An Investigation of Ogasawara Islanders of Western' Origin and Their Preservation of Identity and Assimilation into Japanese Society: Historical and Current Aspects of Culture, Language, Politics and Economics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In this research project, we examined the identity of the "Westerners" of the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands, a community of non-ethnic-Japanese people who are Japanese citizens from the time their ancestors were naturalized in the latter 19^<th> century. We looked at the ways in which they maintain their unique identity on the one hand, and are being assimilated into mainstream Japanese society on the other. The approaches used were from the fields of the four researchers, namely, linguistics, musicology, international relations and tourism studies. We studied the subtleties of the ways in which they mix the English and Japanese languages into a unique island language variety, the ways in which islanders are preserving the dances and songs brought from Micronesia and collectively known as the Nanyo Odori or "south seas dances", the ways in which both ethnic Japanese and "Westerners" participated in the political processes leading to (and sometimes opposing) the reversion to Japanese authority in 1968, and the ways in which the Westerners view tourism as a means to economically maintain their community and the educate outsiders about their unique heritage.