Contested Bodies: Female imagery in pre-war Okinawa

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Tomizawa-Kay, Eriko (2025) Contested Bodies: Female imagery in pre-war Okinawa. Japan Forum. ISSN 0955-5803

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Abstract

In April 1938, the international celebrity painter, Fujita Tsuguharu (also known as Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita) arrived in Okinawa for a two-month stay during which he toured the islands, frequenting the Tsuji brothel district, visiting traditional fishing villages and painting the landscape and its inhabitants. Fujita’s Okinawan works offer us critical insights into the complex role of art in negotiating the asymmetries of what scholars have come to call the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 2008). Equally important, they provide us with a lens through which we can re-interrogate paintings of Okinawan women produced over the same period (1938–9) by his Okinawan colleagues: artists and admirers such as Ōshiro Kōya, Nadoyama Aijun and the little known Tōma Yukio, all of whom struggled to visually reconceptualise the relationship between the mainland and its colonial subject. Examining rarely discussed pre-war paintings of Okinawan women by both mainland and Okinawan artists, this essay explores ways in which representations of the female body–the canonical object of the exoticising gaze–offered both coloniser and colonised a means to investigate the ambivalences, contradictions and brutalities of the colonial endeavour. These paintings, this essay argues, were deeply imbricated in wider discussions of colonialism and subordination, and they have been implicated in debates that have produced a new perspective on tensions between Okinawa and mainland Japan.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: fujita tsuguharu,nadoyama aijun,ryūkyūan clothing,tōma yukio,assimilation,colonialism,the okinawan female body,tourism,yōga,Ōshiro kōya,cultural studies,history,sociology and political science ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3316
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Media, Language and Communication Studies
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Centre for Japanese Studies
Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Language and Communication Studies
Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Political, Social and International Studies
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 30 Jun 2025 12:30
Last Modified: 01 Jul 2025 09:32
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99780
DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2025.2494757

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