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TIL: Today I Learned

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TIL that following WWII some Japanese-American soldiers who fought on the European front married local women and brought them back with them to Hawaii (where most of them lived). Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of academic literature on them (or, for that matter, any other cases where Asian-American soldiers married local women), but it is quite fascinating wondering what sort of struggles they would've gone through. It's also another example of something that seems obvious but never really occurred to me.
 
cybrxkhan said:
TIL that following WWII some Japanese-American soldiers who fought on the European front married local women and brought them back with them to Hawaii (where most of them lived). Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of academic literature on them (or, for that matter, any other cases where Asian-American soldiers married local women), but it is quite fascinating wondering what sort of struggles they would've gone through. It's also another example of something that seems obvious but never really occurred to me.
Click to expand...

I think you might find this relevant article interesting:

The Japanese women who married the enemy

Seventy years ago many Japanese people in occupied Tokyo after World War Two saw US troops as the enemy. But tens of thousands of young Japanese women married GIs nonetheless - and then faced a big struggle to find their place in the US.

For 21-year-old Hiroko Tolbert, meeting her husband's parents for the first time after she had travelled to America in 1951 was a chance to make a good impression.

She picked her favourite kimono for the train journey to upstate New York, where she had heard everyone had beautiful clothes and beautiful homes.

But rather than being impressed, the family was horrified.

"My in-laws wanted me to change. They wanted me in Western clothes. So did my husband. So I went upstairs and put on something else, and the kimono was put away for many years," she says.

It was the first of many lessons that American life was not what she had imagined it to be.
Click to expand...

sauce: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33857059
 
shadowplay said:
I think you might find this relevant article interesting:



sauce: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33857059
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. I'm pretty aware of the Asian war brides, actually - within the Vietnamese-American community it's an issue that pops up from time to time (Vietnamese women who married Americans during or shortly after the Vietnam War, and/or the Ameriasian kids who were the children of Vietnamese girlfriends or prostitutes the American soldiers had and were left behind), and within the greater Asian-American community it's also a talked about topic in terms of how it relates to conceptions of Asian race and gender or whatever.

It's the reverse - Asian-American soldiers finding women elsewhere - that's not heard of a lot, even though (as I think I posted earlier in the TIL thread) Asian male-white female marriages were more common than the reverse up until around the mid-century. In fact I was trying to search more on those sort of relationships and it's kind of frustrating because most of the results talk about white (or black) Americans with Asian women.

I forgot to add above, but apparently one reason why some of those Japanese-American soldiers were attracted to the local German women was because they felt they behaved closer to Japanese ideals of femininity in contrast with the more "Americanized" Japanese-American girls back home.

Also, I read a little anecdote about how the local Germans were all WTH when they saw Japanese guys in American uniforms, and some of the soldiers would troll the Germans by telling them Japan switched sides and joined the Americans to fight the Nazis.
 
cybrxkhan said:
Also, I read a little anecdote about how the local Germans were all WTH when they saw Japanese guys in American uniforms, and some of the soldiers would troll the Germans by telling them Japan switched sides and joined the Americans to fight the Nazis.
Click to expand...

That might be a manifestation of a scene from the old Vic Morrow TV show "Combat."
 
Maple syrup is an acceptable substitute for honey in a hot whiskey.
 
TIL that some 14-year olds invented condoms which change color when there is a sexually transmittable illness.
Wonder why this took that long. I assume it is a simple chemical reaction, triggered by evidence of the main known illnesses of this kind. Very cool idea :thumbsup:
 
TIL there are people who dislike eating mooncakes. Even though YIL how tasty they are.
 
Typical mooncakes are round pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 3–4 cm thick. This is the Cantonese mooncake, eaten in Southern China in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau. A rich thick filling usually made from red bean or lotus seed paste is surrounded by a thin (2–3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs. Mooncakes are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.
Click to expand...
Doesn't sound bad...
 
We Vietnamians eat mooncakes too, good filling stuff. You can get good cheap ones at Costco!
 
TIL Moon Cakes =/= Moon Pies
single-decker-moonpie.png
 
Ha! I thought the same thing Hobbs
 
TIL that instrument I saw that was essentially a wood block is called...a wood block.
 
[wiki=Chocolate-coated_marshmallow_treats]Really, Chuchky?[/wiki]
 
Potato's came from the Incan Empire. I knew they weren't Irish but for some reason I had thought that Mexico was the home.

I also learned that Turkeys come from Mexico. Explains why Ben Franklin wanted a turkey as our national bird. Listened to a documentary at work. After about 20 minutes I realized it was basically just summing up the books "1491" and "1493" for me.

Tomorrow I plan to become disgusted with America as I finish listening to documentaries on Reconstruction and the prison system we have in place. Mars too.
 
Well, potatoes come from the Andes, near the border of what is now Peru and Bolivia.

I don't know that it is really fair to credit the Inca with them though, as they are thought to have been first domesticated between 8000 and 5000 BC and the Inca did not conquer the area until around the same time that Europeans arrived in the New World.

Crediting the Inca with potatoes would be like saying the current Egyptian government invented papyrus.

The Inca did continue the long tradition of growing many kinds of potatoes though. Some of the varieties are still extremely toxic, like the wild ancestor was. You have to eat a lot of clay with those potatoes to counteract the poison.


Turkeys are actually native to most of North and Central America. The domesticated varieties do come mostly from what is now central Mexico, but there were still a lot of wild fowl in the woods in all of the original 13 colonies.
 
I think he meant that the Spanish learned about potatoes from the Inca Empire.
 
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