July 4th is Liberation Day

An American Holiday

Last week, I experienced the 4th of July on Saipan. The CNMI celebrated the day as the 77th Liberation Day festivities. There were no fireworks at the public festival¹ but, as I watched a troupe of South Korean teenagers with trombones blast out a rendition of the main theme from Star Wars with my new friends — a Chinese scuba-diver and a bagpipe-playing merchant marine from Pennsylvania — before a troupe of micronesian dancers took the stage, I realized that there was no better way to celebrate the American project.

The Korean Community of Saipan raised money to bring in some performers to celebrate during the parade and at the festival in the evening, including this brass band of teenagers. They played such patriotic classics as ‘The Star Wars Theme’ and “76 Trombones.” This is the world John Philip Souza wanted.

“Small numbers of civilians, ‘homeless, starving, naked, wounded, and in most cases terror-stricken by the savage fighting taking place but a few hundred yards away, suddenly appeared and clamored for assistance... There was little the Marines could do other than offer them a sip of water, while ducking incoming fire and tending to their own wounded comrades. With only the clothes on their backs, and some of them not even that, the refugees from the battle of Saipan huddled on the beach with their children for a long, cold and frightful night.”

There are a lot of pictures like this: Marines and GIs helping the children and locals. I am not naive enough to believe that what was documented and publicized that just so happens to make the US forces look omnibenevolent was the only sort of behavior that occurred, but it does seem to be accurate that by and large they tried as well as they could and certainly more than other belligerants did with civilian populations during the War.

Within a day of the landing, there were a thousand civilians on the landing beach. Saipan was the first place taken by the Allies with a substantial civilian population. As I have written about before, there had been a substantial agricultural operation focused on sugarcane production in the Northern Marianas since the 1920s. Chamorro and Carolinian locals, as well as home-island Japanese, were employed in the fields and refineries. Eventually Koreans - transported there from their occupied peninsula - and Okinawans² were brought to the island.

During the 1930s, as Japan geared up for war, they instilled a racial hierarchy that mirrored some of the tenets of the state-sponsored Shinto beliefs that undergirded much of the war ethics of the soldiers. These status and race categories also made the nature of their surrenders to the Allies worse.

I will write extensively about the tragedies of Suicide and Banzai cliffs, where hundreds of civilians - believing that the Americans would do terrible things to them if captured - leapt to their deaths. But, unknown to these unfortunates, for three weeks at the southern end of the island, the Americans were struggling to figure out what to do with the civilians.

The ultimate answer was internment camps. These were fundamentally different than the mainland Japanese internment camps where American citizens and legal residents were lumped together because of their ethnicities and a racialized overreaction to legitimate national security concerns.

The initial camp was in Susupe, but ultimately a larger camp was built in Chana Kanoa, where much of the sugar refining had taken place.

On July 4, 1946, the final restrictions to entering and leaving the camps were lifted by the Naval government. This has been celebrated ever since as ‘Liberation Day,’ reflecting both the liberation from the Japanese and from the internment camp. By the time the CNMI joined the United States in the 1970s, they had been celebrating July 4th for decades.

Below are some of the photographs gleaned from The Marianas Variety and the Saipan Tribune, with my commentary in the captions.

The parade route was a there-and-back route along the primary road parallel to the lagoon. It was about 4 hours long, with stopping and starting every few hundred yards. It was esaily the most populated public gathering I have seen on island.

Several of the floats were simply car clubs revving their engines interminably, but others were made with a lot of care and preparation - such as this local piggery complete with working barbecue spit.

The winning float was from the Department of Corrections, who runs the 300-bed prison. Why would the prison department have a parade float? No one on island would think to ask such a question. The thing that I like the most about this float is the subtlety.

Saipan has a travellingAwaodori team, which performs a type of Japanese folk dance. No one understood why I thought it was ironic that they would be performing on this day. “They always perform at stuff like this, why wouldn’t they perform today?”

Most floats looked like this one, from the Fraternal Order of Phillipine Eagles, which is described on their English-language website as a ‘first-born’ social club. I really hope that is what it is.

There are a lot of Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans here. This was the first dragon dance I had seen in person.

I will write in the future about why there is a large Bangladeshi community here. Spoiler: Not great! I am glad to see this generation out and participating.

I love the Library here. I am pretty sure that Elmo is my friend Ray from the Pacific Collection, but the best part of this picture is the woman in the window of the bookmobile. Also, it was 85 degrees with 85% humidity that day (and every day). I imagine those suits smell like hockey bags.

This float features Refaluwasch dancers. These are the 2,000 or so Carolinians on Saipan descended from a group who came to the emptied islands in the 1810s and created a unique culture that is a blend of some of the various islands that they arrived from.

These dancers are from the Palaun cultural group on Saipan. Palau is a microstate that was also part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. It became fully independent in the mid 1990s, but remains under a Compact of Free Association with the United States, along with the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.

1. There normally would be. The dire fiscal situation is part of why I am here.

2. In all of the writing and conversations here, ‘Okinawans’ are referred to separately than ‘Japanese,’ which reflects some internal cultural and ethnic distinctions of which I was oblivious.