Rethinking Postwar Okinawa: Beyond American Occupation ed. by Pedro Iacobelli and Hiroko Matsuda (review)

Rethinking Postwar Okinawa views familiar issues from different angles and challenges the paradigms usually associated with them. In one of the volume's eight chapters, Ryan Masaaki Yokota considers Okinawa's convoluted political and legal status and argues that "while the postwar movement for regional autonomy in Japan has generally been from greater centralization to more local autonomy, in contrast, the situation for Okinawa has largely moved in the opposite direction toward greater central control" (p. 60). Thus, reversion from U.S. occupation to Japanese administration in 1972, rather than bringing hoped-for democratization and demilitarization, imposed wide-ranging controls from Tokyo and perpetuated the grossly disproportionate military presence. The 1969 Reversion Agreement broke the Japanese government's promise of a U.S. military presence in Okinawa reduced to mainland levels (hondo-nami), and the accompanying "secret understanding" to allow the return of U.S. nuclear weapons broke the promise of kaku-nuki (no nukes). Yokota writes that reversion "meant the overwhelming Japanization of Okinawa in every manner, from the introduction of yen currency, changing the vehicular right of way [from right-side to left-side traffic], and even the consolidation of local political parties into branches of their mainland counterparts" (p. 63).

Yokota moves beyond looking at advocates in the 1960s and early 1970s for an "independent Okinawan nation-state" and "activists and intellectuals" who contested reversion in "opposition to the Japanese state [and] critiqued the very nature of the modern nation-state itself." He focuses, instead, on proposals for Okinawa to be given "a more moderated federal position," such as a special autonomous region "perhaps mirroring the 'two systems, one country' formation that had been arranged for Hong Kong, [or] regional autonomy such as the province of Quebec in Canada or Scotland in the United Kingdom" (p. 78).

On sex workers, Asako Masubuchi writes of their victimization in the early postwar period of desperate poverty under U.S. occupation and militarization. Despite their mostly unacknowledged (and involuntary) contribution to the devastated economy, they were often denigrated and shunned, even by their own families. For example, Masubuchi describes one public health nurse's encounter with prostitutes in a brothel run by a 30-year-old Okinawan man in 1952.

The room was packed with women sleeping on beds originally used in field hospitals. Some of them had lost every means to live but sell their bodies, while others were brought without knowing anything about their planned fate. [The nurse] described prostitutes as "women who embodied defeat in war (haisen no onna-tachi)," expressing pent-up anger both at U.S. soldiers who "bought" those women and at the Okinawan man who ran the brothel. Compared to male doctors who often described prostitutes as mere strangers or even betrayers, [she] was obviously more sympathetic.

(p. 29)

Laura Kina writes in her chapter that "by the late 1960's, according to the U.S. based non-profit Women for Genuine Security, as many as 10,000 Okinawan women were 'coerced into prostitution through economic hardship' with 'one in thirty [of the total female population] employed as prostituted women in [G.I.] bars'" (p. 154). Kina quotes from her interviews of photographer Ishikawa Mao, who worked in a G.I. bar during the Vietnam War. According to Ishikawa, it is a stereotype to assume that "all women working at base towns are selling their bodies" (p. 154). Kina explains that "some, like Ishikawa, were looking for adventure, love, friendship and sexual freedom" (p. 164). Yet economic circumstances still cause women to work in Okinawa's G.I. bars. In her chapter, Kina cites a study by the U.S.based nonprofit Women for Genuine Security which found that as many as 10,000 women who suffered economic hardship had been coerced into prostitution by the late 1960s. One in 30 of all women in Okinawa worked as prostitutes in G.I. bars.

Johanna...