Mr Selden's Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart & the South China Sea byTimothy Brook (Profile Books, 2015)
This is a wonderfully personable book. It's easy conversational style
brings to life the academic adventure of doing historical research. By
using museum and library collections, tracing connections through texts
and maps, linking them to real people and places in such a way as to
create a dual picture of the world and time being researched, and of the
world and time in which that research is being conducted.
The Selden Map of China (東西洋航海圖 Dongxi yang hanghai tu: "Navigation Chart of the Eastern and Western Oceans") is a seventeenth century navigation chart, deposited in the Bodelian library in Oxford by John Selden, a legal scholar, in 1659. There is still some debate as to when and where, as well as, how and why the map was drawn - but Timothy Brook outlines in this short book his theory that the map was first obtained by Captain John Saris, commander of the trading ship, The Clove, around 1608-1609. The map gives a curiously accurate rendering of the South China Sea, detailing the trade routes along the coastal regions of China and Southeast Asia - and bears interesting comparison to the contemporary map-making skills of European navigators, from portolan charts to Mercator's famous projection, showing how the distortions of mapping linear directions over vast, curved surfaces can be sensibly shown on a flat map and still be accurately usable for the purposes of getting from A to B over such large distances.
I
particularly liked the fact that Brook related Selden's map to one of
his own which he had to surrender to a Chinese Customs Official on the
Vietnam border in the 1970s, and how he deftly refers back to this
incident at apposite moments throughout the text but without
over-stressing the point that maps are important and controversial
artefacts in the history of knowledge, both in the past as in the
present. It's a point very deftly conveyed.
I also appreciated
the fact that he credits other scholars and researchers as he goes in
his text (rather than lumping them together, ghettoised, in an
acknowledgements section divorced from context and from the rest of the
book); too often such books represent themselves as monolithic
achievements of a single individual, but here it's wonderful to see how
Brook's thinking was influenced by others even though the book clearly
presents his own personal thesis (it's doubly nice too, because a couple
of the people he credits are my friends and colleagues!).
He is
also good at highlighting and acknowledging the limitations of both his
research materials and his interpretation of them. In all, this is a
wonderful read - showing how the study of material culture can bring the
past closer to the present, shedding light on the development of the
history of knowledge and the history of science, as well as examining
the contrasts and parallels of perspectives - both East and West - which
almost intersected at a crucial moment in the burgeoning first era of a
globalising world.
I highly recommend it to anyone interested
in cartography, exploration, the history of science, particularly in
relation to China and Southeast Asia, and to early modern European
interventions in this region; and to those interested in using visual
sources and material culture to explore broader cultural and global
history perspectives; as well as to anyone interested in how to go about
writing intelligent, academic history for a popular audience -
stylistically this little book is a real tour de force.
~
Explore the Selden Map in detail on-line here on The Bodelian website
How the Selden Map of China was recently conserved, here
Sometime around 830-840 AD a
merchant ship set sail, most likely from the Chinese port of Yangzhou, or
perhaps from Guangzhou further south, following a well established maritime
trade route through southeast Asia, via Java, towards the Arabian Gulf, where
it was probably heading towards Basra, then the principal port of the Abbasid
Caliphate, in modern day Iraq. The ship was carrying a large cargo of ceramics
– some 70,000 pieces were tightly packed inside its hold, along with other,
more precious goods such as finely crafted items of gold and silver, plus 29
bronze mirrors, as well as more perishable commodities, such as spices and probably
textiles too (silk was certainly used as a currency at this time). However, the
ship never reached its intended destination, as it was wrecked en route in the Java Sea, some 600 km
south of Singapore.
The wreck was discovered in 1998,
not far from the Indonesian island of Belitung, by fishermen diving for sea
cucumbers. Given that the wreck was located in shallow waters and less than 3
kms from the shore it was very vulnerable to looting and accidental
destruction, consequently the Indonesian government authorised a salvage
company to recover the 9th century ship’s cargo. This recovery
operation took place over two seasons. The importance of the wreck, despite its
having been subject to commercial salvage rather than a more scientific
programme of archaeological excavation, was noted and hence, in order to
preserve the assemblage as a whole, the cargo was purchased by Singapore with
the purpose of making it available to the peoples of the wider Southeast Asia
region in a public museum. Accordingly, the contents of the wreck were first
put on temporary display at Singapore’s Art Science Museum in 2011 (you can read
an interesting and thought-provoking review of that exhibition, and the
controversial issues surrounding the original acquisition of the wreck’s
contents, by Rachel Leow on her blog here and here). Now, nearly five years
later the Belitung shipwreck has at last found its final berth in a new permanent gallery at Singapore’s excellent Asian Civilisations Museum. This new
display was opened to the public last month by Ms Grace Fu, Singapore’s
Minister for Culture, Community and Youth. I was lucky enough to be invited to
the opening ceremony.
For anyone visiting Singapore who
has an interest in art and archaeology, the Asian Civilisations Museum is a
must-visit site. Built in 1865 the Neoclassical building, which originally
housed the offices of the British colonial government, has recently been
undergoing a transformation. Last month saw the opening of the first of the
Museum’s “New Spaces” with the T’ang Shipwreck gallery as its centrepiece. The
shipwreck is clearly being showcased as an important marker for modern
Singapore’s 50th anniversary celebrations. As one of the texts
accompanying the display attests: “Singapore
lies between two oceans, along a busy sea route running from the Middle East to
India, Southeast Asia, and China. This network rivalled the more famous Silk
Route through Central Asia. Glass was brought from the Middle East, cotton from
India, spices and wood from Southeast Asia, and ceramics and silk from China.
These economic ties led to the exchange of artistic ideas, and to contacts
between peoples of different cultures.
The Tang Shipwreck reveals that
Singapore’s region lay at the heart of a global trading network in the 9th
century. The success of Singapore as an exchange point of global shipping thus
has ancient roots. The beautiful objects of exceptional rarity testify to the
ingenuity of artists and merchants, and show that exotic objects have long been
appreciated by the world’s consumers.”
Paeans to ancient precursors of
modern consumerism and political agendas aside (see here for a recent article on maritime archaeology and modern day nationalism), the actual analysis of the
antiquities recovered from the Belitung shipwreck has revealed some fascinating
information. It is claimed that “not a
single nail or dowel was used to construct the ship,” instead it was made
from wooden planks which had been sewn together with rope made from coconut
husks and caulked with wadding and lime. Scientific tests have shown that the
wood came from Africa, and that later repairs were made in a variety of
materials sourced from other far distant places, such as India and parts of
Southeast Asia. All this suggests that the ship was a dhow, plying a trade route of immense distance from the Arabian
Gulf to China, returning with a cargo which gives us a window onto the
commercial web which networked the Abbasid and Chinese Empires together, most
likely via the maritime hub of Palembang, the capital of Srivijaya in Sumatra
(Java) – arguably the Singapore of its day.
The ship’s cargo attests to the
almost industrial scale of output from certain Chinese kilns of the period,
particularly that of Changsha in Hunan province, of which, some 57,500 pieces
have been recovered from the Belitung wreck. Plus highly prized celadon wares,
green-splashed wares from the Gongxian kilns of Henan, and beautiful
white-glazed wares from the Xing kilns of northern China, all of which have
also been discovered at other sites in Asia and the Islamic Middle East. Many
of these ceramics were packed into larger ceramic vessels, tightly coiled and padded
out with straw, these jars contained up to 130 bowls each. This method of
packing was highly successful and undoubtedly also ensured that many of the
ceramics remained preserved intact on the seabed. In total the ceramics from
the ship weighed around 25 tons.
Many of these bowls are now on open
display in the gallery, but why they have been mounted on long metal stems
making them look like a large abstract field of poppies, or so many plates
spinning on poles, is a modern design mystery which no one I asked could
fathom. Thankfully the displays and accompanying texts give adequate context
and explanation. The spacious gallery is light and airy with large windows
looking out, rather appropriately, onto the waters of nearby Boat Quay, where
on my first visit I saw dragon boat races being held. I’m told that once all
the redevelopments are complete this area will become the new entrance to the
Museum, hence the T’ang shipwreck will be the first gallery the visitor
encounters.
The rest of the Museum is filled
with a wonderful array of artefacts from many different cultures and wide-ranging
regions across Asia. The sculptures of the Ancient Religions room,
including several pieces from the ancient cultural crossroads at Gandhara (in
modern day Pakistan), such as the magnificent monumental terracotta head of a bodhisattva
with a mass of curly hair, are not to be missed. Plus, the two Southeast Asia
rooms are crammed with such a variety of fascinating treasures that I became
completely engrossed and lost all track of time. The room dedicated to the
“Chinese Scholar” is an exquisitely evocative new addition to the Museum too.
I’m looking forward to returning next summer to see what other transformations
will have taken place by that time.
I’ve clocked many air-miles in the
last ten years or so. I’ve even circumnavigated the globe on one particular
trip, but this summer was the first time I crossed the equator. As I’ve
written before (see here), a lot of the journeys I make are done on freighter
flights where the lack of the usual creature-comforts of standard air travel
are sometimes compensated for in other ways. Watching the world passing by
below, charting rivers, mountains, seas and lakes with your own eyes, surveying
an endless cloudscape, or watching the night time stars merge with the growing
glow upon the horizon really allows you to gauge the vast expanse of the globe
beneath you.
This was another long haul trip.
Travelling from London via Mumbai to Hong Kong; then Hong Kong to Sydney and
Melbourne, finishing up with a truck ride several hours overland. Quite an
exhausting itinerary with the shock of transitioning the whole spectrum of
climate zones. From a sunny but mild London summer’s day to the torrential
downpour of Mumbai’s mid-monsoon, to Hong Kong’s tropical 40ºC with matching humidity, to
Australia’s frosty winter mornings with lows of -3ºC.
The journey took four days in total
which meant I slept for long portions of two of the flight’s four stages.
Consequently I missed what route we flew from London to Mumbai, but I suspect
we may well have flown over or close to the Ukraine, where only a few days
later the tragedy of Flight MH17 occurred. From Mumbai we flew across India and
Bangladesh, where I had a good view of (what the pilots told me was) the
confluence of the Rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra, before crossing Burma into
China, where we then headed down to Guangzhou. I sat in the cockpit for what
was quite a spectacular night landing at Hong Kong. Below we had good views of the
bright lights of Guangzhou, the Pearl River, Macao, Hong Kong Island and
Kowloon as we weaved our way between dark fluffy lumps of cloud in which
tropical lightning was flickering on and off. What the pilots (when speaking over the radio to
air-traffic control on the ground) calmly referred to as “patches of weather.” This
was quite an otherworldly spectacle to behold and far better than any firework
display I’ve ever been to!
On the flight south from Hong Kong
to Sydney I asked the pilot to let me know when we crossed the equator as it
was my first time travelling to the Southern Hemisphere. He joked that he’d
come and pour a glass of water over my head in honour of the traditional
‘crossing the line’ ceremony! Thankfully he didn’t, especially as it turns out
I was asleep at the time. He did give me a map with our exact route printed-out
as a souvenir though, consequently I could easily pin-point the place where we
crossed the line of zero degrees latitude over the Molucca Sea between the
northern point of Indonesia’s Sulawesi (Celebes) and North Maluku, islands
which resonate in my imagination as the setting for Joseph Conrad’s novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896). After
which we crossed the Banda Sea which, ever since watching Lorne and Lawrence
Blair’s Ring of Firefilms, I’ve
always wanted to cross – except I’d rather hoped to do so in an old Bugis
sailing prau as they did, but hey-ho,
you can’t always have your cake and eat it, I suppose!
When not reading I spent much of
the daylight hours of this journey cloud watching or trying to interpret the
physical features of the landscape below. Along with the two great rivers of
Bangladesh I had some wonderful views of the interior of Australia. Coming into
land at Sydney I had an excellent view of Sydney harbour, the famous harbour
bridge and opera house. As the aircraft banked round and came back along the
coast, descending into land I watched the cliffs and beaches growing closer and
I couldn’t help thinking of Captain Cook sailing along that same stretch of
coast in HMB Endeavour. Thinking how
much has changed in all that time, and yet still how each new landfall we make
is a similar personal voyage of discovery of our own – and, of course, without
a doubt it’s always fun to make such new landings in novel and unconventional
ways, like arriving in your own private 747!
These are the dates on which Japan
capitulated and then formally surrendered. Consequently September 2nd
1945 is commonly seen as the date which marks the official end of the war, yet
it is a contested point for history is rarely so neat and tidy. It took time
for word to filter through the decimated ranks of Japanese troops scattered across
the far flung battle arenas in the Asia-Pacific region. In some places the
soldiers continued to fight – either because they had not heard that
hostilities were officially at an end, or because they did not believe that
this information was true. It took time for these isolated areas to cease
combat either through continued armed suppression or eventual surrender.
Some have argued though that the
war never truly ended; or, if it did, they may even extend the date to other events
decades later – for example, November 9th 1989, the fall of the
Berlin Wall, or, December 25th 1991, when President Gorbachev resigned
and the Soviet Union was dissolved – dates which effectively mark the end of
the Cold War. Yet, whether we choose to set our historical chronometer by dint
of plain facts – say, by the dates of certain treaties, or we choose to frame
our chronicles according to more elaborate or nuanced perspectives, such as those
favouring the longue durée
approach, history is perhaps philosophically as much as historiographically
speaking a matter of relative perception.
There is a Japanese writer
(Wakaichi Kōji) who maintains
that the very last shot which was fired as part of the Second World War was a
fatal one; and it occurred not in 1945 or in the years immediately after, but
rather decades later – early in the morning of October 5th 1972. The
soldier who died that morning was named Kozuka Kinshichi and he died on the
island of Lubang in the Philippines. He and a fellow Japanese soldier had been startled
whilst attempting to steal provisions from some Filipino farmers and subsequently
Kozuka was fatally wounded in a shoot out with local Police. His companion
managed to escape and by all accounts seemed to simply melt into thin air like
a ghost.
The two men were indeed like ghosts. Spectral apparitions
left-over, haunting the island from an altogether wholly ‘other’ era – for the
war they still seemed to be fighting had officially
ended nearly thirty years previously. At the time newspapers and TV media all
around the world reported the story in equally fantastical terms. The perceived
exoticism of lonely Japanese soldiers doggedly ‘holding out’ in the jungles of
East Asia were fast becoming a standard trope. A stereotyped image of the stoical
national character typical of the Japanese which has since set fast in the West
as a cultural commonplace, an image which now seems almost impossible to
override in the popular imagination. TV comedy shows have cashed in on laughs
wrung out of this familiar-but-seemingly-fanciful idea (the reality for the
islanders of Lubang however was far from laughable). There are even sporadic
yet highly newsworthy occasions remarkably occurring right up until recent
times where serious claims of newly discovered ‘hold outs’ are announced
wherein the headlines proclaim that: “Japanese
Officials are seeking to confirm recent claims that ...” (for example: in 1980, see here and here; and in 2005, see here, here, and here; plus 2006, see here and here).
Battle of Guam, 1944 (British Pathe News)
But these stories often miss the subtle
nuance between the designation of a ‘straggler’ and a ‘hold out’ – which, in my
opinion, signify two very different categories – though perhaps this is only
natural (journalistically speaking), because there is far more exoticism and
shock-value in one over the other. A ‘straggler’ is a defeated soldier who has
missed repatriation at the end of hostilities for any of a variety of reasons,
either by choice or by compulsion. He may fear death or punishment in his home
country, or he may simply feel too ashamed to return; similarly he may not be
permitted to return if he remains held in a POW camp, or is caught in another
conflict zone (such as those interned in the Soviet gulag system, or those caught up in the
civil war which resumed in China at the close of the Second World War); he may voluntarily
or otherwise decide to join another army (for instance, the independence fighters
in Indonesia or Vietnam). Many of the Japanese soldiers who were taken prisoner
in North Korea and the Soviet Union are still to this day slowly filtering back
to Japan (figures show that even as late as 1995 some 369 repatriates returned
to Japan from China*). ‘Hold outs’, however, are stragglers of a wholly different
kind. These are the men who refused
to surrender – either because the deep indoctrination of their upbringing or
their military training meant that they believed
it was their duty to resist and fight
to the death rather than surrender, or that they distrusted the veracity of information
claiming that the war had ended, viewing it suspiciously as enemy propaganda or
simple subterfuge – and, consequently, in some cases (such as Lubang) they even
continued to fight on; whilst others who in time came to accept the fact that
Japan had indeed been defeated maintained their refusal to surrender because
they genuinely feared they would be executed by ‘the enemy’ if they were
caught, and so, consequently, they hid.
Guam - I Was There, A Cameraman's Narrative (British Pathe News)
These ‘stragglers’ and ‘hold outs’
continued to surface in the immediate post-war years and were subsequently
returned to Japan well into the 1950s. The reactions they received at home
were mixed and can be read over time as a barometer of national feeling as the
Japanese nation as a whole sought to contend with the social realities of defeat
and the subsequent and deliberate re-moulding of their collective consciousness
which was socially engineered by the occupying US forces who supervised the
restructuring of the nation and the re-writing of its constitution. The deep
psychological shocks and traumas of the war period permeated the immediate
post-war era in many different ways across the different levels of society. But
as Japan began to rebuild and re-emerge as a changed, and eventually as a
highly prosperous, modern nation these ghosts of the past still managed to resurface.
The most remarkable of these ‘hold outs’ were undoubtedly the ‘final’ three,
who also made the biggest impact in the media when they emerged in the early to
mid-1970s.
The first was Sergeant Yokoi Shoichi
(1915-1997), who held out in Guam until he was discovered quite by chance in
1972. As with many of the ‘hold outs’ Yokoi had not been alone until the last
few years before he finally emerged from hiding. He said he’d hidden out of
fear for his life when Guam had been recaptured by the US Army in 1944. The
Battle of Guam had been intense and the Japanese mostly fought to the death,
such that there were relatively few prisoners taken. Dispersed groups of
Japanese soldiers hid and continued to fight long after the island was deemed
to have been secured by the American Forces. Yokoi was initially part of such a
group. Later he said that he had come to realise that Japan had lost the war,
but his fear of harsh reprisal from the local inhabitants (who had been
brutally and viciously treated by the occupying Japanese Imperial Army) had
been so strong that he thought it better to hide indefinitely. Although careful
to hide all traces of his existence on the island, living alone in a tiny,
cramped dug-out or self-made ‘cave’ and emerging mostly by night, he was
eventually taken unawares by two local men, who, realising he was a Japanese
soldier, captured him as humanely as they could manage. Yokoi was then
hospitalised and treated for malnutrition.
He was eventually repatriated to
Japan – expressing his ‘deep shame’ that he had not succeeded in laying down
his life for his country in the conflict. His homecoming was to turn him into a
minor celebrity worldwide, but particularly in Japan – which after nearly three
decades Yokoi found a totally transformed place. However, it seems the Japanese
media chose to shy away from the unanswered questions which clearly remained
surrounding public discussion of the wartime era, focussing instead on the more
personal side of Yokoi’s story. His ‘weird’ (奇妙kimyō) otherness or the
exoticism of his extreme survival skills, noting how in his profound isolation
he had managed to weave his own clothes from bark fibre and whittling his own
buttons, whilst contending with bugs and lizards, were a source of wonder and
fascination. Yokoi was still a man of his time though – his request to meet the
Emperor for whom he had fought, raised the awkward issue of Japan’s
reconciliation with its past and was quietly passed over. As far as we know,
Yokoi never officially met Emperor Hirohito.
These awkward issues however would
resurface far more pointedly after the incident in Lubang which resulted in the
death of Private Kozuka Kinshichi (1922-1972). The unfortunate incident was
confirmation, as had long been suspected, that Yokoi was not a singular oddity
– there were in fact other Japanese soldiers still out there, unaware or unable
to conceive that hostilities had given way to peace. It was now known beyond
doubt that one soldier was still fighting on. His name was known too – he was
Second Lieutenant Onoda Hirō (1922-2014). His family and various other official search groups travelled to
Lubang to try to ‘rescue’ Onoda – trying to contact him in order to persuade
him to come out from hiding. But despite these efforts Onoda still managed to
convince himself that these were again the advanced subterfuge tactics of the
enemy, designed specifically to entrap him. He had been given orders never to
surrender, nor to take his own life, but rather to continue his mission to the
end, and he was determined to do this; hence his continued harassment of the
local Filipino population – pilfering their provisions and stealing their
supplies and livestock, setting fire to their fields in order to survive and
‘do the enemy harm’ whilst gathering ‘intelligence’ which would be useful once
the Imperial Army returned. There still is, and was even then, some doubts as
to what degree Onoda was actually convinced that the war was not over. It was
later discovered that he had a transistor radio amongst his personal effects
(and he had apparently heard of Yokoi’s ‘surrender’). Yet he had been trained
as an intelligence officer at the elite Nakano Military Academy and it was
noted at the time by some in the Press at home that his indoctrination had
either run very deeply indeed, or, (somewhat sarcastically) that he was perhaps
not a very intelligent intelligence officer
if after so many decades he still hadn’t worked out for himself that the war
was actually at an end. Either way he was eventually persuaded that the war was
in fact over, and thereby he set out the terms under which he would finally
give himself up.
The unlikely events which lead up
to Onoda’s highly publicised surrender in 1974 began with an equally unlikely
encounter between Onoda and a Japanese student ‘drop out’ who had idly gone to
look for him. The backpacking ‘drop out’ was a young man named Suzuki Norio
(1949-1986), who had famously told his friends that he was setting out in
search of adventure, hoping to find ‘a panda, a yeti, or Onoda.’ Consequently,
it was not without a little trepidation that one morning, as he sat by his tent
whilst camping solo on Lubang, he saw Onoda emerge from the undergrowth holding
a rifle. When Suzuki told him that the war was over Onoda’s reply was
reportedly: ‘It isn’t over for me.’ In the ensuing conversation Onoda stated
that he was willing to surrender but only if he was officially relieved of his
duty and told to stand down by his commanding officer. Suzuki later managed to
convey this demand to the relevant authorities (Onoda having permitted Suzuki
to photograph him as a way of demonstrating actual proof that their meeting had
taken place), and amazingly enough the necessary arrangements were made. Onoda
emerged from the jungle and was ordered to stand down by his former commander, Major
Taniguchi Yoshimi (who since the end of the war had been living quietly as a
bookseller in Tokyo).
Much fanfare surrounded the
theatrical ‘surrender’ of Lieutenant Onoda some thirty years after Japan’s defeat – a ragged and unshaven Onoda was
even photographed publicly handing over his sword to Ferdinand Marcos, the then
President of the Philippines (who also pardoned Onoda of various crimes and misdemeanours,
not least of which was his participation in the deaths of around thirty
individuals who came into contact with Onoda’s band of ‘hold-outs’ during those
intervening years).
Yet, remarkably, Onoda was not the
last of these confirmed World War Two ‘hold outs’ to emerge, nor the last of
which that prompted yet further awkward issues in Japan concerning its
unresolved past. Later that same year a group of Indonesian soldiers, who had
taken several days to reach their objective, surrounded a small hut deep in a remote
and highly inaccessible region of the island of Morotai and gently began to
sing the Japanese national anthem. The naked man who emerged from the little hut
froze to the spot – petrified – and thus apparently offered no resistance to
his subsequent ‘arrest.’ He was Nakamura Teruo (1919-1979), a soldier in the
Japanese Imperial Army but of ethnically aboriginal Taiwanese descent. Even
more ‘a man out-of-time’ than either Yokoi or Onoda, Private Nakamura was a
colonial subject from an Empire which no longer existed. Moreover, he had spent
the last twenty years entirely alone. Initially he had difficulty answering the
questions posed to him, or had difficulty articulating the concepts which
informed his answers given his dislocated and temporally disjointed world view,
particularly in light of the new realities which his military captors attempted
to explain to him. He apparently thought of himself as Japanese and yet he (quite
naturally) wished to return to his native Taiwan – he seemed unable to grasp
the complications that this simple wish now entailed given the fact that his
homeland was now administered by the Government of the Republic of China. His
repatriation proved even more problematic due to the political contretemps surrounding the very
delicate issue that Japan was then in the process of shifting its formal
diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-Shek on
Taiwan, to that of the Peoples’ Republic, led by Mao Tse-tung on the Chinese
mainland. Eventually though Nakamura was repatriated directly to Taiwan,
by-passing Japan altogether.
The resurfacing of these ghosts of
a formerly militaristic nation, like men stepping out of a time-machine almost,
confronted by a world utterly transformed and a society they no longer
recognised was a disconcerting and polarising experience for both parties.
Overwhelmed and disorientated by the rampant materialism of modern day Japan
the ‘hold outs’ seemed unfathomably odd and even quaint in the baffled gaze of
a generation who had never known the war. Yokoi, Onoda, and Nakamura were
admired for their self-reliance and their extreme survivalist skills. Yokoi’s
fear of death or harsh reprisal compounded by his intense personal ‘shame’ at
even being alive were at first rationalised, recasting him as a ‘victim’ of an impersonal
and dehumanising system of intense indoctrination. Onoda however presented an
altogether different and somewhat more complicated case; his intense and
avowedly maintained militaristic demeanour was harder to explain away, and yet
his stoicism and his exemplary attitude towards service and above all to duty were
in some ways seen as admirable (much was made of the fact that when he
surrendered Onoda’s rifle was still in pristine working order and he still had
a cache of live ammunition). Yet Nakamura’s outright rejection of the
invitation which resulted from an intense popular up swelling of calls for him
to be allowed to settle in Japan arguably reawakened old and unresolved issues
concerning post-colonial guilt (which arguably helped to push Japan to
officially redress the issue of more appropriate compensation for non-Japanese
veterans who had served in the Imperial Army as late as the 1990s).
Certainly questions
continued to bubble away as to the extent to which the Japanese Government was
guilty of wilful negligence in mounting proper searches for ‘stragglers’ and
‘hold outs’ as well as returning the remains of fallen soldiers from the
battlefields of the Asia-Pacific region. To what extent could the general
population be exonerated of guilt if blame was placed entirely on the Japanese
military when ordinary members of the population had served in that very same
military? The resulting ambiguity of being both guilty and innocent on the
personal level was arguably just as hard to reconcile collectively. And to what
extent can the phenomenon of the ‘straggler’ or ‘hold out’ be viewed as a
peculiarly Japanese one? Certainly stragglers of other nationalities were known – there is even the example
of Liu Lianren, a Chinese national who was forcibly taken from Shandong in
China and transported to Hokkaido (northern Japan) in 1944, who was forced to
work in a mine but who managed to escape before the end of the war and
continued to survive in the mountains for thirteen years unaware of the end of
the conflict. When he was discovered in 1958 the Japanese government were highly
suspicious of his story due to Cold War tensions, but he was later repatriated
to China and the question of his compensation rumbles on and still awaits a
final settlement to this day (see here,here, and here). It’s also arguable that the
trope of the Japanese ‘hold out’ – a kind of latter day exotic ‘orientalism’ perhaps – which has become
somewhat fixed in the popular culture of the West in part fed into the
continuing US national fixation with its own M.I.A.s (“Missing in Action”) and
the widespread belief in, and the search for, missing military personnel left
in Viet Cong prison camps at the close of the Vietnam War (a conflict which was
contemporary with the emergence of Yokoi, Onoda, and Nakamura) – and stories of
which continue to surface to this day (see here and here).
For those people who actually
fought in the war the date of its actual end is likely to have been much more
personal, and could perhaps even be graded on an individually unique scale, for
instance: of the eventual cessation of combat at the site where they fought; of
their discharge from service or de-mobilisation; of their return to their home
country; or their return to their actual family home – or perhaps even the day
their medals arrived. Some may even go so far as to say a war is not over until
the last soldier who partook has peacefully passed away in old age, or even
when the last person with a living memory of those events has finally passed.
All are perhaps equally relevant terminal points in the continuum of such a momentous
event in world history. Whether taken together as a whole or looked at in
isolation, these different end points define what continues as the sum total of
collective and individual social memory.
There is little doubt that issues
concerning the reconciliation of the Japanese state to its role in the Asia-Pacific
region during its period of colonial expansion and the Second World War
continue to taint or inform current foreign policy and regional news agendas,
particularly in Japan’s relations with its near neighbours, Russia, Korea, and
China, in the form of diplomatic and territorial disputes, or the controversial
visits of Japanese Prime Ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo which
enshrines the nation’s war dead. But this does not make them unique. The
respective nations of the Europe from time to time are also reminded of the
bitterness of a violent and adversarial shared past. The European Union was
instituted in order to unite and so help allay the repetition of such
animosities as much as to promote trade and mutual economic benefits, even
though such deep divisions definitely do persist beneath the surface. Our
modern world of nation states may well have been forged out of the era of
colonial expansion which arguably brought about the two cataclysmic conflicts
of the first half of the 20th century, but the collective and
enduring legacy of those wars continues to affect us all on a personal level. Questions
of nationality and social rank feed into our notions of identity and serve to place
us into context – how we remember
either connects or disconnects us to the questions raised by our shared past in
ways both seen and unseen. This is why history matters. Why the signing of a
treaty is just as important an end point as the day our grandfather received
his medals (or perhaps didn’t as the case may be). Reconciliation is the key to
a better future – reconciling the personal and the collective legacies of war,
reconciling the victors with the defeated, and the defeated with the victors,
is something which historiography can help inform and open up. Better that we
discuss and describe in textbooks openly and honestly rather than seek to
conceal or shy away from the past for the sake of pain or politics, or out of fear,
shame, regret, or anger. Differences matter, but they should not be allowed to
divide us. Acknowledging our differences and our diversities whilst working
together as one is surely the best of all solutions. If we can actually claim
to say that wars do eventually come to an end, it is certainly true that their influences
continue to be felt long after the last bullet has been fired and even after
the last soldier has surrendered his sword. But this does not mean we should
forget, or, perhaps worse still, cease to examine the history which has made
our world what it is today.
All
of the photos illustrating this article are confirmed as being in the public
domain, or are assumed to be in the public domain given the age of the events
they depict and their general prevalence on the world wide web; wherever
possible I have sought to ascertain and credit their original provenance with
the relevant links embedded and as such any infringements of rights therein or
consequent to their assumed fair use in this article is wholly unintended. The
colour photographs accompanying this piece were taken by me personally during
my own trip to Guam in 2009. Many remarkable images and videos of WW2
military wreckage and ruins in the Pacific region can be found across the
web, but these are a couple of very good examples: here, here, and here.
UPDATE:A BBC News report today (January 17th 2014) says that Onoda Hirō has passed away at the age of 91 in Tokyo. The report contains archive film footage of his return to Japan in 1974. (The main text above has been updated accordingly)
