Ethnicity and Gender in Teruko Yoshitake's Okizari : Saharin zanryu nihon jyoseitachi-no 60-nen (Left behind - 60 years of post-war life for the Japanese women left in Sakhalin)

This paper explores the representation of gender and ethnic identities in Teruko Yoshitake's (2005) nonfiction book on Japanese women who could not return to Japan after World War II and continued to live in Sakhalin. Employing a discourse-historical approach (Wodak 2001) from critical discourse analysis, it provides linguistic analysis of Yoshitake's text as well as social and historical contexts of Sakhalin and the women. Although Yoshitake (1931-2012) was known as an activist in liberating Japanese women and having critical views on wars and the state, we argue that Yoshitake's ideas about the Japanese women in Sakhalin do not fully reflect on their transnational and multilingual identities and are based on a rather simple conceptualization of gender and ethnic identities