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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Base(ic) Transfigurations: Race and the Cultural Logics of Flow Along US Bases in Okinawa Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8g44s2hz Author Carter, Mitzi Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Base(ic) Transfigurations: Race and the Cultural Logics of Flow Along US Bases in Okinawa By Mitzi Louise Carter A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Nelson Graburn, Chair Professor Laura Nader Professor Elaine Kim Summer 2016 Abstract Base(ic) Transfigurations: Race and the Cultural Logics of Flow Along US Bases in Okinawa by Mitzi Carter Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Nelson Graburn, Chair What happens when concepts of “security” that circulate at a more global level consolidate around concepts of race, gender, or other factors at the local level in Okinawa and how and what precipitates the fragmentation of those consolidated imaginaries for US Americans in Okinawa? With the ever increasing consolidation of joint US-Japanese military power in Okinawa and the attempts to secure the narratives to frame “sacrifice” and “global security,” how do those people most vulnerable to these discursive claims — specifically women, children, mixed race Okinawans, and military personnel of color, and economically insecure military personnel — find ways to maneuver from these interpellations? And more importantly, how do they shift the discourse that thrives on postcolonial states of exception? This research project focuses on how people craft themselves as globally flexible in these local “in-between” militarized sites to restructure their own resistance and modes of knowledge-making against what sometimes seems to be insurmountable militarized conditions. This project explores how these flexibilities are shaped, 1) spatially at the interstices of binaries marked as on/off base spaces, 2) in circulating discursive maneuvering by long-term expatriates and military personnel living in Okinawa, 3) by mixed race Okinawans and Black soldiers whose histories are indelibly marked within Okinawan spaces of coloniality, and 4) by artists and performers attempting to shape concepts of friendship, flow and hybridity with alternative discourses, all of which are strongly linked to the maintenance of security imaginaries on the island. I argue that life situated within Okinawan partial sovereignty, is always affected by the rubric of national security that attempts to bridge the temporal gap between WWII and the more ambiguous, global “war on terror.” Therefore, alternative trajectories for pushing past the cultural logics that deem Okinawans as simply stuck “in the middle” of a geopolitical situation require savvy interlocutors who can flexibly and delicately dodge the disciplining effects of state power and transnational security imaginaries. I argue these actors rewrite cultural codes of “flow” and commercialized hybridity that weave together perspectives of the insecurely rooted, the routinely racialized via security talk, and the globally and locally dislocated subjects in uneven spaces of privilege at the Okinawan fencelines. "1 Dedication To my mother who provided intimate guidance, love, encouragement, and direction, and for whom this entire project is built around. Her sacrifices and her complicated tales of transformation, survival, reflection, and refractions are always softly tracing each chapter. ! "i Table of Contents Dedication i Preface: Nappy Routes and Tangled Tales iv Approaching homeland and “the field” vi Self-Censorship and Seduction vii Fugitive Events and the Emergent ix Contacts and Interviewees xi Acknowledgements xv Chapter 1: Framing Research of Okinawan “Flow” 1 Early Frameworks of Okinawan Difference 2 Situating Okinawa within Contemporary Ethnographies of Militarization 7 Resort(ing) to Peace Tours: Positioning Okinawa within theoretical frameworks of Tourism 10 Chapter Summaries 13 Panel 1: Misnomers 16 Chapter 2: ‘We Call it the Rock’ 18 Okinawa and the “Good ‘Ol Days” 20 Okinawa as Military Heritage 25 Touring ‘The Rock’: A Tale from the Field 26 Joining to Tour and Settling to Live: Settling for Anti-Blackness 35 Shima Gaijin (Okinawa foreigners): Okinawa is Now My Home 43 Military Dependents 48 Panel 2: Ricocheting “Security” 57 Chapter 3: Kichi gai Kichi: Off-Base Bases and The Cultural Logics of Trespassing 59 Suburban Encroachment Off-Base: Planning Occupation 60 Locating Off-Base 65 Trespassing Off-Base 72 Limbo Status and Jural Inconsistencies 76 “We Can’t Reach:” Untouchables and Closures at the Fencelines 80 Emi’s story 81 Boke Cartographies and Uprootedness 85 "ii “The Land of Misfit Toys:” Military Containment 90 Panel 3: Incomplete Sovereignty, Fragile Security, Strong Love 96 Chapter Four: Base(ic) Racialized Bodies Along the Fencelines 99 Introduction: A Scene from a Stroll 99 Between Camps 101 Black Tectonics in Okinawa and Koza Rumblings 104 Black Dissent and Racializing Hope in the Heart of Darkness 107 Base(ic)ly Mixed 110 Base(ic) Proximity and Barbed Wire Racialization 114 Chuuto Hanpa 117 Diasporic Dislocations and Futuristic, Fragmented Halfwayness 120 Conclusion: Transfiguring the Memoryscape 125 Panel 5: Why did she leave? Why did you come? 127 Chapter 5: Radical Flow and Chuuto Hanpa 129 Militarized Friendship and Stunted Flow 130 Flow, Friendship, and Cosmopolitanism 137 Akiko and Gendered Flow 142 Chuuto Hanpa is not Bridge Talk 146 Everyday In-Betweeness: Flow and Patrols 149 Militarized Flow 152 Forced Authentic Flows 157 Conclusion 159 Bibliography 162 "iii Preface: Nappy Routes and Tangled Tales The first time I snuck into my dad’s old grey filing cabinet in his muggy garage office in Texas, I was in high school. Somewhat inspired by the Blood Hound Gang on the PBS after-school show in my youth, I was a self-appointed detective rummaging for clues about my father’s life. He didn’t talk much about his military life in Okinawa, nor of his time in Vietnam, Korea, or Thailand. Every now and then, his retired military friends and their mostly Okinawan or Filipina wives and their mixed children would unfold into our backyard and there in the suffocating Houston humidity, between the servings of sweet iced tea, ribs, tempura, goya stir-fry, and wise cracking jokes, I gathered glimpses into a world that was both culturally familiar and yet so temporally foreign. I took it for granted when my mother, always an active storyteller, would pass on her memories of a bullet-ridden Okinawa. The imaginary I crafted from these stories were in technicolor, fluttering by like a jumpy, semi-melted filmstrip of tales layered against the sounds of war. Sometimes the stories were poetic and fragmented. She gave details of soft leaves and rough branches falling about her, neatly and quickly chopped by whistling bullets from the American planes above while she ran over the decaying bodies below. I could nearly hear the crisp, stinging, buzzing metal rounds that screeched past her ears as she walked over mangled bodies in the dark evenings, searching for new shelter in caves in the hillsides and scavenging for food in ripped up fields from the war raging around her. The pewn-pewn-pewn bullet sounds she made punctuated these tales of violence — from the squirming maggots in the pestering hole of her mother’s leg, injured by the shrapnel from an itinerant American bullet to the tales of the claustrophobic feeling of huddling together with other families gathered in dank caves reeking with the suffocating smell of rotting flesh, urine and feces all about them. The stories would come unexpectedly. While on a walk along Anini Beach in Kauai, she stopped to show me the broad, thick leaves above us and noted they were the same ones her family and probably many other Okinawans used like toilet paper after the war began. She would often talk about the Hollywood films that made her dreamy, repeating tales of the the ones she saw from the booth where the reels spun magical stories, above the buzz cut heads of American GI’s in the theater where she worked in those tense post-war years. In her other job making identity cards on the base, she came to quietly know US systems of class and race. She quickly determined who and how quickly new stripes were gained. She quietly noted that Black American men gained fewer than others. I knew that the well water sometimes tasted salty, the one at her old home in Naha directly on the edge of the ocean -- the one the American bombs exploded along with the rest of her village at the start of the Battle. Her Okinawa was complex, rarely progressed through time evenly, and her narratives invoked a sense of displacement, not as a privileged tourist but more in the sense of exile, through a broken diasporic lens, where the binary between West and East were blurred. My father’s Okinawa was more grid-like and linear, clean up front, dirty in the back. In our home hung military souvenirs of “stations”– a black lacquered plate with a map of Okinawa etched in, base names mapping the island, military plaques with "iv achievements stamped onto golden tags. USAF (US Air Force) stenciled onto the bodies of wooden kokeshi dolls with bobbing heads. My father’s Okinawa was a stop- over with powerful nostalgic routes. He described Okinawa within the militarized lexicon as a “station.” His Okinawa was a stopping point, verging on the touristic, a site of deployment in a broader military “theater” where the already circulating Orientalist images abounded. It was not a place where the layering of faded signs, was a reflection of the complex palimpsest, the cultural “make- do with what we have to survive” practices nor were actions such as a request for some items from the base commissary registered as being more complex than a one- dimensional acceptance or even mere tolerance of the burdensome presence of such a heavy base presence in Okinawa.