ABSTRACT
The history sketched in Chapter 3 raised the idea that one of the effects of domination by Japan on Okinawan identity was that Okinawans were perceived to exist temporally between the modern Japanese and peoples imagined to be primitive, such as those of the South Seas. In Solomon Taiyo this modernist influence on Okinawans’ ethnic subjectivity manifest in various ways. It was by no means the only influence on Okinawan fishermen’s relations with other ethnic groups; class was an important factor, and another key influence was Okinawans’ self-identification and identification by Japanese managers as grassroots cosmopolitans. Modernism, however, permeated relations, with hierarchical ethnic identities interacting with workplace hierarchies. Modernism in Okinawan identity was an antagonistic influence on relations with Solomon Islanders in Solomon Taiyo, exacerbating frictions caused by workplace hierarchies and negating the conciliatory influences of their cosmopolitanism. In relations with Japanese managers, structural hierarchies between permanently employed Maruha managers and annually contracted Okinawan fishermen were also compounded by the historical subordination of Okinawans within Japan, part of which was the subjectivization of Okinawans as backward.
