76.4 December 2024
This is the last issue of American Quarterly whose content was reviewed and selected by the Hawai‘i-based editorial team. We began our editorial work believing that our location in the Pacific gives us a particular vantage point from which to advance scholarship that interrogates and reframes “America” in its myriad manifestations. The issues we have put out in the past decade indeed reflect our visions and aspirations. We have been inspired by the uncompromising critique of America and the commitment to social justice, solidarity, and care that are evident in the works we have been fortunate to review and edit during the past decade.
It is extremely fitting to end our editorship by showcasing the five essays included in this issue. There could not be better examples of the kinds of interdisciplinary, intersectional, transnational scholarship that our editorial team had envisioned. All of these essays have undergone multiple rounds of revision based on the peer reviewers’ and the board members’ feedback, which the authors graciously and patiently incorporated, sometimes by conducting substantial new research. The essays are thus products of the authors’ scholarly commitment and of collaboration and mentoring at its best.
“Transpacific Muumuus and the Rise of Japanese Neocolonialism in Hawaiʻi”
Issay Matsumoto
As the preeminent consumer space of the Pacific, Hawaiʻi is known globally through its commodities. Mahogany ukuleles, plastic lei, canned pineapples, macadamia nuts, flashy aloha shirts, and other products have all proliferated images of Hawaiʻi as an accessible site for imperial mass leisure in the Pacific.
For women across Hawaiʻi, the United States, and Asia, however, perhaps no object from Hawaiʻi embodied the liberating potential of consumption than the bright muumuu dress—mass-produced in Hawaiʻi using cheap, richly-colored, and high-quality Japanese textile imports. My article, “Transpacific Muumuus,” uncovers the forgotten history of Japanese muumuu culture from the 1960s through the 1970s, and the crucial role that Japanese women who wore, made, and wrote about them played in making Hawaiʻi an international tourist destination.
Although first introduced by American missionaries during the 1820s, the “Mother Hubbard” undergarment was indigenized by Native Hawaiian women as muʻumuʻu— which translates from the Hawaiian language to “shortened” or “maimed,” referring to the removal of the structural piece of a dress such as a bodice. I use archival sources found in Japan and Hawaiʻi to argue that Japanese women’s appropriation of Hawaiian muumuu culture was not a simple mimicry of the iconic sartorial practices of Native Hawaiian women or imitation of the pale pageantry of white American tourists. Instead, the dress should be understood as part of a transpacific material culture that mobilized Japanese participation in Hawaiʻi’s international tourism industry and facilitated the rising Japanese presence in the Pacific during the 1960s and 1970s.
Once an adored and controversial fashion statement in Japan, today muumuus are hard to come by in the streets of Ginza or Waikīkī. Nevertheless, the history my article reveals continues in the present.
Tori Richard dresses—but no muumuus! Image taken by author at the Tori Richard branch at Kahala Mall in Honolulu, 2024.
Asian technology, materials, and labor continue to play an outsized role in the production of contemporary aloha wear. Although they have not carried muumuus for years, as of 2024 the legacy Honolulu garment maker Tori Richard has recently revived marketing strategies that identify its deep Japanese heritage. Tori Richard’s new “Made in Hawaiʻi - Cotton Lawn Collection” boasts this historic Japanese connection my article analyzes. “Crafted exclusively for Tori Richard, each textile is expertly printed in Japan using the same screen cutting techniques we have used for over 60 years,” its website reads. “Once the print is complete, each shirt is hand-cut, sewn and finished in Hawaiʻi before finally making its way to its forever home.”
Tori Richard aloha shirt. Image taken by author at the Tori Richard branch at Kahala Mall in Honolulu, 2024.
Today, many non-“local,” ready-to-wear garment and textile imports from Southeast Asia are viewed as low quality in both Hawaiʻi and Japan—a position in which Japanese exporters similarly found themselves during the first decades after World War II. That these ubiquitous connections with the Global South are comparatively downplayed by apparel companies in the Global North raise clear questions and concerns about the hidden labors and inequalities underpinning globalization in the Pacific world today.
Despite the decline in popularity of the muumuu, there have been signs of resurgent interest in the dress among Indigenous, local, and Japanese women. In 2024 the Honolulu Museum of Art exhibited “Fashioning Aloha,” featuring the history of aloha wear with several historical examples of both aloha shirts and various muumuu and formal holokū fashions.
Today, the volunteer-run Muʻumuʻu Library, a program of the Native Hawaiian women-led arts nonprofit Pu‘uhonua Society, operates as a sustainable fashion repository for renting vintage muumuus. The organization functions as a space for women to “perpetuate Hawaiian fashion,” focusing primarily on “Made in Hawaiʻi” designs in a time when “fast fashion has become the societal norm.”
A Mauna Kea Galleries display in Yokohama. Image taken by the author in 2023.
For a steep price, contemporary aloha wear in Japan has prevailed as men’s high fashion. Firms like Toyo Enterprise have been the most prolific producers of Japanese aloha shirts and proudly showcase their postwar origins catering toward US servicemen stationed in Japan on their website.
Since 1999, retailer Mauna Kea Galleries in Yokohama has sold Hawaiiana and similarly highlights the unique Japanese history of aloha wear on their website. They highlight Yokohama as an intersection for “Japanese immigrant culture and the aloha shirt,” noting that the harbor “flourished as a site for textile and aloha shirt export.” If after a visit to Yokohama you have had enough fun with Toyo’s “Sun Surf” vintage aloha shirt replicas, you can try their manly “Sugar Cane” plantation-style workwear!
But it is Japanese women who continue to be the most enthusiastic foreign consumers of Hawaiiana—whether through wearing muumuus, dancing hula, or travel to Hawaiʻi. Japanese retailers in both Hawaiʻi and Japan maintain women’s connections to the muumuu through everyday dress, travel, and dance. Currently Japanese-owned, Princess Kaiulani Fashions in Waikīkī, for example, has exported many of its dresses to hula schools in Japan.
Menehune Plantation, a store in Tokyo, also specializes in selling Hawaiian products to Japanese customers. They take pride in helping “all hula and Hawaii lovers enjoy authentic hula and mana-filled Hawaiian life.” Many of their products are geared particularly for Japanese women, helping hula practitioners in Japan obtain and customize appropriate outfits for performance and even providing consultation for Hawaiian weddings.
While presenting my muumuu research with Japanese audiences, I have been privileged to hear women in Japan themselves recount fond and forgotten childhood memories of mothers and grandmothers wearing adored muumuus around the home or after a bath. Although those with whom I have spoken are too young to remember the days when muumuus were the mood in Ginza public street fashion, the appeal of the garment has clearly not been lost on us members of the post-muumuu generation.
This history reveals not only how Japan transformed the political economy of statehood-era Hawaiʻi, but also speaks to how Hawaiʻi continues to shape Japanese women’s pursuit of beauty and comfort in the present day. After a long year revising this essay for American Quarterly readers, even I am a little tempted to try on a muumuu myself.