Published with the support of the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i
Islands of Protest
Japanese Literature from Okinawa
EDITED BY
Davinder L. Bhowmik
and Steve Rabson
University of Hawai‘i Press
HONOLULU
University of Hawai‘i Press
www.uhpress.hawaii.edu
© 2016 University of Hawai‘i Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Islands of protest : Japanese literature from Okinawa / edited by Davinder L. Bhowmik and Steve Rabson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8248-3979-6 cloth : alk. paper — ISBN 978-0-8248-3980-2 pbk. : alk. Paper
1. Japanese literature—Japan—Okinawa-ken—Translations into English. 2. Okinawa-ken (Japan)—In literature. I. Bhowmik, Davinder L., editor. II. Rabson, Steve, editor.
PL886.O52I84 2016
895.6'08095229—dc23
2015034523
Published with the support of the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i
ISBN for this edition:
978-0-8248-5824-7 (EPUB)
Also available:
ISBN: 978-0-8248-5825-4 (Kindle)
ISBN: 978-0-8248-5826-1 (PDF)
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3979-6 (Cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3980-2 (Paper)
For further information, please visit:
www.uhpress.hawaii.edu
This anthology is dedicated to the memory of Okamoto Keitoku.
CONTENTS
Introduction
FICTION
Hope by Medoruma Shun (1999)
Translated by Steve Rabson
The Kunenbo Orange Trees by Yamagusuku Seichū (1911)
Translated by Carolyn Morley
Black Diamonds by Ōta Ryōhaku (1949)
Translated by Amy C. Franks
Taiwan Woman: Record of a Fish Shoal by Medoruma Shun (1983)
Translated by Shi-Lin Loh
Tree of Butterflies by Medoruma Shun (2000)
Translated by Aimée Mizuno
Island Confinement by Sakiyama Tami (1990)
Translated by Takuma Sminkey
Swaying, Swinging by Sakiyama Tami (2003)
Translated by Kyoko Selden and Alisa Freedman
POETRY
Backbone by Tōma Hiroko (2005)
Translated by Victoria Young
Inner Words by Kiyota Masanobu (2001)
Translated by Masaki Kinjo
White Ryukyuan Tombs by Mabuni Chōshin (1910)
Translated by Jon Holt
Okinawa! Where Will You Go Now? by Yamanokuchi Baku (1964)
Translated by Jon Holt
DRAMA
The Human Pavilion by Chinen Seishin (1978)
Translated by Robert Tierney
Contributors
INTRODUCTION
ON JUNE 26, 1999, THE ASAHI, a major Japanese newspaper, published a very short story by the most critically acclaimed writer from Okinawa in recent years, Medoruma Shun. The brevity of this piece belies its impact on readers. Unsettling in both form and content, the story depicts the constraints of everyday life in Okinawa, a small island on which 75 percent of Japan’s United States military bases occupy less than 1 percent of Japanese soil. It is here where, owing to the terms of the United States–Japan Security Treaty, Okinawans have since the end of the Asia-Pacific War lived with violent crimes and deadly accidents endemic to the vast military presence. In this story, in which the infamous 1995 rape by three U.S. military servicemen of a twelve-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl serves as a backdrop, the protagonist, an Okinawan who has just strangled to death an American boy, reflects that his is a crime both natural and inevitable for those without power who are forced to live under conditions of constant fear.1 Had the story ended there, it might well be considered a fiercely polemical essay. It doesn’t. After the protagonist commits his crime, he drives to the site of the rally held to protest the schoolgirl rape, a historic event that drew 85,000 Okinawans together to demonstrate their resistance to the presence of U.S. military bases. There, the protagonist sets himself on fire, effectively ending both his life and the story.2
The title of Medoruma’s story, “Hope,” is no less disturbing than is the content. What could possibly be hopeful about the murder of an American child or the self-immolation of an Okinawan man? To be sure, killing an innocent child is unconscionable, but the protagonist’s act of suicide in no way diminishes the crime. Rather, the murder of the child and the death of the man only redouble the sense of powerlessness felt by people living in Okinawa. The child and his murderer seem to be diametric opposites: one is a young American; the other is an older Okinawan. Yet we see the two inextricably linked in a telltale line: “As I finished strangling him from behind, something burst in the back of his throat, and a gob of filth soiled my arm.” Like many such passages in Medoruma’s oeuvre—phantom soldiers sucking water from Tokushō’s enlarged toe in “Droplets,” for example—this one shows how a bodily fluid can messily link together the oppressed. It is precisely the neat symmetry or bond forged between the child and his murderer that redeems this story, raising it to the level of art. Even as the line between victim and aggressor is blurred, what remains crystal clear is the fraught condition of everyday life in Okinawa. The story’s ironic, darkly humorous title conveys Medoruma’s wish for an alternative to the burden of the military bases Okinawa continues to shoulder. In sum, “Hope” is the author’s pointed critique of the clichéd notion of a gentle Okinawa ceaselessly depicted in Japan’s mass media.3 Medoruma’s protagonist exhibits agential change even if it results in his own death.
This anthology offers English-language readers outstanding works of prose fiction, poetry, and drama. Like Medoruma Shun’s “Hope,” they show how Okinawan artists have mined Japan’s southernmost island prefecture, the soil of which is said to be fertile due to a complex history,4 in order to pen compelling literature in which the cultural conditions of oppression and protest are key. Reading this literature reveals art replete with a geopolitical and historical specificity that is so often elided in Japan’s mass media.
The history of oppression in Okinawa began as early as the sixteenth century, when, having established itself as a politically independent entity by the early 1500s and engaged in maritime trade that led to a flourishing court culture, the Ryūkyū Kingdom, of which Okinawa was part, was invaded by the Shimazu family of the Satsuma domain in 1609. For roughly the next three hundred years, the Satsuma insisted that Ryukyuans maintain their culture, an injunction that neatly demarcated the Satsuma from Ryukyuan “Others,” providing justification for rule by the former. This colonial-type administration ended in 1879, more than a decade after the Meiji Restoration, when Japan annexed the region, now demarcated “Okinawa,” as part of its expansion of the nation-state, in what is known as the “Ryukyu disposition” (Ryūkyū shobun).
With the rise of the nation-state, the nature of oppression in Okinawa changed. Paradoxically, whereas Okinawans had earlier been made to exhibit their Ryukyuan heritage, they were now compelled to suppress it. Okinawa was deemed Japanese territory, yet disregard for the new prefecture’s denizens reached an extreme despite their best efforts to assimilate to Japanese culture. This was particularly acute in the Taishō period (1912–1926), when Okinawa’s economy ground to a halt due to plummeting prices of sugar, a series of natural disasters, and burdensome economic policies. The vast majority of Okinawa’s populace strove to assimilate; however, the effort of Okinawans to identify themselves
as Japanese remained thwarted because, as Alan Christy has succinctly explained, “a weak, insufficiently modernized Okinawan economy discursively constructed an Okinawan identity, which was correspondingly weak and undeveloped, to serve as the origin of the economic problem.”5 Throughout the prewar period, Okinawans remained in this vicious cycle wherein they encountered discriminatory policies from the government in Tokyo and fierce discrimination in housing and the workplace on the mainland. Rampant discrimination culminated in the decimation of the populace of Okinawa, site of the largest land battle waged in the Asia-Pacific and the only battle undertaken on Japanese soil.
The Battle of Okinawa, which resulted in the deaths of nearly a third of the island’s civilian population, exceeding the number of atomic bomb casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, has cast a very long shadow on postwar Okinawan literature. Indeed, if identity is the main theme of Okinawa’s prewar literature, the main theme of its postwar literature is the horrific battle. In spite of the human cost borne by Okinawans defending the mainland, immediately after Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty concluding the U.S. occupation of the mainland in 1951, Okinawans began to petition en masse for a reversion to Japanese sovereignty. The day that the treaty was signed is referred to as the “Day of Shame” by Okinawans, for, as John Dower puts it, “both the Japanese government and Imperial Household were willing from an early date to trade away true sovereignty for Okinawa in exchange for an early end to the Occupation in the rest of Japan.”6
The reversion movement in the 1950s and 1960s grew extremely popular, with greater than 70 percent of the Okinawan electorate supporting reunification with Japan at a time when, in one of history’s repetitions, U.S. occupation forces encouraged the flourishing of Ryukyuan culture in an effort to distance Okinawans from their mainland cousins. This strategy mirrored the strategy the Shimazu clan from Satsuma employed during its rule in the kingdom period. Protests against the protracted occupation in Okinawa peaked during the Vietnam War, when the island served as a strategic staging ground. Calls for reversion became ever more strident in Okinawa, and great numbers of mainland Japanese, including public intellectuals such as Ōe Kenzaburō and Oda Makoto, who opposed the conflict in Vietnam, rallied in support of the reversion movement. In December 1969, Prime Minister Satō Eisaku and President Richard Nixon agreed on Okinawa’s return to Japanese prefectural status, which took place, at last, on May 15, 1972.
While Okinawa did regain its long-sought prefectural status, its citizens’ expectations for base closures, the departure of the United States military, and new social and economic opportunities remained unmet. Japanese Diet deliberations that took place in 1971 over Okinawa’s reversion betrayed the hopes of many Okinawans, for they revealed a U.S.-Japan collusion to continue indefinitely the operation of U.S. military bases. Protests for base reductions on par with those on the mainland (hondo nami) met with failure. Not only were base reductions far fewer than in the mainland, but reversion to Japanese sovereignty led to the deployment of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to Okinawa. Today, despite overwhelming opposition to the bases by the populace, Okinawa continues to carry the burden of maintaining the United States–Japan Security Treaty.
In 1996, after the outcry that followed the schoolgirl rape alluded to in Medoruma’s “Hope,” the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO) Agreement stipulated the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma, located in a congested area of central Okinawa, to the Henoko district of Nago City in the largely unspoiled north. This decision remains controversial in part because the pristine site abounds in coral reefs, the natural habitat for the dugong, an ancient symbol of abundance in the Ryukyus and an endangered species today. Inamine Susumu, the current mayor of Nago, the largest city in northern Okinawa, fiercely opposes relocation to Henoko in favor of relocation outside Okinawa, yet unsurprisingly, the Japanese government has refused to consider moving the base to another prefecture. Presently, despite extreme resistance to the relocation in the form of 24/7 protests, preliminary construction of the base has begun. It is precisely this type of destruction of the natural environment, which Inamine abhors, that fills the pages of Okinawa’s postwar literature.
Local resistance such as Inamine’s has raised awareness of the base issue within and outside Okinawa. Despite repeated bilateral pledges since 1996 to build a base in Henoko, the indefatigable protest movement has stymied its construction. Residents have staged rallies, organized campaigns in the media, and sailed flotillas of small boats into the designated offshore construction area, blocking Japanese government ships from completing preparatory on-site surveys. In December 2011, the Japan Times pronounced the project “all but dead,”7 and in April 2012, the United States agreed to the unconditional redeployment elsewhere of 9,000 of the 18,000 Marines stationed in Okinawa, a move that had previously been contingent on construction of the base at Henoko.
The fight to prevent relocation to Henoko took a grave turn when in late December 2013, in an about-face, Governor Nakaima conveyed to Prime Minister Abe his approval of the government’s application to claim landfill in Nago for the proposed relocation. In January 2014, an international petition to cancel the planned base, signed by the Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone, activist Noam Chomsky, and dozens of other luminaries, gained the attention of the public. Remarkably, also in January, Inamine Susumu handily won reelection despite intervention by Abe’s government, which generously backed a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) opponent. Once reelected, Inamine traveled to New York and Washington, DC, to raise awareness of his city’s strong disapproval of the Abe administration’s plan to move forward on the relocation of MCAS Futenma to Henoko. And in the most recent gubernatorial election held in November 2015, the anti-base candidate, Onaga Takeshi, who used the slogan “All Okinawa,” beat the LDP-backed incumbent, Nakaima Hirokazu, by 100,000 votes, a clear signal that the Okinawan populace was united in its opposition to the relocation. Then, compounding their resistance, in the snap parliamentary election called by Prime Minister Abe, LDP candidates won every election except in Okinawa, where all four LDP candidates failed to win. There is now no disputing that Okinawa’s governor, its mayors, and the prefecture’s four Diet members, all of whom oppose the relocation of Futenma to Henoko, are standing together in defiance of the Abe government.
In August 2015, one year after base construction began in Henoko, Prime Minister Abe made a surprise announcement suspending construction for one month, citing rising tensions. Protesters’ enthusiasm waned when Abe added that whatever the outcome of negotiations, construction would resume. Forbes Asia proclaimed Governor Onaga “Japan’s bravest man” when he announced on September 14 his “unhesitating” decision to proceed in cancelling the landfill permit authorized by his predecessor, Inamine. At press time, Onaga spoke at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva to gain international support to halt base relocation to Henoko, and has revoked the landfill permit issued by former governor Nakaima. All signals point to a potentially serious clash between Governor Onaga and Prime Minister Abe in the months to come.8
Protests against the Futenma relocation by Inamine and others who are against the destruction of the natural environment wrought by base construction in Henoko include the Nago resident Medoruma, a prominent antibase activist who not only participates in the opposition by manning a protest canoe but also writing about his activities in a daily blog. In recent protests against the start of base construction in Henoko despite the wishes of the populace, protestors marched the streets of Henoko, Tokyo, Washington DC, and New York. The literature we present in this volume brings to the fore oppression by the central Japanese government, easily dismissed by those for whom Okinawans’ past experience of wartime battle does not insistently trouble the present as it does in militarized Okinawa.
Most of the works in this anthology were published in the postwar or contemporary period, when Okinawa’s culture, oppressed by relentless demands to assimilate t
o mainland culture, experienced a dramatic resurgence. The two exceptions, Yamagusuku Seichū’s 1911 “The Kunenbo Orange Trees,” the pioneering story of the modern period, and Ōta Ryōhaku’s 1946 “Black Diamonds,” the first work of postwar Okinawan fiction, are included for their historical importance9 and because the backdrop of both stories is war. “The Kunenbo Orange Trees” shows the fractured nature of society in Okinawa at the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, when pro- and anti-Chinese factions reigned; “Black Diamonds,” on the other hand, is set in 1940s Indonesia, where an unnamed Okinawan protagonist witnesses the tumultuous effects that war has on a young Indonesian male named Paniman.
FICTION
“The Kunenbo Orange Trees” opens with a seemingly idyllic family scene in which the Matsudas gather oranges that have fallen during a typhoon. Responding to contemporary critics’ thirst for “local color,” Yamagusuku Seichū painstakingly depicts Okinawa’s lush, subtropical landscape:
Amid this tranquility, N, the isolated southern seaside village, was exposed to a salty breeze unique to the Ryukyus. The leaves of scrawny trees, like the beach hibiscus and Indian coral, had curled up, an earthen brown. Their trunks stood in rows, still black with dampness. Even so, the thick leaves of such subtropical plants as the aloe, windmill palm, betel nut, brindle-berry, and banyan, like ceramic saucers dipped in deep green, had mopped up still-moist whitish salt.
The typhoon that opens the story signals winds of change that swept Okinawa during the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Japanese soldiers, “wearing yellow hats and black uniforms with a red stripe” and “disparagingly called ‘Yamato beasts,’ ” pour into Shuri Castle, get drunk, and assault local women. The Matsudas, who run a lacquerware business, rent a wing of their home to Hosokawa Shigeru, an elementary school principal who disseminates anti-Chinese propaganda to his students. Hosokawa also urges the Matsudas’ son Sei’ichi to cut his hair in the Japanese style, warning, “they’ll be calling you pigtail boy!”
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