Perspectives on the Global Past. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. xi, 205 pp. (Tables, graphs, maps, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6756-0.
Over the past few years, an increasing number of scholars have addressed the particular histories of the southern portion of Japan’s empire, giving greater attention to regions that have been overshadowed, in both history and historiography, by Korea and Manchuria. Hiroko Matsuda’s extensively researched and informative study of Okinawan immigrants to Taiwan is a welcome addition to this growing body of scholarship because it centers our attention upon the autonomy of a hitherto marginalized population. Placing Okinawans at the physical and discursive border between Japan’s Inner and Outer Territories, and drawing upon Victor Turner’s idea of liminality as an in-between position, Matsuda argues, “Liminality created the space for the common people of Okinawa to exercise their agency and enabled them to make their careers in the Japanese colonial empire” (151). She also follows the work of Jun Uchida and Emer O’Dwyer in highlighting the reality that Japanese settlers often acted in their own interests rather than those of the imperial state.
In building her argument, she first situates Okinawans within the broader Japanese population, particularly among those who left Japan. Although representing a small percentage of the entire nation, Okinawans at times constituted a remarkably large proportion of Japanese abroad, from roughly a quarter in the Philippines to an astonishing 45 percent in Argentina, which allowed them to forge a strong ethnic consciousness. Not so in Taiwan, where Okinawans were a small percentage and were spread across a range of professions, factors that mitigated against ethnic cohesion. We learn in chapter 2 that the centre for Okinawan migration to Taiwan was the Yaeyama Islands, a region closer to Taiwan than to the rest of Okinawa Prefecture. Pushed out of this peripheral zone by the economic dominance of mainland Japanese, Yaeyama islanders were also drawn by an image of Taiwan as a more modern, civilized place than their homeland. Chapter 3 explores how Okinawans attempted to become more Japanese in Taiwan. Looked down upon at home, in the colony their relative familiarity with Japanese language and customs allowed them to advance their socio-economic position.
It is in chapter 4, which explores the educational opportunities open to Okinawans in Taiwan, and chapter 5, which concentrates on how these migrants navigated the Japanese-Okinawan borderlands, that Matsuda reveals the complexities of Okinawan liminality. In her fascinating examination of the substantial numbers of Okinawan settlers who pursued medical training in Taiwan, she shows the contradictions between Yaeyama as a part of advanced Japan that was, developmentally, behind the urban centres in Taiwan where Okinawans moved to; and between the initially less-educated Okinawans, who eventually surpassed the Taiwanese because of their greater access to education. Then she details the identity struggles of these migrants. Some chafed at being placed below other Japanese when they were sent to school with Taiwanese students, and yet recalled no particular difficulties in their interactions with those classmates. Most eschewed an Okinawan heritage in their quest to assimilate, and yet during the war years, Matsuda tells us, one settler named Kabira Chōshin, grandson of an aide to the last monarch of the Ryukyu Kingdom, led a movement to promote Okinawan culture, with support from a Japanese scholar, Sudō Riichi, and other participants in Japan’s folklore studies movement of the 1930s and 1940s. This relatively minor episode served as a bridge to the postwar period, when Okinawan identity resurfaced due to a confluence of factors. First was the repatriation policy formulated under US influence, which divided Okinawans from other Japanese and kept a higher percentage of the former in Taiwan longer than the latter, even though many Yaeyama islanders managed to clandestinely repatriate themselves. Second was the condition of living in Okinawa after repatriation, where the experiences of settlement in Taiwan marked the repatriates as different from those who had not left and had endured the Battle of Okinawa. Although the subsequent focus on that horrific episode caused the erasure of colonial migration from the collective memory of Okinawans, Matsuda indicates that many repatriates (hikiagesha) emerged as leaders in the reconstruction of their homeland. Once again, their liminal status worked to their advantage.
Throughout the book, Matsuda provides incredibly rich details on the lives of Okinawans, gleaned from a wealth of memoirs, oral histories, other documentary evidence, and her own interviews with former residents of Taiwan. She demonstrates well the benefits of an ethnographic approach for recovering long-ignored histories. However, the vibrancy and clarity with which she depicts the individual Okinawan immigrants, and that overall community, stands in contrast to the Japanese and Taiwanese, who appear as relatively flat, shadowy collectives. This unevenness challenges her otherwise compelling use of liminality, because it is not as clear between where, or who, the Okinawans were situated. Moreover, Matsuda uses the memories of Okinawan settlers to present a highly positive image of interactions between them and the urban Taiwanese, but one wonders if the historic relationships were indeed that smooth and unproblematic. The absence of Taiwanese voices is particularly noticeable in this regard.
Nevertheless, this book should be read by scholars of Japan’s empire, of modern Japanese immigration, and certainly by anyone with an interest in Okinawan history. It brings that under-studied history to light and, in the process, it serves to accentuate the fissures within the modern Japanese nation-state. Far from a seamless political entity, or a collectivity of “100-million hearts beating as one,” in the phrase of wartime propaganda, modern Japan emerges from the pages of Matsuda’s book as a somewhat fragile construction during its imperial heyday, and it is equally clear that some of those divisions remain, in the incomplete and contested memories of that past.
Evan Dawley
Goucher College, Baltimore