In global artworld imaginaries, there are few more evocative cultures than Hawaiʻi and Japan. Exhibit curators have a good sense for these things, as demonstrated by the special exhibits headlining the British Museum in the spring of 2026.
Hawaiʻi and Japan. We know the iconic images: Hawaiʻi’s waterfalls, palm trees, turquoise water under red summer sun; Japan’s samurai, Zen temples, green tea under crimson autumn leaves. Many also know the painful histories underneath. Native Hawaiian artist-activist-scholar Haunani-Kay Trask has outlined the manufacturing of Hawaiʻi’s tourist images—its “lovely hula hands” (1999)—as corporate exploitation [1]; Noenoe Silva speaks of “aloha betrayed” (2004) [2]. And scholar-activists working at the colonial borderlines of Japan’s Okinawan communities in the south and Ainu in the north remind us of Japan’s imperial erasures of Indigenous peoples.
Less known are the historical connections between these communities—Japan-Okinawa-Hawaiʻi—cast against the foreground of colonial encounters with Great Britain and the United States. In 1778 James Cook landed in the Hawaiian Islands. Initially welcomed, he was killed the following year after attempting to seize the ruling aliʻi (chief), Kalaniʻōpuʻu, as a hostage during a dispute over a longboat. Over the following decades, the independent island kingdoms were united through diplomacy and warfare under Kamehameha I, and a sovereign Kingdom of Hawaiʻi gained international recognition through treaties with Britain, France, and the United States in 1843. Japanese migrants first arrived in 1868, with large-scale immigration beginning in 1885. The first organized migrants from Okinawa (formerly the Ryūkyū Kingdom before its annexation by Japan in 1879) arrived in 1900. By 1920, people of Japanese ancestry—including many from Okinawa—comprised approximately 43 percent of Hawaiʻi’s population compared to 16 percent Native Hawaiians [3].
Immigrants from elsewhere followed—Korea, China, Philippines, Portugal, Micronesia, and still more from continental America. Today these ancestries make up much of Hawaiʻi’s population, while also contributing to the ongoing displacement of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) populations.
Research as Healing
In light of these heavy histories, with unequal movements and mixing of people, capital, food, language, tradition, and art, are there ethical ways to navigate hegemonies of cultural exchange that recognize the past but can also heal from it? Can research on and through cultural hybridity ever itself contribute to healing?
I draw this question directly from colleagues and friends at a Native-Hawaiian operated NPO called Hoʻoulu ʻĀina, part of a community health center named Kōkua Kalihi Valley (KKV) that serves a predominantly Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander (ANHPI) population in the Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu. When I joined KKV as a grant writer in 2023, I learned how people like Puni Jackson (Hoʻoulu ʻĀina Program Director) and Megan Inada (Research Coordinator) approach research-as-healing, which had developed over many years of working closely with the community.
This form of research seeks not merely to know but to establish a relation through shared inquiry that mutually uplifts. KKV storytellers say that despite the challenges, the community work they do has also been joyous. They tell stories of how the organization arose in the 1970s from the efforts of neighborhood Super Aunties who went door-to-door asking community members what they needed. Healing arises here through relations. Therefore, if research is to heal, it must include everyone. Although after a year in connection with the community I had only scratched the surface, I couldn’t see why else to research.
When later I joined an international research project based in London on the anthropology of joy, I couldn’t think of better experts than my former colleagues at KKV. In May 2026, just as the British Museum Exhibit “Hawaiʻi: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans” had reached its end, Hoʻoulu ʻĀina leaders Puni and Casey Jackson—farmers, artists, educators, land stewards, and healers/practitioners of lāʻau lapaʻau (herbal medicine)—made space in their wildly demanding schedules to visit London to share with us their approaches to community, work, and research.
Research as Ceremony
In Hawaiian protocol, shared across oceanic cultures and resonating with practices in Japan, relationships start—where they start well—in ceremony. These might include words of welcome (or sometimes chants [oli] or song [mele]), gifts, and sharing food and drink from a common bowl. In our case Casey had brought in his carry-on luggage (his check-in luggage was mysteriously lost) a large kānoa (bowl) and dried ‘awa (known as kava elsewhere in Oceania) processed from a plant grown several years on land in Kalihi. He had also brought five ‘apu (coconut-shell drinking vessels) he carved himself, each unique to a member of our five-person research team, four of whom he knew only in name.
Sharing ‘awa smooths conversations and deepens relations, in part by expanding connections with others who grow a web of interdependence—so long as the web is strengthened through practices of further sharing, reciprocity, and responsibility. If the relationships are trusted, says Puni, one can go straight to the depths of sharing across various borders, where healing can happen over time and in modes of relation that recognize the joy of connecting—even while acknowledging painful histories.
In this sense, research not only begins in relationships (or what anthropologists in a more extractive mode of relating in the past had called “rapport-building”); rather, research fundamentally is the relationships one cultivates—and often also its fruits, methods, and purpose.
The Arts of Emplacing Research
Relationship building in research that heals takes place not only with people but also—primarily so—with place. Puni, Casey, Megan, and many others stewarding ancestral lands in upland Kalihi have embodied an ethos of aloha ‘āina, of loving land, and of mālama ‘āina, of caring for land, in ways that allow land to care for the communities that live there. Therefore, because histories of Kalihi also run through histories of displacement from land, in part by waves of migrants from Japan and the continental US, healing from those histories is helped by reconnecting (often together) with land.
The British Museum’s Exhibit Hawaiʻi: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans, for all the justified concern that this colonial institution would not, could not, get this right, placed land at the center of its exhibit. It did so with the help of Native Hawaiian co-curators. One enters the exhibit with a degree of protocol, welcomed in a sound recording of one of the Kingdom’s most honored oli (chants), Eia Hawaiʻi, voiced by Laʻakea Perry:
Eia Hawaiʻi,
He moku, he kanaka
He kanaka Hawaiʻi ē
He kanaka Hawaiʻi
He kama na kahiki
Here is Hawaiʻi,
An island, a person
Hawaiʻi is a person
A person is Hawaiʻi
A child of Kahiki
As Native Hawaiian stewards describe, in connecting with the exhibit’s mea Makamae (treasured objects) one also connects with ancestral lineages that blend kinship with nature. As Exhibition Co-Steward Kanani Enos writes of one figure in its gallery label:
Being in the presence of this kiʻi (image) connects me not only to my kūpuna (ancestors), but to the elements and natural cycles that fed them. It takes me on a journey to deep ancestral forests, to a place of birth. From germinating seed, sprouting and growing, to the pule (prayers) and ceremonies that gave this tree a new life and purpose, this kiʻi carries the intelligence of our ancestors. Its existence today continues to teach and inspire. (Kanani E., Exhibition Co-Steward)
Certain places and things hold power, a power inseparable from its emplacement. This is one of many reasons the curation of objects in museums far away from native places is so fraught. But some Native Hawaiian curators who, as the exhibit title reflects, crossed oceans to share their stories, also say there is something to celebrate in such exhibits, something to (dare) feel joyful about. Following their lead, are there ways of experiencing these exhibits that recognize the trauma of colonialism but are not reduced to it?
When Puni and Casey arrived in London the exhibit had unfortunately ended, but they visited some of its mea makamae in the intimate spaces of The British Museum’s archives. One can imagine such a visit feeling heavy. Puni and Casey again brought ceremony with them to smooth relations, introducing themselves in oli to the objects and ancestors long waiting for them. They were meeting again Hawaiʻi, a person, an ancestor, family. In this sense the homecoming was also joyful, light, full of love, laughter, and care.
I like to think the mea makamae were also happy to see their descendants, and to be held by them in loving hands. Puni and Casey handled the objects like the kūpuna (ancestors) and kahuna (experts) who made them. Casey and Puni are carvers themselves. So when holding a paddle they might feel the way it catches the water, or how the big belly of a canoe sits in the sea. There was a moment when Puni, gazing at the intricately carved familiar facial features of one ki’i (image), voiced in delight: “Hiii, I know you!” The ki’i must have known Puni too, proud and pleased to reconnect with a native daughter.
Healing Fieldwork
Researchers with the AnthropoloJOY project ask in collaboration with our own co-stewards, such as Puni and Megan who are formal advisors on our team, what can joy teach us of and in the midst of crisis, hardship, and heavy historical legacies? What can it allow us to newly see in the past and to reconcile in the present? (See this talk on joy and natality by AnthropoloJOY project leader Joanna Cook). And how can research as a practice of healing, such as is carried out by organizations like Hoʻoulu ʻĀina and its allied organizations across the Pacific, inspire other educators to practice research as a form of relationship building that is led by the joy of mutual flourishing through reciprocity and shared responsibility?
In the Elements of Joy subproject of AnthropoloJOY, our team works with natural farmers, gardeners, eco-activists, and other stewards of land and sea across Japan, Okinawa, and Hawaiʻi to explore how connecting joyfully with land can help us connect meaningfully with each other. Especially in a time of shared crises under climate change and its socioeconomic consequences, we seek to learn with colleagues how the arts of research-as-healing might also in small ways heal relationships across troubled cultural borders of all kinds today, following joy as a guide, method, and fruit of research.
Does joy in and of the natural elements guide your own work, life, play, or activism? Would you like to share on your own terms and authorship? If so, please get in touch at the links below!
[1] Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1999. “Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture.” In From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, rev. ed., 136–147. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.
[2] Silva, Noenoe K. 2004. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[3] Ronald Takaki. 1983. Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaiʻi, 1835–1920. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 28.
Fully agree with you Dan - research is a relationship of presence, in the present, which cannot be reduced to preexisting power structures nor extracted and expanded towards external goals. Joy is often the result of relational cultivation of intimacy - we get to know people emotionally and affectively at least as much as we think we can "make sense" (as in analysis) of their history or motivations. It is this slippery process that we are trying to capture in our different field-sites at AnthropoloJOY, with hopes that we can also influence even minutely how research is being thought of and conducted in wider scholarly circles.