In Alegal: Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life, Annmaria Shimabuku explores a subject of current scholarly discourse—the political, social, legal, philosophical, and cultural implications of a mixed-race identity.Footnote 1 In an earlier article, she problematizes such terms as hāfu, haiburedo, miscegenation, and even “identity” itself, which she surrounds with quotation marks. She asks, “Should we transcend ‘identity,’ and get back to real issues? Otherwise, must we constantly be confronting nativists, essentialists, fundamentalists, and Third World nationalists?”Footnote 2
Focusing on real issues of American militarism and Japanese capitalism in Okinawa, Shimabuku makes a persuasive case for the term “alegal” in her title. In the introduction, she explains its definition as:
that which is irreducible to a binary of legal versus illegal or extralegal.… The function of the “a,” therefore, does not refer to what or where the law is not: words already exist for that, namely, “illegal” meaning that which is against the law, such as a criminal act, or “extralegal” meaning that which is outside the law, such as an area in which other states exercise extraterritoriality. Rather, what this enigmatic “a” gets down to is an incongruous relationship between alegal and the law. (p. 1)
Shimabuku applies this term to the status of mixed-race children with Okinawan mothers and American military fathers, and to the status of Okinawa itself.
During the US military occupation (1945–72) that dragged on twenty years longer than the Allied Occupation of mainland Japan, Okinawa's legal status was ambiguous under international law—not American, not Japanese, and not Okinawan or Ryukyuan. For more than a decade after Okinawa's reversion to Japanese administration, the legal status of these children often depended on confirming the citizenship of their fathers, who might have abandoned their mothers and returned to an unknown location in the United States. Some became “stateless.” Only after 1985 could mothers pass on Japanese citizenship to their children. Many of them, especially those with their fathers’ physical features, have encountered severe discrimination, including bullying, which continues to this day. Shimabuku describes how they have faced ostracism and violence owing to a pernicious illusion that they are somehow connected with the wartime American enemy; with the occupiers; or with US military personnel who commit crimes, including rape and murder. However, she also points out that mixed-race Okinawans have been popular musical performers on US bases and on the mainland, although this, too, can be seen in part as the result of illusions, stereotypes, and exoticizations.
Shimabuku's chronological account of the US military occupation period is the fullest and most up-to-date currently available in English. Drawing extensively on sources in Japanese and English, she emphasizes its economic effects from the perspectives of people whose farming lands were seized by the US government for base expansion and construction starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She explains how mass-protest marches in the mid-1950s—effectively organized by a coalition of landowners, opposition political parties, labor unions, and teachers—compelled the United States to abandon a policy of “lump-sum” land purchases at far below market prices, and to make regular “rental” payments to landowners. Still, these payments were wholly inadequate for the survival of former farming families. Thus, many moved to the base-towns for livelihoods that depended on enterprises servicing off-duty military personnel, mostly in liquor sales and prostitution. The population of these towns, especially Koza in central Okinawa, increased rapidly as people in other rural areas of Okinawa—on its main and separate islands—also migrated there to open or work in base-town businesses.
From available statistics and published interviews, Shimabuku describes the lives and livelihoods of women who became sex workers in the G.I. bar/brothels. She focuses on gender and labor issues in analyzing their considerable, but largely unacknowledged, contribution to Okinawa's Occupation-era economy that was heavily dependent on US military projects and purchases. She quotes Okinawan women with conflicted attitudes toward the American military presence, which many opposed for its devastating effects on the community while in relationships with soldiers that went beyond “servicing” them, extending to long-term cohabitation and marriage. Interviews with these women and their children personalize Shimabuku's informative descriptions of life in postwar Okinawa set in historical and theoretical context.
