About

MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing is a literary journal published twice a year by the University of Hawai‘i Press. It is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year.

The publication of our summer 2009 issue, Voices from Okinawa, is made possible by grants from the following:

• Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts;
• National Endowment for the Arts;
• Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities, with additional support from the “We the People” initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and
• Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sciences of Japan. The University of the Ryukyus received a 2008 grant from the ministry to do research on human migration, and the Pacific and North/South American Research Project generously donated some of those funds to publish this book.

Guest editor Katsunori Yamazato is a professor of American literature and culture at the University of the Ryukyus, director of the American Studies Center of the University of the Ryukyus, and director of the Pacific and North/South American Research Project “Human Migration and the Twenty-first Century Global Society.” His books include Great Earth Sangha: Dialogues between Gary Snyder and Sansei Yamao; Japanese translations of Snyder’s A Place in Space and Mountains and Rivers without End; and Post-War Okinawa and America: Fifty Years of Cross-Cultural Contact, which he co-edited.

Artist Ozaki Seiji created the woodblock prints in this volume. The colorful prints depict Okinawan dolls and toys and are reproduced for the first time from his book Ryukyu gangu zufu (Kasahara Shoni Hoken Kenkyujo, 1936), which is in the Sakamaki/Hawley Collection. Housed in Hamilton Library, of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, this collection is comprised of many rare Ryukyuan and Okinawan items.