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I have long tried to make sense of my “diasporic existence,” and I see a parallel with artist Laura Kina’s similar journey to find a sense of place and identity. Like Kina, in the wake of a collapsing economy and shortage of jobs, my ancestors left Okinawa to immigrate to Hawaiʻi in the early part of the nineteenth century as sugar plantation laborers. Kina’s artwork, however, has revealed to me even more complicated dimensions of this Uchinanchu diasporic existence.¹ Her paintings remind me that we are both in a space between the popular images of Hawaiʻi and Okinawa and the material realities of those places. Like Laura’s father, I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi. Behind the popular "Blue Hawaii” aloha images of paradise is the real history of Native Hawaiians being displaced, exploited, and nearly exterminated by outsiders. The most ambitious and powerful of those settler-colonizers brought in tens of thousands of other outsiders— – immigrants to be laborers on their sugar plantations— – from impoverished and/or colonized parts of the world, including southern China, western Japan, Korea, the Azores and Madeiras, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Okinawa. Like Laura, I have gone to the homeland of Okinawa to find my roots, only to find that Okinawa has become Japan’s equivalent of Hawaiʻi as a tourist mecca. The blue ocean is the dominant motif of virtually every Japanese tourist agency brochure that advertises low-cost tours in Okinawa. Behind the “Blue Okinawa” image, however, is the reality that Okinawa is the site of 73% of the American bases in Japan. Okinawa makes up about 0.6% of the total landmass of Japan.

In her exhibition statement Kina writes, “Risking distortion, misreading, nostalgia and erasure, I fully engage in the messy business of memory, collapsing time and space into one ‘Blue Hawaiʻi.’” I share in the messiness as I am inspired by Laura’s work. This inspiration risks distortion, misreading, nostalgia and erasure in my interpretation of her work, but it also opens up greater possibilities in the construction of memory clouded by shame while enabling the linking of Hawaiʻi and Okinawa in a shared colonized history.

Okinawan diasporic time is marked by shame. There is the shame of being brown people who came to produce white sugar for white people, of speaking Pidgin English rather than “standard” English, and the shame of not being “real Americans.” There is the shame of being uncouth and backward “Ryukyuans” who do not speak proper Japanese and have strange customs. I am often told that the various forms of shame that I talk about are things of the past as if discrimination no longer exists. I would beg to differ, but even if discrimination was a thing of the past, memories of shame color our present.

When I view Laura’s paintings, it is the color blue, which elicits my feeling of shame, the literal melancholic blues that lives persistently in Okinawan diasporic time. It is a shame that I have inherited from my Okinawan grandparents and from my Hawaiʻi-born parents, and it is probably the same shame that I pass on to my own children. In Kina’s indigo blue oil paintings based on old family and community photos from Okinawa and Hawaiʻi, I see the stoic expressions of bearing the shame, but not losing to it. In works such as Issei (2011), which is a simultaneous portrait of her “picture bride” immigrant great-grandmother and her great-great grandmother who died in the Battle of Okinawa, their gaman expressions [of endurance] are worn like a protection against defeat, like the kimono, yukata [summer kimono], work clothes, uniforms, aloha shirts, and “American clothes” they wear to protect them from the cutting leaves of sugarcane stalks or the sharp stares of both Japanese and American assimilationist practices.

In collapsing time and space in her work, Kina is painting not only generational memories that she has not lived first hand but also, to borrow the term from Ann Cvetkovich’s conception of trauma, an “archive of feeling.” Her work has awakened a memory of my own grandmother. A memory that is tinged with shame and sadness for not being able traverse the layers of cultural and linguistic differences that stood between us when she was alive, but a memory of light and spirit just waiting to burst forward below the dark blueness.

Tossing and turning
In the darkness waiting for a brand new day
Spirit woman with tattooed hands
From a land invaded by the north
Growing what she could not eat Eating what she did not grow.
All in the name of a far away emperor

I was the youngest of Baban’s grandchildren. She was my maternal grandmother who had come to Hawaiʻi from Okinawa in the 1910s to join my grandfather. Her migration to Hawaiʻi was only a few decades after the former Ryukyuan Kingdom had been forcibly annexed by Japan in 1879. The annexation of the Ryukyuan Kingdom into the modernizing nation-state of Japan plugged the island people into a larger global system. Japanese government administrators, military personnel, educators, and businessmen poured into Okinawa. If not for the Ryukyuan Archipelago’s geopolitically strategic location, it seems doubtful that Japan would have bothered to annex the small resource-poor islands. However, the fact that sugarcane could be grown in Okinawa was icing on the cake. Okinawa became a sugar-producing region for mainland Japan. Sugar was grown as a cash crop so that Okinawans could buy consumer goods from Japan and pay off their debts and taxes that went to the Japanese mainland.

I suppose that when one region takes over another by force, the main task is to figure out what to do with the people who are the original inhabitants in the acquired region. Our own country carried out policies of genocide on Native Americans. At least on the level of cultural genocide, what happened to Okinawans was similar to what happened to Native Americans. It seems so familiar when I read about the “kill the Indian, save the man” philosophy of the “Indian Schools” that prohibited Native American school children from speaking their own language or practicing their culture. In Okinawa, while land reform, electoral politics, and other modernization efforts lagged behind the rest of Japan, the Japanese education system was implemented in Okinawa very rapidly. By the time that my grandmother was born in 1893, most Okinawan children were in schools, where they would be punished for speaking the Okinawan language and expected to worship the Japanese emperor. A large wooden tag with the words 方言札 (hōgen fuda), or “dialect tag,” was place around the neck of school children who spoke in the Okinawan “dialect.” The tag symbolically relegated the Okinawan language to the inferior status as a backward “dialect” of Japanese, while corporeally ingraining a sense of shame and fear in generations of Okinawans for speaking their own language and being their own selves.

Physical genocide did take place on Okinawa. Japan’s leaders knowingly caused about a fourth to a third of Okinawa’s population to perish in less than three months during the Battle of Okinawa when they used Okinawa as a buffer to hold off American troops heading toward Naichi (mainland Japan) or Japan proper in 1945. Laura’s “Before the War” and “Soldier Boys” paintings depict relatives in Okinawa who were conscripted as children to fight Americans and to commit suicide in the end to protect and serve the emperor that they were forced to revere in school. In some cases, Okinawans were executed by Japanese soldiers under the suspicion of being spies for the Americans because they spoke in the unintelligible Okinawan language and because many had actually spent time in Hawai’i and other parts of the U.S. as immigrants and, therefore, had questionable loyalty to Japan in the eyes of the Japanese military.

When Baban was a young girl, she and her friends tattooed their hands, trying to recreate the traditional hajichi tattoos that older girls and women had on their hands. By the time that they tattooed their hands, however, the Japanese government had outlawed hajichi for its backwardness and barbarity. My grandmother was an outlaw.

Coming to a land
Overthrown by business men
Working for a dollar a day
Field woman with calloused hands
Working from whistle to whistle
Growing what she could not eat
Eating what she could not grow
All in the name of a manifest destiny

My Okinawan nisei [second generation] mother who was born on Kaua’i, grew up with the taunts of Naichi nisei children. One of the childhood insults that survived in many Okinawan nisei memories probably due to its rhythmically concise efficiency in conveying meanness: Okinawa ken ken, buta kau kau.” Okinawa Ken, meaning Okinawa Prefecture, is the name that the Japanese government gave the former Ryukyuan Kingdom. “Okinawa ken ken” seems to be a play on that name, but I think there is an added connotation that although Okinawa may be a prefecture of Japan, Okinawans are not really Japanese. In fact, when the first Okinawans who came to Hawaiʻi in 1900, Naichi Japanese (who had begun arriving in 1885) called them Japan Pake or Japanese Chinese”

Now the buta kau kau part. Buta is the Japanese word for pig, while kau kau is the Hawaiian creole word for “food” or “to eat.” The phrase points out that Okinawans eat pig, which seems innocuous now. However, until quite recently in Japanese history, eating meat from four-legged animals was stigmatized. In Japan, the practice of killing of animals as well as collecting human waste, leatherwork, undertaking, and other “dirty” work was relegated to Buraku castes labeled by such words as Eta [full of filth] or Hinin [non-human]. So buta kau kau really has a longer and deeper historical and social context that points to Japan’s caste system that still exists today. The proof exists in the unwillingness to talk about the issue and to treat it as if it has disappeared. That is, avoidance of present issues of discrimination in Japan (and elsewhere) is the most obvious indicator that the issue is alive and well. I recently visited an urban area near Takarazuka where “Buraku” people have historically resided and are still predominant. While walking into the area, I noticed a cemetery and crematorium for the small settlement. My host explained that many “regular Japanese” still do not want to be burned and buried with discriminated caste members. One thing to consider is that the concepts of the Japanese emperor as a sacred symbol of Japan or that of a “pure” Japanese race depends on having people to do dirty work and people who represent “dirtiness.” I remember my mother telling me that growing up Okinawan meant that she wished could wash away the feeling of being dirty.

Streaks of light through the darkness
From a spot on the horizon
She greets this quiet explosion
Tattooed hands together
Nirai kanai, teach my children to find you.
Nirai kanai, teach them to look sideways.
Nirai kanai, I go back to you again.
Nirai kanai, I go back to you again.

As I remember—or perhaps, recreate—my grandmother in her last days restlessly waiting to get up to pray to the morning sun rising over Kaua’i, I imagine a much longer history and tradition of women and men like her from Okinawa, and possibly the rest of the world, looking toward the horizon to a new day being born. Nirai kanai, the source of life and sustenance and the place where gods resided, was commonly believed to be far to the east toward where the sun rises. Maybe I am too idealistic in imagining that this horizontal ontology was not bound by the idea that all good things come from a heaven up above and that people of higher rank, income, education, or level of purity are superior. I imagine that it did not emphasize the separations between people as we do when we envision the world from a top-down cartographic perspective that looks at nations separated by boundaries and borders or islands separated by bodies of water. I imagine that it did not give power to self-aggrandizing ethnographic ideas that “(lesser) others” “belong to” different (inferior) cultures or to an idea that the “Far East” or the “Orient” is a strange, evil, backward, barbaric, and terroristic place.

Laura’s work draws out unarticulated and contradictory feelings. Wistful longing for an idealized past of a “pre-colonized” culture and warm “pre-postmodern” community connections is evoked along with a realization that this idealized past has been constructed on a heteronormative generational framework, which itself is built upon such binaries as heaven/earth, pure/impure, Occident/Orient, American/Oriental, loyal/disloyal, and straight/queer.

I find inspiration Laura’s work for it helps identify the blueness that I strive to burst though. In the blueness, however, is something that fuels naïve idealism and hope against all odds. I stare at “Graves by the Sea.” Blue sky scratched by power lines and a metal barrier between the graves and the viewer. Departed souls encased in concrete tombs pushed up against each other. They are testament of the reverence for ancestors and tradition in Okinawa that contradicts the reality of the lack of space on Okinawa. Vegetation between the tombs strives to reach the sun. There is a strong and powerful message that the ancestors and land are telling us through Laura’s work.

I end this essay at a time when I have just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C. with an Okinawan delegation that was making a direct appeal against plans by the U.S. and Japanese governments to push ahead with construction of a new U.S. Marine Air Station on the clear blue waters of Henoko despite strong opposition by Okinawans. Under pressure and promises of more money by the administration of Japanese Prime Minister Abe, on December 27, 2013, Okinawan Governor Nakaima agreed to approve of the landfill construction at Henoko. Because Nakaima was elected on a campaign promise to not allow the new base to be built in Okinawa, his approval ratings plummeted in Okinawa immediately. Then, on January 19, 2014, the anti-base mayor of Nago, which Henoko is a part of, was reelected by a large margin over his opponent who was backed up by the Japanese government who promised large sums of money for Nago if he were elected.

We met with U.S. officials, think tanks, one Senator, and staff of several other Congress members to press our case. At this time, both the Japanese and U.S. governments are stepping up their attempts to push past unyielding local Okinawan opposition to build a U.S. Marine Air Station in Henoko, which is on the northern part of Okinawa. Henoko is the site of a large thriving coral reef, turtle spawning grounds, seaweed beds, and an already endangered species of dugong. The blue ocean of Henoko will be no more if this plan goes through.

Most of the officials, politicians, and researchers we met in Washington, D.C. had made up their mind about new base construction at Henoko, saying that it is the best plan for the U.S.-Japan security arrangement and for the security of Pacific Asia. However, what the delegation was trying to get across to deaf ears was that Okinawans have stopped the construction for eighteen years by placing their bodies in front of ships and equipment coming to start construction. Old people, as old and tiny as my Baban in my memories of her, have come to sit on the beach every day in quiet but unrelenting resistance to American Manifest Destiny and Japanese fatalistic dependency on that Destiny. In the blue space between the popular images of Hawai’i and Okinawa and the material realities of those places is a lot more emotion than Orientalistic modes of perception can detect and a lot more commotion than colonial power can hold back.

¹Editor's note: Uchinanchu is Okinawans’ name for themselves.