Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Session 8A, Panel
Chair and Organiser: Amanda Mayer Stinchecum (Independent Scholar, New York)
Discussant: Laurel Kendall (American Museum of Natural History)
Okinawa's recent and more distant histories distinguish Japan's southernmost prefecture from the rest of the nation. Not only the historical experiences but the religion, social structures and languages of the Ryûkyû Islands are different from those of the Yamato people. From the earliest populating of the archipelago; the development of agriculture; formation of the Ryûkyû kingdom; its close relationship to China; invasion by and subjugation to Satsuma; forced annexation by the Meiji government; the devastation of World War II, especially the toll on the civilian population, not only by U.S forces but at the hands of Japanese troops as well; the protracted U.S. Occupation (and its extension today) and Reversion to Japan 20 years later than the Occupation ended elsewhere—this background has naturally resulted in the formation of other memories, and the construction of different narratives to describe these experiences.
Multi-layered on both personal and co mmunity levels, some of these memories are limited by the parameters of " Okinawa as victim"; some romanticize the glories of the monarchy, or the dedication, labor and simplicity of the "co mmon people," while yet others conflate the sacred and historical. The political implications of memory in Okinawa include opposition to both Japanese and U.S. governments. In the marginalized Outer Islands of Yaeyama, there may also be explicit or implied criticism of the central government in Okinawa.
This panel examines the construction, preservation, transformation and public representation of memory in the cultural institutions of museums, memorials and festivals. Linda Isako Angst discusses the accretions of memory and meaning at the Himeyuri Memorial Peace Museum, dedicated to the student-nurses, symbols of Okinawan wartime suffering, who accompanied Japanese soldiers onto the battlefield during the Battle of Okinawa. Amanda Mayer Stinchecum explores the changing representations of historical memory in Yaeyama through the structure of the Tanedori festival and the costumes worn for offeratory performances during this and other Yaeyama festivals. Takeo Shigeki analyzes transformations in the continually changing construction and transmission of collective memory in festivals on Iriomote Island, as participants adapt memory to new social, economic and political situations. Discussant Laurel Kendall will frame the presentations in the context of institutions of memory among other colonized and marginalized cultures.
The burial and memorialization of war dead resulting from the Battle of Okinawa, in which over 200,000 Okinawan, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, American, and British combatants and non-combatants perished, has been a center of political contention and diplomatic imbroglio both before and after the return of the Ryukyu Islands to Japanese rule in 1972. The islands’ status as a U.S.-occupied territory from 1945 to 1972 complicated the maintenance of Japanese war memorials on the main island of Okinawa, but also turned this activity into a diplomatic tool with which Tokyo could assert national sovereignty over Okinawa before the territory’s formal reversion. Reiiki or sacred ground—that is, soil soaked in the blood and mixed with the bones of the war dead—thus became beachheads for Tokyo’s (re)nationalization of Okinawa. This paper highlights what could be termed the gradual nationalization of Okinawan sacred ground from pre- to post-Reversion. By “nationalization” I mean the redefinition and re-presentation of sacred ground in Okinawa from within a Japanese national imaginary, one that largely overwrites the organization of memorial space that was previously guided by local knowledge in the form of burial practices, territorial mappings of sacred ground, and historical representations of the war. These concrete, physical parameters gave way to sacred ground shaped by symbolic correspondences with Japan as nation. From Reversion to the mid-1980s this nationalization of Okinawan sacred ground—which in crude practical terms meant a soldier-centered glorification of the spirits of the war dead without due consideration of the plight of Okinawan civilians, especially those who suffered and died at the hands of Japanese soldiers—did not meet with the kind of local criticism that it would in the 1990s. In the post-Cold War, post-Hirohito environment of the 1990s, more open and direct questioning of Okinawa’s status between Japan and the United States erupted, and with it bolder challenges to mainland representations of the Battle of Okinawa in history textbooks, films, literature, museums, and epigraphs on war memorials, leading to what might be termed a denationalization or re-localization of sacred ground, but one that could never return to the original state of the immediate postwar memorialscape in Okinawa
Takeo Shigeki (Meiji Gakuin University)
Rituals based on agriculture and ancestor worship, performed for centuries on the islands of the Yaeyama group, have long intrigued anthropologists and historians. The former have focused mainly on the relationship between social structure and its function in ritual. The latter have based their research on primary documentary sources in attempting to establish "historical fact." The resulting studies have emphasized supposedly unchanging aspects of society. In practice, however, rituals continually undergo transformations according to the interpretations of their participants. This dynamic aspect of change has not been sufficiently analyzed.
In a society which has little written history, how is "collective memory" constructed and transmitted from generation to generation? C ultural or collective memory is "in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting . . . vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived" (Pierre Nora). Among its other functions, ritual makes, fixes and transmits collective memory. This requires examination of ritual as a whole, and as a process.
Memories are registered in the rituals themselves. Ohoho, the grotesquely-masked tempter who appears in the Shichi festival of Hoshidate, Iriomote, is absent from the same festival in the neighboring village of Sonai. His attempt to seduce the village women and their rejection of him is presented as a comical farce. In fact, in 1640, the daughter of the chief of neighboring Sonai was abducted, probably by a shipwrecked European, but Ohoho does not appear in Sonai's Shichi festival. Thus "collective memory" has not been handed down directly in the village in which the event occurred but in the neighboring village, where its historical roots have been forgotten. In Hoshitate, Ohoho was transformed into a comic character with a squeaky voice who squanders U.S. dollars to attract village women. History and memory have been intertwined through ritual to create a new "memory," based in an entirely different historical period.
Drastic social changes have occurred in recent years not only in the urban areas of Okinawa and mainland Japan but also on remote islands like Iriomote. The evolution of memory persists. Are the rituals of small, rural co mmunities flexible enough to adapt to these transformations and to further attributions of meaning by those participating in them? My paper portrays the cultural processes that continue to give life and new meaning to rituals in the Shichi festival.