“Forgetting your native tongue means forgetting your native country” 

Nmarijima nu kutuba wasshii nee kuni n wasshiin

The above is one of my favorite Okinawan (Uchinaaguchi) proverbs. And it is central to my academic journey.

Coming from a Japanese-Okinawan plantation family, I never grew up hearing Japanese. I never even knew Okinawan was a distinct language. Instead, I grew up hearing English. Actually, I grew up hearing mostly Pidgin, otherwise known as Hawaiʻi Creole English. You could say that I come from a very Local family. But I grew up avoiding Pidgin at the urging of my teachers who said stuff along the lines of, “If you want to go to a good college, you need to speak good English.”

And so I did. Now I struggle to switch into PIdgin when I’m not at home. Even when I am at home, I don’t use it consistently. When I was younger, I used to joke that I’m not “Japanese Japanese” because my family doesn’t speak the language or practice the culture, but now that I’m older, I’ve begun to think I’m not “Local Local” because I can’t speak Pidgin fluently. 

In middle and high school, I began studying Japanese to connect with my Japanese heritage. I rejected anything Local. In the summer before my senior year, I participated in the Hawaiʻi Youth Conservation Corps, which dramatically altered my thinking about being from Hawaiʻi. I began to appreciate being from Kauaʻi and the language spoken in my home. When I went away for college, I didn’t realize how different English could sound. The English spoken in the Pacific Northwest sounded harsh and sharp to my ears, but whenever I heard another Local person speak, I felt at peace and connected to home. The language I once scorned became something I longed after.

But Pidgin wasn’t central to my college journey. Instead I explored my Okinawan identity in Salem, Oregon. It was really quite serendipitous that a community member in Salem was from Okinawa and offered to teach sanshin (a three-stringed instrument akin to a banjo and a predecessor to the Japanese shamisen) to university students. I immediately joined as a way to learn more about the heritage I was never exposed to growing up. But the harder I tried to connect with my Okinawan identity, the more it was challenged by exchange students from Japan.

Growing up in Hawaiʻi, I always considered Japanese and Okinawan to be separate ethnic identities. In college, I could not understand why students from Japan would tell me that Okinawans were Japanese. As a Japanese Studies major, I thought I would connect more deeply with my Japanese roots in college, but these experiences regarding my Okinawan heritage redirected my interests to look more critically into what it means to be Okinawan vis-a-vis Japan. I was fortunate to receive a summer research grant to conduct oral history interviews in Okinawa in the summer of 2011 and my senior thesis was a continuation of that experience, exploring transnational Okinawan identity as expressed through the 5th Worldwide Uchinānchu Festival. After graduating, I returned to the Loochoo (Ryūkyū) Islands for three years as an Assistant Language Teacher in the JET Program, based on the island of Tokunoshima just north of Okinawa, which exposed me to another aspect of Loochooan (Ryūkyūan) culture and language I was not familiar with.

After this experience, I thought I would go into language documentation in the Loochoos, receiving my MA in linguistics in 2018. However, fate intervened again and pulled me back to oral history – using my training in language documentation and previous oral history experience in Okinawa to conduct life history research here in Hawaiʻi. Now that I am finally back home, I can see how much language I have sacrificed to get to where I am today.

My family does not speak Japanese. They do not speak Okinawan. They speak Pidgin. I want to reclaim that language and identity I sacrificed so long ago. It is the language of my immediate ancestors, the language of a common struggle and ethnic solidarity in a colonized kingdom. A language of resistance and resilience. And this is a history shared with my Okinawan heritage as well. It is because I do not want to forget where my ancestors come from — where I come from — that I embark on this journey.