Chie Ikeya
(2005 - 2006)
Contact Information:
ci14@ucornell.edu
Bio
Chie Ikeya completed her doctoral degree in History from Cornell University in 2005 for her dissertation, "Gender, History and Modernity: Representing Women in Twentieth Century Colonial Burma.” While in residence at the University of Washington, Dr. Ikeya's research, titled "Miscegenating Women, Half-Caste Children: Legacies of the Japanese Occupation of Burma during the Second World War (1942-1945)," focused on war narratives by and about the women who consorted with or married Japanese soldiers and who bore children by these soldiers, and compared discourses of mixed unions and miscegenation in Burma during the period of British colonial rule and during the Occupation. Her project examined the role that discourses of sexual transgressions have played in histories of Southeast and East Asia, and engaged with contemporary scholarly debates about the place of the Japanese Occupation in the history of the region. Dr. Ikeya was in residence at the Simpson Center for the Humanities during the 2005-06 Academic Year.
Research Narrative
“Oh Sein Kyi, Sein Kyi,
You have erred, you have erred.
To Tokyo he has left, your Japanese lord,
Left you, he has, rotund with child.”
(Burmese saying)
Born to a Japanese father and an Anglo-Burmese mother, I spent approximately the first ten years of my life living in Japan where I learned about the horrors of the atomic bomb and the inhumane suffering that the Second World War had unleashed on the “innocent” women and children in Japan. When I moved to BurmaBurma seemed to harbor either largely fond memories of their "Asian" comrades or had no significant recollections of the Occupation at all, with one exception: the prevalence of a Burmese saying that chastises a Burmese woman who is abandoned with child by her Japanese husband, who was presumably a soldier. The saying turned out to be one of the most, if not the most, common “memory” of the Occupation. If such unions or sexual relations were occurring to such a degree that warranted popular social commentary, why had I not met a single child of such wartime unions? Of all the aspects of the Occupation that people in Burma could have remembered, why have relationships between Japanese soldiers and Burmese women become the focal point of Burmese collective memory? How did this memory influence the ways that my parents' marriage was viewed in Burma only half a century after the war?
