Organizer and Chair: Davinder L. Bhowmik, University of Washington

Discussant: David L. Howell, Princeton University

Much scholarship concerning Okinawa/Ryukyu has focused on protests against U.S. military bases in Okinawa, violence inflicted on the nearby civilian population, and the degradation of local culture bordering the bases. A prominent trope of anti-base rhetoric, academic as well as journalistic, is a romanticized view of the Ryukyu kingdom that highlights Okinawa’s present role as tragic victim. Described as a pacifist society that rejected and still rejects military force, a "southern island paradise" inhabited by artless creators of natural beauty, the identity of Okinawa today perpetuates these essentializing myths. This interdisciplinary panel historicizes the romanticization of Ryukyu and analyzes the functions of its cultural and political manifestations in Okinawa today from the fields of history, literary criticism, and anthropology. Smits examines Ryukyuan military forces during the 14th-18th centuries to debunk the myth of a "pacifist" kingdom, and investigates the myth's 19th-century origins. Stinchecum discusses the formative role of Japan’s Folk Craft Movement as it manipulated the postwar revival of bashofu (Okinawa’s fiber-banana cloth) in the construction of a new Okinawan identity. Bhowmik considers the contemporary fiction of Sakiyama Tami, whose discordant stories subvert preconceived ideas of the healing nature of Okinawa’s marginalized southern islands. Nelson analyzes the varying motivations for the resuscitation of eisaa, Okinawa’s dance of the dead. Through these multifaceted aspects of Ryukyu/Okinawa, we examine the creators of this romanticized Ryukyu, whom it serves, and why it persists. As discussant, Howell offers expertise on ethnic identity in Japan’s northern extreme, providing a vital opportunity to enlarge our viewpoint.

Gregory J. Smits, Pennsylvania State University

In both popular media and academic literature, it is common to find portrayals of Ryukyu as a pacifist kingdom. Such portrayals usually also claim that this pacifism is an important, though violated, part of modern Okinawa’s heritage. Such claims undoubtedly resonate with a desire to behold a real example of a non-coercive society, but they are historically inaccurate. The Ryukyuan state was not an aberration. Like all states, it was based on coercive force. This paper has two goals: 1) laying to rest the myth of Ryukyu as a pacifistic kingdom by analyzing the composition and function of its military forces; and 2) examining the origins and development of this myth. The image of a pacifistic Ryukyu, governed by courtesy and with no knowledge of weapons, originated in the early nineteenth century with reports from British and other sailors who visited Okinawa. The image persisted in a different form during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Japanese military planners repeatedly characterized the inhabitants of Okinawa Prefecture as unfit for effective military service owing to an alleged lack of patriotism and martial spirit. The postwar U.S. occupation of Okinawa re-invigorated the myth of Okinawan pacifism, in part to portray Okinawa as a victim of Japanese aggression. The most recent iteration of the myth dates from the infamous rape incident of 1995. The incident shined a spotlight on the problems connected with U.S. military bases, and diverse critics of U.S. policy found the pacifism myth especially useful as rhetorical ammunition.

Amanda Mayer Stinchecum, Independent Scholar

From the time of his first visit to Okinawa in 1938, Yanagi Soetsu, founder of Japan’s Folk Craft (mingei) Movement, promoted an image of bashofu (cloth made from the fiber-banana) as emblematic of an essentialized, idyllic and homogeneous Okinawan culture. Yanagi’s view of Okinawa as a "tropical country," a southern island paradise, became the theme of the islands’ tourism industry after Japan’s defeat in 1945. Since the 16th century, bashofu has clothed the people of the Ryukyu archipelago, from Ryukyu’s kings to its poorest villagers. Production and use of the cloth persists today in two strains, defining Okinawan identity from inside and outside. These two merge in tourism development—the creation of an "island paradise" within Japan. The cloth is still worn for local festivals and celebrations. Okinawans have made it an emblem of their own identity as "simple island people." In contrast, the most finely-made bashofu, from the village of Kijoka, is purchased primarily by mainland Japanese. It has been appropriated by the Japanese government, which has designated it an "Important Intangible Cultural Property." Its leading maker, Taira Toshiko, was named as a "Living National Treasure" in 2000. Through the intervention of Yanagi and his colleagues, the mingei view of Okinawa has shaped an image of the islands that came to be held by both Okinawans and mainland Japanese. It persists today. My paper examines bashofu as one medium through which members of the Folk Craft Movement and other outsiders, and through them, Okinawans themselves, have defined Okinawan identity.

Davinder L. Bhowmik, University of Washington

Sakiyama Tami’s fiction centers on a particular topos—the island—rendered shima in katakana, the syllabary reserved for things foreign. As her orthographic choice suggests, Sakiyama’s is a defamiliarized island that stands in stark contrast to widely circulated images of Okinawa, which appear in film, television, print journalism, and tourist brochures. Rather than portray a semi-tropical island to which the urban weary flock, Sakiyama’s island is dark and depopulated, rife with conflict and poverty. Some construe this writing as a welcome turn toward interiority in Okinawan prose. The shadowy, recessed island, they argue, is a womb-like space in which Sakiyama’s protagonists contemplate their maladjusted urban lives. Indeed, her narratives bear little trace of major themes in the genre, such as discrimination and warfare, focusing instead on the narrower bandwidth of introspection virtually absent in the prose of fellow authors. Nonetheless, I argue that Sakiyama’s works should be celebrated less for the development of navel gazing characters, than for a narrative style the author likens to a wild dance of words, both standard and regional. This potent mix of language allows Sakiyama to eschew the kind of smooth Japanese writing whereby regional speech merely supplements a central language. Her method destabilizes the very ground her texts seek to depict, creating instead an island freed from the romantic discourse of healing (naoshi no shima). Despite the relative depth of Sakiyama’s characterization, I argue that her fiction resists the romance of the individual life, and speaks, in a different register, for a broader collective.

Christopher T. Nelson, University of North Carolina

Japan has a fascination for things Okinawan. For many, Okinawa is a portal to fantasies of longevity, of tropical leisure, of a lifeworld grounded in relationships with men and gods impossible elsewhere. These fantasies condense in the material objects and diversions of commodity culture: popular music, herbal medicines, televisions series and summer holidays. Fascinated by the passionate performance of Okinawan dancers and the beauty and power of their dance, many Japanese have begun to learn eisaa—the Okinawan dance for the dead. Across Japan, dancers of all ages struggle to master the intricate steps, demanding percussive rhythms, and unfamiliar melodies that make up the performance. And yet, eisaa remains a very important—and very different—practice in its Okinawan context. Resuscitated in the aftermath of the Battle of Okinawa after having been forbidden by Japanese military authorities, eisaa has become the largest public ritual memorializing the dead. My paper considers the modalities of mourning, commemoration and aesthetic production that coalesce in eisaa. Is the concept of mourning adequate to understand the maintenance and reconfiguration of relationships with the dead when the boundary between life and death is viewed as permeable? How does eisaa configure participants’ understandings of the trauma of Okinawan history—its Japanese colonialism, wartime genocide, and American occupation? I focus on how eisaa clears space in the traumatic wreckage of recent history, drawing into this opening a kind of indefinite time of everyday life. I examine, too, what the productive and transformational consequences are for the dancers who create this space.