Alternate Origins - Surfing In Morotai, Indonesia

In the vacuum of an isolated Indonesian island, a different kind of surf culture has taken shape.

- George Matthews, photographs by Jason Childs

In a weathered hut near a crescent shaped beach, Bapak Carel lit his lantern and began telling us the story of his island. Carel had lived on Morotai his whole life and thought he was somewhere between 98 and 109 years old; he couldn’t say for sure. His voice was shaved down by the ages to little more than a whisper, and he told us about a very different time in his small village when he was a young man. Back then, he was strong enough to climb trees to fetch coconuts, which he was often asked to do by the Japanese soldiers camping in the jungle nearby.

At the time, there were hundreds of Japanese soldiers living on the island. It was 1944, Morotai had strategic importance in the Pacific War, and the Japanese soldiers had been tasked with defending it from American forces. But when the Allied landing party of more than 50,000 troops reached the island, the Japanese were quickly overrun.

Carel doesn’t remember much of the fighting. He said it took place mostly in the swamps to the southwest of his village, where the landing craft didn’t have to worry about incoming swell. But Carel did remember two of the soldiers: one Japanese, and one American.

The Japanese soldier was Teruo Nakamura, who was famously the last Japanese soldier to surrender during World War II. After the initial attacks, Nakamura retreated into the jungle, where he built a hut and lived from 1943 until his eventual surrender in 1974. Carel brought him coconuts from time to time throughout the 31-year ordeal.

The other soldier was a young black Marine whom Carel remembers only as “Sam.” Unlike the rest of the Marines, Sam had stayed on Morotai after the battle, married one of the villagers, and fathered five children, eventually dying of natural causes. Sam changed the course of Morotai’s history, says Carel, because he was the one who taught the villagers how to surf.