First "new book in the former native speaker's library" post of 2024!

This afternoon, I went to the neighborhood 7-Eleven and picked up a book I ordered yesterday from the 博客來 website: it's called 《島國知音：台灣問題專家葛超智其人其事》(An Island Nation's Close Friend: Taiwan Expert George H. Kerr's Life and Experiences). It's a translation of 《沖縄と台湾を愛した ジョージ・H・カー先生の思い出》, which was published in 2018. I have a copy of the Japanese book, but I can't read it, so I was excited when I found out a Chinese translation had been published. 

The book is a collection of essays about George H. Kerr by people who knew him (like Kabira Tomokiyo 川平朝清 and Higa Mikio 比嘉幹郎) and people who have studied his life and work (like Su Yao-tsung 蘇瑤崇 and Yoshihara Yukari 吉原ゆかり). It looks like it'll be a good book to read on the flight home! 

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

Since the Association of Asian Studies conference this year was cancelled, I took advantage of the University of Hawai'i Press Asian Studies online sale (you can still order by 3/31!) to buy a couple of books that I have been interested in for a while:

• Maritime Ryukyu, 1050-1650, by Gregory Smits (2019)--I got interested in this book after reading John Grant Ross' enthusiastic review on the bookish.asia blog. 
• Liminality of the Japanese Empire: Border Crossings from Okinawa to Colonial Taiwan, by Hiroko Matsuda (2019)--this book combines two of my favorite kinds of research methods--archival work and oral histories--to tell the story of Okinawans who immigrated to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period there. Paul Barclay has a positive review of the book in Japanese Studies. 

The books showed up on my porch today, so I donned my hazmat suit and brought them in. Since we're all socially distancing ourselves right now, I might even get a chance to read them in the near future, especially if I don't read my books in the order that I buy them. 

I'm currently reading another book that I ordered earlier:

• Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship, by Shui-yin Sharon Yam (2019). I haven't seen any reviews of this book yet, but I'm interested in Yam's discussion of storytelling as a way to promote what she calls "deliberative empathy" among different and differently-empowered groups in a society. I'm also interested in the book's focus on Hong Kong as a site of struggle among competing populations of Hongkongers, South Asians, Southeast Asian domestic workers, and mainland Chinese migrants.
  

Hopefully posting these books will force me to read them!

Night in the American Village

I just finished reading Akemi Johnson's Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, which I bought in Kindle format after reading John Grant Ross's review of it.

Ross does a good job summarizing the book (without giving away too much!), so I recommend you read his review (and then buy the book!). I just want to mention a few points that I found interesting (which probably will say more about my own particular--or peculiar--interests than about the book itself). A lot of what the book centered around had to do with language, culture, and intercultural relations of various kinds--not surprising, I suppose. One extended example:

Johnson describes a 34-year-old Okinawan woman named Naomi who worked at the U.S. Navy Hospital as an Master Labor Contractor (MLC), a full-time position for "permanent residents of Japan who are unconnected to the U.S. military"; Johnson describes MLCs as forming "the lowest rung of the chain of command, below American active duty and civilian personnel." And not surprisingly, these workers as the lowest rung turn out to be "the continuity that [keep] the place running." One of things that make Naomi essential to the functioning of the base is her language ability and cultural knowledge. Johnson describes how this knowledge works on a typical day:

Over the first four to five years on the job, Naomi had learned a sophisticated system of code-switching to thrive in her multicultural workplace. "Once I go through the fence [between the U.S. base and its surroundings], I become chotto, a little bit, American," she said. On base, she shifted her mindset, ready to say "no" if she meant "no" instead of the "Hmm, let me think about it" she'd use off base. She had to be ready to adjust, depending on whom she was talking to, something she excelled at because of her experience living in both the United States an Okinawa. "I can imagine how they tend to think," she said of Americans and Okinawans. She knew with a local, middle-aged man who worked on base, she had to joke with him, talking to him casually, with an Okinawan accent. When she spoke to her contractor from mainland Japan, she switched to a Tokyo accent, which she'd learned from having Japanese roommates in the States. With her American supervisor, she had to use clear and professional English. If she messed up, the stakes could be high. "If I talk to an Okinawan ojichan [grandpa] with a mainland accent, he'll block me right away. Boom! 'I don't talk to you anymore.'" If she talked to him the correct way, he treated her like family. "That's how I figured out how to survive in that environment. I like it, actually."

Shuttling among languages and cultures (as Suresh Canagarajah might put it), Naomi demonstrates a sophisticated rhetorical awareness of what it takes to get done with different people in different contexts. She is almost a different person depending on who she is talking to. To Johnson, Naomi points out the implications of this in terms of her self-identity:

Looking back on her experience, Naomi thought it was easy to label the different roles she had played: Okinawan, international student, adult professional. But those labels didn't adequately describe her. "The inside is more difficult," she said. "I'm a blend of so many factor: Okinawa, United States, California, and on the base. ... It's hard to categorize me right now." ... She valued this flexible self she had cultivated. "My perspective changes almost every day," she said. "I'm creating my own style."

I'm not sure if Naomi is her real name because Johnson notes that she changed some interviewees' names (but on the other hand, she mentions a "Naomi Noiri" in her acknowledgments). I've been discussing with some colleagues the issue of international students' names, in particular the international students who choose to be called by "English" names. Naomi's experience and her awareness of moving in and out of identities adds an interesting twist to the question of what it might mean to take on a name that is not the one you were born with (or rather, that your parents gave you) in intercultural contexts.

Anyway, read the whole book! It's a great read.

Work on GHK introduction, a flashback, and reflections on teaching writing

A couple days ago I finally completed a draft of my introduction to a forthcoming new edition of Formosa Betrayed and sent it to the editors for their input. I'm sure it will go through some (probably many) changes before it sees publication, but that's OK with me. I was writing an email to a friend just now and mentioned the project and one of its earlier incarnations:

You probably don’t remember your comments on this blog post from 2010 (https://jonintaiwan.blogspot.com/2010/02/some-notes-about-publication-history-of.html), but what I’m working on now grew out of what I was working on back then—8 years ago! I always like to mention these kinds of things to my writing students—my 9-year dissertation, this thing, etc.—to remind them of how long the writing process can sometimes be.

I can date the interest in Kerr back a couple of years further than that, when I wrote in this post almost 11 years ago:

I found out that Tunghai's History Dept. library had these books [a 3-volume set of facsimiles of Kerr's writings and correspondence], so I borrowed them today. Talk about fascinating stuff to curl up with on a cold winter night. There are all sorts of interesting topics that come up in the letters--discussions with (and about) Thomas Liao (a Taiwan independence activist-in-exile who eventually returned to Taiwan in a propaganda coup for the KMT), letters in response to Formosa Betrayed and concerning the trouble he was having publishing a history of Taiwan to 1945, discussions regarding the assassination attempt on Chiang Ching-kuo in 1970 and its aftermath... Just a lot to keep a curious reader busy. 

"Keep a curious reader [and writer] busy." As I said to my friend, it's always interesting to get students' reactions to the idea that a writing project (or writing projects) can take years, or even decades. Kerr's work on Taiwan is itself an example of that, from working on earlier versions of Formosa Betrayed back in the late 1940s, to getting it published finally in 1965, and working on the other "Formosa" texts (one of which never saw publication) into the 1970s and 80s.

I would like to give students a taste of how those kinds of long-term writing projects happen, and I guess I do do that, to some extent. In my business writing class, for instance, they work with one topic for most of the semester and base their final project on that topic, as well. But it's an acquired taste for some students who might not be able to develop the kind of passion for a topic that it takes to sustain interest over a longer period of time (even 14 weeks can be a long time if you're not interested in what you're working on!). And I also have to realize that neither I nor Kerr (or probably anyone else) have fully focused on that one project over all of those years. Kerr wrote about Okinawa, as well, for instance. And we all get distracted over time. (At least I hope "we all" do--I hope it's not just me!) Would it be necessary/helpful to try to build that "distraction" into the syllabus, as well? Could that be done in a 14-week course? Maybe I'll try...

George H. Kerr, Ryukyu: Kingdom and Province Before 1945 on Archive.org

In their introduction to Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa, editors Davinder L. Bhowmik and Steve Rabson argue that in the 1950s and 60s, Okinawans' preference for Japanese control over U.S. occupation "grew extremely popular, with greater than 70 percent of the Okinawan electorate supporting reunification with Japan at a time when, in one of history's repetitions, U.S. occupation forces encouraged the flourishing of Ryukyuan culture in an effort to distance Okinawans from their mainland cousins" (4).

George H. Kerr took some role in this U.S. effort. Kerr had conducted research with SIRI (The Scientific Investigations of the Ryukyu Islands), a joint academic-military effort. Kerr expressed concern about the Okinawan desire to "revert" to Japanese control. Hidekazu Sensui quotes from a 1952 SIRI progress report in which Kerr worries that this movement "constitutes a threat to our position in political warfare" (qtd in 40). As part of the U.S. occupiers' efforts to distance Okinawans from the Japanese, Kerr was asked to write a history of the Ryukyus that would be translated into Japanese.

The English book was written, as Kerr notes in a foreword, "at the request of Brigadier General James M. Lewis, Civil Administrator for the Ryukyu Islands, who desired a text suitable for translation into the Japanese language for use at the University of the Ryukyus" (ii). Kerr's 1953 book, Ryukyu: Kingdom and Province Before 1945 (available on archive.org) became the basis for Ryukyu no Rekishi.

In his short biographical essay about George H. Kerr (pdf), Tony Jenkins notes that

Okinawans of a certain generation variously celebrate or scorn George Kerr's Ryukyu no Rekishi (1956), which they were required or encouraged to read in their college days. It was, and still is, seen either as welcome international recognition of Okinawa's place in history, or as American propaganda, occasionally erroneous, that sought to divorce the 1950s Okinawan collective mentality from Japan. (3)

It would perhaps be understandable if the history of the Ryukyus that Kerr was writing was meant only for American civil administration. The fact that the U.S. Civil Administrator saw a need to have an American write a history of Ryukyu to be translated into Japanese was cause for suspicion among Okinawan academics, as Jenkins notes.

But Jenkins also argues that Kerr was at least somewhat aware of the complicated nature of Okinawan-Japanese relations--Kerr saw the Okinawans as needing to emphasize a more equal status with the Japanese mainland so that when Japan retook control of the islands, they wouldn't be treated as second-class citizens. This theme is also evident in the foreword to Ryukyu, where Kerr argues that "the people of Ryukyu are much more eager to be recognized and accepted as 'Japanese', than the people of Japan are ready or eager to claim them without reservation." He concludes,

Okinawa and its people have sometimes been likened to Texas and the Texans. They are proud of their tradition of former independence, and cherish special cultural characteristics which set them apart and give them self-respect. But like the Texans whose pride and patriotism as citizens of the United States should not be challenged, the people of Ryukyu consider themselves patriotic and true citizens of the larger unit, Japan. The attitude of the sophisticated Japanese of Tokyo toward the farmers and fishermen of Okinawa Province finds its parallel in the attitude of the native New Yorker toward the drawling, ranch-born cowhand on the most distant border ranges. With great reluctance the Okinawan will admit that the record shows Japan's discrimination in economics, politics, and social advantage. Nevertheless, the ties of race, common language, education, political and administrative institutions, and economy were and may be assumed to be permanent. (ii)

It would be interesting to know if any of these thoughts made it into the Japanese translation, though. Here's an interesting case where any changes between the English and Japanese versions would be a result of the U.S. civil administration's censors rather than "cultural" differences or censorship by the Japanese themselves.

[Update: Prof. Sensui noted on Facebook that the Japanese translation of the book included the foreword, which was "often quoted by Okinawan writers and politicians (Prof. Ota's was one of the earliest cases), though they usually skipped the part in which GHK drew comparison with Texans."]