Exhibition Review: Everest through the lens (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR, UK: 5 October 2022-20 January 2023) - this review was originally written for the Other Everests Research Network.
NB - the exhibition is currently back on display at the RGS from 20 January 2025 - 15 April 2025 (10.00am-5.00pm, Monday-Friday), free entry. Click here for more information.
Everest through the lens was
an exhibition marking the centenary of the first two British attempts to climb
the world’s highest mountain in 1922 and 1924. It examined the expeditions as
seen through the lens of official expedition cinematographer, Captain John
Noel. Focussing on the two films he made, Climbing Mount Everest (1922)
and The Epic of Everest (1924), the exhibition set out ‘to unpick the
uncomfortable and complex social, racial and geopolitical dynamics that shaped
the expeditions – from their beginning to enduring legacy.’ Utilising a range
of photographic and documentary sources, as well as a handful of well-chosen
objects – such as a kinomatograph camera, similar to the one Noel used at high
altitude, and Noel’s own Remington portable typewriter – exhibition visitors were
guided through the various stages of the two expeditions, from their meticulous
preparation, through their actual execution, to their final presentation in
both print and film media.
As a documentary filmmaker, Noel’s
lens was far from an objective one. The narrative of both films gives a
distinctly colonialist view of the ‘heroic’ exploits of the British climbers,
whilst the far larger entourage of local porters and other indigenous labourers
who were key to enabling the endeavour are lost somewhere in the flickering
side-lines, obscured by the simultaneous glare of the white snows and the
reflected imperial glory bestowed upon the films’ British protagonists. Viewing
the expeditions in the context of their times, this was a period when empires
and nations vied to best one another in epic feats of exploration in harsh and
extreme environments. Notably the British had lost out in the races to be the
first to reach the North and South Poles, hence the summit of the world’s
highest mountain – or the ‘Third Pole’ as it was then dubbed – represented a
last chance at attaining pre-eminence. Together, the Royal Geographical Society
and the Alpine Club formed the Mount Everest Committee, which tasked itself
with recruiting a team of elite mountaineers and geographers. Naturally these
men were all British born and bred, privately educated and recruited through a
network of mutual contacts. Letters and medical appraisals show that social
considerations of class and military background counted as much as aptitude and
experience in mountaineering. We are told that George Finch, as an Australian,
was a lone exception to this rule, but that consequently he ‘was looked down on
by some team members.’
A far more overtly condescending
view was expressed with regard to the indigenous communities whom the
expeditions encountered as they made their way through Tibet. An intertitle
card from one of Noel’s films gives a clear example, stating that: ‘The men and
women exist from the cradle to the stone slab, on which their dead bodies are
hacked to pieces, without a wash the whole of their lives.’ The British expedition
members were genuinely fascinated by the cultures they encountered in the
Himalaya. Noel filmed scenes described in another intertitle as: ‘the weird and
fantastic devil dances at the sacred monastery of the Rongbuk.’ A Tibetan
cymbal brought back by the expedition leader, Brigadier-General Charles Bruce
in 1922, included in the exhibition, shows how the British climbers were particularly
struck by Tibetan music which must have seemed very different to their
unaccustomed ears. Climber and surgeon, Howard Somervell transcribed Tibetan
folk songs into Western musical notation, and Noel later had bands perform this
music as an evocative accompaniment to the screenings of his silent films.
Trailer for Noel's "The Epic of Everest" (BFI)
Social hierarchies shaped the
expeditions. Base Camp was effectively a small village, run by the British along
familiar colonial lines, with clear demarcations according to social, racial
and class considerations. The selection process for local porters may have been
less careful to note down details, but everyone recruited – ‘from bootmakers to
botanists’ – had a role with set expectations and was renumerated accordingly.
Ranked highest in this hierarchy were the high-altitude porters, who were very
skilled and often more adept mountaineers than the British, who nicknamed them
‘tigers.’ It is notable in many of the photographs of the expedition that there
is a marked discrepancy in the size and weight of the loads which these men
were charged with carrying compared to the British members of the team. Without
their efforts, lugging huge quantities of supplies, equipment and oxygen tanks
to the various camps ascending the mountain, the British climbers would have struggled
in their attempts to reach the summit. These efforts were not without genuine risk,
as a disaster in 1922 made only too apparent. Seven porters – six Sherpa,
Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya, Pema, and one Bhotiya, Norbu –
lost their lives in an avalanche. George Mallory, seen as the hero of Noel’s
films, felt himself responsible. Writing to a friend, he stated that the men
who died were ‘ignorant of mountain dangers, like children in our care. And I
am to blame.’ However, the loss of these men’s lives was dealt with in a
bureaucratic manner, with their families in Tibet, Nepal and Darjeeling being
financially ‘compensated.’
In Noel’s film, the disaster was
edited out of the final cut for fear of a negative backlash from viewers. A
poignant memorial of this fact is embodied in a small bronze figure of the
goddess Tara, which was on display in the exhibition. This was given to the
British climbers on their return from Everest by Dzatrul Rinpoche, the Head
Lama of Rongbuk Monastery, to commemorate the lives of the seven men who died.
This action was filmed by Noel, but in the final version of his film Noel
edited and placed these scenes at the start, representing the exchange as
though it were a gift given to bless the expedition when it was first setting
out.
Similarly, Noel appears to have had
no qualms about appropriating an image of a deity depicted in a mural at the
monastery in order to accentuate the sense of drama. A deity which the British
stylised as ‘a mountain goddess angrily destroying the bodies of white climbers.’
As it is well-known, the 1924 expedition resulted in the loss of the lives of
climbers, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who disappeared from view while
making a bid to reach the summit and never returned.
The names of Mallory and Irvine,
like those of Robert Falcon Scott and his men in Antarctica, were of course
duly added to the roster of ‘heroic defeats’ which now characterise the annals
of British Imperial exploration. A vision of heroism and self-sacrifice which
Noel’s films did much to crystallise. As the final sections of the exhibition
showed, this was not without controversy however.
Noel very actively sensationalised
Tibetan culture as a marketing ploy for his films. He was personally invested
in them, having funded much of the 1924 expedition himself in order to retain
the rights to his footage. He hired and brought to London a troupe of seven
Tibetan dancers to perform at screenings. These ‘dancing lamas’ were in fact
Tibetan novice monks rather than lamas. The publicity stunt deeply offended the
Dalai Lama and Tibetan government, such that they banned all Westerners from
entering Tibet to climb Everest for the next ten years. Despite the fact the
British mountaineering community knew that the controversy of the ‘dancing
lamas’ was the real cause of the ban, the Everest expeditions were meticulously
stage-managed operations, consequently they drew ranks and found a convenient
scapegoat in John Hazard, who undertook an unauthorised survey expedition in
Tibet also in 1924, pinning the blame on his activities instead.
For a small exhibition, Everest
through the lens, explored a number of less well-known faces of the two
earliest attempts by British mountaineers to ‘conquer’ the world’s highest peak
very effectively. It elucidated a number of often overlooked themes,
incorporating a rich array of written and visual documentation; particularly
Noel’s film, The Epic of Everest, which was screened on a continuous
loop as part of the exhibition. Shining a light on the lives of those whose
names are well-known to history, such as Mallory and Noel, but more importantly
it also highlighted the indigenous team members who have stood, obscured in the
background for far too long. Recovering some of those names which otherwise
might have been lost to history in the panel and label texts, as well as
listing them in the leaflet accompanying the exhibition. In doing so, Everest
through the lens showed that there is still much to be learned about
cultures of imperial exploration. By taking a closer look, information which
has lain hidden in the archival shadows cast by the official record which the
two British expeditions carefully created as their own legacy can begin to
emerge. Much like the unnamed Sherpa who can be seen steadying the camera
tripod, if one looks very carefully, at the well-known photograph of John Noel,
seated on a kit box, shooting the first of his films at high altitude in 1922.
For more information on my involvement with the 'Other Everests' Research Network, and my chapter in the forthcoming (open access) edited volume of essays which the network will publish in 2024, see here.
A month or so ago I happened to catch a screening of The
Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957) on Talking Pictures TV.
It’s a movie which I’d never heard of before, but I’m quite a fan of old movies
and there are a lot of ‘lost’ or long forgotten gems to be found on this
particular UK TV channel. This one naturally piqued my interest because I was
intrigued to see how it depicted Tibet and the Himalaya.
Directed by Val Guest, the film is based upon a BBC TV play
titled The Creature (1955), written by Nigel Kneale, which Kneale adapted for
the famous British horror filmmakers, Hammer. The Abominable Snowman tells the story of Dr John
Rollason (played by Peter Cushing), a British scientist, who is staying at a
remote monastery high up in the Himalayan mountains, with his wife, Helen
(Maureen Connell), and his assistant, Peter Fox (Richard Wattis). They are
nearing the end of their expedition. Rollason and Fox are introduced
to the viewer via an extended scene in which they talk with the Head ‘Lhama’ of
the monastery (Arnold Marle). It is clear that Rollason and his companions are
respectful of the Head Lama and they thank him for letting them stay at the monastery
while they have gone about their work, collecting plant specimens, and the
like. But as the conversation continues and Rollason is left alone with the
Lama, the Buddhist cleric begins to talk cryptically to Rollason, hinting at
some sort of deeper clairvoyance. The wise old Lama quizzes Rollason about his
real motives and intentions in coming to the Himalaya, telling Rollason that he
knows Rollason hasn’t yet finished all of his work in the mountains. The Lama
says some men are coming and Rollason intends to join them. Rollason tries to
deny this, but the Lama craftily manages to tell just enough of his suspicions
to Rollason’s wife, who is naturally upset because she is keen for them to
leave and return to their normal life, far away from the mountains. It’s also revealed
that Rollason was once an expert climber, but that he’s given up the dangerous
sport; hence another reason why his wife is both concerned and upset by the
Lama’s revelation. But there’s something strange about the way Rollason
receives all of this information, because it seems as though he himself is not
fully aware of all the facts the Lama has alluded to with such assurance, along
with an edge of definite disapproval.
Cushing & Connell
It soon turns out that the Lama is
correct. A party of Americans arrives at the monastery. They are on their way
up into the mountains, heading far above the snowline in search of the Yeti –
the much fabled ‘Abominable Snowman’ of the film’s title. They’ve already conveniently
cached their supplies at various staging posts along the way during the summer
months, and so everything is set for the intentionally small group of explorers
to embark upon the adventure which lies ahead. Against his wife’s wishes,
Rollason is persuaded to join the expedition led by brash American, Tom Friend
(Forrest Tucker), along with his companion Ed Shelley (Robert Brown). There’s a
third member of the party, a young Scottish photographer, named Andrew McNee (Michael Brill), who seems very different
from the rest. And, of course, they take with them a local guide, a Sherpa by
the name of Kusang (Wolfe Morris), who says he has actually seen the Yeti.
Cushing, Brill, Morris, Brown & Tucker
Rather than pick apart the fanciful
plot of the movie, I’m more interested here in penning a few thoughts on the
stylised representations of Himalayan mountaineering and exploration as they
are depicted in this film. Naturally, it is very much “of its time” (as current
euphemistic parlance might describe it). All of the local Tibetans – mainly monks
mumbling their sutras in the background, and rowdy porters shouting angrily about
their lack of pay, along with a small group of easily disbursed bandits, plus a mystical (and perhaps Svengali-like?) Lama, who talks like a gnomic grandfather of Master Yoda (a familiar figure in the later Star Wars franchise) – are racist caricatures. But
then, so too are the Westerners stereotyped in their own peculiar ways. The
British are decent, level-headed sorts, who believe in fair play and talk with
clipped and flinty British accents. The Americans are brash, selfish and
insensitive, ‘gung-ho’ manly-man-types, loud and uncouth. Dr Rollason represents
the quintessential disinterested-nobility of pursuing science for its own sake, although he is also susceptible
to an innate sense of Romanticism which is naturally implicit in such a quest.
McNee turns out to be a character who is similarly flawed, but in a different
manner to Rollason. McNee is not up to the quest, but there is something spiritual
about him, something which drives him with an equal sense of passion and destiny
– he too, like the Lama, seems to have a telepathic connection to the region and
to the Yeti in particular. There are quite a few allusions in the film to mystical
powers and psychic connections, thought transference, and the like, but
interestingly none of these points is too heavily implied or overplayed. We get
the sense that the Yetis might be higher beings, not so much a ‘missing link’, but
a more of a co-evolutionary lineage, who might somehow be better than humans.
Rollason deplores the two Americans’
commercial greed in their hunt for the Yeti, but the Americans flatter Rollason
that having him on-board as a member of their expedition will lend it some
scientific credibility, and they persuade him that, ultimately, they are working towards the same
ends in the pursuit of knowledge – and, in particular, the desire to understand
mankind’s place in the world. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) Rollason
is the sole survivor. He returns to the monastery because, as the Lama hinted
at the beginning of the story, his fate would be decided by what was most
essential within him – that sense of decency innate to his character has seen
him through (whereas, by the same token, the misadventures of his companions
has brought about their demise). And so, having looked into the face of the
Abominable Snowman, Dr Rollason says that there is no such thing as the Yeti in
existence. The ending is very ambiguous. Perhaps Rollason has been hypnotised by the Head Lama, or perhaps he has realised that some mysteries in life must remain just that, mysteries.
It is worth bearing in mind that
this movie is a melodrama. It is a Hammer horror movie which was primarily
intended to shock and thrill, and to excite and entertain its first audiences. As a morality play about the psychology of paranoia, all the movie posters for the film ‘ham up’ those frights, challenging the viewer: “We
dare you to watch it alone!” – Claiming it is “More terrifying than The
Curse of Frankenstein.” The Yeti is described as the “Demon-Prowler of
Mountain Shadows … The Dreaded Man-Beast of Tibet.” – But for all the
fanciful elements which are embellished throughout the course of the movie,
there are some aspects which are to certain degrees grounded in fact.
The set-dressings in the monastery scenes
are reminiscent of genuine Tibetan monasteries, although I don’t recall if in
the film the story’s location is explicitly referred to as being Tibet per se
(except perhaps for a joking reference to the ‘awfulness of Tibetan tea’). The architecture is similar, with trapezoidal
windows; Tibetan butter churns and a mani stone can be seen in the monastery’s courtyard; and
there are quite realistic thangka paintings hanging up in the interior
rooms, but these are also adorned with strangely stylised Southeast
Asian-looking Buddha statues (though more scowling than serene); the monks’
robes are fairly generic, and their religious dances seem pretty perfunctory. As
already mentioned, the Chief Lama appears to behave more like an Indian guru-figure,
one who perhaps The Beatles might have befriended in the subsequent
decade, rather than a genuine Tibetan cleric. And, in many ways, it is hinted
that he is a kind of deus ex machina, operating with a pseudo-all-seeing
supernatural effect, possibly even guiding events behind the scenes throughout the film.
The mountain
scenery is certainly the most impressive aspect of the movie. While many of the
scenes were clearly filmed in the synthetic mock-ups of a studio, these are nevertheless
blended into some impressive long sweeping shots of diminutive figures wending
their way through realistically wide Himalayan-looking vistas (filmed in the French Pyrenees). On the whole,
the characters’ contemporary mountaineering gear looks credibly authentic; and there
is even a passing reference to Eric Shipton in the initial dialogue.
In the context of this movie’s
times, the hunt for the Yeti was not such a far-fetched idea for a cinematic plot
either (although if you tune into certain TV channels today, such as Blaze,
you’d be forgiven for thinking that such quests are still widely held to be
credible even now!). Sir Edmund Hillary, after his first ascent of Mount
Everest (Chomolungma) in 1953, subsequently returned to the Himalaya on just
such a scientific quest himself. Consequently, it is worth watching this movie
with an eye to the cultural insights it might suggest – not so much about
Tibet, Tibetans, or the Himalaya – but rather, about the psychological
perceptions, prejudices, and peccadillos of British and American movie
audiences, and the piquantly picturesque elements of these pseudo-Himalayan themes which it was
thought by the filmmakers would most appeal to movie-goers at the time.
It’s a topic which certainly
appeals to me. Having spent so much time studying genuine travel accounts written
by Westerners who ventured into this part of the world during the first half of the twentieth century for my
PhD thesis, I am keen to continue my studies, looking at the way in which the ostensible
realism of this genre was subsequently transmuted and later valorised into such
fictional representations. In many ways, it was a genre which began with the
making of a movie version of James Hilton’s bestselling novel, Lost Horizon (book 1933,
movie 1937), and continues on through later cinematic outings, such as Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child
(1986), to Brad Pitt, starring as Heinrich Harrer, in the Hollywood version of
Harrer’s memoir, Seven Years in Tibet (book 1952, movie 1997).
The Himalaya remains a region of
perennial fascination for cultural outsiders. Ever since writers such as
Alexandra David-Neel and Charles Bell took an interest in interpreting Tibetan
Buddhism for a Western audience and perhaps inspired novelists such as James
Hilton, the Himalaya has become a kind of spiritual and geographical backcloth
onto which popular tropes of solipsistic questing can be projected. Yet the continuing
ubiquity of such clumsy metaphors and cultural misappropriations which seem to
abound in Hollywood’s fascination for the Himalaya as an always remote, hidden
and inaccessible region seem to attest to a continuing need to locate an ‘orientalising’
search for the self through tests of spiritual, psychological and physical endurance
in this notion of esoteric mysteries persisting somewhere far away. In this
sense, the Himalaya as it is seen in Hollywood remains a place which is pristine
and untouched by modernity, a place located beyond the ordinary mundane nature
of our own humdrum lives, somewhere lost perhaps in someone else’s or some
other culture’s past whether real or imagined. As a meta-myth it has become a cliché,
a cultural trope in and of itself which only serves to occlude and evade a
deeper and far more intriguing question: why does such a need to culturally appropriate
as a means of mediating inwardly with ourselves by projecting our own
perceptions through such a process of ‘othering’ continue to persist?
Original Movie Trailer
Watch The Abominable Snowman (1957) on BFI iplayer
NB - This blog post has been re-worked and expanded into a proper academic paper which was published in an edited volume of film studies, titled: "Explorers on Screen: Adventure! Danger! Romance!" Edited by Sue Matheson & Cynthia J. Miller (Edinburgh University Press, 2026). For more info, see here.
ONODA: 10,000 NIGHTS IN THE
JUNGLE – Directed by Arthur Harari (Bathysphere, 2021)
To all intents and purposes, this
film is a biopic of the life of Lieutenant Onoda Hirō (1922-2014), the Japanese
soldier who remained a ‘hold out’ on the island of Lubang in the Philippines
for 30 years after the end of World War 2 – remarkably not surrendering until
March 1974. But the film’s director, Arthur Harari, describes it as a work of historically-inspired
fiction. It is based upon Bernard Cendron and Gérard Chenu's biography Onoda:
Seul en Guerre dans la Jungle (Arthaud, 1974), and Bernard Cendron
collaborated in the writing of the screenplay. Harari has said he didn’t read
Onoda’s own account, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War
(Kodansha, 1974), preferring to give his own interpretation of the story and
the themes it suggested to him. Harari has said that he was inspired by writers
such as Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote tales of adventure about
sailors marooned in the south seas. And, although it is a war film, much like Letters From Iwo Jima (2007), Harari acknowledges that it takes many of its visual
cues from Hollywood Westerns, as well as the films of Akira Kurosawa. When Harari
first heard the true story of Onoda Hirō he thought it sounded like a joke. Harari is
certainly not alone in that respect, even at the time of Onoda’s surrender, the
racist caricature of the doggedly stupid and fanatical Japanese soldier still
slinking about the jungle, parting the bows of the bushes to peer out at the modern
world, was a commonplace visual trope repeated on various TV comedy sketch
shows and sitcoms, such as The Dave Allen Show, and It Ain’t Half Hot
Mum (‘The Last Warrior’ episode), in which the equally
caricatured British Army theatre troupe dress up as the three little maids from Gilbert
and Sullivan's TheMikado in order to coax a Japanese ‘Hold Out’ to
emerge from his hiding place and surrender. But, while this film does have its
moments of dark humour, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle is definitely
not a comedy, nor is Onoda a figure to be laughed at.
Film trailer for the UK release of Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (April, 2022)
The film is actually a very
sympathetic portrayal of a lost figure. An impressionable young man who finds a
sense of purpose and self-worth in a mission that is morally misguided. In many
ways, Onoda is a modern-day Lord Jim. The film begins in a very Conradian way,
with echoes of the opening pages of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as we
hear the older Onoda’s husky voice narrating a kind of flashback in which he
parallels the arrival of Suzuki Norio, the young man who eventually rescues him, with his own
arrival on the island of Lubang in 1944. We meet Onoda early on in the film as
a young man, still in Japan, who has failed to become a fighter pilot. He
thinks he has failed because of his fear of heights, but he is told by Major
Taniguchi – a surrogate father-figure who recruits him into a special commando
school – that the real reason he failed to become a pilot was because of his
fear of dying. In this new elite, secret unit made up of social misfits and ne’er-do-wells
he is taught that his fear of death will be his greatest strength, because he is
charged with a special mission in which he must paradoxically remain loyal to
the task assigned to him whilst at the same time he must be his own officer,
giving and obeying his own orders, doing whatever it takes to survive and carry
out his overarching orders – hence, perversely he is both free of, and yet also
unbreakably bound by military discipline. The entire film is structured around
such dualities and paradoxes. Situations and character couplings are constantly
paired down to this sort of pairing. Onoda and his second-in-command, Kozuka,
become a steadfast unit of two – Kozuka almost making it to the end of the
mission with him in 1974. Onoda and Suzuki, the drop-out student tourist who
eventually finds Onoda and persuades him to leave the jungle become a mirror
image of each other in the sense of reality versus potentiality – as we see Onoda,
both burdened and bound by his sense of duty, permanently rooted to his island
hideout; and Suzuki, entirely free and carefree in his idle wanderings about
the globe, going in search of “a wild panda, Onoda-san, and the Yeti, in that
order.” The life that was and the life that could have been, but for different
times and different circumstances.
The film has been lauded, winning the
Prix Louis-Delluc and was nominated at the 11th Magritte Awards. It
has been praised as a captivating ‘existentialist action movie’, but it has
also been criticised as ‘an absurdist slow burn’ at almost three hours running
time. A very superficial review in The Observer characterised it as a Boy’s
Own adventure yarn, much like J.M. Barrie’s lost boys, with Onoda as the young
boy who grows old whilst remaining “hopelessly lost in the woods, playing his
forlorn game of soldiers after everyone else has gone to bed.” It’s a nice
conceit, and makes for a catchy last sentence to a short and pithy review, but
the reality which this film is clearly setting out to portray is a lot darker
than this; a closer parallel might be a grown-up version William Golding’s Lord
of the Flies. Certainly, when viewed as a biopic, rather than historically
inspired fiction, it is a reasonably faithful rendition. Much of the
cinematography mirrors well-known images from the actual lives of the
characters involved – the photo of Onoda as a young recruit in his cap and smart
uniform is echoed in the shot of him standing on the boat looking towards Lubang
when he first arrives on the island. Suzuki’s blue jeans and shirt, as well as
the way he holds Onoda’s rifle and comments on how heavy it is when he takes
the selfie photo which he uses to persuade Major Taniguchi to come out of retirement
and order Onoda to lay down his arms and surrender mirrors the real-life photo
Suzuki took to prove he’d met Onoda. And lastly, the view of a lithesome Onoda, wearing his patched-up army uniform while walking towards the
helicopter, watched by the islanders whom he has terrorised for nearly three
full decades, faithfully echoes the TV news footage of the actual event – it is
all there.
Original photo of Suzuki Norio with Onoda Hirō
Actual photo of Onoda surrendering in 1974 (Guardian)
A scene from the movie, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Bathysphere)
But therein lies the ambiguity which
such a movie cannot fully resolve, although it goes some way towards showing it
– which is the direct impact Onoda’s actions had on the lives of those around
him. In his delusion that he must continue the fight against ordinary
civilians. People simply trying to live their lives in what should have been
peacetime. The film does show the moral conflict within the characters, wondering
who shot first in the confrontations they have, shooting into the air in order to
scare people away rather than expressly shooting at them – but, in reality, it
is thought that Onoda and his band needlessly killed up to thirty individuals
in those three decades post-1945. The death of a lone woman whom they accidentally
encounter is presumably meant to stand collectively for all of those innocent
victims. And yet, when Onoda did eventually surrender, he was praised for his
military discipline – the fact he’d kept his rifle in pristine working order across
all those years. He was even pardoned by the then Philippine President,
Ferdinand Marcos, to whom he symbolically handed over his sword in a televised ceremony
of surrender. Back home again in Japan, after all those years of undoubted
hardship, Onoda was hailed as a hero – again for the virtues he seemed to
embody of selflessness, discipline, self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. But
some also saw him as a victim. Brainwashed by a militaristic regime, given an
inhuman and inhumane mission to fight a total war without surrender, without
the right to die, at such personal cost and self-sacrifice – robbed of any
chance of a normal life. On the other hand, some less charitable souls condemned
him as a not very intelligent intelligence officer for scrupulously following
his orders to the letter for so many decades after it had become patently
obvious that the war was long since over. A personally protracted thirty-year
war fought perhaps as an expression of bitter pride?
The film shows us scenes wherein Onoda
and Kozuka doubt a Japanese repatriation party, which includes Onoda’s brother
and father, hailing them in the jungle after one of their party decides to abandon
them and surrender on his own. How the two of them conjure up a fanciful
explanation of the ‘subterfuge’ they perceive in reading modern newspapers,
imagining the fanciful ‘truths’ of an on-going war in which the new Japanese ‘Self-Defense
Force’ has allied with Mao’s Communist China in order to continue the fight
against the Americans, but wondering whose side is the Philippines is now on?
Naturally, it is the film’s premise – as with all movies – for us as the viewer
to sympathise and even empathise with its central character. And in this
respect the film certainly succeeds. By the end of the movie, we see Onoda as a
kind of living, walking ghost-figure, a man who has merged with the jungle,
haunted by the memories of his dead comrades, the ghosts of his past, visiting and
laying flowers upon the graves of those he has known and served alongside because
ultimately this is all he has left of the truth by which he has chosen (and/or
been ordered) to live by. There is a strange sense of nobility in the silence
he maintains when confronted by Suzuki on their first meeting, and even moreso
when he finally stands in front of Major Taniguchi, who reads out to him the official surrender order issued in September 1945, telling him to stand down in March 1974. His
silence is the most eloquent expression of the contradictions which confound
his sense of confusion. Like all absurdities it is both uncanny (rather than
outright funny) and deeply tragic. It suggests a man emerging from an oddly
baffled sense of pessimism, his new situation slowly reorienting him. It is a profoundly Conradian psychological dilemma. The film
ends with a strangely tantalising and yet unresolved sense of pathos – what was
it all for in the end?
The nobility Onoda found in his role
as the leader of a small band of men may have redeemed the self-perceived inadequacies
which originally got him into this pickle – but it perhaps only belies the bigger
paradox, that in seeking to do the right thing he has ended up accomplishing its
opposite – wasting not just his own life, but also the lives of those who remained with him,
and of those whom they encountered and killed. When watching the film’s long
closing shot of Onoda’s face as he looks out of the helicopter lifting him out
of Lubang, mirroring the way he looked to the island on his arrival, one can’t
help wondering what he might be feeling and thinking deep inside as he listens
to the unending metronomic rattle of the helicopter’s rotor blades passing
overhead. It seems as though the clock which stopped long ago in 1945 has finally begun
ticking for him once again. But this is an unanswerable question. Only Onoda
can really know what it felt like, the rest of us can only speculate.
All images from Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Bathysphere), original photo of Suzuki and Onoda presumed to be in the public domain.
~ * ~
Postscript: –It seems there's something in the zeitgeist at the moment prompting reflections upon the life of Onoda Hirō. In June this year, an English translation (by Michael Hofmann) of a novel, The Twilight World(Penguin / Random House, 2022), by the filmmaker, Werner Herzog, is due to be published. This should make for an interesting read. Herzog, whose own work very much bridges the psychological space between Joseph Conrad and J.G. Ballard, is fascinated by themes of the quixotic and the dystopian. As Herzog himself has said: “I am fascinated by the idea that our civilisation is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness” (Scottish Review of Books, 13 May 2011). Herzog first met and got to know Onoda Hirō in 1997 when visiting Japan, so – although still a fictional representation of a reality, presumably much like Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle – this novel may well present some further enlightened and informed existential insights into this fascinating subject of a man removed from time, stuck in confrontation with himself and the world as he sees and experiences it, at the edge of that thin layer which separates external reality from the internal abyss, lodged deep within the human psyche.
In early January 2020, I bought
myself a copy of Owen Lattimore’s The Desert Road to Turkestan (1929) in
the gorgeous treasure house of books which is Isseido Bookstore in Jimbocho,
Tokyo’s famous ‘book town’ district. It was a travelogue which I had long been
wanting to read, but 2020 had other plans. I left it at our home in Tokyo and
then found myself stuck 9,000 miles away, unable to return as I then found
myself living under ‘lockdown’ in the UK during the Corona virus pandemic which
seemed to stop the world in its tracks. It was well over a year and a half
before I was reunited with my copy of Lattimore’s first published work, but it
was well worth the wait. Owen Lattimore’s Desert Road is a truly magical
book.
My copy is the Kodansha reissue of
1995, which contains Lattimore’s own updated Introduction from 1975, plus
an additional Introduction written by his son, David Lattimore
(Professor of Chinese Studies at Brown University in the USA). In this edition
it’s interesting to read how the older Owen Lattimore looks back and reviews a
work written while he was a young man. Re-evaluating some of its faults and
weaknesses – faults which he deems were due either to his young age and
inexperience, and/or due to the tenor of the times in which it was written. He
says “there is […] a kind of condescension that makes me wince today, 45
years later when I read some of the pages – a once-fashionable condescension of
‘the white man among the natives.’ I particularly regret some of the
patronising remarks about my loyal companion, ‘Moses’, because they belong to
the bad old tradition of praising the ‘faithful native servant’ as an indirect
way of building up one’s superiority. There are also passages that show that in
spite of my love of venturing into the deep interior, I had by no means thrown
off the social snobbery and appalling political insensitivity of the Treaty
Port foreigner on the coast of China in the 1920s.” (p. xxvi)
That said though, Lattimore’s book
is far less condescending than some of his contemporaries, such as the plant
hunter, Reginald Farrer, for example, whose ‘humorous’ descriptions of the
locals he hires in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands repeatedly reduces them to
racist caricatures and simplistic clichés. Farrer and Lattimore were both men
in their twenties at the time they wrote their travelogues; but, unlike
Lattimore who lived a long life, Farrer died young (whilst travelling on one of
his journeys), so we’ll never know if like Lattimore he may have grown to
regret and revise the opinions of his younger self. Lattimore owns up to his
overly “bookish” attempts (as he puts it) to impress his reader, viewing
his first published work as “a young man’s effort, sometimes too strained an
effort, to show how much he knows, how thoroughly he has mastered his problems,
how deeply he has penetrated the lives of people whose nature the reader could
never understand without his help.” (p. xxvi)However, his younger
self was perhaps more perceptive than his older self gives him credit for.
Certainly, he was more honest and open than a great many of his peers in one
major respect, as the book’s original Preface attests; where he notes he
has consciously attempted to avoid a “tendency, regrettably marked among my
own countrymen, to omit all references [to other travellers, such as Nikolay Przhevalsky and Pyotr Kozlov], thus
giving the vicious implication that one has been travelling in totally
unexplored and unmapped countries.” (p.xxxv)
The Desert Road to Turkestan was
a book which marked the beginning of a transformation in Lattimore’s life and
livelihood. It certainly helped to launch him on a long and distinguished academic
career. A career which was the envy of some of his contemporaries, who
attempted to severely malign him in the suspiciously paranoid and febrile atmosphere
of McCarthy era America during the 1950s. Born in the USA in 1900, Lattimore
had grown up in China where his father worked as a businessman in Tianjin. And,
like many children born to ‘Treaty Port’ foreigners, he was sent overseas to
school, first in Switzerland and then in England. Returning to China, he
entered employment in Arnhold & Co.’s import-export company. But unlike
other foreigners residing in China at the time, Lattimore actively studied
Chinese and Mongolian, a character trait which his family joked was due to the
fact that he simply couldn’t “bear not to know what other people are saying.”
His job as a commercial agent required him to travel, a role in which his abilities
as a polylinguist were a real advantage. It was one such journey, “to
expedite a wool shipment,” which led him to the railhead at Hohhot
(Kuei-hua), where modern transportation reached its furthest extent and gave
way to the older modes transit which had hitherto sustained the commerce
between China and Central Asia for centuries, the place where great long
caravans of camels set out across the steppes of Mongolia, following the much
fabled ‘Silks Roads’ heading west. Lattimore was transfixed. He realised this
was a way of life which was teetering on the cusp of great change.
“It was a strange thing to walk
in those markets, feeling the pulses of the life led through inenarrable
yesterdays by the farthest-going caravans, and knowing the shadow of tomorrow
would distort all their type and character. When the camel man has done up his
bundle, he shambles away out of the city as if he were expecting to stroll home
within half an hour; but he plods on until he finds the camp where the caravan
waits behind the hills with its camels at pasture, until its complement of
loads be filled; when camp is broken, he plods away again until he fetches up
in Central Asia; for the men of his calling, by leaving their houses and
pitching tents, depart with no more ado from the civilization of telegraphs and
newspapers, bayonets and martial law, into a secret and distant land of which
they only know the doors.” (p.27)
Eleanor & Owen Lattimore
Oddly enough this journey was actually
Lattimore’s honeymoon, yet he travelled alone with the caravan men across
Mongolia. His wife, Eleanor Holgate Lattimore, likewise travelled alone –
departing from Manchuria, heading to ‘Chinese Turkestan’ (Xinjiang) through
Russia on the trans-Siberian railway. Rendezvousing in Xinjiang the
newly-weds travelled onwards together, through the Karakorum mountains
to India via Ladakh, even though the internecine rivalries between Chinese warlords which around
this time in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 frequently flared up in
chaotic bouts of fighting meant this would likely be a hazardous undertaking. Eleanor later published
her own travelogue, Turkestan Reunion (1934), which travels in tandem to
Owen’s Desert Road, based on her letters written during the journey. The
couple returned to China once more after a brief stay in America, travelling
through Manchuria. Owen wrote about this journey in his second travelogue, High Tartary (1930). Returning to Mongolia in the 1930s, Lattimore continued to observe and reflect upon the
influence of Chinese settlers on the traditional way of life of the nomadic pastoralists whom the Chinese were increasingly displacing.
Although he had sat and passed the
entrance exam for Oxford, Lattimore never went to university because he was
unsuccessful in attaining the scholarship which he would have needed to support
himself during his studies. This missed opportunity, however, certainly never
held him back. Indeed, soon after it was published, The Desert Road to
Turkestan was duly noted for its scholarly merits. As his son, David,
recounts: “In America, the Social Sciences Research Council, imaginatively
judging the book equivalent to a Ph.D., awarded my father a year of
‘postdoctoral’ study in anthropology at Harvard University. More grants
followed for further travel and study in China and Inner Asia, one from the
Harvard-Yenching Institute and two successive ones from the Guggenheim
Foundation.” It was perhaps an astute rather than ‘imaginative’ award,
because anyone reading The Desert Road surely can’t help but take notice
and admire the deft and very subtle way in which Lattimore manages to interweave
highly perceptive strands of several allied subject areas – combining geography
with history and anthropology, and these in turn with etymology and language,
as well as relevant nods to contemporary politics – all within the first-hand
narration of a singular and unusual journey. The Desert Road very ably
records what was certainly an arduous journey made at a unique point in time.
It’s this combination of elements, along with Lattimore’s quietly understated
talent as a writer, which today makes this book a genuine classic.
When I began reading it, I expected
Lattimore to be erudite and interesting. I’d already dipped into his most
famous scholarly work, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940). But what
I’d not really expected was for him to be such affable company while travelling
on The Desert Road. There are several points where his humour shines
through marvellously. To give just two examples, remarkably both from the same
chapter of the book: – the first is his recounting of his conversation with a
doctor friend prior to setting out, in which Owen is seeking advice on
maintaining a healthy diet while travelling with the camel caravan, and what
preparations he should make ahead of his journey:
“Now my stomach is a prideful
organ that has always urged me to let it try anything once, and has usually
liked it. Nevertheless, when I returned to Peking, I took that same stomach to
a friend of mine who was a doctor with Mongolian experience and asked him what
I should put into it. The doctor thought of a lot of things. He drew up a
wonderful list in which the proportions of the proteins and the carbohydrates
and the what-nots were superbly balanced. Then he checked it by the dietary of
the American Navy (for he was versed in many things besides Mongolia), saw that
it was good, and made some additions. Afterward I checked it with a check book
and made some subtractions. Finally we arrived at a ‘modus edendi.’ Of the
original theory on which the regimen was based I seem to remember only that the
American Navy can keep afloat (if pushed, as the saying goes) on baked beans
and what are Americonautically called “canned” tomatoes.
Although
a layman, I take a really intelligent interest in my gastric juices. Therefore,
when the doctor had squared his idea of what I should buy with my idea of what
I should pay, and announced that the calories, at any rate, would be no
disgrace to the American Navy, I made bold to ask him how I stood on vitamins,
the A and the B, or both, or either. I told him roundly that tinned vegetables
were deficient in vitamins. Nor could he deny it. We pondered the vitamins with
silent gloom and a whiskey-soda. At last the doctor said: ‘Well, anyway,
America was largely civilized by the canned tomato.’ To which I answered … but
no matter. The American Navy has been getting very large of late.” (p. 164)
Lattimore's dog, Suji (eating from a dead camel carcass?)
My other example rather reminds me
of a very memorable passage in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and
London, published in 1933, coincidentally not so long after Lattimore’s Desert
Road – in which Orwell meditates on the probable evolution and hence eventual
dilution of the efficacy of the F word as a particularly versatile and
pungently pugnacious swear word. Lattimore ponders the vernacular in a similar
vein, observing:
“It is a pity that even in this
age of experiment a treatise on swearing would have to be privately printed,
because language that is robustly and originally foul is almost always achieved
by startling combinations of words that look so disgusting. It is a still
greater pity that the disguised use of swearing in print should have led to all
kinds of sham. I do not mean so much things in the style of ‘d---!’ or ‘The
captain swore a frightful oath. ‘Confound you!’ he said turning on his heel.’ I
mean serious and active falsity in our literature, which was revealed to me
while pondering an attempt to Bowdlerize the strong talk of the Kuei-hua camel
men without emasculating it. What I cannot away with is the spurious ornament
and gingerbread ‘picturesqueness’ of our versions of Persian, Egyptian, Arabic,
Hindu, and Oriental cursing generally. In that hour of mental exertion it was
forced on my understanding that the ruck of those rococo expressions must be
not only related in kind but identical in word with many of the raw formulae of
the caravan men. They have, I can only suppose, very little of that artful
sophistication they have assumed in English. What is ko-p’ao! jih ta tsu-tsu!
(a favourite address to a camel) but ‘O base-born son of a shameless ancestry!’
Yet literally (and, except for the comparatively little-known dialect of the
northwest, I have selected an Easy Example for Beginners) it is ‘Bastard! – his
ancestors!’
It
is at that word in blank that we stick. ‘Defile’ is in some measure a version;
but it is not a full rendering, not a flat-footed, absolute translation.” (pp.
153-154)
I can’t help wondering what
Lattimore would have made of them had he lived long enough to read the works of
Irvine Welsh … ?
Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart at Gilgit, 1935.
The Desert Road to Turkestan
had a significant influence on subsequent travellers to the region, perhaps
most notably on Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, for whom the book was both an
inspiration and a guide. Fleming and Maillart, both very young but experienced solo
travellers, combined forces to make a journey through Xinjiang around ten to
fifteen years after Lattimore made his journey through Mongolia. They were
journalists, each respectively working for British and French newspapers at the
time, who each subsequently wrote their own travelogues of their shared
journey. It’s fascinating to read Fleming’s News from Tartary (1936)
alongside Maillart’s Forbidden Journey (1937), simply to see how a
single journey can differ so greatly in simple terms of personal perspective.
Each disavowed any intentions to claim that they were ‘serious explorers’,
claiming that their journey was an entirely ad hoc one which succeeded simply
through luck and good fortune rather than by means of meticulous planning and
preparation. Nonetheless, their journey was commended by more experienced veterans
of the Desert Road, notably Sir Eric Teichman, who chronicled his own journey in
a book titled, Journey to Turkistan (1937), and, of course, by Owen
Lattimore himself.
Fleming’s book is nonchalantly laid
back in tone, never seeming to take the journey seriously; an affected attitude
which some have taken to be a cover for the fact that he was really making the
journey in order to gather intelligence for the British Secret Service (his
brother, Ian Fleming, was famously the writer and creator of James Bond, 007).
Maillart’s book, in contrast, is much more reflective and romantic in tone;
clearly the vast open spaces she travelled through, as well as the places and
people she encountered, touched her heart deeply; and indeed, she continued to
travel in Central Asia for many years thereafter. She subsequently made another
famous shared journey, this time travelling through Afghanistan, travelling in
company with fellow Swiss writer and photographer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach,
whom Maillart calls ‘Christina’ in her book, The Cruel Way (1947).
Lattimore certainly thought very highly of Maillart, both as a traveller and a
writer.
Ella 'Kini' Maillart
Given Lattimore’s unusual entré
into academia, it is perhaps not so surprising to discover that his scholarly
career was equally unusual. His academic life was suitably adventurous, and in
many ways it remained as independently motivated as his first journey with Mongolia’s
caravan men. It brought him into the orbit of some of the era’s most prominent and
powerful statesmen. He met Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai in the 1930s, before
they came to power in China. And he was appointed by American President,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the Second World War to act as a foreign adviser
to Chiang Kai-shek, who was then the President of the Republic of China. And
though Lattimore’s politcial analysis differed little in substance from that of
other official US China watchers at the time, his access to such individuals and
some of his alleged political sympathies with the left enabled a shadow of
doubt to be cast over his underlying aims and intentions.
Owen Lattimore with Chiang Kai-shek
As such, he was
suspected of harbouring Communist sympathies and accused of being the top
Soviet spy operating covertly in the United States by Senators Joseph McCarthy
and Pat McCarran. A lengthy Congressional Investigation meticulously picked
through everything he wrote himself and commissioned from other writers and
academics whilst he was working for the Institute of Pacific Relations as the editor
of its journal, Pacific Affairs. No conclusive proof, however, was found
at the time or since to prove the allegations; and despite the support of
friends and colleagues during the tortuous course of the various hearings,
Lattimore’s name and career in the US never really recovered from what he
described in a book of the same title, as an Ordeal by Slander (1950).
Consequently, in 1963 he moved to the UK where he took up an appointment to
found a new Department of Chinese Studies (now East Asian Studies) at Leeds University,
where he also established a programme of Mongolian Studies, a subject he
remained devoted to even in the years after he retired. He spent much of the
remainder of his life in Europe and Mongolia rather than the USA, although he
died and was buried there in 1989.
Owen Lattimore during the McCarthy Era Congressional Investigations
During his lifetime he received due
recognition and many academic honours, and his scholarly work still resonates
with students and specialists across many disciplines today because he retains
that far-reaching, transcendental sense of perception which seems an essential
prerequisite in making truly original connections. Lattimore’s work has since been
built upon, continued and diversified in more recent years by many notable
scholars, such as James Millward, Peter Perdue, and Alfred J. Rieber, to name
only a few. And as Peter Perdue has observed, “Modern historians,
anthropologists, and archaeologists have revised many of Lattimore’s arguments,
but they still rely on his insights. All of the themes addressed by Lattimore
continue to inspire world historians today.”
Indeed, despite his own
self-referential criticisms of his younger authorial self in The Desert Road
to Turkestan, I think there is still much to be learned from his first book
– not least in terms of his mindset and his methodology, but also from his
authorial manner; it is his patience and his curiosity allied together in the
way in which he conducts himself and couches his observations which establish
him as a master of his chosen métier. Setting his pace in
time with that of the caravan plodding along the Desert Road, he walks with
steady, well-paced assurance, with an open eye which remains trained to the
horizon at all times. In many ways, reflecting on his background in relation to
his remarkable life, beginning from relatively humble, if unusual,
circumstances, and his highly accomplished career which managed to endure such
extremes of adversity, I think it’s a fair claim to make, that Lattimore’s
writings show that true scholars are both born and self-made.
~
Mongolia - On The Edge of the Gobi, 1975.
In 1975 Owen Lattimore advised
and narrated two documentary films about Mongolia made for Granada Television’s
“Disappearing World” series. These two films, plus a two-hour long interview
with Lattimore by anthropologists, Caroline Humphrey and Alan
Macfarlane in 1983, help to give a clear view of Lattimore as a person. His
speaking voice was no less beautifully clear and measured than his written
voice, it is a real joy to be able to hear him speak in what remain as a series
of fascinating films and conversations. I have collated a ‘playlist’ of these documentaries
and interviews on YouTube, which you can access here.
Mongolia - The City On The Steppes, 1975.
~
Owen Lattimore, 1967.
Further Reading
Charles Forsdick, ‘Peter Fleming
& Ella Maillart in China: Travel Writing as Stereoscopic and Polygraphic
Form,’ in Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2009), pp. 293-303
Caroline Humphrey & David Sneath, The End of Nomadism? Society, the State and the Environment in Inner Asia (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999)
Justin M. Jacobs, Xinjiang and
the Modern Chinese State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016)
James Millward, Eurasian
Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007)
Peter C. Perdue, China Marches
West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 2005)
Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle
for Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of
the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
William T. Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore,
Asia, and Comparative History’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 66,
No. 3 (August, 2007), pp. 759-786
“It seemed to me a little hard
that I should have had only this one chance of seeing one of the remotest
places of the earth [Etsina / Kara Khoto], and, passing almost within
hail, yet pass it sight unseen. It made me wonder how much more I might have
seen and learned, had I been a Competent Traveler, with all the assistance of
lavish funds and the cordial regard of legations. As it was, the fortune I followed was no more than the fortune of travel in company with the trading caravans – the haphazard
life among men whose very going forth and coming in is a survival from
forgotten ages, and is as regardless of outer things; men sometimes closed-lipped
and sometimes free-spoken, whose fragmentary legends of immemorial tradition
are like dim lights flickering down long corridors of ignorance.” (pp. 193-194)
