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

suppressed, and consumed through the nation-wide political and cultural centralization, industrialization, and urbanization. The “faceless” image comes from Wendt's interest in Noh and Kabuki—traditional Japanese drama with highly stylized song, mime, and dance—for the aristocracy and commonality respectively, and also in a contemporary Japanese literary issue of “ambiguous self,” which he finds common in the postcolonial Pacific “selves.”

Before Wendt's work, postcolonial literary representations of Japanese subjects in the Pacific could be recognized in contemporary writing from Hawai‘i dating back as far the late 1970s. They have been created through representations of various colonial relationships in Hawai‘i—the relationships of Japanese plantation laborers with their white masters, Japanese businesspeople and tourists with native Hawaiians, Japanese laborers with other local peoples (specifically Koreans and Filipinos), Japanese immigrants with local Japanese-Americans and half-Japanese half-white people, local Japanese-American men with Japanese women, and so forth.

These diverse Japanese subjects in Hawai‘i contribute to the complexity and dynamics of postcolonial literary discourses not only from Hawai‘i or Oceania, but also from the enlarged Oceania that includes Japan. The common and frequent use of Pidgin English mixed with Asian lexicons in ethnic Hawaiian texts defies easy accessibility to English readerships and translation into other national or imperial languages. This prevents the texts from being readily commoditized into circum-Pacific markets (at the expense of their readership). Despite the cultural and political significance of Hawaiian writers of Asian descent, the native Hawaiian writer Haunani-Kay Trask has argued that even these local texts are not authentic or representative vehicles for the voices of Hawaiians; in other words, they are “not counter-hegemonic”