by | 23 December 2006 · 8:15 am

On Leaders Forged (or Not) in Manchuria

It is extremely difficult to try to generalize, but I think that we must consider this issue—including the problem of war responsibility—in a multilayered manner. I myself think that at present this is a theme for future research, not a time at which we can offer generalizations. Thus, let me just say a few words about the directions subsequent research might take and how we can try to place Manzhouguo in world history.

Although I have written about it in a number of articles, I think we need to reassess once more the meaning of Manzhouguo in postwar Asia. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party derives at least one of its bases in the fact that it won the anti-Japanese war which began with the Manchurian Incident. In this way, the fact that some Japanese argue for the legitimacy of Manzhouguo thus denies the very legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. This dispute is unproductive, with a strong probability of the two sides following parallel tracks semipermanently.

Let me focus for a moment, though, on the importance of Manzhouguo on the Korean peninsula in postwar East Asia. First, in the Republic of Korea there were a number of men who were educated in Manzhouguo—such as Pak Chŏng-hŭi (1917-79) and Ch’oe Kyu-ha (b. 1919) who graduated from the Daidō Academy—and acquired power in postwar Korea. [Aikido had a curious prominence in its curriculum.—J.] In this instance, Manzhouguo served as a supply base for human talent. We certainly cannot say this was always the case, for the debate continues over what the “pro-Japan faction” in Korea was. I have only introduced a very limited number of such men in my own work, but in fact there were a large number of them.

In North Korea as well, Kim Il-sŏng (1912-94) derived one of the bases of his legitimacy in the victory against Japan in Manchuria, and this legacy continues for North Korea today. There are pros and cons, but the postwar in East Asia cannot be understood without Manzhouguo.

By the same token, as concerns wartime and postwar Japan, Tōjō Hideki (1884-1948) came to amass such great power by virtue of the unification of the military police (kenpei) and the regular police in Manzhouguo. It was the first case he confronted as commanding officer of the Guandong Army’s military police, when he was awakened to his administrative skills. Until that point, he had always been treated rather coldly in Japan, but in the process of his acquisition of power thereafter, the administrative experience tying him to the military police in Manchuria was to have critical importance.

Kishi Nobusuke spent only three years in Manchuria, but the money and personnel he put together at that time was to have a huge impact on postwar politics. Together with such men as Shiina Etsusaburō (1898-1979), Nemoto Ryūtarō (b. 1907), Hirashima Toshio (b. 1891), these mainstays of the Liberal Democratic Party all had Manchurian experience. At the time of the revision of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960, Kishi made a trip to Southeast Asia before visiting the United States. The reason for this, in Kishi’s words, was that, for Japan to cross swords as equals with the United States, it was best for it to assume a position as the leader of Asia. Only then, as he put it, would Japan be on an equal standing with the United States and thus be in a position to have the Anpo Treaty revised.

In reply to a question from an interviewer, Kishi noted: “My present feeling that Japan must become the leader of Asia is no different from the consciousness I had when I went to Manzhouguo. This has not changed in the least even in the postwar era. If indeed I possess a kind of pan-Asianism, then my present sense of things is completely linked to the time when I traveled to Manzhouguo.” Thus, his Manzhouguo experience—including the money he amassed—played an extremely important role in his career. Although a well known story, Kishi told a fellow bureaucrat upon returning to Japan: “It’s best to use money after filtering it.” The effectively plutocratic essence of the Liberal Democratic Party as it has come down to us now may then be said to trace its roots back to Manchuria….

The generation of Japanese prime ministers from Yoshida Shigeru (1878-1967), who was consul-general in Fengtian, and Kishi down to Fukuda Takeo (1905-95) and Ōhira Masayoshi (1910-80) all had Asian experience. When he was serving as a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fukuda spent over two years in Nanjing as an advisor on economic affairs to the government of the Republic of China. Ōhira worked in the Asian Development Board in Zhangjiakou and the liaison section of the Mengjiang regime.

Through the years of Fukuda and Ōhira, it was people who knew Asia as a tactile experience who served as prime ministers. Thereafter, Japanese policy toward Asia became thoroughly clumsy and unskilled. To be sure, the early men had stood on the side of the rulers, but they understood, as if it was experience acquired through their skin, about the vastness of the Asian mainland, the atmosphere prevailing there, and the enormity of the population. This also meant that they understood its formidable character. The prime ministers who followed them, however, lacked as a sense of touch this spatial understanding of Asia and China, and the influence exerted by this absence of experience on Japanese policy vis-à-vis Asia has been immense. In particular, from Hosokawa Morihiro (b. 1938) to the Koizumi Jun’ichirō (b. 1942) now, the continued blur of Japan’s Asian policy is, I believe, linked to a lack of Asian experience. I would even go so far as to say that there is no remedy for this lack of sensibility.

I by no means want to leave the impression that their role in colonial rule was a good thing, but the fact that the policies of Japanese political figures, including diplomatic officials, toward Asia has now entered a dangerous stage is, in my view, heavily influenced by the lack of experience—including that acquired in Manzhouguo—gained through the senses and not simply having seen the place but having lived there. This will remain a problem for the future. I would argue for the need for men and women who wish to become politicians to spend two or three years wandering about various sites in Asia.

SOURCE: Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, by Yamamuro Shin’ichi, trans. by Joshua A. Fogel (U. Penn. Press, 2006), pp. 238-239

And the same goes for would-be leaders from other parts of the globe. Well, I can’t quote any more from this book. I have to send it on to my brother who just finished teaching a course on East Asia.

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by | 22 December 2006 · 5:17 pm

Cathedral Bell Diplomacy in Armenia and Tibet

A lengthy post on a new blog, Tibeto-Logic, by a serious scholar of Tibet begins with unexpected tales of cathedral bell diplomacy in mountain realms of Central Asia in centuries past.

In the heart of Armenia, both corporeal and spiritual, stands the Cathedral of Etchmiadzin, about 1700 years old, and founded on a still more ancient fire altar. Although not so well known to the world at large, it is a very holy place for Armenian Christians, more or less equivalent to the Vatican for Roman Catholics or the Jokhang for Tibetan Buddhists. Inside a tower attached to the Cathedral is a large bell with a Tibetan inscription. I haven’t yet been able to see a photograph of the letters, but hope to before long. It isn’t certain when the bell came to Armenia, but it is at least possible that it was supplied at the time the bell towers were built. The main bell tower was finished in 1657 by the Catholicos Yakob, and was further decorated in 1664. Soon after, in 1682, three further bell towers were added by Catholicos Eliazar. I’m told the Tibetan bell was still there last summer.

In the heart of the old city of Lhasa still today lies the Buddhist ‘Cathedral’ known as the Jokhang. Carbon datings have apparently confirmed that the main wooden structure of the Jokhang really does date back to its founding in the first half of the 7th century during the reign of Emperor Songtsen Gampo, who died in 649 give or take a year. As strange as this might sound, there is or was a Christian bell, minus its clapper, hanging in the vestibule of the Jokhang, although at the moment it may lie in storage. It was left as a relic of the Capuchin missionaries, who kept a chapel in Lhasa during the first half of the 18th century.

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by | 22 December 2006 · 4:57 pm

The Oldest Mosque in North America

Freelance journalist and journalism professor Michael Judge profiled the oldest mosque in North America in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–Not far from the banks of the Cedar River and the concrete silos of the Quaker Oats plant, in a working class neighborhood adorned with Christmas lights and American flags, sits the oldest mosque in North America. Founded in 1934, and admitted to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, it’s not what you think of when you think of a mosque. There is no lofty minaret, no balcony for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer. There is, however, a place of worship that most resembles a one-room schoolhouse–a single-story, white clapboard box with plain black shutters. If it weren’t for the crescent-topped green vinyl dome and the canopy above the entrance bearing the words “The Mother Mosque of America: Islamic Cultural & Heritage Center,” one might easily mistake it for a modest, if not meager, Pentecostal church, which indeed it was for a brief stint in its history before being abandoned altogether….

“We’ve been here for four and now five generations,” says Imam Tawil, pointing to a panoramic black-and-white photo of dozens of early settlers; the picture dates to 1936 and shows an imam and priest, both of Middle Eastern descent, proudly shaking hands in the center. “We’re as old as the oak trees in Iowa,” he continues. “We’re part of the fabric of this great state. We’re Americans with dreams and aspirations.” Many of the earliest Muslim settlers came to Cedar Rapids in the late 19th century from what is now Lebanon to work the farmland and raise crops of their own. As the community grew, it needed a permanent place to worship. Despite the hard times of the Great Depression, the local Muslim community pooled its resources and the “Mother Mosque” was dedicated on June 16, 1934. Sixteen young men from the Muslim community here served their country in World War II; two of those men never made it home. Since then, Muslim-Americans from eastern Iowa have served their country in nearly every major military conflict. “At least 20 members of the community are currently enlisted in the military,” says Imam Tawil. “Several are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq right now.” Cedar Rapids is now home to Muslims from some 30 countries, including Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, dozens of Iraqi families–mainly Shiites who rose up against Saddam–found refuge here. Today, of the 700 Muslim families who call eastern Iowa home, more than 50 are from Iraq. “Nearly all of these refugees are striving to become U.S. citizens,” says Imam Tawil, who emigrated from Jerusalem in 1983 and became a U.S. citizen in 1990. A Palestinian by birth, he says, “I have never had citizenship anywhere else but America. Every time I vote I feel so proud because I didn’t have this right in my home country.” Around the same time that he became a U.S. citizen, Imam Tawil set out to renovate and restore the Mother Mosque. The building, which had gone vacant after housing a Pentecostal church and a teen center, was purchased in 1990; renovations began in 1991 and a grand opening was held in February 1992. The mosque serves mainly as a cultural and historical center since a modern Islamic Center was completed in 1971.

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by | 21 December 2006 · 9:59 pm

Manchuria as Japanese and International Refuge

When we consider the political space of Japanese modernity, Manchuria seems to possess distinctive significance. It is important to remember when considering Japanese modernity that with the exception of only a very small number of people, such as the actress Okada Yoshiko (1903-92) who defected to the Soviet Union in 1938, and the translator and dramatist Sano Seki (1905-66), scarcely any Japanese took refuge abroad. The issue itself of why there were so few Japanese refugees is important, I believe, in understanding the history of Japanese modernity. In modern Japanese history, Manchuria appears to be something of a space for taking quasi-refuge.

The [South Manchurian Railway], too, provided a site accepting of large numbers of leftist converts. In this sense, it was the only asylum in modern Japan. A moment ago, I mentioned a certain image of Manchuria that was invested with ideals and in which was sought that which could not be realized in Japan. I think Shiba Ryōtarō (1923-96), the famed historical novelist, was no different in this regard. He was drawn to Mongolia out of a yearning for the wilderness of Manchuria and Mongolia. It bore the sense for him of an asylum to which one might escape from the space Japan blockaded. This phenomenon was not limited to men, for looking at the memoirs of Japanese women as well we see some who went to Manchuria because they could not develop personally in Japan. For example, there were a certain number of women who had dreams of developing into teachers or who wanted to teach people of other ethnicities.

In this sense, we have two polar images of Manchuria in tandem: the extremely dark image of a Manchuria as a hellish abyss and that of Manchuria as a site for asylum. Whichever extreme would emerge would depend on the person, and the image of Manchuria, then, was inevitably rent asunder. Although this is a bit of personal experience, I became quite close to Professor Matsuda Michio (1908-98). When I was writing Kimera: Manshukoku no shōzō (Chimera, a portrait of Manzhouguo, published in 1993 [the volume herein translated—JAF]), he once said to me: “It’s strange that you’re using your energy on such a thing as this. As far as we’re concemed, it’d be just fine to forget Manzhouguo altogether. It’s bizarre that such a thing ever existed.” I have never forgotten these strong words of his to me. For people who lived through it, Manchuria remained an object to be rejected but which continued nonetheless. I think that this is one of the reasons that evaluations offered by postwar scholarship on Manzhouguo has been split in bipolar fashion….

One additional issue is the existential importance of Manchuria for the Jewish people. Shanghai was the most important Jewish place of asylum in Asia, but second to it was Manchuria. Of course, once the Tripartite Alliance was signed among Japan, Germany, and Italy, they were to be expelled from Manchuria, too, but such schemes as the “Fugu Plan” conceived of a harmony of the six ethnicities—the five initially conjured up and the Jews—and military officers such as Yasue Norihiro (1888-1950) and Inuzuka Koreshige (1890-1965) were actively trying to realize it. “Fugu” or blowfish carried the meaning that, although this kind of fish is delectable, if it disagrees with you, its poison can be especially strong. If Jewish capital could be well used, this scheme envisioned, then it could be of great value. In the sense of using such a plan to control the Jews in the United States, this tactic was an extremely calculated political ploy.

Reading through the memoirs of people who actually lived in Manzhouguo, it appears that places such as Harbin were relatively easy for Jews and White Russians to live in. We know a bit about what happened to White Russian men who graduated from Kenkoku University. We thus need research which will examine what Manzhouguo, or the Kenkoku University, may have meant for White Russians. For not only Jews, but Muslims who had escaped from Central Asia as well, Manzhouguo provided a kind of asylum, as I describe it in my recent book, Shisō kadai to shite no Ajia (Asia as an intellectual task, published 2001), an important site where people who had escaped Soviet oppression could live. It is an undeniable irony of world history that, for people who escaped from Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, Manchuria bore importance as a space for survival. There were many more who traveled through Manchuria en route to the United States, and we need studies which examine this phenomenon.

Needless to say, there is as well the issue of how Manzhouguo tried to use the Jews and Muslims. Research on ethnic groups in Manzhouguo to this point has examined only the “five ethnicities,” but we need to insert into our vision the flows of such world-historical peoples as the Jews and Muslims and consider the place of Manzhouguo in their migrations. We are collecting material in this area now. There is even a recent book about Poles in Manchuria, published in Poland, describing who was there and what they did.

SOURCE: Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, by Yamamuro Shin’ichi, trans. by Joshua A. Fogel (U. Penn. Press, 2006), pp. 233-234, 237-238

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by | 21 December 2006 · 6:01 pm

Japanese Army Drug Lords of Manchuria

Furumi Tadayuki (1900-83), who served as assistant director-general for administrative affairs in Manzhouguo, once said: “Manzhouguo is an immense installation created by a top secret fund of the Guandong Army.” The Japanese army was able to engage in extensive activities, such as intelligence gathering, throughout Asia, because it had sufficient funds which Manzhouguo siphoned off. This practice cast a huge shadow over postwar Japanese politics, beginning right with Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke (1896-1987). The basic source for the monetary fund was opium. This was the problem which Gotō Shinpei worked hardest on in Taiwan; by making the sale of opium a monopoly, Gotō tried gradually to reduce the quantity of it available. He took the same approach in Manzhouguo, and although it was said to have been well regulated in Manzhouguo, this was in fact not the case. Opium production provided the richest source for such a slush fund. It was not only produced in Manchuria, but steadily flowed into Manzhouguo via Turkey, India, and Shanghai. The opium produced colosgal profits which became the financial source for Japan’s military schemes. The very fact that Amakasu Masahiko (1890-1945) gained such power in Manchuria was due to this money. While Kishi was a mere bureaucrat, Amakasu had at his disposal a slush fund of some ten million yen—which would come to ninety billion yen (roughly $800 million) today—for his special operations. This is difficult to prove on the basis of documents, the only corroboration being oral testimony, but younger scholars are now examining materials in such places as the Public Record Office in Great Britain on the remittance of opium, and this issue will probably be cleared up in the not-too-distant future.

SOURCE: Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, by Yamamuro Shin’ichi, trans. by Joshua A. Fogel (U. Penn. Press, 2006), pp. 231-232

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by | 20 December 2006 · 10:05 pm

Three Years and 1377 Blogposts

I started blogging on a Saturday exactly three years and 1377 blogposts ago. I need to concentrate on a few other things over the next few weeks so posting will be a little lighter than usual.

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by | 20 December 2006 · 8:59 pm

On Limiting the Misfortune One Causes Others

I have lived in this same bunkhouse for most of my career in San’ya, sharing a room with six others and separated from them by a single curtain. The manager who sat at the front desk when I moved in has already departed this world, having succumbed to liver cancer. I suppose I can number myself among the old-timers at this doya [ドヤ].

I can’t say that life here has been all that comfortable, but I’ve made an effort to develop something resembling affection for the destiny that has landed me in this place. This is how I look at it: What would have happened if by some mistake I’d remained stuck in a job with an ordinary firm? Unable to resist the all the static around me, I probably would have gotten married and had a family. Yet would such a life course really have been better than my life here in a doya? I think not. I doubt very much that I could have maintained my mental equilibrium had I been placed in those circumstances.

I am a vessel that was made to hold nothing more than my own body and soul. I have been quite incapable of shouldering any other burden than these. My psyche would have been crushed by any added weight. The consequence would have been not just my mental breakdown and a life of confinement but also the certain misfortune visited on family members as a result of my breakdown. At the very least, then, I’ve been able to prevent myself from becoming the source of other people’s unhappiness. Those who are made like me or who have turned out like me would surely have ended up leading the kind of life I’m leading in the sort of place I’m living in, regardless of the era. Yet might I not take secret pride in the fact that I have been able to limit the misfortune I’ve caused others to the bare minimum? (In the case of my parents it really can’t be helped.) This is how I sometimes view things. At other times, when I’m in a more positive mood, I fancy that I have happened upon a life here that quite agrees with me. There is nothing to add or detract, and I really have no cause for dissatisfaction.

I have always tried to steer my thoughts in this direction. I intend to stay the course. If possible, I’d like to remain lost in these thoughts and slide as if in a trance toward death. For someone like me, who is on the threshold of old age, such a wish is akin to a prayer of supplication.

No matter what the future holds, I am determined not to harbor any bitterness toward the fate that has led me to this place.

SOURCE: A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer, by Ōyama Shirō, trans. by Edward Fowler (Cornell U. Press, 2005), pp. 15-16 (reviewed here and here)

UPDATE: I had a heck of a time trying to track down the kanji for the word Japanese word doya, which I couldn’t find either in my dictionaries or on Google. I finally found it spelled in katakana in the Japanese Wikipedia entry for San’ya (山谷), an area of Tokyo that contains many doya.

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by | 19 December 2006 · 6:50 am

Pirate Recruits and Draftees in the Early 1700s

Pirate ships recruited men from every sort of vessel which sailed the Atlantic and Caribbean, but there were two trades which stood out as a source of willing men. The first was the Newfoundland fishery which attracted the pirates of the 1710s just as it had those of a century earlier. Here every summer there were some two thousand English and American sailors and fishermen, ‘shamefully exploited by the masters of their ships’ and doing work of ‘extraordinary labour and pains’, perfect recruits for the pirate ships who came to Newfoundland ‘to get better manned’. The West African slave trade was an even better recruiting ground for pirates, the crews of slavers being ‘generally glad of an opportunity of entering with them’, as Snelgrave reported. Slavers were notoriously unpleasant ships to work in, with more than their fair share of harsh and brutal captains and with incredibly high mortality among their crews, an average of one in four who shipped at English slaving ports such as London and Bristol not surviving the voyage. Sailors were described by a clergyman eager to redeem them as ‘a third sort of persons, to be numbered neither with the living nor the dead: their lives hanging continually in suspense before them’. This was literally true for the crews of slavers, making them very willing to swap their harsh conditions for the easygoing life aboard a pirate ship, even if it was a ‘voyage to Hell’ in which they would inevitably die sooner or later, as a pirate in Captain Cocklyn’s crew described the prospects of the venture on which he had embarked.

In the first three or four years of this period of piracy, few men were forced to join the pirates, except those known as ‘artists’, skilled men desperately needed aboard the ship such as carpenters, coopers, sailmakers and surgeons or perhaps a tailor, the pirates with their shipworn clothes ‘wanting such a person very much’, as a tailor forced to serve Bartholomew Roberts against his will declared at his trial. Musicians, such as trumpeters and fiddlers, were also more than likely to be forced on board as music was an essential part of life on a pirate ship. De Bucquoy describes the men on Taylor’s ship practising with their weapons on deck, ‘while their musicians play divers airs so that the days pass very agreeably’, though this might not be so pleasant for the musicians who were ordered ‘to play their tune or be beat’, as was ‘one of the musick’ of a slaver captured by pirates in West Africa.

But the general run of sailors, ‘being encouraged by the daily and uninterrupted success of the pirates’, needed no force to make them enlist, sometimes whole crews at a time, but more often just two or three of the more adventurous or more discontented of the merchant crew. John King, a young passenger on a sloop captured near the Virgin Islands by the famous pirate Black Jack Bellamy, was absolutely determined to join his crew. ‘He declared he would kill himself if he was restrained and even threatened his mother who was then on board as a passenger.’ But such enthusiasm for the piratical way of life began to wane as time went on and it became increasingly apparent that life as a pirate was likely to be a short one. Now volunteers dried up and more and more men were forced to serve, often with a pistol at their head or with a whip, a change in policy which made pirate crews dangerously divided between forced and willing men and enabled the former to take control of the ship on several occasions.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 166-168

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by | 18 December 2006 · 9:34 pm

Multiple Religious Secessions in Virginia

I can well predict the reactions of many secular progressives to the latest news about religious secession in Virginia.

The efforts of Episcopal Church leaders to bring about reconciliation within the troubled denomination suffered their biggest blow yet, as eight parishes in Virginia voted this weekend to sever ties with the church.

While the actions involved only eight of 7,200 Episcopal congregations, they showed that traditionalists in the US and Africa are intent on raising the pressure within the Anglican Communion. These pressures will likely come to a head next February, when the 38 top Communion leaders meet in Africa. Some have said the disagreement are so basic that they cannot sit down with the new US leader, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

As the US branch of Anglicanism, the church has been a lightning rod within the global community over its 2003 consecration of a gay bishop, with traditionalists threatening schism unless the church’s convention repented its decision.

A small number of conservative US parishes had formed a network within the church – the Anglican Communion Network – to press for a return to traditional teachings. But this weekend’s actions amounted to a dramatic secession involving two of the largest and most historic congregations. (One of them can say, “George Washington worshiped here.”)

The Falls Church and Truro Church in the northern Virginia suburbs voted overwhelmingly to join the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a group connected to Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, the most prominent and outspoken leader of traditionalists.

The office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Communion, issued a statement after the votes clarifying that CANA was “a ‘mission’ of the church of Nigeria. It is not a branch of the Anglican Communion … nor has the Archbishop of Canterbury indicated any support for its establishment.”

National churches within the Communion are autonomous, and rules prohibit one national church from interfering in the affairs of another. This tradition has been strained as US conservatives developed ever closer ties with church leaders in Africa and elsewhere. One congregation in Texas recently left the Dallas diocese and put itself informally under the bishop of Peru.

Earlier this month, the 10,000-member Diocese of San Joaquin in California took the first step toward changing its constitution to sever ties with the church.

After the June election of Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori, seven dioceses petitioned Canterbury for “alternative oversight.” Some oppose female leadership in the church; others say they cannot work with the new leader because she favors blessing same-sex unions and a role for gay bishops.

What many secular progressives (and regional bigots) may not realize is that many moderate Virginians have already seceded from the politically conservative Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for similar reasons: an objection to the polarizing politics of their respective elites.

As the SBC moved toward religious fundamentalism during the 1980s and 1990s, many Southern Baptist congregations redirected their offerings to more moderate organizations such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) and the Mainstream Baptist Network. After the SBC withdrew from the Baptist World Alliance (headquartered in Falls Church, VA) on the grounds that the BWA was “too liberal,” two of the most powerful of the dissident Southern Baptist state organizations, those in Virginia and Texas, applied to join the BWA.

In what would be a first for the Baptist World Alliance, state associations of Southern Baptists in Virginia and Texas–who at times assert their independence from the Southern Baptist Convention–have been recommended as full members in the Baptist World Alliance, the organization that the SBC left last year in an ideological dispute.

British Baptist Alistair Brown, who sits on the BWA membership committee, said in March that it is “the committee’s unanimous view that both be recommended” to the BWA General Council to become full member bodies of the worldwide group of Baptists.

The Baptist General Association of Virginia and the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which are already major financial contributors to the Baptist World Alliance, in January joined the North American Baptist Fellowship, one of BWA’s six regional groups.

Both state groups relate to the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and other nationwide missions organizations.

But if “the recommended membership is approved by the BWA’s General Council during its meeting in July, it would mean the two state conventions would become members on the same level as CBF, the American Baptist Churches, or any of the 200-plus other national and regional Baptist groups that make up BWA’s membership. They would be the first U.S. state conventions to join.

The moves by the two conventions come after the SBC voted last year to leave the global fellowship amid charges that it was too liberal, a charge denied by BWA leaders. “Both bodies express sadness at the withdrawal from membership from the BWA of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Brown told the assembled BWA leaders. “And they said that the withdrawal from the BWA had removed from them a means of fellowship with Baptists from around the world.”

And the same goes for the Episcopal Church, whose leaders have drifted too far left, while the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention have drifted too far right in relation to substantial numbers of their respective coreligionists. Both sets of elites are starting to feel the backlash.

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by | 18 December 2006 · 7:08 am

A Far Outlier Favorite Blogpost for the Year

I only recently discovered the fascinating blog Dumneazu, which follows threads of food, family, friends, and folklore wherever they lead across time and space, with plenty of photos from past and present. Its author is one of my favorite commenters on Language Hat. The Dumneazu blogpost on The Dwarf Jewish Theater of Maramures has got to be among the most far-outlying I’ve read all year. Here’s a taste.

There is an extensive wikipedia entry on the Ovitz Family. On arrival, the family members were selected by Dr. Jozef Mengele for genetic experiments. Thus it was that the Ovitz family, which in May 1944 arrived in Auschwitz together – seven dwarfs and the rest of their normal-sized family members – many of whom might have been murdered immediately had they arrived on their own, were not only spared the gas chambers, but were accorded special conditions which helped facilitate their survival. What’s more, they were able to convince the Nazis that their trusted family assistant and coachman Shimon Slomowitz, his wife and six children, as well as two additional neighbors from Rozavlea with no special connections to the family, were also relatives, and as such were allowed to join the Ovitz group. Incredibaly, the Ovitz’ were one of the only families to enter Auschwitz and survive intact, along with most of the other Maramures Jews whom they falsely claimed as relatives – thus attracting the protective umbrella of Mengele’s expermientation.

After the war, the Ovitz family settled in Haifa in the newly established state of Israel, where they called themselves the Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz and began touring. Their bittersweet cabaret was an enormous success. When they retired they had enough money to buy two cinemas, a café and a large flat where they lived together. the last surviving member of the family troupe, Perla Ovitz, died in 2001 in Haifa after revealing her amazing story to Israeli journalists Koren and Negev. “If I was a healthy Jewish girl, one meter seventy tall, I would have been gassed like the hundreds of thousands of other Jews in my country. So if I ever wondered why I was born a dwarf, my answer would have to be that my handicap, my deformity, was God’s only way to keep me alive.”

I’m a little puzzled by the blogname Dumneazu. When you google it, Google asks whether you might have meant Dumnezeu, lit. ‘Lord God’. Perhaps it’s a dialectal variant.

Whatever it may be, it provides me a good excuse to disquire a bit about Romanian deferential pronouns. The nondeferential second person singular, of course, is the familiar tu. The polite second person singular is dumneavoastră (often abbreviated d-vă), lit. ‘your (plural) lordship’. The “officious” second person singular is dumneata (d-ta), lit. ‘your (singular) lordship’. (The officious second person is the one they taught us at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey—presumably suitable for interrogating people from a position of authority.) There’s even a set of polite third person equivalents: dumnealui (d-lui) ‘his lordship’ and dumneaei (d-ei) ‘her ladyship’.

UPDATE: The blogger himself clarifies the mystery in the comments:

The name Dumneazu is a dialect variant – it is actually the nickname of a friend of mine who is the lead fiddler – the primas – of a Gypsy band in Transylvania. Everybody in the band does exactly what he tells them to do, hence the nickname. In the Transylvanian dialect that they use in Maramures, and even stronger in Moldavia, the -e sounds often get elided into -ye sounds. Pe mine becomes pe minye, etc. In the Boyash (Rudari who speak Romanian, having lost Romani) gypsy dialect of Romanian spoken in Hungary and Croatia the interesting written (mostly used for song lyrics) form – mnye – is used.

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