Personal Statement - Ariko Ikehara
Ariko S. Ikehara is a Director at Koza X MiXtopia Research Center in Okinawa. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Osaka University (2017_19), and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Gender and Women Studies at UC Berkeley (2016). Her peer-reviewed published works are “Champurū Text: Postwar Okinawan Writing,” Beyond American Occupation: Race and Agency in Okinawa, 1945-2015. Lexington Press. 2017., and “Third Space as Decolonial Con/Text: Okinawa’s American Champurū.” Transnational Asia: An Online Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 1-1. Fall, 2016. Chao Center for Asian Studies, Rice University. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled ‘‘Okinawa’s MiXtopia: Teruya Soul MiXtory”, which is a study of a place called The Black District that existed during the American occupation on Okinawa.
This project was manifested through my deep connection to this place called Teruya located in the central part of Okinawa. I was born here/there when Okinawa was under US military occupation (1945 - 1972). Teruya was one of the four districts located at the Koza Crossroad, the first transportation road built by and for the military. Almost immediately after the war, people who were released from various internment camps, neighboring and other parts of islands, and other countries arrived at the crossroad to rebuild their lives in Okinawa's postwar occupation era. As people rebuilt their lives the Koza Crossroads became an epicenter of economic activities created by those who sought a different future yearning for more than just survival. Through imagination, willpower, and working with what was available, people not only survived but came to thrive in the process of creating what I call a postwar economic miracle. With two strong unions representing a business street and a market area, Teruya was also known as the Black district, a bar and entertainment district that served Black soldiers in the military, which lasted twenty-three years, four years beyond the post-occupation. At the time, Teruya's mixed racial-ethnic-cultural-language-national geography included not only Okinawan and Black communities but also Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italians, Indians, Koreans, Filipinos, and more including the children of various mixed-racial ethnicities. For twenty-three years, people created a community in which everyone had a chance of making, creating and imagining how to live in the company of others while negotiating difference. Looking back at this complex time and space of history, it becomes clear that every life mattered. Yet, this history is rarely known and the stories are almost never heard in the mainstreams of both the US and Okinawa. There are many missing links and gaps in the twenty-three years - stories of those who touched the lives of many and who are forever linked to this history but have yet to be accounted for in the writing of history. Bodies without maps. Words without language. My purpose for establishing this center is to archive the MiXtory (history, story, and mystery) of Teruya to fill in the blanks of the unknown parts of history and to give back to the community that taught me how to live artfully, to be able to see the possibility in what is thought to be impossible.