Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

104 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
military employment office, and American children’s schools within the Kanda Air
Base (Okinawa Shiyakusho Kikakubu Heiwa Bunka Shinko-ka 1999: 96–101). 52
This was the Koza riot, and it was the only spontaneous, outbreak of violence on
this scale in Okinawa’s postwar history.
Participants included union members, schoolteachers, base workers, and other
ordinary citizens who were drinking in Koza. 53 However, a public servants’ union
member who joined the riot stresses that there was no union involvement: the main
instigators were younger people who worked for the bars and restaurants in Koza
catering to the US soldiers (Mainichi Shimbun (Seibu Honsha) 17 December 2000).
Tomiyama explains that the explosive anger of these workers was directed at the
discrimination and human rights abuses they experienced in their daily contact with
the US military and its people. In the Koza riot, the ‘bar town’ workers who had
been excluded from the definition of ‘citizens’ in the reversion movement
themselves became the subject of a struggle, as ‘Okinawans’ (Tomiyama 1996: 29,
Aldous 2003). The Koza riot gave voice to the ‘bar town’ workers, at least to young
male workers who were capable of violence but who had been irrelevant to the
organization or mobilization of the progressive coalition.
The power of the Koza riot was ‘different from any rallies or protest “movements”’
according to a New Left mainland Japanese student (Ryūkyū Shimpō
20 December 2000). The riot, completely outside of the organizational and
ideological spectrum of the Council for Reversion, was an indication of internal
divisions among the community of protest and, importantly, of the separation
of the ‘Okinawa Struggle’, led by the progressive parties and unions, from
the day-to-day issues faced by many Okinawans in living with the US military
presence.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined the second ‘wave’ of protest in postwar Okinawan
history. In the 27 years of direct US military’s occupation, the Okinawans suffered
from loss of political autonomy, systemic racial discrimination, lack of protection
from many forms of workplace abuse, unprosecuted lawlessness, and criminal
behaviour on the part of US personnel (due to the extraterritoriality provisions),
economic dependency, insecurity, and distorted development including the development
of a huge sex industry, threats of continuing land expropriation, the noxious
presence of huge quantities of weaponry including B-52s and nuclear and chemical
weapons, and potential arms and weapons-related accidents. And this list could
probably go on. More significantly here, reversion was for many during most of
this 27-year period perceived to be the answer to these problems – following US
withdrawal and access to the protections of the Japanese Constitution.
During the reversion movement, leading political organizations and coalitions
were formed on the basis of class struggle and nationalism. In the end, however,
emotional attachment to Japan as a ‘home country’ became the dominant and
most popular ‘framing’ – more popular than the idea of class struggle promoted
by the OPP, trade unions, and student groups. This, as we have seen, suited the