Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - I

The Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, a botanical institute dedicated to the study of  plant life, was founded in the city of Petrograd in 1894. (The city is successively named Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg.) In March, 1921, a thirty-three-year-old man named Nikolai Vavilov, a bright young star in Russian science, was appointed as director of the penniless institute.  His dream was to turn the institute into the world’s first seed bank, a facility to store and preserve seeds for future use in agriculture, research, and conservation. 

Vavilov's inquisitiveness about the natural world drew him to biology. In 1906 he joined the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture in Moscow. He developed a longing to see his theoretical work produce material benefits. He learned that Russian farmers reaped the poorest harvests anywhere in Europe. He knew that around half the harvest depended on the quantity of fertilizer used to feed the crop, and a quarter on the method of cultivation. The final quarter, however, depended on the quality of the seed grain. If he could improve the varieties of grain — higher yielding, better adapted, and more resistant — it might be possible for Russian farmers to improve their yields.

IN 1913 Vavilov went to England and met top geneticists there. Bateson, who had coined the term genetics just eight years earlier, had a profound influence on Vavilov's thinking. He was particularly impressed by the idea that potentially valuable wild varieties of wheat, rye, barley, and other crops had been overlooked by farmers in bygone centuries. Bateson believed these previously plants might carry invaluable genetic qualities that could be bred into today's crops.

When Vavilov arrived at Petrograd (then called Leningrad), he found out that the small collection of seeds at the Plant Institute had all but been destroyed. Looters had got into the building and eaten some of the seeds. He acquired a three-story nineteenth-century tsarist palace grand enough to house the world’s first seed bank. He collected a staff of keen, dedicated individuals committed to his vision. He took no interest in a person’s background, whether they came from peasant stock or a more well-heeled background. 

At that time, Russia was gripped by nationwide famine. WWI had led to a civil conflict that had crippled the country’s food production. Inflation, profiteering, the collapse of food supplies, and the breakdown of authority had led to a political coup that had brought to power the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Drought and crop failures worsened these human-made problems and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were now starving to death.

Everywhere conflict, natural disaster, and the destruction of habitat threatened to make certain types of plants extinct. Once destroyed, these specimens and their unique characteristics would be irretrievably lost; no amount of genetic tinkering could bring them back. The extinction of unexamined plant varieties could mean the loss of world-changing medicines, or varieties that could enable communities and nations to protect themselves against famine.

Vavilov mounted a series of expeditions to collect and catalog ancient, domesticated varieties of wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops. He also sought their wild relatives, which, he reasoned, might prove useful in his experiments to breed unique varieties. He went to Iran, US, Mongolia, the Mediterranean, Italy, the Middle East, western China, Japan and many other countries in search of seeds and sent samples back to the Plant Institute to be sorted, cataloged, and stored. 

Vavilov's aim was to cross-breed different varieties of possibly overlooked crops to make supercrops, as we would term them today. So he would breed types of wheat, for example, that are disease-resistant or have a very high yield or able to withstand different climates. In twenty years, the Institute had become renowned throughout the world. The idea of a seed bank was novel, and the long-term value of a repository of genetic plant material had yet to be fully understood at the time. 

He got many prestigious awards. In Britain he was an elected member of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an honorary member of the Linnean Society of London and the Royal Horticultural Society, and of the Royal Society of Biology. In the United States he became a member of the American Geographical Society, and an honorary member of the Botanical Society of America. He was awarded honorable associations and honorary doctorates in Germany, India, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. 

By 1934, Vavilov had established more than four hundred research institutes and numerous stations around the Soviet Union. His journal, the Bulletin of Applied Botany, Genetics and Plant Breeding, had become a leading international publication in its field. Under his direction, the Soviet Union had become the world leader in plant breeding showing how countries might protect their populations from famine and starvation. 

But storm clouds were gathering. 

Hiroo Onoda - II

By the time Onoda returned to Japan, he became something of a legend in Japan. People wanted to see a  man who was still living in 1944! Or at least only a few days out of it. A man who for the past thirty years must have been carrying around in his head the forgotten wartime propaganda of those times. Japanese publishers were keen for the rights to Onoda’s story. He astonished most of them byturning down some of the more handsome offers and choosing a publisher whom he admired because of its youth magazines, which he had enjoyed in prewar times. 

Onoda kept neither diary nor journal, but his memory seems to have been remarkable. Within three months of his return, he had dictated two thousand pages of recollections ranging from the most important events to the tiniest details of jungle life. In July, 1974, articles began running in serial form in a weekly. His memoir, entitled No Surrender: My Thirty - Year War was published in Japanese and English translation. He himself made sketches for all of the diagrams and drawings in this book, as well as for many others appearing in a Japanese children’s edition.

He writes in his memoir that in a normal military school in Japan, recruits were taught not to think but to lead troops into battle, resolved to die if necessary. The sole aim was to attack enemy troops and slaughter as many as possible before being slaughtered. Soldiers were supposed to give their lives for the cause, not grovel in enemy prison camps. However, he was recruited for secret operations and the training he got was different: the aim was to stay alive and continue to fight as guerrillas as long as possible, even if this entailed conduct normally considered disgraceful. He says: 

I came to the conclusion then that I would probably go off to the Philippines and carry on my guerrilla warfare in the mountains until I died there all alone, lamented by no one. Although I knew that my struggle would bring me neither fame nor honor, I did not care.

In 1959, 15 years after he went to Philippines, a search party left behind newspapers and magazines. Onoda and his surviving friend thought that the newspapers were doctored up by the American secret service to eliminate any news they did not want them to see. For them, the newspapers seemed to confirm that the war was still going on. Why? Because they told a lot about life in Japan. Their thinking was that if Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead.

When they arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the phrase ichioku gyokusai (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips in Japan. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. They took this at face value. They sincerely believed that if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered. The wartime newspapers all played this idea up in the strongest possible language. He writes: 

I was virtually brought up on this kind of talk. Reading the 1959 newspapers in this same frame of mind, the first thought I had was, “Japan is safe, after all. Safe and still fighting!” The newspapers offered any amount of proof. Wasn’t the whole country wildly celebrating the crown prince’s marriage? ... There was nothing here about one hundred million people dying. Japan was obviously thriving and prosperous. Who said we had lost the war? 

They had been stuck in 1945. Only after Onoda returned to Japan and looked out the window of his hotel at the streets of Tokyo did he realize that he had been living in an imaginary world. On his return he was cheered by a crowd of up to 8,000 people – a moment that was played out live on NHK, the country's national broadcaster. At that time, more progressive views of the war, which included atonement for crimes, were becoming more widely held. His re-emergence offered a useful propaganda tool for the country's powerful conservatives about old Japanese virtues of bravery, loyalty, pride and commitment that had been widespread during wartime.

He returned to a hero’s welcome in Japan, but found himself unable to adjust to modern life there. He received back pay from the Japanese government for his twenty-nine years on Lubang, but it amounted to very little. He moved to Brazil for a calm life of raising cattle on a ranch. In May of 1996, Hiroo Onoda returned to Lubang, and donated $10,000 to the school there. He then married a Japanese woman, and the two of them moved back to Japan from Brazil to run a nature camp for young people. On 16 January 2014, Onoda died of heart failure at the age of 91.

Onoda wasn't the only soldier who found it difficult to believe that the war had ended. Many Japanese groups continued fighting long after the country's surrender. Twenty-one soldiers were rounded up on the island of Anatahan in 1951. Teruo Nakamura, a Taiwanese-Japanese soldier, endured 29 years in the jungle after the end of World War Two, on Morotai, in present-day Indonesia. The key difference, says Seriu, is that many other Japanese holdouts "found ways to live in the formerly occupied country," and even started families in some cases. Onoda, on the other hand, "refused to live in collaboration with the inhabitants [of Lubang]."

Hiroo Onoda - I

On December 17, 1944, the Japanese army sent a twenty-three year old soldier named Hiroo Onoda to the Philippines to join the Sugi Brigade. He was stationed in the Philippines, and his orders were to carry out guerrilla warfare. At that time, the Asian leg of WWII was raging and his mission was to destroy Lubang island's (approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Manila) airstrip and the pier at its harbor ahead of the Allied invasion. 

Before leaving, his division commander told him that under no circumstances was he to give up his life voluntarily; however long the war lasts, so long as he has one soldier, he has to continue to lead him even if he has to live on coconuts. It turned out that Onoda was exceptionally good at following orders, and it would be 29 years before he finally laid down his arms and surrendered.

A couple of months after Onoda came to Lubang, the Allied forces defeated the Japanese. As they moved inland, Onoda and the three other guerrilla soldiers in his group retreated into the dense jungle. They survived by rationing their rice supply, eating coconuts and green bananas from the jungle, and occasionally killing one of the locals’ cows for meat which would sometimes bring them into conflict with the locals. It was upon killing one of these cows that one of the soldiers found a note left behind by a local resident, and it said, “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!”

The guerrilla soldiers decided that it was an Allied propaganda trick to coax them out of hiding. They got several such messages over the years - fliers were dropped from planes, newspapers were left, and they got letters from relatives with photos. Each attempt was viewed by the soldiers as a clever hoax constructed by the Allies. They braved jungle heat, incessant rain, rats, insects, and the occasional armed search party for years. Any villagers they sighted were seen as spies, and attacked by the four men, and over the years a number of people were wounded or killed by them. 

In a few years, one of the soldiers left and one was killed. The two remaining soldiers operated under the conviction that the Japanese army would eventually retake the island from the Allies, and that their guerrilla tactics would prove invaluable in that effort. On October of 1972, one of the remaining soldiers was killed by a Filipino police patrol. Onoda escaped back into the jungle, and was now alone in his delusional mission. 

He had been declared legally dead about thirteen years earlier but after this skirmish, it was concluded that he was still alive. More search parties were sent in to find him, however he successfully evaded them each time. But in February of 1974, after Onoda had been alone in the jungle for a year and a half, a Japanese college student named Norio Suzuki managed to track him down.

Onoda and Suzuki became good friends. Suzuki tried to convince him that the war had ended long ago, but Onoda explained that he would not surrender unless his commander ordered him to do so. Suzuki convinced Onoda to meet him again about two weeks later in a prearranged location. Suzuki returned to the island with Onoda’s one-time superior officer, Major Taniguchi. Onoda came in his uniform, wearing his sword and carrying his rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. Major Taniguchi, who had long since retired from the military and become a bookseller, read aloud the orders:

Command from Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army. Orders from the Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Bekabak, September 19, 1900 hours.

“1. In accordance with the Imperial Command, the Fourteenth Area Army has ceased all combat activity.

“2. In accordance with Military Headquarters Command No. A–2003, the Special Squadron in the Chief of Staff’s Headquarters is relieved of all military duties.

“3. Units and individuals under the command of the Special Squadron are to cease military activities and operations immediately and place themselves under the command of the nearest superior officer. When no officer can be found, they are to communicate with the American or Philippine forces and follow their directives.

“Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi.”

Onoda waited for some time feeling sure Major Taniguchi would come up to him and whisper, “That was so much talk. I will tell you your real orders later.” After all, Suzuki was present, and the major could not talk to him confidentially. He waited for some time but when the major remained silent, he realized the impossible: This was no trick - Japan had really lost the war! After a moment of quiet anger, Onoda pulled back the bolt on his rifle and unloaded the bullets, and then took off his pack and laid the rifle across it. When the reality of it sunk in, he wept openly.

By the time he formally surrendered to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1974, Onoda had spent twenty nine of his fifty two years hiding in the jungle, fighting a war that had long been over for the rest of the world. He and his guerrilla soldiers had killed some thirty people unnecessarily, and wounded about a hundred others. But they had done so under the belief that they were at war, and consequently President Marcos granted him a full pardon for the crimes he had committed while in hiding.