by | 21 June 2004 · 5:53 pm

The Firing of Evan Dobelle

The summary dismissal for cause last week of University of Hawai‘i President Evan Dobelle made the news on CNN, MSNBC, and even the Guardian. The best coverage seems to be that of AP correspondent Bruce Dunford, whose 20 June 2004 report in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin seems to me the most comprehensive and fairest summation to date.

From day one, his $442,000 salary and perks have been an issue, including spending $1 million on renovations to his residence, the UH’s College Hill mansion and guest house. It was three times the amount that had been planned.

Dobelle hadn’t been on the job for a year when his spending habits caught the eye of Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Brian Taniguchi (D, Moiliili-Manoa). He called for an audit of University of Hawaii Foundation money being used by Dobelle to take two dozen donors and staff members to a Janet Jackson concert at Aloha Stadium [a concert free of any “wardrobe malfunction”].

Despite such questions, the regents in their first year evaluation of Dobelle praised him for initiating progress and changing attitudes in the university system.

Things ran smoothly until November 2002, when in the closing days of the heated campaign for governor, Dobelle appeared in a television ad to endorse Democrat Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono over Republican Linda Lingle, who ended up winning….

Some see that as the root of the move to get Dobelle fired as Lingle began making appointments to the Board of Regents.

However, it was Democratic lawmakers who began pressing the point on Dobelle’s spending, including personal use of University of Hawaii Foundation funds and his hiring of highly paid assistants [including his old buddy “Wick” Sloane as the university’s CFO and Sloane’s wife as head of the UH Foundation].

On July 6, 2003, House Higher Education Committee Chairman K. Mark Takai (D, Newtown-Pearl City), Sen. Donna Mercado Kim (D, Kalihi Valley-Halawa), retired professor Ralph Moberly and UH official Amy Agbayani, a veteran Democratic Party insider, co-authored an article highly critical of the UH president.

“In Dobelle’s two years, we see an institution where student tuition is being raised while administrative salaries are boosted by more than $4 million, where substance and services take a back seat to marketing and public relations, and where a globe-trotting president fails to bring home the money he promised,” the article said.

Takai said he initiated a search for Dobelle’s spending and travel records after the president and his top aides didn’t show up at a House Higher Education Committee meeting on April 16, 2003, to answer questions about the $200,000 President’s Protocol and Support Fund at the University of Hawaii Foundation, the legally separate nonprofit organization that raises funds for the school. It’s to be spent on things that the president feels will advance the university.

Dobelle had notified the committee he would be at a mainland conference that day, but Takai said his staff checked with conference officials and determined Dobelle did not attend.

The lawmaker, who once headed the UH student body government and Manoa campus student newspaper, said a check of travel documents showed Dobelle was on Oahu that day.

“So in effect, he lied to us,” said Takai, who added that the Dobelle spending and travel records obtained by the committee were turned over to the Board of Regents and likely prompted a private audit ordered by the regents. The report on that audit has yet to be made public….

In February, the board began a new evaluation of Dobelle, headed up by [Kitty] Lagareta, a Lingle confidante and key Lingle campaign official in the 2002 governor’s race.

The tone for the new evaluation no doubt was set in April, when the previously confidential and highly critical report on Dobelle’s 2003 evaluation was made public at the direction of the state Office of Information Practices.

The UH Board of Regents are in a tough spot. When they gave Dobelle a negative evaluation earlier in the year, he threatened to sue if they made it public. Now they’re taking a lot of flack for not spelling out the grounds for Dobelle’s dismissal, even though they risk lawsuits if they breach confidentiality in personnel matters. Both Dobelle and the Regents have hired lawyers.

Here are a few more background items from various sources.

Pacific Business News reported that Dobelle apparently knew something was up, suggesting he perhaps deliberately made himself hard to reach.

Two members of the University of Hawaii Board of Regents say the regents warned Evan Dobelle he should attend their meeting this week, and when he didn’t they tried repeatedly to reach him by phone to tell him what happened….

Board of Regents Chairwoman Patricia Lee replies that the meeting was not kept secret from Dobelle, who asked if he should be there for it and was told he should. She also says the regents made several attempts to reach Dobelle by phone, but never got a callback, and still haven’t.

“Evidently the president chooses not to communicate with the board,” Lee said Friday. “He has communicated with counsel.”

Dobelle was rumored to have been job-hunting ever since he ran afoul of the legislature last year. Perhaps his prominent placement (cover and lead article) in the Winter 2004 issue of The Presidency was part of that effort.

“The American Council on Education’s flagship magazine, The Presidency focuses on college and university presidents and chancellors.”

Dobelle appears to be a master of PC PR, managing in 2002 to wangle a position judging the decidedly un-PC Miss America pageant and helping give it a PC spin (as reported by Jake Tapper of Salon).

“This selection validates an opportunity for young women who never would have considered entering this competition,” says judge Evan S. Dobelle — the president of the University of Hawaii and the White House chief of protocol during the Carter administration — when it’s all done. “By picking a multiracial, Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard Law School woman who’s articulate and personable and was selected, in my opinion, because she was the smartest — that is antithetical to the perception historically of the pageant.”

Early in his tenure, Dobelle managed to “tread on dangerous ground politically when he handed out more than 200 termination notices to deans, directors and top managers” around Christmas 2002. “Even though most of the notices weren’t acted upon, they left bad feelings, sentiment that reverberated all the way to the Legislature.” The recipients never received follow-up letters whether each would be rehired or let go at the end of the year. Instead, clarifications were issued through press releases. UH administrators often had to read the local papers to find out what was happening at the university. In that respect, the manner in which Dobelle was fired gives him a taste of his own medicine.

I don’t know. Dobelle seems to be someone a Texan might describe as “all hat, and somebody else’s cattle” (rather than “all hat, no cattle”). The Regents who appointed him and gave him such a rich, long-term, iron-clad contract have as much to answer for as the ones who fired him.

UPDATE: More background information is coming out about Dobelle’s dismissal. First, concerns about accreditation seem to have been a factor.

The dysfunctional relationship between University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle and the Board of Regents threatened the accreditation of three UH campuses, according to a strongly worded report that appears to have been a factor in Dobelle’s firing.

A team from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges — the accrediting body for UH-Manoa, UH-Hilo and UH-West Oahu — told the university last month that the “severe difficulties” between the regents and the president do not meet standards of accreditation for leadership of a university.

Dobelle’s response was to send the regents for training. It was all their fault.

He described the board as “inexperienced” and said he set aside $50,000 for regents to get training from the Association of Governing Boards — another recommendation in the report.

“It’s a learning curve that they chose not to take,” Dobelle said. “I wish we could work it out. They chose not to.”

Next, a legislative fiscal hawk expresses concern about Dobelle’s inability to deliver on his fund-raising promises.

Donna Mercado Kim, state Senate vice president, a longtime critic of Dobelle, said she doubts that Dobelle was fired because of his political support for Gov. Linda Lingle’s opponent, former Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono.

“As a Democrat, I’d like nothing better than to point the finger to Lingle and say it was all politics and that she orchestrated it,” Kim (D, Kalihi Valley-Halawa) said in an interview. “I know she is denying her involvement and I tend to believe it. I was talking to one of the regents. They said they wouldn’t fire him unless the evidence was clear.” …

“I spoke to regents who left the board prematurely, and they said they did so because of Evan Dobelle and (they) were ones appointed by Cayetano [the previous governor, a Democrat].

“They said they couldn’t stomach it any longer, so it was only a matter of time.”

Kim recalled that she was impressed with Dobelle when he came to Hawaii in 2001, but after failing to get him to explain what he would do if he were unable to raise the $150 million for the medical school, she became frustrated.

“Time went by and he was making these promises, but he didn’t have anything to show for it,” Kim said.

Long-time UH faculty member Meda Chesney-Lind adds her perspective.

By way of introduction, I’ve been in the UH system since 1969, and in my time I’ve known and worked with five presidents [Harlan Cleveland, Fujio Matsuda, Al Simone, Ken Mortimer, and Dobelle]. Obviously, I worked with some more closely than others, but I was on the Senate Executive Committee of the UHM Faculty Senate when President Dobelle was first on the campus. I recall the excitement and all the hope that we had about his presidency.

I also recall the deep disappointment that began, for me, some months into his tenure. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that after saying he was a “bottom up,” “faculty driven” administrator, we hardly ever saw him again; his talks announcing major new University initiatives were all off campus. Ultimately, he barely avoided being censured by our senate (and that was avoided only because he threatened to make Deane Neubauer resign if we went through with it). After the first year, filled with cronyistic hiring, excessive and expensive foreign and domestic travel, and grand schemes, he sort of disappeared. Candidly, most of us felt that he was phoning in his performance for much of the last year.

Finally, Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter Cynthia Oi editorializes under the headline Dobelle’s team of outsiders acted as their own insiders:

No one has dared to say outright that he was seen as an uppity mainland haole [Caucasian] who snubbed local sensitivities, but undertones of the viewpoint were audible beneath careful remarks of politicians, faculty, community leaders and others.

There have been many times, private and public, when localism seeped into conflict and life in these islands. Slippery to define, the characteristic fuses values and attitude, social and economic standing, birthplace and ethnicity. It can be precious asset or parochial contaminant.

But in Dobelle’s case, I don’t think it can be marked as the overpowering toxin that produced this unseemly mess. It isn’t an “only in Hawaii” situation. Disrespect knows no boundaries of ocean or land. It is not one-sided or singular….

Dobelle and his crew were their own dazzling insiders. As intelligent and experienced, as sophisticated and charming, as motivated and passionate about doing good, they seemed deaf and blind to the importance of engaging the community. Not just perfunctorily, not through “howzits” and other words, but through deeds, through showing up.

Dobelle may be unaware that he was cut a lot of slack. He made big shoulders about raising money, but the flash didn’t match the cash. Give him time, was the initial reaction. But extravagances overshadowed fund raising, talk subbed for progress, and evasion and snubs became the norm….

Disrespect yields the same.

25-28 June 2004 UPDATE: Former regents appointed by Democratic Governor Ben Cayetano have begun to speak out.

University of Hawaii regents began having concerns about ousted UH President Evan Dobelle’s leadership style on his first day in office, a former regent said.

Regents also began questioning Dobelle’s travel spending and fund raising months before board members appointed by Gov. Linda Lingle took office last July, documents and interviews show.

When regent Michael Hartley resigned on Nov. 5, 2002, he cited Dobelle’s public endorsement of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mazie Hirono as one of several incidents that led to his decision….

Hartley also criticized what he saw as Dobelle’s “lack of respect” for the board by not consulting with regents before sending a fax announcing his endorsement of Hirono….

In a May 8, 2003, memo to Dobelle, former Maui regent C. Everett Dowling asked the president to provide the board a summary of his expenses charged to the UH Foundation and of his travel, including costs for other people traveling with him. As part of last year’s annual evaluation of the president, Dowling also asked for a summary of Dobelle’s fund-raising efforts….

Former board Chairman Bert Kobayashi followed up with another memo on June 17, 2003, repeating Dowling’s request. [Former regent Bert Kobayashi is to former governor Ben Cayetano as current regent Kitty Lagareta is to current governor Linda Lingle–strong political allies in both cases.] …

At a press conference announcing his hiring, Dobelle, with the regents standing behind him, announced several high-level personnel appointments.

Board members were stunned because personnel appointments have to be approved by the board, and no one had been given advance notice.

The business community seems far more stunned at Dobelle’s firing than the university community does. The former have probably been drooling over all the promises of new campus construction projects. In October 2002, Hawaii Business magazine named Dobelle one of “The 10 most influential people in Hawaii” (in #3 position after First Hawaiian Bank CEO Walter Dods and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, both of whom were said to be among Dobelle’s strongest backers; Dods was on the selection committee). In January 2003, Pacific Business News reported, “Evan Dobelle, president of the University of Hawaii, has been named as the 2002 Sales Person of the Year by the Sales and Marketing Executives of Honolulu.”

Two MidWeek magazine columnists weigh in on opposite sides. Dan Boylan, a Democratic Party insider who served on the committee that selected Dobelle and writes a column called “Mostly Politics,” manages in the 23 June 2004 issue to blame the whole affair on partisan politics, while explicitly acknowledging that Dobelle was a compulsively partisan political hack [which was very likely a feature, not a bug, for the selection committee].

Dobelle let his partisanship blind him to his responsibility to the university he led. [One could say the same for the selection committee!] Dobelle, the former treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and protocol officer for Democratic President Jimmy Carter, couldn’t rise above his party loyalty.

The other columnist, veteran newsman Bob Jones, is much harsher in the 30 June 2004 issue.

Three observations from one of the regents: 1) Six of the ten regents who voted for the firing are card-carrying democrats. 2) If the public knew the mountain of data we have they’d be asking why we didn’t fire him earlier. 3) The BOR attorney said he felt they had a strong case for showing moral turpitude.

Jones’s column on 23 June 2004 ends off on an equally harsh note.

We may find that the vice president who’s now acting president and who previously ran the UH Business School, David McClain, is the right man at the right time.

I sure wouldn’t want to go back to the same old search committee that brought us Trinity College’s leftover [and his hapless predecessor].

A year ago, on 4 July 2003, long-time Hawai‘i muckraking reporter Ian Lind blogged a harbinger of Dobelle’s problems:

Both Honolulu papers this morning report on the resignation of Maui developer Everett Dowling from the University of Hawaii’s Board of Regents. Both focus on the flap over Dowling’s potential conflict of interest in a proposed land deal. But Dowling also been one of President Evan Dobelle’s key backers on the board, and his departure could signal rockier relations between the president and the board.

For decades, Hawai‘i’s dominant Democrats have seen the University as primarily a construction site, not an instruction site. Dobelle certainly fit the bill in that regard.

Perhaps Dobelle thought Hawai‘i operated the way Connecticut operated under now disgraced Republican Gov. John G. Rowland (due to resign on 1 July), with whom he cooperated on urban renewal projects.

UPDATE (13 July 2004): KITV investigative reporter Keoki Kerr adds several new details about ongoing investigation of Dobelle’s finances:

UH regents are investigating whether Dobelle’s wife attended a college reunion instead of going to an official conference on a trip paid for by the UH Foundation, sources told KITV 4 News. An audit revealed the foundation spent $4,100 to send his wife, Kit, to a conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, representing her husband. However, investigators want to know how she attended a UM Amherst class reunion at the same time.

Another issue under investigation is why a UH fiscal officer who raised questions about pricey renovations to the president’s College Hill mansion was forced out on administrative leave. In 2001, renovations there soared from an initial $170,000 to $1.2 million, including $500 for a birdcage….

[T]he regents are also looking into about $70,000 in renovations to Dobelle’s office at Bachman Hall on the UH Manoa campus.

The Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii lent the president’s office [$70,000] for the work in 2001 and Dobelle’s office didn’t pay the money back for nearly three years, until May of this year, sources said.

That raised eyebrows because RCUH’s mission is research and training, not office renovations for the president….

Dobelle knew his job was in jeopardy months before he was fired. Sources said at least one regent told Dobelle to start looking for another job as far back as January of this year, six months before he was fired.

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by | 20 June 2004 · 7:37 pm

Spicy SPAM Balls Wins Guam Cook-off

Guam’s Pacific Daily News reports:

Ben Torres modified a local favorite dish to win the fourth annual SPAM Cook-off Islandstyle last weekend.

The 53-year-old Barrigada resident’s “Spicy SPAM Balls,” which is made up of ingredients used in fried rice, rolled into a ball and quick fried, bested the dishes of five other finalists. With the win, Torres received $1,000 in cash and a trip for two to Austin, Minn., the SPAM capital of the world.

The SPAM Museum is worth seeing, Ben. But bring your own food.

SPAM played a crucial role in World War II, and not just in the Pacific Islands.

As America entered World War II, SPAM luncheon meat played a crucial role overseas. With Allied forces fighting to liberate Europe, Hormel Foods provided 15 million cans of food to troops each week. SPAM immediately became a constant part of a soldiers’ diets, and earned much praise for feeding the starving British and Soviet armies as well as civilians….

  • SPAM was used as a B-ration – to be served in rotation with other meats behind the lines overseas and at camps and bases in the States. However, many times GIs were eating it two or three times a day….
  • Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev wrote, “Without SPAM we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.”
  • Margaret Thatcher, then a teenager, vividly remembered opening a tin of SPAM on Boxing Day (an English holiday observed the day after Christmas). She stated, “We had some lettuce and tomatoes and peaches, so it was SPAM and salad.”

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by | 20 June 2004 · 10:31 am

Political Shibai or Kabuki?

The Japanese word shibai ‘performance, drama’, as in Okinawa shibai or Ikari ningyo shibai ‘Ikari puppet theatre’, now seems well established in at least one regional dialect of English as a way to denote an empty political performance.

It has been used for a long time in Hawai‘i political talk, and someone recently (after 1999) submitted the following entry to the OED.

political shibai – (Hawaiian, from the Japanese) political shamming

Here’s an example of its usage in a column by David Shapiro in the 5 May 2004 Honolulu Advertiser headlined “What reform? It’s all shibai” about typical political sleight-of-hand by the Hawai‘i State Legislature.

With great fanfare, the 2002 Legislature voted to make Hawai’i the only state in the nation to impose price caps on gasoline.

Senators and representatives ballyhooed the new law in that year’s election, congratulating themselves for bold action to reduce the crushing burden of high fuel prices on Hawai’i’s consumers.

The problem was that the law was an illusion, a political sleight-of-hand that did absolutely nothing to regulate gasoline prices–not in 2002 or 2003 or now, it seems, even 2004.

That’s because the Legislature, while saying consumers needed relief “now,” delayed implementation of the caps for two years to study how to enforce lower prices.

Key agencies couldn’t make the deadline, partly because the Legislature’s misguided capping formula could have increased local gasoline prices by 10 cents a gallon.

So the Legislature is now delaying implementation again, from July 2004 to September 2005. The 2005 Legislature will have yet another chance to tinker or delay before the law takes effect.

HawaiiAnswers.com cites more examples from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (attesting usage dating back to the 1960s) and Linkmeister titled a 7 January 2003 blogpost “Shibai, crap and nonsense” but I haven’t been able to turn up any convincing examples of political shibai used by people without Hawai‘i connections.

The more common synonym elsewhere seems to be kabuki, as in:

  • “Outrage Kabuki: When bloggers attack” by Julian Sanchez in reasononline on 5 April 2004 (“That means ritual outrage isn’t just fun; it can be politically efficacious.”)

  • “The Elephants in the Kabuki Theater” on Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal on 22 April 2004 (“the elephants in the kabuki theater: … long-time Republican hawk Richard Clarke and … bipartisan long-time security hawk Rand Beers”)

  • “Energy Kabuki: House to repass energy bill to vex Democrats” by Amanda Griscom in Grist Magazine on 15 June 2004. (“The whole thing is a sham,” said Jim Waltman, director of refuge and wildlife programs for the Wilderness Society. “It’s just an elaborate Beltway blame game.”)

The earliest online usage I turned up in a quick Google search is by AP reporter Ron Fournier quoting John McCain in an article in the Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News on 1 September 1999.

[McCain] called the congressional tax-cut plan an “exercise in political kabuki,” criticizing GOP leaders for a bill that gives immediate tax cuts to special interests and delays reductions to taxpayers.

On 10 November 2000, during the legal maneuverings in the wake of the U.S. presidential elections in 2000, Bill Baker of Election Watch accused Al Gore of allowing “this outrageous and bizarre political kabuki theatre to continue.”

On 10 August 2001, Jake Tapper writing in Salon slathers Kerry with the same face paint.

Kerry clearly is taking nothing for granted, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t recognize what essentially right now is political kabuki theater. I cannot even hint that I want anything other than my Senate seat, lest they resent me for it.

In a retrospective published by the Japan Times on 23 September 2003, Japan-resident foreign correspondent David McNeill applied the same term in an imaginary story he wished he could have filed in 2001.

Koizumi wins political kabuki show

Bumbling Yoshio Mori has finally been replaced by the more media-friendly Junichiro Koizumi in a contest for leadership of the LDP that nevertheless leaves Japan’s sclerotic political structure intact. Politicians in Japan have, in any case, very little power to influence policy in comparison to the bureaucrats who write it.

By now, political kabuki seems well entrenched, not just as a twisted borrowing from Japanese, but as a hackneyed meme, like most political reporting itself.

UPDATE: Semantic Compositions assembles some googlestats on (political) kabuki.

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by | 19 June 2004 · 8:39 pm

Kamishibai Shrinks but Spreads

Kamishibai–“the picture card show”–is a kind of storytelling that, as late as 1950, was still enormously popular in the Japanese countryside. It has been estimated that at that date there were yet active some 25,000 players. In spite of the poor documentation (as is the case, incidentally, with nearly all other types of folk arts in Japan and elsewhere until recently), the magnitude of their impact on society was tremendous. Satoshi Kako calls kamishibai a type of early-day television. With the advent of that modern electronic device, however, its primitive forerunner faded from the streets with amazing rapidity.

Kamishibai now is to be found, for the most part, only in primary school classrooms as a teaching device and devoid of its traditional associations. Very few Japanese under age forty whom I approached had ever heard of kamishibai as a form of street entertainment.

“Uncle Kamishibai” usually carried with him three sets of pictures for telling separate stories. Each set consisted of approximately ten thick paper sheets or light boards of illustrations. The sheets would be inserted one after another into a box with a large, fixed-frame aperture. The most important words that went along with a given scene would be written on the back of the sheet. The box, during this century, was most often attached to the back of a bicycle. The kamishibai player would ride about from neighborhood to neighborhood, striking his wooden clapper or beating on a small drum to attract the attention of children. When a crowd had gathered, he would sell them sweets or, more rarely, books, medals, and trinkets that even poor children could afford. Those who bought from him would be permitted to stand up front where they could see and hear clearly. This is how the kamishibai player earned his living. One is reminded of the old folk doctor of the American frontier. It is difficult to say which of his wares were more important–the remedies, potions, and appliances or the bombastic rhetoric and showmanship. In both cases, what was important is that a minor entertainment “event” took place that relieved the participants of the tedium of everyday life.

The origins of kamishibai are lost in obscurity but may, perhaps, be traced back to so-called “shadow-pictures” (kage-e). It has also been suggested that they may have been imported from Germany during the nineteenth century. Peep shows … were indeed introduced to Japan from abroad and were known during the Meiji period (1868-1912) as nozoki karakuri (“peep gimmick”) or karakuri-megane (“gimmicky glasses”) (note that puppets and marionettes may be referred to as karakuri-ningyoo “gimmicky dolls”). It would seem, however, that the technique of kamishibai was derived from a combination of influences (etoki [‘picture-explanations’ at temples dating back to Heian times], kage-e, Middle Eastern and European picture boxes, etc.). Be that as it may, kamishibai clearly falls within the general development of Asian picture-storytelling.

SOURCE: Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis by Victor H. Mair (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1988; now out-of-print), pp. 115-116. [Mair compares these traditions with Southeast Asian wayang ‘shadow’ plays, Indian bhopo, Chinese pien wen (Buddhist song-tales dating from Tang times), German bänkelsang, Italian cantastorie, and medieval European jongleur traditions.]

While kamishibai has shrunk down to a classroom technique in Japan, it has expanded to classrooms around the world. There is even a kamishibai version of Beowulf.

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by | 18 June 2004 · 6:19 pm

Japaniizu Beesubooru, Hittingu

More creative Japanese baseball terms of English origin: Hitting Terms

abekku hoomu ran ‘back-to-back home run’ (lit. ‘dating home run’, from Fr. avec ‘with’ although most abekku are likely to be vis-à-vis, not dosey-do)

endo ran ‘(hit) and run’

ueetingu saakuru ‘on-deck circle’

oobaa ‘hit over the head of an outfielder’ (thus, reefuto oobaa, raito oobaa, sentaa oobaa)

kushyon booru ‘ball hit off the (cushioned) outfield fence’

jaasto miito ‘just meeting the ball, contact hitting’

shooto rainaa ‘line drive to short’ (cf. fuasto rainaa ‘line drive to first base’)

suitchi hittaa ‘switch hitter’

goro ‘ground ball’ (SANRUI goro ‘ground ball to third’)

hoomu in ‘run, reaching home to score’

tsuubeesu ‘two base hit, double’

taimurii ‘a timely (clutch) hit that scores a run’

taimurii eraa ‘a timely error that allows a run to score’

nokku ‘fungo’ (knocking balls into the field for fielding practice)

MANRUI hoomu ran ‘full-base home run, grand slam’

ranningu hoomu ran ‘running home run, inside-the-park home run’

fuoa booru ‘four balls, a walk’

SOURCE: A Slightly Askew Glossary of Japanese Baseball Terms by professional translator Steven P. Venti

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by | 18 June 2004 · 5:53 pm

Herbert Nicholson, Grandfather Goat

One of the near-saints in the lore of the family I grew up in was an old man we called Yagi no Ojiisan ‘Grandfather Goat’, a Quaker missionary whose principal contribution to postwar Japan, Okinawa, and Korea was organizing the delivery of goats to farmers who had lost their means of livelihood in the wake of the horrible destruction of that war. The Goat Farmer (“The largest circulation goat magazine in the world”) mentions one of his exploits:

Goat soup is traditionally served at various festive events, and served raw–as sashimi–it is considered a delicacy. Goat soup is often served before or after the athletic events as the meat is high in energy, and it is said to be the best cure for a hangover and thus served after drinking parties. However, most Okinawans are not so familiar with its milk.

People in their 50s and older may have some hazy memories from the past of drinking goat milk as children. Many doctors say that, for small babies, goat milk is far better alternative to cow’s milk when mother’s milk is not available. Right after the war, U.S. military provided many Okinawan children goat milk because of its high nutritional value.

After WWII in 1947, Pastor Herbert Nicholson of LARA (Licensed Agencies for the Relief in Asia) introduced about 200 goats to Okinawa. Over the following years another 2,615 goats were brought in by LARA to produce goat milk. The Okinawans popularly called those goats “LARA goats.”

Okinawan associations in Hawai‘i also played a big role in providing relief for their ravaged homeland.

The various relief efforts spanned four years (1945-1949), during which time 150 tons of clothing, hundreds of small appliances, toys and sundry items were collected. But the relief efforts didn’t end there: Hawaii Uchinanchu [Okinawans] and other compassionate individuals and organizations sent $20,000 in medicine and medical supplies, collected $50,000 to purchase and transport 550 pigs and 750 milking goats, and demonstrated their foresight by assisting in the effort to build the University of the Ryukyus. These relief missions revived efforts to establish a unified organization of Okinawan individuals, clubs and groups.

After that concerted effort, the fractious associations from separate villages, towns, and islands of Okinawa finally managed to form the Hawaii United Okinawa Association in 1951.

The only other thing I knew about Yagi no Ojiisan as a kid (human, not goat) was that he was a Quaker and had a cabin at Karuizawa, in Nagano prefecture, where he kindly allowed us to stay for a few weeks during the summer of 1957, when the current Japanese Emperor Akihito met the current Empress Michiko on the tennis courts of the same resort. (My father was raised a Quaker, and it was by virtue of Quaker cronyism that Nicholson allowed us to use his cabin. It certainly wasn’t any connection to royalty.)

But I wasn’t aware of his earlier history:

Historians have acknowledged the important, even heroic, role of former missionary Herbert Nicholson in providing material aid to Japanese Americans from the Los Angeles area interned at Manzanar. Nicholson made literally dozens of trips to the camp, bringing news from home, personal belongings from storage, and gifts from friends, and handling numerous business transactions…. But others also combined opposition to removal and internment with concrete acts of service to improve conditions for the interned Japanese Americans.(27)…

(27) Betty Mitson, “A Friend of the American Way: An Interview with Herbert V. Nicholson,” in Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation, ed. Arthur Hansen and Betty Mitson (Fullerton, Cal., 1974), 110-42; Michi Weglyn and Betty Mitson, eds., Valiant Odyssey: Herbert Nicholson In and Out of America’s Concentration Camps (Upland, Calif., 1978) [the latter being “Interview and personal stories of Herbert Nicholson, pastor of the West Los Angeles Japanese Methodist Church in 1941, who traveled to many of the internment camps during the war” according to the Go for Broke Educational Foundation]

Confirmation that Nicholson was a Quaker, not a Methodist, comes from testimony by Victor Okada of Los Angeles:

After 25 years as a missionary in rural Japan, Rev. Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker was asked to take over the Japanese Methodist Chruch in Pasadena. Nicholson and his wife visited Manzanar, Poston and Gila River camps. “While the majority of people on the outside kept their distance, we were fortunate that people like Reverend and Mrs. Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker missionaries who had served in Japan, would visit and bring a truckful of item like baby cribs, blankets, newspapers and magazines. Through his church in [Pasadena] other churches regularly donated things for the internees. P 105 Muts Okada”

UPDATE: A website on Quakerism in Japan indicates that Herbert and Aladeline Nicholson were among the Quaker missionaries near Mito (a conservative Tokugawa stronghold) during the early decades of the twentieth century. My father says we first crossed paths with Nicholson when we lived in Kokura, Japan, just across the straits from war-ravaged Korea during the early 1950s. Although Nicholson was ojiisan ‘grandfather’ to us kids, he was known as Yagi no Ojisan ‘Uncle Goat’ to Japanese school children at the time. Apparently Nicholson and Albert Schweitzer were among the few, if not the only, model foreigners profiled in Japanese schoolbooks in those days.

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by | 17 June 2004 · 8:46 pm

Naipaul on the Imperialism of Universal Religions

The overthrow of the old religions–religions linked to the earth and animals and the deities of a particular place or tribe–by the revealed religions is one of the haunting themes of history. Even when there are texts, as with the ancient Roman-Christian world, the changeover is hard to follow. There are only indications. It can be seen that the earth religions are limited, offering everything to the gods and very little to men. If these religions can be attractive now, it is principally for modem aesthetic reasons; and even so, it is impossible to imagine a life completely within them. The ideas of the revealed religions–Buddhism (if it can be included), Christianity, Islam–are larger, more human, more related to what men see as their pain, and more related to a moral view of the world. It might also be that the great conversions, of nations or cultures, as in Indonesia, occur when people have no idea of themselves, and have no means of understanding or retrieving their past.

The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people–the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet–a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 63-64

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by | 17 June 2004 · 8:31 pm

Naipaul on Sacred Places

My first eighteen years were spent two oceans away, on the other side of the globe, in the New World, on an island in the mouth of one of the great South American rivers. The island had no sacred places; and it was nearly forty years after I had left the island that I identified the lack.

I began to feel when I was quite young that there was an incompleteness, an emptiness, about the place, and that the real world existed somewhere else. I used to feel that the climate had burnt away history and possibility. This feeling rnight have had to do with the smallness of the island, which we all used to say was only a dot on the map of the world. It rnight have had to do with the general poverty and the breakdown of the extended family system that had come with us from India. It might have had to do with the wretched condition of India itself; and with the knowledge at the same time that we who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped quite abruptly with a father or grandfather.

Later, years after I had left–knowledge of things never corning all at once, but in layers–I thought that the place was unhallowed because it hadn’t been written about. And later still I thought that the agricultural colony, in effect a plantation, honored neither land nor people. But it was much later, in India, in Bombay, in a crowded industrial area–which was yet full of unexpected holy spots, a rock, a tree–that I understood that, whatever the similarities of climate and vegetation and formal belief and poverty and crowd, the people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of their earth were different from us.

There would have been sacred places on the island, and in all the other islands to the north. On the tiny island of St. Kitts, for example, there were–hidden by sugarcane fields–rocks with crude pre-Columbian carvings. But the aboriginal people who knew about the sacred places had been destroyed on our island, and instead of them there were–in the plantation colony–people like us, whose sacred places were in other continents.

Too late, then, I remembered with a pang a story I had heard about when I was a child, and later read another version of (in Charles Kingsley’s At Last, 1871). Every now and then, according to this story, groups of aboriginal Indians in canoes came across the gulf from the continent (where remnants of the tribes still existed), walked to certain places in the woods in the southern hills, performed certain rites or made offerings, and then, with certain fruit they had gathered, went back home across the gulf. This was all that I heard. I wasn’t of an age to want to ask more or to find out more; and the unfinished, unexplained story now is like something in a dream, an elusive echo from another kind of consciousness.

Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness–which is more than the idea of the “environment”–that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness–rather than history and the past–that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover.

So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries–lran, Pakistan, Indonesia–the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 51-52

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by | 16 June 2004 · 8:20 pm

New Missionaries to Japan, 1950

We left for Japan from Winchester, Virginia, in August of 1950. We travelled from Martinsburg by train. We had one child who was one year old and 17 pieces of baggage. We traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, where we had to change trains for the three day trip to San Francisco where we would debark for Japan. Our cabin was a small one with barely enough room for us to sit or lie down. Joel had problems with being cooped up so long in such a small space. Edith was pregnant and often sick from the motion of the train. It was not the most pleasant trip of my life.

We finally arrived in San Francisco where we stayed in a hotel for two days until the ship left. The several new missionaries who met there took turns baby-sitting each other’s children so that they would have some chance to tour the city and make final preparations for departure. We embarked on the President Cleveland on or about August 12 for the two weeks voyage. Our accommodations were great and the ship provided us plenty of space to move around, laze about, play shuffle board, horseshoes, deck volleyball, and take walks around the ship. Joel had just learned to walk and could not understand why the surface on which he walked kept bobbing around. The food was exquisite. Our waiter complained, “A banquet every meal” and he was right! We could order as many appetizers, entrees and desserts as we wanted. Mealtime was sometimes quite an experience with a one year old and a pregnant, seasick wife, but I mainly remember how good the food was.

We arrived in Japan on August 23, 1950. Japan was a long way from home in Southampton County, Virginia. Except for the trip on a cattle boat to Europe in 1946, including a brief few days in Poland, this was my first experience outside of the United States. I really knew very little about the land which would be my domicile for most of the next twenty years or so. I knew even less of the Japanese language for it was the philosophy of the Foreign Mission Board that foreign languages were best learned in the country where the missionaries would work. A Japanese actress who had spent most of her life in the United States and was on the President Cleveland returning to her native land to play a leading role in Madame Butterfly took the time to teach those of us who were interested a few phrases in Japanese. So, as I have so often in my life I embarked on an adventure for which I was ill prepared.

I did not at that time fully realize that all those Japanese were not the foreigners but we were. Americans often feel that natives of other lands are the foreigners rather than ourselves when we travel to their countries. Everything seemed so “foreign” to me. The language sounded like nothing I had ever studied or heard. Signs in Japanese had no appearance of familiarity as would have Spanish or German for instance. The many unknowns gave the whole experience an aura of excitement but the predominant feeling was one of awe and uncertainty about what lay ahead. I remember seeing an American flag flying on a ship in Yokohama harbor and feeling a sense of security that we would be living under an occupation which would provide some measure of safety in this strange land to which I have come to live. This proved to be true but I do not remember feeling any anxiety about being mistreated by the Japanese even after the Occupation was over. The Japanese people welcomed us and were gracious to us. They were often rude but not more so to us than to each other it seemed. In fact, they treated us better than they treated each other. We learned soon that an outward politeness was often a cloak for negative feelings but on the whole we were pleasantly surprised that these people who not so long ago had been America’s bitter enemies were now so very friendly to Americans and so eager to learn all they could about their former enemies.

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by | 16 June 2004 · 5:32 pm

Evacuation Day from Korea, 1940

During the Korean War, the rapid UN retreat from northern Korea in the face of massive intervention by the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” in late 1950 was known as the Big Bugout. Almost exactly ten years earlier, many Westerners in Japanese-occupied parts of Northeast Asia staged their own Big Bugout.

On September 12, 1940, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew cabled Washington from Tokyo with his famous “green light message,” switching his support to the hard-liners in the U.S. government who wanted to punish Japan for its aggression on the Asian mainland. Yet punishment was hardly advisable as long as thousands of American civilians, all potential hostages, were living in the Japanese Empire. It was time to put out the signal that war was getting closer by evacuating “non essential” American civilians from East Asia. The number to be evacuated from China, Japan, and Korea was estimated at over a thousand, making it necessary to charter several passenger ships to make the rounds and pick them up. The SS Washington was sent to Shanghai, the SS Monterey to Shanghai and Yokohama, and the SS Mariposa to Shanghai and Ch’inhuangtao in northeast China, Jinsen (Inch’ôn) in Korea, and Kobe, Japan.

The State Department’s evacuation order went out to embassies and consulates during the second week of October. When it reached Seoul, Consul-General Gaylord Marsh quickly wrote up a notice and passed it to American community leaders for distribution….

He had no legal power to order anyone to leave Korea. However, the American community reacted with something bordering on panic. An immediate casualty was Pyeng Yang Foreign School. At the time, PYFS was one of the best international boarding schools in Asia with a history of more than forty years. It had started the 1940-41 school year in September with new teachers from the United States and 105 students, 55 of them from outside Korea, and everything had functioned normally through the middle of October. But over the weekend of November 1, PYFS simply ceased to exist. When the evacuation order came from Consul-General Marsh, the school board held an emergency session and voted to suspend classes without delay. The boarding students were put on trains within hours, and three days later, on Tuesday; November 4, the school closed forever….

The withdrawal of American civilians from Korea touched off withdrawals by British subjects also, including Canadians and Australians who were essential to the Protestant missionary effort. In Seoul, Horace and Ethel Underwood were appalled by the stampede. After fighting off the Presbyterian Mission’s attempts to remove them from Chosen Christian College, they were in no mood to obey the consul-general’s alleged order. Horace was angry at the way Gaylord Marsh had frightened the expatriate community….

The evacuation “order” caused consternation in Japan. In Tokyo, the Japan Advertiser gave the official Japanese view that “Evacuation in principle is all wrong and a retrograde move. Even at the cost of some personal and temporary difficulties it should be stopped, if not by governments, as far as possible by individuals.” A columnist in the Miyako described the U.S. government as “trembling at phantoms” while the Tokyo Nichi Nichi said that the evacuation was one of a series of moves meant to intimidate Japan and wondered what subsequent moves might be. Other Japanese papers welcomed the withdrawal as a chance to move in on American privileges and markets in China and Korea. While expressing amazement that Washington could think its citizens in danger, the departure of American and British “fifth columnists” was seen as a boon to the future of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

On November 15, 1940, the Mariposa crossed the Yellow Sea and anchored at Inch’ôn…. For the Americans on shore, the next morning brought Evacuation Day. From all parts of Seoul by car, Korean kuruma cart, and on foot, more than two hundred Americans converged on the railroad station for the 22-mile trip to Inch’ôn. Porters carried trunks on chigye A-frames, enough to create a mountain of baggage on the platform. Korean friends braved police surveillance to come and say good-bye, and there were enough empty seats on the special evacuation train to permit many of them to travel all the way to Inch’ôn for their last farewells….

Toward dusk, the Mariposa weighed anchor and headed for the open sea, the Americans aboard feeling reassured by a rumor that the cruiser USS Augusta was out in the darkness standing watch. Life on the Mariposa then took shape as people settled into their cabins. The ship was not full, so the captain did away with the class system–after making sure that the Foreign Service families had the best cabins. The crew organized games and parties for the 196 children on board. Religious services were organized and a room was set aside for daily meditation. And there were the ship’s usual amusements: tea dances, movies, and band concerts. On Thanksgiving Day there was a turkey feast. In fact, everything wonderful about America seemed to be contained on the Mariposa. “The Mariposa is a little bit of Heaven,” wrote one evacuee. A tea dance menu carefully preserved by another bore the notation “This boat is a luxury ship, and no mistake–everything about it is superb.”

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 250-257

I have similar fond memories of being “evacuated” to Japan aboard the SS President Cleveland and SS President Wilson as a kid.

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