Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific By Nao ...

Wendt's postcolonial modes (chapter 3); and the diverse Japanese involvement in postcolonial interventions depicted in literary works from Hawai‘i (chapter 4) and Guam (chapter 5).

By connecting and intermingling the nodes of representations in these chapters, Epeli Hau‘ofa's “sea of islands” re-emerges as a palimpsestic communal space (i.e., a space that has many different layers of meaning for cultural groups) concerned with wa: harmony, unity, peace, mildness, pacific, and Japanese. The Japanese word wa has all these meanings—in Japanese, “harmony” is cho-wa, “unity” is wa-go, “peace” is hei-wa, “mildness” is on-wa. Wa means taihei (“pacific”). The Pacific Ocean is taihei yo, which means “peaceful ocean.” Wa also means “Japanese.” Japanese food is wa-shoku, Japanese way is wa-fu, Japanese people is wa-jin, etc. Wa connects these words, and this connection is symbolic (wa connects the “Pacific” and “Japan”). George Keate's late-eighteenth-century noble-savage narrative of Palauan Lee Boo is appropriated and reworked in Ikezawa Natsuki's novel, where Lee Boo asserts, “In this world an individual is not so individual as you think” (Mashiasu Giri 470). This comment from Ikezawa's Lee Boo is in unison with Albert Wendt's argument about va (relationships), that “important to the Samoan view of reality is the concept of va or wa in Maori and Japanese” (“Tatauing” 402). Gary Pak depicted, together with a critique of imperial dominant culture of Japan, a greater affinity for local oppressed Japanese as non-haole (white people), whereas girls in Lois-Ann Yamanaka's works have ambivalent feelings toward both Japanese and haole cultures. Nakajima Atsushi, an official of the colonial administration in Koror, depicted his skeptical view of Japan's colonization and his duties in his literary texts as noncommittal and confidential as the bai's (or community house's) storyboard pictographs that he was well informed of by Hijikata Hisakatsu. Owing to the