Full Description
Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices - living and dead, visible and immaterial - that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune-tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, antiwar activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a "not yet" that has always remained just beyond reach.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Opening a Rift in the Everyday 13
2. Iphigenia in the China Sea: Confronting the Memory of Sacrifice 53
3. Unburying the Future: Okamoto Tarō and the Dialectics of Sacrifice 102
4. From Among the Dead: The Transformation of Sacrifice 157
Conclusion 231
Notes 237
Bibliography 263
Index 281
