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This book is a collection of interwoven historical narratives that present an intriguing and little known account of the Ogasawara (Bonin) archipelago and its inhabitants. The narratives begin in the seventeenth century and weave their way through various events connected to the ambitions, hopes, and machinations of individuals, communities, and nations. At the center of these narratives are the Bonin Islanders, originally an eclectic mix of Pacific Islanders, Americans, British, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and African settlers that first landed on the islands in 1830. The islands were British sovereign territory from 1827 to 1876, when the Japanese asserted possession of the island...
Typescript version of the London Constable & Co. 1915 edition; text may be incomplete.
Like my two other books about security and territorial issues in the U.S.-Japan relationship, The Origins of the Bilateral Okinawa Problem: Okinawa in U.S.-Japan Relations, 1945-19523 and The Return of the Amami Islands: The Reversion Movement and U.S.-Japan Relations, 4 this is first and foremost a study on the "intra-alliance" dynamics in which one country, the United States, continued to occupy and administer islands that were recognized as Japanese territory but, for a number of reasons, the United States and its wartime allies felt necessary to continue to administer. The longer this control continued, the more unnecessary it was seen by increasingly larger segments of the public and go...
Many inhabitants of the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands in the northwestern Pacific Ocean speak a mixture of English and Japanese that resulted from the islands unique and complicated history. The development of Bonin English began with the arrivalon previously uninhabited islandsof men and women speaking eighteen European and Austronesian languages in the early nineteenth century. As the islanders intermixed, their native languages intertwining, the need arose for a common language and shared means of communication. Eventually, a pidgin version of Englisha language once merely one among the islanders languagesemerged as the preferred method of communication as well as a strong symbol of island identity. As Bonin English developed among second- and third-generation islanders, it was further complicated by the arrival of thousands of Japanese speakers. Increasingly, these formerly western islanders became bilingual, and by the mid-twentieth century Bonin English had evolved to incorporate elements of Japanese. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of Bonin English and the complex sociolinguistic factors that have influenced its endurance and metamorphosis.