 Well, welcome everybody to our Wednesday night JRC seminar series. And I'm Helen McNaughton. I'm chair of the Japan Research Center, and it's a real pleasure to welcome tonight, Ina Heim, who is professor for Japanese studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna in Austria, although she is dialing in from Germany at the moment. She's chosen to lockdown in Germany momentarily instead of Austria. So her research thus far has concentrated on representations of Okinawa in both Japanese and Okinawan literature, film, television series and other media. And so her research has broadly aimed to understand the discourse on Okinawa and its relationship to Japan since the 1990s. So tonight she's focusing on representation of Okinawa in literature, but she's going to talk us through a little bit of her journey at the start of her presentation. So she's we're going to follow our usual format. She's going to present for about 45, 50 minutes. She's got a PowerPoint show for us. And then at the end, we'll have plenty of time for Q&A. So if you look down the bottom of your screens, you'll see a Q&A function button. So near the end or at any time, please feel free to pose your questions to Ina by typing them into the Q&A chat. So there's no video or microphones tonight. We can't see or hear you. So feel free to make that bread and have a glass of wine while you're listening. But if you have any questions at any point, we'll collect them at the end. And Ina is very happy to answer them. So please use the Q&A button for that rather than the chat button. I'll try and get them all in the same place. So I'm going to hand over to Ina, who's going to upload a presentation. I'm just going to turn my camera off while she does that. And I'll come back at the end of the presentation. So over to you. OK. Well, I hope I'm on full screen right now. Yeah. Yeah, that looks good. I can start. So thank you very much, Helen, for this kind introduction. And of course, I would also like to thank you very much for your invitation, especially because I've been mostly involved with University Administration for the past years, actually. And as you all know, the corona situation didn't exactly make these things easier. So I'm about to start into a sabbatical right now, starting actually next week. And I cannot really wait to finally hurl myself back into research again. And as Helen just mentioned, and as some of you may know, for the past 20 years or so, I have analyzed the ways in which Okinawa has been constructed in Japanese as well as Okinawan fictional literature and movies and television series, starting from the 1990s to now. And throughout this period, I have published several book chapters and journal articles, unfortunately, mostly in German. I think there are only two in English available right now. But it was my intention from the start to sum up all of this in a more extensive monograph someday. And this actually is what I'm planning to work on over the next six months of my sabbatical. So for me, this talk comes as a wonderful opportunity to discuss how Okinawa is represented in non fictional essays, which is something I've only come across quite recently and which I thought I would have to think about more closely for my book project. Now, there may be some Okinawa experts among the audience, but as actually Okinawa is a topic that is kind of a niche within Japanese studies still. I thought that before we actually delve into today's topic together, I should first of all provide you with some relevant background information, thus enabling a general understanding of the broader context of my research on the one hand and on the other, as Helen has just mentioned of the process that led me to the kind of new material I'm going to discuss in today's lecture. Maybe Okinawa is such an interesting and at the same time quite complicated case study because what today is called Okinawa was for the longest time considered a foreign country by Japan. As I guess, you all know Okinawa used to be a kingdom in its own right from the 15th to the 19th century. The Shimazu clan from the Satsuma domain in southern Kyushu brought the Kingdom of Ryukyu under its control in 1609. But at that time, a cultural assimilation was not yet demanded. Rather, my quote from Hein and Seldin, there it's not me, but Laura Hein and Mark Seldin in the publication who wrote that Satsuma insisted that the Ryukyu Kingdom was a foreign and barbarian land at that time in the beginning of the 17th century. Ryukyu was officially incorporated into the modern Japanese state as late as 1872 when it was first turned into a Japanese domain, a han. And then seven years later, it became a prefecture of Japan. This course of events is often referred to as annexation. Many authors, including myself, actually deemed the process one of colonization. Even though Okinawa, unlike Taiwan or Korea, had never been termed a shokumichi or like Japanese colony officially. As Tessa Morris Suzuki points out in her very enlightening book chapter about the pre-modern space-based Japanese worldview and its shift to a time-based one which developed under Western influence during the Meiji period. Now, I quote, the Edo period vision of a world made up of concentric circles where foreignness increased. The father one moved from the center, came to be replaced by a vision of a single nation where development and modernity diminished, the father one moved from the capital toward the geographic extremities, end of quote. As a result, Ryukyu's foreignness now became to be explained in terms of backwardness rather than an innate strangeness. After Japan's victory in the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894 and 1995, Japan began to pursue a stricter assimilation policy, trying to ensure that the Okinawan people were to be turned into Japanese citizens. Okinawans thus had to learn the Japanese language and they were expected to become loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor. At the same time, though, they were clearly not perceived as equal, but rather were stereotyped as being lazy, hedonistic, prone to alcohol, uneducated, irresponsible and untrustworthy. Cultural differences were interpreted as signs of inferiority and backwardness by the Japanese and several Okinawan customs, such as the women's hand tattoos or activities carried out by the female shamans called Yuta were abolished by Japan, by the Japanese government as a consequence. The next great historical turning point came with the Battle of Okinawa, which raged on the islands between April and June 1945. It can be regarded as a collective trauma in Okinawa because one quarter of its civil population, an estimated number of about 130 to 140,000 people died in this battle. It is also important to note here that these Okinawan men, women and children were not only killed by members of the Allied forces, but by Japanese soldiers, garrisoned in Okinawa as well, sometimes because civilians were suspected of sabotage when they spoke the Okinawan language, which for Japanese from the main islands used to be completely unintelligible back then. In other instances, because Japanese army tried to secure food and shelter for itself, and therefore drove Okinawans out of their hiding places. The most traumatic experiences, however, were the documented cases in which Japanese soldiers forced Okinawan civilians to commit group suicides, which I will return to later in my talk when discussing Oe Kenzaburus' volume of essays, Okinawa Notes. After the war, Okinawa was put under American occupation, which lasted 20 years longer than on the Japanese main islands. And even after Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972, military bases and US troops stayed in the prefecture, causing many problems on the islands such as noise and environmental pollution, manoeuvre, plane and helicopter accidents and criminal offenses committed by US Army members. Today, Okinawa is Japan's poorest prefecture with the highest unemployment rate and the lowest level of education and income. This being said, now let me try to briefly summarize the most important findings of my previous research on fictional representations of Okinawa in Japanese media. First of all, it is important to note that the paradigm shift clearly can be observed. The negative stigmatizing perceptions of Okinawa that were prevalent before 1945 has by now been substituted by more positive, sometimes even idealized images. The Okinawa boom of the past decades has resulted in Okinawan music and food having come into vogue on the Japanese main islands and Okinawa has been discovered as a southern island paradise by the Japanese tourism industry. From the 1990s onwards, Okinawa has also served as an exotic setting in the continuously growing number of films, literary works and since the year 2000 also serialized television shows. And this is just like a sample of some examples I've been working on doing research on, representing the mainstream media, the images of Okinawa that Japanese mainstream media is transporting. These Japanese mainstream productions usually employ a number of stereotypical features in order to visualize Okinawa's otherness, often referring to aspects of everyday culture and folklore. Elements of the regional language are also frequently used to distinguish Okinawa from Japan. These media texts tend to create an Okinawa where spirituality and traditions are still alive. It is thus represented as Japan's exotic other as a place. And I quote Mikaku here, who has done a very interesting study on film representing Okinawa. And she writes, Okinawa is represented as a place from which the people of mainland Japan seek comfort and onto which they project their nostalgia for a utopian vision of Japan's pre-modernity. And, of course, moreover, Okinawa very often is represented as a place inhabited by and again, I quote from Mikaku by cheerful and nice Okinawan people who enjoy singing, dancing and drinking. And, of course, the Okinawan characters usually are depicted as relaxed, natural, informal, simple-hearted, friendly and innocent. In these media productions and literary works, Okinawa is idealized as a peaceful island paradise, inevitably being represented in terms of its subtropical vegetation, blue sea, white beaches, etc. Experiences this version of Okinawa ultimately leads to Iyashi, spiritual and emotional healing. One can translate to her maybe on the part of the Japanese characters who usually are the protagonists of these stories. Okinawa is thus being functionalized for Japan's interests. The basic tenor of these mainstream productions is one of nostalgia on Natsukashisa. Japan, which usually is equated with the Tokyo metropolitan area, symbolizes modernity, while in Okinawa something that Japan has supposedly lost on its way is still preserved. Most of these productions ignore the not-so-beautiful aspects of Okinawan reality. Everything that would compromise the positive image is left out of the picture. Like the prefecture's quasi-colonial past, the traumatizing experiences of the battle of Okinawa, the fact that the Okinawan landscape is largely dominated by military bases and that the natural environment is endangered by Japanese construction projects and mass tourism. Japanese mainstream constructions of Okinawa does seem to primarily aim at selling Okinawa as a commodity. They tend to make use of Okinawa as an exotic and beautiful background for staging stories that usually do not really center around Okinawan issues. Interestingly, and now we can never look at the other side in this broader discourse about Okinawa, filmmakers and writers from Okinawa very often refer to the same markers for Okinawa difference that the Japanese mainstream media and popular literature is using. So they also address local customs and manners, the local language, and diverse other ever-recurring elements which are deemed typical for Okinawa. However, when looking into the matter more thoroughly, one finds that Japanese and Okinawan representations actually tend to diverge from each other considerably. For example, the manner in which local color elements are employed by writers from Okinawa seems to be very deliberately counter the way the Okinawan difference is staged by the mainstream media. Narratives by authors from Okinawa since the mid-1990s frequently seem to question the assumption that there is one shared reality within the Okinawan prefecture instead emphasizing the plurality of experiences, opinions and lifestyles among Okinawans. Moreover, what separates Okinawa from Japan is discussed by addressing exactly the inconvenient topics which usually remain excluded from the hegemonic Okinawa discourse. The Okinawan population's specific experiences with the wall, occupation and continuing presence of US military facilities on the islands, but also the lack of future perspectives for young people and the economically difficult living conditions. The image of Okinawa as healing island paradise is often ironically inverted and Okinawan traditions are deconstructed. Despite the heterogeneity of their different approaches, these authors and filmmakers all tend to construct images of Okinawa which are more complex and ambivalent than the usual representations of Okinawa from a Japanese main island's perspective made for mainstream media. As can already be concluded from all this, the discourse on Okinawa, of which fictional media is the vital part, tends to negotiate the prefecture's cultural identity in terms of difference on the one hand and sameness on the other hand, usually with Japan as the point of reference. Very often, Okinawa is constructed as an internal other within the wider framework of Japan. Sometimes this difference is explained by using a notion of a temporal lack. According to this line of argument, which is based on the so-called historical idea, the so-called nitsiru doso ron or literally the same ancestor theory, Okinawa and Japan share the same ethnic historical cultural and linguistic origin but then have developed with different speeds, Japan having modernized rapidly while Okinawa having lagged behind. In this line of argument, Okinawa usually is being equated with the past Japan. According to the proponents of this idea, elements of Japanese culture which allegedly were lost in the process of hyper modernization are supposedly still alive in Okinawa. The Japanese anthropologist Yanagita Kunio, for example, thought of Okinawa as, and I quote, an anthropological treasure box, its contents revealing the original form of things how they once had been on the whole Japanese archipelago. Thus contributing to the prevalent view that Okinawa was, and another quote from Richard Sittle, a living museum of Japan's ancient past. And let me add that many other supporters supported this theory with their research in different academic fields such as archaeology and history of religious thoughts or linguistics, thus trying to prove that Okinawa has been a part of Japan since time immemorial, as Julia Yonetani put it in her publication. However, other academics predominantly but not exclusively from Okinawa have voiced the opinion that the difference between Okinawa and Japan is a more fundamental one. Okinawa having its own history as Ryukyu Kingdom, its own culture, religious traditions and language which sets it apart from Japan. These authors thus also tend to emphasize that Okinawa used to be a foreign country which was robbed of its independence by Japan. The respective motivations for taking each of these positions and the implications of these discussions and constructions always seem to be politically charged. On the one hand, Japanese claims of sameness between Okinawa and Japan tend to support the point of view that is only natural for Okinawa to have become a part of Japan in the 1870s and that it has rightfully been handed back to Japan in 1972 after the years of American occupation. Okinawans advancing the sameness argument on the other hand usually have aimed at establishing equal rights between Japanese and Okinawan citizens attempting to improve the situation of Okinawans who as they felt have been treated as second class citizens by the government in Tokyo. Representatives of the Okinawan Reversion Movement thus frequently referred to the sameness of Okinawa and Japan hoping for Okinawa to be freed of the US military bases once it returned under the protection of the Japanese constitution, a hope which we all know I guess has not been fulfilled yet. A third approach predominantly followed by Okinawan authors who refer to Okinawa's past as prosperous kingdom in its own right and thus stress the difference argument fosters the idea that Okinawa can and should regain its former independence or at least achieve a much higher grade of autonomy within Japan. The discourse about Okinawa its inhabitants, their culture, the question where Okinawa belongs and its relationship to the Japanese main islands becomes manifest across diverse kinds of media. The fictional formats which I have been focusing on in my research up to now but also academic publications, news programs, documentaries, journalism etc. Now as I have mentioned in the beginning just recently I have come across the vast corpus of non-fiction writings discussing various aspects of Okinawa and its relation to Japan and since no research seems to exist about these kinds of texts I have decided to start a kind of spin-off or maybe complementary project to what I've been doing up to now and the essay volumes I have worked through so far cover a broad range of topics and positions and thus they differ considerably. On one end of the scope there are quite outspoken political essays about the Okinawa-Japanese relationship which adopt a highly critical stance towards Japan's role in the annexation and subsequent quasi-colonization of the UQ Kingdom in the late 19th century. Problems addressed in this context usually are Japanese political as well as cultural dominance over Okinawa. The way Japan has treated Okinawa as a protective shield to defer the landing of the Allied forces on the main islands towards the end of the Pacific War. The military use of the island's Japanese security policy has brought about after 1945 and the structural neglect of Okinawa prefecture by the national government in Tokyo. Therefore these authors tend to question the necessity and rightfulness of the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1972. Interestingly there are also quite some publications focusing exclusively on the question of Okinawan independence which I can maybe subsume under the key term of Dokuritsudon and I just want to show you two slides with just a few covers of publications that I think show that there's really something going on, some discussion going on about the possibility of independence for Okinawa. Here is the second one just to give you an impression. Unfortunately I haven't yet had the time to look deeper into this matter but I'm definitely planning to carry out some future research on this topic in the near future but I have to leave that aside for the time being. On the other side of the spectrum a large number of essays discuss Okinawan's identity by highlighting aspects of its history and culture. However even these texts are not free from a political agenda albeit in a less direct manner which I hope I will be able to show you at the end of this talk. So now I will take a closer look at the following four examples published between the early 1960s and the late 1980s and of course we have to keep in mind here that two books have been published prior to Okinawa's reversion to Japan and the other two afterwards which might be of some importance. The authors of these collections of essays have very different backgrounds. Okamoto Taro was a highly acclaimed and internationally renowned artist. Oe Kenzaburo Nobel Prize Laureate is one of Japan's nationally as well as internationally most well-known writers and public intellectuals. Arasaki Muriteru was a historian specialized on the history of Okinawa and Miki Takashi is a journalist who used to work for the Okinawan newspaper Dukyu Shibu. Okamoto and Arasaki were born on the Japanese main islands. Oe comes from Shikoku as you may know and Miki Takashi is from Ishigaki the southernmost island of Okinawa prefecture. In the following part of my talk I will introduce to you how Okinawa is described in these four volumes and discuss what kind of relation between Okinawa and Japan their authors construct. In doing so I'll try to identify the major topics and lines of argument of these four publications and finally give some thought to the question what the political implication of the positions taken by the respective authors might ultimately be. So starting with Okamoto Taro he writes about his travels first to Naha on the main island of Okinawa and then because he searches for the true culture of Okinawa which as he feels is not present on the main island of Okinawa anymore further south to Ishigaki. He describes what he experiences things and feels during his journey referring to different elements of traditional Okinawan culture. The major point he makes is that Okinawa contrary maybe to the widespread opinion of Japanese mainlanders of that time does actually have a rich cultural heritage but this richness has according to Okamoto not become manifest so much in material objects not in mono and works of art sakuhin but rather in immaterial aspects like musing songs and their lyrics dance customs and habits and way of living. It then becomes apparent that Okamoto favors the everyday culture of farmers and common people over the high culture and art forms of the former Ryukyu and aristocrats. He praises this culture simplicity and plainness keywords frequently used by him are Muzaki and Tanjun and Soboku which clearly are artistic ideals for him. Japan on the other hand has lost this quality sometime along the way as Okamoto states and therefore the direct and spontaneous expression of feelings he observes in Okinawan dance for example cannot be found in its Japanese equivalence anymore. The case of Okinawa thus seems to be used by Okamoto to criticize Japan's over refined culture. Another important topic he addresses repeatedly in his essays is that the kind of culture he appreciates so much is vanishing. What Japan has lost in the process of modernization is still to a certain degree living on an Okinawa but is finally threatened with extinction even here because fewer and fewer people still support and keep alive the respective aspects of Okinawan culture. Always Okinawa notes very different consists of one prologue dated to January 1969 and nine essays the last one from April 1970. They can be seen as a kind of travelogue as well. Again an artist from the Japanese main islands this time is the writer travels to Okinawan. The essays in this volume describe what he experiences, sees, hears and thinks during his repeated stays in the prefecture. Oew wrote his Okinawa essays against the backdrop of the Satonikson Agreement alternatively termed Okinawan Reversion Agreement which stipulated that the U.S. returned control over Okinawa to Japan on condition that the U.S. military would be allowed to maintain its facilities in the prefecture. This came as a big disappointment to the Okinawan Reversion Movement whose primary aim of course had to be had been to free Okinawa of its base burden. In the eyes of many Okinawans the reversion to Japan thus became in a way a replay of the Day of Shame Kutsu Jokunohi which refers to the day the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect in 1952 because they felt that Japan now sold Okinawa to the U.S. for the second time. Again without involving Okinawans in the decision-making process. In his essays Oew takes this as a starting point subsequently focusing on issues that highlight the unequal and conflictual relationship between Japan and Okinawa. Repeatedly he states that the will of the Okinawan people was ignored by Japanese politics and that decisions concerning Okinawa were solely made in Tokyo. He primarily refers to contemporary issues often by taking up newspaper articles or radio news in order to explicate his thoughts regarding the problems between Okinawa and Japan. Several times however he also goes back in Okinawan history especially focusing on the second half of the 19th century in which the previously independent Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed by Japan. He shows that there was considerable resistance from Okinawans and then draws parallels between the so-called Ryukyu Sobun the doing away with Ryukyu and the events around the time of Okinawa's reversion to Japan. In his essays Oew frequently refers to and quotes Okinawan academics historians anthropologists etc but also intellectuals local politicians and activists who are highly critical of the transformation of Ryukyu into Okinawa Prefecture as well as of Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972. The examples he cites clearly show that there was Okinawan resistance against Japanese and US heteronomy but also that these fights have always been unsuccessful but Oew nevertheless tries to feed their voices into the discourse that would prefer to shut them out completely. Oew also does not shy away from addressing some highly tabooed issues among them for example the existence of ABC weapons nuclear material and toxic gas on military bases in Okinawa. He states that Japan profits from the protective field of nuclear chemical and biological US weapons which on the other hand made or make Okinawa a potential threat and target. Another highly controversial issue raised by Oew are the so-called Shudanjiketsu compulsory mass suicides of Okinawan civilians during the battle of Okinawa which were enforced by members of the Japanese army for mentioning them he and the publishing company Iwanami Shoten were sued in a trial that continued for about seven years between 2005 and 2011 I think. Oew uses these topics to support his argument that the Okinawan population has again and again been victimized by Japanese politics throughout its history. He then draws connections to a structural discrimination of Okinawa as other by Japan throughout its history. According to Oew Okinawa suffered a three-fold victimization in the 20th century. Towards the end of the Pacific war it was used to keep the Allied forces away from the Japanese main islands as long as possible. Then after 1945 it was according to Oew sacrificed for the benefit of Japan by putting it under US occupation and now with the planned reversion it would be sacrificed again. Again another time it cannot decide for itself and again it won't regain its former autonomy. By means of the reversion Okinawa will finally be eliminated and become completely absorbed absorbed by Japan. The very term hondo fuki implies according to Oew that Japan incorporates everything Okinawan step by step and thus quote attempts to put Okinawa into an aseptic box and to do away with it. All critical voices from Okinawa were suppressed and Japan would constantly try to eliminate everything that's Okinawan. Okinawa teki naru mono. For Oew with the reversion the Japanese government pursues the termination of Okinawa's existence. Throughout its volume Oew also criticizes the Japanese for the lack of awareness and for their self-centeredness. Even though Japan has made itself guilty by the way it has mistreated Okinawa this keeps getting ignored. The Okinawan people have been let down by the Japanese. The Japanese from the main islands try to evade responsibility and the youth think that they don't have anything to do with the past. Oew however makes the discovery that Japan depends on Okinawa as it is deeply indebted to its southernmost prefecture. He then develops the argument that Japan secretly belongs to Okinawa as he stays several times in his essays Nihonga Okinawa ni soku suru and not vice versa as it usually argued. The Japanese main islands virtually are dangling on Okinawa's tale Okinawa no Shippu with its nuclear military bases. Oew constructs an antagonistic relationship between Okinawa and Japan on a very emotional level. He mentions feelings of anger, fear, pain, injuries, powerlessness and despair on the side of the Okinawans who meet Japanese with dislike and reject them with their silence. In some instances Japanese are perceived as enemies, as techie, as despicable and detestable. The Japanese on the other hand should feel ashamed Oew states. On a more subtle level Oew differentiates Okinawans from Japanese by some interesting choices of diction. In his first essay he writes of Okinawa Kenmin, citizens of Okinawa or Okinawa no Minsu, the Okinawan people. Later however he begins to use the phrase Okinawa no Nihongin which translates as Japanese from Okinawa. By doing so on the one hand he separates them from Japanese mainlanders whom he calls hondo no Nihongin but at the same time he emphasizes that both should have equal rights as Japanese nationals which however is not the case. For Oew the question of what is Okinawa is directly connected to the question of what is Japan. The ways Japan has dealt with Okinawa show us what Japan actually is and this Japan has an ugly face. It is selfish, unscrupulous and not interested in others problems which it has caused in the first place. It exerts power over others and sacrifices them to its own advantage. So according to Oew Okinawa and Japan are just two sides of the same coin. If one deals with Okinawa's situation thoroughly this will inevitably bring to the fore and title unseen criticizable side of Japan. I found Oew's Okinawa knows very hard to access and understand for several reasons. However throughout the book he operates with a few light motives which help shed light on his overall agenda. For example he repeatedly asks what it means to be Japanese and whether he may be able to transform himself into a Japanese who is different. This is a phrase that is repeated over and over again throughout all these essays. At one point he also states that the reason why he travels to Okinawa is that he wants to confront himself with his being Japanese. It may therefore be concluded that on the bottom line these essays deal with Okinawa maybe only on the surface and on the deeper level they are actually much more concerned with Japan. In the third publication I would like to introduce to you historian Alasaki Muriteru also highlights the fact that Okinawa used to be a state in its own right in pre-modern times. He therefore stresses the view that the history of Okinawa is not merely that of one region of Japan among many others but has to be regarded as something distinct. The keyword used in his context is Chi-Kite-Kidokujise. The central theme in his essays is the dominance Japan tries to exert over Okinawa while Okinawa does not really identify as a part of Japan historically and culturally. Alasaki criticizes the normativity of the Japanese point of view. As one example he explains that when school textbooks ask about cherry blossom season Okinawan children would answer in winter as in Nagu the cherry blossom usually occurs in January or February which would be counted as wrong though since the reference point for the correct answer is mainland Japan where the cherry blossom marks the beginning of spring. As another example the author explains that in Okinawa the important events and dates of Japanese history have to be studied at school but vice versa in Japan little is known about the history of the Ryukyu Kingdom. Alasaki develops his key argument by first presenting a conflict which arouses about an instruction issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education that demanded the more decided enforcement of hoisting the Japanese flag and singing the national anthem on official occasions at school festivals, graduation ceremonies and the like in Okinawa in the mid 1980s. After a previous nationwide survey had yielded that in Okinawa both activities were carried out out much less frequently than in other prefectures of Japan. This instruction met quite strong resistance among students and teachers alike. Alasaki refers to several instances students and teachers ignored it protested against or undermined it. In another essay of the same volume he in the similar vein writes about the reserved attitude towards the tenno in Okinawa. All in all Alasaki draws a picture of Okinawan culture as a culture of protest against Japanese predominance. The volume also contains the documentation of a Zadankai and group discussion with Okinawan poet Takara Ben, Okinawan author and activist Asato Aiko and Okinawan architect and activist Makishi Yoshikazu chaired by Alasaki himself. All participants had originally supported Okinawa's reversion to Japan but later changed their opinion now advocating a higher degree of autonomy for Okinawa. Asato clearly speaks up against the ongoing Japanization of Okinawa emphasizing the importance of keeping up or maybe rather reviving local culture and traditions. Moreover Makishi states that it is Okinawans not Japanese who should decide on the fate of Okinawa. Finally in the last essay Alasaki writes that for Okinawa keeping up its regional particularity is important and he mentioned several alternatives to being a prefecture of Japan such as becoming a special prefecture demanding a higher degree of autonomy, an autonomous region or even a free state. Let me come to my last example. Miki Takashi the fourth and last publication I would like to talk about today Miki Takashi's Okineshiya Bunkaron attempts to unhinge Ryukyu from the Japanese context placing it in the cultural sphere of the Pacific. This idea is illustrated by a map of the Asia-Pacific region following the book's title page which shows the three Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia and an added Okinesia I hope you can see it here in the north. The introduction to the volume serves as an overview of the manifold linkages between Okinawa and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. It is followed in the second part of the book by a large number of short travelogues presenting the author's observations in diverse regions of the South Pacific during his travels through Micronesia and Melanesia between October and December 1985 which then had been serialized in the Okinawan newspaper Ryukyu Shimpul. These essays serve as illustrations for the author's main pieces stated in the first chapter. Okinawa is connected historically and culturally to other regions in the South Pacific also because they as well became colonies of Japan which is mentioned explicitly in the volume. Miki on his travels detects many similarities between the places he visits and Okinawa. He predominantly focuses on the production of everyday items and handcrafted artifacts like for example Indonesian Bartik fabrics and Bingata the Okinawan Bingata but also on immaterial culture such as sports, dance and customs like the dragon boat races and on burial sites and sister worship etc. By doing so Miki clearly presents Okinawa as a culture of the South a sphere where cultural elements of the Asian continent and Southeast Asia culture come together mix and form a synthesis. The third part of Miki's volume contains essays published between 1982 and 1987 dealing with several problems Okinawa was facing at that time and is still interestingly facing today. Implicitly Japan is criticized here because of its neglect of the prefecture. Miki also stresses that the war was a highly insistive event for the Okinawan population. He then questions the notion of post-war sengu for Okinawa arguing that the war still is very present in the prefecture but also mentioning that sometimes war memories are also suppressed. Interestingly, Ohe in his Okinawan notes comes to a very similar conclusion when he states that Okinawa continues to be in a state of war because it played a central role as a military hub in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Similarly to Ohe again Miki addresses Okinawan experiences of having been wronged on the one hand while Okinawans had been co-proprietors during the war as well. In the fourth and last part of the book Miki explains the title of one year with its recurring many festivals and celebrations the overall message being that old Okinawan customs are vanishing bit by bit. As different as they may be these four publications share some major lines of arguments and as you may have noticed there are many intersections with other discussions and representations of Okinawa and its relationship to Japan in other media formats as well. I will now try to sum them up in the concluding part of my talk today. First and foremost thinking about Okinawa always seems to be mean thinking about Japan as well. Arasaki for example states that his book is concerned with the so-called Okinawa problem the Okinawa Mondai but then he adds that to reflect on the situation of Okinawa at the same time means to reflect on the situation of Japan and Okamoto very similarly explains that his essays on Okinawa his Okinawa Ron are essays on Japan Nihon Bunkaron as well. For him taking an outside position means that Japanese culture comes into sight and for Oe as well in the end his critique of Japan seems to be the primary interest. Miki however seems to follow a different approach here which might already be reflected in the cover of his book it shows only a map or rather an outline of the Okinawan islands Japan which usually is the reference point is missing in the picture. Miki actually is the only author of the four who obviously tries to discuss Okinawa without automatically relating it to Japan. Secondly all four volumes confirm the postulate that Okinawa is different from Japan. For Okamoto this difference is not a fundamental one but rather a matter of time or progress. Japan used to be like Okinawa but has changed and lost its Okinawan qualities on its path to modernity. He prefers the one over the other as for him Okinawan culture is archaic and therefore more natural, direct and honest. Arasaki on the other hand states that Okinawa cannot just be regarded as a variation of Japan as it has its own distinct history. His examples that highlight the most depressive resistance of the Okinawan people show that they do not really identify with Japan. Oei also places Okinawa in opposition to Japan emphasizing Yuki's former independence. He does not address cultural issues but is exclusively concerned with political and historical developments. For him Okinawan identity seems to be a historical category which is shaped by the repeated collective experience of mistreatment and injustice. For Miki again Okinawa has more in common with the islands of the Pacific than with mainland Japan which is why by understanding it as Okinigya he attempts to separate Dukyu from the Japanese main islands from Yamato as it is often called in this discourse in the broader discourse. However he seems to be quite undetermined here because on the one hand he regards his concept of Okinigya as a way to capture the diversity of Yamato culture while on the other hand he states that it may give the Okinawan population an own identity. The author also seems to attempt to construct an imaginary spiritual homeland he calls it Seishi Dokuwa Koku for Okinawans. This thought however is only mentioned once in the book and then in the title of the book but unfortunately it's not fleshed out at a later point. The third important notion to be found in both Okamoto and Miki is that of a temporal lag between Okinawa and Japan. According to this line of argument Okinawa has certain qualities that Japan allegedly has lost in the process of modernization. Okamoto goes as far as calling Okinawa a rare mirror naga mekaisukitsu nakagami for Japan. The primordial characteristics of Japan thus are thought to be living on only in its periphery. Even though Okinawanness does not bear any negative connotations here but rather on the contrary is being highly idealized. Clearly a notion of backwardness is perhaps unconsciously projected onto Okinawa which resonates with the mainland Japanese view that has become dominant and popular since the 1990s. A fourth important point which is closely connected with the third one is the notion that Okinawanness is getting lost due to Japanese influence. According to Miki Okinawanness is threatened and running the risk of vanishing as Okinawa becomes more and more Japanized. He stresses that traditions and nature should be preserved. However all of Miki's essays ultimately show that what Okinawa has already lost is still present and alive in Micronesia. Its gentleness, its idleness, its softness, relaxed lifestyle, lacking sense of order and discipline for example. Similarly Okamoto cannot find the real Okinawa and its traditional life on the main island anymore. It is prone to getting lost due to Japan's influence and only still alive on the smaller southern islands. Arasaki again writes that for Okinawa keeping up its regional particularity is important. Similarly Oel mentions that traditional Okinawan music and dance are about to vanish and that the Yamato people have not contributed anything in order to preserve them. Okinawa is thus losing its Okinawan character and it seems like this is even welcomed by Japan. Lastly three of the four publications discussed with only the exception of Oel address the hybrid character of Okinawan culture. Its early and intense contacts with the islands of the Pacific region and Southeast Asia, its close relationship with China until the end of the 19th century, Japanese dominance since the late 19th century and even U.S. American influences which have left their traces on Okinawan culture since 1945 are frequently stressed in many publications, academic as well as popular fiction and non-fiction alike. In these publications different terms and concepts referring to phenomena of cultural blending are used. Okinawan trans-culturality can be found as well as cosmopolitanism, hybridity or put more simply the mixed or champudu character of Okinawan culture. The term cultural blending may best describe the various phenomena of mixing, combining, intersecting and amalgaming of different cultures. While Okinawa, while Japan has for several decades been wrongly imagined and described as being culturally isolated from the outside and homogeneous insight encounters publications, Okinawa has often been represented as being the exact opposite as a fluid, open and heterogeneous space. It is exactly this mixture of different influences which in the discourse about Okinawa is regarded as one of the characteristic elements and used in order to mark Okinawa as different and three of the collections of essays I've just discussed are no exception. The notion can be found in Miki since he stresses the fact that Okinawa shares many features with the islands of the South Pacific and in Okamoto, however not that prominently, mainly in the chapter about traditional dance forms which came to Okinawa from many different regions from the Asian continent and also from the southern Pacific region. And in the Zadankhai published in Adasaki, Asatu Eiko also mentions that Okinawa is deeply connected to the south but also has close ties to Japan. Except for all the essays discussed here today are not overtly criticizing Japan for the way it has treated and still is treating Okinawa and they do not explicitly pose any political solutions but the author's positions regarding for example the reversion of Okinawa to Japan or the option of Okinawan independence can be identified anyway. Now let me just very briefly come up with some conclusions regarding the political positions of the respective authors. Adasaki clearly wants to show that Okinawa is enriching the history of Japan rather than being a shortcoming. From this it becomes clear that the current stages of Okinawa being a part of the Japanese state is accepted by the author in general. Miki does not fundamentally question Okinawa's belonging to Japan either. His volume is not a call for independence but rather a pledge for recognition and preservation of Okinawan cultural features. However, Okamoto in his essay Hondo Fuki ni Atate which was added to the original volume in 1972 the year of Okinawa's reversion to Japan questions the benefit for Okinawa stating his opinion that reversion will pose a threat to Okinawan culture and that Okinawa should not strive for hondonami becoming like the Japanese mainland but rather keep up its own culture. Of all four volumes discussed, Ue is clearly the most skeptical one regarding the status of Okinawa as a Japanese prefecture without being granted a voice and matters concerning its own political fate. He demands equal treatment of Okinawa and at the same time questions the necessity of Okinawa's reversion to Japan instead seeming to favor the idea of Okinawan independence. I hope that I stayed within the timeframe and would be open and I'm looking forward to your questions and comments. Maybe I can stop the screen sharing and have a look. Great Ina that was brilliant so that was a really fascinating talk and your four case studies were really interesting like you say they were all obviously analyzing Okinawa in different ways and at the same time all focused in different ways on Japan and implicitly all of them were critical of Japan as well. I have a question I'll start the questions just to remind everybody can you type your questions into the Q&A button not the chat button the Q&A button and we have some questions coming in so we'll get to those in a second I was just going to ask one question it may be one that you can answer it may not be it may be one that may be someone else in the audience wants to. So the four essays that you've chosen focus in obviously when we think about Okinawa on culture politics identity but I just wanted to ask whether there's any reference to sort of the economics of what's going on in Okinawa because I was struck at the beginning when you said that Okinawa has the highest unemployment and is the poorest prefecture in Japan and this is a little bit surprising in a way when you think that there's been that Okinawa boom and like you said there's lots of tourism and Japanese construction and at the same time you've got these US bases which must be having some kind of spillover into the economy so I just wondered what's happening there in terms of you know as all of that being siphoned back to Japan or even the US and in these kind of I know the four essays that you looked at didn't really support independence explicitly but in some of this dokeritsuron is there anything focused on you know gaining back economic independence in any way alongside these sort of cultural political independence I wondered if you could comment on that. Yep just very roughly I'm afraid so in the four volumes of essays I've discussed today I didn't really come across like really down to earth economic matters actually they were not really mentioned by the four authors but maybe because also they are not specialists and maybe not really interested in this aspect of Okinawa reality I think. Yeah but the point is a very important one and of course like as you've mentioned there are two main economic factors in Okinawa which is like the base military base economy obviously on the one hand and tourism on the other and but it's very often stressed that the income from tourism actually does not go into the like doesn't spill over into the Okinawan population but rather like all the big tourist companies are in the hands of Japanese like large companies so they all the resort hotels and really the agencies they are basically Japanese owned companies so they make the money out of that. As for the military base economy that's really interesting because actually this is one of the reasons why maybe the Dokuritsudon has that it has always been a minor I think my very small part of the broader discourse about Okinawa and I haven't had as I said I just came across like maybe two years ago I saw that so many new publications were coming up like using this term Okinawa Dokuritsudon so I became interested and I bought some of the titles but I have not yet had time to really have to look at them so this is really like I think a project of its own I would really like to do that from now on but I came across one that's really interesting just very roughly I just had a very short glimpse at it and it's written by an economist and I think the title was like something like how the Dokuritsu would be really something that could be realized like Genjitsu Genjikirunoka and he's suggesting like really some things that Okinawa should do in order to become economically independent from there are some I guess there are some attempts really developed models for Okinawa that some suggestions and how it could really work and on the other hand like this has never become a major like not really all Okinawans share this wish because also many Okinawans really live quite well off the land they are leasing to the US military so of course they are forced to lease their land land owners before agrarian society so they had the land farming land that was confiscated after 1945 by the US military or US government and the former land owners are actually forced by law to rent this land out to for military use but they are compensated quite well right now not right in the beginning but then later on like the sums were quite considerable sums so many live quite well and so it's not in their interest to be rid of or become rid of this sources of income job thank you thank you for your answer right I'm going to go into the Q&A chat now I'm going to I know that you can see them and I can see them in a bit nobody else can see them so I'm going to read them out for the audience so Peter Koniki welcome Peter nice to hear from you we can't see you and he has a comment and a question so the comment is a well-known professor at Cure Die once told him that Japan had never been invaded and when he asked about Okinawa the professor said that's not really Japan so the question so maybe you want to comment on that but also his question is do you you know what's do you call Okinawa or do you call it Ryukyu as a political choice and so many of the independence books you showed opted for Ryukyu and when he was there he he thought that Ryukyu had become a term of choice so what's the view in Okinawa about the choice the choice of names yeah I think that's like a very good observation of course um yeah as I also said only one sentence may be my presentation but all these choices it's like a minefield actually whenever you talk about Okinawa there everything is politically charged in a way all like all the academic work going on producing either this result or that result they are all being used for arguments against or pro or against belonging Okinawa's belonging or incorporation into the Japanese state and also the wording and like choosing Okinawa or Ryukyu use I try to stick with like just the historical periodization so when I refer to Ryukyu I mean the Ryukyu Kingdom before its annexation by Japan and when I refer to or when I say Okinawa I refer to Okinawa having become of Japan in the late 19th century but actually like after 1945 many of you may know under the US occupation the US actually tried to enforce more like a local um more consciousness about like the distinct Okinawan or Ryukyu identity so they used again Ryukyu for Okinawa and of course like all the authors who actually support this idea of Okinawa or Ryukyu and independence they choose Ryukyu because that's just the word that makes clear okay we have been independent in in our own right had this Kingdom and our own culture and everything and we want to return to that so of course the the term Ryukyu always refers back to this history thank you but I didn't mean it that way I very very conservatively maybe I'm using Okinawa just for Okinawa prefecture after 1970-80 there's a question here from Hilsin saying that other writers such as Miro Miro Rimashun and Chinen Seishin have included critical discussion of Okinawans themselves as well as Japanese in their work so where if anywhere do you see more critical discussion of the role of Okinawan people in the state of Okinawa at the moment or as something missing that's what I actually wanted to say but due to time reason I think quite long I just decided to skip that there are some really parallels between some only some of the lines of argument in these essay collections and of course fictional works by authors from Okinawa predominantly and what I found really interesting was that especially for over he really blames the Japanese for everything and it's also a problem I think he he really depicts Okinawan people as victims and this is there is this huge discourse about the victimization of Okinawa and some maybe many Okinawan authors authors from Okinawa try to evade this victim this discourse of victimization by also showing like that Okinawans also had agency and there were not they were not only victims but also some of them participated in atrocities or at least they feel some guilt so I think Miro Rimashun is quite a very good example for that he has published some very interesting short stories where like the protagonists become they try to forget like what they experienced in the battle of Okinawa but somehow these memories they come and they haunt then they come back and they cannot evade them and then they are confronted with their own feelings of guilt whether they are really guilty or not that's not a question but they have done things that they feel sorry about so these things come back and that's a very interesting point that from this insight perspective many authors from Okinawa try to deconstruct this victim rhetoric as well. Oshiro Tatsuhiro as well he's doing that as well so he also shows Okinawan characters having participated in the war as soldiers as members of the Japanese Imperial Army for example. Thanks Stephen asks Takashi has expressed the belief that Okinawan culture is endangered is this a sentiment you share and what are some of the tangible ways that indigenous Okinawan culture can be preserved? Well I mean there are all kinds of of course maybe Okinawan people have the same some not always all of course they might have the same feeling and there are all kinds of activities going on trying to preserve like the Julian customs but as I think and especially language maybe that's a good example I'm not a linguist myself but I know a linguist who is actually Patrick Heinrich I'm afraid he's not here right now but if he is he should maybe comment on that but I've heard some presentations given by him and he's a specialist on endangered languages and maybe that's a very good example to show that of course the Duquean languages they don't exist anymore. That's a typical example I think where one can highlight how a process of colonization that's why I really think that Okinawa is a like prototypical example for how a colonization process is has been going on. So like really like there is no authentic Duquean anymore and people don't they lost their language they don't know how to speak it. There are only very few really really old speakers of Duquean and still around and they are getting fewer and fewer and then you have typically this one the next generation they didn't use this language anymore and now the young people they come and they try to like revive a little bit like the local varieties but it's of course not the Duquean language anymore and so you can imagine like maybe an analogy to this language example some activities are going on to preserve and also preserve the memories that I think very important and there are some also of course projects going on at Okinawan schools witnesses of like these atrocities that were happening during the the battle of Okinawa going to schools and telling their experiences so there's a lot of these things going on in Okinawa to keep the culture and the memory alive and I think of course that's important but I don't think that there is this authentic culture that that doesn't exist anymore of course but that's everywhere it's the same so the process and things are changing all the time even in Japan and maybe in the UK. Question here from Patrick. So have you seen any communication or dialogue between it that Okinawan Ron works and works by well he doesn't mention the word minorities but works by other underrepresented groups in Japan such as the Zainichi or the Ainu or so are those experiences of Okinawa ever linked to the experiences of others in Japan who are not you know mainstream Japanese mainland Japanese? I'm not sure if I really remember that right not in the other three volumes but I think that Oe actually does that a little bit so because he is not only really focused on like he's getting into really small details about like the news on he's he's traveling to Okinawan and he's sitting in his hotel room and he's listening to the radio news and it's 1970 and then he's writing about whatever he's what kind of strikes and these workers at that factory they are on strike and stuff like that so it's very detailed and very focused on Okinawa on the one hand but then actually what he what his agenda is is something different and that's really like he's reflecting Japan's role and also he goes beyond Japan and I think he's has this very global perspective in mind also like security politics and nuclear like it's called war of course so he's always of course thinking about the Soviet Union and the US and China and as well I think he has like all other all kinds of other countries in mind and actually there's one sentence where he states that he wants to think about democracy and ethics I'm not really sure whether he really mentions Zainichi but I think his perspective is quite close to what the one participant had in mind but I know that there are of course there are some connections but maybe not in my material in the material I introduced to you today but there are some kind of like attempts at joining forces even with Ibaksha and also Zainichi and also victims of Japanese colonialism and the war in other Asian countries between Okinawan people and people abroad so there's something going on some of course projects but they are not explicitly mentioned in the material so they're like prepared for today it's okay it's hard to incorporate everything into a 45 minute job there's a couple of questions I might pose at the same time because maybe they're kind of linked so the first one says you've mentioned the outside influence on Okinawa from for example Japan obviously mainland Japan but also islands of the South Pacific but what about the you know the influence of the USA you know to what extent is the loss of Okinawanness due to the the US influence and presence in Okinawa and then so that's sort of a post war question but then another question here somebody says they are Japanese and they are their heritage is from the Ryukyu Kingdom and you described Ryukyu I always have trouble saying that Ryukyu Kingdom as an independent country but their understanding is that it was a semi-independent country between Japan and the Qing dynasty so you mentioned China a bit so you know to what extent did that you know even with the modernization and what happened you know how difficult was it to keep it as a status of semi-independent country so yeah and then and then he or she says it seems to me that this makes it difficult to understand the position of Okinawa or even Okinesia for mainland Japanese people today so yeah sort of you know the US influence and then the historical influence of the status of Okinawa thank you for the great questions yeah wonderful comment actually I think yeah that's very important and that's why I try to at least say this is one sentence that the case of Okinawa is really a complicated one it's not bad no point I try to like for the sake of clarity I broke it down maybe made it a little bit too easy of course it's much more complicated and also what I found really interesting is in the books that I prepared for today and introduced to you even Oe I was really surprised because he I don't know if I could so call it fell into the trap but he's working so much with dichotomies that actually don't really work so he has like the the the poor and victimized Okinawas on the one hand and you have the bad, ugly and corrupt and aggressive Japanese on the other and like they are the enemies and so and it's not actually that easy and the same with Okinawa and the the history of the Ryukyu Kingdom which is much more complicated at least starting in the 17th century in the beginning with the Satsuma invasion so you have this phase of dual subordination it's called by a Japanese by Taira Koji I think Japanese historian because it's like in the way it has to pay tribute to China as well as to Japan so you have this double dual as he calls the dual subordination and so it's a question how independent was the Ryukyu and Kingdom actually at the time Japan annexed it so this is very interesting and of course makes the case much more complicated as for the impact of the USA I found that really interesting that in the books and in these essays I have analyzed today and there's not very much mentioned they are much more occupied with the bilateral relationship between Okinawa and Japan and they kind of leave even if it's like the occupation by the US and also like after 72 Okinawa is given back or had this reversion to Japan and of course the US stays and still keeps up the military basis but that's not the major point in these publications interestingly I only know of one book I have it in my shelf but unfortunately in Vienna which is occupied but it's it's more like a collection of academic papers about the impact of US culture on Okinawan culture so there is there must be some publications about that but not in the ones I have discussed today they are really focused very much on Japan that's interesting because I sometime I gave a presentation about something like the fictional representations of Okinawa and there was a Japanese a colleague in the audience and he was really upset and approached me afterwards because he said like okay I was always talking about the colonization and I meant that Okinawa was colonized by Japan and he was really mad at me because he said in reality it's colonized by the US so yeah this comes into play as well like no at least and you talked a little bit before about language and and I think you mentioned Patrick Kine and he commented actually that he is here and you and you did a very good job of the it's in the chat actually not this is Patrick Kine nice okay thanks so yes sorry yeah and he said well done for the discussion of the language and so I don't know if you want to pick up on that but someone else uh Olexandra has someone else had asked about language as well but Olexandra asks what about Okinawan religion so have any of the authors focused on Okinawan religion as part of its uniqueness so I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about the language is unique and the religion as well as unique how much extent does that come into these these essays maybe not that explicitly in these essays but they are always a big topic when I just try to think about the fictional literature and also movies and television productions it's all always there like the spirituality is really important as like staging Okinawan like the what's special about Okinawan so these examines also the Okinawan authors themselves they always refer to like these shamanistic practices and also ancestor worship for example the importance of ancestor worship in Okinawa but that's really interesting because you can also maybe I oversimplified it also a little bit between like my the attempt to try to very briefly summarize my the research results concerning fiction because I tried to summarize what's happening in the Japanese mainstream media on the one hand like this exoticization and stereotypicalization of Okinawan characteristics on the one hand and then what do Okinawan authors do so it's not that simple and easy of course because they are also other authors from maybe from Japan from the Japanese mainland would also write very interesting things about Okinawa but as a tendency writers from Okinawa they are more skeptical I think also about the like the presence or like whether these traditions are still alive so and their depictions it's more like for example the Utah they are also and like if you have a problem or if you think you go and consult a Utah and they have like special ceremonies they carry out in order to come to results and in the works by Okinawan authors for example and they always show or tend to show that the Utah is not successful anymore so even Medudumashun I think is a good example and also Matayoshi Aki is a very interesting author from Okinawa who in his works show that people do not believe in these spiritual things anymore not really they do it in a way just as a form but they don't really share this this deep belief in these things and also like when they conduct like the Utah they do this Mabugumi for example somebody loses his spirit due to shock or something and then so it's the Utah's duty to pray and try to get the spirit back into the body and Medudumashun for example he has this one story Mabugumi and it's called the title story of a volume of short stories where he shows that this Utah tries and tries and she's praying and trying to conduct these rights and she's not successful anymore so these topics I think and spirituality and also the language come up also in works by younger authors from Okinawa and also the loss the loss of these traditions and the loss of the language and generational gap between like the elder like the Oba the elderly grandmother they still speak the language and but the younger ones they don't understand it anymore so I think the topic is always there but it's treated in a very different way depending on who's writing or producing films about that thanks I'm just gonna put a couple of questions sort of together and paraphrase them a little bit so one is kind of saying is it not the case that Okinawan people are sort of ethnically close to Koreans or Japanese or Taiwanese it's suggesting then there's another question here which may be linked to that can can we it's basically asking can we see Okinawans and these discussions of Okinawans as as discussions of indigenous people and you know how does how does that link in so for example you know they use the example of China that you know what but there are other examples that indigenous people are often a threat to the mainstream who want to have this you know to who want to impose this uniform identity and uniform historical narrative so to what extent does it can we look at it from that lens that basically both sort of asking sort of implicitly about the ethnicity of of Okinawans which as we know is very different to the I know for example who I think is yeah I think I'm afraid I cannot really add the question about the ethnic origin of Okinawan people I think they are like as with the Japanese there might be very different theories about that but actually I think it would be really interesting in the beginning I thought it might be just too easy to start with this hypothesis that okay so you have the the main the Japanese they write in this way about Okinawa like from an outsider's perspective and then you have the population in Okinawa and they have this one other point of view regarding their own experience and history and of course it's much more complicated than that but then surprisingly as a tendency you really find there are some things that Okinawan writers really seem to have in common and they seem to really write from a very different point of even if Oe for example he's trying to advocate like be an advocate for Okinawan issues but as a person a very well-known person from the Japanese mainland and actually I think his approach is very different from I some I think last year or maybe even before corona I gave a talk and I tried to compare the Okinawa Noto by Oe with essays written by Mido Duma Shun who has also authored a very interesting volume of essays it's called Okinawa Sengu Zeronen I think like the year zero after the war the battle of Okinawa and I came up with very different like the results were very different and in this comparison you could really see what Oe is doing as a writer from the Japanese main islands and what Mido Duma Shun is doing as a writer from Okinawa itself and that's really like the agenda is completely different because Oe actually I think he's really interested in Japan's role in the whole process while Mido Duma Shun really really focuses on Okinawa itself and that's why what I thought was very interesting for example in Miki who is the least well-known of the authors I presented today he's this journalist from Okinawa but he's the only one who's really trying to focus on Okinawa from his insider's perspective and so I guess not to lose like the original keep the original question in mind um I have not conducted any research like that and I have not come across any comparisons but I think it would be really worth the attempt to like this is such a huge field for research that could go on and on for years and years and I think one should do that one at one point also as a joint project that may be relating what we find in this case of Okinawa and also like of course what do Okinawan people write about themselves and their own culture and how do filmmakers from Okinawa present their vision and their view of Okinawa and compare that to other minorities within larger maybe nation states who might have similar problems what I've come across is within Japan there is this one very interesting comparison between Okinawa and Tohoku this is this double gisei no system I forgot the name of the author this is the system of sacrificing the peripheries and the one example is Okinawa with the base burden on the one hand so Tokyo just um that tries to keep like it they have to do it they have this contract with with the US but they try to keep it as far as away from Tokyo as possible and on the underhand you have the nuclear power plant in the north and so this author tries to compare it and says that it's basically the same structure of discrimination and I think you can do that with other regions and also worldwide with other countries as well thank you question here from David Hughes who now retired from SOS but nice to hear from you David and he's asking about the presence of Okinawan culture and Okinawan people in mainland Japan so he says Taishoku in southern Osaka has a lot of Okinawans living there and there's a couple of Okinawan song clubs and restaurants and Okinawan Museum and parts of Tokyo also have some Okinawan aspects so he's just asking about that and asking are they still as popular as they were say about 20 years ago showing your age there David by asking about 20 years ago 20 years ago yeah he's right of course because in the 1990s there was like you can see the beginning of this real like the Okinawa boom going on and also with food and with music and then like this whole boom jumped into like the area of the field of media production and when I recall how I recall Japan I think it wasn't really that present like restaurants for example and also like Okinawan cultural affairs going on on mainland Japan that was something I think that really got popular after the 1990s maybe even in beginning of the 2000s and interestingly there are like some television productions that usually are made responsible for that for example Tudasan this NHK morning drama that made Okinawans things Okinawan really popular in in the Japanese metropolitan areas and afterwards like everybody knew some Okinawan words from from the local language that were used in the series and also with the food that was shown and Avamori and Goya and Tampuru and things like that so I think the media productions are actually a big impetus to make like the local products really popular in Japan and I think by now it's just got normal I think that the big boom is maybe over by now but I still come across like many Okinawan restaurants and also food stores all over like places in Tokyo so I think it's maybe it lost this special appeal maybe already a little bit just became normal and omnipresent in a way I'm a little bit conscious of the time yeah and just another question a quick question from Peter Korniki again could you say a bit more about the lawsuit you mentioned involving Oe and his mention of the Shudan Jigetsu yeah I'm afraid that I don't have the details here but it's really interesting it was a very famous law famous or infamous lawsuit and that was not only directed again not only Oe was sued but there was like a whole list of authors who wrote quite critical accounts of Japan's role in the Pacific War and touched upon war crime atrocities actually and I think they were all published by Ivan Ivanami Shuten so basically it was the publishing company that was sued Oe and the other authors and in Oe's case that was really interesting because I expected something very different because I knew okay this book was the Okinawan note was really this one of these books that were object of this lawsuit and then I expected Oe to have written much more about it but it was only like maybe five pages in the whole book it's about 200 pages long book I think and he only wrote very in very general terms and he didn't even mention though it's about two officers of the Japanese Imperial Army who was stationed on one island in Okinawa and there were like really recorded cases of these Shudan Jigetsu among the Shudan Jigetsu is a very bad term actually to you so it's like this compulsory mass suicide actually and there were two officers who allegedly gave these orders that the population the villagers had to kill themselves and they were distributing hand grenades to the local people and made sure that they killed themselves or also other relatives sometimes parents had to kill their children their husbands had to kill their wives and vice versa and I've been to one of the peace museums in Okinawa and there were some accounts written by people who survived these mass killings and they were really giving these accounts like how they witnessed what was going on and there is like this one island and there were these two officers stationed on the island who gave these orders and Oya doesn't even mention their names interestingly he's only basically talking about one of these two and he's I think always calling him only Anno Otoko like this man and so he doesn't mention the name but he was sued by two like they obviously recognized themselves in this account so and they sued the publishing company because they said that they never gave these orders and they wanted the publication to stop and after I think it was like the first trial and that I'm not really sure about you can look it up on Wikipedia I think there's in Japanese there is a whole entry a long one not very I think it's quite good explaining how this whole trial went on and I think it came back again and again three times to the superior court in the end that's why it's stretched over seven years and then in the end it was decided actually or that there was enough evidence that these things actually happened and that actually these two officers gave the order to the the villagers and the population so the two lost the case and of course always note and the other publications can still be published thank you I'm just going to end with one tiny little question from myself actually I as someone from New Zealand I found the idea of Okinesia quite interesting and the map that you showed I don't know if I read that wrong but it included New Zealand it went down as far as New Zealand but it didn't include Australia is that right is did I read that correctly and if so why why was Australia left out you mean the Mickey with the map of Okinesia Okinawa as being in the you know South Pacific or or Polynesia I don't have it here right now so don't worry don't worry I just maybe you can look at that later I thought my my look at it it looked like New Zealand was included but Australia was not but anyway it's a minor technical question there's lots of comments here just saying a brilliant lecture and and really you know people just basically thanking you for such an interesting and brilliant lecture so that's nice and I'm sorry if we didn't get to your question but we did have 90 people in the audience which is brilliant and not quite 90 questions but a lot and it's great that you're going on sabbatical Ina because there's lots for you to do here this it's a nice it's a rich topic so good luck with the sabbatical and enjoy it I'm sorry that I cannot really I saw that there are many more very interesting questions you can send them to me right so I was just going to say we will send you the full chat in Q&A and so anything you want to follow up on some of them don't have the names on so it might be difficult but but thank you to everybody for joining us thank you of course to Ina for such a fabulous presentation but thank you to all of you for joining us and I hope your dinner and your wine and your bed bread baking went well while you were watching and we're back next week and I think every other week until the end of term actually so if you like today please tune in and see what else we've got coming but thank you Ina enjoy your sabbatical very jealous and thank you for a fabulous presentation so good night everybody or good morning wherever you are thank you for joining us fine