The working hours in the government sector will be from 7am to 11am during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, and 80% of the staff will be required to work remotely.
This, and other details of the Cabinet's decisions regarding the work system in government agencies and educational institutions, and arrangements for the Doha Corniche during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and its accompanying events, were announced by the Official Spokesman for the Government Communications Office (GCO), Dr. Mohamed bin Nuwaymi al-Hajri, the official Qatar News Agency reported.
1. The official said that according to the Cabinet's decisions, the following will be implemented from November 1 (Tuesday), until Monday, December 19:
* In the government sector, the number of employees present in the workplace will be reduced to 20% of the total number of employees in an entity, while 80% will continue their work remotely.
* The working hours according to the new system will be from 7am to 11am.
* The military, security, health, and educational sectors are excluded from these decisions, noting that vital sectors of the country will not be affected.
* The Doha Corniche is to be allocated for pedestrians to ensure the continuation of the events accompanying the World Cup.
2. The GCO official also made announcements regarding the education sector, based on the Cabinet decisions. Following are the details for public and private schools from November 1 to 17:
* The working hours for public and private schools that apply national standards will be from 7am until 12 noon.
* Students' and employees' working hours in public and private schools will be from 7am until 12 noon. However, during the end-of-first-semester exam period (November 6 to 17), students in public and private schools that apply national standards will be from 9am until 11am, according to a related statement by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE).
* The mid-term holiday will be from November 20 until December 22.
* The ministry said in its statement that the working hours of staff/children in private nurseries and education centers for people with disabilities will be as usual before and during the World Cup.
* The MoEHE emphasized the importance of everyone's role to make the country's hosting of the World Cup a real success.
3. Private sector international companies:
* These will continue with their regular schedule during the World Cup.
Zinovy Peshkov came from a poor provincial Jewish family, but thanks to his natural talents, he had a brilliant career and even became friends with Charles de Gaulle.
Zinovy Peshkov was a son of a Nizhny Novgorod craftsman, who became a French military commander and diplomat. He was a brother of the famous revolutionary Yakov Sverdlov, but an ardent anti-Bolshevik. A graduate of a provincial parish school, he spoke on equal terms with great writers, military leaders and politicians. Zinovy Peshkov had an amazing life story, full of unexpected twists and turns.
Adopted by Maxim Gorky
A future French legionnaire and friend of Charles de Gaulle, Zinovy Sverdlov was born in 1884 to the family of a Jewish craftsman in Nizhny Novgorod. The world famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky (his real name was Alexey Peshkov) came from the same city. Gorky knew the Sverdlov family and was particularly fond of Zinovy, an inquisitive and enthusiastic kid.
The young man soon joined the writer’s circle, where he met many rebellious intellectuals and developed an enthusiasm for revolutionary ideas, which even landed him in trouble with the police. They say that after Zinovy converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, his Jewish family renounced him and Gorky adopted him, giving the young man his name.
Zinovy was very gifted artistically. He had a beautiful voice and a great ear for music and even considered becoming a professional musician. However, his life took a different turn. At the age of 20, Zinovy left Russia in search of adventure and interesting work. Another motive was to escape the watchful eye of the police...
A friend of de Gaulle
Canada, the U.S., New Zealand... Abroad, Peshkov worked as a loader at a brick factory, at a fur factory and in a printing house. He tried his hand at business, but went bankrupt. He had relative success working in a Russian publishing house in the U.S., before travelling to France, where he found himself caught in the outbreak of World War I.
Unlike the revolutionaries he used to know back in Russia, Zinovy did not want Russia and its allies to suffer a defeat in the war. Without a second thought, he signed up as a volunteer. Since foreigners were not allowed to join the French army, he ended up in the Foreign Legion.
In 1915, in an attack near Arras, Peshkov was badly wounded in the arm. The orderlies thought there was no hope for him and wanted to leave him on the battlefield. However, Zinovy’s life was saved by a lieutenant named Charles de Gaulle, who insisted that the wounded soldier be evacuated from the field. Zinovy was then sent to an American hospital in Neuilly.
The arm had to be amputated, but the patient showed great perseverance and learned to manage perfectly well with one arm. That same year, under an order from Marshal Joffre, the Russian legionnaire was awarded the Croix de Guerre with palm at a ceremony in Les Invalides. As for his savior de Gaulle, the two men would become friends. And there was a new war awaiting them...
An enemy with his brother
At first, both Zinovy and his brother Yakov were quite taken with revolutionary ideas. However, in the end, different life paths led them to opposite sides of the barricades, turning them into ideological enemies. Zinovy did not accept the Bolshevik Revolution, with its violence and desire to seize and divide everything.
“With him, it was more about some romantic notions of revolutions, which were typical of the young generation at the time. It is for a reason that, after 1917, he never returned to Russia, although, without a doubt, he could have, had he wanted to. Peshkov had long developed different values and ideals. That is why in the Civil War he found himself on the side of the White Army,” says writer and journalist Armen Gasparyan, a member of the Russian Military Historical Society and author of numerous books on Russian military history.
In the meantime, Zinovy’s brother Yakov became one of the leaders of the Red Terror, a mastermind of repressions against the Cossacks and one of the officials behind the decision to execute the royal family.Yakov publicly disowned his brother, who had become an “agent of the Entente”. In early 1919, Zinovy sent a telegram to Yakov: “Yashka, when we take Moscow, we will hang Lenin first and you second, for what you did to Russia!” But Yashka did not have long to live: in March 1919, he died of the Spanish flu, which was raging in Russia at the time. At least, that was the official version...
It was known that Lenin was not too fond of dangerous rivals.
Russian-French agent
His shrewdness and cunning, the ease with which he established contacts, his rhetorical talent and ability to win people over did not go unnoticed in certain circles in France. That was how Peshkov began his diplomatic career. He hit the ground running: very soon Zinovy was sent on very serious and sometimes secret missions to different countries.
During the Russian Civil War, Peshkov was a member of the French diplomatic mission in the country. He took an active part in the famine relief effort, arranging deliveries of goods from Le Havre and Marseille. He also helped many compatriots to evacuate from war-ravaged Russia.
His next mission was a military one. Peshkov travelled to Morocco, where he was assigned command of a company. The writer André Maurois described him as follows: “…One of those commanders who know how to boost the morale of the humiliated and the insulted, inspiring them to join in the task that the Foreign Legion inherited from the legions of the Roman Empire - the task of serving civilization. When Zinovy Peshkov talks about the Legion, his eyes glint with emotion. He is an apostle of this religion.”
Despite Peshkov’s anti-Bolshevik views, the French security services kept a close eye on him: After all, his brother was a prominent Bolshevik in Russia and his father was a writer favored by the Soviet regime. That aroused a lot of suspicion. However, today historians are convinced that those suspicions were totally unfounded. “Peshkov certainly did not work for the 7th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR. Moscow had other sources of information in France.
But the suspicions that arose are understandable. The papers at the time were full of articles exposing Bolshevik gangsters in Paris. Many emigrants were under suspicion, so it is not surprising that a striking character like Peshkov was, too. But, as far as I know, the Sûreté did not find a single fact indicating his possible ties with Moscow,” Armen Gasparyan said.
Loyal to France to the last
In 1940, Zinovy refused to recognize the power of the Nazi occupiers and to serve under the Germans’ command. He was arrested and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. But here, too, he was, once again, saved by his talent of a diplomat and his combat experience in hot spots: he managed to turn his guard, exchange the gold watch that Maxim Gorky had gifted him for a grenade, take the commander hostage, seize a plane and fly it to join de Gaulle’s forces.
His old friend knew Peshkov’s talents well and entrusted him with serious assignments. Zinovy worked in South Africa to persuade the local authorities to side with the allies. Then, he became the head of the French mission in China and, later, in Japan. Finally, he was elevated to the rank of ambassador.
During World War II, Zinovy Peshkov received numerous decorations and distinctions, becoming a brigadier general of the French army. He retired in 1950, a highly decorated officer, including with a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, and lived in Paris, on rue Lauriston.
Zinovy died at the age of 82 in Paris and was buried in the cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois. The ceremony was attended by prominent French military figures and politicians. In line with his will, his tombstone carries a simple inscription: “Zinovy Peshkov, a legionnaire.”
There were two seasons the armies of the Mughal empire often dreaded: winter and monsoon.
Winters can last for years in George RR Martin’s novels A Song of Fire and Ice and the HBO blockbuster series Game of Thrones. They bring long nights, bitter cold and endless snow to the kingdom of Westeros. Winters also resurrect violent nonhuman creatures called the Others in the novels and White Walkers in the TV series. These creatures lead armies of the undead known as wights. It is the fear of the advent of such a troubling winter that is immortalised in the pronouncement “winter is coming” – now a part of pop culture.
There were no White Walkers or wights in the Mughal Empire. But winter could still strike similar fear in the hearts of the empire’s armies. Moreover, while the people of Westeros had to fear only winter, Mughal armies often dreaded a second season: monsoon. This fear of environmental forces was so fierce that at times it slowed down the military juggernaut of the empire and even jeopardised territorial expansion. In this essay, we will encounter three stories of Mughal soldiers, commanders and even a prince who refused to serve, all for fear of the environment.
Refusals were not common in imperial ranks. The emperor was the fount of authority in the Mughal political world, and loyalty and willingness to serve were celebrated as the highest virtues. To oppose the emperor was to oppose divine will itself. Even on a more earthly level, the emperor was the supreme arbiter of all promotions and punishments. Refusing to comply with his wishes could be seen as serious insult and attract severe penalties. This is why these three refusals are particularly striking.
Prince Murad Bakhsh in Balkh
The year was 1646. The fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan dispatched a huge army under his son Prince Murad Bakhsh to conquer the Uzbek-ruled city of Balkh in what is today Afghanistan. This was supposed to be the first step in the Mughal reconquest of their ancestral lands in Central Asia, which the Uzbeks had captured from the Mughals in the days of Babur. As the army approached, the Uzbek ruler of Balkh fled the city. Prince Murad occupied the place without much difficulty.
But soon after, he started growing uneasy. He did not want to stay on in Balkh. He wrote to his father requesting a transfer of post. Shah Jahan was busy celebrating the victory in Balkh when his son’s request arrived. Annoyed, he denied the appeal and instructed Murad to remain at his station. Although Balkh had been occupied, Mughal authority over the area was yet to be established. Murad refused to obey the order. Leaving his subordinate commanders in charge, he set off on a return journey. In retaliation, Shah Jahan cancelled his son’s mansab (rank) and jagir (land assignment). But he could not reverse the prince’s refusal to serve in Balkh.
What accounts for this behaviour of the prince? Contemporary sources are unanimous: the fear of the onset of the harsh and snowy Central Asian winter. The roads in the region were often narrow and the terrain rugged. Winter snow would block the roads for several months every year, which created major logistical problems for Mughal armies. They would often get stranded for days during campaigns when excessive snowfall would make roads impassable. Workmen would have to go ahead of the main army, shovelling snow and levelling the ground. The region was also extremely arid, making it difficult for large armies to feed themselves off the land. As a result, they had to carry much of their provisions with them. This, however, slowed them down and limited their ambit of operations. Gathering enough grass and fodder for the large number of horses of the cavalry also proved to be challenging.
By the time the Mughal troops under Murad Bakhsh reached Balkh and occupied the city, they were already greatly aggravated by the environmental conditions. With the freezing winter round the corner, they were also extremely anxious about what lay ahead. The roads would get blocked once the snow started by October, making their return to Hindustan impossible until spring. This was the context of Murad Bakhsh’s petition to his father. In fact, contemporary chroniclers indicate that the prince’s reluctance to weather a winter in Balkh was shared widely by the rank and file of his army. Shah Jahan’s denial of Murad Bakhsh’s request for a transfer must have come as a shock to the prince. Much more than upcoming military challenges, it was ultimately the fear of enduring the Central Asian winter that prompted his refusal to serve in Balkh.
Mughal campaign in Kashmir
This is similar to what had happened in Kashmir some years before. The Srinagar Valley had just fallen to the empire in 1586. Yet, Muhammad Qasim Khan, the commander of the victorious army, found himself in a fix. In occupying Kashmir, he had defeated its erstwhile rulers – the Chak dynasty. But the supporters of the previous regime refused to bow down to the conquerors and put up a stiff resistance. With challenges to Mughal authority mounting, there was no respite for the imperial army stationed in Srinagar. Yet, much to the chagrin of Qasim Khan, the troops under his command simply refused to venture out of the city to engage the insurgents in battle. Left with no option, Qasim Khan had to ride out himself to face the enemies.
Once again, historical sources point to environmental challenges as the main factor behind the refusal of the Mughal troops to fight. The initial experience of Mughal armies in Kashmir had been marked by struggles to cope with freezing winters, rugged terrain and arid conditions. Akbar’s biographer Abul Fazl writes that imperial troops were “exceedingly harassed by the severe cold, the dearness of provisions, the difficult roads and the rain and snow”. The mountainous terrain proved particularly challenging round the year. In 1594, for instance, around 115 porters lost their lives in an avalanche and landslide near the Pir Panjal Pass. Supply was another issue. Cultivation was limited in Kashmir, making it difficult for large Mughal armies to sustain themselves by feeding off the land.
The Kashmiri aristocracy often exploited these environmental conditions to resist the invaders – they would, for instance, attack imperial forces in difficult and narrow mountain passes. This made life extremely difficult for the Mughal soldiers. Most of them were used to warmer conditions and level ground. Noting this problem, Abul Fazl writes sarcastically: “Apparently these delicate men of hot countries were averse to campaigning in a cold country and did not like to traverse defiles.” It is in this context that we have to understand the refusal of Qasim Khan’s soldiers to venture out of Srinagar and face the Kashmiri resistance.
Mughal advance in Assam
As mentioned earlier, monsoon was another season that could jeopardise Mughal campaigns. This was, in fact, a regular affair in the eastern reaches of the empire. This is what our final story is about.
In 1662, an army under emperor Aurangzeb’s trusted general Mir Jumla invaded the Brahmaputra Valley. It ran over Assam rather swiftly without much resistance. After some initial engagements, the Ahoms withdrew to the hills and forests, leaving most of Assam to Mir Jumla’s forces. By early 1663, the operation culminated in a treaty between the Mughals and the Ahoms.
Murad Bakhsh. Credit: Columbia University/Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain].
Towards the end of the campaign, Aurangzeb sent a farman(royal decree) to appoint two officers from the Assam campaign to the positions of subadar(governor) of Assam and faujdar (military commander) of Kamrup respectively. The emperor’s emissaries travelled all the way from North India to Assam, where they presented the farmans to an assembly of Mughal officers. To the shock of everyone present, both the commanders promptly refused to accept their new appointments. No amount of persuasion could change their mind.
Here too, the decisions of these commanders can be traced to the troubles the army had faced in negotiating Assam’s environment.
Soon after the Mughal army occupied the region, heavy monsoon rain had caused widespread floods. This threw the invading army into utter disarray. Describing the horrors of the monsoon, one chronicler, Khafi Khan, writes: “… [A]rmies of clouds, moving like elephants, appeared from the side of every mountain; arrows of raindrops caused the nalas and the rivers to swell; and the latter, putting on helmets of waves over their heads, raised noise and tumult in all directions.”
The Ahoms took advantage of this situation. They came out of their refuge, mounted their boats, and attacked the invaders. Mughal soldiers, in contrast, had become marooned at different stations because of the floods. Unable to come to each other’s aid, they became easy targets for the Ahoms. The Ahoms exploited this situation, repeatedly leading devastating attacks, especially at night. Mughal troops found themselves helpless.
To make matters worse, the rain and the flood snapped Mughal communications with their base in Bengal. This resulted in a breakdown of the supply line and created widespread shortage of food grains. Various epidemics broke out in the Mughal camp, leading to heavy casualties. Ultimately, the imperial army barely managed to strike a settlement with the Ahom kingdom and rush out of Assam. It was this traumatic experience of the campaign that prompted the two Mughal commanders to refuse their new appointments. Accepting the appointments would have meant serving in Assam and reliving the horrors they had just experienced.
Vagaries of nature
In all three cases, there were other factors besides climate, terrain and ecology. Significant military challenges, to name one. In Balkh, Uzbek mounted archers attacked Mughal armies on the march relentlessly. In Kashmir, the ousted aristocracy put up a resilient fight even after the imperial occupation of Srinagar. Finally, in Assam, Mughal forces struggled against determined night-time attacks carried out by the Ahoms.
However, in all three cases, military challenges became more difficult to handle because of the way the adversaries exploited environmental conditions to their advantage. This was made possible by their greater familiarity with local conditions.
Supply was also a problem in these cases. In most of South Asia, Mughal armies relied on itinerant grain merchants, called the Banjara, for food. However, they did not operate in any of these three regions. Once again, these logistical difficulties were amplified by the aridity of Balkh and Kashmir as well as by the floods and disease ecology of Assam.
These stories offer us a window into the complex interactions of the Mughal empire with the natural environment. Warfare was a domain in which many of these interactions played out. Mughal capacity to make war was based on its ability to harness and use environmental resources like animals, crops, firewood, and water. In course of military campaigns, armies also sought to tame the environment by cutting down forests, levelling the ground, removing snow and bridging rivers. At the same time, environmental factors like climate, ecology and terrain shaped the conduct of campaigns. They decided military tactics, strategy, logistics and deployment of technology. And in the case of the Mughals, they sometimes derailed the course of imperial expansion in more than one way.
Today, we live in a world where a killer pandemic has brought human civilisation down to its knees. Global environmental catastrophe seemed like a rather distant and vague possibility even ten years ago. Now it is staring us in the face. In order to understand how we got here, it is important to study the dynamics of human-environment relationships in the past. This is where environmental history becomes important.
In case of South Asia, this field has flourished mainly in the context of the colonial period. We know far less about human-environment dynamics during the pre-colonial times. By focusing of the interactions of the Mughal Empire with the natural environment, we are offered a glimpse into these relatively unexplored histories.
Pratyay Nath is Associate Dean, AshokaX, and Assistant Professor of History, Ashoka University. He is the author of Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (Oxford University Press, 2019). His ongoing research projects explore the concept of “early modernity” in history-writing, empire-environment relationship in the early modern world, and history of the horse in South Asia.
'We are fortunate that we can now give these places back to nature'
They were once military bases at the centre of a 50-year war between the world's two superpowers. They will soon become a haven for rare birds and other animals.
The German government has announced plans to convert 62 disused military bases just west of the Iron Curtain into nature reserves for eagles, woodpeckers, bats, and beetles.
The German government is converting disused military bases into nature reserves especially for rare birds (Dieter Damschen) ( BUND-Naturschutz )
Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said: "We are seizing a historic opportunity with this conversion — many areas that were once no-go zones are no longer needed for military purposes.
“We are fortunate that we can now give these places back to nature."
Together the bases are 31,000 hectares — that's equivalent to 40,000 football pitches. The conversion will see Germany's total area of protected wildlife increase by a quarter.
After toying with the idea of selling the land off as real estate, the government opted instead to make a grand environmental gesture. It will become another addition to what is now known as the European Green Belt.
A spokesperson from The European Green Belt told The Independent: "In the remoteness of the inhuman border fortifications of the Iron Curtain nature was able to develop nearly undisturbed.
"Today the European Green Belt is an ecological network and memorial landscape running from the Barents to the Black Sea."
Iran has vowed to retaliate after its most powerful military commander was killed by a US drone strike at Baghdad airport.
"Severe revenge awaits" those behind the attack on General Qasem Soleimani, said Iran's Supreme Leader.
So what do we know about Iran's military capabilities?
How big is Iran's army?
There are an estimated 523,000 active Iranian personnel in a range of military roles, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a UK-based think tank.
This includes 350,000 in the regular army, and at least 150,000 in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
There are a further 20,000 service personnel in the IRGC's naval forces. This group operates a number of armed patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, the site of several confrontations involving foreign-flagged tankers in 2019.
Iran's missile capabilities are a key part of its military prowess
The IRGC also controls the Basij unit, a volunteer force which has helped suppress internal dissent. This unit can potentially mobilise many hundreds of thousands of personnel.
The IRGC was set up 40 years ago to defend the Islamic system in Iran and has become a major military, political and economic force in its own right.
Despite having fewer troops than the regular army, it is considered the most authoritative military force in Iran.
What about operations abroad?
The Quds Force, which was led by General Soleimani, conducts secret operations abroad for the IRGC and reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It's believed to be about 5,000 strong.
The unit has been deployed to Syria, where it advised military elements loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and armed Shia militias fighting with them. In Iraq, it has supported a Shia-dominated paramilitary force which assisted in the defeat of the Islamic State group.
However, the US says the Quds force has a wider role by providing funding, training, weapons and equipment to organisations that Washington has designated as terrorist groups in the Middle East. These include Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The IRGC has its own navy and air force, and oversees Iran's strategic weapons
Economic problems and sanctions have hampered Iran's arms imports, which are relatively small compared to those of other countries in the region.
The value of Iran's defence imports between 2009 and 2018 was equivalent to just 3.5% of Saudi Arabia's imports over the same period, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Most Iranian imports come from Russia, and the rest from China.
Does Iran have missiles?
Yes - Iran's missile capabilities are a key part of its military prowess, given its relative lack of air power compared with rivals such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Iran's IRGC detained the British-flagged tanker the Stena Impero in the Strait of Hormuz in 2019
A US Defense Department report describes the country's missile forces as the largest in the Middle East, comprising mainly short-range and medium-range missiles. It also says Iran is testing space technology to allow it to develop inter-continental missiles, which can travel much further.
However, the long-range missile programme was stalled by Iran as part of its 2015 nuclear deal with foreign countries, according to the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) think tank. But it added that it may have resumed, given the uncertainty surrounding that deal.
In any case, many targets in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf would be within range of Iran's current short and medium-range missiles, and possibly targets in Israel.
In May last year, the US deployed a Patriot anti-missile defence system to the Middle East as tensions with Iran increased. This is meant to counter ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and advanced aircraft.
What are its non-conventional weapons?
Despite years of sanctions, Iran has also been able to develop drone capabilities.
In Iraq, Iranian drones have been used since 2016 in the fight against IS. Iran has also entered Israeli airspace with armed drones operated from bases in Syria, according to Rusi.
In June 2019, Iran shot down a US surveillance drone, claiming it had violated Iranian airspace over the Strait of Hormuz.
The other aspect of Iran's drone programme is its willingness to sell or transfer its drone technology to its allies and proxies in the region, says Jonathan Marcus, the BBC's Defence and diplomatic correspondent.
In 2019, drone and missile attacks damaged two key Saudi oil facilities. Both the US and Saudi Arabia linked these attacks to Iran, although Tehran denied any involvement and pointed to a claim of responsibility by rebels in Yemen.
Does Iran have cyber-capabilities?
Following a major cyber-attack in 2010 on Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran ramped up its cyber-space capability.
The US has accused Iran of supplying Houthi rebels with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is believed to have its own cyber-command, working on commercial and military espionage.
A US military report in 2019 said Iran has targeted aerospace companies, defence contractors, energy and natural resource companies and telecommunications firms for cyber-espionage operations around the world.
Meet the group of activists risking their lives to provide a ‘third voice’ in the conflict
A network of Libyan activists in the country’s east opposed to warlord Khalifa Haftar’s months-long offensive to seize the capital, Tripoli, has emerged; evidence that the civil society idealists who originally began the 2011 uprising against the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi persist, even if they are often cowering in fear.
Ahmed Sharksi, a 29-year-old activist and petroleum engineer now living in exile in Tunisia, is one of the coordinators of the Society for Civic Cooperation, a largely secret network of activists in eastern Libyan cities including Benghazi, Ajdabiya and Beida – the metropolises that make up the ancient Roman province of Cyrenaica.
They oppose both Haftar’s militaristic vision and the Islamist-leaning armed groups he is fighting.
“We reject the rule of militias in our capital, Tripoli,” Sharksi says. “And we are also opposing the attempt by Haftar to impose a military state. We are a third voice.”
They include lawyers, labourers, students, and engineers. They hold quiet meetings with each other and try to spread the word, occasionally appearing on one of Libya’s satellite television channels.
Anti-war movements are something of a rarity in an Arab world still enamoured with glorifications of armed forces and fighting men. Organising protests in eastern Libya’s tightly controlled streets is considered too risky.
Much of the group’s work remains underground, organising discreet meetings and launching hashtag campaigns, including one called “War is not a solution”. The group lacks even a Facebook page, worried that Haftar’s henchmen in the east would use it to track down and detain activists.
“There is without question some people who are not agreeing with this military intervention in Tripoli,” says Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan businessman and philanthropist.
“In Cyrenaica, it’s not so easy for them to say what they believe. It’s a very controlled environment. There are some people who have been imprisoned.”
Dissent is easier in western Libya because of the competition between rival groups. “There are too many powers running it, so it feels looser,” he says.
Sharksi was forced to flee Tunisia after he posted a video criticising Haftar’s Tripoli offensive that went viral and struck a chord with Libyans.
“Why do you destroy our dreams and aspirations for a stable country?” he said in the five-minute clip, which he posted to Facebook on 19 April, 15 days after Haftar launched his battle to take Tripoli.
“Haven’t we had enough bloodshed, enough killing? We don’t want another war.”
He chastised eastern Libyans for supporting Haftar’s grab for the capital, now nearing four months with over 1,100 dead and tens of thousands displaced. He also criticised western Libyans for believing the worst about their eastern compatriots.
We can’t tell the fighters to put down their weapons unless we have a logical solution. We are trying to assemble an alternative
Ahmed Sharksi
“Everyone in the western region heard that there were calls for massive demonstrations [in Benghazi] to support the war in Tripoli,” he said. “In these demonstrations, not even five or 10 people turned up. The silent majority did not participate and rejects this war.”
The threats came quickly and became increasingly violent. He was blasted as a liar and a traitor.
“I swear that you are a liar,” said one commentator. “May god damn you!”
“We will kill you,” another warned.
Some were from random trolls. But others came from Facebook accounts with postings and religious sentiments suggesting they were tied to the Saudi-influenced armed extremist militias partnered with Haftar.
Less than a week after he made the video, he wound up in neighbouring Tunisia, where many Libyans have fled to escape their country’s continuous armed conflicts.
He was right to be intimidated.
On 17 July, Haftar’s henchmen allegedly abducted Libyan activist and former lawmaker Seham Sergiwa, shooting her husband and 14-year-old son during an attack on her home a day after she criticised the war in a television appearance.
Haftar, backed by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russia and France, launched his operation to seize control of the capital from the United Nations-brokered government on 4 April, promising his benefactors a quick victory.
But militias in the west united against him, garnering the support of Turkey. The conflict has now become bogged down in a stalemate on the capital’s outskirts.
Ordinary Libyans are increasingly uneasy about the situation of their country, but unable to speak out, with both camps tightly controlling media. In recent days came allegations that Haftar’s forces bombed a clinic facility, killing five medical personnel, although the claim has been disputed by his side.
Like many Libyans, Sharksi said he supported Haftar when he first launched his 2014 effort to rid the country of the militias that had sprung following the collapse of Gaddafi’s rule. Some, such as Ansar al-Sharia, had ties to al-Qaeda.
But Sharksi and others turned against Haftar as it became apparent he sought to usher in a new dynasty.
Haven’t we had enough bloodshed, enough killing? We don’t want another war
Ahmed Sharski
“Haftar tried to push his family as ruler of Libya,” he says. “We are against that. We won’t allow it. We won’t support any new dictatorship in Libya.”
In his video, Sharski sought to appeal to Libyans’ better instincts. “We must try our best to reject hateful speech, and reject violence,” he said. “Frankly, war has never been a solution. We are honestly scared that this country will be divided, and we don’t want that.”
Other than rhetoric, there is not a lot that ordinary Libyans can do to change the course of their country. UN-backed plans for elections to install a new government overseeing all of Libya have been repeatedly delayed, and it remains unclear whether any of the country’s well-armed factions would respect any results that diminished their power.
Armed men rule Libya’s streets in both the country’s east, west and south. Haftar appears to answer to no one, surprising not only the UN but even his own benefactors with his assault on the capital.
Armed groups in the west, though reined in somewhat in the last year or so, have re-emerged vigorously on the streets of the capital, their tan Toyota pick-up trucks spray-painted and plastered with the names of their brigades and cities.
Activists like Sharksi try to build networks online, reaching out to like-minded Libyans in the rest of the country as well as in the diaspora.
In Tunis, he seeks audiences with diplomats and the UN, demanding a halt to the blatant interference in Libya’s affairs by countries such as France and Turkey. But ultimately he acknowledges that it is Libyans themselves that must work out a solution.
“Today we are just organising ourselves,” he says. “We can’t tell the fighters to put down their weapons unless we have a logical solution. We are trying to assemble an alternative.”
Protests in neighbouring Algeria and Sudan brought down governments this year. But Tatanaki says Libyans might be too exhausted and hopeless to make such a move. “I don’t think there’s enough courage or organisation or will,” he says.
Sharksi says it is still way too dangerous to try to take on the country’s armed factions in the streets with flowers and peaceful slogans.
“We’re trying to decrease the risks for activists,” he says. “We’re trying to limit information about our group so the names don’t get public.
'Additional properties with existing infrastructure are routinely being identified and evaluated by federal agencies as potential locations for temporary sheltering'
The Trump administration is making preparations to warehouse migrant children on military bases, according to Defense Department communications, the latest sign the government is moving forward with plans to split up families who cross the border illegally.
According to an email notification sent to Pentagon staffers, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make site visits at four military installations in Texas and Arkansas during the next two weeks to evaluate their suitability for child shelters.
The bases would be used to hold minors under age 18 who arrive at the border without an adult relative or after the government has separated them from their parents. HHS is the government agency responsible for providing minors with foster care until another adult relative can assume custody.
Immigrants who illegally crossed the Mexico-U.S. border turn themselves into Border Patrol agents May 9 near McAllen, Tex. (Loren Elliott/Reuters)
The email characterised the site visits as a preliminary assessment. "No decisions have been made at this time," it states.
An official at HHS confirmed the military site visits, speaking on condition of anonymity because the plans are not yet public. The official said HHS currently has the bed space to hold 10,571 children.
In a statement, the agency's Administration for Children and Families said its programmes required "routinely evaluating the needs and capacity of an existing network of approximately 100 shelters in 14 states".
"Additional properties with existing infrastructure are routinely being identified and evaluated by federal agencies as potential locations for temporary sheltering," the statement said.
Those facilities are at 91 percent capacity, an HHS official said, and the Trump administration's crackdown plans could push thousands more children into government care.The official said DHS has not provided projections for how many additional children to expect.
Trump officials say they are moving forcefully to halt a sharp increase in the number of families crossing the border illegally this spring, many of whom are Central Americans seeking asylum. US border agents arrested more than 100,000 illegal border-crossers in March and April, the highest monthly totals since Donald Trump took office.
Trump has seethed at the increase, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for blame. He has ordered her to "close" the border and cut off the migration flows, which typically increase in spring with seasonal demand for rural labour.
Ms Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions say the government will take the extraordinary measure of filing criminal charges against anyone who crosses the border illegally, including parents travelling with their children. In most cases, that means adults will be held at immigration jails awaiting court dates while their children are sent to foster care.
"If you're smuggling a child, then we're going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law," Mr Sessions said in a speech last week.
"If you don't want your child separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally" he added. "It's not our fault that somebody does that."
Children held in HHS custody spend an average of 45 days in the government's care, the HHS official said, and they are provided with educational and recreational opportunities. The agency conducts background checks on potential sponsors for the minors, and in 85 percent of cases the children are released to a parent or other adult relative already present in the United States, the official said.
Homeland Security officials have struggled for years to manage the demographic shift in the population of migrants arrested at the border, where single men from Mexico were once the overwhelming majority of those taken into custody.
Families with children and unaccompanied minors were 10 percent of illegal border crossers five years ago, Ms Nielsen told senators in testimony Tuesday. Today they account for 40 percent of those detained by US border agents, she said.
The use of military bases to hold migrant children is not without precedent. At the peak of the 2014 child migration crisis, the Obama administration used bases in Oklahoma, Texas and California to house more than 7,000 children over a period of several months.
Critics of family separation denounce the practice as heartless, saying it inflicts additional trauma on families fleeing for their lives from Central America's bloody gang wars.
Mr Trump last month ordered the Pentagon to help Homeland Security officials cope with the surge in illegal crossings, including the mobilisation of up to 4,000 National Guard troops. Military personnel have been deployed in a supporting role, and are not allowed to arrest migrants.
It's not clear whether the troops could be assigned to the bases where children will be held. Three of the bases are in Texas - the Army's Fort Bliss, Goodfellow Air Force Base and Dyess Air Force Base. Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas also will be evaluated, according to the Pentagon communications and HHS.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt Col Jamie Davis, said the Defense Department had not yet received a formal request from HHS. When the military has loaned space at its facilities in the past, HHS has reimbursed the Defense Department and the military has had little to do with the operation.
They married the enemy and created uniquely American lives, writes Kathryn Tolbert in the Washington Post. Read on:
I thought she was beautiful, although I never understood why she plucked her eyebrows off and penciled them on every morning an inch higher. She had been captain of her high school basketball team in Japan, and she ran circles around us kids on a dirt court in our small town in Upstate New York. I can still see this Japanese woman dribbling madly about, yelling “Kyash! Kyash!” That’s how she said Kath, or Kathy.
Hiroko and Bill with Kathy, left, Sam and Susan.
She married my American GI father barely knowing him. She moved from Tokyo to a small poultry farm just outside Elmira, N.Y., and from there she delivered eggs all over the county and into Pennsylvania. My sister describes her as having a “core of steel.” She raised us as determinedly as any mother could, and yet, looking back, I barely knew her.
Some people think the film I co-directed, “Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides,” is a paean to loving Japanese mothers. When one interviewer suggested as much to me and fellow director Karen Kasmauski, we exchanged a look that said, “Shall we tell him the truth?” The film, titled after a Japanese proverb, is about strong women, for sure. Warm and loving mothers? No.
So who are these women and what do we, their children, know about them?
After World War II, tens of thousands of Japanese women moved with their new husbands, American soldiers, and assimilated into American culture.
They are sisters and daughters of the ferocious enemy that attacked Pearl Harbor in the “day of infamy,” an enemy that surrendered four years later after waves of firebombing on Japanese cities and the dropping of atomic bombs. They married men who occupied their country and came to the United States. And then? They disappeared into America. There were tens of thousands of them, yet they vanished from public awareness — Japanese women who were barely a blip in immigration history, who married into families of North Dakota farmers, Wisconsin loggers, Rhode Island general store owners.
They either tried, or were pressured, to give up their Japanese identities to become more fully American. A first step was often adopting the American nicknames given them when their Japanese names were deemed too hard to pronounce or remember. Chikako became Peggy; Kiyoko became Barbara. Not too much thought went into those choices, names sometimes imposed in an instant by a U.S. officer organizing his pool of typists. My mother, Hiroko Furukawa, became Susie.
How did it feel to be renamed for someone in the man’s past, a distant relative or former girlfriend? My mother said she didn’t mind, and others said it made their lives easier to have an American name.
The brides, as many as 45,000, landed in the home towns of their husbands, places where Japanese people had been visible only on World War II propaganda posters. Was their skin really yellow? One war bride in South Carolina was asked to pull up her sleeve since no yellow was visible on her hands and wrists.
Hiroko Furukawa Tolbert, 85, mother of Kathryn Tolbert, arrived in Elmira, N.Y., in 1952. Her in-laws called her Susie. (Karen Kasmauski for The Washington Post)
My mother, once a daughter of privilege, came to her in-laws’ chicken farm. She has lived in the same two square miles of countryside ever since. It has been 64 years.
I read and reread the transcripts from interviews I had recorded with my mother when I was pregnant with my own daughter more than 20 years ago, when I realized I didn’t have even a timeline of her life. Six hours of tapes and they didn’t tell me what I now wanted to know. So I went back to her recently to try to understand what she could possibly have been thinking when she made the choice to marry an American soldier she barely knew. “I wasn’t thinking. I just had to get out,” was one of her succinct responses.
I didn’t know other women like her, although I had two journalist friends who were also daughters of Japanese war brides. When they proposed making a film about our mothers, I readily agreed because I had always wanted to tell her story. And she’s such an excellent raconteur that, sitting beside her in the film as her interviewer, I’m almost an unnecessary prop.
In making the film with Kasmauski and Lucy Craft, I began to understand that my mother’s struggles as an immigrant woman who was alone in this country were mirrored in the lives of tens of thousands of other Japanese women of her generation who came as wives of Americans. As a journalist, I felt compelled to talk to some of them before it was too late. As a daughter, I wanted to know my mother’s place in U.S. history and perhaps my own. I received a grant from my alma mater, Vassar College, to travel the United States and interview Japanese war brides and their families, to capture their voices in audio stories and scan their old photographs, to create an oral history archive. Over the course of a year I recorded some 60 conversations.
Hiroko and Bill Tolbert with their children at Fort Lee in Virginia, where Bill finished his military duty. (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)
Sometimes the women, now in their 80s and 90s, were reluctant to be interviewed and were coaxed into being recorded by their families, especially their children, who wanted to hear the stories themselves. But once they started to talk, these women remembered some of the most startling details of their early lives — the small lies they told their mothers, the sudden glimpses of temper in the men they would marry, the sweetness or bullheadedness of American men trying to communicate with future Japanese fathers-in-law. They showed me albums with wonderful treasures — photos of striking young couples, of themselves in glamour poses perhaps influenced by the Hollywood films that were so popular in Japan, of beach outings with their soldier boyfriends.
These are the stories they and their families tell.
The bombs fell, the emperor surrendered, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops landed on the Japanese homeland by troopship and transport plane, to prevent starvation and social collapse while they remade the defeated nation.
Only families of wealth and elevated social status were able to insulate their daughters from the world of American soldiers. Those who had survived needed work, and the Americans provided it. They set up typing schools and English classes, hired secretaries, clerks, maids, babysitters. Nightclubs and cabarets sprang up for the occupiers, and Japanese women found work there, too.
My mother, the daughter of an Imperial Japanese Army officer, had a pampered childhood in Korea when it was ruled by the Japanese, with maids and dance lessons. An aide came every morning to polish her father’s boots and chauffeur him to camp. But her father died of an illness, and the family came back to Japan during the war, reduced in circumstances.
After high school, she looked for a job. There was no money for her to go to college; it would be saved for her brother. The U.S. military operated a PX — or Army post exchange, a retail outlet for soldiers — in the Ginza area of Tokyo. She went for an interview and was hired as a sales clerk in the jewelry department, helping servicemen pick out gifts for their girlfriends.
Hiroko, right, with her mother, Ume Furukawa, and her brother, Masaaki, in a portrait taken in Korea, where the family lived a privileged life under Japanese occupation. (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)
Sometime in 1950, she was going home on a streetcar when a GI started talking to her. She told him she worked at the PX. He started showing up there to talk to her and ask her out. She turned him down, but he kept asking. Japanese men, the war brides recount, rarely pressed their luck after being rebuffed. American men? Extremely persistent.
These ardent Americans also brought presents the Japanese could not afford or had never seen before — chocolate, dresses from Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward and even Spam, a culinary oddity. And they seemed handsome. Tall, well-fed, wearing crisp uniforms. Japan had lost so many of its young men in the war, and the ones who came back were physically and mentally debilitated.
American chivalry, the notion of “ladies first,” also enchanted Japanese women. War brides almost universally say “he was such a gentleman” to describe their American suitors.
There was, of course, bad behavior. A woman remembers seeing GIs in a train station with watches up and down their arms, taken from Japanese men. Others I spoke to witnessed physical abuse of Japanese civilians.
My mother liked Bill, the soldier from Upstate New York who spoke to her on the streetcar. Liked him well enough, that is; she wasn’t head over heels. He was quiet and well-behaved compared with some of the American soldiers she had seen; he did not drink. She does not speak of romance, only of her desperation to get out of what she viewed as her hopeless situation in Japan. He was her opportunity.
I met a family whose story begins with a similar chance meeting in postwar Japan, and in their case led to rural Wisconsin. In a small ranch-style house with a large fenced garden, a deer blind and, across the road, an expanse of cornfields, Nancy Roberts, 84, recalls the day she met Don. Her name was Hiroko Yamamoto then.
Hiroko Roberts | Making Hiroko Happy
Hiroko Yamamoto Roberts, known by her family and friends as Nancy, is 84 years old and lives with her husband in rural Wisconsin. She still enjoys watching the movie “From Here to Eternity.” (Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber for The Washington Post)
Her girlfriend dragged her through a Kyoto department store where they worked to look at the Marine who she said resembled Montgomery Clift, the actor in their favorite movie, “From Here to Eternity.” Hiroko was a sophisticated city girl and thought he was cute, in a country bumpkin kind of way. She brazenly spoke to him, and he invited her out for a meal. He began to call her Nancy, because she reminded him of the cartoon character in Nancy and Sluggo, with her button nose and black curly hair. She had no idea who that was.
It was 1953. Hiroko was 21, enjoying a life of movies, parties, going around with groups of other young people determined to have fun and not think about the future. There was a kind of recklessness about these young women who had seen their families and nation ruined by war.
“We didn’t care about yesterday or tomorrow because we found out that everything we believed in wasn’t true and we just lived for today — fun, fun fun!” That’s how Hiroko once described herself to her eldest daughter, Charmaine Roberts.
The Yamamoto family was respectable, and for a daughter to date a GI was a big blemish on its reputation. Some families disowned daughters, striking their names from family registries, the all-important record of ancestry.
Hiroko’s father died when he was struck by a truck while riding a bicycle, and she hid her Montgomery Clift look-alike boyfriend, a Marine and cook for the officers club, from her mother for quite a while.
As for my family, my Japanese grandmother opposed my mother’s relationship with Bill, and neighbors gossiped pointedly. My mother didn’t care. Neither did she care when my grandmother warned her with an old proverb: “He’s like the bones of an unknown horse.” My grandmother was saying: Before you marry a man, you must know his family, his circumstances, his values. The soldiers were an unknown quantity in a society where lineage is all-important.
Hiroko Yamamoto and Don Roberts on Aug. 17, 1954, the day of their
marriage in Kobe, Japan. (Courtesy of the Roberts family)
The U.S. government was not in favor of these liaisons either. The men faced tremendous legal hurdles to bringing home Japanese wives. The Immigration Act of 1924, which limited immigrants through a quota system by nationality, also excluded any person who was not eligible for citizenship, and that meant Asians. Several temporary laws in the late 1940s allowed servicemen to marry their Japanese girlfriends and bring them home if they could complete the paperwork in time. The system was designed to make marriage difficult to accomplish, and easy for the young man to change his mind.
Passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 removed the legal obstacles, although paperwork was still considerable. Commanding officers continued to discourage the relationships, not just out of personal animus but also because they anticipated the unions might be deemed illegal in the men’s home states. In 1952, interracial marriages were still banned, at least on the books, in more than half the nation. The Supreme Court declared those laws unconstitutional in the 1967 decision for Loving v. Virginia.
Kimiko Amato | With JFK's Help
Kimiko Yamaguchi Amato, 90, lives in East Boston, in the same house her husband bought in 1954. After Congressman John F. Kennedy sponsored a private bill on her behalf, she was able to come to the United States to join her fiance. She arrived on Christmas Eve of 1950 and married Angelo Amato the following year. (Karen Kasmauski for The Washington Post)
With their can-do American persistence, some men lobbied their congressmen for help. In 1947, Angelo Amato had just turned 20 and was determined to bring Kimiko Yamaguchi — “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen” — home to East Boston. That’s how the young John F. Kennedy, his congressman, came to sponsor H.R. 8558, “A Bill for the relief of Kimiko Yamaguchi, May 18, 1950.” Their son, Joseph Amato, treasures the sheaf of letters from Kennedy regarding the bill.
On Christmas Eve 1950, his father brought his fiancee home to a triple-decker in his Italian American neighborhood, where she has lived ever since.
It seems incomprehensible to me, as a mother, to let a daughter go so far away with a foreign man, knowing communication would be difficult and coming home almost impossible. But I also know that some families were large, and poor, and to send a daughter off with what they thought was a rich American was a tough but practical decision. America meant a brighter future.
The young women were ill-prepared for their lives in the United States. As one family liked to joke, their mother went from life in Tokyo with a maid to life in Florida with an outhouse. And women who married black GIs entered an America segregated to a degree they did not imagine.
“My husband told me about it. He mentioned to me before I left Japan,” said Chizuko Watkins, 88, of Los Altos Hills, Calif. “He told me when you go to the States, you see something, funny things like that.” But she didn’t think much about it until she traveled by train to meet her husband in Atlanta, where she unknowingly checked into a “white” hotel and her husband, Clifford, couldn’t join her, or even meet her there.
One of the many letters from John F. Kennedy to Angelo Amato regarding
efforts to bring Kimiko Yamaguchi to the United States. (Courtesy of the Amato family)
And what about the men? What did they expect? Probably wives who would be more submissive than American women, but also, paradoxically, wives who would run American-style households, cook American meals, raise American kids and impart American values to those children. The Red Cross in Japan ran popular “brides schools,” where Japanese women were taught how to make beds, bake cakes, wear makeup and walk in high heels. Toyo Swartz, 92, of Vallejo, Calif., showed me glossy photographs of herself in those classes and recalled being taught how to make meatloaf. Such photographs were taken to show Americans that the Japanese women were going to fit right in.
In many cases the men were unprepared as well. After all, my mother knew she was going to a farm. My father probably never suspected he was bringing home an opinionated, strong-willed woman who could never be content as a chicken farmer’s wife.
Toyo Swartz | Not Madame Butterfly
Toyo Kaneko Swartz, 92, tried to do everything right, attending a brides school in Tokyo run by the Red Cross to learn American housekeeping and getting her U.S. citizenship as soon as she could. (Jeff Singer for The Washington Post)
My mother remembers vividly her second day at the chicken farm. She was pregnant with me. Helen, her mother-in-law, took her into the hatchery to see the baby chicks. They were a blanket of yellow fuzz in large drawer-like trays under heating lights. A potbellied stove nearby kept the entire room warm. What happened next made my mother sick. Her mother-in-law reached into that peeping sea of yellow and pulled out a chick that was deformed in some way, a runt perhaps or exhibiting some other sign of poor health. And she opened the door of the stove and tossed the chick into the flames. It made a popping sound. She repeated this several times while my mother struggled to stay upright.
At this moment my mother realized that life on the farm was going to be like nothing she had experienced or expected. It’s painful for me to hear her describe her shock at farm life — the dirtiness of the house, the crude, rough way of living. Her constant fights with my father over what she wanted — a life apart from the farm, for him to continue his education on the GI Bill. Her frustration with his lack of ambition.
The more my father wanted to settle for what he had — a house trailer and low-level farm work — the more my mother fought for what she wanted. And for years, that was the pattern. She says it made their marriage worse, and she blames herself as much as him: she wasn’t the right wife for him. Not because she was Japanese, but because they were poorly suited for each other. In temperament. In outlook. After more than 30 years together, they got divorced.
He remarried and died more than 15 years ago. I wish I had asked him why he chose my mother, what made him think he should marry her and bring her home to the farm, whether he believed in the obedient Asian wife stereotype. I do know that as the years went by, he resented her ambition, her desire to expand the grocery store, build a new home, push her children to apply to the best colleges possible. And because of their personalities, she got her way.
Never once did she consider going back to Japan. No war bride I’ve interviewed felt they could go back to Japan. When they left, they recalled, they were warned: Don’t come home crying. And certainly don’t come home crying with children.
Some descended into bitterness and depression. Most simply moved forward as best they could — raising kids, finding solace in friendships or faith; reinventing themselves to fit their changed reality.
The Red Cross ran brides schools in Japan starting in 1951 to teach American customs to the young Japanese wives of U. S. servicemen. Many of the volunteers teaching the classes were wives of U. S. military officers. Toyo Swartz is standing at left rear. (Courtesy of the Swartz Family)
There were many exceptions, of course. Great love stories, solid partnerships, loving families; men who cared about their wives’ Japanese roots. More than 12 years after his wife, Kiyoko, died, 82-year-old Joe Sexton of Philadelphia still sends a large box of gifts every Christmas to her relatives in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, and calls them annually, using an interpreter. He treasures his favorite ramen broth that they send to him in return packages, and he shares the bounty with his children.
Women married to career military men more easily found other Japanese war bride families to form friendships. But they also endured husbands absent for long stretches — including duty in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s. During that period, the Japanese wives left behind near the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Md. formed a social group that continues to this day.
About a dozen of the women meet every month, often at the Golden Corral for the all-you-can-eat brunch, loading their plates with fried chicken, macaroni and potatoes. They trade Japanese books and magazines, teach each other how to make new origami ornaments, go to cheer the Japanese youth baseball team that comes to compete in the Cal Ripken World Series.
Yoko Breckenridge | Passing the Exam
Yoko Sasaki Breckenridge, 83, is a successful real estate agent and founder of a Japanese lending library in Minneapolis. For many years she was a barber before deciding she wanted a job that involved less standing. But selling homes involved a whole new set of challenges for her. (Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber for The Washington Post)
In the United States, work — any work — felt like a form of liberation and was often a necessity. The skills many of them brought from Japan were as seamstresses and barbers. Keiko Ingerson’s Keiko’s Family Hair Care in Lewiston, Maine, was an institution for many years. Most of her customers did not know of her hardships, her need to work to support her three children after her husband left. Yoko Breckenridge’s abusive father made her learn barbering so he wouldn’t have to pay for a shave. She married Roger to escape him, and she became a successful barber when she landed in Redwood Falls, Minn.
My mother worked at the family farm, processing eggs and delivering them. Then she and my father, Bill, ran a small grocery store after it was clear the farm was too small to survive.
When my parents divorced, my father offered my mother the choice of keeping either their house or the country store — assuming she’d take the home. It only went to show how much he still misjudged her. My mother took Tolbert’s Store and made an unlikely success of it — also demonstrating a kind of feminism by employing only women, from Ellie, who worked the deli, to “Betty, my butcher.”
In fact, Betty Maramack became my mother’s closest friend and business confidante — teaching her how to control inventory and also persuading her to get her first flu shot. Betty advised my mother when to sell the store — a sale that made enough money to usher her into comfortable retired life.
Yoko Breckenridge was a highly skilled barber, shown here as a judge of the hair styling contest in the Upper Midwest Barber Show in 1965. (Courtesy of Yoko Breckenridge)
The Japanese war brides were determined to raise what they imagined were all-American children. And they did. Their children are American, and they have little connection to Japan. Most do not have Japanese names.
I don’t think of myself as Asian American. In my Upstate New York upbringing, there weren’t other Asians, certainly not other Japanese Americans, with whom I might have felt some affinity. But I was surprised to find that even children of Japanese war brides on the West Coast — with its deeply embedded Asian communities — did not think of themselves as especially Japanese American.
I think that’s partly because the Japanese war brides so rigorously suppressed their former identities to become American. Their departures on the arms of American men were viewed with sadness, by the women and their families alike, because they were probably leaving forever. And there was an underlying tinge of shame that they had turned away from Japan or that Japan could not provide for them.
The women don’t view their families today as a branch on their Japanese family tree; they started from scratch. “I came here alone, and today I have 28 family members,” one woman told me with quiet pride.
Bill and Hiroko Tolbert owned Tolbert's Market just outside Elmira, New York. After their divorce, Hiroko ran the store on her own, but had invaluable help from a veteran of the grocery business, Betty Maramack. Betty worked in the meat department and Hiroko always referred to her as "Betty, my butcher." (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)
My mother didn’t speak Japanese to us. Very few war brides used Japanese at home. Their husbands didn’t want them to, fearing it would become a shared language that excluded them. And the women viewed it as counterproductive to their efforts to become real Americans and to have their children be seen the same as other kids.
Some of their children who later learned Japanese or who were able to spend time in Japan found it gave them unexpected insights into their mothers.
Rodney Yoder, of Boston, was a Harvard student spending a year at Doshisha University in Kyoto when his mother, Itsuko, came to visit. Decades later, sitting in his Back Bay apartment, he choked up at the recollection. “I could understand my mom for the first time. I could hear her speak, I could hear her sense of humor. My home-stay family told me how bright and cheerful my mother is. So in a way it was like getting to know her for the first time.”
The women often stayed away from Japan — perhaps taking only one or two trips “home’’ during 60 years. Sometimes it was because of the expense. But also, Japan had changed, become unrecognizably rich, and they themselves had become strangers there.
My mother enjoyed more regular visits to Japan — sometimes as a member of the local delegation in the “Sister City” exchanges between nearby Corning, N.Y., and the city of Kakegawa. Japan may have changed, but the food she loved was the same. Her mother, brother and sister always welcomed her. Her nieces took time off from work to go around with her. She was lucky.
But she never told her mother that she was divorced; she couldn’t bring herself to undermine the picture of her American life that she had painted over the years, of a good marriage and wonderful family. She also didn’t want to concede that her mother had perhaps been right more than six decades ago with her warning about the bones of an unknown horse.
Hiroko Tolbert on the family poultry farm in the early 1950s. (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)
She herself knew she did not make a mistake. She has said over and over that it was the right decision to leave Japan. She bounced back from a hard landing, made a life and is satisfied with how it turned out.
America has been perfect for her in that sense, because she was entrepreneurial and the harder she worked, the more she could get ahead. That brought her immense satisfaction.
And she raised four children, not with warmth or expressions of love, but with a fierce determination.
The language my mother used when we were growing up was always about hard work and studying, getting ahead. Like Japanese mothers in general, she was obsessed with education. She paid for tutors. She read my history chapters when I was in junior high so that she could ask me questions before a test.
She wanted us to succeed because that would mean she succeeded. That was extremely important to her. She said she didn’t want people to say, “Look what happens when a Japanese comes to this country.”
Hiroko with her daughter and granddaughter during a Christmas 2008 visit to Washington. (Courtesy of the Tolbert family)
Her mothering didn’t include saying to her children, “I love you.” To this day she doesn’t say it, although she now returns goodbye hugs, if stiffly.
I am the oldest child, the custodian of her story. I tell my mother’s story, and those of other Japanese women like her, to give them recognition for what they endured and what they achieved. For their extraordinary resilience.
I have learned Japanese and taught it to my daughter. I also hug my daughter every time I see her, and I always tell her I love her.
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