Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how the Okinawan female body has been appropriated not only as a trope of the relationship between subjugated Okinawa and its ruler, mainland Japan, but also as a site where intricate issues of discrimination, gender, power and Okinawan identity converge.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses pre-War paintings of Okinawan women - particularly labourers and those of the Tsuji Pleasure District - created by Okinawan and mainland Japanese artists, focussing on both the defiant rhetoric of tradition and communal identity, and the conflicting practice of the exoticizing gaze of the colonizer.

Up until WWII, mainland Japanese painters turned to the theme of Okinawan women as a means to express subordinate identities through the trope of the de-politicized exoticized other. It was only in the wake of the war that Okinawans began to explore their cultural heritage and issues of communal identity on their own terms, embedding their subjects within discourses of tradition in a move designed to celebrate, in the face of political subordination, indigenous identity.

Yet these differences were crucially mitigated both as a result of the mainland formation of many male Okinawan painters, and through the machinery of official art exhibitions, which brought together diverse political audiences. Thus, for example, whilst depictions of Okinawan women wearing traditional apparel played to the desire to celebrate indigenous identity, the imagery was simultaneously available as a symbol of the exotic other, an ambivalence aimed at satisfying the demands of local and mainland audiences.

The deliberate invocation of 'local colour' became a requirement of Okinawan art, one that Okinawan painters found expedient to follow. Yet local colour, expressed through dress, was more subtle than it might seem, where under Japan's administration, only élite Okinawan women were permitted to wear kimono: the depiction of traditional clothing thus spoke to Okinawan audiences of the imposition of colonial dress-codes; similarly, the absence of Western dress, symbol of mainland modernization, raised the thorny issue of Japan's economic subordination of Okinawa.

The paper explores ways through which the Okinawan female body became a site where intricate issues of discrimination, gender, power and Okinawan identity converged. Examining the socio-cultural complexities of Okinawan identity against the backdrop of the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire, it enlists visual culture not simply as a documentary source but as a means of accessing the often murky intersection of art, politics, and gender.