Mongolian Warships Lost and Found

Long ago, when I visited the Austrian Military History Museum, Vienna, I was taken aback to find a Navy Department in it.  My surprise shows my ignorance of history.  Up to the First World War, Austria(or after 1867 Austria-Hungary) had a powerful navy based at Trieste on the Adriatic.  I decided then and there that I would go to Trieste one day.
It was a third of a century afterwards that I fulfilled my wish.  We travelled by land from Zagreb, Croatia, to Ljubljana, Slovenia, and entered Italy at Trieste in 2010.  Trieste looked very peaceful, apparently forgetting its own naval history.
In a similar way if one talks about Mongolian warships he would not be taken seriously.  But it is a fact.  There was a time when Mongolians had a powerful navy which tried to conquer Japan twice.
It was not Mongol in the narrow sense.  Chingis Khan(1162-1227) built a great empire over the continents.  His grandson, Khubilai(1215-94), now with his capital at Beijing, wanted to conquer Japan.
To digress a little bit, Yoshitsune(1159-89) was a brilliant Samurai commander and a most popular person in our history.  There is a legend, persistently believed, that after being chased by his elder brother he went over to the continent and became Chingis Khan.
Anyway Khubilai sent mighty fleets on two occasions to Japan with an interval of seven years.  Some of their troops landed in Kyushu, and surprised the Japanese counterparts with their novel gunpowder.  But on both occasions they were blown away by typhoons.  Khubilai planned a third invasion, but he was busy with a war of invasion against Vietnam, and the attempt was dropped.
These typhoons gradually came to be known as divine typhoons, and during the Pacific War we were led to believe that those winds were bound to come and blow away all the US fleet from near the Japanese waters.
Earlier in this month, the NHK broadcasting showed in its TV programme how the research is going on about those sunken Mongolian ships.  The research teams found keels and other parts of those ships.  They have also ascertained that the specific types of granite filling the anchors are available only in a certain region of South China and were making use of by the Muslim merchants at the time.  It is known that a large part of the ships on the second invasion came from the port of Nin-po, Central China.
These are very painstaking research, but will be of great use in shedding light on the history of East Asia.  Fortunately or unfortunately, Mongol is mainly known in Japan today not as a great invader in the past but a country which has sent a number of Sumo wrestlers.  At present both of the Grand Champions of Sumo are from Mongol.     

A New Palestinian Conflict is Over

A new conflict erupted in the Middle East with the Israeli killing of a high-ranking military man of the Hamas organization on 14 November.  It goes to the credit of all the parties concerned that it was over with the signing of a ceasefire which took effect at 9 pm, 21 November.
The new Egyptian President, Mr.Md.Morsi, was instrumental in bringing it about quickly.  His role reminded us that what is popularly known as the Arab Spring, though by now considerably tarnished by the events in Syria, is still real.  His presence there itself, whatever the internal problems in his own country, instead of his pro-American, pro-Israeli predecessor, is a part of this Spring.  And it is this Spring which has prevented Israel from invading Gaza again with its land troops as it did in 2008-9.
The US-backed Israel still looks at Hamas as a terrorist organization.  But once these two countries recognize it as a force to reckon with, as a party to talk to, the shape of things will change greatly.  This is the only way to ensure that there is no more armed conflict in the region.  Hamas is the winner of the popular elections of January 2006 in Gaza.  To deny the legitimacy of Hamas is to deny the self-respect and the right of self-determination of the people of Gaza.
The post-election US has shown to the world, unfortunately, that it sticks to its old policy of backing Israel through thick and thin.  By doing so it has also shown that it is impossible to solve the Palestinian problem for years to come.  It has also strengthen the suspicion that the US needs the tensions in the region to be kept high for her own reasons.  Is it not the meaning of giving $ 3 billion of military aid to Israel, and half of it to Egypt, every year?  This is in spite of all the talk of her 'Financial Cliff'.
In the midst of the conflict, the re-elected Mr.Obama assured Israel its right of self-defense.  Was it not a green signal for Israel's land invasion of Gaza?  This is not fair.  This is a double-standard.  It would be far better if the US says the same thing to Hamas, and try to prevent both from the use of that right.  She will be hailed the world over as a peace-loving nation.
Her Secretary of State  would then no longer be asked by Chairman Abhas if she is a member of the Likud?      

Justice Pal and the Tokyo Tribunal

Dr.T.R.Sareen, my great historian friend from India, is a prolific writer.  Not so long ago I reviewed his eye-opening book on Jinnah and Linlithgow in these columns.  I have just got his new book, India and The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945-1952, Life Span Publishers, 2013(!).  Looking at the contents, the fifth chapter on Justice R.B.Pal at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East has immediately attracted my attention.  I will therefore discuss this chapter here.
As is well known by now, Pal was the only judge out of eleven who declared all the defendants not guilty at the Tokyo Tribunal.  In his thinking 'The victors have no right to change them(the rules of International Law) in order to punish the vanquished'(p.115).
It would have been certainly difficult to find evidence to show that all of Japan's wars from 1928 to 1945 had been executed according to a certain conspiracy, as was put forward by the prosecution.  In this sense Pal's reasoning was well-founded.
But if you go further and deny the existence of a war of aggression, or a war crime, for the reason that these concepts were not clarified in the existing Law, I am afraid it is a bit too conservative an attitude.
Alternatively you could make this Tribunal, together with the preceding one at Nuremberg, an opportunity to create new international norms concerning the aggression, war crime, and related concepts.  Already, as early as in the post-First World War years, there was an attempted indictment of Kaiser William of Germany as a war criminal.  These examples could well have been codified into the Law.  The UN Charter was also in place.  Otherwise the mankind would not have had today's International Criminal Court, and  would have been totally incompetent before a series of large-scale atrocities.
If Pal's judgement had been the majority opinion, what would have happened?  Pal himself was not blind to what Japan had done during the war years.  He pointed to the cruelties committed at Nanking, China, and on the POWs.  Still, if all the defendants had been not guilty, the conclusion would have been that the war was one of liberation of Asia, or at least of Japan's self-defense.  Pal himself used those terms(p.122).
Unfortunately nothing would be further from the truth.  When he said that if Japan would be convicted then the Allied powers 'must also be put under the scanner in the same way for their part'(p.126), or criticized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, he was perfectly right.  But it is a different matter than the nature of Japan's war.  When the Filipino judge thought that the judgement was 'too lenient'(p.124), he represented the mind of the Asians once under the Japanese conquest much better than Pal.
Why then?  Probably it was, as was suggested by the author, the influence of Subhas Chandra Bose, Pal's fellow Bengali, and his Indian National Army, who fought with the Japanese.  To judge Japan guilty was to judge Bose and his INA also guilty, which was impossible for Pal to do.  Already the Defense Counsel for the INA, a famous lawyer who belonged to the Indian National Congress, had declared before Pal's departure for Japan that Japan was a liberator of Asian nations(pp.108-9).  Was the freedom of India achieved on the strength of such a fiction?  What was Gandhi doing at the time, who had written 'To Every Japanese' in 1942 to make it clear that the Indian people would never welcome the Japanese on their territory.  Unless you regard Japan starkly as an aggressor, you cannot fight other imperialist powers.  This was the relevance of Pal's criticism of the atomic bombs.
More than a decade ago a cinema was released in Japan which was about Pal, Bose and Tojo(Army general, Prime Minister when Japan declared war on the US).  The story was that Tojo assisted Bose to bring independence to India, and Pal, as if in return, declared Tojo not guilty.  This shows how Pal's judgement has sometimes been made use of in a very harmful way, although it may not be his responsibility.
This one was a real conspiracy.  Six out of the seven who were hanged were Army generals.  They were made scapegoats to save others.
I thank Dr.Sareen for expanding my horizon.                          

Appoint New Peace-Loving Secretaries

The American elections are over.  Mr.Obama's 20-minute Victory Speech was terribly enthusiastic and hugely impressive.  I do not know exactly why I feel happy on his victory.  Probably the reasons are, (1) he may be deemed to be representing the large masses of underprivileged, in the US and may be beyond,  (2) he has at least talked of the non-nuclear world, and (3) he is less likely to go to war over Iran.  May be more.  All in all I feel more secure at his victory.  I would be deeply unhappy, and feel insecure, if the result was the other way round.
But all this is the one side of the coin.  Take Iran, for example.  If you talk about Iran's possible nuclear armament, why not talk about India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapons which are publicly owned by their governments.  Moreover, the US, and the West, may well be advised to recognize the position of Iran as the Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, and make use of it as a means to have dialogue not only with Iran but a wider range of the third-world nations.  There is no harm in it at all.
Another factor in the Iranian question is the aggressive attitude of Israel because of which there is a danger of a fairly large-scale war in the Middle East.  In reporting the US elections the media had much to say about the Hispanic vote but very little about the Jewish vote, so far as I saw.
I personally would not be surprised if their vote was split between the two camps.  Partly it is because of insurance.  Also both camps were more or less equally expected by Israel to back them up in case of a war.
Similarly, there was not much difference in the stand of the two camps on, say, the Japan-US relations.  Both were keen on strengthening the military alliance, and in that sense Japan was taken for granted.  On the election day itself 10,000 American troops were engaged in joint military exercises with 37,000 Japanese Self-Defense forces.  Who knows it may not provoke China, whose Chairman Hu stressed in his report to the 18th Congress of the Communist Party two days afterwards, among other things, the importance of defending China's maritime interests.
Not only might China have been provoked.  Also on the same election day, the demonstrators in Okinawa, Japan, were carrying placards whose slogan was No Rape! No Osprey! No US Bases!
In short, we would like to feel more safe and secure here in East Asia.  For that purpose there can be a lot that not only Japan and China, but also the US can do("Yes, we can!").
One of such steps will be clearly the appointment of two peace-loving persons by Mr.Obama as the new Secretaries of State and Defense.