Amongst the deep blue waves of the central Pacific lies the tiny state of Nauru. Here, the azure of the sea meets white beaches and lush green foliage; rusting cantilevers extend past the reefs, while the interior of the island is a rugged moonscape of jagged earthen pillars, all that remains from the ravages of extensive phosphate mining. A single island a mere 21 km2 in size, Nauru is not only the third-smallest country in the world by land and the 2nd smallest by population; as of last week, it’s also the single most-followed foreign country on Japanese-language Twitter.
With 167,000 followers, the Japanese-language Governmental Tourist Bureau of the Republic of Nauru account now has over fifteen times as many Twitter followers as its country does citizens. (The only sovereign state with a smaller population than Nauru’s 10,670 denizens is the neighborhood-sized Vatican City.)
The sudden popularity of Nauru’s Twitter account has led to a rush of good-spirited coverage of the small state in Japan – a country, it seems, few had heard of or considered before. Conspicuously absent from most of the discussion, however, is the deeper history the two island nations share. Japan and Nauru, despite all appearances, did not discover each other only this past month. This unforeseen moment for Nauru to shine in the Japanese consciousness offers a worthwhile view of the small connections nations can make from across the sea. It also allows us to take a look at the country’s less-than-happy past.
A Hankering for Humble Humor
First, though, comes Twitter. The Nauru Tourism Bureau account, which was only created in October 2020, has steadily picked up new followers. A major aspect of what seems to be attracting users to the account is its impressively self-effacing tone. Popular tweets reference how Nauru can’t even be seen on a world map (but is closer to Japan than Hawaii); how all of Nauru could easily fit inside of Lake Biwa; or how Nauru, despite a paucity of tourists, still requires would-be visitors to obtain an entry visa.
To all Japanese citizens, holders of the strongest passport in the world – aren’t you tired of all these countries who don’t require you to get a visa? Let’s all go; Nauru, the Country with a Visa. We don’t have anything, but we do have visas. The Republic of Nauru.
In particular, a post wherein the account is shocked to see its follower count become many times its own population has only increased simpatico with tiny Nauru. In late January, the account tweeted the following:
What?! A country with a population of 13,000 has 60,000 followers?
The tweet went viral on the Japanese Twittersphere, gaining over 90k likes. In the month since the tweet was published, the account’s following has ballooned from said 60,000 followers to nearly three times as much.
The Union of Small Populations
With 167,000 followers, the Japanese-language Governmental Tourist Bureau of the Republic of Nauru account now has over fifteen times as many Twitter followers as its country does citizens. Click To TweetThe account’s jocular tone has even resulted in a response from local Japanese government. On February 4th, the Nauruan account appropriated a popular Tottori Prefecture slogan: “We may not have a Sutaba (Starbucks), but we do have a Sunaba (a sandpit).” The well-worn joke references the famed sand dunes of tiny Totorri – the least-populated prefecture in Japan, a country in which a lack of a single Starbucks long served as the standard by which the most middle-of-nowhere of the countryside prefectures were measured. (In fact, Tottori received its first Starbucks in 2015.)
On February 10th, Tottori’s governor, Hirai Shinji, took the opportunity to speak to Nauru during a press conference. He jokingly recommended that Nauru and Tottori form the “SuNauru Kyowakoku Rengo” (砂売る共和国連合, Sand-Selling Republic Alliance). After all, tiny localities with nothing to offer but sand needed to stick together. (Although Tottori’s population of 570,000 dwarfs that of Nauru by almost 54 times.)
This attempt at small-scale, humor-driven diplomacy is a pleasant thing. It helps build small ties between Japan and Nauru, a country that has surprisingly little in the way of a formal relationship with Japan compared to other Pacific island nations. According to Nauruan statistics, not a single Japanese national lives on the island. Nor is there a Japanese embassy in Nauru (only Australia, Taiwan, and a representative from the unrecognized state of South Ossetia have that honor). Tourism from Japan is non-existent, compared to the million Japanese who visit Guam each year.
And yet, Japan wielded significant, if brief, influence on Nauruan history. To understand this understated relationship, we need to take a look back on the dark days of the Pacific War.
A Deeper, Unspoken Connection
Understanding anything about modern Nauru requires mention of the resource which has so shaped its recent history: phosphate. It was phosphate that brought the Australians and British who so long governed the island. It was phosphate, too, which brought the Japanese. Nauru is one of the three “great phosphate rock islands” of the Pacific. Over millennia, congregating birds left their droppings on the rock, eventually producing remarkably rich deposits of phosphate, incredibly useful as a fertilizer. The desire for this resource influenced the entire 20th century for the Nauruan people.
Tourism from Japan is non-existent, compared to the million Japanese who visit Guam each year. Click To TweetUp until 1900, however, the phosphate went unnoticed. This helped Nauru avoid colonization long after nearby peoples on Palau, the Carolines, and the Marianas had been conquered by Spain. Instead, the Nauruan people – whose origins are both Micronesian and Polynesian – governed themselves all the way to 1888. Traditionally the island was ruled by twelve matrilineal tribes. Each group had its own part of the island. Today, the flag of independent Nauru bears a star with twelve points, one for each of the tribes. The flag reflects Nauru’s geographical position, just below the equator in the blue of the Pacific. Nauruans harvested coconuts and pandanus fruit, raised fish in the small brackish lake in their interior, and even trained cormorants to catch fish from the ocean.
The Coming of the Foreigners
In the 19th century, following initial contact with European sailors, Nauru became a destination for the occasional Western deserter. Beachcombers fleeing the drudgery of life on whaling vessels were adopted into Nauruan families.
More problematic was the liquor and guns traded with Western vessels that called on the islands. Alchohol and weaponry allowed for an unprecedentedly deadly, protracted civil war on the small island. From 1878, a conflict raged between north and south over chiefly succession. 500 people – a third of the Nauruan population – died in the war. The German Empire, eager to belatedly stake out colonial holdings in the Pacific, used intercession in the war to plant their flag on Nauru. In 1888, they took control, confiscating over 700 guns – about one for every Nauruan.
In 1914, as World War I commenced, Japan took advantage of allyship with Britain to declare war on Germany, scooping up much of their colonies in the Pacific. But while Palau, the Carolines, and the Marianas fell into Japanese hands, Nauru was deemed too close to Britain’s zone of influence. Instead, the Australians were allowed to invade Nauru. This began the most important relationship in Nauruan history. In fact, Nauru is even today sometimes derisively referred to as a “client state” of Australia.
Colonial Micronesia
The Australians found a Nauruan population still decimated by war, and now laid low by occasional diseases brought by foreign ships. (The 1918 influenza pandemic devastated Nauru. Contrastingly, Nauru is currently one of the only countries in the world without a single case of COVID-19.) The first goal of the colonial administration – beyond phosphate mining, of course – was to help the Nauruans again reach a sustainable population. 1500 was thought to be the necessary number. It took until 1932, but finally, the Nauruan population reached its milestone. The baby whose birth accomplished the desired population was declared the “Agnam” Baby (Agnam meaning “jubilation”). The anniversary of her birth is celebrated even today.
Under the Australian trustee mandate, the rate of phosphate mining exploded. The colonial overseers noted that Nauruans seemed uninterested in working as phosphate miners, so labor was instead imported from overseas; 1350 Chinese “coolies” were living on Nauru in 1940, alongside 49 Pacific Islanders (mostly from modern Kiribati). With the 192 Westerners on Nauru, the total foreign demographics nearly matched the native population of 1761. The phosphate these laborers extracted produced great wealth for Australia and New Zealand. Meanwhile, the Nauruan people received small sums in exchange for the extraction, which allowed them to purchase Western goods and get by. (These allowances, however, were a pittance compared to the sums being generated by the phosphate). During this period, Nauruan phosphate served as a major source of fertilizer for the plantations Japan was building in its South Sea Mandate in Micronesia.
War Arrives
On December 7th, 1941, the Pacific was set alight with the stunning Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, Guam, Midway, and British Malaya. Included in Japan’s declaration of war was Australia; tiny Nauru now faced menace from the heavily militarized islands of Japanese Micronesia. To its east, the Gilbert Islands faced almost immediate invasion.
Tiny Nauru, however, mostly escaped the strategic eye of the Imperial Japanese Navy for over a year. On December 8th, Naurans noticed a Japanese scout plane in the skys above their island; over the next few days, Japanese bombers launched small attacks on Nauru’s radio station, finally destroying it on the third try. After that, the skies went quiet.
At first, Nauru was simply deemed too distant from anything to be of much military use. This proved lucky, since Australia had abided by League of Nations mandate rules and had avoided militarizing the island. (In other words, Australia took the exact opposite stance as Japan had with its Micronesian holdings, each of which had been armed to the teeth) Nauru was too far away from Australia for regular visitations from its navy and was outside of the fly-by radius; it would be easy pickings for the Japanese war machine.
This lack of real defense persisted despite two German naval attacks the year previous. The Nazis had carried out aquatic shelling on Nauru, their former colony, during 1940. These badly damaged phosphate operations; the attacks were the most successful German assaults in the Pacific during WWII. (They also resulted in aggrieved messages to Germany from the Japanese, who relied on Nauruan phosphate.)
Sea of Tranquility
After the German boats retreated, things returned to normal. The months went by, with Nauru a pocket of strange quietude amidst the invasions and bloodshed going on throughout the rest of the Pacific. Islands to the east and west fell to the Japanese; Nauru remained in Australian hands. The British Phosphate Commission leadership, however, was getting antsy. After all, if the Japanese had no intentions towards Nauru, why had their bombers left the phosphate infrastructure intact? They requested that the Australians and others on the island be evacuated; the government in Canberra, however, was slow to act. The island didn’t appear in immediate danger, and there were those who worried that Australia would lose prestige in the eyes of the Nauruans if they up and fled.
Finally, the Australian government relented. Two ships braved the waters off Nauru, where so many Japanese ships preyed. They dropped off supplies as the island’s Australian population embarked, leaving their homes behind. 391 Chinese workers also boarded the ship; the plan had been for all the Chinese on Nauru to leave with the Australians, but 191 were left behind when the ship crew noticed how cramped onboard quarters were getting. The remaining Chinese were promised that the Australian Navy would return for them; this, sadly, never occurred. During all this, the workers at the phosphate plant still had time to thoroughly sabotage their machinery, finishing off what the German attack boats had started two years previous.
As for the Nauruans themselves, the Australian administration deemed rather paternalistically that “with their genial natures and friendly manners [they] would not suffer at the hands of the Japanese.’ Only seven Westerners remained on Nauru as the Naval ships set sail in February of 1942. Frederick Royden Chalmers, administrator of the island, felt it was his duty to stay with his Nauruan charges. For the first time in thirty years, the Nauruans made up a clear majority on their own island.
Invasion
On August 23rd, 1942, the feared Japanese invasion of Nauru finally took place. Six months had elapsed since the evacuation of the majority of the island’s foreign residents. The offensive against Nauru was part of Operation RY, whose goal was the wresting of phosphate-rich Nauru and neighboring Ocean Island from the British and Australians. To accomplish these aims, an invasion consisting of two cruisers and nine planes departed Truk in what is now the Federated States of Micronesia. Truk was the highly-fortified military headquarters of Japan’s South Seas Mandate; its status as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” earned it the moniker “the Gibraltar of the Pacific.”
The two guns placed on Nauru by the Australian military posed no threat to the invading Japanese; within 24 hours of the arrival of the Japanese warships, Lt.-Colonel Chalmers raised the white flag. 300 Japanese marines dispatched from Palau made landfall unopposed. While the official head of the new Japanese occupation force lay abed, struck down with sickness, Lt. Nakayama Hiromi ruled the island with an iron fist. Nauru’s three years under Japanese occupation had begun.
A Brief Coexistence
Immediately upon arrival, the Japanese forces imprisoned the five remaining Western administrators; only the two missionaries, who held great sway with the Nauruans, were allowed free movement around the island. Within days, 72 employees of the South Seas Development Company arrived, intent on getting the phosphate mines up and running. To this aim, a labor force of a thousand Japanese, Korean, and Gilbertese workers was brought to Nauru, swelling the small island’s population. 300 Nauruans were also coerced into laboring in the mines. Their harsh treatment was all for naught; the mining infrastructure was too damaged. Within a year, the South Seas Development Company gave up and left the island. The main purpose of the occupation had amounted to nothing; from now on, the focus of forced labor would be on turning Nauru into a military fortress.
Amidst the extensive militarization of Nauru, the biggest building project by far was the creation of a major airfield. Many Nauruans were coerced into the backbreaking labor of clearing what was once the most productive lands of coastal Nauru into a long, flat plain unto which a concrete strip was overlayed. Their everyday culture had been completely upended; before the occupation, many Nauruans did not have to possess any particular source of employment. Now, most were involved in forced manual labor, receiving a small amount of rice and beef each day for their efforts. Those who didn’t work fast enough faced beatings. The fruit of their labor, the Nauru airstrip, remains a legacy of the brief Japanese era: the modern Nauru Internation Airport uses the strip as the country’s single runway to this day.
A Halting Attempt at Colonialization
Despite these difficulties, for the first year, the Japanese occupation bore interesting similarities to their colonies elsewhere in Micronesia. Nauruans faced discrimination, insufficient rations, and forced labor, but were also briefly the object of Japanese attempts at colonialistic largess. Schools were set up, where the Japanese language was taught and imperialistic propaganda dispersed. Native celebrations were sponsored by the Japanese occupiers. The Nauruans were nominally allowed their own ruler, Head Chief Timothy Detudamo. Already a leader to the Nauruans before the occupation (and the translator of the Bible into Nauruan), Detudamo was sadly reduced to a figurehead used to repeat Japanese directives, with those who disregarded orders threatened that they would be “skinned and treated as pigs.” These paternalistic attempts to raise the indigenous people towards “civilization” resembled efforts in other Japanese colonies like Sakhalin and Palau; the nature of the brief wartime existence of Japanese Nauru, however, meant these efforts were short-lived.
A story about Chief Detudamo’s young son recorded in a Nauruan diary from this period represents the paternalistic but ineffective Japanese efforts towards instilling Japanese virtue in their charges: “The 10-year-old son of Detudamo was imprisoned today by his father’s command. It’s because an air officer asked him how he enjoyed the trip (on one of the Japanese planes) the other day. The boy then said “I enjoyed it very much.· Then the officer said now which country did you like most, the English or the Japanese. The boy said ‘I like both the English and Japanese.’ The officer was very sorry as he expected the lad to praise Japan so he talked it over with Detudamo, advising him to teach the boy to learn good manners. So his father imprisoned him.”
During this period, at least, the Nauruans felt they were treated better than those on the lowest rung of the Japanese culture on the island: the Chinese. Chinese workers, including those two hundred left behind by the Australians, received smaller rations than Japanese or Nauruans. They also faced more frequent beatings and, tragically, executions.
The Atrocities
As the war in the Pacific raged on, things on Nauru became significantly worse. Soon after the Japanese occupied the island, their military’s early successes against the Allies began to reverse; battles like those of the Coral Sea and Midway put Japan on the defensive. Nauru was spared direct invasion by the allies (according to historian Samuel Eliot Morison “…the more Nauru was studied, the less anyone liked the idea of assaulting it,” ). But American bombers soon appeared, attacking the airfield time and again. Japanese lines of supply were cut off, and the island’s overpopulation led to dwindling food supplies.
It was soon after the initial major air assault on the runway that the first atrocity occurred on Nauru. Suddenly, the five Europeans under house arrest disappeared. They would never be seen again. After the war, Lt. Nakayama and others would claim to the Australian Military Court that the five Europeans, including former administrator Chalmers, had been killed in a US air raid. Their remains, too, were claimed to have been vaporized in a subsequent bombing. Later testimony by Nauruans and Chinese who had been present on the island revealed otherwise. Nakayama and others had summarily executed the prisoners using swords and bayonets, seemingly in retribution for the air raid. Members of the occupation force later backed up this version of events.
A Dark Act on the Pacific
Nakayama was responsible for another horrific action. In the early 1920s, foreigners arriving on Nauru had brought with them the plague of leprosy, previously unknown on the island. The disease spread through the local population, resulting in an epidemic so bad that at one point nearly a third of the Nauruans developed the horrible sickness. However, the combined efforts of skilled doctors from both Australia and Nauru slowly reduced incidences of the disease, and by 1940 only 8% of the population still had leprosy.
The arrival of the Japanese halted the good works of these doctors. Japan has a history of stark discrimination towards lepers, including strict segregation and even eugenicist policies. Families with relatives with leprosy could face ostracization. (So bad was Japanese treatment of lepers in their own country that in 2001 the government felt compelled to issue an apology and reparations.) Japanese doctors refused to treat the Nauruan lepers, instead confining them away.
When the Australians retook Nauru in 1945, the 39 lepers known to be on Nauru were missing. Japanese soldiers told them that the lepers had been sent to a peaceful, distant island. The Australian authorities, more concerned with discovering what had happened to their own five missing men, were in no hurry to follow up on this explanation. Only later did the real story come to light, in large part thanks to Ishikawa Yoshio, a Development Company employee who had been directed to deal with native affairs during the occupation.
Ishikawa produced a harrowing tale. After telling the Nauruan lepers that the Empress Dowager had donated funds to give them a better life on a faraway island, the diseased were been placed in a boat and pulled out to sea. Once out of view of Nauru, the vessel was shelled and sunk. All onboard – whose ages ranged from children to elders – were killed by the ordinance, drowned, or shot as they tried to swim to safety.
Testimony by Ishikawa and others revealed that Nakayama was behind the orders to get rid of the lepers. During the war crimes trial that resulted, the Japanese defense argued that the lepers posed a danger to Nauru since bombings might set them loose on the general population: the defense stated that “I think the step which was taken at that time was to sacrifice a few for the benefit of the majority.” The act was ruled a war crime, but Nakayama was already beyond punishment. He was dead by hanging, punishment for his murder of the five European prisoners.
A Nauru Without Nauruans
A third act on the part of the Japanese occupation has had the greatest effect on Nauru going forward. By 1944, Nauru was almost completely cut off from the outside world. Allied preponderance in the surrounding oceans and sky meant that Japanese supply runs, either by sea or by air, were impossible. Food was scarce, and Nauruans were forced to eat what meager fare could be grown in small agricultural lots afforded them. With the island overcrowded with thousands of Japanese soldiers and imported manual laborers, it was decided that the best thing to do would be to remove the Nauruans from their own island. In 1943, only a year into the Japanese occupation, 1,200 Nauruans were deported towards Truk. 67% of the indigenous population had been removed; only the increased dangers of the allied blockade prevented the Japanese military from exiling the rest of the Nauruans.
On Truk, the Nauruans were placed throughout various islands. Life quickly became difficult, with even less food to go around than on Nauru itself. Starvation quickly followed. Chief Detudamo, exiled alongside his people, worked tirelessly to find food and petition the Japanese for extra rations – but to little avail. Japanese soldiers stationed nearby took advantage of local desperation by bringing Nauruan young women to “work” at their headquarters. Violence and forced labor was the norm. 38% of the deported Nauruans died during this exile, never able to see their homes again. Those that died included the Angam Baby, then in her teens, as well as one of the European missionaries. Even upon return to Nauru post-war (something which took over a year to accomplish, given the priorities of the Australian fleet), things were not the same. The population had again dipped below 1,500 total Nauruans – the continuance of the Nauruan people was no longer assured.
The Wounds Remain
In August of 1945, the Japanese garrison on Nauru surrendered to the Australians. The war had ended without any major fighting on the island, yet Nauru’s landscape and culture was devastated. Such was the anger of the Nauruans and, especially, the surviving Chinese, that the Australian had to protect the defeated Japanese from reoccurring attempted beatings.
Here the wartime nature of the Japanese occupation of Nauru marks a significant difference between Nauruan memories of Japan and those of the Japanese colonies in Micronesia. The people of, say, Palau bore the brunt of discrimination and haphazard cruelty from Japanese settlers and their colonial administration. Yet still, there remains a certain sense of nostalgia for the “Japanese time.” Palauans received (highly nationalist) education from the Japanese, and grew up in Japanese colonial towns. Many even worshipped at the Nan’yo Shrine in Koror, the top-ranked Shinto shrine in the South Seas. Japanese colonization brought suffering and hardship. But there are still those who can recall the so-called positives of life under the Japanese.
The situation in Nauru, sadly, is different. There was no “colonization” of Nauru by the Japanese; no lasting attempt at so-called “civilizing.” There was only brutal occupation during the height of a massively violent World War.
A New Nauru
The brief three years of Japanese occupation on Nauru bore outsized effects on the Nauruan psyche. The harsh treatment at the hands of the Japanese occupiers was especially traumatic; they’d been beaten, executed, starved, been expelled from their homes, and exploited in a more direct way than they’d experienced under other colonizers.
The Japanese were not the only ones to leave an impression, however. The Australians had generally abandoned their erstwhile charges. The Americans had bombed them, even if incidentally, killing more than 30. On Truk, the Nauruan refugees were ill-treated by their native Chuukese neighbors, who resented these newcomers taking up scarce resources. The result was that Nauruans felt they could only depend on themselves; they needed self-determination.
The post-war years saw a turn towards self-sufficiency and democracy. Nauruan society, which before the Japanese had eschewed workaday employment, now sought daily jobs for each individual. The old tribal leadership system was abandoned for a local government consul. Chief Detudamo, who had worked so hard to keep his people hopeful and alive during the occupation, remained an important force during the changing Nauru of the post-war years. He passed away in 1953. In 1968, Nauru declared independence from Australia. They bought the rights to the phosphate business on their island.
In the 1970s and 80s, runaway phosphate production made Nauru briefly one of the richest nations on Earth. Nauruans bought Japanese cars and technology, while the interior of their island faced intense environmental degradation from surface mining. The phosphate is now mostly used up, leaving Nauru devastated, newly impoverished, and searching for a new path to take. (Housing detention centers for illegal immigrants to Australia is one controversial way the country has tried to make up for phosphate deficits.)
Nauru and Japan
It’s understandable why all this is rarely brought up amidst the mini-boom in Nauru talking points going on in Japan right now. For both Japanese and Nauruans, the three years of Japanese occupation hardly make for happy conversation. They do, however, represent the intrinsic historical relationship that exists between Japan and so many island nations across the Pacific.
Nauru was permanently changed as a result of contact with Japan. If a stronger, more positive relationship can now be formed between these two island nations – perhaps one which even begins with a cheeky tourism Twitter account – perhaps, all the better. Nauru, the least-visited country on Earth, wants friends. Just maybe, Nauru’s newfound celebrity can turn old bitterness into a fruitful cross-pacific relationship.
Sources
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Viviani, Nancy (1970). Nauru, Phosphate and Political Progress. Australian National University Press.
Tanaka, Yuki. (2010.) Japanese Atrocities on Nauru during the Pacific War: The murder of Australians, the massacre of lepers and the ethnocide of Nauruans. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 45-2-10.
Pollock, Nancy J. (1991.) Nauruans during World War II. Remembering the Pacific War. pp. 91–107.
