Japan and Okinawa

Structure and Subjectivity

Glen D. Hook, Richard Siddle, Glen D. Hook, Richard Siddle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9781138863095
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134427871
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Japan and Okinawa provides an up-to-date, coherent and theoretically informed examination of Okinawa from the perspective of political economy and society. It combines a focus on structure and subjectivity as a way to analyze Okinawa, Okinawans and their relationship with global, regional and national structures. The book draws on a range of disciplines to provide new insights into both the contemporary and historical place of Okinawa and the Okinawans.
The first half of the book examines Okinawa as part of the global, regional and national structures which impose constraints as well as offer opportunities to Okinawa. Leading specialists examine in detail topics such as Okinawa as a frontier region, Okinawa's Free Trade Zones and response to globalization, and Okinawa as part of the Japanese 'construction state', being particularly concerned with how Okinawa can chart its own course. The second half focuses on questions of identity and subjectivity, examining the multitude of vibrant cultural practices that breathe life into the meaning of being Okinawan and inform their social and political responses to structural constraints.
The originality of this book can be found in its elucidation of how the structural constraints of Okinawa's precarious position in the world, the region and as part of Japan impact on subjectivity. For many Okinawans, in the past as now, acceptance and rationalization of their dependency has made them collaborators in their own subordination. At the same time, however, they have demonstrated a capacity to give voice to a separate identity, inscribing cultural practices marking them as different from mainland Japanese.

1 Introduction

Japan? Structure and subjectivity in Okinawa

Glenn D. Hook and Richard Siddle

Okinawa. Its subordinate integration into global, regional and national orders has posed a challenge for the governments and peoples of Okinawa for centuries. While this structural subordination of Okinawa and the wider Ryukyu islands during the period of the Chinese world order was never complete (Fairbanks 1968), and was ameliorated by the cultural and economic benefits it brought, Satsuma's extension of control over the islands from 1609 onwards created a triangular relationship with both China and Japan. In the face of Western imperial expansion, the pace of Okinawa's asymmetrical incorporation into the Japanese empire quickened with the annexation and dismantling of the island kingdom from 1879. This was followed by its integration, albeit often belatedly, into the political and economic structures of the rapidly developing Japanese state as ‘Okinawa Prefecture’. Until the empire's defeat in 1945, Okinawa was part of another, as yet little explored, triangular relationship, sitting between the empire of Japan proper and the colony of Taiwan (Formosa), acquired in 1895 as part of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. This policy of subordinating the Ryukyus within Japanese political and economic, if not cultural, space, was part of the historical development of Japan as a subimperial power in East Asia (Takahashi 2001). The particular catch-up path of development pursued by Japan led to military aggression and territorial aggrandizement throughout the region. The legacy of the Second World War's outcome has been twofold, one international, one domestic. The first is Japan's well-known colonial legacy in East Asia, which continues to this day to constrain the government's relations with neighbouring states (Hook et al. 2001: 151–257). The second is the less well-known ‘colonial’ legacy within Japan's own legal, territorial borders (as with the island and native people of Hokkaido on the northern periphery of the ‘developmental state’). This combination of geography and strategic significance has historically meant that the ‘Okinawa problem’ becomes most acute precisely at key moments of transition or crisis within the modern Japanese state; the early Meiji transition to modernity; war, defeat and the occupation after 1945; and most recently the post-Cold War realignment.

The latest manifestation of the ‘Okinawa problem’ cannot be understood outside of this context. The historical memory of the nineteenth century, not to mention of the mid-twentieth century, when Okinawa suffered enormously at the hands of both American and Japanese troops, continues to cast a long shadow over relations with the mainland (on the war, see Ōta 1984). Indeed, Okinawa's precarious, shifting position within the tri-dimensional space of politics, economics and culture still generates a multiplicity of answers to the most fundamental of questions: What is Okinawa? Who are the Okinawans? The recasting of these two questions as one is provocatively encapsulated in the title of this chapter: ‘Japan? Structure and subjectivity in Okinawa’. This title, and the chapters making up the book, have one clear aim: to jettison any notion that the structural subordination of Okinawa politically and economically within global, regional and national orders in any way implies the suffocation of Okinawan agency. While ‘Okinawans’ are produced as subjects within powerful structural and ideological formations, Okinawans have historically understood, negotiated, accepted, and indeed occasionally subverted, these structural constraints. They continue to do so to this day. By examining how structure and subjectivity interact and intertwine in tri-dimensional space, this book sets out to shatter the mirror that reflects Okinawa and its peoples as no more than a peripheral appendage to the world and regional stages, or as a fully integrated former colony of the Japanese empire. It is more than that, but is it Japan?

A definitive and satisfactory answer to these interrelated questions is a huge, and probably impossible, undertaking. In attempting, though, to at least move research in this direction, this volume seeks from the outset to avoid the pitfall of reifying Okinawa or Okinawans, or Japan and the Japanese for that matter, by focusing instead primarily on sets of relationships: Okinawa and Japan, of course, as the overwhelming and determining relationship, but also on Okinawa and the US, Okinawa and the region, and Okinawans with themselves, their past and their Japanese ‘Others’. The chapters acknowledge, and attempt to illuminate, the complex, interwoven and entangled nature of these relationships. They are divided into two sections, which seek broadly to interpret Okinawa from ‘above’ and ‘below’, or in another pair of oppositions, from external and internal perspectives. Some authors place Okinawa in the centre of the frame of vision, while others see it refracted through the prisms of powerful, constraining structures and forces. A number of chapters take the political economy of Okinawa as the unit of analysis while yet others delve into the complex subjectivity of a single individual. All, nevertheless, by casting light on different facets of the kaleidoscope of Okinawa and Okinawan experience, combine to push forward our overall understanding of the historical and contemporary structures, forces and contradictions that are Okinawa and its peoples.

The book sets out to answer the above questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. By bringing together specialists in both the human and social sciences, the aim is to tease out an understanding of Okinawa and the Okinawans in a way that demonstrates the central role of both structure and subjectivity when grappling with the central question: Japan? The iconoclastic question driving this research partly arises due to the multifaceted nature of borders. From the late nineteenth century onwards the legal boundaries inscribed in cartographic space have placed Okinawa within the sovereign, territorial borders of Japan. Yet even this formalistic understanding of the structural relationship between Japan and Okinawa needs to be tempered by a recognition of the legal severance of Okinawa in the wake of Japan's defeat in the Second World War. The US occupation of Okinawa from 1945–72 meant that a more tentative, but nevertheless legal, reinscription of borders took place as a result of Okinawa, the Amami group, and the Ogasawara islands being placed under US tutelage as a separate administrative authority – a military colony in all but name. Although Japan retained ‘residual sovereignty’ over Okinawa, the formalistic borders embracing Japan and Okinawa were over-inscribed by a quarter-century long American space. The legacy of this Occupation has meant that, even after the reversion of Okinawa to full Japanese sovereignty in 1972, structurally and subjectively Okinawa and the Okinawans remain part of a triangle, with the other two angles being made up by the US and Japan. The influence of the Japanese and American angles of the triangle on Okinawa has differed over time, but has consistently constrained the independence of Okinawa in political and economic space. Even after the formal end of the American interlude, the structural position of Okinawa is determined within this dual relationship.

Structure: the good, the bad and the ugly

The role of US bases

Within this dual relationship, Okinawa has been incorporated into a tripartite political economy, with military bases defining the quintessential nature of the relationship with the US, on the one hand, and public works expenditures and tourism defining it with Japan, on the other. This is the so-called ‘3K’ economy –bases (kichi), public works (kōkyō kōji) and tourism (kankō). The bases are a central target for those focusing on the negative aspects of these relationships. To start with, the structural constraints imposed on Okinawa and the Okinawans are plain to see as a result of the US presence beyond the 1945–72 interlude. While the great majority of Okinawans had fervently desired a return to Japan, thereby gaining the benefits of the 1947 Constitution, with the protection of human rights, Article 9 and the other benefits of a ‘pacifist, democratic state’ (Hook and McCormack 2001: 23–6), withdrawal or at least a reduction of the US military was expected to be the concrete manifestation of this structural change in the relationship between the US and Japan. Yet any tourist visitor to the ‘tropical island paradise’ willing to abandon the beach umbrella for a glimpse at the military infrastructure, hardware and personnel holding up the US nuclear umbrella can even now still witness at firsthand their continuing effect on the everyday life of Okinawans long after 1972. It starts with the location of 74.8 per cent of US military facilities on only 0.6 per cent of Japanese territory. It ends with a political economy deeply and structurally distorted by the role the bases play in Okinawa.

An anti-base poster ‘No U.S. Bases in Nago, Okinawa or Anywhere in Japan!’ makes the impact of this overwhelming US presence evocatively clear: ‘look among US military bases to find Okinawa’, it cries. As an illustration, the area used by US forces, which with dependants total approximately 49,000 out of a prefectural population of 1.3 million, takes up 82.9 per cent of Kadena Town, 59.6 per cent of Kin Town, 56.4 per cent of Chatan Town and 51.4 per cent of Ginoza Town (based on official figures, Okinawa Ken Sōmubu Kichi Kōshitsu 1998). Whether the focus is on the bases as a hindrance to Okinawa's economic development, a blight on rational urban planning, an immoveable obstacle in building an effective and efficient local transportation system, or as a continual hazard for the local population – with military accidents, murder, rape, crime, noise and environmental pollution, and a thriving sex industry as seeming ineluctable side-effects of their existence – the pernicious effect of 39 military facilities concentrated in Okinawa island alone and taking up fully 10.7 per cent of the prefectural land area cannot be denied. It is for this reason that the pejorative reference to Okinawa as nothing more than a dependent, ‘base economy’ at one time gained currency, suggesting how widely the perception of the US bases as constraints on Okinawa's political economy had taken hold.

Yet this does not permit us to gainsay the contribution US bases have made and continue to make to the local economy. In other words, for some, the bases are a ‘good’. For as with any number of subnational economies integrated asymmetrically into a subordinate position within a national political economy, opportunities, not only constraints, continue to exist. Those with a vested interest in the bases, in particular, have willingly or with a heavy heart taken advantage of them. The point is illustrated by groups of landowners who receive rent payments from the Tokyo government for the military use of their land. While 3,000 continue to oppose the occupation of their land and have refused to accept payments for its use by the US military, many of these are outsiders who own tiny plots under the hitotsubo anti-war landowners’ movement. On the other hand, 29,564 (March 1995) Okinawan landowners received such payments without protest. The total amount transferred in this way was 63 billion yen in 1996, with an additional 7.3 billion yen of payments made to landowners whose land is used by the Self-Defence Forces (SDF). This has increased almost annually from 1972, when the amount transferred was only 12 billion yen (Okinawa Ken Sōmubu 1998: 279, 284). Similarly, in the case of workers on the bases, such employment opportunities on an island with the highest unemployment rate in Japan remain attractive. Even though the number of local workers has declined dramatically, falling from a peak of 18,118 in 1972, to 8,349 in 1996, up from a low point of 7,177 in 1979, the bases still provide opportunities for work (Okinawa Ken Sōmubu 1998: 286). It should be noted, however, that because of the introduction of ‘sympathy payments’ in 1978 – that is, euphemistic host-nation support, the costs to the US forces of employing Japanese on the bases has been reduced, with the Japanese government paying for a range of benefits over the years, starting out with national insurance payments and going on to cover pay differentials as well as pay allowances for language ability. Whatever the source of the income, working for the US continues to remain popular, as can be seen from the fact that far more Okinawans apply for jobs than can possibly be employed.

Finally, the bases more broadly contribute to the local Okinawan economy. Even if the multiplier effect of GI money spent on pints and prostitutes is limited, especially in times of a high yen, some activities do redound to the benefit of the economy, as with the purchase of local products by military personnel and dependants. Still, it is calculated that, whereas in 1970 the contribution US bases made to the local Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 25.6 per cent of the total, by 1996 the amount had fallen to only 5.7 per cent. Statistics, of course, can be calculated and manipulated in many ways, and there are others who argue that the rate of economic dependency remains high when indirect contributions, such as base-related public works, are also taken into account (Maeshiro et al. 1998: 12). As with much else in Okinawa, even economic data are politicized as part of the ongoing struggle to challenge and transform the Okinawan political economy. Nevertheless, the downward trend in US dependence is hard to deny. In short, the US military presence is a double-edged sword, though on balance the negative effects and constraints imposed by the bases are far greater than the positive effects and opportunities created for the peoples of the prefecture.

Okinawa's integration into the ‘construction state’

The mainland's role in imposing this second structural constraint results from the very nature of the Japanese political economy, rather than a need for military deployments on the island as part of a global and regional strategy, as in the case of the US. The nature of the ‘construction state’ has led to widespread criticism of the collusive relationship between the construction industry, the prefectural government and the state, eroding democratic accountability in Okinawa and leading to charges of corruption and malpractice. Public works play a large role in the local economy; 50.3 per cent of construction business in Okinawa was generated by public works in 1996, compared to 40.7 per cent nationally (Okinawa Ken Kikaku Kaihatsubu Kikaku Chōsei Shitsu 1998: 43–4), while the construction business itself comprised 13.9 per cent of the Okinawan economy in 1995 in contrast to 10.3 per cent nationally (Okinawa Ken Kikaku Kaihatsubu Kikaku Chōsei Shitsu 1998: 6). This is viewed negatively by many commentators who see the tentacles of the Japanese ‘construction state’ or ‘public works state’ reaching into the inner sanctuaries of this ‘tropical island paradise’. The central role of the ‘construction state’, via the Okinawa Development Agency, in promoting Okinawan development has led to an all-out transformation of the natural habitat, from ‘nature’ to a ‘nurtured’ environment, making the island more ugly in the process. Following on from the degradation of the environment initiated by widespread base construction under US rule, this human intervention has created a situation where riverways, beaches and land have been bulldozed and concreted. What is worse, air and water pollution, soil erosion and wider environmental degradation are ruining the coastline, eating away at the coral and posing a danger to marine life. While many small Okinawan construction firms act as subcontractors and thus provide a livelihood for local people, the large projects and their profits remain largely in the hands of the giant Japanese construction firms, some of which were helping the US authorities build bases even before the 1972 reversion. Some projects, such as the Okinawa International Ocean Exhibition, planned as a way to reinvigorate the local economy soon after reversion, have been spectacular failures that have left a stream of local bankruptcies in their wake (Arasaki 1996: 49). Even recent flagship projects such as the Ginowan Conference Centre or the facilities constructed for the 2000 G8 summit in Nago are a mixed blessing since they also represent a drain on scarce public funds for their upkeep.

As in the case of US bases, however, the role of the ‘construction state’ in providing benefits for Okinawa and the Okinawans is also plain to see. Apart from the large amount of employment generated by the construction industry, the work carried out by these companies has undoubtedly improved the quality of life of the population. Prior to reversion to Japan, the infrastructure was below the national level, whereas now Okinawa has caught up in a number of key areas. The amount of public housing is up, there are more public parks and modern sports and cultural facilities, and Okinawa now boasts five universities in contrast to only one at the time of reversion. The low level of Okinawan living standards before 1972, a reflection of the low priority given by the US administration to civilian needs, has thus been dramatically improved. But at what costs?

The structure of ‘exotica’

The number of tourists wanting to hold up Okinawan beach umbrellas has increased dramatically over the years following reversion. This is the third wave of post-reversion tourism after battlefield tours and organized shopping trips for cheap goods, and is centred mainly on the young. Yet the results of this are often simply short package holidays with many visitors catered for by hotels built with mainland capital, staffed by mainlanders or other non-Okinawans and located in select areas isolated from the ‘natives’. While no tourist would deny the potential of the azure sky, the white sands and the turquoise sea to act as economic resources for the Okinawans, the structural integration of these natural resources into the mainland political economy has often transformed them into nothing more than commodities for the ‘tourist industry’ and the ‘construction industry’. Within this subordinate relationship, the role of the advertising and culture industries, driven by mainland capital and interests, produces a particular identity for the Okinawans, deracinated from the complex reality of Okinawan life. Indeed, the culture of Okinawa is frequently treated as no more than a commodified object, rather than as the vital expression of a living community. Put simply, Okinawans are inscribed as the non-threatening, laid-back and relaxed...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Japan and Okinawa
• Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/RoutledgeCurzon series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Japan? Structure and subjectivity in Okinawa
• PART I Structure
• PART II Subjectivity
• Index