The Subaru Telescope and Interimperial Intimacies Between Mauna Kea and Mt. Fuji

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea within a tradition of Japanese militarism and contextualizes the settler colonial dynamics of its construction in Hawaiʻi. The first half analyzes the telescope as a symbol of US-Japanese interimperial partnership and Asian settler colonialism through Japanese astronomers’ claim to “nostalgia” in Hawaiʻi. The second half analyzes Nicole Naone’s film “Mauna Fuji,” which counters Japanese temporalities of nostalgia by critically juxtaposing Mauna Kea and Mt. Fuji. Through a relational reading of Mauna Kea and Mt. Fuji’s shared conditions of militourism, this essay attends to the uneven atmospheric relations between both mountains.

KEYWORDS:

• Imperialism
• astronomy
• science
• Mauna Kea
• Mt. Fuji

Acknowledgments

This research was possible thanks to the generous support of the USC Center for Transpacific Studies and East Asian Studies Center. I’ve had the privilege of sharing this work with audiences at at the Association of Asian American Studies, the American Studies Association, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis, and I want to especially mahalo Christine Hong, Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, and Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado for their feedback. Candace Fujikane, Nayan Shah, and John Carlos Rowe all provided invaluable guidance too. Finally, mahalo nui loa to the anonymous reviewer, and to Nicole Naone and Kaleikoa Kaʻeo, for generously allowing me to include their work and manaʻo in this essay. All mistakes are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Yoshida Noriyuki, “Subaru” ga saguru uchū no hate: Hawai ni dekita sekai-ichi ōkina Nihon no bōenkyō (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūjo), 32. All translations done in this article are my own. Japanese names are presented in the same manner they are published under, meaning that there is some variation in the name order of writers publishing in English and in Japanese. For the most part, surnames are first, followed by the given name. Japanese romanization follows modified Hepburn style.

2. “Japan princess’s visit to include Mauna Kea,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 14, 1999, 9.

3. Alex Salkever, “New scopes give clearer view of origin of cosmos,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 5, 1999; “A New-Generation Telescope for the 21^st Century: Leading the way in computer-controlled observing without compromise!” (The Mitsuo Akiyama Archival Collection, University of Hawaiʻi-Hilo, Hilo, HI, May 1998), http://www.malamamaunakea.org/library/download/index/1998.; Karin Stanton, “Subaru Telescope is a marvel to see,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 12, 2005, 38.

4. Leon Noʻeau Peralto, “Mauna a Wākea: Hānau Ka Mauna, the Piko of Our Ea,” in A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, ed. Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 238. See also Emalani Case, “I Ka Piko, To the Summit: Resistance from the Mountain to the Sea,” The Journal of Pacific History 54, no. 2 (April 3, 2019): 166–81; Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, “Protectors of the Future, Not Protestors of the Past: Indigenous Pacific Activism and Mauna a Wākea,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 184–94.; Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship: Making ‘Modernity,’ ‘Ancient Hawaiians,’ and the Telescopes on Mauna Kea,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 4, no. 2 (2017); Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

5. Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, “We live in the future. Come join us.,” Ke Kaupu Hehi Ale, April 3, 2015, https://hehiale.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/we-are-not-warriors-we-are-a-grove-of-trees/. On competing temporalities on Mauna Kea, see David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile, “On Being Late: Cruising Mauna Kea and Unsettling Technoscientific Conquest in Hawai‘i,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 45, no. 1 (2021).

6. Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, First edition (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 137.

7. On Asian settler colonialism, see Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008) and Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawaiʻi Statehood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

8. Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire, 7.

9. The Associated Press, “Japan Suspends Annual Funding For Thirty Meter Telescope Project,” Honolulu Civil Beat, March 4, 2020, https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/03/japan-suspends-annual-funding-for-thirty-meter-telescope-project/.

10. Moanikeʻala Akaka, qtd. in Aanchal Saraf, “’We’d Rather Eat Rocks’: Contesting the Thirty Meter Telescope in a Struggle over Science and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 11, no. 1 (2020): 159.

11. Interview with Kaleikoa Kaʻeo, April 11, 2024, emphasis mine.

12. For another analysis of projection and Nicole Naone’s work, see Courtney Sato, “Settler Colonial Projections: The Visual Politics of the Interwar Pan-Pacific Movement,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8, no. 2 (2022): 201–32.

13. Abraham Kamakawiwoʻole, qtd. in Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship,” 1.

14. See Hatayama Kunio, “Speech for Reception & Dinner Party by Kunio Hatoyama (Minister of Education, Science, and Culture),” The Mitsuo Akiyama Archival Collection, July 6, 1992, http://www.malamamaunakea.org/library/reference/index/refid/2283-speech-for-reception–dinner-party-by-kunio-hatoyama-minister-of-education-science-and-culture.

15. Dennis Normile, “Subaru Opens Up World for Japan,” Science, New Series, Vol. 283, No. 5402 (January 29, 1999): 627.

16. Takahashi Keitarō, “Kaifu Norio rongu intabyu dai 8-kai: Subaru bōenkyō,” Tenmon Geppō, November 11, 2020, https://www.asj.or.jp/jp/activities/geppou/item/113-11_719.pdf.

17. Howard W French, “On Hawaii, A Telescope Widens Orbit of Japanese,” New York Times, September 19, 1999, 16.

18. French, “On Hawaii.”

19. Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

20. “Mine’s bigger than yours: Japan’s new telescope,” The Economist, December 31, 1998.

21. As scholars such as Shibusawa and Yoshiko Nakano elucidate, the domestication of tropes and imagery of aviation and air power were particularly central to Japan’s postwar rehabilitation. See Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally. See also Yoshiko Nakano, “‘Wings of the New Japan’: Kamikaze, Kimonos, and Airline Branding in Postwar Japan,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 4, no. 1 (2018): 160–86.

22. Benjamin Uchiyama, Japan’s Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 202, emphasis mine.

23. French, “On Hawaii.”

24. Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 113.

25. Ibid.

26. “Tenmon eisei Subaru bōenkyō nado uchū gijutsu bōei-shō ga gunji tenyō kentō Yoshii giin ga shiryō o nyūshu,” Shinbun Akahata, February 3, 2012, https://www.jcp.or.jp/akahata/aik11/2012-02-03/2012020301_03_1.html.

27. Japanese Ministry of Defense, “Defense Programs and Budget of Japan: ~Defense-Strengthening Acceleration Package~ Overview of FY2022 Budget (Including FY2021 Supplementary Budget),” https://www.mod.go.jp/en/d_act/d_budget/pdf/20220420.pdf.

28. Yoshida, Subaru, 29.

29. French, “On Hawaii.”

30. Yujin Yaguchi and Mari Yoshihara, “Evolutions of ‘Paradise’: Japanese Tourist Discourse about Hawaiʻi,” American Studies 45, no. 3 (2004): 98.

31. Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, 2019 Annual Visitor Research Report, by Jennifer Chun, Minh-Chau Chun, Lawrence Liu, Ariana Kwan and Joseph Patoskie (Honolulu: 2019), https://www.hawaiitourismauthority.org/media/5062/2019-annual-report-final-for-posting.pdf, 6.

32. Ibid., 92. It should be noted that there were people of Japanese descent who opposed the development of astronomy on Mauna Kea, such as the former Hawaiʻi County Mayor Herbert Matayoshi and former Governor George Ariyoshi. I want to mahalo Nicole Naone for suggesting their inclusion in this essay.

33. “In Memoriam: Mitsuo Akiyama, 1920–2004,” Nā Kilo Hōkū: The Ones Who Look to the Stars: A Newsletter from the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaiʻi (blog), Summer 2004, https://www2.ifa.hawaii.edu/newsletters/article.cfm?a=168&n=16.

34. “Aloha! Subaru” on Subaru Telescope, presented by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (U.N. Limited), DVD.

35. Kaifu, Subaru, 2, emphasis mine.

36. Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire, 11, emphasis mine.

37. On Asian settler identification with settler state, see Fujikane, Okamura, Saranillio. On Japanese empire’s transnational and diasporic dimensions, see Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

38. Jan TenBruggencate, “Conflicts mount at telescope dedication: Science, nature share Mauna Kea,” Honolulu Advertiser, September 18, 1999, A8.

39. Interview with Nicole Naone, April 23, 2024.

40. “MAUNA FUJI: Video Installation, 2014,” N. Naone, https://www.nicolenaone.com/projects/maunafuji.

41. Case, “I Ka Piko,” 176.

42. John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawaiʻi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 14–5.

43. Ibid., 56, 62.

44. Ibid., 5, 178.

45. Ibid., 149.

46. Ibid., 196.

47. Ibid., 166.

48. Interview with Nicole Naone, April 23, 2024.

49. A.W. Carter’s son, Hartwell Carter, began co-managing. Billy Bergin, “The Reign of Hartwell Carter,” in Loyal to the Land: The Legendary Parker Ranch, 1950–1970, Volume 2 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006), 49.

50. Ibid., emphasis in original.

51. E. Kalani Flores, qtd. in Walter Ritte, “Pohakuloa Now that you know, do you care,” YouTube, uploaded on July 7, 2017.

52. Bergin, “The Reign of Hartwell Carter,” 53.

53. Thomas Kaser, “Japan forces want to train at Pohakuloa on Big Isle,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 5, 1991, 3.

54. Jon Yoshishige, “Japan troops hone their skills,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 16, 1993, 3. It is not clear if the $250,000 was paid per year or for the multiple years.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid. In Yoshishige’s article, the training ground in northern Japan is referred to as “Ojojima,” though there is no such place called that in Japan. The JSDF’s 2^nd Anti-Tank Helicopter Unit trains at Kamifurano in Hokkaido. It should be noted that Hokkaido is Indigenous lands seized from the Ainu during Japan’s 19^th century and ongoing settler colonialism.

57. Ibid.

58. H. Byron Earhart, Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011).

59. Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 33, 57.

60. Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 196.

61. Ibid.

62. Naone, “Mauna Fuji.”

63. Nariai and Kaifu, “Japanese telescope.”

64. Uchiyama, Japan’s Carnival, 202, emphasis mine.

65. On modernity and Mauna Kea, see Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship.”

66. Kuwada, “We live in the future.”

67. Ibid.

68. Tanaka Eriko and Hatakeyama Teruo, “Nihonjin no Fujisankei no hensen to gendai no Fujisankei.” Chigaku Zasshi 124, no. 6 (2015): 953–63.

69. Anthony Kuhn, “In Japan, overtourism is raising concerns about the environment at Mt. Fuji,” National Public Radio, November 5, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/11/05/1210734177/in-japan-overtourism-is-raising-concerns-about-the-environment-at-mt-fuji.

70. Sayama Hiroshi and Nishida Masanori, “Fujisan ni okeru sengo no bika seisō katsudō no hensen,” Randosukēpu Kenkyū 64, no. 5 (2000): 485–8.

71. Teresia Teaiwa, “Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Epeli Hauʻofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the ‘Polynesian’ Body,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 251.

72. I could not obtain permission to reproduce any photographs here. You can access an archive of photos and videos of all past Camp Fuji Live Thermal Exercises on the website of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (in Japanese): https://www.mod.go.jp/gsdf/event/fire_power/index.html.

73. Hiroshi and Masanori, “Fujisan ni okeru sengo no bika seisō katsudō no hensen,” 486.

74. Ibid., 487.

75. Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, 107. On water and Mauna Kea, see also Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, “Protectors of the Future”; Case, “I ka Piko.”

76. Ibid., 114.

77. Yasuhara Masaya, et al., “Overview of the Special Issue ‘Groundwater in Mt. Fuji,’” Chigaku zasshi 126, no. 1 (2017): 25–27.

78. Ibid., 25.

79. County of Hawaiʻi General Plan, February 2005, https://www.planning.hawaiicounty.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/301643/637204664141830000.

80. Kīhei de Silva, “Maunakea,” Kaʻiwakīloumoku: Pacific Indigenous Institute, https://kaiwakiloumoku.ksbe.edu/article/mele-maunakea.

81. “Written Direct Testimony of E. Kalani Flores,” https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/mk/files/2016/10/B.02a-wdt-EK-Flores.pdf, 21.

82. Neel Ahuja, “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2 (May 9, 2015): 377.

83. Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, 7.

84. Flores, qtd. in Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, 125.

85. Jody Berland, “Mapping Space: Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body,” in North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 242.

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Sam Ikehara

Born and raised on Oʻahu, Sam Ikehara is currently a UC President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work appears in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and is forthcoming in American Quarterly.