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Swaying, Swinging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

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Sakiyama Tami (1954-), real name Taira Kuniko, was born on Iriomote Island, the largest of the Yaeyama island group in Okinawa Prefecture, where she lived until age fourteen when her family moved to Koza (present-day Okinawa City). Sakiyama graduated from the Department of Law, Economics, and Literature at the University of the Ryukyus. She began publishing in Okinawan periodicals in 1979 and in mainland Japanese literary magazines, a conventional means of launching a literary career, starting in 1988.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2016

References

Notes

1 According to Japanese custom, ancestors are remembered through rituals held on the seventh, forty-ninth, and one-hundredth days after their deaths. Additional ceremonies are held on the first, third, seventh, thirteenth, seventeenth, twenty-third, twenty-seventh, thirty-third, fiftieth, and one-hundredth year anniversary of their deaths.

2 “Bub-bon dance” captures the punning of “awa odori,” here the dance of the bubbles (awa meaning “bubble”), and “Awa odori,” a kind of “bon” dance to celebrate and remember ancestors in the summer obon season in Tokushima Prefecture, the former Awa Province.