A US Navy aircraft carrier, USS Ticonderoga, departed from Subic Bay on December 5, 1965. An attack jet from the carrier carrying the B46 nuclear bomb fell into the sea near Kikai Island, Kagoshima Prefecture in Japan. The bomb, attack jet, and its pilot were never found and remain lost to this day.
Sources: “Japan Asks Details On Lost H-Bomb”. The Washington Post. May 10, 1989. p. A-35.
During the Japanese invasion of Joseon Korea in late 1500’s, the Japanese soldiers killed Korean civilians, including women and children, and took their noses as war trophies. It was a custom in East Asia to take the heads of slain enemies as a war trophy. But because heads were inconvenient to transport back to Japan during wartime, the Japanese took noses and ears of the slain people back to their country. Today, there are various monuments and tombs of those noses and ears. One of the most notable example of those would be Mimizuka in Kyoto.
King Taejong of the Joseon Dynasty was one of the toughest kings from the period. Once, while on a hunting trip, he fell from his horse. The King was embarrassed, and ordered his attendants not to let the royal recorders know that he fell. It was the recorders’ job to record everything that happened around the court, especially things about the king. Since the recorders were so dedicated to doing their job, they wrote that the king fell from his horse and ordered his attendants not to let the recorders know.
Source:
Taejong Sillok Book 7. 5th year of King Taejong’s Reign (1404), February 8.
“Depending upon the size and nature of the pond, gardens that include bodies of water with islands generally include bridges connecting the islands with the shore and often with each other. In the Heian Period and probably earlier, some of the bridges of the large boating ponds were arching structures of Chinese inspiration, allowing boats to pass beneath the spans. They could be built of either wood or stone (a wooden arched bridge is called sori bashi, a stone version sori ishibashi).
In later gardens, many of which have ponds that are too small for boats, bridges are often simple slabs of stone used singly or in combinations of two or three spans. These slabs are frequently natural, uncut stones, which together with the upright stones that usually flank the ends of the bridge should be considered part of the general "stone aesthetics” of a garden. In some instances, the bridge is actually part of a dry landscape, spanning only a sand or gravel stream. Other bridge types include simple wooden structures (kibashi) sometimes consisting of logs laid parallel to one another and supported on a truss-work frame, and more elaborate covered bridges that sometimes approach the scale of a pavilion.
The Chinese arched bridge (or “full moon bridge,” engetsukyo in Japanese) also survived into later periods and were sometimes employed in the same garden in which rustic slab bridges were found, but most of these have disappeared.“
A collection of animated stereoscopic photographs of French colonial soldiers from the French colonial territory of Indochina in Fleury-sur-Aire, France, during World War 1. Taken by French soldier Raoul Berthelé on June 25, 1916.
Noor Inayat Khan was born on January 1st,1914 to an American mother and an Indian father descending from the 18th century Sultan of Mysore. Her family moved from Moscow to London and later to Paris.
Noor played music and wrote children’s stories. The Second World War put an end to those peaceful occupations. She fled to London after the capitulation of France in 1940. Noor first joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in November 1940 and trained to be a radio operator. She then became part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) at the end of 1942 and was dropped in France in June 1943. Doubts regarding her suitability were raised, but she was chosen because she spoke French fluently.
Noor’s codename was “Madeleine”. She began to work as a radio operator for the “Prosper” resistance network, providing contact with the SOE in London. Several members of the network were arrested, but Noor kept doing her job. She moved from place to place, avoiding capture until she was betrayed in October. Noor fought the French officer who had come to arrest her. She put such a resistance, biting, drawing blood, that he was unable to subdue her physically and had to draw his gun.
Noor was thus made prisoner by the Gestapo. She made an escape attempt through the bathroom window, but was caught. Noor endured and didn’t reveal anything to her captors. She was later transferred to the Dachau Concentration Camp where she was tortured and executed. Her was last word was “Liberté” or “Freedom” in French.
Noor was posthumously awarded the George Cross for her bravery.
The Tibetan Army was established in 1913 by the 13th Dalai Lama, who had fled Tibet during the 1904 British invasion of Tibet and returned only after the fall of the Qing power in Tibet in 1911. During the revolutionary turmoil, the Dalai Lama had attempted to raise a volunteer army to expel all the ethnic Chinese from Lhasa, but failed, in large part because of the opposition of pro-Chinese monks, especially from the Drepung Monastery. The Dalai Lama proceeded to raise a professional army, led by his trusted advisor Tsarong
Tibet’s military control was located in Qamdo from 1918. During this time, the Sichuan warlords were busy fighting the Yunnan warlords, allowing the Tibetan army to defeat the Sichuan forces and conquer the region. The Tibetan Army was involved in numerous border battles against the Guomindang (KMT) and Ma Clique forces of the Republic of China. In 1932, the KMT defeated the Tibetan army, driving them out of Kham.
Their first encounter with the People’s Liberation Army was in 1950, when they took over Dengo, and after failed negotiations initiated the Battle of Qamdo, marking the Chinese occupation of Tibet that continues to this day.
photos of ChushiGangdruk, Tibet’s volunteer guerilla army in 1959. They were made up of young males from Amdo and Kham (eastern Tibet) regions that border China.
initially, the US State Department refused to support Chushi Gangdruk, and they were forced to organize their own army and buy their weapons with their own money as well as meager donations from farmers sympathetic to the liberation struggle. After they formed, the CIA provided training and weapons to the troops for a short period, and Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek funded them temporarily.
Chushi Gangdruk disbanded in 1974, effectively ending the Tibetan liberation movement, after Richard Nixon’s famous olive branch to Mao in 1973 that revived Sino-American relations, thus cutting all funding for the Tibetan freedom cause.
When the Portuguese arrived in Japan in 1549 they brought Christianity with Jesuit missionaries. During this period Japan was in a period of civil war known as the Sengokuera where several warlords were in conflict with each other for control of Japan. Unsurprisingly, many samurais - particularly ronins who did not serve a master of their own - adopted Christianity choosing Jesus as their lord instead. Curiously, many of these samurais did not share the same common practices as their fellow warriors like seppuku where they committed ritualistic suicide to restore their honor because suicide is a sin and instead they fought to the death. The most well-known of them are Dom Justo Takayama who is on his way of becoming the first Japanese saint recognized by the Catholic Church, and Amakusa Shiro, who is revered as an folk saint by Japanese Roman Catholics.
We found this *very minimally catalogued* scrapbook recently during a Special Collections inventory and were fascinated by the early twentieth century photos it contains. Two of our staff members are currently working on translating the captions and identifying the photos, and we already know that it contains pictures of Korea and Mongolia as well as photos of China.
Want to contribute to this project? We’ve made the scrapbook entirely online here and have enabled users to post comments:
When I was a teen, I worked as a summer hire filing Vietnam War records. I couldn’t articulate it then, but as a Filipino America, working there deeply affected me.
Imagery of the Vietnam War is so one-sided that many have been desensitized to the trauma and suffering of Vietnamese people—even Asian Americans ourselves. By that age I had already long been taught to identify as an un-hypenated American, and to root for Rambo and other violent white saviors. So that’s why, when an older white co-worker—who was a Vietnam War vet—suggested my Asian presence was triggering to him, I internalized it by learning to walk on egg shells around him and make myself smaller. It didn’t matter that I was Filipino. To him, I was just another g**k.
The US now recognizes the suffering of the 58k soldiers who died and vets who returned with ailments and PTSD—so common that the term “Nam flashback” is ubiquitous—but that empathy hasn’t extended towards the innocent Southeast Asian lives that were also affected, both during the war and after.
The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than it did in all of WW2, but didn’t stop there—it also dropped 2 million+ tons of ordnance on Laos for 9 straight years (making Laos the most bombed country per capita in history) and 2.7 million in Cambodia as part of its “Secret War.” Two-thirds of Vietnam’s 3 million+ deaths were civilians. If that wasn’t enough, they’re still dying today. Since the war ended, nearly 40k have died from unexploded bombs and landmines left behind, and 67K more have been blinded or maimed—together that’s double the number of US war deaths.
While PTSD is a serious issue, “Nam flashback” suggests that the pain of war for American vets lives in the mind and that the physical threat is buried in the past. But for Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer victims of America’s relentless bombing, the threat remains buried in the ground they live on. International law requires the US to clean up unexploded ordnance in Southeast Asia, but the US is skirting responsibility. As a result, cleanup is estimated to take hundreds of years at the current rate. (It’s worth noting the US war in Afghanistan is creating similar conditions as we speak.) Similarly, the US largely ignores the 20-30k Amerasians fathered and abandoned by US soldiers in Vietnam—legacies of US sexual plunder—and the enduring impact of Agent Orange, which is so destructive it altered the DNA of Vietnamese survivors and gave their children debilitating deformities.
It’s not hard to understand why Filipinx have an affinity for our SEA neighbors—we also experienced war and genocide at the hands of the US in 1899, which is sometimes called “The First Vietnam” because it set a precedent for US intervention/exploitation in the Southeast Asian region. But on a personal level, I saw the inherited legacies of war in Southeast Asian refugees—whose Asian American kids were my high school classmates. Their existence was all but criminalized, pushing them towards teen pregnancies and gangs, and putting them on the school to prison to deportation pipeline.
So in discussing the Vietnam War, it’s not enough to talk about US vets. We must also recognize the PTSD and continued terror that Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians victims experience, and acknowledge America’s racist institutional animosity towards Southeast Asians (abroad and in the US) that persists today.
Note: All of the information and stats talked about here are from publicly available sources. Also, please be respectful to Vietnamese people and remember to call the war by its full name (“Vietnam War”) and not shorthand it as “Vietnam.”
If you enjoy my comics, please pledge to Patreon or donate to Paypal. I recently lost my publisher for trying to publish these strips, so your support keeps me going until I can find a new publisher/lit agent.
Initially, I had preplanned this post in light of the upcoming Jewish holiday of Pesach (in English, Passover), which begins at sundown on April 10th, 2017. In the 1920′s and 1930′s, Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters began excavation work of the Roman city of Dura Europos, located in modern day Syria.
As an archaeological site, Dura Europos provided a early archaeologists with an amazing view into the expanses of the Roman Empire, and the great diversity which existed within this city. The city has provided endless fascinating discoveries: it gives us our earliest found example of Chemical Warfare between the Sassanids and the Romans in 265 CE, as well as the earliest found example of a Christian Church, and the earliest found example of a Jewish Synagogue at the site, where inscriptions inform us that in 244 CE, a Jewish leader of the local community enlarged and refurbished the synagogue.
The frescoes beautifully illustrate a variety of scenes from the Jewish Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), including scenes following Moses’ life in the Book of Exodus. Above are two fresco scenes: the first depicts the infancy of Moses, and his rescue from the Nile, before the wife of the Pharaoh hands her adopted son to Moses’ real mother, who then serves as his Hebrew nursemaid. The second is a later scene which moves from left to right.
The scene begins with Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, then transitions, showing Moses raising his staff as the parted seas crash down upon Egyptian armies, before the scene ends with Moses and the Israelites standing together under the outstretched hands of God, having successfully survived their flight from Egypt.
And this is where this planned post took another course – I could not write about the history of Dura Europos without discussing the present of Dura Europos, and the state of Syria. Due to ISIL/Daesh activity, Dura Europos has been one of many archaeological or historical sites attacked. As a historian who works with artistic and archaeological material, I understand that the destruction of our past is a dangerous thing, and that destroying heritage and culture (especially of minority religions) is a part of terrorism.
However, I also understand that it is our human duty to be concerned for humanity first, and objects second.
The story of Exodus is a story of refugees, and it therefore feels imperative to talk about the refugees of today. In this case, the story is about Syrian refugees, but in 2015, the UNCHR estimated that about 60 million people in the world are refugees, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. Syrians accounted for roughly 11 million of those people. The Syrian Jewish community has dwindled over several decades: in the 1970′s, the population of Syrian Jews was roughly 4,600 people. Over the course of about thirty years, Canadian music teacher Judy Feld Carr helped smuggle some 3,228 Syrian Jews out of Syria. By 2014, the total Jewish population of Syria was thought to be under twenty remaining people, and after a 2015 rescue operation for the Halabi family organized by Israeli Authorities and assisted by Muslim rebels in Aleppo, it is suspected the remaining number of Jews in Syria is zero, or close to it.
The refugee and humanitarian crisis of Syria is not over, however. And while no one person can fix it, each person willing to put forth the effort to help can improve the world. Or, in other words –
You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it
I know watching a humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world unfold can be overwhelming - and that we often feel like what we do doesn’t matter, or that there is no hope, or that we can’t singlehandedly fix the problems ourselves. Politics can overwhelm many people, threats of war can frighten us into complacency, and that sometimes terrifying times feel incomprehensible, even if we are the ones being affected by them. But I also know that each step gets us a little further to completing the work of making the world a better place.
“Jenkins has succeeded, in a manner like none before him, to convey the feel, spirit, energy and texture of these formative years of Indonesia’s making, marked by violence, triumph and calamitous failure, and brutal intrigue. Jenkins’s Soeharto reveals the man… and his long, mostly quiet emergence, in brilliant contextual detail, and shows how he developed his extraordinary capacity for political adroitness and concise, decisive leadership.”
Came across the show Journeys to the End of the World on @historyhit The episode The Lost Buddhas of Afghanistan talk about the Buddhas of Bamiyan that dated back to roughly 550-650 AD. Sadly these statues were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
The voyage taken by host and photojournalist David Adams @davidadamsfilms to get to the statues is amazing. If you can watch it, do so.
