Okinawa book (E+J)

[Aaron Gerow]

A rather interesting book has just come out from Serika Shobo called 
_Okinawa ni tachisukumu: Daigaku o koete shinkasuru chi_. It is an 
outgrowth of a panel at the Cultural Typhoon conference at Waseda last 
year organzied by Iwabuchi Koichi that featured his undergraduate 
students from ICU giving papers on representations of Okinawa in 
various media, including TV, film and pop music. Not only was it rare 
to have undergraduates give papers at an academic conference, but the 
panel itself became an event, as especially students from Okinawa 
started a discussion that in fundamental ways questioned the premises 
of the panel, the kind of research that was being done, and the 
continuing problem of Okinawan identity. Iwabuchi, Tada Osamu and 
Tanaka Yasuhiro decided to turn this panel into a book, one that is 
thus not only about representations of Okinawa, but of the role of 
universities in media studies. The book is composed first of the 
undergraduate papers, second of a record of the discussions at the 
panel, and third of commentaries written afterwards by the various 
teachers and academics who were present.

On the film side, one of the undergrad papers is on Nabi no koi 
(Nabbie's Love). (And thus some of the commentaries on that paper 
discuss the reception of that film in Okinawa.) My commentary takes on 
the problem of area studies and textual analysis, using Aoyama Shinji's 
Ajima no uta as an example.

The bibliographic details are as follows:

_Okinawa ni tachisukumu: Daigaku o koete shinkasuru chi_
Edited by Iwabuchi Koichi, Tada Osamu and Tanaka Yasuhiro
Tokyo: Serika Shobo, 2004. ISBN 4796702547. 2300 yen.

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Aaron Gerow
Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University