Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

18 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
and effective means of communication provide basic platforms for collective
identity formation and unity building everywhere.
A second fundamental point registered by Anderson relates to the extraordinary
power of these instruments. They can build unity that is as tough and tenacious as
that forged by ties of blood (Anderson repeatedly points to the willingness of
citizens not just to die but to mass kill for their countries). Their range, however,
is so much greater. The whole process is testimony not just to the power of language
and print but also to the power of the human imagination in which language,
literature, and the institutions of literacy are rooted. Hence the title of his book –
Imagined Communities (1991).
To be sure, this analysis cannot simply be applied to the experience of the
Okinawan community of protest. To begin with, that community is just that of
a protest and not a nation. The fact that protests in Okinawa lack the overt political
struggle for national independence has always entailed more limited political
horizons. And this, in turn, has meant restricted access to resources – including
the resources to communicate. Protest movements are also self-limiting in another
crucial respect. Unlike nationalist movements, they aim typically to influence
government, not to become an alternative government. The implications of
this point, of course, are profound and go ultimately to questions of forceful and
violent means of struggle. The Okinawan community of protest does not have a
military to protect its sovereignty; rather, it challenges the legitimacy of the state’s
military.
Yet the two very different kinds of communities have something important in
common. In both cases, language and means of communication – energized by
human imaginative faculties – provide basic platforms for collective identity
formation. (Indeed, unable or unwilling to use violent means, this often applies
with greater force to protest movements.) But that issue to one side, in both
cases these platforms are used to construct worlds of shared origins, beliefs, and
aspirations. And it is impossible to overestimate the importance of this common
ground – the basic platform. That is why it has been emphasized so heavily here.
The work of campaigning, of winning hearts and minds, rests more heavily on
informal and episodic modes of communication, on brief opportunities to
‘broadcast’ which are improvised or seized opportunistically. This is how shared
experiences, memories and visions are created and, if I may adapt Charles Tilly’s
term, the Okinawan community of protest does this with ‘repertoires of storytelling’
that are limited. An incomplete list of ‘items’ in that ‘repertoire’ would include (1)
face-to-face conversation, anecdotal exchange, and joking, (2) rallies, demonstrations,
sit-ins, blockades, chants, and speeches (3) public lectures; (4) discussions
and workshops, (5) ephemeral publishing, press-releases, posters, and limited
circulations newsletters; (6) the performing arts – music, song, theatre, street theatre,
poetry reading; film and television; (7) the purely visual arts – graffiti, posters
photography painting, etc; and (8) now, also, the exploding new multimedia world
of the internet and telecommunications more generally.
The most striking feature of this list of communicative media (a repertoire of
storytelling) relates to its limited reliance on the printed word. Language is almost