In the Name of Wild: One Family, Five Years, Ten Countries, and a New Vision of Wildness by Vannini Phillip;Vannini April;

Author:Vannini, Phillip;Vannini, April;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chichijima is shaped like a caricature of a little dragon. Its hands and feet protrude east and west. Its long neck stretches out of its body and curves left, and its head is bent downward, as if it were staring at its feet. The top of the dragon’s neck is the neighbourhood of Okumura. The dragon’s mouth is “downtown” Chichijima, where all shops and most lodgings and restaurants can be found. Save for a few pockets of homes and accommodations, the rest of the dragon’s body is forested.

Downtown Chichijima stretches about a kilometre between the Japanese self-defence force base and the island’s only gas station on one end and the harbour on the other. Between them, you’ll find businesses, a soccer pitch, tennis courts, the island’s two grocery stores, a town hall, a coral beach, a small park, and the island’s only traffic light.

The place felt calm, serene, and pretty without any pretense of being fashionable or enchanting. There was something rather enchanting, however – a mysterious jingle. The melody played every day at five o’clock throughout the streets. The jingle seemed to be an anthem of sorts, not the Japanese anthem, but somehow equally meaningful. The song would last for about two minutes, broadcast from invisible loudspeakers. Playing at a loud but discreet level, the anthem did not seem to require standing up or arresting oneself mid-step. But where was it coming from? What did it mean? What were we supposed to do when it played? Was it a performance of remembrance? Of pride? Of unity?

We found another interesting feature downtown – the Japanese flag. It hadn’t always been there. It was only in 1543 that the islands were first visited by humankind, when Spanish explorer Bernardo de la Torre saw and named them the “Forfana Islands.” But the islands remained free of human residents. The Japanese first explored them in two successive expeditions in 1670 and 1675. They were renamed “Bunin Jima” – literally “uninhabited islands.” In the West, a misunderstanding of the word “Bunin” meant that the islands became known as Bonin. But still, no one lived there, and no one owned them for many years. No flag flew over the Ogasawara, so to speak.

The first temporary residents of the Bonin arrived in the early 1800s. The first ship to arrive was the HMS Blossom. In typical British fashion for the time, Captain F.W. Beechey quickly claimed them as a British possession. But it was a later arrival that would change the Bonin forever. In 1830, American Nathaniel Savory and twenty-nine other people from Hawaii, the continental United States, and Europe founded a permanent settlement on the islands.

Savory brought along a Bible. When Commodore Matthew Perry visited the island in 1853, he noticed that Savory owned the sacred book and thought that such possession made him more qualified to oversee the island than anyone else. Perry appointed him governor. The islands became an American possession.

The archipelago changed hands again in 1862, when they were claimed by Japan.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.