Is This a Warning ?

Is this a warning to the Japanese?This may be from Bougainville. I found this picture in my dad's scrapbook.

 

That or a warning from the Japanese.

 

I am thinking it's something less than an amusing anecdote.

 

Looks like something the Japanese may have done in China. Maybe a Japanese soldier had carried it to Bougainville.

tom

 

Wasn't there some headhunter / cannibal action on Bougainville? Looks like their handiwork with some stolen Kanji propaganda. One of the articles on Bougainville mentions the cannibals didn't like GI stew because of the cigarette smoke prevalence. They did go for the Japanese. Adding macabre to the macabre imho.

 

Could well be a warning...Unfortunately this sort of thing wasn't rare...Going by just the picture i'd guess it was a warning to the japanese (given the inscription is in Japanese) - But perhaps more than i warning. This sort of thing was commonly used to give the other side the "heebee jeebees"...Both in terms of reducing morale and to make the (younger and less experienced) fear the enemy and where they are and what they are in. It could also make the enemy mad as hell and therefore rush into situations without preparation. Reminds me of the same thing during Vietnam....both sides did it.

 

I do have some pictures not yet uploaded, that show some of the natives with heads in hand,showing off for the camera.Dad always said he was glad they were on our side.They scared the hell out of him.He also talked of the Fiji headhunters.

 

That makes sense too. "Not one grain of rice, or direction for the Americans or you die!"

 

My question, is that in Japanese or Chinese?

 

I believe CAC said it was in japanese.

 

Everything I have read said it was. The Dutch, French and Americans had stopped the practice (head hunting) but as it became clear that the American forces were going to recapture the Solomons, the practice was restarted by some of the native Melanesians population as a direct warning to the Japanese. As it became fairly widespread one would think that it must have been done with the complicent (sp?) acceptance of the American forces.

 

Scanning one of my old anthropology textbooks I've read that the only well-documented ceremonial exocannibalism in the area occurred in Papua-New Guinea. Bougainville is named after French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811) who reported cannibalism on nearly every island he touched. However, by 1940 the taste for long pig had long been discouraged on most islands. The practice persisted in Papua-new Guinea mainly because the island is so large and its valleys so remote from the coastal colonial settlements. Bougainville, however was pretty well explored and colonized by the time the Japanese came in 1942. Without something better than anecdote I would tend to classify this as GI lore, rather than fact. Remember the typical US soldier or Marine in WWII was 19 years old with a high school education. They were fighting on islands they didn't even know existed before a pre-invasion briefing (sometimes very brief). As to the native cultures, even their officers didn't know anything beyond what a few may have read in the National Geographic. So an 18th century French Admiral described the Solomons as "cannibal islands," (big whup, Bougainville could have saved considerable ink by listing the non-cannibal islands) therefore the GIs relating the few bits of information they may have acquired about the South Pacific islands to their current location come up with cannibal islands are inhabited by cannibals. No surprise, it's the typical reasoning of 19 year olds, which is what one must expect with a non-professional army.

Actually there could be a whole sub-forum on the subject of WWII myths, not the myths people have today about that war, but the myths the typical soldier inflicted on himself. It's human nature to bridge gaps in sound, supportable knowledge with lore, and it takes a disciplined mind to resist the urge to fill in the blanks. (Hey, it's the Lore/Data dichotomy for all you Star Trek NextGen fans) Some myths persisted in spite of training... for example, helmet straps. American soldiers were trained to strap their helmets firmly to their chins for these obvious reasons: 1) A helmet that's not on your head can't protect said head. 2) It's hard enough to see with a helmet that fits snugly let alone one that flops around each time you look left or right. 3) It takes two hands to fight so the guy who has one hand on his rifle and the other holding his helmet on isn't fighting. Yet even given the training the majority bought in to the story that a strapped on helmet would cause your head to fly off with the first nearby artillery detonation. The fact that there wasn't a plethora of disembodied yet firmly helmeted enemy heads all over the ground didn't seem to deflate the myth. If Patton caught a GI with his straps dangling he's fine the guy $20 on the spot, but all that got him was a reputation for harshness. So the straps continued to dangle right through Korea and Vietnam. The advent of the Kevlar helmet roughly corresponds to the advent of the all-professional US Army. Straps don't dangle now.

As for the picture of the head with the Japanese (or Chinese) poster, that's unlikely to be the work of Melanesian natives simply because the typical native islander wasn't literate in any language, or if he was it was likely English, German or Dutch. Cutting off heads and using them as a warning to others is a more typical Imperial Japanese behavior.