Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

16 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
social historian Charles Tilly has coined the term ‘repertoire of collective action’
to refer to the accumulation of experience resulting from collective actions
shared by different organizations, through mutual interactions and learning. Shared
learning and understanding have in the past included such matters as forms of
collective action, the conduct of demonstrations, how to organize and what to do
in a mass rally, how to use and learn from the media, ‘several varieties of strikes,
petitioning, the organization of pressure groups, and a few other ways of articulating
grievances and demands’ (Tilly 1978: 152).
The ‘Okinawan struggle’ as a ‘movement’ is often constructed through establishing
distinctive ‘repertoires of collective action’. These repertoires have become
incorporated within popular accounts – stories told and retold – of major Okinawan
struggles, including the ‘all-island’ struggle against the US land policy, the struggle
against the US military ‘bulldozers and bayonets’ that forcefully dislocated
the farmers from their own land, the base workers’ struggle against the discriminatory
working environment, and more. Equally, however, ‘repertoires of
collective action’ can point to differences among protest actors. Depending on
the activists’ experiences and definitions of who ‘we’ are, preferred strategies and
codes of conduct in protest can vary. Thus, there is not one ‘movement’, but many
‘movements’.
This book uses the term ‘framings of protest’ – a term indebted to the concept
of ‘framings of collective action’ (Snow and Benford 1992). Framings of protest
assist in identifying different but recognizably generic sets of characteristic meanings
that various social movement organizations attach to collective action.
‘Frames’, like collective identity, highlight how collective actors look at their
own activities and interpret them to establish ‘meanings’ of collective action ‘by
selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and
sequences of actions within one’s present or past environment’ (Snow and Benford
1992: 137). 7
The concept of ‘collective action frames’ or ‘frames’ arise from the RMT school
of social movements noted above. As such, it rests upon the foundations of a rational
individualism, which tends to view mental dimensions of meaning production as
‘resources’ for successful mobilization and participation of a social movement.
Though ‘frames’ give certain solidity to the set of meanings attached to collective
action after they are produced, they also allow room for examination of the ways
in which frames of protest, once produced, are reassessed and renegotiated by the
actors (Snow et al. 1986). Where the process of constructing collective identity
addresses the question of who ‘we’ are (Okinawans, in this case), different protest
framings address the question of how we see the world (Okinawa and its
‘predicament’ in this case).
As previously indicated, this book takes the view that representations of the
‘Okinawan anti-base movement’ often fail to capture the diversity of its many
protest actors. New social movement theories offer potential correctives to this
unbalanced view but so, too, can resource mobilization theories – as they highlight
varying reform agendas, motivations, priorities and definitions of what is at stake,
framings, and so on.