U.S. Soldier with the Japanese Skull

When I find something on the internet that I feel will work in my class, I take it and run. I found this picture below on the internet with this description, and I found it fascinating... partly because we are doing Heart of Darkness, a book which juxtaposes "civility" and "savagery..." questioning what is civilized and what is savage....(not to mention the obvious Hamlet reference)

For some reason this picture struck a chord with me, it is so surreal, here is a reasonably attractive woman, writing a thank you note to her boyfriend for the gift of a man's SKULL. The "surrealness" of it, if that's even a word, reminds me of an article that first appeared in the New York Times, titled "The Corpse on Union Street" which was about the insanity of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Although a news article, it read like a short story.

Here's a reprint:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090805C.shtml

Not that it surprises me that our soldiers would do this, but it was surprising, because I had never heard of this until last night. So I found the picture, the brief article and then the poem, and basically threw out my lesson for today and whipped this new one together on a whim, which is one of the few things you are allowed to have in the New York City Public School system (whims,) although I think we might have given it back to the city in our new contract negotiation... I'll have to check.

http://www.nycenet.edu/Administration/mediarelations/PressReleases/2005-2006/10032005.htm

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Our narratives, the stories we tell about war change with time. At least what we find acceptable. Below is a photograph that was printed in Life magazine during World War II. The caption on the page read: Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her. While racism is still an important element in war, we are not so obvious in showing it.

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United States:
"We boiled the flesh off enemy skulls"

"Japanese skulls were much-envied trophies among U.S. Marines in the Pacific theater during World War II. The practice of collecting them apparently began after the bloody conflict on Guadalcanal, when the troops set up the skulls as ornaments or totems atop poles as a type of warning. The Marines boiled the skulls and then used lye to remove any residual flesh so they would be suitable as souvenirs. U.S. sailors cleaned their trophy skulls by putting them in nets and dragging them behind their vessels. Winfield Townley Scott wrote a wartime poem, 'The U.S. Sailor with the Japanese Skull" that detailed the entire technique of preserving the headskull as a souvenir. In 1943 Life magazine published the picture of a U.S. sailor's girlfriend contemplating a Japanese skull sent to her as a gift - with a note written on the top of the skull. Referring to this practice, Edward L. Jones, a U.S. war correspondent in the Pacific wrote in the February 1946 Atlantic Magazine, "We boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers." On occasion, these "Japanese trophy skulls" have confused police when they have turned up during murder investigations. It has been reported that when the remains of Japanese soldiers were repatriated from the Mariana Islands in 1984, sixty percent were missing their skulls."

Source: Kenneth V. Iserson, M.D., Death to Dust: What happens to Dead Bodies?, Galen Press, Ltd. Tucson, AZ. 1994. p.382.

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The U.S. Sailor with the Japanese Skull
by Winfield Townley Scott

Bald-bare, bone-bare, and ivory yellow: skull
Carried by a thus two-headed US sailor
Who got it from a Japanese soldier killed
At Guadalcanal in the ever-present war: our

Bluejacket, I mean, aged 20, in August strolled
Among the little bodies on the sand and hunted
Souvenirs: teeth, tags, diaries, boots; but bolder still
Hacked off this head and under a leopard tree skinned it:

Peeled with a lifting knife the jaw and cheeks, bared
The nose, ripped off the black-haired scalp and gutted
The dead eyes to these thoughtful hollows: a scarred
But bloodless job, unless it be said that brains bleed.

Then, his ship underway, dragged this aft in a net
Many days and nights - the cold bone tumbling
Beneath the foaming wake, weed-worn and salt-cut
Rolling safe among fish and washed with Pacific;

Till on a warm and level-keeled day hauled in
Held to the sun and the sailor, back to a gun-rest,
Scrubbed the cured skull with lye, perfecting this:
Not foreign as he saw it first: death's familiar cast.

Bodiless, fleshless, nameless, it and the sun
Offend each other in strange fascination
As though one of the two were mocked; but nothing is in
This head, or it fills with what another imagines

As: here were love and hate and the will to deal
Death or to kneel before it, death emperor,
Recorded orders without reasons, bomb-blast, still
A child's morning, remembered moonlight on Fujiyama:

All scoured out now by the keeper of this skull
Made elemental, historic, parentless by our
Sailor boy who thinks of home, voyages laden, will
Not say, 'Alas! I did not know him at all'.