Amerasia Journal
Ikehara, S. (2023). The Subaru Telescope and Interimperial Intimacies Between Mauna Kea and Mt. Fuji. Amerasia Journal, 49(3), 167–188.
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.
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.
Against Kaifu’s feeling of nostalgia, which projects onto Hawaiʻi a narration of the past tailored to justify present-day desecration, Nicole Naone’s film “Mauna Fuji” formulates its own vision of Mauna Kea’s past, one of uneven militarized geographies that bind it to Mt. Fuji.
“Mauna Fuji” opens with footage of Mt. Fuji projected atop a retired paniolo—the Hawaiian word for cowboy, and in this case, specifically a Parker Ranch cowboy—who gazes directly at the camera. Along with this figure, “Mauna Fuji” features two young Japanese boys playing with one another. Projected atop them is a variety of footage that mark a collision of different times and spaces: shots of multiple telescopes on the summit, of Japanese educational material about Subaru written for children, and of gatherings to protect Mauna Kea from the TMT. “All three were first shown what would be projected,” Naone explains on her website, “and were then asked to behave, dress, and be—in response or not, to what they saw.” “Mauna Fuji” makes use of collision as its central aesthetic strategy to elucidate the need to understand Subaru and its construction through multiple genealogies of empire, and it critiques not only the construction of the Subaru Telescope, but also the liberal multicultural structures of feeling that made it possible in the telescope’s emphasis on children’s education as a universal good.
The various genealogies that collide in a film like “Mauna Fuji” can only be traced through an interimperial frame, one that would enable us to read the telescopes as part of a longer genealogy of conquest, one that spans the slopes of Pōhakuloa to the summit of Mauna Kea. This aesthetics of collision brings Mt. Fuji to Hawaiʻi and Japanese children to the summit of Mauna Kea, to the telescopes constructed in their name, rendering visible what has primarily been felt and making clear how the interimperial project collides onto Japanese settler subjectivity. If, as I write earlier, diasporic subjects can be emotionally recuited to projects of settler colonialism and imperialism, a question that remains is how they may be reoriented to a project of relational, multi-sited decolonization and deoccupation. Such a radical shift necessitates what Emalani Case has called being “pushed to the summit,” a condition which is not just about physical movement, but “psychological disruption, or dis-ease” that is inherent to a radical reorientation to the world. I argue that the film’s aesthetics of collision produce this “dis-ease,” elucidating the possibility of falling out of sync with the nationalist and imperialist rhythms of affective alignment and synchronicity. These ruptures across time and space open up possibilities for modes of seeing beyond what E. Kalani Flores has called “the telescoping effect,” which I will return to at the end of this paper.
The importation of cattle, the allocation of land for Parker Ranch, the militarism that demanded the creation of Pōhakuloa Training Area—these instances of colonial violence do not happen in a distinct time and space independent of Mauna Kea, but continue to unfold here and now in relation to the postwar intrusions of the telescopes. In Naone’s film, it is the figure of the paniolo that carries the weight of these cartographies of multilayered violences. Through his presence, we are attuned to the continuity between these geographies of expansion, wherein the nineteenth century frontier of the South Seas paradise serves as the condition of possibility for the upward frontier of space. The paniolo’s unwavering gaze raises a crucial question: what does he see when he looks at Mt. Fuji?