The Bridge

Flayed Bonito

The other night Mrs Fool and I went to a floor talk at the Canterbury Museum. The talk, by Dr Richard Bullen of the Art History and Theory programme at the University of Canterbury (who, according to his profile on the university website, was voted Lecturer of the Year by students in the College of Arts in 2008), was presented in conjunction with the museum's Pleasure and Play in Edo Japan exhibition.

I was aware that the museum had a huge number of Japanese dolls, pottery, and other artifacts that never go on display, but what I didn't know is that they also have a sizable collection of Japanese paintings and woodblock prints from the Edo period. Most of these are part of a collection assembled by shipping magnate Sir Joseph Kinsey and donated to the museum in the middle of the 20th century by his daughter, May Moore. Only recently have these works been properly identified, and many of them are being exhibited for the first time.

Flayed Bonito (c.1847-1849) is one of two works in the exhibition attributed to Katsushika Hokusai, who's probably most famous for his print Great Wave off Kanagawa. The exhibition catalogue informs us that the fish's "mass, and its delicate, moist surface are rendered through the overlay of colours to describe the subtly modulated variations of hue in the lightly glowing pink, red and apricot striations of the flesh, the dense, dark tones of the skin, and the dancing highlights on its surface", but I'm sure you already knew that, and that the "anthropomorphic smile of the bonito introduces an element of humour and playfulness into the composition".

The exhibition runs until 7 March.

Fire!

Just after nine o'clock last night there was a loud knock on the front door.
"You'd better get out," said a voice, "your neighbour's hedge is on fire!"
It took me a moment to realise that my neighbour didn't have a hedge. It was our hedge that was on fire!

It's the third time in about seven years that we've had a hedge fire. The first one nearly burnt the house down. And although this one was quite a distance from the house, the initial sense of panic was just the same. It didn't take long for the passerby who'd alerted me to the blaze to find the garden hose, but it seemed like an eternity before I managed to turn the water on (the gate to the courtyard where the tap was located was locked and so I had to go inside and get the keys and then go inside again to figure out which key was the right one as it was too dark to see outside).

The fire brigade arrived pretty quickly and we were reduced to the status of onlookers as they took over the firefighting duties. We joined, and were comforted by, the small crowd of neighbours who had gathered on the corner outside our house. If there's a silver lining to this particular cloud it's that we got to meet for the first time some neighbours who live in a nearby rental property and were reacquainted with quite a few others. And although this particular disaster wasn't exactly on the same scale as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, or the other tragedies covered in Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (which is still on my Amazon wishlist), last night I was reminded of the main finding of that book, which is that in disasters we are nearly all better people than we are in our everyday lives.

The White Man's Burden

In The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, which I've just finished reading, James Bradley (author of Flags of Our Fathers) details the circumstances of the U.S. takeover of the Philippines just over a century ago, an event that inspired Rudyard Kipling to write the poem "The White Man's Burden". The U.S. had long eyed the Philippines, formerly a Spanish colony, as a potential gateway to Asia, enabling them to compete with the British and Russians for the riches of China. Hawaii had been annexed by the U.S. in 1896 following a coup instigated by local Euro-American business leaders, and the Spanish-American War of 1898 provided an opportunity for the U.S. to gain control not only of the Philippines but also of Guam, providing yet another stepping stone across the Pacific.

In May 1898, with the help of Filipino freedom fighters (who backed the Americans on the understanding that they would be given independence once the Spanish had been driven out), the U.S. invaded the Philippines and soon surrounded the capital, Manila. Resigned to defeat, the Spanish agreed to hand over Manila to U.S. forces. With the Spanish on the run, the Filipino resistance leader Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines and began setting up a government. However, the U.S. reneged on their agreement to grant independence, instead agreeing to purchase the Philippines from Spain for 20 million dollars. This sparked the Philippine-American War, otherwise known as the Philippine War of Independence.

U.S. troops administering "the water cure" to a Filipino captive in 1901

The Philippine-American War lasted for just over three years and left over 4,000 U.S. dead and nearly 34,000 wounded. Figures for the losses on the Filipino side vary, but conservative estimates are that the U.S. forces killed some 20,000 resistance fighters and 300,000 Filipino civilians. During this war the U.S. military experimented with a variety of torture techniques, one of which involved holding the victim down and pouring water over their face and down their throat and nose until they either submitted or lost consciousness. If they passed out they were rolled aside and allowed to come to, whereupon the procedure was repeated. This form of torture was dubbed the "water cure". It is still practiced today under the name waterboarding.

The Philippines remained a U.S. colony until 1946. Following independence, the U.S. continued to occupy two large military installations, the Subic Bay Naval Complex and Clark Air Base, as well as several smaller ones. These were eventually handed over to the Philippines in 1992. The U.S. military still have several hundred troops in the Philippines as part of a counterinsurgency operation known as the Joint Special Operations Task Force - Philippines.

Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1950 after the grip on power held by the Euro-American business leaders who had controlled the islands since the 1890s was finally broken. Guam is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. While its people are U.S. citizens, they have no right to vote in presidential elections and their representative in the U.S. Congress cannot vote on legislation.