In 1900, a group of Okinawans sailed to Honolulu aboard the SS China in order to escape the hardships of Japanese colonization in Okinawa. Over a century later, their descendants represent the largest Okinawan diaspora in the world today. This study examines the divergent trajectories of cultural development through the diaspora and the homeland, demonstrating that aspects of the venerated ideals of traditional Okinawan culture were preserved in the diaspora while the homeland suffered assimilation with the Japanese. The significance of the comparison is that through a cultural renewal contemporary diasporans recognize the differences and are motivated through homeland imagining to engage in a return movement of support. This study is timely for several reasons. It fills a void in the investigation of Okinawan Hawaiians through the common Oral History approach which has been diminished due to the loss of first and second generation diasporans. The exploration of signifiers of culture, as lived and practiced, provides insights into cultural identity which have consequences for the diaspora and the homeland - at a time when the mature diaspora faces important directional shifts beyond the cultural renewal and historically-based oppression in the homeland is reaching a critical stage, including the possibilities of full Japanese assimilation, Okinawan language extinction, and the permanence of U.S. military base entrenchment. This study employs a diasporic framework adjoined with ethnographic observations for the examination of the interplay of culture and power through the Okinawan Hawaiian diaspora. The multicultural setting of Hawaii and a double-diaspora, double-minority factor - a constant comparison between the Okinawans and Japanese in Hawaii - reveal delineations of culture and set up the comparisons with the development of culture in the homeland over time. The divergent cultural outcomes represent a neglected focus in diaspora studies - the significance of social class considerations of the diasporan community. Okinawan oppression in the homeland is examined through conceptions aligned with misrecognition and the impediments to human flourishing, revealing the depth of the hardships and the strategies of control by the colonizing forces. Finally, the investigation into the Okinawan-Hawaiian diaspora allows insights into the role of culture in diaspora theorization.

This thesis is an historical study of biopolitical relations between racism and biometric identification in Japan since the late nineteenth century to the present day. Adopting Foucault’s historical method, it challenges progressive accounts of the history of racism and that of biometrics. During the nineteenth century, practices of biometric identification emerged as constitutive of the knowledge of race wherein imperial power relations between superior and inferior races were enabled. Progressive accounts proclaim that colonial practices of biometrics were not scientific but politically intervened, which has since been discredited and replaced by a ‘true’ science of biometrics as individualisation. Contra progressivist claims on postraciality, the thesis concretely historicises the ways in which subjectification and control of race is conducted through the interplay between the epistemic construction of race and the technology of identification in each historical and geographical context. It analyses three modalities of racial government through biometrics in Japan: biometrics as a biological technology of inscribing race during Japanese colonialism; biometrics as a forensic technology of policing former colonial subjects in post-WWII Japan; and contemporary biometrics as an informatic technology of controlling a newly racialised immigrant population. The thesis concludes that despite a series of de-racialising reforms in the twentieth century, biometrics persist as a biopolitical technology of race. Neither racism nor biometrics as a technology of race is receding but they are continuously transforming in a way that a new mechanism of racial government is made possible. Race evolves, it is argued, not in the sense of social Darwinism but because the concept of race itself changes across time and space wherein a new model of racism is empowered. The thesis contributes to existing literature on the biopolitics of security and biometrics by extending the scope of analysis to a non-Western context, explicating historical relations between racism and biometrics, and problematising biometric rationality at the level of racialised mechanism of knowing and controlling (in)security. It also makes contributions to Foucaultian studies by advancing the analysis of biopolitical racism beyond Foucault’s original formulation and by offering a critique of rationality in the field of biometrics.