Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance

Steve Rabson
The Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 35, Number 2, Summer 2009, pp. 389-394 (Review)
Published by Society for Japanese Studies DOI: 10.1353/jjs.0.0099

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connection to the type of intellectual engagement that was possible after the collapse of the AMPO era and the lost promise of the 1960s? Similar questions can be asked about Nakagamis experiments with the shishosetsu. Zimmerman argues that Nakagami desired to rid his characters of their interiority, a move we can see throughout his work. Prewar writers were criticized for shirking their responsibilities as public intellectuals when they turned inward to the interior realms of the private self. What did it mean to rid oneself of internal life in the postwar era? How does such elimination of personal depth allow one to challenge the codes of literature and history? Zimmerman sets out to address the triangular relationship between a body of texts, an author, and the world outside, but this third point is not as fully explored as the other two (p. 11). In limiting the analysis to the realm of the literary world, Zimmerman also puts limitations on her ethnographic approach. This is both a weakness and a strength of the work. At times the reader is so deeply engrossed in the text that the argument gets lost. I appreciate her reluctance to use a postmodernist analytical framework as it risks severing the text from its historical grounding, but sometimes her immersion in the text keeps her from reaching the powerful conclusions hinted at in her chapters. This should not detract from the value of the work. Zimmermans close textual analyses are insightful, rewarding, and extremely welcome; her translations are moving and powerful; and the links she makes to Nakagamis criticism are illuminating. Out of the Alleyway is an important contribution to Nakagami studies. It inspires the reader to want to read more Nakagami, thereby ensuring his legacy.

Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance. By Davinder L. Bhowmik. Routledge, London, 2008. xiv, 234 pages. $170.00. Reviewed by Steve Rabson Brown University Organized chronologically by author, this study is the first critical overview in English of modern prose fiction by Okinawan writers from pioneering stories in the 1900s to works that have attracted a steadily growing readership in the 1990s and 2000s. Critic and translator Davinder L. Bhowmik analyzes selected works, providing translations of key passages. Her book usefully complements previously published English translations, including the anthology Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (University of Hawaii Press, 2000) from which she draws stories for analysis. Bhowmik makes judicious use of theory to locate works in a wider

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literary context and of biographical information to supply historical and cultural context. She explores issues of language, culture, identity, war, occupation, and military bases as they are represented in Okinawan literature. The first authors of modern Okinawan fiction were educated early in a campaign to promote the use of standard (i.e., Tokyo) Japanese in the nations newest prefecture where the local language was mostly incomprehensible elsewhere in Japan. Okinawan writers launched their careers with the support of prominent writers in Tokyo and wrote in standard Japanese out of necessity. Yamagusuku Seichu, who produced fiction late in the Meiji period, and Ikemiyagi Seiho, prolific during the Taisho era, created works in which there existed a dual structure of language, Bhowmik explains. This language consisted of standard Japanese and, for traditional sentiment and conceptions, Ryukyuan dialect (p. 67). In the 1910s and 1920s, writers infused their stories with occasional Ryukyuan expressions, often to evoke local color, which were usually close enough to standard Japanese to be understood by mainland readers. The mixture of language in Okinawan fiction attests both to its authors creativity and to their complicity with market forces (p. 12). In the 1930s and early 1940s, however, they abandoned even these modest efforts. With increasingly strict national and local enforcement of standard Japanese, . . . the use of dialect, even to provide realistic dialogue, remained absent (p. 63). During this period, writers such as Kushi Fusako, Yogi Seisho, and Miyagi So turned to natural description for conveying Okinawan perspectives. In places where standard Japanese will not fully express an emotion, . . . glimpses of local landscape appear (p. 68). Oshiro Tatsuhiro appended the subtitle Jikken ho gen o motsu aru fudoki (A gazetteer with practical dialect) to his 1966 story Kame no ko baka (1966; Turtleback Tombs, 2000). This work depicts the efforts of a family to survive the Battle of Okinawa by taking refuge in their large ancestral tomb, a locus of Okinawas indigenous religious practice based on ancestor worship. As Bhowmik notes, Oshiro uses standard Japanese for descriptive passages but creates an artificial language [for dialogue passages] that has local flavor but is still comprehensible to readers of standard Japanese (p. 99). She and other critics have praised Higashi Mineos more natural use of dialect (p. 99) in his 1971 story Okinawa no shonen (1971; Child of Okinawa, 1989), which portrays the confused sexual awakening of a teenage boy growing up in the familys home where his parents run a bar/brothel for American G.I.s. Higashi treads further in his use of dialect by employing it more fluidly than did Oshiro (p. 126). The local language he uses is mostly understandable by readers elsewhere in Japan, and expressions unfamiliar to them are accompanied by kanji glosses. Many of the characters in Medoruma Shuns fiction, published in the 1990s and 2000s, also speak in Ryukyuan, but he includes glosses more

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often in his later works. Bhowmik attributes this change to the growth of Medorumas readership on the mainland after his story Suiteki (1997; Droplets, 2000) won Japans most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, in 1997. She writes that the fiercely radical prose (p. 158) Sakiyama Tami has published from the late 1980s to the present seeks to tear her writing away from the grips of Japanese (p. 173). [She] extends her use of dialect to descriptive passages, . . . providing few glosses or Chinese characters to aid the reader (p. 172). Refusing to bow to market forces, Sakiyama . . . seems aware that her project will, undoubtedly, limit her readership (p. 158). All of these varying applications of Ryukyuan and standard Japanese in modern Okinawan fiction reflect what is perhaps the central focus of Bhowmiks study: the often-troubled relationship between Uchina (Okinawa) and Yamato (the rest of Japan), especially the nations power elite in Tokyo, and disagreements among Okinawans themselves as to what this relationship should be. In 1879, the Meiji government disposed of (shobun) what had been the quasi-independent Ryukyu Kingdom and annexed it as Okinawa Prefecture, having previously reduced it to a fiefdom (Ryu kyu -han) in 1872. Sho Tai, the last Ryukyu king, was forcibly exiled to Tokyo. The Meiji governments subsequent campaign to promote the use of standard Japanese was part of a more wide-ranging and repressive assimilation policy in Okinawa that included efforts to ban local customs such as the consulting of shamans, the wearing by men of topknots, and the tattooing by women of their hands to signify passage into adulthood. Japanese officials, who also mandated the worship of State Shinto, deemed these customs cultur ally, and therefore politically, incompatible with their conception of a unified and modernized nation. As Japans central government appropriated more and more authority, administrators appointed from the mainland often showed disdain for the very people they were entrusted to govern. Yet, even in the face of such policies and attitudes, opinions in Okinawa at the end of the nineteenth century were divided over its future political direction. Assimilation brought significant benefits to the small but influential intelligentsia, including writers, who received higher education on the mainland and, in many cases, established reputations there. Entrepreneurs successfully marketed local products on the mainland, and growing numbers of youth found employment there that helped support their families in impoverished farming villages back home. Bhowmik calls Yamagusuku Seichus landmark work Kunenbo (Mandarin oranges, 1911) a histori cally accurate tragicomedy depicting the fractures in Okinawan society at the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 189495 (p. 34).
Portrayed vividly are two opposing factions: the first, the enlightenment party (kaikato), which is comprised of pro-Japanese Okinawans, and

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the stubbornly conservative party (gankoto), which is made up of pro Chinese Ryukyuans. During this period a man from Kagoshima named Yamajo Ichi, pretending to be a secret envoy sent by Li Hung-chang, a Chinese politician, embezzled large amounts of money from Okinawans loyal to China. (p. 34)

Japans victory in the Sino-Japanese War persuaded many Okinawans that identification with the nation rising in wealth and status promised a better future. The pro-China faction rapidly declined, and newspaper editorials advocated thoroughgoing assimilation with Japan in areas ranging from education to styles of dress and grooming. Some people changed their distinctive Okinawan family names to common mainland alternatives. In the more prestigious schools, teachers and students alike decreed the use of standard Japanese while students were punished and humiliated for speaking Ryukyuan, even inadvertently. Yet, the embracing of assimilation, even for specific career goals, resulted in confusions of identity and feelings of alienation. As Bhowmik explains, this dilemma that Okinawan writers explore in depth is shared by minorities in many countries. Hyaku, the protagonist of Ikemiyagi Sekihos Ukuma junsa (1922; Of ficer Ukuma, 2000), passes an entry examination to become the first policeman from his village. The villagers initially celebrate his achievement with pride, but, as he associates increasingly with his fellow officers who are from Kyushu, he becomes irritated with the untidy conditions and relaxed lifestyles in the village. One day he assembles the villagers for an imperious harangue, revealing the disdain he has come to feel for them. Now alienated from his community, he is still not accepted by his mainland colleagues, who regard him as a foreigner (ikokujin). Bhowmik notes how, in spite of the cruelty Hyaku inflicts on his family and neighbors, the nar rator manages, through concise and well-crafted descriptions of Hyakus mental state, to elicit the readers sympathies for the young policeman as he struggles in vain to establish an identity for himself (p. 49). In Horobiyuku Ryu kyu onna no shuki (1932; Memoirs of a Declining Ryukyuan Woman, 2000), Kushi Fusako describes the desperate poverty in Okinawa that compels many to migrate to the mainland and then to conceal their Okinawan identity for social and economic survival in the face of severe discrimination. Like Ikemiyagi, Kushi evokes sympathy for her protagonist, a successful businessman who hides his origins not only from the employees he supervises in his company but even from his wife and daughter. You have to understand, he explains. If people found out that I was Ryukyuan, it would cause me all kinds of trouble (p. 73). Okinawans view the Japanese governments decisions to sacrifice the prefecture as a throwaway stone in the worst battle of the Pacific War, to agree to prolonged U.S. military occupation after the war, and to permit

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the continuing imposition of the vast U.S. military presence as ultimate manifestations of mainland discrimination. Oshiro Tatsuhiro writes about the Battle of Okinawa from the viewpoint of local civilians, who were most of its victims. He describes atrocities committed against them by Japanese soldiers from the mainland and criticizes exhortative, emperor-centered education in prewar Japan. However, as Bhowmik points out, he also portrays an Okinawan school principal burdened with enormous guilt for his complicity in conveying this indoctrination to his students and for reacting with animal-like obedience (dobutsu-teki chuseishin) when the soldiers ordered civilians to kill themselves rather than be captured by U.S. forces (p. 105). In his writing about the battle in retrospect, Medoruma Shun is critical of those Okinawan survivors who, in the words of the main female character in Suiteki, are tryin to profit off peoples sufferin in the war (p. 144). Bhowmik writes that Medorumas stories on the battle raise the question of who owns memory [and] show clearly tensions between and among local and national forces as they vie to narrate the past (p. 152). Oshiro and Medoruma are two of the writers Bhowmik discusses whose work depicts the prolonged U.S. occupation and continuing military presence. Poetry and prose critical of U.S. policies published by Arakawa Akira and other literature students at Ryukyu University in the magazine Ryudai bungaku led to its suspension by occupation authorities in the mid-1950s (p. 92). A decade later, Oshiro was the first writer from Okinawa to win the Akutagawa Prize for his story Kakuteru patei (1966; Cocktail Party, 1989). Its protagonist seeks to press charges against the American soldier who raped his daughter and confronts not only the oxymoronic hypocrisy of military occupation law, which makes this virtually impossible, but also the unexpected reluctance of three people he counted among his closest friendsa refugee attorney from China, a reporter from mainland Japan, and a U.S. civilian employeeto support his quest for justice. Bhowmik identifies the overarching theme of this work: namely the protagonists growing awareness of his Okinawan identity (p. 100). Sexual assaults on Okinawan girls and women by U.S. forces, whose arrest and detention are complicated nowadays by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), still occur with chronic frequency. U.S. bases there comprise 75 per cent of the U.S. military presence in all of Japan and, as Bhowmik notes, remain largely in place almost four decades after the Japanese government broke its promise that they would be scaled back to mainland levels after reversion. Bhowmiks author-focused methodology is well suited for her critical overview, and her analyses of individual works are persuasive. It is a minor disappointment that she does not give us her reading of Medorumas short fictional piece Kibo (1999; Hope, 1999), set shortly after the 1995 rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three U.S. military men. It is the firstperson narrative of a protagonist who, frustrated with the ineffectiveness

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of polite protest demonstrations, kidnaps and murders the child of a U.S. serviceman, believing that only such an act can lead to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Okinawa. Although it provides rare insight into the mind of a terrorist, Bhowmik might agree with critics who read this piece more as an essay of rhetorical warning than a story. Perhaps she will deal with it in a future publication.

Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. By Christine L. Marran. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007. xxv, 220 pages. $67.50, cloth; $22.50, paper. Reviewed by John Mertz North Carolina State University The term poison woman (dokufu) was applied generically to several Japanese women in the late 1870s who had poisoned or otherwise dispatched their husbands and lovers. Their tales were widely published over the ensuing decade, including serializations, elaborately illustrated reprints, plays, and even kanbun editions. Two in particular acquired canonical status: reprints of Kubota Hikosakus Torioi Omatsu kaijo shinwa (1878) and Ka nagaki Robuns Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (1879) remain widely available in collections of Meiji literature, and Takahashi Oden, executed in 1879 for murder, remains a cultural icon. Previous scholars (Maeda Ai, Asakura Kyoji, Hirata Yumi, Matthew Strecher, and Mark Silver, to name a few) have recognized the importance of these stories, but Christine Marran is the first to devote an entire volume in English to their cultural implications. To be sure, Marrans book extends well beyond the usual boundaries of the dokufu genre, taking into consideration confessionals produced by female ex-convicts, accounts of women implicated in political terrorism, scientific discourse on sexology and psychoanalysis, and a selection of postwar films. The inclusion of women as diverse as Shimazu Omasa, Fukuda Hideko, Kanno Suga, and Abe Sada into the same narrative may seem a stretch at first glance, but Marran clearly demonstrates how their stories fit into an evolving symbolic realm, often serving the ideological needs of the political, medical, and military establishments. Such needs were rarely met straight on. Marran shows how meanings shifted with unintended consequences, how attempts to undermine authority were often accompanied by even stronger affirmations, and especially how a consistent focus on the deviance of the criminal