What comes to mind when you hear the name Okinawa?

Is it a tropical paradise booming with tourists? The historic home to the diverse cultures of the Ryukyu Kingdom? Or one of the most militarized places in the world ¡ª a controversial hub of the U.S. armed forces in Japan?

Brazilian Mateus R. Oliveira, 39, a graphic designer and cultural anthropologist based in Tokyo, is making these questions on knowledge production in Okinawa the focus of his doctoral research.

Oliveira is among the contemporary academics and journalists who are adding their voices to an advocacy network centered on the archipelago, located some 1,600 kilometers from Tokyo. They are collaborating with local scholars and institutions to amplify the most pressing social and political issues faced by Okinawa¡¯s residents today.

¡°One of my contacts said they were tired of seeing academics come to Okinawa to (simply) observe,¡± says Oliveira, currently a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo¡¯s Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. ¡°They immediately turned my focus to how indigenous communities ... are also colonized by knowledge.¡±

Oliveira cites a historical example from his own university. During the Meiji Era (1868-1912), anthropologists from the imperial universities, including the University of Tokyo, ¡°used their knowledge (to support the government¡¯s efforts to) push indigenous people to assimilate. ... And this was often a very violent process. It¡¯s important to realize the knowledge we produce can also be colonial.¡±

The ethical responsibility of knowledge creators to consider positionality is nothing new, says Oliveira, but it has particular relevance in Okinawa today. Fellow academic Tamy Gushiken, a Brazilian whose paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents migrated from Okinawa, agrees.

Gushiken, 33, first came to Japan in 2018 and is now a language lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies while completing her doctoral thesis in sociology at Tokyo Metropolitan University. Gushiken researches Okinawan diaspora communities and their traditions of tanamoshi (mutual aid organizations), comparing local groups in Yokohama and Sao Paulo, where she grew up.

Sao Paulo is home to the largest population of Nikkei (people of Japanese descent outside of Japan), an estimated 1.6 million, including many families with roots in Okinawa. ¡°Even if you¡¯re studying your own cultural community, there will be differences in generation or social class,¡± says Gushiken.

At last summer¡¯s Symposium on Feminism and Intersectionality, hosted at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in the village of Onna, Gushiken and Oliveira teamed up with Shannon Welch, 35, an American literary scholar who moved to Japan in 2023 as a project researcher at Tokyo College, an interdisciplinary academic unit of the University of Tokyo.

Welch studies Brazilian literature by members of the Japanese and Okinawan diaspora within...