Doing History

I extend my deep gratitude to all of the brilliant scholars in this forum who have taken such time and care in reading and insightfully commenting on Coral and Concrete. I am also honored to be cross-read with such a fine scholar as Eiichiro Azuma, whose work has also inspired my own. Here I will attempt to respond as much as possible to each of the insightful and nuanced questions and comments the reviewers posed in relation to my book.

In Concrete and Coral, I was most interested in analyzing narratives and their embodiment and performance as lived histories, what my mentor Greg Dening referred to as “doing history.”1 My doing of history accounts for the complexity of multiple positions and subjects in part through the metaphor of the reef, adopting the dialectical layerings of coral and concrete to respectively narrate the complexities of individual, trans-local affiliation and agency versus monolithic, nationalistic official narratives of governments and institutions that erect walls or flatten and erase the complexity of relationality between people and places. Indeed, as several reviewers suggested, settler colonialism is certainly a big part of what I was implicating through the analogy to concrete, although I did not name it as such. My fixation on concrete was moreover drawn from the very landscape of contemporary Kwajalein Atoll and many of the islands that were once Pacific War battlefields across Oceania, in that both settler colonialism and militarism naturalize violence into everyday life. Literally and figuratively, concrete is the amalgamation of harm—symbolic of how war and displacement are perpetuated while hidden in plain sight, rendered banal and even boring, implicitly condoning and institutionalizing the presence of a nasty elephant in everyone’s living room.

In this sense, I resonated with Komori’s associations with the island of Hashima, otherwise known as Gunkanjima, or “Battleship Island,” for the way its entirety is covered with concrete buildings that resemble the silhouette of a military vessel. I visited Hashima just last year for the first time and was struck not only by how the official signage mentioned absolutely nothing of the mining island’s history of wartime Korean forced labor and many other abuses, but how the guides—all former residents of the island—spoke with such nostalgia and affection for that desolate compound of cement and rusty iron that they had tears in their eyes. This rose-colored narrative smoothed over the horrific histories of hard work and suffering, even death, that made Hashima one of the biggest producers of coal for the Japanese Empire. It reminded me painfully of how most American former residents of Kwajalein often describe the island by waxing endlessly about the beautiful beaches, the two swimming pools, our yearly carnivals, anecdotes about going to school barefoot, or the trauma that ensued when the supermarket ran out of dishwashing soap or someone’s air-conditioning broke down. Very few residents of Kwajalein are appreciative of the Marshallese mechanics who are paid minimum wage to keep the Americans cool in their homes while they themselves ferry home to sweat in sweltering aluminum shacks back on Ebeye islet. Even fewer people seem to know of the histories of forced labor, migration, overwhelming numbers of war dead, and the detonation of sixty-seven atomic weapons in the Marshall Islands that led to the existence of the Kwajalein Atoll military base in the first place.

The majority of the American residents on the base at Kwajalein are in fact civilians, who typically position themselves as bystanders to the violent, dark histories of American militarism. This is not unlike the Japanese and Okinawan settlers who lived in the Marshall Islands before the war for nearly thirty years—most of whom were from marginalized communities back in Japan and who had come to make a living in the islands. They, too, differentiated themselves from privileged Japanese elites and often criticized Japanese government leaders for the circumstances that caused them to migrate, or even for unfair treatment toward local islanders, but they rationalized the original trespass on Native lands as damage that had already been done by others. In the years since I completed the research for Coral and Concrete, I have spent considerable time in Okinawa speaking with elders who were born in the Marshall Islands and other parts of the former Nanyō Guntō Pacific colonies, and it is intriguing to learn about the complexity of their experiences as subjugated minorities of Japanese Empire who were involved in the settlement and displacement of Micronesians.

As Sommers writes, these struggles of structural violence between coral and concrete play out in present-day Okinawa as well, where the United States’ security treaty and military basing agreements with the Japanese central government in Tokyo override many of the rights and objections of local Okinawan landowners. The base construction at Henoko is a blatant example of this. Like the traditional rights holders of Kwajalein who must negotiate with their own central government in Majuro in order to lobby for better treatment and compensation, the people of Okinawa struggle to make their voices heard by Japanese lawmakers. Okinawa, itself the overthrown and occupied Ryukyu Kingdom, is nearly upholstered with American bases, not unlike Hawaiʻi or Guåhan (Guam) are today. Even so, many Japanese, including tourists, are apathetic to the plight of Okinawans today, although Okinawa is vast and has a large population as well as a robust political and cultural scene from which emerge many voices of resistance that are hard to ignore. In comparison, Kwajalein Atoll is one of nearly thirty atolls in the Marshall Islands, and a substantial distance from Majuro Atoll. It is completely out of sight and out of mind, not only for most Americans or Japanese, but also for most Marshallese people.

I appreciate both Sharma’s and Caldwell’s invitations to think about how more comprehensive considerations of race could further our understanding of Marshallese lived experiences inside and outside the bounds of Micronesia, as well as how Japan’s particular imperial brand of anti-Blackness was imprinted on multiple colonial spheres. I have, in fact, pondered these questions quite a bit since writing Coral and Concrete, as I, too, have been deeply saddened by the intense discrimination and violence experienced by Marshallese and other Micronesian migrants to Hawaiʻi and other places over the past decade. Since writing the book, I have also been conducting more research on local communities in Japan and Okinawa that have festivals where locals still parade around in blackface parodying “southern Natives,” and I have also been exploring archives related to so-called human zoos in Japan and its colonies (including Taiwan, Korea, and Hokkaido). Clearly these problematic discourses around Blackness are pervasive in Japan, and many of these histories have gained more public scrutiny here in Japan as a result of recent protests in support of racial justice and awareness.

A thread of my research that demands further work is the complicated history of the Japanese racial category of kanaka-zoku, a term that Japanese colonists used to refer to dark-skinned islanders, which they differentiated from chamoro-zoku, the latter referring not only to Indigenous CHamoru from the Mariana Islands but also to any islander throughout the Micronesian colonies who was perceived to be more “civilized” based on their having lighter skin and mixed European heritage. Japanese administrators and anthropologists had adopted the racialized category of kanaka from Europeans, Australians, and Americans, who had institutionalized the term most horrifically through the practice of blackbirding, the kidnapping and enslavement of more than sixty-two thousand Pacific Islanders from Melanesia to work on plantations in Australia. This Pacific slave trade, which began as recently as the 1840s, was so extensive that at one point Queensland was nicknamed “Kanakaland.” Many Australian blackbirders and sugar magnates were indeed directly tied to the earlier European conquest of African lands and bodies, having amassed family fortunes and notoriety through trans-Atlantic chattel slavery in the Caribbean. And while Marshallese were not directly targeted by this sinister enterprise, my argument is that Japanese maintenance of kanaka-zoku as a racial category helped to institutionalize and spread that brand of anti-Blackness throughout southern Oceania up to the end of World War II.

Imagined hierarchies of race in Oceania are so often tied to colonial legacies, as Margaret Jolly has noted, in that the very categorization and regionalization of Pacific Islanders by Europeans from the 1700s onward was already deeply entrenched in fictions of race propagated by White colonists—Polynesians compared to Greek gods and British nobles, Melanesians literally named for their Blackness in comparison to Polynesians, and Micronesians somewhere in between.2 Marshallese, Pohnpeians, Kosraeans, Chuukese, Yapese, Palauans, and CHamoru people have all been at one time or another studied and lumped into the same “demographic” by Germans or Japanese as kanaka and later as “Micronesians” by American officials during the US Trust Territory period. This is not to say that these very diverse islanders all did not resist or subvert this—or that they did not define themselves in relation to each other and people from all over Oceania; my point is that outsiders interpellated them all as a race to begin with.

The question of solidarity between Marshallese and other Pacific Islanders around the notion of Blackness is not something I have conducted much research on, but the late Teresia Teaiwa gave a powerful talk at the Pacific History Association conference in 2016 in which she poetically reflected on the crisis unfolding in West Papua and lamented the lack of Pacific Islander concern for Melanesians suffering under Indonesian assimilationist violence. Pointing out how geographical identities from one island to another in postcolonial Oceania tend to matter more than a pan-Pacific sense of racial solidarity, she cited the example of how Māori and other Polynesians once identified as Black but gradually began to identify as Brown in the 1980s–1990s, “severing the chord—political, if not umbilical—declaring their independence from this particular struggle.”3 In the past two years, however, the outpouring of support for #BlackLivesMatter by so many young Pacific Islanders, including Micronesian activists, is evidence of a broader movement, fueled by Internet connectivity across national borders that were closed due to the pandemic.

During my research for Coral and Concrete, I recall many conversations with elderly Marshallese who reflected on their first encounters with African American soldiers during the Pacific War. I was struck by how several of these war survivors, all of whom had been educated in Japanese schools and could still speak Japanese, described their fear and fascination upon first meeting these soldiers, the first time they had ever met a ri-Kilmej (a Black person). Raised in a strict Japanese hierarchy of skin color, rather, Japanese framings of race may have predisposed Marshall Islanders to render these individuals as completely foreign and Other, but this also simply had to do with the fact that Japan had effectively kept the Nanyō Guntō islands of Micronesia closed off to most outsiders from the early 1930s onward. In the decades of American strategic colonization that followed the war, however, Marshallese laborers would develop friendships and solidarities with African American workers on Kwajalein as well as the sizable population of Native Hawaiian contractors on the island, many of whom empathized with Marshallese land rights holders in the 1970s and 1980s during their protests against unfair US lease negotiations.

At the same time, Marshallese working and living on Kwajalein have been subjected to anti-Black racism by Americans from the time of the Pacific War up to the present, sometimes exploited and discriminated as if they were proxies for African Americans in the United States. As I describe on page 184 of my book, reporter Giff Johnson famously described the racial discrimination and huge economic disparities between Ebeye and Kwajalein as “apartheid” in the 1980s. To some extent, anti-Black racism on Kwajalein is entangled, too, in the class and educational makeup of the American population who have lived there at any one time. For example, whereas when I lived there in the 1970s, when many of the residents were educated elites sent by major defense contractors, in recent decades technological advances have reduced the demand for on-site expertise, with more personnel performing more manual labor. Since many Marshallese from Kwajalein Atoll migrate to Hawaiʻi and the US mainland, Kwajalein sadly serves as a training ground that prepares them for the racism they will face abroad.

I should emphasize, however, that most citizens of the Republic of the Marshall Islands do not live in Kwajalein Atoll, and many have never even been there. Unlike Hawaiians, Palauans, CHamoru, and many other colonized Pacific Islander communities, Marshallese have never truly been a minority in their own territory, with the relatively small islet of where the Kwajalein base is sited being the only exception. Aside from the war years when some atolls were overrun with soldiers, during German, Japanese, and American colonial eras, Marshallese always outnumbered foreign settlers. So in this larger conversation about anti-Blackness, Marshall Islanders from Majuro and rural atolls probably experience racism quite differently from their counterparts on Kwajalein or in the diaspora.

In writing Coral and Concrete, my biggest hope was that it would open unexpected and new conversations like this forum has been for me. I agree with the reviewers that we all have a responsibility to acknowledge our complicity in supporting and endorsing the metaphorical laying of concrete that persists in the world all around us—whether it be the structural violence of colonization, the perpetuation of racism and hatred, the creation of barriers and bases and bombs, or the perpetuation of inequalities that enable some of us to stay safe and healthy while others perish from avoidable viruses. I believe that, through conversations like these, we can also chip away at that concrete in whatever way we can, while nurturing and rehabilitating the collective coral of our complicated reefs of human history for each other and for future generations to come.

Greg Dvorak (MA, University of Hawaiʻi; PhD, Australian National University) is a professor of Pacific/Asian cultural studies and gender studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he holds a dual appointment to the School of International Liberal Studies and the Graduate School of Culture and Communication Studies. Among other publications, he is the author of Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2018). He also works as a curatorial advisor for contemporary art.