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During his trip to the inland, Tamura and his colleagues met the local people in the area, around 4 May. For TAMURA, the way they spoke, dressed and behaved was completely foreign. However, as we shall read in the following two pieces, he communicated with them and bought tropical fruits from them. He was impressed with the innocence of the local children. He found it amusing that the locals found the Japanese as curious as the soldiers saw them as strange. It is clear that he appreciated the differences and managed to see the local people as human beings.
Notes 1. It is most likely that the local people spoke mainly in their own language. A few of them could have spoken Pidgin, which some Japanese soldiers picked up quickly so that they could carry out simple transactions such as buying food. 2. One hundred sen made one yen. This currency unit was abolished after the Pacific War. It is rather difficult to speculate how much twenty sen is equal to, but HISAEDA Akiyoshi who was a private in the Japanese Army in 1942 was paid ten yen fifty en when he was in Rabaul. Thus, it seems likely that TAMURA was paid at about the same level in 1943. 3. Reasonable numbers of Japanese troops had been sent inland to attempt to grow food and to establish a “western front” inland, to protect Wewak. 4. Catholic missionaries had come into this area from the coast before 1942, but there were no permanent mission stations. There had been a very small station at Maprik in 1942. 5. The local tribe in the area, the Arapesh, were completely naked before colonial contact. Margaret Mead who conducted a fieldwork among the Arapesh people in the 1930s wrote that the men “fasten their bark-cloth G-strings with a carelessness and disregard of their purpose that shocks the more sophisticated beach people” (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, 1935, p.8. It is likely that many of those local people TAMURA met were still traditional and naked in 1943. For more about the Arapesh people, see Margaret Mead’s ethnographic works, such as The Mountain Arapesh, which was published in the late 1930s. |
Links Overview essay First entry In the jungle Letters home Daily life Airfield construction Night air raids Mountain highland trip Meeting locals Death Highs and lows Human relationships Last entry Attitudes links
Click images to enlarge. Diary of TAMURA Yoshikazu, page 47b Diary of TAMURA Yoshikazu, page 48a Diary of TAMURA Yoshikazu, page 48b |
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