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

becomes a great comfort to a lonesome American soldier (his father), falls in love with him, gets torn away from her husband and children, and then is ultimately killed by Japanese troops. Therefore, she is close to the Western prototype of the “good native” (like Pocahontas), or the “tragic Pacific maiden” (as she appears in Pierre Loti's and Paul Gauguin's Polynesia and James Michener's Melanesia), although the Chamorro-American text invests her with a measure of independent spirit and colonial critique. The text itself suggests that postcolonial representations in Guam remain to be decolonized; in other words, the past of the Japanese occupation in 1941–1944 should be related by Guamanian Chamorros themselves and how Guam has been under the aegis of the United States since 1898 should be demystified. Such views of the islanders as victims of the US and Japanese intrusions are also seen in Japanese literary works coeval with Mariquita; the works show the persistence of an imperialist view that, for the Micronesian islanders under the Japanese control in 1914–1945, the Japanese (as non-Western colonizers) were more tolerable than Americans. Both Micronesian and Japanese literary texts from the 1990s rework the representation of Micronesians as “victims” involved with US and Japanese colonialism and neocolonialism. The texts place greater emphasis on cultural survival by way of Pacific mothers who have never been eradicated despite being the ones who are most affected by the powerful effects of colonization and hybridization.

Palauan poet Cite Morei's “Belau Be Brave” is a counter discourse to US and domestic pressures to amend the antinuclear constitution of Palau: