Where You Are Is Where We Begin

Michelle Fukuyama: History you can walk through

Michele Fukuyama thought she was going to be an English teacher. Fresh out of college, she arrived in Okinawa through the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, where she spent five years developing lessons and leading her students though field trips outside the classroom walls.

But one of those experiences changed the trajectory of her career. A fieldwork study of the Battle of Okinawa opened a window onto a history she had barely known existed-complex, painful, and still visible in the landscape, the culture, and the daily lives of the people around her. That experience helped shape both her academic and professional path.

She returned to school to study museology, or museum studies, conducting oral histories with Okinawans who had grown up under American control. She then placed their testimonies in the Histreet Museum in Okinawa City. Returning to Okinawa for good, she focused her PhD dissertation on the experiences of the Okinawan domestic workers who had been employed by American military families during postwar occupation, recapturing the stories of women who had been largely written out of the historical record.

In 2016, Fukuyama joined UMGC in Asia, where she designed the curriculum for HIST 316N, History of the Ryukyu Islands, and has brought her fieldwork directly into the course. The learners in her classes, many of them servicemembers and their families living on or near U.S. military bases, encounter Okinawan history as living context, rather than as a sequence of dates and political events.

"Whether my students are new to the island, here for just a couple of years, married to an Okinawan, or even Okinawan themselves, I want them to leave the class with even more curiosity regarding the history and culture here," Fukuyama says.

Fukuyama actively builds opportunities to enhance that curiosity. When the course covers the archaeological record of ancient Okinawa, learners visit replicas of homes from 2,000 years ago and can climb inside them. When protests make the news, learners can refer to their study of prior periods of unrest to better understand the historical context.

Fukuyama's explicit ambition is for the course to function as a "grassroots-level tool to improve relations between Okinawans and the Americans who live here," a goal that positions history as something with practical, relational stakes in the present instead of an abstract academic exercise.