Open Collections

Chen, Ruikun

University of British Columbia

Half a century has passed since Okinawa’s 1972 reversion to Japan after 27 years of American military rule, but the region continues to struggle with unfinished histories of colonization, war(s), and occupation. Despite this troubled past and present, mainland Japan has often depicted Okinawa Prefecture as “healing islands” (iyashi no shima), exoticizing it while reinforcing its colonial status. Medoruma Shun (b. 1960), a significant literary voice from Okinawa, has proactively written about war memories of the Battle of Okinawa and its aftermath through his innovative fiction. This thesis examines how Medoruma’s short stories “Droplets” (“Suiteki,” 1997) and “Spirit Stuffing” (“Mabuigumi,” 1998) challenge hegemonic narratives about Okinawa’s war experiences and its portrayal as “healing islands” through their representations of human bodies within and against various natural, linguistic, and social landscapes. In the main chapters, I analyze “Droplets” and its use of bodily sensation to explore war experiences excluded from official historical accounts. This approach reveals the complex position of Okinawans as both victims and victimizers. My close readings demonstrate how the protagonist’s mysteriously swollen foot and the water it exudes function to disrupt the alignment between body and nation, thereby subverting the absorption of individual Okinawan experiences into simplified accounts of sacrifice and victimhood. I also read “Spirit Stuffing” as a challenge to the “healing islands” narrative through its portrayal of community tensions and the dynamic interplay between human bodies and environmental imagery. The story’s narrative perspective and treatment of gendered bodies unmask how supposedly “healing” landscapes operate as repositories of unresolved trauma. By examining these literary interventions, I argue that Medoruma’s writing constitutes a form of decolonial resistance specific to the Okinawan context. Rather than offering paths to reconcile war memories, both texts expose fundamental contradictions between mainland Japan’s portrayal of Okinawa and war survivors’ trauma. Through his focus on embodied experience and environmental connection, Medoruma creates a literary space where voices excluded from colonial frameworks become audible while also inviting readers to engage as active listeners in a process that transcends the binary of colonizer and colonized.

Text

2025-04-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90710

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/