Using primary sources and oral history, individual contributors examine how Okinawan identity was constructed in the various countries to which Okinawans migrated, and how their experiences were shaped by the Japanese nation-building project and by globalization. Essays explore the return to Okinawan sovereignty, or what Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzaburo called an "impossible possibility," and the role of the Okinawan labor diaspora in Japan's imperial expansion into the Philippines and Micronesia.
Of particular interest is the exploration of the plight of Okinawan Latin Americans, deported and then interned in U.S. camps in the early years of World War II. This chapter highlights the tenuous existence of a people with a hybrid identity in a world of nation states that insists on essentialized identities. Using a different approach, another contributor draws on postmodern theory to describe the use of the popular eisaa, originally a religious dance, to protest the U.S. military presence in Okinawa. Another proposes a pan-Okinawan identity to link the widely scattered diasporic communities. The final essay weaves together memory and imagination to tell the mythic tale of the Agari-umaai (Eastern pilgrimage), the original diaspora that brought the first settlers to the Ryukyu Islands.
