The last bai on Palau (Arin Greenwood)

To most of the world, Guam represents the end of the earth. In Micronesia, however, Guam is the big city. As part of Micronesia, Palau is an independent republic consisting of more than 300 gorgeous islands in the North Pacific and Philippine Sea. And so, as people everywhere flock to bright lights, big islands, a lot of Palauans live on Guam.

Today there is an effort on Guam to build a bai, a traditional Palauan meeting house, for its Palauan population. That there are Palauans on Guam isn't surprising, and that they'd want a home on Guam isn't surprising, either. What's unusual is that bais are still being built, especially after they came so close to dying out.

"There used to be two bais per village," says Joe Kagle, an expert on Palauan storyboards, one for men and one for women. "The men's house was the more elaborate one. It was the main building in the community, and was decorated as such."

Bais, wood buildings made without nails and topped with thatched, pointed roofs, were the historical centers of villages. They were decorated with storyboards, carved pieces of wood that depict Palauan scenes and legends. For centuries, Palauans etched legends and tales on the inside and outside of bais. "Storytellers became the carvers," Kagle says. "The oral tradition had to be written down, and the easiest way to do that was through carving."

Inside the bai were carved stories of history, family, and morals. "Outside the bai," Kagle says, "the stories were erotic, funny, or 'heroes-that-go-wrong' stories." Other traditional carvings decorated the bai as well, such as a spider representing the god who taught Palauans that babies could be delivered naturally (previously, the legend goes, babies were born by cesarean sections, which usually killed mothers).

The Airai bai (Arin Greenwood)

Most tourists are surprised to learn that not only are storyboards relatively new creations, but they were devised by a Japanese artist and anthropologist, Hisakatsu Hijikata, who came to Palau in 1929 when the region was under Japanese administration and Palauan carving had nearly died out.

When Hijikata arrived on Palau, carving was dying, and the bais were mostly gone. "By the early 20th century, bais were largely abandoned," says Donald Rubenstein, an anthropologist at the University of Guam. "A lot had been destroyed in a typhoon in 1908, when Palau was under German rule. Also, bais were maintained by the clans and lineages. Maintenance of bais requires cohesive clans. In the early 20th century, Palau was shifting from a clan economy to a colonial economy."

Kagle offers another reason: "In the 1920s carving was dying out because there was no market for it."

Hijikata befriended a group of teenagers and urged them to continue the carving custom. He encouraged his students to carve traditional scenes, using traditional styles and colors, but on small pieces of wood: Hijikata's plan was to revive the bais, and also to create a new kind of souvenir for the increasing numbers of Japanese tourists in Palau.

Storyboard (Arin Greenwood)

The souvenir carvings were stunningly successful. After the carvers gained some renown, they started moving in their own artistic directions, away from the simple, two-dimensional bai scenes, and adopting their own styles.

Take the most colorful example: Palau's Koror Jail, where, Kagle says, "instead of making license plates, prisoners made carvings." The convicted murderer and master carver Baris Sylvester was an inmate at the jail, where he developed what has come to be known as the "jail school" of storyboards (Baris ensured his supremacy in the jail school by chopping off the hand of a fellow prisoner who claimed to be a better carver.) Unlike the painted, two-dimensional carvings in the bais, the jail school storyboards were unpainted and three-dimensional, with multiple layers of images. They also had particular stylistic elements to them, Kagle says. "You could tell the jail school carvings because the women were all voluptuous."

But what became of the bais? "There's no danger of storyboards dying out—that's very vibrant," Rubenstein says. "But the houses may not survive. There are a lot of measurements and other very technical things you have to know to build a bai. It's more than just carvings."

Then World War II devastated Palau, and by the end of the war there was one bai remaining, in the Palauan state of Airai.

Things hadn't turned out exactly as Hijikata planned, but the bai situation may not remain bleak, says Vicki Kanai, Palau's historic-preservation officer. "There are people today who are still living who know how to build bais," Kanai says.

Palauan chiefs have overseen two renovations of the Airai bai-one in the 1970s and minor repairs since. The chiefs are passing their knowledge of bai construction on to the younger generations. Several new bais have been constructed since World War II (one, built in 1969, burned in 1978 and was rebuilt in 1991).

There is evidence that the early bais didn't actually have any carvings in them, Rubenstein says. In 1783, an English crew shipwrecked in Palau wrote long descriptions of bais. While bais are described in detail, says Rubenstein, there was no mention of any carvings. Thirty-five years later, another English ship came to Palau. This time, Rubenstein says, "There were narrative drawings on the bais."

What happened? "Possibly the Palauans were inspired by the English artists they saw drawing on the ships and started creating storyboards," Rubenstein says.

Further evidence that Palauan carving tradition has a strong element of cross-cultural pollination: An early storyboard shows Europeans with cameras taking photographs of Palauans. The storyboard, Rubenstein says, was a gift to the photographers from the carvers, who were as fascinated with European methods of recording stories as the Europeans were with theirs.

Arin Greenwood is a freelance writer and lawyer living on Saipan.

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