Okinawa, 1972–1995: Life That Matters

This chapter examines the post-reversion era from 1972 to 1995. Along with reversion came the enforcement of the anti-prostitution law and the demise of Okinawa’s large-scale sex industry. The first generation of mixed-race individuals came of age and started speaking for themselves instead of allowing themselves to be spoken for. This was also a time when Okinawans started to look past the unfulfilled promises of the Japanese state for liberation and to conceptualize different forms of autonomy in the global world. This chapter reconsiders self-determination as a philosophical concept. In place of the imperative for a unified self and unified nation as the precondition for entry into selfhood and nationhood (i.e., the capacity for “self-determination”), this chapter revisits Matsushima Chōgi’s concept of the “Okinawan proletariat” to rethink the theoretical implications of Okinawa, as a borderland of the Pacific, where humans and non-human objects circulate. It appeals to Tosaka’s anti-idealist attempt to assign a different kind of agency to morphing matter and reads Tanaka Midori’s mixed-race memoir, My Distant Specter of a Father, for an example of a life that fails to unify before the state, but nonetheless continues to matter or be significant in the quality of its mutability.

Japan in the 1950s: Symbolic Victims

Chapter 1 presents a genealogy of sexual labor in Japan from licensed prostitution and the so-called “comfort woman” system of sexual slavery in the imperial period, through the state-organized system of prostitution for the Allied forces in the immediate postwar, and to the full-fledged emergence of independent streetwalkers thereafter. It links protest against private prostitution in the interwar period to aversion toward the streetwalker in the postwar period through an examination of Tosaka Jun’s Japanese Ideology. There, he defined Japanism as the symbolic communion between the family and state and showed how Japanists attacked private prostitution for purportedly interfering with the integrity of both. What was at stake was the ability of a budding middle class to manage the reproduction of labor power for the biopolitical state. Through Tosaka, this chapter delineates a mechanism of social defence amongst the middle class that targeted life thought to be unintelligible to the state such as the streetwalker and her mixed-race offspring. Further, it shows how this occurred through cultural productions such as anti-base reportage that focused obsessively on the figure of the streetwalker.

Okinawa, 1952–1958: Solidarity under the Cover of Darkness

This chapter charts the position of the sex industry amidst mass social protest known as the “all-island struggle” from 1952 to 1958. The U.S. military attempted to contain this resistance by issuing off-limits orders on base towns that paralyzed the Okinawan economy. As a result, base town workers were pitted against popular political protest. This chapter addresses the sex worker as a subject who could not be mobilized under a political platform before the state, i.e., the lumpenproletariat. Instead of dismissing the lumpenproletariat as non-political and therefore not useful, it repositions politics as the interplay between a radical heterogeneity (i.e., alegality) attuned to the immediate struggle for life and political representation oriented toward an idealistic goal by examining the activities of Kokuba Kōtarō in the underground communist party. It was under the cover of darkness that this chapter locates moments of solidarity between women involved with G.I.s and Okinawans resisting U.S. military repression. This solidarity, however, dissolved along with the introduction of ethno-nationalism of pro-reversion political forces such as the Okinawa People’s Party. Kokuba’s understanding of politics as the merely instrumental representation of the masses was replaced by the assumption of a spiritualistic communion between the people and Japanese state.

Okinawa, 1945–1952: Allegories of Becoming

Chapter 2 gives a brief biopolitical prehistory to Okinawa. From the perspective of economic development, it was not treated like a national or colonial territory by the Japanese state, but ambiguously suspended in between both. This foregrounded the sexual politics surrounding the U.S. military in Okinawa because unlike mainland Japan, there was no development of a middle class equipped to reject the formation of a sex industry in base towns on the basis of an established ethno-nationalism. Hence, in contrast to the symbolic structure of Japanism presented in Chapter 1, this chapter positions Okinawa’s alegality in terms of Benjamin’s notion of allegory, or that which constantly fails communion with a totality. It argues that debates surrounding the establishment of a sex industry were driven by the sheer fear of exclusion from the biopolitical order, not by an identification with it, and were subsequently absent of discourses lamenting the racial contamination of the population. It traces the omnipresence of this fear through the Okinawan reception of so-called “comfort women” during the war, the experience of sexual violence and exploitation in the immediate postwar, and the formation of the sex industry after the “reverse course” of occupation in 1949.

Conclusion

The Conclusion re-engages the words of the so-called “father of Okinawan studies,” Ifa Fuyū, who wrote shortly before his death in 1947 that he was not in a position to “command [his] descendants to be in possession” of the ability to “determine their own fate.” Although this text is usually read as a lamentation of Okinawa’s inability to exercise self-determination, the Conclusion instead repositions it as a problem of how to think about the Okinawa’s alegality, or life unintelligible to the state. Specifically, it considers mixed-race life that was targeted as inimical to the monoethnic Japanese state (Chapter 1), and along with the contention surrounding the circumstances of its birth, continued to haunt Okinawa’s struggle with political representation from 1945 to 2015. It examines Ariko Ikehara’s essay on a mixed-race story in which a grandmother, by proxy of her daughter, claims her mixed granddaughter as a child of Okinawa. She exercises an autonomy irrespective of state recognition, and by doing so, reclaims an Okinawan life that matters.

Okinawa, 1958–1972: The Subaltern Speaks

The period between 1958 and 1972 marks the full-fledged emergence of the movement to revert to the Japanese administration along with the emergence of the New Left both globally and in Okinawa. This chapter shows how the New Left developed useful critiques of the Old Left’s ethno-nationalism, but once again, failed to account for the radical heterogeneity of base town workers who were immune to the class-based politics of the “Japanese proletariat.” Some critical Marxist activists such as Kawada Yō and Matsushima Chōgi questioned middle-class assumptions implicit in the “Japanese proletariat.” Paying attention to Okinawa’s historical exclusion from the biopolitical state, Matsushima defined the “Okinawan proletariat” as the condition of a class that constantly fails to be represented by the state. Reading this insight alongside Spivak’s distinction between Darstellung and Vertretung, this chapter presents an allegorical reading of sex workers in reportage and film, and asks the ways it is possible to hear them speak. Instead of making their voices intelligible in terms of state representation, it reads them in the quality of their alienation from the state. It was in this quality that these purportedly “pro-American” collaborators turned against their clients and instigated the Koza Riot in 1970.

Introduction

The Introduction defines the alegal in terms of Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty and Foucauldian biopolitics. It shows how this positioning is integral to dislodging Okinawa from the traditional area studies paradigm and instead uses it to theorize the formation of a new postwar global network of sovereignty between the U.S. and Japan. In particular, it foregrounds the biopolitical dimensions of this network in which Japanese politicians protested violation of Japanese sovereignty by the U.S. military symbolically through the trope of sexual violence. Concerned with the ability to secure Japan as an economic partner, the U.S. responded by reducing its military presence in the mainland and transferring troops to Okinawa in the late 1950s. It sensed a deeply-entrenched cultural aversion to sexual contact around the bases, which, this book argues, was abhorred because it interfered with the formation of a Japanese middle class. By revisiting the writings of Japanese Marxists such as Uno Kōzō and Tosaka Jun, the Introduction defines the contours of a biopolitical state concerned with developing a Japanese middle class along the norms of patriarchal monoethnicity. It is this kind of state from which Okinawa was excluded, and to this state which it ambivalently sought to return.