About

Davinder Bhowmik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature at the University of Washington. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Modern Japanese Literature from the University of Washington, as well as B.A. degrees in Japanese Language and English Literature from the same institution. His fields of interest include 20th and 21st-century Japanese literature and Okinawan fiction. His current research projects include a book manuscript titled “Off-Base: The Rhetoric of Peace in Contemporary Okinawan Literature” and an anthology of Japanese fiction and poetry from Okinawa co-edited with Steve Rabson. Bhowmik has authored works such as 'Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance' and has contributed to various scholarly publications. He teaches courses on modern Japanese literature, cinema, and culture, and actively engages in research related to Okinawan identity, resistance, and literature.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Art
• Law
• Media studies
• Aesthetics
• Classics
• Anthropology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Women and Aftermath: Koza as Topos in Literature from Okinawa—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami

  2025-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, Koza, a military base town adjacent to the largest US Air Force base in the Asia-Pacific, has served as fertile ground for the setting of literature from Okinawa. The writing of Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko and, in particular, Sakiyama Tami illustrates the impact the US military has had on residents of Koza from the dispossession of land to aircraft and vehicular accidents to rape and murder. Their writing on aging bar hostesses, vibrant mixed-race children, and intrepid tourists rails against interminable war, the loss of home, and violated bodies. Furthermore, their work stands counter to male writers’ literature of Koza in the form of indelible female characters who challenge depictions of passivity through bold action.

  PublisherDOI

• Women and Aftermath: Koza as Topos in Literature from Okinawa—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami

  2023-02-15

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 20 Women and Aftermath: Koza as Topos in Literature from Okinawa—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History

  Chapter 20 Women and Aftermath: Koza as Topos in Literature from Okinawa—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami was published in Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers on page 309.

  PublisherDOI

• Women and Aftermath:

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2023-01-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan by Sabine Frühstück

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Reviewed by: Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan by Sabine Frühstück Davinder L. Bhowmik (bio) Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan. By Sabine Frühstück. University of California Press, Oakland, 2017. xi, 276 pages. $85.00, cloth; $34.95, paper; $34.95, E-book. The focus of this magnificently illustrated monograph on children, war, and play in Japan's modern and contemporary eras is on the use value of the metaphorical child in an array of textual and visual media. In a nutshell, Frühstück's argument is that children and childhood are instruments by which war is naturalized and peace sentimentalized. That children are similarly deployed in times of national conflict and in the absence of war is the paradox alluded to in the work's subtitle. Playing War is comprised of two parts, "Playing War" and "Picturing War." "Playing War" consists of two chapters, "Field Games" and "Paper Battles"; chapters on "The Moral Authority of Innocence" and "Queering [End Page 549] War" make up "Picturing War." In the first body chapter, "Field Games," Frühstück examines how children conceive of war as play on the ground, on paper, and on the screen and argues that children's "little wars" connect to the "larger wars" the nation-state of Japan engaged in beginning with the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars and extending to the Asia-Pacific War. Readers learn how, from the Meiji period onward, elites in government and education agreed on the importance of raising children to be prepared for war and debated about how best to achieve this end. Following Karatani Kojin whose "The Discovery of the Child" posits the "child" of today was only of recent vintage, Frühstück explains the process whereby in late nineteenth-century Japan the child becomes distinguishable from the adult and molded through education into a citizen-subject. In her 2016 ethnography, The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan, Andrea Gevurtz Arai expounds on this point: [K]ey theorists and historians of the modern category of childhood— Jacqueline Rose, Claudia Casteneda, Carolyn Steedman, Denise Riley, Stefan Tanaka, and Karatani Kojin—each situate issues of youth management and control within the new times of capitalist modernity and the structures and timelines of comparison that modern nation-states began to impose on each other.1 Through an analysis of contemporary newspapers, textbooks, and journals, Frühstück shows how military play (think King of the Hill) was repeatedly promoted as a means of preparing for war. Indeed, the author argues, such play soon became normalized, and by naturalizing the advance from playing to making war, Japan's elite created a clear trajectory from child to soldier (p. 56). The author deftly uses primary and secondary sources to build her argument, as demonstrated by including discussion of, for example, global concerns about the effects of modernity on children. American historian Lisa Jacobson noted that many adults worried that "an effeminate, postfrontier urbanism was robbing their boys of virility" and added that Daisy Air Rifles promised "to restore manly vigor to pampered middle-class boys" (p. 45). Despite all that separated them, Frühstück concludes that the child is the precursor to the soldier, that child and soldier are both liminal, and that each is the infinite mirror images of the other (p. 56). Having established a link between child and soldier in chapter 1, in "Paper Battles" the author shows how children's war games, which often included detailed maps, became ever more bound to the development of children's bodies and minds as Japan moved from nation formation to empire building. Sugoroku, games "similar to the ancient Indian game Snakes [End Page 550] and Ladders (known in the United States as Chutes and Ladders)" (p. 64), would presumably reverse the deleterious effects of modernity by allowing children to imagine invasion and war. Children's publications, rife with pictorial maps, added a geographical-imperialist dimension to reading. Wartime cartoons like Norakuro depicted a lowly dog-soldier steeped in adult notions of racial superiority, colonization, and just war (p. 84). In the 1950s...

  PublisherDOI

• Unruly Subjects in Shun Medoruma’s ‘Walking a Street Named Peace’ and Miri Yū’s<i>Tokyo Ueno Station</i>

  Wasafiri · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Sociology

  (2020). Unruly Subjects in Shun Medoruma’s ‘Walking a Street Named Peace’ and Miri Yū’s Tokyo Ueno Station. Wasafiri: Vol. 35, Japan: Literatures of Remembering. Guest edited by Elizabeth Chappell, Hiromitsu Koiso and Yasuhiko Ogawa, pp. 60-66.

  PublisherDOI

• Subaltern Identity in Okinawa

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Imagining the Unimaginable? Sound and Fury in Öshiro Tatsuhiro's "Oh, Futenma!"

  Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2018-12-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

• Hope

  Japan focus · 2016-06-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  On June 26, 1999, the Asahi , a major Japanese newspaper, published a very short story by Okinawa's most critically acclaimed writer of recent years, Medoruma Shun. The brevity of this piece belies its impact on readers. Unsettling in both form and content, the story depicts the constraints of everyday life in Okinawa, a small island on which nearly 75 percent of Japan's United States military bases sit on less than one percent of Japanese soil. It is here where, owing to the terms of the United States-Japan Security Treaty, Okinawans have since the end of the Pacific War lived with violent crimes and deadly accidents endemic to the vast U.S. military presence. In this story, the infamous 1995 rape by three U.S. military servicemen of a 12-year old Okinawan schoolgirl serves as a backdrop. It is a fictional expression of the powerlessness many Okinawans feel, long oppressed by the governments of Japan and the United States, and of the extreme action one individual takes in response to this lack of power.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Seirai Yūichi, translated by Paul Warham,<i>Ground Zero, Nagasaki: Stories</i>

  Japanese Studies · 2016-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Seirai Yūichi, translated by Paul Warham, Ground Zero, Nagasaki: Stories." Japanese Studies, 36(1), pp. 144–145

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul S. Atkins

  1 shared

• 英治 吉川

  1 shared

• Edward Mack

  1 shared

• Michael S. Molasky

  1 shared

• Fuki Wooyenaka Uramatsu

  1 shared

• Steve Rabson

  1 shared

Labs

• Davinder Bhowmik LabPI