The Modern Girl Question in 1920's and 30's Okinawa: Colonial Modernity and Women's Mobility

As part of an international collaborative research on modern girl and colonial modernity in East Asia, this paper focuses on the case of Okinawa. Despite the limited size of population of around 100,000 in the 1920’s and 30’s, and the poorly developed urban consumer culture, evidence shows that there was indeed a modern girl phenomenon in the capital city of Naha. How and why was this possible? Who were these modern girls? Where did they come from? In dealing with the conundrum of the modern girl question in the remote island of Okinawa, this paper casts light on the importance of mobility among young women belonging to the emerging new elite families and the migratory networks that linked them to Tokyo, Osaka and other cities of the Empire. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part examines the emergence of girls’school culture in the early 20th century Okinawa,as a prerequisite of both “new women”and modern girls. Schools,a core institution of assimilation policy,were at the same time the locomotive for stimulating the desire for mobility. The second part focuses on the role of Iha Fuyu's intellect ual circle in fostering “new women” and their cultural exodus to Tokyo in mid-1920’s will be discussed. The third examines and analyzes portrait pictures of young women, daughters of the new Okinawan elite, published in the newspapers in 1934, and will reveal the politics of cultural capital and gender sought by modern girls and their parents through the practices of yugaku (or pursuing one’s studies in the urban centers outside of Okinawa)