The Transpacific on Fire: Sparks of Decolonial Resistance Across Okinawa and Brazil in Medoruma Shun's “My Brazilian Granddad's Sake” (1999)

Abstract This article disentangles the complex web of social relations in and across Okinawa, Brazil, Japan, and the United States as represented in Medoruma Shun's 1999 short story “My Brazilian Granddad's Sake.” The story focuses on an elderly Okinawan man who develops a friendship with a young boy around the time of Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972 and passes down his memories of his migration to Brazil in the 1920s and his family's deaths during the Battle of Okinawa. This article draws from colonial racial capitalist critique and uses a transpacific lens to interrogate the connections between these seemingly disparate occurrences as they unfold across different spaces and times. In particular, it looks at the transpacific power structures of capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism that the story brings into focus and takes up relationality as a critical point of reflection from which to consider the actors entangled in these structures beyond a dualist framework of victim/perpetrator. By analyzing the relationships in the text between Okinawans, Brazilian capitalists, farmworkers, Indigenous Brazilian nonhuman beings, and Japanese and US state officials, the article thinks through the challenges of working toward decoloniality in the transpacific and the role of accountability in practices of solidarity.