Toshihiro Yoshida’s journey into northern Burma in 1985-1988
There have been numerous Japanese tales in Burma’s periphery. Some Japanese even participated in cross-border combat activities with ethnic minority armed groups, and a few of them published written accounts. Takazumi Nishiyama, the author of the book mentioned by Andrew earlier in these pages, was one of them. I have not read his book (as it is not easy to get hold of a copy). But Nishiyama’s writing left on the internet is remarkably thoughtful, showing that he made the decision to join the Karen army as once-in-a-lifetime commitment. The book is well-known among the Japanese who are interested in the contemporary Karen situation on the border, but outside this rather small circle it is not a widely recognizable title. It was never re-printed and is out of print today.
The best-known Japanese cross-border adventure into Burma in English is Hideyuki Takano’s outrageous misadventure to the Wa land. The Shore Beyond Good and Evil: A Report from Inside Burma’s Opium Kingdom presents a story of a young Japanese man’s seven-month life in a Wa village (from October 1997 to May 1998). There he grew - and in the end was hopelessly addicted to - opium. Despite the grandiose English title, Takano is a humor writer and this book is self-consciously hilarious. Unlike Nishiyama, Takano was driven not by political commitment but by shameless curiosity. While he routinely gets drunk with fellow Wa villagers until he passes out, Takano turns out to be an honest and acute observer, and his book gives such a rare glimpse into day-to-day life in a Wa village. (It is said that Khin Nyunt found out about this book from the Japanese ambassador and he had it translated into Burmese. In recent years Takano has been visiting Burma legally. It is remarkable that the Burmese government grants him a visa!)
Of all the Japanese cross-border journeys into Burma’s periphery, however, those by Toshihiro Yoshida are regarded as the most valuable. Yoshida started visiting Shan villages in 1977 when he was a college student. In January 1985 Yoshida crossed the border from Mae Hongson to Burma, and in March he left the KNPP headquarter with KIA troops going back to Kachin State along the Salween River and then through the Shan Plateau. Until October 1988 - that is, for three years and seven months - Yoshida crisscrossed northern Burma, primarily Kachin State, with KIA soldiers. (Incidentally this is also the time that Bertil Linter was traveling in the same part of the country-a journey resulting in his Land of Jade.) Here are two maps of his journeys:
Nishiyama died from malaria he got in Karen. Takano developed a hideous skin disease in Wa. In Kachin, Yoshida too suffered seriously from malaria and it appeared that his life was ending there, until a shaman miraculously saved his life. He returned to Japan with 31 notebooks and 2800 photos. It took another seven years until he managed to publish his first book. (It won the major non-fiction award in Japan in 1995.)
Yoshida learned to speak Jingpo fluently and in the books he offers exceptionally detailed descriptions of what he saw and heard in parts of Shan and Kachin States. He wrote in detail about remote villages and villagers-their houses, clothes, farming methods and tools, food, animals, plants, music, myths and legends, festivals and rituals, language, kinship structure and naming rules, etc. Yoshida writes about atrocious acts by the Burmese army. He also squarely speaks about the Japanese cruelty during WWII. (One day he came across a village that had been recently bombed by the Burmese air force. Then a village elder told him that the village had been bombed by the Japanese forty years ago.)
Yoshida’s interest in the end, however, is not in military or political affairs. What enthralled him most in northern Burma were the deep, mesmerizing forests, in which he saw the villagers skillfully conducting swidden farming. Despite the many deaths he encountered, Yoshida found dignity and richness in the lives of trees and humans in northern Burma’s deep forests. And he succeeded in capturing these qualities in beautiful, evocative prose.
What distinguishes Yoshida’s writing is the humility and respect with which he writes about the living and dying of ordinary people in northern Burma. I hope it will be translated into English. I am sure that his writing will be translated into Burmese (and hopefully Jingpo) when people there can read freely about their own country.
14 responses so far ↓
1 Moe Aung // Jun 26, 2008 at 9:39 am
I’d love to read all these tales and hope they’ll be translated into Burmese. Don’t think I’ve heard of Takano’s Burmese translation being available. All the three wartime best sellers of Hino Ashihei were translated by the late Ludu U Hla and wife Daw Amar during the war.
2 Hla Oo // Jul 21, 2008 at 6:43 am
Takano’s book is incredible. The way the Wa administrative and poppy based agricultural system works and was effectively administered was acutely observed and written so clear that I felt like I was in his place there. (The Khin Nyunt’s story must be true as the book is packed with valuable information for both friends or foes of very militant Wa.)
But I’ve never heard of Yoshida’s book. I tried Goggling, but nothing came out save this posting. Can you please post the title of it and whether it is available in English translation. Thanks.
3 Hla Oo // Jul 21, 2008 at 11:04 am
In all these books about cross-border adventures deep into Burmese jungles the authors often mentioned the dangerous malaria and how they themselves had suffered from it. But Burmese soldiers seem to be immune from that scourge of the jungle. Are they genetically different from the foreigners? No, but they have a secret weapon no one seems to know about it.
As part of their rations every Burmese soldier on the front line is issued a bottle of army rum heavily laced with quinine and no one knows what else every week, for the battalions in Kachin State almost every day, as a preventive measure against malaria. It really works. So my advice to anyone planning to cross into Burma should buy that army rum bottles at the border and carry it along with them. It has a very bitter taste though, but if one drinks it long enough one can easily get addicted like Takano to the brown opium.
4 Stephen // Jul 21, 2008 at 5:44 pm
I’ve heard it said that Burmese soldiers operating in Karen State have long been taken out in disproportionatley large numbers due to malaria. Those operating in the area thus long ago took to calling the local mosquitoes “The Karen Air Force.”
5 Moe Aung // Jul 21, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I think quinine is obsolete as a prophylactic against malaria. Doxycycline 100 mg daily in my experience is ideal for tourists and the rest since it is an antibiotic that covers other infections including bowel infections too.
6 Hla Oo // Jul 21, 2008 at 6:22 pm
It must be one of the Karen soldiers’ denigrating jokes towards their arch-enemy. I don’t know much about the situations in Karen State though, but in Kachin Land the malaria related causalities was very low among the Burmese soldiers while I was there in the early seventies.
I was right there in the deep jungle beyond Chibwe and then Htawgaw hills. We slept tough in the open and drank the water from the mosquito infested creeks and I never have had malaria. But the frightening side effect was the liver-cirrhosis I have now from drinking the army issued rum for nearly two years almost every night.
7 Nicholas Farrelly // Jul 21, 2008 at 9:07 pm
For more about malaria along the Thailand-Burma border, Aung Naing Oo (a former ABSDF leader) has a great piece about this “No 1 Enemy” over at The Irrawaddy. Well worth a look. As he intimates in the final flourish, “For years, malaria remained the main life-threatening enemy of the ABSDF members rather than the solders in the Burmese army.”
He also relates that he took quinine to beat off his malaria - but that was almost two decades ago and under conditions of an ongoing jungle “revolution”. In areas of mainland Southeast Asia where malaria remains a serious threat I have, over the years, tended to take doxy, as Moe Aung recommends. Thus far, it has always seemed to do its job. But it isn’t, as understand it, always feasible to take it for long periods of time. And it does cost. By the sounds of it, it wasn’t like the ABSDF had a great deal of spare cash for medicines of any sort.
8 Moe Aung // Jul 21, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Army rum laced with quinine is well known in Burma, and alcohol related illnesses unfortunately common among military personnel. Drinking now becoming less of a taboo and more fashionable in more materialistic times bodes ill for the young and not so young alike.
A degree of immunity to malaria is shared among the Burmese who have been exposed from young particularly to the common vivax strain, but the virulent and drug-resistant falciparum malaria is the killer. The Andaman islanders are believed to have innate immunity aginst this strain, even stronger than that of Africans with the haemoglobin S gene, leading to American efforts to patent their DNA. Makes you wonder if this is the final frontier of capitalist exploitation.
9 Hla Oo // Jul 21, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I met Aung Naing Oo in Sydney in 1991 while he was visiting Australia as the Foreign Minister of ABSDF. By then he was not fighting any more in the jungle and he seemed pretty well fit and full of confidence for the imminent success of their revolution. We and most of the Burmese community here were mesmerized by his youthful enthusiasm. We saw no traces of malaria’s effect on his serious and often smiling face then.
He was then telling us the military government in Rangoon would be overthrown in less than 2 years, if I still remember correctly. Only a few years later I read an article he wrote about factional fights in the ABSDF and the killing of some students by others and realized that he was putting a brave face during his foreign visits.
Later someone told me he took a scholarship from some university and studying in the west. He is a very decent man and he definitely loves his country. At least he wasn’t uselessly killed in the jungle and did survive to continue his political struggle. I wish him good luck as we definitely need a young man like him for the bright future of Burma.
10 Moe Aung // Jul 21, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Hla Oo reminds me of the same ill-founded optimism proclaimed by the communists in the early days of the civil war - ‘Victory in 2 years’. Would that things could be that simple! By the time the ABSDF came into being the communists knew better from long and bitter experience that Rome would not be built overnight.
I couldn’t agree more it’s been a tragic loss of generations of good men and women still in their prime in most cases. But it won’t stop people looking towards and fighting for a new society where peace, freedom, fairness, justice, prosperity, and opportunities to fulfil the genetic potential of the Burmese nation can all come true.
11 Hla Oo // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:51 am
Moe Aung, you seems to know a lot about old history of Burma. I’ve never heard that claim of Communists. Two years! That was very short for a revolution. But Castro did it in Cuba even against mighty USA, didn’t he, and he is still alive and powerful.
My Father was an officer in BIA and later he joined BCP and he was the divisional commander of 3M division (Ma Thone Lone) i.e. Mandalay, Myingyan, and Meikhtila during the very early fifties. But he died a bitter death after losing the war to his former brothers-in-arms from the same old Burmese army.
General Kyaw Htin was his young lieutenant when he was a battalion commander during the Japanese Revolution. Burmese civil war is a real nasty war among the brothers. I think more than a million people were killed so far since 1948! That is without counting that half a million death of Japanese and Allied soldiers in Burma during the last big war.
12 Masao Imamura // Jul 23, 2008 at 2:46 am
More malaria tales.
Here is a paragraph from Michael Adas’ 1974 book, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852-1941: “Malaria was (and is) endemic to most of the Delta. It was particularly intense in those areas which were being settled for the first time. S. Grantham reported in 1920 that colonies attempting to open jungle tracts in the Myaungmya district were debilitated and even wiped out by malaria epidemics. He observed that after an area had been worked for some time that death rate and general malaise of the population declined. He attributed this drop to immunities developed by settlers who survived and a decrease in the number of mosquito vectors. More recent research bears out Grantham’s observations. It has shown that the Anopheles hyrcanus mosquito, which is the principle vector in Lower Burma, becomes extremely prolific in areas where forest has recently been cleared. If such areas are in tropical climates, the species has been known to produce serious malaria. Officers in many other Delta districts in the British period concurred with Grantham’s claim that malaria conditions had greatly hindered efforts to bring fertile tracts into production. In Konbaung times there was little incentive for settlers to move into virgin areas where malaria was likely to be endemic. Both migrants from the Dry Zone and the indigenous inhabitants tended to cluster in areas which had long been occupied. Thus, malaria was not only a major obstacle to agrarian development, it was also a prime determinant of settlements on the Delta frontier.” (p. 24-25)
Most of the 180,000 Japanese casualties in Burma during WWII died not in combat but from malaria, dysentery and starvation. Quinine was apparently not particularly effective, and the Japanese did not have a sufficient supply of it to begin with… Survivors have written horrifying stories of how they walked across Burma desperate for food and fighting disease.
Hla Oo, you asked if Yoshida’s writing is available in English. Unfortunately it is not. I very much hope that it will be.
13 Moe Aung // Jul 23, 2008 at 6:50 am
Looks like your old man probably knew mine, Hla Oo. Well, unlike in Cuba, the civil war followed close behind the heels of the War, and the initial revolutionary fervor soon petered out as war weariness set in over the countryside. Besides they were fighting the first and Socialist government of newly independent Burma made up of their erstwhile comrades-in- arms and not an established right wing dictatorship. U Nu was also shrewd enough to deploy ethnic troops to fight the Communists in the Burman heartlands and then to recruit auxiliaries under the direct command of Ne Win to turn on the Karen later. India’s crucial arms shipment saved U Nu’s beleaguered ‘Rangoon government’.
The ‘victory in 2 years’ slogan gave way to the ‘1955 line’ when the Communists started suing for peace. Only an unconditional surrender was on offer with no chance of re-entering the political arena as a legal party. No cease-fire agreement was reached as in recent times with the armed ethnic groups. Some Burman groups did ‘enter the light’ and later formed opposition parties in parliament whose votes U Nu needed to survive after the AFPFL split. Socialist commanders in the army were staunch supporters of U Nu’s political adversaries and were destined to play a much bigger role in the running of the country and to prove Mao’s dictum - political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The rest as they say is history.
14 Hla Oo // Jul 23, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Moe Aung, you have to tell us a bit more about your old man. It must be very interesting.
Masao, that will be the opportunity for you. Why don’t you translate Yoshida’s book. By the look of your posts, you appear to write beautiful English prose.
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