Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) - Hardcover

Nelson, Christopher T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822343495 ISBN 13: 9780822343493

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s--and his broader effort to understand Okinawans' critical and creative struggles--was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā, the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher T. Nelson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""Dancing with the Dead" is a beautifully written, deeply evocative, and smartly argued book about the ways in which the past intrudes into the present and how memory is given shape, recognition, and vigor through storytelling of various forms. This will be an important book not only for and about Okinawan history but also about the times of continued violence and militarism in which we live."--Anne Allison, author of "Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

dancing with the dead

memory, performance, and everyday life in postwar okinawaBy CHRISTOPHER NELSON

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4349-3

Contents

acknowledgments...........................................................................................viiintroduction the battlefield of memory...................................................................11 fujiki hayato the storyteller..........................................................................272 the heritage of his times teruya rinsuke and ethnographic storytelling.................................583 the classroom of the everyday fujiki hayato and his "shima to asobimanabu" seminar.....................894 in a samurai village....................................................................................1265 dances of memory, dances of oblivion....................................................................171conclusion in the darkness of the lived moment...........................................................215notes.....................................................................................................221bibliography..............................................................................................253index.....................................................................................................263

Chapter One

fujiki hayato, the storyteller

Our campaign slogan must be: reform of consciousness, not through dogma, but through the analysis of that mystical consciousness which has not yet become clear to itself. It will then turn out that the world has long dreamt of that which it had only to form a clear idea of in order to really possess it. It will turn out that it is not a question of any conceptual rupture between past and future, but rather the completion of the thoughts of the past.-KARL MARX, Letter to Ruge

In chanpuru rhythm, we happily combine new lines of scientific inquiry, unscientific traditions passed on from older generations, as well as outright lies. I am convinced that when absolutely incompatible perspectives are brought together and the boundaries between this and that are weakened, a new truth, a new culture will be born.-TERUYA RINSUKE, Terurin Jiden

HISTORY AND THE EVERYDAY

It was the autumn of 1945. The battle of Okinawa had ended. Their villages destroyed and their farms confiscated, thousands of Okinawans remained confined in resettlement camps under the haphazard administration of American military authorities. During the day, people gathered in the muddy streets between the ramshackle tents and shacks in which they were forced to live. Shocked, saddened, bored, they struggled to piece together the fragments of their daily lives. One day the dentist and comedian Onaha Buten joined them, laughing impishly.

I know that things have been terrible, but you can't go on this way. Here's what I'm going to do. Everyone gather around-I'll tell some stories and maybe we can sing a few songs. Now I know that times are tough, but I need to survive too. So I'll just put my hat down in the middle here. Then, everyone can close their eyes and pitch in whatever they can afford. That way, someone without much money won't be embarrassed. Once everyone has put their money in, I'll give a signal. You can open your eyes and I'll go on with the show.

They all agreed that this was a good idea. Buten put down his hat and told his audience to shut their eyes. Everyone dug into their pockets and threw money into the hat. After a few minutes, Buten shouted, "Open your eyes!"

When they looked around, Buten had taken the hat and gone. Laughing, he waved to them from his bike as he raced away down the street.

"Don't you ever learn?"

In the spring of 1997, the Japanese Diet acted with extraordinary-almost unprecedented-dispatch, passing a special law enabling the central government to compell Okinawan landowners to continue to lease their land for use by the American military. With this decision, the exuberance and determination of the previous months came to an abrupt and shocking halt. Nearly two years before, in 1995, the prefecture had erupted in anger over the rape of an Okinawan child by American soldiers-the latest in a series of attacks visited upon young women by American servicemen. Since that incident, there had been a prefectural referendum on the future of the bases, a series of public hearings on the renewal of leases, and several massive demonstrations.

A tremendous amount of critical effort had been directed at reconsidering the Okinawan past, and not merely the history of American military occupation. Essays in newspapers and journals, public discussions, and private conversations debated Okinawa's history of Japanese colonialism, wartime genocide, modernization, and incorporation into the Japanese nation-state. Questions of Okinawa's subjection to nativist analysis and cultural commodification were aired in the mass media. Angry commentators and politicians revisited Okinawa's history of discrimination at the hands of both the American and Japanese states. Calls were heard for greater regional autonomy, for recognition of Okinawa's unique status in the Japanese nation, even for independence. Commentators on both the right and the left urged Okinawans to seize this opportunity to determine their future; of course, the choices that these commentators enjoined their fellow Okinawans to make were radically different. In the midst of all of this, complex negotiations with the Japanese national government and American authorities continued. When landowners were finally forced to renew the leases held by the Japanese government, when the Diet enacted special legislation making leases compulsory, Okinawans were amazed to once again find their claims so summarily dismissed.

An editorial in the journal Keshi Kaji explored the deep emotions that swept through Okinawa following the Diet's stunning actions. The author, Miyazato Chisato, described how a feeling of chirudai came to pervade everyday life. In this case, chirudai can be understood to be a state in which the boundary between waking life and dreams has become blurred and charged with feelings of disappointment and loss. Politicians, activists, and critics would soon reorganize, particularly in the context of announcement of U.S. plans to build a new helicopter base in Nago. However, in a series of performances throughout Okinawa-at the Terurinkan in Okinawa City, at Ryubo Hall in Naha, and at the Nakamurake in Kitanakagusuku-the humorist and essayist Fujiki Hayato had already organized a different sort of response to the state of despondency described in the Keshi Kaji essay. Evoking the work of Teruya Rinsuke and the aforementioned Onaha Buten, Fujiki attempted to both transform the sense of chirudai-of disappointment and loss-and provide a critique of everyday life in contemporary Okinawa.

"One does not have to be a resentful reactionary to be horrified by the fact that the desire for the new represses duration." Theodor Adorno wrote these words in a critique of modern art; however, at this historical conjuncture it would be impossible to separate the cultural from the economic, the aesthetic from the quotidian. The modern era has been characterized by a kind of ceaseless impulse toward change. In the case of Japan, postwar economic growth was driven by a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822343495
• ISBN 13: 9780822343493
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande