Between Ruin and Rebellion: A Yuntaku Reading of Everyday Sovereignties in Okinawa's "Black District"

During the U.S. Occupation, Teruya was designated the Black District of Okinawa because of U.S. racial prejudice. The prevailing literary and scholarly representations of the Black District portray it as a place of ecological, social, and moral ruination—yet ruin is not all there is to see. In this essay, I propose a "yuntaku reading method" as an Indigenous feminist methodology to read against and beyond ruination, putting literary analysis in dialogue with the Okinawan cultural and social form of yuntaku (Uchinaaguchi: chit-chat, gossip, conversation). Drawing on a close reading of Jun Kishaba's short story "Dark Flowers" (1955) and yuntaku with Teruya residents, I argue that even as tropes of ruination allowed Okinawans to critique the transpacific coloniality and racial logics underpinning the U.S.-Japanese settler militarist structure, they demonstrated a refusal to allow ruination to be the sole condition of their social and psychic lives. By reading against ruination, a yuntaku reading method reveals the complexities of living with/in occupation. Ultimately, by conceptualizing the literary and the everyday, I suggest that Okinawans, through their everyday actions, transformed Black-Okinawan relationalities into fertile ground for articulating other possible futures, enacting everyday sovereignties between ruin and rebellion in Okinawa's Black District.