Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  MAN: Do you really think I killed him? I bet you plan to blab to the police when they come and start asking questions. You’ll say, “He was the one who killed him,” won’t you?

  WOMAN: Why would I say such a thing?

  MAN: Since all women are liars.

  WOMAN: Not me. If I promise not to say a word, I mean it, even if I am struck by lightening.

  (The man is so startled that he almost jumps up. He is thoroughly perplexed. Then he puts his arms around the trainer and lifts him up.)

  MAN (to the woman): Hey, give me a hand. Someone is approaching. We have to hide the body quickly!

  WOMAN: To hide the body? Where are we going to hide such a big thing? (She pays no attention to him.)

  (The man walks around the stage dragging the body of the trainer after him. But he finally hits on a good idea. After he sits the trainer in his own former place, he picks up the trainer’s whip and his hat from the floor. Then, slowly, he puts the hat on his own head and laughs as though he is pleased with himself. He snaps the whip in his hand, making a sharp crack.)

  MAN (to the audience): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to extend you a warm welcome to our Human Pavilion. As all of you recognize, human beings are all entitled to equal treatment under the law in accordance with universal principles of humanity. The rights of all human beings, without exception, must be respected. We must never permit discrimination at any time or place, whatever form it might take.

  (After pausing a moment) … In short, there are universal principles of humanity.

  So why do some human beings discriminate against others? What causes such a thing to happen? (He points to the whip.) The cause is perfectly simple: it results from ignorance and prejudice. [He laughs alone at his own joke.] … Is that too hard for you whippersnappers to understand?

  But, seriously, how can we end discrimination, correct prejudice, and eliminate ignorance?

  And so on and so forth. The play returns to the beginning and repeats itself.

  The author ends the play reluctantly, but he can do nothing about it.

  Those of you who do not have any vital business to attend to and are not in a hurry may stay and watch the play from the beginning a second time around. Whatever the case, it will not be easy to let the curtain fall. The reason why is that history really does repeat itself.…

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ON PASSAGES IN OKINAWAN DIALECT

  Jinruikan is a linguistically hybrid and complex work. Chinen Seishin used a mixture of different languages, including standard Japanese; the hybrid language Uchinaa-Yamato-guchi, in which Okinawan dialect is embedded in Japanese grammatical structures (in this case, the author provides the Okinawan pronunciation in furigana); and an Okinawan dialect—to mention only the three principal ones. In addition, he inserted directly into the script passages from literary Okinawan, song lyrics, political speeches in stilted Japanese, propaganda slogans from the wartime and postwar periods. The translator faces a formidable task in keeping these different registers of speech distinct from one another, not to mention rendering them into appropriate English equivalents.

  Translating the numerous passages in Okinawan dialect is a difficult challenge for a translator of Jinruikan. These passages situate the play within a Japanese political context and are therefore vital to the play as a whole. One method of translation would be to look for an English equivalent to Okinawa dialect and to translate all passages to this dialect. A second would be to write the entire text in standard English, leaving the dialect unmarked and untranslated. The third would be to mark the passages in dialect with italics but essentially leave the dialect untranslated. In my translation, I chose this third alternative. On the one hand, I could not think of any dialect or regional speech that bore a relationship to standard English that corresponded to that of the Okinawan dialect to Japanese; on the other hand, I thought that the dialect change was too important to leave unmarked.

  Michael Molasky draws a parallel between the position of Okinawa in Japan and Ireland in Great Britain. In both cases, we find two distinct places that have their own unique culture, language, and history and that have been in a relationship of domination and subordination for many centuries. To be sure, there are differences: Ireland is an independent nation, whereas Okinawa is a Japanese prefecture; and there is no equivalent to Northern Island in the case of Japan. Nevertheless, just as in the case of Ireland and Britain, Japan and Okinawa today have entered a postcolonial period, which continuing to this day, provides a context for the play and its interpretation.

  It is in this postcolonial context that we need to reflect on the politics of language as it is enacted within this play. A Japanese spectator of the play who is ignorant of the Okinawa dialect will not understand what the characters are saying for fairly long stretches of the play. This was also my experience when I first saw the play performed onstage in 2009. While linguistic comprehensibility was probably not an issue when the play opened in Okinawa, it became a crucial political matter when the play was performed in metropolitan Japan. Indeed, the playwright and the director deliberately put the metropolitan audience in the uncomfortable position of not understanding what the Okinawan characters are saying by refraining from the use of subtitles or providing a translation or gloss in theater notes. In Jinruikan, the politics of language and dialect is a central theme of the play, notably in the scene in which the man wears the dialect placard, the absurd language lessons that occurs twice in the play, and the execution of an Okinawan as an alleged spy during the war. In all of these scenes, we witness the imposition of national norms of language; the rejection of Okinawan dialect as inferior, subversive, or uncivilized; and perhaps most of all, the use of dialect as an instrument to separate Japanese and Okinawans during the war. Ota Masahide has shown that Okinawans who used nonstandard Japanese or dialect were seen as dangerous and threatening to the order of the nation at war. It is unlikely that an American reader or viewer of the play would understand the precise nuance of meaning that these scenes might have in the Japanese context. In the Japanese context, they articulate a radical critique of Japan’s national mythology of racial homogeneity and its policies of linguistic standardization. Nevertheless, it is not inconceivable that a director of the play in English might choose to make American viewers look on without understanding what the characters are saying during parts of the play. He or she may choose to have scenes of the play performed in Spanish or one of the many other languages spoken by large groups of U.S. citizens or residents. In fact, as many commentators have noted, the differences between Okinawan and Japanese, which are mutually incomprehensible, more closely resemble those between French and Spanish than they do those between, for example, standard English and black English.

  Notes

  The Human Pavilion (Jinruikan) was first published in the periodical Shin Okinawa Bungaku 33 (New Okinawa Literature) in 1976. The following year, it appeared in the February issue of the theater journal Teatoro and was awarded the twenty-second annual Kishida Award for the best play of the year. It was performed for the first time by the troupe Sōzō at the Nakagashira Kyōiku Kaikan in Okinawa City in July 1976.

    1. A munjurū hat is a straw hat with deep eaves, which is worn by women in traditional dance.

    2. Yamatojin in the original text is a term used by Okinawans to refer to mainland Japanese.

    3. When Okinawans moved to mainland Japan in search of employment in the 1920s, some factory owners and landlords put up similar signs at the entrance to their factories and rooming houses to exclude Okinawans from looking for work or lodgings.

    4. Gujinfū is a term for classical music originally performed at the court of the Ryukyu king. Today this music is often played at the start of festive occasions.

    5. The Human Pavilion (later named the Scientific Human Pavilion) was an off-site pavilion at the Fifth Industrial Exposition held in Osaka in 1903. “Specimens” of various “primitive” populations were displaye
d in living, human showcases. Unlike the Okinawa exhibit depicted in the play, the real one featured two Okinawan women, whom reporters described as prostitutes recruited to work under false pretenses. According to some reports, a Japanese man with a whip presided over the “natives.” The image of a Japanese trainer with a whip has become an icon of Japanese oppression of other races during the colonial period, although it is uncertain whether such a man actually existed.

    6. The pun here is hard to translate into English. In Japanese, “whip” and “ignorance” are homonyms pronounced muchi.

    7. The habu is a snake indigenous to Okinawa and the Amami Islands, measuring about two meters in length and with a triangular head; its venom is extremely poisonous.

    8. The first part of this line is a prayer to a lower deity (nora), while the second part is a tongue twister used for practice by kabuki actors.

    9. This “great mystery” resulted from the 1921 collapse in the price of sugar, a crop that represented 80 percent of Okinawa’s exports. The price collapse devastated farming communities in Okinawa. As in earlier famines, peoples on some islands ate the leaves and lower stalks of the sotetsu, a fern palm (cycad) that provided nourishment but had to be prepared carefully to avoid poisoning. Japanese visitors began to refer to the islands as the “sotetsu hell,” a term that combined pity with condescension. See Alan Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1, no. 3 (1993): 176.

  10. These are sections of towns in Okinawa where prostitutes worked during the U.S. occupation. GI bars lined the streets in Harborview, Naminoue, and Center, as well as in Teruya, where the clientele was almost exclusively African Americans.

  11. Yamatomono means made in Yamato, that is, mainland Japan.

  12. These lines are from the first act of the play Okuyama no Botan (The Peony Deep in the Mountains), written by Iraha Inkichi. During this scene, the daughter of a bandit (shiidō) leaves her aristocratic husband and children so that she will not damage her son’s career prospects in the Ryukyu Kingdom. The woman’s line is the text of the poem she writes before she separates from her husband. The son brings this poem with him as a keepsake when he sets out in search for his mother. After the lines are spoken, the men and woman begin to perform kumiodori, a dance form influenced by Noh.

  13. This speech consists of a medley of wartime slogans.

  14. Hōgen fuda (dialect placard) was a wooden placard placed around the neck of students who used Okinawa dialect on school premises, a punishment that dates from the early twentieth century. Students at the Naha Middle School were the first to inflict this punishment on their fellow students; a student could get rid of it when he caught another student using dialect. Ironically, teachers who favored the return of Okinawa to Japan revived this practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no kyōkai (The Boundaries of the Japanese) (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1998), 565–569.

  15. Governor Yara Chōbyō, the first democratically elected governor of Okinawa, served his term at the time of the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. Yara had fought for reversion, but he grew disillusioned when the reversion failed to reduce the U.S. military presence in Okinawa. As with many who had participated in the reversion movement, he had fought to uphold the pacifistic and democratic constitution of Japan.

  16. The six-month Okinawa International Ocean Exposition opened on July 25, 1975. The Japanese government spent billions of yen to promote this exhibition, held to celebrate the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. But the number of tourists plummeted after the exposition ended, resulting in bankruptcies and economic dislocation, and the main long-term beneficiaries were construction and travel companies from Japan. In addition, the opening ceremony, attended by Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko, was marred when leftist activists tried to hurl a Molotov cocktail at the crown prince.

  17. Cadmium is a toxic and carcinogenic element used primarily in the making of batteries. In postwar Japan, the release of cadmium in irrigation channels by the Mitsui Mining Company caused widespread poisoning of the local food supply in Toyama Prefecture, resulting in kidney disease and softening of the bones, a condition known as itai-itai (it hurts, it hurts) disease.

  18. Okinawa was ruled by the U.S. military administration from 1945 to 1972. Even after its reversion to Japan in 1972, the archipelago continued to bear the burden for 75 percent of the U.S. bases in Japan, which occupy almost a sixth of the landmass of the islands.

  19. Ota Chōfu, a respected Okinawan leader and promoter of assimilation, asserted in a 1900 lecture, “One of the most important tasks of today’s Okinawa is to make everything look as it does in other prefectures in Japan. We should even sneeze the way people in other prefectures do.” Quoted in Oguma, “Nihonjin” no kyōkai, 281.

  20. In Japanese, hakushon.

  21. The term, ironic in this context, denoted the Japanese military.

  22. Meaning unknown.

  23. The chondaraa is a performance art piece that used to be sung and danced by ambulant artists before the gates of houses. As the written form of chondaraa suggests (it is written with the character kyō for the capital city Kyoto), the art was transmitted from Kyoto to the Ryukyu Kingdom during the medieval period. The first part of the chondaraa is called gochigyō, the distribution of land and properties to retainers by a feudal lord.

  24. Prime Minister Satō Eisaku made this statement in a public address during his first official visit to Okinawa in 1965 (Okinawa no sokoku fukki nashi ni wa sengo wa owaranai). Satō negotiated the Okinawa reversion agreement with U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969. Under this agreement, Okinawa was returned to Japan in May 1972, but with U.S. military bases remaining largely intact.

  25. The five hundred female students from middle and high school who made up the Princess Lily Student Nurse Corps (himeyuri butai) were conscripted to serve as nurses on the front lines and carry food and ammunition to soldiers on the battlefield. Many were killed in the Battle of Okinawa, while others committed suicide rather than be captured.

  26. The Blood and Iron Corps was an elite group composed of 1,779 male students from high school who took up arms to fight the Americans in the Battle of Okinawa. Most of those mobilized in the battle of Okinawa lost their lives. Ota Masahide, “Reexamining the History of the Battle of Okinawa,” in Okinawa: Cold War Island, ed. Chalmers Johnson (Cardiff, CA: Japan Policy Research Center, 1999), 24.

  27. The Yasukuni Shrine is a major Shinto shrine in Tokyo established in 1879 and dedicated to the spirits of the soldiers who died in defense of the emperor in Japan’s modern wars. It has been the object of widespread criticism for enshrining convicted war criminals and for visits by Japanese prime ministers as violations of the Japanese constitution’s separation of religion and the state.

  28. The Homeland Defense Corps was made up of older Okinawan men organized at the village level. Among other tasks, it kept a lookout on the coast to watch for the arrival of American ships or to report on enemy troop movements.

  29. During the Battle of Okinawa, the military often mistrusted Okinawan civilians and accused them of spying. In one case, the military executed more than a thousand Okinawan civilians without any legal process on charges of spying for the Americans. In addition, the Japanese military viewed the Okinawa dialect, incomprehensible to them, as a secret code of resistance and punished those who used it. Indeed, the headquarters of the Japanese defense force in Okinawa issued a directive on April 9, 1945, that required all soldiers and civilians to use only standard Japanese and threatened that those who disobeyed would “be regarded as spies and receive appropriate punishment.” Ota, “Reexamining the History of the Battle of Okinawa,” op cit., 30–32.

  30. The expression “war of attrition” suggests that the Japanese armed forces were prepared to fight to the bitter end to defend Okinawa, as Japanese propaganda claimed. However, historians argue that the real aim of Japan’s high command was to tie down the invaders to buy time and
build up defenses for the decisive battle that would take place on the mainland. See ibid., 23. This military tactic has been likened to the discarded stone strategy (suteishi sakusen) in the game of go, in which one side sacrifices a pawn to divert his opponent.

  31. As a common noun in Japanese, kama means “sickle.” In this scene, the word becomes a personal name of the trainer. All of these names—Kama, Kami, Uji—are very common first names in Okinawa.

  32. This phrase was used by Emperor Hirohito in his radio speech of August 15, 1945, as his way of informing the Japanese people that Japan had lost the war and would surrender to the Allied forces.

  33. Yoron is an island about twenty-three kilometers to the north of Okinawa that used to belong to the Ryukyu Kingdom but became part of Kagoshima Prefecture in 1953. It was just beyond the seventeenth parallel marking the border of U.S. jurisdiction during the occupation of Okinawa and, for advocates of reversion, symbolized the desire to return to Japanese sovereignty.

  34. This refers to the emperor of Japan, officially called “a living god.”

  CONTRIBUTORS

  DAVINDER L. BHOWMIK is an associate professor of Japanese at the University of Washington, Seattle. She teaches and publishes research in the field of modern Japanese literature with a specialization in prose fiction from Okinawa, where she lived until the age of 18. Regional fiction, the atomic bombings, and Japanese film constitute some of her other scholarly interests. Her publications include “Temporal Discontinuity in the Atomic Bomb Fiction of Hayashi Kyōko” (in Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999); Writing Okinawa: Narratives of Identity and Resistance (2008); and “Subaltern Identity in Okinawa” (in Reading Colonial Japan, 2012). Currently she is writing a book manuscript on violence and military base-town fiction in contemporary Japanese literature.

  AMY C. FRANKS is a professional translator and professor of Japanese language and literature currently residing in Northern Virginia. She received her B.A. in English and Japanese studies from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and her Ph.D. from Yale University in Connecticut.