The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within by Steve Rabson (review)

The American Occupation of Okinawa can perhaps best be defined by incuriosity. Certainly the lives, land, and labor of the Okinawans must have been studied, as the business of administering the occupation required legions of military intelligence analysts, police, agricultural experts, bureaucrats, and administrators documenting and interpreting the details of everyday life. For more than four decades, however, Okinawa and Okinawans remained wrapped in America’s dismissive embrace, ruled and yet blithely ignored by U.S. academics—with the notable exception of scholars such as George Kerr and William Lebra. Norma Field’s memoir In the Realm of the Dying Emperor (Pantheon, 1991) and Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Henry Holt, 2001) broke this relative silence, aiding scholars such as myself, Matthew Allen, Linda Isako Angst, Davinder Bhowmik, Gerald Figal, Masamichi Inoue, Michael Molasky, Mark Selden, and Gregory Smits in our research and writing. And yet, as important as these two publications were, neither influenced my own work as did Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkley, 1989), Steve Rabson’s translations of Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s Kakuteru pātī (The Cocktail Party) and Higashi Mineo’s Okinawa no shōnen (Child of Okinawa). Reading these stories as a young graduate student gave me an exciting and troubling glimpse of art, critique, and everyday life in Okinawa and inspired a research project that would occupy me for the next decade. Rabson then collaborated with Molasky on Southern Exposure (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), their edited collection of Okinawan short stories and poems in English translation. Even now, these two texts remain touchstones for anyone with a serious interest in Okinawan issues.¹

With The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan, Rabson has turned his focus to social history. While this is a fascinating departure for a scholar better known for his translations and literary criticism, the book’s introduction grounds this choice in a compelling personal and intellectual narrative. Arriving in Okinawa as a young army draftee in 1968, Rabson experienced the tense counterpoint between his duties as a soldier on an American military installation and the daily lives of the Okinawans living in the base towns and rural villages around him. He writes critically of the impact of the military occupation on Okinawan society, and he describes his own response to this: volunteering in outreach programs, interacting with Okinawans, and trying to make sense of the complex political dynamics of the time. This involvement in his early years led him to the study of Japanese literature and a career as an influential teacher and scholar.

Rabson bases the current book on a wealth of material he collected from community and prefectural archives throughout Okinawa and from Okinawan associations and museums on the mainland, which he buttressed with interviews and surveys. He weaves together translations of personal narratives that depict the complex and ambiguous history of the Okinawan people within the framework of modern Japan. These accounts of labor, sacrifice, and the struggle to belong place well-known analyses of the establishment of modern Japan within a rich and vivid context.

Rabson’s decision to focus on the Okinawan community in Kansai, and particularly Osaka, allows him to explore the seemingly contradictory—yet absolutely necessary—place of marginal peoples in the ongoing creation of an ideology of a homogeneous and unified nation. It is not the novelty of his argument that is important here, as scholars of Japanese history have been attentive to this ideological project for some time. Rather, it is his detailed exploration of the consequences of the migration of young men and women from the farms and villages of Okinawa to the industrial communities of the mainland that provides powerful insights into the creation of the urban proletariat. Here, his analysis complements the groundbreaking work of Tomiyama Ichirō—still largely unavailable in English—and dovetails in compelling ways with the work of scholars such...