Memories of War: Micronesians in the Pacific War

Chapter 11. Some Micronesian Preoccupations

169 Chapter 11 SOME MICRONESIAN PREOCCUPATIONS Happiness is an important value in Micronesian cultures, most often taking a form perhaps best translated as psychological and physical contentment .1 Contentment comes from an individual’s social standing—that is, the possession of a certain rank (or position) in the community, which brings acknowledgment of one’s worth and respect. It also comes from social harmony , characterized by the absence of public conflict and the presence of sharing, exchange, and working together. Of course, even in the small-scale societies of Micronesia, daily life entails disputes, and island societies have many ways to negotiate, resolve, or bury such conflicts. The modes of resolution form part of the underlying cultural order, the mutual understanding that the desirable state of society is one of harmony, cooperation, and peace. When these taken-for-granted understandings are compromised, as happened in the Pacific War, there is a real threat not only to individual welfare but also to the continued existence of the community. CASUALTIES OF WAR: HAPPINESS, SOCIAL HARMONY, AND ABUNDANCE When Islanders talk about contentment, they express the recognition that it also comes from some forms of material plenty, although in these Island cultures the meaning of material satisfaction is somewhat different from its meaning in mass production and consumption societies such as the United States and Japan. The linking of physical objects with well-being does not mean Micronesians are materialistic, but rather that material goods carry 170 chapter 11 strong symbolic weight in island societies. Goods are used for personal consumption and display, but they also play other important roles. Gift giving may be motived by kindness, but sharing an element of one’s self with others also extends an individual’s social standing. Sharing also creates solidarity within a group, and giving gifts to those outside one’s group confers power over them. Micronesian cultural ideas of happiness, harmony, status, and even physical and mental health are linked to perceptions of abundance and exchange. Material shortages, then, take on the added implication of threats to individual and social well-being. It is not surprising that stories about shortages—especially shortages of food—make up perhaps the dominant theme in describing wartime hardships. Nearly every Islander remembers hardship due to food Marshallese boy holding a package of K-rations supplied by U.S. troops, Kwajalein. (Micronesian Seminar: Transition to Peace, website album ) micronesian preoccupations 171 shortages, though this ranges from a lack of favorite or imported foods (true everywhere), to a lack of familiar staples (anywhere the Japanese controlled taro gardens, breadfruit, and coconuts), to actual starvation (in the bypassed Marshalls and parts of Chuuk, the Central Carolines, and Palau). On islands where the local population was swelled by civilians or troops, the final years of the war are characterized in memory as times when feeding oneself and one’s family was a tense and sometimes dangerous challenge. On blockaded islands targeted for regular bombing raids, the struggle to feed troops, military workers, Japanese civilians, and Islanders became desperate. Recall that in Chuuk Lagoon, for example, the natural resources that had readily supported nine thousand to ten thousand Chuukese in the early colonial era then had to supply as well some thirty-eight thousand military personnel and foreign laborers.2 The Japanese Army imposed strict control of food supplies and rationing, with rations in some places allotted according to ethnicity. Where the Japanese took over gardens and food trees, Islanders had to steal from their own confiscated lands to survive, often at the risk of their lives. They ate unappealing food, rotten food, famine foods; they ate leaves, tubers, or vines they had thought inedible. They fished despite the danger of strafing, or dynamite, or mines; they waded or paddled out to gather dead and stunned fish after bombing raids. Throughout many parts of Micronesia, the oldest, weakest, sickest, and youngest of the Islanders succumbed, and Japanese troops and remaining civilians also suffered malnutrition and starvation. But the meaning of food in Micronesian war remembrance goes beyond the very real threat of starvation. Food is a core symbol. As a product of shared land and labor, food carries tremendous cultural meaning, both when used as provisions within a household and when shared with others.3 Kin may be seen as the product of shared food, as much as of shared biology.4 Indeed, the sharing of...