Paper short abstract:

This paper presents preliminary results of my analysis of the construction of cultural identity in Shimao Toshio’s Southern Island essays. This is an important step in assessing its role in the broader context of the discourse on Okinawan identity.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese writer Shimao Toshio is known for participating in the discourse on Okinawan cultural identity and its relationship to the Japanese mainland in his writings on the Southern Islands, having summarised his ideas and assumptions under the term “Yaponeshia”. This concept focuses on the heterogeneity of the Japanese culture, proposing a counter-concept to the prevalent notion of cultural homogeneity as advocated by the nihonjinron. With this idea, Shimao turns attention to the periphery, especially Okinawa and Amami, as an important element of Japanese culture.

Born in Yokohama, Shimao writes his essays on Okinawa from the perspective of an ‘outsider’. Nonetheless, his ideas have been utilised by proponents of political discourses such as Okinawan anti-reversionists at the end of the 1960s. On the other hand, Shimao’s depiction of the Ryūkyū Islands can also be interpreted as part of the nantōron (Southern Island discourse), strengthening Japan’s claim over the Southern Islands. While there are many works about Shimao’s writings, none have systematically analysed his ideas about culture in their entirety yet.

I explore Shimao’s attempt at creating a new cultural identity (namely Yaponeshia) for the Ryūkyū Islands and mainland Japan. I am focusing on the distinction between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in his texts as an important part of (cultural) identity formation. In this talk I will present preliminary results of this research, particularly focusing on Shimao’s construction of Okinawan culture through his gaze of an ‘outsider’ as part of the construction of Yaponeshia as a cultural identity. To assess his writings on a macro and micro level, I am using quantitative and qualitative methods, combining a computerised analysis with an in-depth textual analysis. The results will be discussed against the historical and cultural backdrop of that time, drawing on theories of Othering. This presents an important step in assessing Shimao’s entire Southern Island discourse and its role in the broader context of the discourse on Okinawan identity and how it is perceived.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a reading of visual artist Miyagi Futoshi's novel Ikuyo (2021) as a queer utopian novel that allows its queer female Okinawan protagonist to envision a future beyond the racist and heterosexist constraints of 1940s Japan through a speculative return to the past's queer potential.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2017, visual artist Miyagi Futoshi also publishes fiction. His novels explore the past and present relationships between Okinawa, mainland Japan and the U.S.A. through the intimate relationships of his queer male Okinawan protagonists with American men. A collection of his novels was included in Aesop Japan's 2022 "Queer Library" project, a selection of around 60 LGBTQIA+ themed Japanese novels, which were offered as gifts to visitors of the store, regardless of purchase. This marked the inclusion of Miyagi into the canon of queer Japanese literature.

His latest novel "Ikuyo" ("How Many Nights," 2021) differs from previous ones in that it features queer female protagonists. It tells the story of Chiyo, a young Okinawan woman living in Tokyo, and her experience of the Asia-Pacific War. More than the war, however, the novel focuses on her ultimately unhappy relationship with Yukiko, whom Chiyo met as a student at the liberal Bunka Gakuin. As I will demonstrate, despite Yukiko's marriage bringing an end to their relation, we can read Ikuyo as a queer utopian novel.

In "Cruising Utopia" (2009), Jose Esteban Muñoz wrote that while there often is no place for the queer in the hegemonic narratives of family and reproduction, this does not mean that to be queer means to lack a future, or to embody its negation. Rather "queer" signifies the always existing potentiality of, and the moving towards, an alternative future; a movement enabled by retrospection: the return to the fragments that are queer history. For it allows for both holding History accountable for erasing queer lives and possibilities, and the hypothetical reintegration of "what if's" into shattered queer pasts, gesturing towards not only what could have been, but also what could be possible.

"Ikuyo" performs such a return. An avid reader and translator, Chiyo revisits various histories that allow her to negotiate her experience as a queer Okinawan woman in 1940s Tokyo, and that enable her to imagine a future queerer than the present; a future ultimately realized through the reader, who has to piece together the fragments of this speculative process that are scattered throughout the text.