Who gets to marry whom? Should your skin color, genetic makeup, or country of origin matter? We’ve seen tremendous progress in legalizing gay marriage, but how far have we really come? I wonder about these things as we conclude a year in which we’ve struggled more than ever to understand each other. Many of our assumptions about our fellow human beings and our relationships are too flimsy to withstand such changing times. The 2002 World Book Encyclopedia (the edition I have on hand) has an entry on marriage that states, “if a man and woman are of a different age, nationality, religion, or background, their chances of a successful marriage drop significantly.” According to more recent research, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher found three particular capacities associated with happy partnerships: empathy, emotional self-control, and focusing on the positive (what you like about your spouse) rather than the negative. These could apply to anybody! Fisher’s subjects were in the United States and China, indicating that some measures of marital success are not culture bound.
I hardly considered limitations on whom I could marry, largely because of the systemic racism of white privilege whereby I didn’t have to think about such things. Where love and compatibility are not the main criteria in choosing a life partner, political and religious leaders have, historically, tried to intervene in people’s love lives, telling them whom they can and cannot marry. Until I was eleven years old, many states had laws banning interracial marriage. Then the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Virginia anti-miscegenation law, thereby making it illegal for any state to prohibit interracial marriage. The court decided that such laws violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Sixteen years after that court decision, I married my husband, who is among the third generation of his Japanese family to live in America. We’ve been married more than thirty-seven years. Are we mismatched? Yes, in many ways that have nothing to do with ethnicity or skin tone. We have some cultural differences, for sure, but doesn’t everybody? We have two so called “mixed race” daughters and celebrate a mix of cultures. I like the old saying that variety is the spice of life. And, biologically speaking, variety makes for stronger communities, such as plant diversity in ecosystems.
In scientific terms, race is a social construct. Psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum explains, “Despite myths to the contrary, biologists tell us that the only meaningful racial categorization is that of human.” Still, we persist in categorizing groups and highlighting supposed differences among those groups. Socially constructed boundaries defining my European ancestors broke down over the centuries. Partly due to intermarriage, the significance of identities, such as French or Dutch, diminished. It is easier, and widely acceptable, to say I am European American rather than list the half dozen countries from which I am derived.
Our daughter, Emily, and I both had our genes tested by 23 & Me, with predictable results. My ancestry was said to be 100% European and Emily’s was half European and half Asian. But one of the fascinating things about those tests is that, as they become more refined, they yield new and more specific results. I was notified the other day, for instance, that my genetic testing now shows that my ancestry is only 99.8% European, with a bit of “trace ancestry,” glimmers of unknown forebears outside Europe. (And, if you are wondering, I have a little Neanderthal, too.) Also, I can now say that I’m 22.4% British and Irish. My Irish ancestors likely came from County Donegal, County Dublin, County Cork, and County Kerry. That’s how precise the tests can be. (I’m not sure why my mother’s Manx roots were not similarly specified. I’d like to know more about my ancestors from Isle of Man.)
While genetic information is illuminating, it is not the whole story. I would never want to erase or even blur any of the ingredients that make up a person. In other words, I don’t want to be colorblind. How bleak that would be to overlook something as intrinsic and gorgeous as skin color! Lethal and divisive problems arise not from acknowledging differences, but from our attachments to what those differences mean. I am not saying we should ignore our identities or histories. Rather, I want to respect what identity means to each person, and honor loving, egalitarian relationships, regardless of gender, culture, or other human variations. Maybe the categories of people will continue to get broader and broader, as happened with European Americans, until I can simply say, “Me? I’m of the human race.”
As for marriage, it’s about time for it to be about love, first and foremost. What other force is strong enough to hold us together through thick and thin? Along with humor, I suppose. Fisher calls laughter “the elixir of survival – it evolved to get us through hard times.”
May we be in good health, good spirits, and good humor in the coming year! All the best to each of you. (I felt obligated to find photos of couples for this post. If any of these are not okay to share, I will gladly remove them. Except the last one. That’s me and my husband!)
The spread of the novel Coronavirus has made me realize how nuts I am about scientific method. A friend tells me her church is people. I like that. The Dalai Lama says his religion is kindness. I like that, too. My philosophical perspective nowadays includes both humanism and kindness, leaving plenty of room for science. Including empirical evidence is important to me because I was brought up to respect science and admire scientists and engineers. My parents’ idea of a fun vacation was to attend a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). My father was a mathematician and liked to have his information verified, preferably by empirical, scientific methods. Even watching television commercials, he’d demonstrate a healthy skepticism for the misleading statistics of four-out-of-five-dentists type claims and taught me to be skeptical, too.
With the rise of COVID-19, it’s clear that scientists are constantly working behind the scenes to understand viruses, prevent outbreaks, and deal with contagions. It was a woman named June Almeida who first identified the human coronavirus under a microscope, though she wasn’t taken seriously at first. It’s easy to sit back and speculate about an illness and its origin. Tracking it to its source, whether it is a chimpanzee in the case of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or bats in the case of recent viruses, takes diligent, painstaking effort over the course of years.
Our neighbor, M.C. Kang, is a chemist who developed drugs for the treatment of AIDS. He noted that, “In a rough sense, it takes thirty years or longer to deliver a medicine from the first understanding of biology to the market. Identification of biological mechanism takes twenty years or so through basic research in biology in academia.” For instance, M.C. worked for ten years to bring a drug called Fuzeon (T20) to market for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Such breakthroughs, along with the work of Anthony Fauci, M.D., virologist David Ho, and others, save lives.
Dr. Fauci says that lessons learned while working on the AIDS virus were useful in tackling the novel coronavirus. “Viruses cause disease by binding to receptors on cells in your body, be they in your upper airway or in your lung, in the case of COVID-19. They then replicate at a rapid rate that triggers a variety of pathogenic processes. Targeting drugs to interfere at one or more vulnerable sites within this replication cycle is something that we learned with HIV.”
Now people all over the world need tests, vaccines, and treatments for COVID-19. Scientists and doctors are developing them as fast as they can. There will be mutations of the virus that require new vaccines and treatments. And there will be new viruses emerging. As M.C. points out, that’s part of nature. Scientific evidence indicates that the novel coronavirus came not from a laboratory but from nature. And it’s part of human nature to try to understand and cure viral illnesses and, when possible, prevent them. Like the AAAS, we can advocate for evidence and its integrity and hasten our victories over the virus.
Shio lived in the seaside village of Nakanohama, Japan. Her husband was a fisherman and she expected her three sons to become fishermen, too. Her two daughters would become wives of fishermen and stay close to home.
That’s how it was in Japan two hundred years ago.
Could Shio see a different destiny for her second son, Manjiro? Ever since he was born, Manjiro glowed like a firefly and he was always curious.
“Manjiro,” she’d say, “it’s up to you.
There’s nothing you can’t do.
If you keep trying, you’ll see it through.”
When Shio’s husband died, nine-year-old Manjiro started going to work every day. With no father and an older brother too sick and weak to work, it was up to him to provide for the family. Little Manjiro may have looked skinny as a rice stalk, but he became strong as bamboo. He helped empty the nets on fishing boats and brought home fish for the dinner table. At least they had something to eat with their rice.
Every morning, Shio told her little son,
“My dear Manjiro-chan,
try your hardest again today
and remember: Gaman!
Gaman means to stay strong
like a tree stands in a storm.
Don’t give up and don’t give in.
Have patience and go on.”
Manjiro’s two brothers and two sisters depended on him. Sometimes they called out to him as he left for work,
“C’mon, gaman!
You can do it.
You’ll get through it.
Oni-chan, gaman!”
At this time in 1836, Japan had hundreds of rules, like the rule that children always grow up to work in the same jobs as their parents. No Japanese citizen could leave to visit other countries, and no person from another country could visit Japan. People who broke the rules were punished and imprisoned. That’s how it had been in Japan for a long time.
When Manjiro was fourteen-years-old, he was working on a small fishing vessel with four other fishermen when a storm came up and blew their boat far away from Japan. When her son did not return, Shio had to accept that he was either drowned or shipwrecked somewhere. After a while, the family even had a funeral for him. Shio was very sad, but she told herself, “Gaman. Stay strong like a tree in a storm.” She had to keep going and take care of her family.
Manjiro’s family didn’t know he was still alive.
Almost twelve years later, on October 5, 1852, they got a big surprise. Guess who was coming to their door! Shio heard someone calling “Okasan” and went outside her little house. A man who seemed somehow familiar was coming towards her, walking very fast. “Mother, I’m here! I’m here!” he said. Then he stopped and bowed his head low. “I’m sorry I left you for so long.”
“Manjiro? Could it be you?” Shio said. Tears came to her eyes. Then her son hugged her and cried along with her. His brothers and sisters came running to see what was happening and stopped short in surprise. Shio drew herself up and said, “It is your brother. He has come home.”
Their shock gave way to joy as they shouted, “You’re back! Hurray!” And then, “Manjiro! Where have you been?”
“Yes, Manjiro, what happened to you?” asked his mother. If she had known, she would have been a wreck herself.
The family gathered outside on straw mats with cups of tea. It was a warm autumn afternoon in their village between the mountains and the sea. “Manjiro, we thought you were dead. You left here a boy and now you’re a man. Where did you go?” his mother asked.
“I’ve been around the world and back,” Manjiro said. Then he realized that his family would not understand what that meant. They knew as little of the planet as he had twelve years ago when he was shipwrecked. He decided to start at the beginning of his journey.
“I was fishing on a boat with four others. A storm broke our mast and oars. The cold rain and winds lasted for seven days and blew our boat far, far out in the Pacific Ocean. All we could do was hang on.”
“Gaman,” said his mother, glad that her son had remembered what she taught him.
“Then we used planks of wood to row ourselves toward a tiny island. Our boat broke to pieces on the rocks, so the five of us swam to shore.”
“Oh,” said Shio, with a sharp intake of breath. “You didn’t give up.”
“There were no people living on the island, only albatross birds. We ate their eggs. We also found shellfish to eat. We saved rainwater and allowed ourselves three sips a day. That’s how we lived for five months! At night we slept in a cave.”
Castaway on the rocky island of Torishima
A tear rolled down Shio’s cheek as she thought of their loneliness. “So much for a boy to endure!”
Manjiro’s sisters remembered the words they’d shouted to their brother as he went to work. Now they chanted them again in order to cheer up their mother and to help Manjiro continue telling his story.
“C’mon, gaman!
You can do it.
You’ll get through it.
Oniisan, gaman!”
Manjiro laughed, remembering how their high spirits had lifted his mood so many years ago. He decided not to dwell on his trials as a castaway, such as the earthquake that almost buried them in their cave, and jumped ahead to a happier part of the story. “We always looked for boats to come take us home. One day while I was looking for food on the shore, I saw a ship. I shouted and the others came running, waving their clothes until the sailors on the ship saw us. We were rescued!”
Manjiro’s mother, brothers, and sisters leaned toward him with their eyes wide. “By Japanese?” asked his sister.
“No, they were Americans from far away, hunting for whales in a big ship. They rowed a small boat to our island and picked us up. Then they took us on board the big ship and fed us rice and soup. They gave us sailor clothes to wear and washed our old things for us. But they could not bring us home, because Japan does not allow foreign ships to enter its ports.”
“Weren’t you scared, Manjiro?” asked his littlest sister.
“My four fellow fishermen were very scared. They expected to be killed. I was too curious to be scared, so I followed the sailors around to see what they were doing. Some of the men were friendly even though they laughed when I tried to repeat the words they said. Then one of them touched the tall tree trunk holding their sail and said mast. I repeated it and this time I knew what it meant. I learned new words every day and soon I could talk with the crew and even the captain.”
“The whaling ship took us to the island of Oahu where there were many good people. The four other fishermen decided to stay there. The ship’s captain, William Whitfield, asked me if I’d like to go home with him to America. I said yes.” Manjiro took a chopstick and sketched a map in the dirt to show how far he traveled. “In America, in a place called Massachusetts, I lived with Captain Whitfield and his family. I went to school and learned many things.”
Captain William Whitfield wrote on June 27, 1841: “Sent two boats to see if there was any turtle, found 5 poor distressed people on the isle, took them off.”
“You learned another language?”
“Hai, Okasan. Yes, Mother, I learned to speak, read, and write in English.” Manjiro scratched in the dirt to show them. He wrote John Mung, the name the Americans gave him because it was easier for them to say than Manjiro. Then he continued with his story. “Some people did not like me at first because I was different. I was the first Japanese person they’d ever seen, so, of course, I was strange to them. But I made many friends and learned from everybody. I even learned to ride a horse.”
This was astonishing to Manjiro’s family, because the only people who rode horses in Japan were samurai who served the shoguns and nobility. They did not expect a boy from a poor fishing village to ever have that privilege.
His mother looked confused. “How did you get back to Japan from the other side of the world?”
“There was something called a Gold Rush on the west coast of America. I went there and found gold.”
His brothers and sisters pumped their fists in the air and cheered him again. “And what did you do with the gold?” his mother asked.
“I sold the gold and made enough money to buy my own small boat, the Adventurer, to put on a big ship. The captain of the ship brought me close to Japan and I went the rest of the way in the Adventurer.”
“Where is your boat?” asked his younger brother. After all, a boat is a good thing to have for a fishing family.
“Naturally, I was arrested when I got here, because I have been out of the country. Local officials took my boat away. Then they locked me behind bamboo walls and questioned me for more than a year. Finally, I was released so I could visit you. I hiked ninety miles to get here.”
No one could speak for a few moments as they thought how far Manjiro had come. His brother patted him on the back a few times. Then Shio wiped her eyes on the cotton sleeve of her yukata. She was so grateful her boy who was lost at sea was alive and well. With a smile for Manjiro she said, “I must get you something to eat.” She hurried to the cooking fire. Her son, the firefly, was home at last.
Nakahama Manjiro, ca. 1880
EPILOGUE
Manjiro stayed at his childhood home for three days. After that, he was taken to a castle in Kochi for questioning and then to Edo (now called Tokyo) for more questioning.
Fortunately, he did not have to stay in jail again. The more Manjiro talked to officials, the more they realized that he could be a valued advisor to the Shogun and other leaders of Japan. A scribe wrote down and illustrated what the traveler told them. Those writings and pictures became a book called Drifting Toward the Southeast that is still available today.
Manjiro became a teacher and taught English and other subjects to samurai.
In December 1853, Manjiro was given the rank of samurai himself. The young fisherman from Nakanohama received payment, two special swords and a new name, Nakahama Manjiro. (Only high-ranking people in Japan had second names. Manjiro named himself after his village.) He could finally help support his family as he’d tried to do as a child.
Manjiro was often asked to tell people about America. He told the Japanese leaders how helpful and friendly the Americans had been to him. Manjiro’s words helped the leaders consider being friendly, too, and in 1854 Japan entered into a treaty of peace, friendship, and trade with the United States. They opened two ports to ships from the United States of America and other countries. After 250 years of closed doors, Japan was open to the rest of the world.
Manjiro had gaman, guts, and grit. He did more than endure his difficulties. He took action, made friends, and changed the world.
JAPANESE WORDS AND THEIR MEANINGS
Gaman = Endurance, strength, and perseverance
Hai = Yes
Okasan = Mother
Oni-chan = Brother (informal)
Oniisan = Brother (formal)
Samurai = Warrior in service to the shoguns
Shogun = Head of the samurai government
Yukata = Cotton kimono
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernard, Donald R. The Life and Times of John Manjiro. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992.
Blumberg, Rhoda. Shipwrecked! The True Adventures of a Japanese Boy. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Hirasuna, Delphine. The Art of Gaman: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005.
Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii. Humanity Above Nation: The Impact of Manjiro and Heco on America and Japan. Honolulu: The Joseph Heco Society of Hawaii, 1995.
Manjiro, John and Kawada, Shoryo. Drifting Toward the Southeast: The Story of Five Japanese Castaways. Told in 1852 and translated by Junya Nagakuni and Junji Kitadai. New Bedford, Mass.: Spinner Publications, Inc., 2003.
Rosenbach Museum and Library, Nakahama Manjiro’s Hyosen Kiryaku: A Companion Book. Philadelphia: Rosenbach Museum and Library, 1999.
My daughter, Emily, and I used to visit the International Crane Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and later worked there briefly as volunteers. We were fascinated, as were millions of people by the work of George Archibald and Ron Sauey to save endangered crane species, especially the whooping crane, from extinction. With only thirty known whooping cranes left in the world, it became crucial to breed Tex, a female crane in captivity. Trouble was, she was imprinted on humans from an early age and had no interest in flirting, much less mating, with her own kind. But George she liked.
George Archibald tells the story of Tex and her egg.
So they would dance.
During mating season, George got up every morning and walked with Tex over a grassy hill of the Crane Foundation. She was, in her mind anyway, his crane wife, (also the name of a popular folk tale in Japan). The whooper was always delighted to see him. Together they would do deep knee bends and flap their appendages in the brisk Wisconsin air. Whooping cranes are four to five feet tall and have six to eight feet wing spans. Tex could hold her own with Dr. Archibald! The couple danced each spring for three years. Eventually, George’s assistant was able to artificially inseminate the bird as her attention was on George. George Archibald kept Tex company day after day and, like in the Japanese folk tale, his “crane wife” returned the favor. She laid a fertile egg! The egg hatched into a chick named Gee Whiz that carried on Tex’s genetic line.
Though whooping cranes now number in the hundreds, they are still rare and endangered. You can see wild cranes in the wetlands of Wisconsin and you can see cranes of all fifteen species at the International Crane Foundation.
People over the centuries have no doubt observed the way newly hatched birds sometimes bond with humans. Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) specialized in studying this behavior known as imprinting. Working with greylag geese, he stayed with some hatching eggs until the goslings emerged from their shells so that he was the first animate object they saw. The goslings attached to him as if he were their mother, following him all around.
Konrad Lorenz
Emily’s fiancé, Alex, had a similar experience with one of their geese on their Duck Duck Goose Farm on Whidbey Island. One spring day Alex heard a peeping in the grass a short distance from the nesting area of the geese. He found a tiny hatchling, cold and wet, and wondered how he got separated from his mother. When Alex returned the little guy to his mom, she pushed him away. As Alex put it, he “shopped” the gosling around to the other geese moms and none would take him.
So Alex took the fluff ball inside the house, dried him off, and fed him. Once he warmed up, the little goose kept chirping for attention, so Alex turned on some music to try to calm him down. When a piece by Amadeus Mozart started to play, the gosling was entranced and peaceful. So Alex named him Mozart.
After that, Mozart liked being with humans and had to be babysat at all times. In fact, on Mother’s Day, Emily showed up for our celebration at my house, handed me the fluffy, peeping baby, and said, “Happy Mother’s Day!” He was my first grandchild, as it were. I tended to him while she and Alex cooked a nice dinner. At the Greenbank Pantry and Deli, you can see where Mozart’s image is painted (by our daughter Steph Terao) under the store sign on the side of the building. He’s now the mascot of the deli where Emily and Alex work, because he spent so much time in the yard there while they set up their new business.
Napping baby gooseMozart with Stephanie
This past spring, one-year-old Mozart bonded with a Roman tufted goose and she laid a nest full of eggs! Their offspring imprinted on their parents and followed them all over the farm. Even though Mozart is an excellent father and well-adjusted gander now, he still greets Alex and Emily with a big spread of his wings, happy to see them.
Mozart the gander watches over his offspring at Duck Duck Goose Farms.
As one of my mentors, Paula Underwood, used to say, what may we learn from this?
From George and Tex, I am reminded to dance. Sometimes it’s more than fun and exercise; it can be a bonding experience and help continue the species!
Perhaps there is a warning in imprinting: don’t follow every animate object that catches your eye or soothes your vulnerabilities. It is disturbing to know that the Austrian Konrad Lorenz was an active member of the Nazi party during WWII. With that in mind, the charming photographs of him with lines of devoted ducks or geese behind him might conjure up the kick step march of German soldiers saluting Hitler. If someone appeals to our instincts and takes advantage of our innocence, we may be recruited as devoted followers. This is not usually done with our best interests at heart.
What about Mozart? He found no kindness in the nest as a gosling, but due to human kindness became an attentive friend and parent himself. When given a chance, we can fly higher than our upbringing and origins. With fluffiness and fortitude, we bring smiles to those in the heart of an island.
Before there were pantsuits, there were bloomers. Before there were female presidential nominees, there was Susan Brownell Anthony.
Pantsuits
Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820 and grew up in Massachusetts. Her family, especially her Quaker father, Daniel, believed that everyone deserved freedom, education, and other rights, regardless of race or gender. So Susan received as much education as did the boys in her town. (On a personal note, Susan’s cousin, Sarah Anthony also received an education and in later years married my great great grandfather, Zaccheus Test.)
Inspired by news of the Seneca Falls, New York conference for women’s rights in 1848, Susan went to Seneca Falls herself a couple years later and met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer, anti-slavery and women’s rights activists. They were both wearing bloomers! The outfits consisted of loose Turkish-style trousers gathered at the ankles and covered by a skirt that came down just below the knees.
Woman in bloomers
Bloomers may not look comfortable to modern eyes, but they were more convenient than most women’s styles of the 19th century. A woman in America back then typically wore seven layers, including a corset to mold her figure and a skirt so long and full it made everyday movement such as climbing stairs a challenge. Women could never count on making full use of their hands, much less the rest of their bodies, as they managed their hoops and layers. Bloomers freed them up considerably.
In support of such freedom, Susan B. Anthony wore bloomers–for about a year. When her clothing attracted more attention and ridicule than her lectures about women’s rights, Susan went back to wearing her usual dark blouse and skirt, with her hair pulled back in a bun. That’s how we see her in the photograph that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Susan, wearing her most conservative clothes, decided to test the voting laws in a national election. It was illegal for her to cast a ballot for either Ulysses S. Grant or Horace Greeley, so she was arrested and tried by a hostile judge and all-male jury. As the New York Times reported, “It was conceded that the defendant was, on the 5th of November, 1872, a woman.” She was ordered to pay a fine and never paid it. She continued her fight for equality throughout her life.
Fourteen years after the death of Susan B. Anthony, women won the right to vote. The 19th Amendment passed in 1920 and stated, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” It was known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
That was 96 years ago. What will you wear to the polls on November 8 of this year? I’ll be wearing jeans and using a ballot with the name of a woman running for President of the United States. A woman wearing a pantsuit.
Lily with twins David and Donald (my husband) in Chicago, 1949
Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of my mother-in-law, Lily (or Yuriko) Terao. She was mugged by a purse-snatcher near her home in Los Angeles and died from her injuries November 8, 2005. As a nisei (second-generation) Japanese-American, Lily was born in Seattle in 1920 and returned to Japan many times in her life. In fact, she went to high school in Japan, then returned to the United States to work.
Due to the events of World War II, Lily was sent to the desolate Gila River internment camp in Arizona in 1942. She was imprisoned there merely for being Japanese and had to destroy her Japanese items, including her high school diploma. Anything Japanese was suspect at that time. Fluent in both Japanese and English, Lily was soon recruited to go to the University of Michigan and teach Japanese to intelligence officers and others. She saw her chance to get out of the crowded, makeshift camp and she took it.
Gila River barracks 1942
“I took a loyalty test to get out of camp,” she said in an interview transcribed by our daughter, Stephanie. “Then I was sent to Michigan to help teach soldiers Japanese. The student soldiers would come [for one year] and we would speak nothing but Japanese to them. I mostly taught military intelligence.”
I once went to the University of Michigan and got a copy of a document written in 1943 by Marine Major Sherwood Moran, Intelligence Division. It revealed what Lily was working on back then at the University, along with revealing a stark contrast between Moran’s approach and our recent treatment of prisoners, such as at Guantanamo Bay. Moran’s attitude toward interrogation, or “interviewing” as he called it, was more about befriending than brutality.
A June 2005 Atlantic Monthly article, “Truth Extraction,” by Stephen Budiansky explained the impact of Moran’s work, revealing that “abusing prisoners is not simply illegal and immoral; it is also remarkably ineffective.” For instance, James Corum, an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, noted that the cruelty of Abu Ghraib personnel was not a case of the ends justifying the means. “The torture of suspects did not lead to any useful intelligence information being extracted.”
Moran’s attitude was, “I am a human being talking to a human being.” And, he noticed time and again, that human being wants to tell his story. He believed that “those interrogators who tried the hardest to break down the morale of POWs were actually revealing their own fear.” Such “hard-boiled” tactics rarely yielded results.
What was effective during WWII was following Sherwood Moran’s suggestions, recruiting second-generation Japanese Americans, including Lily, and having them teach both language and culture to interrogators. The interrogators could then get to know the prisoners and help them open up to the point where they’d share important information.
Lily made friends with the other nisei women in Ann Arbor and enjoyed teaching the young men how to speak a new language. According to James Corum, “the graduates of this course were among the most effective interrogators in the Pacific Island campaigns of 1944 and 1945.” For instance, it only took Marine interrogators 48 hours to obtain the complete Japanese battle plans in the Marianas in June of 1944. Perhaps some of them were Lily’s students.
Medal honoring Lily (Kobayashi) Terao’s service to Military Intelligence, received by her sons, David and Donald.
On July 1, 1946 my dad, Sgt. Frank Wolf, sent a letter to his grandmother from Bikini Atoll with a special postmark for that day: “Atomic Bomb Test.” “Be sure and save this envelope,” he wrote, “as it may some day be quite a collectors’ item.”
On July 1, fifty-four years later, Dad died of a type of cancer associated with radiation exposure. And in July of 2013, I received a letter informing me that the U.S. government would be sending a check to me and my siblings in compensation for our father’s exposure to nuclear fallout.
Dad was what we’d nowadays call a nerd. A skinny guy, his nieces and nephews called him Uncle Peewee. To his math students, he was Professor Wolf. We four kids just knew him as Dad, the one who got us up early to go fishing and who couldn’t resist a bad pun.
He took keen interest in his work as an engineer in the Army’s technical division, producing U-235 from uranium—even if he was kept in the dark about WHY he was doing it. Stories of the U.S. atomic weapons project came out after the fact—from Enrico Fermi’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago, until the first successful test of the bomb three years later. Terms like “nuclear fission” were coined by scientists as they gleaned what the split atoms could do. Secret nuclear research accelerated to a hectic pace with the events of World War II.
TESTS ONE AND TWO
In July 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, sent two of his fellow scientists a cryptic letter inviting them to join him for “our fishing trip.” They knew what he meant: the new device called the Gadget was about to go off in New Mexico.
The blast on July 16 was equal to 15,000 tons of TNT, surpassing all expectations. People in three states reported seeing the flash. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, a close witness, admitted that when the test began, “there was in everyone’s mind a strong measure of doubt.” Its success “was a justification of the several years of intensive efforts of tens of thousands of people—statesmen, scientists, engineers, manufacturers, soldiers, and many others in every walk of life.” He called the effects of the bomb unprecedented and terrifying, yet also “magnificent.”
The success of the Manhattan Project in producing and detonating its astonishing gadget meant it could then be used in warfare. The atomic bomb let loose on Hiroshima, Japan was essentially the second trial of the new technology.
My husband’s cousin, Reiko, lived in Hiroshima. She was at her desk on the morning of August 6, 1945 when the bomb fell. She was eight-years-old. The other third-graders rushed to the window to see what caused the big, white flash. Reiko did not look up from her schoolwork until the glass in the window shattered. As the atomic cloud swelled over Hiroshima, tens of thousands of her fellow citizens were already dead. 100,000 more were injured, including many of her classmates. Almost half of the 320,000 people of Hiroshima would die from the effects of the bomb by the end of the year.
Reiko walked to her home on the outskirts of the city. She and her mother went out in the evening and took food to the ash-covered people fleeing the devastation.
TESTS THREE AND FOUR
The next use of the atomic bomb was three days later in Nagasaki, causing more devastation and killing more than 70,000 people. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan.
The fourth use of an atomic bomb was the one celebrated with the special postmark on Dad’s letter, after the War. Four days later, at a Paris fashion show, a new swimsuit named after the bombsite debuted: the bikini. A cartoon series depicting the atomic age of 2062 was developed called “The Jetsons,” imagining a tricked-out, high-speed world of the future: a hovercraft in every carport, a robotic maid in the kitchen.
Having worked at Oak Ridge laboratories for the Manhattan Project, Dad wanted to see the uranium-fueled technology in action. For that fourth test, he was watching from the U.S.S. Haven beyond the lagoon. With the lightning-bolt insignia of the Special Engineering Detachment on his shoulder, Dad must have felt part of the power surge carrying America into a new age, ready to apply his training. He got his chance when he was assigned to be a radiation monitor for the next test in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll.
TEST FIVE: A MAJOR MISTAKE
Dad wrote about that day, “It was an interesting mix of people in the Radiological Safety Section. My particular team of radiation monitors consisted of a Major from the Army Field Artillery, myself, and two others. The Major was appointed senior monitor.” This appointment, Dad told us, was based on rank and not expertise. The Baker explosion (click to see photos and video) was detonated underwater in the Bikini lagoon at 8:35 on the morning of July 25, 1946. Two hours later, my dad and his team entered the lagoon in their small landing craft, accompanied by a gunboat. They had a Geiger counter and an ion chamber for measuring radiation.
The team headed for the middle of the lagoon, keeping their eyes on the Geiger counter. Dad noticed, “As we got closer to the target center the readings went up. Then rather suddenly they dropped to almost nothing. I told the Major I thought we might be in heavy radiation. He looked at the dial on the counter and said that I must be mistaken since the needle was at zero. As we headed closer to target center, I decided that this was not the time to explain how Geiger counters work, ignored the Major, and went to the cabinet in the rear and got out the ion chamber.”
Radiation levels were actually beyond the capacity of the Geiger counter to measure. When Dad got the ion chamber set up, its needle climbed and kept on climbing. The Major saw they were in radioactivity ten times above the recommended limit and ordered the landing craft and gunboat to get out of there.
“We headed back to the entrance of the lagoon as fast as we could go,” Dad wrote. Their boat, it was found later, was so contaminated from radioactive fallout it could not be used again.
My father, in his youth, was optimistic about the possibilities of the Atomic Age. As he grew older and worked for peace and environmental causes, he would have agreed with Enrico Fermi who said that scientific advances have certainly “led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. […] What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.”
We now know the horrifying consequences of nuclear warfare and can, with maturity, wisdom and united effort, prevent its use in the future. May we make good use of the knowledge and powers we’ve acquired and work together for a healthy, beautiful world.
A new version of my blog post about John Muir Memorial Park appeared in Orion Magazine’s “Place Where I Live.” I like visiting the park to appreciate John Muir and his hard work preserving beautiful places in America. Drive north of Madison, Wisconsin to the little town of Montello and you will find the park nearby.
I’m writing this blog post on the birthday of E.B. White (July 11, 1899- October 1, 1985) and remembering the pure pleasure of reading his 1952 children’s book, Charlotte’s Web. It turns out that both Elwyn Brooks White and his character, Wilbur, were fond of warm manure, that inextricable aroma and texture of farm life.
A new book by Michael Sims, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, provides a hundred ways in which White connected with nature. Of course, a book about a spider named Charlotte and a pig named Wilbur began in nature; what is fascinating is how addicted White was to domesticated nature.
He was a shy, quiet, and sometimes depressed person and, though he tried therapy, he found his greatest solace and healing in the barn. Growing up, his family in Mt. Vernon, New York had stables with horses, pigs, geese, hay, and manure. Little Elwyn loved watching and listening to the goings-on there and later wrote about himself, “This boy felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people” (Sims, p. 4). As an adult, he and his wife, Katharine, bought a farm in Maine where they worked on their writing and editing. White wrote, “Animals are a weakness with me, and when I got a place in the country I was quite sure animals would appear, and they did” (p. 132). The Whites raised pigs and chickens and enjoyed watching spiders spin their webs in the doorways of their big, white barn.
In the book, the manure pile was a big part of Wilbur’s world, as it was a big part of White’s experience of country living. “There is no doubt about it,” he wrote (p. 195), “the basic satisfaction in farming is manure, which always suggests that life can be cyclic and chemically perfect and aromatic and continuous.”
I notice in my own posts on this blog that various forms of manure have come up, including that of turtles and birds. The truth is that encountering scat is part of being outdoors and gives us clues as to who is doing what and where. My first chore when I arrive at our cabin is to sweep the guano off the stoop. Bats sleep in the peak of the covered entry and poop like mad. Someday I’ll also clean off the robin and phoebe droppings that whitewash the log walls where they build their nests. Lately, I’ve had to clean off the dock some mounds packed with crunched-up bits of crayfish shell, probably from a raccoon.
As David Gessner wrote in his book, Sick of Nature, nature writers talk a lot about scat, but are supposed to be refined about it. White put it front and center in his book, starting a draft, before there were any human characters involved, with: “Wilbur was a small, nicely-behaved pig living in a manure pile in the cellar of a barn” (p. 195). We write what we are called to write, as Charlotte did in her web in order to save Wilbur’s life.
Birth and death, intake and output, animals and manure–you cannot have one without the other. For White, it was part of “a paean to life, a hymn to the barn, an acceptance of dung” (p. 188).
Joy by her aunt's and grandparents' graves, with Earlham Library in background
The day after Thanksgiving, we had a service for my mom who died October 20, 2010, a week after she turned 85. Daughter Emily and I were asked to speak about Mom’s Quaker heritage, followed by a minute of silence and a Quaker hymn. Here is what I said and the gist of what Emily said. For those who knew Joy, I hope it resonates with you. For those who didn’t know my mom and Emily’s grandmom, here’s a glimpse of her and her ancestral roots.
My mother, Joy Wolf, was committed to spiritual exploration and also to the written word. (She was a librarian.) These two priorities are apparent in her ancestors as well and, at one point, led to profound conflict for her great-grandfather Zaccheus Test. Before Emily explains about that, I want to share a couple anecdotes about Mom that are special to me and that, I think, help introduce the subject.
Mom spoke fondly of her Episcopalian upbringing and particularly Emmanual Episcopal Church in the St. Louis area where she and Dad were married. Later, she and Dad became Unitarian-Universalists and were happy to be part of the UU Fellowship of Northfield. Like many Unitarians, she and Dad were eclectic and open-minded to many different paths, reading omnivorously and always learning. When I became Buddhist 34 years ago, I often found them reading my Buddhist publications before I got to them myself. To them, it was all very interesting.
In 2001, a year after Dad died, Mom and I took a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for some Native American-related events and workshops. During a presentation about the three clans of the Bear, Wolf, and Turtle, we learned that the Bear Clan tends to have the R & D folks, the ones with new ideas. Like the curious, omnivorous bear, they explore widely—and from multiple perspectives, the way Bear can stand on 4 legs or 2.
Now, I know that Mom married into the Wolf family, and loved it, but on this day she felt connected to the ways of the bears. When we broke into three groups, I went with the Wolves (the planners who put Bear’s ideas into action) and Mom went off with the boisterous Bears, feeling quite at home, and I didn’t see her for a while.
The only sticking point came the next day when it was time for a closing circle, a Talking Stick. Before we sat down under the azure New Mexico sky, I told Mom that people take turns speaking and only the person holding the stick gets to talk; everyone else sits quietly. Mom told me, “Oh! I don’t know if I can do that.” She so relished dialogue with people that she didn’t know if she could keep from commenting and making relevant points! I’m here to tell you she did fine and was an excellent listener.
Because Mom enjoyed dialogue so much and was sometimes uncomfortable with silence, it might come as a surprise to hear how much she valued her Quaker heritage, since the Quakers traditionally sit in silence at their meetings until moved by spirit to speak. Mom would sometimes point to a painted portrait she had of her great-grandfather, Zaccheus Test, saying that he was a patriarch of the family and that he had once been Quaker, but for some reason that she did not know, he left the Society of Friends.
When my daughter Emily went to Earlham, a Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana, we had an opportunity to solve this mystery.
Emily will continue the story from here.
EMILY:
Actually, I chose Earlham for its science program and the horse barn right on campus, not because of family history. It wasn’t until I walked in the Earlham Cemetery with my parents and saw more than a dozen graves of Tests and Giffords, including my great-great-great grandfather Zaccheus Test, that I realized that Grandmom used to have a lot of family in Richmond, most of them Quaker.
After that, we found more links to our ancestors such as Test Road that goes by the stables and over to the remains of the Test family woolen mill. When I studied birds in Peru one May Term, I noticed that my program was partly funded by the Test family, my relatives. When Grandmom visited me in 2008, we were able to take her to many family history sites around town. She especially enjoyed seeing a stained glass window dedicated to the daughter of Zaccheus Test and Sarah Anthony Test. (Sarah was Susan B. Anthony’s cousin.)
The biggest surprise came when the library archivist told us that Zaccheus Test was not only a professor at my school, he was a founder of it and was the one to name it “Earlham” after a Quaker estate in England.
Zaccheus left Earlham in 1866 and started going to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which is how Grandmom’s family became Episcopal. The archivist solved the mystery for us when he explained that Zaccheus got in trouble with the Friends by “writing his remarks” and reading from them at the Sunday meeting. This was not the usual practice; even readings of the Bible were not permitted in meetings. His fellow Quakers tolerated this only under protest and did not approve of his reliance on the written word.
Joy's children, grandchildren and great grandchildren on 11/26/10
That is why he left the Quakers. Zaccheus, like Grandmom, had great affection for both the spoken and the written word, and was not willing to give up either.
I’ll be thinking of Grandmom when I graduate in May. I have a feeling she’ll join all those ancestors in the Cemetery to keep an eye on me.
OF THE EARTH by Barbara Terao 