by | 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 As a result, Pohnpeian adopted many words from Japanese, some of which are have fallen out of use or been replaced by words from English as the prewar and wartime generation passes from the scene.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 | 3 May 2007 · 8:55 pm

Hakata: Japan’s First International Border, 663

The war of 663—known in Japanese as Hakusuki-no-e-no-tatakai [白村の江の戦い ‘Battle of the White Village River’] or the “Battle of the Paekchon River,” after the old name for the Kŭm River—has long attracted the attention of historians and laymen alike in Japan….

In Kyushu … the effects of the war were immense and long lasting…. It is no exaggeration to say that the events of the 660s and early 670s created an international boundary where none existed before. Prior to the war, there was no clear line between “us” and “them,” and traffic between the Korean Peninsula and Kyushu was relatively free (although never tremendously frequent, given the dangers and the distances involved). Within a decade after Japan’s defeat, such a line had come into existence (in the Korea Strait between Tsushima and Silla), and Japan had a fortified border with a single designated gateway. The gateway was Hakata, and the gatekeeper was Dazaifu, the command center south of the bay.

Of course, Yamato had long had a significant interest in northern Kyushu, and in particular Hakata, because of the area’s strategic location. The most sensible way to get from Yamato to the Korean Peninsula was to go down the Inland Sea, follow the northwest Kyushu coast to Hakata, and then cut across the Genkai Sea via the islands of Iki and Tsushima. To control Hakata was thus to control access to the continent—the key to hegemony in early Japan. This is why the Iwai “rebellion” posed such a threat in the 520s, and why the court moved so swiftly to put it down. After Iwai was killed, his son offered territory near Hakata to the court (in order, according to the chronicles, to save his own skin). Soon afterward, in 536, Yamato established a line of granaries (miyake, probably best understood as supply depots) up and down the Inland Sea. Much of Fukuoka Plain was also converted into a granary at this time. In 1984, remains of sixth-century storehouses and office buildings, presumably part of this “Nanotsu Miyake,” were uncovered by archaeologists working on a salvage operation near Japan Railways’ Hakata Station in Fukuoka.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 23-25

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by | 2 May 2007 · 6:01 pm

The Tang Chinese Predecessors of Matthew C. Perry, 664

Once upon a time, residents of a fishing village in Japan watched with trepidation as a fleet of foreign warships appeared in the offing beyond their own little harbor. The main concern was their lives. What knew what strange creatures might be on board or what nefarious plans had brought them to Japan?…

The year was 1853 and the place was Uraga, situated near the tip of the Miura Peninsula at the mouth of Edo (now Tokyo) Bay.The foreign vessels were under the command of Matthew Calbraith Perry, an American naval officer charged by President Millard Fillmore to induce Japan to establish trade and diplomatic relations with the United States. (Not incidentally, Fillmore wanted Japan to open its ports to American whaling vessels, whaling being one of the great American industries of the era.)…

What few people realize is that Perry’s arrival was not the first time that such a scenario had played out upon Japanese soil. The events of 1853 were a close replay of an equally momentous occasion some twelve hundred years earlier. The year was 664, and the location was Tsushima, a mountainous isle (actually, two isles separated by a narrow strait) about 50 kilometers south of the Korean port of Pusan and 150 kilometers west of Hakata on the Kyushu mainland.

On that earlier occasion, the visitors had been Chinese, not American. Their large junks, bearing flags of the Tang empire, had first been sighted on an early summer’s day in the fourth month of the Japanese lunar calendar. The ships were slowly approaching Tsushima across the Korea Strait from the general direction of Paekche, a kingdom on the west side of the Korean Peninsula. They seemed to be making directly for the village—or more precisely, for the small harbor below, where the villagers’ fishing ships lay at anchor. Those watching the approach were worried—and with good reason….

Only the previous year—663 by the Western calendar …—a vast fleet had come from Hakata on its way to “rescue Paekche,” so they said. Woe be to them! Not long afterward, some of the tattered remnants of Yamato’s once-proud navy limped back to Tsushima. Few of the war veterans tarried long; they seemed afraid of who might follow in their wake. The same was true of the many refugees from Paekche—some of them members of the royal family—who accompanied the Japanese survivors. Before long, almost all the new arrivals had departed for the Kyushu mainland, or for Yamato.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 11-14

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by | 1 May 2007 · 8:34 pm

Anne Applebaum on the New Europeans

Looking at the French elections, Anne Applebaum defines Sarkozy’s constituency as the New Europeans—those who are willing to emigrate:

Thanks to the European Union, which has opened borders and eliminated employment barriers, it is now not only possible to move, it is downright easy. And not only for the French: Something like a million Poles have left home since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, largely for England and Ireland. Unlike France, Poland is booming. But as in France, high taxes and complex regulations mean that jobs for young Poles are still too scarce and badly paid. Abroad, young Poles earn more and are treated better.

When they come back (if they come back) they’ll demand no less. The plumbers in Warsaw already expect to be paid something remarkably close to what plumbers are paid in Berlin — that is, if you can find a plumber in Warsaw at all.

All of this is, of course, precisely what previous generations of European politicians have feared. For the past decade, French, German and other European leaders have tried to unify European tax laws and regulations, the better to “even out the playing field” — or (depending on your point of view) to make life equally difficult everywhere. The emigration patterns of the past decade — and the past five years in particular — prove that that effort has failed. Sarkozy’s election campaign, if successful, might put the final nail in the coffin.

The political and economic consequences of this new mobility could be quite profound. Countries such as Poland and France may soon be forced to scrap those regulations and taxes that hamper employment, however much the French unions and the Polish bureaucracy want to keep them: If they don’t, their young people won’t come home. Leaders in those countries may also have to alter their rhetoric. Sarkozy’s Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, now uses words such as “entrepreneurship” at least some of the time, too.

Down the road, there could be cultural consequences as well. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the European Union’s failure to create anything resembling a meaningful European “Idea.” Almost by accident, the European Union may have created a new kind of European citizen instead: mobile, English-speaking, Internet-using, perhaps with the same nostalgia for Krakow or Dijon that first-generation New Yorkers feel for Missouri or Mississippi but nevertheless willing to live pretty much anywhere. Sarkozy is the first European politician to appeal directly to these new Europeans. Even if he loses, he probably won’t be the last.

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by | 1 May 2007 · 6:44 pm

Yeltsin, Putin, and Deng

In his retrospective on Boris Yeltsin in this week’s international edition of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria contrasts the divergent paths toward reform of China and Russia after their respective ideological houses of cards collapsed.

Boris Yeltsin … will surely stand as a figure on the hinge of history—yet he pointed Russia in the wrong direction. Compare Russia with China. In the early 1990s, they were the two most important countries in the world that lay outside the sphere of democratic, capitalist states. Russia had by far the stronger hand. In those days it was still regarded as the second most important world power, whose blessings were needed for any big international endeavor—whether the first gulf war or Middle East peace negotiations. It had a GDP of $1 trillion (in purchasing-power parity), the world’s second largest military and its second largest pool of technically trained personnel. Perhaps most significant, it had the most abundant endowment of natural resources on the face of the earth. And with Yeltsin as president, the country had a charismatic leader who could leverage this hard and soft power.

China by contrast was an international pariah. It had just gone through the shame of the Tiananmen Square massacres. Its per capita GDP was just one third that of Russia’s, making it one of the poorest countries in the world. Its educational and technological system was still in shambles, having been shut down during the Cultural Revolution. Its leaders—a group of seemingly narrow-minded engineers—were cautiously introducing reforms to a country still limping after decades of Mao Zedong’s mad gambits at home and abroad….

Look at the two countries today: though the Russian economy has surged because of high oil and commodity prices, China’s is now six times larger. Even more interesting is the political trajectory. Russia, in almost every dimension, has become less free over the past decade….

China, by contrast, has seen greater economic, legal and social reform every year. This year, finally, the Communist Party adopted guarantees of private property and greater government transparency. (For those who dismiss China’s reforms because they are “merely” economic, recall that for John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, the right to private property was at the heart of individual liberty.)

My point is not that China is freer than Russia. It is not. But for a decade, the arrow in Russia has been moving backward, while in China it is moving—slowly—forward.

This divergence between the Russian and Chinese models has had powerful implications around the world. Russia has become an example—but a negative example. The Chinese leadership has privately admitted to having watched Yeltsin’s reforms and decided that they produced economic chaos, social instability and no growth. (Russia’s GDP contracted by 20 percent during the 1990s.) Instead of similar shock therapy—which Bill Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe Talbott accurately characterized as “too much shock, too little therapy”—China chose a cautious, incremental path. “We must cross the river by feeling the stones with our feet,” said Deng Xiaoping. Rather than shutting down state-owned enterprises, Beijing chose to grow the economy around them, so that the state-owned portion kept shrinking and its problems became more manageable.

Look around the world, from Vietnam to Egypt, and you see officials studying China’s economic reforms. I have not come across a single official anywhere who has ever claimed to be emulating Russia’s path from communism.

Charles Krauthammer made a similar point last week.

Twenty years ago, Yeltsin made a strategic choice for democracy. Putin and his KGB regime have made a different strategic choice: the Chinese model. They watched two great powers take their exits from communism — Maoist China and Soviet Russia — and decided the Chinese got it right.

They saw Deng Xiaoping liberalize the economy while maintaining centralized power — and achieve astonishing economic success. Then they saw Gorbachev do precisely the opposite — loosening the political system while keeping an absurdly inefficient communist economy — and cause the collapse of the regime and the state.

Yeltsin’s uncertain, undisciplined and corruption-ridden attempt to deregulate both the economy and the political system caused such chaos that during his tenure gross domestic product fell by half. So Putin decided to become Deng. And while Deng destroyed democratic hopes in one fell swoop at Tiananmen Square, Putin did so methodically and gradually. By the time his goons beat up opposition demonstrators in Moscow and St. Petersburg earlier this month, so little was left of Russian democracy that the world merely yawned.

Of course, China also got a head start. Mao Zedong, the Great Ideologue who did more than anyone to discredit utopian ideologies and pave the way for brutally pragmatic realists like Deng, died in 1976.

via Peaktalk

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by | 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 | 26 April 2007 · 6:29 pm

Disloyalty: Japan’s Second Greatest Defect in the 1500s

From The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, by Beatrice Bodart-Bailey (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 10-11:

Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) has gone down in history as one of Japan’s great unifiers, the third and last of three generals who ended over a century and a half of sporadic local warfare and ushered in some two and a half centuries of unbroken peace. Yet while in hindsight we recognize in Ieyasu the first of an unbroken line of fifteen Tokugawa shoguns, the future of Tokugawa rule looked much less certain to his contemporaries.

“His Majesty … has reasons to fear for his life, for there is the example of his predecessors. This kind of empire is only acquired by force of arms and is retained by the use of tyranny,” mused the Spaniard Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco (1564-1636) when he visited Ieyasu at his retirement seat at Sunpu. The future viceroy of Mexico, who had been shipwrecked in Japan en route to his appointment, marveled at the strength of the fortifications of Ieyasu’s castle, only outdone by those of Edo, where Ieyasu’s son, Hidetada, was conducting the government. In Edo some twenty thousand men were, in de Vivero’s estimation, assigned to duty between the outer defenses ringed by the moat and the inner palace of the ruler, but he noted that Ieyasu at Suruga had a larger contingent of troops stationed nearby.

Life had presented Ieyasu with plenty of opportunity to observe the dangers befalling a ruler. Born as the son of a minor feudal lord in a period known as the “Warring States,” he had spent his youth as hostage to a neighboring clan. Though the emperor was still residing in unbroken lineage at his capital of Kyoto, political authority was split between a large number of military houses, attempting to enlarge their sphere of influence or simply to survive. The bond between lord and retainer was feudal in character, but considerations of loyalty were all too often eclipsed by strategic interests. This lack of loyalty was so prominent that the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606) considered it one of the two greatest defects of the Japanese. He ranked it second only to their sexual promiscuity. Hence the period is characterized by the phrase gekokujou, “inferiors overthrowing superiors.”

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by | 24 April 2007 · 9:11 pm

Did Leopold & Loeb Inspire Myles Fukunaga?

Just as the immense publicity surrounding Harris and Klebold‘s shooting rampage at Columbine in April 1999 explicitly inspired Cho Seung-hui‘s copycat massacre at Virginia Tech in April 2007, the “Trial of the Century” of Leopold and Loeb for kidnap and murder in Chicago in May 1924 seems to have inspired Myles Fukunaga‘s copycat crime in Honolulu in September 1928.

Antiquarian bookseller and publisher Patterson Smith links the two plots:

In 1924 two precocious University of Chicago students, the sons of very wealthy Chicago families, planned the perfect crime. In 1924 Richard Loeb and his close friend Nathan Leopold selected a younger boy at random from the student body of an upscale private school in their neighborhood. They lured Bobby Franks into their rented car, bludgeoned him with a chisel, suffocated him with chloroform, and left his naked body in a marsh. They notified the Franks family by telephone that their son was in their hands and would be returned unharmed if the kidnapers’ instructions were followed and the police not notified. Loeb and Leopold then sent the Franks family a special-delivery letter detailing how $10,000 in ransom should be prepared.

So far everything had gone according to plan. But the plan proved faulty. The site for disposing of the victim had been ill chosen, and the body was discovered and identified before any ransom was paid. Worse, Leopold had dropped his eyeglasses at the site. The police traced them to their owner, uncovered his connection with Loeb, and interrogated the two young men separately. Their loosely prearranged alibi fell apart and both confessed. Only ten days had passed between the commission of the perfect crime and its solution. The perpetrators were indicted on separate murder and kidnaping charges, either of which subjected them to the death penalty for which the public clamored.

Enter Clarence Darrow for the defense. He elected to have the case be heard without a jury and their guilt or innocence be decided by the judge. The prosecution had over one hundred witnesses, the confessions of the accuseds, and an airtight case. The only hope for the defense seemed to rest on an insanity plea. Darrow had his clients interviewed by psychiatrist after psychiatrist in what looked like a search for congenial experts. But Darrow had been planning an altogether different course which he kept secret until the very last moment, even from his clients. In one of the most astounding ploys in an American courtroom, Darrow changed the plea of his clients from Not Guilty to Guilty on both counts of murder and kidnaping. The prosecution was thunderstruck; as the cliché has it, reporters raced for the telephones.

Darrow’s stroke had shifted the contest from guilt or innocence to the question of the punishment. The sentence was within the judge’s discretion—death or life imprisonment. By pleading his clients guilty to both counts, Darrow had prevented the prosecutor from retrying the case on the second count should the prisoners escape hanging on the first….

Another demented kidnaper who did not escape the death penalty was Myles Fukunaga, a Japanese-American who in 1928 abducted Gill Jamieson, the ten-year-old son of a bank vice-president in Honolulu. Fukunaga, aged 19, employed the familiar call-at-the-school tactic and drove the boy away in a cab. The next day a messenger delivered to his father a rambling letter signed “The Three Kings.” It demanded $10,000 in ransom, which the father paid.

The day after that a newspaper received a note from The Three Kings saying that “Gill Jamieson, poor innocent lad, has departed for the Unknown, a forlorn Walking Shadow in the Great Beyond, where we all go when our time comes.” Shortly thereafter the body of the boy, who had beaten to death, was found in a shrubbed area. It lay on a couch formed of burlap and sand surmounted by a cross. A cardboard containing a misquotation from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” lay on the boy’s chest.

The story of Fukunaga is told in The Snatch Racket, published by Vanguard in 1932 and written by Edward Dean Sullivan, a Depression-era author of two other crime books. In addition to dealing with the celebrated cases I have discussed above, it provides a good picture of many lesser-known abductions, including those of underworld figures preying on their own kind.

UPDATE: The photo shows Myles Fukunaga’s jarring, pseudonymous grave marker in Mo‘ili‘ili Japanese Cemetery in Honolulu. The jagged red upright stone is engraved with 因果塚 ingachou ‘karma gravemound’ or ‘heap of misfortune’. Only Fukunaga’s posthumous name is given (釈祐寛信士 Shakuyuukan shinshi lit. ‘explanation/Shakyamuni-help-leniency honorific.title’), but the date of birth and death corresponds to his own: b. Meiji 42 (1909) February 4, d. Showa 4 (1929), November 19.

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by | 22 April 2007 · 10:36 pm

Rhodesia, 1927: Keeping Up Appearances

She found her way along the dark corridors to the library, where a lively fire was burning. Her husband was nowhere to be seen. Instead a servant whose name she had forgotten appeared as if from nowhere and led her wordlessly downstairs to the dining-room, where the long table had been set for dinner with one place setting at either end. [Stewart] Gore-Browne was standing at the window with his back to her, one arm folded behind his back and one hand in his pocket, but turned and came forward to take her hand as she entered. He was dressed stiffly in black lounge suit and white tie and looked as if he was fighting off an urge to look at his watch.

Nodding to a waiter who held out a chair for her at one end of the long table, Gore-Browne took a bottle of Pol Roger from a silver bucket on a side cabinet to celebrate their first night. There was no ice in the bucket and he apologized for it not being chilled, though the cellar kept bottles fairly cool. He always opened champagne himself, as the house servants tended to get so carried away shaking the bottles that guests ended up having a shower. Popping the cork with the suavity of one who has done so many times, he wrapped a white cloth round the neck of the bottle and poured it into two crystal flutes. Taking his place at the opposite end of the table, he waited for Jackson the servant to serve them, then lifted his glass in a toast. ‘Chin, chin, my dear Lorna. To life at Shiwa.’

‘Chin, chin.’ She raised her glass and drank, the tiny bubbles tickling her nostrils.

Another servant entered, mincing uncomfortably in the black patent shoes which Gore-Browne insisted all waiting staff wore, and bearing a silver tray in his white gloves from which he served slices of chicken liver pate on to their gold-rimmed Meissen plates. It must have made an odd scene, the husband and wife so far apart, the large silver candelabra in the centre casting shadows on the white linen cloth, the room silent except for the grind of their cutlery on the plates and the loud tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. Various oil-painted ancestors looked down on them from the walls. In the centre was Gore-Browne’s grandfather, Sir Thomas Gore-Browne, Ethel’s late father, who had been Governor of St Helena, New Zealand, Tasmania and Bermuda, and whose prominent nose had clearly been inherited by his grandson. Next to him was a chubby-faced man in bishop’s robes, Gore-Browne’s uncle Wilfred Gore-Browne, the first Bishop of Kimberley. On the other side of Sir Thomas was his wife, the beautiful raven-haired Lady Harriet, Gore-Browne’s late grandmother from the Campbell family of Craigie in Ayrshire, whom he had always called Grammy.

Having cleared away the first course, Jackson and another servant entered with silver platters of wild duck in orange sauce, sweet potatoes and green peas. The servants were always forgetting to warm up the plates, to the irritation of Gore-Browne, who found cold plates a particular dislike, even noting the event in his diary. His rebuke unnerved Jackson, who was already having difficulty manipulating the serving fork and spoon with the tight-fitting gloves. Nervous herself, and not used to champagne, young Lorna must have found it hard not to giggle, but she had been warned to behave by her uncle Major Goldman, who had always complained that she was an unruly creature, and she was eager to impress her new husband and show him that she was a worthy mistress of this great house.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 143-145

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by | 22 April 2007 · 10:35 pm

Rhodesia, 1922: “A Very Desirable Kind of Socialism”

The whole village had turned out to make bricks, as well as some other Bemba who, to [Stewart] Gore-Browne‘s delight, had returned to the lake on hearing of the ‘mad English bwana‘ and the chance to earn a few shillings. Having never seen a building made from bricks before, they were all intrigued by the process and everyone wanted to join in. ‘We had seen Europeans before and knew they liked building houses,’ recalls Paramount Chief Chitimukulu, who as a young boy worked as a brick carrier at Shiwa, ‘but we had never seen anything like this and it was wonderful to see right in the middle of the bush.’ Already the biggest employer in the whole Chinsali District, Gore-Browne had 110 people on the work register; men at 5d a day, and women and children at 2d. Two men cut the clay out of anthills and the river bed, then others took it to a pit where it was mixed with water brought from the river by small boys. The women mixed the mud and carried it from the kneading pit to the brickmaker who cut and levelled it into a rectangular mould. Once the bricks were made, the women then carried them on their heads to the drying floor, making a jolly sight, Gore-Browne noted in his diary, walking with that classic grace which English women seem to have lost. Behind them follow the old chief and his wife, rounding them up, everyone singing all the while. By midmorning the whole place is resonant with harmony as different work-gangs go back and forth in various directions, all singing. Some came with bundles of grass for thatching, others with poles and blocks of wood which they took to Cowie and Austin who were in charge of the carpentry, building the wooden frame for the house as well as furniture. Gore-Browne smiled as he saw a group of children, none of whom looked older than five, carrying spears, returning from an expedition to search for lime. They had obviously been successful and had chalked their faces with it, causing the dogs to bark in fright.

I feel like a missionary but without the hymn singing, he wrote, watching the scene. He assured his aunt and uncle that he was not about to start urging the natives to copy white man’s ways, and give up their beer-drinking, drumming and polygamy, though he had no qualms about dressing them in European clothes. In fact he hoped that in years to come the skills he was imparting would be passed on, so that the children and grandchildren of his workers would be building their own red-brick houses rather than primitive mud huts. He told Ethel:

It seems a wonderfully right state of affairs and a very desirable kind of socialism. I am cleverer and better equipped than these people so they all work to provide me with what I want, a roof and a garden, but I get them meat and protect their crops from marauding eland and find them money for their tax and few luxuries they can’t get otherwise. Also if an enemy came and burnt their houses or carried off their women, they’d expect me to take up their cause. It’s a fair arrangement and we don’t pretend we’re all equal which we obviously aren’t and when I pass through the village, they fall down and clap their hands and shout my praises. But I know that if I renege on my side of the bargain and take their crops or rape their women, they would soon rise up. In the old days they would have killed me, now I suppose they would go to the magistrate. Or maybe not.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 86-88

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