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

(“Decolonizing” 169–170). I suggest that the lukewarm, halfway, or inconsistent postcolonialism, which Milton Murayama, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Juliet Kono, Jessica Saiki, and others show in their literary texts can also be found in some Japanese texts on the Pacific, like Nakajima's and Ikezawa's works. All of these texts reveal some degree of awareness of the Japanese texts’ historical relations to (or complicity with) Japanese imperialism and make a strategic use of Orientalist representations to oppose Nanyo-Orientalism's process of erasing or disguising such relations.

One can hear the voices from the area of Micronesia that was—or currently is—under the rule of Japan and the United States, and which has therefore been colonized militarily, culturally, and economically by both of these powers. Since the 1980s especially, literary texts from Guam have focused critically on Japan and the United States. Some contemporary Japanese texts also critique the impacts of Japanese and American rule on Micronesia.

Micronesian texts resist conventional colonial historiography and are resonant with other Pacific and Japanese texts in that they decline to adopt a postcolonial mode of radical protest. Indeed, it is still difficult to find a dialogue between Japanese and Micronesian works that shows a mutual reassessment of colonizer and colonized roles. As Mark Skinner pointed out, “the development and promotion of creative writing in Micronesia is growing but still in its infancy” (4). According to Skinner's categorization of Micronesian works, there is only one single work than can be categorized as a novel. This first Micronesian novel, Chris Perez Howard's Mariquita (1982), turns out to be an important text in its articulation of Micronesian postcolonial subjectivity. The representations of a Guamanian Chamorro “self” and its relations to American and Japanese imperialism in Mariquita are noteworthy: Mariquita (the author Perez Howard's mother)