琉球大学学術リポジトリ
ディアスポラ舞台芸術と越境的沖縄ことばの共同体
メタデータ

言語: Japanese
出版者:
琉球大学国際地域創造学部国際言語文化プログラム
公開日: 2023-04-17
キーワード (Ja):
キーワード (En):作成者: 宮平, 勝行
メールアドレス:所属:

URL

https://doi.org/10.24564/0002019724

Ryudai Review of Euro-American Studies No.67, 2023

Diaspora Performing Arts and the Transnational
Okinawan Speech Community
Katsuyuki Miyahira

The notion of speech community has become increasingly complex and at times illusory
in today’s highly ﬂuid and interconnected society. Blommaert and Rampton（2017）re-examine
the basic social science concepts such as language, language groups and speakers, andcommunication in light of today’s diversifying society and argue that anti-essentialist critique
has concluded, more or less, that the notion of“speech community”should be abandoned（p. 494）.1 To discuss the very issue, this paper analyzes some YouTube episodes produced
by Hawai‘i United Okinawan Association, which contain a series of online interviews with
Okinawan migrants and their descendants in Hawai‘i and beyond. By drawing on the analysis
of people’s everyday speech practices online, this paper problematizes the concept of speechcommunity in view of highly mobile and interconnected societies of today.
Past ethnographic research has already identified some emerging online communities
such as English learning speech community among learners in China and trainers in the UnitedStates（Hart, 2016）. It also identiﬁed an online speech community in which shared knowledge
and representations of American cultural and societal beliefs and policies about race and social
class led its community members to particular interpretations of blog news after Hurricane
Katrina（Morgan, 2000, 2014）. Likewise, Kotani（2017）elaborates on the fluid nature ofspeech community boundaries and the negotiability of speech codes after examining instancesof remedial discourses between Japanese sojourners and American hosts. In these studies,speech community is conceived as a socially constructed unit that is spontaneous and ﬂuid,

1

Blommaert and Rampton（2017）further elaborate by saying that“speech community”has beensuperseded by a more empirically anchored and diﬀerentiating vocabulary which include“communities
of practice,”“institutions”and“networks”as the often mobile and flexible sites and links in which
representations of group emerge, move and circulate（p. 491）.

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thereby giving rise to a speech ﬁeld that is not bound to speciﬁc time and space. With theserenewed concepts of speech community in mind, I would like to explore some sociolinguistic
implications of a networked community of Okinawan diaspora and its interaction withhomeland in the mediated public sphere. Can we ﬁnd some shared linguistic and social norms
in Okinawan diaspora so as to characterize it as a speech community? What, if any, would be
the key linguistic and social norms that bind the diaspora and its homeland?
To explore these questions, six propositions of speech codes theory（Hart, 2017; Philipsen,
1997; Philipsen, Coutu, & Covarrubias, 2005; Philipsen & Hart, 2015）
are used to test whether
or not the diaspora that is maintained, in large part, by the interaction with its homelandthrough digital media constitute a speech community. At the same time, the six propositions
are utilized to explore how some means and meanings of deeply cultured ways of speaking
unfold in the online talk of people from this diaspora.

1. Okinawan Diaspora
The ancestral homeland of the aforementioned diaspora is Okinawa, a region once
known as the Ryukyu Kingdom with its own unique languages and culture. The independent
Sho Dynasty lasted for 450 years（1429-1879）until it was ﬁnally annexed by Japan in 1879.
Because of its proximity to China, Taiwan, and Southeastern Asian countries, the Ryukyu
Kingdom ﬂourished, despite its small territory, by trade with other Asian countries. The oceanbound lifestyle of the Ryukyu era and a relative distance from mainland Japan helped nurture
unique customs, languages, and performing arts that are distinct from those of mainland Japan,
and some such cultural practices continue to thrive to this day.
Having been nurtured in a unique cultural milieu, people nonetheless had to migrate
overseas in the past to escape from enduring poverty. The first group of emigrants left
Okinawa in 1899 and migrated to Hawai‘i in 1900 to work on sugar cane plantations.
Likewise, the first Okinawans emigrants to Brazil arrived at the Port of Santos in 1908. In
both cases, the Okinawans migrated overseas out of poverty, due to insuﬃcient arable land inthen mostly agricultural communities（Miyauchi, 2016）. By the time of the Paciﬁc War（19411945）, up to 12% of Okinawans lived in the Paciﬁc and the Americas（Selleck, 2003）, and theremittance these emigrants sent home was a substantial portion of Okinawan revenue（ibid.）. It
was followed by a second wave of migration during the US military occupation（1945-1972）
and continued until 1993. At each new site of resettlement, Okinawans banded together in partto support each other and to safeguard themselves from prejudice and discrimination againstthem（Mori, 2003; Selleck, 2003）. Soon these support groups developed into cohesive social
associations called kenjinkai（prefectural associations）, established, for example, in Hawai‘i-24-

in 1905 and in Brazil in 1926. Today an estimated 415,361 Okinawans and their descendants
live overseas around the world（Matayoshi and Urasaki, 2016）. Among those associations,perhaps the most vibrant one is in Hawai‘i. Yet Brazil tops the list with a constituency of
about 162,892 people（ibid.）. Okinawan diaspora now consist of third, fourth, and sometimes
ﬁfth generations who are highly educated and play active roles in their host societies as was
represented, for example, by the 2014 appointment of David Ige as governor of Hawai‘i.
These kenjinkai associations played a key role in maintaining ties with the members’
ancestral homeland through joint cultural events, business alliances, student exchange
programs, and various other channels. Among many such occasions, nowhere else has this been
more evident than the sites of Worldwide Uchinanchu（Okinawan）Festival（hereafter, WUF）
held every ﬁve years since 1990. Both overseas and local Okinawans and their descendants
across the world gather in Okinawa to commemorate their ancestral heritage and to solidify theworldwide network of Okinawan descendants. The sixth WUF in 2016, for example, started
with an opening parade with participants from 28 countries on the Kokusai Street, the mostbustling street in Okinawa. It was followed by workshops, cultural events, and sports playedwith local participants. Attendees also watched performing arts such as Ryukyuan dance,
sanshin concerts, and karate demonstrations. Some overseas participants visited local schools
and municipal halls and gave informal talks about their countries. At all such venues, overseas
participants are eager to explore their ancestral roots through cultural exchanges with local
people（See Petrucci & Miyahira, 2009 for a fuller discussion of WUF）. The first WUF in
1990 drew 2,397 from overseas to Okinawa, and the number of participants has continued to
grow with each WUF, reaching a record number of more than 7,300 during the latest event in2016（Okinawa Prefecture, 2016）. The growing trend of worldwide participation and ensuing
online exchanges have helped build a global network of Okinawan cohorts around the world.

2. Speech Community, Speech Codes Theory and Data for Analysis
Gumperz（1971）deﬁnes a speech community as“any human aggregates characterized byregular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set oﬀ fromsimilar aggregates by signiﬁcant diﬀerences in language use”
（p. 114, emphases added）. Thisclassic deﬁnition makes it clear that the emphasis on language use and human interaction wasin place from the inception of theorizing speech community; speech community was conceived
in a ﬁeld of action. After reviewing the historical development of speech community concepts,
Kasutani（2007）goes further and recapitulates that a deﬁning feature of speech community isa set of shared social norms about language use such as a norm that determines which style of
speaking is considered prestigious, formal, and informal. Such focus on linguistic interaction-25-

and the social norms that are at work behind linguistic interaction is a foundational principleof speech codes theory（hereafter, SCT）
. Therefore, one way of exploring the aforementioned
questions is to pit some features of the networked community against the propositions
advanced by the SCT. In most cases, existing studies have named speech communities bycertain demographic features, be it race, ethnicity, geography, income and socio-economic
status, gender, age, and sexuality, and thus specific composition of a speech community
have been necessarily defined a priori（Milburn, 2004）. However, unless one can identify
distinctive speech codes and hear the codes like local members do, the speciﬁc makeup of thesaid speech community remains vague, if not illusory. A transient community, for example,
can be spontaneously formed, and its boundary stays fluid as participants negotiate means
and meaning of their communicative conduct（Fitch, 1994, 1999; Mortensen, 2017）. That
is why the current study tries to identify some distinctive speech codes and then attempts tooutline the scope, composition, and some salient features of speech community in Okinawan
diaspora. By identifying speciﬁc speech codes that serve as shared cultural resources among its
members, this study tries to ascertain an emerging, digitally mediated speech community.
A speech code is defined as“a system of socially-constructed symbols and meanings,
premises, and rules pertaining to communicative conduct”（Philipsen, 1992, 1997; Philipsen& Hart, 2015）, and it consists of six specific propositions. The propositions are designed
to illuminate how culture is inextricably woven into our everyday talk. The theory helps
us discover each culture’s distinctive terms（i.e., symbols）and their metacommunicative
vocabulary as well as totemizing ritual sequences of talk, which pay homage to the culture’ssacred objects. In addition, the propositions are designed to help us predict how an artful useof speech codes give voice to the sacred objects and explain the local meanings of deeply
cultured ways of speaking. To take an example, Proposition 3 states: A speech code implicates
culturally distinctive psychology, sociology, and rhetoric（Philipsen, 1992; Philipsen, Coutu& Covarrubias, 2005; Philipsen & Hart, 2015）.2 Hart（2017）unpacks this highly condensed
proposition this way:
A speech code reflects more than a group’s ways of communicating; it also reveals
important information about what it means to be a competent and eﬀective individual andmember of society. Here, psychology refers to ideas about personhood, including notions
about what a“proper”person is, and how such persons should conduct themselves.
2

Because space is limited, my analysis focuses primarily on this proposition. However, needless to say,the ensuing discussions are informed by SCT as a whole.

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Similarly, sociology refers to the parameters by which people deﬁne their group and/or
other groups, and it also encompasses beliefs about how people should interact with or
relate to others within the group, and/or those outside of it. Finally, rhetoric refers to theways in which group members use（or feel they should use）communication strategicallyto achieve the desired ends.
（p. 4）
If we can ﬁnd some situated vocabularies and symbols that reference the nature of such
personhood, social relations, and strategic communicative practices in people’s everyday talk,we can identify a distinctive speech code, which will in turn reveal to us some aspects of a
distinctive cultural group, namely a speech community. The diaspora-homeland connection
encourages us a new application of this proposition and offers a renewed notion of speechcommunity.
To investigate speech codes in Okinawan diaspora, data were collected from a YouTube
channel called HUOA Yuntaku Live!, a movie channel produced by Hawai‘i United Okinawa
Association（HUOA）. This ongoing video project has, as of September 2022, accumulated 67,
approximately 90-minute episodes, on which worldwide viewers have posted their comments.
So far, 3,460 viewers have registered for this channel and most episodes have acquired morethan 1,000 views. In the episodes the hosts talk about the dance, music, ancestral lineage,
student exchange and other topics related to Okinawa with featured guests. The guests are
not limited to Hawai‘i residents; they include members of Okinawan diaspora in Argentina,
Peru, and other countries, not to mention people in the homeland. The word“yuntaku”in theseries title is a popular Okinawan term best translated as“chitchat,”and as such the entire
live show proceeds like a casual conversation connecting people not only in Hawai‘i but alsoin Okinawa and other places in the world. Some scholars have argued that unique Okinawan
performing arts like music, dance, and taiko have greatly contributed to the diaspora-homelandties ever since Okinawans migrated overseas（Katsuren, 2000; Kinjo, 2010）. Indeed, Kinjo（2010）maintains that performing arts are the“cords and belts”（chuutai）that have bonded thehomeland and many Okinawan diasporas around the world. With this in mind, I have chosen
the video episodes that featured performing artists for data because they are likely to containculturally rich talks.
Video clips in which local symbols, vocabulary, and ritual conversation sequence
were implicated in the scenes were transcribed. Then they were sorted according to thethree dimensions of Proposition 3 for the purpose of comparison and contrast. It must be
noted that the Yuntaku Live! shows are staged but not scripted, and they closely simulate
everyday communication of the Okinawan diaspora in Hawai‘i and in other locations. The-27-

six propositions and the three dimensions of Proposition 3 are so closely interrelated that thetheory deﬁes singling out of any proposition or dimension to account for the speech codes.
Nonetheless, analytically, it is of our interest to focus on each proposition or dimension
because doing so will illuminate some distinctive characteristics of speech community.

3. Personhood in Okinawan Diasporas
The ﬁrst dimension of Proposition 3 is culturally distinctive psychology; i.e., a culturally
sanctioned view of what a proper person is and how they should conduct themselves. Yuntaku
Live! shows contain many instances of talk that convey such localized view of diaspora
personhood. One of the guests who teaches sanshin recollects his childhood when he used tothink that the culture is in his DNA―it would come to him automatically. After realizing thatthat is completely untrue, he started force-feeding himself and learned to play the sanshin in
his quest for a connection with the homeland. He considers that playing sanshin provides him
with a gateway to ﬁnding more about his culture. He explains his viewpoint of music:[Extract 1]
If you are an artist, art is your form of expression. If you’re an
expressive person, you use your music as your expression. Music andperforming arts are a way to express this identity that I have and thisconnection. So, at first it was a means to build that connection, thatconnection to my roots, to my heritage. For me now one of the interesting

things about performing arts is that it’s this conduit for you to connect
to this tradition, culture, and history.

The development of his awareness from initial indifference to continuing search forconnection to his heritage allowed him to understand his fellow members from the Okinawan
diaspora in Hawai‘i. Many people are experiencing a lack of connection with their cultural
heritage and a lack of cultural background. When he teaches sanshin, he tries to help people
sort out the right questions to ask about their identity and ﬁnd the answers to those questions.
For him and for many of his students Okinawan music is one of the answers to their quest
for their cultural heritage and their identity. They can fill the lack of connection throughlearning and playing traditional Okinawan music. That being the case, for the sanshin teacher,
Okinawan music is not simply a form of arts; it is most poignantly an expression of his own
cultural identity.
However, almost thirty years later, he states self-deprecatingly that he is still totally-28-

confused about his identity. Another musician guest echoed this sentiment in his episode.
After receiving formal music education at a prestigious university, he says he has one footput in Western music and the other in Okinawan music. The constant balancing act of thetwo traditions exposes him to diverse music but eventually pulls him back and grounds him
in his Okinawan heritage, as was succinctly surmised by one of the show hosts. A similarbalancing act is reported by Yanagisako（1985）in her ethnographic study of ﬁrst- and secondgeneration Japanese Americans in Seattle, in which she closely describes the dialectic tension
between the“Japanese past”and the“American present”and subsequent transformation to a
hybrid identity. The balancing act and the subsequent transformation from a dialectic tension
between the diaspora and the homeland is an essential part of Okinawan diaspora personhood.
In the episode of an Argentine doctor-musician, such hybrid identity is described plainly
in a statement:“We’re kind of in-between.”Or, using an Okinawan term, he says,“We’rechampuruu,”which refers to a mixture of a variety of things or a dish made from an assortment
of several ingredients. It must be emphasized here that this balancing act and transformation
are ongoing process because even the experienced sanshin master acknowledges that he is still
midway through his search for such personhood.
Other comments made by the guests including the sanshin teacher above capture anotheressential dimension of Okinawan diaspora personhood: i.e., historical continuity. Participantsin these shows often comment on their connection to their roots, heritage, and tradition. One
instantiation of this connection is their sense of connectedness to their predecessors. For
example, reﬂecting on his background in performing arts, the aforementioned sanshin teacher
provides a clear description of the historical continuity:[Extract 2]
When I sing or play a song, a lot of times it’s … I’m usually not singing
by myself; it’s usually the person that either taught me the song or the
person whose version that I like the most. Usually, they’re singing in myhead with me and so I’m just basically riding along with them and so every

time I sing this song, it’s actually Nakasone-sensei singing in my head
and I’m singing along.

When he plays a traditional song, he relives a moment of life with his own sanshin master,
thereby paying tribute to his predecessor and the associated tradition that has been handed
down over the generations. This reliving of a moment with his master is a way of experiencing
the actual sense of being connected with his roots, heritage, and culture. In this way, the-29-practice of playing this traditional instrument constitutes a signiﬁcant part of his personhood
because through the practice he found an answer to a long-lasting question of his own cultural
identity. The Okinawan diaspora personhood is not inherited by blood; it is acquired solely byengaging with tradition, performing arts being a central one.3 All in all, historical continuity
forms a critical part of Okinawan diaspora personhood, and one way to experience it ispracticing Okinawan performing arts.

4. Social relations in Okinawa diaspora
Performing arts not only build one’s connection to tradition but also help create acommunity. Like all other performing arts, Okinawan traditional preforming arts are mutual
engagement between performers and audience. Every performance embodies performers’
messages, which are appreciated by each individual in the audience in his or her own way. As
was discussed earlier, if a sanshin performer encodes his/her expression of historical continuity
in his/her performance, some apt audience will be able to appreciate the message andsimultaneously experience the historical continuity by engaging in the performance. Once thissharing of historical continuity is made possible, there will likely be a sense of ties between
the performer and audience, which after repeated performances among many interested people
may give rise to a sense of community.
With respect to this formation of community, the sanshin teacher drew on his previous
experiences and said:[Extract 3]
It’s not just the performers on stage that put out the performance andpeople just passively listen to it. The audience have to be involved.
The Okinawan stage is not just this platform to play and perform; it’s aplatform to share. So you need that reaction, you need that energy andthe input from the audience. That’s where the tradition comes from, thewhole concept of performance.（（ellipsis））If we talk about identity, if we
can help people finding a way to connect to that identity, then our songs
and music make sense.
3

Miyahira（in press）
discusses a similar instance of historical continuity in another episode of Yuntaku
Live!, in which a featured guest stresses the importance of pronouncing one’s surnames in traditional
Okinawan language rather than in more recent, standardized variety of Japanese（e.g., Tamagusuku rather
than Tamashiro, Ufugusuku rather than Oshiro, etc.）. Sticking with the traditional names, the guest
stresses, gives them conﬁdence and cultural foundation.

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The narrative makes it evident that the performing arts serve as a means to acknowledge
and reinforce the shared cultural identity. Audience must actively engage in this ritual eventfor the performance to be meaningful. Performance occurs in the space between performers
and audience, and what takes place in this event of mutual engagement is a recognition of
the participants’shared tradition. That said, however, audience members who come fromdifferent cultural backgrounds will engage in the performance as a pure artistic expression
and be content with it. Meanwhile, those who are Okinawan by origin but have little exposure
to traditional performing arts may simply turn away from them or may appreciate them but
do not experience the recognition of shared tradition in the same way. In other words, there
is a diversity of positionality within Okinawan diaspora. In this regard, SCT provides an
explanatory framework for a myriad of things that happen between performers and audience
members during such an event. Proposition 4 states that the significance of speaking iscontingent upon the speech codes used by interlocutors to constitute the meanings ofcommunicative acts. Although the event in question is not a verbal communicative act, it is aform of communication mediated by immaterial art form, and for that matter the signiﬁcanceof the messages is contingent upon the speech codes being shared by community members.
Furthermore, sanshin performance is an artful use of shared Okinawan diaspora speech codesthat are suﬃcient for explaining the intelligibility, prudence, and morality of communicative
conduct（Proposition 6）. For those who choose to view Yuntaku Live!, the sanshin teacher’smotive to share his rendition of tradition is made intelligible due in large part to shared speech
codes.
The sharing of tradition through performing arts facilitates building of social relations
as well. After the comment above, the sanshin teacher explains the lyrics of one of thesongs he played. It contains a Ryukyuan poem once read by King Shotai（1843-1901）who
reigned during the last period of Ryukyu kingdom: Ikusayu n shimachi / mirukuyu n yagati/ Nageekuna yo shinka / nuchi du takara（War is over now, and soon peace will come. Do
not despair fellow Ryukyuans; life must be treasured.）
The sanshin teacher favors this song
because it pays tribute to the lesson inherited from Okinawan ancestry. In times of war andimbalance, we always look for peace and balance. The way we get through the times ofimbalance, he continues, is through our relationships to each other; we aﬃrm our ties to eachother, our friendships and love for each other. Furthermore, within the lyric he picks a single
word that epitomizes the social relations. The word kanaganaatu describes the way one should
treat others: i.e., kindly, friendlily, and aﬀectionately. The predecessors of Okinawan diaspora
teach current members how to build relationships among its members and encourage them toexpand the circle of relationship beyond linguistic and ethnic boundaries. This morality, to-31-

borrow a SCT term, is what he wants to share with his audience, and it directly references thekind of social relations desired in Okinawa diasporas.
Another sanshin player in a diﬀerent episode also drew on a similar morality about social
relations. He picks a well-known song called choodee gwaa bushi（a song of siblinghood）,
which praises the moral practice of treating others with aﬀection like one’s sibling. Miyahira（in press）reports a scene in which a Ryukyuan dance teacher tells small children the same
adage in the lyric, translating it in the simplest terms possible for her young students:“Weare one big family.”As shown in these examples, through mutual engagement, Okinawan
performing arts, traditional songs in particular, enable participants to share cultural symbols,
beliefs and values. If historical continuity and distinctive social relations are invoked throughsongs and if they are deeply felt by both parties in a performing art event, then the participants
can experience a connection to their homeland. In such occasions,“the songs and music makesense.”
We must note at this juncture that the term“homeland”in diaspora discourse is one of
the cultural symbols（Carbaugh, 1993）
with speciﬁc meanings and signiﬁcance as is conceived
in SCT.4 The homeland is not present Okinawa nor is it Okinawa in the past; it is a collectionof diaspora members’fragments of memories. In an episode titled“Imaginary Homelands”adance instructor explains that the title derives from one of Salman Rushdie’s essays in which
the author recollects his homeland in India. The dance instructor was inspired by Rushdie’simaginary homeland:[Extract 4][H]is essays were talking about how writers from India in Britain are
writing about their homeland through different eyes, different remembrances

to fragments of their remembrances and how to hang on to these fragments

so dearly because that’s all we have, right? When we leave our homelands,
we’re desperate to hang on to anything when actually it may be justfragments of what it was. So it’s more about us forgetting than it is for
us remembering.

The speaker has long taught modern dance at university and later in her career studied

4

In his analysis of Soviet-US discussion, Carbaugh（1993）reports that the participants give voice tocultural symbols of“soul”and“self”respectively, and their communicative conducts reﬂect some rules
and norms of social interaction in a respective community.

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traditional Okinawan dance. She has struggled between her modern dance background and her
imaginary homeland, trying to reconcile these two backgrounds while remaining respectful
to both. As she straddles these two very diﬀerent traditions, she seems to tell herself that she
can choreograph Okinawan dance while giving a modern dance outlook to it when she says,“I think it’s OK to do this.”This sense of assurance derives from the very nature of homeland,
which is fundamentally imaginary. If homeland is created by fragments of memories, there
are inﬁnite versions of homelands which are part authentic and part imaginary. Her renditionof Okinawan dance is an instantiation of such creation from fragments of memories. In thisdiaspora-homeland context, she is assured by a thought that everyone engages in this creative
process, and she is entitled to hers. She hangs on to her memory fragments and imagine herversion of homeland by creating a new art form of Okinawan dance. In a sense the entire
efforts to create a new Okinawan dance is a result of her losing memories of homeland;
diaspora performing artists create in order to make up for such loss. The whole practice ofsuch creation is literally“the memory’s ﬁght against forgetting”to borrow Rushdie’s words.
What is critically important here is that performing arts elevate what is normally an
individual creative endeavor to a community-level practice. As the sanshin teacher says above,a performing stage is a platform to share individual memories and subsequent constructionof homelands. As people engage in this sharing, a community of practice（ Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet, 1992）
does emerge because they engage in the activities under a common
goal of sharing their memories of homeland. If this is the case, new ways of doing things,
talking, beliefs and values, and social relations will develop in the course of engaging in thecommon endeavor. To cite just some examples of the outcome of such collective practice,another sanshin teacher describes“Jumblish,”a jumbled parlance of English, Japanese,and Okinawan mixed together, to be a unique feature of Okinawan diaspora. Elsewhere, aparticipant explained about a new Twitter hashtag, #Uchinaa 1000, which was motivated by adesire to connect 1,000 Okinawans and Okinawans-at-heart worldwide. The same participantalso announced that the week of October 30 to November 6 as World Uchinanchu Week, also
dubbed as PORK（Peace of Ryukyu Kingdom）. All in all, performing arts serve as“cords
and belts”（Kinjo, 2010）of diaspora and homeland because they provide a site for the mutual
engagement and sharing, which in the long run results in distinctive diaspora social relations.

5. Communication practices in Okinawan diaspora
The third dimension of Okinawan diaspora speech codes is rhetoric––culturally distinctive
communicative strategies to coordinate a talk with one another for the desired ends. The dance
instructor in Extract 4 has much to comment on this dimension. As she was juggling two-33-

diﬀerent traditions, a new insight dawned on her:
[Extract 5]
I was trying to hold on to tradition, trying to keep it very pure andsacred. You know, modern dance has given me tools to create, but the
Okinawan dance gave me reasons to create. It gave me stories.

Looking back, the narrator reckons that in both times of war and peace, people in Okinawa
and those who migrated overseas created songs and dances to cope with the social conditionsof the times. They did so to celebrate nature and human relationships as well. Just like ourancestors did, she continues,“we should be using whatever experience we have to tell ourstories.”Every song and dance contain some salient stories that, having been passed on fromgeneration to generation, have become iconic cultural narrative. Yet, in a diaspora, some new
and different versions of stories are created in order to deal with a new social climate. For
example, a story of naval and aerial bombardment of Okinawan islands during the last war has
been told as a“tetsu no boofuu”（literally, a storm of steel）
in Okinawa. However, a new dancechoreographed by the dance instructor is titled“steel rain.”The changes in the titles, albeit
subtle, suggest diﬀerent social conditions as well as a passage of time. Although the diaspora
story is a diﬀerent version of a historical event, the dance tells a story, and it gets shared bythose who participate in the performing art event. The making of the original stories andsharing them with community members are the reasons for her to create the dance.
Such stories surface in daily talk at times. One good example can be found in aconversation between a boy and his grandfather in an animation dedicated to a song composedby an Argentine musician-doctor, who is a third-generation Okinawan migrant. The song
was ﬁrst created in Spanish under the title of Entre Claveles（literally, In Carnation Flowers）
in 2015 and two years later it was re-recorded in Japanese under a different title, Jikuu no
Hana（literally, Flowers beyond Space-Time）（Higa, 2017）. It tells a story of his childhood
memory with his grandfather who had migrated to Argentina with his wife in 1934（ibid.）. The
YouTube music video of this song begins with a short animation video in which a boy asks
his grandfather about his life as an immigrant. The grandfather tells the boy how dreadfully
impoverished Okinawa was, and in order to earn livelihood for his family and his family in
Okinawa he came to Argentina. After many years of hard work and community support, he
was finally able to establish himself as a farmer growing carnation flowers. The following
extract is a part of that conversation as it appeared in the subtitles of one of the Yuntaku Live!
episodes.

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[Extract 6]Grandpa:

We didn’t have money, plus we didn’t know Spanish. The only

thing we could do was work in the flower fields from early day

until the sunset. Many Okinawans who emigrated to Argentina

devoted themselves to cultivating flowers. The Uchinanchus

Boy:Grandpa:（Okinawans）were very hard workers.

I see. So the reason of our fortune is all because of youreffort. So grandpa, were you able to fulfill your dreams?

Of course! We were able to build a beautiful family, whichmakes me very happy! Grandson, even if you were born inArgentina, Okinawa will always be in your blood.

An Okinawan animation artist contributed the animation pictures, and the conversation wasrecorded by local Okinawans. When another descendant of Okinawan migrants who now lives
in Okinawa translated the original Spanish lyrics into Japanese, the musician shared his visionof his grandparents overlooking him and other family members from a widespread field of
carnation ﬂowers on a cloud, feeling happy about what they have accomplished. The Japanesesong title, Jikuu no Hana, comes from that vision he had. It tells a story of historical continuity
by having the boy acknowledge grandpa’s toil and in effect thanks his forebears, while
foregrounding a family-oriented social relations that are treasured in Okinawan diaspora. The
musician’s story which was created from fragments of his memory is given a clear rhetoricalform through collaboration with an animation artist and voice actors.
This narrative may be only a fictional representation of Okinawan diaspora rhetoric,
but again fragments of memories are all we have. In this regard, telling stories is an essential
means of diaspora rhetoric. Yuntaku Live! shows offer a great forum for such storytelling.
Several pairs of people serve as show hosts, and most of them favor using the phrase,“talkstories,”in such an expression as“Come join us and talk stories.”Being encouraged in thisway, guests are willing to tell their own stories like the prelude to the song above. When they“talk stories,”often it is about their memories of homeland, and by sharing their stories, they
try to draw a fuller picture of their homeland. A Yuntaku Live! show oﬀers a great opportunity
for participants to engage in this communal activity by listening to a guest“talk stories.”As
one of the guests aptly pointed out,“Yuntaku Live! kept the community together”throughthese mutual engagements. In a like manner, Miyahira（in press）draws on Proposition 55 of
5

Proposition 5 postulates: The terms, rules, and premises of a speech code are inextricably woven into

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SCT and concludes that yuntaku among people in Okinawan diaspora is a culturally distinctive
communication ritual that pays homage to the ancestral homeland. Yuntaku is not a mere
chitchat; it is a collective engagement in“talking stories”so as to piece together an imaginary
homeland from participants’fragments of memories.
What has become clear from this focused discussion of performing arts is that diaspora
members tell stories through both linguistic and extralinguistic means on the one hand and,on the other, help expand the circle of the community of practice globally using informationand communication technology（ICT）platforms. As the collaboration on a musical production,
Jikuu no Hana, illustrates, diaspora community practice now involves homeland Okinawa as
well as much wider global participation. This global reach is made possible by a key featureof performing arts. One of the guests, who is a renowned ukulele player puts it this way:
Music is not so much a universal language as a language of universe. Yuntaku Live! showsdemonstrate a case in point in that individuals literally congregate for performing art eventsfrom across the world talking in the ﬁgurative language of universe. Similarly, as if he was toexpand this circle of participants, a Peruvian musician contends that Okinawans must be open
to other Nikkei communities and for that matter to a wider global society. The universal appealof performing arts along with the help of global ICT platform gives rise to a community of
Okinawan cohorts that is small in scale but global in its reach.

6. A Mediated Transnational Speech Community
Thus far, we have seen some instances of distinctive personhood, social relations, andcommunication practices that are commonly observed in Okinawan diaspora. SCT stresses theimportance of describing those cultural resources that interlocutors draw upon to make senseof communication practices. On the one hand, interlocutors utilize a variety of means in coding
distinctive local meanings in their communication practices. On the other hand, by being
able to mobilize some pertinent cultural resources to make such coded practices intelligible,
they experience certain allegiance to a speech community. In the case of Okinawan diaspora,the speech community is not located at any speciﬁc place; rather, it is a networked space of
cultural activities, to which participants join from far and wide. Those participants use some
cultural symbols such as“homeland”and“champuruu” along with some very common andyet culturally salient meanings（e.g., Nuchi du takara）and their metacommunicative comments（“kanaganaatu”）so as to give voice to their sense of personhood and social relations. They
speaking itself. To discover such intricate relationship, SCT urges analysts to look at, for instance, somespecial forms of communicative conduct such as rituals, myths, and social dramas.

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also practice a communication ritual,“yuntaku”or“talking stories,”in a way that reaﬃrms
those cultural symbols and culturally ratiﬁed ways of engaging in communicative interaction.
Therefore, wherever these cultural symbols and metacommunicative vocabulary are involvedin communicative interaction, and as long as the signiﬁcance of speaking is contingent upon
the speech codes used by interlocutors as is stated in Proposition 4 of SCT, there is to be founda speech community of Okinawans that is transnational.
This transnational speech community is constructed both linguistically andextralinguistically. Linguistically, it makes use of many cultural symbols or labels thatderive from Okinawan indigenous language. Okinawan diaspora have been linguisticallyassimilated by their host countries, and it is not a type of linguistic diaspora as in the case ofMolise Croatian speakers in Italy, for whom language is the central characteristic connecting
people across time and space（Šimičić and Rajko, 2021）. Although the members of Okinawan
diaspora don’t speak solely in Okinawan or Japanese, they use certain key Okinawan linguistic
symbols and labels as well as some distinctive metacommunicative vocabulary in their yuntaku
talks. This study identified some such cultural symbols and elaborated on their situatedmeanings so as to uncover some aspects of Okinawan diaspora speech codes. The analysis
reveals that Okinawan heritage language plays a signiﬁcant part in the linguistic constructionof speech community.
The transnational speech community is constructed through extralinguistic means as
well. Most importantly, it is mediated by Okinawan performing arts in general. Although
performing arts themselves may not involve communicative practices, when they are
performed, audiences engage themselves in the stories that are being told along with theimmaterial and extralinguistic form of performing arts. Yuntaku Live! shows prove to be agreat contributor to this process of extralinguistic diasporization because the performance isoften accompanied by performers’own stories and audience’s commentary on the stories fromacross the globe. Audiences can join such events because they are digitally mediated, which isanother extralinguistic means of constructing a transnational speech community. ICT aﬀords
us a transformative shift in the ways we build human networks, and along with it comes a new
type of speech community.
The new type of speech community is best defined by shared speech codes. Like
Blommaert and Rampton（2017）who predicted a demise of traditional speech community,
Jacquemet（2019）urges that researchers should go beyond the study of speech communities
and shift to the study of“linguistics of contact”by retooling their methods of analysis. His
proposal is, in part, a reﬂection of a growing number of communicative practices by groupsof people who are not bound by geographic regions and who interact with others both in face--37-

to-face and in digitally mediated environments. What my analysis shows is that, in the case of
Okinawan diaspora, there exist shared speech codes across the diasporas. Although individuals
may speak in their second and/or third language and interact with each other using innovative
communication strategies such as borrowing, code-switching（e.g., Jumblish）, and/or crossing,
they also invoke shared speech codes when they participate in cultural dialogues and by doing
so they reaﬃrm shared beliefs and values. This emerging speech community is not anything
monolithic; it is constantly remaking itself with an influx and an outflux of people of both
Okinawan descent and Okinawans-at-heart. That being the case, however, the artful use ofshared speech codes and the ability to predict their intelligibility, prudence, and morality（Proposition 6）thus far outlined above serve as“identitiﬁcative resources”（Philipsen, 1992）
for each member to come to have a sense of speech community.

7. In Closing
An overriding premise of the preceding discussion is that“homeland”plays a key rolein community building. It is interesting to note in closing that the homeland that is sharedthrough everyday discourse and storytelling is an imaginary one for both diaspora and thosein Okinawa. That is to say, the homeland can no longer be found in present Okinawa. Lately,
most Okinawan residents spend their daily life using Japanese rather than the indigenous
Okinawan language. Okinawans have been alienated over the years from their own language
under a political regime that painstakingly propagated monolingual ideology throughout Japan（Heinrich, 2012）. One may go so far as to say that they construct their version of homelandfrom the collective memory of the ancestral past. It is analogous to Okinawan diaspora
members constructing their“imaginary homeland”from fragments of their memories. For bothparties“homeland”is a social construction. Therefore, the diaspora’s search for authenticity
may not be completed in current Okinawa; it will only be reached in the ancestral past. One
accidental outcome of such social construction of homeland is an opportunity for both diaspora
and Okinawans to collaborate on this enterprise and develop some grand narratives about
personhood, social relations, and communicative practices, which will eventually lead to ashared feeling of membership in a transnational Okinawan speech community.
It is also clear from the discussion thus far that indigenous Okinawan vocabulary isessential for creating such grand narratives. The indigenous Okinawan vocabulary orient both
diaspora and Okinawans to the shared ancestral past and allow both parties to negotiate themeanings and normative uses of the vocabulary. Recent ICT-enabled venues like Yuntaku Live!
shows have accelerated the collaboration to the extent that these parties now share speech
codes; that is,“a system of socially-constructed symbols and meanings, premises, and rules-38-pertaining to communicative conduct.”Such shared speech codes indicate that a new modelof transnational speech community is developing. What started with small cultural enclaves of
Okinawan migrants has developed, through participating in performing arts events online andengaging in digitally mediated forms of communication, into a global network of people whoare practicing what is traditionally considered Okinawan. In light of today’s superdiversity thatis characterized by ﬂuid community boundaries, the mediated transnational speech communityof Okinawans offers a new case of community formation as it responds to the surge ofsuperdiverse society. It does so by capitalizing on the resilience of indigenous Okinawan
language.

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ディアスポラ舞台芸術と越境的沖縄ことばの共同体
宮平勝行

超多様性が日常化する現代社会において、社会言語学の基本的概念である「ことばの共同体（スピーチ・コミュニティ）」をどのように捉えるべきなのか。本稿ではハワ
イの沖縄ディアスポラ共同体が発信する YouTube ビデオシリーズ“Yuntaku Live!”のインタビュー談話に注目して考察を行った。スピーチ・コード理論に基づいて、舞台芸術家を対象としたインタビューの談話を分析した結果、沖縄ディアスポラ共同体の個
人像、社会的人間関係、そしてコミュニケーション行動の特色について次の点が明らかになった。舞台芸術家はその演舞を通して自らの内にある混成性（ハイブリディティ）と沖縄との歴史的連続性を重視し、演目に込められた、記憶の断片から想像した祖国の物語を聴衆と共有することで沖縄ディアスポラの社会的人間関係を構築している。舞台芸術に込められたこうした物語は、日常会話において「ユンタク」という固有のコミュニケーション儀式を通して広く共有され、国境を越えて人と人を結ぶ役割を担っている。舞台芸術の演舞とオンラインの仮想空間を媒介としてもたらされる人と人のこうしたネットワークは、超多様性を享受する現代における新出の「ことばの共同体」であり、この共同体創造の基盤をなすのが沖縄語語彙、メタ言語としての沖縄語、そしてそれらを契機として創造される物語である。

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