Welcome to My
Okinawa Page
You are visitor number 22957 to access this page since February 20, 1996.
This page is under construction, so watch your step!
Updated March 5, 2000
You are visitor number 22957 to access this page since February 20, 1996.
This page is under construction, so watch your step!
Updated March 5, 2000
Again, this area is under construction! I haven't had the time that I would want to work on these files so many of them are currently unavailable. Keep checking back!
I spent 1988-90 on a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship in Okinawa, Japan. I was conducting graduate research on Okinawan folk religion (this was when I was working on my Master's degree). While in Japan, I was affiliated with the University of the Ryukyus as a graduate research fellow in the Department of Social Sciences.
Specifically, I had set out to study a type of folk religious specialist called yuta, who serve as spirit mediums, folk healers and--to use a term I really dislike given its New Age connotations--shamans (I use the term here only because it has some utility as an anthropological term).
Yuta are almost always women, which is part of what interested me in the beginning. The bulk of my coursework in anthropology here at CU was in symbolic anthropology, the anthropology of religion, and the ethnography of Asia. To begin with, I wondered why these religious specialists, who are still very prevalent and important in Okinawan culture today, were almost all women (there are some men now, but this appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon). This caught my attention as I had been reading a book about Japanese "shamans" called The Catalpa Bow, by Carmen Blacker. The bulk of Japanese shamans described in this book as well as in a course I took about Japanese religion were male; yuta were mentioned briefly as an aberration from the typical model of Japanese shaman. So I wondered about these women and why, in all Japan, Okinawa was known especially for its female shamans.
Over time, my interests have changed and I have become more interested in the relationship between Okinawan folk religion, culture change, and national/cultural identity. This was because I found, as I got to know Okinawa, that there were more important and immediate issues in Okinawan culture than this gender issue, at least to my mind, and according to the advising I received from my Okinawan academic advisors.
When I got to Okinawa, I found that it was very difficult to study yuta. Language was a complicating factor; I was barely functional in Japanese despite four years of undergraduate classroom study. I found out that the langauge of ritual and everyday use for more traditional Okinawans, including yuta, was Okinawan dialect, which is not mutually intelligible with Japanese. In addition, yuta were very reluctant to speak with scholars about their work, although being female was helpful in this respect as yuta and other Okinawans expected women of about my age to be interested in this topic. They assumed that I wanted to become a yuta, which was not at all what I was thinking.
So my daughter, Shushila (who was eight at the time), and I set off for Okinawa, pretty nervous and scared (having never traveled abroad before) and not really knowing what to expect there. What we found was a beautiful island filled with very kind and hospitable people (well, this sounds idyllic, but it's true). We found also a culture shadowed by a tragic history, and filled with painful and immediate issues for us, as Americans. It was probably the most wonderful, difficult and painful experience of my life, so much so that I am only now getting to the point where I can talk about it and think about it.
I was so lucky and blessed in being able to go and in being able to learn the things that I did. I would like, somehow, to share that with others, and that is what this page is about.
As you may have noticed, I am currently working on these files, so they may not be available.