[PDF] The Translocal Island Of Okinawa eBook

Author : Shinnosuke Takahashi
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 17,95 MB
Release : 2024-06-13
Category : History
ISBN : 135041154X

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The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal island which offers a way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region.

Author : Shinnosuke Takahashi
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 10,88 MB
Release : 2024-07-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1350411531

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The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal island which offers a way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region.

Author : Hiroko Matsuda
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 45,45 MB
Release : 2018-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 0824877071

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Okinawa, one of the smallest prefectures of Japan, has drawn much international attention because of the long-standing presence of US bases and the people’s resistance against them. In recent years, alternative discourses on Okinawa have emerged due to the territorial disputes over the Senkaku Islands, and the media often characterizes Okinawa as the borderland demarcating Japan, China (PRC), and Taiwan (ROC). While many politicians and opinion makers discuss Okinawa’s national and security interests, little attention is paid to the local perspective toward the national border and local residents’ historical experiences of border crossings. Through archival research and first-hand oral histories, Hiroko Matsuda uncovers the stories of common people’s move from Okinawa to colonial Taiwan and describes experiences of Okinawans who had made their careers in colonial Taiwan. Formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom and a tributary country of China, Okinawa became the southern national borderland after forceful Japanese annexation in 1879. Following Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War and the cession of Taiwan in 1895, Okinawa became the borderland demarcating the Inner Territory from the Outer Territory. The borderland paradoxically created distinction between the two sides, while simultaneously generating interactions across them. Matsuda’s analysis of the liminal experiences of Okinawan migrants to colonial Taiwan elucidates both Okinawans’ subordinate status in the colonial empire and their use of the border between the nation and the colony. Drawing on the oral histories of former immigrants in Taiwan currently living in Okinawa and the Japanese main islands, Matsuda debunks the conventional view that Okinawa’s local history and Japanese imperial history are two separate fields by demonstrating the entanglement of Okinawa’s modernity with Japanese colonialism. The first English-language book to use the oral historical materials of former migrants and settlers—most of whom did not experience the Battle of Okinawa—Liminality of the Japanese Empire presents not only the alternative war experiences of Okinawans but also the way in which these colonial memories are narrated in the politics of war memory within the public space of contemporary Okinawa.

Author : Andrea E. Murray
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 50,59 MB
Release : 2017-06-01
Category : Travel
ISBN : 1785333879

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The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.

Author : George H. Kerr
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
Page : 596 pages
File Size : 41,8 MB
Release : 2011-10-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1462901840

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"[Okinawa: The History of an Island People is] a book that answers the questions of the curious layman, satisfies the standards of critical scholarship, and is readable and fascinating besides. --American Historical Review"

Author : Johanna O. Zulueta
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 13,38 MB
Release : 2019-09-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9813297875

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This book considers the role of civilian workers on U.S. bases in Okinawa, Japan and how transnational movements within East Asia during the Occupation period brought foreign workers, mostly from the Philippines, to work on these bases. Decades later, in a seeming “reproduction of base labour”, returnees of both Okinawan and Philippine heritage began occupying jobs on base as United States of Japan (USFJ) employees. The book investigates the role that ethnicity, nationality, and capital play in the lives of these base employees, and at the same time examines how Japanese and Okinawan identity/ies are formed and challenged. It offers a valuable resource for those interested in Japan and Okinawa, U.S. military basing, migration, and mixed ethnicities.

Author : Daniel Akihiro Iwama
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 13,49 MB
Release : 2023
Category :
ISBN :

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Since WWII Okinawa Island has remained one of the densest global outposts of US militarism. Over seventy-percent of all US military land throughout Japan is concentrated in Okinawa Prefecture - the formerly independent Ryukyu Kingdom - on less than one-percent of the country's land base. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of Indigenous repossession that occurs when militarized land is reclaimed by those from whom it was dispossessed. Specifically, I ask: What has been the effect of military base return on Okinawans' relationships with land and strategies of resistance under the US and Japanese governments' post-1995 regime of base realignment? Using a mixed-methods embedded case study methodology and eighteen months of fieldwork including discourse analysis, interviews and social movement participation I present three substantive sections. My historical entry-point is an archival study of militarist dispossession in the first decade of US military occupation following the Battle of Okinawa. Then, I offer two contemporary embedded cases. The first of these examines the return of the US Army's Awase Meadows Golf Club in Kitanakagusuku Village and its subsequent redevelopment into what at the time was Okinawa's largest Western-styled shopping mall. The second case study examines the sit-in against the construction of a new "replacement facility" in the northern village of Henoko, which was made a necessary condition for the yet unrealized return of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan City under the US-Japan Special Action Committee on Okinawa's Final Report. I argue that the return of military land produces no necessary reversal of the territorial alienation and uneven exposure to violence that Okinawans have experienced over seventy-eight years of military occupation. Instead, novel forms of occupation and continuities of colonial violence emerge even in periods of purported demilitarization. Okinawans participate flexibly in this regime of return, negotiating mainstream planning processes and participating in protest to realize myriad benefits from economic empowerment to cultural reconstruction in the wake of Japanese and American colonialisms. Findings from this dissertation emphasize the necessity of understanding the procedural dynamics of military land reform in conjunction with the larger political frame of reterritorialization in which resurgent Indigenous peoples are engaged.

Author : Gavan McCormack
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 42,90 MB
Release : 2018-03-08
Category : History
ISBN : 1538115565

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Now in a thoroughly updated edition, Resistant Islands offers the first comprehensive overview of Okinawan history from earliest times to the present, focusing especially on the recent period of colonization by Japan, its disastrous fate during World War II, and its current status as a glorified US military base. The base is a hot-button issue in Japan and has become more widely known in the wake of Japan’s 2011 natural disasters and the US military role in emergency relief. Okinawa rejects the base-dominated role allocated it by the US and Japanese governments under which priority attaches to its military functions, as a kind of stationary aircraft carrier. The result has been to throw US-Japan relations into crisis, bringing down one prime minister who tried to stop construction of yet another base on the island and threatening the incumbent if he is unable to deliver Okinawan approval of the new base. Okinawa thus has become a template for reassessing the troubled US-Japan relationship—indeed, the geopolitics of the US empire of bases in the Pacific.

Author : Masamichi S. Inoue
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 45,73 MB
Release : 2007-04-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0231511140

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In 1995, an Okinawan schoolgirl was brutally raped by several U.S. servicemen. The incident triggered a chain of protests by women's groups, teachers' associations, labor unions, reformist political parties, and various grassroots organizations across Okinawa prefecture. Reaction to the crime culminated in a rally attended by some 85,000 people, including business leaders and conservative politicians who had seldom raised their voices against the U.S. military presence. Using this event as a point of reference, Inoue explores how Okinawans began to regard themselves less as a group of uniformly poor and oppressed people and more as a confident, diverse, middle-class citizenry embracing the ideals of democracy, human rights, and women's equality. As this identity of resistance has grown, however, the Japanese government has simultaneously worked to subvert it, pressuring Okinawans to support a continued U.S. presence. Inoue traces these developments as well, revealing the ways in which Tokyo has assisted the United States in implementing a system of governance that continues to expand through the full participation and cooperation of residents. Inoue deftly connects local social concerns with the larger political processes of the Japanese nation and the global strategies of the United States. He critically engages social-movement literature along with postmodern/structural/colonial discourses and popular currents and themes in Okinawan and Japanese studies. Rich in historical and ethnographical detail, this volume is a nuanced portrait of the impact of Japanese colonialism, World War II, and U.S. military bases on the formation of contemporary Okinawan identity.