Book Project: The Search for Modern Micronesia – Genealogies of a Colonial Past

On February 6, 2023, the governor of Kōchi prefecture in Shikoku, Japan, welcomed a delegation from Chuuk State, Micronesia, for the quintennial celebration of kinship and shared heritage between the prefecture and the Pacific lagoon. By convention, the celebration is centered on the legacy of one Kōchi man named Mori Koben (森小弁 1869–1945) who set up a trading enterprise in Chuuk as early as 1892. Trying his luck as a self-made advisor to the chief, and marrying a little later the chief’s eleven year-old daughter, Mori held out the period of German colonial rule (1899–1914) and paved the way for the Japanese take-over of the islands in World War I. Mori was as much a champion of Japan’s colonial overture as he remains an eminent figure in the lagoon’s historical identity: according to the Japanese Embassy in Kolonia, as many as 2,000 claim kinship ties to this harbinger of empire. After the celebrations of the pioneer’s 150th birthday in 2019, hosted in Chuuk by former Micronesian president Emanuel Mori – himself a direct descendant of Mori’s –, this year’s commemoration in Kōchi was more modest, with Chuukese governor Alexander Narruhn, his advisor Roger Shigeru Mori, and the state’s vice-minister of public health, Anthony Mori.

The genealogical ties apparent in this episode are the living remembrance of a colonial past that has hardly been processed beyond the affected community. What few scholarly accounts have been produced of Micronesia’s modern experience to date remained centered on the agendas of colonizers that came and left, or on the ultimate disaster of the Pacific War.[4] After the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945, the islands of Micronesia found themselves subject to yet another outside administration, but one that arguably had more interests in continuing rather than unmaking the colonial legacy they found. By the 1950s, after all, the cold war had turned Japan into America’s most important ally, and Micronesia into a central piece of naval infrastructure. This political reality is reflected in an academia that – consciously or not – reinforces geopoliticized concepts of the Pacific. While governments and corporations pour funds into think tanks, security studies and policy-oriented research, the humanities are all but reduced to each researcher’s private funds. As a result, most outsiders look toward the region as a mere way of passing, as a trove of natural resources, or as the negligible pawns of empire.

How, then, can the past of Micronesia proper, with its diverse set of trans-colonial experiences, be written into global history? My Search for Modern Micronesia starts out with the experimental inversion of epistemic hierarchies. What if values, categories and concepts as they descend from Native discourses, were the guiding principles based on which the colonial archive is reexamined? What if we regarded Western academic knowledge as an ethnically specific convention, and instead applied the analytical and narrative tools of a colonial vernacular? What questions may emerge from such experimental writings pertaining to silent archives, hierarchies of agendas, and the very definition of knowledge? The project is exploratory in a number of ways: it draws attention to a “forgotten colony” and sheds light down those rarely-walked aisles of imperial archives populated by the Oceanian past. But more importantly than that, it shall confront dead records with living conversations between disparate medialities and systems of knowledge. Engaging with the Micronesian experience at a methodological level necessitates abandoning the rigid separations between humanistic disciplines and meeting the living memory where it stands: at the intersection of history, literature and artistic expression.