Okinawa in American Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Rabson
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Battle Of Okinawa ◽  
The U.S

The several works of American literature set in Okinawa or about Okinawans include travel narratives, war diaries, memoirs, biography, fiction, and drama. Perhaps the earliest, Francis L. Hawks’s 1856 Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, is an account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy of 1853–1854 when he forced his demands on leaders of what was then the Ryukyu Kingdom, allowing Americans to land, travel, and trade there. Hawks also provides informative and colorful descriptions of the local residents, architecture, and natural environment. A century later, Okinawa commanded all of America’s attention in the spring of 1945 during the last and worst battle of the Pacific War. Two Okinawan immigrants to the United States published autobiographical accounts in English of mid-20th-century Okinawa, including the battle and its aftermath. Masako Shinjo Robbins’s My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa (2014) describes life in prewar, wartime, and early postwar Okinawa from the perspective of a daughter in an impoverished family. Sold as a child by her father to a brothel in the 1930s, she barely survives the battle after being trapped in a cave collapsed by shelling. Jo Nobuko Martin’s novel A Princess Lily of the Ryukyus (1984) depicts the horrifying ordeal of the Princess Lily Student Corps of high school girls, the author among them, and their teachers, who were drafted as combat medics during the Battle of Okinawa. Writing from the American side of the battle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernie Pyle accompanied U.S. forces as a war correspondent. His account in The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950) begins with American battleships’ shelling of Okinawa and ends the day he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the offshore island of Iejima. Over more than 12,500 Americans died in the Battle of Okinawa which took the lives of approximately 94,000 Japanese soldiers and 160,000 Okinawan civilians, between one-quarter and one-third of the prefecture’s population at the time. The widespread devastation left most residents homeless, destitute, or both. During the months that followed, the American military placed thousands in refugee camps, sometimes for more than a year, supplying food, shelter (mostly tents), and medical treatment for the wounded and ill. U.S. occupation personnel supervised the distribution of relief aid and the construction of homes and public buildings, but they were also tasked with bringing “democracy” to Okinawa, which many Americans considered feudalistic. The contradiction between American espousals of democracy and policies imposed top-down under U.S. military rule soon became obvious to Okinawans, and to at least some American military personnel. One of them, Vern Sneider, published a satirical novel, The Teahouse of the August Moon, in 1951. Later adapted into two plays and a film, it is probably the best-known work of American literature set in Okinawa. Lucky Come Hawaii (1965) by Jon Shirota depicts the experience of Okinawans in Hawaii, focusing on the strained relations among resident ethnic groups following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the first novel by an Asian American writer to become a bestseller and one of several works portraying the lives of Okinawan immigrants including three plays by Shirota and an autobiography by Hana Yamagawa. Victory in the Pacific War brought Okinawa under American military occupation for the next twenty-seven years, 1945–1972. Forcibly seizing private farmlands, the U.S. government constructed a vast complex of bases to support hot wars in Korea and Vietnam and the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Sarah Bird’s novel The Yokota Officers Club (2001) depicts the bases’ effects on Okinawans and Americans living in close proximity yet in separate worlds during the U.S. occupation. Today, more than four decades after Okinawa’s return to Japanese sovereignty, a grossly disproportionate 74 percent of the total U.S. military presence in Japan remains in this small island prefecture with 0.6 percent of the nation’s land area. Bird’s Above the East China Sea (2015) juxtaposes the ordeals of an American military dependent living on base in present-day Okinawa who contemplates suicide after her soldier sister dies in Afghanistan with a student medic in the 1945 battle ordered to kill herself to avoid capture by the Americans. Drawing on extensive research in Okinawan culture, Bird evokes Okinawan religious beliefs and observances relating to death and the afterlife to frame her narrative and inform her readers.

The US Military in Okinawa

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Etsuko Takushi Crissey
Keyword(s):  
Taxi Driver ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Battle Of Okinawa ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
The U.S

The Battle of Okinawa, which began in late March and ended in late June, 1945, took the lives of 94,000 Japanese soldiers, 28,000 Okinawans in local defence corps, which included middle school boys, 12,500 Americans, and an estimated 122,000 civilians, between one-fourth and one-third of the prefecture’s wartime population. Most of the survivors ended up in refugee camps for several months. It was the only battle of the Pacific War fought in a Japanese prefecture. With the congealing of the Cold War in the late 1940’s, the U.S. government decided to hold strategically located Okinawa for the long term, stationing some 30,000 troops there. The U.S. created civilian administrative agencies, but the military maintained ultimate authority until reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. The result was an economy heavily dependent on jobs and incomes generated by the bases, such as auto mechanic, janitor, maid, taxi driver, bar hostess, and prostitute. To make room for the rapidly expanding bases, the U.S. military forcibly evicted Okinawans from their land with “bayonets and bulldozers.” Massive protests led to Congressional hearings and marginally increased, though still wholly inadequate, “rental payments” to landowners. Reversion restored Japanese administration to Okinawa, but the bases remain to this day,

Water and Land: Asian Americans and the U.S. West

2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy Fujita-Rony
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Political Dominance ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The U.S

What happens when we examine U.S. West history from the vantage point of Asian Americans moving back and forth across the Pacific and consider a perspective shaped by both land and water? This article underscores the importance of the Pacific Ocean as a space for historical inquiry, by addressing the formation and migration of Asian American communities in and around the Pacific, particularly in the context of the considerable military, economic, and political dominance of the United States in the Pacific region.

Accurately Counting Asian Americans Is a Civil Rights Issue

2018 ◽  
Vol 677 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lee ◽  
Karthick Ramakrishnan ◽  
Janelle Wong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Data Disaggregation ◽  
Rights Issue ◽  
The U.S

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing group in the United States, increasing from 0.7 percent in 1970 to nearly 6 percent in 2016. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2065, Asian Americans will constitute 14 percent of the U.S. population. Immigration is fueling this growth: China and India have passed Mexico as the top countries sending immigrants to the United States since 2013. Today, two of three Asian Americans are foreign born—a figure that increases to nearly four of five among Asian American adults. The rise in numbers is accompanied by a rise in diversity: Asian Americans are the most diverse U.S. racial group, comprising twenty-four detailed origins with vastly different migration histories and socioeconomic profiles. In this article, we explain how the unique characteristics of Asian Americans affect their patterns of ethnic and racial self-identification, which, in turn, present challenges for accurately counting this population. We conclude by discussing policy ramifications of our findings, and explain why data disaggregation is a civil rights issue.

Japanese Labor in World War II

1990 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 29-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rice
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Workers ◽  
The Pacific

Apart from the intrinsic value of understanding the fate of Japanese workers during the war, Japanese labor history in World War II also gives us a non-Western point of comparison for studies of wartime labor in the West. To facilitate that comparison, we should consider government policy, the response of the labor movement, and the conditions of workers during the war. In Japan, labor and economic history periodization of World War II does not conform to the European and American conceptions. For the Japanese, the war began with the outbreak of the “China incident” in 1937; Pearl Harbor, traumatic as it was for the United States, only marks the beginning of a new stage the Japanese call the “Pacific War.” It is not surprising, then, that Japanese labor history begins its wartime phase in 1937. In fact, to comprehend changes during the 1937–45 war, at least brief mention must be made of earlier developments.

The Posthuman Subject in/of Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle N. Huang
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century

Is the posthuman postracial? Posthumanism, an interpretive paradigm that unseats the human individual as the de facto unit of literary analysis, can be a powerful tool for Asian American literary studies when deployed with attention to critical race theory and literary form. Throughout American literature, Asian Americans have frequently been figured as inhuman—alien, inscrutable, and inassimilable. Representations of Asian Americans as either sub- or superhuman populate many genres, including adventure literature, domestic realism, comics, and science fiction. This trope, which combines yellow peril and model minority stereotypes, forms a through line that runs from depictions of Asian Americans as nerveless 19th-century coolies to 21st-century robotic office workers. Manifesting both threat and promise for America, posthuman representations of Asian Americans refract national and racial anxieties about the fading of the United States’ global influence as Asian nations, especially China, become political and economic superpowers. Rather than directly refuting these characterizations, Asian American writers have creatively engaged these same thematics to contemplate how developments in science and technology produce different ways of understanding the human and, concomitantly, engender changes in racial formation. Novelists, dramatists, poets, and artists have all deployed posthumanism in order to conduct imaginative experiments that challenge expectations regarding the typical purview of Asian American literature. Several nodes of inquiry that demonstrate the importance of posthumanist critique for Asian American literary studies include race as an index of humanity, the mutability of race through biotechnology, the amplification of racial inequality through infrastructure, and the reproduction of race through algorithmic culture. In the wake of early 21st-century ecological disaster and biotechnological fragmentation, examining the evolving relationship between Asian American racialization and posthumanism continues to provide important insights into how race is structured by the changing boundaries of the human and, in turn, demonstrates that the posthuman subject is never “beyond” race. In addition to offering an overview, this article provides a case study regarding the stereotyping of Asian Americans as robotic.

Global China in 21st-Century Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunny Xiang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Chinese Descent

Contemporary English-language prose and poetry writers, primarily of Chinese descent, are employing a range of stylistic strategies and exploring increasingly diverse themes in their representations of China and Chineseness. Through these representations, these contemporary writers build on, adapt, and contest a historically complex relation between “global” and “China” within an American imaginary. Twenty-first-century literary novelists and poets raise many questions about this relationship. These literatures of and about “Global China” both extend from and depart from, a “Chinese American” literary tradition. For instance, writers such as Jenny Zhang, Sharlene Teo, and Wang Weike are reworking long-standing narrative tropes such as intergenerational strife and transforming conventionally ethnic genres such as the autobiography. Contemporary literary works also take more heterogeneous approaches to referencing the United States and even “the West” more generally. And, unlike a prior tradition of Chinese American literature, these works open us to consider multiple kinds of China that far exceed the putative origin point of Mainland China (the most famous instance is Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, which features Singaporeans of Chinese descent). On the flip side, representations of “Global China” may lack representations of identifiably “Chinese” characters (for instance, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye Vitamin). In other cases, Chinese characters may be relegated to a role, or Chineseness may be insignificant to a story’s plot. New themes and topics are emerging, most notably adoption, biraciality, mental health, and return-to-Asian journeys. Finally, the literatures of Global China include robust outgrowths of genre literature, ranging from speculative fiction to detective fiction. Writers of genre fiction include Ovidia Yu and Ted Chiang.

Intersections of Arab American and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol W.N. Fadda
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Arab American Literature

The interconnections between Asian American and Arab American studies are deep and long-standing, with scholars and activists in both these intersecting fields affirming their common investments in anti-racist, anti-imperial, transnational, and coalitional feminist frameworks. Various scholars have even called for Arab Americans to be included under a broader definition of Asian American identities. An intersectional study of the forms of alliances and solidarities developing among these racialized communities becomes a cornerstone for combating the effects of racism, orientalism, imperialism, and xenophobia, as well as enactments of occupation, exclusions, internment, and incarceration carried out by the projects of colonialism and empire within the United States and abroad. Even while being shaped by the specificities of geographical, historical, and political contexts, Arab American literature showcases an array of thematic foci and engagements that link it to other ethnic literary traditions, including Asian American literature. Such thematic connections extend to engagements with cultural and transnational in-betweenness, collective and individual marginalization and racialization, wars and conflicts in original home countries and their effects on US diasporic identities, transnational connections and movement across borders, food and cultural memory, language, gender roles, heritage, and religious expression, to name but a few. The literary output of Arab American and Asian American writers from the 19th century up till the early 21st century closely reflects the factors that shape Arab and Asian experiences in the United States and the conditions that shape the affective, material, legal, and political lives of immigrant and diasporic communities. The viewpoints, experiences, and perspectives presented in the works of Arab American and Asian American writers, however, are far from uniform. They are widely varied, encompassing different immigration pathways, histories, struggles, military and geopolitical conflicts, literary lineages, and artistic investments.

Filipino American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Filipino Americans ◽  
Filipino American ◽  
American Group

The large body of Filipino American literature has helped to define and challenge the boundaries of the Asian American literary canon. Documenting various waves of Filipino migration to the United States as a result of US-Philippine colonial relations beginning at the turn of the 20th century, Filipino American literature includes genres such as autobiography, novels, short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction (letter writing and essays), and graphic literature. While Filipino American literature shares common themes with other forms of Asian American literature (exile, displacement, racist exclusion), it is distinguished by its inability to adhere to an immigrant-assimilationist paradigm. Filipino American literature provides insight into the experiences of Filipino colonial and neocolonial subjects who have migrated from the periphery to the center. The unique historical and geopolitical framework of US-Philippine relations recasts themes such as the search for identity and “home,” the seduction of assimilation, and postcolonial resistance to US orientalist discourse. At the heart of the Filipino American writer’s discovery that she is a part of, yet apart from, Asian America is the task of confronting her unique location as informed by the Filipino collective experience of racial/national subordination. For Filipino Americans, racism and US colonial/neocolonial control of the Philippines are inextricably intertwined. Filipino Americans, the second largest Asian American group in the United States and the largest Asian American group in the state of California, constitute a major segment of the Filipino diaspora which is over twelve million—a majority of whom labor as Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). More than 5000 Filipinos depart the Philippines daily as a strategy for economic survival. US-Philippine neocolonial relations, together with the traumatic global dispersal of Filipinos, function as the political unconscious of contemporary forms of Filipino American literature. These works grapple with heterogeneity, difference, displacement, and diverse strategies of decolonization—from exploring the complexity of Filipino American identity (intersection of race, gender, sexuality, class) to articulating the yearning to belong. For contemporary writers, Filipino American identity and the concept of decolonization are contested terrains—both still in the process of becoming.

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