EAPSI:Understanding the Formation of Local Identities in Relation to Foreign Military Bases

Kajihiro Kyle, Honolulu HI

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate how the tensions between Okinawans and the Japanese national government over the expansion of a U.S. military facility in northern Okinawa may affect the way residents articulate and enact their local identities. This study will examine whether the galvanizing effect of the bases protests may signal an emerging trend toward Okinawan identification as a distinct national or indigenous group, as opposed to a Japanese ethnic minority, and what the broader implications of such a shift might be. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Kosuzu Abe, an expert on social movements at the University of the Ryukyus. Through interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis of news media, this study will seek to identify emerging trends in Okinawan cultural and political identity formation in the context of the military bases controversy. U.S. military bases in Okinawa have been a source of tension since the end of World War II. Yet aside from periodic waves of intense protest against the bases, Okinawans have generally accommodated the bases. However, since the 1995 rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by U.S. marines, and most recently, after the national government commenced land reclamation activities in Henoko, protests against construction have intensified, and anti-base candidates swept the most recent elections. Political geographers are interested in the phenomenon of national identification, how large collectivities of people coalesce into an imagined community around a shared set of cultural ideas and practices, political and economic interests, and territorial claims. The mobilization of national identities into political movements can have profound implications for states as evidenced by independence referendums in Scotland and Catalonia and separatist conflicts in the Ukraine and Iraq/Syria. This EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).