Mire Koikari's Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa examines US occupied Okinawa (1945–1972) and situates it within the Cold War context. Through a rigorous and nuanced investigation of women's grassroots activities in the domestic sphere of homemaking, the author engagingly demonstrates how women, through active participation, were complicit in Cold War expansionism and imperialist politics while the occupation violently transformed Okinawa into a garrison island.
In discussing the US occupation of Okinawa and its legacy, it is inevitable to examine violent incidents like the 1995 rape of a schoolgirl by three US servicemen in Okinawa. Capturing masculine US domination and feminine Japanese/Okinawan subjugation, such incidents seemingly epitomize postwar US–Okinawa relations and can effectively serve as a critiquing tool. However, Koikari challenges this binary, gendered trope because, as she points out, US dominance in Okinawa has been extraordinarily complicated, involving not only violence and coercion but also other kinds of dynamics entailing women and gender (p. 4). Instead of portraying Okinawan women as simply “victims” or “resisters” (as a reverse image of “victims”) during the occupation (p. 16), she looks at feminine and domestic activities in which they engaged during Cold War deployment of women and treats them as active participants in the occupation, or Cold War US expansionism.
Koikari argues that domesticity was central to the US occupation of Okinawa by applying Amy Kaplan's concept “manifest domesticity”—a critical line between domesticity and US imperialism—to occupied Okinawa. To this end, she examines women's social events in postwar Okinawa such as “Friendship Teas” which American and Okinawan women jointly organized in order to promote feminine affinity beyond racial and national differences. Contrary to their depoliticized appearances, Koikari discloses that they were in fact deeply linked with Cold War politics (Ch. 2). Drawing upon Christina Klein's “Cold War Orientalism,” she claims that such feminine and domestic activities in occupied Okinawa embodied the Cold War integrationist dynamic that enticed American women to reach out to non-white women (i.e., Okinawan women in this case), mutually embrace their cross-cultural encounters, and deepen their emotional bonding.
To explore the Cold War integrationist dynamic, Koikari draws attention to Michigan State University's (MSU) project in which the university sent its home economists to Okinawa's newly established institution called the University of the Ryukyus (UR) to modernize Okinawans’ home lives (Ch. 3). In particular, she focuses on MSU home economists’ attempt to implement the university's philosophy emphasized by its charismatic president John Hannah: Land-grant institutions like MSU, unlike elite private universities, should realize America's mission to help emancipate the poor and uneducated of the world. At the UR, they worked closely with their Okinawan counterparts to help develop a new feminine academic space of home economics by designing new courses and curricula. Outside the university, they reached out to local women to introduce them to new methods of homemaking and performed a series of instructional domestic demonstrations throughout Okinawa. In the process, the US military was necessary for MSU economists to live and travel in the occupied islands. This collaborative endeavor between MSU and the military, as Koikari asserts, was an important part of Cold War domesticity when MSU home economists spread the gospel of modern domesticity across the frontier of Okinawa.
Koikari also addresses the “egalitarian” nature of Cold War domesticity. While distancing themselves from pre-existing racist/colonialist sentiments and practices, MSU economists carefully attempted to establish mutual “people-to-people” relations with Okinawan women through grassroots cross-cultural exchanges. For example, an MSU home economist facilitated an opportunity for Okinawan home economics teachers to actually experience American domestic life with American military wives on the base (p. 93). Koikari poignantly reveals the mechanism of Cold War manifest domesticity in which “egalitarian” feminine bonding served to conceal Cold War American empire-building and helped to sustain the legitimacy of American military rule in occupied Okinawa.
A highlight of this book is Chapter 5, which thoroughly examines Okinawan home economists at the UR. With their advocacy of the land-grant philosophy and female empowerment inspired by MSU home economists, UR home economists attempted to contribute to the reconstruction of postwar Okinawa by establishing female leadership within and beyond academia. Particularly intriguing is a discussion of the Japanese home economist Onaga Mikiyo's professional life in relation to empire-building. Onaga's career began in colonial Korea, as a home economics teacher at a Japanese girls’ high school, and then soared in occupied Okinawa as a faculty member at the UR. Koikari connects this upward mobility with Okinawa's history of “double colonialism” by Japan and the US, since Onaga's teaching experience, which she had cultivated earlier in colonial Korea by serving the Japanese empire, gave her the opportunity to renew and strengthen her commitment to domesticity in occupied Okinawa while working with the American occupiers. For Onaga and her fellow UR home economists, occupied Okinawa was an exciting space of female empowerment to articulate their concern as women, researchers, and Okinawans. Correspondingly, they passionately promoted domestic education, as they knew from experience that it enabled women to achieve female self-realization, or to “do anything and everything” (p. 159). Thus, Koikari skillfully presents the extraordinarily mobile dynamics of domesticity that crossed national borders within the contexts of Japanese and American empire-building.
Although I understand Koikari's emphasis on mutuality promoted in Cold War cross-cultural engagements, I would wish to have found a more detailed discussion of how Japanese and American women empowered themselves and improved their statuses by “civilizing” racialized Okinawan women behind “egalitarian” feminine bonding. Nevertheless, Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa is a well-crafted, insightful exploration of the Cold War integrationist politics which painted the occupation as a positive occasion for multicultural understanding and mutual affinity. This volume is a significant contribution to gender and the Cold War studies. It will also appeal to a broad range of both specialists and general readers with interests in female empowerment, US imperialism, the US occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese history, and Okinawan history.
