What is the role of Oceania in the history of the Japanese Empire? Historians have long sought to write sea and islands into the empire, keeping the apparently inconvertible encoding of Indigenous memory at arm’s length. This contribution inverts such hierarchies by writing Japan into the framework of Oceanian history instead. Centred on the life and afterlives of Mori Koben, it explores genealogies that sprawl out from Chuuk Lagoon along genealogical connections with overseas pasts and futures. Indigenous memory annexes colonial pasts into an ‘ancestral space-time’ of modern Micronesia.
My search for modern Micronesia is a prompt to reconsider historiographical choices by foregrounding the meanings of migration, kinship and postcolonial dependencies. Disparate structures of the past or practices and materialities of memory can inform novel modalities of historical inquiry––methods attuned to the multitude of possible storylines and to the contingency of meaning on social context. I argue that engaging with Micronesian modalities of knowing at a methodological level can inspire new ways to meet the living memory where it stands: at the intersection of science, literature and artistic expression.
