After Spring, the Tamaki Family | Jared L. Cohon University Center
Date:3/1 14:00
Location:Carnegie Mellon University, McConomy Auditorium – Jared L. Cohon University Center
During Taiwan’s period of Japanese rule in the 1930s, a group of pineapple farmers sailed to the Yaeyama Islands in Okinawa to start a new life. Over time, they became naturalized Japanese and thrived. Grandma Tamayo TAMAKI was among the first-generation of these immigrants. In 2015, the TAMAKI family reunited to celebrate her 88th birthday, taking her back to Taiwan to revisit her family, and reigniting memories of her quest for a better life.
From the basis of the TAMAKI family’s history, HUANG undertook extensive fieldwork to represent the forgotten history of these island immigrants. Having experienced and observed many historical events such as Japanese rule, WWII and Taiwan’s retrocession, their identity as a Taiwanese faded with time. But by returning to Taiwan, questions of identity resurface. Like Shinsuke OGAWA, HUANG fully immerses himself in his subjects’ lives and environment enabling him to establish an intimate rapport with his subjects, while ample archive materials give depth to the story’s historical context.
📍Join us afterwards for discussion with Chu-wen Hsieh.
Hsieh is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UNC. She received her bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Political Science and earned a master’s degree in Anthropology from National Taiwan University. She also received a year of training at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Japan.
Hsieh’s research interests include the military, social movements, nationalism, empire, Japan, and Okinawa. Her master’s thesis, “Resistance for Peace,” illustrates how and why Okinawans insist on using peaceful methods to protest against the U.S. military and the Japanese government. This work culminates in her current project, which focuses on understanding everyday life in communities living next to U.S. military bases on mainland Japan against the backdrop of the U.S. military’s global ubiquity and the shifting patterns of the U.S.-Japan Alliance.
Films screened
After Spring, the Tamaki Family
The Tamaki family waited through many springs before reaching a late life of peace. About three hundred kilometres from Taiwan, in the Yaeyama Islands of Okinawa, a small island forgotten by history was where Taiwanese from the colony settled after migrating before the war. They lived through land clearance and conscription, forced repatriation during the war and the aftershocks of the 228 Incident, and finally became stateless political refugees under American administration, adrift for thirty years. Carried up and down by the currents of the age, the family, now more than a hundred people, is together again, and the children are planning to take their ageing mother back one last time to the home she left in her youth — Taiwan.
This is a family film spanning eighty years of hardship across East Asia. The Tamaki children have travelled far, and now their feast has come. It is not only one family's journey through memory but the shared history of drift of all the Taiwanese migrants of Yaeyama — like waves between two islands, striking back and forth without rest, the young figures of then now grown into the keepers of memory.
In the early spring of 2015, over a week of family holiday, the Tamakis follow their mother's fading memory onto a journey back to their roots that none of them had made before — a search about memory, identity and going home.
More on After Spring, the Tamaki Family and its other screenings →