Workshop on Okinawa: Identity, History and Culture

Workshop Content
 
The workshop anticipates interest primarily from faculty form the Humanities and Social Sciences, so the broad themes below would largely respond to their professional needs. These themes would be explored through expert talks and presentations, and through participants’ engagement with museum collections, historic places and cultural sites.
 

• Okinawa’s pre- and natural history and archaeology;
• The Ryūkyū Kingdom: prosperity, relationships with the Satsuma Domain and decline;
• Modern Okinawa as a strategic location: 1870s untill WWII;
• Okinawa and WWII;
• Postwar Okinawa: U.S. Occupation, Ryūkyū independence movement and Reversion;
• Contemporary Okinawa: tourism; ecology and natural environment; Base Issue tensions;
• Okinawa’s culture and material culture: architecture, literature, arts, crafts, indigenous beliefs; the past and present read through buildings, objects and the fine and creative arts.

 
The workshop will have multiple lecturers and guest speakers, drawn from the University of Hawai'i and Okinawa’s major universities, including OIST faculty. Also, we hope to attract local artists and members of citizen’s groups as guest speakers in addition to, very tentatively, spokespersons for the Japan Self-Defence Forces base near OIST and the office of the local representative of the U.S. State Department. Workshop participants will benefit from readings packets prepared by UHM faculty; these will include materials to contextualize both the morning lectures and talks and the afternoon activities, among which also site visits.