Okinawan Literature

The Japanese perceptions of Hawai’i and Okinawa today share fundamental similarities: Both postcolonial island chains are appreciated as stereotypical tropical paradises with beautiful beaches and untouched nature, where gentleness (yasashisa) and healing (iyashi) await the visitor. However, although affirmative, such interchangeable images obscure not only the social, economic, and political reality, but also the historically grown oppression. The questions thus arise whether these images are part of cultural discourses of power and whether they follow a conscious or unconscious “neo-imperial” agenda employed to silence subaltern Pacific voices. This paper examines the interwoven structure of the Okinawa boom (200122009) and the “healing boom” (iyashi bumu) in mainland Japan. Locating the two islands in a Pacific framework, statistical data of Okinawa and Hawai’i will be investigated to demonstrate how analogous postcolonial and “neo-imperial” issues actually are. Exemplarily, the NHK television drama Churasan of 2001 and Yoshimoto Banana’s travel diary Nankurunaku, nai (‘What Will Be, Will Not Be’) of 2006 will be investigated with the aim of uncovering trajectories of colonial agency and thus elucidate what political roles mass tourism, its media, and popular agents play in the power framework of “neo-imperial” oppression in the Pacific.

La tesi fornisce una nuova prospettiva nei confronti della produzione di Yamanokuchi Baku (1903 - 1963), specialmente quella poetica, analizzando in chiave contemporanea una selezione di poesie (13) a poco più di cinquant’anni dalla sua morte, cercando di abbandonare etichette precostituite e comprendendo i limiti della metodologia utilizzata. Attraverso la sua poetica, Baku mira a una responsabilizzazione collettiva che si rivolge a tutti, giapponesi, ryukyuani e il resto del mondo, affinché si possa parlare seriamente di una rinascita non solo ryukyuana ma, in generale, umana. Infatti, i fattori che hanno favorito gli eventi capaci di ridisegnare il concetto di identità nelle Ryūkyū sono gli stessi che, in realtà vicine o lontane, animano il dibattito tra le minoranze.
Il terzo e ultimo capitolo rappresenta il contributo propriamente letterario di questo lavoro. Dopo una breve premessa e le dovute avvertenze, i paragrafi si
risolvono in una suddivisione tematica che racchiudono una selezione di poesie, al cui testo originale in lingua giapponese si aggiungono la traduzione in lingua
italiana e una dettagliata analisi del testo. Parallelamente alla descrizione delle modalità di analisi e traduzione delle poesie, alcune annotazioni sono state dedicate ai limiti posti in essere dalla traduzione e dalla volontà di comprendere
adeguatamente il contesto storico-letterario delle poesie.
La tesi intende fornire uno sguardo critico verso la questione ryukyuana all’inizio del secolo scorso e, per farlo, intende indagare le poesie di Baku e i modelli da essa proposti, modelli che, ora come allora, continuano a essere i
protagonisti sia dentro che fuori all’arcipelago delle Ryūkyū.

Japan's Meiji period (1868–1912) was a time of rapid upheaval, both for the subjects of the historical Japanese polity and for populations within its sphere of influence: Ainu, Ryūkyūans, Taiwanese, and Koreans.  In 1879, Japan annexed the Ryūkyū Islands, dissolving the nominally independent Ryūkyū Kingdom and establishing Okinawa Prefecture.  This "disposition of Ryūkyū" produced social effects that were no less dramatic than the effects of the Meiji Restoration in mainland Japan.  On an economic level, annexation triggered a fitful transformation of longstanding relations of production.  On a cultural level, it stimulated the modification of old forms and practices and the invention of new ones.  The cultural form most representative of Okinawa during the Meiji and Taishō periods is popular theater, particularly musical drama or kageki.  In this paper, I use the early musical drama Uyanma (The Kept Woman) as a lens through which to assess social change in Okinawa in the decades following annexation.  My first aim is to introduce the genre and the play, which are not well known outside of Okinawa; my second aim is explore ways of theorizing the link between political, economic, and cultural dimensions of Okinawan modernization.

Keiichi Karimata
AN OUTLINE OF RYUKYUAN ORAL LITERATURE
The oral literature of the Ryūkyūs exhibits a basic dividing
line between the noble caste and the peasantry. Both social
groups transmitted literature orally but the nobility depended
on written records. Ryukyuan oral literature comprises three
genres: songs, theatre and prose. In the first case, there was a
difference between the courtly omoro songs and ritual songs of
the provinces, between ryūka songs of the noble caste and the
epic songs of the peasantry. In the second and third cases, there
was a vivid difference between court theatre and folk theater,
between state myths and folk myths. The oral literature of the
nobility was also transmitted in a written form, as was the case
with the Omoro Sōshi, while the oral literature of the peasantry
was recorded only in modern times. That also provides
a contrast between the oral literature of the nobility and that of
the peasantry.
(Бакшеев Е.С., перевод с японского  / /  Каримата Кэйити (狩俣恵一) ОЧЕРК УСТНОГО НАРОДНОГО ТВОРЧЕСТВА РЮКЮ /in Russian, translation from Japanese be Evgeny Baksheev/

This paper examines magical realism in Okinawa bungaku (Okinawan literature) with a special focus on the literary works of Medoruma Shun. The central research questions are what kind of Okinawan realities these magical-realistic texts point towards and which real problems thus become obvious. Against the theoretical background regarding the discussions on magical realism in literary science, qualitative analyses of the two short stories 'Akai yashi no ha' (1992) and 'Umukaji tō chiritei' (1999) are conducted. The findings of these analyses show that the narrative mode of magical realism is used to point towards post-colonial power relations and to express a political critique of contemporary relationships with mainland Japan and the United States from an Okinawan point of view.

This paper is based on my public lecture delivered at the 51st General Meeting of the Japanese Association of Cultural Anthropology at Rokko Campus of Kobe University on 29 May, 2017. It aims to consider two different modes of sociality, grid and wave, in relation to nationalism. Most cases of "grid mode" are found in the disciplinary system of the state. By wave, I mean social relationships in a face-to-face situation. It is primarily related to orality as against literacy. Nationalism is a movement to interpellate people into a nation. A modern state needs not only an archival control over its subjects, but a story to mobilize them to fight for the state. The final part starts with two novels by Shun Medoruma of Okinawa origin. Then, I bring up Christian Boltanski's art works, which tell a possibility of wave mode against a gigantic and collective phallic monument, where personal names are not visible.

This paper examines Medoruma Shun’s (b. 1960) fiction and non-fiction writing for examples of how sites of the war have significance and meanings for Okinawan war survivors and their offspring.  After analyzing the depiction of first-generation war survivors in Medoruma’s fiction, I investigate how transgenerational war memory manifests in his writing. I contend that the experience of being raised in sites of the war past generates what I call geographically-proximate postmemory, a kind of postmemory that is more inclined to vicarious narration and imaginings than the geographically-displaced postmemory of second-generation Holocaust survivors. I argue that Medoruma’s fiction vicariously narrates and imagines war survivor recollections of the war due to an intimate understanding of the concrete sites and contexts within which the war unfolded.  Before beginning my examination, I first discuss the difference between the notion of the postwar generation within Japan and the idea of second-generation survivorship and situate Medoruma’s fiction within the context of second-generation survivor postmemory and literary expressions.  I close by reflecting on the significance of the multiple and intertwined war-related meanings that animate the Okinawan landscape in relation to post-war and contemporary attempts to recast Okinawa as a tourists cape.

Works discussed: "Droplets" (Suiteki), "Mabuigumi" / "Spirit Stuffing" (Mabuigumi), "Crying Wind" (Fūon), "Army Messenger" (Denreihei), _Forest at the Back of my Eye_ (Me no oku no mori) / _In the Woods of Memory_

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. The Handbook examines various modes of literary production (such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays) as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated. Attention is drawn to the idea of the bunjin as a ‘person of letters’ and a more realistic assessment is provided of how writers have engaged with ideas – not labelled a ‘novelist’ or ‘poet’, but a ‘writer’ who may at one time or another choose to write in various forms. The book provides an overview of major authors and genres by situating them within broader themes that have defined the way writers...

冊封・幕藩、両制度に属した近世琉球の外交政策の中心部として芸能があった。能楽・浄瑠璃・歌舞伎や琉球口頭文学から本説を得て琉球語で演じられる組踊が、明代中国からの使節団向けに、異国でありながら儒教などの思想を理解する文明国としての姿勢を見せるために作られたというのは周知の通りである。ただし、私が大英博物館で発見した絵入り図録『琉球奏楽図』がこれまで知られる中でもっとも詳しく物語るように、逆に江戸上りの際、琉球使節団が将軍の前で中国語による演劇を「唐踊（とうおどり）」という名称で上演することもあった。本発表では板谷徹氏が紹介された東京大学総合図書館蔵『琉球劇文和解』、徳川美術館蔵『琉球歌舞図巻』などの諸本との異同を確かめる。その結果、日本外務省蔵『通航一覧』の寛政８年の該当箇所に一致して東大本にはない、音楽、合唱曲、琉球踊、唐踊の番組・役者目録、琉歌や合唱曲の歌詞、さらにその晩の料理の菜単まで備わっているということがわかる。なお、その絵を見ても徳川本に見られない細部描写もある。したがって、近世琉球が日本と中国、二つの本国を相手に、それぞれ適切な文芸を披露することによって自国の一種の独立を図った一相を伝えてくれる貴重な資料だということになる。

Throughout the early-modern period, the small island kingdom of Ryūkyū was putting on diplomatic shows for its two tributary masters, China and Japan: cultural pageantry was essential to most exchanges. Kumi odori, a theatre developed in Ryūkyū’s vernacular from a mix of Japanese and Ryūkyūan legends and performance traditions to entertain Chinese investiture missions, remains an important part of Okinawan culture today. However, a previously-undiscussed picture book in the British Library provides the most complete textual and pictorial record yet known of a roughly opposite phenomenon: a Ryūkyūan performance of Chinese theatre for a Japanese audience. Personnel lists, synopses, and lyrics accompany colorful paintings of orchestral and choral music, Ryūkyūan songs, fan dances, and sanshin performance, the Chinese plays—even the menu of the banquet served. Based on correspondences with records preserved by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I identify the occasion as the 1796 tributary mission to Edo, situate this object as the most complete yet known, and argue that Chinese performance was as important as Japanese and local forms to Ryūkyū’s theatrical diplomacy, whose basic move was to preserve Ryūkyūan independence by playing the domesticating and exoticizing gazes of Japan and China against one another.

Jinruikan (The Human Pavilion, 1976), by the late Okinawan playwright Chinen Seishin (1941-2013), is one of the most highly regarded works of contemporary Okinawan drama and literature.  First published and performed in 1976 in Okinawa, the screenplay later appeared in the mainland Japanese journal Teatoru (Theater) in 1977 resulting in additional performances in Okinawa and mainland Japan before it was awarded the 22nd Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1978.  Since then the play has been reprinted and anthologized numerous times, was revived for performance under the direction of the author in 2003 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the “The Human Pavilion incident” (jinruikan jiken) of 1903, and recently was selected for inclusion in volume 20 of the 75th Anniversary Shūeisha collection, Sensō to Bungaku (War and Literature) published in 2012. 

As critics and scholars have observed, The Human Pavilion exposes the colonial structures of power between Japan and Okinawa and accompanying notions of Japanese racial, ethnic, and cultural superiority that Okinawans have internalized – and challenged – since the former Ryukyuan Kingdom’s dispensation and annexation into Japan in the late 19th century.  The play makes evident how Okinawan identity is performative, both producing and produced within the complicated matrix of political, cultural, and military power that structures Okinawa’s past and ongoing relationship with Japan and the United States.  After annexation, Okinawans were coerced and forced to adopt Japanese cultural, intellectual, and linguistic practices, and were interpolated as inferior or more primitive Japanese requiring assimilation into Japan’s Empire.

Within the context of Okinawa’s relationship of colonial subordination to Japan in which Okinawans have been constructed as imperfect Japanese, subversive moments of parody, private ridicule, and contradictory juxtaposition that appear in The Human Pavilion repeatedly underscore the transgressive and disruptive potential that such performances of Okinawanness contain for exposing the “phantasmatic status” of “the natural”-ness of Okinawa’s cultural and racial inferiority to Japan.  Furthermore, the revealing of the supposed Japanese ringmaster as an Okinawan at the end of the play points to the performativity of Japaneseness and all identities generally, that such identities are created through the enactment of discursively constructed behaviors. Parodical moments of discursive slippage, however, are contrasted with the context of the Battle of Okinawa, when the disciplining of and violence directed at Okinawans by Japanese soldiers escalated, resulting in instances of execution for speaking Okinawan, the raping of Okinawan women, and coerced group suicides of Okinawan civilians. Hence, although the play unsettles and dislodges reified and naturalized Japanese notions of Okinawanness that have been mobilized during the twentieth century by highlighting the constructed nature of Okinawan identity through repetitive parody, it also suggests the limits of a politics of performativity that resides primarily in the discursive when confronted with immediate physical violence, discipline, and death. The potential of a politics of performativity may be powerful enough to dislodge entrenched discursive notions of identity, but may be limited, indeed precarious, in the face of immediate material violence that its transgressive potential can provoke.

В поисках «Богини из Ниима»: по следам легенды «Почему перестали рождаться красавицы». Часть 1-2.  Из наследия Н. А. Невского по культуре Окинавы (I) /in Russian/ “根間の神様”を訪ねて－「美人が生まれぬわけ」伝説の跡を追求しながら　-　（沖縄文化にかんするニコライ・ネフスキーの遺産)  /
see:  http://leit.ru/modules.php?name=Pages&pa=showpage&pid=1475,
http://leit.ru/modules.php?name=Pages&pa=showpage&pid=1476
Research paper based on field work on Miyako Islands, Okinawa (with original photos)

Two days till payday. John and the others had long since run out of money, and George had no more to lend them. Hostesses at the bar no longer sat with and entertained them as they usually did. George noticed that the hostesses kept looking toward the entranceway, waiting for other customers to arrive. George wanted to leave but couldn't say this to his companions. They seemed now to be feeling awkward themselves, after the berserk frenzy of a few moments before. Their bottle of whiskey had been emptied long ago. Requests for more were met with demands for "cash, cash" from the hostesses, who no longer let them touch their breasts and thighs. John, Wilde, and Washington, smoldering just below the surface, seemed on the verge of something. The faces of all three were red and puffed up from the alcohol. Each face, in fact, was getting redder and redder, and each of their muscled bodies was getting more and more tensed. Soon something was bound to set them off. George remained calm and in control of himself, but he felt his heart pounding a bit harder as he observed the mood of his companions. Their vacillation, he thought, was making things worse. If you're not going to drink, then don't take a drop of the stuff and don't say a word to the hostesses; but if you are going to drink, then you should drink yourself silly, feel up the hostesses, and go on and have sex with them. It has to be one or the other. Two of the hostesses casually got to their feet and turned toward the door. Three Caucasians with faces darkly tanned from long exposure to the sun had entered the bar. Each scanned the place with his large eyes. George could tell immediately that they were back from Vietnam on R&R leave. Military on R&R are very free with their money. Hostesses in the Asign bars-the ones U.S. military personnel were authorized to frequentcalled them yama-otoko ("men back from the wilds") and went out of their way to offer them every imaginable service. They were the best source of money. George and his group recognized their own less favorable status. George's group was still stationed in Okinawa, having just arrived from the States, while the yama-otoko were old-timers, hardened by combat in numerous battles. Even in their sleep, George imagined, these men were never free from thoughts of war. However much they

The article examines how literature about the Battle of Okinawa has been shaped by the identity and experiences of the author as well as the social and historical context in which the works were created. First I briefly discuss the relationship between writing about the Battle of Okinawa and war memory, and provide an overview of existing scholarship. I then review the major characteristics of the Battle of Okinawa, and controversies, over representation and remembrance, that have occurred over the past several decades. The main section of this chapter examines non-fiction writing about the battle, before discussing select works of fiction. I conclude by analyzing a second-generation war narrative, ‘Tree of Butterflies’ (Gunchō no ki, 2000) by Okinawan writer Medoruma Shun (b. 1960).

Unarticulated Memories of the Battle of Okinawa: The Early Fiction of Second-Generation War Survivor Medoruma Shun
Kyle Ikeda
Abstract

This article examines two early pieces of literary war fiction by Okinawa's leading contemporary writer, Medoruma Shun, that deal with two kinds of unarticulated memories of the Battle of Okinawa: memory constrained by social consequence and the inexpressible memory of trauma. Both stories constitute explorations of war memory that are not found in survivor testimony and, as such, simultaneously reveal and critique the limitations of survivor-authored narratives of the war. I first explicate how the war-survivor characters in “Fûon” (“The Crying Wind,” 1985 – 86) lived their lives since the war without telling anyone about their most haunting war experiences, in large part, I argue, because of the possible social consequences of disclosure. Drawing from Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart's, as well as Oka Mari's, scholarship on the nature of traumatic memory, I demonstrate how the traumatic war experiences of an elderly war-survivor character in “Heiwa dôri to nazukerareta machi or aruite” (“Walking the Street Named Peace Boulevard,” 1986) remain beyond her ability to narrate them.

The article argues that Medoruma's war fiction needs to be interpreted within the frame of second-generation survivorship in order to better reveal the ways in which his narratives contribute to understandings of the Battle of Okinawa and its ongoing effects on survivors. It is Medoruma's experience as the child, grandchild, and relative of numerous survivors of the Battle of Okinawa that has provided him with an intimate look at the nature of war trauma and made him aware of the gap between war stories that survivors recount in public and the inarticulate expressions of war trauma that haunt many of them in private. At the same time, because he has not directly experienced the war, Medoruma is removed enough from the traumatic event to be able to address that which survivors have avoided or have been unable to articulate.

SInce the 'Okinawan Boom' of the 1990s, 'Okinawan literature' has gained credence as a literary genre, yet as the interest in works by Okinawan writers has increased, those works have also risked being appropriated by the demands of the Japanese cultural mainstream. Published between 2006 and 2008 in the literary journal Subaru, Sakiyama Tami's "Kuja Series" contains seven short stories set in Kuja, a town that lies in the shadows of the military base. Depicted as 'a town in the abyss' (fuchi no machi), Kuja resists and subverts mainstream expectations of Okinawan literature. Drawing upon an understanding of écriture féminine as articulated by Hélène Cixous, this paper stages a reading of the Kuja stories as a work in and of translation in order to elucidate the significance of the 'abyss' (fuchi) that provides both a backdrop and structure for the text. In this alternative critical approach, Kuja is revealed as a "new world" wherein lies the potential to disrupt, reinvigorate, and even escape the boundaries of Okinawan literature as it has commonly been defined.

... I am particularly grateful to Lisa Anderson-Levy, Hiromi Mizuno, Kazuyo Kubo, Yuichiro Onishi, Anita Mannur, Patricia Hill, Claire Potter, Ann Wightman, and ... A large portion of Santa Cruz Prefecture belongs to the eastern lowland, or llano, that shares its borders with Brazil and ...