Conflicted Childhoods in the South Seas: The Failure of Racial Assimilation in the Nan'yo (original) (raw)
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The young Micronesian today is often heard to complain that "The System" is trying to create Micro-Americal1s: that is, white minds wrapped in brown skins. It is especial1y the education he has received that is the target of his criticism.
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Further research on the operations of empire and on Indigenous histories offers the opportunity to examine how Indigenous communities in the Japanese Empire experienced competing currents of loyalty and identity during the Pacific War. This article examines how three Indigenous populations—Ainu, Indigenous Taiwanese and Micronesian Islanders—survived the ideological and social pressures of an empire at war and, despite the intense assimilationist demands of Japan’s kōminka program and traumatic wartime experiences, retained cultural identities sufficiently robust to allow expression at the end of the century in the form of action to maintain community lives apart from, while engaged with, the nation-state.
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Pacific Islands Policy examines critical issues, problems, and opportunities that are relevant to the Pacific Islands region. The series is intended to influence the policy process, affect how people understand a range of contemporary Pacific issues, and help shape solutions. A central aim of Pacific Islands Policy is to encourage scholarly analysis of economic, political, social, and cultural concerns in a manner that will advance common understanding of current challenges and policy responses. The series editors and members of the editorial board are all affiliated with or on the staff of the Pacific Islands Development Program (PIDP) at the East-West Center.
History of Education Quarterly, 2003
Under the policies of the United States, it will be very difficult to prohibit schools of this kind unless it were definitely proven that they were teaching treasonable things.—P. P. Claxton, U. S. Commissioner of EducationThis article critically examines how the 1919 Federal Survey of Education in Hawai'i, under the guise of a scientific study to guide educational reform, was used as the means to implement colonial policies over the territory's largest ethnic group, the Nikkei, people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the survey was also used by various other political and religious parties and individuals to further their own objectives. Although there were many facets to the federal survey, this study focuses only on the debate surrounding Japanese language schools, the most sensational issue of the survey. The battle over the control of Japanese language schools among the white ruling class, educational authorities, and the Nikkei community in Hawai'i created the fo...
2012-03 , 東京大学大学院総合文化研究科附属グローバル地域研究機構アメリカ太平洋地域研究センター , Center for Pacific and American Studies, Institute for Advanced Global Studies, The University of Tokyo , 東京大学, 2012
Naoto Sudo’ s Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific is a fascinating and informative addition to the field of colonial/postcolonial studies, providing a fresh perspective to theory that (in English-language terms, certainly) has all too often concentrated solely on British and American hegemonic relationships with the South Pacific region. The author clearly delineates the geographical region in question to assess Japan’s problematic relationship with the Pacific Islands in light of Edward Said’ s seminal work, Orientalism (1978 ). The Korean scholar, Kang Sang-jung’ s reinterpretation of Japanese Orientalism, in which Kang argues that Japanese textual interpretations of Micronesia reflect “ the simultaneous operation of double desires: the desire to avoid Western territorial ambition directed at Japan and the desire to use Orientalism’ s hegemonic power over other Asian/Pacific regions also forms a touchstone for Sudo’ s theoretical framework. The earlier literature of Nanyo-Orientalism , the author proposes, implies a dual moral imperative, encapsulating as it often does the propagandistic desire to “ save” indigenous culture from itself through tying it to Japanese protection, while also seeking to redress the perceived wrongs of Western imperialism and colonization, a “ primordial chaos [which must] be reclaimed from or liberated from Western rules by the Japanese” .