In this ambitious ethnographical study, Masamichi S. Inoue attempts to explain how the large, long-standing, and continuing U.S. military presence in Okinawa contributed to the formation of a postwar Okinawan identity, a culture of resistance, and a deep sense of island solidarity. By the 1990s, when Inoue conducted his research, however, he found fissures at the intersections of class, gender, and generational difference. Maintaining cohesion became even more complicated as Okinawans “awakened to globally disseminated ideas about ecology, women's equality, and peace” (p. 9). Despite cracks in solidarity, Inoue demonstrates, the culture of resistance remains a formable force in Okinawa's relationship with policy makers in Tokyo and Washington. At the same time, Inoue acknowledges the fundamental question that continues to vex Okinawa's activist community: Why has the protracted anti-base movement fundamentally failed to alter the status quo?
Inoue's theoretical and methodological stances make his ethnographical account overtly political as he takes an activist, participant observation approach, which makes for a passionate account that some readers will welcome and others may find too partisan. Inoue, a graduate student in Duke University's Department of Cultural Anthropology, embraces an activist anthropology that teaches “skills and arts of subversive border-crossing in search for global solidarity” (p. xi). Addressing readers who might see his work as a criticism of U.S. servicemen, Inoue borrows from James Scott (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985]) in expressing sympathy for American soldiers. Quoting directly from Scott, he compares U.S. servicemen to Okinawans, as subalterns “hav[ing] been bought at the margin of the labor market to [fight] for an institution whose principal beneficiaries were often excluded from service” (p. 13). Inoue sees “local” Okinawan resistance as part of a global struggle to contain the institutional power of the U.S. military complex that, according to Chalmer Johnson's recent count, is arrayed in 151 countries with 761 active bases (The Nation, October 8, 2008). At a time when many scholars are unwilling to take political stances and take refuge in the naive belief that “objectivity” is somehow neutral, Inoue's account captures Howard Zinn's spirited assertion that one “cannot be neutral on a moving train.” Hence, Inoue is not afraid to champion Okinawa's “local resistance to the armed globalization from above” (p. 38) and optimistically concludes that his study demonstrates how a vibrant public sphere can “constrain, influence, and suspend what I see as the dangerously native, and increasingly influential and popularized, view of the U.S. military as simply a champion for freedom and peace” (p. 210).
Inoue's activist scholarship draws on the “so-called new social movement literature,” which deal with “the questions of culture, identity, and difference in contemporary struggles” (p. 20). This theoretical disposition allows Inoue to explain how two simultaneous articulations of Okinawan identity can exist in the time and space: “we are Okinawans” and “we are Okinawans but of a different kind” (p. 11). To address this dilemma of Okinawan identity formation, Inoue (who did his fieldwork in Henoko, a small rural community in northern Okinawa incorporated into Nago City) draws on Emmanuel Levinas's critique of the “intimate society.” Inoue tells the reader that he turned to Levinas's critique to recover the “critically transformative voices of Okinawans” otherwise excluded by the “Foucauldian/postmodern model of power and resistance” (p. 26). He positions Okinawans as the “third person” in the “intimate society of love—and, I should add, hate—between the United States and Japan” (p. 26). The affluence made possible by lavish subsidies provided by Tokyo and by the U.S. base economy, Inoue argues, gives Okinawans confidence to “express their autonomy within and against the intimate society” of the U.S.–Japan relationship and in the process, “construct a hybrid global citizenship” (p. 27).
In setting the context for his ethnography in Henoko, Inoue devotes a full chapter to historicizing the contingencies that have shaped Okinawan identity in the postwar period. During the twenty-seven years of U.S. military occupation, Okinawans rose up to demand reversion to Japan. Inoue suggests that this phase of resistance is best characterized by “old” Marxist and nationalist narratives that assume a homogeneous minshū (people) and explain the large-scale mobilizations of this period in terms of “structural conflicts between the dominating and the dominated”(p. 45). While validating the signifier “old” for the pre-1972 resistance movements, Inoue claims that by the 1990s, Okinawans' primary identity had shifted from minshū to shimin (citizen), where the people, no longer subjugated, are “affluent, confident, and planetary yet grounded ‘citizens’ with diverse backgrounds” (p. 63). Thus, it was these cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and globalized shimin who rose up in protest after the 1995 rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. service men in a unified yet heterogeneous resistance movement that shook the foundation of the U.S.–Japan security relationship.
Island-wide anger over the incident forced policy makers in Tokyo and Washington to establish the Special Action Committee on Okinawa, which diminished the extraterritoriality privileges long accorded to U.S. military personnel on Okinawa in the Status of Forces Agreement. Okinawans also received the promise that the United States would lighten its military footprint by agreeing to close some bases, most notably the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station, located in the middle of densely populated Ginowan City. The initial jubilation soon soured as U.S. officials, with Tokyo's tacit approval, announced that Futenma Air Station could not be closed until a new base was built and proposed construction in the sea off of Camp Schwab in Nenoko District, in the less densely populated region of northern Okinawa. In a matter of weeks, Henoko went from an obscure community to the focal point of the shimin movement to resist the relocation of Futenma Air Station.
The four chapters that Inoue devotes to his fieldwork in Henoko are the strongest and most intriguing sections of the book. Chapters 4 and 5 explain the historical context of Henoko, emphasizing how the community was an “outlier” in the reversion movement. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Marine Corps wanted to build a new base, something that the proponents of reversion bitterly contested. Henoko, an impoverished and isolated community, had experienced very little of the economic benefits that accrued from the U.S. military presence, located almost entirely in the southern half of the island. City leaders, wanting to boost the region's underdeveloped economy, agreed to locate the new base, Camp Schwab, in Henoko. The establishment of Camp Schwab led to a radical social transformation of Henoko, from a sleepy village to a thriving yet seedy and dangerous base camp town. The Vietnam War further spurred Henoko's economic growth, as several hundred thousands Marines circulated through Camp Schwab on deployment to Vietnam. Henoko's acceptance of the base made it “different” from the rest of Okinawa, a consciousness that Inoue characterizes as “we are Okinawans but of a different kind” (p. 19). But even as Henoko stood apart from the rest of the island, the solidarity of Henoko's pro-base identity was transformed by the protracted U.S. military presence. Inoue demonstrates how “traditional” kinship bonds, women's roles, and youth attitudes were fundamentally altered as “out-of-towners” who had moved to Henoko from other parts of Okinawa during and after the 1960s upset the close-knit ties of the community (p. 19).
The end of the Vietnam War and Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972 depressed Henoko's military base economy for the next thirty years. Henoko's long economic stagnation and its pro-base history made it a logical location for the new base. But things did not go smoothly. Inoue shows how Henoko's middle-class residents, who ironically derived their status from the pre-reversion base economy, resisted the construction of the new base and joined forces with the island-wide anti-base coalition. This group of “we are Okinawans” acting as hybrid shimin initiated a massive petition drive that culminated in a plebiscite in Nago City on whether to accept the Henoko base. Inoue's fieldwork also led him to cover the pro-base coalition: pro-business, conservative politicians allied with their Liberal Democratic Party Japanese benefactors and the local working-class community.
In chapter 6, the climax of the referendum, Inoue analyzes the tensions, contradictions, and nuances of the pro- and anti-base struggle, a virtual “civil” civil war over the direction of the community. In covering the referendum, Inoue brilliantly illustrates how the local struggle was in microcosm a globalized struggle against the exercise of hegemonic power. Witnessing the increasing exhaustion of the anti-base coalition in the final days of the campaign, Inoue abandoned his stance as “objective ethnographer” as he assisted the movement by “writing signboards, setting them up, and driving through Henoko and beyond to make announcements about meetings and demonstrations” (p. 189). Despite the array of local, national, and international forces advocating for the military base, the scrappy anti-base organizers pulled off a victory that forced the mayor, Higa Tetsuya (temporarily) to accept the wishes of the people.
The referendum victory, however, was short-lived. Inoue describes how Mayor Higa, cajoled and coerced by local and national pro-base interest groups, traveled to Tokyo, met with Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryūtaro, and announced that he would accept the base—only to resign his office immediately, which in effect left the matter to be decided by his successor. This affront to democracy set the stage for a highly charged and bitter campaign to replace Higa. Although the polls indicated that the anti-base candidate Tamaki Yoshikazu was ahead, the pro-base candidate, who had the entire resources and support of Tokyo and the Liberal Democratic Party, scored an upset victory, albeit by a razor-thin margin of 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent.
How does Inoue account for this reversal? He shows how the middle-class anti-base coalition, made up of groups primarily from the more affluent southern half of Okinawa, upset local sensibilities by discounting the economic consequences of rejection of the base. Essentially, many of the local inhabitants revolted against the condescending and patronizing attitudes of the largely bourgeois anti-base coalition, who seemed more interested in preserving the dugong, an endangered species similar to the Florida manatee, than addressing the chronic unemployment and livelihood issues of residents; in essence, “we are Okinawans but of a different kind” redux.
In the concluding chapter, Inoue throws off his researcher hat and dons the activist mantle. He takes issue with prescriptive analyses that will away “the complex contemporary reality of diversification and fragmentation of the category of ‘Okinawa’” itself (p. 211), and makes a passionate plea for “radical appropriation” as a means to “to reconstruct a subversive and oppositional public sphere in Okinawa and beyond” that is open, inclusive, and heterogeneous (p. 210). Regardless of whether they are pro-base or anti-base, Okinawans, Inoue optimistically, if not somewhat naively, believes, can “reunite on the basis of universal, but locally grounded, desire for democracy and life without the military” (p. 218).
While Inoue offers a compelling ethnographical account of the situation in Henoko, I am less convinced by his theoretical approach and his historical analysis of Okinawan social movements. As stated earlier, Inoue categorizes Okinawan protest movements after 1972 as “new” social movements, shimin, and the pre-1972 reversion movement as an “old” social movement, minshū. Certainly no one would want to argue that the postmodern/globalization era has not shaped social movements in new ways; however, I doubt whether these “new” social movements are fundamentally different from the “old” social movements. Inoue conceptualizes Okinawa minshū movements as resistance by a subjugated people who possess an “exclusive and unitary” identity as Okinawan people (p. 63), which he contrasts with movements in the present “age of globalization” in which the Okinawa people are “affluent, confident, and planetary yet grounded ‘citizens’ with diverse backgrounds. … in a manner different from the Okinawan minshū” (p. 63).
To begin with, I question the validity of his conceptualization of globalization as a late twentieth-century phenomenon—recent scholarship has demonstrated significant “globalization” as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A more specific objection is that he implies that older social movements lacked the diversity and “planetary” sophistication of more recent social movements. My own research has revealed a heterogeneous, if not factionalized, constituency that, ironically, on the eve of reversion came to oppose and regret reversion to Japan. And like the current Henoko situation, class, gender, generational differences, and locality played central roles in creating a complex and a contradictory reversion movement. Okinawans participating in the reversion movement were also “globalized,” as they were quite conscious of and inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States, and other leftist-nationalist movements prevalent in the 1960s.
I also take issue with how Inoue differentiates the actions of nation-states today from the recent past. Previously, Inoue asserts, states maintained power in an overt and oppressive manner, but in a globalized world, nation-states maintain power by an “elusive” and “cunning” use of money “that can exert [control] over [the people] as mediator between global interests and local concerns” (p. 65). This dichotomy, I believe, misrepresents both the past and the present. Even democratic states today appear all too willing to use oppressive force to maintain state authority (look no further than the police tactics used during the Republican National Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota), and of course, during the Cold War, the United States was never shy in its “elusive” and “cunning” use of money to further foreign relations goals. How many millions of dollars did the Central Intelligence Agency give to the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialist Party starting in the 1950s to protect the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty?
These objections aside, Inoue has provided an inspired and activist ethnographic account of how Okinawa took on the pervasive state interests of both Japan and the United States, and forced both countries to heed Okinawan concerns. Anyone who is interested in recent social movements, the history of Okinawa, or how to conduct effective ethnographic fieldwork or is looking for inspiration as to how scholars can be advocates for social justice will certainly want to add this work to their library.
