Since its incorporation into the Japanese nation-state in 1879, Okinawa has been seen by both Okinawans and Japanese as an exotic “South,” both spatially and temporally distinct from modern Japan. In The Limits of Okinawa, Wendy Matsumura traces the emergence of this sense of Okinawan difference, showing how local and mainland capitalists, intellectuals, and politicians attempted to resolve clashes with labor by appealing to the idea of a unified Okinawan community. Their numerous confrontations with small producers and cultivators who refused to be exploited for the sake of this ideal produced and reproduced “Okinawa” as an organic, transhistorical entity. Informed by recent Marxist attempts to expand the understanding of the capitalist mode of production to include the production of subjectivity, Matsumura provides a new understanding of Okinawa's place in Japanese and world history, and it establishes a new locus for considering the relationships between empire, capital, nation, and identity.

Japan and Okinawa provides an up-to-date, coherent and theoretically informed examination of Okinawa from the perspective of political economy and society. It combines a focus on structure and subjectivity as a way to analyze Okinawa, Okinawans and their relationship with global, regional and national structures. The book draws on a range of disciplines to provide new insights into both the contemporary and historical place of Okinawa and the Okinawans. The first half of the book examines Okinawa as part of the global, regional and national structures which impose constraints as well as offer opportunities to Okinawa. Leading specialists examine in detail topics such as Okinawa as a frontier region, Okinawa's Free Trade Zones and response to globalization, and Okinawa as part of the Japanese 'construction state', being particularly concerned with how Okinawa can chart its own course. The second half focuses on questions of identity and subjectivity, examining the multitude of vibrant cultural practices that breathe life into the meaning of being Okinawan and inform their social and political responses to structural constraints. The originality of this book can be found in its elucidation of how the structural constraints of Okinawa's precarious position in the world, the region and as part of Japan impact on subjectivity. For many Okinawans, in the past as now, acceptance and rationalization of their dependency has made them collaborators in their own subordination. At the same time, however, they have demonstrated a capacity to give voice to a separate identity, inscribing cultural practices marking them as different from mainland Japanese.

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.

Contains numerous maps. One of a series of monographs prepared by the Historical Division that deals with the activities of Marine Corps units in World War II, this monograph is the work of Captain Carleton. While on Okinawa he lived with the men of the Sixth Marine Division, watched them fight and listened to their accounts of the action. He was with the Twenty Ninth Marines on Motobu Peninsula, the Twenty Second Marines during the fight for Naha, and spent considerable time with the Sixth Reconnaissance Company. Most of the material in this monograph is the result of Captain Carleton’s personal observations or was gained through his interviews with the officers and men who fought in the Okinawa battles.

This edited volume presents the latest multidisciplinary research that delves into developments related to contemporary Okinawa (a.k.a Ryukyu Islands), and also engages with contemporary debates on American hegemony and Empire in a larger geographical context. Okinawa, long viewed as a marginalized territory in larger historical processes, has been characterized solely by the U.S. military presence in the islands, despite having embraced a multiplicity of social and cultural transformations since the end of the Pacific War. In this timely academic revision of Okinawa, occurring at the time of numerous debates over the building of yet another military base in the island, this volume's contributors tell a story that situates Okinawa in the context of other militarized territories and thus, goes beyond the limits of Okinawa prefecture. Indeed, the book examines the ways in which studies on Okinawa have evolved, moving away from the direct problems brought by the establishment of foreign military bases. Previous studies have explicated how Okinawa has fallen prey to power politics of more dominant nations. In expanding on these themes, this volume examines the unique social and cultural dynamics of Okinawa and its people that had never been intended by the political authorities.

Exploring contemporary Okinawan culture, politics, and historical memory, this book argues that the long Japanese tradition of defining Okinawa as a subordinate and peripheral part of Japan means that all claims of Okinawan distinctiveness necessarily become part of the larger debate over contemporary identity. The contributors trace the renascence of the debate in the burst of cultural and political expression that has flowered in the past decade, with the rapid growth of local museums and memorials and the huge increase in popularity of distinctive Okinawan music and literature, as well as in political movements targeting both U.S. military bases and Japanese national policy on ecological, developmental, and equity grounds. A key strategy for claiming and shaping Okinawan identity is the mobilization of historical memory of the recent past, particularly of the violent subordination of Okinawan interests to those of the Japanese and American governments in war and occupation. Its intertwining themes of historical memory, nationality, ethnicity, and cultural conflict in contemporary society address central issues in anthropology, sociology, contemporary history, Asian Studies, international relations, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies. Contributions by: Matt Allen, Linda Isako Angst, Asato Eiko, Gerald Figal, Aaron Gerow, Laura Hein, Michael Molasky, Steve Rabson, James E. Roberson, Mark Selden, and Julia Yonetani.

Using a multi-national and multi-archival approach to this diplomatic history study, the author examines comprehensively and in great detail for the first time the origins of the so-called Okinawa Problem. Also inlcludes four maps.

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.