ARTICULATING DESIER: POWER, IDENTITY, AND RECOGNITION IN MODERN OKINAWAN LITERAUTRE by XIAOYU WANG A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2023 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Xiaoyu Wang Title: Articulating Desire: Power, Identity, and Recognition in Modern Okinawan Literature This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures by: Rachel DiNitto Chairperson Roy Chan Core Member Davinder Bhowmik Core Member Andrew Goble Institutional Representative and Krista Chronister Vice Provost for Graduate Studies Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of Graduate Studies. Degree awarded June 2023. 2 © 2023 Xiaoyu Wang 3 DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Xiaoyu Wang Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures June 2023 Title: Articulating Desire: Power, Identity, and Recognition in Modern Okinawan Literature My dissertation analyzes four Okinawan literary works to explore how desire and the struggle for recognition, as formulated by Hegel, unfold within the Okinawan context. Through examining the various manifestations of the Okinawan characters’ desire, my dissertation investigates what is ultimately desired by Okinawans as colonized individuals, and how this desire reveals a subjective domain of colonial deprivation that goes beyond political and material dispossession. The four stories, I maintain, reveal how colonial domination reproduces itself through a vicious cycle that feeds on the colonized subject’s desire to be seen and recognized for their human validity and value. This psychological mechanism of colonialism keeps producing a false sense of inferiority and dependence among the colonized, which in turn perpetuates the hierarchical power structure of colonialism. In the meantime, however, Okinawan subjects negotiate for themselves recognition they seek and reap certain benefits from the process, even if this recognition turns out to be deceptive and detrimental to their quest for true autonomy. The four Okinawan texts, I argue, question the nature of recognition that Okinawan subjects pursue under the colonial condition and indicate how self-alienation as well as loss of autonomy occur during the pursuit of such illusory recognition. In addition, I contend that these works depict a complex and nuanced image of Okinawans, which prompts a reconsideration of the relationship 4 between Okinawa and its colonizers in terms of intimacy and collusion to go beyond the simplistic binary of resistance and oppression. 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express sincere appreciation to the people who have supported me during the past six years. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professors Rachel DiNitto, for reading my drafts, writing me recommendation letters, and providing advice on both my dissertation project and job applications. It has been a great pleasure to study and work with an organized, efficient, professional, encouraging, and caring mentor like her. Without her guidance and support, I would not have been able to complete my dissertation as planned and secure a job position before I graduate. Secondly, I extend my gratitude to all my committee members. Many thanks to Professor Roy Chan for guiding me through the labyrinth of theory and influencing the way I approach my research materials. I am grateful to Professor Andrew Goble for bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to my dissertation project and for listening to my personal difficulties like a trusted grandpa. I also thank Professor Davinder Bhowmik for providing inspirational thoughts on my research and being a guiding light for junior scholars in Okinawan literature. Thirdly, I would like to thank the Japan Foundation for granting me a research fellowship, which made it possible for me to do a half-year field research in Okinawa. Special thanks to Professor Murakami Yōkō for her enormous guidance and inspiration when I was doing research at Okinawa International University under her mentorship. I also extend my thanks to all the other professors, with whom I took classes at the University of Oregon, and a special appreciation to Professor Alison Groppe for offering me significant help in dealing with the most challenging situation I have ever encountered as a graduate student. Last of all, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude and love to my parents and my partner. I am grateful to my parents for their steady support in allowing me to pursue my dream 6 in a foreign country, even though they wished to keep their only child by their side. And I cannot express how fortunate I am to have an intelligent, humorous, and reliable partner who loves, understands, and emotionally supports me. I truly appreciate the profound impact that my intimate relationships have had on shaping me into the person I am today and will become in the future. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 10 Okinawa as a Colonial Space: an overview of the Ryūkyū Kingdom era and Okinawa’s modern colonial experience .................................................... 14 Overview of Existing Scholarship on Okinawan Literature ............................ 17 The Problem of Recognition in Colonial Okinawa.......................................... 21 Chapter Outlines .............................................................................................. 26 II. DESIRING THE OTHER: THE DISCIPLINED BODY AND THE APPROPRIATED VOICE IN IKEMIYAGI SEKIHŌ’S “OFFICER UKUMA” ................................................................................................................. 30 Living as “Defective Japanese” in Japan’s “Internal Colony” ........................ 34 The Problem with Publishing........................................................................... 41 The Image of the Policeman in Ikemiyagi’s Stories ........................................ 42 The Visible Policeman and the Invisible Policing Power ................................ 45 The Double-Edged Police Uniform ................................................................. 53 Incompatible Approaches for Recognition ...................................................... 55 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 60 III. IMAGINING THE WORLD AS HOME: THE TRAUMATIZED OKINAWAN SUBJECT AND HIS STIGMATIZED HOME IN MIYAGI SŌ’S “OUR HOME IS THE EARTH”................................................... 62 “Becoming Japanese” as the Only Future: accelerated cultural assimilation in the 1930s ...................................................................................................... 67 Experiencing Tokyo as an Okinawan Elite ...................................................... 71 From Okinawa through Tokyo to Honolulu: the journey of pursuing recognition .................................................................................... 77 8 Chapter Page The Incompatible Self-image and the Image of Home .................................... 82 From Concealing Origin to Imagining a New Home ....................................... 86 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 94 IV. ILLUSION, DISILLUSION, AND THE EVOLVING SELF IN ŌSHIRO TATSUHIRO’S “The COCKTAIL PARTY” ....................................................... 96 The Complex Occupation Reality and the Intricate U.S.-Okinawa Relationship ............................................................................. 102 Constructing Subjectivity through Recognizing Complexity .......................... 106 The Illusionary Equality and Fragile Power .................................................... 110 The Alienated Compatriots and the Estranged Home ...................................... 117 The Evolving Self-image and the Developing Knowledge of Reality ............ 124 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 129 Ⅴ. A STORY OF DISPLACEMENT: PRECARIOUS OKINAWANS IN ARASAKI KYŌTARŌ’S “THE VILLAGE OF SAGO PALMS” ........................ 131 Live in Ruins and Chaos: the early postwar period in Okinawa...................... 134 Military Prostitution and Its Narratives in Postwar Japan ............................... 138 The Anachronistic Woman and the Otherized Past ......................................... 141 Meaningless Knowledge and Groundless Recognition ................................... 146 The Objectified Body of the Stigmatized Panpan ........................................... 149 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 155 Ⅵ. CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 157 Recognition in Contemporary Okinawa .......................................................... 158 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 162 9 Chapter Ⅰ Introduction Less than two months before the fiftieth anniversary of Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty on May 15, 2022, Border-crossing Square (Ekkyō hiroba), a local journal founded by contemporary Okinawan novelist Sakiyama Tami, published an issue that reflected on the past five decades and contemplated the future of Okinawa. In the preface to the issue were printed the lyrics of “Where are you going, Okinawan boy” (Doko’eyiku Okinawan-bōyi 1994), a well- known Okinawan folk song written by Okinawan blues musician Chinen Yoshikichi. The last four lines of the quoted lyrics read as: Oh, where are you going, Okinawan boy? What once was beautiful is now covered in mud Oh, where are you going, Okinawan boy? Even your dreams were predetermined The song evokes the symbolic image of Okinawan boys seen in modern Okinawan literature, which, as noted by Kurosawa (2015, 40), personifies the impotence of Okinawa emasculated in its encounter with the powerful “male adults” represented by China, Japan, and the United States, who exploit, manipulate, and entice the “Okinawan boys.” In the folk song, the Okinawan boy, standing before the intersection of the catastrophic past and the obscure future, is left baffled and disoriented. He struggles to find the place that he dreams of going, only to realize that even his dreams are not entirely his own creation. The very forces that trampled on what he once cherished have sought to manipulate his inner world by dictating his dreams. If the repetition of the question “where are you going, Okinawan boy” creates a sense of loss and confusion about the future of Okinawa, the lament that even the dreams of the Okinawan boy were prescribed to serve the larger national and international agenda suggests the lack of actual autonomy in Okinawa, both politically and spiritually. 10 While recognizing the devastating impact of political, economic, and military mechanisms of colonial control over Okinawa by Japan and the United States historically and in the present day, I want to explore the less visible facet of colonialism by examining the dreams that have been instilled in the minds of Okinawans throughout modern times. I interpret the word “dreams” in the song “Where are you going, Okinawan boy” as referring to objects or manifestations of desire. My inquiries involve examining what specific dreams have been projected onto Okinawans, how this process of projection has been carried out, the role that Okinawans have played in accepting, internalizing, and reinforcing the rationale behind these dreams as something worth pursuing, and whether Okinawans have merely been passive dreamers without benefiting from pursuing these dreams. Through examining the various forms of desire and their interrelationships, my dissertation investigates what is ultimately desired by Okinawans as colonized individuals, and how this desire reveals a subjective domain of colonial deprivation that goes beyond political and material dispossession. To that end, my dissertation draws on Hegel’s dialectic of desire and recognition as well as Fanon’s criticism of Hegel’s formula of mutual recognition to analyze four pieces of Okinawan prose fiction, wherein the Okinawan characters envision and strive to achieve what they perceive as worthy of pursuit. The four works that stage the dynamics of desire are: “Officer Ukuma” (Ukuma junsa 1922) written during the height of the prewar acculturation of Okinawans into mainland Japanese society, the wartime novella “Our Home is the Earth” (Kokyō wa chikyū 1934), the prize-winning novella “The Cocktail Party” (Kakuteru pātī 1967) published during the final stage of the U.S. occupation of Okinawa, and “The Village of Sago Palms” (Sotetsu no mura 1976) written after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan but set in the immediate postwar era. I chose literary works from different historical eras to explore what remains constant in desire of 11 Okinawan subjects despite changing sociopolitical contexts. Although the specific objects desired by the Okinawan characters vary in these stories, I maintain that they ultimately express a desire for recognition which, in the Okinawan context, refers to a state of being seen, acknowledged, and valued by the colonizer as equally autonomous human beings. To attain such recognition for their self-worth and equal humanity, however, Okinawan subjects modify their body and mind to conform to the sociocultural values of the colonizer, who dominates over the whole mechanism of recognition by defining which human qualities deserve social respect and inclusion. This definition, while purportedly universal, is in effect exclusionary since its very function is to maintain and justify an insurmountable boundary between the colonizer and the colonized. In depicting how their Okinawan characters are trapped in situations that run counter to their dreams, these four stories, I argue, question the nature of recognition that the Okinawan subject pursues under the colonial condition, demonstrating how self-alienation as well as loss of autonomy occur during the pursuit of such illusory recognition. What makes the colonizer’s recognition significant and their standards valid is the colonizer’s domineering power, exclusive privilege, and, more incisively, the reality of the extremely unbalanced colonial relationships, which function to position the colonizer as at once the arbiter of recognition and the model of civilization and humanity for the colonized to admire and even emulate. The two prewar stories provide a vivid account of how the mainland Japanese characters are able to set the norms against which the Okinawan characters perceive and assess themselves and their fellow Okinawans. The two postwar stories illustrate how the Okinawan characters’ intimacy with the American occupiers can either lead to a sense of exceptionalism or make them an object of desire for their fellow Okinawans. All four works, I argue, delineate a colonial relationship in which the colonizer solicits the desire of the colonized and feeds on that 12 desire to reinforce their superior status. Taken together, the four works demonstrate how colonial domination validates and reinforces its control over the subjugated population through the manipulation of their subjective experiences and cultural identity. This psychological mechanism of colonialism keeps producing a false sense of inferiority and dependence among the colonized, which in turn perpetuates the hierarchical power structure of colonialism. In addition to examining how colonial hegemony operates through the mentality of the colonized, I explore the complex roles played by Okinawans, particularly those of elite status, in the colonial process. The protagonists in the four stories are either elite Okinawans themselves or from a former elite family, giving them more access to the colonizer’s world or a relatively privileged social position in comparison to non-elite Okinawans. For these Okinawans, colonial encounters brought not only violence, oppression, and confrontation, but also opportunities to enter the colonizer’s world, enjoy a similar economic lifestyle, and even build friendships with the colonizers, creating an illusion of empowerment. Rather than dismissing this illusion as naïve and false, I understand it as a manifestation of the Okinawan subject’s desire to share the power and privileges of the colonizer, to acquire a sense of self as equal to the colonizer, and to be recognized as such. The desire compels the Okinawan subject to associate more with the colonizer, not only physically, but also spiritually and culturally. When reconsidering the colonial relationship between Okinawa and its historical colonizers in terms of the desire of Okinawan subjects for power and recognition, Okinawans can no longer be viewed as mere passive victims of colonialism, but as active (even if unwitting) participants in colonial construction. As I demonstrate in each chapter, Okinawan subjects negotiate for themselves recognition they seek and reap certain benefits from the process, even if this recognition turns out to be deceptive and detrimental to their quest for true autonomy. 13 Reading Okinawan literature through the lens of desire, specifically the desire for recognition, offers insight into how colonial violence wields power by manipulating the psychological state of the colonized, and how this subjective dimension of colonial control has shaped their self-identity and subjectivity. My dissertation illustrates how the Okinawan subject’s endeavor to overcome their inferior status and attain recognition for their humanity in effect perpetuates and reinforces the hierarchical colonial structure. In doing so, I aim to delineate a complex and nuanced image of Okinawans, who have actively negotiated with the colonial power and whose efforts may have contributed to the consolidation of the oppressive colonial system. I propose to reconsider the relationship between Okinawa and its colonizers in terms of intimacy and collusion to go beyond the simplistic binary of resistance and oppression. This is not to discount the generations of colonial oppression, but rather to highlight how colonial domination reproduces itself through a vicious circle that feeds on the colonized subject’s desire to become the colonizer or befriend the colonizer. To break this disastrous cycle, it is crucial to realize one’s entrapment in it and restructure Okinawan society on the terms of Okinawans. Okinawa as a Colonial Space: an overview of the Ryūkyū Kingdom era and Okinawa’s modern colonial experience Located at the southernmost point of Japan, Okinawa has piqued the interest from scholars across disciplines by virtue of the existentially and intellectually challenging political, cultural, and societal transformations that have occurred throughout its history. In 1429, the premodern Ryūkyū Kingdom era began when the first Shō dynasty (1405-1469) unified the three kingdoms on the main island of Okinawa and established the centralized Ryūkyū Kingdom. The second Shō dynasty (1469-1879) expanded the Kingdom’s territory to outlying islands, including 14 Kume Island (Kumejima), Yaeyama Islands (Yaeyama-rettō), and Amami Islands (Amami-guntō) through continuous military conquest and invasion (Iha 1998, 122-126). During the second Shō dynasty, the Satsuma Domain of the Tokugawa shogunate invaded the Ryūkyū Kingdom in 1609, while preserving and reaping economic benefits from the Kingdom’s tributary and trade relationship with the Ming dynasty and later the Qing dynasty of China. Under the state of “dual affiliation” (ryōzoku), the Ryūkyūan politician and scholar Shō Shōken proposed the theory of “same ancestor of Ryūkyūan and Japanese” (nichiryūdōsō) and advocated for the adoption and assimilation of Japanese culture and aesthetics (134-135). However, despite prohibiting Ryūkyūan people from imitating and behaving as Chinese, Satsuma politicians refused to recognize them as Japanese (135). The period of Satsuma’s cruel economic exploitation of Ryūkyū lasted until the Meiji government abolished the Ryūkyū Kingdom and integrated the Ryūkyū Islands into Japanese territory through a series of political and military measurements called the “Ryūkyū disposition” (Ryūkyū shobun 1872-1879). Following Japan’s territorial and political annexation of Okinawa, the Japanese government implemented the “preservation of old customs” (kyūkan onzon) policy to appease the discontented Okinawan aristocrats (shizoku), a policy that partly resulted in Okinawa’s belated modernization (Meyer 2020, 2). Japan’s victory in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) was “a crucial turning point in Okinawan attitudes toward the campaign for assimilation and the central government’s methods for implementing it” (Rabson 2012, 27). Since then, Okinawans became more actively identified with the powerful Japanese nation-state and acculturated to Japanese language and culture with the desire to participate in the process of modernization. However, despite decades of assimilation to Japanese culture and customs, Okinawans suffered from the discrimination from the mainland that denied recognition of 15 Okinawans as qualified Japanese nationals. During the Battle of Okinawa (April-June 1945), Okinawan civilians who could not speak standard Japanese were at risk of being labeled as spies and killed by mainland soldiers. Residents of Kerama, Zamami, as well as Tokashiki islands were even commanded by the Imperial Japanese Army to commit mass suicide as the battle approached its end and Japan’s defeat became inevitable. This horrendous ground combat, which claimed the lives of a quarter of Okinawan civilians and devastated the landscape of the main island of Okinawa, marked the beginning of the twenty-seven-year U.S. occupation of Okinawa. On April 28, 1952, the Treaty of San Francisco granted full sovereignty to the Japanese mainland, while the U.S. military force continued its occupation of Okinawa. If we understand the “Ryūkyū disposition” as less an event that occurred in the early Meiji era than recurrent political violence that dismissed the will and interest of Okinawans (Maeda 2021, 33-34), the separation of Okinawa from mainland Japan in 1952 marked the second “Ryūkyū disposition,” and Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972 marked the third. Yara Chōbyō, then the governor of Okinawa, delivered a speech on the day of reversion, lamenting that the agreement between the Japanese and the U.S. governments on Okinawa’s reversion “did not necessarily fulfill our earnest desire…the situation will continue to be difficult for us, and we may encounter new challenges in the future” (Sakurazawa 2015, 166). Even after five decades since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan, the U.S. military bases continue to persist on the main island of Okinawa, causing damage to the local environment and violating the human rights of its citizens. In his book Year Zero of “Postwar” Okinawa (Okinawa “sengo”zeronen 2005), contemporary Okinawan novelist and activist Medoruma Shun questions the validity of the notion of “postwar” (sengo) in the context of Okinawa, criticizing it as misleading. As one of the most visible and materialized symbols of the unfinished war, the presence of U.S. military bases 16 and personnel in Okinawa also represents Okinawa’s ongoing colonial condition. This condition is structured by “the mutually dependent relationship of two colonialisms that work together” to serve “the joint interests of the United States and Japan” (Shimabuku 2012, 134), which are enshrined in the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (anpo jōyaku). The four Okinawan stories examined in this dissertation span the prewar era and the postwar period prior to Okinawa’s return to Japanese sovereignty. In my analysis, I define Okinawa’s relationship with mainland Japan in the prewar era and with both Japan and the United States in the postwar era as colonial in nature. In Red Skin, White Masks (2014), Coulthard defines the colonial relationship as one “where…interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power…has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority” (6-7). While Coulthard’s research is on settler-colonialism, I find his definition of colonial relationship relevant and convincing in the case of Okinawa, but with the caveat that mainland Japanese domination over Okinawa did not necessarily involve the dispossession of Okinawans from their lands while the U.S. occupation of Okinawa did. My research examines the impact of the dynamic colonial relationship on the identity and subjectivity of Okinawans, and how this influence informs our understanding of the psychological mechanisms of colonial oppression and the complex nature of colonial relationship. Overview of Existing Scholarship on Okinawan Literature The majority of the previous scholarship on Okinawan literature has employed a postcolonial lens for textual analysis, exploring how themes of language, culture, history, identity, and power are unfolded and problematized in Okinawan prose fiction. In her book 17 Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (2008), which is the first monograph in English dedicated to Okinawan literature, Bhowmik provides a critical overview of Okinawa’s prose fiction from the 1900s to the 2000s, raising the question of how Okinawan literature should be defined and positioned in relation to Japanese literature. She examines how Okinawa’s alterity, despite being sometimes diluted by the rhetoric of “local color,” is articulated and deployed in this body of literature to challenge the discourse of homogenous national unity. Bhowmik recognizes in Okinawan literature the power of resistance that disguises itself under the strategic depiction of Okinawa’s local color. She maintains that the writing of difference is a tactic for Okinawan authors to “consciously exploit, to good effect, the overlap that exists between regional and minority literature” (3). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” Bhowmik argues for an approach to reading Okinawan fiction that acknowledges its artistic potency as well as its political subversiveness (11). The exploration of cultural alterity in Okinawan literature continues in Morton’s The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature (2009), where he dedicates two chapters specifically to Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s works. Through analyzing the imagery of Okinawan shaman (yuta) and priestess (noro) in Ōshiro’s fiction, Morton demonstrates how the author employs these cultural symbols to convey the “anguish caused by the loss of identity suffered by modern Okinawans” (149), while at the same time establishing “an Okinawan identity separate from but related to the mainland as part of his design to create a new vision of Japan” (7-8). Morton argues that Ōshiro’s aesthetic reconstruction of the image of traditional religious figures in Okinawa possesses the symbolic power to facilitate a reconsideration of Japanese culture and identity beyond the assumption of homogeneity. 18 In addition to the dynamics of culture and identity, the representation of disastrous events in Okinawa’s modern history and their profound influence on the lived experience and psychology of Okinawans constitute significant foci for literary scholars in Okinawan studies. Two representative works that address how the traumatic past continues to haunt Okinawan narrations are Ikeda’s book Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun (2014) and Murakami’s Reverberation of Traumatic Events: Atomic Bomb Literature and Okinawan literature (Dekigoto no zankyō: genbaku bungaku to Okinawa bungaku 2015). In his analysis of Medoruma Shun’s war fiction, Ikeda borrows terms and theories from Holocaust studies while highlighting the unique shape of Okinawan war memory due to “the condition of geographic proximity to the sites of the traumatic past” (7) and the continued presence of U.S. military bases in Okinawa. He demonstrates that Medoruma’s war fiction, which is infused with personal and emotionally charged war memories, not only presents an alternative war narrative that reflects the lasting impact of the Battle of Okinawa, but also suggests the possibility of the “transmission of psychological scars and effects of the war across generations” (19). In her book focusing on “the reverberation” (zankyō) created by the writings of devastating historical events, Murakami proposes an approach to reading Okinawan literature that listens for the faint, trembling echoes of trauma and memory. These echoes reverberate through language while refusing to be fully captured by language and straightforwardly understood by readers of Okinawan literature. She argues that this reverberation produces a multiplicity of experiences and memories that resist being contained by a grand narrative of the history. Through analyzing Okinawan literary works that deal with the experience, memory, and legacy of the Battle of Okinawa and the U.S. occupation, Murakami demonstrates how the 19 lingering reverberation of traumatic events in literature evokes a visceral image of the past and creates a shared moment of memory and pain for those who directly experienced the events and those who did not. In recent years, there has emerged research on Okinawan literature that takes either a comparative approach or a transnational and diasporic perspective. For example, Nakahodo has conducted extensive research on literary works and films produced by Okinawan migrants in Hawaii (2012; 2019). In 2022, Oitate published his book Reading African American Literature and Modern Okinawan Literature (Amerikakokujin-bungaku to gendai Okinawa-bungaku o yomu), which examines the intersections between these two bodies of literature. Oitate draws on theories such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” to analyze how elite Okinawans, such as the protagonist in the novella “The Cocktail Party,” experience a split sense of self as a result of straddling two compartmentalized worlds within the colonial space. Oitate addresses the issue of the lack of recognition of Okinawans for their individuality under the U.S. occupation, which parallels my research in the sense that we both attend to the problem of recognition in the colonial context. My research, however, differs from Oitate’s in that it delves into how the absence of sociopolitical equality and recognition of Okinawans for their humanity give rise to the Okinawan subject’s desire for inclusion in the colonizer’s world and recognition as equally dignified human subjects. Furthermore, I explore how the colonial system feeds on the Okinawan subject’s desire for recognition to consolidate the hierarchical and oppressive colonial structure. My research builds upon the existing scholarship by analyzing how the themes of power, violence, cultural identity, and subjectivity are unfolded in Okinawan literature. However, I foreground my analysis on the dynamics of desire and recognition to explore the intricate 20 relationships between colonial power and the desiring Okinawan characters. By doing so, I aim to shed light on the nuanced role that Okinawans, particularly the elites, have played in (re)producing colonial hierarchy and reinforcing colonial control. As far as I have read, previous studies have not paid adequate attention to how the desire for power and recognition among Okinawan subjects has influenced the way they perceive the colonized Okinawan society and navigate their sense of self in relation to the hierarchical colonial context. My dissertation therefore fills a previously overlooked niche in Okinawan literary analysis. In addition, my dissertation includes two stories, examined in Chapter Two and Four respectively, that have not yet been translated to English and have not been studied extensively in either English or Japanese scholarship.1 By analyzing previously unstudied texts, my dissertation sheds new light on the complexities of power and identity under different historical circumstances, making a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on Okinawan literature. The Problem of Recognition in Colonial Okinawa My dissertation uses the concepts of desire and recognition as they are framed by Hegelian philosophers. In the section on lordship and bondage in Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel formulates the struggle for recognition between two self-consciousnesses as a dialectic movement in which each side seeks to affirm its certainty of self, to present it to the other as truth, and to win recognition from the other of its essential being, at the cost of negating or annihilating the other. But since “the presentation of itself as the pure abstraction of self- consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing 1 While Nakahodo briefly introduced “Our Home is the Earth” in his books, Miyagi Sō: from the journalist of “Reorganization” to the writer (2014) and The Hundred Years of Okinawan Literature (2018), he did not provide an in-depth analysis of the story. As for “The Village of Sago Palms,” an article published in 2019 and written in Korean included the novella along with three other Okinawan stories. According to the article’s Japanese abstract, the author focuses on how the imagery of prostitutes catering to American soldiers has changed in literary works published in Okinawa’s local magazines. 21 that it is not attached to any determinate Being-there, not to the universal singularity of Being- there in general, not attached to life” (Hegel [1807] 2018, 78), the struggle for recognition is from the very beginning a life-and-death combat, wherein each side aims at the other’s death while at the same time putting their own lives at stake to attain recognition. The life-and-death struggle initially resolves into the master-slave relationship, wherein the master consciousness realizes and reveals itself as autonomous being and is recognized as such by the dependent slave consciousness. According to Hegel, however, this one-sided recognition fails to capture the pure concept of the term since proper recognition can only be achieved when both consciousnesses “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (77). For reciprocal recognition to be established, it is necessary for the slave to go beyond the slavery condition and be recognized by the master as an equally autonomous being. The slave, contended by Hegel, can eventually overcome servitude and achieve true autonomy by surmounting their fear of the master and transcending both the natural world and their own natural being through their work carried out as a service to the master. Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel delves deeply into the dialectic of desire and recognition, indicating that “man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right…to that thing, to make another recognize him as the owner of the thing…to make the other recognize his superiority over the other” (1969, 40). As contended by Kojève, “it is only Action that flows from such a Desire, that creates, realizes, and reveals a human, nonbiological I” (40) since only by desiring and acting on a non-being can self- consciousness liberate itself from the given being to realize genuine freedom. As such, the life- and-death struggle for recognition arises from the desire of each participant to subjugate the other’s desire and to be recognized of their human reality and autonomy. To my analysis of 22 Okinawan literature, I apply the Hegelian concept of desire and recognition to investigate how the desire for recognition of one’s self-worth and validity underlies and interrelates with various types of desire of the Okinawan protagonists in each story. Precisely, I examine how the Okinawan subject’s pursuit of material possession, social advancement, and intimate relationships bespeaks a desire less for the desired object itself than for the object as a symbol of power, equality, respect, or/and the other’s desire. Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s formula of mutual recognition is relevant when analyzing the endeavors of Okinawan subjects to pursue what they desire and gain recognition for their self- worth and validity. In “Negro and Hegel” in Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Fanon points out the difference between Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and its manifestation in the colonial reality: For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation. The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object. (Fanon 1952, 172n8) In colonial contexts, the colonizer typically seeks to extract labor and resources from the colonized population rather than engaging in reciprocal recognition of each other’s worth and value. The colonized, instead of revealing and realizing autonomy through transforming and transcending the natural world, finds in the image of the dominating colonizer the recognized humanhood and the only path to freedom. The colonized turns toward the colonizer, internalizing the latter’s language, culture, and values, and learning to perceive the colonial world, their fellow countrymen, as well as themselves as the colonizer does. In a colonial society characterized by unbalanced power relations, the desire of the colonized subject for recognition often motivates them to assimilate to the civilization projected as the universal standard for humanity rather than 23 seeking out and claiming for the validity of alternative modes of civilization. As Fanon argued, the psychological element of colonialism and the socio-economic structure in colonies have been historically interlocked and interdependent. He therefore believed that the project of decolonization must address both the objective and subjective dimensions of colonial domination and must be waged on both levels. Fanon’s psychological analysis of colonial structure provides valuable insight into the examination of the mainland Japanese-Okinawan dynamics during the prewar era. The Japanese mainland projected itself as the model of universal and advanced civilization and was recognized as such by Okinawans, specifically Okinawan teachers, intellectuals, and politicians. The protest of Okinawans against the notorious “human pavilion incident” (jinruikan jiken) in 1903 serves as an example of how the mentality of the colonized was influenced even at a relatively early stage of colonial domination. At the Fifth National Industrial Exhibition held in Osaka, two Ryūkyūan people were exhibited alongside Ainu, Taiwanese, Koreans, and other ethnic groups of people that were viewed through a lens of exoticism and primitivism. Ryūkyū News (Ryūkyū shinpō), the local newspaper of Okinawa, fiercely criticized the exhibition and protested that Okinawans as Japanese subjects should not be equated with Ainu and Taiwanese barbarians. This stance is reminiscent of Fanon’s observation that North Africans internalized the racist perspectives of their colonizers, as he wrote, “I was astonished to learn that the North Africans despised men of color” (1967, 76). The whole project of assimilation and acculturation, which was carried out either actively or forcibly in Okinawa throughout the prewar era, transmuted Okinawans “to be in a position…to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (8) that was imposed on Okinawa by the Japanese mainland. 24 Although the postwar U.S. occupation of Okinawa took on a different form of colonization geared towards the militarization of the region, the political power, material wealth, and technological capabilities of the United States projected an image of the American colonizer as the symbol of advanced civilization, which aroused admiration among Okinawan individuals. To speak the “language” of the colonizer during the U.S. occupation era was less about speaking in English or assimilating to American culture than about promoting the rhetoric of Okinawan- American affinity and bringing to the fore the cultural uniqueness of Okinawa. To a certain extent, Okinawan subjects appeared to have gained recognition for their self-worth and value, which was manifested in discourses that acknowledged the validity and highlighted the significance of Okinawan culture. Nevertheless, it was ultimately the American colonizer who decided which aspects of Okinawa could be recognized and for what purpose that recognition served. In the context of the Okinawan-American relationship, Okinawans were denied proper recognition as autonomous individuals insofar as the forms of recognition “end up being determined by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner in the relationship” (Coulthard 2014, 17). However, this limited and deceptive recognition could generate a false sense of empowerment for Okinawans, particularly if the Okinawan subject gained access to the American community in Okinawa and maintained intimate relationships with Americans. As illustrated by Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s story in Chapter Three, the Okinawan subject’s pleasure in being closely connected to the American world was grounded in and strengthened by the reality of an imbalanced and unequal relationship between Okinawa and the United States across various social arenas. The psychological impact of American domination and hierarchization of Okinawan society manifested in the Okinawan individual’s assessment of their self-worth in relation to both the American colonizers as well as their fellow Okinawans. As such, both prewar 25 and postwar Okinawa witnessed a vicious loop whereby the lack of recognition for Okinawans galvanized their pursuit of recognition, which ironically reinforced the hierarchical colonial structure and perpetuated the colonial deprivation of autonomy of the colonized population. This was because the form of and the path to recognition were predetermined by those in power. Chapter Outlines My dissertation examines four Okinawan novellas, two from the prewar era and two from the postwar era, to investigate the psychological dimension of colonial control in the Okinawan context and examine how the Okinawan subject’s pursuit of recognition may end up reproducing and reinforcing the colonial power dynamics. In Chapter One, I analyze the protagonist in “Officer Ukuma,” who, in Spivak’s words, is a “regional-elite subaltern” (1988, 285) straddling hierarchical social spaces and failing to secure a stable position in each space. I examine the protagonist’s interpersonal relationships with individuals dwelling in disparate social spaces–the marginalized village that is his birthplace, the authoritative police station as his workplace, and the sensual pleasure quarter where his lover lives and works as a prostitute. I demonstrate how the protagonist’s pursuit of homosocial friendship and heterosexual pleasure intertwine and interplay with his desire for power and social recognition. I argue that the protagonist’s profession as a police officer is thematically significant, as it embodies two different but interlocking mechanisms of colonial control—one effectuated through coercive force and the other through (re)producing and promoting cultural norms that are projected as unquestionable, universal standards. I argue that the protagonist’s endeavors of self-discipline, driven by his desire to be recognized as equally capable and powerful as the colonizer, turn him into a collaborator of colonial domination. His consent to and pursuit of the set of values established by 26 the colonizer in effect perpetuate the colonial practice of hierarchizing cultures and differentiating peoples. In Chapter Two, I examine the “homeland complex” of the Okinawan protagonist in “Our Home is the Earth” and the colonial implication of the novella’s title. I focus my textual analysis on how the protagonist, an elite Okinawan who migrated to Tokyo to pursue career success and social recognition, develops an inferiority complex toward home as he becomes more undifferentiated from elite Tokyoites. The protagonist’s desire to be recognized as an intellectual elite confronts the stigmatized image of Okinawa as his homeland, driving him to either conceal or erase the social stigma brought about by his origin. I argue that the seemingly ambitious and promising statement “our home is the earth,” buttressed and empowered by the protagonist’s own journey to Honolulu as well as the narrative of transnational migration of Okinawans, ironically reveals the Okinawan subject’s inability to publicly and confidently state that “our home is Okinawa.” I demonstrate that the protagonist aims to attain social recognition for himself as well as Okinawans through constructing a desirable image of Okinawan migrants travelling beyond the national and imperial borders. To effectively do so, I argue, the protagonist must accept and acknowledge the validity of the Japanese empire’s valorization of transnational migration as a potential channel to expand imperial territories and increase imperial power. Consequently, the protagonist’s proposal “our home is the earth” not only romanticizes the lives of Okinawan settlers in foreign territories, but also runs dangerously close to being assimilated into the expansionist narratives of imperial Japan. Chapter Three explores how the Okinawan protagonist in “The Cocktail Party” simultaneously falls victim to and functions to maintain the illusory concept of Ryūkyūan- American friendship. Through an analysis of the protagonist’s desire for material and sensual 27 pleasure offered by the American world and his sense of empowerment through access to that world, the chapter demonstrates how the protagonist is misguided by his belief that his affinity with the American occupiers satisfies his desire for power and elevates him above his fellow Okinawans within the colonial hierarchy. I argue that the protagonist is not blind to the colonial reality but is rather aware of the hierarchical relationship between Okinawans and Americans, which drives him to complicitly promote and perform the Ryūkyūan-American friendship. In addition, by examining the process through which the protagonist determines to tear down the hypocritical mask of the “benevolent” colonizer and fight the violence embodied by the idea of international friendship, I demonstrate the significance that the story ascribes to viewing oneself in terms of history and community. A resolute resistance against colonialism, the story suggests, is only possible through the colonial subject’s development of a more sophisticated understanding of their history, the current colonial reality, as well as the role they have played in that history and that reality. Chapter Four analyzes the novella “The Village of Sago Palms” and examines the disturbing experience of three displaced Okinawan characters, who have been deeply affected by their respective historical eras. I interpret the three characters–the protagonist’s grandmother, his father, and the Okinawan prostitute who caters to American soldiers–as representatives of the pre-annexation era, the prewar era under Japanese rule, and the U.S. occupation era, respectively. The chapter explores how the teenage protagonist perceives the three characters, who share a common experience of struggling to find social belonging within Okinawan society under the U.S. occupation. I argue that the novella, by juxtaposing disparate temporal spaces within the narrative, illustrates how Okinawan individuals, regardless of their generation, gender, education, or economic class, are mentally traumatized and socially or culturally alienated as a 28 result of colonization. I further argue that the novella employs the immediate postwar setting to insinuate the sociopolitical and psychological chaos afflicting Okinawans after Okinawa’s return to Japanese sovereignty. In this way, the novella questions whether the end of war and occupation have brought any essential changes to the subjugated status of Okinawa and the lack of autonomy of Okinawans. My analysis of how the hierarchical colonial structure has shaped the colonized subject’s desire for recognition is not intended to suggest an all-encompassing power of colonialism over the colonized, but rather to emphasize the subjective impact of colonialism and argue for the significance of Okinawan literature in visualizing and problematizing this invisible and nuanced form of colonial subjugation. The loss of belonging, autonomy, and even humanity of the Okinawan characters depicted in the four stories raises the question of whether it is valid for the colonized to cater to the colonizer’s values and interests in their pursuit of visibility, respect, and recognition. Put together, these stories illustrate how seeking recognition without challenging the existing politico-economic structure and cultural hegemony can paradoxically strengthen the colonial power hierarchy and lead to the foreclosing of the road to recognition for individuals subject to colonial domination. 29 Chapter Ⅱ Desiring the Other: The Disciplined Body and the Appropriated Voice in Ikemiyagi Sekihō’s “Officer Ukuma” In October 1922, Emancipation (Kaihō), one of the most competitive magazines of the Taishō era (1912-1926), published a special issue including two prize-winning works that were awarded the magazine’s prize for fictional writings (sōsaku). One of the two novellas, “Officer Ukuma” (Ukuma junsa 1922),1 was written by Ikemiyagi Sekihō (1893-1951), poet and novelist born in Okinawa. At the time when “Okinawa was regarded as the remotest of all remote areas (hekichijū no hekichi) in popular minds, and literary writings about Okinawa were neglected” (Nakahodo 2018, 22), the awarding and publishing of “Officer Ukuma” by a reputable mainland magazine were of great significance. In A Journey of Melancholy (Aishū no tabi 1982), Arakaki Mitoko (1901-1996), Okinawan novelist who was once married to Ikemiyagi, recalls how Ikemiyagi’s personal biography as well as his picture were played up in the local newspaper Ryūkyū Shimpō (Ryūkyū shinpō) after the award (119). It is difficult to know the content of the newspaper article due to the vast loss and damage of books and magazines during the Battle of Okinawa (April-June 1945). Yet, it is easy to imagine how Ikemiyagi’s award was welcomed by the local newspaper as an exciting event that symbolized recognition of an Okinawan writer by Tokyo’s intellectual circle. At the time when Okinawa’s status in Japan was between “a forgotten colony and an abandoned prefecture” (Meyer 2020, 1), the achievement of an Okinawan individual was celebrated as the glory of the collective. The prize-winning work, “Officer Ukuma,” features a young man, Ukuma Hyaaku (hereinafter referred to as Hyaaku), who was born in a “special hamlet” (tokushu buraku) of 1 The protagonist’s last name, “Okuma,” reads as “Ukumanu” in the original Japanese text. In this paper, however, I use the English rendition of the name, “Ukuma,” to avoid confusion. 30 Chinese lineage in Okinawa and becomes the hamlet’s first police officer. As a member of the marginalized hamlet, the experience of being discriminated against and shunned by society intensifies Hyaaku’s desire for social inclusion and recognition. Yet, Hyaaku eventually falls into the double alienation dilemma as he strives for social advancement; his endeavor to get rid of his stigmatized identity results in his estrangement from the hamlet, while at the same time his friendship with the mainland policemen remains superficial and unequal. At the end of the story, Hyaaku is confronted with a predicament that further reveals his in-between status. While his arresting of an Okinawan man, who is in the act of committing a theft, promises Hyaaku a promotion and recognition in the workplace, the fact that the thief is the older brother of Hyaaku’s lover, Kamarū, a prostitute who is not a member of the hamlet, threatens to destroy his intimate relationship with the girl. For Hyaaku, the irreconcilable relationship between his identity as the hamlet’s resident and his professional identity as the policeman keeps interrupting the promising process of inclusion and destroying any possibility of a real recognition. Previous scholarship on “Officer Ukuma” has examined Hyaaku’s in-between status and his suffering from the double alienation. Engaging the story with theories of subalternity and colonial mimicry, Bhowmik (2012) reads Hyaaku as the regional elite-subaltern, a term Spivak (1988, 285) employs to refer to indigenous individuals who are dominant at the regional levels of the colony. Bhowmik maintains that, while Hyaaku lacks the power and authority to speak out, his mimicry of the colonizer, represented by his mainland colleagues, produces polyphony and ambivalence that are menacing to disrupt the colonial structure. In his explanatory notes (kaisetsu) of the story, Nakahodo (2015) examines how the police uniform, a symbol of power and authority, brings Hyaaku the disturbing experience of alienation. Nakahodo further points 31 out that it is impossible for Hyaaku to retrieve his “true self” merely by taking off the police uniform since Hyaaku already internalizes the sense of duty embodied by the uniform. Building on Bhowmik’s reading of Hyaaku as the elite subaltern and Nakahodo’s examination of how the uniform has constructed Hyaaku’s sense of self, my analysis of “Officer Ukuma” explores the dimension of desire to demonstrate how the self-alienation occurs when Hyaaku endeavors to learn to speak in the language of the imperial authorities. Hyaaku’s desire for social advancement and recognition, his homosocial desire for constructing the fraternity with his mainland colleagues, as well as his heterosexual desire for the prostitute, Kamarū, intertwine with each other and complicate Hyaaku’s relationships with the story’s other characters, who are of different social status. My examination of Hyaaku’s desire as well as the manifestations of his desire helps me to explore how imperial subjugation operates through manipulating the mentality of the dominated and how this invisible power influences the formation of subjectivity of the dominated. At the end of the story, when the chief commands Hyaaku to bring in Kamarū, Hyaaku becomes “a wild beast fallen into a trap” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 89).2 I argue that the metaphor of a trap indicates the extensive and intensive power of imperial structure, which, through eliciting the desire of elite subaltern for advancement and recognition, transforms the desiring elite into the delegate of imperial control, whose very endeavor in adopting and performing the privileged identity reinforces the imperial hierarchy. I propose to read Hyaaku’s dilemma as the literary rendition of the predicament encountered by Okinawans, especially Okinawan intellectuals and elites, during the 1920s. The desire for sociopolitical recognition and economic development drove Okinawans to assimilate to the mainland standard for modernization and civilization, through which the body and the mind of Okinawans were disciplined and supervised by the imperial authority. However, to assimilate is to firstly negate 2 All quotations are from the Bhowmik translation unless otherwise noted. 32 and erase any deviation from the standard, to alienate the Self, and to embrace the Other. The endeavor for assimilation and for achieving the equality through assimilation eventually pushed down the Okinawan individual into the trap, inside which they find their voices appropriated by the imperial authority to endorse the rationale for political and cultural hierarchies. In the following sections, I firstly examine the social and intellectual background around the 1920s to analyze how Okinawa was situated within the Japanese nation-state and how the national identity of Okinawans was discursively constructed. Before turning to the text of “Officer Ukuma,” I look to Emancipation, in which the novella was initially published, to explore how the story was framed in the magazine and how the magazine’s mainland readers might read it. My reading of the novella focuses on the desire of Hyaaku as the regional elite, analyzing his interactions with his family and neighbors, his mainland colleagues, as well as his lover, Kamarū. I examine how his desire for social advancement and recognition has been shaping his intersubjective relationships, and how this desire manifests in and conflates with Hyaaku’s sexual desire for Kamarū. I demonstrate how Hyaaku’s efforts in constructing a homosocial relationship with his mainland colleagues reflect a desperate desire to be included in the world of mainlanders, who play the role of the “superior” Other in the story. What stirs Hyaaku’s desire for recognition is the unequal power structure between a marginalized village in Okinawa and the Japanese mainland, which endows the latter with absolute authority to decide how the former should be discursively constructed. In the story, Hyaaku merely functions as the means through which the mainland officers construct and confirm their sense of self as powerful and privileged Japanese nationals. Hyaaku’s tragedy lays bare the gloomy imperial reality, in which the desire of the subordinated for equality and recognition can never be satisfied and is exploited to consolidate the superiority and centrality of the dominator. Deceived and exploited 33 by the hierarchical imperial system, Hyaaku eventually degenerates to a wild beast, trapped within the system that is nourished by the desire for recognition of the self-disciplined Hyaaku. Living as “Defective Japanese” in Japan’s “Internal Colony” Before analyzing the novella, it is necessary to examine the sociocultural context as well as the intellectual discourses on Okinawa during the 1920s. Japan’s military invasion and political integration of Okinawa during the Meiji era encountered stubborn resistance from local aristocracy, most of whom had been schooled in Chinese classics and believed in China’s political and military might. Yet, Japan’s victory in the first Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895) greatly lowered the sociopolitical influence of pro-China groups in Okinawa and changed Okinawa’s popular attitude toward their inclusion into Japan. The late Meiji and Taishō eras were a time when “more Okinawans began to identify themselves more frequently and forcefully as ‘Japanese’” (Christy 1993, 610). In the early 1920s, however, the plummeted price of sugar, which was Okinawa’s main product for export, as well as Japanese government’s turn to Taiwan (colonized by Japan in 1895) for sugar production resulted in severe economic depression in the already impoverished Okinawa (Rabson 2012, 65). The prefecture turned into the so-called “sago palm hell” (sotetsu jigoku) where the inappropriate cooking of the poisonous plant caused food poisoning and death. The number of Okinawans who migrated to the mainland for job had largely increased from 1920 to 1925 due to economic reasons (66). Working and living in the mainland, Okinawan migrants had to confront the cultural differences with their Yamato neighbors, suffering from discrimination in various aspects of daily life.3 The prefecture’s economic crisis as well as the prejudice its residents experienced in the Japanese mainland 3 Distinctions that are striking in the eyes of mainland Japanese include Okinawan dialects, names, music, clothing, and hair styles. Prejudice Okinawans encountered in mainland Japan included job discrimination, which culminated in the early 1920s when “posted notices began appearing in front of factories and employment offices, announcing, ‘Hiring workers, but no Koreans or Ryūkyūans need apply.’” (Rabson 2012, 71). 34 compelled Okinawans to actively assimilate to “Japanese language and culture” in the 1920s.4 Meanwhile, the necessity and the urge for assimilation led to conscious concealment and suppression of Okinawan customs and cultural elements that were labeled as either primitive (e.g., ancestor worship) or exotic (e.g., Okinawan surnames). The Okinawan side’s desire for becoming proper Japanese as well as their hope for participating in the process of modernization were nevertheless betrayed by the Japanese administration of Okinawa, which had been emphasizing the cultivation of the loyalty of Okinawans while ignoring the local demand for economic development and social equality. Take the education policy in Okinawa as an example, by contrast to the early introduction of the emperor’s portrait to educational institutions as well as the active construction of elementary schools, the development of secondary education was neglected to the extent that there were only two middle schools and no high schools in Okinawa by the time of 1924 (Meyer 2020, 5). In addition, there was a tendency among mainland critics and intellectuals to blame Okinawans for the prefecture’s economic problem and the prejudice from the mainland. The above-mentioned “sago palm hell,” for example, was interpreted by mainland critics as a result of Okinawa’s failure to catch up with the process of modernization (Christy 1993, 613). In a word, while Okinawa was politically and theoretically defined as an integral part of modern Japan, its actual relationship with the mainland was problematic, and the mainland attitude toward Okinawa was either discriminatory or dismissive. Ever since Okinawa’s territorial inclusion into Japan, discourses on historical affinities as well as ethnic sameness between Okinawans and mainland Japanese have benefited from and 4 Admittedly, the notion that there is one homogenous “Japanese language and culture” is itself illusionary and problematic. Rather than referring to specific linguistic expressions and cultural practices, the notion of a “Japanese language and culture,” to which Okinawans should assimilate, takes effect by evoking the image of civilized Japanese citizenries, who act as the model for Okinawans–the “not-yet-Japanese”–to become. 35 been supported by academic disciplines, such as linguistics, anthropology, and ethnology. For example, Torii Ryuzō, the renowned Japanese anthropologist, archeologist, and ethnologist, travelled to Okinawa twice during the late Meiji period (1896, 1904) to do research on Okinawa’s ceramic ruins. Through a detailed investigation of the shapes and patterns of the debris, Torii came to the conclusion that the ancient pottery unearthed in the Okinawan main islands are similar to those discovered in mainland Japan (1925, 217-218). He regarded this similarity in ceramic debris as proof that Okinawa’s ingenious people were Ainu, who had been residents of both Okinawan Islands and mainland Japanese Islands in ancient times (219). Since he surmised that “the majority of the residents in Okinawan Islands belong to the Mongoloid racial group, specifically showing a high degree of resemblance with we Japanese” (209), it was not difficult for Torii to construct a narrative, in which ancestors of Okinawans, just as ancestors of mainland Japanese, subjugated the indigenous Ainu and dominated the Okinawan islands (219). Torii’s archaeological investigations on the indigenous people of Okinawan islands successfully constructed a connection between Okinawa’s ancient history with that of mainland Japan, including Okinawa into the picture that depicts the origin of ethnic Japanese. When Torii visited Okinawa, he was accompanied by Iha Fuyū, the Okinawan ethnologist who is acclaimed as the father of Okinawan studies. In Ancient Ryūkyū (Koryūkyū 1911), a book that thoroughly examines the history, languages, literatures, religions, and customs of Ryūkyūan, Iha cited Torii as the authority to discuss the ethnic and cultural affinities between Okinawa and mainland Japan. As Tomiyama points out, while Iha agreed with Torii that Ryūkyūan are ethnic Japanese, for Iha, “the areas of similarity between the two are set up as a third category, ‘common ancestry,’ that is neither ‘Japanese’ nor ‘Ryūkyūan’” (1998, 170). In other words, Torii’s research on the Okinawan islands, its residents, and its ancient history 36 employed Okinawa as a means through which he explored and constructed the history and identity of “we Japanese,” whereas Iha’s research on Ryūkyūan history and cultures put Okinawans in the position of autonomous historical subjects, who are equal to their mainland Japanese counterparts. Iha’s initial purpose of composing the book was not only to “provide the local youth with the knowledge of their hometown” (Iha 1965, 25), but, as Oguma (2014, 302) points out, to restore the confidence and pride of Okinawans. For Iha, the establishment of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, the creation of Omoro sōshi (a compilation of ancient songs and poems of Okinawa), as well as the prosperous commercial trade with neighboring districts–all these are what prove the specific capacity possessed by Okinawans in producing material and spiritual achievements (Iha 1965, 86). Even as he praised the “disposal of Ryūkyū” as a liberation of Okinawans from the centuries of exploitation by Satsuma clan, what he meant is that the influx of mainland Japanese personnel and ideas will bring vitality to local economy and culture (92- 93). The “Okinawa” in Iha’s research exists for itself instead of being a means for the construction of Japanese national consciousness. It is this same person, however, who published in Okinawan Education (Okinawa kyōyiku) an essay titled “For Sekihō” (Sekihō-kun no tameni 1924), in which he lamented that “possessing unique language and history for a small ethnic group is one of the unfortunate things in this age” (55). From the 1920s, Iha abandoned “the theory of the common ancestor of Japanese and Ryūkyūan” (nichiryūdōsoron) and turned to proposing that Okinawan culture is a branch of Japanese culture. The 1920’s economic crisis in Okinawa announced the bankruptcy of Iha’s dream of preserving Okinawa’s autonomy and cultural specificity through an equal communication between Okinawa and the mainland. Realizing that his theory “cannot get sympathy from mainland politicians and entrepreneurs” (55) led Iha to conceptually “assimilate” 37 Okinawa to mainland Japan. It is noteworthy that while mainland scholars, such as Torii, seemingly proposed the same “common ancestor theory” and appreciated Okinawa’s specific culture, it does not mean that they recognized Okinawans as autonomous historical subjects as Iha did. After all, the mainland project in investigating Okinawa as the nation’s newly acquired territory serves for the end of constructing a national and imperial narrative of the emerging Japanese empire. The Okinawan desire for being recognized as an equal member with other Japanese prefectures has always been betrayed by the depressive reality, in which Okinawans were treated at best as “defective Japanese.” This makes Okinawans extremely sensitive to representations that depict Okinawa as backward, exotic, and culturally distinct from Japan. In 1925, Okinawa Asahi Newspaper (Okinawa asahi shinbun) published a letter of protest submitted by the Kansai Okinawa Prefectural Association (Kansai Okinawa-kenjinkai). In the letter, the association objected to the publishing of a serialized article in Osaka Daily News (Ōsaka mainichi shinbun), which was titled “A Journey to the New Ryūkyū” (Shin-Ryūkyū’e’no tabi). The association specifically had an issue with the article’s illustrations, one of which shows how Okinawans carry pigs by putting pig baskets on their head. Such portrait of Okinawa, the association lamented, would damage Okinawa’s public image, and hinder the process of economic developments and cultural reforms in Okinawa (Nakahodo 2018, 57-58). Ironically, by claiming that Okinawan intellectuals and social elites are currently taking earnest efforts in reforming Okinawa’s “bad customs” (heifū), the letter of protest participated in the creating and reinforcing of the image of Okinawa as economically undeveloped and culturally uncivilized. The association’s assigning of negative values to local customs reflects how they have learned and internalized the mainland standard for civilization. The letter of protest in effect recognized the 38 cultural superiority of the mainland, the status of which as the center and the standard was further consolidated through Okinawa’s cultural assimilation. Another famous protest against discriminative representations of Okinawa and Okinawans occurred in the following year, when Hirotsu Kazuo (1891-1968), Japanese novelist and literary critic, published Ryūkyūan Drifters (Samayoeru Ryūkyūjin 1926) in Central Review (Chūō kōron). Merely one month after the novella’s publication, the Okinawa Youth Association (Okinawa seinendōmei) published in Hochi Newspaper (Hōchi shinbun) an article titled “Objecting to Mr. Hirotsu Kazuo” (Hirotsu Kazuo-shi ni kōgisu). In this written protest, the association, while appreciating Hirotsu’s understanding and sympathy toward Okinawa’s economic predicament, criticized Hirotsu’s problematic depiction of Okinawans migrants and his very use of the pejorative term “Ryūkyūan.” The association expressed its concern that the novella will deepen the already existent prejudice toward Okinawans and reinforce the negative public image of Okinawa as remote and backward. The association’s excessive consciousness of discrimination is manifested evidently in its critique of Hirotsu’s choice of the word “Ryūkyūan” to refer to the prefecture’s people. The term “Ryūkyū” was bestowed to the Ryūkyū Kingdom by the Chinese Emperor during the premodern period and therefore acts as a reminder of Okinawa’s historical separation from mainland Japan. Referring to Okinawa as Ryūkyū has the connotation that denotes the foreignness of Okinawa and the ethnic ambiguity of Okinawans. In addition, “Ryūkyūan” as the epithet for Okinawans has been “associated with lazy aristocrats, anti- Japanese reactionaries, or, at best, backward losers” from early Meiji to Taishō eras (Meyer 2020, 6). On the one hand, the association’s written protest reveals the severe discrimination and economic difficulties suffered by Okinawans at that time, while on the other hand, it 39 demonstrates how Okinawans have learned to see and criticize representations of themselves through the perspective of the mainland. The two protests vividly show how Okinawans, especially the young intellectuals and elites, were concerned about the way in which Okinawa was presented and seen by the mainland. The gaze directed by Okinawan associations toward the image of Okinawa presented in mainland media is not so different from “the gaze of refracted Orientalism” (kussetsusareta orientorizumu), a term coined by Komori Yōichi in Fluctuating Japanese Literature (Yuragi no nihonbungaku 1998). According to Komori, for Japanese intellectuals and social elites in the Meiji era, the first step toward westernization is to “learn and internalize the way in which Westerners, who play as the Other to the Japanese Self, look down on the Orient” and to “follow that internalized standard, erasing characteristics that are Oriental from one’s external appearance and, eventually, one’s inner world” (174). When viewing themselves through the lens of the West, the Japanese subjects adopted a gaze of refracted orientalism, which is “far more sensitive than the Western gaze in detecting the Oriental barbarity, producing an excessive sense of discrimination” (174). In the 1920s, Okinawa played as the exotic but backward “Orient” to mainland Japan, learning from the mainland the idea of modernity and projecting the mainland as the model for modernization and the standard for civilization. The similar gaze of refracted orientalism was adopted by Okinawan intellectuals and social elites, who internalized the contemptuous gaze of the mainland when looking to Okinawan culture and lifestyles and were therefore extremely sensitive to characteristics labeled and despised as “Ryūkyūan.” While the purpose was to develop Okinawa’s economy and to erase discriminations suffered by Okinawans, especially those who worked and lived in the mainland, by negating the difference in Okinawan culture and customs as deviations from the standard and symbols of backwardness, 40 Okinawan subjects in effect consolidated the hierarchal power relations between Okinawa and mainland Japan, participating in the marginalizing and silencing of themselves. The Problem with Publishing To better understand the mainland reception of “Officer Ukuma,” it is worthwhile to examine the features of the mainland magazine Emancipation, which recognized and published the novella. One of the magazine’s founders, Yoshino Sakuzō, was a well-known political scientist during the Taishō era who was from the mainland. His redefinition and proposal of the idea of “democracy” (minponshugi)5 have had enormous impact on Taishō Democracy (Taishō demokurashii)–a term used to refer to “the diverse set of movements begun in the later 1910s to institutionalize a democratic system of rule” (Han 2007, 357). When browsing the contents of Emancipation, one would notice that the magazine’s socio-political agenda includes fighting militarism and capitalism, emancipating the socially and economically underprivileged individuals, such as factory workers and women, and promoting the friendship and cooperation between Japan and its East Asian neighbors.6 The magazine’s October 1922 issue, in which “Officer Ukuma” was published, included essays that introduce Marxist theories as well as commentaries on the political and economic situations of Soviet Union. What further suggests the magazine’s socialist bent is the literary work titled A Survey of the Thoughts of Factory Workers (Shokkōshisō chōsasho), which was selected with “Officer Ukuma” as a prize-winning work and was later included in Collection of Proletarian Literature in the Early Years Ⅳ (Shoki puroretaria bungakushū-yon 1985). Considering the magazine’s concern with marginalized social groups, the portrait of an impoverished and discriminated Okinawan village, the members 5 Although both “minponshugi” and “minshushugi” can be translated as “democracy,” Yoshino asserts that, by contrast to minshushugi, which denotes popular sovereignty, minponshugi means that sovereignty, while residing in the emperor, works for the welfare of the people (Silberman 1959, 316). 6 See Honma Yōko (1957). 41 of which suffer from social oppression and economic depression, fits into the magazine’s main theme and its sociopolitical agenda. At the same time, however, the novella’s representation of Okinawa’s quasi-colonial condition as well as the unequal power relations between Okinawa and mainland Japan goes beyond the thematical dimension of Emancipation, which mainly focuses on class struggles within the mainland society. In addition, while there are articles about territories (e.g., Hokkaido, Korea, and Manchuria) that are newly annexed by or currently under the administration of imperial Japan, almost none of the magazine’s contributions write about Okinawa. It is therefore reasonable to doubt whether the magazine’s editors and its mainland readers, who may only have limited knowledge of Okinawa, could fully grasp what is going on with the Okinawan protagonist of “Officer Ukuma.” The novella’s inclusion in Emancipation and its grouping with socialist essays and literary works that mainly concern socialist theories and living conditions of mainland proletarians may risk glossing over Okinawa’s semi-colonial condition depicted in the story. Consequently, while the publishing of “Officer Ukuma” in a mainstream mainland magazine seemingly provided a chance for the almost invisible Okinawa to represent itself to mainland readers, the representation was nevertheless reframed in a manner that conflates the Okinawan problem with class struggles that occurred in the mainland. The Image of the Policeman in Ikemiyagi’s Stories Ikemiyagi Sekihō, the author of “Officer Ukuma,” has been known as the “wandering poet” (hōrō no shijin), who not only has authored numerous fictional works as well as short Japanese poem (tanka), but also travelled across Japan from Hokkaido to Yaeyama Islands during his lifetime. After graduating from Waseda University, Ikemiyagi once returned to Okinawa, worked for the local newspaper, and taught in the local middle school. He is talented 42 in language learning, translated quite a few foreign works written by renowned authors such as Leo Tolstoy and Guy de Maupassant. Before “Officer Ukuma,” Ikemiyagi had already written and published several short stories, which include “The Death of a Policeman in Aboriginal Territories” (Bankaijunsa no shi 1912), “Explanation” (Yiyiwake), and “Hat” (Bōshi).7 In addition to fictional works, he composed short Japanese poems under the penname “Sekihō,” to which he assigned two Chinese characters that are different from those in his real name. He and his wife Arakaki had two sons; the older one died on the Philippine battlefields and the younger one went missing after the war. Ikemiyagi passed away in 1951. He was said to have been very drunk when he collapsed with a cerebral hemorrhage in the bathroom. As Nakahodo (2018, 198) points out, Ikemiyagi had a specific interest in the image of police officers. In the above-mentioned “The Death of a Policeman in Aboriginal Territories,” Shimoda, a Japanese policeman in Taiwan, is killed and beheaded by a group of Taiwanese aborigines the same night his lover runs away from him. Although the killing seemingly occurs for no specific reason, that Shimoda refers to the aborigines as “hostile barbarians” (tekiban) indicates a confrontational relationship between him and the Taiwanese indigenous people, who are probably victims of the extermination policy implemented by Japanese colonial authorities in aboriginal territories (Tierney 2010, 40-41). As a Japanese policeman, Shimoda is “not only a disciplinarian who imposed law and order, but also a schoolteacher, agricultural advisor, medical doctor, arbitrator of trade, and—most of all—the eyes and ears of the colonial state” (41-42). The police’s role as the representative of the colonial state divests Shimoda of his individuality, turning him into a concretized form of Japanese colonialism and his body into a site that bears the fury of the subordinated aborigines. Shimoda’s position within the imperial structure falls 7 The exact publication dates of “Explanation” and “Hat” remain unknown to scholars. The two stories were included in the collected works of Ikemiyagi in 1988. 43 between the top, which is occupied by imperial authorities, and the bottom, which the aborigines are forced into. While he acts as the local representative of the Japanese authorities and is marked by the aborigines as such, he is not as privileged as imperial administrators and eventually loses his life in the unexpected, brutal killing. The image of the policeman appears in another Ikemiyagi story, “Explanation.” The story is a defense made by a nameless man for his father. The man is trying to convince the policeman that his father could not possibly have committed theft. He details how his father as well as the entire family, although desperately impoverished, are fulfilling their moral and social responsibilities in both familial and communal spaces. According to the man, the adults in his family are ill-educated and engaging in menial jobs, such as hat knitting. The honorific forms that the man uses whenever he refers to the policeman indicate that the policeman occupies a relatively higher social status and is recognized by the man as such. For the man, the policeman is powerful and authoritative, representing the abstract but inviolable legal system. While the relationship between the man and the policeman is not as antagonistic as the one between Shimoda and the Taiwanese indigenous people, the man demonstrates a fear of the policeman as the embodiment of the formidable punishing system. After a tedious explanation of his family’s pathetic living situation, the man abruptly stops complaining and apologizes to the policeman that “yes sir, I should not keep talking about my family’s situation” (Ikemiyagi, n.d., 28). This suggests how impatient the policeman becomes in listening to the man’s explanation and how apathetic the policeman is to the sufferings of the man’s family. From the perspective of the frightened man, the story indirectly characterizes the policeman as a figure whose relationship with the local people is defined by separation if not opposition. 44 The award-winning story, “Officer Ukuma,” combines the images of the policemen in the two previous stories, further exploring the policeman’s social position as defined by an awkward in-betweenness. The policeman’s dilemma results from the fact that, while they are more than often from the subordinate class, they act for the nation-state that surveils and controls its population through the institutionalized police system. The situation even worsens if the policeman serves at the behest of the imperial system since the separation and hierarchy between the imperial elite and the dominated are based not only on their unequal access to political privileges and economic sources, but also on abstract concepts of cultural and ethnic superiority. In maintaining the imperial order through implementing moral norms and legal rules established by imperial authorities, the policeman from marginalized social groups inadvertently participates in the disciplining and repressing of his people. The policeman’s dilemma exemplifies the quandary of the regional elite-subaltern, who straddles hierarchized spaces and, accordingly, suffers from the split produced in their sense of self. It is through this schizophrenic image of the policeman that “Officer Ukuma” explores the psychological impact of Japanese imperialism on individuals located in the periphery of the empire. The Visible Policeman and the Invisible Policing Power “Officer Ukuma” starts with a brief introduction to the special Okinawan hamlet where the protagonist, Hyaaku, was born. Located at the edge of Naha, the hamlet is shunned by local Okinawans for its villagers are of Chinese descent and engaging in “menial jobs” (sengyō), such as hunting frogs and making straw sandals. The discrimination based on occupation as well as the hamlet’s marginalized location make the villagers a parallel to the burakumin, ethnic Japanese who “have been discriminated against, even construed as racial others, on the basis of their bloodlines, places of residence (buraku), and work in occupations that, however necessary, 45 are deemed unclean by custom and religious doctrine” (Fowler 2008, 1703). The fact that the villagers are Chinese descendants, however, complicates the situation by suggesting the ethnicity of the villagers as another source of discrimination. The community’s very existence in Okinawa as well as its current economic situation convey messages that not only inform Okinawa’s historical affinity with China, but also show how the power and wealth of Okinawa’s Chinese communities have declined since Japan took control of the Okinawan islands. It is hard to know why Ikemiyagi writes about a community of Chinese lineage in Okinawa, which uncomfortably, considering the time’s social context, reminds of Okinawa’s historical intimacy with China before it was officially annexed by Japan. But in rendering the villagers as Chinese descendants, the story allows for a reading of the exclusionary attitude of the mainland officers toward the villagers as a problem specific to the special hamlet. Okinawans outside the hamlet are almost absent from the picture. Nowhere in the story does the conflict occur between the mainland officers and “non-Chinese” Okinawans. On the surface, it appears that, in developing a narrative around the special hamlet, the novella avoids touching the issue of cultural difference between Okinawa and mainland Japan, a topic that almost became a taboo among Okinawan intellectual and elites at the time. Yet, as analyzed in following sections, a close reading of the novella will reveal how the way mainland officers discriminate against the villagers and the inferiority complex experienced by Hyaaku conjure up the image of the contemporary Okinawa-mainland relationship. While the hamlet’s residents are impoverished and excluded by fellow Okinawans, they, according to the story, “enjoy a simple, communal life with few worries” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 79). It is after Hyaaku’s advancement to the position of police officer that the harmony in the village is interrupted. The village’s ethnic origin is the source of discrimination that Hyaaku experiences 46 in his workplace, where the mainland officers are contemptuous of Hyaaku’s background, and regard him as a person of a different country, or an “outsider” (ikokujin) (83). Hyaaku is very conscious of the gaze of his mainland colleagues who view him and the villagers as foreign and uncivilized. He gradually internalizes this gaze, turning it on his family members, his neighbors as well as himself. As a result, not only the village’s peaceful and harmonious everyday life is interrupted, but Hyaaku himself suffers from an inferiority complex with regard to the mainland officers. The two layers of discrimination experienced by the village–one from local Okinawans, and the other from the mainland officers–apparently have different effects on the villagers, especially on Hyaaku as the village’s elite. The exclusionary attitude of local Okinawans is far less destructive than the disparaging gaze of mainlanders in disturbing the psychological state of Hyaaku. Through adopting the Orientalist perspective of the mainland officers in viewing his family and neighbors, Hyaaku reproduces the violence of the imperial mechanism that categorizes the villagers as the uncivilized foreign Other. As Bhowmik points out, Hyaaku’s “position as a police officer marks him as a member of the regional elite, while his status as a second-class citizen from a discriminated village relegates him to the subaltern” (2012, 102). The ambiguity and complexity in Hyaaku’s social position are brought about by the irreconcilability between his multiple identities. Here, I want to further point out that Hyaaku’s job as a policeman makes his professional identity even more at odds with the social class to which he belongs. Unlike his family and neighbors, whose occupations require few professional skills, Hyaaku needs to pass the national police examination and receive professional training before officially working as a police officer. Having dreamed of career success and strived for promotion, the policeman Hyaaku cannot help but feel the psychological distance from the village’s other young men, whose occupation has 47 nothing to do with either systematic training or promotion. Furthermore, the policeman’s symbolic significance as the delegate of the central government has the potential to transform the equal and intimate relationship between Hyaaku and the villagers into one defined by hierarchy, alienation, and even opposition if the villagers violate regulations or commit crimes. It should be noticed that the regulating power of Hyaaku as the policeman targets not only the hamlet’s residents but also local Okinawans outside of the hamlet. The policeman quandary therefore comes into play whenever a conflict occurs between the policeman Hyaaku and those who fall under the national and imperial control. In the story, there are two scenes in which Hyaaku wields his power as the policeman. The first scene indicates the police’s function in tracking and fighting crimes. As soon as Hyaaku catches sight of an Okinawan man, who is hiding in the graveyard and acting in a suspicious manner, he arrests the man on suspicion of theft and remains indifferent to the man’s claim of innocence. Hyaaku forcibly takes the man to the police station, where the latter is interrogated by the police chief. Amazed at the chief’s interrogation technique, Hyaaku cannot help but praying that the man is the real thief, otherwise the chief will doubt Hyaaku’s competency as a policeman. Hyaaku’s concern demonstrates that there exists a conflict of interest between him and the man. Either the man is convicted of the theft, or Hyaaku loses the possibility for promotion and the chance to win recognition. From the moment when Hyaaku arrests the man, he and the man are assigned opposite positions, since there is no solution that can satisfy both Hyaaku’s desire for performing as a competent policeman and the man’s desire for being released without charges. The second scene in which Hyaaku acts as the policeman is more nuanced. It bespeaks how “police work did not stop in front of the doorstep but found its way into the people’s homes 48 to intervene in cases of alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and as behaviour that was perceived to be deviant from…norms” (Kocak 2018, 18). It is a scene in which Hyaaku delivers a harsh, didactic speech to admonish the villagers to completely and immediately change the way they work, live, and entertain themselves. The speech demonstrates how Hyaaku is dissatisfied with the village’s living environment and lifestyles because they harm his reputation as a policeman. In her analysis of the speech, Bhowmik points out the imperious tone of Hyaaku, who “begun to view his own family and neighbors with contemptuous disdain” (2012, 96). My purpose for quoting the speech is to further analyze how the speech conceptually and discursively constructs the villagers as uncivilized, how it reveals Hyaaku’s desire to erase the “stigma” that obstructs his road to advancement and recognition, and how it exemplifies an invisible but forcible method of state control. In the speech, Hyaaku lists several behaviors and customs that he labels as inappropriate or violating moral principles. He calls on the villagers to erase their “moral defects,” which, according to Hyaaku, account for the village’s long-term poverty and social stigma. The speech goes as follows: From now on the sewers must be cleaned thoroughly every day. When it’s hot in the summer, many of you go around without clothes. This is a crime punishable by law, so if a policeman sees you, expect to be fined. I’m a policeman, too, and from now on I won’t let you get away with anything just because you say you’re from this village. We public officials value nothing more than impartiality. So we can’t look the other way even if a member of our own families or a relative does something wrong or vulgar…Furthermore…drinking until late at night and singing is forbidden. You must drink less, work harder, and save your money, so you can get more respectable jobs (Ikemiyagi 2012, 81-82) To begin with, the speech, though given by an individual of the subordinate class, reads as colonial rhetoric that denigrates the morality of the colonized, plays with the idea of equality, and blames individuals of the colony for their own subjugation. Hyaaku applies the concepts of hygiene and hard work to measure the morality of the villagers, criticizing the village’s unsanitary condition and the villagers’ lifestyle as “something wrong or vulgar.” His demand that 49 the villagers should immediately correct their “moral defection” is menacing–those who fail to meet the moral standards will be punished by the law. As the regional elite, Hyaaku’s targeting the villagers’ “uncivilized” habits and behaviors cannot be understood without taking into account his desire for recognition. When analyzing why leaders of the Kansai Okinawa Prefectural Association urged the dissolution of Okinawan communities in the mainland, Steve Rabson insightfully points out that “as individual members of an often demeaned minority who had achieved comparatively high social status, they were overly concerned about mainland Japanese seeing drunks, gamblers, and seedy bars in Okinawan neighborhoods that were, in fact, common to other urban neighborhoods (on the mainland)” (92). The similar mindset can be seen in Hyaaku, who regards the village’s “filthy” living environment and its “vulgar” residents as shameful aspects that will mar his image as the local elite and become an obstacle to his endeavors for advancement. That Hyaaku once suggested his family move out of the hamlet further reveals that he is not really interested in improving the village’s living condition and enlightening the villagers. What mainly concerns Hyaaku is how the negative images of the village as deviant and uncivilized may prevent him from being properly recognized as a well- educated, civilized, and modern Japanese male. Hyaaku’s mention of the concept of equality when he warns the villagers of the punishment for violating moral norms is another sign of his attempt to disassociate himself from the villagers. By making clear that he will not show favor to the villagers if they violate the moral laws, Hyaaku refuses any intimate connection with his neighbors during his work time. It is extremely ironic to see how the idea of equality is emphasized in a speech filled with unfair accusations of the villagers. While factors including the village’s long-standing poverty and the local government’s neglect in improving the village’s public infrastructure can account for the 50 village’s unsatisfactory living conditions, Hyaaku blames the villagers for their economic predicament and marginalized social status, criticizing them for lacking the motivation for advancement. What makes Hyaaku’s valorization of the idea of equality even more ironic is that the moral criteria he relies on to define the villagers as uncivilized do not apply to his colleagues at all. These mainland officers always come to Hyaaku’s home during the daytime, drinking Okinawa’s regional alcohol (awamori), entertaining themselves with Kagoshima folk songs, and brandishing their swords when dancing. What is worse, “these officers, staggering through the streets on their way home, would shout insults at the villagers who wore few clothes when they worked” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 82). From the perspective of Hyaaku’s family and neighbors, who are despised by Hyaaku and insulted by mainland officers, these mainlanders, who drink alcohol during the daytime and shout at innocent villagers, are extremely rude and violent. Interestingly, the narrative saves the word “gentle” (otonashii) for describing the villagers while using the word “brutal” (ranbō) for the mainland officers, throwing doubt on Hyaaku’s accusation of the villagers as uncultured and morally deficient. That Hyaaku’s mainland colleagues can freely do what Hyaaku forbade the villagers to do further indicates the hierarchical relations between the villagers, Hyaaku, and the mainland officers. Rather than stipulating what should and should not be done, the moral criteria evoked by Hyaaku function to label the villagers as barbarians and deviants to justify the discrimination and the discipline of them. This second scene, in which Hyaaku powerfully and authoritatively speaks as a policeman with the attempt to regulate every aspect of the daily lives of the villagers, is different from the first scene, in which Hyaaku arrests the Okinawan man on suspicion of crime. The latter presents a widely recognized image of the policeman, who fights crimes to maintain order and the safety of society. When Hyaaku “shoved the man roughly into the interrogation room, as if 51 he’d been some stray dog” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 88), a forceful and, to some extent, violent image of the policeman is vividly presented. By contrast, there is no visible violence in the second scene where Hyaaku attempts to educate the villagers to be civilized. As Hyaaku demands the villagers drink less and save money, what he is doing is extending the scope of his regulating power to a relatively domestic sphere to interfere with the villagers’ private lives. At the very moment when Hyaaku refers to himself as “we public officials,” the concrete image of Hyaaku as the policeman merges with and dissolves into an abstract multiple, through which the sets of social norms and values disseminate and effectuate their disciplinary power. Surely, before Hyaaku disciplines the villagers, he himself must be disciplined first. He must learn and internalize the concept and value of, for example, hard work and hygiene before he effectively applies the standards to evaluate and “civilize” his family and neighbors. The mainland officers, needless to say, act as Hyaaku’s models, who, despite violating concrete moral norms, represent the abstract concept of civilization. One way for Hyaaku to imitate and to become his models is to adopt their perspectives. As a result, the more Hyaaku has contact with his mainland colleagues, the more he becomes dissatisfied with his family and neighbors. He grows even more irritable after his colleagues come to visit him. When seeing through the “civilized” gaze of the mainland officers, the hygienic condition of his home and the village appears unbearable. Things that Hyaaku has once been accustomed to suddenly turn into shameful markers of the backwardness of himself, his family, and the entire village. It is noticeable that when Hyaaku loses his temper with his family members, his mother “cried at the sight of him railing at his sister and wondered what had caused her good-natured son to change so drastically” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 81). In Hyaaku’s family, the mother figure lacks the ability to settle the conflict between her children; the father figure, who “excused him (Hyaaku) from his 52 daily chores to encourage him in his studies” (79), vanishes from the narrative after Hyaaku becomes the policeman. Hyaaku is depicted as the modern educated young man who overpowers his parents and possesses a dominant position within the familial space. The narrative’s overturning of the power structure in traditional Okinawan families, in which the senior male member possesses absolute authority over other family members, is to suggest how the modern ideas and values imported from the mainland can threaten and even subvert the traditional family order. Hyaaku’s desire to be recognized as modern as his colleagues makes him a perfect delegate to learn, reproduce, and apply to the community the normalized cultural and moral standards, which legitimate the hierarchization of imperial subjects and the marginalization of individuals who deviate from the standard. The Double-Edged Police Uniform In her analysis of the significance of the police uniform, Bhowmik demonstrates that the uniform is “a symbol of the Japanese state and its authority” (2012, 98) and that Hyaaku’s Self merges with the nation-state through the uniform. Built upon Bhowmik’s interpretation of the uniform as the “skin” that Hyaaku dons on to mimic the colonizer, my reading of the uniform focuses on its function in concretizing and materializing Hyaaku’s desire for recognition and its importance as a convenient means for Hyaaku to satisfy his homosocial desire. Nakahodo (2015, 52) once pointed out that the uniform transforms Hyaaku into a terrifying figure in the eyes of the villagers. Indeed, the police uniform Hyaaku has been wearing since the day he officially becomes the police officer plays a crucial role in informing Hyaaku’s transformation into a “different individual” and his changing power relations with the villagers. As a symbol of his successful advancement to the position of local elites, the uniform acts as the embodiment of power, endowing Hyaaku with the authority that is at once admirable and threatening in the eyes 53 of the villagers. When Hyaaku appears in his police uniform and cap, the village’s women “stared with admiration and awe at his strangely imposing figure” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 80). The uniform effectively distinguishes Hyaaku from the rest of the villagers and makes him appear less familiar in the eyes of his neighbors. Yet, before the uniform brings about the disturbing experience of estrangement, it helps Hyaaku reap the benefits of being a policeman. The story writes that merely seeing Hyaaku walking in his uniform could be a special and exciting encounter for the villagers, who “said they hoped their own sons would become policeman someday” (80). Hyaaku not only wins the respect of the villagers, but, more importantly, is acclaimed by the villagers as a model for the village’s next generation. The policeman Hyaaku is desired by the villagers, whose desire in turn confirms Hyaaku’s human value and his superiority as the regional elite. The fact that Hyaaku wears the police uniform almost all the time not only indicates how Hyaaku is obsessed with his newly adopted identity as the nation’s public official, a privileged identity that is visualized through the uniform, but also suggests how he enjoys being seen and admired by the villagers, who recognize Hyaaku for his power and dignity. The function of uniforms in producing a sense of equality is of great significance in Hyaaku’s case. While the relationship between Hyaaku and the mainland officers is defined from the outset by inequality and mutual differentiation, working in the same police station and wearing the same uniform help to maintain the illusion of equality and identification. It is the gap between the illusionary fraternity and the actual hierarchy that drives Hyaaku to continue socializing with his mainland colleagues to reassure himself of his membership in the superior social group. While Hyaaku has no interest in communicating with the village’s young people, from whom he consciously distances himself, he actively befriends his mainland colleagues, who “often visited him at home…stayed on from afternoon late into the night, drinking and raising a 54 ruckus” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 82). The police uniform and the identity as a policeman, which is materialized by the uniform, are indispensable for Hyaaku to build a homosocial relationship with the mainland officers. The uniform enables Hyaaku to identify himself more with the mainland officers than with the villagers despite the cultural difference between him and mainlanders. The shared identity as the policeman is what effectively bonds Hyaaku with his colleagues, even if the bond remains superficial. Hyaaku’s true feeling toward his fellow officers is that “he was unable to speak with them from the heart” since “their lives and feelings differed sharply from his own” (83). In the meantime, realizing that he is viewed and despised as a foreigner by the mainland officers increases the psychological distance that Hyaaku feels toward his colleagues. When Hyaaku continues mingling with the mainland officers at the expense of suppressing his true feelings, the uniform, while offering a way for Hyaaku to emulate and integrate with mainlanders, gradually imprisons him in the pathetic performance of a disguised Self. Incompatible Approaches for Recognition After the above-analyzed speech that Hyaaku delivers to educate the villagers, the villagers’ recognition of Hyaaku as a respectable policeman and the pride of the village is replaced by a refusal to recognize Hyaaku as a member of the community. For the villagers, Hyaaku’s image gradually overlaps with the threatening figures of all other policemen, whose existence only helps to reinforce the oppression and discrimination that the village has been suffering. The villagers begin to alienate Hyaaku as well as his family to the extent that they even “curse the very presence of Hyaaku’s house in their midst” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 82). Losing his sense of belonging to both the village and the police station makes Hyaaku “wilt like the withered grasses and trees, growing utterly downcast” (83). The double alienation that inflicts 55 Hyaaku is in effect a doubled lack of recognition. It is this doubled lack of recognition that makes Hyaaku’s encounter and interaction with the prostitute, Kamarū, meaningful, since what Hyaaku obtains from his relationship with Kamarū is not only the sexual pleasure, but the pleasure of being loved and desired. Ironically, Hyaaku’s encounter with Kamarū is initiated by one of his mainland colleagues, who invites Hyaaku to the brothel district on their way home, and who is apparently a regular visitor to the street. While Hyaaku never came to the district before, he chooses to follow his mainland colleague and buys a woman as his colleague does. After the first visit, Hyaaku believes that he has done something wrong and swears to himself that he will never come to the pleasure quarter again. However, when he comes to the pleasure quarter another day to pay Kamarū for his first visit, the same colleague, who is by chance in the brothel, joins Kamarū in encouraging Hyaaku to stay for another night. This time, too, Hyaaku does not refuse his fellow officer and chooses to stay. It is as though the mainland colleague turns into an experienced guide who leads Hyaaku into an erotic world, where the latter experiences, satisfies, and explores his sexual desire. If Hyaaku’s homosocial relationship with the mainland officer is what initiates his heterosexual relationship with Kamarū, then the failure in constructing an authentic friendship with his fellow officers is what in turn deepens Hyaaku’s desire for Kamarū. The shadow of the mainland officers eventually intrudes into the most private aspect of Hyaaku’s life, exerting its invisible but powerful influence over the interactions between the Okinawan couple. In addition, Hyaaku’s desire for Kamarū is closely connected to his desire for power from the outset. After all, the satisfaction of sexual desire through prostitution is achieved by the consumption of the commodified female body. What is concealed beneath the intimacy between 56 the Okinawan couple is the hierarchical status between Hyaaku as the consumer and Kamarū as the consumed. Moreover, that Kamarū has not yet reached her adulthood endows Hyaaku with the feeling of being powerful. Kamarū’s appearance as a lovely doll and her personality as a spoiled child serve as a foil to Hyaaku’s masculine figure as the police officer. Yet, the inequality based on gender and social status does not prevent Hyaaku from associating himself with Kamarū, especially after knowing how the young girl has been leading a miserable life. According to Kamarū, she was sold by her brother to the brothel to pay the debt of their family, which economically collapsed after the family’s father died. The fact that Hyaaku’s attachment to Kamarū deepens after he knows Kamarū’s tragic life experience indicates how Kamarū, an economically and socially underprivileged woman, serves as a foil to Hyaaku, who occupies a relatively higher social and economic status. The childish, feminine, and deprived prostitute effectively functions to confirm Hyaaku’s adulthood, masculinity, and powerful identity as a policeman. That being said, it is noteworthy that Hyaaku’s sense of power derives not only from Kamarū’s powerlessness, but also from this powerless woman’s love for him. When Hyaaku tries to make sense of his obsession with Kamarū, he thinks of not only Kamarū’s lovable face and personality, but also her deep attachment to him. The author writes, “the more she showed her feelings for him, the more his feelings for her deepened” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 86). That Hyaaku always finds Kamarū waiting for him whenever he comes to visit her further strengthens his feeling of being needed and being desired by Kamarū. As the village’s first policeman, Hyaaku was once desired by the villagers, who upheld Hyaaku as the model for their children. The villagers’ recognition is of little significance to Hyaaku, who disdains the former as uncivilized, but the villagers’ admiration for Hyaaku now turns into fear and disinterest. As for Hyaaku’s 57 relationship with his mainland colleagues, it is always Hyaaku who desires recognition of the mainland officers, but not vice versa. The intersubjective relationship between Hyaaku and Kamarū is different in that it is defined by a reciprocal love and desire. Being desired by the woman he desires reconfirms Hyaaku’s value as a male and an individual. For Hyaaku, Kamarū’s love is a promising signal that denotes her recognition of Hyaaku as a lovable and desirable individual. In their analysis of the scene in which Hyaaku deliberately takes off his uniform and changes into traditional civilian clothes (kimono) before visiting Kamarū’s place, Bhowmik maintains that, when with Kamarū, Hyaaku’s sense of power mainly derives from his masculinity so that he no longer needs the uniform to empower him, while Nakahodo (2015, 52) demonstrates that Hyaaku’s change of clothes reflects his hope to take off the mask (kamen) and to show his natural face (sugao) to Kamarū. I want to advance these interpretations by arguing that Hyaaku’s decision to present to Kamarū the image of an undisguised Self demonstrates his hope to construct a sincere interpersonal relationship with Kamarū and his feeling of empowerment through the love and recognition of Kamarū. The bond between Hyaaku and Kamarū is deepened during three stormy nights when, “amid the sounds of roaring wind and rain, they looked into each other’s eyes and talked of many things, their mutual attachment growing stronger than ever” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 87). The severe weather can be read as a metaphor of the sufferings that Hyaaku and Kamarū have been experiencing, which are too powerful to be fought against. While the two differ in terms of gender, birth origin, and social status, the communication between them makes possible a mutual recognition, through which they “understand themselves to be reflected in one another,” but “this reflection does not result in a collapse of the one into the Other…or a projection that annihilates the alterity of the Other” 58 (Butler 2000, 272). In front of Kamarū, Hyaaku is able to take off his police uniform, which he relies on to facilitate his integration into the mainland officers and to obtain from the villagers recognition as the powerful policeman. Hyaaku does not need the uniform to maintain his intimate relationship with Kamarū since their intimacy is constructed through mutual love and recognition. The way in which Hyaaku interacts with Kamarū demonstrates a desire to be recognized as an autonomous human being and a dream of constructing a human relationship that is based on neither the subordination of the Other nor the assimilation of the Self. The novella’s ending, however, destroys Hyaaku’s last hope for a real recognition and a sincere human relationship. The unexpected familial relationship between Kamarū and the man arrested by Hyaaku threatens to destroy the bond between Hyaaku and his lover, which offers a refuge for Hyaaku to escape from the frustrating double alienation. The “enthusiasm” (nesshin) and “pride” (hokori) felt by Hyaaku when he takes the man into the police station change into “regret” (kaikon) and “rage” (ikidooru) as he realizes how the man’s face resembles Kamarū’s (Ikemiyagi 2012, 88-89).8 Hyaaku is once again forced into the in-between state when the station’s senior officer commands him to bring the man’s sister, i.e., Kamarū, to the station for interrogation. Hyaaku’s ecstasy of being seen and recognized by the senior officer as a competent policeman turns into a desperation when he realizes the impossibility of reconciling his desire for social advancement with his dream for a sincere human relationship and authentic recognition. After all, the ongoing process of self-discipline keeps othering the Self, to the point of eventually destroying the “natural face” (Nakahodo 2015, 52) that Hyaaku reveals in order to achieve a mutual recognition with Kamarū. The novella, in showing how the police uniform has dissolved into Hyaaku’s body and has become an integral part that constitutes his self- 8 The word “enthusiasm” (nesshin) is not in the English translation, but on page forty-eight of the original Japanese text. 59 consciousness, cruelly shatters Hyaaku’s illusion that he keeps intact his natural face under the mask of the policeman. The disciplined policeman Self has permeated every aspect of Hyaaku’s life, rendering impossible the existence of a refuge immune to the policeman’s quandary. Conclusion In “Officer Ukuma,” while the discrimination toward the Okinawan village of Chinese lineage has existed for decades, it is after Hyaaku becomes the village’s first policeman that the discrimination takes on the power to disrupt the peaceful everyday lives of the villagers. What Hyaaku brings into the village is the disciplinary power of social control that seeps into the domestic and private sphere of the villagers. One manifestation of this extensive but relatively invisible power is a series of standardized criteria that are applied to measure an individual’s normality and otherize those who deviate from the standard. In the story, the deviation of the villagers is linguistically constructed and conveyed through the pejorative term “foreigner /outsider,” which is used by Hyaaku’s mainland colleagues to justify their exclusionary attitude toward Hyaaku and the villagers. Furthermore, what the term denotes is not merely a difference in ethnicity or nationality. From the didactic speech that Hyaaku addresses to the villagers, it can be seen how the hamlet’s residents are conceptually constructed as culturally defective and inferior. As such, the villagers are framed as the uncivilized foreign Other, from which Hyaaku is eager to disassociate, while the mainland officers play the role as the civilized Japanese Self, which Hyaaku desires to attain. As the only member of the hamlet who establishes close contact with the mainland officers, Hyaaku realizes the unequal power relations between the villagers and his fellow colleagues. It is this hierarchical power structure that elicits from Hyaaku the desire to join and eventually become the powerful side. For Hyaaku, who is extremely sensitive to customs that are 60 despised as uncivilized by his colleagues, the daily practice of the villagers becomes the very object for inspection and castigation. However, Hyaaku failed to realize that the language he uses as he attempts to criticize and “civilize” the villagers does not belong to him but comes from mainlanders. In repeating the words of the dominator, Hyaaku reinforces the authority of the voice of the dominator and effectuates the dominator’s ideological control on the dominated. By reducing Hyaaku to a wild beast, who “could only stare blankly at his chief” with his eyes “smoldering with the fear and rage” (Ikemiyagi 2012, 89), the story’s ending suggests how Hyaaku eventually loses the very ability to vocalize as a human being since he, through the process of self-discipline, loses his own language and is trapped within the extensive net weaved by the imperial ideology. 61 Chapter Ⅲ Imagining the World as Home: The Traumatized Okinawan Subject and His Stigmatized Home in Miyagi Sō’s “Our Home is the Earth” Presumably the most widely known modern Okinawan poem, “A Conversation” (Kaiwa 1930),1 written by renowned Okinawan poet Yamanoguchi Baku, is famous for its narrator’s grapple with the question “where do you come from.” The poem takes the form of a dialogue between the narrator “I” (boku) and “the woman” (onna); in each stanza, the conversation is interspersed with the narrator’s internal monologue. To the woman’s questions about birth origin, the narrator, instead of giving a clear answer, responds with short geographic terms, such as “the south” (nanpō) and “the subtropics” (anettai). By contrast, the narrator’s internal monologue is disproportionally long, detailing how the woman’s questions evoke in the narrator’s mind a group of stereotypical images, such as “tattoos” and “women carrying pigs on their heads,” that “are perceived by the world’s prejudicial gazes as synonyms of my hometown” (Yamanoguchi 1938, 54).2 Tomiyama interprets these images as components of “the self-image which ‘I’ (the narrator) thinks that such questions call for or are calling for” (1998, 176). It means that for the narrator, the question “where are you from?” is in fact “an inquiry asking ‘who are you?’” (176). The narrator is aware that, once he utters the word “Okinawa,” he is subject to the process of being identified as the primitive, exotic, and uncivilized Other to the Japanese Self. As Nakahodo (1975, 120-121) demonstrates, the poem describes the disturbing moments in which the Okinawan narrator has to conceal his birth origin consciously and 1 “A Conversation” was initially published in “Literature” (Bungei) in 1935, and was later included in Yamanoguchi’s collection of poems, “Garden of Speculation” (Shiben no sono 1938). The exact date of the poem remains unclear, while it is believed that Yamanoguchi wrote it around 1930 (Matsushita 2015, 78). 2 The quote is from the original Japanese version, and the English translation is mine. 62 painfully. The narrator’s anxiety of being stigmatized by the prejudicial images of his homeland gives rise to his impulse to conceal his Okinawan identity. A contemporary work of Yamanoguchi’s poem, “Our Home is the Earth” (Kokyō wa chikyū 1934), authored by Okinawan journalist and writer Miyagi Sō, thematizes the same inferiority complex toward home, depicting how its Okinawan protagonist, Nishida, is mentally afflicted by the discredited image of Okinawa as his homeland. While being a self-sufficient intellectual in Tokyo, Nishida severely suffers from the discriminatory gazes toward Okinawa and its people. When realizing how the mainland society denies proper recognition to individuals from Okinawa, Nishida becomes unable to answer the question “where are you from?” in a straightforward way and loses his self-assuredness. At the end of the story, Nishida sails across the ocean to Hawaii and, by evoking the imagery of courageous Okinawan migrants, asserts that the home of Okinawans is the earth. The story’s cheerful ending seemingly suggests Nishida’s successful liberation from the mainland discourses on Okinawa. Indeed, projecting the international space as home allows Nishida to construct a masculine and cosmopolitan image of Okinawans, with which he is able to proudly identify himself and contradict the mainland representations of Okinawans. At the same time, however, the statement “our home is the earth” reveals the reality that if there exists any effective way for Nishida to overcome his sense of shame toward home, it is to imagine an alternative home. The posture of finding home in the international sphere, I maintain, betrays Nishida’s loss of social position and belongingness within the national borders, where the image of his home remains stigmatized. In this chapter, I examine how Nishida’s desire for social esteem and recognition functions as he is wrestling with the stigmatized image of Okinawa. As an Okinawan elite in Tokyo, Nishida frustratedly finds that his self-image as a modern intellectual of high virtue is 63 contaminated by mainland stereotypes of Okinawa as the land of miserable barbarians. The exclusionary and discriminatory attitudes Tokyoites have toward Okinawans deny Nishida the respect and recognition that he desires and believes he deserves. As a result, Nishida grows extremely sensitive to representations of Okinawa in the mainland mass media and pays enormous attention to not expose, if not deliberately conceal, his identity as an Okinawan. I argue that proposing the idea “our home is the earth” is for Nishida a strategy to cover his “homeland stigma,” which damages his otherwise privileged elite identity and obstructs his way to social recognition. I use the term “stigma” in the way that it is framed by Link and Phelan as the co-occurrence of the process of “labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination…in a power situation that allows the components of stigma to unfold” (2001, 367). In Nishida’s case, the label of “Okinawan” links him to a set of stereotypical images and concepts that differentiates “uncivilized” Okinawans from civilized Tokyoites. To combat the stigma and the process of stigmatization of Okinawans, Nishida highlights the historical and contemporary practice of overseas migration of Okinawans, asserting the global space as the home of his fellow countrymen. The question then arises: how and why Okinawans’ transpacific migration can function as the factual basis for Nishida to depict a desirable image of Okinawans that deserves recognition of their dignity by the Japanese mainland? The novella’s original title, “People of My Hometown” (Kokyō no hitobito), was announced in the Tokyo Daily News (Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun) before its serialization in the newspaper (Nakahodo 2014, 65). The change of title to “Our Home is the Earth” not only foreshadows the story’s ending, where Nishida receives an invitation from his cousin in Brazil while visiting the “international village” in Honolulu, but also, I contend, resonates with the expansionist ideology of the Japanese Empire. In The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism 64 (2019), Lu sheds light on the continuities and connections between migration and settler colonialism in the Japanese context. He elucidates how Japanese emigration to overseas regions, including Hawaii, South America, and the South Seas, was institutionally and discursively connected to the Japanese empire’s expansionist agenda during the imperial era (1869-1945). According to Lu, Meiji expansionists projected European Mayflower settlers as the model to promote migration to Hokkaido as well as the American West. By the same token, “Our Home is the Earth,” while published in the early Shōwa period, draws a parallel between residents of the “international village” in Hawaii and Europeans who set foot on the land of North America three hundred years ago. In doing so, the story effectuates and reproduces the ideological link between Japan’s overseas emigration and Japanese settler colonialism. Nishida’s assertion that the earth is Okinawans’ home not only means that every Okinawan individual is closely connected to the international space through Okinawan migrants around the globe, but also functions to claim that his fellow Okinawans embody the very adventurous spirit that has driven them to make a home in foreign lands. The Japanese empire’s valorization of migration as a means of imperial expansion enables Nishida to depict a masculine, progressive, and cosmopolitan image of Okinawan migrants to counterattack the mainland representations of Okinawans as feminine, backward, and provincial islanders. In other words, if Nishida believes in the power of the image of Okinawan migrants to destigmatizes himself as well as his fellow countrymen, it is because he is aware of how the image of national subjects migrating across the ocean and setting in foreign lands caters to the empire’s expansionist narratives on international migration. In this sense, the statement “our home is the earth,” proposed by Nishida in order to attain proper recognition for Okinawans as honorable imperial subjects, in effect recognizes and reinforces the expansionist ideology of the Japanese empire. 65 In the following sections, I first examine Okinawa’s economic issues, the overseas migration of Okinawans, and the sociopolitical context within Japan around the 1930s. I demonstrate how the desperate economic conditions in Okinawa as well as the ongoing military expansion of the Japanese empire played an important role in accelerating the process of cultural assimilation and imperialization of Okinawans at the time. Although the definition of “Japanese” and the boundary between “Japanese” and “non-Japanese” have been changing over time, becoming and being recognized as qualified Japanese nationals was the only means for Okinawans to economically and socially survive in the 1930s. Nevertheless, as Miyagi’s story illustrates, Okinawans who identified themselves as Japanese faced the curious gazes and exclusionary attitudes of mainland Japanese once their “Okinawan identity” was revealed. Nishida’s disturbing experience of being denied equal status as a Japanese citizen exemplifies how the colonial subject suffered from the empire’s contradictory colonial policy, which required the acculturation of Okinawans on the one hand, while denying them social equality as Japanese citizens on the other. As an Okinawan intellectual, who had secured privileged social positions in Tokyo and established intimate connections to the literary world centered in Tokyo, Miyagi’s prewar experience sketches out an image of Okinawan elites, who were painstakingly negotiating with the (mis)representation and (mis)recognition of their homeland within the cultural ecosystem of Tokyo. While “Our Home is the Earth” can be read as an I-novel (shishōsetsu), a literary genre that models its protagonist after the author, and in which the events correlate with the author’s personal experience, I maintain that it portrays the disturbed inner worlds of Okinawan male elites, who were struggling to socially survive in the nation’s center. 66 My analysis of the novella investigates Nishida’s desire for recognition of his self-worth by examining his travels to and his experience in Tokyo and Honolulu. I analyze how, for Nishida, his Okinawan origin turns into a stigma that prevents him from winning “the respect and regard which the uncontaminated aspects of his social identity…have led him to anticipate receiving” (Goffman 1986, 9). After a series of attempts to destigmatize himself and attain social recognition, Nishida comes up with the idea that his homeland is the earth. Yet, to claim that “our home is the earth” is to romanticize the experience of overseas migration and to take part in the Japanese empire’s expansionist discourses. The statement “our home is the earth,” while seemingly liberating Nishida from the biased narrative concerning Okinawa, suggests how this elite Okinawan is imprisoned in the matrix of the imperial narrative, which not only constructed overseas emigrants as honorable national subjects, but also conceptually created the inferior Okinawa. “Becoming Japanese” as the Only Future: accelerated cultural assimilation in the 1930s To contextualize Nishida’s experience of discrimination in Tokyo and understand Okinawa’s overseas migration at the time, this section examines the historical contexts in Okinawa as well as the entire Japanese nation during the 1930s. Okinawa’s desperate economic conditions did not improve around the 1930s but became even more severe when the Great Depression started in the United States and strongly affected the economy of Japan. From the late 1920s, quite a few books and collections discussed the various reasons that led to Okinawa’s declining economy (e.g., The Dying Ryūkyū (Hinshi no Ryūkyū 1925) and Okinawa’s Economic Conditions (Okinawa keizai jijō 1925)) or proposed specific measures to save Okinawa from the depression (e.g., Collection of Essays on Rescuing Okinawa (Okinawa kyūsairon-shū 1929)). Aside from improving the prefecture’s industrial structure and reducing the tax burden, 67 encouraging overseas migration was proposed as an effective way to solve economic problems by alleviating the population pressure in Okinawa (Maeda 2021, 45). Okinawans’ international migration started as early as 1899 when twenty-six Okinawans departed for Hawaii (Ishikawa 2005, 14). Poor economic conditions starting in the 1920s witnessed a rapid increase in the number of overseas emigrants; nevertheless, migration to Hawaii, the most popular destination for Okinawan migrants, became impossible due to the enactment of the Immigration Act by the U.S. Congress in 1924 (Kondō 1995, 10). To make matters worse, the Social Bureau of the Ministry of Home Affairs of Japan, while encouraging Japanese migration to Brazil by paying travel expenses for Japanese migrants, excluded Okinawans from the project based on the reason that Okinawan migrants not only had behavioral problems but also tended to break labor contracts in Brazil (10). While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs eventually lifted the restriction on Okinawan migration to Brazil, it imposed on Okinawans certain conditions that did not apply to Japanese from other prefectures, such as Okinawans must be able to speak standard Japanese and at least finish the compulsory education before emigrating (10). To meet the government’s requirements for international migration and to avoid the inconvenience in daily lives as well as the discrimination from other prefectures, the importance of mastering standard Japanese and of reforming Okinawa’s traditional customs were further emphasized from within Okinawa. Migration to mainland Japan as well as foreign countries was both the result of and the solution to Okinawa’s economic depression from the 1920s to the 1930s. Through the practice of migration, the economic problems in Okinawa intertwined with the sociocultural projects of language learning and cultural assimilation, which served the imperial aim. In a broader context, the Manchurian Incident in 1931 not only initiated Japan’s all-out invasion of China in the following years but signified the empire’s military ambition for imperial 68 expansion. Under the circumstances, inculcating national consciousness and loyalty to the Emperor in Okinawans, who were new members of the Japanese nation-state and residents of the nation’s southern border, became a critical project that was profoundly related to the issue of national defense. Beginning in the 1930s, the physical body and spirit of Okinawans were under close military scrutiny for the purpose of national defense; Okinawans were criticized as spiritless, unreliable citizens who were lacking the consciousness of the Japanese national community.3 The importance of “imperialization education” (kōminkakyōyiku) was therefore further highlighted in Okinawa for the purpose of cultivating in local residents the necessary consciousness as imperial subjects. For example, the enforcement of standard Japanese language (hyōjungo) targeted not just students, but all Okinawan inhabitants. As Christy points out, the term assigned to the educational Japanese language changed from “the language of Tokyo/Yamato” (Tōkyō-go/Yamato-go) or “normal speech” (futsūgo) in previous eras to “standard speech” in the 1930s, demonstrating “an increasingly absolutist imperative for this language…through modern Okinawan history” (1993, 628). Aside from the intensified demand for language standardization, saluting the imperial portrait and learning the teachings of the Imperial Rescript on Education became daily routines in local schools of Okinawa. In addition to education, measures for cultural assimilation, such as changing distinctive Okinawan surnames to Yamato ones (e.g., from Nakandakari to Nakamura) and changing traditional Ryūkyūan dresses to Yamato and, gradually, to western clothing, were actively implemented in Okinawa in the late 1920s (Hagiwara 2021, 71). The imperialization education and the assimilation project served the purpose of cultivating patriotic sentiment and of disciplining Okinawan residents to become qualified warfare combatants, who would die for the empire. As Takaesu (2021, 86) 3 See Gabe’s (2021, 114-124) research that examines official documents submitted to the Japanese government respectively by Ino Jirō, Okinawa’s prefectural governor from 1930 to 1935, and Ishii Torao, commander of the imperial army’s Okinawa regiment. 69 demonstrates, “the beginning of war saw the intensified process of cultivating loyal imperial subjects and the increased demand for war cooperation in various forms; as soon as the war escalated, all these practices pointed to only one end, that is, to die for the emperor.” Despite the difficulty for Okinawans to achieve recognition as Japanese, the definition of which was constantly changing, the 1930s was an era when the specific sociopolitical, economic, and military conditions rendered “becoming Japanese” as the only correct and promising future for Okinawans. In the meantime, the unabated mainland prejudice toward Okinawans as the cultural Other continued to prevent Okinawan migrants in the mainland from revealing their hometown origins. Kushi Fusako, Okinawa-born female writer, depicted Okinawans concealing their birth origin in “Memoirs of a Declining Ryūkyūan Woman” (Horobiyuku Ryūkyū onna no shuki), a story serialized in the mainstream journal Woman’s Review (Fujin kōron) in 1932. The novella’s serialization, however, was suspended due to the fierce protest from the Okinawa Prefecture Student Association in Tokyo and the Okinawa Prefecture Association. According to Kushi’s “In Defense of ‘Memoirs of a Declining Ryūkyūan Woman’” (‘Horobiyuku Ryūkyūonna no shuki’ ni-tsuyite no shakumeibun 1932)–a short essay that is in its form a letter of apology while in its content an argument against the associations–the former and current presidents of the student association criticized her use of the term “ethnic” to refer to Okinawans and her blunt depiction of Okinawa’s dire situation. Kushi identifies the anxiety Okinawans felt when defined as an ethnic group that was put on a par with Ainu and Koreans. This demonstrates their desire to be recognized as full-fledged Japanese by dissociating themselves from “non-Japanese;” the dissatisfaction with the novella’s depiction of the miserable everyday lives in Okinawa reveals a strong desire to conceal the shame of Okinawa. This sense of shame and the impulse to conceal, 70 ironically, are exactly what Kushi’s novella thematizes through the image of the protagonist’s uncle. As a successful businessperson who conceals his birth origin from his wife and daughter, the uncle functions in the novella as a representation of the well-educated Okinawan son, who is living a modern life in Tokyo while leaving behind his “uncivilized” mother in Okinawa. When depicting the lives of these modern sons in Tokyo, Kushi writes, “Ryūkyūan intellectuals…tend to form hidden clusters, like mushrooms, even in this vast metropolis of Tokyo…If one of us broaches the subject, we avert our eyes, coldly, like two cripples (fugusha) passing on the sidewalk” (2015, 74).4 The metaphor of disability has the connotation that being Ryūkyūan in that era is a social defect that is akin to a physical disability. The endeavors of concealing one’s identity as Okinawan and of “passing” as people from other prefectures demonstrate the fear of being stigmatized by the negative images of Okinawa as the homeland. The irony lies in the fact that, while the Okinawan associations were concerned that readers might mistakenly view the uncle as representative of all Okinawans, their very complaint inadvertently revealed their anxiety about being associated with stereotypes of Okinawa. This is reminiscent of the uncle’s attempt to evade discrimination by concealing his Okinawan origin. While the specific targets for concealment may change, the complex toward Okinawa as the homeland can be seen in the fictional uncle as well as young Okinawan intellectuals in the real world. Experiencing Tokyo as an Okinawan Elite Miyagi’s “Our Home is the Earth,” which was published two years after the Kushi incident, is a story that further explores the Okinawan subject’s complex toward home. Satomi Ton, renowned Japanese novelist, recommended Miyagi’s novella to the Tokyo Daily News; the newspaper included the novella with other four works in its new year literary session, acclaiming 4 Although I acknowledge that the original Japanese term “fugusha” and the English translation “cripples” are considered insulting, I have decided to leave them as they are because the discriminatory connotation conveyed by them serves to highlight the disadvantaged social position of Okinawans in mainland Japan. 71 that the five authors are “champions who are recommended by five established writers as representatives of the culture of the next era” (Nakahodo 2014, 64-65). In fact, Miyagi had already made several attempts to enter literary circles before publishing “Our Home is the Earth;” his work “The Mystery of a Beautiful Woman’s Commitment to Suicide” (Tōshinbijin no nazo 1929) won the monthly magazine Bungei Shunjū’s prize for “true stories” (jitsuwa). However, the issue that published Miyagi’s “true story” was banned for violation of the Publishing Act and Press Law, which deemed Miyagi’s story as corrupting public morality (Miyagi 1968, 143). Later, Miyagi successfully published two stories respectively in the mainstream weekly newspaper Sunday Daily (Sandē mainichi) and the magazine for modernist and experimental fiction New Youth (Shinseinen); curiously, both stories deal with the themes of sex and crime in his banned story (Nakahodo 2014, 56-62). To Miyagi, one of the many youths who came to Tokyo to become a professional writer, serializing “Our Home is the Earth” in nationwide newspapers was so thrilling that it made him feel immersed in the pleasure of being greeted by the glory of life (64). If publishing in mainstream newspapers promises an increased visibility, being introduced as one of the representative writers of the new year signified for Miyagi a recognition that he had been making earnest efforts to obtain. During the wartime and postwar era, Miyagi continued publishing fictional works, which include two collections with stories set in Hawaii–Honolulu (Sōsaku Honolulu 1936) and Hawaii (Hawai 1942). Miyagi visited Hawaii several times in his life, at first to advertise books published by Kaizō and later to collect materials for his novels; Hawaii appears as a recurrent theme not only in Miyagi’s novellas, but also in his travelogues and essays (98). Aside from fictional works, Miyagi published in 1923 a news report on the Great Kantō earthquake in Reorganization for Women (Jyosei kaizō); Miyagi based the report on what he 72 personally experienced in the first few days after the earthquake. However, Miyagi did not write into the report that a stranger persistently questioned whether he was Korean in front of police station (Miyagi 1968, 162), an uncomfortable experience that Miyagi recalled in his autobiography Literature and Myself (Bungaku to watashi, 1967-1974).5 Miyagi was not the only Tokyo-based Okinawan who was confronted with unexpected questions about their ethnic identity after the earthquake. Higa Shunchō, an Okinawan historian who was working for the Kaizō publishing company at the time, was woken up at night by vigilantes and forcibly taken to the police station as a suspected Korean (Nakahodo 2014, 38-39). While Miyagi and Higa were fortunate enough to have someone vouch for them, Higa’s niece failed to escape from the violence and was seriously injured after being beaten by the vigilante mob (39). The experience of being misrecognized as Korean partly denotes how the external appearance of Okinawans may appear foreign to people from other prefectures; this exoticness of Okinawans was the target of curious, skeptical, and discriminatory gazes, which labeled Okinawan individuals as the cultural or ethnic other. On the other hand, the fact that Miyagi and Higa were able to escape the abusive violence by proving that they were Okinawans demonstrates how the situation of Koreans in Tokyo, at least in the context of the Kantō Massacre, was even more precarious than that of Okinawans. The multi-leveled hierarchy and discrimination within the imperial system in turn makes the issue of “correct recognition” crucial for Okinawans in the prewar era; the above- mentioned accusation of Kushi’s novella is an example that revealed the anxiety Okinawans had over being “improperly” recognized as Koreans, an ethnic other. As I will discuss in detail later, 5 The violent incidents that mainly targeted Koreans were known as the Kantō Massacre. Immediately after the Great Kantō earthquake, rumors about Korean crimes, such as arson and poisoning the public wells, led to the mass killing of Korean residents, which was carried out by Japanese military, the police, and civilians (Ryang 2007, 3). One way for the uniformed officers to identify Koreans was to see if the individual could pronounce specific Japanese words without a Korean accent. 73 “Our Home is the Earth” includes the scene in which the protagonist and his fellow Okinawans are extremely careful about speaking in dialect in public in case they are mistaken as Koreans. Before Miyagi pursued his career as a professional writer, he worked as a journalist for the Kaizō publishing company, which issued one of the three dominant magazines during the Taishō and early Showa eras, Reorganization (Kaizō). Founded in the 1920s, a time “viewed by Marxist and non-Marxist contemporaries as a potentially fatal ‘deadlock’ (yukizumari) in Japan’s economic development” (Hoston 1984, 48), Reorganization showed a deep concern about Marxist theory in general and labor issues in Japan. The Kaizō company was closely connected to Okinawan intellectuals in Tokyo; the founder, Yamamoto Sanehiko, once taught in Okinawa’s schools, but the company also hired quite a few Okinawans working in various departments (Nakahodo 2014, 22-23). Miyagi’s responsibility in the company was to collect manuscripts from the magazine’s contributors, which include the era’s most prominent novelists, such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Satō Haruo, and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Miyagi’s frequent contact with mainland writers made him realize how the mainland knowledge of Okinawa was prejudiced and “incorrect.” In order to “present a true image of Ryūkyū to mainland intellectuals,” whose “imagination of Ryūkyū was totally different from the actuality of Ryūkyū” (115-116), Miyagi published a number of essays on Okinawa’s nature as well as culture in magazines issued by the Kaizō company. What motivated Miyagi to write about the history, society, as well as traditional arts of Okinawa was the anxiety about the misrecognition of Okinawa and the desire to represent Okinawa properly and correctly to a mainland audience. Miyagi’s rationale for writing and publishing Okinawa-related essays exposes his excessive consciousness of the mainland gaze and how Okinawa is negatively seen through that gaze. 74 Miyagi’s close connection to the literary circle (bundan) in Tokyo not only manifests in the intimate relationship that he established with well-known novelists, but also reflects in two literary works that had to do with Miyagi; one of the works is Hirotsu Kazuo’s Ryūkyūan Drifters (Samayoeru Ryūkyūjin 1926), and the other is Satō Haruo’s Absorbed in Wandering: a poet’s story (Hōrōzanmai: arushijin no hanashi 1933). In Chapter One, I analyze the incident caused by Hirotsu’s depiction of impoverished, deceiving Okinawans; the novella’s main Okinawan character, K, takes advantage of the generosity of the protagonist, a mainland intellectual modelled after Hirotsu himself. The novella’s other Okinawan character, M, “a serious journalist working for the K magazine” who “looked extremely furious about what K has done” (Hirotsu 1994, 49), was modeled after Miyagi. Miyagi recalled in Literature and Myself that, while he did not remember directly introducing Kadekaru, the model for K, to Hirotsu, he did introduce Kadekaru to quite a few thinkers and novelists in Tokyo (Miyagi 1970, 193). In “Our Home is the Earth,” Miyagi based one episode on Hirotsu’s controversial novella as well as the agitation it caused among Okinawan intellectuals and students in Tokyo; the episode, which is excessively charged with the anxiety of (mis)recognition, will be closely examined later. In Satō Haruo’s Absorbed in Wandering, the novella’s protagonist, an Okinawan poet with wanderlust, is modelled after Yamanokuchi Baku, the author of the above-mentioned poem, “A Conversation.” Satō wrote that, “the first time Ono visited my house was because M, a journalist, introduced him as a young man who aspired to be poet. M asked if I could review Ono’s drafts of his poem” (1999, 45). Miyagi’s indirect involvement in the creation of both novellas demonstrates how Miyagi was willing to employ his connections to Tokyo’s intelligentsia to help his fellow countrymen out, no matter whether they were salesmen or poets. 75 Miyagi returned to Okinawa after the Second World War and significantly contributed to the fields of literature and history in postwar Okinawa. Aside from publishing literary works in local newspapers and magazines, he served on the selection committee of the novel section of the literary journal, New Okinawa Literature (Shin Okinawa bungaku), and as the committee of the Okinawan District of Kyushu Okinawa Art Festival (Kyūshū Okinawa geijutsusai). As a member of the Council for Compiling the History of Okinawa Prefecture (Okinawakenshi henshūshingikai), Miyagi has played a key role in recording the war experience of ordinary Okinawans and in including these personal experience into historical compilation; the methodology was influential in that numerous records of war experience were produced in later decades, and it inspired the projects of recording the personal war experience of Okinawans living inside and outside Okinawa (Nakahodo 2014, 235-236). Within the author’s postwar oeuvre, there exists a novel that bears the same title and conveys a similar sentiment to the short story analyzed in this chapter. The postwar novel was serialized in the Okinawa Times (Okinawa taimusu) from 1957 to 1958. In “the author’s words,” Miyagi introduced the novel as an accurate depiction of “the climate, the ethnic sentiment, and the actuality of the U.S. military bases in Okinawa–a place that is currently under the spotlight of the world” (Nakahodo 2014, 175). The author’s words as well as the novel’s title represent Okinawa as a place that profoundly connects to the rest of the world, suggesting an increasing visibility of Okinawa on the international stage. The novel not only portrays Okinawans living in different areas of Okinawa, but also describes the lives of Okinawan migrants in mainland Japan as well as foreign countries. Nakahodo (178) points out that the novel introduces each new Okinawan character by explaining how they are genealogically related to other Okinawan characters in the story. In this manner, every Okinawan is connected to the world because their 76 blood relatives are scattered around the globe. Despite the difference in content, this postwar novel shares with its prewar predecessor the same cosmopolitan sentiment. From Okinawa through Tokyo to Honolulu: the journey of pursuing recognition In the prewar “Our Home is the Earth,” the protagonist travels, if not necessarily migrates, twice. The two journeys, one from Okinawa to Tokyo and the other from Tokyo to Honolulu, are connected through the oceanic scenery on the way and the traveling subject’s purpose of pursuing recognition. This section tracks Nishida’s travel from the nation’s periphery through the nation’s center to a utopianized international space to investigate how Nishida’s longing for respect and recognition has initiated and is manifested in his travels. In my reading of the story, it starts with Nishida’s dream for Tokyo and ends with another dream targeting the international sphere; the latter one, I maintain, is merely a variation of the former in that they both bespeak Nishida’s desire for being recognized as a respectable man of masculinity, adventurous spirit as well as liberal mind. The novella opens with the portrait of Nishida as a highly spirited youth aspiring to become the era’s hero; he finds his models in The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children (1856), a collection of Greek mythologies authored by British novelist Charles Kingsley. Nishida is captivated by “the innocent and courageous youth” (Miyagi 1994, 583) depicted in the book, and he specifically empathizes with Perseus in the latter’s determination to fight for recognition and nobility. The words of Perseus that resonate the most with Nishida–“I would rather die young with honor than naturally decease without ever being known and loved by the world” (583)–manifest a strong desire for recognition. Reading how Greek heroes bravely fight monsters and enemies generates in Nishida the impulse to become the same lovable and respectable hero. Tokyo appears on the scene at this very moment because “to become the hero 77 of our time, the first thing that one must do is to depart for Tokyo” (583). For Nishida, Tokyo is imagined as a trial ground that parallels the mythological landscape in the Greek stories instead of an urban space that offers sensual pleasures. His dream includes but goes far beyond achieving secular success; what he aims for is to be seen and recognized by others for his accomplishments and his capability. Departing for Tokyo is for Nishida a decision that evinces his “male spirit” (otoko-rashii tamashii) (Miyagi 1994, 583). Before he leaves Okinawa, Nishida encourages his students to come to Tokyo and instructs them that “those who possess manly souls are able to make significant progress and gradually advance to higher positions; whereas those who are content with doing menial jobs will find themselves continually moving backwards and finally sinking to the deep bottom” (583). Nishida regards the motivation for advancement as well as the capacity to climb up the social ladder as decisive indicators of one’s masculinity. Nishida’s obsession with the male Greek heroes as well as his glorification of manhood as intrinsically connected to the progressive spirit demonstrate how his dream of adventure and social advancement is heavily gendered. Throughout Nishida’s pursuit of recognition, performing and being recognized as a paragon of manliness is of enormous importance for him. Nishida’s romanticization of his planned journey for Tokyo reaches a peak when he embarks on the ship to Tokyo. He makes several parallels between his travel to Tokyo and Perseus’s adventure to exterminate the Gorgons; the ship Nishida is riding on becomes Perseus’s flying sandals, while the islands of Japan that Nishida passes through are imagined as the Cyclades, the islands of Greece. Nishida’s heart is filled with hope, pleasure, and ambition, just as Perseus, whose heart was high and joyful during the adventure. Nishida’s departure for Tokyo is motivated not only by his desire to achieve success and earn recognition, but also by his 78 confidence in doing so. In this first journey, Nishida is portrayed as an aspirational and self- assured male elite. Nishida’s journey to Honolulu, by contrast, is part of his endeavors to recover his self- assuredness, which is destroyed by the mainland discriminatory discourses and prejudicial representations of Okinawa. Feeling frustrated by how mainland society denies proper recognition to individuals from Okinawa as equal Japanese citizens, Nishida turns his gaze outward to the boundless ocean and the extensive international world in search of consolation and liberation. Right before Nishida’s departure for Honolulu, the novella depicts a scene in which Nishida and his colleagues are invited to their boss’s villa, where the ocean scenery pacifies Nishida’s disturbed inner world. For Nishida, the author writes, “the ocean is a loving mother, a bosom friend…all his childhood memories are associated with ocean…he can feel an infinite love and pleasure even from a swell of the ocean” (Miyagi 1994, 604). As a metonym for mother and home, the ocean offers Nishida the feeling of acceptance and the sense of belongingness, which he fails to obtain from urban space. The ocean not only brings solace to Nishida, but also resuscitates his dream of becoming the hero of the modern era. As though to display his recovered confidence and masculinity, Nishida joins a sumo wrestling match with Haraguchi, one of Nishida’s colleagues who always ridicules Okinawans. To Haraguchi’s provocation, “people do sumo even in Ryūkyū, isn’t that true?” (Miyagi 2014, 605), Nishida responds in an aggressive manner that “I will show you whether people do sumo in Ryūkyū…Before challenging the strongest one, shall I go first with you, the big talker?” (605). If Nishida’s colleagues, who regard Nishida as a humble and modest Okinawan man, feel surprised at Nishida’s assertive words, seeing how Nishida forcefully throws Haraguchi to the ground astounds them to the extent that they are at a loss for words. 79 Beating Haraguchi without any effort makes Nishida “feel that the power to take the first step to self-assurance is springing up in his heart, modestly, temperately, and purely” (606). Through dramatic sumo wrestling, the novella reconstructs a masculine image of Nishida. Moreover, in making Nishida’s sumo match with Haraguchi take place after the former is emotionally healed by the oceanic scenery, the novella suggests the significance of the ocean in helping Nishida to regain his power as a man. Rather than staying in Tokyo to continue his unfulfilled dream of success and recognition, Nishida leaves Tokyo for Honolulu after his impressive performance in the sumo wrestling match. How Nishida’s life in Tokyo will change once he regains his confidence and masculinity therefore remains a mystery. Nishida’s sudden departure for Honolulu is reminiscent of Shimazaki Tōson’s The Broken Commandment (Hakai 1906), in which the protagonist leaves for Texas after confessing to his students his burakumin background (burakumin is a term used to refer to an outcaste group in Japan). The protagonist’s departure for a foreign country at the end of each story suggests their loss of social position within the national territory; both stories are unable to let their protagonists remain in Japan. In this sense, Nishida’s journey to Hawaii acts as a sign of his failure and inability to win social acceptance and recognition within the national boundaries. Yet, the novella depicts Nishida’s departure from Japan in an upbeat manner, as though leaving Tokyo signifies that Nishida actively breaks through the prison structured by prejudice and discrimination and is reborn in the broader world with his original heroic aspiration. Nishida’s life in Honolulu is depicted as brimming with love and hope; words such as “brother” (kyōdai) and “close friends” (shinyū) pop up in the conversation between him and the two welcoming Okinawan migrants, indicating the intimate interpersonal relationships in 80 Honolulu. Following the two migrants, Nishida visits the villa area in Kokokahi, a word that means “brothers” in the language of native Hawaiians; the area is currently under construction and named “international village” (kokusaison). The names of both the town and the villa area construct a romantic image of the international community, in which people of different national and ethnic identities live side-by-side and closely connect to each other as brothers. The inclusive “international village” stands in contrast to the exclusionary society of Tokyo, showing a welcoming posture that refrains from the practice of differentiation and ostracization. Nishida’s experience in Honolulu allows him to confidently claim that the home for Okinawans is the spacious world, a claim that is further strengthened when Nishida adds South America to the picture. The above-mentioned letter from his cousin in Brazil moves Nishida to tears, making him feel that “even Santos and Buenos Aires, where his beloved families and friends are living, are not so far away from him that he can easily get to those places only after a night’s travel on sea” (Miyagi 1994, 608). Realizing that his families and friends have settled down in different places around the world not only shortens Nishida’s psychological distance from these foreign territories, but also drives him to imagine the global space as the alternative home for Okinawans. The far-reaching presence of Okinawan migrants in Hawaii and South America enables Nishida to create a positive image of Okinawans as adventurous explorers and cosmopolitan citizens of the world to resist the mainland representation of Okinawans as timid, spiritless, and provisional barbarians. Through claiming “our home is the earth,” Nishida proposes an alternative lens through which Japanese mainlanders can see and recognize Nishida and his fellow Okinawans as dignified imperial subjects. Furthermore, this positive image of Okinawans with which Nishida is identified makes it possible for Nishida to overcome his inferiority 81 complex toward home and to recover his self-assuredness. At the same time, however, Nishida’s definition of the foreign territories as Okinawans’ home is based on the assumption of the inclusive and welcoming social condition of the migration destination. It is precisely for this reason that the novella has to focus its depiction of Honolulu on its similarity with Okinawa in terms of topography and on the friendly attitudes of local Okinawan migrants toward Nishida. Hawaiians, mainland Japanese migrants, and migrants from other countries are absent from the picture, making it difficult to know the dynamics in intergroup relations, which could significantly impact the everyday lives of Okinawan migrants and should be more complex than what Nishida has experienced in Tokyo. It is only through the simplified description of the local society of Hawaii that the novella can idealize Hawaii as well as other destinations for migration as the home of Okinawan migrants. From Tokyo to Honolulu, Nishida’s aspiration changes from attaining respect and recognition for himself as an individual to demanding the correct representation and proper recognition of Okinawans, of which he is a member. What accounts for this change is Nishida’s traumatic experience in Tokyo, which forces him to realize how his personal image is closely interlocked with the images of Okinawa and his fellow countrymen. As soon as Nishida arrives in Tokyo, his birth origin overshadows other labels, such as gender and social class, becoming the decisive element that influences how he is perceived by the people around him. Exposed to the mainland prejudice toward Okinawa, Nishida, the once aspirational and assertive elite Okinawan, is eventually overwhelmed by his inferiority complex toward home. The Incompatible Self-image and the Image of Home The main body of the story centers on Nishida’s Tokyo life between the two journeys. Contrary to Nishida’s expectation that Tokyo is the stage for him to fully demonstrate his 82 capabilities, his life in Tokyo turns out to be a series of traumatic experience of identity disturbance. On the one hand, working on the editorial staff of the mainland magazine Advancement (Senshin) confirms for Nishida his elite identity in terms of class. This privileged identity opens for Nishida a door to a fascinating world in which “everything that he sees and hears is exceptionally novel and marvelous” (Miyagi 1994, 584). Moreover, by virtue of his frequent contact with the magazine’s main contributors, most of whom are renowned intellectuals and politicians, Nishida naturally becomes part of their exclusive social circle. The splendid Imperial Hotel, the luxurious automobiles, and the millionaires, dignitaries, and celebrities at the party that Nishida attends not only constitute the urban space that offers Nishida sensory pleasures but also produce in him the illusion that he belongs to this modern city. During the initial period of his Tokyo life, the elite Nishida feels complacent about his living condition and “never considered for a moment what he should do to fulfill the dream that he once had” (585). Nishida’s experience of Tokyo is significantly different from Okinawans who are engaging in menial jobs in the city. For example, Kariyama, Nishida’s former classmate selling oil heaters in Tokyo, is depicted as “a bumpkin fresh from the countryside” who is “wearing an alpaca jacket that is dirty and out of season” (585). The gap between Nishida and Kariyama in their material living standards demonstrates how Nishida is privileged in terms of his economic conditions. On the other hand, however, Nishida is stigmatized in terms of origin. One of Nishida’s mainland colleagues, Haraguchi, keeps bringing up Nishida’s “Ryūkyūan identity” with malice and a sense of superiority. In the beginning, Haraguchi’s provocations hardly infuriate or disturb Nishida. Nishida either calmly answers Haraguchi’s provocative questions, such as “is your friend also a Ryūkyūan?” or pretends to not notice the discriminatory undertone of Haraguchi’s 83 words. This is mainly because Nishida perceives Haraguchi’s discrimination toward Okinawans as a sign of Haraguchi’s intellectual and moral defects. However, Nishida continues to be confronted with the mainland perception of Okinawans as the ethnic and cultural Other on various occasions. Even though the president of Advancement assigns Nishida “the task of visiting the contributors on an equal footing with everyone else in the publishing company” (Miyagi 1994, 584), what Nishida experiences when contacting the contributors is different from his mainland colleagues; Okinawa is frequently mentioned by the contributors with curiosity and a tinge of inconspicuous discrimination. One novelist, for example, tells Nishida how his family is amused by his wife’s question “is Nishida a Ryūkyūan savage (Ryūkyū no seiban)?” (600) when she learns that Nishida comes from Okinawa. Realizing that “the wife’s words straightforwardly express people’s real thoughts about we Okinawans” (600), Nishida finds himself no longer able to answer the question “where are you from” without any hesitation and concealment. Nishida’s inability to straightforwardly answer the question about his origin demonstrates how he is anxious about the possibility of being stigmatized by the negative and prejudicial images of his homeland. The fact that Nishida insistently refuses to refer to himself as “Ryūkyūan,” a term with the connotation that suggests the ethnic otherness and cultural backwardness of Okinawans, indicates how he is subconsciously keeping a distance from the undesirable images of Okinawa. Sensing Nishida’s instinctive resistance to the words “Ryūkyū” and “Ryūkyūan,” Haraguchi goads him with an insensitive question: “isn’t it interesting that you don’t like to be called as Ryūkyūan even though you are a Ryūkyūan? I, unlike you, am very proud of being from the people of Satsuma” (Miyagi 1994, 589).6 Nishida pretends not to hear Haraguchi’s question, but 6 Satsuma, the present-day western half of Kagoshima, was a domain of the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo period (1603-1867). The Ryūkyū Islands were invaded by the Satsuma domain in 1609 and had been under its 84 the question itself verbalizes Nishida’s fear of being defined by a set of stereotypical images that the specific signifier “Ryūkyū” brings to mind. The uncivilized and underdeveloped image of Okinawa is incompatible not only with Nishida’s individual identity as a modern, progressive intellectual, but also with his professional identity as an editor of the publishing company, the name of which, Advancement, suggests its aim for societal and ideological progress. From the story’s description of Nishida’s contact with the contributors to the company’s magazines, it is clear that most contributors are representative intellectuals of the era and professionals in various fields. Working in the company, Nishida not only has first-hand experience with intellectual outputs, but also plays an active role in the production and circulation of advanced knowledge and modern ideas. His job, therefore, further intensifies the conflict between his personal image that embodies the sense of newness and modernity and the dominant narrative of Okinawa as antiquated and primitive, resulting in the irreconcilable relationship between this elite Okinawan and his discriminated homeland. Nishida completely loses his composure when confronted by his “Ryūkyūan identity” after the mainland mass media widely reports Okinawa’s economic depression and serializes a manga depicting Okinawan culture. The contemporary economic problems as well as traditional customs that have been practiced by Okinawans for centuries constitute the shameful picture of Okinawa that casts a shadow over Nishida’s self-identity as a polished, respectable social elite. When Haraguchi annoyingly questions Nishida whether Okinawans are still using pig toilets depicted in the serialized manga, Nishida suddenly stumbles in his speech, “falls into a tyrannical subjugation until the “Ryūkyū Disposition” (1872-1879). In the story, Haraguchi is rendered as the most annoying mainland character who always makes fun of Nishida’s origin and treats Nishida in a condescending manner. The story’s characterization of Haraguchi as the people of Satsuma contains historical implication and, more or less, expresses Okinawans’ hatred toward the Satsuma as the invader, a sentiment that was fully conveyed by the famous words of Iha Fūyu, the father of Okinawan studies, that “the Ryūkyū Disposition is like the emancipation of slaves (from the Satsuma subjugation)” (Iha 1998, 168). 85 bottomless desperation as though he was driven into a corner and becomes desperately aware of each part of his body that is burning with shame, while his mind completely goes blank” (Miyagi 1994, 599). Nishida attempts to deny the manga’s representation of Okinawa as nonsense; nevertheless, he is unable to negate the existence of pig toilets in Okinawa and therefore cannot escape from the logic that labels Okinawans as uncivilized barbarians through the discovery of their use of pig toilets. The negative representations of Okinawa in the mass media make Nishida realize that the image of Okinawans as backward Aboriginals has been circulated around Japan through nation-wide newspapers and has taken root in the mind of the mainland audience. The curious, individual gaze toward Okinawa from people around Nishida suddenly proliferates into countless gazes from every corner within the national scope. Nishida’s desperation emerges along with his growing consciousness of these numerous judging gazes, which either seek to discover in him their expected “Okinawan characteristics” or project onto him the primitive and exotic images of Okinawans. From Concealing Origin to Imagining a New Home Severely traumatized by the discriminatory and exclusionary gazes toward Okinawa, Nishida endeavors to forestall the process of being identified as the savage Other by covering his Okinawan origin. Answering “somewhere that is as far as Kyushu” (Miyagi 1994, 600) to the question “where are you from” and avoiding using “Ryūkyū” and “Ryūkyūan” when interacting with people who know Nishida’s origin are techniques that Nishida employs to cut off the link that connects his personal image to the undesirable imagery of Okinawa/Ryūkyū. In the meantime, no matter whether consciously or unconsciously, Nishida is effectively accustoming, if not necessarily assimilating, his body and mind to the Tokyo standard of civilization and sophistication. This practice effectively erases from Nishida the characteristics (e.g., speaking 86 broken standard Japanese) that are labeled as typically Okinawan/Ryūkyūan in discriminatory discourses. The scene, in which Nishida “discovers” three Okinawan women in front of the railway station, vividly shows how he succeeds in passing as an elite Tokyoite. Whereas Nishida easily identifies the women as Okinawans through their awkward make-up and the unusual way they wear kimono, the women misrecognize Nishida as a native of Tokyo before the latter talks to them in Shuri dialect (one of the dialects used in central and southern Okinawa). In the eyes of the women, who “look curiously at Nishida from around his chest to his feet” (593), Nishida appears to be a modern, wealthy, and polished city person, whose “Okinawan-ness” is imperceptible. Nishida kindly offers helps to the women when he knows that they lost their way in Tokyo. The image of the three impoverished Okinawan women following Nishida through the maze-like urban landscape further demonstrates how Nishida, through his elegant appearance and his knowledge about the city, successfully performs the masquerade as a Tokyo-born elite. If Nishida’s decent looks are not necessarily an intentional concealment of his Okinawan identity, his conscious management of his use of Okinawan dialects no doubt signifies a posture of concealing. Even though Nishida speaks with the women in Shuri dialect, they speak either in a low voice or when there is no one around, since “they are afraid of being misrecognized as Korean or Manchurian if their Okinawan tongues are heard by mainlanders” (Miyagi 1994, 594). Nishida even stops talking to the women as soon as they ride on the train, a narrow space that is not “safe” for speaking Okinawans dialects. On the one hand, the fear of being mistaken as Korean or Manchurian manifests the Okinawan characters’ reluctance to be associated with the two ethnic groups, revealing the multi-layered structure of discrimination within the imperial system. On the other hand, the fact that Okinawan dialects can be misheard as foreign languages indicates how certain Okinawan features can appear alien to mainlanders and how Okinawans 87 straddle the boundary between Japanese and non-Japanese. The desire to stay within the category of proper Japanese and to be recognized as such forces Nishida and the Okinawa women into an unnatural silence. Ironically, the women’s endeavor to avoid drawing unnecessary attention instead makes their presence conspicuous. “It is evident to anyone that the women are companions since they sit side by side,” the narrative goes, “however, they never talk to each other from the moment they get on the train; this makes them look stupid” (594). Lacking the knowledge of the urban space and the skill of speaking standard Japanese, the Okinawan women are as though “blind and dumb” (593). In contrast, Nishida’s familiarity with Tokyo and his proficiency in standard Japanese make it relatively easy for him to “conceal or obliterate signs that have come to be stigma symbols” (Goffman 1986, 92) and to pass as an ordinary elite from Tokyo. When Nishida is challenged with negative representations of Okinawa by people who know his Okinawan identity, he criticizes in his mind that these representations are merely misperceptions of Okinawa and denies the existence of Okinawan customs and cultural practices that are labeled as exotic and barbarian. Nishida’s response to the serialized manga, which makes fun of the culture of Okinawa, exemplifies such endeavors. The manga that provides its mainlander readers, such as Haraguchi, with the information of Okinawa’s pig toilets is full of caricatures of Okinawans. Before examining Nishida’s reaction to the manga, it is worthwhile investigating how the manga, which is titled “The Ryūkyū Scroll” (Ryūkyū no maki), represents Okinawans and Okinawan culture.7 The manga’s first frame features an overweight, naked Ryūkyūan woman standing side by side with a skinny, naked Ryūkyūan man, who has his hair tied up strangely. The manga’s author, Iwakō, draws himself and his companions as curious 7 In my analysis of “The Ryūkyū Scroll,” I only use the terms “Ryūkyū” and “Ryūkyūan” when specifically referring to the content of the manga. 88 observers of the Ryūkyūan couple, and he calls the readers’ attention by writing that “Look! The woman is busy with her work, but the man is doing nothing! The locals seemingly believe that a mature woman should be able to free her man from working” (Miyagi 2014, 597). Iwakō portrays the Ryūkyūan couple as barbarians who live in the past, show no signs of modern civilization in their bodies, and adhere to peculiar community norms. The manga’s emphasis on reversed gender roles implies Okinawan society is matriarchal, which easily generates the notion of Okinawa as a primitive society that is culturally exotic and economically underdeveloped. Besides, the contrast between the couple in physical shape as well as body movement in effect feminizes the Ryūkyūan male, whose image is devoid of vitality and masculinity. The manga’s next frame continues featuring the barbarian Ryūkyūan couple, who kneel on the ground in front of Iwakō. The author denotes that kneeling on the ground is something that the natives (dojin) customarily do to show respect to their superiors. Iwakō, while merely being a curious visitor of the village, receives from the couple recognition of his superiority over them. Iwakō directs his eyes downward to the couple, whose position is much lower than their mainland guest in both physical and social meanings. In the frames in which the couple accommodate Iwakō in their house with awamori and Ryūkyūan music, the author deliberately adds several notes to inform his readers of the local Ryūkyūan dialect words for alcohol and the three-stringed instrument. Through accentuating the difference or deviance in language and cultural practices, the manga brings to the foreground the foreignness of Okinawa. The novella’s account of “The Ryūkyū Scroll” showcases how the visual representation of Okinawa recklessly picks out images as well as cultural items devoid of historicity and contextual significance, placing them side by side to constitute a cultural mosaic that ostensibly represents Okinawan culture. The manga specifically obsesses over the linguistic texture of 89 Ryūkyūan dialects and the bodily characteristics of Ryūkyūan men and women, (re)producing “a composite visual stereotype…that stigmatizes another culture as at once corporeally and linguistically intractable” (Chow 2002, 65). At the same time, the manga’s author reassures his audience that this incomprehensible Ryūkyūan culture is not a menace at all, since its bearers— represented by the Ryūkyūan couple—recognize and respect the more civilized ‘us,’ which includes both Iwakō and his companions as well as the manga’s audience who are identified with Iwakō as mainland Japanese. In fact, the incomprehensibility of the work ethic and dialects of the Ryūkyūan locals serves to highlight the supposed lack of logic and reason in Ryūkyūan society. For both Iwakō and the manga’s mainland audience, the inscrutability of Ryūkyūan culture therefore functions conveniently to confirm their identity as civilized mainland Japanese distinct from the irrational Ryūkyūan Other. Nishida’s reaction to the manga, which is intentionally put on his desk by Haraguchi, goes through three stages. At first, Nishida stays calm as he usually does; he believes that “no one would read this bullshit; even those who read it would in no way take it seriously” (Miyagi 1994, 597). Yet, when he realizes that his reaction is being closely observed by Haraguchi as well as other employees, Nishida suddenly loses his composure, fiercely criticizing in his mind the manga’s author and its readers. His criticism targets the public’s inability to distinguish truth from falsehood as well as the artist’s problematic morality in taking pleasure from the misfortunes of others. The criticism demonstrates that Nishida negates the manga’s representation of Okinawa as something that is fabricated and does not correctly reflect the actuality of Okinawa. To Haraguchi’s derision that “Ryūkyū is quite an interesting place, isn’t it?” (598), Nishida responds “evasively, denying that none of these is true” (598). Nishida’s denial of the authenticity of the Okinawa represented in the manga bespeaks his anxiety at being 90 perceived in the same way as the manga’s barbarian Ryūkyūan characters. Nevertheless, Nishida’s attempt to reconstruct his respectable self-image through negating the actual existence of certain Okinawan customs, such as the pig toilets as well as working Okinawan women and idling Okinawan men, is doomed to failure. After all, the problem is not in whether the manga’s representation is false or not since the notion of an “uncivilized” Okinawan culture does not stem from any particular cultural traits that signify the barbarity of Okinawans, but rather from the colonial discourse that deliberately constructs Okinawan culture as uncivilized to justify the colonial subjugation and discrimination of Okinawans. In fact, Nishida is not unaware of the irrationality in the practice that labels the culture of the Other as savage and inferior merely through a few cultural manifestations that are different from the culture of the Self. When Haraguchi confronts Nishida with pointed questions about Okinawa’s customs, Nishida recalls in his mind the day when he witnessed an American couple standing on the bridge, disdainfully watching Japanese boats discharge waste into the sea in front of Ginza. “After familiarizing himself with various customs of foreign countries as well as Japan,” the narrative goes, “Nishida comes to the conclusion that, in the eyes of Americans, boats that are pouring excreta in front of Ginza appear more barbarian than Okinawa’s pig toilets” (Miyagi 1994, 569). At the intense moment when Haraguchi’s questions push Nishida into a corner, Nishida’s recalling of the contemptuous gazes of the American couple brings out the absurdity in Haraguchi’s logic of assuming his superiority over Okinawans. However, Nishida’s magnificent counterattack to Haraguchi remains in the sphere of imagination; in reality, Nishida stumbles over his words, desperately negating the manga’s representations of Okinawan culture while remaining unable to effectively attack the logic that defines Okinawan culture as barbaric. Nishida completely falls into a state of panic as he realizes that his response to the 91 manga is closely observed by his mainland colleagues with undisguised curiosity and excitement. No matter what response these mainlanders are expecting from Nishida, their very act of observing implies a demand for Nishida to react as the Okinawan local, a role that sets him apart from his colleagues in the office while linking him to the Ryūkyūan couple depicted in the manga. In other words, their gazes interpellated Nishida as a member of the same community as the couple, characterized by exotic cultural items and primitive customs. Being cornered into the position of a Ryūkyūan subject, primitive and inferior to the mainland Japanese as demonstrated in the manga, Nishida’s attempt to negate the manga as a false representation, while in vain, becomes a means of salvaging his self-identity as a sophisticated intellectual equal to mainlanders. As the story approaches its end, Nishida’s passive negation of the “uncivilized” image of Okinawa develops into his active claim for positive representations of Okinawa. The conversation between Nishida and Morimoto, Nishida’s former schoolmate in Okinawa, is charged with the desire for proper recognition of Okinawa by means of replacing negative depictions of Okinawa in the mass media with desirable ones. Morimoto visits Nishida immediately after the mainland novelist, Shizuura, published a novella that features Kariyama, who palms off his oil heaters on the Tokyo’s intellectuals he met through Nishida’s introductions. According to Morimoto, Okinawan students studying in Tokyo call for countermeasures to Kariyama’s cheating; their proposals include repatriating Kariyama to Okinawa and calling Nishida to account for his irresponsible recommendation of Kariyama to renowned mainland intellectuals. No matter what the specific measure is, the students’ proposals aim to restore the reputation of Okinawans through concealing or eliminating “the shame of Okinawa,” which in this case is personified by Kariyama. While Nishida disagrees with the 92 students in whether he should have refrained from introducing Kariyama to mainland intellectuals, he agrees that Shizuura’s exaggerated depiction of Kariyama results in the unpleasant misunderstanding of Okinawans among the mainland public. When they discuss the pictorial and literary representations of Okinawa in mainland mass media, Nishida and Morimoto frequently mention the word “recognition” (ninshiki), expressing their concern about the mainland misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and misrecognition of Okinawans. The two Okinawan elites criticize the inability of the mainland Japanese to recognize the true value of things and agree on the importance of correcting the false perception of Okinawans through presenting an authentic and preferable image of Okinawans to the mainland public. The issue of “masculinity” reappears when Nishida and Morimoto find fault with Shizuura’s portrait of weeping Okinawans, who are suffering from Okinawa’s high taxes as well as family separation brought by migrancy. The two decide to request that Shizuura replace the effeminized image of Okinawans with one of masculine Okinawan migrants who bravely travel across the Pacific Ocean. Nishida and Morimoto’s objection to the representation of Okinawans in Shizuura’s work is similar to Nishida’s negation of the above-mentioned manga as falsehood. What is misrepresented is less the miserable living situation in Okinawa than the image of Okinawans as spiritless in nature; what the Okinawan intellectuals seek to refute is less the actuality of certain cultural or social phenomenon in Okinawa than the stereotypical and essentialist definition of Okinawans. Yet, neither Nishida nor Morimoto is capable of overturning the entire system that continues to produce and reproduce prejudiced narratives of Okinawa as the uncivilized Other. What they are able to do is to initiate an internal screening system to determine which parts of Okinawa should be concealed from the mainland gaze and which parts should be played up to correct the mainland misperception of Okinawans. This 93 internal screening system, however, is operated by elite Okinawans with a strong consciousness of the mainland gaze as well as the imperial ideology. If the image of Okinawan migrants sailing across the ocean and settling down around the globe can be presented in a positive light, it is precisely because the image of aspiring international migrants embodies the adventurous spirit valorized by Japanese expansionists. In addition, the impulse, suggested by Nishida’s statement “our home is the earth,” of domesticizing the international destination for migration aligns with the Japanese empire’s agenda from the 1920s, which aimed at the “ideological departure from Western imperialism…by advocating the principle of coexistence and coprosperity” (Lu 2019, 232). It is the expansionist spirit and the idea of internationalism that Nishida manages to incorporate in his re-representation of Okinawan migrants in particular and Okinawans in general. At the same time while Nishida appropriates the expansionist narrative on migration to assert that Okinawans deserve recognition, his words are incorporated into the same narrative to strengthen the imperial structure–the very structure in which Okinawans were degraded and confined in a marginalized position as the inferior and exotic Other. Conclusion “Our Home is the Earth” thematizes the “homeland complex” that has been afflicting its Okinawan protagonist, Nishida, for whom the stigmatized image of Okinawa not only contaminates his self-identity as a well-educated social elite but also becomes an obstacle to his pursuit of honor and social recognition. Nishida’s claim of the earth as Okinawans’ home is part of his endeavor to restore his dignity through concealing, negating, or correcting the stigmatized aspects of his social identity. When projecting “the earth,” the scope of which is unclear in the novella, as Okinawans’ home, Nishida is in effect rendering Okinawans as valiant explorers and worldly-wise cosmopolitans to counterattack the mainland representation of Okinawans as 94 effeminate barbarians with limited outlook. This new image of Okinawans aligns with Nishida’s self-image as a masculine, competent, and progressive subject who deserves recognition he desires. Besides, the novella’s posture of looking outward to the international sphere functions to criticize the narrow-mindedness and egocentrism manifested in the discriminatory gazes toward Okinawa’s different cultural practices. By taking the elevated intellectual and moral position for its protagonist, the story attempts to challenge the unreasonable value system that categories and hierarchizes individuals based on birth origin. On the other hand, however, the idea that the earth is Okinawans’ home is problematic in and of itself. To define the foreign destination for migration as the home for Okinawan migrants is to romanticize the experience of overseas migration. When describing migration merely in positive terms, the novella not only dismisses the gloomy reality that drove the phenomenon of Okinawa’s overseas emigration, but also risks glossing over the real-life struggles of Okinawan migrants in Hawaii and South America, who were in no way free of economic problems or social discrimination. Furthermore, the novella’s glorification of travels across the Pacific Ocean and its admiration for Okinawan settlers in foreign territories have the danger of being appropriated by and assimilated to the expansionist narratives of imperial Japan. Nishida’s praise of the venturesome spirit of Okinawan migrants and his celebration of the practice of overseas migration, while being a necessary path for him to redefine Okinawan identity in a positive light, in effect strengthen and buttress the imperial system that rendered Okinawans as the inferior and stigmatized colonial subjects. 95 Chapter Ⅳ Illusion, Disillusion, and the Evolving Self in Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s “The Cocktail Party” In 1967, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, an established writer in postwar Okinawa, published in the local literary journal, New Okinawa Literature (Shin Okinawa bungaku), a novella titled “The Cocktail Party” (Kakuteru pātī 1967) that won the Akutagawa Prize at the same year. For the first time, Japan’s most prestigious literary prize was awarded to an Okinawan novelist. According to Ōshiro, a senior Okinawan writer excitedly held Ōshiro’s hands at the celebration party, saying that “You fulfilled the dream that we have had since the Meiji period” (1967, 325). The local newspapers reported the award as an epoch-making event throughout the prewar and postwar eras (Motohama 2015, 130). Ryūkyū News (Ryūkyū shinpō), one of the major newspapers in Okinawa, organized a “symposium on paper” (shijō zadankai), which was titled “Okinawa is not a barren land without literature” (Okinawa wa bungakufumōnochi dewanai).1 The symposium’s title was followed by eye-catching headlines that claimed Ōshiro’s award to be a proof of the potentiality of literature from Okinawa and a springboard for Ōshiro himself to open the gateway to the central literary world in Tokyo (Matsushita 2011, 111). Considering the prestige of the Akutagawa Prize as the most coveted award for emerging writers and its authoritative status in literary evaluation, it is not unusual for the intellectuals and mass media in Okinawa to welcome the award with excitement and ecstasy. At the same time, however, it is important to take into account the time’s political context, in which Okinawa’s future return to Japanese sovereignty came under the spotlight. Awarding the prize that was established to promote Japanese literature to an Okinawan novelist signaled the inclusion of Okinawa’s literary 1 In 1966, New Okinawan Literature held a symposium titled “Is Okinawa a barren land without literature?” (Okinawa wa bungakufumōnochi ka), which discussed the past activities, the methodology, and the future of Okinawa literature (Nakahodo 2018, 99). The title of the “symposium on paper” held by Ryūkyū News was apparently a confident response to questions on the quality and potentiality of Okinawan literature. 96 production into the body of Japanese literature, a posture that preceded and envisioned the forthcoming political (re)integration of Okinawa into Japan. In this sense, the award of “The Cocktail Party” and the Okinawan side’s response to the award manifested the political, social, and cultural currents in the 1960s that favored and propelled Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese administration. The prize-winning work, “The Cocktail Party,” is set in postwar Okinawa, presumably around the mid-1960s when the policy for returning Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty has gradually taken shape. The novella is divided into two parts. The first part, titled “Prelude” (Zenshō), takes place at the cocktail party attended by the Okinawan protagonist in the American military housing. In the second part, which is titled “Aftermath” (Kōshō), an American soldier’s rape of the protagonist’s daughter triggers a series of unexpected incidents and discoveries that eventually result in the collapse of the friendship between the protagonist and the story’s main characters. Moving from “Prelude” to “Aftermath,” the novella delineates the process through which the protagonist gradually faces up to the filth hidden beneath the glorious facade of the cocktail party as well as the international affinity performed in the party. The relationship between “Prelude” and “Aftermath” is not merely one defined by temporal sequence. In “Aftermath,” the protagonist’s grasping of history and reality as well as the way in which he locates himself in that history and reality develops into ones that possess certain complexities, which the protagonist in “Prelude” lacks. The protagonist, through discovering secrets from the once familiar world and realizing how limited his knowing of that world can be, in effect evolves from the former Self, who failed to recognize that his knowledge of the reality is partial. In this sense, the movement from “Prelude” to “Aftermath” parallels the development of the protagonist’s ability to recognize the occupation reality and understand his own position and 97 situation within that reality. Along with the process of self-questioning and self-criticism, the protagonist in “Aftermath” awakens from the illusion of being empowered by the hypocritical friendship between him and the American occupiers. At the end of the story, the protagonist determines to prosecute the rapist despite the difficulty in suing American soldiers in Okinawa, giving the novella a tone of resolute resistance. Previous studies on “The Cocktail Party” have discussed how the novella examines the multi-faceted Okinawan identity by making the protagonist contemplate Okinawa’s problematic role as the aggressor during wartime. In his reading of the novella, Kano (1987) demonstrates that the work reflects the long-term intellectual agenda of its author, Ōshiro, who proposed to recover the subjectivity (shutai) of Okinawans by fully investigating and understanding the multiple dimensions of Okinawan identity. When analyzing the unusual change in personal pronoun from the formal “I” (watashi) in “Prelude” to the informal “you” (omae) in “Aftermath,” Kano maintains that this change “functions to denote the shift from subjectively self-identifying as victim to objectively recognizing the image of oneself as aggressor in the eyes of others” (368). According to Kano (368), the significance of “The Cocktail Party” lies in its examination of Okinawa’s ambiguous role in history, its emphasis on the importance of confronting the uncomfortable image of oneself as the aggressor, as well as its calling on Okinawans to overcome the melancholy of self-victimization. However, the novella’s examination of the complicated role that Okinawans play in the contemporary foreign occupation is absent from Kano’s analysis. While Kano (359) notes that attending a party in the base housing requires the protagonist to temporarily cut ties with the Okinawan world and behave as if he belonged to the American world, he does not continue to analyze how straddling two 98 incompatible worlds has influenced the protagonist’s sense of Self and how this self-image bespeaks the protagonist’s ambiguous position within the hierarchical occupation system. In his analysis of the novella, Molasky (1999, 42-43) insightfully points out that the protagonist constructs his victimhood through the raped female body of his daughter, who falls victim to both the American soldier’s sexual violence and her father’s decision to prosecute the soldier in spite of her opposition. As a result, the Okinawan girl is “situated within overlapping spheres of domination that find their common ground in the structures of patriarchy” (43). Molasky pushes forward his analysis by arguing that the identity examined in the novella is a postwar Okinawan male identity and an identity as the social elite. He maintains that the Chinese Study Group, the members of which are the protagonist and his Chinese, mainland Japanese, as well as American friends, functions to certify the protagonist’s membership in “a bourgeois institution with cosmopolitan pretensions,” and that “the protagonist clearly savors the privilege of belonging to this elite group” (41). Indeed, the protagonist takes pleasure in socializing with the group’s members to construct a transregional and transnational brotherhood. Yet, it should be noted that the protagonist’s pleasure comes more from his affinity with Mr. Miller, his American friend, than from his association with the group’s Chinese and mainland Japanese members. After all, the protagonist would be unable to savor the privileges, which include the exclusive access to luxurious food and alcohol in the American military club, if Mr. Miller was not a member of the study group. Built on previous studies, my analysis of the novella defines the Okinawan protagonist as a colonial elite, whose desire for the occupier’s world drives him to participate in the promotion and maintenance of the hypocritical Ryūkyūan-American friendship (Ryūbei shinzen). Colonial elites, according to Fanon, “never insist on the need for confrontation precisely because their aim 99 is not the radical overthrow of the system,” and they “bluntly ask of the colonialist bourgeoisie what to them is essential: ‘Give us more power’” (1991, 22). In the novella’s “Prelude,” the Okinawan protagonist is not unaware of the semi-colonial reality in Okinawa and what it means to be Okinawan under the occupation rule. It is precisely because he is conscious of the disparity between Okinawans and Americans in political and socioeconomic arenas that he is so pleased by his access to the American world and his friendship with Mr. Miller, which, he believes, empower him. Therefore, the protagonist’s illusion in “Prelude” results less from his inability to fully recognize the occupation reality than from his naïve hope that the fraternity between him and Mr. Miller will make some difference to his status as the occupied. Rather than dismissing the novella’s “Prelude” as a stage that the protagonist needs to cross, negate, and forget for self- development and that the narrative needs to depart from to weave the theme of resistance, I want to “linger at” the cocktail party for a while to examine the illusion that the protagonist once had, and the desire manifested by his illusion. I argue that the protagonist’s belief that his intimacy with Americans signifies the occupier’s recognition of him and endows him with power demonstrates a strong desire for the superior status and the absolute power possessed by the American occupiers. Being able to construct a close relationship with Americans creates in the protagonist a deception that, as someone standing close to the occupier, he will not easily fall victim to colonial inequality and violence as his fellow countrymen do. Holding on to this illusion, the protagonist in “Prelude” implicitly consents to and puts into practice the idea of Ryūkyūan-American friendship, which is the conceptual framework that opens up for him the gate to the American world and assures his continuous access to that privileged world. However, the cost for the protagonist to maintain the so-called harmony between Okinawans and Americans is to avoid direct expressions of disagreement with the occupier and, as demonstrated 100 in “Aftermath,” to cover the crimes committed by Americans to Okinawans. The novella juxtaposes the advantages that the idea of international friendship has brought to the protagonist with the idea’s function in downplaying and concealing the violence of American soldiers. In doing so, the novella problematizes the protagonist’s implicit support for the Ryūkyūan- American friendship in “Prelude.” Moreover, in making the protagonist fall victim to the invisible violence embodied by the rhetoric of international harmony, the novella delineates an ambiguous role that the protagonist plays in the U.S domination of Okinawa. Neither an aggressor nor a perfect victim, the protagonist’s problematic position within the occupation system demonstrates how the colonial authority can manipulate its power of control in a more subtle but no less influential manner through eliciting and exploiting the colonial elite’s desire for power. In the following sections, I first analyze the sociopolitical context during the 1960s, which was in general in favor of Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty. I will then examine Ryūkyūs Today (Konnichi no Ryūkyū), a magazine that was issued under the supervision of United States Civil Administration of the Ryūkyū Islands (hereinafter referred to as USCAR), to investigate the cultural strategies deployed by the United States in governing Okinawa from the late 1950s. To draw a clear picture of how Okinawans responded to their forthcoming inclusion into Japan, I analyze the organized and institutionalized reversion movement (fukki undō) in the 1960s and examine alternative opinions among Okinawans that either oppose the immediate return or warn of the danger of being homogenized by the Japanese nation-state. The historical account is followed by the examination of how Ōshiro understands the U.S. occupation reality, the Okinawan side’s political demands for either reversion or autonomy, and what it means to be Okinawan. My analysis of “The Cocktail Party” focuses on the protagonist’s desire 101 for the food, alcohol, as well as the women–specifically, Mr. Miller’s wife–in the American world, and his illusion of being admitted and empowered by the world. I demonstrate how the protagonist’s access to his desired American world and his illusionary brotherhood with Mr. Miller produce in him a deceptive sense of power, which becomes the very motivation for him to participate in the performing and maintaining of Ryūkyūan-American friendship. Through analyzing the protagonist’s alienated relationships with the story’s other Okinawan characters, I further demonstrate how the American occupation brings about social and psychological impacts on Okinawans. The novella’s depiction of the broken bond between Okinawans presents an alternative image of Okinawan community, which was overshadowed by the reversion movement that spoke of the solidarity of Okinawans in their rebellion against the oppressive U.S. domination in the 1960s. In the last section, I delineate the process through which the protagonist makes up his mind to fight the violence of American occupation and expose the hypocrisy of Ryūkyūan-American friendship and, by extension, international friendship. I demonstrate that, in the protagonist’s case, colonial resistance is the stage that he arrives at after adopting historical and universal perspectives to view himself as well as the occupation reality. The protagonist’s determination to prosecute the rapist Robert, I maintain, is to expose the violence of the American occupation, but also to speak out as the occupied, whose voice the occupation authority attempts to suppress. The Complex Occupation Reality and the Intricate U.S.-Okinawa Relationship To understand the social context in which “The Cocktail Party” was written and published, this section provides a historical account of the cultural policies of USCAR and the political currents in Okinawa around the 1960s. While the U.S. military government sped up the militarization of Okinawa from the early 1950s in order to secure its staging area in Asia, the 102 government nevertheless had to modify its policies in governing Okinawa from the late 1950s to pacify the discontent among Okinawans and lower the local demand for reversion (Sakurazawa 2015, 79-80). The 1960s witnessed how the United States was loosening its control over Okinawa and how the Japanese government was getting more authority in managing Okinawa’s socioeconomic affairs. Politically, President Kennedy publicly endorsed Okinawa’s future return to full Japanese sovereignty in 1962, a political agenda that was gradually actualized after Satō Eisaku, then Prime Minister of Japan, visited Okinawa and established the Cabinet Council on Okinawan Issues (Okinawamondai kakuryōkyōgikai) in 1965.2 Economically, the Japanese government initiated and increased its financial aid to Okinawa from the late 1950s through official negotiations with the United States (121). During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Olympic-torch relay took place in Okinawa from September 7 to September 11. On September 11, the flame from Okinawa united in Fukuoka with the part of it that was sent to Kagoshima on September 9.3 The reunion of the two parts of one flame metaphorically united Okinawa with the Japanese mainland, igniting the hope for Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. In addition, the installation of microwave links in Okinawa at the same year made it possible for Okinawans “to experience Tokyo Olympics as a national event” and “to watch the mainland’s television broadcasts in real-time” (107). The communication technology functioned together with the Tokyo Olympics to shorten the psychological distance that Okinawans felt toward the Japanese mainland and cultivate in Okinawans the consciousness of the Japanese national community. 2 Kennedy stated in 1962 that “I recognize the Ryūkyūs to be a part of the Japanese homeland and look forward to the day when the security interests of the free World will permit their restoration to full Japanese sovereignty.” For a full text, see “Statement by the President Upon Signing Order Relating to the Administration of the Ryūkyū Islands” at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 3 Detailed information can be found in the official website of Olympics: https://www.olympic.org/tokyo-1964-torch- relay. 103 As to USCAR’s administration of Okinawa in the 1960s, the magazine Ryūkyūs Today, which was issued from 1957 to 1972, is informative in shedding light on how the U.S. military government resorted to the domain of culture to solidify its domination. On the first page of each issue of the magazine, there is a sentence that reads as “Konnichi-no-Ryūkyū is published to deepen mutual understanding between Ryūkyūans and Americans, and the articles are freely written by Ryūkyūans and others to promote mutual benefits to both Ryūkyūans and Americans” (Ryūkyūs today 1957-72). As Kano (1987, 181) observes, Ryūkyūs Today was devoted to propagating and inculcating in its readers the idea of Ryūkyūan-American friendship, a colonial rhetoric that is the very target of question and criticism in “The Cocktail Party.” Articles published in the magazine can be roughly divided into four types: 1) professional articles written by Okinawan experts in specific fields (e.g. agriculture and public health) to showcase improvements and accomplishments; 2) essays written by Okinawan students or professionals, who either visited or studied abroad in the United States, Taiwan, and other foreign countries through a variety of personnel exchange programs funded by the U.S government; 3) news reports on lively cultural activities and events that were held in Ryūkyūan-American Cultural Centers located around Okinawa; 4) literary or cultural writings, usually written by famous cultural figures (e.g. Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and Kabira Chōshin), that thematized Ryūkyūan language, art, and literature. The first two types either explicitly or implicitly displayed the charity and goodwill of USCAR and the U.S. government, who financially and technologically supported and facilitated the postwar development of Okinawa. As claimed in the magazine’s annual report, the inclusion of the latter two types of writings was to “recover the Okinawans’ consciousness of the unique value of traditional Ryūkyūan culture and make Okinawans proud of the globalization of Ryūkyūan culture” (176). The magazine’s emphasis on the U.S. government’s profound 104 interest in Ryūkyūan culture went hand in hand with its celebration of Ryūkyūan-American friendship; they function to delineate a positive image of the occupation force and to construct a narrative that the American administration of Okinawa is beneficial instead of destructive for Okinawans. In addition, by highlighting the uniqueness of Okinawan culture, the magazine aimed to differentiate Okinawan culture from Japanese culture and foment the sentiment of the so-called “Ryūkyūan nationalism” to lower the local desire for reversion. Although it is true that the U.S. administration of Okinawa brought benefits for Okinawan society, there is no doubt that the magazine magnified the bright side of the U.S. occupation. The absence of articles on conflicts between Okinawans and Americans and crimes committed by American military personnel exposes how the magazine deliberately concealed and dismissed the inequality and violence brought about by the U.S. occupation of Okinawa. Through the establishment of the Council for Okinawa Prefecture Reversion to Japan (Okinawaken sokokufukki kyōgikai) in 1960, the reversion movement carried forward the spirit of the “all-island resistance” (shimagurumi tōsō)4 in the 1950s and gained wide support from the majority of Okinawans. Yet, Okinawans were by no means a monolithic whole that united for Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. Whereas the reformative parties and organizations in Okinawa, such as Okinawa Teacher’s Union, insisted on the necessity of an immediate reversion and a complete withdrawal of U.S. military bases, the conservative parties asserted that it is not yet the time for Okinawa to return and that the development of Okinawa’s economy requires the military bases to remain for a while (Sakurazawa 2015, 131-137). As soon as the “Joint Statement by President Nixon and Prime Minister Eisaku Satō” announced 1972 to be the year for the official 4 The “all-island resistance” is an organized protest against the “Price report” (puraisu kankoku) submitted by the US House Armed Services Committee Military Commission to the House of Representatives. The report ignored the demands of Okinawans for reducing the military use of local land and it supported lump-sum payments for the military expropriation of local land. 105 return of Okinawa’s administrative right to Japan, there emerged in Okinawa alternative voices that questioned whether it would be beneficial for Okinawa to rejoin the Japanese nation-state. Intellectuals, such as the renowned Okinawan poet Arakawa Akira, proposed the “anti-return theory” (hanfukkiron), which transcended the binary between “return theory” (fukkiron) and “independence theory” (dokuritsuron) to question what it means for Okinawans to become Japanese nationals and to warn of the power of nation-state in homogenizing individuals (158). Okinawa-born researchers, such as Taira Kōji and Higa Mikio, asserted that Okinawa should remain politically autonomous from Japan even after the reversion. They claimed the primary identity of Okinawans to be “Ryūkyūan” (Ryūkyūjin) instead of “Japanese” (Nihonjin) and criticized that the agreement between American and Japanese governments on Okinawan issues dismissed the popular will of Okinawans (159-160). The “anti-return theory” and the proposal for political autonomy shared the same concern that Okinawa may completely lose the right of self-governing under the administration of Japan and will end up with assimilating itself to the culture and customs of Japan. Though neither of the two proposals gained the power to change the time’s political trend, they raised the essential problem pertaining to the political and moral independence of Okinawans, a problem that will not automatically disappear through Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. In “The Cocktail Party,” Ōshiro as well explores the issue of autonomy by delineating an Okinawan society that is economically, socially, and psychologically dependent on the American administration. The sexual violence as well as legal inequalities suffered by the novella’s Okinawan characters and the mutually alienated relationships between them exemplify how the lack of autonomy has brought about a profoundly devastating impact on Okinawan society and the mentality of Okinawans. Constructing Subjectivity through Recognizing Complexity 106 For those who are familiar with the life story of Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, it might be tempting to read “The Cocktail Party” as an autobiography since, as the Okinawan protagonist, Ōshiro had been working as an official of The Government of the Ryūkyū Islands (Ryūkyū seifu) during the U.S. occupation era. He went to the Tung Wen College, a Japanese private college in Shanghai, as the prefecture-sponsored student in 1943, and was mobilized in 1944 to serve the information bureau of the Japanese army (Kano 1987, 277). After Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces in August 1945, Ōshiro returned to Okinawa in 1946 and worked as a civil servant in local government until 1986. In the meantime, Ōshiro continued publishing poetry, essays, reportage, drama, and fiction. Winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1967 further established Ōshiro’s status as the leading literary figure in postwar Okinawa. He had been serving on the committee of the New Okinawan Literature Prize (Shin Okinawa bungakushō), the Ryūkyū News Short Story Prize (Ryūkyū shinpō tanpenshōsetsushō), and the Kyushu Arts Festival Literary Prize (Kyūshū geijutsusai bungakushō), all of which greatly contributed to the development of postwar Okinawan literature. A thorough understanding of Okinawa’s historical and cultural specificities as well as its occupation reality are of great significance to Ōshiro. In his memoir, In Search of Light (Kōgen o motomete 1997), Ōshiro discusses the importance in recognizing the complexity of Okinawa’s social reality as well as its relationship with the United States. While criticizing that the U.S. occupation era was a time when “the basic human rights of Okinawans were not recognized and guaranteed by the occupation force,” Ōshiro at the same time notes that “the encounter with American culture by no means merely brought about disadvantages to Okinawans, who in fact learned a lot from this foreign culture” (6). In order to illustrate the intricate relationship between Okinawa and the United States, Ōshiro takes the construction of a self-sufficient economic 107 system in Okinawa as the example, pointed out the irony that Okinawa’s endeavor to reduce its economic dependence on military bases can hardly succeed without financial support from the United States (113). He indicates that, while the uncovering of the mask of international friendship (kokusaishinzen no kamen) in “The Cocktail Party” is to expose the dark side that hides beneath the bright side of American occupation, it is important as well to see through the dark side to recognize the advantages brought by the American administration of Okinawa (201). For Ōshiro, merely recognizing the advantages or the disadvantages of American occupation would result in a partial understanding of the occupation reality, which offers no substantial help for solving Okinawa’s political predicaments. From the latter half of the 1950s, Ōshiro developed an intellectual concern for the recovery of the subjectivity (shutaisei), or agency, of Okinawans. He harshly criticized the nationalistic education in postwar Okinawa to be detrimental to the construction of the subjectivity of Okinawans (Kano 1987, 350-354). For him, to explore the identity and subjectivity of Okinawans in the realm of literature is to create a body of literary writings that springs out from the soil of Okinawa (354). In other words, Ōshiro believes that Okinawa’s literature should absorb its nutrition from the specific nature, history, culture, as well as social actuality in Okinawa, which constitute the very root for Okinawans to construct the sense of Self. From the mid-1960s, realizing how simplified the mainland’s understanding of Okinawa was, Ōshiro began to consciously write about Okinawa as well as its people, not only to show a diversified and vivid image of Okinawa to mainlanders, but also to reconstruct “Okinawan community” (Okinawa kyōdōdai) (379-381, 437). For Ōshiro, the reconstruction of Okinawan community is fundamental for cultivating in Okinawans the spirit of autonomy, helping to “create an Okinawan vision of selfhood and identity that is not merely the fateful Other to 108 mainland Japanese culture, but to locate the Okinawan experience within a larger conception of the Japanese self” (Morton 2009, 8). Written in 1965 and published in 1967, “The Cocktail Party” sketches out the complex relationship between Okinawans and Americans and showcases the impossibility in neatly defining the role that Okinawa has played in history as well as its postwar occupation by the United States. That the Okinawan protagonist is invited to a party held within the area that is inaccessible to Okinawans exposes the contradiction in the American administration of Okinawa. On one hand, the American occupier divides Okinawa into two mutually exclusive compartments, maintaining a dualism between Americans and Okinawans. On the other hand, they emphasize on the importance of mutual understanding and communication, creating a space for Okinawans to stand equally with Americans. Although the occupier’s performing of friendship is hypocritical and serves the consolidation of its domination, the fact that the Okinawan protagonist delightfully attends the cocktail party, which is held in a place that symbolizes the inequality between Americans and Okinawans, demonstrates how the seemingly contradictory occupation policy can work through the tacit support from the desiring occupied population. In depicting the protagonist’s desire for the American world and his active performance of the Ryūkyūan-American friendship, the novella’s “Prelude” demonstrates how the U.S. occupation operates its control over Okinawan society through manipulating the mentality of the occupied. Interestingly, the novella’s Okinawan characters, including the protagonist, are nameless. The lack of a specific name has the effect of suggesting the interchangeability between Okinawan characters. This interchangeability, I maintain, is not to deny the heterogeneity of Okinawan community and the individuality of Okinawans, but to indicate that, despite the 109 difference in gender, age, and class, as well as the way in which they are related to Americans, these Okinawan characters are not so different from each other in that, with their everyday lives highly relying on and subject to the U.S. occupation, they are deprived of the right to autonomy. In the process of awakening from the hypocritical celebration of international harmony, the protagonist realizes that the cost of obtaining power through the attachment to the occupier is the loss of independence and agency. The protagonist’s disillusionment and his break from the deceptive idea of Ryūkyūan-American friendship therefore signify a promising departure from colonial dependence to the pursuit of autonomy and subjectivity. The Illusionary Equality and Fragile Power “The Cocktail Party” starts with the scene in which the Okinawan protagonist is on his way to the cocktail party held in the base housing. It is Mr. Miller, one member of the Chinese Study Group, who invites the group’s other members– the Okinawan protagonist, the Chinese lawyer Mr. Sun, and the mainland Japanese journalist Mr. Ogawa–to the party. The study group, the protagonist describes, “is what held together our special friendship” in “this place where almost everyone is either Japanese or American” (Ōshiro 1989, 35).5 The group, which functions effectively to highlight the commonality between its members (the ability and interest in Chinese language) while downplaying their difference (ethnicities and political positions), enables the four males to construct a homosocial relationship with each other. Yet, as the protagonist confesses, what is most appealing to him is less the cosmopolitan friendship than the access to privileges that are in principle exclusive to Americans. Since the study group holds their monthly meetings in the U.S. military club, the Okinawan protagonist is able to enter the club, which is off limits to Okinawans, and enjoy the club’s food, which is unaffordable for most Okinawans. This open access to the wealthy American world produces the pleasure that is further “enhanced 5 All quotations are from the Rabson translation unless otherwise noted. 110 by the feeling that I’d been chosen to enjoy these privileges” (35). Here, the term “chosen” (erabareta) suggests an unbalanced power relation, in which Americans play the choosing subjects whereas Okinawans are the chosen objects. The protagonist unconsciously recognizes the primacy of Americans as active subjects, who possess the authority of differentiating and categorizing Okinawans. Even though the protagonist does not explicitly differentiate himself from his fellow countrymen, the term “chosen” automatically draws a line between him and the unchosen Okinawans. In addition, to confidently walk within the base housing requires the protagonist to psychologically distance himself from other Okinawans and construct an illusionary image of Self, who is on an equal footing with the American occupiers. In a word, the protagonist’s friendship with Mr. Miller and his admission to the American world create the deceptive feeling that his association with the occupier elevates his position within the occupation system. While the protagonist defines his relationship with his American friend in terms of equality and affinity, he is not unaware of the hierarchy between Okinawans and the U.S military personnel. On his way to Mr. Miller’s house, the protagonist cannot help but recall his traumatic experience of losing his way inside the base housing and his wife’s words that even Okinawans with permission to enter the area might be captured as suspects. Having to give up his interest in wandering around the town from then on, the protagonist laments that “before the war, people could travel easily to any remote corner of Okinawa, but those times have long passed” (Ōshiro 1989, 34). The protagonist clearly knows how the U.S. occupation has changed Okinawa’s natural and social landscapes and keenly observes that Americans have much more freedom than Okinawans in walking around the latter’s homeland. Recalling the fearfulness and anxiety that he once had when he “illegally” entered the base housing, the protagonist wonders: 111 Perhaps the guards, because they carried rifles, were not afraid. There were occasional newspaper reports of foreign children throwing stones or shooting BB guns at the windows of local buses. Surely those children weren’t afraid walking the streets unarmed among the Okinawans. Or were they? And what about Robert Harris, the soldier who rented our rear apartment to share with his girlfriend? Though he stayed only two or three days a week, I wondered if he ever felt apprehensive in a town inhabited entirely by Okinawans (Ōshiro 1989, 34) Whether these mentioned Okinawans and Americans would feel the same uneasiness when they are in the territory populated or controlled by each other is beyond my discussion here. What is worthy of note is that, whereas Okinawans need permission for their legal access to territories controlled by Americans and have to be extremely cautious in case of being mistaken as criminals, Americans have a free access to and behave in a more self-assured manner in areas populated by Okinawans. It is precisely because the protagonist is fully aware of how deprivileged Okinawans are and how restricted their activities are in their homeland that he is flattered by Mr. Miller’s invitation to the party. Immersing into the ecstasy and self-satisfaction of being endowed with privileges that cannot be easily savored by Okinawans, the protagonist unconsciously draws an invisible boundary between him and his fellow countrymen, while at the same time actively identifying himself with Mr. Miller, the American who satisfies the protagonist’s desire for the American world. In “Prelude,” the protagonist expresses several times his feeling of being empowered by his connection to Mr. Miller. His account of the unpleasant experience he had ten years ago is evoked by his current visit to Mr. Miller’s house and functions to highlight how confident and comfortable he feels in the present. “But today, I felt good,” the protagonist says assuredly and proudly, “After all, I’d been invited to Mr. Miller’s party” (Ōshiro 1989, 34). The protagonist is now free from the anxiety that he once had, since he has in hand Mr. Miller’s name, house number, and phone number, which no doubt would help him to avoid any trouble that an 112 Okinawan may encounter in the housing area. This feeling of security extends to the latter half of “Prelude,” when the protagonist participates in the search for Mr. Morgan’s son: As I walked through the family brigade, the vague anxiety I’d felt losing my way here ten years before came back to me…I had no reason to panic as I had a decade ago. I knew the number of Mr. Miller’s house and would not be likely to lose my way this time. Walking along with Mr. Sun, I felt somewhat reassured, as if I were carrying papers that would identify me to anyone who might stop us (Ōshiro 1989, 45-46) In the eyes of the protagonist, Mr. Miller’s house is no longer a simple landmark that guides the direction but becomes a talisman that protects the protagonist from suspicion and a certification that proves his legitimacy in the American territory. The protagonist in “Prelude” has not yet realized that what seems to empower him in effect denies his existence as an independent subject. When he and Mr. Sun go from house to house searching for Mr. Morgan’s son, they introduce themselves as “Mr. Morgan’s friends” instead of using their own names. Indeed, for the protagonist, this is the most effective way to avoid unnecessary trouble and suspicion. However, as long as the friendship with Mr. Miller and Mr. Morgan is the prerequisite for him to freely enter and walk inside the base housing, the protagonist’s existence within the space can only be recognized through his affiliation with Americans, while his selfhood becomes unimportant and meaningless. This temporary loss of selfhood, I maintain, partly accounts for the namelessness of the Okinawan protagonist, who does not need a proper name to be identified in the base housing, where his connection to Mr. Miller is the only meaningful and functional “identification card.” The protagonist’s illusion of being empowered by his fraternity with Mr. Miller even lasts to the initial moments after he gets to know the rape incident in “Aftermath.” When the local policeman lists several difficulties in prosecuting U.S. military personnel in Okinawa and tries to persuade the protagonist against filing the suit, the protagonist is astonished by how unfair and disadvantageous the position of Okinawans is in the legal system. Yet, the vivid 113 memory of the harmonious party in Mr. Miller’s house comes back to the protagonist, immediately recovering his confidence and pride as someone who will not fall victim to the unreasonable legal system: …all at once you recalled the happiness you’d felt just a few days before, hurrying to the cocktail party after the guard had waved you through the security gate. And now the family brigade’s neatly paved streets…seemed to offer you a way out of that despair. The memory of walking to the party revived you. “I will arrange it,” you said again. “The witness will appear in court without fail.” (Ōshiro 1989, 54) What comes to the protagonist’s mind is not merely the joyfulness that he experienced on the way to the cocktail party, but the intimate relationship that he builds with Mr. Miller, who offers him the ticket to the American world and should be able to help him out of the current predicament. It is ironic that the protagonist chooses to rely on an American who works for the U.S. military government to avoid being victimized by the unfair legal system, a system that is effectuated and maintained by the occupation authority. The irony echoes the example that Ōshiro gives in demonstrating how USCAR can be a stubborn obstacle to and a necessary support for the constructing of a self-sufficient economy in Okinawa. The occupier’s dominant power, while being what forces the occupied into an impotent and inferior position, is at the same time what the occupied resorts to when encountering problems that cannot be solved without power. In “The Cocktail Party,” it is not Mr. Sun, a lawyer, but Mr. Miller, to whom the Okinawan protagonist first turns to for help. To the protagonist, Mr. Miller is by no means merely a friend, but one who possesses the power that Okinawans and the local government are deprived of and that non-American professionals lack. This power, the protagonist believes, can be transmitted to him through his friendship with Mr. Miller and helps him to transcend the unbalanced power relations between Okinawans and Americans. At this point of time, what 114 mostly concerns the protagonist is not the sociopolitical hierarchy in Okinawa, but his own position within the hierarchical occupation system. In addition to material pleasures, the sensual body of Mr. Miller’s wife is what the Okinawan protagonist desires as the embodiment of the glorious American world. Whenever Mrs. Miller appears in the story, regardless of whether she speaks or not, the protagonist only cares about and fixes his eyes on her “voluptuous figure” (horei na nikutai) (Ōshiro 1989, 35, 41). In placing the body of an American woman under the erotic gaze of an Okinawan man, Ōshiro constructs Mrs. Miller’s foreign body as that which not only evokes the protagonist’s heterosexual desire, but also embodies the luxury and glamour of the American world. The protagonist’s erotic gaze toward Mrs. Miller is therefore not so different from “the gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector,” which is “a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession: of sitting at the colonist’s table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife” (Fanon 1991, 5). Both the Okinawan protagonist’s sexual attraction to Mrs. Miller and his lust for the expensive alcohol and food that are out of the reach of Okinawans are manifestations of his unarticulated desire for entering and possessing the occupier’s world, a world that is materially plentiful and socially privileged. Excited by Mrs. Miller’s curvaceous body, the protagonist cannot help but begin to imagine whether the Okinawan males in Mrs. Miller’s English class would feel the same way as he does: I suddenly found myself imagining Mrs. Miller taking a moment while she taught English conversation to ask some of her adult students about their children. And I began to wonder if some of the men in her class felt guilty, excited by her voluptuous figure (Ōshiro 1989, 50) In ending the novella’s first part with the protagonist’s erotic imagination that objectifies and eroticizes the body of the American woman, Ōshiro portrays the cocktail party as a space that offers the protagonist sensuous pleasures, which are symbols of power and prosperity. 115 The protagonist’s contemplation of whether the Okinawan males would have the sense of guilt (tsumi no ishiki) when being excited by Mrs. Miller’s body should be read against his later imagination of a crime scene, in which he assaulted Mrs. Miller. The imaginary crime scene comes to the protagonist’s mind after Mr. Miller refuses to help the protagonist in persuading Robert to appear in court under the pretext that the prosecution will harm the Ryūkyūan- American friendship. Mr. Miller’s logic that the rape should be kept within the private realm instead of being taken as a conflict between Okinawans and Americans awakens the protagonist from the deceptive harmony of the party, which was held in the same house just several days ago. When Mrs. Miller expresses her concern for the protagonist’s daughter, the humiliated and furious protagonist can only think of the following clause from Code of Penal Law and Procedure: Any person who rapes, or assaults with intent to rape, any female United States Forces personnel may be punished by death or such other punishment as the US Civil Administration court may order (Ōshiro 1989, 57) 6 Staring at Mrs. Miller’s plump face, the protagonist cannot help but imagine what Mr. Miller’s reaction would be and how the Ryūkyūan-American friendship might be affected if he raped Mrs. Miller. This imaginary revenge denotes how the protagonist’s desire toward Mrs. Miller as well as the American world that she embodies is turning from one of possession to one of destruction. For the protagonist in “Aftermath,” the irony is that the idea of Ryūkyūan-American friendship, which once enabled his access to the American world and promised him an equal relationship with Americans, becomes the very excuse for Mr. Miller to persuade the protagonist from prosecuting Robert and to cover the crimes committed by American soldiers. The invisible violence of the rhetoric of international harmony and friendship functions to prevent the visible violence from being exposed to the eyes of the public, and therefore demands the Okinawan 6 Code of Penal Law and Procedure (Keihō narabini soshōtetsuzuki hōten) is the penal code constituted by USCAR in 1955 and enacted in postwar Okinawa before its reversion to Japanese sovereignty. 116 individual to keep silent about their victimhood. The loss of the right to speak out makes the protagonist in “Aftermath” realize the superficiality of the power that he obtains through befriending Americans. If the protagonist’s prosecution of Robert is a gesture to fight physical and sexual violence committed by American soldiers, his determination to tear off the hypocritical mask of Ryūkyūan-American friendship indicates his recognition of and resistance to a more unnoticeable type of violence that is carried out in the name of international harmony and fraternity. The Alienated Compatriots and the Estranged Home The American occupation of Okinawa not only brought about hierarchical power relations between Americans and Okinawans, but has affected the interpersonal relationships between Okinawans, whose everyday life is forcibly intruded upon by the almost omnipresent American occupiers. In “The Cocktail Party,” every Okinawan character is connected to the occupation force in certain ways. In addition, their contact and interaction with each other are mediated through the presence and the action of the American occupiers. In this section, I divide the story’s Okinawan characters into three groups according to their relationships with the protagonist and their social status. I demonstrate that the mutually alienated relationships between Okinawan characters bespeak how Okinawans are overwhelmed by the hierarchy between them and Americans. Looking closely into the image of the unsympathetic Okinawans, one would discover the forceful and forbidding figure of the American occupier, whose dominating and threatening power casts a shadow over the daily interactions between Okinawans. The first group of Okinawan characters–the Okinawan guard and housemaids–are those who work within the military base housing. For them, the U.S. military force is what provides 117 the necessary financial source for living. Both the guard and housemaids are quite aware of how precarious the presence of Okinawans can be within the military territory. Nevertheless, they remain indifferent to the protagonist when the latter walks inside the base housing. When the protagonist asks, “Is it really all right for me to go in like this?” (Ōshiro 1989, 33), the guard responds “Yes, you won’t have any trouble” (33) with no expression on his face (muhyōjō) and is not surprised at all by being asked such question. The guard, who “seemed inured to the monotony of his routine” (33), apparently has no interest in either the protagonist’s traumatic experience ten years ago or his current attendance at Mr. Miller’s cocktail party. The guard’s disinterest in the protagonist’s presence and emotions manifests what Okamoto describes as “the breakdown of Okinawa’s communal sensibility” (89). The relationship between the two Okinawan characters is defined by a lack of empathy and communal bonds. Moreover, working in the base housing, the guard’s responsibility is to protect the American residents from suspicious Okinawans. By featuring this Okinawan character, whose job in effect maintains the compartmentalized structure of Okinawan society and therefore reinforces the American hegemony in Okinawa, the novella suggests how the everyday lives of Okinawans are entangled with the U.S. occupation and how ambiguous the role of Okinawans is in the operating of the American domination of Okinawa. As for the Okinawan housemaids, who the protagonist encountered when he was lost in the housing area ten years ago, they are not so different from the guard in that they wear the same blank expression (muhyōjō) on their faces. From the perspective of the anxious protagonist, the “placid, self-possessed air” (ochitsukikata) (Ōshiro 1989, 34) of the housemaid to whom he asked for directions “gave the impression she was someone who belonged here and made me feel a vast distance between us” (34). To the protagonist, this encounter with his fellow Okinawans in 118 the American community is embarrassing and disturbing. The maid’s expressionless face shows no signs of sympathy toward the protagonist’s predicament, and her calmness forms in sharp contrast with the protagonist’s restlessness, creating a distance between her and the “suspicious” protagonist. In his analysis of this unpleasant encounter, Molasky (1999, 41) notes the different social status of the Okinawan protagonist and the housemaid, maintaining that the protagonist, who is a government official, must feel humiliated at being rescued by a housemaid, who belongs to the lower social class. It can be said that, in front of the protagonist, whose presence in the area is illegitimate, the housemaid is performing her legitimacy by behaving in a self- assured manner and showing her familiarity with the area. The protagonist’s lack of both the legitimacy and the knowledge possessed by the housemaid should be a humiliation to him as the social elite. Yet, I want to further point out that, if asking a housemaid for help would harm the protagonist’s self-esteem, it is more because the protagonist realizes the existence of a much more dominant force, which not only possesses the very authority to decide the legitimacy of Okinawans in entering an area that is constructed on the land of Okinawa, but also can temporarily reverse the power relations between Okinawans of different social classes. It is this dominant force that intervenes between the protagonist and the housemaid, separating and alienating them from each other though they both are Okinawans and they both belong to the community of the occupied. When portraying the Okinawan guard and housemaids, Ōshiro repetitively uses the word “expressionless” to suggest the numbness and impassiveness of these characters as if they have lost the spirit and energy for living. They show no interest in what might happen to the protagonist in the base housing, and even deliberately distance themselves from him when he enters the area without permission. In contrast with these Okinawans’ indifference to their fellow 119 countrymen, the American residents are closely connected to each other. The reason why these American residents can sympathize with Mr. Morgan and are willing to offer help in the searching of his missing son, the protagonist explains, is because “living isolated like this in a foreign country probably brings them together (unmeikyōdōtai), especially when there’s trouble” (Ōshiro 1989, 47). The attachment between the American residents forms a contrast to the detachment that the protagonist feels between himself and the Okinawan housemaid, who, instead of actively offering helps or showing sympathy for the protagonist, consciously creates a distance between herself and the protagonist to avoid being involved in the potential danger the protagonist may encounter. While the lost American boy arouses concern from the party’s American guests and the American residents, who are able to openly search for the boy in the base housing, the situation of the once lost Okinawan protagonist is completely different. The precarious status of Okinawans inside and outside the housing area results in their inability to sympathize with each other and their choice to remain docile and silent. Being different from the occupier, who has the absolute control and authority in the land of Okinawa, the occupied, who is struggling to obtain for themselves a relatively secured position within the occupation system, lost both the power and the hope to help. I want to further point out that the protagonist’s understanding of why the American residents can empathize with each other exposes a temporary amnesia of the unbalanced power relations between Okinawans and Americans. In describing Americans as uniting with and supporting each other in order to survive in a foreign country, the protagonist portrays Americans more as immigrants than as occupiers. The protagonist dismisses the fact that the country that is foreign to Americans is currently under their control and administration, and that the community formed by Americans, though being built on the land of Okinawa, is much more 120 foreign and threatening to Okinawans but not vice versa. In rendering Americans as outsiders who are clinging to each other to make lives in the foreign land, the protagonist imagines himself as the host, who behaves comfortably and self-assuredly at his home, while Americans are the guests. For the moment, the protagonist forgets his precarious existence within the base housing and the very authority possessed by the American “guests” in deciding his legitimacy in his homeland. It is not surprising that Mr. Sun, the Chinese immigrant in Okinawa, responds with silence to the protagonist’s words that neutralize the dominant power of Americans. As will be discussed later, the relationship between Mr. Sun and his fellow Chinese in Mr. Sun’s story of finding his lost son during the wartime is defined by a mutual distrust and alienation. Located in the upper echelon of Okinawan society, the American residents are willing to help their compatriots out since they possess the ability to do so, whereas the very existence of Mr. Sun and his fellow countrymen were extremely precarious even in their home country. The point is therefore not where a group of people is living, but how they are related to other groups in society in terms of power. The second group of Okinawan characters in question are policemen, who are, like the protagonist, government officials working under the supervision of the U.S. occupation force. The protagonist’s encounter with the policeman is in “Aftermath,” when he visits the local police office to ask about procedures in prosecuting Robert. As the Okinawan policeman explains the difficulty in successfully prosecuting U.S. military personnel and the lack of rights the Okinawan government has in summoning military personnel to court, what comes to the protagonist’s mind is the gaze directed on him by those expressionless Okinawan housemaids when he was aimlessly wandering trying to find his way out of the base housing. The protagonist wonders: As you walked in frustration along winding streets that seemed to lead nowhere, Okinawan maids and gardeners, your fellow countrymen, had cast furtive looks at 121 you. What sentiments had been radiated in those glances–suspicion, scorn, resentment, compassion, or disguised indifference? Surely the feelings of the officer who sat before you now were different from any of these, but he shared one thing with the others. They all seemed to cry out in silent despair “there’s no way we can help you” (Ōshiro 1989, 54) The gaze upon the protagonist is anything but a sympathetic gaze that demonstrates the will for help and the spirit of solidarity. It is a gaze directed by the powerless, which speaks of the fear of the powerful occupier, the attempt to disassociate from the troublemaker, and the loathing of the troublemaker and even themselves, who can do nothing but act as apathetic bystanders. The various emotions that the protagonist observes from the gazes directed upon him suggest the way the protagonist views himself. The desperation concealed beneath the “suspicion, scorn, resentment, compassion, or disguised indifference” (54) denotes the protagonist’s consciousness of his status as the powerless colonial subject, a consciousness that never disappears from the protagonist’s mind even as he immerses himself in the illusion of empowerment. The story’s third group of Okinawan characters are the protagonist’s daughter and Robert’s Okinawan girlfriend, who is living on the protagonist’s property. As the owner of the house and the father of the family, the protagonist nevertheless finds himself losing control of things that occur to and between the house’s residents. To begin with, the protagonist’s knowledge of his daughter is apparently limited, and he only has third-person knowledge of her whereabouts or actions. It is not the girl herself but the protagonist’s wife who tells the protagonist about the rape incident. To the protagonist’s decision to prosecute Robert, the girl responses with strong opposition while she remains silent when the protagonist asks why she refuses to sue Robert. Only when the CID agent comes to arrest the girl under Robert’s accusation, does the protagonist learn that she pushed Robert off the cliff after being raped. Whereas Molasky (1999, 42-43) argues that the protagonist’s posture of speaking for the girl in the story as her father and in the narrative as the narrator indicates how the patriarchal system 122 marginalizes and silences female characters, I suggest reading the girl’s silence as her refusal to communicate with her father. As she remains impenetrable to her father, her silence in fact becomes what indicates the protagonist’s loss of his patriarchal power within the domestic space. The fact that the rapist is Robert, the American soldier who rents the protagonist’s house and befriends the protagonist’s family, further drives the protagonist to realize how limited his control and knowledge of his familiar world are. The protagonist cannot believe that the rape really happens because “it was difficult to connect the vaguely sinister image of alien soldiers with the foreigners you know personally as friends” (Ōshiro 1989, 51). His decision to prosecute Robert, as he himself confesses, is partly to retrieve his control over the world around him. What further baffles the protagonist is that Robert’s unexpected attack of the protagonist’s daughter results in the collapse of the friendship between the protagonist’s family and Robert’s Okinawan girlfriend, who moves out of the protagonist’s house as soon as she is informed of the incident. The protagonist cannot help but feel “how remote this girl’s world was from your own” (51). The psychological distance between the protagonist and the girl contrasts with their physical closeness, that is, living in the same house, suggesting the existence of the unknown and the unfamiliar in the domestic space that the protagonist once believed to be under his control. Robert’s rape of the protagonist’s daughter as well as incidents triggered by the rape completely destroy the protagonist’s confidence in his ability to differentiate truth from falsehoods. When the protagonist’s daughter, who stays overnight in her friend’s apartment instead of directly coming back to home after being released by the CID, emotionlessly explains that she feels suffocated by her parents’ pathetic eyes (aware na manazashi) and wants to escape, the protagonist finds himself unable to accept her explanation: For a moment you suspected she was not telling the real reason she decided to stay out overnight. But you soon realized that, if she wanted to make up a story, 123 she would hardly have said she dreaded the pitying looks of her parents and spent the night in Koza. And now it annoyed you to have harbored the same twinge of mistrust (shinjigatai) toward your daughter that you had felt toward Mr. Miller and Mr. Sun (Ōshiro 1989, 70) What the protagonist discovers in Mr. Miller and Mr. Sun is their concealed secrets and their very act of concealing, which force the protagonist to realize that the Chinese Language Study Group is by no means a utopian space that is free from political conflicts and historical animosity, and that the chasm and antagonism between the group’s members has always existed behind the masquerade of intimacy and equality. The protagonist’s “mistrust” targets less a specific person than his ability to differentiate what is true and the possibility for him to know the truth. The protagonist’s emerging distrust of his daughter as well as his ability to know his daughter further estrange him from his once familiar world and even the version of himself, who felt self-assured and empowered on the night of the cocktail party. The protagonist’s self-doubt and self-negation, however, does not last long. As discussed in the following section, through viewing himself through the eyes of Mr. Sun, and realizing how he is deeply connected to his fellow Okinawans, the protagonist continues discovering new images of himself, which in turn broaden and complexify his understanding of the occupation reality. The Evolving Self-image and the Developing Knowledge of Reality While the first Sino-Japanese characters in the titles of the story’s two sections, which are respectively zen (before) and go (after), suggest a temporal sequence between the two parts, what differentiates the two sections is less the incidents or secrets described in “Aftermath” than the protagonist’s discovery of them. The protagonist’s continuous discovery of things that he failed to know or acknowledge before is crucial for his journey to disillusionment and his reconstruction of self-identity. Questions then arise as to what exactly the protagonist should discover to awaken from his illusion and how these findings function in driving the protagonist 124 to tear down the mask of international friendship. There is no doubt that Robert’s rape of the protagonist’s daughter and Mr. Miller’s refusal to help act as the turning point from which the protagonist gradually realizes the hypocrisy in the occupation authority’s promotion of Ryūkyūan-American friendship, which is no less violent than the process of militarization of Okinawa. However, the story does not end with the protagonist’s realization of the invisible violence of the rhetoric of international friendship, but continues with two more episodes, which are respectively the protagonist’s discovery of Mr. Sun’s personal war trauma and Mr. Morgan’s decision to prosecute his Okinawan maid for kidnapping his son. What connects the two incidents to Robert’s rape of the protagonist’s daughter is that they demonstrate how the unbalanced power relations between the ruler and the ruled bring about social inequalities and violence and how the celebration of international friendship deliberately ignores historical scars and contemporary colonial violence. In this section, I examine how these two incidents, which do not directly involve the protagonist, drive the protagonist to redefine who he is by viewing himself from the eyes of the historical Other and reconnecting himself to Okinawan community. The story of Mr. Sun, the Chinese lawyer working in Okinawa for the U.S. military force, has its own “Prelude” and “Aftermath.” When he is with the protagonist searching for Mr. Morgan’s missing son, he tells the first part, in which his son once went lost in the wartime China and was finally found under the “protection” of the Japanese military police. The friendly, sympathetic image of compatriots, who are willing to offer help to their fellow countrymen, was absent from Mr. Sun’s story. The anxiety that there might be spies among the town’s residents resulted in a mutual suspicion between Mr. Sun and the Chinese he encountered on his way. There is no way for Mr. Sun to do what Mr. Morgan does when searching for his son even though it was his home country. It appears on the surface that Mr. Sun’s recall of this experience 125 is driven by his empathy toward Mr. Morgan as a father who once experienced the same anxiety. Yet, considering Mr. Sun’s lament of how cruel it was to see compatriots suspecting each other as the country was suffering from foreign invasion, it reads more as an ironic response to the protagonist’s comment on the frankness and warmheartedness of the housing’s American residents. Despite the gloomy atmosphere of Mr. Sun’s story, its first part ends with a seemingly satisfactory ending, that is, the discovery of his son’s whereabouts, just as the “Prelude” of “The Cocktail Party” ends with the resumption of the harmonious party after Mr. Morgan’s son is found at the home of his Okinawan maid. It is very likely that Mr. Sun would never disclose to the protagonist the second part of his story if Mr. Ogawa, the mainland Japanese journalist, did not suppose that Mr. Sun should be able to empathize with the protagonist through their common sufferings from the invasion of foreign military force. Mr. Ogawa’s light-hearted attitude in evoking the history of Japanese invasion of China apparently provokes Mr. Sun, who suddenly pushes the protagonist and Mr. Ogawa into a corner with the second part of his story, in which he came back home with his son only to find out that his wife was raped by Japanese soldiers when he was away. While Mr. Sun attempts to use his own experience to persuade the protagonist to give up the prosecution, the protagonist feels more astonished by Mr. Sun’s suppressed hatred toward Japan, from which Okinawa and Okinawans are not exonerated. Being confronted by Mr. Sun’s aggressive questioning of the role that the protagonist and Mr. Ogawa had played in the Japanese invasion of China, the protagonist recalls how the Chinese he encountered in a Chinese village behaved in an extremely obedient manner in front of him. From the fearful gaze of the Chinese villagers in his memory as well as the furious eyes of Mr. Sun, the protagonist unexpectedly sees the image of himself as the aggressor. Moreover, the protagonist realizes that Mr. Sun never forgot but is 126 merely concealing his traumatic war memory and his hostility toward Japan in order to survive the war and to live in the land of Okinawa as a Chinese. The celebration of international harmony (kokusai shinzen) requires Mr. Sun to forget the unforgettable and to forgive the unforgivable. He has to de-historize himself first to attend the international “cocktail party.” To the protagonist, the discovery of Mr. Sun’s secret does more than shows him how he has played the role of aggressor in history and how deluded his friendship with Mr. Sun is. Realizing how the seemingly appealing idea of international harmony has silenced Mr. Sun (and the protagonist as well) as well as the history he went through, the protagonist can no longer avert his eyes from the violence exerted by the rhetoric of international friendship and the problematic role he himself has played in perpetuating that violence. The significance of Mr. Sun’s wartime story is that its first part forms a contrast with Mr. Morgan’s searching for his lost son, and its second part reads as the counterpart of Robert’s rape of the protagonist’s daughter. The parallel between the two incidents of lost boys, which occurred in different times and places, is that both fathers eventually found their sons at the place of the foreign Other. The power relation between the father figure and the foreign Other in Mr. Sun’s story, however, is completely opposite to the one in Mr. Morgan’s case. Mr. Sun mentions how grateful he felt when he was able to take back his son after a thorough interrogation by the Japanese police, even though he questions whether his boy was really under the police’s guardianship. Like Mr. Sun, Mr. Morgan cannot decide whether his Okinawan housemaid intended to kidnap his son, but he is able to do what Mr. Sun was unable, that is to immediately sue the foreign other on suspicion of kidnapping. That Mr. Morgan easily and successfully sent the “suspicious” housemaid to CID for interrogation contrasts with the difficulty the protagonist has in summoning Robert to court as well as the impossibility for Mr. Sun to do anything to the 127 Japanese military police, who claimed to be protecting his son, and the Japanese soldiers, who raped his wife. The juxtaposition of these incidents, some of which occurred in wartime China while others in postwar Okinawa, indicates that, in spite of temporal and spatial differences, colonial domination and military occupation produce social and legal inequalities that can never be eliminated, but are concealed and even perpetuated by the celebration of international friendship. For the protagonist, knowing what happened to Mr. Sun and is happening to the Okinawan housemaid reshapes the way in which he identifies himself. When Mr. Ogawa, the mainland Japanese character, mentions a literary account of atrocious Japanese soldiers in China during the wartime, the protagonist recalls in his mind how Okinawan civilians suffered from similar atrocities committed by the mainland Japanese army. The protagonist’s empathy toward Mr. Sun and Chinese civilians, however, is doomed to receive no response. Realizing that Okinawans cannot be differentiated from mainland Japanese in Mr. Sun’s mind as invaders of China, the protagonist finds in himself a duality, the discovery of which is necessary for a more sophisticated understanding of who he is. If Mr. Sun’s secret propels the protagonist to recognize through a historical perspective the seemingly contradictory images of himself, Mr. Morgan’s decision to sue the housemaid has the effect of connecting the protagonist to his once alienated fellow Okinawans through their suffering from legal inequalities of the discriminative occupation system. Adding these two incidents into the story, the novella frames the American soldier’s rape of the Okinawan girl as less an individual misfortune than a manifestation of systematic violations of human rights that are by no means specific to postwar Okinawa. In making the protagonist determine to prosecute Robert after he developed the ability to transcend spatiotemporal scales to understand the current rape incident, the novella delineates colonial 128 resistance as a process that is accompanied by the resisting subject’s evolving knowledge of Self and colonial reality. Conclusion In putting into play the interactions and conflicts between its main characters, “The Cocktail Party” offers a stage on which the Okinawan protagonist is confronted with the complicated historical and political relationships between Okinawa and China, mainland Japan, as well as America. In the process of negotiating with Mr. Miller and discovering Mr. Sun’s secrets, the protagonist develops new perspectives to view his position in the historical as well as contemporary transnational/transregional contacts that are characterized by the unbalanced power relations between the contacting subjects. This disparity in power determines the international friendship between the four characters as one that builds on the deliberate amnesia and concealment of conflicts and violence, the victim of which is more than often the powerless side. In “Prelude,” the Okinawan protagonist has not yet realized the illusionary nature of his equality and brotherhood with his American friends and participates in the celebrating and maintaining of the hypocritical fraternity. It is only after his American friend, Mr. Miller, demands his silence about the violence committed by the American side, does the protagonist realize how his intimacy with the occupier functions less to empower him than to create the illusion of empowerment. As analyzed above, the protagonist in “Prelude” is not unaware of the inequality and violence brought about by the U.S. domination of Okinawa. Nevertheless, it is in the “Aftermath” that he develops a more sophisticated understanding of the occupation reality through his discovery of violence sugarcoated by the deceptive slogan of Ryūkyūan-American friendship. As the protagonist continuously discovers disturbing secrets and the very act of 129 concealing of people with whom he constructs close relationships, he gradually develops the ability to draw a new picture of himself and the reality, which is less partial than before. From subconsciously deciding to sue Robert, hesitantly giving up the prosecution, to determinedly continuing the lawsuit, the protagonist no longer understands the rape as a personal misfortune, but as a manifestation of colonial violence that transcends temporal and spatial specificities. In historicizing and universalizing the American soldier’s rape of the Okinawan girl, “The Cocktail Party” portrays the protagonist’s prosecution of Robert as a symbol of his resistance that targets less a specific American soldier than the mechanism of violence that operates through silencing the powerless. 130 Chapter Ⅴ A Story of Displacement: Precarious Okinawans in Arasaki Kyōtarō’s “The Village of Sago Palms” In 1976, four years after Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty, “New Okinawan Literature Prize” (Shin Okinawa bungakushō), a literary prize established by the local newspaper, The Okinawa Times, announced “The Village of Sago Palms” (Sotetsu no mura) to be the year’s prize-winning work. In “Comments on the Selected Works,” Shimao Toshio, Japanese novelist then serving on the prize committee, wrote that he was impressed by “the vibe of the trilingual life” (isshu no sanjyūgengōseikatsu no kanjyō) that is reflected in and nurtures Okinawa’s literary creation (Shimao 1976, 148). By “trilingual life,” Shimao means the ways of living and being undergirded and shaped by different languages, cultures, social orders, and sets of values, which collide while coexisting in the land of Okinawa as a result of the islands’ historical experience of the Ryūkyū Kingdom era, the Japanese era, and the U.S. occupation era. The way in which Shimao perceives the trilingual Okinawan society is positive; he expressed his jealousy toward novelists who “settle in the land of Okinawa,” where there “exists a widely open world” that “frees their eyes” (148). Yet, the award-winning work, chosen for the author’s outstanding “sketching skills” (dessanryoku) in depicting the immediate postwar life of Okinawans, provides a counternarrative to Shimao’s celebration of the liberating function of the trilingual circumstances in Okinawa. In the novella, postwar Okinawan society, where different temporal spaces intersect, and the violent historical process, which resulted in the intersection, are precisely what have brought about the experience of displacement to Okinawan individuals. Authored by Arasaki Kyōtarō, “The Village of Sago Palms” depicts the everyday lives in an impoverished Okinawan village from the perspective of an Okinawan adolescent, whose 131 family was repatriated from the Japanese mainland to the village after the end of war. The story’s other main characters–the boy’s grandmother, his father, and a village woman catering to American soldiers–are primarily portrayed through the eyes of the Okinawan boy. Each of the three characters possesses distinctive characteristics that render them representative figures of the Ryūkyū Kingdom era, the prewar era when Okinawa’s assimilation to mainland Japan accelerated, and the U.S. occupation era, respectively. The specific sociopolitical conditions and cultural values of each historical era have imprinted marks on the body as well as the mind of the Okinawan subject, who is struggling in their own ways to live through postwar scarcity and confusion. Despite their different reflections in the eyes of the boy, the novella builds a connection between the three characters through their common lack of the place of belonging in either the village or the contemporary era, or both. This lack, while being differently experienced by the three Okinawans, is itself a manifestation of how colonial violence has exerted its impact on the perception and the experience of the subjugated in terms of time, community, and themselves. As realistic representation of postwar Okinawa on the surface, the novella, I argue, delineates the unsettling experience of Okinawan individuals, who are living in the colonial space and are exposed to bodily as well as spiritual violence brought about by colonialism. If Okinawa’s postwar novellas are “melancholy observations of oneself who hardly copes with reality” (Ōshiro 1993, 11), “The Village of Sago Palms,” I maintain, situates the postwar occupation within the turbulent modern history of Okinawa, in which the Okinawan subject has been forced to modify their bodies and minds to adapt to and live through the new reality created by the domineering colonizer. I further maintain that the immediate postwar setting of the story corresponds to the post- reversion reality in which the novella was written. The political, economic as well as 132 psychological confusion experienced by Okinawans after Okinawa was “returned” to Japan by the United States in 1972 revived the memory of the chaotic society after Okinawa was surrendered by Japan to the United States in 1945. Just as the end of war did not bring peace and stability to Okinawan society, the end of the U.S. occupation in Okinawa failed to free Okinawa from military exploitation. As the boy’s father laments in the story that Okinawans have been undergoing the same sufferings throughout the premodern and modern eras, the history of deprivation is repeating itself in Okinawa despite the ever-changing political circumstances in the islands over the past century. In this sense, the novella questions the newness of the era that was marked as anew by virtue of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. If the transfer of sovereignty failed to realize the demilitarization of Okinawa and its political equality with mainland Japan, will the post-reversion era become a mere repetition of modern history, which moves forward in disregard of the will of Okinawans? My analysis starts from the historical account of the immediate postwar era to elucidate the sociopolitical context of the story. Before turning to the text of “The Village of Sago Palms,” I examine previous research on the narratives of panpan–Japanese prostitutes catering to American soldiers during the U.S. occupation era–to shed light on the image of the panpan in the novella and the boy’s multilayered desire for her. I divide my analysis of the story into three sections, each of which is devoted to a close reading of a character: the boy’s grandmother, his father, and the panpan respectively. Through analyzing how each character is reflected in the eyes of the boy and how they respond to the new sociopolitical conditions, I examine how they suffer to varying extents the lack of sense of belonging and what brings about their experience of displacement. I demonstrate that images of the amnesic old woman, the helpless elite intellectual, and the discriminated prostitute differ while overlapping with each other in that they together 133 bespeak how Okinawans are deprived of the control over their own destiny. Rather than providing a realistic narrative of postwar Okinawa, the novella, in portraying the three displaced Okinawans who are characteristic of different historical eras, demonstrates how Okinawan individuals have been experiencing alienation in terms of temporality and community throughout the modern Okinawan history. Live in Ruins and Chaos: the early postwar period in Okinawa To better understand the historical background of the story, this section examines the social context of Okinawa from 1945 to the early 1950s. The Battle of Okinawa, which started at the end of March 1945 and officially ended when the delegation of Japanese forces in the Ryūkyū Islands surrendered on September 7,1 was one of the bloodiest battles of the Asia-Pacific War and the only land battle that occurred in Japan’s domestic territories during World War II. It severely destroyed the landscape of the main islands and killed almost one quarter of the population of Okinawa. Death caused by war-related reasons continued to occur even after the end of the war. Among war survivors, there were people who died from war injuries, emaciation, malaria, and sago palm poisoning, as well as those who eventually committed suicide due to mental afflictions (Medoruma 2005, 60-61). The U.S. troops’ landing on the main island of Okinawa in April 1945 announced the beginning of the postwar U.S. occupation of Okinawa; the U.S. military set up disparate camps for Okinawan civilians and war prisoners as soon as they landed, distributing free food and clothes to the former, who were mobilized to construct or renovate military facilities for the U.S. military (Kabira 2011, 38). The camps’ civilians, inflicted by the war and shocked at the loss of war, were suffering from severe malnutrition, and were 1 It is commonly regarded that the Battle of Okinawa ended in practical terms when Ushijima Mitsuru, the Lieutenant General leading the Imperial Japanese 32nd Army on Okinawa, committed ritual suicide on June 23, 1945. The Government of the Ryūkyū Islands made June 23 as “Okinawa Memorial Day” (irei no hi) in 1961. Yet, as Sakurazawa (2015, 5) points out, the end date of the war can vary from individual to individual, for whom the day when they were put in prison camps marked the end of the Battle of Okinawa. 134 described as being “in a state of absentmindedness and lethargy” (75). In the meantime, there were those who felt liberated by the life in camps, which is “free from the anxiety and fatigue they have experienced when evacuating into the mountains” and enables an equal relationship between individuals, who “were wearing the same clothes and shoes, living in the same thatched- roof lodges, and receiving the same ration of food” (76). To most Okinawan civilians, the “postwar era” (sengo) started from the day when they were brought to the camps, where they encountered for the first time the incredible wealth of Americans, a wealth that manifests in the abundant supplies of food, and which signifies the dominant power possessed by the U.S. as the occupier. While Okinawan civilians were allowed to return home from the camps as early as October 1945, many discovered that their community was either destroyed during the war or appropriated by the U.S. occupation force as territories for constructing military facilities, and therefore had to relocate themselves to areas either near the original community or near the camps (Sakurazawa 2015, 9).2 The U.S. military government enacted in 1946 a policy of constructing “standardized houses” (kikakuya) on the main island of Okinawa to alleviate the housing shortage. The standardized houses were freely allocated to Okinawans, but not every Okinawan had the chance to move into such houses and continued living in tents until the 1950s (Kabira 2011, 164-165). As regards to food, the U.S. occupation force had been distributing food and clothes to Okinawans for free until it lifted the prohibition on currency exchange in Okinawan islands on March 25, 1946 (53). On the other hand, the free allocation of food was not sufficient at all. Okinawans not only searched for food from mountains and beaches, but also learned how to simply process the food waste, which was poured into the ocean from military 2 In October 1946, one year after the returning project started, there were more than one hundred and fifty thousand of Okinawans unable to return to their prewar residence (Kabira 2011, 63). 135 vessels, to remake them into edible things (54). The forced requisition of arable lands for military use further aggravated the shortage of food and made it difficult for Okinawans to make a living on agriculture. Military-related jobs, especially working as truck drivers, had become popular among Okinawans as early as 1946; working for the U.S. military was attractive to the extent that even schoolteachers would quit their jobs for profitable military-related jobs (56-57). It is less the salary than the great chance of obtaining living materials that had been attracting Okinawan residents to work for the U.S. military. Aside from the shortage of houses and living materials, Okinawans lost the freedom of travelling across their homeland in the first two years after the war–the daytime traffic between residential areas was not permitted in the main island of Okinawa until March 1947 (Sakurazawa 2015, 10). Under such circumstances, military drivers benefited from the relatively free movement. At the time, there were Okinawans who sneaked living materials from military territories and were called “the master thief of military achievements” (senkua’agiya) (Okinawa Times 1998, 60). Military drivers were able to pilfer a considerable amount of essential as well as luxurious material from military territories, which could be sold via the smuggling routes to Hongkong, Taiwan, as well as mainland Japan (67, 88). Since the U.S military took over the Okinawa islands and managed Okinawans basic daily necessities, American goods penetrated and pervaded Okinawa’s socioeconomic arenas. As such, the U.S. military constituted a crucial and integral part of the everyday lives of Okinawans in the early postwar period. Starting in July 1946, hundreds of thousands of Okinawans, who either worked as migrant workers in the mainland before the war or were evacuated to the mainland during the war, were repatriated to Okinawa under the forceful command of Douglas MacArthur, General of the U.S. Army. MacArthur insisted that Okinawan migrants, impoverished and heavily reliant 136 on Japanese, would become an obstacle to the postwar reconstruction of mainland Japan and requested Chester William Nimitz, who was Chief of Naval Operations then and supervised the Office of Military Government, to repatriate these Okinawans as early as possible (Kabira 2011, 138). While Nimitz refused the request under the reason that Okinawa ran short of food and housing, the repatriation project started as soon as the U.S. army took over administration of Okinawa. From the very beginning of the U.S. occupation era, Okinawa and Okinawans were excluded from the political democratization and the economic reconstruction in mainland Japan. In a document dated May 29, 1948, the Office of Military Government explained the difference between Okinawa and mainland Japan in terms of the U.S. occupation policy, demonstrating that “as long as the Ryūkyū islands are under the domination of the U.S. military government, it would be impossible to establish in the islands a permanent democratic government and a full democracy” (Nakano and Arasaki 1976, 17). What was worse, the military government did not have a clear policy of administrating Okinawa in the early stage of occupation; while the U.S. Armed Forces “insisted on securing Okinawa as a military base for Anti-Soviet strategy and as the staging area in Asia,” the U.S. Department of State hesitated in militarizing Okinawa and separating it from Japan (16). The lack of a long-term, consistent occupation policy resulted in the slow progress in Okinawa’s postwar political reforms as well as economic recoveries (Sakurazawa 2015, 9). In 1949, when the establishment of People’s Republic of China opened up the front of the Cold War in Asia, the United States decided to retain Okinawa as its foothold for containing communism and sped up the militarization of Okinawa. While the U.S. military bases have caused numerous incidents and threatened the security and the well-being of Okinawans, they were at the same time deeply involved in every aspect of Okinawan society to the extent that 137 “Okinawans can barely live without relying on the bases” (Okinawa Times 1998, 298). At least in the early postwar period, the U.S. occupation force brought in materials and opportunities for Okinawans to live through the postwar chaos, even though it was one of the main causes of this chaotic situation. Among those who employed their connections with the bases and American soldiers to find a way out of the postwar shortage of living resources, were the panpan, prostitutes catering to American soldiers, maintaining the most intimate but problematic relationship with the American occupiers. Military Prostitution and Its Narratives in Postwar Japan Panpan is a derogative word for Japanese prostitutes who catered to American soldiers during the U.S. occupation era. The women who became panpan, while being discriminated and excluded from Japanese society, are “probably the first new breed of human that symbolizes the postwar era” (Molasky 2015, 2). Having received living materials as well as luxurious goods from their American customers, panpan not only played a crucial role in the circulation of American goods among Japanese citizens. By “dressing in flashy clothes, humming American pop music, and imitating slangs and gestures that were prevalent among American soldiers” (Molasky 255), panpan in effect contributed to the spread of American popular culture among Japanese society. At the same time, however, panpan and the foreign soldiers “connected in the gray area between dating and prostitution in bars and public spaces” (Sanders 2012, 408), posing a threat not only to public morality but also to the sexual authority of Japanese men. Panpan’s eye-catching appearance, bold behaviors, and their intimate relationship with American soldiers made them a sensational topic for documentary and literary writings even before the U.S. occupation ended in mainland Japan. While the censorship policy of SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) prohibited any depictions of the “fraternization” 138 between American soldiers and Japanese women, writers strategically used code language, such as referring to a woman’s appearance that is appealing and different from most Japanese women at the time, to characterize panpan in their works (Molasky 2015, 11). In their respective research on panpan, Chazono (2014) and Molasky (2015) demonstrate how panpan’s existence challenged the patriarchal system and values in Japan by embracing the male occupiers and refusing to be contained by domesticity. Vulnerable but threatening, panpan was a target of legislative as well as narrative violence. The former manifests in the so-called “panpan hunting” (panpan-gari) during the occupation era, in which Japanese police caught streetwalkers and forcibly brought the women to hospitals to do VD tests. As to narrative violence, Chazono (17) points out that most narratives produced in and immediately after the U.S. occupation era either criticize panpan in terms of morality or treat them as a commodity for erotic consumption, or, at best, as an object of salvation; nevertheless, none of the narratives represents panpan as an object of aspiration. In his analysis of Mizuno Hiroshi’s The Chastity of Japan (Nihon no teisō 1953) and Gotō Tsutomu’s The Chastity of Japan, A Sequel (Zoku nihon no teisō 1953), Molasky (261- 262) criticizes that, by replacing the female body with the national body as the subject that is bereaved of chastity, the two works project as the victim not merely the women who were actually raped but all Japanese citizens including men. What can be seen from Chazono and Molasky’s research is that panpan are more than often portrayed in literary and non-literary writings as morally corrupted women, pitiable women to be saved, or uncomfortable reminders of the foreign occupation of Japan. In either the material world or the world of writing, panpan are denied social equality, subjectivity, and human dignity. The image of the panpan girl in “The Village of Sago Palms” is classic: she wears bright- colored clothes, has her fingernails painted red, and possesses luxurious materials, such as gum, 139 toys, as well as fountain pens. She rides in the military jeep with her American customers, passing through the village road as the villagers “stop working and watch her in silence” (Arasaki 1990, 63). The panpan does not have a name, neither is she given voice to in the story. Readers see her through the eyes of the Okinawan boy, who always looks at her from a distance. The novella details how most villagers, especially the women, despise but envy the panpan, how the boy is fascinated with her beauty, and how the boy’s father sympathizes with her predicament. By contrast, the panpan’s reaction to the villagers’ mixed reception of her is absent from the narrative. She is depicted as an object that captures the attention of the villagers, arousing in them admiration, abomination, sympathy, and desire. When analyzing the imagery of panpan in literary works, Molasky (2015, 263) observes that those authored by male writers more than often depict panpan from the perspective of the male narrator and that panpan are at best assigned a supporting role in these stories. “The Village of Sago Palms” is not an exception to this narrative pattern–it is from the perspective of an adolescent Okinawan boy that the novella delineates the image of the panpan. Moreover, rather than allowing the panpan to tell her own story, the novella makes the boy’s father, a conscientious intellectual, speak for the panpan that she has no choice but to become a sexual worker due to her family situation. While the images of the boy’s grandmother and his father are portrayed through the eyes of the boy for the most part, they are represented as conscious beings with emotions, thoughts, and desires. By contrast, the novella’s depiction of the panpan focuses on her sensual body, which functions to symbolize the material abundance and social privileges of her American customers. As such, while the novella constructs a more complex image of panpan as women who are not merely exposed to contemptuous, pitiful, or erotic gazes but also 140 attracting gazes of admiration, it nevertheless reproduces the narrative violence that objectifies panpan and denies them recognition. The Anachronistic Woman and the Otherized Past “The Village of Sago Palms” is set in a seashore village located in the north of Okinawa. A plant that contains toxic substance, the sago palm is the primary source of food for the villagers. Naming the village after the indigenous plant that has been used as emergency food in Okinawa for decades, the novella’s title frames the postwar famine as another episode of Okinawa’s history of food shortage. The repatriation of the family of the Okinawan boy to the village two years prior dates the story to the initial stage of the U.S. occupation of Okinawa. The village, which is the hometown of the boy’s mother, “is quiet at most times as though it was dying” (Arasaki 1990, 60). The villagers are living in either shacks (anaya) or tents since the war destroyed most of the buildings in the village and left intact only two houses. Through the gaze of the boy, who is searching for food across the village, a miserable image of starving villagers in dire need for food is vividly presented–not only that there is no fruit left on the mulberry trees, but also that even fish in the sea are extremely tiny and cannot satisfy the boy’s empty stomach. The whole village is enveloped in bottomless darkness, not only because of the insufficient illumination at night, but because of the endless sufferings from hunger and disease. The village’s adults have to work in the fields or search for food in the mountains even though they are infected with malaria; the children, while always gathering in the beach at daytime, are too starved to accumulate enough physical strength for swimming. The villagers are devoid of vitality, losing the passion for life and the expectation for the future. At most times, they are merely moving their bodies under the desire for food and the instinct for survival. The village’s dreadful living conditions bring into question the coming of a new era implied by the term 141 “postwar.” Having survived the war, the villagers nevertheless find themselves experiencing the threat of death on a daily basis, just as they did during wartime. The boy’s family is special in the village. They lived in Shuri, a district in Naha that was once the center of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, before the war, and are “outsiders” (yosomono) in the eyes of the villagers (Arasaki 1990, 61). Yet, the family is given preferential treatment precisely because Shuri is venerated by the villagers as “the Fatherland” (uyaguni) (61). The boy’s grandmother, once a lady of the high rank “warrior class” (shizoku) in Okinawa,3 loses her memory of the war and occupation. She cannot understand why the family stays in such a remote, impoverished village, and dreams of going back to her home in Shuri, where her servants would take good care of her. Even though it is extremely difficult to find proper food at the time, the grandmother remains picky about food quality, and is specially treated in the family as though she was still a lady of the noble class. When the boy’s father promises her that the third son of the family, who is doing “military jobs” (gunsagyō) in the U.S. military bases, will soon arrange a truck for them to move back to Shuri, the old woman merely repeats the words “military jobs,” written in katakana, with confusion. The fact that the word “military jobs,” a signifier emerged from the occupation reality, is too foreign for the grandmother to understand further indicates the discrepancy between the grandmother’s internal world and the external world. The old woman’s amnesia tears her in half in terms of temporality–while she is physically living in the present, her mind is stuck in the past. In the eyes of the boy, his grandmother appears as “an enigmatic being who belongs to another world” (Arasaki 1990, 58). She has gruesome tattoos (hajichi, or irezumi in standard 3 The “warrior class” (shizoku) in prewar Okinawa was constituted by the original aristocratic class of the Ryūkyū Kingdom. The novella does not explicitly indicate the family lineage of the protagonist’s grandmother; however, since she is from Shuri, the central district of the kingdom, her family must have possessed relatively high and privileged social status in prewar Okinawa. 142 Japanese)4 on the back of her hands, and she calls the boy and his father by pet names (warabinā),5 the meanings of which are beyond the boy’s comprehension. The boy’s parents call the grandmother “ayāmē,” a word used in high rank noble families to address one’s mother during the Ryūkyū Kingdom era. Lacking the knowledge of the historical context of the word, the boy misunderstands “ayāmē” as his grandmother’s name and willfully assigns in his mind an insulting Sino-Japanese character to the syllable “mē.” The boy feels most confused and dissatisfied when the old woman seems to have no qualms about enjoying her special treatment in the family. The boy’s inability to appreciate the cultural significance encoded in tattoos and pet names, which were symbols of femininity and nobility respectively, indicates how the cultural practice and customs of the Ryūkyū Kingdom have been marginalized to the extent that, for the boy’s generation, they belong to another temporospatial dimension. To this anachronistic and insane woman, the boy refuses to pay respect and to communicate with her. Yet, the boy’s disaffection toward his grandmother is outweighed by his instinctive fear of her. Both her oddly glittering eyes as well as the grotesque tattoos on her hands terrify the boy to the extent that he “cannot even think about disobeying his grandmother” (Arasaki 1990, 58). Whenever stared at by her eyes and caught by her hands, the boy cannot help but feel that “his body becomes stiff as though she cast a spell on him” (57). For the boy, if his grandmother’s tattoos are material signs that represent the remote past when people of the Okinawan islands were following “eccentric” customs, her glittering eyes are what threaten to bring him with her into that exotic space and time. Curiously, the boy projects his fear of his grandmother onto 4 Hajichi is a tattooing practice that was specifically performed on women in the Ryūkyū Islands. The process can last very long, from days to years, and it brings unbearable pain. The reason why women got hajichi varies; some regard hajichi as a symbol of feminineness, while some believe that, if they did not get hajichi, they may be taken away by Yamato or unable to be reborn as human beings in the next life. The Meiji government regarded the tattooing practice as barbarian and officially banned it in 1899. 5 Warabinā literarily means “childhood name.” During the Ryūkyū Kingdom era, a person’s family members and friends used the name to refer to that person to show intimacy and affection, even though the person is no longer a child. 143 habu, a type of venomous snake that is indigenous to the Ryūkyū islands, when he encounters the snake for the first time in the village. While the snake does not physically attack the boy and merely stares at him from a distance, the boy “is overwhelmed by a strange feeling that he is about to be swallowed up by its eyes and disappear from this world” (66). Moreover, “its eyes look exactly the same as those of his grandmother, whom the boy is mostly scared of” (66). After the snake attack, the boy remains reactionless to the outside world even after the villagers killed the snake and made it into soup. Under the instruction of the village women, who believe that the boy has lost his soul at the very site where he encounters the snake, the boy’s mother performs mabuigumi6 to retrieve the soul and put it back into the body of her son. Unable to move his body while being aware of what is happening around him, the boy is literally spellbound by the snake, a magic that he has long been afraid his grandmother would perform on him. Through the frightened eyes of the boy, the image of the snake overlaps with that of the grandmother. An integral part of Okinawa’s natural ecosystem and an important component of Okinawa’s food culture, the habu snake has existed on the islands since ancient times. The fact that the boy only heard of the snake while never seeing one before demonstrates an urban-rural difference in natural environment. If the boy’s unfamiliarity with the snake is a result of spatial difference, what distances the boy from the grandmother, who represents the sociocultural orders that had been observed in the past, is their temporal inconsistency. The snake was absent from the boy’s physical world, while the grandmother’s bodily markers and her cultural habits unwelcomingly intrude into the boy’s conceptual world. Both the snake and the grandmother are imagined to be possessing the magic that takes control of the boy’s body and separates his soul 6 In the folk belief of Okinawa, the soul of human beings is essential in maintaining one’s physical and mental health. The soul may drop outside the physical body when the human subject is extremely terrified or shocked by certain objects or incidents. It is believed that people who lose their soul will suffer from illness or mental disorder. It is therefore necessary for yuta (Okinawan shaman) or the person’s female relatives to practice the ritual, mabuigumi, to put back the soul into the body. 144 from his body. The boy’s paranoia emerges from his uncomfortable encounter with things that are unfamiliar and exotic to him, even though the snake as well as the grandmother are beings that coexist with him in the land of Okinawa. The boy’s fear of losing his control over his body manifests an anxiety caused by being confronted with the existence that is incomprehensible or uncontainable by his existing knowledge, and which interrupts the process of forming a consistent view of world and of constructing a stable image of Self within that world. The strangeness in the image of the grandmother drives the boy to dis-identify from her, an attempt made visible by his endeavor to hide himself from her gaze. At the same time, however, the boy’s imagination of being absorbed into the grandmother’s eyes, a body part that I read as the doorway to her spiritual world, betrays his curiosity and unconscious desire for the otherness embodied by the grandmother. The boy’s desire to know and to approach his grandmother gradually converts to his willingness to bear the responsibility of taking care of her when the old woman falls ill. In the latter half of the story, the boy goes beyond the bodily markers and customs that he finds odd to discover his grandmother’s nature as tenderhearted (yasashii). He even offers his grandmother the dried fish, which he receives from neighbors at his brother’s funeral and cherishingly puts in his pocket for several days, with the hope that the nutrition would help her to recover from illness. The dried fish, found being tightly held in the hands of the grandmother when she passed away, becomes what connects the boy and his grandmother even when the latter is departing for another world. In depicting the old Okinawan woman, who is projected as the Other from the perspective of the boy, the novella not only suggests the dramatic shifts in Okinawa’s cultural and symbolic sphere across generations, but also demonstrates the grandmother’s loss of belonging and her alienation from contemporary Okinawan society. The grandmother’s hope for 145 coming back to her home is doomed to be an unrealizable dream since what she really yearns for is not a place of residence but a space in which her subjectivity and her experience of the outside world have not yet been disturbed by political and social transformations. Seen from the boy’s point of view, the grandmother is an anachronistic being, who fails to advance with the time. From the perspective of the grandmother, however, forgetting the war and occupation is a strategy for her to protect herself from traumatic experience, which results from the war in particular and the social upheavals brought by colonialism in general. Her inability to recognize reality is at the same time a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the contemporary in defining who she is. This temporal rebellion lasts to the moment when she realizes that the family is unable to bury one of her grandsons, who died from venomous snake, in their family tomb in Shuri. After the funeral, the grandmother recalls everything that she once forgot and completely loses her will to live. She finally does not make her way back to Shuri–she died right before her grandson secures a military truck for the family to move back. Even her body is left in the village, buried with the historical time that she embodies, and which can never be retrieved. Meaningless Knowledge and Groundless Recognition Aside from family origin, the boy’s well-educated father is another reason for the villagers’ respectful attitude. An elite intellectual working successively as a police officer and a governmental official during the prewar era, the father is acclaimed by the villagers as the most “knowledgeable man” (shimitsuchiyu, or bokujin in standard Japanese) in the village. The villagers’ comment that the boy’s father “speaks standard Japanese even more fluently than mainland Japanese people” (Arasaki 1990, 61). This not only indicates the father’s privileged social status that allowed him to access to modern education in the prewar era, but also suggests the authority of standard Japanese in evaluating an individual’s knowledgeability. The villagers’ 146 admiration for the father is further deepened by the fact that the latter’s “practice of moxibustion is the only scientific medical treatment in the village” (61). The father’s image as a cultivated and respected man is what the boy discovers when he sees his father through the villagers’ eyes. Yet, he himself has doubts about the reliability of his father and the value of the knowledge that his father possesses. While the boy “feels proud of his father, who is venerated by the villagers as ‘the person of knowledge’” (Arasaki 1990, 70), he at the same time is troubled by the uncomfortable feeling that his father seems to be out of place in the village. While the majority of the villagers are “struggling to make ends meet in their everyday lives” (70), the boy’s father devotes his nighttime to reading books even after a day’s arduous work in the field. The scene, in which the father immerses himself into books with passion while the boy is watching him from behind with confusion, delineates an obscure and unfathomable image of the father reflected in the eyes of the boy, to whom the value of knowledge lies in whether it can resolve real world problems. The boy’s admiration for his father, who discovers from the books a potential way to detoxify the poison of sago palms, immediately turns into disappointment, when his father fails to save the boy’s older brother, Tsuneharu, from the habu snake. When Tokujyū, the village’s “snake expert,” says that the family should have asked him for help as soon as Tsuneharu was bitten by the snake, the boy’s father responds with silence. At the moment, the boy “cannot help but feel that his father looks somewhat different than usual–he looks helpless” (75). It is ironic that the father’s mastery of scientific knowledge of medical treatment does not equip him with the ability to save the life that could have been saved by his uneducated neighbor. Even when Tsuneharu was alive, it is the boy’s mother who sold her luxurious kimono in exchange for nutritious food that is beneficial for the bedridden Tsuneharu to recover health. Furthermore, Tsuneharu’s 147 funeral cannot be smoothly held without the necessary props and food provided by the neighbors. The education that the father receives and the knowledge that he possesses seem to be pointless in dealing with the issues that are closely related to the life and the well-being of his family members. The gaze directed by the boy upon his father is thus one of admiration and question at the same time. If the father’s knowledge is not as useful and reliable as the neighbors’, is the villagers’ acclamation of the father as the most erudite man in the village a false statement and a misrecognition? The wooden house (nukigiya)7 where the boy’s family is living functions as the metaphor for the boy’s father, whose prewar social status and educational background lose practical value in the immediate postwar context. When deciding the new residents for the wooden house, the previous owner of which was missing in the war, the villagers choose the boy’s family to show their hospitality and, more importantly, their respect for the boy’s father. This is a posture that manifests the villagers’ recognition of the boy’s father as someone who is mostly qualified to own the house that is simultaneously desired by others. The villagers’ recognition of the father further suggests how the psychological impact of the prewar social order, in which the father as the colonial elite was located closer to the colonizer and was therefore endowed with superiority to a certain extent, remains active even as its material foundation was destroyed. The symbolic value of the father’s identity as the elite is materialized and visualized through the wooden house, which, according to the father, is even more spacious than houses in Shuri. Despite its magnificent appearance and large space, the wooden house is as fragile as shacks and tents in withstanding typhoons. Whenever the typhoon comes, the boy’s family takes 7 Wooden houses (nukigiya) and shacks (anaya) represent two structures that are commonly used in Okinawa for building houses. In principle, only “deputy land stewards” (jidōdai) were allowed to construct wooden houses, which were usually covered by tiled roofs. It is only after 1889, when the Meiji government abolished the Restriction Order that stipulates the style and scale of houses based on social status, can the common people in Okinawa adopt wooden structure for their houses. 148 refuge in the shack of their neighbors, who “appear as if they know everything about typhoons” (62) and prepare for the typhoon’s coming in a manner that is calm and confident. The way in which the neighbors deal with the natural disaster gives the boy “a sense of security that he has never gained from his father as well as his older brother” (Arasaki 1990, 62). Even the food prepared by the neighbors to accommodate the boy’s family tastes much more delicious than what the boy usually has at home. The delightful atmosphere and the sense of security that the boy experiences at the neighbors’ home make him “look forward to the coming of typhoons” (62). The advantage of the wooden house proves to be meaningless under the attack of natural disasters, just as the father’s knowledge turns out to be no use in coping with survival challenges. The villagers’ reliability is a result of their familiarity with the village’s living situation, in which even the most basic human needs cannot be guaranteed. A social elite during the prewar era, the father was far from living the life of hunger and disease, and therefore lacks the type of knowledge that the villagers have acquired from their life-long struggles against the shortage of living resources and natural hazards. The boy’s sharp sense of the distance between his father’s world and that of the villagers helps him to see through the glamor of respect and recognition to discover the reality of alienation, which is not unrelated to the father’s status as the imperial elite during the prewar times. Through the boy’s doubtful gaze toward his knowledgeable father, the novella lays bare the unfounded nature of the villagers’ recognition of the father. The immediate postwar setting further allows the novella to expose the artificiality and arbitrariness of the prewar imperial hierarchy through the helpless image of the father, whose intellectual superiority loses its very ground in the different sociopolitical context. The Objectified Body of the Stigmatized Panpan 149 If the boy’s grandmother and his father represent the times that have passed, the panpan is the one who embodies the contemporary and the occupation era reality. While set at the beginning of the U.S. occupation era, the novella devotes few paragraphs to portraying American soldiers as well as their interaction with the villagers. It is through the panpan, a twenty-year-old village woman, that the novella delineates the power dynamics between the villagers and the foreign soldiers. The villagers pejoratively refer to the panpan, her family, as well as the “luxurious house” they are living in as “American home” (amerikaya), a word that denotes the uncomfortable intimacy between the panpan and her American customers. The panpan lives with her family on the eastern edge of the village, separate from the other households in the community. On the one hand, the location of “American home” indicates the marginalized status of the panpan’s family within the village. On the other hand, the panpan’s house, covered by a solid roof and decorated by colorful walls as well as glass windows, attracts the attention of the villagers, who “pretend to be disinterested in the panpan’s family, while their use of the derogatory word ‘American home’ ironically betrays their admiration for and jealousy of the ‘American home’” (Arasaki 1990, 62). The “American home” functions as the window through which the villagers catch a glimpse of the life that they dream of but do not have access to. The panpan’s possession of the living resources that the villagers lack makes her a target of the villagers’ discontent and indignation. This is not only because her occupation is shameful in the eyes of the villagers, but also because she is a much more accessible, vulnerable, and convenient target for the villagers’ fury than the powerful American soldiers. The novella renders visible the hierarchical power relations in occupied Okinawa not through a direct comparison of the living standards of American soldiers and Okinawan villagers, but through differentiating and distancing one member of the village, who seemingly benefits from the presence of the U.S. 150 military force. In this way, the panpan no longer represents herself as an individual; her body becomes the medium through which the material prosperity and the dominant status of the American occupier are visualized and displayed. The novella highlights the beauty of the panpan by contrasting her sexually alluring body with the plain-looking appearance of the village’s other women. The panpan’s skin, which is white as milk, and her dresses, which are bright colors, are in sharp contrast with the dark skin and the plain outfits of the village’s women. The women insinuate that the panpan’s whitish skin is a result of her daily intake of American diet and her sexual intercourse with American soldiers. The American diet, which is beyond the access of most villagers, is a symbol of the material abundance of Americans as the occupier. While the women’s purpose is to insult the panpan, their interpretation of her beauty as a bodily reflection of her unlimited access to American foods lays bare their concealed desire for not only the nutritious food but also the everyday life that is free from worries about food. On the other hand, the women despise–or at least appear as such– the way through which the panpan acquires the food. In morally condemning the panpan, the village women strengthen the bond with each other through shared values while reinforcing the boundary that excludes the panpan from the community. It is worthy of note that the women’s assumption that having sex with Americans would change the skin color of Okinawan women is half joking, but it demonstrates a fear that the intimate contact with the American world would render an Okinawan subject less a member of Okinawan community. The panpan acts as a living example for the women that warns of the loss of recognition of one’s membership in the village. As such, the women are torn between the instinctive desire for the panpan’s beauty as well as her material possession and the sense of morality that compels them to condemn prostitution catering to foreign soldiers. 151 From the perspective of the boy, the village women, when they are contemptuously denigrating the panpan, “appear much more hateful than they think the panpan is” (Arasaki 1990, 63). Unlike the villagers, who adopt a discriminatory and exclusive attitude toward the panpan, the boy is fascinated with her sexual body, the image of which sometimes “suddenly springs to his mind, making his heart race and knocking the breath out of him” (64). The remarkable distinction in appearance between the panpan and the village women renders the former even more attractive in the eyes of the boy: the image of the panpan is decorated with vivid colors, whereas the contours of the village’s women disappear in darkness. What this contrast in “colors” bespeaks is not merely the difference in bodily characteristics, but also the huge gap in living conditions. It is the panpan’s relatively large possession of nutritious food as well as luxurious clothes, which are “lightly fluttering in the wind” (63), that makes her body appear healthy and full of vitality. By contrast, the villagers’ bodies are devoid of energy, lacking the necessary nutrition for health. Wearing the same work pants (monpe) and clothes made from khaki uniforms, the village women appear dull and lifeless. However, what enables the panpan to live a materially better life is her job as a sexual worker. The panpan exchanges her body for material objects while at the same time she herself turns into an object that serves to satisfy the sexual desire of the foreign soldiers. Her female body becomes an exclusive possession of the soldiers, which functions as another material symbol of the power and privilege of the American world. In this sense, her body is not so different from the gum, toys, and fountain pens that her younger brother shows off to the villager’s children in that they all give the villagers a sense of what the occupier’s world looks like. Admittedly, the alluring body of the panpan evokes sexual desire in the Okinawan boy, who is undergoing the process of sexual maturation. Yet, it should be noted that the sexuality 152 embodied by the panpan is profoundly related to the power and the material possessed by the panpan’s American customers. If the boy finds himself unable to take his eyes off the panpan’s sensual body, what captivates his attention is not merely the panpan’s body as such, but a body that is desired and, more importantly, possessed by the American occupier. The boy’s affection toward the panpan turns into hatred after the funeral of his brother. During the funeral procession, a military jeep, in which the panpan rides with three American soldiers, rushes into the crowd and disturbs the procession. As furious and frustrated as the other villagers, the boy at the same time “realizes that there is something hidden beneath his anger” (Arasaki 1990, 81), some strange feelings that he cannot clearly define and make sense of. Even after the funeral, the boy still keeps picturing in his mind the image in which the black hands of the African American soldier8 grope at the panpan’s white thighs. The novella depicts the boy’s internal complex as follows: The woman’s body is dazzling in the eyes of the boy. It is beyond his reach no matter how eagerly he dreams for it. He cannot help salivating when starting at her white feet, and for some reason he becomes breathless whenever he thinks of her soft body. But now, a pair of black hands are toying with that body at will. The boy feels so jealous of the hands that he almost screams out. The white skin that he has been drawing in his mind with admiration was easily surrendered by the woman to the black hands. And isn’t her back rippling with laughter? ‘This is unforgivable!’ the boy thinks. His hatred toward the woman wells up in his heart (Arasaki 1976, 82) While the villagers are enraged at how disrespectful the panpan and the soldiers are toward the boy’s dead brother, it is the intimate body contact between the panpan and the African American 8 A detailed analysis of the image of the African American soldier is beyond the scope of this paper, but I want to point out that the contrast in skin color between the soldier and the panpan has the function that likens the body contact as the invasion of something foreign. The habitual depiction of black people in terms of “physiological, or ‘racial,’ elements (with an overwhelmingly emphasis on sexuality)” (Molasky 1999, 75) in the postwar Japanese discourse can be seen in the novella’s emphasis on the race of the soldier in a scene that has strong sexual implication. Another possible reading is that, since Okinawans were keenly aware of the racial hierarchy within the U.S. army, making the panpan offer her body to an African American soldier is to frame the scene in a more striking and humiliating manner. Yet, as Molasky demonstrates, Okinawans’ response to black soldiers were complicated since “Japan’s discourse on Okinawan alterity has historically focused on their darker skin in addition to cultural differences” (71). The soldier’s blackness reminds of the villagers’ dark skin, rendering difficult a straightforward reading of this African American character. 153 soldier as well as the former’s laugh, which is perceived by the boy as a signal of her consent to the body contact, that irritate and frustrate the boy. To the boy who only had a vague concept about what it means to be a panpan before the funeral, the soldier’s sexually suggestive touch on the panpan’s body is too striking to be forgotten. In addition, if the jeep’s intrusion into the funeral procession demonstrates how the death of an Okinawan villager is of no account to American soldiers, the panpan’s presence in the jeep and her displayed intimacy with the soldiers double the humiliation. The panpan’s laugh renders the scene further unsettling as the villagers are crying for the death of the boy’s brother. From the perspective of the boy, the cheerful panpan, by offering herself to the pair of black hands, joins the world that is separated from and placed above the pathetic world of the boy as well as the villagers. It is precisely this extremely disturbing encounter between the villagers and the panpan that forces the boy to realize and recognize the power relations between the soldiers and the villagers, with whom the boy is on the same side. The military vehicle that rushes into the crowd parallels the soldier’s hands that encroach on the panpan’s body; both signify the dominant force of the American occupier, a force that rips up the boy’s dream for the panpan’s body and tramps on the dignity of the Okinawan villagers. While the boy’s hatred toward the panpan is eventually pacified by his father’s didactic words that point out the problem of venting anger on the pathetic panpan, the villagers’ discriminatory attitude toward the prostitute has never changed throughout the story. In addition to moral denigration of the panpan, the villagers do not recognize prostitution as a job involving labor. When they lament how the change of era brings about the decadence of social morality, they target the panpan as the culprit. For the panpan, however, prostitution is the most feasible and efficient way to support and save her family, of which the male adults all died in the war. 154 She has no choice but to become a panpan, even though her choice results in her marginalization in and exclusion from the village that was once her home. Conclusion Through the eyes of the Okinawan boy, “The Village of Sago Palms” portrays three Okinawan characters, who are mentally or/and culturally residing in different temporal spaces and coping with the traumatic postwar moment in different ways, to tell a story of displacement. For the panpan, embracing foreign soldiers to obtain food and other living resources brings about her marginalization in the community to which she once belonged. The boy’s father, while being respected and recognized by the villagers in terms of social status and education background, turns out to be less knowledgeable and reliable than the villagers when encountering challenges that threaten the life and the well-being of his family. The boy’s grandmother, while being projected as an anachronistic being in the eyes of the boy, she herself, by forgetting the experience of war and hiding in her memory of the past, refuses to identify with and to be defined by the time and space in which she is physically living. The three Okinawan characters, despite their difference in gender, generation, and social class, are not so different from each other, not only in that they are living a similarly precarious postwar life, but also in that they all lack the place of belonging and the proper recognition within the Okinawan village and, by extension, the postwar Okinawan society. What hides beneath their disparate ways of living through the social disturbance and upheavals brought by war and occupation is a shared sense of helplessness that results from the lack of control over their own destiny and ways of being. Written at the time when Okinawa’s reversion to Japan turned out to be a project that prioritized the interest of the U.S.-Japan security alliance over the will of Okinawans, the novella questions whether the reversion would direct Okinawa to a 155 promising future or is merely the starting point of another disturbing historical period in which Okinawans are deprived of the right to determine their ways of living and self-defining. 156 Chapter Ⅵ Conclusion In this dissertation, I examined how the themes of desire and recognition unfold in four Okinawan literary works that were published in different historical periods but similarly depict Okinawa as a colonial space. The first three chapters analyze stories published in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s, respectively, exploring how Okinawan subjects’ desire for recognition of their validity, self-worth, and equality has been aroused but frustrated by the colonial reality, wherein the hierarchical and exploitative colonial relationships nullify any possibility of mutual recognition between colonial authorities and the colonized population. The chapters demonstrate how recognition takes on a one-sided form under the colonial condition, with Okinawan subjects either openly or tacitly admiring and associating themselves with the colonizer, while at the same time being unable to endorse, identify with or speak positively for Okinawan cultural practices and customs. It is therefore not only the colonizer who refuses to grant proper recognition of Okinawans, but Okinawans themselves who have also participated in the denial and denigration of the validity and value of anything in Okinawa that does not satisfactorily conform to the colonizer’s vision of civilization. Okinawan subjects’ recognition of the colonizer’s material power, political and military strength, as well as cultural supremacy has in effect perpetuated the hegemonic structure of colonial domination. However, their endeavors to either emulate or be recognized as a member of the colonizer’s group have failed to initiate the movement of recognition from the colonizer in return. The dissertation’s final chapter analyzes a post-reversion story that adopts the perspective of an Okinawan boy to portray three Okinawan characters representative of respective historical stages. The chapter demonstrates that the story’s retrospective view of Okinawa’s modern 157 history sheds light on how the modification–which has always been carried out under the name of modernization–of Okinawan’ bodily features, linguistic expressions, religious practices, and more, has significantly transformed Okinawa’s cultural landscape and affected the self- perception of Okinawans. What lies underneath the dramatic and traumatic socio-cultural transformation is the unchanging colonial condition characterized by asymmetrical power relationships between Okinawa and its colonizers, and the lack of recognition of Okinawans for their autonomy. The four chapters collectively present a vivid picture of modern Okinawa, wherein the economic and sociopolitical arenas have been marked by pronounced inequality between Okinawa and its colonizers, which changed from Japan during the prewar era to the United States during the U.S. occupation era and to both Japan and the United States after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. This unbalanced colonial relationship has been deriving material support from and supplementing the socio-economic structure of colonialism. As argued throughout the dissertation, it is a relationship that not only lacks mutual recognition but also reproduces itself through the desire for and the pursuit of recognition among the colonized, who serves to confirm the value and superiority of the colonizer. Realizing the subjective mechanism of colonialism in (re)producing and imposing on the colonized society the desire for the colonizer’s world and recognition is therefore significant for the colonized to escape their assigned inferiority and fight for agency to manage their own culture, history, identity, and contemporary political affairs. Recognition in Contemporary Okinawa Since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, there have been substantial changes in both the material and cultural landscapes of the region. In addition to the implementation of political reform, economic revitalization, and infrastructure construction, Okinawa’s re-integration to 158 Japan has led to a considerable increase in mainland tourists to Okinawa, stimulating investment in resort hotels by mainland companies and facilitating the development of local tourism-related enterprises. The so-called “Okinawa boom” in the 1990s, which discursively and pictorially constructed Okinawa as exotic tropical islands with premodern cultural ties to China to attract mainland Japanese tourists, continued to the twenty-first century with the “emigrating to Okinawa boom” (Okinawa ijū būmu), which promotes Okinawa as healing islands that function as a paradise for anxious young mainlanders. It is true that Okinawa has gained popular visibility through the blue sky and ocean highlighted in promotional advertisements by travel agencies and NHK television dramas, such as Churasan (2001) and the recently released drama Chimudondon (Heart-beating 2022). This heightened visibility has not only brought about economic benefits through tourism, but also generated enormous interest in Okinawan culture and reduced, if not eliminated, mainland discrimination toward Okinawans.1 In the meantime, however, the lack of self-determination and autonomy remains a significant issue in contemporary Okinawa, with the burden of the U.S. military bases in Okinawa being disproportionately placed on Okinawans. The controversial relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to Henoko has been met with strong opposition from Okinawan people as well as the prefectural government, which has been trying to withhold official consent to the construction plan. Despite local opposition, the Japanese and U.S. governments have been pushing forward the relocation work, ignoring the voices of Okinawans. Given the political context and the actuality of militarization of contemporary Okinawa, the lighthearted celebration of Okinawa’s natural beauty and cultural distinctness 1 In 2016, a young riot police officer from the Osaka Prefectural Police made a discriminatory remark using the word “dojin,” a derogatory term referred to the indigenous people, towards Okinawan citizens protesting near the construction site of U.S. helipads in the Takae district (Ishido 2016). This incident serves as a recent example of the not-yet-eradicated discriminatory consciousness of mainland Japanese toward Okinawans. 159 becomes problematic as it not only exoticizes and commodifies Okinawa and its historical experience, but also romanticizes the region at the cost of disregarding its historical scars as well as ongoing colonial condition. As such, the mainland’s seemingly promising posture of recognizing Okinawa for its worth as a tourist or migration destination is delusive, as the mainland gaze toward Okinawa is now focused on aspects, while positive, that serve their desire to escape daily chores and pressures and to be healed by the islands as an affordable tropical paradise. In the realm of literary representation, contemporary Okinawan literature explores issues of Okinawan history, culture, and identity through various settings and strategies to challenge, criticize, and contest the ahistorical and decontextualized image of Okinawa as a carefree haven. These literary experiments, which include but are not limited to Medoruma Shun’s reexamination of Okinawa’s war history and the position of Okinawans within it, Sakiyama Tami’s dark and disturbing island stories filled with linguistic conundrums, and Matayoshi Eiki’s aesthetic reconstruction of Okinawa’s cultural landscape and tradition, will be the focus of my future research on recognition. Amidst new challenges in the contemporary context, the stories of elite Okinawans who strive for recognition by adhering to rules established by the colonizer gradually transform into stories that explore alternative ways of narrating one’s past and envision one’s future. 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