Although “Memoirs” is set in 1932, prior to the time frame for this site, it provides insight into pre World War II class and gender issues in Okinawa and reflects a feminist consciousness. It also expresses the author’s sadness at the decline of her homeland. At this stage, she had no premonition of the Asia/Pacific War or of the horrors that Okinawan civilians would experience in the brutal last battle of the Pacific War, April to June 1945, when one-third of the population died in the cross-fire. Nor could she foresee the establishment of the U.S. military in post 1945 Okinawa and the bar and brothel culture which grew around U.S. bases during and after the Cold War.

I WAS VISITING a friend who had just returned from a family funeral on our home island. I expected to hear from her about my mother but was afraid of what she might say. It was hard for me to imagine my mother surviving this winter with her failing health, and I listened to my friend, feeling as if I had walked out onto thin ice. But she spoke only of my mother's unflagging endurance, and I could detect no sign of concealment on her face, which looked as if it had been freshly swept by the salt sea breeze of our island. Then, sighing deeply, she began to talk about the state of total exhaustion in Ryukyu.

"It's pitch-black at night in S City. I heard that all the rich folks there want desperately to move to N to avoid high taxes. The stone hedges in front of the houses are all crumbling now, and most of the yards inside have been turned into farm fields. Can you believe that S is still Ryukyu's second largest city? To make matters worse, emigration abroad has been banned. People can barely make a living these days by going to work on the mainland."

"I know."

For a time we forgot everything else as we talked of our homeland. My friend, looking worried, explained how she wanted to bring her mother up to Tokyo and help her start a business selling Oshima tsumugi cloth.

"The problem is her tattoo."

Tattoos have caused suffering in almost every Ryukyuan family. Even if a woman can save enough money to send several sons to higher school, she is destined to be left behind in her hometown until she dies, thanks to those tattoos on the back of her hands. In the worst cases, mothers have died without ever knowing the names of their grandchildren. The more their sons succeed, the more strictly the mothers have to be confined to their "homes," where they are given a tiny bit of freedom and supported by whatever petty allowance their sons care to provide. Of course, there have been a few exceptions.

Ryukyuan intellectuals are not nearly so bold as those Koreans or Taiwanese who live in mainland Japan. While they openly maintain their customs and manners, we tend to form hidden clusters, like mushrooms, even in this vast metropolis of Tokyo. Though individuals, we can't help but share the loneliness of being Ryukyuan, a loneliness that echoes in our hearts like the sound of the sanshin. Yet we never speak of this plaintive sound. If one of us broaches the subject, we avert our eyes, coldly, like two cripples passing on the sidewalk.

We are a people in desperate need of some rapid awakening, but only live from day to day mired in vacillation and pretense, blinded by the deep-rooted mentality of petite bourgeoisie. We always seem to be at the tail end of history, dragged along roads already ruined by others.

Now other dark thoughts filled my mind as I walked along beside the bergamot orange hedges on the way home from my friend's place. I remembered that I was supposed to meet my uncle at a certain train station. He was another of our people who could not reveal the truth about himself for all the twenty years he had lived in the middle of Tokyo. He managed several branches of a company, supervised univer¬sity and technical school graduates, and lived in a spacious apartment with a bossy wife and a daughter in her prime who was soon to be married. Yet he had never disclosed the slightest hint to any of them that he was Ryukyuan.

Before I knew it, the faded green train had carried me to X Station, where I went to meet him, as usual, in the third-class waiting room, covering my face with a shawl. Only a few hours remained before New Year's Eve, and there was a tension in the room that reminded me of a tightly wound spring. Everyone looked nervous. Only the young women, with their hair done up for the occasion in traditional Japanese style, basked in the calm afternoon sunlight and seemed to glow in anticipation. Watching them, I felt like some alien creature, constantly scratching my dandruff-filled hair. My body and spirit had all the vitality of a dead cat.

In one corner of the waiting room, a man in an old padded kimono, dirty and worn, was being interrogated by a policeman. The only rea¬son seemed to be that he'd been lying on the floor. Why are the poor always the first to be regarded as criminals? Though this seemed to be someone else's problem, for some reason it disturbed me almost more than I could bear.

"Hello."

All at once I noticed my uncle standing in front of me. Without returning my silent bow, he sat down next to me, clenching a cigar between his teeth. Our awkward conversation lasted about two minutes.

"I've just been too busy," he said brusquely in what sounded like an excuse. "Please send this as usual:' He took a ten-yen bill out of his wallet and put it down beside me.

"Certainly" My answer was also curt, as usual.

Our talks always ended quickly.

I gazed after him until his bulky figure had crossed the station square and was swallowed up in the crowd. It occurred to me that his body blended in well with the city buildings and with his large office desk, which was piled high with business letters. It was an even more perfect match, I thought, than the plum trees and bush warblers often portrayed together in traditional Japanese paintings. He was typical of that corporate breed of men who look as if they were born for these surroundings. Watching his back as he moved away, I felt only a machine-like precision, power, and coldness. The last fading rays of sunset that hovered over the layers of buildings seemed to reflect the gloom in my heart.

Though I had never met his wife or daughter, from what my uncle said, I had a general picture of how he lived. Of course, I do not know his home address. I once visited his office after finding that address in the telephone directory, but he had politely forbidden me to come again. This didn't really bother me, though, since I had no intention of relying on him for anything.

At home he kept three maids, an elderly handyman, and a piano. This is the story of how he started sending three yen every month to his stepmother at his other "home":

One day five years ago he suddenly returned to Ryukyu. Thirty years had passed since he disappeared, shortly after being discharged from the army somewhere in Kyushu, and people even suspected he had died.

Apparently, he thought my family was still prospering. After giving our name to a ricksha man, he looked all over town for our house and finally arrived that evening at our wretched little shop, which sat behind a mailbox in a yard barely ten feet square. My mother bowed down almost to the ground, all in a fluster because she had mistaken this arrogant-looking man in a Western suit for the tax collector who always scolded her for the way she kept accounts on items like ciga¬rettes and salt.

My uncle's own family and relatives, too, had all fallen on hard times. The mistress who had become his father's wife was reduced to wearing patched kimonos and lived with his grandmother, now hard of hearing, in a house with no floor padding under the tatami mats. His grandmother had come to resemble a child fearful of strangers as she sat facing the wall all day long silently spinning jute yarn. His father's wife, whose hair had turned white on top, eked out a living doing errands and washing clothes.

Despite her circumstances, this woman seemed to be the picture of trust and devotion, maybe in part because his father had so cherished her when he was young. Yet his affection waned after a few years, and his later profligacy threw her into the depths of despair. It wasn't long before he lost his head over some woman from the demimonde and, drawn by lust and her modest fortune, brought her into the house. Now his wife again fell to the status of maidservant. She slept curled up on the kitchen floor and did all the housework, washing everyone's clothes by hand and cooking for all of them. Yet she suppressed the urge to complain, never protesting to anyone. This was probably why she always looked as if she had just been crying.

It was during this time that my uncle's younger brother suddenly died, and the young, widowed wife and their three-year-old boy were added to the impoverished household. His father's wife, unbearably lonely, welcomed these new family members. And, while the widow weaved, the wife kept busy doing errands for people and cooking meals as before, along with baby-sitting for her grandson-in-law. Mean¬while, her estranged husband tried to make money in the fortune-telling business, but he failed miserably and soon returned to a life of dissipation with his mistress.

Poverty constantly threatened this complicated family. The mistress' meager savings were soon exhausted, and harsh reality was forced upon these two middle-aged voluptuaries. Then one morning, people were astonished to learn that the young widow had run away. And, less than half a year later, the wayward husband was confined to bed with tuberculosis. Now they were truly destitute.

After a time, the mistress also ran away, leaving in this ravaged family only a small boy, a tuberculosis patient, the patient's senile mother, nearing ninety, and the wife, who was also entering old age. Though she worked to the very limits of her strength, it was like sprinkling drops of water on parched soil. With that tearful expression on her face, she made the rounds of every relative she knew, begging for help, but found them all in similar straits. Occasionally, they would give her twenty or thirty sen, which she spent on sweets for the boy or medicine for her husband, never thinking of herself. All her clothes were threadbare hand-me-downs from relatives, and the hems and sleeves would soon be drooping like rags until a sympathetic family member gave her another piece of cast-off clothing. Having lost all pride, she received anything they gave her with a childlike delight that had, pitifully, become second nature by now.

She boiled foreign-grown rice into gruel for her mother-in-law, her sick husband, and the boy; but for herself she cooked only a few sweet potatoes that would comprise her meals over the next five or six days. She carried the boy on her back wherever she went. When he cried for a piece of brown sugar, pressing his head against her back, she felt her heart would break. "Poor thing. Please don't cry;" she would say in her faltering voice, trying to comfort him, but she only ended up bursting into tears herself. It hurt her even more to think that he had given up on real sweets and just asked for brown sugar. Yet only during the days she spent with the boy did her face, which always had that tearful look, recover the tiny trace of a smile.

It was on one of those days that her husband finally died, leaving them nothing. Fate is like a rolling stone, and only God knows where it will stop. With her husband's death, at least she felt relieved of the burden to support him. But now the boy, who, though not related to her by blood, had become her only hope in life, came down with acute intestinal fever, and her world was plunged into total darkness. Like a woman gone mad, she wandered from doctor to doctor; then, having lost her powers of reason, she went on to try any superstitious remedy anyone suggested. She even began feeding this seriously ill child huge portions of candy, hoping to make up for his past malnutrition. Yet no one could stop her from following this blind impulse, for she couldn't bear the thought of allowing him to die without eating the sweets he loved.

In the end, his death left her insane with grief. She would gaze into space like an idiot for hours at a time and walk the streets with lowered eyes, the strands of her disheveled chignon dangling down her back. The little band of music makers that marched through town one day each week to advertise the movies had once brought the boy bounding out into the dusty street, but now it came only as a dreadful reminder of him, driving her again to bitter weeping. The tearful expression on her face grew even more sorrowful, and she seemed to be struggling constantly against the lure of death.

Yet there was one person who had been utterly indifferent to all these misfortunes: my uncle's grandmother. She appeared to accept the deaths of her own son and grandson with equanimity and even grinned when her great-grandson died. The only noticeable change in her was such an enormous increase in her appetite that she would ask for breakfast again four or five minutes after finishing it.

This was the state of my uncle's "home" when he returned after his long absence.

SINCE my uncle hated to stay in his own house, he lodged with my family. Our home consisted only of the dilapidated store, that ten-foot yard, and a small room of six tatami mats. We could let him use the room, though, because I had gone to live in the countryside, where I worked as an elementary school teacher.

When my mother took him around to the relatives announcing his return, he was welcomed everywhere with stained, sagging tatami and chipped teacups. Each family's conversation, gloomy as the rainy season, was all about the troubles that weighed down on them. The stone hedges were crumbling, the weeds were growing, and there were too many old people in the family. Yet instead of sympathy for the miserable state of his homeland, my uncle seemed to feel only disgust. And, after less than three weeks, he abandoned it again without telling anyone that he was leaving or where he was going.

"I've already transferred my family register to X Prefecture on the mainland," he explained to someone just before he left. "In fact, nobody in Tokyo knows I'm from Ryukyu. I do a good business with prestigious companies and have lots of university graduates working for me. You have to understand that if people found out I was Ryukyuan, it would cause me all kinds of trouble. To be honest, I even lied to my wife, telling her I was going to visit Beppu City in Kyushu."

At first his relatives had been captivated by his success in life and eagerly sought his company, only to have him reject them, refusing in his disgust even to let them see him off at the pier. He'd acted as if he wanted only to slice off these creatures that clung to him like octopus legs and get away as fast as he could.

I had known neither of his return nor of his departure until I heard my mother complaining about him. Yet I could truly sympathize with my uncle, who had only finished elementary school and was struggling to keep up this pretense to protect the business he had built with his sweat and blood. As I sat in the dirty, horse-drawn wagon, which bounced and jolted me on the ride back from my mother's house to the village where I worked, I could not help reflecting on the decline of our isolated homeland, Ryukyu.

The scenery all around me at dusk evoked poignantly the essence of these islands: sweet-potato vines trailing on the craggy soil, groves of lanky sugarcane plants, rows of red pine trees, clusters of fern palms, banyan trees with their aerial roots hanging down in thick strands like an old man's beard, and the sun setting radiantly in a shimmer of deep red behind the ridge of hills. It all flowed deep into my heart like the tide that rises to fill the bay.

The sounds of the horse trotting in choppy rhythms along the road and the coachman singing in a low, wailing voice seemed perfectly suited to our homeland's decline, as did the coachman's song in Ryukyuan dialect.