Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific

Foreword

vii Foreword Cynthia Enloe Readers will be reading this collection of insightful articles when Iraq has slipped off the front pages of the world’s daily papers and faded from television news screens. Fewer people will be paying attention to Afghanistan’s ethnic and provincial groups as they continue to cope with the myriad effects of the multinational invasion. There will be a new U.S. president, and the governments of Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines more than likely will have changed hands. Perhaps even the talk of “empire” will have lost its popular cachet. This will be precisely the right time to read this book, cover to cover—slowly. Our short attention spans might be tempting us to look away from the scenes of militarized imperial action; nonetheless, as we open this provocative book, Guam will still be under U.S. colonial rule, the Philippines and South Korea will remain subjected to intense American pressures, and Japan will continue to be internally divided over whether to stay under the U.S. protective umbrella or to expand its military even further. The wheels of militarization, in fact, are greased by such popular inattention . The militarizing processes going on in Asia and the Pacific have been made easier to sustain by our distractedness and our inclination to look elsewhere. We might have imagined that the U.S. government’s war on terror was militarizing only those countries chosen for the headlines: Iraq, Afghanistan , Iran, and Pakistan, along with Britain and the United States. Yet, as these attentive contributors show us, individual Okinawans, mainland Japanese, Chamorros, South Koreans, Filipinos, Fijians, and Hawaiians each have been weighing and responding to intense militarizing influences— subtle and blatant—during these same early twenty-first–century years. The seeds of those influences were planted long before September 11 and viii · FOREWORD the military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, though they have been fertilized by states’ responses to those featured events. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho consciously bring together here both the big picture and the microscopic view of militarism. They allow us to move between these views. We can enhance our explanatory skills by thinking big in order to think small and by thinking small in order to think big. Neither view alone is sufficient if we are to make full and nuanced sense of how militarism works, why it continues to push forward into our personal and societal lives, and how it might be rolled back. Recognizing this dual intellectual imperative—to think big and to think small—has been one of the gifts of feminist analysis. That is why tracking militarism in contemporary Asia and the Pacific calls on us to explore privatized sexualities and governments’ military-basing policies simultaneously. That is why, at the same time we are tracking the stubborn entrenchment of militarizing processes in such an expansive region, we have to cultivate a curiosity about both individual memories and organized resistances. We learn here that each is gendered. Soldiers’ sexualities, the iconography of atomic testing, organized support of those surviving elderly women once forced to become wartime sex slaves, local military recruitment , popular mobilizing against external militarizers—if we leave out the politics of femininities and the politics of masculinities in our investigation of any one of these, we are destined to underestimate the complex cultural politics of each and the interactions among them all. It is all too rare to have Hawai‘i and South Korea considered in the same book. It is even more unusual to have them joined together between the same bindings by Guam and Japan. In most analyses, “Asia” is treated as politically and culturally separate from “the Pacific,” with the latter getting the short shrift. By contrast, Shigematsu and Camacho deliberately have put the two artificially constructed regions into a common analytical frame: the frame of militarism. Today, at a time when U.S. security strategists (civilian and uniformed) are anointing Guam as a hub of American global military operations, absorbing the contents of this book—connecting Guam’s Chamorro women and men to the women and men of Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Korea, and Fiji—becomes an urgent enterprise. In an innovative move, Shigematsu, Camacho, and their contributors are asking us to explore the legacies and linkages between the early twentieth-century Japanese Empire and the present U.S. empire. If you FOREWORD · ix are a Chamorro in Guam...