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Okinawa: a Different Japan? a Historian‘S Perspective

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Okinawa: a Different Japan? a Historian‘S Perspective View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Universität Wien: OJS-Service Okinawa: a different Japan? A historian‘s perspective Stanislaw Meyer (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) The question of whether Okinawa is Japan inevitably concept, introduced first by Eric Hobsbawm and Ter- leads us to another one, namely what Japan is, it also cre- ence Ranger (1983), enjoyed a world-wide success, being ates a temptation to search for the essence of Japanese- adopted by many scholars, including Japanologists.3 The ness. Indeed, if we think of Japan in terms of sakura, sake, concept not only explains how people invent traditions in samurai, salaryman and sushi then definitely Okinawa order to legitimize their rights to nationhood, but also how is a different Japan. Sakura hardly blossom in Okinawa they invent the past. Put differently, “inventing traditions” and does not even try to compete with local deigo1. The concerns the problem of collective memory: what people Okinawans do not drink nihonshu, but awamori2. Yes, want to remember and how they want it to be remem- they eat sushi, but above all they love pork. Time goes by bered. Thus, the past serves as a “mirror of modernity” much slower in Okinawa and punctuality is considered a (Vlastos 1998), reflecting national values and virtues. It is rather rare virtue. With their easy going lifestyle the Oki- a source of national identity. nawans fit neither the image of hard-working salarymen Okinawa was “invented” by the Japanese as well as nor stern samurai. the Okinawans. Japanese policymakers needed a justifica- The list of stereotypes used to highlight a lack of tion for the appropriation of the Ryūkyū Islands. Japanese compatibility between the two countries is as long as the scholars, obsessed with the idea of Japanese uniqueness, Ryūkyū Archipelago. Among the more interesting ones performed intellectual acrobatics to adjust Okinawa to are odd stories that the Okinawans do not speak Japanese, their vision of Japanese civilization and race. And the or that they do not use chopsticks but knives and forks. Okinawans simply wanted to find some comfort to their Not all stereotypes, however, are negative. Okinawa is troubled identity. also being portrayed as a “better” Japan – a tropical para- Okinawa as a reservoir of Japanese dise, where one can relax from the stress of life in Japan ancient traditions proper. It is a “pacifist” Japan, without the ugly face of nationalism. Okinawa as a reservoir of Japanese ancient traditions was The question of “Japanese-ness” has long preoccu- conceptualized in the 1920s by scholars who were highly pied the attention of scholars. Whilst the prewar genera- concerned about the negative effects industrialization and tion of scholars embarked on a mission to prove that Oki- modernization might have upon Japan. Since 1920 Japan nawa was and always had been Japanese, their postwar was coping with a long economic crisis that made many critics took the opposite stance. Nevertheless, Okinawan people critically reconsider Japan’s relations with foreign studies were for many years kept hostage by a dichotomy countries and cultures. Some scholars, including Yana- of “Japan(ese) or not” and it has been only in the past two gita Kunio, Yanagi Muneyoshi and Orikuchi Shinobu, decades that scholars have reformulated their academic believed that what Japan needed was not only a program inquiries by simply asking what Okinawa is. for economic recovery, but also a cultural revival. In So, is Okinawa Japan or not? As a historian, I do not Yanagita’s eyes, for example, the reason for rural distress have a problem with answering this question. If it is highly lay in the weakening of religious consciousness of the inappropriate to dump the whole Ryūkyūan past into the people.4 Hence scholars embarked on a mission to find same sack as Japan, then it is also wrong to deny that an antidote for Japan’s ills. They found it in Okinawa – a present-day Okinawa is Japan – even though a different country which they saw as being rich in relics of Japanese one. One may say that Okinawa is an “invented tradition” culture in its purest, unchanged form. They discovered in of Japan, but “invented” does not mean “not true”. And Okinawa archaic forms of the Japanese language, of Shin- even if Okinawa, hypothetically, should separate from toism and art that unlike its Japanese counterparts had not Japan in the future (which I highly doubt), it will not be been affected by influences from China and the West. able to erase easily the Japanese chapter from its history. “Things that have been lost in Japan proper”, Yanagita The concept of “invented tradition” can tell us a great Kunio wrote, “are perfectly preserved on [Okinawa] deal about how Okinawa has been made Japanese. This island” (Yanagita 1997: 293). Okinawan customs and MINIKOMI Nr. 82 5 beliefs, which were thought to reflect the spirit of ancient and dances of the Bon festival are also impressive, but less Japanese collectivity, were supposed to help the Japanese alive than these expressions of intensity of spirit. I beg you my readers to waste no time before coming to see such dance rediscover principles of social configuration. Okinawan as this, whether of fishermen, or farmers, or the slow, quiet, dialects, on the other hand, were supposed to provide a and deep dances of the old court (Yanagi 1972:165). solution for the ongoing corruption of the Japanese lan- guage. In Okinawa Yanagi found a remnant of perfect art One needs to give credit to prewar scholars for which he would put in a museum and preserve it as it depicting Okinawa in very positive colors, considering the was. He was critical about the modernization of Japan, fact that Japanese people of the time usually associated but after all he did not reject it and acknowledged that Okinawa with poverty and backwardness. Their attitude, Japan was changing. He assigned to Okinawa the role of however, was highly idealistic, if not paternalistic. In that an antidote to the negative side effects of Japan’s mod- sense they resembled Western scholars who were engaged ernization. Was Yanagi’s Okinawa entitled to undergo the in an anthropology of “rescuing cultures”. Being obsessed same changes as Japan? Perhaps not. If it did, the antidote with the search for a “real” Japan they ignored the fact would lose its potency. that Okinawa had developed its own genuine culture. In In a manner of speaking, Yanagita, Yanagi and others a manner typical of scholars representing the synchronic found in Okinawa the essence of Japanese culture. Yet paradigm in anthropology, they put Okinawa outside the they did not necessarily place Okinawa within the frame historical context, as if it was a land frozen in time. of Japan proper. They assigned to Okinawa only a passive Yanagi Muneyoshi’s Okinawa deserves special role in the process of shaping Japan. Okinawa became a attention. Being deeply influenced by Buddhist philoso- recipient of Yamato culture and its preserver, but it was phy, Yanagi placed Okinawa within the context of a philo- Yamato, not Okinawa, that had created Japan. sophical discourse about the nature of art.5 He was pro- Okinawa and the ideology of expansion foundly concerned with the negative effects of industri- alization which, in his opinion, had brought about a rapid Generally speaking, the Japanese of the prewar genera- disappearance of art from people’s daily lives in Japan. tion did not show much interest in Okinawa. Okinawa He was displeased with the introduction of machinery was a remote and forgotten land with very few resources into crafts, as people began to seek easy profits by pro- to offer. In terms of business opportunities it could not ducing cheap but ugly wares. Yanagi believed that the match neighboring Taiwan. Japanese public officials pre- main reason crafts were losing their beauty was that fine ferred going to Korea, perceived by many as a spring- art had been separated from crafts, lost its utilitarian char- board for their careers. Academics, on the other hand, acter and turned into art for art’s sake practiced only by were too busy with their research on the mainland, and specialized artists. hence only a dozen of them noticed Okinawa at all. Thus, Yanagi began the search for perfect art: an The situation changed in the 1930s, when Japan art that was present in every aspect of human life; a per- engaged in the war with China and started preparing fect state of art where beauty was not separated from for a confrontation with Western powers over domi- practicality, and where crafts and fine art constituted nation in Asia. The Japanese moved their eyes to the one whole; art that did not require any differentiation South and rediscovered Okinawa, which in many ways between its creators and recipients, or the artist and the resembled the countries they wanted to colonize. Studies public, as it was produced by all people, anonymous of nan’yōdo, or “southern seas countries” had a positive bearers of tradition. Such art was perfect because there impact on Okinawan studies, and Okinawa itself took was no dichotomy of beauty and ugliness; accordingly, deeper roots in the consciousness of the Japanese people. beauty and ugliness were not separated but together con- One aspect of this state of affairs was that some stituted one whole. patriotic scholars began confusing ideology with schol- Yanagi believed that such art had existed in the arship and, consciously or not, subjugated their work to remote past. He found one example of it in the poems of the political needs of the Japanese state.
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