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| 1 |
ID:
073443
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| Publication |
2006.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article chronicles the changing subject-positions of Okinawans in Bolivia from the 1950s to 1990s, who migrated to Colonia Okinawa, an agricultural settlement in the eastern Santa Cruz region, as sponsored migrants backed by the United States military administration and the Okinawan (Ry?ky?) government. Since the forced annexation of Okinawa by Imperial Japan in 1879, Okinawans and the Okinawan Diaspora have often been discriminated against by the Japanese government and the immigrants from mainland Japan as illegitimate Japanese national subjects. The lack of active intervention by the Japanese government and the virtual absence of Japanese mainlanders in the settlement, however, enabled the Okinawan settlers to maintain their Okinawan cultural identities and practices without being questioned about their legitimacy as Japanese. Underscored by their socioeconomic success as large-scale farm owners who employed the locals as inexpensive laborers, the settlers gradually shifted their primary identification from "Okinawan" to "Japanese" in the particular social contexts of Colonia Okinawa. The settlers' concern about their children's cultural assimilation into the local Bolivian population led them to stress the Japanese-Bolivian polarity, while relegating the troubled history between Japan and Okinawa into the background. As a result, Okinawans in Colonia Okinawa, despite their status as formerly colonized subjects under Imperial Japan, "became" Japanese-vis-à-vis local Bolivians-without culturally becoming as one.
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| 2 |
ID:
188583
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| Summary/Abstract |
The destruction of Okinawa after the Pacific War led Okinawans to look for new interpretations of their past to overcome the hardships of the present and imagine a new future. Although scholars have recently examined Okinawans’ memory politics, they have paid little attention to the history of Okinawans in South America and their memory construction during the American occupation of the Ryukyu Islands between 1945 and 1972. To fill this gap, this article analyzes Okinawans’ diasporic memory narratives in Argentina in conjunction with transnational memories circulating between 1945 and 1965. Community leaders in Argentina during this period intended to construct a compelling remembrance narrative that could support their identity claims in the face of an uncertain future for their home islands. While this process was shaped by existing transnational discourses, Okinawan immigrants in Argentina negotiated and accepted only those ideas that fit their local agenda and served as sources of diasporic identity and pride. Even if Okinawan immigrants claimed to be Japanese, these memories need to be analyzed as strategies to rebalance asymmetrical power relationships within Japanese immigrant society.
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