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In This Issue
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Sarah
Bird
Kinjo
Shigeaki
Morita
Seiya
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Greetings!
We feature two Okinawa-themed articles this week. Sarah Bird's
novel, Above the East China Sea, excerpted here, describes the suicide
dilemma facing a young Okinawan during the battle, and then pursues the
same theme into the ranks of US forces on Okinawa in the present. Her
discussion with former Marine Steve Rabson explores themes from the two
periods and the making of the novel. The theme of compulsory suicide is the
subject of Kinjo Shigeaki's interview on the circumstances in which he and
his family were caught when he was a sixteen year old during the Battle of
Okinawa in March 1945. Contrasting two forms of discrimination in
contemporary Japanese society-Zaitokukai's repeated hate demonstrations
directed at Zainichi Koreans and the treatment of women in a recent high
profile art exhibit at the Mori Museum, he queries the silence of
progressives on issues of gender discrimination.
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Sarah Bird with Steve Rabson
Above the East China Sea:
Okinawa During the Battle and Today
This article provides excerpts from Sarah Bird's newly published novel, Above the East China Sea,
together with the author's conversation with Steve Rabson, who served in
the military on Okinawa in 1968 en route to becoming a leading translator
of Okinawan literature. Bird's novel engages the themes of suicide and
death from the 1945 Battle of Okinawa to the present, interweaving the fate
of Okinawans and American occupying forces.
Sarah Bird's novel, Above the East China Sea,
was published in spring 2014 by Knopf. This is her second novel set in
Okinawa, following The
Yokota Officers Club, published by Ballantine (2001).
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Kinjo Shigeaki
interviewed by Michael Bradley
"Banzai!" The Compulsory Mass
Suicide of Kerama Islanders in the Battle of Okinawa
Translated by Maehara Naoko
This is an April 2014 interview with 85-year-old Kinjo
Shigeaki, a survivor of the compulsory mass suicides which occurred on
Tokashiki Island, Okinawa in March 1945. Kinjo details the atrocities he
was both subject to, and forced to commit, during the Battle of Okinawa.
The author calls on the Japanese government to properly account for this
period in Japan's Imperial history.
Michael Bradley, a former broadcast journalist with BBC
Northern Ireland, teaches at Okinawa Christian Junior College.
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Morita Seiya
Taiwan and the Ryukyus (Okinawa) in
Asia-Pacific Multilateral Relations - a Long-term Historical Perspective on
Territorial Claims and Conflicts
Translated and Introduced by Caroline
Norma
Morita Seiya's timely book, excerpted
here, challenges the meaning and limits of Japanese misogynistic cultural
products as a form of "hate speech." Contrasting the strong
progressive response to the public attack on Zainichi Koreans through repeated
Zaitokukai demonstrations in Tokyo with the silence in the wake of of Aida
Makoto's 2013 exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the author
confronts public media contexts where women, children, and disabled people
are exclusively targeted victims; where the environment is sexualised; and
where the context is purportedly one of entertainment, art or culture.
Morita argues that Japan's progressives, including human rights activists
and liberals, have been blind to human rights violations against women, or
at least do not see anything serious enough to warrant raising voices in
protest in such contexts. The author asks why pornography showing human
rights violations like rape, enslavement and brutalization produced in
numerous films and other media each year are justified as 'freedom of
expression.'
Translator Caroline Norma lectures in the School of Global, Urban and
Social Studies at RMIT University and is an editorial board member of
Women's Studies International Forum. Her book, Japanese comfort women and sexual slavery during
the China and Pacific wars, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in
2015.
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