the Abayudaya number of approximately 750 people, and live in villages surrounding Mbale in eastern Uganda. Many members scrupulously follow Jewish ritual, observe the laws of the Sabbath, celebrate Jewish holidays, keep kosher, and pray in Hebrew. Since the community’s original self conversion, and through the difficult period of Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s, the Abayudaya have been distinguished by their commitment to following mainstream Jewish practice, an approach that’s been amplified since their increased contact with Jews from North America and Israel since the mid-1990s.…

I’ll tell one story. I was with the community in 2002, right before their official conversion, and the discussions in the community were really interesting at that point, because here were people who had practiced as Jews, many for four generations. I was sitting in a meeting of the Abayudaya Leadership Council, and one member said, “I have a question. We are talking about conversion here, but I’m Jewish, my father was Jewish, my grandfather was Jewish. Can you tell me exactly what I am converting to?” And the leadership, Gershom Sizomu and J.J. Keki, were very thoughtful here. They said, “We understand. We are not saying that we’re not Jewish. But there are formalities that need to be practiced in order for us to be recognized by world Jewry.” So the community decided not to call this a “conversion.” Internally, they called it a “confirmation” of their Judaism. They were confirming their Jewish identity, but they felt that they had been Jewish since the initial conversion by Semei Kakungulu in the early 1920s….

In many ways, Kakungulu’s self conversion to Judaism was an act of rejection of the British. A rejection of the British. A rejection of colonialism. It was Kakungulu and his followers saying, “No longer will we followed your directions here. We are going to follow our own spiritual path.” The British didn’t know what to make of Kakungulu’s Judaism. The book to read on this is Michael Twaddle’s book, “Kakungulu and the Creation of Uganda—1868 to 1928.” But basically, Kakungulu’s adoption of Judaism was very much him going off on his own path, not only religiously but politically, asserting his separation from the British, who were totally identified with the Anglican Church.

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by | 17 December 2007 · 9:45 pm

To Ceausescu and Back: Notes from a Tunnel

I recently discovered a new autobiographical blog called Notes from a Tunnel by someone who “was born as a member of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, a child during Ceausescu’s dark 1970s, a teenager during the surreal Romanian ’80s, a student during the radical ’90s and a visiting émigré in recent years.” Here are some of the blogger’s earliest recollections about life in Romania during those years.

The First Glance Back

The following recollections though, from the Romanian pre- and post-Revolutionary years, are street-level snapshots with often surprising similarities between the old and the new country. They come together not as a grand portal into the past and quasi-present, but a small window for just one head at a time to peer through it….Having left that country eleven years ago, returning there regularly to this day, I can still meet and converse with many ghosts, ghosts cosily nesting in the altered, recently became ultra-material(istic) world of the Carpathian mountains.

This is about both the past when those ghosts still possessed powerful bodies in my weathered homeland, making Europe seem just some distant mirage, and the present when that world, still silently and slowly being kneaded by these ghosts, has gone through hasty re-decorating for its welcome party into a suddenly so reachable and tangible Europe…

It is also about the surprising and worrying parallels that one sees between that, thought to be defunct, world and the present day experiences in a historical democracy, the latter paradoxically resorting to exponentially increasing amounts of control in an attempt to safeguard its values…

Home

My home town, Marosvasarhely… A medieval city in Transylvania, comfortably resting in the valley of river Maros, in just one of the many valleys which spread themselves on the map like half-open protecting hands… Valleys that so often were not protective enough, but at least were able to soften the sounds of thunderstorms and too numerous battles into a gentle rumble that used to reverberate along the many rivers of that bruised land… A town that in peacetime used to gaze down on lively markets unfolding their tents on the plains outside its old walls… hence its name, ‘marketplace on river Maros’ ….

All this sits pretty much right in the middle of Transylvania where eminently non-fictional creatures have been spilling and consuming blood for too many centuries. They did this in broad daylight, totally immune to garlic, casting onto those hills and plains of ever-changing colour very long and dense shadows which persist to this day in political life, in the ethnic tensions arising from the echoes of annexing the former Hungarian territory to Romania… These shadows are also present in the collective psyche that only in the last few years was freed from the most recent non-fictional, demented, but so calculated Evil.

I grew up there, during Ceausescu’s ‘Golden Era’… and can’t recall whether there was a certain moment when I realised that everything surrounding me was a tragicomic absurd play, set in a theatre made to seem considerably smaller than the world entire.

I still find it difficult to reconcile those two sides of me… One, the small kid opening his eyes and ears tentatively and initially very fearfully, a happy kid enjoying to the max a very minimalist childhood, accepting the food rationing and powercuts, propaganda and fake celebrations as the normal and, above all, the only possible reality. Then there is the other person, the grown-up looking back and finding that weird reality filled with funny and sad absurdities, contradictions still tying the mind into a confusing identity-warping knot.

Light

My school days and years came after I learnt the fundamental physics of light and heat. Not the complex laws defining and governing them, but how ideological darkness and cold calculation can alter them when it came to what I then perceived as normal everyday existence. The joyous and by all means luminous play of the mind that took over for brief hours my early school days was quite opposite to what came after school, when due to shortages of class rooms we started doing ‘afternoon shifts’ alternating with our normal weeks of 8AM daily start…

I was finding my way on streets rendered pitch black by power saving measures, with constellations of warm orange and yellow and reddish dots, daubs and flecks of lights coming through the windows, coming from kerosene lamps and candles and the occasional battery-powered torches, projecting shadows of tired bodies animated by tired souls inhabiting the houses and block flats.

The economics of these cuts didn’t make any sense, as the consumption of the population was infinitesimal compared to what was engorged by old-fashioned, hopelessly obsolete industrial monsters. For example, the aluminium plant at Slatina was making deplorable quality aluminium with old electrolysis methods, soaking up every electron that the also inefficient power plants around it could squeeze out of low-grade coal or methane.

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by | 16 December 2007 · 9:09 am

Tessaku Seikatsu: Postwar Delusions

From Life behind Barbed Wire [鉄柵生活 Tessaku Seikatsu]: The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawai‘i Issei, by Yasutaro Soga [1873–1957] (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2008), pp. 202, 204-205:

A memorial service for the war dead was sponsored by the Buddhist federation and held at the theater on the night of September 14 [1945]. Rev. Joei Oi began the evening by saying that the service would honor the war dead of both sides, which was commendable. However, in his sermon, Rev. Enryo Shigefuji of Fresno expressed opinions that clearly showed he did not understand the current situation. I was surprised at his ignorance. First he attacked the United States for its unlawful and unjust use of atomic weapons. This was admirable. Then he reported, “Japan was so incensed at the inhumanity of this act that it wiped out the entire American expeditionary force in the Far East in three days and forced the United States to surrender.” Rev. Shigefuji was said to be a highly learned priest, so I wondered what had happened. Outside after the meeting, Mr. Komai, Rafu Shimpo president, and I were so dumbfounded that all we could do was exchange stunned looks. We were so amazed by his remarks that we were practically speechless.

Two days later, I heard a sermon by Rev. Shuntaro Ikezawa of the Christian church in the east classroom. The weather was very bad—rain, hail, even thunder. There were only a few priests and about a dozen people present. As I expected, Rev. Ikezawa had grasped what was happening. In his sermon, “Truth and Love,” he talked about the atomic bomb: “What was wrong was not the invention of atomic energy, but the thinking that led to its use in war. If we use our inventions for good, all human beings benefit. His Highness the Prime Minister said to General MacArthur, ‘You must forget Pearl Harbor and we must forget the atomic bomb.’ These were wise words.” The Reverend then prayed for the birth of a new Japan. I felt what he had to say was well worth listening to. Over the next few days the internees could not stop talking about Rev. Shigefuji’s sermon while Rev. Ikezawa’s was never mentioned. Rev. Shigefuji was praised for expressing his opinions without fear and was regarded as a hero….

Even those who should have known better were misinformed or deluded themselves. Around this time I met an uneducated but admirable young man… One morning in early October, the two of us were taking a walk. I asked if he wished to return to Japan. He answered that, because he was poor, he could not go back and wanted instead to remain in the United States, where many jobs would be available in restaurants. He continued: “Actually, one of my friends advised me to return to Japan with him. I said I would if I had the kind of money he had. He said looks were deceiving; in fact he was penniless and that was why he was returning to Japan. Since Japan had won the war, internees could expect reparations from the United States. Internees who went back now could receive as much as fifty thou- sand dollars. If they returned later, the money might no longer be available. My friend repeated that I should go back with him. I did not know what to say. There are so many such fellows who think Japan has won the war.” And so many of them were greedily waiting to return to Japan.

On October 1 all residents of the sixty-sixth barracks boycotted the Santa Fe Times and suspended their subscriptions.

After Spain withdrew its offer to represent Japanese interests, Switzerland took over the responsibility. The Swiss representatives visited the camp with State Department officials on September 27. Mr. Fischer was among them. They met with General Manager Koba and other camp officers. A report of what had transpired, written in question-and-answer form, was mimeographed both in English and Japanese and circulated to all barracks on October 2. U.S.-Japan relations, the surrender of Japan, and the changed conditions in Japan were outlined in detail. I quietly noted the internees’ responses to the report. Many said that talks between representatives of a small country like Switzerland and State Department officials could only be propaganda. They showed no further interest in the matter. The prevailing attitude toward the report was indifference.

On October 2, the camp population was 2,027, of which 106 were in the hospital and 3 were in the temporary holding cell. Those of us in the “traitors group” estimated that the number of internees who had any real understanding of the war and its aftermath was less than a hundred. Even Nisei who visited their parents in the camp around this time advised them not to worry, because Japan was winning the war. The purpose may have been to bolster the spirits of the internees, but it also seemed to provide fuel for the diehards who refused to accept Japan’s defeat. In the end this sort of thing did more harm than good.

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by | 16 December 2007 · 9:06 am

Hijab vs. Koteka: West Papua Culture Clash

From Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 224-225:

From the air, my first view of Wamena was a broad, grassy valley dotted with traditional Dani hamlets surrounded by incredibly neat and extensive sweet potato and vegetable gardens. Then came the town itself: an untidy, rusting conglomeration of tin-roofed buildings whose streets were laid out in a grid pattern. The silver minaret on the mosque gave it a distinctively Javanese appearance, even from above.

In the streets of Wamena, you see an extraordinary mixture of humanity. Proud Dani men, still holding fiercely to their traditional dress of koteka (penis gourd) tied at its base to a protruding testicle, stalk down the street, beards thrust forward and hands clasped behind their backs. Nervous-looking Muslim women, the oval of their face the only flesh visible in a sea of cotton, whisk gracefully by, while military men in immaculate and tight-fitting uniforms swagger confidently down the middle of the road.

Surely it is a perverse twist of fate that has put a nation of mostly Muslim, mostly Javanese, people in control of a place like Irian Jaya. You could not imagine, even if you tried, two more antipathetic cultures. Muslims abhor pigs, while to highland Irianese they are the most highly esteemed of possessions. Javanese have a highly developed sense of modesty. They dress to cover most of their body and are affronted by overt sexuality. For most Irianese, near-nudity is the universally respectable state. Moreover, men from the mountain cultures of western New Guinea wear their sexuality proudly. The long penis gourd often has the erectile crest of the cockatoo attached to its tip, just in case the significance of the upright orange sheath is missed.

Javanese fear the forest and are happiest in towns. They attach much importance to bodily cleanliness, yet pollute their waterways horribly. Irianese treat the forest as their home. Many are indifferent to dirt on the skin, yet, through custom, protect the ecological health of their forests and rivers. Javanese respect of authority is typically Asian in its obsequiousness. Irianese are fiercely intolerant of attempts at domination. No Dani man would ever let another lord it over him as a tuan (prince) does a Javanese petani (peasant).

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by | 15 December 2007 · 1:37 pm

Tessaku Seikatsu: Tule Lake Thuggery

From Life behind Barbed Wire [鉄柵生活 Tessaku Seikatsu]: The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawai‘i Issei, by Yasutaro Soga [1873–1957] (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2008), pp. 168, 170-171:

A right-wing youth group called Shichisho-kai (literally “Club of Seven Lives”) held its first meeting in the east classroom on the night of December 12 [1944]. I decided to attend. At the meeting, young people seated themselves in groups and roll was taken. Then they all stood up and chanted in unison: “We are the loyal subjects of the Emperor. We are determined to be reborn seven times and serve our country.” After that Rev. Dojun Ochi talked about the great history of Japan, beginning with the Meiji era and going back in time. It was very interesting. The leader of Shichisho-kai was apparently a man from Tule Lake….

A rumor spread that more of these “shaven heads” would be arriving from Tule Lake…. Among the internees at Tule Lake, two groups that were constantly at odds with one another were the pro-Japan or “disloyal” faction and the pro-American or “loyal” faction. Such a division in thinking could be found at any relocation center or camp, but it was especially serious at Tule Lake. The pro-Japan group set up a spy ring to gather information on those who were sympathetic to the United States. They infiltrated various groups, placing certain individuals under surveillance and using gatherings to collect information about their enemies. They selected faction members who were to take direct action against the enemy through extraordinary measures. If this proved unsuccessful, they planned to report the enemy to the Japanese government after the war. Once a person was identified as pro-American, they intimidated him by throwing human feces at his house or even boiled feces at the windows. Families were afraid of what others might think and quickly and quietly cleaned up the mess. In July 1944, after a certain Mr. Hitomi had been murdered, fear among the pro-American internees reached a panic stage. Thirteen families fled to a separate enclosed barracks, leaving everything behind. Some of the soldiers who were asked to retrieve their possessions were said to be in sympathy with the pro-Japan group, because when they went to collect one person’s belongings, they asked, “Where’s the dog’s luggage?”

The internee population of Tule Lake Camp was eighteen thousand in October 1944. There were many families, so the camp resembled a town in Japan. Because there were many young girls at the camp, romances blossomed. This, fanned by an uncertain future, led to rash and impulsive behavior. Forty to fifty babies were born every month. Japanese-language schools were not allowed at relocation centers, but there were seven at Tule Lake, two of which were specifically named First National School and Second National School.

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