Okinawa's Starry 80s - Words, Women, and Treasure Chests
Ai Tamaki (Born in 1994, from Uruma City)
The fascination of the "1980s"
To me, Okinawa in the 80s is like a "treasure chest." It has an intrigue where, despite surely having existed, it is passed over by everyone as if it never existed at all. I often feel, why is that? It's so fascinating if you just look at it! I find it difficult to express the time lived by people in Okinawa solely through the divisions of Okinawan political history. Okinawan history is often captured through the lens of shifting governing powers or incidents and accidents involving the U.S. military. What were the people living their lives in Okinawa seeing in the 80s? How does it influence the Okinawa of today? Even now, I am driven by such thoughts.
The trigger for finding the 80s interesting was nothing major. When I was a university student, perhaps during a literature lecture, a male professor from mainland Japan was talking about Okinawa. I don't even remember the content, but I remember being brazen enough to feel angry, thinking, "How can you talk about Okinawa so proudly when you don't even understand the feelings or pain of the Okinawan people?" I have that memory. While listening to that lecture with irritation, a question suddenly popped into my mind.
"What kind of period was Okinawa in the 80s?"
I think that was when it started. I began to take an interest in Okinawa's 80s and the period surrounding it. I simply felt that there must have been something there. It was just that it hadn't been noticed, or had been made invisible. There was no basis for my feeling that it was interesting, but there was a romance in the fact that no one had looked at it and it hadn't been written about.
One book
For that "irritating" lecture, I bought and read Shun Medoruma's "Forest in the Depths of the Eyes" (Kage Shobo, 2009) for an assignment to read a work by an Akutagawa Prize-winning author and submit a report. I am grateful that I encountered this book.
I chose Medoruma's work because his hometown was the Nakijin region where my grandparents lived. I recalled the house of my grandparents where I played as a child, the fukugi tree-lined paths, the gravel roads, the fishing spots my father often visited, the coastline, the fields, the bay, the sunset with the sun tilting, the pitch-black nights, and that atmosphere of Nakijin. I felt I could understand the words, topography, characters, and silence in the stories Medoruma depicted with strange depth. I read on, expanding my imagination with the scenes of the stories, the voices of the people, their pain, and their emotions in my own way.
I knew that sexual violence by U.S. soldiers had occurred in Okinawa. I had seen it on the news, and while I thought it was awful, a vague feeling and landscape had spread in my mind. It was after reading Medoruma's "Forest in the Depths of the Eyes" that I began to think about militarism and sexual violence against women with imagination.
About half a year later, in May 2016, it was reported that a 20-year-old woman in Uruma City, where I was born and raised, had been raped, murdered, and abandoned by a former Marine. The shock that a woman of my generation had been raped and killed by a former U.S. soldier. The victim of the incident could have been me. It could have been my friend. It was the first time I experienced my body trembling, struck by the anxiety and fear that sexual violence is not simply a thing of the past.
I read Medoruma's "Forest in the Depths of the Eyes" once again. I kept it in my bag and carried it around for about a year. It was a time when time stood still, I was very lonely, and no words would come out. When the Uruma City incident occurred, I was 21. I met many Okinawan women in the field of social movements. I listened to the words and thoughts of these women. My encounters with these women would later connect to my interest in the 80s.
The untold stories of women
About two and a half years later, in the autumn of 2018, I began writing my master's thesis on the history of social movements by Okinawan women in the 80s. The purpose of that thesis was to re-examine the social movements of women in 1995 that appear in modern Okinawan history. I attempted to prove that the movement by women did not start in 1995 in Okinawa, but that its background lay in the 80s. In particular, I focused on a women's group called the "80 Okinawa Women's Association" (hereinafter, the Women's Association). According to documents, member Chieko Aguni was an employee of the Naha City Office, and Yuki Shimabukuro was an employee of the Prefectural Office, and they were active for about 10 years from 1980 to 1990. After that, the association went on hiatus. The Women's Association was launched by Okinawan women inspired by the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985). The fact that it was a small group without belonging to a large women's organization can be said to be a characteristic of the Women's Association that reflects the background of the times. The Women's Association raised its voice against prostitution tours to Asia by Okinawan and Japanese men, and held rallies and study sessions. At the 3rd World Conference on Women NGO Forum held in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, in 1985, Women's Association members Aguni and Shimabukuro held a workshop. Holding a workshop at the NGO Forum had a major influence on the "Unai Festival," which continued from 1985 to 2014. The Okinawa Women's Association had a critical perspective on patriarchal customs in Okinawa. The themes they took up were diverse, including the succession of the totome (ancestral tablets) and related inheritance issues, the burden of events forced upon women, and the prostitution problem by the youth division within labor unions.
Me and Okinawan events
Even now, patriarchal customs in Okinawa remain deeply rooted. In my family too, every time there is an event, all the siblings gather at the house of the eldest son who has the totome, and the men drink alcohol together in the living room. The women are standing in the kitchen or its vicinity, or sitting uncomfortably. When I am absorbed in chatting with my cousins, I am called out by my mother, who has a gentle, formal expression. I show resistance for four or five minutes, but somehow, conscious of the "eyes" of others, I join those women. A kind of small political struggle unfolds every time there is an event. I don't dislike my relatives' or family's events. I just feel a bit conflicted somewhere.
Also, there are relative madams who, "worried" about me, tell me to get married, talk about my income, or tell me to have children soon every time there is an event. That time, which is like ascetic training, is honestly painful. There was an incident I will never forget. On New Year's Day in 2018, when I was given a "New Year's greeting" saying, "You have a face that looks like you have many men around you," I thought about grabbing them by the collar. I was furious, wondering why I had to be told such things, and for the past few years, I have been carrying out a strike when visiting relatives with my father and mother.
What kind of period was the 80s?
I hold a hope that in the words, art, literature, and atmosphere of the people who lived in Okinawa in the 80s, some new possibility can be seen. Was Okinawa in the 80s really a blank, calm period? This era of Okinawa, which will likely become the author's lifelong hobby, has hardly been touched by anyone's hands. I conducted research and studies focusing on Okinawan women and social movements, but I want to keep touching the words of women written in the 80s and their energy. When I felt the heat of the women on my skin, I strongly decided, "I will continue to write too."
How do the people who lived through the 80s in Okinawa look back on that time? Because for me, born in '94, the 80s in Okinawa, while not that distant in time, feel somehow far away.
One day, I asked my mother, "What kind of period was the 80s? What were you doing?" My mother opened her eyes wide and laughed, saying, "M (my sister) was born in '83, and T (my brother) was born in '87. It was an era when balancing child-rearing and work started as soon as I gave birth, so I don't remember anything. I was doing my best, even if it doesn't look like it." I was about to blurt out, "I see, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law," but I stopped. Even the feeling of "I don't remember anything" intersected somewhere in my mind like falling stars between my mother's memories and the Okinawa of the 80s.