Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

134 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
Bay and Shiraho struggles were residents and networks of sympathetic citizens
living in other places. The central instigators of protest were the residents in the
community, not the traditional leading figures of the anti-establishment political
activitists in Okinawa, namely progressive political parties, workers’ unions, and
teachers’ associations.
It was not just in Okinawa that ‘residents’ were becoming grassroots protesters.
In mainland Japan, in the aftermath of the Ampo protest in 1960, large-scale,
centralized and established organizations affiliated with the JCP and JSP were
increasingly susceptible to internal conflicts and fragmentation. As public disillusionment
with the leftist organizations – preoccupied with organizational survival
and sectarian struggles – increased, awareness of the importance of the participation
of individual ‘citizens’ became increasingly prominent. Sasaki-Uemura explains
that ‘the notion of the citizen subject’ was a reaction against the dominance of the
‘Marxist framework’ and ‘the proletarian working class as the agent of social
transformation’. The Japanese word shimin (citizen) carried an expectation of
enlightened individuals ‘as the agents of history’, and as the ‘heart and spirit of
democracy’ (Sasaki-Uemura 2001: 31–2). 11 The citizen subject emphasized the
significance of the spiritual element in political activism of the individual. Emphasis
on the independent individual’s direct political participation was the most significant
feature of the residents’ movements as a ‘new avenue of citizen participation and
as a new political force in Japan’ (McKean 1981: 5–6). For the supporters of Japan’s
postwar democracy, the ‘residents’ movement’ was a realization of the principle of
individual political participation, at the local level.
Citizens’ movements and residents’ movements are terms that are used interchangeably.
12 In the context of protest in Okinawa, the most important difference
between the two manifests in the difference between the external ‘supporters’, who
participate in collective action that concerns the community they do not live in, and
the residents of that community. Mainland-Japan-based NGOs, for example, are
often referred to as ‘citizens’ movement organizations’, as opposed to the locals
who participate in protest as residents. Significant boundaries separate the activists
who participate from outside, and the ‘residents’.
The late Asato Seishin was a former schoolteacher and a resident of Yakena
village near Kin Bay, a founder of the Kin Bay Life Protection Society and its
most respected member. Sakihara Seishū, a former schoolteacher and fellow
member of the Kin Bay Life Protection Society, recalls that Asato was critical of
the interventions of the left-wing political parties, trade unions, and the progressive
coalition. In his opinion, in order to represent the interests of the local residents
properly, local residents needed to ‘organize and do things themselves’ (Sakihara,
Interview April 1999). Asato stresses the need for the local residents to separate
their struggle from external organizations participating in the Kin Bay struggle
from the mainland and other parts of Okinawa, through activities such as
demonstrations and court cases. In his oral record of the Kin Bay struggle, Umi wa
Hito no Haha de Aru (Ocean, Our Mother), he points out that the external supporters
often tried to be ‘movement instructors’, telling the residents what to do, and taking
the struggle away from the locals (Asato 1981: 141).