Library Director: Takeshi MIYAGI
Takehi Miyagi

The present exhibition is held as an event marking one year after the death of the first Okinawan writer who won the Akutagawa Prize, Tatsuhiro OSHIRO, who passed away in October last year and as a pre-event of the 7th Uchinanchu World Festival to be held in October next year.

Our library received from Tatsuhiro OSHIRO the donation with about 10,000 materials, such as manuscripts of his own hands, and we created the Tatsuhiro Oshiro Collection in 2010. OSHIRO has written several novels, dramas, kumiodori scripts, essays that have as its theme the history and culture of Okinawa, promoting the Okinawan literature of the post-war, having provided an immense service for the promotion of art and culture of this province.

The Short-story NOROESUTE TETSUDO (The Northwest Railway) has as its theme the Okinawan immigrants and was inspired by his trip to South America in 1978, listening to the experience of Kame OSHIRO, an old lady who emigrated before the war, of the first group that emigrated to Brazil, known as KASATO-MARU Emmigrants. The present work represents the life of an Okinawan in the initial period of emigration to Brazil, while expressing in the form of literature the feelings related to the arduous struggle with which the emigrants who launched themselves abroad facced abroad and longing for home, being a rare work.

In this exhibition we will make available materials such as the manuscript of NOROESUTE TETSUDO and OSHIRO's creation notebook that are part of the Tatsuhiro Oshiro Collection and also, for the first time, the interview audio of Kame OSHIRO, thanks to the collaboration of several entities. Also, we are presenting the rare materials such as photos before and after the war that were borrowed from institutions in Japan and abroad, such as the Okinawa Kenjin Association of Brazil, the Japan National Diet Library and the Institute for Latin American Studies at Rikkyo University.

The 7th Uchinanchu World Festival is scheduled for October next year. We hope that through this exhibition the largest number of Okinawa prefecture citizens will be interested in the uchinanchu that have launched abroad and that we could expand and continue the new Uchina Network.

October 30, 2021
Okinawa Prefectural Library
Library Director: Takeshi MIYAGI