Making Micronesia: A Political Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama by David Hanlon (review)

Biography, in a conventional Western sense, tends to follow the trajectory of an individual from birth to postmortem legacy, focusing on the individual’s linear path through the world. In Making Micronesia, historian David Hanlon reconstructs the life of Tosiwo Nakayama, the pioneering first president of the Federated States of Micronesia, yet he does so in terms of a grand oceanic voyage that is anything but linear or individualistic. Hanlon shows how, like all Pacific wayfaring, Nakayama’s career involved immense wisdom and navigational skill that triangulated between social and intellectual genealogies, multiple sites, sometimes-conflicting trans-Oceanic affiliations, and major superpowers. This is thus not only a biography but also a Pacific Islands studies–informed history of the cultural contexts and eras linked by Nakayama’s life and by the literal and metaphoric ocean worlds he inhabited. It encompasses the lives of whole communities and a worldview that visualizes myriad islands and atolls as part of a larger global neighborhood.

Hanlon, who knew Tosiwo Nakayama personally and had the opportunity to interview him in the years before his death in 2007, describes his surprise in learning that Nakayama had discarded all of his presidential papers. Their absence compelled Hanlon to embark on a journey far beyond the archives, resulting in a meticulous and insightful study of a true Oceanian leader and the perspectives that influenced him. As in his other books, Upon a Stone Altar (1988) and Remaking Micronesia (1998), Hanlon here is passionate in his critique of the European, Japanese, and US regimes that gave birth to the colonialist construct of “Micronesia” in the first place. He contrasts this limiting notion of region, however, with the Micronesia that Nakayama imagined—an archipelagic world that was vast and diverse but localized to the needs of its people (5). In retracing how Nakayama realized this vision, Hanlon thus provides both a long-overdue portrait of a major Micronesian leader and a detailed look at the challenges of decolonization and the intricacies of affiliation, land, and power in this part of Oceania.

Tosiwo Nakayama was born in Namonuito, one of the largest atolls on earth and the eastern edge of the precolonial sawei, an expansive exchange and voyaging network of islands that extended all the way to Yap. Narrating the interlinkages between Nakayama’s home island of Piserach and the other places he grew up—the Mortlock Islands and different islands in Chuuk Lagoon—Hanlon weaves between deep time and precontact histories of voyaging and Islander settlement to illustrate an intricate genealogy of places and people. Through his mother Rosania, Nakayama inherited a strong navigator heritage and an affiliation to a clan that was widely dispersed throughout Micronesia. It is into these ancestral islands and oceans that Spanish first trespassed in the sixteenth century, followed by Germans and Japanese in the nineteenth century. A subsequent wave of migration from Japan brought Nakayama’s father Masami to Chuuk in 1915; coming from Yokohama at the age of seventeen, Masami got a job working for Nanyō Bōeki Kaisha, a trading firm that would over the next thirty years become a pillar of Japanese commerce and infrastructure throughout the region. Masami married Rosania, and the couple had six children, the third of whom was Tosiwo. Although Tosiwo was never formally schooled in Japanese (despite his entitlement to a higher standard of education), his Japanese citizenship within the former empire enabled him to have a different perspective and, indeed, yet another affiliation that stretched even further across the Pacific Ocean.

Reading about the childhood of Tosiwo Nakayama through to adulthood, one gets an intimate and personal sense of the turbulent transitions that ensued throughout the twentieth century in the islands. Though relatively brief, the section on the prewar Japanese era under the League of Nations Mandate provides a sense of the relative peacefulness and prosperity that Micronesians experienced from the 1920s through the mid-1930s...