Over There is a collection of independent and intensive anthropological research on U.S. military outposts in Asia (South Korea, Japan, and Okinawa) and Germany, whilst also focusing upon the internal gendered, racial, and class dynamics that sustain the U.S. military as a social institution. Overall, the book effectively challenges the self-denial of the United States as a global empire, due to the informal, invisible and de-territorialized rule based on liberal principles. The chapters of this book illustrate the tactile realities of imperial hierarchies uniquely visible around and within U.S. military bases as the most clearly territorial existence in the hosting societies, or “contact zones” where imperial subjects and colonized “others” meet.
Chapters by Seungsook Moon, Michiko Takeuchi, and Maria Höhn deepen the previous research on interstate alliances' reliance on prostitution by Kathleen Moon and Cynthia Enloe. The authors reveal that in immediate post-World War II South Korea, Japan, and West Germany, occupation and then alliances depended on the availability of local women's bodies for the U.S. service members. All three hosting governments pragmatically condoned or even institutionalized brothels specifically for the GIs, recruited impoverished local women, and controlled venereal diseases using registration systems and other harsh measures that bordered on human rights abuse. In particular, South Korean and Japanese governments set up and supported brothels symbolically referred to as “comfort stations” for the occupation forces, inherited from the Japanese military: even condoms circulated during World War II were recycled for the GIs during the U.S. occupation in South Korea. The Japanese Police Commissioner and its local subsidiaries were given the responsibility of recruiting “comfort women” nationwide for American soldiers. In the process, the United States, local governments, and societies also intervened against miscegenation, especially out of concern stirred up by the sexual relations between white German women and African American soldiers. In all occupied states, also, racism within the U.S. military was imported to local hosting societies, where women and bar owners strictly limited their service to either white or African-American soldiers only.
It is a pity that there is no section that organically connects and comparatively analyzes the insights obtained from the different chapters; the task of a comparative analysis is left to the reader. For example, the United States decided to ban the “comfort stations” in occupied Japan in 1946 after a year of thriving business, in order to maintain the U.S. moral profile as a civilizing force in Japan. This was to promote democratization and liberation of Japanese women from feudal local practices. In South Korea, conversely, the U.S. military continued benefiting from state-sanctioned brothels during the Korean War and beyond. This research should be followed by a query: what is the implication for the U.S. Congress's accusations against the Japanese government in the early twenty-first century for not apologizing for “comfort women” issues that affected women in Korea?
Other chapters demonstrate that gendered codes sustain the distinction between “military” and “war”: “military” is a life-supporting institution that provides employment, professional training, health care, education, housing, and other benefits, as distinguished from “war,” which is to do with destruction and death. Robin Riley's study shows how feminine identification with the protection that the military provides for their livelihood—and disassociation with killing and dying—enables women to serve in the defense industry without recognizing their roles in war preparation. Military families' contributions to soldiers' morale have been considered crucial for the overseas deployment in the history of the U.S. military. Despite the recent attempt to restructure the U.S. military into more mobile and ruthless “masculine” forces composed mainly of single men, Donna Alvah argues that the military will continue to rely on the roles played by the families. But their contributions, associated with feminine qualities, are undervalued and regarded as creating extra costs and potential targets for the enemy forces. Chris Ames's chapter examines the U.S. military's integration with the local community through kinship and romantic associations with Okinawan and Japanese women. The chapter's account of the isolation and discrimination of local women with U.S. military personnel, however, requires another look: is it so much due to the radicalized xenophobia and nationalism of the Okinawan anti-base activists? To the reviewer, the issue speaks more loudly of sexism and racism that keep the military presence going, shared by the societies on both sides of the fence. Jeff Bennett's research delves deep into the abuses in Abu Ghraib: what were the proprietors thinking? Bennett concludes that the incident was a natural extension of the “attitudes toward sex, gender, and domination that already existed within the military subculture” (p. 376), indispensable to maintain hierarchy among the ranks. Chris Nelson's chapter provides some hope by showing how local people in Okinawa have maintained and reconstructed their own “subject” in a militarized society, through creative performance that allows continuing dialogue with history.
The two editors, Höhn and Moon, provide three chapters each on U.S. military-society relations in, respectively, South Korea and West Germany. Höhn's chapter on the racial crisis of 1971 provides the most interesting comparison: local prostitutes in South Korea, and local university students in Germany contributed to the settlement of the racial unrest and reform within the U.S. military. Here, I wish the editors had made a separate book more tightly and comprehensibly focused on the U.S. military and communities in South Korea and Germany developed from these six chapters, which would stand out as a distinctive contribution to the studies of the U.S. global empire of bases: in particular, a study of extraterritorial privileges given to the U.S. militaries in Europe and Asia is necessary. Although not many people will be able to read all the chapters, Over There provides many windows for those who are interested in the human face of the U.S. military as a global institution.
