Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  The lone exception to the eager assimilation to Japanese culture by the story’s characters is a devoted Confucian teacher, the sixty-five-year-old Okushima, who held a high position as a scholar in the Ryukyu Kingdom. His Nakayama School of Confucian study has fallen on hard times with the growing popularity of “Yamato education,” which he denounces as heresy. As might be expected, at the outbreak of war, he declares his support for China. “The yellow gunboats will defeat the Yamato,” he predicts. Outnumbered by Okinawans, whose support for the Japanese grows with each successive victory against China, Okushima is shunned. Rumored to be enticing beautiful young boys into his home with promises of mandarin oranges and despised as a rebel and a traitor, the old man stays locked indoors, protecting himself from slurs and rocks with which the townspeople assail him. Just as the homoerotic attraction evidenced by Okushima in the story’s final scene would be suppressed in the course of Japan’s modernization, so too the possibility is quashed of Okinawans allying themselves with China. The eerie depiction of Japanese soldiers filling the streets of Shuri in 1894 calls to mind occupation of the same site by Japanese soldiers in the Battle of Okinawa fifty years later. Okinawa’s pioneering work of prose fiction shows clearly the incursion of Japanese-imposed modernity.

  Unless one happened to know that the author of “Black Diamonds” is Okinawan, nothing about the story would mark it as prose fiction from Okinawa. Set in wartime Indonesia, “Black Diamonds” depicts a platonic relationship that develops between an Indonesian youth and a reporter working for the Japanese army. At the outset, Paniman is described as beautiful, and his body, “slender like a girl’s … radiate[d] a natural innocence.” As the war for independence wears on, though, Paniman, whom the narrator happens upon after a long separation, changes markedly. His eyes still glow like black diamonds, but his clothing is soiled with sweat and dirt, his hair is disheveled, his cheeks are drawn and haggard, and his hands clutch a gun. Clearly, the war has taken its toll on the youth, who finds himself caught in a complex web of diverse nationalisms, ranging from Japanese to Dutch to Indonesian to overseas Chinese and to British. After a brief exchange, the protagonist watches Paniman’s retreating figure, suppressing the urge to run after the young man, who “had taken up arms and marched into the blood and filth of war,” “sacrificing his youth and innocence for his country.” As this is the protagonist’s final encounter with Paniman, readers do not know what becomes of him, but even were he to survive, it seems unlikely that this beleaguered youth could ever return to his formerly refined demeanor.

  The power of the work lies in its clear depiction of the impact of war on youth. However, what makes it doubly powerful as a work of Okinawan fiction is precisely what its author, Ōta Ryōhaku, leaves unsaid, no doubt for fear of reprisal by U.S. censors in occupied Okinawa. Constrained by the occupation of his home island in 1946, Ōta cannot write freely about conditions in Okinawa. What he does instead is write an autobiographical work based on his experience as a reporter in Indonesia. In so doing, he employs a literary mode recognizable to Japanese readers: personal fiction. And by setting the piece in Indonesia, Ōta gives it an “exotic” location that functions, ironically, as a haven for the pointedly subversive narrative he produces. That is, the parallels that Ōta suggests between the foreign and the familiar provoke readers to identify the allusion to their own contemporary situation. In telling his story of the fight for Indonesian independence, surely Ōta is suggesting independence as an alternative to the predicament of Okinawa, sacrificed by the Japanese in the Battle of Okinawa and occupied by Americans following Japan’s defeat. When he writes how President Sukarno convened the “All Indonesia Youth Convention” to embolden his followers, after which Indonesians started to show resistance against the power of the Japanese army, is Ōta not envisioning a similar scenario in war-torn Okinawa?

  One can see the impressive range of Medoruma Shun’s artistry in stories of his showcased in this anthology, from the blunt style of “Hope” to the evocative “Taiwan Woman” to the memory-laced story “Tree of Butterflies.” In addition to the varying styles of these pieces, Medoruma presents readers with a diverse cast of characters. These stories feature not only Okinawans of differing generations but also an American child, a Taiwanese woman, and in the haunting “Tree of Butterflies,” a Korean sex slave. By depicting widely disparate characters, Medoruma shows that the issues of occupation, war, and memory, of which he so often writes, are not restricted to Okinawans alone but rather are shared concerns.

  Considered Medoruma’s debut, the 1983 “Taiwan Woman: Record of a Fish Shoal” is a Proustian coming-of-age story set during Okinawa’s reversion period. It revolves around a migrant Taiwanese woman who comes to the island to work in a pineapple factory. The narration, told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, is layered with depictions of the foreign woman and the tilapia fish that swim in a polluted river adjacent to the factory. Prominent in the work’s striking imagery is the overlapping eyes of the boy, the fish, and the woman, who is at once the object of desire for all the males in the boy’s family. Victim and aggressor blur, too. The boy, lowest in the pecking order of males in his family, elevates himself in the only way he can: by violently piercing the tilapia, all the while fantasizing about the Taiwanese woman. She enthralls the men around her, but as a migrant worker, her allure is necessarily brief.

  Perhaps the most harrowing of Medoruma’s war narratives is “Tree of Butterflies.” Published in 2000, the story relates the deep and abiding love that a dying old woman named Gozei has for a man named Shōsei, who, last seen in the midst of war, is presumed dead. After a long absence, Yoshiaki, the story’s protagonist, finds himself in his hometown, where his arrival coincides with the town’s harvest festival. As the annual festivities take place, Yoshiaki is drawn slowly to traditions in which he had long been uninterested. These include music, dance, and the performance of melodramatic but beloved plays that depict rampant prewar discrimination in Japan toward Okinawans. The connection between Yoshiaki’s pursuit of his identity and Gozei’s love is faint but becomes more distinct as the work unfolds. Ultimately, it is Yoshiaki’s tie to Gozei and Shōsei’s generation that emerges as Medoruma’s primary concern.10 The transmission of memory, ever problematic, particularly when related to war, became a raging issue among Okinawan intellectuals as the new millennium drew near, and it clearly informs Medoruma’s writing of “Tree of Butterflies.”

  A broken yet still coherent stream of scenes from the past juts violently into the narrative present, revealing the horrors of Gozei’s life as a sex worker employed at the Morning Sun (Asahi) “inn,” where Japanese soldiers resided in Okinawa during the war. It is here that she met Shōsei, a servant at the inn, and became his lover. The pair’s only relief from harsh servitude comes in stolen moments enjoyed under a tree clustered with masses of yellow blossoms that look like butterflies from a distance. Yoshiaki learns these details of the couple’s past from a ninety-year-old gentleman named Uchima, who had previously served as ward chief. In a telling revelation, the narrator discloses that none of these particulars are recorded in the “Village History.” The perilous nature of these memories is underscored as one is made aware that even the orally transmitted history of the ostracized pair would have been lost had Yoshiaki not queried Uchima about Shōsei. Advanced in age, Uchima is the sole repository of memories deliberately left unmentioned in local history until Yoshiaki hears the tale. It is precisely what the village history excises that forms the core of “Tree of Butterflies.”

  Sakiyama Tami is represented in this anthology by two of her island stories, “Island Confinement” and “Swaying, Swinging.” The former work is the story of an Okinawan woman in her early thirties who returns to a remote island to visit the dying mother of a man to whom she had been briefly engaged. Through the portrayals of these two women, the Okinawan woman learns of the traditions of the island from the dying mother, who, ironically, comes from the main islands of Japan. When th
e story concludes, it is unclear whether the younger woman, who has learned certain island traditions from the elder woman, will assume the dying woman’s place in the island community or whether she will, like so many others, abandon the island and its ways for those of the main island of Okinawa. In any case, Sakiyama shows in this and other of her island stories not only the tensions that lie between Okinawans and mainland Japanese or Okinawans and Americans but also those that pit Okinawans against each other.

  “Swaying, Swinging” is set on Hotara, a fictive island that calls to mind Kudaka Island, a sacred place close to the main island of Okinawa. Similar to Kohama Island, a sparsely inhabited island west of Iriomote and the setting for “Island Confinement,” Hotara Island is nearly depopulated. This wildly fantastic story tells the history of Hotara, now populated only by the elderly, through the voices of three men, Jirā, Tarā, and Sanrā, whose ages range from 80 to 113. Chatting idly over tea, the men mourn the passing of island traditions, such as proper burial of the deceased. They marvel at the inexplicable dance of sea foam witnessed by one of them, a dance in which the creation and possible demise of their home is expressed. Through the incisive use of what Sakiyama calls “island language” (shimakotoba), she tells her story of an island lost, underscoring the grim reality of Okinawa’s smaller, outlying islands from which the young flee.

  In the essay “A Wild Dance with Island Words” (Shimakotoba de kachaashii, 2002), Sakiyama writes of a methodological shift in her fiction writing that destabilizes the Japanese language.11 In subsequent fiction, Sakiyama’s protagonists pursue imperiled words, restoring them to life, if only in the span of a given work. These “alien” words, left unglossed, convey sound without definition to mainland readers, while Sakiyama’s masterful storytelling keeps them engrossed. Whereas many other writers from Okinawa provide aids for readers to understand the local language, Sakiyama increasingly does not. Hers is writing that treads a fine line between captivating and confounding readers.

  POETRY

  The themes of prose fiction from Okinawa, such as destruction of the environment and identity, often in the form of a clash between tradition and modernity, are also conspicuous in the prefecture’s poetry. Like writers of fiction, poets often create ironic juxtapositions of Okinawa’s lush, subtropical landscape with its residents’ troubled circumstances. Tōma Hiroko’s poem “Backbone” contrasts “white beaches … tropical lemon-limes, red hibiscus” with a “wire fence, fighter jets,” and “streets bright with neon [that] are the man’s playground.”

  In other poems, the natural environment reflects human circumstances and emotions more directly through association or memory. The lovesick, but tongue-tied, protagonist of Kiyotaka Masanobu’s “Inner Words” likens his predicament to “Waves undulating [that] / Wash over the roots of quicksand … / … flowing through the burst stems of night flowers / Forgetful of voices, vomiting.”

  Poets write of the many Okinawans who, compelled mostly by economic circumstances, have left their home islands for mainland Japan or other countries. The speaker of Mabuni Chōshin’s “White Ryukyuan Tombs,” in traditional thirty-one-syllable tanka form, voices homesickness for his village while traveling in the city. “With feet used to walking the beach / how painful is it to pass down Ginza’s boulevards.”

  Perhaps no poet is as beloved in Okinawa as Yamanokuchi Baku (1903–1963), an eminent author of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Known foremost as an Okinawan writer, he also won widespread critical acclaim in mainland literary circles. Baku’s writing has appeared not only in collections of works by Okinawan writers but also in major anthologies of Japanese literature and poetry in general, and his 1959 anthology of poems, The Definitive Yamanokuchi Baku Poetry Collection, won the prestigious Takamura Kōtarō Prize for poetry.

  Baku’s poetry is recognized for its flashes of humor and plain style, and it often centers on issues of Okinawan ethnic identity, especially as it relates to the author’s own experiences of alienation and ambivalence in mainland Japan. His most famous poem, “A Conversation” (Kaiwa, 1938), presents the reader with a conversation in which an unnamed woman in Tokyo begins by asking the first-person narrator a seemingly simple question—“Where are you from?” In the remainder of the poem, the narrator offers only vague responses, emboldened by interior monologue, replete with stereotypical images of Okinawa. This is the island to which he is clearly attached but cannot give voice in response to the woman’s query. When the woman later asks where in the south the narrator is from, he responds,

  In the south, that zone of indigo seas where it’s always summer and dragon

  orchids, sultan umbrellas, octopus pines, and papayas all nestle together

  under the bright sunlight. That place shrouded in misconceptions

  where, it is said, the people aren’t Japanese and can’t understand the Japanese language

  “The subtropics,” I answered.12

  Many poems in Baku’s collections, such as “Okinawa! Where Will You Go Now?” (Okinawa yo, doko e iku, 1962), included herein, encapsulates the predicament of a narrator riddled with questions of identity. In the 1962 poem, the narrator gives voice to prevailing stereotypes depicted earlier in “A Conversation,” all the while asking a question pressing for many Okinawans during the island’s protracted occupation—where does our future lie? “Okinawa! Where Will You Go Now?” also expresses homesickness by evoking Okinawa’s indigenous flora: “Islands that bear papayas, bananas / and kunenbo oranges / Islands of the sago palm, of agave trees, of the banyan / Islands of the scarlet flowers of hibiscus, of the deigo coral tree / … / having lost my bearings, [I am] stuck, cast under this spell of homesickness.” And, echoes of Baku’s “A Conversation,” can be seen in Kiyota Masanobu’s 2001 “Inner Words,” a poem depicting the anguish of the silenced speaker.

  DRAMA

  Chinen Seishin applies acute Swiftian satire to lampoon the many myths and stereotypes that Okinawans encounter in mainland Japan. Based on an actual incident, “The Human Pavilion” dramatizes the demeaning exhibit of Okinawans who, dressed in their “native costume” with their “primitive artifacts,” were displayed for a fee as “exotic specimens” to audiences at the Fifth World Trade and Industrial Exhibition of 1903 held in Osaka. (Other “specimens” included Ainu, Taiwanese, Asian Indians, Javanese, and a Bulgarian.) In the context of what was later criticized as a “circus animal show,” Chinen demonstrates how prejudice and discrimination have resulted in relentless pressures on Okinawans, often internalized, to reject their culture and “become more Japanese.” And he shows how attitudes in Japan revealed so starkly and blatantly at the Human Pavilion a century ago are ultimately dehumanizing.

  Whether through Chinen’s satirical drama, Tōma’s ironic juxtapositions in poetry, or Medoruma’s pointed accusations in fiction, these writers voice protest in varied forms to the circumstances imposed on Okinawans: relentless pressures to adopt mainland culture, economic inequities that erode rural life, the disproportionate military presence, and the suppression of wartime memories. While such issues are hardly exclusive to Okinawa, its writers illuminate them in unique and arresting ways that continue to captivate readers in Japan and elsewhere.

  A Note on Tone and Language in the Translations

  No single philosophy or methodology has been applied in the translations. Each work required its own criteria for rendering, as faithfully as possible, the Japanese text into idiomatic English. In the case of Medoruma Shun’s “Hope,” for example, the narrator’s tone is bitter and mocking as he tells how and why he murdered a small American child. By contrast, the tone of Ōta Ryōhaku’s narrator in “Black Diamonds” is filled with adoration and longing for a young soldier. Tone is an especially crucial element in Chinen Seishin’s satirical drama “The Human Pavilion.” Its main character, resembling a circus ringmaster, touts the “exotic” peculiarities of the exhibited human “specimens” with exaggerated ridicule to fascinate his audience, while the objects of his
rants respond obediently, even obsequiously, to his taunts. The tone of Medoruma Shun’s “Taiwan Woman: Record of a Fish Shoal” is one of bittersweet reminiscence as the narrator recalls his adolescent sexual awakening.

  Readers should also note that while Japanese literature from Okinawa is written primarily in standard Japanese, nearly every writer in this anthology includes some variety of local language. The motivation for this could be as simple as to enhance local color or as complex as to resist the hegemony of standard Japanese. Since Japanese and Ryukyuan each belong to the Japonic language family and developed into separate languages due to geographic distance and other factors, it is not surprising to discover linguistic diversity in Okinawa’s literature. Whereas Medoruma Shun and Sakiyama Tami refrain from using Okinawan languages in their early works, in the authors’ most recent writing speech is rendered in local language and, in Sakiyama’s case, a plethora of local language fills even her descriptive passages. Thus, Sakiyama’s 1990 “Island Confinement” presents little difficulty to readers of Japanese while her 2003 “Swaying, Swinging” can bewilder readers with its profusion of regional language. For the Okinawan language in Sakiyama Tami’s two stories, the translators followed the author’s practice in the Japanese original of including phonetic renderings of Okinawan expressions so the reader can hear how they sound. While space limitations have reduced the volume of these phonetic renderings, particularly in the dialogue, as a compromise, we have retained them in the descriptive passages. Finally, Chinen Seishin’s complex use of language in “The Human Pavilion” necessitated that an explanation of the work’s linguistic hybridity follow the translation of the drama. Notes, used sparingly throughout the anthology, were necessary for this work to avoid distracting interruptions in the characters’ orations, which depend for their impact on crude, pithy outbursts.