Charting the complex fascinations to be found in the sixty-four million square miles of the Pacific Ocean was a task made immeasurably easier thanks to the help generously offered to me by Charles Morrison, president of the East-West Center in Honolulu. He gave me an office and administrative assistance during the six weeks I spent in Hawaii in the winter of 2014; and the use of these facilities—most notably the excellent library, which together with the Pacific Collection at the University of Hawaii, just up the road, makes for a truly incomparable resource—rooted me to my subject in a manner that would have been well-nigh impossible to fashion elsewhere. So my thanks must go first to Dr. Morrison, and to his staff and colleagues—June Kuramoto, Anna Tanaka, Phyllis Tabusa, Karen Knudsen, Elisa Johnston, Scott Kroeker, and Carol Fox in particular—who helped me lay the foundations for the making of this book.
I am also most grateful to the U.S. Navy for assistance offered in Hawaii and beyond. Commander Jason Garrett was the point man at Pacific Fleet headquarters at Pearl Harbor; and Lieutenant Colonel Eric Bloom at the all-forces Pacific Command headquarters at Camp Smith, nearby. Both officers bent over backward to offer help and access to various nooks and crannies of the byzantine world that is the U.S. armed forces in the region, and so far as I recall, not a single thing I asked for was denied.
The commander of the Pacific Fleet during my time in Hawaii was Admiral Harry Harris, who was later promoted to take over the entire Pacific Command: his courtesy and help to me were warm and personal, and I am most thankful. One of his senior advisers, Commander Jon Duffy, now at the White House, was helpful both at the time in Hawaii and subsequently when posted to Washington; he took time to read the passages concerning the rise of modern China, and made many useful and constructive comments. Naturally any errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone, and neither his words of advice, nor those of any others mentioned here, should be thought of as suggesting an official endorsement.
My visit to Kwajalein Atoll and to the U.S. Army’s missile range operations there was arranged by Michael Sakaio and Shannon Paulsen, both of whom were hospitable to a fault during my stay with them. If I write critically of the local treatment of the Marshall Islanders, Mr. Sakaio and Ms. Paulsen will both appreciate, I am sure, that it is the policies that I fault, and not the personnel, who in their cases were kindness personified.
Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, were especially obliging in sharing with me their research and knowledge of the ocean. I am grateful to Carl Peterson, a longtime trustee of the WHOI, for arranging visits and contacts; and to Susan Avery, the director. With Jayne Iafrate’s assistance I was able to spend valuable time with, among others, Daniel Fornari and Adam Soule, discussing hydrothermal vents; with Maurice Tivey, an expert on deep-sea mining; and with Ken Buesseler, a specialist on the sea-borne radiation effects of atomic testing and from nuclear-related accidents.
JAMSTEC, the Japanese government’s principal meteorological research agency, could not have been more helpful; and for arranging visits to see some of its teams of remarkable weather scientists I must especially thank Ms. Mizue Ijima—who nearly missed the plane that would take her and her husband on a well-deserved holiday, to make sure I received timely information that I needed before my visit. The JAMSTEC scientists whose work I found especially relevant to this book were Kentaro Ando, Satomi Tomishima, and Takeshi Doi—the last an expert on the workings of Earth Simulator 2, the homegrown NEC supercomputer that endeavors to solve some of the more complex of the Pacific’s weather conundrums.
Officials past and present at the Sony Corporation were unfailingly helpful when I was attempting to piece together the story of Masaru Ibuka and the company’s first transistor radios. Hiroko Onoyama worked for many years as chief assistant to Akio Morita in New York; and Hiroko Maeda is with Sony USA today: both made introductions for me and arranged visits to Sony offices, archives, and showrooms in Tokyo that were enormously useful. I also grateful to John Nathan, professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written what remains probably the best popular history of the corporation.
The men and women of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, eager, enthusiastic, and brave, were tremendously welcoming and helpful whenever I chanced by their boatyard offices, as they prepared for their epic malama honua voyage of 2014. Marisa Hayase, who then acted as communications coordinator for the planned circumnavigation, was subsequently unfailing with her advice and timely assistance. May fair winds continue to attend all who are involved in the expedition.
Among the many individuals to whom I owe much for their encouragement or assistance or both, I must thank the following: Kate Andrews, an Australian environmentalist friend of many years, who looked after me in Darwin and then read and helped tweak the relevant Australian chapters; Sasha and Marina Belousov, geologists in Kamchatka, who kindly took me to see the Zhupanovsky volcano while it was in full eruption; Simon Bowden and Dana Yee, for allowing me affordable use of their apartment in Honolulu; Mark Bradford, senior meteorologist on Kwajalein, and fund of information on tropical cyclones; Mark Brazil, who from his base on Hokkaido travels the world pursuing his environmental interests; David Christian, director of the Big History Institute at Macquarie University in Sydney; Gavan Daws, the writer, long based in Hawaii, who is a walking treasure-house of Pacific Island matters; John Dvorak, who runs a large university telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, and is the author of a fine account of the San Andreas fault; the wise writer Gretel Ehrlich, who now lives in Hawaii with her husband and my old NPR friend Neal Conan; John Elias of Nautilus Minerals; Mary Hagedorn, an expert on hot-water corals; Kevin Hamilton, an atmospheric scientist and former director of the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii; Louise Hancock at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford; Hiroshi Hasegawa, single-handed savior of the short-tailed albatross and a true hero of the avian world; Laurie Irvine of Soil Machine Dynamics in Newcastle upon Tyne; Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, an old friend, a true Hawaiian, and student of the original instructions of the world’s elders; Kurt Matsumoto of Pulama Lanai; the talented writer Jon Mooallem, who made many noble attempts to unravel today’s Lana’i story; my old friend and former Hong Kong government official Peter Moss; Jack Niedenthal, who from his base in Majuro acts as liaison for the displaced people of Bikini atoll; the geochronologist Professor Paula Reimer at Queen’s University, Belfast; Kylie Robertson, a great Australian friend and publicist currently based in New York; Tom Roelans, general manager of the Four Seasons resorts on Lana’i; Philip Smiley, one of the last British colonial officers in the Solomon Islands; Lori Teranishi, who is Larry Ellison’s spokesperson in Hawaii; Kazuyoshi Umemoto, formerly Japan’s ambassador to the UN, now in Rome; Charlie Veron, the world-revered champion of corals; Julianne Walsh, an expert on the Marshallese people at the Pacific Islands Studies Center at the University of Hawaii; and my son Rupert Winchester, of London and Phnom Penh, who kindly proofread the near-finished book and offered a wealth of corrections and invaluable suggestions.
This was a challenging book, both to research and to write; but the task was made much less daunting by the clear-eyed and wise counsel of my friend and HarperCollins editor Henry Ferris, for whose lexico-surgical skills I have the greatest admiration. I continue to believe that a readable book is the result of intimate team-work between editor and writer; and if this book comes to be regarded as readable, then it will stand as testament to the hard work that Henry Ferris put into it to help make it so. Both he and I were greatly aided by Nick Amphlett, his stellar editorial assistant at Harper, who attended to the myriad nuts and bolts of this project with great good humor and forbearance. So to all in the HarperCollins team in New York, as well as to my splendid London editor, Martin Redfern, and his colleagues there, I raise a glass, or several, in salute.
As I do also to my agents at William Morris: in New York to the redoubtable Suzanne Gluck, to her incomparable assistant Clio Seraphim; and across in London, to my great friend Simon Trewin. My sincerest thanks, and blessings to you all!
Simon Winchester
Sandisfield, Massachusetts
July 2015