Memories of War: Micronesians in the Pacific War

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Some sixty years after the end of World War II, Micronesians still speak about their wartime experiences, and those of their parents and grandparents, as a time of profound transition, “the greatest hardship” that they and their societies have endured. These islands, ruled by Japan for decades before the war, contested in the bloody Central Pacific campaigns of 1943–1945, then governed by the United States, play a key role in the military history of the conflict. Yet the many volumes of Pacific War history based on Allied or Japanese sources scarcely mention the Islanders across whose lands and seas the fight was waged. The story of the northern Pacific theater, and most of that global war, is archived as the record of the major combatants’ experiences. Micronesians, like other indigenous peoples, are “missing in action” from the written accounts of World War II. MICRONESIA’S “MISSING IN ACTION” Our ethnohistorical research on Micronesians during the war years set out to fill this gap. During 1990–1991, we collected approximately four hundred oral histories from Micronesian elders. Our field research, conducted with the help of Micronesian research assistants and translators, focused on the Marshall and Caroline islands and included accounts from men and women of different statuses, educational backgrounds, and wartime work assignments. We also used existing collections of oral history by other researchers for Palau, Guam, the Northern Marianas, Kiribati, and Nauru. 2 introduction Our interview design was intentionally simple. We explained our project, asked permission to record and use the interview information, and invited consultants to share their war-related memories. Interviews were conducted in the speaker’s first (or preferred) language and later translated into English. Interviews were largely, though not entirely, open-ended. We asked people to talk about the war within a chronological framework: the Japanese colonial era, war preparations, the conflict itself, war’s end, and initial American occupation . At the conclusion of the interview we invited their reflections on the entire era and asked what they would like others to know about their wartime experiences. Interviewers provided guidance when needed and asked followup questions for clarification or elaboration. Otherwise, we allowed speakers to follow their own inclinations in focusing on what they felt to be important. Despite the passage of so much time since the war’s end, we were not disappointed with what we were able to learn. Because so little had been written about indigenous experiences of the Pacific War in Micronesia, the first book resulting from our research provided a historical overview of the circumstances and impact of the war years (The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). In that book, we combined information from documentary sources with oral history, using the historians’ work to set the context of the military events that controlled the circumstances of Islanders’ personal experience. The use of extensive short passages from our interviews in the first book helped convey—through the voices of Micronesian survivors—the presence of Micronesians during the war, the detailed knowledge, the thoughtful reflection , and the feeling tone contained in their stories. In collecting and analyzing these accounts, we were struck by the wide range of Micronesian experiences. Indeed, one of the challenges we faced in writing the first book was to portray this diversity. But we were also struck by certain regularities in what storytellers had to say and in how they said it. Although people’s memories of wartime experiences were varied, they were also distinctively Micronesian. Our goal is to acknowledge the importance of these memories and their links to Micronesia ’s present and future. PLAN OFTHE BOOK Whereas our first book was an ethnohistory of the war in Micronesia written primarilyforspecialistsinPacificIslandsstudiesandmilitaryhistory,thisbook introduction 3 aims at a wider audience, looking at the common (though not uniform) ways in which Micronesian individuals and communities think about, retell, commemorate , and otherwise represent the war today. Our focus is not so much on the events of the war as on the remembrances themselves—the ritual commemorations , stories, dances, and songs that keep memories alive through a process that social scientists call the “construction” of cultural memory. Keeping alive a community’s memory of an event or experience is not automatic or simple. Instead, it is an ongoing process of social interaction and cultural creation through...