Under Occupation

Under Occupation: Resistance and Struggle

in a Militarised Asia-Pacific

Edited by

Daniel Broudy, Peter Simpson

and Makoto Arakaki

Under Occupation: Resistance and Struggle in a Militarised Asia-Pacific, Edited by Daniel Broudy, Peter Simpson and Makoto Arakaki

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Broudy, Peter Simpson and Makoto Arakaki and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4750-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4750-6

CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................................................... viii Foreword .................................................................................................... ix David Vine Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Daniel Broudy, Peter Simpson, and Makoto Arakaki Part I. Occupation and its Defenders Chapter One ................................................................................................. 8 Nappy Routes and Tangled Tales: Critical Ethnography in a Militarised Okinawa Mitzi Uehara-Carter Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 Romancing the Occupation: Concepts of ‘Internationalisation’ Among Female University Students in Okinawa Makoto Arakaki Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 49 What’s Going on Behind Those Blue Eyes? The Military Man and his Many (Mis)perceptions Nika Nashiro Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 66 The Ethics of Long-standing Conditions: Complicity and Innocence Examined in a Militarised Okinawa Christopher Daniel Melley Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 78 Naming and Framing in (Post)Colonial Okinawa Daniel Broudy and Peter Simpson

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 98 Complicit Amnesia or Willful Blindness? Untold Stories in US and Japanese Media Kiyomi Maedomari-Tokuyama Part II. Occupation and its Resistors Chapter Seven .......................................................................................... 126 Moananuiākea or ‘American Lake’? Contested Histories of the US ‘Pacific Pivot’ Kyle Kajihiro Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 161 Japanese Wartime Occupation, War Reparation and Guam’s Chamorro Self-Determination Miyume Tanji Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 183 Resisting the Proposed Military Buildup on Guam Leevin Camacho Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 191 Collective Traumatic Memory in a Jointly-Colonised Okinawa Yukinori Tokyuama Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 203 This Sky and Earth Belong to Us Chinin Usii Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 224 A Base for (In)Security? The Jeju Naval Base and Competing Visions of Peace on the Korean Peninsula Andrew Yeo Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 238 Remembering 4/3 and Resisting the Remilitarisation of Jeju: Building an International Peace Movement Gwisook Gwon Postscript ................................................................................................. 271 Chie Miyagi

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Afterword ............................................................................................... 273 Douglas Lummis Contributors ............................................................................................ 285 Index ....................................................................................................... 288

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Editors and Authors wish to acknowledge the following individuals and organisations for critical feedback on their work, as well as their patience, support, and commitment to scholarship and action toward social justice and demilitarisation: Julian Aguon, Arakaki Tomoko, Arasaki Moriteru, Kinuye Avery, Robert Avery, Olivier Bancoult, Lawrence Berlin, Paco Booyah, Mark Caprio, Choi Sung-Hee, Christine de Matos, Thomas Fazi, Kathy Ferguson, Philip Fiadino, Fija Byron, Curtis Gayle, Nelson Graburn, Iha Yoichi, Ikue Kina, Jon Mitchell, Oshiro Nariko, Enrico Parenti, Park Kyung-Soo, Park Yune, Toyoda Maho, Masami Mel Kawamura, Terri Keko‘olani, Nakachi Kiyoshi, Miyagi Michiko, Igor Saveliev, Shimabukuro Jun, Shimamura Lei, Shimizu Fumihiko, Sunagawa Kaori, Noenoe Silva, Takuma Sminkey, Randolph Thrasher, Tobaru Sunao, Wesley Uenten, David Ulvog, Urasaki Akiko, Christopher Valvona, Weston Watts, Yamazato Katsunori, Yonaha Keiko, Yoshida Kensei, Yoshikawa Hedeki, Yoshikazu Makishi, Chagos Refugees Group, the Citizens’ Network for Biodiversity in Okinawa, Dialogue Under Occupation, the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2010-DZZ-3104), Hawaiʻi Peace and Justice, DMZ-Hawaiʻi / Aloha ʻĀina network, Okinawa Outreach, Kamaduu gwa tachi no tsudoi, Korea Foundation / Northeast Council Korea Travel Grant, Grant-in-Aid from the Catholic University of America, the International Institute of Okinawan Studies (IIOS) at the University of the Ryukyus, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Silk Dragon Productions.

FOREWORD

DAVID VINE

I feel honoured and proud to have been asked to write the foreword to this remarkable book. I also feel a heavy responsibility to do justice not just to the impressive work of the volume’s authors and editors but also to the remarkable conference that inspired this book. For the fifth (V) iteration of Dialogue Under Occupation (DUO) conference, held in August 2011, in Okinawa, Japan, was no ordinary conference. DUO-V created an all-too-rare space for dialogue by gathering some of the occupied and some of the occupiers from Okinawa and mainland Japan, Guam, Hawai‘i, and the rest of the United States, Korea, Britain, and even the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago (home to the US military base on Diego Garcia).

Most importantly, the conference gave voice to the experiences of the occupied—people so often ignored in debates about international relations, military policy, and national security. At DUO-V, those living under occupation spoke powerfully about their experiences. And they brought tears to many eyes as they detailed some of occupation’s painful effects—displacement, dispossession, damaged health, and crime to name a few—caused by US military bases in Okinawa, by the US military presence throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and by centuries of occupation by a succession of Asian powers. Olivier Bancoult, Chair of the Chagos Refugees Group representing the people of Diego Garcia, spoke to the experiences of many when he said, “We are part of the remains of a nation that was evicted from a small island . . . . We have not forgotten, and we hope that more and more people will remember the injustice that was done to us and will help [and] support us.”

This book represents a testament to the conference. It represents a deepening of the conference’s intellectual contributions and a broadening of its impact beyond attendees alone. It represents an important collection of original, innovative, and authoritative scholarship that should be required reading for academics, journalists, politicians, and anyone trying to understand the presence of US bases and military forces in Okinawa, in Japan, and in the Asia-Pacific region more broadly.

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Unfortunately, the need for the analytic contributions presented here could not be more timely given growing tensions in the region and the United States’ recent “Asia pivot” (although several of the book’s chapters remind us that the United States has long been pivoted toward Asia, maintaining hundreds of bases in the Pacific since World War II as part of a global network of more than 1,000 foreign bases). In this context, the book’s chapters help us to question this decades-old status quo. The book’s chapters help us to question the assumed normalcy of the ongoing presence of tens of thousands of US troops and family members thousands of miles from the borders of the United States. The chapters make visible this continuing US occupation, which has long been seen as part of the natural order of things, while also addressing themes of war, colonisation, imperialism, the gendered impacts of occupation, cultural identity, collective psychology and memory, the role of language and the media in legitimating occupation, as well as resistance and peace.

Among these themes, resistance is particularly important. In the conference’s final moments, speakers and audience members stood in a moment of passionate applause. They stood to applaud the conference organisers and a group of some 40 unpaid Okinawan volunteers who worked nearly non-stop over most of a typhoon-interrupted week, coordinating panels across two venues, providing simultaneous translation, feeding and entertaining international visitors, shuttling speakers around Okinawa, and attending to conference attendees’ most every need. Soon, side-by-side, speakers, audience members, organisers, and volunteers were standing and applauding one another’s work. They shared a moment reflecting both the joy of a week spent working to build new connections—intellectual, political, and personal—and the painful experiences that gave birth to those connections—occupation and long-standing struggles opposing occupation. So many had worked so hard because the conference was, itself, an act of resistance.

This book is too. It will be an inspiration for resistance movements across the Asia-Pacific region and globally, and it will offer much-needed fresh perspective for anyone seeking to understand the area, occupation, US military presence in the region, and brave struggles to finally bring unjust occupation to an end.

INTRODUCTION

. . . there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by

obedience and submission. These robbers of the world, having by their imperialism exhausted the land, they now raid the deep. If the enemy be rich, they seek to plunder;

if he be poor, they lust for power and control; neither the East nor the West has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name

of empire; they make a wasteland and call it peace. —Tacitus (30 C.E.) imagining the words of Celtic general Calgacus resisting Roman conquest

We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and

buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors . . . And so, by these Providences of God—the phrase is the government’s, not mine—we are a World Power.

—Mark Twain (March 8, 1906) reflecting on the massacre of 600 Moro islanders

Every language has a term for peace, but few have found so many ways as the language of the Roman empire and its linguistic descendants to reverse its meaning to justify war. Such is the case with peace and pacific. The Oxford English Dictionary dates pacific to the 15th century. The term derives from the Latin pacificus, which from its inception applied to settlements with vanquished populations based upon slavery and colonialism, as opposed to tranquil relations based upon notions of equal rights and justice. With reference to the broad body of water between Asia and the Americas, the term found its way coincidentally into European languages as a result of Magellan’s fairly unhampered circum-navigation of the ocean in 1521. This was less than half a century after

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Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean, which ushered in a centuries-long genocide throughout the Americas.

Viewed from the perspective of the contributors to this volume, the name that Magellan’s expedition gave to this largest expanse of ocean seems little more than an extension of its earlier meaning. It is hardly surprising that the name Pacific would serve as the root of pacification, a term with a long contested history. Perhaps echoing Mark Twain’s 1906 observation regarding the military process of pacification, George Orwell noted in 1949 how cynically the term had come to be deployed in the military’s defence and description of this practice:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.1

The process of pacification played out in the Pacific during late 19th and 20th century state formation did much to destroy what was left of the fractured independence of relatively self-sustaining communities throughout the region, efforts that have only intensified over the span of 20th century wars and ongoing conflicts. This book aims to give voice to island communities throughout this region which have experienced these deviant forms of pacification.

From Hawai‘i’s usurpation, Guam’s enduring legacy of occupation, to Okinawa, and Korea, these essays deconstruct practices of pacification and resistance to military occupation and the language long used to either accept or reject them. The chapters take readers on a tour of American frontier activities that move across the Pacific from Hawai‘i to Guam then northward toward Okinawa and Korea.

The first part of the book examines interpersonal perceptions and preconceptions held by occupier and occupied alike which underpin and seek to normalise today’s dominant US military dispensation. In the first chapter, Mitzi Uehara Carter draws upon her own complex relationship with Okinawa and the US military to examine how postwar circumstances have created intricate and, at times, conflicting attitudes and identities that should be recognised (both celebrated and lamented) as well as recorded as important portions of Okinawa’s postwar chronicle. In contrast to the overt and covert discriminations of the past, Makoto Arakaki takes a descriptive approach to today’s occupation narrative, which focuses on the positive and negative perceptions that Okinawan people still hold of American military men and of the local women who seek their company.

In a complementary chapter, Nika Nashiro deconstructs the field notes she gathered in a series of informal interviews of military men at a popular

Under Occupation: Resistance and Struggle in a Militarised Asia-Pacific 3

Starbucks who hunt out yet who voice a thinly veiled condescension towards local women. For Nashiro, this discourse fits within a larger neocolonial context wherein white men, burdened by their self-perceived superiorities, see themselves as protectors and liberators of brown women. As a teacher of some of these same young men, Christopher Melley, professor of philosophy, explores his own long history connected to the US overseas military experience, its ethical implications, at the interpersonal and structural levels, and his sense of complicity in the foregoing relationships.

Daniel Broudy and Peter Simpson survey Okinawa’s postwar history, the concepts of American exceptionalism necessary to achieve and sustain occupation, and the creative uses of language, with their curious internal contradictions, which mirror the purported need to preserve the status quo. Kiyomi Maedomari-Tokuyama undertakes a close study of mass media performance and the sort of structural violence enacted in the reporting practices of three major news outlets. Hers is an examination of how American and Japanese corporate media effectively marginalise views that depart from the received wisdom emanating from the US-Japan alliance.

In the second part of the book, Kyle Kajihiro revisits Hawai‘i’s painful past during its annexation to contexualise a critical discussion of some pressing issues that face contemporary movements now resisting the Obama Administration’s aim to make the Asia-Pacific region a “top priority” in its military planning. Exploring a more distant and even more detached outpost of US military hegemony, Miyume Tanji examines how Guam, during the Japanese occupation, came to identify itself as an island of resistance to the Japanese and at the same time as an ally of the US presence in the Pacific. Neither Hawaii nor Guam under occupation can succeed alone in liberating itself. Leevin Camacho examines both the language of resistance to and the current unfolding of US military plans to expand its presence and operations across Guam in the wake of calls to reduce the US Marine footprint on Okinawa.

Yukinori Tokuyama retraces the history of the 1609 Satsuma invasion of the Ryukyu kingdom, the ensuing long process of Japanising Okinawan people, and the post-Pacific War conditions which, in the name of US-Japan security, presently wield control over local decision-making and other democratic processes. chinin usii presents a narrative description in her chronicle of the resistance efforts in Okinawa challenging the status quo and the myth that Okinawa is an equal player in the larger Japanese society where decisions are made on Okinawa’s behalf.

In revisiting the traumatic memories of the April 3 incident, “a campaign to cleanse the island of supposed Communist agitators,”2 Andrew Yeo and

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Gwisook Gwon recount the past to contextualise the contradictions of the present and how, in the name of regional security and economic development, government plans to militarise ‘the island of peace’ have divided Jeju citizens, galvinising some into active resistance and others into a pacified acceptance of Korean military plans.

From an Okinawan vantage point, pacification comes in the form of the US military’s forced deployment of the notorious MV-22 Osprey, which has already been deemed too dangerous or too damaging to fly over communities in the United States.3

As we write, a concerted effort to reject the Osprey and close the Futenma base continues with a constant vigil at the Nodake Gate in close proximity to where we live and to the universities where we work, one of which suffered the impact of a helicopter crash in the summer of 2004. Prior to this ‘mishap’4 and a host of other assorted outrages, two Marines and a sailor raped a twelve-year-old schoolgirl in 1995, a crime that resulted in the formation of the so-called Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO).

As Funabashi Yoichi’s fawning account (paradoxically entitled Alliance Adrift) unintentionally reveals, SACO was a committee that was, from its inception to its conclusion, an entity designed to cement the US-Japan military relationship, to the exclusion of Okinawan opinion. In keeping with the long-established joint colonial protocol (see Tokuyama this volume), the US-Japan committee included not a single Okinawan representative, elected or otherwise, but instead was composed of Tokyo and Washington bureaucrats and the commander of US Forces Japan.5

Charged with the task of forming “recommendations . . . on ways to consolidate, realign and reduce US facilities and areas, and adjust operational procedures of US forces in Okinawa . . . ,”6 SACO proposed four central measures to achieve its goals—the return of land, adjustment of operational procedures, implementation of noise reduction initiatives, and improvement of the SOFA. Crucially among the results was the April 1996 agreement to return MCAS Futenma to Okinawa—after a suitable replacement facility had been built. Seventeen years on, the base remains in place, caught between opportunistic and contradictory statements made by American leaders—one suggesting Futenma is the most dangerous airbase in the world and the other attempting to reassure the local population of its safety.7

While direct US military rule over Okinawa ended in 1972, another kind of rule has replaced it. It is the rule of objectification, a way of pacifying resistance to change while maintaining theoretical power over people and places perceived to be mere objects. For many years after

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reversion, Okinawan people have fought shy of expressions such as ‘occupation’ and ‘colonialism’, but this volume confronts the collective historical amnesia that renders terms such as these in the Asia-Pacific context less than self-evident. Reimagining another world in which peace can be achieved on equal terms is a shared aspiration of all contributors to this volume, and we all share the belief that demilitarisation is an essential first step in reaching that objective.

We opened this introduction with the aim of locating this volume in historical concepts of pacification and Pacific and close with references to geographical spaces. An edited volume such as this one can only offer a selective and partial redress. In a similar way, maps like the one featured below are anchored and oriented in ways that can either reinforce or challenge conventional narratives. 8 However, since even seemingly progressive institutions, such as the British Museum or the New Internationalist, 9 either erase some of the islands and archipelagos featured in this volume or otherwise declare them the ‘possessions’ of nation states, we hope the following illustration will offer some crude redress. At the same time, the authors of this volume intend to make common cause with those inhabitating the myriad other, more or less, occupied spaces on this map and beyond.

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Notes 1 George Orwell. “Politics and the English Language,” 1949. 2 Howard French. “South Koreans Seek Truth About ‘48 Massacre” The New York Times (Oct. 24, 2001). 3 See Aspen Times (Jun. 7, 2012) “Training Plans influx for New Mexico Airbase,” AP (Jun. 8, 2012) “US Air Force Delays Low-altitude Flying,” West Hawaii Today, “Military to Limit Use of Upolu” (Jun. 13, 2012). 4 In his article titled, “Copter Incident Report Cites Confusion, Fatigue on Futenma Flight Line,” Stars & Stripes reporter David Allen chronicles the US Marine Corps Command Investigation of the crash and the military’s conspicuous use of the term ‘mishap’ in its response to the public. The editors of this volume consider the term ‘mishap’ as a somewhat flimsy euphemism for ‘crash.’ ‘Mishaps’ have been sub-divided into various categories, but they have also been subject to scrutiny, and in many cases, the results of close scrutiny have gone unresolved. For further details about a higher level of open scrutiny into causes of military helicopter crashes, please visit http://www.g2mil.com . 5 SACO composition: Japan’s North American Affairs Bureau Chief of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Defence Policy Bureau Chief of the Ministry of Defence, and the Director of the Defence Facilities Administration Agency. America’s Assistant Secretary of State, and Assistant Secretary of Defense and the Commander of US Forces Japan. Apr. 15, 1996. 6 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Japan-U.S. Special Action Committee (SACO) Interim Report, Apr. 15, 1996. 7 While flying over Futenma in November 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is reported to have said that it is ‘the world’s most dangerous base’” (Fogarty 2010). Yet, less than a year later, when a certain degree of evidence for this assertion was provided by the crash of a heavy-lift helicopter onto the campus of Okinawa International University, Secretary of State Colin Powell still felt able to provide safety assurances of air operations at the base (Fuji TV interview Aug. 13, 2004). 8 Denise Newfield. Words and Pictures (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993). 9 The Peters World Atlas (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications).

PART I

OCCUPATION AND ITS DEFENDERS

CHAPTER ONE

NAPPY ROUTES AND TANGLED TALES: CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY IN A MILITARISED

OKINAWA

MITZI UEHARA CARTER

Introduction: Trespassing Blurred Borders

“Do you see this fence? It’s the old fence, the old boundary of US military land. Just a little farther back is the new military fence. That land in between has been reverted back to Japan, but they kept this old fence for some reason.” O-san, a Yomitan resident I had just interviewed, wanted to show this to me because I had explained to him that I was interested in how people make sense of militarised spaces, live with detour mentalities and checkpoint cultures, and how these shape imaginaries of Okinawa in particular ways. He was eager to show the boundary to me as it illustrated how material demarcations persist in limbo states in Okinawa and how residents are sometimes unclear if they are trespassing, physically but also culturally.

Fig. 1-1 Typical sign reinforcing physical US military barriers throughout Okinawa. Source: Photograph by author

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“The maps say this is now Japan,” he said with some hesitation as he inspected the newly mended fence. ‘Keep out - US Army Facility’ and ‘Restricted Area’ signs were posted ominously on the fence. He looked concerned. “I was just here a few months ago and there used to be an opening here—the fence was open here, a hole right here so us residents could pass through it easily. I’ve been going through this area for years.” Although the fence had been repaired, there was an opening to the space in-between on the other side. “I wonder what they are trying to do?” His eyebrows furrowed. The weeds on the fence curled around the wires.

An elderly woman slowly jogged by on the narrow strip of land between the fences, passing a plot of newly tilled crops growing on what looked like an old military airstrip. O-san, a self-made historian and avid researcher of all things Okinawan was brimming with curiosity, so I was not surprised when he called me the next day and said he went to the Japanese Self Defense office in Kadena to unearth some answers. He had taken with him some of his maps and asked some officials directly (after passing through several checkpoints and had obtained the many passes necessary to get answers) whether that particular area belonged to the US or to Japan. He said they hesitated with their answers, looked him up and down with suspicion, but he eventually learned, after much persistence on his part, that the maps in his possession were wrong. Yes, the land had been “returned,” but these tracts were still not officially signed off as being Japanese.

They were in a limbo existence awaiting signatures for their final return. He explained to me, “It’s like when a married couple file for divorce and they live separate lives while they await the judge’s signature to officially declare the end of the contract. The paperwork is in that weird limbo state for some reason.” When he asked the officials if this meant he was trespassing on that land, they indicated that technically yes he was, but no one minded if it was just being used for everyday causal use—like farming or jogging on but not for devious matters.

This resident then proceeded to tell me about all the areas he knew of off the top of his head that were like that—areas in the north where “jungle warfare training”1 occurs and roads are open to local civilians but where military priorities could trump civilian use in an instant for whatever the military deems a security issue. The roads can be closed down suddenly without notice, so residents are then required to take rather inconvenient detours.2

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Fig. 1-2 Ambiguous spaces not clearly signified as public or militarised. Source: Photograph by author

It is these kinds of everyday detours, the ones not officially marked, which are also a part of the intricate process of US militarisation. They are typically not included in ethnographic research as much as they are inscribed in local literature, poetry, or art. I suggest that those who study militarisation, especially those from outside Okinawa whose ultimate goal is to support, or be an ally of, Okinawans struggling against intense forms of militarisation, should be attuned to how the various narratives of Okinawa are entangled, not just locally but also in the Okinawan diaspora and in the “military diaspora.”3 Our ethnographies of militarised spaces must include the intricate stories—the ones about weeds growing rampantly around ambiguously porous fences which then become a naturalised part of the landscape, the ones about how gates and openings can morph back into closed fences, and those that show how the extra-legal becomes a normative cultural practice in militarised spaces in Okinawa.

As a mixed Black American/Okinawan who occupies fluctuating states of being, the blurry boke4 world of transnational racial figuring and/or disfiguring, I am sensitive to concepts of trespassing on a visceral level. I am sensitive to the gazes along the fence-line and how double or, in some cases, triple consciousness is strikingly absent from ethnographies of Okinawa, trivialised, or dismissed to stale economic reductionist binaries of understanding.

I offer a few tangled tales from my family and those with whom I engaged during my fieldwork as a way to rethink certain ethnographic approaches to writing about militarisation. How can scholars analyse and write about militarisation in places like Okinawa without depending on an overly structuralist or functionalist framework to make arguments about the US military presence in Okinawa? How can we approach the taken-

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for-granted stories and the hushed intimate ones about the nappy routes of everyday belonging in militarised Okinawa while also remaining critically engaged with how the circulation of these types of narratives can inadvertently neutralise any impetus for change?

Criticism and Recovery

In his book Violent Cartographies5 Michael Shapiro remarks poignantly why he favours ethnography over other forms in studies of militarisation:

While strategic approaches to warfare tend to be explanatory in emphasis (and indeed tend to suppress their interpretative predicates), an ethnographic focus is more concerned with the interpretive practices that sustain the antagonistic predicates of war. Moreover, a critical ethnography attempts to disrupt dominating interpretations by locating the silenced remainders of various discourses. Rather than naturalising the boundaries by which states maintain their control over the representations of global issues, the focus involves both criticism and recovery. It is aimed first at disclosing how representations of alterity (dangerous Others) reproduce the identities and spaces that give nation-states and nations in general their coherence, and second at disclosing other forms of affiliation uncoded in state-oriented interpretations.6

Okinawa has been at the centre of numerous studies highlighting strategic approaches to war and peace, from military history to political science, and many of these tend to naturalise nation-state boundaries. As Shapiro urges, a focus on the excess of various dominant discourses in these militarised spaces would render a different type of knowledge visible. For example, anthropologist Inoue Masamichi7 expresses his wariness of past dominant studies on Okinawa, especially in fields such as anthropology. He argues that while they have been able to better address power and social justice issues within a postmodern (Foucauldian) paradigm as well as examine ideas of appropriation (specifically how the oppressed appropriate the cultural practices of the dominant forces of power), these studies still tend to be too fixed in a Self/Other dialectic. His method of critical ethnography and activism in Henoko allowed him to explore movements of opinion along these lines of differences so as to reconceptualise two former dominant interpretations of Okinawan resistance and, thus, to better explain the “third space” between Washington D.C. and Tokyo.

Through his ethnographic work, Inoue also offers an interesting theoretical perspective that can frame alternative ways of thinking about

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militarisation in Okinawa. His findings did not fit into what he considers to be over-used “life politics” to describe resistance by citizens8 nor the more traditional, structural Marxist models of resistance. Instead, Inoue puts aspects of both sets of theoretical perspectives into tension with each other to produce a “globally structural perspective” to better explain contemporary transformations of class relations and the new poor. To help explain what may seem like confusing contradictory messages of some residents in base towns whom he interviewed and with whom he worked and interacted on a regular basis, Inoue leans on Emmanuel Levinas’ critique of the “intimate society” and his conceptualisation of the third person, to help set the predicaments of Okinawan identity against global and local militarisation.

He argues that in the Foucauldian-postmodern model of power, Japan and the US are recognised in the dialectic “game” of power and pleasure, but the third party, Okinawa, is not. The island is considered to be an excess. Therefore, the voices of Okinawan people and their acts of resistance, or appropriation of the lifestyle made possible by Japanese “political compensation” for living alongside military bases, often go unexplained or are too hastily analysed and described in terms of simple economic reductionism. The notion of the “third person” allows Inoue to discuss “oppositional appropriation.”

The stronger ethnographic works on militarisation are not neat, compact stories but are dense and rely heavily on sprawling narratives of people who imagine themselves and their surroundings within multiple regimes of knowledge, with multiple discursive processes at work to highlight Otherness and sanitise violence. This is partly because the “third person,” or the “third space,” and the ways in which in-betweeness are articulated require extensive description. It is not a surprise, then, that many of these authors tend to apologise to their readers for a book that may not deliver bullet point answers or models.

Anthropologist Joesph Masco, for example, explains to his readers in the introduction to his book on nuclear militarisation, “Those expecting a linear narrative will be disappointed. The text that follows pursues a multi-sited approach, . . . one that necessarily produces moments of contradiction, repetition, and temporal flux.” He then asks, “For how could one approach a project on the scale of the US nuclear complex without recognising complexity, if not contradiction, at each turn?”9 The necessary work involved in critiquing previous or dominant areas of knowledge about militarisation and recovering alternative forms is a long and messy process, so readers should be wary of simple models offered up with neat conclusions.

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My own ethnographic work in Okinawa involves highlighting the dislocations that abound in the racial and cultural fence-line landscapes, and so some of the critiquing and recovering in which I have engaged have produced more ambivalence and anxiety about the role of traditional academic frameworks to disclose the necessary analysis to the questions I pose in my fieldwork. I too may have to apologise to readers for a return to the “thick ethnography.”10

Critical Directions, Critical Essentialism, and Critical Listeners

I was still an undergraduate student in the US when the explosive 1995 rape incident occurred in Okinawa. Three US servicemembers planned and carried out the brutal gang rape of a young schoolgirl. As the crime triggered a renewed social movement against US bases in Okinawa, the island was suddenly on the mainstream news radar in the United States. Members of the military’s public relations unit were more robotic than ever in what they said; movement on SOFA status individuals within Okinawa was restricted; and prevailing definitions of ‘security’ were being directly challenged by Okinawans who lived on the island and in the large-scale diaspora as well. It was during this time when a scholar at my university approached me to see if my mother might want to be interviewed about Okinawa and the US bases.

I called her in Texas, and she initially and resolutely declined. She had never been formally interviewed and was hesitant for three good reasons: (1) the interviewer was not Okinawan but from mainland Japan, (2) he was a man, and (3) he was a scholar. Given the weight of his privilege and social capital, she questioned (in her own way) whether he could hear, know, and transmit what she would communicate to him (and for whom?)

She later reluctantly did the interview but was baffled by why a Japanese person wanted to know her opinion about the bases in Okinawa even when she was living in the US. She later told me about the interview, and based on what she said to this researcher, her answers may have appeared much more sympathetic to the bases than how she actually felt then and still feels.

I believe she became a politicised subject in the moment of the interview. Her remarks about the ongoing military violence in Okinawa in its fluctuating postcolonial state drew upon narratives that most likely crossed several scales, bouncing about the many subject positions she likely assumed with the posing of different questions. Trying to get him to see why “his people” (mainlanders) are responsible for what is happening

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too, she made the US military less of a target in her responses. I saw her a few weeks after her interview and asked her why she answered him in this way. With a simple wave of her hand to shoo away my persistent questioning, she responded that he’d never “get it.” Not a woman with long-suffering patience during those difficult years, it is easy for me to visualise her giving up on trying to help him see, to help him “get it.” “I mostly just tell him what he wanna hear.”

I always wondered how that interview and possibly others like it were transformed into his ethnographic text. Was he sensitive and perceptive enough to read into her responses in that communicative site of the interview? Would it be taken as evidence that some Okinawan women living abroad have absorbed and accepted a heavily militarised vision of their homeland? Was he reflexive enough to take into account how he himself was being positioned and, if so, how would this experience and possibly others like it be translated into the greater ethnographic practice? What can critical ethnography do to change the way we understand militarisation and the transnational spaces in which they exist in places such as Okinawa?

As someone who grew up within circulating and often competing discourses of sacrifice, I understood that there was more than a simplistic economic reductionist explanation of Okinawa along the fence-line. In Okinawa, fence-lines are constantly in flux as are the cultural practices that occur in these borderlands. There are guilty desires, longings, and diverse practices within and outside the contractual agreements of the SOFA, and there are spaces where certain narratives of militarisation thrive more so than others do.

The criticism process that Shapiro speaks of in militarised landscapes is in a constant state of change, but recently its course has taken a new direction. A growing group of scholars is emerging and redefining how militarisation has been routed in the transnational spaces of Okinawa through our own transnational experiences. Many of us have been in conversation with each other for many years, critically engaging in a dialog about that which is silenced from the current literature. It is no coincidence that many of us are Okinawans who have spent a significant amount of time in both the United States and in Okinawa, especially at the University of Hawaii, or are mixed Okinawans invested not just in the politics of belonging but also in militarisation in the most intimate spaces along the fence-lines. We are attempting to reshape how understandings of the postcolonial conditions/moment have been described in Okinawa, taking direction from scholars in the indigenous movement in Hawaii who

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have keen perspectives on the spatial configurations of violence and those hushed cultural practices such as settler occupation.11

Under the direction of Okinawan professors such as Yamazato Katsunori (Literature and American Studies), Ishihara Masahide (Linguistics), Arakaki Makoto (Cultural Studies), Tomochi Masaki (Statistics/Math), Kina Ikue (Literature) and several others not named here and their graduate students and mentees, the momentum in the academic movement is growing exponentially to create new frameworks to challenge former interpretations of difference and violence in Okinawa in a more organic way. This is happening during a critical moment as a growing influx of faculty and graduate student slots at top universities in Okinawa are being filled by those who grew up outside Okinawa, primarily mainland Japanese scholars. The specific type of criticism being launched by this group of Okinawan scholars in the cartographic re-routing process is significant because their impetus is urgent, and they are re-educating various communities in English, Uchinaaguchi, Uchinaa-yamato-guchi and Japanese.

On her popular blog geared toward doctoral students in the social sciences, anthropologist Karen Kelsky wrote that for many graduate students of colour, “scholarship starts and ends with the question, ‘does this help or hurt my people?’”12 Kelsky continues:

Sure, white people can feel a sense of belonging to an ethnic group, or to a class. Working class white people in the academy do, indeed, feel system-atically excluded from the in-groups and from classroom debates. I am not denying that. But it is different, because the stakes are different. When your people are dying, literally dying, from forms of cultural genocide, your approach to academia is going to be different. It’s going to be urgent. It’s going to be impatient. It’s going to be angry. You’re going to ask questions about why their stories are not being told, and why scholars aren’t asking how the discipline helps or hurts a group of people, your people, who are already suffering from so many histories of neglect and disregard.

While I argue for the necessity of carefully accepting a more “strategic essentialism” as construed by several South Asian postcolonial theorists (most notably Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) in our scholarship in Okinawa, I also acknowledge that many true allies who are not ethnically Okinawan nor have long-term familial roots on the island (outside of marriage) have also worked toward radical change. Many who have done far-reaching work already in various grassroots activist organisations to raise awareness also remain sensitive in their approach. For example, Welsh journalist and poet Jon Mitchell has written extensively about Okinawan environmental

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politics, militarisation, and its various cultural manifestations all with his particular understanding of power, from his particular perspective, and with the support of local activist groups and individuals who find his words transformative for mainstream readers of The Japan Times and progressive scholars who follow the Asia-Pacific Journal.13

In the past, however, works that have been produced as a result of the transnational, diasporic communication between Okinawan scholars of many generations appear not to be as broadly recognised nor properly credited. This emerging, vocal group of scholars treats the salient complexities in their stories about the effects of militarisation that require the rough “in-house” candour of casual conversations that cannot be told by outsiders (without extensive uses of hedges or qualifiers) along with the delicate handling needed for teachable moments to more mainstream listeners/readers. Their stories also tend to be much less concerned about fitting into an academic register and discourse style typical of inaccessible scholarly conferences, but more about reaching affected communities with more widely accessible language in venues frequented by people of all walks of life.

These new scholars are just as much activists as they are researchers. Two entire panels at the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference in Chicago in 2013 have been approved and will be fully moderated and comprised of all Okinawans and Okinawan-Americans, all of whom have been vocal and actively involved, in some form or another, with activist work against militarisation.14

In 2012, at the International Symposium of Okinawan Studies held at Waseda University, a thought-provoking panel entitled, “Struggle for Our ‘Okinawan Studies’: Viewed from Uchinaa Unai (Okinawan Women) Today” laid the foundation for future scholarship and critical recovery of knowledge. These women, Sakihara Chihiro, Kayatani Yamashiro Rinda, Chibana Megumi, Akamine Yukari, and Oyakawa Shinako along with discussant Professor Kina Ikue, challenged conference attendees to rethink dominant knowledge about Okinawa in a more radical, feminist way—by being more cautious about how scholars name and define parameters of violence, by not being dismissive of anecdotal information, and by making knowledge more accessible.

They acted on their words and brought their papers back to Okinawa and presented their work in a community forum in a more local, multi-generational, non-academic setting in Naha a few months after the conference. 15 All of these women panelists effectively merged their activism with their academic work. These are just a few people in a larger and growing group moving in between transnational spaces, drawing upon

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their own experiences of growing up Okinawan, or with Okinawan parents, and rethinking the micro-practices of living in these complex social systems of bases to recover and re-route their/our tales.16

In spaces such as Okinawa, critical ethnographic work from these diasporic activist scholars also tends to emphasise and accept fractures and repetitions in their findings, drawing upon their lived experiences in confronting the varied displacements they or their family members have encountered in a militarised culture. In her book Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War,17 Grace Cho explains that research projects on trauma and warscapes, where silences and hauntings endure painfully across generations of diasporic movement, require not only a variety of methods to be employed but also ‘multiple drafts.’ 18 Cho, like some of these Okinawan scholars, allows for interruptions in the text. She breaks sections of the text with unexpected, multiple voices and allows them to co-exist in patchwork layers—some academic, some quiet thoughts resonating from tales in her families, some rumours from the streets, hard statistics, communal life stories that emerge through poetry, and some simply angry and seemingly irrational.19 This ethnographic methodology challenges the authority of a singular voice. For many of us who are attempting to move the direction of critical ethnography to include more of our “drafts” and speaking ancestors, we start then with our plural, communal stories—fractured, repeated from multiple angles and borderlands, and in flux.

Kina Ikue has called attention to some of the inherent problems of reading and writing about Okinawa, and her cautions echo Cho’s desire to actively reengage with the need for writing with multiple voices and from multiple spaces and laments that this is still missing from contemporary theory-based scholarship on Okinawa. “What is missing” she argues “is a physical sense of place or homeland which deeply ingrains people to their living reality, and enables them to constantly give rise to their stories not only from individual sensory experience but also from an awareness of communal responsibility.”20 This responsibility emerges in various forms for those of us who have long been connected to transnational Okinawa. Kina notes that even in the face of extreme difficulties such as language loss, “the desire to remember is so strong and deep that the memories cannot be lost so easily” and the “inherited memories constantly beckon Okinawans to look for or to invent the right words so as to articulate both who they are and what their cultural values are.”21 This is where critical ethnography begins for many of us with families in these militarised spaces on the edge of these borderlands.

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Interviewing, Yuntaku-kai, and Co-creating Cultural Forms

Criticism and recovery in ethnographic practices in “the field” involve active listening outside the traditional structure of the formal academic interview. In militarised zones, the practice also requires learning how to recognise the narratives that activate powerful ideologies and how violence becomes imbricated into everyday practices. For many of the people mentioned above, we lean on our lifelong experiences of hearing and reflecting on the tales passed down by our family members—stories about hushed labour or sexual exploitations, intermarriages which brought shame or sometimes boastful pride, jokes about how a military employer was skillfully and heedlessly duped.

We know that when one celebrates the news that a relative received a job on base, it does not necessarily translate into that person’s tacit acceptance of the military presence in Okinawa, and we write that up with all its complexities. The fine line between economic survival and tolerance is not locatable in words but is over a series of practices that are still difficult to document without more experiential ethnographies, without knowing how to listen, or knowing how to ask in “communicative events.”22

Anthropologist Charles Briggs has written extensively about how researchers need to take more caution in using interviews without thinking carefully about how they are based on ideological presuppositions, especially in terms of how publics are hailed through them. He argues that the communicative practice in the form of the interview has been a significant method for extracting and later analysing and producing knowledge but has been largely taken for granted and, thus, not widely understood as a technique of power, capable of normalising certain subject positions and also racialising and naturalising differences. Here, I ask how we can take some of the questions he posed and analyses he put forward and employ them in a critical way in Okinawa studies.

Briggs uses the term communicability to “point to the way that texts project specific, unique cartographies of their own locations in the movement of discourse”23 and suggests that communicable cartographies can allow symbolic domination to persist by “projecting a small set of shared and predictable circuits, creating subject positions . . . and making only a very limited range of responses thinkable.”24 He also warns that the unexamined interview may also help to circulate social imaginaries with or without their referents.

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This issue underscores precisely why treating the interview as some “tightly bounded event”25 can be highly problematic, especially if a space allowing for the unpredictable and ambiguous is closed off. In her discussion of open and effective ethnographic practices, Marilyn Strathern argues, “ambiguity signals the way in which claims elicit counter-claims, open themselves up to explanation by third parties, and so forth.”26 An ideologically construed interview not open to the contingent, then, could potentially “restage” the injurious effects of speech acts27 that are beyond the body of the speaker and which minimise the “possibility of agency”28 on the part of the speaker, giving the interviewer and interviewee movement to shift the terrain of power via resignification of subject positions.

Scholars still tend to see the interview as static temporally and spatially, Briggs argues, as well as being a path to “traverse geographies and genres without losing authority or shifting meanings.” 29 “Good ethnography requires determining the relationship between things said in interviews and the circumstances of their production and projected circulation.”30 Ethnographers in militarised spaces should, thus, be even more aware of this fact, especially when they are positioned as journalists or when they practice more interdisciplinary approaches to public anthropology.31 The observations and results that come out of our research can unexpectedly appear in the public sphere instantly through our current, largely mediatised culture.

Briggs suggests that anthropologists need to attend to how our own “reifying communicative ideologies . . . [can] blind us to the fact that we co-create cultural forms that . . . embody our own communicable pre-conceptions.” 32 In transnational, militarised landscapes like Okinawa, where rumour and gossip can travel at lightening speed (both on and off base), this is an especially dire warning. The cultural forms that emerge in countless interviews may come into the State’s purview for consumption and so the problem is further complicated by the fact that these forms, then, too easily morph into sound-bites for the State.33

The communal yuntaku then, much like “talk story” in Hawai‘i, requires active forms of listening, the development of trust, and open exchange. Its participants may not expect the details of their stories to circulate the way they do in a traditional interview and, therefore, may offer different angles of their tales and experiences. There is a danger, however, in romanticising this form of knowledge over others, but ethnographers in Okinawa must be able to comfortably engage in this form over others in the co-creation of cultural forms, which cannot be taken hostage to the hegemony of State values or placed into the clichéd

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category of “Okinawa-US friendship” discourses. The yuntaku expects participants to take the vulnerable risk of sharing their own stories, disclosing their own understandings of public spheres, and being understanding of temporal and spatial jumping about.

I discovered that many people whom I spoke with accessed the communicative site of our yuntaku/interview to communicate to others what they felt was more difficult to do outside of that event. Sometimes their words seemed to be directed at loved ones or at others in a less coherent “public.” It was as if they had imagined their words circulating through text back to their target audience but in a mixed form of testimony, which has become well used in Okinawa and in other parts of Japan such as Hiroshima.34 In some instances, it seemed that my own mixed outward appearance served as a signal to some ‘informants’ to use the site of the interview to gather only “rational” facts, answering in ways that seemed fill-in-the-blankish, and yet also switching into yuntaku form where the power of questioning became more egalitarian and the information less subject to traveling along a linear path, where stories took the form of a gift with a more communal, reciprocal value. 35 The knowledge gained from a yuntaku comes not solely from direct answers to questions but, rather, from instructive advice, the questions themselves, the silences and shared values of the unspoken.

I decided to toy with these expectations, experimenting with three public gatherings,36 which brought mainly US military members, soldiers, DoDDS 37 teachers, Marines, and Airwo/men along with Okinawan activists, and community members from various walks of life to hold a yuntaku about “fenceline culture,” race, and “security.” The gathering proved to be a productive site for sharing tales in the midst of tension and to learn from each other how people experience militarisation, how we name their various processes, and how we live with and resist it. The peripheral conversations that took hold and the production of the events became even more interesting and revealing than the public ones themselves. 38 The sorts of questions that emerged by email and the tensions and politics that arose, based on questions and responses, were revealing in many ways and will be detailed in a later publication.

For the purpose of this chapter, however, what is important to note is that tensions between that which was expected in a yuntaku and that which was expected in a more traditional interview highlighted the apparently clashing “security imaginaries,”39 which may have given more license to circulate in these different communicative sites. Some military members, and even long-term expatriates, called me later to explain that they had not been able to effectively frame the logic of the US friendship and protector-