Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

6 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
describes and reaffirms the reality of ‘a comprehensive people’s movement (minshū
undō) against the current marginalization of Okinawans’ voices – an experience
resulting simultaneously from US military bases, the Japan–US security alliance,
and the US global military strategy’ (Arasaki, Interview, February 2002). Most
significantly, perhaps, Arasaki’s use of the term gives shape and a name to numerous
and diverse events, and renders them as a struggle of a single group of people that,
as noted above, has peaked three times.
The idea of ‘three waves’ certainly captures periods of more intense political
conflict, often now also called ‘the island-wide struggles’ (shima-gurumi tōsō)in
Okinawa. These have been exceptional periods when the population put aside its
differences and collectively expressed widely shared demands. Importantly,
temporary unification in these periods briefly enhanced the ‘Okinawan’ bargaining
power vis-à-vis the state authorities (US and Japan) in securing their demands.
These periods were also unquestionably threshold events and Arasaki’s ‘three
waves’ provide important chronological markers – a temporal framework –
extremely useful for analytical purposes. This book makes use of Arasaki’s waves
in this way.
It is also important to note that Arasaki’s unity has been a relatively rare and
episodic phenomenon occurring only three times in more than 50 years. And this
immediately prompts some pressing questions: Why has unity been so rare? And
what about the very large stretches of time falling outside or between the waves?
Does something bind the waves together and establish a larger coherence over time
– and not just at (separate) peak times, so to speak? Can we speak of latent or hidden
unity existing beneath the turbulent surface of the fragmented and multivocal
movement between the waves? And conversely what happens to difference and
diversity when they are overtaken or swamped by waves of unity? Is something
lost as well as gained? Arasaki does not adequately answer these questions; he does
not adequately reconcile the diversity of protest groups – of which he is aware –
with the overarching concept of a wavelike ‘Okinawa Struggle’. Indeed the idea
of three waves of ‘Okinawa Struggle’ in the post-WWII period is meant to explain
the rises and falls of protest momentum in the tripartite US–Japan–Okinawa relations,
and therefore cannot do full justice to the complexity, the diversity, or the
turbulence of the community of protest. It sustains a conception of unity which
often works to conceal differences – differences which are at play between Arasaki’s
three waves and more significantly, perhaps, while they are peaking.
Community of protest and myth
Here, by way of prelude, it must suffice to say that the many voices of Okinawan
protest are bound informally by common values, shared experiences, and collective
memories that lend themselves to the ideas of continuous struggle and one people.
At the same time, however, the meaning of these values, experiences, and memories
is constantly in contention, constantly undergoing revision and reinterpretation.
Among the protesters who share these common, invisible elements constitute what
I call the ‘community of protest’ in Okinawa. Likewise and accordingly, these