Mire Koikari's Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa opens with Brigadier General John Ondrick, Civil Administrator of the Ryukyu Islands, giving a speech, “Why Are We Here?” on March 3, 1960, to an audience of American and Okinawan women. Ondrick's framing of the US Occupation of the islands as a humanitarian endeavor and call to women to come together to ease political tensions and raise the standard of living for the local population provides a glimpse into the way that women were asked to use their feminine virtues to help maintain the Cold War peace (p. 1). This opening scene expresses the complicated and contradictory narratives that politicians and intellectuals from around the world who converged on Okinawa after 1945 wove, in order to reframe their colonial acts into acts of charity. Koikari untangles these threads and in so doing contributes to a variety of fields, including but not limited to Okinawan studies, American studies, Occupation studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies.

First and foremost, Koikari provides an alternative to the “trope of masculine domination and feminine subjugation” that has dominated discussions of the US-Okinawa relationship since the start of Occupation. Objecting to this simplistic characterization, she argues that Occupation invited a diverse range of participants into the fold, including local female teachers, liberal American educators, Asian American policymakers, US military officers, and wives of civilian and military personnel who for their own reasons bought into the project of spreading modern domesticity to Okinawa. Tying her project to the critique of “white domesticity” that theorists like Jane Simonsen and Vicente Rafael have engaged in to show how the ideal of domesticity, rooted in the Anglo-Saxon Christian home, was a powerful tool of colonial subjugation to discipline and assimilate Native Americans, African Americans, Native Hawaiians, and other minoritized groups, Koikari argues that in Okinawa too, this variant of cultural imperialism was no less violent than the more obvious violations of female bodies that have inspired large-scale anti-US political struggles in the islands. Okinawan women, far from being pure victims of domination or naïve collaborators, were at once the main targets and central actors in the promotion of American norms of domesticity as an instrument of rule.

Cold War Encounters is thus a broad-ranging, intersectional, multi-sited critique of US imperialism that resists simple assessments of complicity or resistance. Koikari responds to Catherine Lutz's call for more ethnographic analyses of empire by meticulously tracing how scholars, policymakers, and ordinary people on both sides of the Pacific actively participated in the enactment of white domesticity in the militarized space of Okinawa (p. 18).Footnote ⁷ Her opening chapter places Ondrick alongside local and Japanese women who were instrumental in establishing the Home Economics Department at the University of the Ryukyus (UR).

Chapter 2 focuses on the spread of grassroots cross-cultural activities that brought wives of military officials together with leading practitioners of home economics like Onaga Kimiyo, head of the department at UR who became known as “Mother of Okinawan women.”

Chapters 3 and 4 shift to the American academy. Three charismatic and ambitious university presidents—John Hanna of Michigan State University and Gregg Sinclair and Thomas Hamilton of the University of Hawaii—who pursued international exchange programs in order to raise the reputation of their respective land grant institutions receive top billing here. Koikari reveals that these leaders who were instrumental in providing home and technical education training to Okinawa relied upon a multiculturalist discourse not unlike the one that Ondrick deployed in order to rationalize and celebrate their accomplishments in the burgeoning field of international education. Chapter 4 also features Baron Goto, a Japanese American agriculturalist from Hawaii who became a central player in the establishment of the East-West Center in Honolulu. The role that Goto played in the production of knowledge during the Cold War allows us to see the connections between the establishment of rule in Okinawa and the assimilation of Asian Americans into the postwar national community through his participation in what Koikari calls a “multiracial endeavor involving men of color and its agents” (p. 115). Koikari illuminates the important differences between the state's interpellation of these “men of color” as agents of empire and the transformations that they underwent through their interactions with local populations. These encounters revealed and, at times, reinforced an awareness of their own complicity in reinscribing colonial relations that subjugated populations in countries where they had kinship ties. They had to reconcile this knowledge with their belief in the power of science and technical education to make the world a better place. In Goto's case, technical superiority won out. Koikari argues, “[H]is compassionate depoliticized understanding of racial and national ‘others’ was … reinforced in the context of Cold War integrationist politics where mutual affinity and affiliation were repeatedly articulated” (p. 122).

In chapters 5 and 6, Koikari highlights the continuities between the Japanese and US empires by tracing Onaga's trajectory from an instructor of sewing, cooking, and social etiquette in colonial Korea during the mid-1920s to the leader of home economics in US-occupied Okinawa.

By paying close attention to the details of empire and by tracing the personal and professional lives of a variety of actors who in one way or another rode the engine of empire in Okinawa to achieve notoriety and success, Koikari reveals the complex attachments and affinities that shaped US rule in Okinawa. In showing its readers how disciplinary boundaries can be subverted and multiple regions can be traversed without sacrificing detail, Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa joins a growing body of work by scholars working in diverse fields—like Lisa Lowe, Hyun Ok Park, and Manu Goswami—who have challenged the stability of such analytical categories as the nation, the region, or the colonial that have limited the questions that we have been able to pose.