Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

48 Myth, protest and struggle in Okinawa
Victim-consciousness
A victim-centred perspective has dominated mainland Japanese narratives of war
and peace, most directly inspired by the cataclysmic experiences of the atomic
bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Dower 1999: 198–9, Orr 2001). At the same
time, Japanese nationalism in the postwar period has enshrined commitment to
principles of democracy and peace in the 1947 Japanese Constitution (Dower 1999).
It is arguable that both the trauma and the recovery have served to cover up the
state’s responsibility for causing war and conducting invasions. It also had the effect
of suppressing the hardships Japan’s war inflicted on non-Japanese civilians. These,
again, included the forced labour and ‘comfort women’ brought from Korea and
other colonies, and Okinawan civilians effectively removed from the mainstream
memory of Japan’s war (Hein and Selden 1997, McCormack, 2001, Yoneyama
1999).
In some of its official expressions the Okinawan commitment to peace is built
on the same uncertain foundations. In fact, the construction of the Cornerstone of
Peace in 1995 elevated Naha into the league of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: one of a
Japanese ‘triad of peace sites’ (Figal 2003: 71). With emphasis placed on the name
inscription of the dead including those from the US and Britain as well as Koreans
and Taiwanese, the Cornerstone of Peace is different from the commemorations
that deify the dead as nationalist-patriotic heroes, as in the Yasukuni Shrine.
Nevertheless, as Figal explains, the official commemoration of the Battle of
Okinawa – exemplified by the opening ceremony of the Cornerstone of Peace –
avoids articulating critical issues such as the ‘the role of the emperor system in the
subjugation of Okinawa’; ‘the question of the emperor’s responsibility in the
prosecution of the war’; ‘degrees of willing participation among Okinawans’ (1997:
753). In other words, collective mourning for the dead, even in Okinawa, is converted
into a vague, universal message of peace with no mention to specific details
about who is responsible, who got killed first, what led to war, why Okinawa became
the battlefield in the first place, and, most saliently, perhaps, how likely it is
that Okinawans might be involved in another war, given the presence of the US
bases.
Ongoing controversy over the meaning of Peace Memorial Museum highlights
this point: no critical inferences – whether in relation to the US bases or Japanese
foreign policy – can be drawn from the memorialization and commemoration
themselves.
The ‘Peace Memorial Museum’ debate
Several months into the new prefectural government’s inauguration, Okinawan
Governor Inamine Keiichi and two Deputy Governors ordered the manufacturers
to remove and change a significant number of historical materials prepared for
display at the new opening of the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum,
planned for March 2000, a project inherited from the Ōta administration. Originally,
the local supervisory committee, responsible for the Museum display contents