Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Timing is Everything!: The 100th Anniversary of The Legends of Tono

By Ronald A. Morse

In June 2010, there will be an international symposium in the small town of Tono in Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Legends of Tono published in 1910 by the founder of Japanese folklore studies, Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962).

To kick-off the 100th anniversary celebrations, there was a book party for me in Tono on February 21, 2009 to mark the publication of my translation of The Legends of Tono: 100th Anniversary Edition (Lexington Books, September 2008). The book will be a centerpiece of celebrations through 2012, the date of the 50th anniversary of Kunio Yanagita’s death.

In 1910, Yanagita paid to have 350 copies of his short collection of folk legends printed. Like Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812), which he had read, his work was in a standard literary style that any Japanese could understand.

The immediate reaction to Yanagita’s work in Tokyo literary circles in 1910 was mixed and the book was not published again until 1935. In fact, it was really only after World War II, when there was a sense that the old rural traditions of Japan were being lost, that The Legends of Tono gained new prominence as literature and historical record.

In more recent times, The Legends of Tono has generated a broad spectrum of commentary. It has been compared to the Chinese revolutionary writer Lu Xun’s collection of fables from the 1920s and 30s, Old Tales Retold. The leftist Japanese writer, Ryumei (Takaaki) Yoshimoto wrote a Freudian interpretation of the work in his The Psychic World of Shared Fantasies (1969). Yukio Mishima, the famous nationalist writer and politician, has written favorably about the eerie literary qualities of the work. And in 1976, a popular writer also from the Tono region, Hisashi Inoue, poked fun at Yanagita’s work in his A New Reading of the Tales of Tono.

Today Tono City, in part because of The Legends of Tono, but also because of the Tono material in the Lonely Planet travel book for Japan, has become a popular domestic and international tourist destination. Over the years, Tono City has designed an impressive set of cultural facilities to support its popularity – an impressive library and museum complex, a new hotel where chanters recite the legends, a historical village, and a research institute. This month, the Japanese government also issued a commemorative stamp series of Tono landmarks and customs.

The mass media has also picked up on the stories and legends. In 2007, an award-winning animated movie directed by Kenichi Hara, Summer Days with the Kappa Coo used Tono as a setting for a good part of the film. The stories in The Legends of Tono are also currently being serialized in the popular manga magazine Big Comic. The artist, Shigeru Mizuki, famous for his renderings of ghosts and goblins, will display his original drawings in Tono in 2010.

Ronald A. Morse is a leading thinker and commentator on Japan and is the translator of The Legends of Tono: 100th Anniversary Edition.

Marching on In Amelia Earhart’s Shoes: an Update on Research

By Tom King

Back on October 5, 2007, I reported here briefly on the 2007 expedition to Nikumaroro Island, continuing the research reported in the Altamira Press book Amelia Earhart’s Shoes. I’d like to update that report a little.

Readers will recall that our research is aimed at determining what happened to aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, when they disappeared over the Pacific in July of 1937. In a nutshell, we think they wound up on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the Phoenix group of islands, part of today’s Republic of Kiribati but In those days part of the Crown Colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Our work is sponsored by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), whose website, is the place to go for up-to-the-minute news and a wealth of background material. The 2007 expedition was our seventh to the island, and its primary focus was on the “Seven Site.” This is a location near the southeast end of the island, where colonial documents indicate a partial human skeleton was found in 1940, together with a sextant box with numbers on it, a woman’s shoe, and a few other artifacts, as well as evidence of a fire in which birds and turtles had been cooked. In 2001 we carried out fieldwork at the site, finding the remains of fires with bird, fish, and turtle bones, and a number of artifacts indicating that someone had been camping there in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

In 2007 we cleared the dense brush off a large area of the Seven Site, and found the remains of more fires. We scanned the area closely for human bones and teeth, and found none, but we did find a number of other suggestive artifacts. At the time of my October 5, 2007 report, analysis of what we brought back was just beginning. It’s been a slow process, since we’re entirely supported by volunteer work and contributed funding, but we’re at the point where I can report the following results.

1. A shard of beveled glass found on the site turned out to match another shard found in 2001, and together they very closely match the size, thickness and shape of a mirror from a 1930s woman’s compact.
2. Three small tabular lumps of red material found in two separate fire features have been subjected to chemical analysis; their chemistry is consistent with that of early twentieth century cosmetic rouge. The three lumps fit easily into the outline of the rouge compartment in a 1930s compact.
3. A piece of a pocket knife – one end of the knife and one of the thin metal strips that forms one side of one of the blade compartments – has been identified as coming from a bone handled jackknife produced by the Imperial Cutlery Company of Providence, Rhode Island sometime between 1930 and 1945. A similar knife is in the inventory of material recorded as being on Earhart’s plane prior to her world flight, but this type of knife was extremely common during World War II. Interestingly, the piece shows evidence of having been used as an informal prying tool, after the knife itself came apart.
4. Analysis of fishbone from the two fire features indicate exploitation of a broad range of easily available reef and lagoon species, with no indication of a focus on species usually favored by Pacific island populations. Moreover, whoever ate the fish did not consume the heads, which are usually regarded by Pacific Island people as delicacies. The faunal assemblage also includes a number of baby sea turtle bones, and the remains of one or more brown boobies; birdbone analysis is still underway, however.
5. One of the fire features contained the fragmented remains of two partly melted bottles, both of which had apparently been standing upright in the fire. One was an amber returnable beer bottle of probable pre-World War II origin; the other was a green bottle of a size and shape consistent with medicinal or cosmetic use, with an embossed patent number dating the bottle to sometime after 1933. We think the bottles may represent an attempt to purify water by boiling.
6. Both fire features contained many fragments of badly rusted ferrous metal, which appear to represent metal containers and/or cooking equipment.
7. Part of a zipper – the “pull” found on the surface of the site turns out to have been manufactured by Talon, an American company, in the 1930s. It was apparently not military in origin.
8. Perhaps most intriguingly, and the major focus of current research, is a fragmented lump of brown material sifted out of the excavation at one of the fire features. This turned out – to our considerable surprise – to be fecal material, and to contain human DNA. Analysis is continuing, by Molecular World, Inc. of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Meanwhile, we’ve done further study of the numbers on the sextant box described in 1940 as having been found with the human bones, probably at the Seven Site. The box itself was lost in Fiji sometime after 1941. Comparative analysis provides strong indications that it held an early 20th century nautical sextant made by the Brandis Instrument Company and acquired by the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War I. Many such sextants were adapted by the Navy for aviation use, and were probably sold as surplus in the 1920s.

Incidentally, Google Earth now has excellent, fairly up-to-date imagery of Nikumaroro, though under its old colonial name of “Gardner Island.” You can view the Seven Site by navigating to 4o41’08.30”S, 174o29’48.34”W.

Details on the ongoing analysis will appear from time to time in TIGHAR’s newsletter, TIGHAR Tracks, and on its website. A full archaeological report and summary journal article are in preparation, pending the completion of analyses in progress. No further expeditions are planned at the moment, due to scarce finances, though there is certainly more fieldwork that could usefully be done. Nikumaroro, incidentally, is part of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, featured last year in National Geographic. Its ecosystem is delicate, as are its archaeological sites, and it must be visited with care. Since it is very expensive to get there (by chartered ship), it has thus far not suffered too much from human use.

Tom King is the author of the Altamira Press textbooks Cultural Resource Laws and Practice, Federal Planning and Historic Places, Thinking About Cultural Resource Management, and Places That Count; he is also the co-author of Amelia Earhart’s Shoes. His latest book, elaborating on the points in this discussion, is Our Unprotected Heritage, published by Left Coast Press.

In Amelia Earhart’s Shoes: Return to Nikumaroro

by Thomas F. King

Readers of Amelia Earhart’s Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved? (Altamira 2004) may be interested in the results of this year’s return expedition to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands, Republic of Kiribati. The expedition, like all our work in pursuit of the elusive aviation pioneer, was sponsored by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR); information on the work and our ongoing analyses can be found  on TIGHAR’s website, www.tighar.org.

To recap briefly: We hypothesize that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, when they disappeared on July 2 1937, made their way to Nikumaroro and landed safely, but were not seen by the search planes that flew over a week later, and eventually died on the island. We’ve found a variety of pieces of evidence supporting this hypothesis – airplane parts in the ruins of Nikumaroro’s colonial village, anecdotal accounts of wreckage and human bones being found, a detailed official British government account of the discovery of a partial human skeleton and a woman’s shoe at the southeast end of the island in 1940, our own discovery of a woman’s shoe from the 1930s, and so on.

This year we had two major goals on the island we fondly call “Niku.” One was to look at a portion of the old colonial village (1938-1963) where we’d found plane parts in the past, and where the village carpenter shop stood before it blew away in a storm in about 1990. The other was to give serious attention to the “Seven Site” at the other end of the island, which we think is where a partial human skeleton was found in 1940 along with a sextant box, a Benedictine bottle, a woman’s shoe, and other interesting artifacts; we think this may have been Amelia Earhart’s skeleton. Our physical anthropologist, Kar Burns, was also to carry out a taphonomic experiment – putting out the remains of a pig and seeing how fast and in what directions the coconut crabs and strawberry hermit crabs took its parts away. Biologist/forester Josh Gillespie was to identify key tree species to allow construction of a general vegetation map. Finally, we wanted to do some detailed topographic mapping of the reef where we think Earhart landed her Lockheed Electra, to permit detailed hindcasting of tidal conditions there at the time she would have landed. Remarkably enough, we got all these things done.

We flew to Nadi in Fiji on July 14^th, and from the nearby port of Lautoka embarked on the motor-sailor Nai’a for the five-day trip to Niku. We were 16 in all – the basic TIGHAR team, a videographer, and the representative of the government of Kiribati. The trip was uneventful but for various cases of seasickness; the weather was good but the swells were pretty high. We landed as usual in the ship’s inflatables, going ashore every morning and returning to the ship in the evening. Gary Quigg took charge of work in the village, while I ran the Seven Site project. As it turned out, members of the ship’s crew helped a lot on both projects; they said they were bored aboard, as it were, and wanted some shore time.

The village work involved clearing largish areas of coconut deadfall, metal detecting, mapping and excavating test units. Suffice it to say that Gary’s crew were able to define and pretty definitively survey the carpenter’s shop and the debris field created downwind when it blew away, and they collected a number of bronze bushings and other parts that just might have been salvaged from an airplane. These are currently being cleaned and catalogued at TIGHAR Central in Wilimington, DE and sent out for various kinds of analysis.

At the Seven Site, we first had to clear a lot of scaevola, a nasty shrub, in a way that wouldn’t mess up the site surface. We accomplished this using a lot less of the traditional tools (bush knives and chainsaws), in favor of long-handled pneumatic loppers powered by dive tanks; they worked remarkably well (See airphoto). We then undertook a variety of excavations, metal detecting, and surface scanning for teeth and bones using a solar-powered daylight ultraviolet scanner designed by team member John Clauss. We also did kite aerial photography (KAP) to help document the site in its environment (hence the photo below), and used a robotic total station to update and correct the site map prepared in 2001. The UV scanner worked but didn’t get us any teeth or bones. The total station strained our technological competence but gave us what we needed, and the KAP worked great, as did our state-of-the-art PVC sifting screens. We excavated several fire features that will help us (we hope) figure out what sort of person was camping at the site – lots of fish, bird, and turtle bone for dietary analysis. And we found some things – a zipper, a snap perhaps from an article of clothing, part of a small pocket knife, a piece of beveled glass that may be from a small mirror – that aren’t easily associated with use of the site by Gilbertese colonists and U.S. Coast Guardsmen, the two groups known to have been there at various times. One of the fire features, too, contained the broken and mostly melted remains of two bottles, one of them apparently a heavy brown bottle similar to Benedictine. Lots of analysis to be done there, too.

And the crabs duly carried away bones, posing for time-lapse photography, while the total station made it possible to obtain detailed elevation and topographic data on the reef.

So as usual, we didn’t exactly find what we went out looking for, but we did find other stuff, and we actually did pretty much everything we planned to do. We then sailed uneventfully to Apia, Samoa, flew to Nadi, and then flew back to the States. Good weather the whole time (130 degrees f. recorded on the Seven Site, but a pleasant breeze) and it was great to have one more visit to the island.

We’re grateful as always to the financial sponsors who made the trip feasible, to our faithful shipping sponsor Federal Express, and to the various people and corporations who donated equipment and services – Brooks Leffler and David Wheeler for KAP technology, the Sokkia Corporation for total stations, Stihl Inc. for chain saws and hand tools, and Focus Design for screens.

Analysis of the material and data we brought home will take awhile, but results will be forthcoming on the TIGHAR website and in other media.

The Seven Site under excavation, after much lopping

 

Sunrise over Nikumaroro

 

 

What we had to dig through – typical coral rubble “soil.” The PVC screens, however, donated by Focus Design (http://www.focusdesign.org/), were wonderfully durable despite their light weight.