Organizer: Michael S. Molasky, Connecticut College
Chair: Gregory Smits, Eastern Washington University
Discussant: William Kelly, Yale University
Challenging and Accommodating Gendered Nationalism: Roles, Representations, and Meanings of Himeyuri, 1945-1995
Linda Angst, Yale University
Okinawa has occupied an ambivalent position within the imagined community of modern Japan. It has been treated according to economic and political necessity, signifying ever-shifting national policy toward this frontier. From Meiji the state's programs of cultural assimilation dominated the discourse on development and modernization, marking Okinawa as distinct and deficient. Furthermore, the trope of a hierarchical family-state presided over by an emperor-father framed a modernizing state ideology based on gender-role distinctions: women were to support the public duties of men by reproducing loyal subjects at home.
Educated Okinawan women were eager to demonstrate their national loyalty in an on-going attempt to prove their worthiness as first-class Japanese subjects. During the war years (1930-1945), Japanese women supported men by joining patriotic associations such as the Aikoku Fujin-kai. Female Okinawan students trained as battlefield nurses. The Battle of Okinawa was a tragic consequence of inscribing onto Okinawa a status of inferiority critical to an emergent national identity, and the tragedy of the Himeyuri Student Nurse Corps is the direct outcome of Okinawan women undertaking roles as "good subjects." Today, war and U.S. occupation are the main referents around which women survivors narrate their life stories. I explore how and why the relatively few Himeyuri survivors have come to represent the general wartime experiences of Okinawan women as well as the meanings of that representation. Their stories speak of challenges to and accommodations of gendered nationalisms at the geographic and ideological fringes of the state.
Historical Authenticity and Present Creativity: Two Contested Narratives on
"Okinawan Culture" in the Mass Media
Yoshinobu Ota, University of Kyushu
This paper examines various negotiations and reinterpretations of "Okinawan-ness" in two television shows aired in 1993: Ryûkyû no kaze, an NHK drama, and Owarai pôpô, a locally produced entertainment show based on contes.
The former show, on the one hand, narrativizes Okinawan tradition in the glorious history of the Ryûkyû Kingdom, which maneuvered a tense and complicated political relationship with both China and Japan. To the extent that the show's historical authenticity remains unquestionable, it reduces the present to a mere shadow of the glorious past. The latter show, on the other hand, narrativizes an emergent and inventive present whose aesthetics is "impure" in the sense that various influences from the outside are reconverted into Okinawan culture, which is exemplified by this process of creative reconversion. This representational contest between the authentic past and the emergent present is transposed onto more serious arena in which a range of questions are contested, negotiated, and reinterpreted in complex ways. Such questions include who has the right to represent whom in what terms-an issue debated not only in anthropology but also, more widely, in postcolonial criticism.
The Reversion Debate and Critiques of Japanese Nationalism
Michael S. Molasky, Connecticut College
This paper examines the critical debate over Okinawa's reversion to Japanese prefectural status in 1972. The "reversion debate" (fukki ronsô) reached its peak in the early 1970s amidst opposition to the Vietnam War and engaged a wide range of prominent writers and critics from both Japan's main islands and Okinawa, including Ôe Kenzaburô, Nakano Yoshio, and Yoshimoto Takaaki. At the center of the reversion debate were three issues that continue to occupy Japanese intellectuals: (1) the legacies of Japanese colonialism and militarism; (2) the status of the United States-Japan Security Treaty in the face of shifting geopolitical relations; (3) the question of how the nation should treat those citizens whose sense of ethnic or cultural difference prevents them from embracing the ideology of Japanese homogeneity. In examining these issues, my paper will devote special attention to the incisive criticisms that Okinawa's "New Left" directed against their Japanese sympathizers.
The criticisms from Okinawa not only raised the emotional intensity of the debate but often revealed how the liberationist rhetoric of Tokyo intellectuals relied on the very nationalist ideology that they decried. The reversion debate thus exposes important fault lines separating postwar "mainland" intellectuals from their Okinawan counterparts. It also highlights conflicting perspectives within each group, particularly with respect to the issues of cultural assimilation and nationalism in modern Japan-issues that are at the very heart of the reversion debate.