What the Tongue Remembers
Updated: 13 hours ago
By Chua Zea Ra
Somewhere, Mr. Ichiro contemplates between a bowl of udong noodles or domburi. Except behind him rises no snow-capped Fuji—only reefs, stretching flat and turquoise to the horizon. Our Mr. Ichiro is not standing in Honshu, or Tokyo, or anywhere in Japan for that matter. He is in Koror, the old capital of Palau—four thousand kilometers from Japan; whose vocabulary still peppers his mind eighty years since that country stopped governing Palau.
Photo: Alamy
Palau is an island country in the western Caroline Islands of the Pacific Ocean. In 1947, Palau became part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands administered by the U.S. under a UN trusteeship before gaining independence. Over the last three centuries, four different foreign flags have flown over it. Spain annexed the Carolines in 1686, and for over two centuries brought tricklings of Catholicism and the Spanish language into the region. When the Spanish-American War left Spain's colonial finances in ruins, it sold Palau to Germany in 1899. Germany's tenure lasted less than two decades before it, too, was stripped of its Pacific holdings after the First World War. Neither empire built the kind of ground-level presence needed to leave any real linguistic mark on Palau. The contrast with Guam, four hundred kilometers to the north, is telling: there, over two centuries of direct Spanish rule left the Chamorro language deluged with Spanish borrowings, to the extent that even greetings, numerals and some pronouns are Spanish in origin. Palau, ruled from a distance and with far less colonial investment, absorbed almost none of this. Spanish came and went, and the Palauan language barely noticed.
Of an entirely different character, Japanese rule over Palau was one that stayed. In 1914, Japan seized Palau from Germany. Soon after, the League of Nations granted control of Palau to Japan, and Japan would hold the islands for the next 30 years. Its influence, however, predates formal rule—Japanese traders had been buying land in Palau since the 1890s, during the Spanish era. But it was the speed and thoroughness of Japan's administration after 1914 that set it apart from what came before. Within months of taking the islands, Japan began building schools and a public education system conducted entirely in Japanese, complete with purpose-built textbooks for teaching the language to the empire's newest "South Sea islanders."
The linguistic legacy is glaring. In the Palauan state of Angaur, Japanese is recognised as a co-official language alongside Palauan and English. The New Palauan–English Dictionary, still the standard reference for the language, also treats Japanese as a structural feature of Palauan rather than an occasional borrowing. Roughly 1,000 Japanese-derived words remain in active use—more than 60% of all foreign borrowings in the language, well ahead of English in second place. These words rarely enter unchanged; Japanese udon and donburi, for instance, surface in Palauan as udong and domburi: reshaped to fit the local Palauan tongue.
We return to Mr. Ichiro—a man who has never set foot in Japan, shares no blood with it, and yet carries a name that sings the rhythm of the Japanese language. A number of prominent Palauan families do descend from actual Japanese settlers, among them the founders of Koror mainstays like Asanuma Enterprise and Yano Store, long-running family trading businesses that are still local household names today. But the wider prevalence of Japanese surnames in Palau owes as much to bureaucratic necessity as to bloodline. On Saipan and the other former Nan'yō-chō territories, islanders had already taken Spanish surnames under earlier colonial rule and needed no new ones when Japan arrived. Palauans had never used surnames at all; identity ran through maternal clan membership, entirely separate from what a person was called. When Japan's civil administration introduced birth registration, marriage licenses, property inheritance and taxation, all of it required a surname that simply didn't exist yet. Japanese names filled that gap. They have stayed in place ever since, passed down through generations of families with no Japanese blood whatsoever.
It is worth pausing on how strange this is: an entire naming system, inherited and unremarked-upon, that has nothing to do with ancestry and everything to do with paperwork. Benedict Anderson's account of the colonial census in Imagined Communities is a useful lens here. Colonial states needed fixed, individuated identities in order to tax, register and govern populations that had previously organized themselves through other means entirely. A census cannot count a clan; it needs a name attached to a single, countable person. James Scott's related idea of legibility makes the same point from a different angle: modern states govern less through visible force than through the mundane work of making a population administratively readable—standardizing names, land holdings and vital records so the state can act on them efficiently. Palau's surnames are exactly this residue. They are the leftover machinery of a bureaucracy whose original purpose disappeared decades ago, a system nobody maintains anymore, yet nobody has replaced either.
Colonial rule is usually remembered through its dramatic exits—flags lowered, treaties signed, administrations dissolved. But Palau shows how much of it never actually leaves. Japan lost the war, lost the islands, and lost its formal claim to Palau in 1944. What it left behind were not grand monuments or ideologies: it was paperwork, categories and naming conventions deeply rooted across generations, still observed coherently in ordinary Palauan life. They are just what Palauan names look like, what lunch is called, how a business signs its name in Koror. This is, in some ways, a more durable kind of colonial legacy than the ones usually discussed. This is certainly not because it was more violent or more total, but because it became infrastructure. And infrastructure, unlike ideology, does not need anyone to still believe in it in order to keep functioning.
Somewhere in Koror, Mr. Ichiro still decides between udong and domburi for lunch, still has never been to Japan. But Japan, in a sense, was never far away either.
Check out the other articles published as a part of our collaboration with Todai Shimbin on their website:
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