This book examines classical and modern interpretations of education in the context of contemporary Okinawa as a site of neoliberal military-industrial development. Considering how media educate consumers to accept the plans and policies of the powerful, it questions current concepts of development and the ideology that informs national security policies. The book closely examines the signs, symbols, and rhetorical manipulations of language used in media to rationalize and justify a kind of development, which is the destruction of the environment in Henoko. Through careful analysis of public relations literature and public discourse, it challenges the presupposition that Okinawa is the Keystone of the Pacific and necessarily the only location in Japan to host U.S. military presence. Forced to co-operate in America’s military hegemony and global war-fighting action, Okinawa is at the very center of the growing tension between Beijing and Washington and its clients in Tokyo and Seoul. The book represents a case study of the discourse used in society to wield control over this larger project, which is a more developed and militarized Okinawa . Considering how history is given shape through external power structures and discourse practices that seek control over both historical and contemporary narratives, it reveals how public attitudes and perceptions are shaped through educational policies and media.

Through careful analysis of literary texts and attention to writers and works long excluded from Japan's postwar literary canon, this book introduces fresh perspectives on the occupation era.

This book examines roles of gender, race and nation in the geopolitics of Cold War East Asia on the Island of Okinawa.

Allen (Japanese history, U. of Auckland, New Zealand) describes and analyzes the complex questions of identity in Okinawa, with its separate culture and history from Japan, large American military presence, and religions connected with shamanism and agricultural rituals. Though written by a professor of history, the study is strongly interdisciplinary, employing fieldwork familiar to anthropology and models from psychology in its study of religion. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Okinawan people have developed a unique tradition of protest in their long history of oppression and marginalization. Beginning with the Ryukyu Kingdom’s annexation to Japan in the late nineteenth century, Miyume Tanji charts the devastation caused by the Second World War, followed by the direct occupation of post-war Okinawa and continued presence of the US military forces in the wake of reversion to Japan in 1972. With ever more fragmented organizations, identities and strategies, Tanji explores how the unity of the Okinawan community of protest has come to rest increasingly on the politics of myth and the imagination. Drawing on original interview material with Okinawan protestors and in-depth analysis of protest history, Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa will appeal to scholars of Japanese history and politics, and those working on social movements and protest.

Six decades after the end of the occupation of mainland Japan, this volume approaches the theme of the occupation’s legacies. Rather than just being a matter of administrative practices and international relations, the consequences of the US occupation of Japan transcended both the seven years of its formal duration and the bilateral relations between the two countries. Rich with fresh analyses on a range of topics, including transnational and comparative views on the occupation, the influence of Japan on the United States as well as the reverse, international perspectives on this “odd couple”, and the memory of the occupation in both countries, this book provides a greater understanding of the transtemporal, transnational and transcultural legacies of one of the crucial events of the 20th century.

This book documents Japan's psychological deterioration caused by its defeat in August 1945. Also, Japan’s traumatic transformation from authoritarianism to democracy is detailed. The study exposes an ideological war between the Soviet Union and the USA within American-occupied Japan, which triggered violent polarization among the Japanese. Under General MacArthur’s tutorage, the defeated Japanese were expected to become a peace-loving people, but the Cold War derailed Japan’s progress toward freedom and democracy. The “Red Purge,” instituted by MacArthur's Headquarters (GHQ) from 1949 to 1950, triggered the devastating side effects on Japan's academic freedom and freedom of speech. Stanford University Professor Dr. Walter C. Eells (1886–1962) served at the GHQ as an influential education adviser and became the most vocal advocate of the Red Purge. Japanese Marxist historians have constructed the popular postwar narrative of the Red Purge, blaming the GHQ for every failure. The vast archival materials, including the GHQ papers, Eells papers, and Japanese-language documents, revealed that the Red Purge was a serious propaganda battle between the Americans and the Soviets in a war-torn Japan. This propaganda war engendered the violently polarized political climate, in which the conservative Japanese government behaved according to the dictates of US Cold War policy. By revealing feverish tensions within the GHQ regarding communist influences in Japanese universities, this study sheds bright new light on the Red Purge and its lasting impact on Japan's political future.

The American military started building its massive base complex in Okinawa at the end of World War II. During the decade that followed, US forces seized vast areas of privately owned land, evicting and impoverishing thousands of farmers. US military occupation rule, imposed during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, lasted until 1972, twenty years longer than the Allied occupation of mainland Japan. Besides land seizures, Okinawans were subjected to numerous human rights violations, including oxymoronic “occupation law” that consistently favored the US military in cases of serious crimes against civilians, denial of the freedom to choose candidates for elected office, and strict limits on travel outside Okinawa, even to mainland Japan. The commanding military presence has persistently stymied economic development in Okinawa, which remains Japan’s poorest prefecture. Yet, even as the disproportionate burden of bases continues to impose dangers and disruptions, hundreds of Okinawan women every year have married American servicemen and returned with them to live in the United States. Former Okinawa Times reporter Etsuko Takushi Crissey traveled throughout their adopted country, conducting wide-ranging interviews and a questionnaire survey of women who married and immigrated between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s. She concentrates especially on their experiences as immigrants, wives, mothers, working women, and members of a racial minority. Many describe severe hardships they encountered. In Okinawa's GI Brides, Crissey presents their diverse personal accounts, her survey results, and comparative data on divorces—challenging the widespread notion that such marriages almost always fail, with the women ending up abandoned and helpless in a strange land. Her book, the first on Okinawan wives of US servicemen, also compares the circumstances of their marriages with those of so-called “war brides” and postwar spouses of American servicemen stationed in mainland Japan and Europe. Written in brisk and lively prose, this book is stimulating and informative reading for a general audience, and a timely resource for specialists in the fields of history, political science, sociology, international relations, and anthropology, as well as ethnic, immigrant, and gender studies.

The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal island which offers a way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region.

Military occupations and interventions have a gendered impact on both those engaged in occupying, and those whose lands have been occupied, yet little has been published about this effect either historically or in contemporary times. This collection redresses this neglect by examining and analyzing the impact of occupation on men and women, both occupied and occupier, in a variety of geographical spaces from Japan to the Philippines to Iraq. The gendered perspectives offered are also intimately tied to analyses of ‘power’: how power is enacted by the occupier; how powerlessness is experienced by the occupied; how power is negotiated, shared, compromised, subverted, reclaimed; institutional power; and contested power in post-conflict societies. This collection covers a variety of geographical and period contexts in the Asia Pacific and Middle East since 1945, offering the reader a comparative view across time and space of post-WWII military occupations and interventions. The term ‘military occupation’ is interpreted broadly to include military interventions, the presence of military bases, and peacekeeping/post-conflict operations, allowing space to demonstrate that the lines between each definition are blurred. Including perspectives from established and emerging scholars, aid workers, and activists from around the world, this volume incorporates voices from those conducting research on and those with direct experience of military occupations and interventions.