Preparing Okinawa for Reversion to Japan

Volume 8 | Issue 29 | Number 2 | Article ID 3386 | Jul 19, 2010 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Preparing Okinawa for Reversion to Japan: The Okinawa International Ocean Exposition of 1975, the US Military and the Construction State 沖繩の本土復帰をめぐって——1975年沖繩国際海洋博覧会、米軍、土建国家 Vivian Blaxell Preparing Okinawa for Reversion to impossible possibility. But the hand of the Japan: The Okinawa International Pentagon had been so stern, so deforming on Ocean Exposition of 1975, the US the Ryūkyūs,and the realistic alternatives so few, that reversion to Japanese sovereignty Military and the Construction State seemed better to many Ryūkyūans than continuing as America’s China Sea military Vivian Blaxell outpost complete with nuclear weapons. Yet, at “Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not the point of reversion and in the 38 years since figurative ones:machines driving otherreversion, Japanese sovereignty was a mask: machines, machines being driven by other the US occupation of the Ryūkyū Islands machines, with all the necessary couplings and continued undiminished, but now Tokyo and connections.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, not Washington paid most of the bill; Japanese Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia sovereignty in post-reversion Okinawa continued “to be subject to the over-riding Japan’s war for empire in Asia had many principle of priority to the military, that is, the endings: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and US military.”1 Nagasaki; the imperial broadcast announcing acceptance of surrender terms, “suffering the On the day of reversion, it rained. There had insufferable”; signing of the surrenderbeen protests against reversion in Japan and in instrument on the deck of the USS Missouri; the Ryūkyūs, but now there were street promulgation of a new constitution; the last marches, speeches, celebrations, and an execution of a convicted Japanese war criminal, approaching tide of laws and policies and plans Nishimura Takuma; American implementation made by Tokyo, all designed to reterritorialize of the Treaty of Peace with Japan; the 1964 the Ryūkyū Islands into Okinawa, into Japanese Tokyo Olympics; establishment of the Asia space, and to give heft to the gauze of Japanese Women’s Fund to compensate the former sovereignty. Political reversion entailed comfort women (1995). But no one of those territorial mobility, the U.S.-governed Ryūkyū endings was more protracted and potentially Islands moved, becoming Okinawa Prefecture more recuperative of Japan’s view of itself than again in territory bounded by Japanese title but the reversion of the Ryūkyū Islands to Japanese dominated by American military policy. As part rule on May 15, 1972 after 27 years of direct of this movement, Tokyo set aside budget and American military control. Reversion did not go marshaled corporate sponsorship for an uncontested among Ryūkyūans. Memories of international exposition to be built and held in the entrepôt Kingdom of the Ryūkyūs and its 1975 near Motobu, a very small townon the final annexation by Meiji Japan inMotobu Peninsula in the north of Okinawa 1879persisted: independence was theIsland just a short journeyfrom Nago City. 1 8 | 29 | 2 APJ | JF During the time of the Ryūkyū Kingdom there had been a collection of villages here. One of those villages, Nuwha, is the setting of a famous Ryūkyūan love song still sung today: 伊野波の石くびり無蔵連れて登るにやへも石くびりとさはあらな The steep cobbled street of Nuwha Expo 75 Opening Day Ceremonies Is very hard Expo 75 was a grand affair designed to make the insubstantial seem substantial, to make a Yet, when walking and talking with narrow ambit appear broad, and to produce my love and release the Japanese state and its intimate connections with capitalism and imperial I want it to go on forever history into the regained prefecture. And given the limits of the renewed Japanese sovereignty In this nostalgic, relatively remote, provincial in Okinawa, the task of producing and place, in this very local place, Japan built projecting what sovereignty there was fell Okinawa Kokusai Kaiyō Hakurankai; the heavily on Expo 75. But how are we to Okinawa International Ocean Exposition: Expo apprehend the tasks of Expo 75 in all their 75. The exposition occupied 1 million square complexity, connectivity, productivity and, yes, meters of land and sea. It hosted the pavilions in all their emptiness? World fairs and of 37 countries. Crown Prince Akihito made a international expositions have been well- speech at the opening ceremonies and James studied, variously conceived of and interpreted Michener was the keynote speaker. With its as symbolic universes ritualizing and affirming centerpiece, Aquapolis, Expo 75 celebrated the dominant social, economic and political 3 reversion of the American-controlled Ryūkyū orders, as pedagogical strategies, models and Islands to Japanese rule as Okinawa Prefecture. sets of lessons “of what the future might look 4 As one Japanese report from the time put it, like [and] how it may be brought about”, as Expo 75 was integral to shinsei Okinawa-ken, spectacles imposing hegemonic meanings onto 5 the “reborn Okinawa Prefecture.”2 a depoliticized mass audience and as metaphors for colonial and/or economic orders of power.6 Each approach tells us something about the operations of expositions and world’s fairs, but not enough. Expositions are more than materializations of hegemonic discourse; they are more than architectural and visual metaphors for prevailing relations of power and capital. Expositions and world’s fairs are more than themselves. 2 8 | 29 | 2 APJ | JF base and superstructure in upon itself. Ideas, capital and the means of production then are all machines composed of machines, and all machines are both produced by, expressive and productive of the “social forms capable of generating them.”7 Whereas the one existing study of Expo 75 by Tada Osamu8 sees its subject as a metaphorfor dominant social forms, a sign of something else, machinic thinking turns Expo 75 into the social form itself. Machinic thinking also emphasizes the radical connectivity and proliferation of machines. Machines are comprised of other machines connecting over and over again with still more existing machines, and with time and space, to produce new machines, which then connect with other machines. When it comes to the study of Expo 75, this idea of machinic connectivity and proliferation is especially important for it permits us to understand Expo 75 well beyond the abstract and technical material bounded by its gates and beyond the A Poster for Expo 75 scholarship of representation and metaphor. Like other Deleuzian machines, Expo 75’s job Machinic thinking reveals this more. In what was to aid and abet reterritorializations of follows below, machinic thought is a mode of space, matter and thought through production thinking about Expo 75 that conceives of it and and release of social forms that resulted in both pulls it apart as machine or machinic device, enslavement and subjectification, and it did so rather than mechanical device, in the sense by connecting with other abstract and technical that machine and machinic are conceptualized machines, producing more machines which in the work of Gilles Deleuze and in Deleuze’s acted upon the spatial and social territory of work with Félix Guattari. The advantage of Okinawa at reversion to vary and mutate it9 in machinicas opposed to mechanical thinking ways serving the strictured ambit of Japanese about Expo 75 is twofold. First, both discourse sovereignty. Everything about Expo 75 and techne can be seen together and apart as connected with other machines, abstract and machines doing what machines do: production. technical, from the machine of the 1970’s In this way, machinic thinking recovers the Japanese state in its multiple embraces with Marxist understanding of machines asdevelopmental capitalism, to the machines of constantly multiplying agents of capitalist historical memory, landscaping and avant- production and enslavement, but by taking garde architecture. Through these machinic mechanical devices as at oncetechne and connections, Expo 75 produced technocracy, abstraction, and discourse as both techne and nationalism, religion, knowledge capital and abstraction, machinic thinking evades the design aesthetics in Okinawa in ways that made problem posed to agency by metaphor while the mask of return of the Ryūkyū Islands to collapsing the erroneous distinction between Japanese sovereignty seem almost real, seem to 3 8 | 29 | 2 APJ | JF be the face itself. Furthermore, “The sea you want to see” connected Expo 75 with Okinawa and Okinawa The theme of Expo 75 was marine and with the proliferating and machinic complex of futuristic: “The sea you want to see.” There was Japanese tourism. Speaking the language of the a small crack in the mask of Japanesesea, Expo 75 was to unite Okinawa and the sovereignty here, for in its seemingly innocuous main islands of Japan as one but more theme, Expo 75 connected with more serious importantly, the theme of sea, desire and the matters and looped around back to the decades future was to instate “Hawai’ianization” of the of American military enslavement of Okinawa. Ryūkyūs.10 If the Ryūkyū Islands were Despite Japanese sovereignty, Okinawabecoming Okinawa Prefecture again, Okinawa remained a linchpin in the Cold War military Prefecture was also becoming something in strategy of the United States, a Deleuzian “war addition to a US military base and a Japanese machine.” By 1960, military oceanography and border

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