Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Sue Sumii was not a burakumin. But she lived near a ghetto, and recorded and decried its residents’ plight in speeches, articles, and in a series of novels collectively entitled “The River with No Bridge”. This sad, tender saga, begun in Mrs Sumii’s 50s, after her husband died, tells of the trials of a family of sandal-makers: the poverty, the taunts, the shame of trying to buy food when shopkeepers will not touch coins that have been handled by an outcast. When a fire breaks out in their village, the neighbours stand around remarking how an eta fire stinks, instead of helping. In a real-life reflection of Mrs Sumii’s story, the areas worst hit by the fires that followed the Kobe earthquake of 1995 were the narrow streets and wooden shacks where the burakumin lived. Local people claimed that the fire brigade doused buraku flames last.

  Extraordinarily, given Mrs Sumii’s controversial subject matter and radical politics, the seven volumes of “The River with No Bridge” have sold more than 8m copies, and been turned into two films. At no small risk to herself, Mrs Sumii made links between the imperial family’s

  wealth and its subjects’ wretchedness, and between the shared religious roots of emperor-worship and scorn for the burakumin.

  For many Japanese, Mrs Sumii’s writings were their sole window on the untouchables. The subject is almost never aired in the Japanese media, and foreign books that touch on the buraku problem have all references to it deleted when they are translated into Japanese. Japan Airlines once pulped an edition of its in-flight magazine because of a brief mention of the topic in an article on private investigators.

  Partly, the silence that enshrouds buraku affairs reflects editors’embarrassment at the existence of a tormented minority in their supposedly harmonious society. But, also, it is because campaigners for buraku rights have been known to fight prejudice with their boots and fists. Publishers of books considered offensive have had their offices invaded and their bookshops picketed by bellowing firebrands from the Buraku Liberation League. Since few papers or television companies can keep pace with the league’s ever-shifting decrees about which words are acceptable when referring to burakumin, and which are not, most choose to avoid the subject entirely. Mrs Sumii’s work was the only conspicuous exception to this rule.

  It should be said in fairness that life for the burakumin has improved in the past two decades. Special grants have made the ghettoes less slummy, and three-quarters of burakumin now manage to marry non-buraku partners. Some achieve this by moving house, changing their names, and concealing their origins; but other “mixed” weddings reflect a waning of medieval prejudice. If anyone deserves the credit for this, it must surely be Sue Sumii. She was working on an eighth volume of her saga when she died.

  Sun Yaoting

  Sun Yaoting, a eunuch serving China’s last emperor, died on December 17th 1996, aged 93

  The men who run China were uncertain what to do with Sun Yaoting. Some were minded to condemn him to a gulag or simply to execute him. He was seen as a relic of life in old China. While a boy his genitals had been removed. As a eunuch he had been a servant in the court of China’s last emperor. Clearly, it was argued, he was not fit to live among revolutionaries forging a new society. This feeling took hold during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, when he was attacked by the Red Guards, an organisation of young Communist Party toughs.

  But some in the party were, and are, reluctant to dismiss all Chinese history before communism. It is instructive for a foreigner to be lectured by a senior party official about China’s 3,500 years of continuous civilisation, sometimes enthusiastically expanded to 5,000 years. Mr Sun, for all his shortcomings, was a part of this history. This sentiment enabled him to survive China’s random purges and live to a remarkable age.

  A historically minded official might also point out that castration was an accepted practice in other advanced societies. The emasculation of boy singers in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries enabled them to retain their higher range of voice, known as falsetto, into later life instead of allowing the voice to deepen. Some of Handel’s operas contain leading roles for a eunuch. A castrato sang in the Sistine Chapel as recently as 1922. A technically brilliant castrato, Carlo Broschi (1705−82), had a tone which so enraptured Philip V of Spain that he consulted him on matters of state.

  The Chinese eunuchs, though, were not primarily admired for their voices. They were servants in the Forbidden City, the palace in Beijing of the emperors of the Manchu dynasty, who had ruled China since the 17th century. At dusk all men, apart from the emperor, had to leave the palace. The women of the imperial family and the emperor’s concubines were guarded by the eunuchs. It was into this society that Sun Yaoting entered at the age of eight.

  It may be wondered why any parent would allow a child to undergo a crude operation (with, it was said, hot chili sauce as the only local anaesthetic), to be followed by a life of servitude. There was no compulsion. On the contrary, there was great competition among the poor for a son to be admitted to the sanctum of the Chinese ruler. Eunuchs, with their control of the royal household, became the conduit between the emperor, confined to his palace, and the civil service running China’s vast bureaucracy. They often became rich through bribes, and their relations outside the palace benefited accordingly.

  Mr Sun, though, did not become rich. A few months after he entered the emperor’s service the Manchu dynasty was overthrown, and in 1912 China became a republic. The last of the emperors, Pu Yi, was allowed to go on living in the palace, and Mr Sun seems to have become a close friend. At any rate, they passed the time playing tennis in the palace courtyards.

  Outside, the republic tore itself apart. The revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, lost control and warlords took over the country. Civil war followed. The Japanese invaded in the 1930s and Pu Yi became their puppet. In 1940 he rode in state through Tokyo. He died in 1967. His ashes were lost for a time, but subsequently, as a result of the party’s “rediscovery” of Chinese history that has also benefited Sun Yaoting, they were placed in Beijing’s imperial cemetery. Young Chinese have given him a sort of accolade: Pu Yi sunglasses, like those in a film about the emperor, are selling well.

  With his mentor gone, Mr Sun took refuge in various temples. According to a friend, he lamented the fall of the imperial system and longed for its return. However, no such counter-revolutionary ideas were publicly expressed by Mr Sun, described by the friend as “a man of rare intelligence”. He was respected for his great age and in 1993 was invited to make a nostalgic visit to the Forbidden City. He wandered around his old haunts, now a museum, pointing out a number of inaccuracies in the displays, and these were courteously noted.

  A more personal concern for Sun Yaoting was the whereabouts of his penis. A eunuch would take great care of his amputated genitals so that they could be united with the rest of his body at the time of death. This would ensure that he would be reincarnated, as taught by his religion, as a whole man. Mr Sun learnt that, during the cultural revolution, a relation had destroyed the penis, fearful that the Red

  Guards would find it. “When I die I will come back as a cat or dog,” he lamented.

  Was Mr Sun the last of the imperial eunuchs? In China’s large population, most of it in rural areas, it is possible that a few eunuchs are living out the end of their lives, just as there are old women still alive whose feet were bound in childhood. But, one way or another, old China is passing unthreateningly into official history.

  Robert Taylor

  Robert Taylor, a possible victim of alien abduction, died on March 14th 2007, aged 88

  WHAT was it about Bob Taylor? He was an unassuming man, steady, phlegmatic, with a thick brush of white hair and a craggy outdoorsman’s face. He liked a pint, and a dram too, but not when he was working. He smoked, but not too many. In his house at the edge of Dechmont Woods near Livingston in West Lothian, where he had worked all his life as a forester, there were very few books. And certainly there was none that could explain what happened to him on November 9th 1979, and
why his trousers, of thick navy serge like a policeman’s and with useful pockets in the sides, should have ended up in the archives of the British UFO Research Association.

  Mr Taylor set off that morning, with his red setter Lara, to check the woods on Dechmont Law for stray sheep and cattle. It was a damp day and, after he had parked the van and set off down the forest track, even the noise of the Edinburgh-Glasgow motorway was muffled by thick, dark fir trees. The dog ran, and Mr Taylor’s trudging wellingtons made the only sound. Then he turned a corner into a clearing filled with light, and saw it.

  It was a “flying dome”, 20 feet wide, hovering above the grass. No sound came from the object, and it did not move. It seemed to be made of grey metal, shiny but rough, like emery paper. About half-way down it had a circular platform, like the brim of a hat, set with small propellers. There were darker areas on it that might have been portholes, but the strangest thing was that the dome would be solid one moment, transparent the next, so that Mr Taylor could see the fir trees through it, as if it was trying to camouflage itself.

  Both he and the dog stood stock-still with surprise. But then, suddenly, two smaller spheres dropped out of the dome and came trundling across the grass, one to his right, one to his left. They were covered in long spikes, like navy mines, that made a ghastly sucking sound as they dug in and out of the mud. They grabbed his trousers, one on the right leg, one on the left, ripping right through to his winter long johns, and giving off a foul choking smell like burning brakes. Mr Taylor felt himself being pulled towards the craft; then he blacked out. When he came to, the visitors had gone.

  So far, so impressive a story to explain a dishevelled homecoming on a Saturday night. But it was in mid-week and at midday that Mr Taylor crawled home, with the dog but without the van, with a graze on his chin and his trousers torn, covered in mud and with a thumping headache. His wife called a doctor and the police. Mr Taylor felt no need for the doctor, and after two days of a wild, craving thirst and the weird brake smell, he felt fine. But he took the police to the scene.

  And there was the evidence. A large circle and inner “ladder” marks, which had flattened the grass but not dented the ground, as if a heavy craft had hovered but not landed. Forty little round holes, leaving the circle clockwise and anticlockwise, as if spiky “mines” had indeed rolled out of it. But no track entering or leaving the clearing, making the machine’s arrival impossible unless it was a helicopter or something dropped by a mobile crane; and nothing of that sort had been seen in the area that day or the day before.

  The detective sergeant in charge of the case did not believe in space visitors. Mr Taylor’s boss at the Forestry Department did not believe either, and thought it was probably some secret device being tested by the government. UFO debunkers thought Mr Taylor might have seen a magnified image of Venus distorted by the earth’s atmosphere, which had made him fall down in an epileptic fit. The press came; and by the time the story reached Edinburgh, it was “small furry creatures” that had poured from the spacecraft to attack him. “I know what I saw,” said Mr Taylor. So doughtily and drily did he stick to his tale (and kept a camera with him ever after, to take the aliens’ pictures if they ever came for him again) that the police opened a criminal investigation for assault, the only one in Britain to arise from a UFO “sighting”. It remains open.

  Mr Taylor’s neighbours proving much more sceptical, he eventually moved away to an undisclosed address. But he also became the most famous “witness” to aliens in Britain. His trousers were taken to spiritualist meetings to be analysed by psychics (“I feel pain from these trousers”), and on anniversaries of the sightingUFO-spotters would gather in the clearing, just on the off-chance.

  The aliens, meanwhile, did not give up. Since that November day they have filled the skies of West Lothian with glimmering discs, strange lights and bouncing balls of fire. The “Falkirk Triangle” now registers more UFO sightings, around 300 a year, than any other spot on Earth. A good many happen outside the Forge restaurant in Bonnybridge, where fireballs sail over the trees and “wingless planes” are seen in the fields. Some experts say West Lothian may be a “thin place”, offering a window from the Earth into another dimension; others say the sightings are linked to the lack of jobs locally, and cheap liquor. But some know the aliens are just looking for Bob Taylor, or his dog, or his van, in the place where they last saw him, suddenly amazing them in a clearing among the trees.

  René Thom

  René Thom, inventor of catastrophe theory, died on October 25th 2002, aged 79

  Great things were expected from René Thom’s catastrophe theory when it first emerged in the 1970s from the arcane deliberations of mathematicians into the everyday world of people who just hope for a more ordered life. Mr Thom did his best to make his theory sound simple. Take the example of a river, he said. It flows along smoothly and predictably until it turns suddenly into a catastrophic waterfall. Salvador Dali, in what he said was “homage” to Mr Thom, helpfully painted a picture of a landscape of smooth hills with a crack running through them, and added a formula for viewers with a mathematical turn of mind.

  But slightly more technically, Mr Thom defined catastrophe as the loss of stability in a dynamic system. Catastrophes are inevitable, but obviously their damage could be lessened if they could be predicted. Could Mr Thom’s theory be applied, say, to the safety of buildings or of ships at sea; to riots; to strikes; to when a tyrant leader would lose control and become vulnerable? The world of finance, alternately in a state of cockeyed optimism and deep gloom, was very interested in the theory. Mr Thom was slightly taken aback by being associated with astrologers, the apocalypse and UFOs, but he referred those interested to his book, “Structural Stability and Morphogenesis”, which briefly became a bestseller.

  It is full of ideas, many of which are only marginally related to mathematics. He claims, for example, that men are physically more fragile than women; women are more rounded, closer to the sphere, the strongest shape in the universe. Maths-type symbols, he said, are recognised by animals: a tiger could spot a gazelle’s hoofprints. In this sense the animal could read.

  But the book was less an offering of easily digested novelties, than a mathematical treatise dealing with the seven ways in which things are likely to collapse suddenly. It is no reflection on the intelligence of many people who tackled the book that they found it baffling. In the 19th century, a mathematician such as Henri Poincaré, a compatriot of Mr Thom, could claim to understand all the important maths of his time. This would have been a rare claim in the 1970s, and rarer still today. Popular interest in catastrophe theory lasted for about 20 years; not bad as ideas go. It waned when it seemed to offer no obvious material gain, and returned to the specialised area from which it came. “All good minds”, Mr Thom said, a touch bitterly, in later life, “decided that it was of no value.”

  One of the theory’s few practical applications was to decide how to save forests from the catastrophic spruce budworm. The answer provided by Mr Thom’s maths was to chop down old trees, which foresters said they knew anyway.

  Mr Thom’s theory may have been treated unfairly. It was philosophical as much as mathematical. The theory continues to be cited occasionally in discussions of how catastrophes have suddenly intervened to reshape history. Mr Thom was keen to explain how the theory worked in the history of his own country. The French revolution was the big bang of catastrophe theory, he said, and its effects had not yet been exhausted.

  One of its effects, he said, was the second world war, a catastrophe for France, and for René’s parents who ran a shop in Montbéliard in eastern France. In 1940, when the Germans invaded, René, then 16, joined the refugees fleeing south. Like many French of his generation he was appalled by France’s quick defeat, but was equally defensive of France’s greatness. Any criticism of his work he disparagingly called “Anglo-Saxon”.

  The young René made his way to Switzerland but then returned to France,settling for a time in Lyo
ns, where he resumed his education. He gained entry to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, which then as now sought only the most brilliant of students. After gaining a doctorate in mathematics Mr Thom taught at various universities in France. He was awarded grants to visit the United States in 1951, where he talked physics with the ageing Albert Einstein.

  He won the applause of his peers with his work on cobordism, a branch of maths that involves algebra and geometry. In 1958 he was awarded the Fields medal, named after J.C. Fields, a Canadian mathematician, which has something of the standing of a Nobel. The judges spoke of “the grand simplicity” of Mr Thom’s ideas. He published a paper on catastrophe theory in 1968, and his seminal book four years later.

  What is a catastrophe? Some commentators on Mr Thom’s work question whether the momentous events of history can really be called catastrophes, using the word in the sense that they were totally unexpected interruptions of an ordered existence. Even the supine French court sensed that something nasty was happening in Paris in the 1780s. Followers of Mr Thom claim that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was unexpected, although only the timing was a surprise. Such events did have unimagined consequences: the emergence of Napoleon; the sudden break-up of the Soviet Union. But they can be accounted for by chaos theory, which is another matter altogether.