Mixed Race Studies

In Japan’s Okinawa, saving indigenous languages is about more than words

The Washington Post
2014-11-29

Anna Fifield, Tokyo Bureau Chief

NISHIHARA, Japan — Rising in turn at their wooden desks, the students giggled, squirmed or shuffled as they introduced themselves, some practically in a whisper.

“Waa naamee ya — yaibiin . . . (My name is . . . ).” One by one, the classmates at Okinawa Christian University managed to get out their names, a few confidently, but most of them sheepishly.

Teacher Byron Fija waved his arms around, laughed and tried to encourage the class, which looked like a college group anywhere — some in hoodies, others in baseball caps and one guy with green hair.

But it was clear that the language — Okinawan — didn’t come naturally to most of them.

It’s the biggest of the six main indigenous languages spoken in this subtropical Japanese island chain, once the independent Ryukyu kingdom but now best known for hosting most of the American military bases in Japan…

…Fija is almost evangelical in his promotion of Okinawan, poetically called “uchi-naa-guchi” here.

In addition to teaching, Fija, 45, plays the sanshin, a three-stringed Okinawan banjo, and sings. For five years he hosted a radio show in Okinawan.

He sees the language as intrinsic to his identity. A product of the military occupation, he is the son of an Okinawan mother and an American father, a man he has never heard from.

Fija cites two experiences that motivated him to embrace the local language and culture.

First, he learned to play the sanshin.

“Someone told me that my playing was fine but my Okinawan sounded American, even though I don’t speak any English. Maybe it was because I don’t look Japanese or Okinawan,” Fija said after class, wearing a traditional Japanese outfit with an Okinawan pattern. His Okinawan pronunciation, he said, was the equivalent of a Japanese person singing in English “I rub you” instead of “I love you.”.

Then, in the 1990s, he spent a year or so in Los Angeles, hoping to make it as a rock star. But as he discovered how hard that was, he had an epiphany. Because of his Caucasian looks, he said, he had never really been accepted as Japanese. But with no knowledge of his father and little proficiency in English, he clearly wasn’t American, either…

Read the entire article here.

School aims to give biracial kids a place to ‘be themselves’

Japan Times
2013-10-20

Michael Bradley, Special to the Japan Times

NAKAGUSUKU, OKINAWA – Melissa Tomlinson doesn’t have very happy memories of elementary school. As an 8-year-old, she “never had a chance to eat lunch normally — the other kids put something in it, or they mixed the milk and soup and orange together and told me to eat it.”

Like the three or four other mixed-race children in her class, Tomlinson was bullied on a daily basis. Now a 26-year-old high school English teacher, she still recalls how “they told me to go home to America, and they talked bad about my mom.”

Her teachers did little to stop the abuse — indeed, some, wittingly or not, even contributed to it. Every summer, on the anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa — the three-month assault in which around 100,000 Okinawan civilians perished — Tomlinson would become the focus of the class. “The teacher always said, ‘Melissa, can you stand up? So, you are half-American, what do you think about this?’ For me, I was like, ‘I grew up here, I don’t know about American things.’ ” Tomlinson had no memory of her father, a U.S. serviceman who’d split from her mother when she was still a baby.

Tomlinson’s story is far from unique. Since 1946, many children here have been born to U.S. military fathers and Okinawan mothers. Sometimes (and especially when the fathers are deployed elsewhere) the mothers are left to bring up the children by themselves, and, like Tomlinson, those children don’t always have an easy time at school.

When five single mothers set up a school for their own “Amerasian” children in Okinawa 15 years ago, they were not so much worried about bullying as concerned about getting their kids a bilingual education. The only one of the women still involved with the school — the current principal, Midori Thayer — explains: “Our children needed to learn both languages because of their two different heritages. They had to be themselves.”…

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Representing Mixed Race: Beyond “What are you?”

Talking Race: A Digital Dialog
2013-05-28

Laura Kina, Vincent DePaul Associate Professor of Art, Media and Design
DePaul University

My 2011-12 oil paintings Issei, Nisei, Sansei, Yonsei, and Gosei are on view in “Under My Skin: Artists Explore Race in the 21st Century” at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle May 10-November 17, 2013. The Japanese language titles mark the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth generations from my father’s lineage to live in the United States.

Issei is a ghostly indigo blue portrait of my great grandmother, who came in 1919 through the “picture bride” system of arranged marriage from Okinawa, Japan to the Big Island of Hawai’i to work on a sugar cane plantation in Pi’ihonua (near Hilo). Her image flickers in front of a row of female sugar cane workers dressed in protective work clothes made from repurposed kasuri kimono fabrics. Nisei features a similarly blue tinged portrait of my grandmother in front of a steamship, the Kamakura Maru, circa 1937-39 when she was sent back to Okinawa for high school. Sansei is a sepia toned image based on my mom and dad’s engagement photo from 1968. Next to their image is a colorful patchwork quilt made from vintage Aloha shirts. Yonsei features my own black and white wedding portrait rendered on top of an auspiciously celebratory red enameled background. I wore a white kimono and constructed Japanesque identity and my husband, who is Ashkenazi Jewish, looked like a young Sean Penn in his black tuxedo. Gosei is a portrait of our daughter Midori wearing a Hello Kitty t-shirt, the ubiquitous consumer sign of global Japaneseness. I painted her during the first weeks of September 2012. She is standing on the beach at once a little girl, my baby, and on the cusp of tweendom and about to enter her Hebrew school education. Midori’s expression and the formal composition directly reference the viewer back to Issei while the exaggerated blueness of her eyes and lightness of her skin signal her potential passing into whiteness…

…I identify as hapa (half Asian), yonsei (fourth generation), Uchinanchu (Okinawan diaspora), and more generally and politically as Japanese American, Asian American, and mixed race. I’m also white but in Chicago, where I live, I am usually read as “Latina” but I have yet to embrace a Hispanic identity (I do have a Mexican American stepdaughter though). I live in an urban South Asian/Orthodox Jewish immigrant community. I’m a convert to Judaism, but no one ever guesses I’m Jewish. I don’t look the part. I’m more likely to be mistaken as Indian, vaguely reminiscent of the Bollywood movie actress Preity Zinta. My father is Okinawan and grew up on a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island of Hawai’i and my mother is from Kingston, Washington, where her family ran a roadside motel near the Kingston ferryboat landing. Her mom was a seamstress from a Basque-Spanish agricultural family and she grew up speaking Spanish in Vallejo, California. Her father was French, English, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch heritage (aka “white”) and hailed from Wacko, Texas, by way of cotton fields in Tennessee. He was a descendent of James Knox Polk, the eleventh president of the United States, as well as Major General George Pickett, whose infamous charge was the last battle of Gettysburg. Sometimes I think it’s funny that I’m simultaneously eligible to claim membership as a Daughter of the American Revolution and to throw my lot in history as a descendent of a Japanese “picture bride.”…

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Petitioning subjects: miscegenation in Okinawa from 1945 to 1952 and the crisis of sovereignty

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Volume 11, Issue 3 (2010)
pages 355-374
DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2010.484172

Annmaria Shimabuku, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
University of California, Riverside

This paper tells a story about miscegenation between US military personnel and Okinawan women from 1945-1952, which includes sexual violence, the establishment of ‘entertainment districts,’ and the emergence of international marriage. Whereas this history has been mobilized by leftists as a truth-weapon in the struggle for political sovereignty from the US military, this paper takes an explicitly genealogical approach. Drawing on Foucault’s work on biopower, this paper shows how Okinawans were transformed into ‘petitioning subject’—subjects that negotiated the sexual exploitation of their bodies in tandem with the radically changing relationship between their bodies and the territory.

Read or purchase the article here.

Positioning American Japanese in the Context of Japanese and Okinawan Nationalism and Ethnicity

Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume II (October 2009)
18 pages

Stephanie Otani
Stanford University

have the right…
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity.
Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy…
To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify…
To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial…
To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.

~from the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, by Maria P.P. Root

They wear war in their faces. They are the symbols of foreign domination. They embody the transgression of sacred boundaries. In Okinawa, people of Japanese and American descent (or Amerasians) are first and foremost foreigners, no matter how Japanese or Okinawan their language, customs, mannerisms, or worldviews may be. Before they even speak, their face and skin signal to people the circumstances of their births. The rights claimed by Root in the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” ultimately culminate in the right to first and foremost be understood as a human being as opposed to racial anomaly or mistake. As of now, these rights are insubstantial claims for those who carry signs of American parentage in their appearance throughout Okinawa and the rest of Japan. Instead, they continue to be externally categorized as gaijin or “foreigners” in their own homes.

Japan does not contain the linguistic nor legal infrastructure to accommodate them under the idea of Japaneseness. Within Japan, Okinawa is a particularly interesting and relevant site to explore issues of cultural and political legitimacy and conflicts between internal and external identity. The historical experience of Okinawa and its struggle for political sovereignty in international affairs mirrors the experience of American Japanese and their struggle to find a sense of national belonging. It is because of the contentious physical and political space Okinawa has historically inhabited that Amerasians struggle to fit into a larger Okinawan or Japanese identity.

Amerasians Within the Broader Context of Japan

In this section I will discuss the overall Japanese attitude toward multiracial people by examining the terms used to refer to multiracial people and the legal status of international couples. These two aspects of Japanese society reflect its reluctance to incorporate ethnic difference…

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