Dude, who even knows.
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That post about fibers got some attention - well, 2 likes and 2 reblogs, which is 2/2 more than I expected, so not being one to pass up an opportunity to draw structural connections between things in the format of a story that makes my life sound more interesting than spending so much time on the internet would imply, let’s expand on it.
I went to Maui a few years back to celebrate my mom’s not, after years of treatment, having cancer anymore. She was born on the Big Island as a Navy brat, went back after college as a secretary in a TV station for a few years, so she’s got some history in the area. She was even given a Hawaiian name, which was kind of funny because then she couldn’t find any of those “if this is your real name, this would be your Hawaiian name” keychains at the souvenier stores.
Maui was kind of the boring island; my dad booked the trip (through an honest to god travel agent) and only seems to know how to book golf vacations. I hear it’s a nice golf island.
Things about Hawaii I noticed: even the Haole use native Hawaiian words a lot - not just “aloha” but the top 40 radio in talking about some community event would mention “…and plenty of games and rides for the keiki”, men’s/women’s bathroom signs would be “kane/wahine”. For a while I wondered if this was actual culture or just a schtick everyone agreed to pull, but on thinking of it I guess actual culture is a schtick everyone agrees to pull.
There was plenty of constant road repair and resurfacing, with larger work crews than I’ve ever seen, even though the roads were by any standard perfectly fine to begin with - I guess that’s what happens when you hardly have any roads but still have two senators to claim your share of highway appropriations.
Bunch of Samoans on the island. I’d heard those guys were built big and solid, but holy shit.
Lot of hitchhikers. Apparently land prices and rents are insane anywhere near the centers of the tourist trade, so people commute from hella far out, and car/gas prices are absurd too. Not many bikes though, which is maybe because “hella far out” tends to mean “halfway up a mountain”.
A lot of native/secessionary flags, handpainted signs, etc. in front yards.
A lot of rocks - like, maybe half a car-sized rocks but not otherwise very distinguished - roped off in the middle of, like, someone’s yard with a plaque being all “this is a sacred rock with a proper name, people might come around to hold cultural events here every now and then, but otherwise don’t mess with the rock”.
OK, so this tour. It was an ecotourism/ziplining thing, because why not, because I was getting kind of tired of sitting around on the beach with my parents. We went up a hill and the guides, natives all, pointed out things about the region. Saw a pineapple farm, they talked about how you’d have to harvest them in like, multiple layers of heavy clothing in the hot as fuck sun, because a pineapple farm is basically a field of goddamn razors with fruit in the middle.
I could see why people would grow marijuana on Hawaii, because the whole place was verdant as fuck, full of ridges and hollows, full of native plants that didn’t really look that far off from cannabis from the air, or even up close, to begin with.
Oh and also the plant I mentioned, which grew near the base of these trees near the top of the mountain, had these brown, downy fibers, softest thing I’ve ever felt, the guides said that the locals used to use them to stuff pillows with, but that the government protected them and kept people from exporting or farming them. Which, on the way out of the airport, yeah you passed through 3 different inspections checking your stuff for native plants.
Now that’s nominally about environmental contamination and invasive species, but I was sure there was an economic protection angle and on looking it up, apparently yes, there’s a big thing of industrial espionage agents sneaking into forests and smuggling plants out. But that’s how it’s always been in the tropics - spices, rubber, tea in China, whatever. You want to keep a monopoly on that shit.
I mean it’s not like the Americans are developing that industry, but I guess the idea is to prevent anyone else from developing it instead. Like, we don’t think about it much now but economically speaking fiber is fucking critical. Making clothing is the most fundamental thing distinguishing humans from other animals, textile production has always been the first step of industrialization, and development of a new and better fiber source will FUCK SHIT UP.
Like, China figured out silk production, and it was like “oh, great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a millennia or two”, just the act of moving it from place to place completely dominates the history of western Asia.
Like the British developed a wool industry and it was like “oh great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a few centuries, first we just need to take all these people in Scotland and northern England, kick them off their farmholds, and turn them into a pathetic wreck of a population working in hellish conditions 14 hours a day, wracked by disease, homelesness, addiction, and violence”.
Like, the Americans figured out the cotton gin and were like “oh great, now we can establish a massive feudal slave empire, and kickstart a development process that will end up with us dominating half the fucking world for a century at least”.
And then the British, in order to hold on to their existing half-the-world empire were like “oh fuck, better conquer Egypt and India and place a few hundred million people under the lash to compete”.
Fiber will FUCK SHIT UP, don’t you forget that.
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So it’s canonical that the CIA was shaping art trends for national advantage in the Cold War. And, of course, in both the peace and war periods of the FDR era, the government had entwined with the domestic cultural apparatus, to mutual delight.
Which makes me wonder about all the Hawaiiana - tiki style, the Elvis movies - in American culture around the time of Hawaii’s accession to statehood.
Basically, to use the Europa Universalis metaphor, was that America spending culture points to make core on Hawaii?
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Shit so this was supposed to be a tumblr about history and kontext, right? What’s all this happy hardcore crap?
Q: What is the Nihau Incident?
A: It’s what your American history books don’t tell you about when they get to Japanese internment in WWII and you’re all invited to have a sad.
Q: Aight, what was the Nihau Incident?
A: Aight. So Hawaii, yeah? And Pearl Harbor, yeah? Okay, so a Mitsubishi Zero coming off that all shot up. Can’t make it back, so he crashes on the tiny, westernmost Hawaiian island, called Nihau. (The official Japanese crashing island. Truefax.)
Which was entirely owned by this one sugar fortune heir, and administered as a cultural reserve for native Hawaiian ways of life, because that’s what happens when WASPs go native. (Basically all the real estate in Hawaii was owned by sugar and fruit barons or Hawaiian royal descendants until reforms in I think like the mid-90s?)
Anyway so the pilot crashes in a field, like, next to this Hawaiian dude and while he’s still dazed the Hawaiian dude takes his papers and gun. The dude doesn’t know about the attack but knows Japan and the US are tense so he’s still like “WTF is this?”
So he gets all his Hawaiian buddies together to deal with this, except the only language they have in common with the pilot is “terrible English” and they’re like “what did he say?”
So they send for one of the Japanese guys on the island. Once Captain Cook discovered Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, basically everyone settled it.
So they track down this Japanese guy and bring him in, and the pilot and him have words and he goes white and walks out.
And the Hawaiians are like “WHAT DID HE SAY?”
So they go to get the other Japanese guy. (There are only like 150 people on this island.)
And the other Japanese guy shows up, and him and the pilot talk. And the Japanese guy turns to the Hawaiians and doesn’t mention Pearl Harbor, but he’s like “hmm, I really think you should give this guy his stuff back”. And the Hawaiians are like “pf no”.
So later the Hawaiians are listening to the radio and they hear news of the attack and they’re like “Oh, ok. Better guard this dude.” Because they’re expecting the island’s owner to show up on his regular route and they can ship him back, only the Navy has boats on lockdown while it tries to figure out how and why and where there was a war all of a sudden.
So they’re guarding him, in the house of one of the Japanese dudes from before. Except I guess they’re not guarding him very well, because the Japanese dudes (helped by the one dude’s Japanese wife) get together and get all the guns (actually both the guns, a shotgun and a pistol) and take over.
It’s kind of a comedy of errors, though, because when they come for the original Hawaiian dude with the papers he’s in the outhouse and manages to run away and secure them. He’s like “I gotta go get help!” But Nihau to Kauai, the closest island, is like 20 miles at the narrowest, and this was a Hawaiian traditional culture preserve, so there were no motorboats on the island.
The thing is, the one thing traditional Hawaiians are super especially good at is open-sea rowing. So just after midnight he gets his Hawaiian friends in a boat and they row
FOR TEN HOURS
to get help.
Meanwhile on Nihau the pilot really wants to find the Hawaiian dude, so he gets this other Hawaiian bro and is like “go find the dude”. And the bro knows the dude’s rowing for help, so he’s like “alright, whatever, pf”. And then the pilot’s like “no seriously, find this dude right now or I’ll kill you all”. And he’s there with one of the other Japanese guys, and they have both the guns.
So at one point the pilot hands the shotgun to the other Japanese guy, and the Hawaiian bro charges him. The pilot pulls out his pistol and shoots the Hawaiian bro three times, and then the Hawaiian bro picks him up
and throws him
INTO A WALL
(and then his wife bashes the pilot’s head in with a rock)
((and then he cuts the pilot’s throat))
(((overkill kinda, but the pilot had really been a dick)))
The other Japanese guy got the shotgun and killed himself with it, which wasn’t particularly useful, but the Japanese were hardcore like that back then.
This is of course entirely on the word of the survivors of that room, so.
And when the rowing dude came back with backup the next day, all that was waiting for them were two corpses, one Japanese guy, and the other guy’s widow. (The pilot torched the plane when he got free.)
And so going into World War II, that’s what was on the minds of all the American defense planners, that the very first time Japanese on American territory - two nisei and a long-term resident issei - had a chance, every single one of them acted - violently and to the death when challenged - for the Japanese empire, against the United States.
So there’s that.