I’m primarily interested in using my time in the academy to try and broaden the sorts of research we consider as acceptable forms of research. Oral histories, public histories, digital humanities projects; these are the future of the field. Not only do these tools widen the scope of who are considered acceptable subjects of history, but they also allow for a wider accessibility to our scholarship.
My research focus on the intersections between tourism, indigenous identity and the legacies of colonialism in Okinawa. My dissertation project, Tensions in Edutainment Tourism focuses on three cultural theme parks in Okinawa–Okinawa World, Ryukyu Mura and Murasaki Mura. In my dissertation, I analyze how history, public memory and tradition are debated and constructed within these for-profit tourist spaces in Okinawa. Okinawa is a small island, only around 450 square miles. Yet it hosts three separate cultural theme parks that each represent Okinawa’s past in slightly different ways. Ryukyu Mura spectacularizes Okinawa’s elite history through performances and reenactment. Okinawa World represents Okinawa’s cultural past as one inherently tied to nature through exciting encounters with limestone caves, botanical gardens, and live animal demonstrations. Murasaki Mura targets children and encourages direct participation in Okinawan cultural production through in-person souvenir-making. Existing scholarship argues that these parks privilege the experiences of the international traveling elite at the expense of indigenous Okinawan communities. But the parks do far more than this. As my project shows, Okinawa’s cultural theme parks mediate local knowledge, changing political regimes, and present-day leisure capitalism to present a semi-mythological Okinawan heritage to Japanese and international tourists. They also provide a space for indigenous workers to form community and preserve knowledge through their performances of Okinawan culture.
I show how the parks commodify Okinawan culture by creating a timeless, amorphous, and frictionless phantasm of pre-colonial Okinawa, and also how Okinawan laborers accept, mediate and challenge these illusions while navigating larger socio-political issues, like local autonomy and cultural revitalization. In contrast to previous studies of Okinawan tourism, which emphasize institutional and governmental histories, my project centers people—visitors and workers—and their relationships to cultural tourism.
I am also currently working on a project discussing eco-tourist theme park, JUNGLIA, and how its interactions and understandings of nature, militarism, preservation and sustainability are fundamentally formed on colonial discourses, and how this bodes poorly for the future of the park.
As a TA
- HIST 2A – Ancient World History
- HIST 2B – Medieval and Early Modern World History
- HIST 2C – Modern World History
- HIST 87 – Japanese History through Art and Literature
- HIST 74 – Poverty, Inequality, and Social Justice
- HIST W 80 – Chinese Civilization and Culture
- HIST 185A – The Qing Empire
As an Associate Instructor
- HIST 87 – Japanese History Through Art and Literature
- HIST 187C – Transnational Postwar Japan