1

Owarai Popo: Laughter of Epistemic Disobedience

Introduction

Humor and its various forms - irony, hyperbole, absurdity, satire, passing, and others -
have been used for centuries to both overtly and covertly comment on and, sometimes, attempt to
humble or undermine the proud and the powerful. In this sense, humor is an important
decolonizing tool employed by artists and scholars who offer audiences alternative ways of
discerning and knowing the empirical world freed from hegemonic channels of mediation.
Decolonial, here, is defined as a third space that is nonbinary, non-Eurocentric, non-hegemonic,
and pluriversal, a method of knowledge production that decentralizes the West to offer other
epistemologies that co-exist with the West (Hall 1992, Anzaldua 1987, Lugones 2003, Minh-Ha
2011, Dussel 1995, Cesaire 2000, etc.).
Performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Pena Gomez and scholars Henry Louis
Gates Jr. and Jose Munoz are but a few among many others who exemplify the centrality of
humor in language and performance. Concepts such as border-crossing (Gomez); signifyin’
monkey; language play as a rhetorical device (Gates); disidentification (Munoz); sarcasm as a
performative mood (Nyong’O), and passer as a strategic literary device used in early African
American literature by African Americans (Fabi) provide a set of performance language that
makes the deployment of humor effective. These and other works reveal and interrupt
reproductions of colonial forms of knowledge concerning race, gender, class, sexuality, culture,
language, and nation[i] which serve to maintain the coloniality of power (Mingnolo).
While Okinawa did not experience the kind of colonization that these authors explore, the
history of Okinawa is, nevertheless, fraught with events[ii] that have forced people to find creative
ways of surviving, resisting, and thriving over the past 400 years—from invasion (1609), the
abolition of independence (1879), forced incorporation into nation-state (1879), the devastation
of war (1945), the American military occupation (1945-72) and a double-colonized present
(Tokuyama 2013) (1972–Present). What I refer to as a genealogy of Okinawan laughter,
elaborated later, is a type of humor that arises from this history of domination. This strain of
humor is an act of “epistemic disobedience” that “takes us to a different place, to a different
beginning” (Mignolo, 2011: 45) in essence, to Okinawa’s worldview.
This chapter aims to deconstruct Okinawa as the colonized subject in decolonial
performances by analyzing the work produced by Owarai Popo, an important comedy troupe
active throughout the 1990s. This period of social change was a clear moment in Okinawa’s
neoliberal era when the question of identity arose as a lynchpin for survival and/or assimilation.
In the throes of the so-called Okinawa Boom, the 1990s was a time when many Okinawan
people attempted to become Japanese while dominant mainland tourism and mainstream media
created a facile representation of a subaltern subject made for mainland Japanese consumption
and a means for capital accumulation in the mainland. In analyzing Popo’s skits, I explore how
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Popo’s humor presents important decolonial strategies necessary for maintaining Okinawan
identity.

Champuru: Enacting Performative Okinawan Disobedience

Creating this third space is itself a decolonial act. The genre of Okinawan performance
that represents Okinawa’s epistemic disobedience is worthy of scholarly attention. It is witty,
rhythmic, and generative and, I argue, emerges in the everyday practice of champuruu.
Champuru means stir-fried and commonly refers to various stir-fried dishes popular in Okinawa.
Commonly, the term champurū culture describes Okinawa’s complex mixtures of identity,
history, and society that has been developing since the 10th century as part of the East Asia trade
zone of the 10th century (Furuki 24). Moreover, Okinawan scholar Yūten Higa considers
champurū's power of “Creativity [which] is the ‘multiplying,’ ‘mixing,’ and combining’ of
things [...] to create a new thing” (Higa 2003: 14). For Higa, Okinawa as a whole arises from and
exhibits, “the creative power of champurū” (Higa 14). I focus on the aspect of Okinawanization
of mixing and combining new or foreign elements into the Okinawan worldview, (re)making
new Okinawa in a continuous mix and flow of changing times. Legendary Okinawan folk singer,
Kadekaru Rinsho (1920 ~ 1999), captures the changing time in the song jidai no nagare (A
Passage of Time, 1975): The first verse

唐の世から大和の世、大和の世からアメリカ世、ひるまさ変わたるこの沖縄

Tō no yu kara yamato no yu, yamato no yu kara Amerika yu, hirumasa kawataru kono
Okinawa

From the Chinese era, to the Japanese era, to the American era, strangely changing, this
Okinawa.

The yu (“world” or “worldview”) denotes not only the historical time of the past but
connotes overlapping subjective/objective realities of a paradoxically changing and unchanging
time, champuru-ing differential times (past-present-future) into a dynamic space for play. This
sense of yu expressed through the traditional form of Okinawa minyo (song) was later revised in
a song, kawariyuku jidai no naka de (Changing Flow of the Times) by Okinawan folk singer and
songwriter, Sadoyama Yutaka. The song included in the CD debut in 1974, two years after
Okinawa returned to Japan in 1972, the lyrics echo the sentiment of what many felt as Japan’s
betrayal to Okinawan people leaving the burden of “hosting” the American military bases as it
was before the reversion. Reflecting the 70’s folk music genre and using guitar as the instrument
of resistance during the Vietnam War when many Okinawan youths, disaffected by the American
bombing campaigns staged from the island, rebelled. Inside the CD cover, the message expressed
his sentiment of the time of reversion/betrayal: Okinawa was "returned" from the United States
in 1972. No, it was "looted" again by the country of Japan (written inside the CD cover).
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Sadoyama Yutaka, Stylistically reworking Kadekaru’s lyric in folk-rock style, Sadoyama

powerfully reflected post-war sentiment while also evoking the feeling of blues characteristic of
Kadekaru’s time. Both musicians express yu in Okinawa time, a sense and style of overlapping
time and space that create new manifestations of champuruu yu. Okinawan humor can, thus, be
understood by appreciating the interstitial play in the changing flow of the times. Analysis that
follows decodes Okinawan humor with the intent to make the humor intelligible but, further, to
clarify how this humor represents an epistemic disobedience that brings into wider view the
long-hidden Okinawan worldview - the champuru yu. Such acts of disobedience are grounded in
an important history.

A Brief Genealogy of Disobedient Laughter in Okinawa Performance

A genealogy of Okinawan performance that deploys decolonial humor can be traced back
to Buten[iii] who was born as Ohana Kozen (1897 - 1969), and later emerged as an important
figure/performer in the aftermath of the Battle of Okinawa (1944 ~ 1945). Known as the King of
Laughter/Comedy, Buten gave people laughter of hope through his performance that used
Okinawan language as a vehicle through which to convey the meaning of a full life. His famous
phrase, nuchinu gusuujisabira (Let's celebrate life!), born in a concentration camp can be argued
as the radical turn that effectively shifted the way one looks at the world at its peril. Going
against reason, Buten used humor in unabashedly Okinawan form, content, and context -
language, instrument, gesture, everyday life matters and materials. His brilliantly clever
wordplay was executed in a stand-up the World Tour, a skit in which he employs homonyms to
tell a funny story about an Okinawan man who travels around the world to deliver laughter.
When the man travels to Germany, he uses word hittoraa in Okinawan means a thief with its
homonymy, the name Hitler (Adolf Hitler) who also stole lives by way of genocide. Here, he not
only did wordplay, but also played with different worlds that he was a part of. At 45, he was in a
concentration camp in Okinawa after WWII at the time The Holocaust (1945) took place in
Germany. Moreover, the year he was born in 1897, Okinawa was only 18 years old after the loss
of independence by Japan’s forced annexation and dissolution of the Ryukyu Kingdom. In this
way, hittoraa (thief) hails simultaneously Japan, the US, and Germany as culprits cleverly
situating Okinawan wordplay in local and international context. Buten affected the next
generations of performers who exhibit the function of humor in similar fashion as the King.
Terurin (Real name, Teruya Rinsuke. 1929 – 2005) who earlier had performed with
Buten later established a successful career as comedian/performer in Koza city, the first military
town established during the US occupation of Okinawa (1945 to 1972). Koza’s cityscape,
culture, history and everyday life became the material for his on-stage mixed-media
performances as well as the outdoor performances. Terurin coined the expression, champurū
rhythm - a “jumble and mixed-up” element - to define his Okinawa' American champuru style,
sound and performance. The US military presence, American culture, Japan and its relation to
Okinawa, and the history of Ryukyu Kingdom and its relation to Okinawa are elements that are
cooked in the rhythm. Debut in 2005, Owarai Beigun-kichi is the latest performance troupe in the
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genealogy of Okinawan humor. Using irony and parody, the group takes up real issues of the
U.S. militarism on Okinawa and Japan political oppression in keeping the bases on Okinawa.
OBK performs annually to a full-house audience of Okinawans who are able to laugh with others
who otherwise would be alone. This type of laughter produces empathy and affinity between the
performers and the audience members, gives fertility and futurity to Okinawan life, and most
importantly, serves the people. These performances, including Owarai Popo, of course, can be
read as efforts to establish autonomy and agency, asserting the sovereignty of the individual and,
thus, the people.

Imperial Subject and Passer

At the height of Japan’s ascendency to modern nationhood in the late 19th century, Japan
constructed Okinawans and other ethnic minorities as the ‘Other’ as they became Japan’s
national subjects. A sociologist and Japanese scholar specializing in migrant labor, Yoko Sellek,
underscores how ethnic and cultural differences justified the exclusion of Okinawans: “The
Naichi (Japanese) emigrants born during this nationalistic era shared the view that Okinawans
were not of the Japanese race and refused to recognize them as equals” (Sellek 2008: 79).
Incorporating Okinawans as “Others” into the nation-state constituted a social closure wherein
their “‘Otherness’—expressed through both phenotypical and cultural differences—has been
constructed” (Sellek 74). In 1903, the history of the human pavilion displayed Okinawans,
Ainus, Taiwanese, Indians, and other minorities at The Fifth National Industrial Exhibition held
in Osaka exemplifies the Japanese gaze of these minorities. 1903 is both the year Japan's victory
of the Sino-Japan war and the era in which the World Fairs where these human displays were a
common form of colonial leisure and entertainment as a method of producing the Other -
imperial, colonial subjects.
Yamato nu yu (Japanese worldview) expresses the early construction of Japan’s empire
under the Meiji government, which established various assimilation policies and programs
(kōminka). The foundations upon which the empire was to be constructed are the correct forms
of thinking. Academic policies, therefore, emphasized and reinforced “education in an emperor-
centered morality as crucial to the production of a unified and loyal population capable of
contributing to the industrialization and militarization of the nation” (Christy 614). The
ideologies of Kōminka facilitated the production of Okinawans, Japanese, Zainichi (ethnic
Koreans of Japan), Taiwanese, and burakumin (the historically stigmatized underclass of Japan)
as imperial subjects. Language education became the most pernicious mechanism of
assimilation, and its most harmful mission was to “fundamentally change thinking processes and
identificatory impulses” (Christy 615).
Centralized language education and reforms, however, adversely affected Okinawans
whose culture and ontological being (characteristically "Okinawan") were made inferior and
backward in the nation-building process, and therefore, unequivocally affected the local self-
governance in political, economic, cultural, and social practices (Chibana, 2012; Christy, 1993;
Nomura, 2005; Sellek, 2008; Shimabuku, 2014). To become “Japanese” for Okinawans meant to
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lose their identity, to change their ontological being, culture, mannerisms, and lifestyle into the
“Japanese.” Some accepted, some refused, some passed, while others laughed at the power of
authority. Forced to hide and negotiate their ethnic differences to assimilate into Japanese
society, Passing became a protective cover and a strategic mechanism Okinawans and others
employed to fit into the Japanese ideological norms of the national subject. While assimilation
policy has been abandoned, the effect of the psychological trauma and memory has not left the
psyche of some Okinawans.
Owarai Popo enacted a form of dis-identificatory performance that points to and plays
against the legacy of assimilation policies against which bodies become salient the experience
and meaning of passing in the performance. Popo employs passing[i] as a signifier to discharge
and disavow the negative significance of assimilation. By super-charging the ethnic was/is
racialized into a signifier, these performers use their bodies as props, as they slip into a third
transitional body that emerges from and slides in/out of the crossing between two subjects in
signifyin' modality. The textual space where a black person moves freely through the linguistic
divide between two discursive universes points to the location in which Okinawan characters are
positioned in the skit, and deploy his/her linguistic signifyin’(g) style of performance. But
beyond the literary textual space, Popo’s work adds the body and plays with the “Okinawan
type” of happy go lucky, kind, dancing, smiling, backward, loose with time, exotic, and dark-
skin. The type represents the accumulation of images of Okinawans produced by the media and
what Khune calls “neo-imperial gaze.” “It is a form of ‘neo-colonial’ oppression through the
‘soft power’ of a culturally stereotyping ‘neo-imperial gaze’ of Japanese tourists” (Khune, 225).
Tomfoolery brings history into re/view. Popo’s work offers a mirror that reflects the
audience/viewer, the performer, and the performance skillfully managing and manipulating the
images of “Okinawan” in a “twilight moment” of decolonial laughter, returning the gaze and
transforming the space into performance art. Beneath the veneer of this sort of comedic humor
lies an ironic wink and grin. In this analysis, I aim to show how Popo’s work shatters dominant
symbols of oppression, long-held stereotypes, or mistaken impressions of Okinawa as a subject,
effectively disrobing the empire and undermining the suppression and dominant media’s
representation of a ‘subaltern subject’ (Khune 2012). Overtly playing on the stereotypes and
mixing metaphors characteristic of ethnic, gender, culture, language, and genres (comedy,
theater, life), Popo, I contend, covertly creates an important third performative space, a
Champuru Opera, wherein signs that signify Okinawa/n are in Fluxus - the subject both
represents and performs neither Okinawa (colonialized) nor Okinawan (homogeneously fixed),
but a heterogeneous and self-determining Okinawan. Champuru Opera is conceptualized by
combining Okinawan humor and Okinawan traditional theatrical form of singing, dancing,
acting, and adlibs, which are sometimes described as Okinawan Opera.

Three Skits by Owarai pōpō (1991 – 1993)

1. Are you Okinawan?

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Man 1: Are you Okinawan?

Man 2: No, I'm not. I'm from Tokyo.
Man 1: Oh, Oh, I'm sorry. (Looks away). Wow, there is rain on the other side.
Man 2: Yes, it's katabui.

The above short dialogue is the format of the skit, Are You Okinawan? in which the one who
tries to hide his Okinawan roots is outed by the questioner. The format is the same, but the
contents will be different. In this scenario, the Man 2 was exposed for he had used katabu, which
is to describe two patterns of rain where one side is raining, but the other side is not. It is also
quintessentially an Okinawan word that is not used in mainland Japan or by Japanese.
The skit is created and performed by a comedy group called Owarai pōpō appeared on
TV from 1991 to 1993, under the leadership of Mahamitsu Tamaki who had already gained
popularity in the 80s establishing his Okinawan comedy troupe in 1983, the Shochiku
[iv]
Kagekidan. [1] Tamaki, who grew up in the 60s, recalls the incident in grade school where he
had been the victim of hogen fuda, a wooden dialect plate was hung on his neck to punish him
for speaking Okinawan, a practice implemented in 1879 (Chibana 2012; Rabson 1999; Sellek
2003). The skit, Are You Okinawan, is a personal account that reflects the experiences of many
who attempted to deny or hide their Okinawan identity to “become” or pass as Japanese. It is
also a poignant reminder of the loss of independence and identity, effectively changing the
national and ethnic naming of its people from Ryukyuan to Okinawan.
Growing up during the economic bubble (1980s), Tamaki was part of a new generation of
Okinawans who enjoyed the eras of economic prosperity and the ethos of the second Okinawa
weave of what Khune calls, the “New Age and spirituality boom” wherein Okinawa became the
tropical paradise for Japanese honeymooners. Young Okinawans moved to Japan in hopes of
launching a successful career, but they met with discrimination and disappointment of
experiencing double booms in which Okinawa and Okinawans were branded as “Tropical
Okinawa”: “Okinawa became a brand of its own with an image that had switched from negative
war memories and US military bases to the stereotyped”(Khune, p. 218). Thus, what Tamaki and
others experienced was the false representation of Okinawans who did not fit the image or
delivered the expectation of the “neo-imperial gaze,” the touristic consumption, and the desired
illusion of Okinawa/n to “perform without the body” the exotic – i.e., Other. Unsettled in this
miasma of two differing expectations (becoming Japanese and performing Okinawan), a turning
point when seeing Terurin’s performance in Tokyo, which awakened. Similarly, Terurin too had
an experience of an awakening after seeing a Hanging Upside Down Ghost, an Okinawan play
about a ghost story in Tokyo. Both cases, hearing the Okinawan sound of music and language
could be said to have brought a visceral effect in the Chimu (gut, liver, heart, soul) that causes an
experience in trinity of body, mind, and spirit, Chimu don don or wasa wasaa (the pounding
sound or unsettling sense of something deep within). Tamaki recognized laughter as an antidote
for pain and suffering, and helps one to reconcile or come to terms with the past by a process of
healing in the present. In 1991, Tamaki established a comedy troupe called Owarai Popo.
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2. Okinawan-English Lesson

Owarai Popo (Popo is the name of Okinawan sweet cake made with black sugar) is a type
of performance. Name is another site of contention that causes pain or pleasure. Okinawan
names are recognizable for they are unique and different from the Japanese names, even if the
kanji is the same, the pronunciation is different. For example, the surname 金城 is read kinjo in
Okinawan or kaneshiro in Japanese, or a castle 城 is read shiro in Japanese, gusuku in Okinawan.
There is also a long tradition in Okinawa of naming women with non-human names—such as
animals, Ushi (cow); rooms in a house, Kama (kitchen area); and household items, Nabe (pan)—
for Okinawan women. In Okinawan plays and theater, characters have names such as taruganii,
sannraa, chiruu, handuguwaa where the last vowels are stretched, the format, which Japanese
language does not have. Under the imperial system and assimilation, many Okinawans had to
hide or change their Okinawanness in order to become Japanese. Some Okinawans changed the
Okinawan pronunciation to Japanese, while others changed completely to leave no trace of
having Okinawan roots. Naming teacher, fūchībā, which means ‘mugwort’ in Okinawan
language, but yomogi in Japanese, is a strategic move not only for laughs, but also to puncture
the walls of silence of Okinawans who were punished for ontological beings. The name like
fūchībā conjures up the Okinawan shame and Okinawan pride while also hailing the Japanese
gaze, which the character is returning its gaze back like a boomerang. The performance, which
centers on Okinawan identity using non-mainstream style and locally specific, addresses the
Okinawan audience in the 90s who are being looked at as the more current formation of an
Okinawan Other.
Against the touristic image of the branded Okinawa/n, PōPō’s performance represents the
everyday people and everyday life, cleverly transforming the mundane into the marvelous
theatrical folly that reflects the social more at the time. In this way, the performance functions as
a critical and creative social commentary. For example, the skits, “Okinawan-English Lesson”,
turns the lesson into learning Okinawan language by performing a kind of Ebonics and blackness
that is specifically Okinawan. That is, it nails the Okinawan champuru style, which does not rely
on the black cultural mimicry often used as a strategy to produce laughs in comedies (i.e., Soul
Tunnel). For Okinawa, there is a content driven from the context in which the postwar Okinawa
is mired in the history of US military occupation and presence in which the borders between
America and Okinawa are fluid and complex in the everyday life of Okinawans. English
language is accessible and the lesson is not imagined but real. Moreover, the presence of blacks
and others in the military who speak in urban intonation is likely. In this context, the skit as a
text performs a double entendre, one points to the plausible situation in real life in which
Okinawans imitate English in Okinawan engrish (Okinawan intonation imitating English of
specific sound). Second, the maneuvering of linguistic and intonation in such a way, the skit
reveals the Japanese common misconception of Okinawans speaking English due to the heavy
presence of American military bases on Okinawa. In both cases, the military presence becomes
central to how, why, and in what manner English is related to Okinawa, but differently. But what
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of Okinawa’s relation to Japan hundreds of years prior? This is a rhetorical question to be

explored later. Instead, I would like to pursue this point on the use of the black-vernacular-
sounding English Okinawan, which I argue is stylistically and strategically represent an
Okinawan champuru word/view.
The use of black cultural signs—black vernacular-sounding English and urban attire and
objects (i.e., boom box)—, Popo intermixes Okinawan attire, language, and gesture employing
black-urban feel as a set for the skit where one cannot deny the black type, stereotyping that
‘reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature by a few, simplified characteristics. … blacks in
popular representation were so common that cartoonists, illustrators, and caricaturists could
summon up a whole gallery of ‘black types’ with a few, simple, essentialized strokes of
difference – thick lips, fuzzy hair, broad face and nose, and so on. Picaninny, Little Black
Sambo, Black Mammy, Aunt Jemima, etc… (Hall: 1997, p249). The term, however, is not fixed
for black body, as it was also used to essentialize characteristics to minorities (i.e., Chinese,
Filipino, Mexican, Hawaiian, Italian, etc. (Aloha Betrayed, Silva), especially those who rebelled,
as backward, lazy, etc. Popo’s use of the speech, attire, and object might be seen as
appropriation, but these black cultural signs do not return to the US colonial origin, but, let me
repeat, “takes us to a different place, to a different beginning” (Walter Mignolo, 2011: 45) in
essence, to Okinawa’s worldview. To make my point more lucid about the significance of the
skit above, I engage with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s notion of signifyin(g).
Signifyin(g) is a rhetorical device that works upon the formal language structure and
produces new and different meanings (Gates 1988). Moreover, it is a black speech act of double-
voiceness, in which trickery, indirections, and other rhetorical performances are elucidated at the
linguistic intersection of signification and signifyin(g). What we see in Popo’s performance is a
doubled-vision of how these signs (black or Okinawan) move across languages (black English
and Okinawan) and gestures (Okinawans and blacks/Americans). Hence, the trickery,
indirections of moving signifiers are apprehended in the content that reveals that the goal of
learning English is redirected in the twist of learning Okinawan language in rhythm and flow of
what is signified as black-English mixed in with Okinawan intonation. The result,
English/Japanese, which is thought to be the primary language, is subordinated in the overt use
of Okinawan and black-English that are often diminished as informal, ghetto, backward, low-
class, and/or uncouth. Mixing signifiers of black and Okinawan, Popo achieves the signifyin(g)
effect of allowing each signified (black/Okinawan) subject to determine its course, illuminating
different trajectories and thereby producing unanticipated and unexpected outcomes. The result,
the empowered Okinawa emerged, and in the process, the black Americans via the American
military presence illuminated as not a sign, but as a (foreign/military) subject in Okinawan
context.

Performance Art-like-life comedy: Champuru Opera

Performance art functions like a method, a pedagogical tool to critically explore topics of
interest (race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, history, culture, society, language, identity,
 9

idea/ideology, art, life, etc.) in creative ways. As such Popo’s performance explores image,
representation, history, identity, language, and idea about Okinawa/n through humor. While
comedy is not performance art, there are recognizable aspects of intermedia, lifelike art and
art/life practices in Popo’s work that blurs the boundaries of art and life. “Art/life,” a sub-genre
of performance art was an art form that explored the crossings of art and life through
performance that pushed the conceptual limits between forms, blurring and obscuring the border
in between. The work, Okinawan Actors Academy, not only presents this crossing, but also
crosses genres of comedy and theater through the critical and creative intra-play of characters
and performance spaces of what I am calling Champuru Opera. In this final next section, I
deconstruct Popo’s comedy skit, Okinawan Actors Academy, that inherits the aspect of lifelike
art to bring into view Okinawan world/view/Okinawanization.

3. Okinawan Actors Academy: Unruly Behaviors:

The comedy sketch Okinawa Actors Academy is a parody of an actual acting school
Okinawa Actors School[1](est. 1983), a hub to train and develop talents for young students
aspiring to become the next big talent in the music and entertainment industry. The major pop
songstress, Amuro Namie (years active, 1992 – 2018) was a major talent that brought fame to the
school.
The sketch[v] opens with the scene of an acting lesson. The scene is a mimicry of the
actual school, but instead of using the modern play or theater, it is Okinawan traditional play that
is being used for the lesson. At the time of the skit, Okinawan Play/Theater, which was the
popular form of art and entertainment for the mass until the 80s. It started to decline in the 60s
when TV, radio, and movies became the people’s choice of entertainment. Okinawan play,
which began informally in the Ryukyu Kingdom era, became a formal theatrical form in the
early 1880s developing into a popular form of entertainment through the postwar period, but
finally closing the curtains in the 80s, the period in which the actual Okinawa Actors School
started its climb toward fame. In this context, the sketch serves as a critique of the modern
capitalistic looting of Okinawan talents in preventing the loss of Okinawan traditional art form
and its function.
At the opening, we see four students preparing to work through a series of acting
exercises to develop the acting skills for Okinawan plays. Representative of the 80s/90s look in
champuru fashion, the students wear Okinawan traditional clothes mixed in with American items
of chiffon see-through light shirt, tight spandex, short satin shorts, the make-up with pink rouge
and lipsticks, earrings, hair bands, and hairpiece. One has the traditional Okinawan kimono,
basaa, with one shoulder out, inside is a black long-sleeve top, a pair of black knee-length shorts,
a legging, and white tennis shoes with white sox. He and others have a headband to complement
the whole look. While students stretch, the teacher arrives and they welcome him with an
Okinawan dance, cachaashii, a common Okinawan traditional dance that usually takes place at
the end of an event or party, counting 1, 2, 3 in sing-song style in Okinawan. The teacher is
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wearing the traditional Okinawan purple fabric is on his head and around his waist, the same way
in Okinawan dance, inside a pair of red shorts are long tights, a vest and a top, a pair of large
gilled gold earrings, and a green feathered fan that common in a Victorian era. Shoes are used in
Okinawan play or dance. The teacher exhibits the first sign of disobedience, the unruly behavior
– a late arrival, sauntering and fanning the feathered fan as he greets the star-struck students.
Time, both waiting and tardy, is perceived differently here, mocking the punctuality of discipline
and order that not only challenges the notion of Time is Money (i.e., the actual Acting School),
but also replaces it with Time is Knowledge. The lateness often signals Okinawan time is a
metaphor for an island time, which is equivalent to what the west calls the people of color time, a
time with flexibility and undisciplined. By overtly playing the teacher's untimely arrival to class,
Popo’s comedy calls into question both the disciplined and unruly behaviors and the cultural and
social meanings that they possess.
When fūchībā the teacher bounces in late with the mischievous grin, students crowd
around the teacher with gyrating gestures of adolescent euphoria. Delightful and proud, fūchībā
immediately begins the class with chanting/singing “one, two, three” in Okinawan language as
everyone performs a playful cachāshī. While instructing the students on how to dance the
cachāshī, the teacher impishly announces to the viewer/audience, “For those who do not like
cachāshī, please leave the room,” breaking the fourth wall that separates the performer and the
viewer. Until this moment in the video (up to 0.53 min.), the actors spoke only the Okinawan
language, but this portion is delivered in Japanese to address the Japanese audience/viewer or
those who try passing as “Japanese.” In a performance convention, breaking the fourth wall,
which separates the line between the audience and actors, is a violation, but Popo trespasses this
line as well as a spontaneous line between actors in the gap within the act for private dialogue
between actors. These breaks can be seen as a comedic technique both purposefully and
accidently that comedians deploy as gags. However, I argue the break serves as a sign to signal
another scene commonly seen at a theater house where the audience talked or yelled to actors
producing a lifelike art spatial atmosphere with no borders. One such example is people’s
recollection of The Upside-Down Ghost, a ghost story about a wife who is murdered by her
husband and returns as a ghost to avenge her killer husband. The drama begins with the scene
when the wife is about to drink the poisoned tea that the husband concocted where her death is
imminent. The moment right before she is about to drink, the audience shouts and/or throws
something like a napkin or chopsticks, yelling, “Don’t drink it, don’t drink it!” What was
remembered is not the story in the play, but the break in which they made the “scene.”
Back to the skit, the teacher switches back to Okinawan language after he announces in
Japanese. And for the next exercise, the teacher asks what is tenko to which the students
enthusiastically and bashfully answer, unko (shit), their bodies writhe with laughter. The laughter
is manifold here because it transforms unko from the dirty word (disciplinary) of real shit to a
lovely object of knowledge (Okinawan). Unko in signifyin’(g) mode delivers a message
something more than the signification of the word as shit. Shit/unko is the answer to whatever
question posed in the sketch.
 11

Doubled-play: untamagiruu

Untamagirū is an Okinawan play (also made into an experimental film) about a mythical
character named untamagirū who lives in the forest and possesses a natural power that allows
him to levitate. Like many superheroes such as Peter Pan, Robin Hood, and Zorro, untamagiru
steals from the rich and gives to the poor. (Okinawa Plays and Films Collection 2008). Owarai
pōpō ’s re-enactment of the play Untamagirū is a play on the actual play to double the scene for
the ski and the storyline of the play into one performative stage. Here, Popo plays both overtly
and covertly the Okinawan subject and the performer subject who takes charge of the body,
resulting in havoc with flying signifiers across and beyond the stage. In the skit, the scene from
the Okinawan traditional story of Untamagirū is used for the acting exercise.
In the re-performance of the Okinawan play Untamagirū on YouTube (3.53 – 4:21 min.),
two actors are appointed to play the leading roles of the protagonist and the antagonist in the
play. When they begin to argue according to the script, the characters, which until now spoke in
an overtly “child-like and feminine” way, begin to speak in a mature tone and sug/gesture of a
strong male character, while still speaking Okinawan. This sound effect takes place in the scene
that doubles as both the sketch and the rehearsal in the sketch, in which the characters gain both
space and subject as a possible stage, enabling the characters to play both “feminine” and
“masculine” back and forth. This sudden character change queers the marking and unmarking of
gender, sexuality, and age in the exchange that takes place in one body that has transformed,
doubled, unstable, and at times invisible or chaotic. With no foreseeable reasoning, the play
experiments with opera that breaks all patterns and signs of opera recognizable, but a champuru
opera in which a female teacher/researcher plays on the piano a high-energy children’s tune like
the ones in Sesame Street. The simple rhythm serves as background music to assist the
movement of the students’ legs to stomp high in the form of a marching band while they sing a
background chorus. The female teacher/researcher goes back to playing that kindergarten tune
To begin performing for the audience, the teacher looks at the camera and speaks in standard and
simple Japanese as if addressing an audience of pre-school children. The performance of this
type was strikingly different from the practice wherein actors act in a child-like manner.
Afterward, the teacher surprised the students and asked them to perform an underground play
and suddenly, the stage darkened and the characters were no longer childlike but radically posed
in their places, on the floor, side, in chair, etc. Moving from a previously noisy scene to the
current dramatic atmosphere, the stage had a sense of an experimental play with various short
words spoken tandemly from the actors, producing a bit of angst through the humor still hanging
low. The voices of actors commingle into a crescendo and finally fade to black. At the end of the
sketch, a student asks, “Is this actor's school?” to which the teacher responds, with a smirk and
with a grin, “This is not actors’ school; this is a school for profit” as if to expose Japanese
corporate model that capitalizes on Okinawan labor, culture and performance of the Other. The
teacher then skips off the stage and a few seconds later, the students skipped off the stage.

Conclusion
 12

Re-performing the play in a contemporary style and context, the sketch stays true to the original
script and creates the “third stage” in which a performance within a performance takes place in a
surrealistic form and style used by an Okinawan filmmaker, Takamine Go. It is a meta-
performance space that emerges as the “third text,” a passage through which the character-
caricature makes an appearance in the exchange where they cross into one another. In the above
skit, addressing three different audiences (the general audience, preschool children, and radical),
Popo’s humor offers various forms of spectacles in which the Okinawan worldview can be
viewed and reviewed in such a way to illuminate the actions of the characters both the play and
the comedy as enacting epistemic disobedience.
Champuru Opera traffics time, space, and place of different times and flows of time, and
in the process, produces a third performative space, allowing the performer to play multiple
subjects within and against one’s signified body in creating an art/life double, enabling the slip
between the Other and the Self. The teacher and the hero are exchangeable here, both deliver the
message but from two different time periods and genres of performance. In this doubled
performance body, fūchībā enacts a form of “double valence”, the “strategic bilingualism”, the
literary strategy used by African American writers in the early African American novels. The
device is understood as resistance, a subversive act to narrate at the meta-level of the novel,
offering multiple modes of communication in the text that open up to the reader. It is a strategy
to serve a political project that moves from the literary to literal reading. For example, “strategic
bilingualism” is a literary device that speaks to a real situation in order to escape and expose
racism: A dark-skinned black man “passes” linguistically by changing his speech patterns
between black vernacular and the master’s language to shift the ending of the story. In the skit,
the play Untamagiruu performed in various forms (Okinawan, Japanese, theatrical, and
adolescence) and the hero untamagiruu dies in the play, but the enduring message lives in the
skit through fūchībā who delivers the message as hero’s double. Moreover, considering the
Okinawa’s spiritual practice of ancestor worship, death is not finite or disconnected to the living.
Thus, untamagiruu’s death is not the end of the story, rather, it is Okinawa’s futurity that lives in
the flow.

[1]
Shochiku Kagekidan parodies Shochiku Kagekidan, Japan’s Opera Company, which existed
from 1928 to 1982(Ortolani 1990: 257–8), a year prior the Okinawa’s Opera Company was
established.

[i]
Coco Fusco and Guillermo Pena Gomez’ famous performance artwork, “Amerindian in
cages” points to the Spanish colonialism of the Indians in 14XX, slavery and colonialization of
 13

Africa, homophobia, and racism that are continuing legacy of the colonization period which
began in 1492.

[ii]
Japan’s invasion in 1609, abolishment of the independent nation in 1879, The Battle of
Okinawa in 1945 in which 200,000 civilians died, the US military occupation from 1945 to 1972,
The Reversion to Japan but the military remained in 1972, and the present moment in which the
undisrupted presence of American military bases now going on for 75 years.

[iii]
In the horrific aftermath of war inside the camp, Buten uttered the unthinkable, nuchnu
gusuugisabira (Let’s celebrate life) and performed a strange combination of song, instrument,
gesture, and dance using Okinawan everyday humor, which eventually made those in despair
laugh, dance, and sing together, transforming hopelessness of reality into a celebration of life
with futurity.

[iv]
http://www.fec.asia/aboutus/index.html
[v]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAtuD7H2GPI

[1] The school is defunct after the boom ended, and moved its operation to Japan in late
90s, at which time opened Dream Planet International School (DPIS), a school based on the
principle similar to OAS. The new school is folded under The Matsushita Institute of
Government and Management, a foundation to develop future leaders. The DPIS is one of the
programs of this institute.[1]

[i] Passing here is defined as a literary device, both as a character and its function, a strategy
used by African American writers in early African American literature. the term “passing” or
“passer” can serve a political function through the creative voice. In these novels, the “passer”
has multiple functions as a “trickster” who represents someone who is transgender, transsexual,
mixed race, or a cross-dresser who cross-performs across the class, gender, ethnic, nationality,
and religious spectrum (Fabi). Traditionally the ‘passer’ is a person who passes as white, and/or
operates on a “line” that aspires toward whiteness; however, in these novels, passing is a strategy
of “double valence” in which “[the] celebration of covert, coded literary practices of opposition
and resistance places the greatest emphasis on the difficulties encountered by African American
authors and on their need to negotiate with white audiences” (4). The passer, whether literary or
real, has the effect of “erasing” the external signs of “blackness” while simultaneously
maintaining the internal difference of an ontological fact of mixedness that operates in tandem.
 14

In the early African American novels, the strategy of “double valence” and “strategic
bilingualism” used by these writers came to be understood as resistance, a subversive act to
narrate at the meta-level of the novel, offering multiple modes of communication in the text that
open up to the reader. It is a strategy to serve a political project that moves from the literary to
literal reading. For example, “strategic bilingualism” is a literary device that speaks to a real
situation in order to escape and expose racism: A dark-skinned black man “passes” linguistically
by changing his speech patterns between black vernacular and the master’s language to shift the
ending of the story.