Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

148 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
Although government-led industrialization and the continued presence of US
military bases in Okinawa were the common target of the community of protest,
actual protest was motivated by many local identities with different experiences
of everyday life, involving a wider range of people who lived primarily as residents
in the localities of protest, rather than by subscribers to particular ideologies or
established parties and unions. In the process of interaction and solidarity building,
the residents intentionally stressed the autonomy and uniqueness of individual
communities. External ‘supporters’ – in particular, political parties and unions
in larger cities or mainland Japan – played an important role, but respecting the
boundaries between outsiders (supporters) and insiders (residents) became an
important feature of the ‘local’ framing of protest. It continues today.
New awareness of the importance of the ‘local’ did not put an end to the idea of
a single ‘Okinawan’ struggle. But it transformed it. A sense of solidarity within
the community of protest was maintained through shared experiences and information
and a shared repertoire of protest. As the centres of protest multiplied,
communication and knowledge sharing among different actors across distant
geographical regions increased, facilitated by the concept of residents’ movements
of the Ryūkyūko region. Having said that, the Battle of Okinawa also remained
common history, a shared memory, an important motivation for the residents’
movements, and a link to the established narrative of ‘Okinawan’ marginalization.
But ‘local’ framing resulted in another important and somewhat paradoxical
change as well. Where struggles fought within the arenas of national political
institutions (through unions, parties, politics, and municipal and national legislatures)
tended to be absorbed within the nation, the same was much less true of
‘local’ political struggles. They were able to reach out beyond the boundaries of
the nation and become international and/or global in scope. International recognition
would nourish identity-building and myth-making in new ways.
The emergence of ‘local’ framing in the Okinawan community of protest is most
relevant to ‘new social movement’ theory and the increasing importance of
post-materialist values, discussed in Chapter 2. At a time when the high-growth
economy was coming to an end, and the horrifying environmental effects of blind
enthusiasm for industrialization were a major social concern, the Kin Bay and
Shiraho struggles convincingly suggested that the traditional lifestyle in rural
Okinawa – even in a remote community in Ishigaki Island – offered an attractive,
alternative ‘Okinawan’ collective identity. Activists redirected their preferences
from assimilation to positively redefining ‘Okinawan’ distinctiveness by discovering
values in rural community and traditional ways of life connected with
nature. This stood in stark contrast to a hyper-industrialized Japan. The Kin Bay
Life Protection Society’s protest and the Shiraho struggle both articulated the
dominant issue that came to give meaning to Okinawan’ protest in the post-reversion
era: Okinawa’s dependence on state-endorsed industrialization, which exhausts
local natural resources.
The Kin Bay and Shiraho struggles represent small-scale residents and social
movements in the ‘low’ period of protest in Okinawa. Perhaps because of the
political opportunity structure that favoured increasing flows of subsidies from