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

of Pierre Loti's romantic ideal of the simple, unspoiled Pacific maiden (Nakajima 1: 286). The figure of the educated native appears again in the work of later Island writers, such as Albert Wendt.

The returnee perspective, as well as a strategic identification with Stevenson as “Tusitala,” is seen in both Nakajima's and Wendt's texts. The perspective can be attributed to their colonial experiences: Nakajima's six-year school days in Japanese-owned Korea, his trip to Ogasawara and Manchuria, and decisively, his stay in Micronesia, and Albert Wendt's secondary and tertiary education in New Zealand. The perspective of a returnee like the native woman in “Atolls,” through which one might attempt to unlearn Orientalism, can also be found in Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973), and later, Ola. However, unlike his earlier writing, Ola presents an enlarged perception of “Oceania” that ranges from Samoa and New Zealand to the United States and Japan, following the author's world trip in 1980 (after the publication of his saga novel, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, in 1979) and a sixteen-day tour of Japan in 1981. The protagonist of Ola is an intelligent young Samoan mother who is also taking a world trip that ends with a tour of Japan. As mentioned previously, the returnee perspective is paradoxically reified in Nakajima's texts as “incomprehensible Nanyo,” finding both his and the islanders’ points of view to be postcolonial interventions in the dominant colonial representation network. Wendt's depiction of a “faceless Japan” in Ola runs against international fixed images of Japan such as a world economic power and is concerned with the enlarged perception of Oceania expressed in Epeli Hau‘ofa's view of “our sea of islands.” Wendt shows Japan as a nation sharing the sea, the waves of modernization or Westernization, and the postcolonial body with Pacific Island states. The text shows compassion for Japan's local cultures, which are marginalized,