Reading Blog: December 2022
Back to Japan and Siberia
After ending reviews titled ‘pandemic reads’, I started monthly book posts in June 2021, meaning that 2022 was my first full calendar year. In 2023, these posts will move to my new Deno blog, blog.georeactor.com (I wrote code to add RSS support, and will be adding topic-specific feeds).
I’m at 28 reads this year (when counting a case study on cheese banks, a thesis on enclaves, and a Churchill book which I didn’t totally finish). I was successful at making a routine of reading books and Arxiv posts and news. But I didn’t develop habits around other real-world goals: exercise, being social, and contributing to ML projects.
It’s difficult to allocate time for YouTube, finishing longer or more detailed books, a 100-page DeepMind paper — at some point I need to make coherent decisions about these things.
Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: A Sociopolitical Analysis (Kayoko Takeda, 2010)
Japanese guidance on name order in English has changed since the publication of this book; here I use family/surname last, as printed.
This book-ified dissertation tells the story of the Tokyo Tribunal’s interpreters and translators (speaking and text, respectively). A year ago I read a biography of Justice Robert Jackson, including his experience as a prosecutor at Nuremberg. But I know next to nothing about the Tokyo equivalent, which the presiding judge Sir William Webb called “[the most] important criminal trials in all history.” The Americans were joined by European allies, Australia (including Webb, a member of their highest court), China, Russia, and (invited later) India and the Philippines.
Nuremberg is known as the origin of simultaneous interpretation (!), but Tokyo’s interpreters were less experienced and did not believe Japanese could be translated this way (SVO vs. SOV, plus differences in directness and negation; today it is done in 15 minute shifts). Early in the process, there was trouble with third languages (Manchuria’s emperor Pu-Yi spoke Chinese, other witnesses spoke Mongolian, France and the USSR threatened to withdraw if prosecutors could not deliver speeches in their languages). Sometimes relaying was needed, or secretarial staff recruited into service. The court sent a telegram to the Nuremberg counterparts for advice.
For this book, Takeda interviewed interpreters and asks them to review their diaries, visits the former courtroom, and scrutinizes photographs to build a timeline of when interpretation booths and signal lights were built and updated.
After communication failures at an earlier trial, the Allies scrapped their plan to rely on Army and Navy school interpreters. Locals were recruited in newspaper ads and paid well. For each interpreter who covered >100 sessions, Takeda takes care to name, interview, and study records to humanize his story.
These workers were managed by Japanese-Americans who had studied in both countries (most had suffered internment after Pearl Harbor), and they were supervised by three white Americans over the course of the trial.
Webb would later state that language barriers could have affected judgments, but international law scholars and others interviewed tend to support the conduct of the trial. The main criticisms at the time seem to be around the pace and delays caused by consecutive and relay interpretation.
- The book “Two Homelands” and TV adaptations (山河燃ゆ in 1984, 二つの祖国 in 2019) are based on the life of David Akira Itami, a supervising interpreter.
- Takeda recently published a book on interpreters of British military prosecution of Japanese soldiers: Interpreters and War Crimes.
- Side note on the modern Japanese alternative to a jury system:
Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region (Masha Gessen, 2016)
This has some overlap with the USSR and Russian concepts of republics vs. autonomous regions, which I read about in Dissolution. Gessen can write about emigration from personal experience and closeness — their family left Moscow in the 1970s for the US, and they later visited Birobidzhan to do interviews for an article in 2009.
The story also follows David Bergelson, a writer from near Kyiv, to illustrate how Jews born in the Russian Empire were looking for a home community in Berlin and the Baltic states. Opinions varied over leaving Europe for the US or Palestine. Bergelson saw danger in Germany, and bristled at cultural assimilation of American Jews, so he pitched a return to the Soviet Union and socialism.
Leninism had abolished or restricted the main trades which were open to the Jewish community, so the Soviet Union was not a popular choice. The government’s first plan was to encourage communal farms around Crimea, before pivoting to a critical mass of farmers in an autonomous region as was done (to/with/for) other groups.
The manufactured homeland of Birobidzhan had a rough start in 1928. The land was not conducive for farming (local Cossacks had survived as nomads), and resettled tradesmen were not prepared to farm or build local shelters. In 1932 Bergelson visited with an American funder to suggest a pivot to factories. He wrote about the trip in superlatives despite residents living in barracks and often fleeing the project when able.
A nascent writing and acting community was short-lived, as safety wavered on Stalin’s whims. There were purges by the late 1930s, a re-opening during the war as Jewish anti-fascist organizers were given a platform, and more refugees joined from Ukraine. But after Israel was founded, Bergelson and other leaders were seen as foreign-influenced separatists and executed. The Soviets dissolved the community by burning Yiddish libraries and materials, and sending Birobidzhan’s young Jews to distant boarding schools. Many took on Russian identities.
By the time a New York Times reporter visited in 1954, there was little trace of a Jewish community, though visitors continued to find a handful of Yiddish speakers when they searched.
Notes:
- Gessen quotes someone on the street saying that there was also a Soviet relocation of Nazi collaborators to Birobidzhan. This does not appear widely online, and seems like maybe it’s positioned as a rumor rather than verified?
- Birobidzhan was the last Russian stop on the ‘Bald and Bankrupt’ YouTube channel before he was deported in 2022.
Updates to Previous / Future Reads
- Behrouz Boochani, who was stopped by Australia and reported from detention in Manus Prison, now has refugee status in New Zealand. He at last set foot in Australia this month to speak at a book festival.
- The If Books Could Kill podcast did an episode on The Population Bomb. The majority of the episode works, though the hosts ridicule the idea of sending new crops around the world, even though this was core to the Green Revolution.
- Germany has been working on prosecuting a number of former Nazis; this case was unusual for taking place in a juvenile court because she had worked as a secretary as a teenager.
- In Madness and Memory, on the discovery of prions, Dr. Prusiner ended with a lengthy discussion of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia issues being caused by prion buildup in the brain. He did not view diet or physical activity or mental exercises as being helpful or relevant.
2022 has been marked by disputes over the causes, potential research fraud, and the FDA approval process. The HN thread in this thread blames sugar (Type 3 Diabetes theory) and Tylenol.
Agriculture-truther Tweets on rice and alfalfa.
