Okinawa and the U.S. Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (review)

Masamichi Inoue’s ethnographic study aims to explain a paradox of power and resistance, namely, why have Okinawans’ protests since the disturbing 1995 schoolgirl rape not restrained the power of the U.S. and Japanese governments? By conducting his fieldwork in Henoko, the strategically located and hotly contested site for a new U.S. military facility, Inoue produces a careful analysis of new articulations of Okinawan identity. While the focus of his study is on the 1990s, Inoue also traces the history of social protests in Okinawa from the 1950s onward, thereby elucidating how the nature of such movements evolved in the postwar period.

In an attempt to avoid the problems of the tropes of self and other in his analysis of Okinawan identity, Inoue draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of the “intimate society” and his idea of the “third person.” The former concept refers to a dual society consisting of just you and me. Inoue quotes Levinas: “We are just among ourselves. Third parties are excluded” (p. 26). The latter term refers to anyone who disturbs the intimacy of this society. Inoue views the mutually affirming relationship of the United States and Japan in terms of Levinas’s “intimate society” and seeks in his study “to specify the democratic potentialities of ‘oppositional appropriation’ by Okinawans,” whom Inoue regards as the “third person” (p. 26).

In the aftermath of the 1995 schoolgirl rape, 85,000 Okinawans rallied in protest of the continued military presence in Okinawa. To stem Okinawans’ anger, the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO) was formed in November 1995. The committee proposed the return of some military facilities by 2003, among them Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, located in the heavily populated central island city of Ginowan. Inoue writes that the proposal had less to do with the welfare of Okinawans than it did with the security aims of Washington and Tokyo. Indeed, a key feature of the SACO proposal was to maintain a stable presence in the region; the plan included a sea-based replacement facility for Futenma in Henoko, an eastern coastal town in the northern city of Nago.

Henoko is doubly significant in the history of Okinawa. Well before the turbulent 1990s when SACO designated the district as a replacement facility site, Henoko found itself at the center of a massive island-wide social protest. These earlier protests took place in the mid-1950s after the U.S. military began to expropriate Okinawan land for base construction. The peak of the movement occurred in June 1956 when 100,000 Okinawans rallied in anger against the military’s blatant exercise of power in the first organized protest in postwar history. In the midst of the protest, some communities accepted the construction of new American bases, largely for economic reasons. Henoko was the first such community to cede to the military, after which other communities followed, putting the protest to an end by 1958. Henoko’s early capitulation made it a target of accusation by those involved in the island-wide struggle against the expropriation of Okinawan land.

Inoue views the 1950s movement, whose theme was emancipation from oppressors, whose mode was that of large-scale collective protest, and whose actors were subjugated residents and poor farmers, as characteristic of “old” organized social protests by the people (minshū). In short, he apprehends the protest “less within the framework of the new social movement literature that addresses ecology, peace, women’s issues, and so forth than with that of the Marxist and nationalist literatures that emphasize structural conflicts between the dominating and the dominated to explain largescale mobilizations” (p. 45). In the subsequent 1960s reversion movement, Inoue notes that “culture” became an added element that resulted in a type of collective mobilization that was transitional in nature. This movement contained features of both “old” and “new” social movements and paved the way for...