Occupation “Goodies” and Intergenerational Change

During the occupation that stretched from 1945 through 1972, radical power and prosperity differentials led many Okinawans to desire American products and lifestyles as their economic situation improved. These goods became status items within the context of Okinawan communities and kinship networks, within which American items circulated through webs of reciprocity, mediating ritual and daily life relationships. For much of the postwar period, the standard of living taken for granted by American servicemembers was far out of reach for most Okinawans. Okinawan base workers had limited access to American prosperity, as they shifted from subordinated positions in the base community, where they served as maids, cooks, and laborers, to the honor and appreciation they received from kin in their own communities by bringing high-status American goods to share after work. “Friends whose parents worked on base always seemed to have goodies such as jam and cake that the rest of us never had,” recalled Higa Toshiko, a middle-aged accountant working on base, as we enjoyed cake and coffee together one afternoon near her home in Chatan Town.

Over the past decade, Higa and many other Okinawans have shared their perceptions and experiences of interacting with the American military. Okinawans of her generation have experienced rising prosperity and more equitable relations with the Americans in their midst. Yet, items from the U.S. bases were valued highly throughout much of the postwar period despite sustained protest against the negative aspects of the bases, such as accidents, crime, discrimination against Okinawans in employment, and so forth.

The meaning ascribed to Amerikamun appears to vary across generations. One informant in her fifties, “Hisae,” noted that her elderly aunt, who was married to a recently deceased American military retiree, buys large amounts of candy on the base and distributes it to her relatives weekly.Footnote ¹ The younger recipients do not know what to do with this Amerikamun, which could easily be purchased down the street at one of the ubiquitous Japanese convenience stores. However, even teenagers in the family realize that to their aunt it is not just candy, but a symbol of joy and perseverance amid historical hardships and a “limited availability” item that requires special privileges on the base (acquired through her military retiree deceased husband) to purchase. “Namiko,” another informant in her twenties, said that she and her friends never use the word “Amerikamun,” but noted that the word has a positive image for her since her grandfather took all his grandchildren to get base pizza every weekend.Footnote ² He, too, could purchase pizza off base, but his insistence on Amerikamun as “Jōtō” (literally “first class”)—a word rarely used in mainland Japan but often employed to describe such things in Okinawa—was something she read as an effort to share an item coded as “special” with loved ones. Across the decades, candy and pizza have been transformed from luxuries to junk food. As the much-noted Okinawan longevity drops in world rankings, Okinawans concerned with nutrition now decry the permeation of their diet with fast food, which began on the island as Amerikamun, but has since expanded into revolving sushi and Japanese deep-fried pork cutlet chains as well as chemical-laden convenience store snacks.

In the early postwar years, appropriating elements of American lifestyles meant modernization or progress for many local consumers. Thus, canned goods such as Spam were, in some sense, markers of modernity or “better living through chemistry,” as the merger of science and commerce in the United States promised at the time. America's defeat of Japan meant America replaced Japan as the principle conduit for Okinawan modernization, which began in earnest in the early 1870s when Japan claimed the islands after embarking on its own feverish modernization. In Okinawa, admiration or yearning (akogare) for American items led to a flourishing black market through which new markers of prosperity and faith in modernity could be purchased as emblems of equality with Okinawans’ dominators. Much of this black market involved small luxuries, usually food items, such as the canned pork luncheon meat Spam, Eggo mayonnaise, canned “Sea Chicken” tuna, canned stew, canned corned beef hash, and Campbell's soup, which have now become staples in the Okinawan diet. Some American cultural items, such as Tex-Mex cuisine, have led to the local invention of hybridized products, such as Taco Rice and Pork-Tamago (Spam and egg) rice balls. Other Amerikamun, such as chicken rotisseries sold as military surplus, served as tools for Okinawans creating other things; in this case the used U.S. military roasters made it possible for Okinawans to reproduce South American–style chicken, which is drawn from ties with Okinawans who emigrated to Peru, Argentina, and elsewhere in the region.

An Amerikamun of One's Own

Improved economic welfare and dietary desire in the 1950s led Okinawan entrepreneurs to bring legitimate supply to erstwhile black-market-fed demand. Placed strategically near an American base in Ginowan City, Jimmy's Supermarket began offering Okinawans American groceries in 1956. The founder, Inamine Seiho, received the nickname “Jimmy” from his American friends when he was a base worker in the late 1940s. “We were very envious of the sumptuous meals on base, and we wanted to give Okinawans access to this kind of food,” noted Inamine (Hokama Reference Hokama2005). The Okinawan diet before the mid-1950s was primarily composed of sweet potatoes, rice, and stir-fried vegetables such as cabbage and Okinawan carrots. Historically, pork would be served at festive occasions such as weddings. The predominant source of protein in the Okinawan diet during the early occupation was tinned mackerel or other inexpensive canned fish. Even rice was not eaten daily by farmers in the prefecture until the middle postwar period. “The introduction of pork luncheon meat to the Okinawan table symbolized escape from the poverty of immediate postwar home cooking in an era when Amerikamun were number one in the world,” explained Inamine (Hokama Reference Hokama2005). Inamine's daughter, Fumiko, now serves as the managing director of the ubiquitous and highly successful supermarket chain, which—through cheap shipping containers and lower import duties accompanying neoliberal globalization—now sells American food items at prices so reasonable that the erstwhile black market in American food from the bases has all but disappeared. In a recent interview, she noted that items such as roast beef, apple pie, and other American staples continue to sell well and that some Americans from the bases shop at Jimmy's, inverting the direction of the flow of goods during the occupation.Footnote ³

Food, being a relatively inexpensive commodity, was the most accessible means for Okinawans to consume America during the occupation. Even an anti-base activist steeped in postcolonial theory, feminist activist and former Naha City assembly representative Takazato Suzuyo, chuckled during my interview with her at the notion of decolonizing Okinawan cuisine.Footnote ⁴ Pork luncheon meat has become so central to Okinawan cookery that it is indispensable. Although the sources of pork luncheon meat in Okinawa range from Denmark to the United States to China, all continue to be classified as Amerikamun. The U.S. garrisons have become the imagined, as often as real, conduit for all Western cultural products, both tangible and intangible, ranging from food to fashion, rock-n-roll, hip-hop, quilting, and even bulldozers.

Established in Okinawa in 1963, A&W was Okinawa's first American-style fast-food restaurant. Its numerous shops on the island have retained the “drive in” design long gone in most of the United States. As in the case of Plaza House Shopping Center, which was Okinawa's first American-style mall that opened in the 1950s, and Blue Seal ice cream, A&W's early clientele were overwhelmingly American military personnel. Rising Okinawan incomes and appreciation in the value of the yen against the U.S. dollar since the 1980s have contributed to the clientele of these businesses becoming mainly Okinawan and mainland Japanese, although they remain popular in the military community. These businesses have become icons of Okinawa in tourist literature.

After Okinawa's reversion to Japanese administration in 1972, the number of fast-food restaurants mushroomed through Okinawan demand (Kinjō Reference Kinjō, Teruya and Yamazato1995). A&W, like other American franchises brought to Okinawa during the occupation, such as Blue Seal ice cream, are vestiges of once-powerful brands in the United States; their American parent-companies have long since failed or lost tremendous market share to competitors. These and other Okinawan businesses play on nostalgia among Okinawans for 1950s Americana, which symbolizes the peak of American power worldwide, and the prosperous lifestyles that accompany this image.

Decreasing Economic Asymmetries, Lingering Spatial Gaps

The average Okinawan today is far better off financially than in the past. Until the 1970s, it was common to encounter Okinawan women who were at least partially motivated to marry U.S. servicemen for the economic security this union offered her and her family. Today, this situation is rare and is sometimes even reversed, as many Okinawan women marrying GIs have more education and economic resources than their American husbands (Ames Reference Ames, Höhn and Moon2010). While some military members dating Okinawan women report receiving gifts of new cars and expensive trips from their girlfriends, military members remain comparatively rich in one key area: space. This is the same critical dimension through which the American Village mall in Chatan Town retains the appeal of luxury inherent in Amerikamun for younger generations who know mainly prosperity. The image—and to some degree the reality—of American military members enjoying privileges out of reach for most Okinawans endures. Even the lowest-ranking military members living on base with family members in single-family dwellings have an American-style yard. In the late 1990s, when questioned about whether the cost of providing housing for base personnel was not excessively expensive, a Japanese Defense Agency official beckoned criticism when he explained that Americans need yards because they love to barbeque. As the ubiquity of enormous barbeque grills in virtually every military yard attests, grilling meat is widely perceived as very nearly a human right for Americans. Unless extremely wealthy, few Okinawans living in the crowded central part of the island can afford to have an expansive lawn. Even if wealthy individuals purchased such a home, it would be surrounded by the tightly squeezed roads, alleys, and homes of fellow, less well-off, Okinawans. This is not to argue that Okinawans necessarily desire to live in bucolic American suburban homes or the suburbs that ensconce them, but that the contrast between American spatial luxury and the dearth of space in Okinawans’ own communities is constant and conspicuous, especially when the verdant lawns are viewed through barbed-wire-topped fences plastered with signs warning of the draconian penalties, including lethal force, of unauthorized attempts at entry. As activist Takazato Suzuyo noted during our interview, much Okinawan frustration over the U.S. military bases is related to a perceived inability to control their own space, which is most visible on the ground where the communities intersect but extends into airspace, wherein the military has priority, and the legal domain with its remnants of extraterritoriality in the Status of Forces Agreement.Footnote ⁵

Reinscribing Power Relationships through Space Reclamation

First-time visitors immediately understand Okinawan calls for base land returns if they drive through the central district of old Chatan, located up a steep road from the new American Village development on the coast. Accessing the area is troublesome even if one is on foot. The human-made aspects of this peculiar landscape came about because Chatan residents were the last group of Okinawans to be permitted to return to their homes from the internment camps after the Battle of Okinawa subsided (Chatan-chō-shi 1988). Many came home to find that their neighborhoods had become military bases.

Land appropriation by the military forced residents to move elsewhere or to rebuild their community on the only land left available on the hills and cliffs lining the coast. Since 1972, when Okinawa reverted to Japan, Chatan's municipal administration has been pressing the U.S. and Japanese governments to return ever-greater tracts of base land for local development. By the late 1990s, Chatan's efforts were paying off as innovative town planning led to this erstwhile “faceless community” becoming the most popular location on the island for Okinawans, Americans, and mainland Japanese to shop and socialize. Even after significant tracts of land have been returned, more than half of Chatan Town remains occupied by bases. Paradoxically, upon realizing hard-won base returns, Chatan embarked on creating American Village, a town resort designed to resemble an outdoor mall near Miramar in San Diego.

By redeveloping returned base land, local leaders have attempted to reinscribe interethnic power relations on a landscape deeply etched with history. The coastal area just north of American Village is where the U.S. invaders first landed on Okinawa Island in “Operation Iceberg” on April Fools’ Day, 1945, marking the beginning of the island's horrific ground battle and the American occupation. To the south of American Village on the Chatan coast is the site where the occupation symbolically ended twenty-seven years later when the final U.S. High Commissioner, the U.S. military “czar” of the Ryukyu Islands, flew away into cloudy skies from the Hamby Airfield in the late spring of 1972. A little more than a decade later, Hamby Airfield was returned and converted into the Hamby Town shopping plaza. The success of Hamby Town and the Japanese bubble economy in the 1980s gave Chatan Town planners the confidence to embark on constructing a far more ambitious project on another returned base in the 1990s in the form of American Village.

Chatan's reworking of base land is widely perceived among Okinawan town planners as a pioneering effort, even a model, for how to transform bases into new town developments amid numerous challenges, including problems establishing landowners’ boundaries concretely, difficulty attracting limited internal demand for new retail spaces, the cost of providing ample parking amid high land prices, as well as other issues. Chatan's redevelopment was comparatively simple, in part because, unlike other areas such as Naha City's Shintoshin development, much of American Village was constructed on “ownerless” land reclaimed from the sea. This approach had spiritual and historical benefits as well, since reclaimed land is also said to lack memory, and, accordingly, ghosts of war dead. Reclaimed land is also land that was never occupied by foreign troops; as a local businessman pointed out, “It has been new Okinawan land since the day it was born.” Thus, American Village is a hybrid combining a former base and new Okinawan land, providing an opportunity for the latter to symbolically reclaim the former. Much of the cost of American Village and similar developments is paid for by mainland Japanese government subsidies as a way to compensate Okinawan communities hosting U.S. garrisons for their “burden,” or, depending on one's perspective, as a way to purchase support and silence from critics amid high unemployment. Many of the businesspeople and bureaucrats in Chatan who made American Village possible are wealthy—some extremely so—from generous payments the Japanese government provides for those leasing land to the U.S. military.

Although pioneering in many respects, Chatan's coastal development's use of architecture and space to reinscribe interethnic power relations has a long history in Okinawa. For example, before the war, mainland Japanese governors and bureaucrats allowed Shuri Castle, the former seat of power during the Ryukyu Kingdom before Japan annexed Okinawa, to fall into ruin. Prior to the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, the Japanese military created an extensive network of tunnels beneath the castle site to make it the military's headquarters in preparation for the battle, virtually ensuring that the paramount symbol of a culturally distinct Okinawa would be obliterated. In 1950, the U.S. occupation attempted to put positive spin on Japanese destruction of the castle by constructing the University of the Ryukyus on top of its ruins, an act celebrated by the U.S. occupation as the gift of Okinawa's first four-year university. Such gifts were numerous during the occupation period, including the Government of the Ryukyus building, the Museum of the Ryukyus, and several Ryukyuan-American Friendship Halls and libraries.

In 1990, then-governor Nishime Junji held a ceremony inaugurating the opening of the new Okinawa Prefectural Office building that replaced the Government of the Ryukyus building built by the occupation in 1953. This site had also been the location of the prewar Okinawa Prefectural Office that was destroyed in the battle. Nishime had been planning the new facility since 1980 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of reversion in 1982, although construction was not realized until almost a decade later (Nishime Reference Nishime1998). The former director of the general affairs division of the prefectural government reflected on Nishime's purpose for the reconstruction, asserting that it was “to symbolize Okinawa Prefecture and provide dreams for the younger generation while aiming at giving pride to the prefectural people for their potential in the 21st century” (Nishime Reference Nishime1998, 536). Nishime's biography, which was compiled from his diaries, points out that the old building housed the Government of the Ryukyu Islands, which included the assembly, consisting of Okinawan elected officials and bureaucrats on the first floor and the U.S. occupation officials’ offices on the second and third floors (Nishime Reference Nishime1998). Thus, U.S. authority “over” Okinawans was built into the Government of the Ryukyu Islands’ office building's architecture.

Nishime also notes that the original building had an inscription engraved upon it commemorating the facility as a gift from the United States to the people of the Ryukyus. A similar plaque was built into the entrance of the former Okinawa Prefectural Museum, another facility constructed by the occupation as part of a psychological warfare strategy emphasizing “Ryukyuan” cultural distinctiveness and hoping to foster pride in Okinawa's pre-Japan past to forestall calls for reintegration with Japan and ensure unrestricted base operations, most notably using Okinawa as a major nuclear weapons platform (Fisch Reference Fisch1988). During anti-base Governor Masahide Ota's tenure, which coincided with the gang rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. servicemen in 1995, the plaque at the museum's entrance was covered up. This move called more rather than less attention to its existence. Ota's act was perhaps an attempt to demonstrate Okinawan control over the legacy of the occupation, an effort that parallels the cultural politics of American Village. The dilapidated occupation-era museum was rebuilt and opened in 2007 on a returned base development called Shintoshin, or “new city center,” in Naha, a development that is American Village's principal rival.

As former governor Nishime's discussion of the old and new prefectural offices makes clear, the appeal of replacing occupation-era facilities with newer ones is not simply based on the physical inadequacy of the buildings, but is clearly an attempt to reinscribe, or in these cases Okinawan-ize, history through architecture. Base returns, such as the ones that made Chatan Town's American Village, Shintoshin in Naha, and the new development on the former military Awase Golf Course in Okinawa City possible, represent not only physical improvements marking increased Okinawan prosperity but also victorious repatriation of Okinawan land and space as well as an extension of local control over areas from which Okinawans were once controlled.

In a sense, this pattern of base return and redevelopment loosely parallels the “island hopping” campaign that brought the U.S. military to Okinawa in 1945, in that it emphasizes the gradual progress of reclaiming territory bit by bit. Former governor and historian Ota had plans to reinscribe much of Okinawa Island through architecture that reflected his perspective—what he maintained is a widely held perspective among the prefectural people—on Okinawan history and cultural ideals. Although he never realized his cosmopolitan city project aimed at reviving Okinawa as a center for trade and diplomacy while removing bases as centers of war and conflict, Ota did manage to reconstruct the Peace Prayer Memorial Park Museum, which houses exhibits that provide a narrative of Okinawa's modern history from Japanese annexation of the islands through the tragedies of the war and occupation to reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. After Ota left office, his conservative successor, Keiichi Inamine, changed parts of the exhibit—particularly a diorama housed in a life-sized cave in which a Japanese soldier points his bayoneted rifle at an Okinawan mother who is trying to keep her child from crying—to avoid upsetting mainland Japanese tourists with images of Okinawans being victimized by mainland Japanese (Figal Reference Figal, Hein and Selden2003). Inamine had the gun removed from the hands of the soldier, but local outcry and pressure from the two Okinawan newspapers led to the soldier being rearmed. Assumptions about perspectives of mainland Japanese tourists are also incorporated into the American Village development, since it is this group that is most attracted to the notion of an “exotic” Okinawa containing little Americas of the bases offering “a trip abroad without leaving Japan” or “another Japan,” as tourist industry officials emphasize.

Agentic Transformation of “Contact Zones”

Despite the construction and expansion of American Village, large parts of Chatan Town are still occupied by U.S. bases, making the area a primary “contact zone”—what comparative literature scholar Mary Louise Pratt (Reference Pratt1992, 6) defines as “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” Reworking returned base land provided opportunities for Chatan Town planners to exert influence on social relations between Okinawans and the base community. Their new “base town” represented a radical departure from the concretized power asymmetries of Koza City, now called Okinawa City.

During the occupation, Koza City became similar to Korea's “camptowns,” where military prostitution flourished amid radical economic disparities between American military members and local civilians (K. Moon Reference Moon1997; S. Moon Reference Moon, Höhn and Moon2010; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus Reference Sturdevant and Stoltzfus1992). Chatan's spatial and geographic limitations prevented it from being as deeply influenced by the military as Koza, which became the emblematic base town with its bars, pawn shops, tailors, discos, tattoo shops, military arm patch stores, strip clubs, red light districts, and souvenir shops filled with faux Orientalia. For Chatan planners, Okinawa City was precisely the model for a town they did not want to construct. As if inverting the negative image of Koza into a print positive, Chatan officials consciously excluded the seedier hallmarks of base towns noted above, supplanting them with a symbol of “healthy” civilian American prosperity and twenty-first-century aesthetics: the glitzy, intentional, and controlled space of the shopping mall.

Former Chatan mayor Hentona Chōichi enunciated his vision for American Village at a special symposium held in 2000 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Chatan's incorporation as a town. His speech demonstrated a selective approach to the elements of “America” planners sought to incorporate into the development. Hentona described the plan as follows:

Hentona's appeal to local residents made it clear that the development was created for Okinawans while also aiming to attract mainland Japanese tourists. This is significant because one of the signal markers of Okinawan perceptions of their own poverty and lack of power vis-à-vis mainland Japan involves well-heeled mainland tourists enjoying Okinawa's luxury resorts, which are financially out of reach for many Okinawans. During the reversion period, Okinawans objected vociferously to luxury hotels cordoning off private beaches, a movement that led to free beaches throughout the island. Hentona's promise to make a town resort for everyone, not just tourists, resonated with locals. Tourism has long been touted as an alternative to the base economy. However, if the most objectionable thing about the U.S. military presence in Okinawa is that it reminds Okinawans that they are not now—nor have they been in modern history—completely in control of their island's space and the comparatively powerful outsiders who reside within it, tourism appears less promising for reducing Okinawan frustration. Just as the sight of military personnel driving American land-yacht automobiles when Okinawans had to take the bus was an irritant to Okinawan pride during the occupation, and as the sprawling lawns of base housing continue to be, the image of tourists cruising in rented convertibles and spending an average of ¥25,000 (US$220) per person per day at luxury resorts leaves many Okinawans feeling impoverished by comparison (Tamamori and James Reference Tamamori and James1996). Hentona's blueprint for a new kind of resort in Okinawa clearly tapped into Okinawan residents’ desire for territory with more equitable power relations. The place of outsiders and their culture within the Okinawan community is a critical issue for understanding the full importance of American Village.

The notion of separating and retaining the “good” aspects or influences of U.S. culture for American Village is a striking parallel with Amerikamun goods and the way the roles they played during the occupation period as a kind of prestige item not easily obtainable was a concretization of “good” from the “bad” base. Ishiki Katsumi, an Okinawa City official who runs the Histreet (“History Street”) Museum that portrays postwar lifestyles in the base town, commented on the irony of Okinawans generally agreeing that fewer or no bases would be best for their island, while the same people also embrace American food and culture, welcoming members of the military community at festivals and international exchange events. She noted, “What is good is good and what is bad is bad. There has never been a boycott of Amerikamun in Okinawa since it is viewed as something good.”Footnote ⁶ She also explained that it is the military as an institution that is unwelcome by the majority of Okinawans, who generally are hospitable to individual members of the U.S. military communities (see Ames Reference Ames2009).

Romantic Longing and Imagined Amerikaa

If American Village represents a novel approach to development in Okinawa, it appears to have numerous architectural relatives when considered from a wider geographic perspective. Throughout Asia and the rest of the world, visually and functionally similar resorts and shopping malls have sprung up over the past decade, many of which look strikingly similar to American Village, almost always featuring a large Ferris wheel at their centers. I have visited two remarkably similar sites: the Odaiba development in Tokyo and the Miramar Mall in Taipei's Dazhi district. As its name suggests, the Taipei mall, which opened in late 2004, draws architectural inspiration from similar shopping centers in San Diego, California. This mall shares a military tie with Okinawa's American Village, since Miramar in California, which calls itself “Fightertown U.S.A.,” hosts sizable U.S. military bases, as does Chatan Town in Okinawa.

Both Taipei's Miramar Mall and Okinawa's American Village play on the Hollywood cachet and sex appeal of the 1986 film Top Gun, which was set in Miramar and was inspired by the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School at the naval base there known as “TOPGUN.” In the film, the characters played by Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis fall in love as Cruise's macho character, Maverick, struggles for the mantle of “Top Gun,” a fantasy valorizing militaristic and economic excellence in competition. The film Top Gun is notable for reasons unrelated to its limited value as art because it represented an unprecedented level of official military sponsorship and censorship in a peacetime film at the time it was made. As such, Top Gun is both recruitment film and propaganda film, as discussed by sociologist James W. Gibson (Reference Gibson1994). Gibson ties Top Gun and paramilitary fantasies to the entrepreneurial spirit and the consumerist and cinematic escapism embodied in Disneyland. In his view, films like Top Gun encourage what Walt Disney had hoped for his theme park. Gibson quotes Disney: “I don't want the public to see the world they live in while they are in the park, I want them to feel they are in another world” (Gibson Reference Gibson1994, 121–22). As activists, young Okinawan women, and active duty military members alike have pointed out to me, Hollywood images of macho military characters, such as Top Gun's Maverick, have contributed significantly to the attraction many young Okinawan women have for the far less glamorous lives of GIs stationed on the island. The “romantic longing” abetted by Hollywood is called akogare, a word that informants of all ages and sexes used to describe the allure of American culture, be it Tom Cruise in his leather flight jacket, Elizabeth Taylor with her diamonds, or simply the illusion of American freedom conjured up through heroic cowboys and strong frontier women (Kelsky Reference Kelsky2001).

It is no accident that the shopping malls in Taiwan—which also once hosted large American bases—and Okinawa relate to American militarism geographically and cinematically through the Hollywood-centric multiplex cinemas in the center of each development. Contemporary akogare for the glitter of Hollywood seems to be an extension of the akogare older Okinawans have reported having for Amerikamun. The tie between the militarized masculinity that the bases have long represented and the desire for the consumption of exotic American luxury goods is not accidental. Japanese literature scholar Norma Field penned an account of “bubble era” Japan at the time of Emperor Hirohito's death in 1989 that included a chapter on postwar Okinawan resistance to Japanese militarism and U.S. bases. She presciently noted that “capitalism as exotic self-indulgence has replaced American masculinity as the expression of military occupation” (Field Reference Field1991, 40). Elsewhere, Field critiques the increasingly long commutes and working and obligatory socializing hours Japanese salarymen and office ladies endure, stating that “ever-intensifying daily sacrifices are justified by the abundance they evidently make possible, which means there must be a perpetual escalation in the level and quality of abundance” (15). If Amerikamun is akin to the abundance Field observes, for Okinawans during the postwar period, the endurance is a greater challenge than riding an impossibly crammed-in train for two hours each way daily, since it is the endurance of what appears to many as life under the constant threat of violence (in the form of war or crime), an endless occupation, and an even longer string of sacrifices for mainland Japanese and U.S. objectives. Commodore Perry, after all, visited Okinawa Island in the Ryukyus and established Okinawa's first U.S. military base before moving on to “open up” the mainland. One of his crewmembers, William Board, raped an elderly Okinawan woman and was reportedly chased off of a cliff by angry locals, who faced draconian punishment under the unequal terms of an agreement Perry forced on the Ryukyu Kingdom.

Across generations, postwar prosperity has led to changes in the scale and manifestation of America that invoke akogare, but what remains clear is that admiration for aspects of America and even Americans themselves is deeply rooted in Okinawa. Ishiki Katsumi, who runs the Histreet postwar culture museum in Okinawa City, explained the relationship between the Ryukyuan-language terms Amerikamun and Amerikaa by delineating the semantic domain of each:

Unlike Amerikamun, which is generally regarded as “good,” Amerikaa also incorporates the negative elements of the bases. A noisy fighter jet flying overhead that interrupts conversations or school classes sometimes invokes shaking heads and exclamations of “Amerikaa,” as might a military community member turning up unexpectedly in a restaurant, bar, or residential district not typically frequented by foreigners.

Space of Violence, Violence of Space

Behind the glittering neon façade of the seaside wonderland of American Village is a debate over the relationship between violence and “place-making” development projects. During the planning stages of this new town resort, politicians in the town assembly and concerned citizens pondered the wisdom of replacing the “violent” American bases with simulacra of an American space. Chatan Town Assemblywoman Kinra Hatsuko was among the most vociferous opponents of the American Village conception. In a December 1994 assembly meeting, she pondered why town planners would want to celebrate a culture that she believes has burdened the local community with crime.

Kinra's emphasis on crimes committed by U.S. military community members against local citizens highlights one of the main factors behind negative perceptions of the military.Footnote ⁸ Other than the noise generated by Americans hanging around the seawall in the Miyagi district, the incidents she addressed in the town meeting involved minors from the base community. Okinawans have little recourse with respect to American juvenile delinquents, in part because Japanese law defines adulthood as beginning at age twenty, leading to difficulty trying minors—Japanese and foreign—for offenses committed. Because American Village is frequented mainly by young people, the perceived bad influence of American children on their Okinawan and Japanese peers is a major concern among local residents. Locals associated the bad attitudes of American youth in Chatan with a lingering “occupation mentality” among military members, also noting that since military families only usually stay in Okinawa a few years, they are not invested in the community, and therefore feel no pressure to be good neighbors, which is consistent with a classic sociological theory called “stake in conformity” (Toby Reference Toby1957).

The annoyances Kinra discussed also raise the specter of darker moments in Okinawan-U.S. military relations. Over the past seven decades, numerous heinous crimes have been committed against Okinawans by members of the military community. These crimes are contextualized by Okinawan activists within the broader history of U.S. domination and asymmetrical power relations. In the summer of 2001, for example, just as American Village was reaching its peak in popularity, U.S. Air Force Sergeant Timothy Woodland raped a local woman in the parking lot of a popular American Village nightclub. This event led to calls for making American Village off-limits to American servicemembers and raised suspicions among local residents that still linger. Locals formed crime patrols and requested increased security from the police.

Ironically, opposition to American Village from the leftist point of view espoused by Kinra is common on the political right as well. Right-wing extremist manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori's Okinawa-ron (Treatise on Okinawa) features a frame in which he visits American Village and makes the following commentary: “I went to Chatan and saw a town popular with young people that was an Americanized creation. It was so bizarre that I did not feel comfortable there at all (iwakan ga arisugiru) with all the fake campus-festival-like buildings” (Kobayashi Reference Kobayashi2005, 381).Footnote ⁹ Kobayashi's discomfort is apparently not widely shared, as two decades after its opening American Village continues to expand and attract Okinawans, Japanese tourists, and American military members, as well as a growing number of Chinese and South Korean tourists. This popularity faced challenges in the late first decade of the twenty-first century, as the “newness” and mainly indoor attractions of the Shintoshin development in Naha beckoned Okinawans, who rarely swim in the sea after childhood and who often to prefer to stay out of the heat, humidity, and UV rays that can be so intense in Okinawa. Shintoshin's lack of the readily available free parking of American Village as well as Chatan's expansion of the development, reclaiming the crown of “new,” has brought back the crowds.

“Amerikamun” Town Planning

During the occupation, town planning was the responsibility of Okinawan residents and leaders. Urban sprawl around military bases in these areas resulted from Okinawans relocating to work on the bases, which distorted urban space due to rapid population growth based on increased prosperity. Prewar Okinawan land-use patterns were also uncontrolled by modern concepts of zoning, having the same narrow lanes and convoluted markets as the contemporary urban areas. A walk through the cavernous Machigwa wholesale market, said to resemble prewar Okinawan markets by elderly Okinawans, provides an interesting contrast with the new commercial developments. Machigwa is an arcade in Naha City that tunnels through a dense maze of buildings, splitting off suddenly into sub-tunnels and terminating abruptly in backstreets. One of its main features is kōsetsu ichiba, a public market where primarily fish, meat, and vegetables are sold. As tourist guidebooks unfailingly point out, kōsetsu ichiba evokes the seemingly loosely organized markets of Southeast Asia, a distinct counterpoint to the grid-like avenues and zoning of Chatan's American Village. Such markets were commonplace throughout Okinawa before American influence led Okinawan town planners and businesspeople to create main streets and shopping plazas as emblems of progress. Chatan's “free market,” which is named after flea markets held on and off base by military community members, resembles older Okinawan markets such as Machigwa in Naha City.

During the late occupation, prefectural capital Naha City's main street, Kokusai-doori (“International Street”), was christened the “miracle mile” (kiseki to yobareta mairu) by Okinawan developers, drawing on American city-planning principles to create an area that was appealing to well-heeled Okinawans, military personnel, and future mainland tourists (Ōhama 1998). This early postwar urban redevelopment project is the first example of domestic reinscription of space in the Amerikamun mode. Historian Ōhama Sō (Reference Ōhama1998) provides prewar and postwar maps in his history of Kokusai Street, graphically illustrating a shift from prewar convoluted roads constructed along landholding boundaries and sacred sites to postwar linear lines inspired by modern city planning. He notes that U.S. military base land-use heavily influenced where and what Okinawans chose to build when they attempted to draw on American wealth and demand in the new development created during the occupation. Numerous businesses on Kokusai Street used the word “international” to attract customers; there was an “International Spa,” an “International Hall,” and multiple “International Theaters.” The word “international” requires a relationship between persons from at least two different nations, to some degree suggesting the possibility of equitable power relations between them.

As was the case with American Village, the first major business on what would become Kokusai Street was a cinema. Movie theaters have been used as anchors in postwar Okinawan urban redevelopment projects from the occupation to American Village and Naha City's Shintoshin positing new centers to urban areas through the fantastic appeal of modernity's premier symbol. It was on movie screens that Okinawans experienced romanticizations of a more just and glamorous America than they experienced in their daily lives under U.S. occupation and subjugation (Yamazato Reference Yamazato2001). Masato Yamazato's history of postwar Okinawan film is replete with the same kind of akogare that characterizes contemporary American Village as a kind of “Top Gun” imaginary space. It is no accident that a Cineplex is at the heart of American Village, a development that Chatan Town Mayor Hentona claims attempts to recreate only the healthy aspects of America.

Beyond Amerikamun: Reversing the Gaze in American Village

The replacement of U.S. military bases with a town resort evoking an American atmosphere raises some important questions about Okinawa's relationships with the United States and mainland Japan. American Village suggests multiple interpretations. The most obvious is that the development is a case of U.S. cultural imperialism. In this view, America's hegemonic culture of consumption imposes itself on host cultures by fomenting false consciousness among locals. Americanization is then played out as a zero-sum game; every new McDonalds is another imperial victory for America, won at the expense of local culture. Literary theorist John Tomlinson's (Reference Tomlinson1991) criticism of the cultural imperialism hypothesis as assuming that culture is a static entity renders such interpretations of American Village insufficiently complex to be compelling.

Film scholar Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (Reference Yoshimoto and Smoodin1994) and anthropologist Joy Hendry (Reference Hendry2000) offer provocative theories explaining why theme parks in Japan such as Tokyo Disneyland—and by extension the theme park–like American Village in Okinawa—may be read as examples of “reverse Orientalism.” Rather than expressing American cultural dominance, Yoshimoto (Reference Yoshimoto and Smoodin1994) argues, Tokyo Disneyland demonstrates Japanese power to reappropriate and recontextualize foreign icons, rendering them Japanese. America is thus merely another brand and is reduced to mere form, having its American content stripped away in the process of being consumed by Japanese in a Japanese cultural context. Yoshimoto labels this process Japanese “neocultural imperialism.” Hendry (Reference Hendry2000) ponders the same problems under the rubric of “reverse Orientalism,” suggesting that the power to represent others rather than be represented by them is a trait shared by Euro-American imperial powers and twentieth-century imperial Japan. Considering Japan's modern history as an anti-colonial colonizer, Hendry's insertion of “reverse” might add an unnecessary valence. The trope of reversals has great appeal to some Okinawan activists, whether it is “turning weapons into musical instruments” or deploying Okinawan war experience to “wage peace,” as Gerald Figal (Reference Figal, Hein and Selden2003) has discussed. To some extent, the Occidental fetishism of American Village may be read as a partial reversal of Orientalist fetishism long institutionalized by shops lining base gates in Okinawa City (Koza City) with their faux Japanese “Fujiyama” scrolls and “Geisha Girl” pseudo-kimonos.

Okinawa City's Orientalia shops feature trinkets emphasizing themes that symbolize Japan or Asia to military personnel despite the obvious absence of such items in Okinawan and Japanese homes in everyday lives. American military officers and their spouses clamor at the latest sale at Phai's House of Jade, where many will purchase extremely decorative kimono obi (belts) that will be used as table runners back in base housing. American customers continue to purchase these items even when they know they are made in Vietnam specifically for Western consumption in Asia. Down the road a few dozen yards, mainland Japanese tourists daily purchase Okinawan souvenirs, many of which are made in low-wage countries in Asia, including such items as Ryukyu Glass, itself a “traditional” industry created during the occupation when Okinawans tried to find a profitable use for soda pop bottles thrown away by GIs, transforming Amerikamun into something of their own. These examples are counterpoints to the corollary process taking place in Okinawan communities through which the images of America and “American goods” are made Okinawan through consumption in a different cultural context, a process shot through and through with interethnic power relations—called transculturation by comparative literature scholar Mary Louise Pratt (Reference Pratt1992).

Guided by Yoshimoto's insight into the cultural power exhibited by Japanese appropriation of Disneyland, Okinawa's American Village appears to be a variant of Amerikamun that represents an agentic attempt by Okinawans to create an America that is under their control. One of the most irritating things about the bases for many Okinawans is that they cannot freely enter them, leading to widespread speculation and wild imaginings about secret nuclear bomb silos and so forth. As activist and politician Takazato Suzuyo pointed out with respect to crime, the military uses “security” as a reason to prevent Okinawans from entering the bases, but Okinawans cannot use “security” as a reason to forbid military people from entering the local community.Footnote ¹⁰

A Yoshimoto-inspired reading of American Village dovetails with activist discourse of “inversions” discussed by Figal (Reference Figal, Hein and Selden2003), such as pop singer and Diet representative Kina Shokichi's “White Ships movement,” which set out to undo the imperialism he contends was foisted on Japan by American “black ships” under the command of Commodore Perry in the mid-nineteenth century. American Village is significant because much of it was built by filling in a tidal flat with truckload after truckload of rocks and soil. This is land that has no memory; a rare space in central or southern Okinawa that is not haunted by the spirits of the war dead. Unlike many of the island's districts, there are no war memorials in the mall. As Okinawan businessman Inafuku Ichirō, who runs a retail business in American Village, explained: “We were glad that we did not have to pay for rituals to appease the ghosts when we built here since it was just the sea before it was landfill.” American Village is thus a kind of neutral zone nestled within the heavily historically inscribed neighboring districts of Sunabe and Hamby, the spatio-temporal bookends of the U.S. occupation located immediately to the north and south of the development.

Chatan's American Village reverses the colonial gaze in myriad ways, if only incompletely. As Ashitomi Jun, who is connected with the larger businesses in American Village, explained: “Americans in American Village are like the Dutch paid to be Dutch at Huis Ten Bosch in Kyushu. The big difference is that the American military members here come to the development for free, unaware that they are part of the show.” The atmosphere in American Village is akin to a stage. Carnival Park, an open space in the center of the development, often features dancers and live music performances. Overall, the theme of “America” is evoked visually through the use of expansive open space uncharacteristic of Okinawa, especially the large, free parking lots that make up three-eighths of American Village. Visual markers signifying “America” as a brand are ubiquitous: Starbucks Coffee's wide outdoor seating area is consistently populated with Americans; across the street Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream beckons beneath the large Ferris wheel that long had a neon Coca-Cola sign blinking at its center, and James Dean and Elvis statues look out from behind storefront windows. Although some of these businesses are the same franchises currently operating on bases, such as A&W and Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream, these icons are not only recontextualized against Okinawan geographic and cultural backgrounds, in a symbolic sense they have become Okinawan.

American Village may be read as an agentic Okinawan bid to realign asymmetrical power relationships between Okinawa and the U.S. military. This architectural reinscription of power relations symbolizes Okinawans’ desire to “control” an America of their own, an expression of what has been precisely denied to Okinawans during the occupation, and to a lesser extent, after reversion. If American Village has succeeded symbolically and practically in reversing the gaze vis-à-vis American military personnel, analysis of its reinscription raises the question of how Okinawans achieved more equitable power positioning. Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972 may be seen as the starting point for greater Okinawan prosperity and confidence to challenge the military's “occupation mentality,” which is still perceptible. Without the massive mainland subsidies that made American Village possible, Okinawan town planners would have had a hard time creating architectural challenges to the residual U.S. colonial gaze. Acceptance of these subsidies resubordinates Okinawan planners to the power of the nation-state and the dominant place of Tokyo as its center.

The place of mainland tourists within the development is also instructive for understanding triangulated power relations. One of the key reasons given by planners for building an “American Village” is that it would attract mainland tourists, many of whom have long expressed the desire to experience an “American atmosphere” in Okinawa during their stay. It is mainland tourists who stay at the towering hotel in American Village, the tallest building in Okinawa Prefecture. The hot spring adjacent to this facility is also a bid to attract them and their money, since Okinawans are comparatively less interested in hot springs due to the hot, humid weather and their marked preference for showers over baths. Thus, within the town resort planned by Mayor Hentona to give Okinawans their own resort is another resort, one that reverses the gaze against erstwhile colonizers—American military members—while resubjecting Okinawans to the gaze of their contemporary rulers, the mainland Japanese … and the money they bring.

Conclusion: Changing Intergenerational Perspectives on Amerikamun

Growing up amid comparative prosperity brought by reintegration with Japan in 1972, the younger generations in Okinawa do not immediately think of pizza or chocolate as luxuries or even as American items, but the desire to consume the “best parts” of American culture continues even if the objects of that desire have changed. The new Amerikamun is the American Village mall in Chatan. By design, American Village shares with Amerikamun the property of retaining the desirable and excluding the undesirable aspects of U.S. bases as well as being amenable to agentic Okinawan efforts to control or recontextualize their meaning for Okinawans. The shopping mall's allure springs from gleeful embracing of American consumerism made possible by American-style wide open space, the greatest luxury of all on a cramped island with 20 percent of its area used by military bases.

American Village is simultaneously an extension of Amerikamun while also transcending it. During the occupation, between 1945 and 1972, American goods were luxury items that affirmed bonds between Okinawans and fostered ties across the unequal ethnic power divide symbolized by the barbed-wire-topped U.S. base fences. American Village goes beyond these attributes and inscribes a more equitable or even reversed power relationship in Okinawan space, drawing upon such efforts during the postwar period. Finally, Okinawa has its own America of relative prosperity and increased control over its territory. Yet, older Okinawans lament that their own society is changing, said in part to be due to outside influences, as the younger generations exhibit ever lower interest in taking part in the reciprocity exchanges and rituals that have long bound kin and community. Younger Okinawans complain that they have little time for such things, since making a living amid global competition and high unemployment is challenging.

Unlike chocolate bars or cans of Spam, American Village is real estate and cannot be circulated hand-to-hand to thank or pay back a relative or friend for their help and support. Consuming American Village takes place not only through purchases of ice cream and pizza at its many retailers, but through the daily practice of visitors photographing themselves, their friends, and their family members and circulating those images on social media. Amerikamun is once again being transformed beyond the confines of small luxuries and even the big luxury of open space into something simultaneously larger and smaller in the form of immaterial shared digital images of experiences. This latest contradictory transformation is perhaps fitting for a site so riddled with ambivalence toward not only the bases and the history they emerged from but also the global capitalism and akogare desire they have prompted—in short, Amerikamun itself.