Abstract

Suzuki examines the multiple roles that transnational media can play in a diasporic community by analyzing reactions to and interpretations of NHK, a company engaged in satellite broadcasting of Japanese programs to Okinawan-Bolivians in Colonia Okinawa, a small farming settlement in Bolivia established by Okinawan immigrants in 1954. Rather than interpreting Okinawan-Bolivians’ enthusiastic viewing of NHK satellite telecasts in Colonia Okinawa as a sign of their nostalgic longing for Japan, Suzuki suggests that their viewing of NHK programs enacts practices of hybridization, the ambiguous and complex process of subjectivity formation that he defines in terms set by Ien Ang. Since Okinawa, the “homeland” of these diasporans in Bolivia, has been in a contentious and ambivalent relationship with the “homeland-nation-state” of Japan over the last century, Okinawan-Bolivians’ hybrid subjectivity needs to be understood alongside Okinawans’ profoundly ambiguous subject-position vis-à-vis Japan’s majority population and the latter’s own diaspora. Moreover, because Okinawan settlers in Colonia Okinawa have also identified themselves as powerful “Japanese” farm owners who employ local “Bolivians” as inexpensive laborers, and because hundreds of their Bolivia-born children have return-migrated to urban Japan in the past two decades to accumulate capital, the Okinawan-Bolivian community’s identification with Japan has gained crucial economic and symbolic meanings within the local Bolivian context. Given these complexities of Okinawans’ and the Okinawan diaspora’s subjectivity in the past and present, Suzuki argues, NHK satellite telecasts in Colonia Okinawa have provided multiple reference points for Okinawan-Bolivians to articulate their ambivalent subjectivity as Okinawans and as an Okinawan diaspora that is not identical to the generic Japanese diaspora and, at the same time, to figure their belonging to the nation-states of Bolivia and Japan.

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