“Just Enough Mystery”: Multivocal Afterlives of a Tokugawa Refugee in Japan and the United States, 1868–2018

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the life and afterlives of Okei, a political refugee from the Japanese Boshin Civil War (1868–69), who became the first Japanese woman interred in North American soil. Looking at a shared space of commemoration, in this case a grave site in California, this paper tracks how Okei’s memorialization on both sides of the Pacific constructed specific communal identities over a hundred and fifty years. Okei’s legacy has been consciously constructed by different actors to at once prove the resiliency of the Japanese spirit, provide an origin story for Japanese America, glorify Japanese expansionism, promote U.S.–Japanese friendship, establish regional prestige, and embody internationalism. Despite these multivocal trans-Pacific interpretations, all renderings of Okei’s story share one key similarity: the manipulation of history to empty Okei’s life of its divisive political context. A history replaced by multiple myths, the Okei narrative came to express contrasting yet parallel identities grounded in that lonely hill in California.