The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community by Wendy Matsumura (review)

The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community. By Wendy Matsumura. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 2015. xiii, 288 pages. $94.95, cloth; $25.95, paper.

While the increasing number of sociological and anthropological monographs on Okinawa published in English has increased in recent years, relatively few historical studies have focused on modern Okinawa, especially during the pre–World War II period. Wendy Matsumura’s ambitious book not only fills the void but also offers a remarkably sophisticated engagement with diverse historical sources. Deeply immersed in Marxist historiography and colonial and postcolonial studies, Matsumura addresses the causes of tension between elites and the ordinary citizens, including small cultivators and peddlers, in the colonized regions while portraying a “nonapocalyptic” account of Marxism that “does not prioritize revolution per se but understands various revolutionary moments as causes and consequences of social transformation” (p. 15).

Matsumura meticulously describes small but significant incidents from the 1860s to the 1930s, during which peasants, weaver women, sugar producers, and others resisted the vision of a harmonious and autonomous community (Okinawa-shugi), as promoted by Okinawan political and cultural leaders who, while concerned about the aggressive penetration of mainland Japanese capital into Okinawa, also aspired to maintain their privileged positions under the Japanese empire.

The introductory chapter presents the theoretical foundations of the author’s agenda. Among them is autonomist Marxism, represented by Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, which highlighted the “power and vulnerability of capital vis-à-vis labor power, the only commodity it could not produce on its own” (p. 16), suggesting that labor would not merely gain leverage against capital but also produce a new collective subjectivity. The chapter aligns the book’s agenda with criticism of the stagism and Eurocentrism in Marxist materialism, as offered by scholars Dale Tomich, Michael Taussig, and Massimiliano Tomba, who argued that capitalist accumulation could take place without fundamentally transforming social relations and structures.

Chapter 1 outlines the simultaneous political incorporation and economic subjugation of Okinawa into the Japanese nation-state, starting with the invasion and conquest of the Ryūkyū Kingdom by Satsuma domain and subsequent conversion of the kingdom into Satsuma’s subsidiary state in the early seventeenth century. The chapter then details the Meiji government’s forced disposition of the Ryūkyū Kingdom and implementation of the Preservation of Old Customs Policy (Kyūkan Onzon Seisaku), which, by selectively maintaining existing tax systems and political and social hierarchies in the kingdom, painted the national government’s unfair laws and policies in Okinawa “as necessary measures in light of the region’s belated entry into the nation-state, the continued resistance to incorporation by the former kingdom’s ruling elite, and the low degree of formal education of the commoners” (p. 47).

Chapters 2 to 5 examine specific episodes in which groups of Okinawans collectively confronted oppressive local government officials and mainland capitalists. Chapter 2 examines the Miyako Island Peasantry Movement (Miyakojima Jintōzei Haishi Seigan Undō) of 1893, in which small farmers, burdened by heavy poll taxes and customary “obligations” to local officials, demanded abolition of the poll tax and enactment of a new land levy. Matsumura argues that the Miyako peasants did not desire to escape from the “backward” social customs in Okinawa with help from the “modern” Japanese state, as characterized by the Meiji government. Instead, Matsumura views their act as “a call for their liberation from the structural conditions that kept them tied to their lands, kept them from having any say in what type of work they engaged in, and gave local officials complete control over the way that communal resources were allocated” (p. 73).

Chapter 3 highlights a group of rural women weavers who held a protest in 1901 after reform-minded political and business leaders, afraid that inconsistent textile quality might damage the Okinawan brand, tried to regulate the weavers. Matsumura describes the political and intellectual efforts to not only rationalize Okinawa’s economy but also transform gender norms, a transition the leaders viewed, according to Matsumura, as “a prerequisite for the...