Okinawa as Transported Landscape: Understanding Japanese Archaeological Remains on Tinian Using Ryūkyū Ethnohistory and Ethnography

Abstract

The two islands of Okinawa and Tinian in the western Pacific are often linked in the modern archaeological literature by a common ethnic heritage in the early twentieth century, with Okinawan culture serving as a template for interpreting the archaeological remains of the Japanese sugarcane plantation era in Tinian. Tens of thousands of Okinawans immigrated to Tinian and other Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to be tenant farmers or contract laborers on the plantations between the 1920s and 1944, when they could no longer leave. Structural and functional parallels do indeed exist between the architectural remains of many farmsteads of the plantation era on both islands. The extent to which these archaeological remains on Tinian reflect a “transported landscape” from Okinawa versus a Japanese colonial construct is explored, using the vehicle of Okinawan ethnohistory and ethnography.