14 December 2009
TOKOTON MA-DE
Coastal Minesweeper USS Progress (AMc-98)
The Far East Network, a radio relay system that broadcast to U.S. forces in Japan used to have a great feature by which the sailors, soldier and Marines stationed in the Home Islands would be invited to learn a word or phrase in Japanese per day.
Theoretically, if you paid attention and did not live on the USS Midway, which was gone from our homeport more than it was home, you could learn a few hundred words and by the end of your tour be prepared to be a less offensive guest of our host nationals.
More than a few of us stayed on in Japan, since it is a remarkable place of great wonder and subtlety. The guy who relieved me in FITRON 151 stayed, and he is a man of influence in the US Forces structure. He is still doing a phrase a day for the wider audience, though his phrases always include some insight into why the Japanese think the way they do.
In the days of Edo, before Japan was opened to the world, the term "TOKOTON" was used in dance to refer to the sound of the dancers' heels keeping time to the music. It was important in theatrical dances that this rhythm-keeping mechanism be carried on through to the end of the performance. In Japanese, MA-DE means "until." Hence, the phrase "TOKOTON MA-DE" means “all the way, to the bitter end.”
That may be the most challenging thing about translation between languages. The origin of that term, in English, is one that commonly conveys something painful and disastrous. The source of this term may have been nautical, a bitter being a turn of a cable around posts (or bitts) on a ship's deck. The term “bitter end” refers to "the part of the cable that stays inboard."
When a rope is paid out to the bitter end, no more remains.
The fo'c'sle on a big ship- my experience is only aircraft carriers- is below the forward flight deck and the gigantic anchor chains pay out there from some locker far below. Each link weighs as much as an NFL down lineman in full gear, somewhere around 350 pounds- and the chain is more than a thousand feet in length for each massive anchor. Each of the great chains, with anchor, amounts to nearly three quarters of a million pounds.
The last hundred feet or so or chain is painted red. That is intended to be a graphic warning to the boatswains that if the chain is paying out fast and there is red, some thing really dramatic is about to happen, which is to say that the anchor and a thousand feet of chain is going to rip the adamant steel footings right out of the hull and there was going to be shrapnel and flying chain all over.
That would be the bitter end, all right.
Anyway, I was going to get to the part of the bio of Admiral Rex today that began with his time at the Naval Intelligence School (NIS) across the river at Anacostia, not far from where my Grandfather camped out on the flats during the Bonus Army days.
Rex reported for duty at the NIS in January of 1951. Starting with the end of the Pacific War, The leadership of the Navy recognized that the intelligence function could not be relegated to the reserve force, from whence it had drawn most of its personnel during the conflict. Intelligence was a vital and permanent part of the active force structure.
James V. Forrestal, when he was still SECNAV and not the first SECDEF, authorized the establishment NIS in order to provide a baseline for a officers to serve continuously in intelligence billets- the beginnings of the Special Duty Intelligence community.
With all that, the Navy was caught flat-footed at the start of the Korean War in June 1950. The Navy's primary combat intelligence training facility, the Naval Air Combat Intelligence Officer School (NACIOS), had been closed and, incredibly, no experienced air combat intelligence officers remained on active duty.
The Navy was quickly forced to organize an Air Intelligence Section at NIS to resurrect an Air Combat Intelligence program, and teach the fundaments of basic air and photo intelligence training along with operational theater indoctrination.
The fact that Rex did not have to go to Korea as an AI is another part of the story, but I am not going to get to it this morning. Instead, I am going to update a part of his early resume, when he was the Lieutenant Junior Grade in command of a small, but very real warship.
His son Earl wrote me about a journey from the tranquil blue waters of Hawaii to the distant seas around the Home Islands. He said that the USS Progess went into a Typhoon as they approached Japan. Gigantic waves bore down on the little minesweeper, and under gray skies with horizontal rain, the ship labored up one mountain of saltwater only to careen down the trough into the face of another.
Rex organized a bucket brigade that started in at the turn of the bilge, and up the buckets came, slopping over as the little ship heeled, to try to keep Progress afloat.
He succeeded, and after helping to make the Japanese harbors safe for navigation, returned his command to Hawaii for decommissioning.
But there at school in Anacostia, there was another hot war in progress, and it was playing out against a backdrop of a Cold one emerging. That is where we are going to have to leave things today.
I slept too late this morning to do much more, and that was a function of the Geminid meteor shower, whose bright streaking glory is best observed in the small hours of the night, and which occupied my attention when I should have been sleeping. Like life itself, the space debris shoots across the horizon emitting drama and brilliant light before it flickers out.
No matter. We will get on with this like the Japanese would, TOKOTON MA-DE.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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