Life under Siege: Militarized Welfare in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa
by
Asako Masubuchi
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto
© Copyright by Asako Masubuchi 2019
Life under Siege: Militarized Welfare in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa
Asako Masubuchi
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto
2019 Abstract
This dissertation examines the formations of what I have termed “militarized welfare,” that is, the multilayered ways in which discourses and practices of protecting and promoting life became intricately and intimately connected with militarism in Okinawa through the period of U.S. administration (1945-1972). This project draws on, and aims to contribute to, roughly three fields of scholarly literature: the politics of life and death, theorized most explicitly by Michel
Foucault; U.S. (and Japanese) Cold War expansionism in the Asia-Pacific; and transpacific militarism. The central argument of my thesis is that the expansion of medical welfare in
Okinawa was not antithetical to militarization, but in fact enabled it. I demonstrate this complementary relationship between warfare and welfare by closely examining the lived experiences of agents and subjects of welfare in/for occupied Okinawa – missionaries, medical practitioners, patients, Okinawan diaspora, and displaced farmers. While each actor engaged in promoting and protecting life in their own right, their acts of welfare were often easily appropriated by the U.S. military and U.S. and Japanese governments to serve their respective purposes. My thesis also tries to capture the moments when this affinity between welfare and the military was destabilized by actors who closely observed the limits of medical welfare in
Okinawa. Chapter 1 explores the role of American Christianity in occupied Okinawa in producing the narratives of liberation and rehabilitation to transform Okinawa into a place ii
worthy of salvation in the American imagination. Chapter 2 closely examines the lived experiences of public health nurses, illustrating how the education and mobilization of public health nurses constituted part of the biopolitical strategy of the U.S. Cold War empire. Chapter 3 explores the transpacific circuits of care and relief that connected occupied Okinawa, Hawaiʻi and beyond in multifaceted ways. I argue that transpacific biopolitical projects of “nurturing life” were facilitated through the necropolitical network that simultaneously shaped the Pacific in
Cold War formations. Chapter 4 focuses on the protest by displaced farmers and shows how land and life itself became an effective basis for the struggle against militarism. However, these movements were soon depoliticized through social security measures.
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Acknowledgment
This dissertation is the product of my personal and scholarly encounters and conversations with numerous people who have guided and supported me throughout my journey of inquiry, including those whom I only met through historical documents. I am indebted to all of them for helping me actualize this project. I would especially like to thank the nurses, doctors, and their families in Okinawa and Hawaiʻi for sharing their valuable stories with me. Their tireless and sincere efforts to bring a better life to Okinawans, and their sharp observations of people’s lives there have always been the most powerful source of my inspiration.
This dissertation could not exist in its current form without the unchanging support of my dissertation committee. First and foremost, I offer my deepest heartfelt gratitude to Professor Lisa Yoneyama for being an exceptional scholar, supervisor, and person. I first “met” her through her book when I was an undergraduate student in a university in Tokyo, and ever since, her work has been one of my most important guiding principles during my scholarly voyage. Her research has shown me how to shape questions to resonate with others who are struggling with similar predicaments. It is such a privilege to work with her; she has guided me to a rich world of scholarship and has pushed me to broaden my theoretical and disciplinary boundaries. Her careful mentorship, generosity, wisdom, and endless support and trust in me has imbued my journey towards a Ph.D. with excitement and joy. I am blessed to have her as my supervisor.
I would also like to extend my thanks to Professor Takashi Fujitani for not only giving me thoughtful and stimulating feedback throughout the dissertation writing process but also for organizing workshops to create valuable opportunities for doctorate candidates to meet and share their progress. These workshops proved fruitful and revitalizing, and casual conversations with fellow writers and professors at the gatherings were glimmers of light that punctuated the often lonely labor of writing. Professor Rachel Silvey was equally a great source of encouragement, support, invaluable input, especially in the field of feminist geography. My external reviewers, Professor Ken Kawashima and Professor Keith L. Camacho at the University of California, Los Angeles, have also been indispensable to the completion of this project. It is a great pleasure and excitement to receive commentary from Professor Camacho, whose scholarly works have greatly inspired me to think about militarism and the politics of life from transpacific and transoceanic perspectives.
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Besides my committee members, Professors Janet Poole, Andrea Schmid, Shiho Satsuka, Jotaro Arimori, Yasuyo Tomita, and Ikuko Komuro-Lee, continuously gave me intellectual insights and emotional support. I would also like to thank Norma Escobar and Natasja VanderBerg for their administrative support and their efforts to ensure a welcoming and cooperative atmosphere at the Department of East Asian Studies. I’d also like to thank Fabiano Takashi Rocha at the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library for helping me to collect materials.
Outside of Toronto, I am grateful to Professor Tomiyama Ichirō at Doshisha University, whose thought-provoking works on Okinawa have motivated me throughout this project. He also generously allowed me to participate in weekly workshops called Kayō-kai, where students, scholars, and activists of various backgrounds gather to freely discuss a wide range of questions about violence, colonialism, militarism, etc. I received valuable input and inspiration from these workshops. Through Kayō-kai, I was introduced to my precious comrades, Yoko Asato, Rima Higa, Kei Kohagura, Akiko Mori, and Naomi Okamoto. We spent hours and hours in Kyoto and in Okinawa, often over beer and awamori, discussing so many illuminating topics. Thanks to them, I have been able to keep my research closely connected with on-going discussions about Okinawa and Okinawa Studies. I would like to offer special thanks to Kei for his incredible support in collecting materials, without which this project would not have been feasible. The conversations with him have shaped some of the core arguments of this dissertation.
I am beholden to the support offered by the Connaught International Scholarships for Doctoral Students, which made my life in Toronto possible. It was with the generous support of the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation, School of Graduate Studies Research Travel Grant, and Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia Pacific Studies that I was able to conduct extensive research in Okinawa, Tokyo, and Hawaiʻi. In Okinawa, Professor Ogawa Sumiko at Meio University generously offered me valuable documents on the development of medicine and public health in Okinawa. She also introduced me to Kinjo Eiko, a former public health nurse, who shared her experiences with me. My one-month research trip in Hawaiʻi in May of 2017 was institutionally supported by the East-West Center, which accepted me as an affiliated scholar. Professor Mire Koikari at the University of Hawaiʻi provided me with great assistance by introducing me to important figures and documents. Librarian Sachiko Iwabuchi kindly taught me to access the valuable resources from the University of Hawaiʻi libraries. Dr. Satoru Izutsu, Vice Dean of the University of Hawaiʻi Medical School offered his time to educate me on the development of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Okinawa Chubu Hospital internship project. I was
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fortunate to have the opportunity to meet graduate students at the University of Hawaiʻi as well. I would especially like to express my thanks to Rika Inamine for not only sharing me her stories and insights while training to be a nurse but also for introducing me to the Okinawan community in Hawaiʻi.
I have greatly benefitted from presenting papers at two conferences: “The Militarism and Migration Conference” organized by the University of California, San Diego in April 2017 and “The Intersections of Colonialism and Medicine in East Asia” sponsored and organized by the University of Pittsburgh in March 2018. While all the people I met in each place were full of helpful insights and feedback, I would like to extend my gratitude to scholars who spent time on making comments on my drafts: Professor Kamala Visweswaran at the University of California, San Diego, Professor Sonja Kim at Binghamton University, and Professor Aya Homei at the University of Manchester. In addition, Professor Hiroko Matsuda at Kobe Gakuin University gave me an opportunity to write a book chapter for her edited book, Rethinking Postwar Okinawa: Beyond American Occupation (Rowman and Littlefield: Lexington Books, 2017). I’d like to offer my warm thanks to her, Pedro Lacobelli, and the anonymous reviewers of the book who gave me detailed comments on my draft, which further helped me to reshape the argument of my dissertation project.
I am extremely fortunate to have had great companions throughout my graduate life at the University of Toronto, Wen Yin Cheng, Sabrina Chung, Jeremy Hurdis, Seongpil Jeong, Yehji Jeong, Sinhyeok Jung, Banu Kaygusuz, Derek Kramer, Grayson Lee, Adrian De Leon, Shasha Liu, Aaron Peters, Jiaying Shen, Jing Wang, and Michael Yu-che Tseng. Their critical insight and encouragement were of great help. Many thanks to Na Sil Heo and Edwin Michielsen for creating and maintaining a secure and comfortable space for dissertation writers. I am indebted to Brenton J. Bunchanan, Alexandra Jocic, and Sara Osenton for providing excellent proofreading and copyediting work for my final draft, and for helping me finalize this project. Michael Rollinghoff read almost all of the chapters in this project and gave me detailed editing advice and productive comments at the different stages of the writing process. As a great colleague and my scholarly sister, Lynn Ly not only helped me edit numerous drafts and offered many intriguing and insightful comments, but she also helped me survive Ph.D. life by transforming even the most difficult moments into laughter over a bottle of wine. I owe a debt to Ikumi Yoshida, Fumi Sakata, Derrik Mach, Noriko Takagi, Haruna Murota, Kota Miyamoto, Mio Otsuka, and Izumi
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Niki and her family for their emotional and material support. Thanks to them, Toronto became another home.
I also must thank my mentors and friends in Japan and the United States, who nurtured my personal and intellectual interests in Okinawa and have supported me in coming through the detour I needed to take: Professors Tanaka Yasuhiro, Koichi Iwabuchi, Lee Hyoduk, and Nakano Toshio; Professors Laura Hein and Ji-Yeon Yuh at Northwestern University; Eric Rubiel, Ngoei Wen-Qing, Xiao Yang, Soo Ryon Yoon, Yui Shimabukuro, Naoko Maeda, Mariko Kondo, Machi Sakata, and Mami Sato. A huge thank you is due to my parents, Michiko and Minoru Masubuchi, for their patience, encouragement, support, and willingness to let me pursue this long journey of inquiry. My sincerest gratitude goes to Mizuki Watanabe for being an amazing partner in my personal and scholarly life. His unconditional patience, rationality as a scientist, and confidence in my endeavors have made our eight-year “transpacific” companionship a secure and joyful space.
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Author’s Note
Japanese and Okinawan names are in most cases given with surname first, followed by the given name, when the named individual resides or has resided primarily in East Asia or the cited work is written and published in Japanese. In Romanizing Japanese and Okinawan language, I follow the modified Hepburn system. Where English translations of the documents are available, I have cited them. Unless otherwise specified, all other translations are my own.
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Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgement………………………………………………………………………………..iv Author’s Note…………………………………………………………………………………..viii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………..ix Glossary of Terms………………………………………………………………………………xii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………..1 Biopower and Necropower……………………………………………………………………7 Okinawa as the Liminal Space……………………………………………………………….11 Military and Welfare in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa……………………………………………17 Chapter Organization……………………………………………………………………….. 26
CHAPTER 1 On a “God-Forsaken Island”: Okinawa in the Eyes of American Missionaries…..29 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..29 Calls for the Okinawa Mission………………………………………………………………35 The Emperor vs. the Christian God………………………………………………………….45 Countering Ancestor Worship and Yuta …………………………………………………….53 Missionaries and the Military………………………………………………………………..62 Epilogue……………………………………………………………………………………...67
CHAPTER 2 Nursing Empire: Public Health Nurses in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa….………….73 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..73 “Professionalization” of Okinawan Nurses…………………………………………………..79 Drawing the Biopolitical Borderline: VD Control in Camptown………………………….. 93 Building Disciplinary Network……………………………………………………………101 Drawing “Ryukyu” in the Fight Against Tuberculosis……………………………………..113 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………………….125
CHAPTER 3 Bridging Empires: Transpacific Circuits of Care via Okinawa and Hawaiʻi……..128 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………128 Bridging the East and West………………………………………………………………... 136 Japan’s Involvement in Transpacific Welfare Projects……………………………………. 153 Building a Nidus for Transpacific Health…………………………………………………. 165 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………………….182
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CHAPTER 4 Begging for Life: Land Seizure and “Law of Relief”…………………………….186 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………186 The Beginning of the “Land Problem”……………………………………………………..193 Compensation, Aid, and Relief……………………………………………………………. 199 Begging to Live……………………………………………………………………………..205 Containment of the Island-Wide Struggle………………………………………………….209 Japan’s Involvement in Welfare in Occupied Okinawa……………………………………218 Emergence of “Population Problem” and Emigration as a Solution……………………….223 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………………….236
EPILOGUE…………………………………………………………………………………...238
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………245
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Glossary of Terms
AAOO Assistance Association for Okinawa and the Ogasawara Islands (Japanese: Nampō Dōhō Engokai, or Nan-en) EWC East-West Center FEC Far East Command GARIOA Government Appropriation for Relief in Occupied Areas GOJ Government of Japan GRI Government of the Ryukyu Islands ITI Institute of Technical Interchange (of the East-West Center) MG (United States) Military Government NLP National Leader Program OCH Okinawa Central Hospital OED Okinawa Engineer District PAO Patients Association of Okinawa (Japanese: Okinawa Ryōyūkai) PHW Public Health and Welfare Section PSB Pacific Science Board RATBA Ryukyuan Anti-Tuberculosis Association SCAP Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers SIRI Scientific Investigation in the Ryukyu Islands Program UH University of Hawaiʻi UOA United Okinawa Asocciation of Hawaiʻi USAID United States Agency for International Development USARPA United States Army Pacific USCAR United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands
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Introduction
Ikusa-yu ya shimachi Miruku-yu ya yagate Najikunayo shinka Nuchi du Takara
[ The time for war is ending. The time for peace is not far away. Do not despair. Life itself is a treasure.] — Shō Tai1
Given that this power [the power of sovereignty]’s objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? It is, I think at this point that racism intervenes. […] It [racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under the power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. — Michel Foucault2 —
In sum, colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other. As such, the colonies are the locations par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended — the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.”
— Achille Mbembe3
On July 21, 2000, the first day of the G-8 Summit, U.S. president Bill Clinton gave an address to the people of Okinawa at the Peace Memorial Park in Itoman, Okinawa. Standing at the center of the Cornerstone of Peace (Heiwa no ishiji) memorial, on which the individual names of over 240,000 war dead from the Battle of Okinawa were engraved, Clinton began his speech by commemorating victims from the Battle of Okinawa: “Every life lost was a life like
1 English translation follows President Bill Clinton’s Address at the Peace Memorial Park, Itoman City, Okinawa on July 21, 2000, The Ryukyu-Okinawa History and Culture Website, http://ryukyu- okinawa.net/pages/archive/itoman.html (last accessed November 18, 2018). 2 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78, trans. David Macey New York: Picador, 2003), 254. 3 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15 (1): 11-40, 2003, 24. 1
yours and mine – a life with family and friends, with love and hopes and dreams; a life that in a better world would have run its full course.”4 Clinton then praised the memorial for its principle of universal humanity: “[w]hile most monuments remember only those who have fallen from one side, this memorial recognizes those from all sides, and those who took no side.”5 Constructed by
Okinawa Prefecture in 1995, the monument was indeed praised as an intervention in the mode of commemoration in the way that it recognizes all victims of the war regardless of ethnicity, nationality, whether allies or enemies, and whether they were soldiers or civilians.6 It made a clear contrast with what had been built on Mabuni Hill, the sight of the last of the fighting, right in front of the Cornerstone of Peace. Each prefecture in Japan, as well as the National War Dead
Mausoleum, constructed its own monument one after another in the 1960s dedicated exclusively to the war dead from their own prefecture. The new memorial’s inclusiveness notwithstanding,
Clinton’s emphasis on the memorial’s universality in effect suppressed the ethnic and colonial memories of the war. Most notably, the names of most of the Korean victims, who were brought to prewar Okinawa as construction workers and “comfort women,” have not been inscribed on the Cornerstone of Peace.7 The erasure of colonial memories under the rhetoric of universality
4 Clinton’s Address 5 Ibid. 6 For the discussion of the monument, see for example, Gerald Figal, “Waging Peace on Okinawa,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden eds., Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power (Oxford: Roman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2003); Kitamura Tsuyoshi, “Okinawa no ‘Mabuni no Oka’ ni miru senshi-sha hyōshō no poritikusu,” Okinawa Daigaku Chiiki Kenkyū-jo, Chiiki Kenkyū, 3 (March 2007): 49-66. 7 The leader of Okinawa Branch of Zainippon Daikan Minkoku Mindan (the Association for Korean Residents in Japan) stated at an unveiling ceremony of the Cornerstone of Peace that some bereaved Korean families had refused to inscribe the name of the victims for the reason that their presence (and especially the fact that they were mobilized as “comfort women”) was and would be “humiliation” for their entire families, and therefore should be kept hidden. Quoted in Arasaki Moriteru, Shinban Okinawa Gendaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), 151-152. As for related discussion on the Korean Atom Bomb Memorial in Hiroshima and how it constituted the contentious site for re/making ethnic identities for Korean residents, see Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialecticts of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), Chapter 5. 2
enabled Clinton to use this memorial site to make almost the opposite claim to the original intention of the monument: “It is more than a war memorial – it is a monument to the tragedy of all war, reminding us of our common responsibility to prevent such destruction from ever happening again.” Clinton went on saying that “our two nations” – Japan and the United States― have worked together over a half of the century to meet that “responsibility,” and that the alliance between Japan and the United States is “one of the great stories of the twentieth century.”8 Referring to the ancient history of the Ryukyus, when the islands served as a gateway between Japan and the rest of the world, Clinton hoped that Okinawa keeps playing a vital role in maintaining the “great” U.S.-Japan alliance. Therefore, as Tanaka Yasuhiro succinctly points out, Clinton strategically turned the spatial and temporal meaning of the Cornerstone of Peace memorial from commemorating the violence in the past to legitimizing the military violence in the present and future.9
Indeed, the Okinawa Summit and Clinton’s address should be understood as the vital point in the process of reconstructing and consolidating the U.S.-Japan security regime in the post-Cold War years, in which Okinawa is expected to continue to endure the burden of hosting
U.S. bases. Five years prior to the summit in November 1955, the Special Action Committee on
Okinawa (SACO) was established by the U.S. and Japanese governments, with the aim to
“reduce the burden of the people of Okinawa and thereby strengthen the Japan-US alliance.”10
The establishment of SACO is usually seen as a direct response to the rape of a then twelve-year- old girl by three U.S. marines in the same year, which, together with numerous incidents caused by the U.S. military, spurred one of the biggest mass demonstrations against the American
8 Clinton’s Address 9 Tanaka Yasuhiro, Fūkei no Sakeme: Okinawa Senryō no Ima (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 2010), 158. 10 “The SACO Final Report, December 2, 1996,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/security.html (accessed November 15, 2018). 3
presence since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. The SACO final report on December 2, 1996 states that U.S. and Japanese governments agreed on closing the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station
Futenma as well as other minor facilities under the condition that a suitable relocation site was found elsewhere in the prefecture, for which Henoko was later designated. As has been pointed out, however, the idea of using the land of Henoko for construction of a new military complex facility had already appeared in a blueprint of the Marine Corps in the 1960s.11 Under the disguise of the trope of “reduce the burden,” the SACO agreement was not so much compensation for military aggression in the past, but in fact set the basis to facilitate the consolidation of military functions on the island in preparation for possible hostilities in the post-
Cold War era. Indeed, the U.S.-Japan Joint Declaration on Security – Alliance for the 21st
Century – signed by President Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto in the following year underscores the importance of continued U.S. military presence for “peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.”12 Furthermore, the rhetoric of “relocation” has not only divided people within Okinawa, but could also possibly drive a wedge into the transpacific alliance against military violence between Okinawa and Guam, which has been one of the proposed sites for relocation. The question is no longer the legitimacy of hosting U.S. bases, but “who” is going to bear the burden.
Quite symbolically, Clinton ends his speech by quoting the famous poem written by Shō
Tai, the last king of the Ryukyu Kingdom: “The time for war is ending, the time for peace is not far away. Do not despair. Life itself is a treasure.” Shō Tai made this poem when he surrendered
11 See for example, Yoshio Shimoji, “The Futenma Base and the U.S.-Japan Controversy: an Okinawan perspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 8, issue 18, no. 5 (May 3, 2010); Ryūkyū Shinpō-sha, Jubaku no Yukue: Futenma Isetsu to Minshushugi (Okinawa: Ryūkyū Shinpō-sha, 2012). 12 “Japan-U.S. Joint Declaration on Security - Alliance for the 21st Century -,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/security.html (accessed November 15, 2018). 4
Shuri Castle when the Meiji government “disposed” of the kingdom in 1879 through incorporating it into the modern Japanese state as Okinawa prefecture. As the last king of the dying kingdom, Shō Tai might have imagined the future of the islands where “life” itself indeed became at stake: a severe famine called “Sago Palm Hell (sotetsu jigoku)” where people had no choice but to eat a toxic cycad in the 1920s as a consequence of capitalist exploitation under the
Japanese imperial state; the fierce ground battle in 1945 resulting in death of over one-fourth of the total civilians; not to mention the so-called compulsory collective suicide (shūdan jiketsu) at the war’s end that forced people to kill themselves or their families, and the post-World War II
American military occupation. All those experiences of being exposed to the sovereign power to kill have made the people of Okinawa continuously ponder the very meaning of life itself. Their will to life has thus been closely and intricately intertwined with their experiences of imminent death and what Tomiyama Ichirō has termed as the “presentiment of violence (bōryoku no yokan).”13 With a progressive form of “having a presentiment (yokan-suru),” Tomiyama tries to capture the moments in which people sense (chikaku-suru) and react to violence based on their past experiences, which could open up possibilities for envisioning alternative future. Arguably, it is these “presentiments of death” that has made the phrase “Nuchi du Takara (Life itself is a treasure)” one of the most powerful and effective slogans for anti-military protest within and beyond Okinawa up until now.
However, as Tanaka’s detailed analysis on the speech shows, Clinton completely appropriated this language of resistance to legitimize U.S. permanent possession of military bases in Okinawa.14 Once it was spoken by the U.S. president, the slogan began generating quite
13 Tomiyama Ichirō, Bōryoku no Yokan: Iha Fuyū ni okeru kiki no mondai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002), 38-41. 14 Tanaka Yasuhiro, Fūkei no Sakeme: Okinawa Senryō no Ima (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 2010), 158. 5
a different meaning: Because life itself is a treasure and thus needs to be protected, the military presence should be kept on the island to maintain security in the Asia-Pacific region. In this discursive configuration, everyone’s life is not equally treated as a “treasure.” Rather, a threshold line is drawn between those whose life is valued and those whose “life cease[s] to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide.”15 Not unlike the ways in which Nazis claimed its sovereignty through producing “life devoid of value” by depriving the Jews of citizenship and nationality before sending them to the camps, the United
States, through its alliance with Japan, seems to maintain its military empire in the Asia-Pacific through producing the legally, juridically, and epistemically liminal space of Okinawa, or the
“unincorporated territories” of Guam and Puerto Rico, where people’s normative civil rights were suspended, and therefore, ready to be sacrificed for the sake of the security of others.16
Under this condition, “life” and people’s will to life was put under siege to provide a ground through which the United States and/or Japan could assert their power and presence.
This dissertation, Life under Siege: Militarized Welfare in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa, examines the formations of what I call “militarized welfare,” that is, the multilayered ways in which discourses and practices of protecting and promoting life became intricately and intimately connected with militarism in Okinawa through the period of U.S. administration
(1945-1972). It asks: how has militarism become deeply and inseparably embedded in people’s
15 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998), 139. 16 It should be noted here that this process of producing liminal spaces in the Asia-Pacific took place simultaneously with the process within the U.S. mainland that turned the certain groups of people into what Lisa Marie Cacho terms as the state of “social death” in which people are criminalized, and therefore made as “ineligible for personhood…subjected to laws but were refused the legal means to contest those laws as well as denied both the political legitimacy and moral credibility necessary to question them.” From Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 6. The same can be said of post- World War II Japan, as it has criminalized formerly colonized subject, most notably, Korean residents (zainichi) in Japan, and in so doing, disavows its imperial past and on-going racism. 6
everyday lives and normalized to the extent that it is now so hard to envision the post-U.S. base society? In what ways did militarism transform the very meaning and value of “life” itself? And what outcomes did it bring to protect life and provide care under the absolute presence of military? In pursuing those questions, I situate the politics of life and death in Okinawa within the longue durée of Okinawa’s modern colonial condition that did not end at war’s end but was rather reinforced through the complicity of the United States and Japan in the Cold War milieu.
Specifically, the thesis closely examines the lived experiences of agents and subjects of welfare in/for occupied Okinawa –missionaries, medical practitioners, patients, Okinawan diaspora, and displaced farmers–, illuminating different ways in which each actor engaged in promoting and protecting life in their own right, and how each act of welfare came to forge the intimate relations with the U.S. military, but sometimes also exposed the affinities between military and welfare.
Biopower and Necropower
My own approach to the politics of life and death in occupied-Okinawa is most generally informed by Michel Foucault’s theorization of biopower and modern governmentality, and the subsequent critiques and reflections on it, especially in its relation to notions of sovereignty and the state of exception by later scholars such as Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe. As
Foucault formulates, biopower, “the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death,” emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as a set of diverse technologies that replaced the old sovereign power to “take life or let live.” Constituting two poles of development of power, disciplinary power over the individual body and regulatory power over the population, biopower
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was indispensable for the development of capitalism.17 Connecting the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics with a discussion of the state of exception in the Nazi’s extermination camps,
Agamben adds that biopower legitimated and necessitated total domination: “only because politics in our age had been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown.”18 Agamben sees the camp as
“the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space,” in which inhabitants are deprived of their political status and reduced into the bare life. In relating to that, Judith Butler clarifies that the sovereign power to kill did not disappear entirely with the emergence of biopower. Rather, sovereignty reemerges in the very act by which the state suspends the law.19 In other words, the production of juridically empty space such as the camp enabled sovereignty to reactivate and exercise its power over homo sacer, who may be killed but not sacrificed. Although Agamben and Butler offer useful frameworks to consider how the state of exception transforms people into
“bare life,” the question remained unanswered on who, among others, are forced to become homo sacer in the first place.
In this sense, Achille Mbembe has made a significant contribution to the discussion by reconsidering the politics of life and death in the context of slavery, plantation, colonies, and military occupation. Mbembe begins his discussion with the assumption that “the ultimate expression of sovereign resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”20 By focusing on the dividing line between who may live and who must die, Mbembe brings the notion of racism back to the discussion of the modern politics of life. In fact, as one of
17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books,1985), 139-141. 18 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 120. 19 Judith Butler, Percarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2006), Chapter 3. 20 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11. 8
the epigraphs of this chapter shows, Foucault himself revisits the notion of racism in relation to his discussion on biopower and defines it as the necessary precondition that makes killing acceptable in a political system that centered on the power to make live. In other words, Foucault states, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between “my life and the death of the other”: “the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.”21 Therefore, it can be inferred from
Foucault and Mbembe that what actually happened in the eighteenth century was not the replacement of sovereignty with governmentality. Rather, the old sovereign power to kill was exported from Europe to colonies, occupied areas, or plantations, transforming those places into the death world, which in turn became the foundation for the biopolitical regimes in Europe. In fact, Mbembe argues that the colonies are “the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization.”22
This is exactly why it is “necropolitics,” the power of death, rather than biopolitics, that fundamentally shapes the colonial world. The notion of “necropolitics” enables Mbembe to theoretically link plantation to colonies to slavery, and finally to contemporary military occupation. Examining the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine, Mbembe describes how populations are subjected to “conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”23 It is this necropolitics, together with biopolitics and disciplinary power, Mbembe argues, that allocates to the colonial power absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory.
21 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 255. 22 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 24. 23 Ibid., 40. 9
My intention here is not to simply “apply” Foucauldian notion of biopolitics and
Mbembe’s necropolitics to the “case” of Okinawa. Rather, Life under Siege seeks to complicate and denaturalize the theories by looking specifically at U.S.-occupied Okinawa. My assumption is that post-World War II U.S. militarism seemed to draw a biopolitical boundary across the geopolitical map of Asia-Pacific, dividing it between the would-be prosperous world and the death world most explicitly embodied as battlefields in Korea and Vietnam or nuclear testing grounds in the Pacific. But the boundary is never fixed and the sovereign power to kill would reemerge anytime and anywhere, but most likely in battlefields or militarized borderlands such as Okinawa. Scholars have asserted the coexistence of biopolitics and necropolitics in the Asia-
Pacific in the context of Cold War geopolitical formation, although not specifically using the terms. Yakabi Osamu, for example, makes a vitally important observation on the “division of labor” centering on the U.S. military bases that characterize postwar East Asia. While Japan enjoyed steady recovery from the war, Okinawa was placed under U.S. occupation to serve as the forward base for training, and send troops and aircrafts to the battlefield in Korea. In this sense, Yakabi argues, Okinawa is the site where “rehabilitation,” “military occupation,” and
“war” simultaneously took place.24 While Yakabi shows spatial concurrency of violence and recovery, Lisa Yoneyama problematizes the ways in which both were narrated simultaneously as the outcome of U.S. military interventions in what she theorizes as “the imperialist myth of liberation and rehabilitation.” Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s critique of the notion of
24 Yakabi Osamu, “Jūsōsuru senjō to senryō to fukkō,” in Nakano Toshio, et.al., eds. Okinawa no Senryō to Nihon no Fukkō (Tokyo: Seikyū-sha, 2006). This edited volume together with Keizokusuru shokuminchishugi: jendā, minzoku, jinshu, kaikyū, Iwasaki Minoru, et.al., eds. (Tokyo: Seikyū-sha, 2006) were the milestone products of the collaborative project of scholars and activists based in Okinawa, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. It was perhaps one of the first truly transnational attempts to generate a space to critically discuss Japanese colonialism and U.S. postwar military domination as not separately, but rather closely interrelated and together constituting post-WWII East Asia. My general view of seeing occupied Okinawa as the conjuncture of transwar and interimperial violence originally comes from these two volumes as well as numerous discussions with scholars who edited and contributed to the volumes, most notably Nakano Toshio and Lee Hyoduk. 10
“indebtedness” that was deployed in the U.S. post-Reconstruction era to bind the newly emancipated to the circuits of exchange, Yoneyama argues that the U.S. forged new relations of power and subjugation with Asia in the post-World War II period by the act of liberation and rehabilitation, which “leaves indelible markers on the liberated of not only inferiority, subordination, and belatedness (to freedom and democracy), but also indebtedness.”25 The trope of “liberation” would thus serve as “payment/reparation that supposedly precedes the U.S. violence inflicted upon them,”26 which has made redress for the injuries inflicted by the U.S. military violence almost impossible. Furthermore, and most important to the current project, the practices of liberation and rehabilitation necessarily entails a re/disciplinary process of the subject population so as to make them fit with American biopolitical governmentality. The notion of “rehabilitation” is particularly important in this regard as it refers to both post-conflict reconstructions of the social infrastructure and restoring one’s “normal” body through disciplinary training, which had been violated and injured. In this very sense, to be free was not only to be a debtor as Hartman radically formulized, but also to be rehabilitated, made to embrace biopolitical interventions.
Okinawa as the Liminal Space
Drawing on such critiques and reflections on the politics of life and death, Life under
Siege makes two general observations on the condition of welfare and the military in Okinawa.
25 Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham: Duke University, 2016), 232-233; See also Lisa Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice: Americanization of Japanese War Crimes at the End of Post-Cold War,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6:1 (February 2003): 57-93. Hartman’s original discussion on the notion of indebtedness is from Sadiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 26 Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice,” 81. 11
First, Okinawa was made as the liminal space where biopolitics and necropolitics coincided and cooperated together. At the end of the Asia-Pacific War in March 1945, with the Proclamation
No.1 of United States Navy Military Government issued by Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz,
Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, all powers of the Japanese imperial government over the islands of Nansei Shoto including the Ryukyu Islands were suspended, and the islands were placed under the U.S. Military Government. Although the U.S. government initially did not have solid plans for Okinawa, it redirected its policy towards permanent control of the area by 1948 as the Cold War tensions intensified in the Far East. Article Three of the San Francisco Peace
Treaty signed in 1951 officially severed Okinawa from Japanese sovereignty and granted the
United States “the right to exercise all and any powers of administration, legislation and jurisdiction over the territory and inhabitants”27 Instead of depriving Japan of sovereignty over
Okinawa entirely, however, John Foster Dulles’s speech at the San Francisco Peace Conference gave a ground to permit Japan to retain “residual sovereignty.”28 Because Okinawa was not officially incorporated as a part of the United States, people in Okinawa became liminal subjects, neither U.S. nor Japanese citizens. They had only limited access to the citizenship of Japan and the United States. Kimie Hara’s work shows how this ambiguous status of Okinawa was formed within the Cold War politics in East Asia. According to Hara, the final version of the San
27 The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, Chapter II, Article 3, quoted in Kimie Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco System (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 13. 28 According to Sudipta Sen, the notion of “residual sovereignty,” the “undigested remainders of indigenous regimes not fully incorporated within the body polity of the Indian empire,” was used in colonial India under the East India Company. Leaving fundamental legal questions relating to conquest unresolved, Sen argues, the implicit idea of “residual sovereignty” validated military exploitation and territorial expansion. In Sudipta Sen, “Unfinished Conquest: Residual Sovereignty and the Legal Foundations of the British Empire in India,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 9(2) (2012): 227-242. It is not clear how much John Foster Dulles drew on the use of “residual sovereignty” in British Imperialism when he applied the notion to Okinawa, but this shows how the production of legally and juridically liminal space as a technology of empire seems to succeed from the British Empire to the twentieth- century U.S. “unofficial” military empire. 12
Francisco Peace Treaty, which has shaped postwar geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific, does not clearly draw the new national boundary of Japan, nor precisely denies which country is going to retain the territories that Japan renounced. Japan’s “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa, proposed by John Foster Dulles, was one of the convenient juridical concepts employed to leave the devolution of the territories vague. This ambiguity, Hara thinks, was intentionally created by the United States: “by not defining the territorial dispositions clearly in the Treaty, Dulles perhaps left some potential ‘wedges’ for defense of Japan against communist expansion, or to prevent any ‘domino effect’, by retaining some potential source of discord between Japan and its neighbors.”29
The production of liminal space as a technology of domination is not entirely a new invention in the post-World War II period, however. Rather, it had been inherent in the U.S. empire building since the late nineteenth century. In 1898, as a result of the Spanish-American
War, the United States acquired the Philippine Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam. As Mae M. Ngai argues, the acquisition of the former Spanish colonies and colonial subjects challenged
American’s belief in democracy and self-government. Regarding the former colonial subjects as
“backward colored races,” Americans did not intend to grant them the same rights as other
American citizens. The acquisition thus means “expanding American sovereignty over territories with permanently unequal status; that is to say, it means establishing colonies.”30 Instead of publicly claiming colonization, however, through a series of court cases known as the Insular
Cases (1901-1922), the United States invented a new legal category called “unincorporated territory,” by which the new territories were deemed as “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” Accordingly, the inhabitants in those territories became “U.S. nationals,” who
29 Hara, Cold War Frontiers, 45. 30 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 98. 13
were neither citizens nor aliens. They did not have the rights of citizens but were required to pledge allegiance to the United States.31 The Insular Cases thus established new legal grounds for the United States to acquire territories without incorporating its inhabitants into the nation.
It is important to note here that John Foster Dulles, the architect of the San Francisco
Peace Treaty, had long engaged in legal cases pertaining to the application of residual sovereignty across Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s.32 Dulles was also involved in the
Trusteeship Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1946-47, in which the
Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTIP) was designated as a “strategic area”, and thus would be placed under the sole U.S. administrative authority of the U.S.33 In either case, Dulles played a significant role in creating and utilizing liminal spaces in a legal system, such as “residual sovereignty” or “strategic areas,” which would work in favor of U.S. imperial sovereignty.
Dulles did not simply apply the Insular Cases to occupied Okinawa, however. On the contrary, Dulles was fully aware of problems caused by the category of “unincorporated territories,” including the issues surrounding citizenship, migration, and trade.34 Ngai, for example, shows how the influx of Filipino “nationals” into the mainland United States following the Insular Cases was recognized as a threat that would destabilize racial and sexual social order.
As a consequence, the movement for the exclusion of the Filipinos became prevalent, which ultimately found a solution in Philippine independence.35 In short, the actual mobility of U.S.
31 Ibid., 100. It is worth mentioning the similarities between “U.S. Nationals” and the status of Japanese Americans in internment camps during the World War II, whose “freedom” and citizenship rights were guaranteed only through claiming unqualified allegiance to the United States, as discussed in Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), Ch. 3. 32 Yuichiro Onishi, “Occupied Okinawa on the Edge: On Being Okinawan in Hawaiʻi and U.S. Colonialism toward Okinawa,” American Quarterly 64-4 (December 2012): 741-765, 757. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 758. 35 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 177. 14
nationals from “unincorporated territories” to the imperial metropole destabilized the legitimacy of the very category. Dulles thus needed to invoke a different legal category to define the status of occupied Okinawa, that is, “residual sovereignty.” The key to “residual sovereignty” is, according to Yuichiro Onishi, the bifurcation of the concept of sovereignty between “de facto” and “de jure,” which allowed “the United States to not only devise a formula to manufacture liminal spaces that were neither foreign to nor part of the United States but also exercise exclusive power to control and govern these spaces and subjects.”36 Because Okinawa was not juridically incorporated as a part of the United States, the occupation of Okinawa would not violate the Atlantic Charter and Cairo Declaration, which intended to prevent Allied Powers from building a colony. In other words, occupied Okinawa was excluded not only from the
Japanese and U.S. constitutions but also from international protocols. As a result, the U.S. could freely exert power over the island without caring about the wills of the inhabitants. As Onishi convincingly concludes, the concept of residual sovereignty, building on the archives of “lawful lawlessness,” became the new legal grounds for the U.S. Empire in post-1945 world order.37
It should be noted here that Okinawa had already been made into the “liminal space” under Japanese imperial-capitalist formation by the early twentieth century. Since the “Ryukyu
Disposition,” abolition of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879, Okinawa had occupied an ambiguous position in the Japanese Empire’s geopolitical map; even if it was incorporated into the modern
Japan state as a prefecture, the people of Okinawa were treated as “the second-class citizen,” meaning not a colonial subject, yet neither fully assimilated as “bonafide Japanese.” Some saw them as a related but backward people who need to catch up with the Japanese, while others, folklorists, linguists, and artists, in particular, treated the region like a cultural repository that
36 Onishi, “Occupied Okinawa on the Edge,” 756. 37 Ibid., 758. 15
preserved the essence of ancient Japanese culture.38 The exoticization of Okinawa was paralleled with, and gave legitimacy to the Meiji state’s decision to preserve the former kingdom’s old customs and administrative and economic system. As historians on modern Okinawan history have revealed, the strategic maintenance of the old social system benefitted both local elites, maintaining their authoritative power over the population, and the Meiji government, utilizing existing exploitative social systems to transform the region into the political, economic, and cultural periphery of the Japanese imperial state.39 As a buffer zone between mainland Japan
(naichi) and the formal colonies (gaichi), Okinawa was made to embody, and adjust to, the crises of Japan’s capitalist economy. The recession following World War I directly affected the sugar industry in Okinawa, which eventually caused mass migrations of surplus population from
Okinawa to major cities in mainland Japan, as well as Hawaiʻi and North and South America. In the meanwhile, those who remained in Okinawa suffered severely from famine and became the subject of various social welfare programs.
The devaluation of the life of people in Okinawa culminated in the final stage of the
World War II when the prefecture was sacrificed as a fortress against the Allied Powers for the security of the Japanese imperial polity. The postwar U.S.-Japan arrangement further reinforced the imposed role of Okinawa as “a sacrificial stone,” as Emperor Hirohito requested the continued U.S. occupation of the Ryukyu Islands for the benefit of Japan and the United States in his secret message to Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. What happened at the end of World War II then was not the total replacement of Japanese colonialism
38 Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 216. 39 For detailed analysis of the process of incorporation of the Ryukyu Kingdom into the periphery of the Japanese capitalist state, see for example, Wendy Matsumura, The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 16
with U.S. military domination, but rather the continued use of Okinawa as a liminal space under
U.S.-Japan complicity.
Military and Welfare in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa
Okinawa’s liminal situation works in two seemingly opposing ways. While it certainly makes the lives of people living there precarious, the fact that the space is placed outside of the definitive state law would result in generating a space of exception where various actors can take part. The second observation I want to make is that there was more space for local and transnational actors to intervene in and complement the lacuna in welfare and healthcare services in Okinawa than in a society where the state has the power and ultimate responsibility for the life of the entire population. Throughout the occupation period, public health and welfare reforms in
U.S.-occupied Okinawa operated not necessarily for the sake of improving the public health of the local population, but primarily for the security of the military. Accordingly, the major public health concern for the U.S. military was the prevention of infectious diseases that would directly affect soldiers’ health, most notably malaria in the beginning and later venereal diseases, and environmental and individual hygiene reform. When the U.S. troops landed in Okinawa in March
1945, the area was experiencing severe public health challenges. Due to its subtropical climate and widespread poverty, the islands were a hotbed of various diseases, such as malaria, filariasis, dengue fever, Japanese Type “B” encephalitis, and tuberculosis. In addition, placed at the periphery of the Japanese imperial state, in Okinawa, overall healthcare and welfare services lagged far behind mainland Japan. The first public health center was built as late as in 1943, six years after the enactment of the Public Health Center Law, which was part of the Japanese state’s biopolitical policy to maximize human resource under the total war regime. Most of the nurses working at the public health center were soon mobilized as military nurses. Doctors were also mobilized or fled to mainland Japan, and only 64 doctors remained in Okinawa when the war 17
was over. In sum, the healthcare system was practically not functioning in prewar Okinawa.40
The twelve-week fierce ground battle not only destroyed all existing medical facilities but also forced people to hide in caves and woods for long periods, making them suffer from poor unsanitary environment and malnutrition.
Shortly after the U.S. troops landed on the islands of Okinawa, the U.S. Military
Government (hereafter MG) was established on April 1, 1945. The MG quickly launched a massive malaria eradication campaign of weekly DDT sprayings of islanders’ houses and relocation camps, to which most of the inhabitants were confined while advancing to fight against the Japanese military. In addition to the prevention of infectious diseases, the MG public health team attempted to reform what they perceived as “unsanitary” practices of the local inhabitants. For example, people’s practices of bathing and washing in streams became a particular concern for the U.S. Army, because streams were also used as water sources for military personnel.41 What annoyed the U.S. military the most was “improper” disposal of human excreta and its use as fertilizer. Regarding the practice as a source of diseases, the MG team rushed to replace old excreta pits with what MG officials called “benjo,” a sort of
“compromise between the native habits and the modern pit latrine.”42 The MG Public Health team was responsible for both the treatment of battle casualties and public health programs
40 As for the prewar and wartime healthcare situation of Okinawa, see Seiki Inafuku, “The Dawn of Medical History in Okinawa.” In Ogawa 2003; Okinawaken Hokenfucho kai. Okinawa no Hokenfu tachi. Okinawa: Hirugi-sha 1994, 207. 41 “Public Health: Lawrence/Watkins” Papers of James T. Watkins IV, vol. 41, no. 18, reprinted as Watokinsu Bunsho Kankō Iinkai eds., Papers of James T. Watkins IV (Okinawa: Ryokurindo 1994). 42 “Public Health and Medical Situation, Village of Chimu,” Report by Robert W. Ball, MG public health officer, recorded in Papers of James T. Watkins IV, vol. 14, no. 82. It describes “benjo” as “a wide straddle trench with a fly-tight floor on top with hinged covers. No seats were provided, in deference to the native squatting position for the act of defecation.” 18
among civilians designed specifically to protect the health of American troops. In this way, military operations and public health reforms proceeded simultaneously.
With war’s end, MG then built medical facilities one after another including hospitals, a leper colony, and a tuberculosis sanatorium, but it was not until 1950 that the U.S. military clearly defined its own principles for the public health and medicine of the civilian population in
Okinawa. In that year, in response to the intensification of Cold War tensions in the Far East, the
United States redirected its policy on Okinawa and decided to retain the islands on a long-term basis for making it into the “keystone” of a Far East military network against Communism.
Consequently, the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyus (hereafter USCAR) was established in 1950 to replace the Military Government to retain stable and planned control over the Ryukyu Islands. The local government, the Government of the Ryukyu Islands (hereafter
GRI), was established in 1952 and placed under the supervision of USCAR. The directive issued by the Headquarters Far East Command to establish USCAR clearly states that “improvement in the standard of living above that existing prior to the war will be accomplished through efforts of the Ryukyuans themselves, without the assistance of United States appropriated funds,” and that
GARIOA funds (Government Appropriation for Relief in Occupied Areas) might be applied only if a higher standard of living above the prewar standards was “necessary for the health of the
U.S. military personnel.”43 This directive should be understood in its relation to the above- mentioned Article Three of the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 that granted the United
States “the right to exercise all and any powers of administration, legislation and jurisdiction over the territory and inhabitants.”44 The two decisions together formed the extraordinary
43 Directive for United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, (b) Objectives, (1) a, 30 April 1952, quoted in Appendix No. 1, “Responsibility of U.S. for improvement of the public health,” USCAR 0000024258, Okinawa Prefectural Archives (hereafter OPA), Haebaru, Okinawa. 44 The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, Chapter II, Article 3, quoted in Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific, 13. 19
condition in which while the United States now had the right to exercise “all and any powers,” it is the sole responsibility of the people of Okinawa to improve their standard of living. USCAR did take the initiative in institutionalizing some public health and welfare services, but only to the extent that it would contribute to the maintenance of the U.S. presences in the islands. The welfare of the local population was thus almost always subordinate to the military.
Because of this principle of “military first,” civil affairs in general, medical and social welfare services in particular, often proceeded in a haphazard and incoherent manner. And this lack of coherence and incompleteness of the healthcare system brought about the ambivalent consequences. As I will discuss further in chapter two, Okinawan doctors, nurses, social workers, and leaders of women’s associations actively and often enthusiastically took part in complementing the USCAR’s mission in managing the life of the population in order to achieve their own goal of improving the quality of life in Okinawan society. Many of those medical and welfare workers had professional experiences in pre-war imperial Japan and its colonized and occupied areas including Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, but went through technical training programs under the U.S. occupation. Without having adequate facilities in Okinawa, they traveled abroad to receive technical training under the human exchange programs generally sponsored by USCAR and the U.S. government. While most of the training programs were held either in the U.S. mainland or Japan in the 1950s, as chapter three illustrates, Hawaiʻi, once it gained U.S. statehood in 1959, increasingly became a vital transpacific hub for educational training and technical interchange. While Okinawan physicians and nurses frequently went to
Hawaiʻi to participate in training programs on health and medical services, American experts were invited to Okinawa to assist in the improvement of medical and public health education.
Okinawan diaspora also actively engaged in restoring and promoting the well-being of the population in Okinawa by sending various relief goods to their homeland, which will be also discussed in chapter three.
20
I said “the ambivalent consequences” earlier because on the one hand, their active and sincere efforts to bring a better life to Okinawa did sometimes unexpectedly produce the excessive space for what Ilana Feldman calls “the politics of living” in the context of Palestinian refugees under the humanitarian condition.45 In distinguishing the “politics of living” from the
“politics of life,” Feldman emphasizes the necessity to see how the humanitarian space, even if it would reduce refugees into “mere” victims and objects of compassion, still constitutes the site where people make claims for their rights and the existential values of their lives. Following
Feldman, Yen Le Espiritu illustrates how Vietnamese refugees sought to generate viable life and make the refugee camp a “home” through everyday practices: “abject spaces can also become
‘spaces of politics’ when camp dwellers enact themselves ‘as political by exercising rights that they do not have’; in so doing, they turn bare life into political life.”46 I wish to go further to argue in this thesis that welfare and humanitarian acts in/for occupied Okinawa not only generated the space for political subjectivity and existential values, they also showed possibilities for a diasporic alliance that would function as an alternative form of social security.
At the same time, however, precisely because of their strong sense of devotion, the local and transnational actors’ investment in the welfare of Okinawa were quite often easily appropriated by USCAR, the U.S. military and U.S. and Japanese governments to serve their respective purposes. For example, the U.S. military and USCAR deployed public health nurses not only to strictly regulate physical contact between American personnel and local prostitutes through venereal disease control but also to indirectly oversee the local population (see chapter
2). More broadly, the promotion of health and welfare and training of local medical practitioners
45 Ilana Feldman, “The Humanitarian Condition: Palestinian Refugees ant the Politics of Living,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Volume 3, Number 2 (Summer 2012): 155-172, 157. 46 Yen Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 76. 21
corresponded well with U.S. Cold War rhetoric of liberating and rehabilitating formerly subjugated populations. For Japan, as chapter four details, sending welfare and medical aid to
Okinawa, which was authorized by the U.S. government since 1961, was one of several crucial opportunities to claim its “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa. The close relations among medical practitioners and patients between Okinawa and mainland Japan also facilitated the so- called “reversion movement,” in which people of Okinawa called for the reversion of the administration of Okinawa to Japan. Even more fundamentally, the act of/for welfare itself, by its nature, constitutes the very site for what Michel Foucault theorizes as modern governmentality, through which the liberal subject is constructed. For, as Foucault writes, the pastoral power, on which modern governmentality is grounded, gave rise to “an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating men, an art of monitoring them and urging them on step by step, an art with the function of taking charge of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence.”47 Caring for lives and calling for better life almost inevitably invites and catalyzes the irresistible desire for modernization and self-governing at the most intimate level.48
47 Michelle Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 165. My argument here directly draws on Takashi Fujitani’s application of Foucault to his analysis of the so-called “loyalty test” that made Japanese Americans in internment camps make the “free choice” to enlist in the U.S. army (Fujitani, Race for Empire). I also hope to align my argument here with critiques on liberalism and humanitarianism such as Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015); Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Julietta Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 48 It might be worth mentioning here that the post-World War II development of “self-government (jichi)” of the people of Okinawa was in close relation to these welfare activities. The first local administrative body and a precursor to GRI, the Okinawa Advisory Council (Okinawa Shijunkai) was established in August 1945, and worked closely with the Military Government to handle rationing as well as public health matters. See Okinawa Shakaifukushi Kyōgikai ed., Okinawa no Shakai Fukushi 25 nen (Naha: Okinawa Shakaifukushi Kyōgikai, 1971). 22
In my view, this radical contradiction of modernity inherent in the practices of welfare is also the crucial reason why the field of public health and welfare has been mostly neglected in the historiography of the occupation of Okinawa, as opposed to studies on that of Japan under the occupation of Allied Powers where the well-publicized trope of liberation and democratization led to the systematic and large-scale public health reforms.49 Although there are some valuable works by medical and public health experts on the condition of the healthcare system in occupied
Okinawa, they tend to re/produce a progressive narrative of how not only US occupation government’s medical intervention but also local medical practitioners’ active involvement in the healthcare reforms contributed to the successful recovery of post-World War II Okinawan society. This is not to deny the fact that the overall public health conditions in Okinawa did improve through the occupation period and local medical practitioners made a huge contribution to that. However, such narrativization hardly fits with the dominant narrative of postwar
Okinawa studies, whose main concern has been the continued system of oppression imposed on
Okinawa by U.S. and Japanese states and people’s struggles against it. If appears at all,
49 Even in the historiography of the Occupation of Japan, the field of medicine and public health has been marginalized until recently. According to Christopher Aldous and Akihito Suzuki, this is because of an assumption that public health reforms during the occupation were regarded as “less political and less controversial” than other tasks, such as drafting a new constitution or purging wartime leaders. See, Aldous and Suzuki, Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945-52: Alien prescriptions? (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 15. One of the first attempts to provide a comprehensive picture of healthcare reform by the occupation force (General Headquarters/Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) was the work done by Eiji Takemae in Inside GHQ (New York: Continuum, 2002). Not only did he foreground understudied areas of the GHQ, Takemae also pointed out important “darker undercurrents” of Public Health and Welfare (PH&W) legacies, such as the use of Japanese scientists complicit in war crimes and the treatment of the atomic bomb victims. However, drawing his argument mostly from the memoir of Crawford Sams, the head of the PH&W Section of GHQ/SCAP, Takemae’s overall argument tends to depict public health reforms as something unilaterally imposed on the population of Japan. In contrast, recent studies of the occupation of Japan offer more nuanced approaches to the PH&W healthcare reforms by depicting local medical professionals’ active involvement in the reforms. See Aldous and Suzuki, Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan; Suganuma Takashi, Hisenryō-ki shakai fukushi bunseki (Tokyo: Minerva shobō, 2005). Sugiyama Akiko further tries to situate public health in occupied Japan within the Cold War geopolitics. Sugiyama Akiko, Senryoki no Iryokaikaku (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1995). 23
healthcare reform is described as either an “exceptional” area where the U.S. occupation force unusually did “good” for the population of Okinawa, or as a tool of pacifying people’s resentment against military violence. As a consequence, it fails to capture the paradox that the act of welfare was not antithetical to military operations, but rather constituted the indispensable vehicle for the militarization of Okinawan society. It is my wish that my dissertation will contribute to not only the field of Okinawa Studies but also scholarly conversations on militarism and the politics of life and death, by showing the complementary relationship between warfare and welfare.
Recently, scholars began to situate the health and welfare in occupied Okinawa within the broader context of U.S. Cold War expansionism and militarism. Most notably, Mire Koikari illustrates the ways in which home economics constituted the site of U.S. Cold War politics where Okinawan women under the guidance of American home economists actively engaged in disseminating a scientific knowledge of domesticity, and in so doing, played a crucial part in making their homes into a “focal site of imperial politics.”50 Likewise, Kayo Sawada’s detailed analysis of the family planning campaign reveals how Cold War geopolitics shaped the discussion on population and reproduction in occupied Okinawa.51 More recently, Sugiyama
Akiko illustrates the formation of medical and public health policies in the early occupation period in Okinawa, illustrating how local leaders, practitioners, and residents in each area negotiated with the U.S. military to restore the healthcare system.52 Building on their works, I
50 Mire Koikari, Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity and Transnationalism in East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 51 Kayo Sawada, “Cold War Geopolitics of Population and Reproduction in Okinawa under US Military Occupation, 1945-1972”, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, vol. 10 (2016): 401-422. 52 Sugiyama Akiko, “Senryō shoki okinawa no hoken iryō shisutemu: guntō betsu no keisei katei”, Okinawa Bunka Kenkyū (March, 2018): 609-671. 24
wish to further explore in two different ways from them the intimacy of military and welfare activities that was forged through the occupation period.
First, focusing on militarized welfare in occupied Okinawa necessarily requires we take transnational and transpacific approaches. For one thing, as Setsu Shigematsu and Keith
Camacho succinctly present with the term “militarized currents,” Asia and the Pacific became increasingly interconnected throughout the twentieth century through the dynamics of U.S. and
Japanese imperialism and militarism, which continuously produced the movement of people, capital, goods, knowledge, and technology.53 Simeon Man’s study excellently shows the transpacific circuit of soldiering where racialized Asian subjects came to be incorporated into the
U.S. nation state through military engagement in the post-World War II Cold War empire.54 As chapter three of this thesis most explicitly shows, even if occupied Okinawa was severed from
Japanese sovereignty, it did not mean that it lost all the connections from the outside. Rather, the
U.S. military closely and intimately connected Okinawa with other militarized sites of U.S. empire such as Puerto Rico, Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, Guam, Korea, and Taiwan. In addition, as some scholars have pointed out, the modern history of Okinawa cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the experiences of those who left the islands to search out a secure life and their diasporic connection with their home.55 For, as briefly mentioned above, displacement and subsequent migration from Okinawa was not simply the outcome of Japanese imperial-capitalist exploitation and U.S. military domination, but rather constituted the necessary condition for the maintenance of U.S. and Japanese imperial formations. Accordingly, the
53 Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 54 Simeon Man, Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018). 55 See for example, Tomiyama Ichirō, Ryūchaku no Shisō: Okinawa mondai no keifugaku (Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 2013), esp. Chapter 2. 25
following chapters examine militarized welfare as the transnational site where various actors within and beyond Okinawa engaged in nurturing life.
Second, while closely examining the intertwined relations of militarism and the politics of life and death, I also wish to capture the moments when the affinity between the military and welfare was destabilized. As I try to show in each chapter, the myth and practices of liberation and rehabilitation somehow failed to prove their legitimacy in U.S.-occupied Okinawa precisely because of the liminality of the islands, where violence and rehabilitation coexisted. While the
U.S. forces promoted the image of a “liberatory” army through various welfare reforms, the visible presence of the U.S. military is a continuous reminder of the transwar state of emergency and U.S.-Japan inter-imperial violence. In treating injuries and pains inflicted on their bodies or those of patients, welfare actors that I will examine were very aware of the traces and symptoms of imperial and military violence. Throughout this thesis, I attempt to capture the moments when they challenged and denaturalized the affinity between military violence and welfare acts: the power to kill and power to nurture life. Their everyday struggles might not have been seen as
“resistance” in a conventional sense, nor did it crystalize into a unified “revolutionary” moment, but their words and actions nonetheless show us moments of rupture through which we could possibly imagine an alternative present and future.
Chapter Organization
The organization of this dissertation is as follows. Chapter One, “On a ‘God-Forsaken’
Island,” explores the role of American Christianity in the early occupation period in Okinawa in not only promoting various kinds of medical and public health reforms, but also producing the narratives of liberation and rehabilitation to transform Okinawa into a place worthy of salvation in the American imagination. However, missionaries ended up encountering what they perceived as “contradictions” of, but what I analyze as the “affinities” between, their evangelical projects 26
and the military aggression taking place in Okinawa. The chapter features two local actors who complicated and destabilized the Christian narratives of salvation. One is yuta, Okinawan shamans, who played a crucial role in providing care both for the dead and living especially in post-World War II Okinawan society where people sought the help of ritual advisors to settle the spirits of the war dead. The other is Taira Osamu, a local Christian pastor, who directly criticized the legitimacy of U.S. military occupation by using the words of the Bible.
Chapter Two, “Nursing Empire: Public Health Nurses in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa,” sheds light on public health nurses. Introduced by USCAR initially for the purpose of protecting
American soldiers from an unhealthy local environment and infectious diseases, public health nurses were expected to serve as gatekeepers to control racial and imperial boundaries between local society and the U.S. military. In addition, they played a central role in disseminating knowledge about hygiene, reforming the everyday lives of Okinawans, and supervising the community. By examining often contradictory experiences of public health nurses, the chapter shows that the education and mobilization of public health nurses was part of the biopolitical strategy of the U.S. Cold War empire. It also shows how they struggled to use various tactics to maximize their opportunities to improve the life of people. Some public health nurse leaders received technical training outside of Okinawa.
Chapter Three, “Bridging Empires: Transpacific Circuits of Care via Okinawa and
Hawaiʻi,” describes the transpacific circuit of care and relief that connected occupied Okinawa and Hawaiʻi in multifaceted ways. I argue that the militarization of the Asia-Pacific often went hand in hand with medicalization of the region. In other words, transpacific biopolitical projects of “nurturing life” were in fact facilitated through necropolitical network that simultaneously shaped the Pacific in Cold War formations.
Chapter Four, “Begging for Life: Land Seizure and ‘Law of Relief,’ focuses on the critical moment of post-World War II Okinawan history when, following the forcible land
27
seizure, displaced farmers organized a collective act of “begging” to protest against military violence. Instead of reading it as the origin of the so-called “reversion movement” which was often imbued with the narrative of national reunification, this chapter sees the land struggle as the moment of rupture when people recognized and re/made their own relationship to the land.
And yet, their political act of begging was soon appropriated and made into the object of social welfare. The latter half of the chapter traces the ways in which what Tomiyama Ichirō terms as the “law of relief,” a series of compensation, aid, and relief measure that have been applied to
Okinawa, emerged as a response to the land struggle. By incorporating displaced farmers into biopolitical governmentality, U.S. and Japanese states successfully tamed would-be unruly populations.
The dissertation ends by revisiting the “Koza Riot” that happened in one of the biggest camptowns in Okinawa on December 20, 1970, right before the reversion. Triggered directly by a traffic accident in which an American soldier under the influence of alcohol hit an Okinawan pedestrian, people in Koza burned over eighty cars owned by Americans and a few buildings in the camptown. The epilogue examines how Koza, the place that most vividly embodies the intimacy between the Americans and local population suddenly became the site where people of
Okinawa exhibited their anger with actual violence and why some people remembered the “riot” as “a liberated space in a sea of fire.”
28
Chapter 1
On a “God-Forsaken” Island: Okinawa in the Eyes of American Missionaries
And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. —The Gospel According to Mark 16:15-161
Our Father, there are a million citizens in the Ryukyus that Thy beloved Son Jesus Christ died for. Make the new High Commissioner bow deeply before the dignity of the people for whom he has been sent and thus make him obey Thee. —Rev. Taira Osamu2
Introduction
In 1960, the non-fiction story titled “The Village that Lives by the Bible” appeared in
Reader’s Digest. The story is set in the village of Shimabuku, located in a central part of the island of Okinawa, fairly close to Kadena U.S. Air Force Base. The article was originally written by Clarence W. Hall, a correspondent with the U.S. forces, who stayed in Okinawa early in the occupation period. The story appeared in a number of evangelical publications in the United
States, was made into a film by the American Bible Society, and finally was reprinted in
Reader’s Digest, which circulated widely in the American public.3 As Christina Klein reveals,
Reader’s Digest played a significant role in structuring the American middlebrow imagination
1 Bible Gateway (online bible), https://www.biblegateway.com (last accessed December 16, 2018). 2 The prayer presented at the investiture of High Commissioner of USCAR, Ferdinand T. Unger on November 2, 1966. For details, see epilogue of this chapter. 3 Edward E. Bollinger, The Cross and the Floating Dragon: The Gospel in Ryukyu (Pasadena, Calif: William Cavey Libray, 1983), 155 29
about the world, and Asia in particular, that dominated the postwar cultural scene.4 First issued in February 1922, the magazine dramatically increased its circulation after World War II, and by
1967, it came to have thirty international editions in fourteen languages with a hundred million readers every month, “more than any other publication except the Bible.”5 Indeed, Reader’s
Digest was deeply embedded in Christian evangelism, and its global circulation and emphasis on an international perspective arose in part out of its close ties with the American missionary movement in the late 19th and former 20th century.6
Hall’s story begins with a scene in which American soldiers encountered what Hall describes as “two little old Okinawan men” leading a large group of villagers walking toward them. The battle-hardened sergeant is wary of “enemy tricks” at first, but soon noticed that the man leading the group had a copy of the Bible in his hand and that the villagers were welcoming the troops as “fellow-Christians.” The Bible was written in Japanese and given to the village from an American missionary in the prewar period. In Hall’s story, the villagers were so impressed by the Bible that they began basing their lives squarely on Christian precepts: “They’d adopted the Ten Commandments as Shimabuku’s legal code; the Sermon on the Mount as their guide to social conduct. In Kina’s [one of the two men who led the villagers] school the Bible was the chief literature; it was read daily by all students, and major passages were memorized. In
Nakamura’s [the other leader] village government, the precepts of the Bible were law.”7
4 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 67. 5 Ibid., 69. 6 The founder of Reader’s Digest, DeWitt Wallace and his wife Lila Wallace were both children of a Presbyterian minister. Lila Wallace also worked as a social worker with the YWCA and the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions in 1922. Numerous other employees in the Digest had missionary origins (Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 70). 7 Clarence W. Hall, “The Village That Lives by the Bible,” The Reader’s Digest Vol. 77 (1960), 205. 30
Although the next day the tide of battle swept over the island, the village was “an oasis of serenity.” The story is didactic and draws the lesson from the incident that the village has triumphantly survived the ravages of war since its inhabitants piously had lived by the Bible. The piece ends with a comment by an American commissioned officer who saw the Bible’s effect on the lives of the villagers: “Maybe we’re using the wrong kind of weapons to make the world over.”8
In this story, Christianity functions as a cultural marker that distinguishes “friends” from
“enemies.” The Okinawans with the Bible were no longer “enemies,” but friends to the
Americans. It serves as a threshold line to define who are worthy of life, care, and protection, and who are destined to die in “the ravages of war.” Scholars in Cold War Studies have argued that
Christianity played an important role in not only forming American public discourse of the
Other, but also actually shaping U.S. Cold War policies. Seth Jacobs, for example, reveals how
Ngo Dinh Diem’s devoutness to Roman Catholicism was the crucial factor for the Eisenhower administration’s opt for the policy Vietnam of “sink or swim with Diem” rather than cooperating with other local anti-communist candidates in Saigon, who had greater political experiences than
Diem, but were Buddhists like majority of the Vietnamese population. For Eisenhower, who
8 Ibid., 208. However, according to Edward E. Bollinger, one of the leading missionaries in postwar Okinawa, however, few Okinawans actually knew much about the content of the Christian message at the time when they encountered American troops. Bollinger visited Kina Shosei, the protagonist of Hall’s story, shortly after the story appeared in Reader’s Digest. Kina, who had been the local school teacher during the war, told Bollinger that they did receive a copy of the Bible from a missionary, but did not understand its contents. Instead of teaching the Bible to their students, they taught many of the maxims of traditional Confucian morality. Bollinger assumed that their reference to “the Way” might have led Americans to assume they were referring to the Christian faith, since “traditional Confucian ethical instruction uses similar terminology in admonishing students to follow the way of the sages of old” (Bollinger 1983, 156). Kina told Bollinger that he had carried the Bible only because he thought that the American troops were “part of a culture which had been deeply influenced by the Bible,” and that “Americans might recognize it even in another language, and thus be persuaded of the peaceful intent of the greeting” (Ibid.). Therefore, while the GIs assumed that the villagers with the Bible were pious Christians who incorporated Christianity into their local context and led their lives by the Bible, the Okinawan villagers assumed the Americans were Christians and strategically used the Bible to protect themselves from American troops. 31
pronounced that “Our system demands the Supreme Being,” Buddhism’s refusal to acknowledge any “Supreme Being” was not acceptable. The U.S. officials expected the same evangelic earnestness from its allies as expected at home, and strongly encouraged “Christian gentlemen” to preside “over an overwhelmingly non-Christian nation on the front line of the Cold War.”9
Buddhists were therefore not regarded as qualified leaders to engage in a holy war against
“godless Communism.”10
However, it is not merely that whether one is Christian or not was used as a prerequisite to enlist in the American Cold War crusade; the Christian narrative of salvation itself was repeatedly deployed to endorse the U.S. imperialist myth of liberation and rehabilitation. Melani
McAlister illustrates how biblical epics were frequently cited and retold in popular culture, newspaper and magazine articles as well as in foreign policy documents to produce the discourse of “benevolent supremacy,” which was supposed to counter totalitarianism and colonialism of the “old” empires. The biblical epics mobilized, McAlister argues, “the logic of liberation from racial slavery to support a political construct of U.S.-dominated liberty.”11 Through the narrative of salvation, the U.S. appears as a “savior,” while the “formerly subject peoples” were depicted as what I would call the “rehabilitatable figure,” who would be able to free themselves from the
“slavery” of empire only if they follow the path to the Christian God and American democracy.
In the following, I explore how Christian narratives were applied to U.S.-occupied
Okinawa to transform the “God-forsaken” island into the place worthy of salvation in the
American imagination. I draw my argument from the following sources: two Christian
9 Ibid., 590. 10 Seth Jacobs,“‘Our System Demands the Supreme Being’: The U.S. Religious Revival and the ‘Diem Experiment,’ 1954-55,” Diplomatic History 25 (fall 2001): 589-624. 11 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 47. 32
periodicals, The Christian Century and The Japan Christian Quarterly; published and unpublished denominations’ reports on Okinawa; and the “missionary fiction.” Missionary fiction is a set of semi-fictional stories written by missionaries based on their own experience of engaging in evangelism across the world. It became a popular literary genre in the United States especially in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks in part to evangelical magazines like Reader’s Digest.
Christian denominations also published their own missionary stories for advertising and fund- raising. According to Hyaeweol Choi, who analyzes American missionary fiction in Korea,
“missionary fiction” typically consists of a story that “based its plot and character development on missionaries’ intimate knowledge of close interaction with the local subjects of conversion.”12
Missionary fiction thus enables us to see not only how missionaries shaped and circulated their images of Okinawa through their writing, but also how a larger political and religious agenda was performed and negotiated in the “contact zone.” Coined by Mary Louise Pratt, the “contact zone” is the space in which “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”13 Moreover, given the fact that missionary fiction about
Okinawa primarily targeted American Christian readers back home where not much information on the islands was yet circulated, it functioned to convince readers that the U.S. presence and
Christian salvation were necessary for Okinawa.14 My analysis goes one step further and
12 Hyaeweol Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 122. 13 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. 14 Perhaps, one of the most famous cultural products on occupied Okinawa that ever circulated in the United States was the Hollywood film, The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956). The film was an adaptation of the novel published by Vern Snider in 1951. Snider wrote the story based on his own experience as a Military Government official in charge of a native refugee camp in Okinawa. Soon after the novel won considerable success, John Patrick adapted it as a play. It first appeared on the Broadway stage first in 1953. The play then toured globally, with stops in Europe, Latin America, Japan and Okinawa. Meanwhile, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) began making the film version of “The Teahouse” 33
examines how these missionaries’ accounts constructed people in Okinawa subjects as “worthy of salvation” in the first place. Why, and from what, did they have to be “rescued”?
Not only did the Christian faith give rhetorical grounds for U.S. Cold War expansionism, but it was also a driving force for missionaries to organize actual rehabilitation programs across the world after World War II. Ian Tyrrell shows how the moral reform movement, which was expanded across the world by Protestant missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, played a crucial role in creating formal and informal U.S. empire. Tyrrell argues, “the boundaries between Christian evangelical networks operating on a transnational level and formal empire were blurred,” as a formal empire was essentially embedded within the evangelical networks forged by missionaries.15 This chapter addresses the ways in which Christian missionaries continued to play an essential role in forming and maintaining postwar U.S. military empire through producing and reinforcing the logic of liberation while engaging in social welfare activities in former colonies or occupied areas, or highly-militarized spaces as Okinawa.
The first part of this chapter illustrates the sociopolitical context before the arrival of the
American missionaries in Okinawa after World War II. Okinawa was left out of the U.S. postwar strategic map after Japan’s surrender until 1948 when the Cold War structure took shape in East
based on the play. Featuring Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford and a Japanese actress Kyo Machiko as leading characters, the film was directed by Daniel Mann and shot on location in Japan and Hollywood. Naoko Shibusawa analyzes the film as a satire and comedy of U.S. military occupation: “like many memoirs and articles written by Occupationers, [it] served to soften and minimize the cold, hard fact of Occupation.” In Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. In my previous study, I analyze the production process of the film as well as reviews on it in Japan and the United States, demonstrating how the entire process of producing and consuming the film constituted the site where post-World War II Japanese “imperial amnesia” and U.S. Cold War cultural politics worked in tandem to disavow racism and imperial violence against Okinawa. See Masubuchi Asako, “‘Hachigatsu Jūgoya no Chaya’ wo meguru ‘manazashi” no seijigaku,” in Tanaka Yasuhiro, ed., Senryō-sha no Manazashi: Okinawa, Nihon, Beikoku no Sengo (Tokyo: Serika-shobō, 2013): 14-38. 15 Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 5. 34
Asia. In closely examining how Christian leaders in the United States came to realize the necessity for missionary enterprises in Okinawa, this section explores the intimate relationship of
Cold War expansionism and Christian evangelism. The second section then explores how missionary accounts sought to demonize what they perceived as most immediate obstacles to converting people in Okinawa into Christians: Communism, Shintoism, and Shamanism. The last section attempts to reveal the affinity between Christian narratives of salvation and militarism by examining how missionaries tried to “settle” the land problem.
Calls for the Okinawa Mission
It was not until 1950 that American Protestant missionaries began to come to the island of
Okinawa for the first time after World War II. This is a surprisingly late date compared to mainland Japan in which approximately 2,500 Christian missionaries had already actively engaged in mission works by 1951.16 Their activities in Japan were strongly encouraged and supported by General Douglas MacArthur, who directed the occupation of Japan as Supreme
Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Despite his sponsorship of the new Japanese
Constitution, which endorses the principle of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, MacArthur held a personal view that “every possible effort” should be made to
“Christianize Japan” in hopes of removing the influence of Shintoism on people’s lives entirely on the one hand, while building a democratic nation that could counter Communist threat on the other.17 Throughout his term in Japan, MacArthur kept urging Christian denominations to send more missionaries to Japan and inviting religious film-makers to visit. He is also well-known for
16 Lawrence S. Wittner, “MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Occupied Japan.” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (February 1971): 77-98, 82. 17 Ibid., 78. 35
his enthusiastic support for a project to establish a university in Japan committed to the Christian way of life. Founded in 1953, the International Christian University, the university was funded by the financial aid of the Federal Council of Churches and the Foreign Missions Conference of
North America as well as the Rockefeller Foundation.18
In contrast, in Okinawa, where there was no support from the authorities, Okinawan lay
Christians took the initiative in reconstructing postwar Okinawan churches. Before the war, in
1937, there were 21 Protestant churches and preaching stations in Okinawa. Their total membership was 1,207, about 0.2 percent of the population.19 In 1941 all Protestant denominations in Japan were incorporated into the United Church of Christ in Japan (Nihon
Kirisuto Kyōdan, hereafter UCCJ) based on the Religious Organizations Law of 1939 (Shūkyō
Dantaihō). Christian bodies in Okinawa, including Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, Presbyterian churches, and the Salvation Army were accordingly grouped into one branch of the UCCJ’s
Kyushu District.20 This measure enabled the Japanese imperial government to control religious bodies and associations, enlisting them in the service of the state. The establishment of the Shrine
Board (Jingi-in) in November 1940 officially authorized the authority of State Shintoism over all
18 Ibid., 86. 19 Civil Affairs Handbook Ryukyu (Lyukyu Islands) OPNAV 13- 31, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department 15 November, 1944. Reprinted and incorporated into Okinawa Ken-shi, Naha-Shuppansha, 1995, 60 and 95. Okinawa’s encounter with Christianity dates back to the early 17th century when a Spanish Dominican missionary landed on Ishigaki Island on his way from Manila to Kyushu. In the middle of 19th century, France and England both sent missionaries to the Ryukyu Kingdom, but neither project was successful in producing converts or establishing churches. It was after the Ryukyu Kingdom was abolished and incorporated into the Meiji Japan as a prefecture in 1879 that American and British churches made some in roads in their mission in Okinawa. See Carolyn Bowen Francis, “Where is the Church to Stand? Christian Responses in Okinawa to the Issue of Military Bases,” The Japan Christian Review 64 (1998): 5-19, 6. 20 Francis, “Where is the Church to Stand?,” 6. 36
other religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, and indigenous religions.21 Ironically, for
Okinawan Christians, cooperating with UCCJ and serving the state was a crucial way to exhibit patriotic devotion towards imperial Japan to secure their status as imperial subject, even if it posed to them a serious aporia of serving the Emperor while simultaneously serving Christian
God.
With the end of World War II in 1945, however, Okinawan Christians’ ties with the
Japanese churches were wholly cut off, leaving them on the war-devastated island without any resources.22 Okinawan Christians, with the support of U.S. military chaplains, first began preaching in relocation camps. In order to facilitate inter-denominational Protestant cooperation in rebuilding churches, they also formed an ecumenical organization, the Okinawa Christian
Association (Okinawa Kirisuto-kyō Renmei, hereafter OCA) in 1947.23
Okinawan Christians were overwhelmingly short of funds and human resource and desperately seeking for missionaries’ assistance. As early as in November 1945, OCA leaders sent out a petition to American church leaders, requesting they dispatch missionaries at the earliest possible time to assist them to rebuild local Christianity.24 Despite the urgent request from Okinawa, it took almost fifty-one months for American Protestant denominations to take action, mostly due to the internal dissension. While they all agreed immediately to support OCA, each denomination had its own goals and methods for missionary enterprises, and they never
21 For further details on the state control of religious organizations, see Sheldon M. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. Chapter two, “Defining Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy,” 60-87. 22 Francis, “Where is the Church to Stand?” 6. 23 Ibid., 7. The Okinawa Christian Association was reorganized as the Church of Christ in Okinawa (1950), and later renamed again as the United Church of Christ in Okinawa (1957). 24 “If Okinawa Is Not to Be ‘God-Forsaken,’” editorial in The Christian Century, August 16, 1950, 965- 967. 37
reached an agreement. In essence, each denomination was eager to increase its membership in the newly attained mission field and was less willing to spend the limited budgets for the inter- denominational cause.
The political situation surrounding Okinawa was the strongest contributing factor to the
American missionaries’ belated response to Okinawan Christians. In the years following Japan’s surrender, the U.S. military in Okinawa, the Ryukyu Command, tended to be treated as a lower priority as an organization compared to units in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines.25
Subsequently, the funds for military construction were curtailed and the number of U.S. personnel sharply decreased during the period. The rumor was widely shared by military officers and enlisted men that “only the worst were sent to duty stations in Okinawa.”26 The magazine
Life called Okinawa at that moment a “Junk Heap,” while GIs called the island “Rock” or “Hell
Hall.” By and large, Okinawa was regarded as nothing more than a burden by U.S. policymakers and military officials until 1948. It is thus not surprising if American Christian leaders were less willing to spend their resource on such a “God-Forsaken island” than in Japan, where the occupation forces were far more eager to call for missionaries to assist in accomplishing the goal of the occupation, i.e., democratization and demilitarization of Japan.
However, this situation completely changed with the proclamation of the People’s
Republic of China in October 1949 and the subsequent outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.
The United States rushed to construct the Far East military defense line against Communism, placing Okinawa as a “keystone” of the military network. Harry S. Truman approved the
National Security Council proposal to retain the island on a long-term basis, authorizing a
25 Arnold G. Fisch, Military Government in the Ryukyu Islands, 1945-1950 (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2005), 69. 26 Ibid., 81. 38
massive inflow of funds for military-base development and construction.27 In December of 1950, the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) was established by a directive of the Headquarters Far East Command in order to maintain stable and planned control of Okinawa, replacing the Military Government. The local government, Government of the
Ryukyu Islands (GRI) was established in 1952 and placed under the supervision of USCAR.
It was precisely at this moment when American church leaders enthusiastically began to claim the need, opportunities, and the responsibility for Christian enterprises in Okinawa. T.T.
Brumbaugh, one of the contributors to The Christian Century wrote the article entitled “’God-
Forsaken’ Okinawa” in June 1950, which ends with the following warnings: “God has not forsaken Okinawa, but American Christians, who bear a considerable share of the responsibilities for what has happened in the Ryukyus in the past few years, are in danger of doing so. We dare not forget the Okinawans, whose destiny is now so largely in our hands.”28
In part, Brumbaugh’s sense of responsibility for Okinawa came from his recognition that numerous sacrifices were made on the islands a few years before: “[t]oward the end of the late war, military necessity was invoked to justify a fearful slaughter of life and destruction of property on strategically located Okinawa. Later these sacrifices were held to the painful prologue to a better order in Asia. […] it supplies and added reason why the people of the
Ryukyu islands should be an object of our concern.”29 Here we can see how deaths and destruction during the battle of Okinawa were smoothly incorporated into a postwar developmentalist narrative of salvation. Despite the obligation to the people in Okinawa,
27 Kensei Yoshida, Democracy Betrayed: Okinawa Under U.S. Occupation (Bellingham, Washington: Center for East Asian Studies Western Washington University, 2001), 42. 28 T.T. Brumbaugh, “‘God-Forsaken’ Okinawa,” The Christian Century, June 7, 1950, 701. 29 Brumbaugh, 700. 39
Brumbaugh lamented, American interests in “the spiritual as well as the physical well-being of the Okinawans,” had been declining. Brumbaugh writes, “the hour is late. One wonders what inroads the Communists have already made among the long-oppressed Okinawan populace.”30
Brumbaugh, much like many other church leaders and policymakers in the United States at that time, regarded Christianity as the antidote to “atheistic” Communism. Indeed, as Seth Jacobs points out, one of the outstanding features of the U.S. social setting in the 1950s was its unrivaled religiosity, and its strong connection with Cold War foreign policy, especially during the Eisenhower years (1953-61).31 John Foster Dulles, who served as Secretary of State under
Eisenhower, was known as a pious Christian, and always maintained that his anti-Communism was firmly based on his devotion to the Christian faith.32 Brumbaugh’s call for American
Christians’ attention to Okinawa thus can be read as a reflection of such a political climate in which anti-Communism was framed through Christian perspectives. As a keystone of the U.S.
Cold War strategic map, Okinawa had to be fortified not only by the military but also by missionaries.
In addition, missionaries thought Okinawa had the particularly high potential for
Christian enterprise because of its socio-political circumstance. Edward E. Bollinger, a Baptist missionary residing in Okinawa since 1955, insisted that Okinawans and captured Japanese troops, who had been afraid of being tortured by the U.S. military before its arrival, must have felt real gratitude when they were actually treated generously by Americans. Bollinger was convinced that the engagement of military chaplains in a variety of relief activities had further
30 Ibid. 31 Jacobs, “‘Our System Demands the Supreme Being’,” 590. 32 Robert Shaffer, “The Christian Century: Protestants Protesting Harry Truman’s Cold War,” Peace & Change, Vol. 42, No. 1 ( January 2017): 93-127, 93. 40
increased the positive image of Christianity among people in Okinawa. The Okinawa Christian
Association also served as the primary channel for supplying food and clothing to many of the villages early in the occupation period, which, Bollinger thought, contributed to reassuring “real gratitude on the part of many for the aid received.”33 As will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, in the initial stage of the occupation of Okinawa, the Military Government’s primary concern was the treatment of battle causalities and a public health program among civilians designed specifically to protect the health of American troops.34 The recovery of the welfare of the local population alone often received lower priority, which gave great opportunities for
Christian organizations to take part in rehabilitation projects as part of their mission work.
Bollinger also maintained that Japan’s defeat was another element that urged people in
Okinawa to reconsider their own faith: “there was at the very least a disillusionment with the efficacy of the myriad gods of the Divine Nation, Japan, as taught in the official mythology of the pre-war period, and an openness to the Christian faith as the religion of the conqueror.” The late war proved that “the strongest gods win battles for their devotees, and the Christian God, the
God of America, is victorious,” and therefore, “it is obvious that the thing to do is to become
Christians.”35 While contrasting Christianity with Japan’s Shintoism by narrating the U.S.-Japan war as the battles between the Christian God and the “myriad gods of the Divine Nation,”
Bollinger made a connection between Christianity and Okinawan’s “traditional” sense of value:
The search for health, wealth and happiness, values most deeply cherished by traditional Okinawan society were to be sought, not through the religion that failed, but through the religion which had obviously brought these values to the Americans. The search for
33 Bollinger, The Cross and the Floating Dragon, 189. 34 Lawrence and Watkins, “Disaster Relief Administration,” reprinted in Paper of James T. Watkins IV, Vol. 41, 4. 35 Bollinger, Ibid. 41
success in the devastated land was thought by many to be best pursued by adopting the religion of those who were obviously successful.36
In this way, Bollinger emphasized that Christianity could find a place in Okinawan society, whose long-standing sense of value would be well compatible with those of the Americans. What
Bollinger, as well as other American Christian leaders, did not seem to expect so much was how destructive the presence of U.S. military was to the life of people living there, and how it distracted people’s “search for health, wealth, and happiness.”
In response to the request from Okinawan and American Christian leaders, at least 18 denominations dispatched missionaries to Okinawa for the first time during the 1950s and 60s.37
As Bollinger himself admitted, however, the result was far less than initially expected: “the vigorous evangelism of the immediate postwar period was continued in the church, though the hope of early years was not fully realized in the 1960s and 1970s. Interest in the Christian message waned during the latter decades, though the program of the church was a very active one.”38 The data shows that while the Catholic Church successfully increased its membership,
United Church of Christ, the biggest Protestant ecumenical association, actually lost membership: from 1,956 members in 1951 to 1,061 members in 1972. The total membership of major Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church in 1972 was 8,269 (Protestant 3,818 and Catholic 4,451), less than 1 % of the total population.39 The rate is slightly higher than that
36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 191-192. 38 Ibid., 175. 39 Bollinger, The Cross and the Floating Dragon, appendix III. The shift of memberships for other major denominations until 1972 are as follows: Episcopal Church, 749 (1965) to 735 (1972); Seventh Day Adventist Church,1174 (1972); Baptist 209 (1956) to 848 (1972) Catholic Church, from 803 (1955) to 4451 (1972). 42
of Japan, but compared to Korea, where the rapid growth of Christian churches was observed throughout the twentieth century, and approximately one-quarter of the population belong to
Protestant or Catholic congregations, the Church growth in Okinawa has been obviously small in number.40
This is partly due to the inter-denominational conflict that hindered cooperative mission works in Okinawa. Besides, Missionaries themselves were far less enthusiastic about going to
Okinawa than they were in the Japan mission.41 But the outcome of the Okinawa mission also indicates a gap between the assumptions of Christian leaders back home and the realities that missionaries had to face in Okinawa. By the time missionaries arrived in Okinawa one after another in the 1950s, the U.S. occupation forces had begun to construct huge military bases on the seized land. As a result of the massive land seizure coupled with everyday military violence against the local residents, people’s resentment against the military was increasingly growing. It was under such circumstances that missionaries had to preach to the people in Okinawan about
Christian love and peace. In this sense, one of the crucial obstacles for their evangelism in
Okinawa was not so much Communism as Christian leaders had expected as the military
40 For an analysis on the causes of the rapid growth of the Church in Korea, see Mark R. Mullins, “Christianity Transplanted: Toward a Sociology of Success and Failure” and Adams, Daniel J., “Church Growth in Korea: A Paradigm Shift from Ecclesiology to Nationalism.” Both are in Mark R. Mullins and Richard Fox Young (eds.), Perspectives on Christianity in Korea and Japan: The Gospel and Culture in East Asia (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995). While Mullins argues that an affirmation of Christian faith became a way for Koreans to assert their national identity and resist Japanese imperialism, Adams points to a strong sympathetic relationship between Neo-Confucianism and the theological conservatism of the early missionaries as a major factor of “successful” development of Christianity is in Korea. Although neither work extends its discussion to the post-liberation period, American occupation and the Korean War certainly played a crucial role in increasing the number of Christians in Korea and Korean diaspora. 41 In the case of the Church of Nazarene, for example, when the Japan Mission Council was held to decide which member to send to Okinawa in December 1956, no one in the missionary group seemed inclined to volunteer: “many of the missionaries felt that their calling was to Japan, and Okinawa seemed unrelated to this call.” In Donald Owens, Sing, Ye Islands: Nazarene Missions in the Pacific Islands (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1979), 35. 43
presence from their own country. Missionaries themselves seemed to be fully aware of the contradiction between Christian claims for people’s well-being and the destruction of the island for the sake of military operations. William C. Heffner, missionary of the Episcopal Church, pointed out a difficulty to convince the people of Okinawa to think their works and the military activities separately:
Many of the people of Okinawa feel that the Christian missions are sponsored and financially supported by the United States government. They have difficulty understanding the American concept of the separation of Church and State. This is understandable since, before the war, State Shintoism, the official religion of the Japanese Empire, was subsidized by the Japanese Government and used as a cohesive force to bind the Empire together. […] In Okinawa, the missionaries followed the American Army. It was only natural based on their own experience, for them to draw that conclusion. This has often lead[sic] to a great deal of misunderstanding, the most amusing of which is that “This Jesus Christ was an American.42
Although Heffner attributed the “misunderstanding” to the influence of State Shintoism, if the missionaries had to follow the American Army in Okinawa, there was indeed not much difference between Christianity and State Shintoism in terms of the intimacy of Church and
State.
In order to dispel what they perceived as “misunderstanding,” missionaries sought for the way to justify the cause for their mission work in Okinawa. In the next two sections, by analyzing a couple of missionary fiction works, I demonstrate the ways in which American missionaries tried to find the target of reform in the history and culture of Okinawa as a way to secure the space for Christian intervention.
42 William C. Heffner, “For Years on Okinawa: a short account of the Episcopal Church’s mission in Okinawa 21 March 1951-21 March 1955,” The Episcopal Church on Okinawa, unpublished report, 1955, 5. 44
The Emperor vs. the Christian God
For American missionaries, Japanese imperial control over Okinawa, symbolized by
Emperor Hirohito and State Shintoism, was the first thing to be gotten rid of and replaced by
Christianity. Missionaries also seemed to assume that countering Japanese imperialism and militarism was an effective, and relatively easy, strategy to gain Okinawans’ appreciation for
Christianity, given atrocities imposed by the Japanese imperial state and military on the population in Okinawa before and during the war. This assumption resonated well with the
Military Government’s plan for utilizing the alleged antagonism between Japanese and
Okinawans to facilitate U.S. administration of Okinawa. The plan was based on the wartime collection of data on Okinawa prepared for the ground battle ahead and subsequent military occupation. As will be discussed in detail in Chapter Three, one year before its landing on
Okinawa, the Naval Department summoned social scientists to Hawaiʻi to discuss the plan for military governance in Okinawa. The research team prepared a series of handbooks and manuals for the military government officials. One of them was Civil Affairs Handbook Ryukyu
(Loochoo) Islands: OPNAV 13-31, which details various aspects of Okinawan history, society, and culture.43 Under the section titled “racial status,” the Civil Affairs Handbook writes:
Despite the close ethnic relationship between Japanese and Ryukyu islanders, and their linguistic kinship, the people of the archipelago are not regarded by the Japanese as their racial equals. They are looked upon, as it were, as poor cousins from the country, with peculiar rustic ways of their own, and are consequently discriminated against in various ways. The islanders, on the other hand, have no sense of inferiority but rather take pride in their own traditions and in their longstanding cultural ties with China.44
43 It is worth mentioning here that 95% of the information included in the “Civil Affairs Handbook” was taken from Japanese materials such as academic articles, magazines, newspapers and governmental journals published between 1934 and 1940. See Miyagi Etsujiro, Senryō-sha no me (Okinawa: Naha- Shuppansha, 1982). This is one example of how Japanese imperial knowledge of its subject was taken up by the United States, and integrated into the Cold War epistemology. 44Civil Affairs Handbook, 61-62. 45
Although the latter half of the description did not capture the far more complex and often ambivalent feelings that people of Okinawa had towards Japan, it did point to the basic Japanese attitude to Okinawans in the prewar period. As mentioned in the introduction, even though
Okinawa was incorporated into the modern Japanese state as a prefecture in 1879, the people of
Okinawa were treated as “the second-class citizens,” who were not colonial subjects like
Koreans or Taiwanese, but rather as not yet “fully assimilated” into Japanese society. The
Japanese state imposed various assimilation programs on the Okinawan populations to turn them into “proper” Japanese, including mandating the use of “authentic” Japanese in schools, the promotion of hygiene and military conscription. The racialization of the people of Okinawa was most vividly and grotesquely represented in an incident that took place in 1903 at the Fifth
Industrial Exposition in Osaka. In this exposition, Okinawans were literally “exhibited” in a pavilion named Gakujutsu Jinruikan (the Scientific House of the Human Race) together with
Ainus from Hokkaido, aborigines from Taiwan, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Javanese, and
Malayans.45 Designed mainly by Tsuboi Shōgorō, a founder of anthropology in Japan,46 the exhibition was indeed what Yoshimi Shunya calls “a display of an empire” in which the imperial state demonstrated its power by displaying the “collections” from its colonies.47 Not only did the
45 Kinjō Isamu, “Gakujutsu jinruikan jiken to Okinawa,” in Engeki Jinruikan no jōen o jitsugen sasetai kai, ed. Jinruikan Fūinsareta Tobira (Osaka: Ātowākusu, 2005), 33. 46 Tsuboi got the idea of Jinruikan directly from the international exhibition in Paris in 1889 that he visited, which featured human showcases of indigenous “species” from the French colonies. One year after the Jinruikan, in 1904, the St. Louis World’s Fair also featured a similar pavilion to introduce the new colonial subject of the United States, the Filipinos. See Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). This clearly shows a transnational network at the turn of the century through which the knowledge and technologies of scientific racism along with imperial expansion was well circulated. This was happening precisely at the moment when Japan and the United States entered into the imperial competition by gaining their first colonies. 47 Yoshimi Shunya, Hakurankai no Seijigaku (Tokyo: Chūou Kōron, 1992). 46
“human showcase” represent imperial domination over colonial subjects, but the pavilion also facilitated racial hierarchization among the subjugated population. For example, one Okinawan local newspaper criticized the pavilion for displaying Okinawans with “Taiwanese savage and
Hokkaido Ainu.”48 As a consequence, the imperial gaze embodied in the exhibition in turn further reinforced Okinawan local intellectuals’ impulses for assimilation.
In referring to the Japanese discriminatory attitude to Okinawans, the Civil Affairs
Handbook suggests: “Inherent in the relations between the Ryukyu people and the Japanese, therefore, are potential seeds of dissension out of which political capital might be made.”49 This understanding was later reflected in Douglas MacArthur’s public statement in June 1947 maintaining that the Okinawans were not Japanese and had been despised by the Japanese, and therefore, the Japanese government would not oppose America’s occupation of Okinawa.50
Accordingly, the U.S. occupation government took an official stance to politically and culturally separate Okinawa from Japan, and instead encouraged the population in Okinawa to develop their own distinct identity as the “Ryukyuans.”51
48 Unsigned editorial, “Jinruikan o chūshi seshime yo” [Let’s put an end to the House of Peoples], Ryūkyū Shinō, April 11, 1903, translated and quoted in Robert Tierney, “Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in 1903 Japan,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 62, Number 4 (Winter 2011): 514-540, 534. 49 Civil Affairs Handbook, 62. 50 Miyazato Seigen, Nichibei kankei to Okinawa (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten 2000), 29. 51 As part of the separation policy, the U.S. government strategically chose the term “Ryukyu” or “Ryukyuan” to refer to the islands in official documents instead of “Okinawa.” While “Okinawa” is the name bestowed by the Japanese state when the region was incorporated into Japan as a prefecture, “Ryukyu” represents, U.S. officials thought, a distinctive cultural heritage and historical independence from Japan, and therefore better fit with their policy. See Miyagi Etsujiro, Iwanami Booklet No. 268, Okinawa Senryō no 27 nenkan (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992), 37. USCAR officials also carefully avoided using the term “hondo (Japan proper),” while Japanese government kept using the term during the occupation of Okinawa. In his letter to the Liaison Office, a civil administrator Gerald Warner writes, “In a formal document it is suggested that more precise language than the characters for ‘hondo’ be used in the Japanese text where the term ‘Japan’ appears in the English text,” as the word might also refer to the mainland China or United States (“Use of ‘Hondo’ for Japan” in USCAR documents No. U8110113B, 47
The “separation” policy is echoed in some of the missionary fiction works; they narrate the ways in which a protagonist, usually an Okinawan boy or girl, makes a decision to choose
American Christianity over Japanese Shintoism (or Japan as a whole). For example, Helen
Temple, a missionary of the Church of the Nazarene, delineates contrasting images of American and Japanese soldiers in her story, You Must Die. The story is set in Saipan, another major site of a fierce battle between the U.S. Army and the imperial Japanese army. It is also well known for so-called “Banzai Cliff,” from which numerous Japanese soldiers and civilians jumped to commit suicide rather than be taken as a prisoner. The battle resulted in high civilian causalities including Okinawans, who came to the island as migrant workers before the war. Temple’s story begins with a scene in which Japanese soldiers are ordering civilians to die: “Water and food supplies are gone. You must all die […] Everyone must commit suicide. This is an order of the
Imperial Japanese Army.”52 Instead of following the order, the protagonist of the story, Shizu, and her family decided to run away from the Japanese soldiers and hide in the bush. While secretly seeking for food and water for her family, Shizu and her brother unexpectedly see
American soldiers saving the life of a Japanese mother and an army officer alike. The mother with her baby leaped over the cliff, but the soldiers caught them with a rescue net, and told her,
“We give water and food. You must not die.” Having seen the heroic action, Shizu tried to convince her father to ask Americans for help, “I have read that Americans are Christians and they are very kind. Now I have seen it. It is a wonderful thing that they would offer food and
OPA). However it seems that they were also concerned that “hondo” connotes that Okinawa naturally belonged to Japan.
52 Helen Temple, “You Must Die.” In Helen Temple, ed. Joy Cometh in the Morning: Missionary Stories from Japan and Okinawa (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1964), 25. 48
water to enemy people.”53 In this way, in Temple’s narrating the war, the American soldiers’ act of saving was contrasted sharply with Japanese soldiers’ order to die.
Another missionary fiction story, A Seed Falls on Okinawa, illuminates the role of an
American soldier as an emancipator in a more nuanced way, describing how a sacrifice of an
American soldier also paved the way for Okinawans to follow Christianity.54 The author of the story, Peter A. Hewett, served as an electrical engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers in the
Aleutian Islands and later in Okinawa during World War II. Thus, the story is also a reflection of
Hewett’s own wartime experience in Okinawa as a soldier. The story roughly consists of two parts. The protagonist of the former part is a pious American boy, who had wished to become a missionary but loses his life on the battlefield of Okinawa while he was serving the U.S. Army.
While the boy dies, a crucifix he had always carried with him remains buried in the soil of
Okinawa. The protagonist then shifts to an Okinawan peasant boy in the latter half of the story.
He by chance finds a crucifix in the foxhole by chance. As a “seed” planted by the American soldier, the crucifix eventually leads the Okinawan boy to learn about Christianity.
What is striking about the story is the way it attempts to give meaning to sacrifices in the
Battle of Okinawa from a Christian perspective. When the Okinawan boy asks an old man, who is not Christian himself but “worldly-wise and learned patriarch” of his village, why God permitted such terrible suffering as the horrible war that Okinawa has just experienced, the old man replies by using the metaphor of childbirth. In the old man’s understanding, the love of a mother for her child and her joy is increased by the realization that “through her contribution of
53 Ibid., 29. 54 The book was published in 1949 by the Christopher Publishing House in Boston. The story was also circulated via an evangelical radio program, The Christian Doctrine Hour. The story was first aired on March 12, 1950. 49
pain and anguish,” a child is brought into this world. He then associates the “love of a mother” with “Christ’s love”:
The Christians say that such was The Christ’s love for all mankind that He died in order that all men might live. As in childbirth, my son, with its painful suffering, so too, This God, called “The Christ,” by His Agony and Death upon the Cross, in the closing moment of His final, physical effort, sighed a great sigh and brought forth “Immortality.” You ask why there are wars. Our Gods too, have their reasons for wars being fought [capitalization and emphasis follow the original text].55
It is obvious here that the author projects Christ’s death onto the sacrifice of the American soldier. Arguably, Hewett wrote this story to come to terms with his own loss and suffering during the battle in Okinawa. However, while the American soldier’s death is glorified as a necessary sacrifice “in order that all men might live,” the story does not describe the sacrifice of the people of Okinawa. Okinawans only appear in the latter half of the story as if they were made to live because of the painful sufferings of those American soldiers.
Hewett’s story also describes the process in which the Okinawa boy discards his faith in the Emperor and instead begins to follow the Christian faith, by highlighting the so-called
Humanity Declaration (Ningen sengen). The Humanity Declaration is an imperial rescript issued by Emperor Hirohito in January 1946, upon the request from SCAP, to deny the concept of the emperor being a living god (arahito-gami). Hewett describes how declaration made a
“devastating impact” and that “the power and destructiveness of improved atom bombs which fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small in comparison. It shocked men’s minds, leaving their physical bodies intact and untouched.”56 To an extent, Hewett emphasizes the impact of the
55 Peter A. Hewett, A Seed Falls on Okinawa (Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1949), 48. 56 Ibid., 50 50
Humanity Declaration almost in an exaggerated way to give an impression that the declaration was the decisive factor for the Okinawan boy to give up his faith in the Emperor:
Confronted with the undeniable admission of the human mortality of his Emperor, the bewildered and confused mind of our simple peasant boy vacillated. Loyal to the precepts of his honorable forbears, yet bolstered by the wisdom he had received from the venerable sage; with a decisiveness born of the impelling urge within him, the boy withdrew The Crucifix from the small recessed tabernacle where he had secreted It and gazed at The Figure in silent contemplation. Distinctly, he connected the words of the aged philosopher…. “Since every man must have a God, if only a personal one,” he soliloquized, “This shall be my God, The God of Brotherly Love and Everlasting Life.57
Thus, the boy chose the “God of Brotherly Love” over the Emperor, who was no longer the
Supreme Being, but a mortal. The old man, who taught the boy about Christianity, also welcomes the boy’s decision: “great changes are taking place in the world today. Okinawa is no longer an unknown and forgotten little island. It may be that holy and pious men will come to
Okinawa so that they may teach us more about the religion of Him whom they call ‘The Light of
The World.’”58 In this way, the story creates a dichotomy between Shintoism and Christianity: mortal and immortal, evil and righteous, darkness (forgotten) and light, old and new (young), secular and sacred, and betrayed faith and true faith. It is “holy and pious men,” supposedly
American missionaries, who would lead people in Okinawa from the old religion to the new one.
the end of the story, the Okinawan protagonist climbs up a huge pine tree that stood at the center of his village, and ties The Crucifix to the tree, so that The Crucifix is suspended from the branch and sways in the wind. The story ends with the words, “The One God Of All Mankind looked down from the height of The Tree Of Life whose sturdy roots were firmly set in the rich
57 Ibid., 51 58 Ibid., 49 51
soil of this tiny Paradise Garden of the Orient.”59 The epilogue reveals that Hewett holds a particularly romanticized and exoticized view of Okinawa: “The description of life on Okinawa, before and after the war, calm, serene, enduring, is to point up the comparison in which Okinawa is symbolic of the world as it might be; the war itself as representing the turmoil and indecision of the world today.” And “The Word of God”, if heeded by “our civilization of indifferent men,” might re-achieve the tranquility such as existed in “The Garden of Eden and the Paradise-like island of Okinawa.”60 It is quite symbolic that Hewett associates Okinawa with “The Garden of
Eden,” a genuine and sacred space from which Adam and Eve were expelled eternally for eating a forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge, a source of civilization. Just like the tropics in the
European imagination in the late Victorian era, Okinawa is described in Christian narratives as what Anne McClintock calls anachronistic and virgin space, in which “colonized peoples cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights, and white male patrimony is violently assured as the sexual and military insemination of an interior void.”61 The fact that the ground battle almost completely wiped out the existing social infrastructure also contributed to the representation of postwar Okinawa as a virgin space in the American imagination. On this “virgin” land, Hewett’s story narrates how “the seed of Christianity” was planted and eternally rooted, thanks to the sacrifice of a pious American soldier.
59 Ibid., 52 60 Ibid., 58. 61 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 30. 52
Countering Ancestor Worship and Yuta
The previous section shows that the Christian narratives on Okinawa were compatible with the military government’s separation policy in the way that both mobilized and reinforced the logic of liberation from Japanese imperialism and militarism. However, while the military government publicly promoted a revival of Ryukyu culture, missionaries saw the indigenous religion, ancestor worship and Shamanism conducted by yuta (Okinawan shamans) in particular, as the biggest obstacle to their evangelism. By demonizing the indigenous religion as
“inhibitory” beliefs and deeds, missionary accounts turned it into the object of the Christian reform.
Garland Evans Hopkins, U.S. Army Chaplain, observed in 1951 that ancestor worship in
Okinawa derived from the basic concept that “the ancestors had a peculiar relationship to the god and that, though human now, they would someday take their places as lesser figures in the pantheon.”62 It is only by receiving the approval of the ancestors that the dead are able to ascend to the afterlife. Failure to do that would cause misfortune, disaster, and trouble for those left behind.63 Yuta, mostly women, play a mediator’s role between the dead and living “in order to ensure that the living acted in ways that enabled the dead to rest in peace, and thus become kami
(gods).”64
In the prewar period, although State Shintoism was imposed on top of indigenous religions both legally in the Religious Organizations Law of 1939 and by custom, it does not
62 Garland Evans Hopkins, “Okinawa Religion,” International Review of Missions, Vol. 40. No. 2 (1951): 179-184, 182. 63 Matthew Allen, “The shaman hunts and the postwar revival and reinvention of Okinawan shamanism,” Japan Forum, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2017): 218-235. 64 Matayoshi Masaharu, Mabui to yuta no sekai (Naha: Gekkan Okinawasha, 1999), quoted in Allen, “The shaman hunts,” 224-225. 53
necessarily mean that Okinawan religion was completely oppressed. The Japanese state, through the Shrine Board, attempted to incorporate local religions into a formal association, by declaring that Okinawan indigenous gods were to be enlisted as guardians to defend the Japanese empire.65
While indigenous gods were accepted as long as they aligned with the Emperor, shamans were severely persecuted. The Japanese Ministry of the Interior introduced legislation to ban shamanism in the 1930s and 40s for the reason that they followed “uncivilized” practices and, more problematically for the government officials, they were perceived as threatening the imperial authority by influencing draft dodging. Accordingly, shaman hunting (yutagari) was conducted in Okinawa by the Japanese Special Higher Police, and more than 500 yuta were arrested by 1941.66
Missionaries’ criticism against Okinawan religion took various forms. While some regarded ancestor worship simply as “superstition” that should be eliminated, others blamed it for practical reasons. For example, one of the booklets published by Okinawa Baptist
Association describes Okinawan tombs, the most visible embodiment of ancestor worship in
Okinawa, as “economic burden on Okinawa’s land and people.” 67
As the pantheon of ancestors, Okinawan tombs, especially those of the upper class, tend to be massive and splendid and did in fact require large tracts of land. However, as a result of the bombing and fighting during the war and the postwar construction of military facilities, many tombs were destroyed or relocated. In some cases, as tombs remained inside the military bases, people had to gain special permission to go inside the bases to visit a grave. It is thus quite ironic
65 George H. Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island People (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2000), 450. 66 Allen, “The shaman hunts,” 222-223. 67 Okinawa Baptist Association, ed. Go Ye…Mark 16:15 (Okinawa: Muramatsu Printing Company, 1960), 5. 54
that the booklet criticizes the tomb as an “economic burden” on land. Perhaps, missionaries’ criticism of Okinawan tombs partly came from the fact that missionaries themselves had a hard time finding available land for churches upon their arrival in Okinawa, not because of Okinawan tombs, but because of U.S. military bases. Missionaries ended up using village halls or even former Shinto Shrines instead for meetings and services until they were finally able to find a location for a church.68
Missionaries’ criticism of ancestor worship also derived from the understanding that
Christianity is the rational ethos that fits with modern society, as opposed to ancestor worship that is “uncivilized,” “irrational,” and “primitive.” A booklet by the Okinawa Baptist Association produces contrasting images between ancestor worship and Christianity in this regard. The first part of the booklet describes Okinawan religion with some photos of women in traditional clothing worshipping ancestral tablets and the hearth (kamado) at home. They are juxtaposed by an ethnographic photo of a female farmer carrying a basket on her head with her baby on her back. The combination of those images together gives a reader an anachronistic impression of the
Okinawan religion and that it is women who bore the burden of practicing ancestor worship in domestic space as part of their mundane labor.
In contrast, the second part of the booklet lists the achievements of their evangelism accompanied by photos of a women’s participation in the church meeting, child education, and a modern building of a newly-established church. By contrasting Christian evangelism with ancestor worship, the booklet seems to put forward that Christianity brought modernization and democratization into Okinawan society, liberating women from a burden of ancestor worship.
68 C. Harold Rickard and Thomas Arinaga, “Rural Evangelism of the United Church of Christi in Okinawa,” Japan Christian Quarterly, vol. 30, No. 1 (1964): 17-27. 55
From a different angle, Edward E. Bollinger, above-mentioned Baptist missionary, also expresses his developmentalist view that Christianity fits better with modern industrial society:
Okinawan society has changed radically in the post-war years. The old communal and family systems are giving way to a new individualism which is characteristic of a society in which cities are growing and industry expanding. With this complex change in society, there is a call for a new moral dynamic which will help men be what they ought to be in all their newly discovered inter-personal relationships.69
In this way, Bollinger maintains that there should be a “new moral dynamic” suitable to the new society that entails a “new individualism.” We can see a clear link here between Bollinger’s view and the language of Modernization Theory, which was another guiding principle of U.S. Cold
War knowledge production (see Chapter Three). For example, in his search for an equivalent for
Max Weber’s notion of the “Protestant ethic” in Japanese religion, Robert Bellah presents a progressive narrative of associating modern industrial society with “salvation religions” as opposed to “traditionalistic religion”: “Whereas traditionalistic religion may give a blanket sanction to myriads of discrete customs and thus help to slow or prevent any social change, salvation religions may, by depriving these discrete customs of any sacred characters (in Weber’s phrase, “freeing the world of magic”) and substituting instead certain general non-situational maxims of ethical action, lead to a rationalization of behavior which can have important effects far beyond the sphere of religion itself.”70 In quite a similar way, Bollinger insisted that “there is a need to understand misfortune not as the punishment of the spirit imposed because of lack of ritual performance, but as a result of living in a world of nature and of human community where
69 Edward E. Bollinger, Reflections, East and West: Views from Okinawa 1978-1983 (Taipei: Dixon Press, publication date unidentified), 4. 70 Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), 8. 56
certain laws are in operation.”71 Here, it is obvious that Bollinger is criticizing ancestor worship and shamanism that associates trouble in the living world with the unsettled spirits, calling for
“disenchantment” from the “world of magic.”
However contrary to Bollinger’s view that the new Okinawan society would require a new moral principle, the demand for yuta actually rapidly increased after the war, as many people sought for the help of ritual advisors to settle the spirits of the war dead.72 In the Battle of
Okinawa, over one-fourth of the total civilian population died, and in many cases, their remains were not recovered nor identified. Since the U.S. military soon began leveling the ground after the war, for most people, who were taken to relocation camps and not allowed to return home, there was no way to find the remains of their family members and bury them properly.73 Under the circumstance, it was only yuta, people believed, who would be able to find the soul (mabui) of the unfortunate dead and see it off to the afterlife so that those who left behind could restore peaceful life. In this sense, dealing with the war dead with the help of yuta was not only the act of mourning but also directly related to the well-being of the living.74 Indeed, even today, yuta
71 Ibid. 72 Allen, “The shaman hunts,” 218. 73 Kitamura Tsuyoshi, Shisha tachi no sengoshi: Okinawa senseki wo meguru hitobito no kioku (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō 2009). 74 Many post-World War II Okinawan literary works narrate stories of reckoning with unsettled mabui in its relation to the war memories. Akutagawa laureate Medoruma Shun’s Mabuigumi is especially noteworthy. The fifty-year old protagonist, whose parents died during the war when he was child, suddenly losses his mabui. Separated from his body, his mabui floated to the beach, where it is revealed that his mother was actually killed there by a Japanese soldier (Medoruma Shun, Mabuigumi, Tokyo: Asahi-Shinmbunsha, 1999). The English translation of Mabuigumi is available in the edited volume, Living spirit: Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa, eds., Frank Steward and Katsunori Yamazato (Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011). In this way, mabui is often depicted as a symptom and/or a sort of messenger of untamed memories. Ōshiro Sadatoshi’s Nujifa depicts a journey in which a protagonist travels to Palau with a yuta to find mabui of his son who died on the island during the war, and brings this mabui back to Okinawa in order for his second son to recover from a prolonging disease. See Ōshiro Sadatoshi, “Nujifa,” printed in his collection, G-beigun yasen byōin ato atari (Tokyo: Jinbun Shokan, 2008). 57
have a strong influence over the various aspects of everyday lives, ranging widely from conducting rituals and diagnosing the causes of misfortune to dealing with family problems and healing mental and physical illness. As Matthew Allen points out, the widely-used expression
“isha hanbun, yuta hanbun (half doctor, half yuta)” well reflects how people in Okinawa see those shamans.75 Especially in the early occupation period, when there was a chronic shortage of medical practitioners and facilities, yuta played a crucial role in providing care for both the dead and living.
Christian missionaries saw such a view of life and death “irrational” and harshly blamed yuta. Jana Clark Jensen, a missionary of the Seventh-day Adventist Church who came to
Okinawa with her missionary husband, expresses her criticism (or even hatred) against yuta in the most striking way in her piece of missionary fiction. Adventure for God on Okinawa depicts the struggle of a young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kuniyoshi, who decided to abandon ancestor worship in order to accept the teaching of Christianity. At the beginning of the story, upon knowing about Christianity, the couple reflected on what they had thought about ancestor worship:
“I am not quite satisfied with a lot of things I have been taught,” Mr. Kuniyoshi confessed to his wife. “Our ancestor worship, for example. I somehow can’t feel that my father and mother are floating around in the spirit world as we’ve always been told. But I’ve never dared to voice any doubts. You know as well as I do what would happen if I did. I would like to see what the Bible says about such things. Maybe it can give us some new light.”76
75 Matthew Allen, Matthew, “Therapies of Resistance? Yuta, Help-seeking and Identity in Okinawa,” Critical Asian Studies 34:2 (2002): 221-242, 221. 76 Jona Clark Jensen, Adventure for God on Okinawa (Nampa: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1960), 53. 58
Mr. Kuniyoshi eventually decides to quit visiting the family tomb, as he was fully convinced that
“my ancestors are peacefully sleeping and that I have been foolish to be tied to the gifts of food and flowers that I have been taking to the tomb all these years. I am through with that.”77 As soon as the couple makes the decision, however, they were struck by one misfortune one after another. It was, in Jensen’s words, as if “he [the devil] did everything in his power to discourage them and bring doubts to their youthful minds.”78 The wife becomes ill with a strange malady, their little son is hit by a bus, and finally, the most frightening thing happens when Mrs.
Kuniyoshi’s distant aunt living in the northern part of the island visits the couple.79 When the aunt arrives at their house, the little house suddenly begins to shake, and the old aunt stiffens and appears to be in a trance. To the couple’s surprise, the aunt starts speaking fluently in Japanese, although she had never learned Japanese and had only ever communicated with the couple in the
Okinawan language (Uchinā-guchi). The aunt, who now seemed to be haunted by the ancestors, blamed the young couple for not visiting the family tomb: “Christianity is all right, but you must not neglect these other things. You must not fail to go to the family tomb. You must not fail to give honor to the spirits of your ancestors. Study Christianity if you must, but do these other things, too, and all will be well. The spirits will be well, and you will have no trouble.”80
The aunt thus oddly proposes a compromise plan that allows the couple to keep their faith in Christianity. Instead of accepting the plan, however, the couple makes a decision to break off their ties with the ancestors, regarding them as “the devil”: “We will not be fooled into what
77 Ibid., 54. 78 Ibid. 79 It should be noted that there is a place in the northern area of mainland Okinawa since the end of the war as a center of religious activities. Many yuta lived in this area and missionaries were aware of this fact. 80 Ibid., 56 59
the devil wants us to believe when we know the word of God is true. We have no fears for the future as long as we have the Bible to guide us.”81 Apparently, “the devil” appearing in the aunt from the northern part of Okinawa reflects and caricatures the image of yuta mediating between the living and dead. By depicting a yuta as “the devil” speaking in Japanese, the story incorporates the untamed figure as yuta into a familiar dichotomy between the Devil and God, enemies and friends, and Japanese and Americans. Okinawan people were to be rescued from the former by the guide of the latter, not the power of yuta.
As is shown in the story, Jensen was very critical about yuta, blaming them for disseminating “ignorance and superstition” among people. She also thought that they extorted enormous fees for “non-existent services.” However, it seems that Jensen’s harsh criticism towards yuta derived from her uneasiness for yuta having extraordinary strong authority in
Okinawan society, which was in sharp contrast with the expected role of women in a Victorian- style Christian family in (re)producing patriarchal heteronormativity. The latter half of Helen
Temple’s story, You Must Die, discussed in the previous section, shows a clear example of how
Christian missionaries expected Okinawan women to behave.
With the end of the war, the protagonist Shizu returned from Saipan to Okinawa with her family. She happily married a man chosen by her father, but her husband suddenly changed his attitude and began to drink heavily.82 Suffering from her husband’s violence, Shizu begins going to church. As her husband initially did not permit her to attend Christian meetings, Shizu was
81 Ibid., 57. 82 In this story, her husband suddenly changed because he heard the rumor that Shizu’s father has “bad blood.” He explodes in anger, saying to her that “the whole village is talking about it. That crippled hand. You claimed it was an accident. Now I know. It’s a disease. A horrible, malignant disease. You have contaminated all my children with this disease” (Temple, You Must Die, 33). Although he does not explicitly say the name of disease, what he said implies it is leprosy. Lepers were the target of harsh discrimination in Okinawa, and Christianity missionaries endeavored to improving the situation. 60
ready to give up her family to be baptized. In the end, her devotion to Christianity ultimately made her husband repent of what he had done to Shizu:
Her husband did not carry out his threat-perhaps fearing that he would be left to care for the children, or possibly admiring her a little, in secret, for this quiet courage that was so different from the storming, angry resistance he had been used to before. Whatever the reason, he let Shizu stay in the home, and as she continued to be a sweet and efficient wife, gradually his hostility subsided.”83
Thus, the ideal role of a woman in a Christian family is, the story tells, not to become an independent woman, but to stay home and serve as a “sweet and efficient” Christian wife and mother, who could guide her husband and children to the way to God. This is analogous to what missionaries promoted among local women in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. As
Hyaeweol Choi reveals, American missionary women, through their evangelical work, tried to disseminate the notion of a “professional housewife” that embodies a modern form of domesticity endorsed by scientific knowledge. Quite problematically, this naturally fit with
Korean male intellectuals’ neo-Confucianist logic that women’s “wisdom, sacrifice, and industriousness in the home would eventually benefit the nation through the fulfillment of their duties in child-rearing and supportive companionship for their husband.”84 As a result, Christian missionaries and Korean male intellectuals together reinforced patriarchal heteronormativity.
In the case of Okinawa, Christian missionary’s understanding of a woman as a bearer of scientific domesticity also resonated well with the aims of the New Life Movement (Shin seikatsu undō) in Okinawa in the 1950s and 60s. Initiated mainly by local housewives and teachers, the New Life Movement aimed at “improving the lives of people, spreading a healthy
83 Temple, 35 84 Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea, 36. 61
lifestyle by rooting out irrational customs, increasing productivity, and stabilizing the economy.”85 Ancestor worship and yuta were the central targets of their reform, as both had imposed an intolerable burden on women.86 In this way, the Christian narrative of liberation sometimes intimately connected with local people’s own call for a better life, which I will return to in the next chapter. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Christian narrative’s emphasis on “the search for health, wealth and happiness,” American missionaries became extremely powerless on the issue of dealing with actual military violence occurring in Okinawa. In the following section,
I elucidate some failed attempts by missionaries to mediate between the U.S. military and people of Okinawa.
Missionaries and the Military
Throughout the 1950s Okinawa witnessed a massive expansion of U.S. military bases, as the island increasingly became the “Keystone of the Pacific.” As Kensei Yoshida demonstrates, while the U.S.-occupied area had decreased to 30,500 acres by 1951 from its initial holding of 45,500 acres, it bounced back to 42,000 acres by early 1953, accounting for 14 percent of the total land area of the main island of Okinawa and 41 percent of the farmland.87
The militarization of the island necessarily entailed massive-scale land appropriation. With the
85 Shakai Fukushi Kyōgikai, Fukushi Shinbun, July 1, 1956.
86 Horiba Kiyoko carefully traces the women’s movement to establish a crematory as a way of rejecting the ritual of washing bones from the remains, traditionally a women’s duty. In so doing, Horiba shows how Okinawan women’s own call for liberation almost inevitably took the risk of falling into a trap of modernization and “Yamato-ka (Japanization).” See Horiba Kiyoko, Inaguya Nanabachi: Okinawa shosei-shi wo saguru (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1990). 87 Yoshida, 61. 62
enforcement of the Land Acquisition Procedure in 1953, the U.S. Army began to seize and occupy Okinawan farmland, by literally employing bayonets and bulldozers. Deprived of their land and the means of living, landowners and farmers organized the protests against the U.S. military rule throughout the island, which eventually culminated into the “Island-Wide Struggle
(Shimagurumi Tōsō).” (see Chapter Four).
Some American missionaries engaged directly and indirectly in the land struggle. Most famously, Otis W. Bell, Methodist and the first postwar missionary to arrive in Okinawa, clearly stated his concerns about the way in which the U.S. military forcibly requisitioned the land of
Okinawan citizens. His article, “Play Fair with Okinawans!” appeared in the January 20, 1954 issue of The Christian Century, reads:
If we are going to have a long-term right relationship with people of the Ryukyus we must have a sound foundation. No one – not even its own civilian employees think that the army has laid that foundation. The Ryukyuans are peaceful people and have shown a conciliatory spirit through these trying years. But the meekest of men, if goaded too long, will finally rise up to defend their rights.88
Given the fact that most Christian activities in the early postwar period were significantly supported by the occupation forces,89 it must have been difficult for missionaries to explicitly express any opposition to U.S. military activities in Okinawa. Bell’s article has largely been regarded as a Christian intervention that triggered public criticism against U.S. control of
Okinawa both in Japan and the United States. However, the detailed analysis of the article
88 Bell, Otis W. “Play Fair with Okinawans!,” The Christian Century, January 20, 1954. 89 William C. Heffner’s account shows that the Episcopal Church, where he worked for as a missionary, received quarters in the Naha area for the Church from the Army. Also, he wrote, the Army allowed the missionaries the use of military currency, PXs, commissaries and other military services that were available in Okinawa. They benefitted from these privileges in return to help military chaplains, whose number had been reduced since the outbreak of the Korean War. In William C. Heffner, “For Years on Okinawa.” 63
reveals that he was not opposed to the U.S. rule of Okinawa itself at all. His main claim is that the land problem “does not arise from the actual use of the land by the occupying forces,” but from the fact that Okinawans were not properly paid according to the loss of their land. As
Chapter Four argues in detail, the central issue of the “land problem” was not so much the amount of compensation per se as the fact that the practices and discourses surrounding the land seizure turned land of Okinawa into calculable commodities which facilitated what Randall
Williams refers to as “racist-colonial capitalism” under the rhetoric of “compensation.”90
Therefore, reducing the land problem into a matter of figures in effect legitimized and reinforced the system where military domination became normalized through quasi-Capitalist contracts between Okinawan landowners and the U.S. military. Indeed, the article ends with the following caution that implicitly endorsed the long-term American occupation of Okinawa: “Let the army run its bases, but let a civilian administration be appointed to deal with the people. A change must take place soon, else we will be occupying a rebellious Okinawa for years to come.”91
Similarly, the account by C. Harold Rickard, another leading Methodist missionary in occupied Okinawa, revealed how missionaries ultimately failed to question the legitimacy of
U.S. military domination over Okinawa. Reflecting on his experiences during his term in
Okinawa between 1951 and 1966, Rickard lists five reasons why the land problem “should be a concern of missionaries and the Church”:
(1) Basic principles of Christian ethics were being violated every day in the name of “protecting democracy” and “fighting Communism.”
90 Randall Williams, Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 100. For further discussion on Williams’ “appellative modes of recognition” and its applicability to the land seizure in Okinawa, see Chapter Four. 91 Bell, “Play Fair with Okinawans!” 77. 64
(2) The “reservoir of goodwill” in Okinawa toward the United States was drying up; friends were fast becoming enemies.
(3) As a rural missionary, I saw the way the U.S. land policy affected individual farmers, as well as people in the cities.
(4) The U.S. policy was having an adverse effect on the Christian work which the church was trying to do.
(5) The Okinawan people needed a voice to speak for them.92
Overall, Rickard blamed official U.S. policy for giving the Okinawan people “an entirely wrong impression” of the American ideal of democracy and freedom. As one example of how the land policy affected the work of the church, Rickard recalls that while he was trying to find land for agricultural missionary’s residence in northern Okinawa and a small church building, he learned of a rumor among the Okinawan people that “the U.S. Army plans to buy all of Okinawa, and the
Christian church is helping.”93
Rickard thus seemed to take part in solving the land problem by mediating among the
U.S. military, USCAR, and local leaders as a way to appeal to the people of Okinawa that missionaries were different from the U.S. military. In addition to contacting a representative of the United Nations and writing letters to The Christian Century, Rickard arranged a meeting with the USCAR officials and High Commissioner, Lt. General James E. Moore and Civil
Administrator of USCAR, Brig. General Walter M. Johnson to hear “the USCAR’s side of the story,” and to give Rickard’s “thoughts and suggestions on the problem, based on his daily life with Okinawans in their own communities.” Echoing above-mentioned Otis Bell, Rickard maintained at the meeting that “the Okinawans appreciate what the U.S. did for them and realize
92 C. Harold Rickard, “The Okinawa Land Problem,” Japan Christian Quarterly, vol. 37, No. 1 (1971): 4- 16, 5. 93 Ibid., 6 65
the need for military bases but they cannot understand why their helpful acts are nullified by the official attitude on the land problem, and why so much of the best farm land is taken,” and proposed that “the U.S. seek not just a legal solution to the problem, but a moral basis for a fair solution.”94 He learned from the meeting that “the two sides [U.S. military and Okinawan] were poles apart in their thinking and fundamental assumptions.”95 In the end, although he kept on sending the information to his co-workers in the United States and holding meetings with farmers in Iejima and Isahama (the major sites of the land seizure) Rickard was not able to take further actions because his regular work kept him busy. Upon his visit to Isahama the day after its forcible land seizure on July 19, 1955, Rickard witnessed vivid traces of military violence:
“While houses were being dismantled, the bulldozers were filling fields with stone and dirt while they made roads and prepared the ground for future construction. Stately old trees were uprooted by heavy machinery. Some of the villagers were crying, others were stoically silent while being
‘relocated.’”96 He then returned home “with a sense of helplessness and shame for this mockery of the much-publicized ‘Ryukyuan-American Friendship.’”
While having a sense of “helplessness and shame,” however, Rickard nonetheless expressed his satisfaction that “the concern of the Christian church for the everyday problems of people was demonstrated,” as he believed that it is important for missionaries and the Church to sometimes “speak out for social justice.”97 In this regard, missionaries served as what Donna
Alvah terms as “unofficial ambassadors,” who in projecting “American goodwill” exerted “soft- power influence” that both complemented and tempered the United States’ hard-power martial
94 Ibid., 9. 95 Rickard, “The Okinawa Land Problem,” 10. 96 Ibid., 11 97 Ibid., 16. 66
presence.98 However, it is not simply that the military violence would be balanced out by unofficial ambassadors’ “good” deeds. Rickard’s sense of “helplessness” in facing the U.S. military violence reveals that the Christian narrative of salvation, in essence, did not conflict with, but rather supplied the theological foundation to the military operations whose ultimate cause was universal justice.
Epilogue
In the end, the United States could not find Ngo Dinh Diem in Okinawa, a Christian leader who would be willing to enlist in the Cold War crusade against Communism. In part, this is because the simplistic dichotomy as Christianity vs. “godless” Communism could not be applied to the islands where people’s long-standing custom of ancestor worship and shamanism, experiences of Japanese imperialism, and finally, the postwar U.S. military violence unsettled the legitimacy of the “Supreme Being.” But more fundamentally, missionaries were not fully aware of the affinities, not conflict, between the Christian logic of salvation and militarism. Both would work together nicely to delineate the boundary between who are made to live and who are let die.
With this regard, it is worth reexamining the implication of St. Mark’s Gospel 16:15-16, an epigraph of this chapter, which has been one of the key biblical basis for missionary enterprises.
It reads, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” Therefore, the Christian evangelism is, in essence, not at all antithetical to militarism; instead, it would almost inevitably entail the power of the sword to condemn those who do not believe in Christian God, and as a consequence, to separate friends from enemies, those who should live from those who must die.
98 Donna Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946- 1965 (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 67
Even if American Christian leaders might not have achieved what they had expected, it does not necessarily mean that Christianity per se did not take root on the soil of Okinawa. On the contrary, some local Christians indeed became very influential in postwar Okinawa society but not in the way that American missionaries might have expected; they came to play a leading role in guiding the anti-war, anti-base movement. Among them was Ahagon Shōkō (1901-2002), known as the father of the anti-war movement in postwar Okinawa, who lead displaced farmers and landowners in Iejima to protest against forcible land seizure. While I offer a fuller explication of his life and activism in Chapter Four, I present here one of the pictures Ahagon took during the land struggle that captures well how the protest strategically deployed Christian words to accuse the U.S. military of its violence. On a hand-made cross raised on the seized land is a caution to American Christian soldiers: “We must fear to be punished by God. We are great friends as brothers and sisters. God always will be watching on our act. We live to do good without contracting against God, don’t we?”99 In this way, Ahagon appealed to the moral ethics of individual soldiers by implying the sovereign power of a Christian God.
Rev. Taira Osamu (1931- ) is another remarkable figure. Taira was born in 1931 on
Miyako Island and moved to Taiwan with his family in 1944. After converting to Christianity immediately following the war, Taira received theological education at Tokyo Union
Theological Seminary with a scholarship from the U.S. military. Upon returning to Okinawa,
Taira was appointed as a pastor of the United Church of Christ in Okinawa in Koza, the biggest camptown adjacent to Kadena U.S. Air Force Base in 1959. Taira became well known both within and beyond Okinawa for giving a following challenging prayer at the investiture of the new High Commissioner of USCAR, Ferdinand T. Unger on November 2, 1966:
99 Ahagon Shōkō, The Island Where People Live: A Pictorial Record by Ahagon Shōkō, trans. ed. C. Harold Rickard (Hong Kong: Christian Conference of Asia, 1989), 121. 68
Our dear God, we thank thee for this opportunity to come together before Thee at the investiture of our new High Commissioner. During the past 20 years wars and threats of wars have caused a situation which has caused many to be unnaturally separated from their homes and loved ones and has caused Okinawa to be separated from her Mother Country. Dear Lord, we earnestly pray that peace may come quickly to our world in order that the New High Commissioner might be the last High Commissioner it would be necessary to send us. However, we should not escape from the reality that we see at this ceremony.
Let us not escape from it, nor be crushed by it. Let us, on the contrary, accept the reality decisively and courageously. And let us work hopefully and fruitfully together with our High Commissioner to achieve our long-cherished goal of world peace and normal relationships between our nations.
Our Father, there are a million citizens in the Ryukyus that Thy beloved Son Jesus Christ died for. Make the new High Commissioner bow deeply before the dignity of the people for whom he has been sent and thus make him obey Thee.
Jesus Christ, with all authority in heaven and on earth, exercised His authority only in such a way as to wash people’s feet. Show our High Commissioner the same way exercising his authority.
Dear God, give us and the High Commissioner strength to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed. Give us courage to change the things that can and should be changed. And give us wisdom to distinguish one from the other.100
According to theologian Miyagi Mikio, Taira’s prayer embodies two seemingly contradictory tenets of his theology: his pacifistic and optimistic theology on the one hand, and “realist” view on the other. The former was developed through his wartime and post-World War II experiences in Miyako, Taiwan, Koza, and Nashville, Tennessee where he spent one year to study at the
George Peabody College for Teachers. During his stay in Nashville from 1965 to 1966, he attended a memorial service for the victims of the Civil Rights Movement and was particularly
100 The United Church of Christ in Japan ed., Nihon Kirisuto Kyōdan-shi shiryō shū dai 3 kan, Tokyo: The United Church of Christ in Japan, 1998, 426. The prayer was given both in Japanese and English. English translation by Taira Osamu. Quoted in Mikio Miyagi, “The Life and Theology of Reverend Osamu Taira: A Christian Response during the U.S. Administration of Okinawa,” ICU Communicative Culture 44 (2012): 31-82, 55-56. In this article, Miyagi presents very detailed and sophisticated analysis on the life of Taira Osamu and his prayer at the Unger’s investiture from the theological perspective. 69
touched by one hymn sung. Hearing the song, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,”101 Taira was convinced that the song truly belonged to those who had been oppressed and that “there should be a song for us, people in Okinawa, to appeal to God from bottom of our heart and soul.”102 Taira’s wish took shape in the above-cited prayer at the investiture.
Miyagi also points out the theological commonality between Taira and Martin Luther
King, Jr. in the way that both regarded “human dignity and value”, which are given equally and unconditionally by God, as the “possibility to bring solidarity among human beings […] including even a demonic person because he or she is also given a chance to be called and regenerated.”103 In Taira’s theological understanding, no one’s dignity should be sacrificed for the sake of others, because God already sacrificed himself for the dignity of all humankind:
“God, who is rich and mighty in heaven, became poor on the cross so that we became rich […] the Lord’s suffering is our salvation, his humiliation is our strength, and his hopelessness is our hope.”104 Taira’s speech act of asking God to make “the new High Commissioner bow deeply before the dignity of the people for whom he has been sent and thus make him obey thee” in effect cautioned USCAR, as well as US and Japanese governments, that the dignity of the people of Okinawa should not, and could not be sacrificed for the sake of others, as they were those who
“Thy beloved Son Jesus Christ Died for” just like everyone else in Japan and the United States.
101 “Nobody Knows that Trouble I’ve Seen” is a gospel song that became widely sung during the Civil Rights Movement. The lyrics read, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve been through/ Nobody knows my sorrow/ Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen/ Glory halleluiah!” 102 Taira Osamu, “Kōtō benmu kan shūnin shiki deno inori,” In Taira Osamu, Okinawa ni Kodawari Tsuzukete (Tokyo: Shinkyō shuppan, 1993), 95. 103 Miyagi, “The Life and Theology of Reverend Osamu Taira,” 46. 104 Taira, Okinawa ni kodawari tsuzukete, 156-157, translated and quoted by Miyagi, ibid., 46. The words are drawn from 2 Corinthians 8: 9, which reads, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” 70
Given his pacifist theological standpoint, it may sound abrupt that Taira soon turned to present a seemingly “realist” view in the prayer by saying that the people and the High
Commissioner should accept “the things that cannot be changed.” This is a quote from American
Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who had urged Christians to give up pacifism to fight against Nazism during World War II and continued to be influential in confronting Communism in the Cold War epistemology.105 Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer reads, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Miyagi concludes that unlike Niebuhr’s realist theology that pursued
“social justice” in a way as to protect the democracy of the Free World against Communist regimes, for Taira, social justice was defined as the recovery of the Okinawan people’s fundamental human rights and dignity.106
But questions remained unanswered as to what Taira thought were “the things that cannot be changed.” Why did Taira, while seeking radical transformation with his pacifist theology in mind, need to maintain the necessity of accepting the “reality” of life? Even if Taira quoted
Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, the words might have sounded quite differently when they were uttered in the context of occupied Okinawa. It seems to me that Taira’s “realism” resonated more with what Kano Masanao describes as “the anatomy of realities (genjitu no fuwake)”107 in referring to how Akutagawa laureate Ōshiro Tatsuhiro faced and depicted the reality of Okinawa.
As Chapter Two details, Ōshiro spent wartime in Shanghai and repatriated to Okinawa after
105 Shaffer, “The Christian Century,” 93. 106 Miyagi, “The Life and Theology of Reverend Osamu Taira,” 62. It should be noted here that Taira was (and still is) a strong advocate of Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, which states Japan’s renouncement of war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. Like many other Okinawan intellectuals, Taira was hoping for the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, not out of his wish for national unification, but because of the Japanese Constitution, which he thought could restore the human rights and dignity of people of Okinawa upon reversion. 107 Kano Masanao. Kano Masanao Shisō-shi Ronshū Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008), 280. 71
World War II to find his homeland completely destroyed. Analyzing Ōshiro’s novels, Kano notes that instead of calling for the reversion to Japan, Ōshiro chose to “stick to the realities
(fumitodomaru),” carefully examining Okinawa’s past relation to Japan and its present relation to the United States. The next chapter begins with a quote from one of Ōshiro’s novels, exploring in detail the contradiction of realities of life in occupied Okinawa where people struggled to promote life and provide care under the absolute presence of militarism.
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Chapter 2
Nursing Empire: Public Health Nurses in U.S.- Occupied Okinawa1
“I would not say that we should go back to the past now.” Yamanouchi said in a bit defensive manner. “But, I feel that what we see now is not ‘real (honmono).’” “What do you mean by ‘real’?” Kyōko asked, as she really could not understand what Yamanouchi meant. “Real is real. It’s hard to explain this.” Yamauchi replied laughingly, but soon continued with a serious look, “Do you think that Ōnaka family [whose land was taken away for base construction], Yaejima [a red-light district], grave robbers are real?” “It is what it is (shikata ga nai).” Tōyama Kyōko replied and continued. “What you said makes me feel as if it is not real that we are visiting patients’ homes every day. I cannot stand that what we are actually devoting ourselves is not real.”
— Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, Shiroi Kisetsu.2
Introduction
The Okinawan writer Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, who is well known for his Akutagawa Award- winning novel Cocktail Party, wrote yet another piece in 1955, which appeared serially in a local newspaper Ryūkyū Shimpō. Set in a camptown, Koza, the novel Shiroi Kisetsu (White Season) depicts various characters whose lives are closely connected to the U.S. military bases, including
1 Part of the earlier version of this chapter has been published as a book chapter: Asako Masubuchi, “Nursing the U.S. Occupation: Okinawan Public Health Nurses in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa,” in Hiroko Matsuda and Pedro Iacobelli eds., Rethinking Postwar Okinawa: Beyond American Occupation (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017): 21-38. 2 Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, Shiroi Kisetu. Originally appeared on Ryūkyū Shimpō and later reprinted as a book, Shiryoi Kisetsu (Tokyo: Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1976), 73. 73
prostitutes, a tuberculosis patient, A-sign bar hostesses, G.I.s, and a local politician who made money by running bars and shops in the camptown. Similar to the narrative structure of Cocktail
Party that consists of four main characters representing different positionalities in occupied
Okinawa, Shiroi Kisetsu features dialogues between the two contrasting protagonists: a doctor
Yamanouchi Shunsuke, who left Okinawa before the war with his family, graduated from a medical school in Nagasaki, and returned to the island after the war; and Tōyama Kyōko, a public health nurse working at the Koza public health center. Yamanouchi cannot accept the rapid transformation of Okinawa becoming an ostentatious camptown, lamenting that the military-centered economy is ruining what he thinks is the “real (honmono)” Okinawa. Most symbolically, Yamanouchi found that the land of his family’s grave had been sold and would be leveled to construct a nightclub. Tōyama, on the other hand, cannot help but face “the reality
(genjitsu)” of Okinawan society under the military occupation through her everyday duties as a public health nurse treating tuberculosis patients, administering venereal-disease control, and surveying mixed-race children. As the historian Kano Masanao insightfully points out, the dialogue format enabled Ōshiro to describe the ambivalent reality that people were experiencing in their everyday lives through the eyes of two medical practitioners, who try to diagnose and treat the social disease of U.S.-occupied Okinawan society.3
As historian Toriyama Atsushi meticulously illustrates, in the early 1950s, during which the story of Shiroi Kisetsu is set, people had to find ways to survive in the society with the emerging presence of U.S. military bases.4 With Article Three of the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed in 1951, Okinawa was legally put outside the jurisdiction of the Japanese Constitution,
3 Kano, Kano Masanao Shisō-shi Ronshū Vol. 3, 246. 4 Toriyama Atsushi, Okinawa Kichi Shakai no Kigen to Soukoku: 1945-1956 (Tokyo: Keisō-shobō, 2013), 41. 74
while Japan’s “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa was simultaneously recognized. The United
States gained “the right to exercise all and any powers of administration, legislation, and jurisdiction” over the territory and inhabitants of the Ryukyu Islands.5 The establishment of the
United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) in 1950 and the Government of the Ryukyu Islands (GRI) in 1952 made people realize that the U.S. control over the islands was not temporary, but would be the basis of their lives for years to come. Captured in this carceral space, Okinawan intellectuals, politicians, and entrepreneurs were divided on how to deal with “genjitsu (reality).” Some sought for an alternative reality outside of the carceral space, including the reversion to Japan and the independence of the Ryukyu Islands, while others cooperated with USCAR to utilize resources and aid provided mainly by the U.S. government in order to survive the reality of being under the military occupation.6 Indeed, it is within this context that the notion of “gentitsu (reality)” or “genjitsu-shugi (realism)” began to appear in
Okinawan discursive space frequently, to refer to those who lived with U.S. military bases, whether they wanted or not. The passage from Shiroi Kisetsu, which I have used as an epigraph of this chapter, epitomizes these conflicting views of “reality” in occupied Okinawa.
In the historiography of postwar Okinawa, as is often the case with the literature on colonialism, a binary framework of cooperation and resistance has been often used to describe the relationship between the people of Okinawa and the U.S. military. Toriyama Atsushi carefully distances himself from the dichotomy, criticizing that the framework itself has reproduced and deepened a divide within Okinawan society up until now. Instead, he focuses on how the logic of militarism shaped the reality of Okinawa, which continually forced people to
5 The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, Chapter II, Article 3, quoted in Hara, Cold War Frontiers,13. 6 Toriyama, Okinawa Kichi Shakai no Kigen to Soukoku, 143. 75
cooperate with the U.S. military.7 Drawing from Toriyama’s approach, this chapter explores the ambivalent reality of occupied Okinawa in which people’s longing for a better life was inevitably and intimately connected with militarism by carefully looking at the lived experiences of public health nurses in Okinawa.
In many ways, as Ōshiro Tatsuhiro aptly describes, public health nurses were the ones who embodied and observed the ambivalence of U.S.-occupied Okinawa in the most striking way. Introduced by USCAR initially for the purpose of protecting American soldiers from the unhealthy local environment and infectious diseases, public health nurses were expected to serve as a gatekeeper to control racial and imperial boundaries between local society and the U.S. military. They played a central role in disseminating the knowledge of hygiene, reforming the lives of Okinawans, and supervising the community.
As Marcos Cueto reveals, promoting international health increasingly became an important strategy for the United States to compete with the Soviet Union, as Cold War rhetoric shifts from direct military confrontation to an emphasis on science and technology.8 In addition, the notion of domesticity played a significant role in Cold War U.S. expansionism in Asia and the Pacific.9 Following Amy Kaplan’s notion of “manifest domesticity,” Koikari argues that women’s engagement in the project of homemaking in occupied Okinawa became a significant apparatus to “turn their homes into a focal site of imperial politics.”10 In this regard, public health nurses could be understood as a critical agent of American Cold War politics, as they played a decisive role in regulating the local population on the one hand, and protecting
7 Ibid., 9. 8 Marcos Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955-1975. (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 5. 9 Koikari, Cold War Encounters, 9. 10 Ibid., 7. 76
biomedical security of the military on the other. Furthermore, they were supposed to embody
American notions of liberalism and heteronormativity through nursing education and daily practices of providing care.
However, while acknowledging that the United States undoubtedly made a huge contribution to the improvement of medicine and public health in Okinawa, public health nurses were also keenly aware of the fundamental contradictions and incompleteness of the healthcare and welfare system in U.S.-occupied Okinawa. To put it differently, public health nurses were simultaneously products of U.S. military empire and observers of the militarized welfare.
Through the act of nursing, they could notice traces and symptoms of imperial and military violence that appeared as “diseases” on patients’ bodies. It was not only the presence of the U.S. military but also the past Japanese imperial violence that relentlessly caused physical and psychological pain in their bodies and lives.
In closely reading the records of public health nurses as well as physicians, social reformers, and patients, I have paid particular attention to their inter-imperial and trans-war experiences. Most of the first group of public health nurses were formerly educated in nursing or/and midwifery before and during the war in imperial Japan. Their prewar and wartime experience sometimes fit well with their postwar role as agents of the military empire. The chapter attempts to reveal how public health reforms under the U.S. military occupation did not replace, but rather reinforced prewar discourse on gender and colonial relation to Japan. At the same time, however, in moving between the two-biopolitical regimes, imperial Japan and U.S.
Cold War Empire, they could nonetheless carve out their own space. Especially in such a field as tuberculosis prevention, where USCAR did not place much emphasis, they managed to expand the area of public health services beyond the USCAR’s initial scope in order to meet the needs of
Okinawan people in general. To quote Michel de Certeau, their behavior can be described as
“tactics,” by which one can maneuver “within the enemy’s field of vision,” without leaving the
77
place where one has no choice but to live.11 While “strategies” distinguish and establish a place of power and distribute forces accordingly, “tactics” enable one to establish a degree of plurality and creativity, drawing unexpected results from one’s situation.12 The contrasting notion of
“strategies/ tactics” is particularly helpful to understand the interplay between USCAR’s biopolitical strategy, which put its emphasis on the management of space, and people’s everyday practices to make better lives under the military occupation. The notion of “tactics” also well resonated with what Ilana Feldman defines as “the politics of living,”13 which I discussed in the introduction, or what Neferti Tadiar calls “remaindered life.”14 By contextualizing the experiences of Okinawan public health nurses within Cold War U.S. geopolitics, the pages that follow explore public health in occupied Okinawa as the site where Okinawan medical practitioners played an ambivalent role in mediating the absolute power of the occupiers, while simultaneously enacting tactics to generate a more liveable “reality” under military domination.
The first section traces the development of the public health nurse system. In the second part, I focus on two major duties of public health nurses: venereal disease control and tuberculosis control. While the former was mostly done in camptowns, a buffer zone between military facilities and local society, the latter put a larger emphasis on social reform in isolated areas and small distant islands. By comparing these two distinct yet related projects, I argue that
USCAR tried to cover the islands with two concentric circles of public health practices with the
U.S. military facility at the core: the inner circle aimed to protect the security of the U.S.
11 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 32. 12 Ibid., 30. 13 Feldman, Ilana, “The Humanitarian Condition,” 157. 14 Neferti Tadiar, “Lifetimes in Becoming Human.” Keynote panel address, presented at “Angela Davis: Legacies in the Making,” Nov. 1. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2009, quoted in Espiritu, Body Counts. 78
military, whereas the outer circle enlists civil populations to promote hygiene reform. The chapter concludes by illustrating the limits and contradictions of the welfare and healthcare system that public health nurses were observing.
“Professionalization” of Okinawan Nurses
When the fierce twelve-week ground battle of Okinawa ended in June 1945, no medical facility was left standing. The battle also forced people to hide in caves and woods for long periods, making them suffer from dreadful sanitary environments and malnutrition. At the end of the war, malaria, filariasis and dengue fever were widespread, and approximately 35 percent of the population suffered from tuberculosis.15 To make matters worse, there was a severe shortage of medical practitioners, as many of them had been killed in the war or had gone to mainland
Japan. While there were 182 Okinawan doctors and dentists registered in Okinawa in 1941, only
64 doctors remained in the islands when the war was over.16 With the establishment of the U.S> military government in April 1945, a massive malaria eradication campaign began immediately with weekly DDT spraying of islanders’ houses and shelters.17 A civilian sanitation organization was also established, consisting of 272 teams of six men each, and distributed throughout the
Ryukyu Islands to administer insect control.18 As a result of the campaign, the number of malaria patients increasingly dropped from a high of over 160,000 cases in 1946 to less than 500 in
15 Fisch, Military Government In The Ryukyu Islands, 50. 16 Sakihara Seizō, Toume Kiyomi, and Ishikawa Rimiko. “Okinawa ni okeru sengo iryō-shi josetsu.” In Okinawa no Rekishi to Iryō-shi, ed. Ryūkyū daigaku igakubu fuzoku chiiki iryō kenkyū sentā (Fukuoka: Kyūshdaigaku Shuppankai, 1998), 57. 17 Fisch, Military Government, 50. 18 Annual Report: Military Government Activities the Ryukyus, 1947-48, 47, USCAR 0000106038, OPA. 79
1951.19 At the same time, the Military Government (MG) rushed to construct medical facilities.
Three central hospitals, five district hospitals, a mental hospital, a leper colony, and a tuberculosis sanatorium were completed by the end of 1948. In order to alleviate the shortage of medical practitioners, the MG also launched refresher courses to train general nurses at a station hospital.20
It should be noted here that all those medical and public health measures followed the international law of war, which aims to safeguard the fundamental human rights of civilians and combatants of the former enemy.21 And it was not until the establishment of USCAR in
December 1950 that the U.S. military clearly defined its own principle for public health and medicine in Okinawa. The directive of Headquarters Far East Command issued to establish
USCAR states the responsibility of the United States for improvement of the public health in
Okinawa as follows:
The establishment of a standard of living in the Ryukyu Islands comparable to that existing prior to the extent that GARIOA funds are available. However, improvement in the standard of living above that existing prior to the war will be accomplished through the efforts of the Ryukyuans themselves, without the assistance of United States appropriated funds. To the extent that health standards are now at levels above the prewar standards and such continued level is necessary for the health of United States personnel stationed in the Ryukyus, a higher level in this respect is authorized with available GARIOA funds for necessary imported materials [emphasis added].22
19 Robert T. Jensen, M.D., “Preventive Medicine and Health Care in the Ryukyu Islands (1945-1970),” USCAR record No. U80800713 B [hereafter “Jensen report”], Okinawa Prefectural Archives, 4. 20 Annual Report: Military Government Activities the Ryukyus, 1947-48, 43-46. 21 Nakano Ikuo, Beikoku Touchika Okinawa no Shakai to Hō (Tokyo: Senshū Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2005), 7. 22 Directive for United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, (b) Objectives, (1) a, 30 April 1952, quoted in Appendix No. 1, “Responsibility of U.S. for improvement of the public health,” USCAR 0000024258, OPA. 80
Therefore, unlike the occupation of Japan, where the emphasis on liberation and rehabilitation led to the systematic and large-scale reform of public health and welfare, the primary purpose of improving public health in Okinawa was to protect “the health of United States personnel stationed in the Ryukyus.” USCAR was concerned with the health standard of Okinawans only to the extent that it would harm the health of U.S. personnel, and left other public health and medical matters to the “efforts of the Ryukyuans themselves.” The U.S. military thus drew a biopolitical borderline on the Ryukyu Islands, separating those whose lives were worth protecting for the sake of maintaining the military from those whose lives not worth protecting. It was thus no surprise that the priority was given to such public health programs as venereal disease control in occupied Okinawa.23 Indeed, the spread of venereal diseases among soldiers especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 was the principal motivation for
USCAR to establish public health centers and public health nursing system. A venereal disease control program had been already initiated by then, but it was not enforced, merely encouraging those who were potentially infected to report to the nearest clinic for examination.24
On his visit to Okinawa in 1949, Crawford F. Sams, the head of the Public Health and
Welfare (PHW) Section of the occupation of Japan (GHQ/SCAP) ordered USCAR to establish public health centers to facilitate public health reforms with particular emphasis on venereal disease control.25A month after Sams’ visit, the first meeting of an arrangements committee for
23 Sugiyama, Senryōki no Iryokaikaku. 24 Annual Report: Military Government Activities the Ryukyus, 1947-48, 46. OPA. 25 Sugiyama, Senryoki no Iryokaikaku, 137. For the details about Sams and healthcare and welfare reform in occupied Japan, see also Takemae, Inside GHQ; Aldous and Suzuki, Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan. According to Aldous and Suzuki, Sams had a hard time to implement venereal disease control in Japan mostly due to the tensions between the U.S. military commanders and PHW officials. While the former claimed for the regular medical checks of prostitutes, the latter including Sams advocated an approach to utilize public health centers to reform the Japanese population as a whole (Aldous and Suzuki, Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 152). It might be worth considering how his frustrating experience in Japan made him intervene in VD control in Okinawa. 81
the establishment of health centers was held at the Central Hospital in Koza in January 1950.26
The committee consisted of both military and civilian medical officials. Koza had already begun to function as a camptown adjacent to Kadena Air Base by then, and the city increasingly became a hotbed of venereal disease. USCAR’s emphasis on venereal disease control as the primary duty of public health centers often irritated Okinawan doctors and nurses. For instance,
Inafuku Zenshi, the first head of Koza Health Center recalled in a commemorative roundtable discussion on the development of public health centers in Okinawa that the U.S. occupation government ordered him to only focus on venereal disease control even while he was faced by the menace of malaria and tuberculosis, which rapidly spread among residents in the early 1950s.
He felt helpless and furious with the U.S. military as he had to adhere to their priorities, leaving behind patients suffering from other diseases. 27 Other doctors pointed out how new public health centers were incomplete (mikansei) both physically and substantially. Despite their modern and outstanding appearance, the buildings were made out of scraps and cheap materials, which frequently leaked in the rain. They were also not equipped with adequate medical supplies to treat patients. Those shortcomings gave Okinawan doctors an impression that the U.S. military did not care about the lives of Okinawans, and only cared about venereal disease control.28
On July 1, 1951, public health centers opened in Naha, Koza, and Nago. The training of public health nurses began prior to the establishment of public health centers. At the end of 1949, a group of Okinawan nurse leaders was sent by USCAR to the Institute of Public Health in
Tokyo. While most of them had been trained as professional nurses under the pre-war Japanese medical system, their nursing licenses were suspended at the end of the war, forcing them to do
26 Okinawa-ken Kankyō Hokenbu Yobō-ka, ed., Okinawa Sengo no Hokenjo no Ayumi: Hokenjo 30 shuunen Kinenshi (Okinawa: Okinawa-ken Kankyō Hokenbu Yobō-ka, 1981), 20. 27 Ibid., 25. 28 Ibid. 82
new training to become public health nurses under the U.S. occupation.29 The Institute of Public
Health was established in 1938 through Rockefeller Foundation’s grants. The Rockefeller
Foundation also granted fellowships to Japanese doctors for graduate study in the United States in the 1920s. It was part of foundation’s large-scale projects in the early twentieth century to develop an American-style medical education system in the Far East, designed to counter the
German system that was predominant in the area at that time.30 In the postwar period, the
Institute of Public Health together with St. Luke’s Hospital, another Rockefeller-funded
Christian medical institution in Tokyo, became a vital retraining ground to co-opt Japanese and
Okinawan medical practitioners and administrators into an American biomedical regime.
Meanwhile, USCAR appointed two American nurses, Josephine Hobbs Kaser and Juanita
A. Watterworth, as counselors to introduce the public health nurse system to Okinawa. Before joining USCAR, Kaser had served as a U.S. Army nurse between 1944 and 1945 on the United
States Army Hospital Ship Marigold, which was stationed in the South Pacific. With the beginning of the occupation of Japan by the Allied Powers, Kaser was appointed as the administrator for the Japanese national training program for public health nurses held at the
Institute of Public Health.31 Watterworth graduated from the University of Oregon and came to
Japan under the occupation with her husband, who was an officer of the Military Government.
She was later recruited to serve as a public health nurse educator in the Shikoku Regional
Military Government Team, where she initiated the public health nurse stationing system with
29 Kinjō Taeko. Genten wo Mitsumete: Okinawa no Koushu Kango Jigyo (Okinawa: Okinawa Koronī Insatsu, 2001), 249-282. 30 Aya Takahashi, The Development of the Japanese Nursing Profession: Adopting and Adapting Western Influence (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 157. Most notable among the Rockefeller’s project in the Far East is the foundation and operation of the Peking Union Medical Collage in China. Please see Mary Brown Bullock, An American Transplant: the Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 31 The Josephine Hobbs Kaser Collection, 1942-74. University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. 83
the assistance of local doctors and nurses until 1949.32 As Jeanne M. Gleich-Anthony’s work reveals, the Military Government nurses played an important role not only in protecting the health of the U.S. troops but also in “democratizing” Japanese women through nursing education.33
With the guidance of Kaser and Watterworth, USCAR proclaimed ordinances No. 35 and
36 in 1951 to set up a public health nurse system. The ordinances introduced the title “kōshū eisei kangofu (Public Health Nurses)” for the first time and defined the duties and qualifications of public health nurses. In the same year, Kaser and Watterworth initiated courses to train public health nurses. Participants applied for the courses through the recommendation of the head nurses of municipal hospitals and clinics. Many women who had nursing licenses came from all over the islands in search of new job opportunities.34 In the course, participants were provided a theoretical education and practical training. After completing a one-year training course, they received their licenses and were posted to public health centers or substations in remote islands and areas. These training courses later transformed into an official curriculum with the establishment of a nursing school in 1955.
Upon graduating, nurses were dispatched to substations in remote islands and isolated areas and stationed in the rotation for approximately two to three years. By 1970, there were six public health centers and 66 substations, which covered the entire islands of the Ryukyu.35
Public health nurses usually had to promise that they would work in remote islands and areas for
32 Kimura Tetsuya. Chūzai Hokenfu no Jidai. Tokyo: Igaku-shoin, 2012, 50-53. 33 Jeanne M. Gleich-Anthony, Democratizing Women: American Women and the U.S. Occupation of Japan 1945-1951, Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio University, 2007. 34 Public Health Nurse in Okinawa, a documentary video clip made by Okinawa International Center, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) 2003, Record No. 0000012416, OPA. 35 Kinjō, Genten wo Mitsumete, 118. 84
a certain period upon graduating from a public health nursing school since most of them had received scholarships for nursing education.36 The stationing system, introduced by Watterworth, was designed to provide health care and nursing to the people in the community while living in the same area with the people, giving them an opportunity, enabled them to closely engage with the people and comprehend the community’s needs.37 Often the only medical authority in each assigned area, public health nurses had to cover a wide range of duties, including home visits to find targets of practical intervention, medical acts if necessary, treatment of patients with mental illnesses, maternal and child health care, and general hygiene education.
For most of the Okinawan nurses, the U.S.-promoted sense of “professionalism” in nursing education seemed to be one of the most significant divergences from the pre-war understanding of the field, in which nurses were subordinate to their superiors, doctors, organizations, and the state. At the same time, they were expected to embody the ideal of the
“good wife and wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo). Aya Takahashi argues that the Japanese term for public health nurses, “hokenfu,” which has been used in mainland Japan from the prewar period up to present, embodies the patriarchal relationship between doctors and nurses. The word hokenfu literally means “public health women,” and does not include a Chinese character referring either to “medicine” or “nurse.”38 Indeed, the Japanese Red Cross, the leading institution of Japanese nursing education since its establishment in 1887, adopted Florence
Nightingale as a perfect symbol of nursing because she was recognized not only as a pioneer of
36 Sumiko Ogawa,dir., Public Health Nurse in Okinawa [video clip], JICA Okinawa International Center, 2002. In OPA collection, Record No. 0000012416. 37 The public health nurse stationing system began in Japan in 1942, but reorganized under GHQ/SCAP in postwar period, maintained in a few prefectures including occupied Okinawa and Kōchi. See Ōmine Chieko, “Senryō-ki ni okonawareta hokenfu chūzai no seido hikaku nikansuru shiteki kō satsu,” Okinawa Kenritsu Kango Digaku Kiyō vol. 2 (February 2001): 108-116; Kimura Tetsuya. Chūzai Hokenfu no Jidai (Tokyo: Igaku-shoin, 2012). 38 Takahashi, The Development of the Japanese Nursing Profession, 157. 85
professional nursing but also as a great exemplar of “female virtues.”39 Furthermore, as the war progressed, the government began to train more women for military nursing to fulfill the shortage of medical practitioners on battlefields. This obscured the professional boundary of nursing, and degraded the work “from a career based on expertise into a female form of civilian contribution to the war effort with much less emphasis upon nursing skills and knowledge.”40
This tendency seems to be even stronger in Okinawa where nurses were seen more as assistant “girls” than professional medical practitioners. For example, Kinjō Kiyomatsu, one of the doctors from the prewar period, recalled that general doctors usually employed “ordinary girls” and trained them to be assistants in prewar Okinawa.41 This is partly because those who wanted to become professional nurses (and doctors) had to go outside of Okinawa since there were no facilities for medical education on the islands. In this regard, it is worth considering how the discourse of “Himeyuri Gakutotai (Himeyuri Students Bridage)” shaped postwar images of nurses in Okinawa. During the battle of Okinawa, more than 200 students and teachers from girls’ high schools were mobilized as nurses to serve in the army field hospital built in a cave, and most of them were eventually killed. Gendered narratives of Himeyuri have been produced and reproduced in novels and films around the image of Okinawan girls devotedly taking care of wounded Japanese soldiers and dying together for imperial Japan.
In occupied Okinawa, not only did Kaser and Watterworth teach Okinawan women medical knowledge but also attempted to nurture their confidence and pride as professional nurses. Symbolically, the term “kōshū eisei kangofu,” instead of “hokenfu,” was adopted in
39 Ibid., 161-163. 40 Ibid. 41 Kinjo, Kiyomatsu. Roundtable Discussion,“Kango no Ayumi.” In Ryūkyū Kango Kyōkai, ed., Ryūkyū Kangofu Kyōkai Souritu Jyusshūnen Kinenshi. Ryūkyū Kangofu Kyōkai (Okinawa: Ryūkyū Kango Kyōkai, 1961), 13. 86
occupied Okinawa, which is a direct translation from the English word “public health nurse” and emphasizes expertise for professional nurses. Yonahara Setsuko, one of the participants in the training course, vividly remembered that Kaser kept emphasizing the importance of
“professionalism”:
In order to get rid of traditional understandings that regarded nurses as subordinates to doctors, Kaser and Watterworth gave us as many opportunities as possible to express our own opinions in public, such as conferences or schools. This greatly contributed to promoting the social position of public health nurses and strengthening our pride and confidence as public health nurses.42
The distinctive uniform of public health nurses, brand-new white shirts and navy-blue two-piece suits with black culottes, also helped them to have a sense of professionalism and pride.43 Kaser collected funding from the American military wives’ associations such as the International
Women’s Club and made uniforms for public health nurses. Kinjō Taeko, the first director of the
Okinawan public health nurse school, recalled that Kaser insisted that the uniform must have a
“modern style” so “it can be easily recognized by anyone, it will make you feel authentic, and give you confidence as a public health nurse.”44 Together with the uniforms, bicycles were also donated by military wives and became invaluable vehicles especially for those nurses who were in charge of remote islands and areas to go around and visit homes in the community, since there was often little means of transportation. As most of the public health nurses never rode bicycles,
42 Yonahara Setuko, Okinawa no Hokenfu (Tokyo: Hoken Dojin-sha, 1983), 27. 43 Kinjō, Genten wo Mitsumete, 127-129. 44 Kinjō Taeko, interviewed in Public Health Nurse in Okinawa [video]. 87
they learned how to ride them every day after class at the public health nurse school.45 Beyond the mere practical purpose, bicycles became the symbol of public health nurses. Yonahara writes in regarding with bicycles: “When I rode a red bicycle onto the school grounds, children gathered around me with curious eyes. As women rarely rode bicycles in those days, bicycles were quite effective tools to catch people’s attention, publicizing the activities of public health nurses.”46
Thus, uniforms and bikes not only enhanced professional consciousness among public health nurses, but also symbolized their mobility, social authority, and female emancipation.
David Arnold and Erich DeWald’s discussion on the bicycle in colonial India and Vietnam helps us understand the implication of public health nurses’ using bikes in occupied Okinawa.
Regarding the bicycle as an “everyday technology,” Arnold and DeWald effectively illustrate how the breadth of its local adaptation and appropriation across lines of race, class, and gender produced a wide range of social uses and cultural understandings. Most relevant to our discussion here is the fact that the colonial government in India and Vietnam began putting soldiers and policemen on bicycles “in order to increase their mobility and effectiveness as agents of surveillance and control, or simply the transmission of messages and commands.”47
While the bicycle soon lost its status as a symbol of martial authority because of its vulnerability in times of riots and insurrection, it remained to be a site for the operations of “the everyday
45 Yona Fumiko, et. al. Roundatable Talk “Konsetto Jidai wo Kataru.” In Kōshū Eisei Kangofukai Kinenshi Henshū-iin eds., Okinawa no Kōshū Eisei Kango Jigyō 15 shūnen nen Kinenshi (Okinawa: Okinawa Kango Kyōkai Kōshū Kangofukai, 1967), 20-21. 46 Yonahara, Okinawa no Hokenfu, 20-21. 47 David Arnold and Erich DeWald, “Cycles of Empowerment? The Bicycle and Everyday Technology in Colonial India and Vietnam,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 53, issue 4 (2011): 971- 996, 989. 88
state” in such occasions such as collecting cycle taxes and regulating bicycle thefts.48 The visible presence of public health nurses in distinctive uniforms on bicycles certainly reminded people of the authoritative power of USCAR and the United States. Furthermore, just like how young
Vietnamese sporting men cultivated modern individual subjectivity through pedaling bicycles, public health nurses transformed themselves and their bodies through practicing and using the bikes in the public sphere.
It is also necessary to reconsider the “professionalization” of Okinawan women in the larger context of Cold War geopolitics. In analyzing Japanese women’s enfranchisement under the U.S. occupation, Lisa Yoneyama argues how the discourse of Japanese women being liberated by the United States from Japanese patriarchy and militarism was repeatedly deployed to prove Japan’s “successful rehabilitation” and justify U.S. Cold War expansionism.49
Transforming Okinawan women from “assistant girls” to “professional nurses” perfectly fits with this discourse. This partly explains why USCAR and US Department of the Army frequently sponsored training programs for general and public health nurses, which brought them across the
Asia-Pacific to mainland Japan, Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Hawaiʻi, and mainland United
States.50 Besides the practical purpose of outsourcing nursing education outside of occupied
Okinawa, technical training for Okinawan women across the Pacific certainly had an effect of promoting the image of the United States as a guardian of democracy and modern science and
48 Ibid., 991. 49 Lisa Yoneyama, “Liberation under Siege: U.S. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement. American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3 (September 2005): 885-910, 887. 50 Kōshū Eisei Kango Jigyō 15 shūnen nen Kinenshi, 28-29. During the occupation period (1945-1972), a total of 189 public health nurses were sent for technical training. 129 of them went to mainland Japan, whereas 60 nurses went to other areas. While training trips were mostly funded by USCAR and the U.S. government in the beginning of the occupation, international health organizations, including the WHO, began sponsoring public health nurses’ training abroad in the 1960s. The duration of each training program ranged from two weeks to a year, but most of them lasted for three months. 89
technology. Among various training programs, two programs are worth considering in this regard: the National Leader Program (NLP) in the mainland United States in the 1950s and programs sponsored by the Institute for Technical Interchange (ITI) at the East-West Center in
Hawaiʻi in the 1960s. I will discuss the details of the training programs in Hawaiʻi and their transpacific implications in the next chapter.
The National Leader Program in Okinawa began in 1950. It was organized by USCAR and US Department of the Army and sponsored by the Government Appropriation for Relief in
Occupied Area (GARIOA) Fund. A total of approximately 400 Okinawan professionals with higher education were dispatched to the United States as “national leaders” to observe advanced technology in their respective fields and were supposed to play central roles in developing
Okinawan society once they returned.51 However, as Tomiyama Kazumi argues, with a relatively short period (ninety days) and limited English proficiency among participants, the NLP was more centered around emphasizing the American way of life to Okinawan elites, in hopes that participants would contribute to promoting “Ryukyuan-American friendship.”52 Overall, NLP served not so much a technical training programs as a reeducation program especially for
Okinawan elites who were hostile to the United States.
Under the NLP, three Okinawan public health nurses were selected and sent to U.S. mainland in December 1956. For the first week in Washington D.C., the nurses took lectures on the basic knowledge of the United States, such as American customs, geography, religion, civil rights, and political and economic systems. They also watched such government films as “Meet your Federal Government,” “Hoover Dam,” and “America the Beautiful.” From D.C., they
51 Tomiyama Kazumi, “Ryūkyū Rettō Beikoku Minseifu ga Jisshi shita ‘Kokumin-Shidōin Keikaku’ nitsuite,” Okinawa-ken Kōbunshokan-kenkyū, No. 17 (2015): 19-27, 19. 52 Ibid., 20. 90
toured around the United States, stopping at Lansing, New York, Richmond, Atlanta, Santa Fe,
Los Angeles, and San Francisco to see medical institutions and meet the Okinawan community in each city. Grace Yokouchi, an interpreter who accompanied three nurses throughout their journey, wrote how the NLP trip changed those nurses in her letter to Col. Norman D. King,
Chief of Public Affairs Division, Department of the Army:
Perhaps, I should tell you that Kinjō said to one of the Americans, “Even if I didn’t learn anything, I have learned a lot about Americans that I didn’t know before, and I say with confidence that I can trust Americans completely. Skepticism I had about them, distrust or lack of complete confidence that were in me have been wiped away and I am going back to Okinawa ready to tell everybody that America and Americans are friends.”53
It should be noted here that Kinjō Taeko, mentioned in Yokouchi’s letter, had a deep distrust of
American nursing supervisors in the beginning. In her eulogy on Watterwoth, when she passed away in 1967, Kinjō revealed her initial dissatisfaction with Watterworth as follows:
We were dissatisfied with them [USCAR officials], as their public health policies were quite different from what had been administered on mainland Japan. Nevertheless, Mrs. Watterworth aggressively wielded her power to make us follow her. I was the one with the most defiant attitude, and I couldn't tell you how many times I rebutted her.54
In part, Kinjō’s antipathy against Watterworth came from her prewar and wartime career as a military nurse. Having received nursing education at the Japanese Red Cross, Kinjō was dispatched to the Japanese Red Cross Hospital at Dalian, Manchuria in 1938, and then moved to
Harbin to work for an army hospital until she returned to Okinawa in 1943. She seemed to have a strong sense of serving the state and the emperor during the war. Kinjō frankly confessed in her
53 Grace Yokouchi’s letter to Col. King, 20 March, 1957, USCAR Record No. 0000106026, OPA. 54 Kinjō, Genten wo Mitsumete, 267. 91
memoir that as a military nurse, she glorified the war just as soldiers did, and would have been willing to die for the emperor.55 In the postwar period, Kinjō was particularly sensitive to differences in the progress of public health in Japan and Okinawa. One year prior to the NLP trip, she wrote an article for a public-health-nurse publication upon returning from her one-year training at the Institute of Public Health in Tokyo. In the article, she deplored the apathy of
Okinawan society and claimed that while the United States did contribute to the improvement of public health in Okinawa, Okinawan public health nurses should now stop imitating America in order to reach the same standard of public health as that in mainland Japan.56
Given this background, Kinjō’s almost dramatic change in attitudes towards America through the NLP trip must have been recognized as one of the most successful cases of the
National Leader Program. In fact, upon returning to Okinawa, Kinjō was immediately appointed as the chief of Public Health Section in GRI, replacing Gushi Yae and Irei Toyoko, both of whom served as public health nurses from prewar period. Kimura Tetsuya speculates that
USCAR intended to facilitate public health reforms by appointing Kinjō, who now became not only familiar with American-style nursing but also embraced American liberalism.57 However, while Kinjō’s experience indeed embodies the “myth of liberation and rehabilitation,”58 as the rest of this chapter attempts to illustrate, public health nurses’ daily duties ironically exposed the absolute presence of militarism in occupied Okinawa.
55 Ibid., 257. 56 Ibid., 188. 57 Kimura, Chūzai Hokenfu no Jidai, 200-203. 58 Lisa Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice,” 58-59. 92
Drawing the Biopolitical Borderline: VD Control in Camptown
Like Okinawan doctors, public health nurses like Kinjo were keenly aware that the primary purpose for USCAR was to establish public health centers and the public health nurse system was not so much for the purpose of improving the public health of the Okinawan population as to protect the health of U.S. personnel.59 The gap in priority between USCAR officials and Okinawan medical practitioners often irritated the latter. In particular, public health nurses often expressed uncomfortable feelings towards venereal disease control. This is partly because of the fact that they noticed the menace of tuberculosis and malaria, which rapidly spread among the population in the 1950s as more immediate and significant public health threats than venereal disease. Indeed, among the home-visit cases that public health nurses dealt with in 1952, 46 percent were tuberculosis patients, and 20 percent were infectious disease patients, while VD patients only constituted 2.4 percent of the entire patient population.60
If we only focus on health centers in camptown areas, however, VD control indeed constituted a major health issue, especially during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The two hot wars brought much military personnel to Okinawa and triggered an economic boom in the island. The economic expansion triggered steady migration of Okinawans into the southern and central part of Okinawa, specifically the region bounded by Koza City and Kadena Air Base in the north and Naha City and Futenma Air Base in the south.61 As camptown became bigger, more and more VD cases were found. At the height of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, over
20,000 patients visited the VD clinic at Koza Health Center annually, and 90 percent of those
59 Ibid., 265. 60 Kinjō, Genten wo Mitsumete, 131. 61 Jensen report (USCAR), 12. 93
cases were related to the U.S. bases, either people working inside the bases, or regularly having contact with the U.S. military personnel. The two VD clinics, established in the Koza Health
Center and the Naha Health Center, were designed to provide patients with not only medical treatment but also hygiene education so that those patients would not further disseminate the disease.62 Public health nurses also engaged in regular medical check-ups of prostitutes in camptowns to find the source of infection, calling the duty “VD-gari (hunting venereal disease).”63
VD control involved the inspection of bars and restaurants in camptowns, which usually served as the meeting points between GIs and prostitutes. In the early 1950s, USCAR began to designate “off-limits” to the local establishments which did not meet the military criteria, while granting “A(approved) signs” to bars and shops that met the criteria. The certificate of “A sign” reads, “This establishment is approved and certified for the patronage of U.S. forces personnel. It is inspected by representatives of the U.S. forces and the Government of the Ryukyu Islands and complies with standards prescribed and the ordinances of the U.S. Civil Administration.”64
Although the “military criteria” was defined officially as to meet the food sanitation standards, as
Yamasaki Takashi points out, “the elimination of contact” between prostitutes and U.S. forces personnel was the crucial condition that allowed an establishment to obtain an “A-sign.”65 In
1957, the sanitary inspection of restaurants and bars was turned over to the GRI, and the A-sign
62 Uezu Haru, “Kichi no Machi ni Kakomarete,” in Okinawa no Kōshū Eisei Kango Jigyō 15 shūnen Kinenshi, 147.
63 Uehara Chiyo,“Beihei Tsurete VD-gari,” in Okinawa Sengo no Hokenjo no Ayumi,88.
64 Yamasaki Takashi, “USCAR Bunsho Kara Mita A-sign Seido to Off-limits,” Okinawa shiyakusho, Koza Bunka Box, Vol. 4 (2008). 65 Ibid., 38. 94
system was abandoned. However, by 1962, as sanitation conditions in public spaces deteriorated, the A-sign system was re-introduced, and a mass serology screening of all bar hostesses was carried out. Under the revised A-sign system, owners of bars and restaurants were responsible for paying the cost of treatment for VD-infected hostesses and prostitutes.66 The revision also required that all establishments be constructed of concrete and that separate flush-type latrines be provided for both sexes.67 Ishihara Masaie’s oral-history interviews with former A-sign bar owners show how much they were afraid of the sanitation inspection, which was often carried out without notice. Since they made their living solely by running bars, “off-limits” designation could be life-altering. What annoyed those owners the most was that the criteria of inspection were unclear, and some inspectors extorted bribes from them. Nevertheless, in order to pass the inspection, the owners made every effort to achieve a high standard of hygiene.68 In this way, the carrot-and-stick like system of “A-sign” and “off-limits” designation together coerced camptown workers to participate in reinforcing the biopolitical borderline set by the U.S. military.
The biopolitical borderline also produced a racial boundary within the U.S. military.
During the occupation, Koza was racially divided into “Kokujin-Gai” (the districts catering for black and Filipino soldiers) and “Hakujin-Gai” (the districts catering for white soldiers). All the restaurants, bars, tailors, beauty salons, and even schools in camptowns ran according to this racial divide. Sanitation inspection was no exception. Tomohiko Okiyama, a sanitation inspector worked at the Naha Health Center recalled, “When I was in charge of Kokujin-Gai, black soldiers surrounded me and complained that I was too strict in Kokujin-Gai and too lax in
66 Jesnsen report (USCAR),10. 67 USCAR High Commissioner report, 1962-63, 177. 68 Ishihara Masaie Seminar (Okinawa Kokusai Daigaku), ed., Sengo Koza ni Okeru Minshu Seikatsu to Ongaku Bunka (Okinawa: Ryokurindō Shoten, 1994), 270. 95
Hakujin-Gai. Even though it was never the case, they tried to make me correct the checklist”69 In this way, sanitary inspection in camptown also reinforced the racial division within the U.S. military, which in turn helped Okinawans to internalize racial categorization.
It is important to note here that the camptown was always a reminder of battlefields, and was the space in which people quite often encountered the traces and symptoms of military violence in their everyday life. Here again, Ishihara’s oral-history interviews vividly show how people’s lives in camptowns were closely entangled with the lives and deaths of soldiers especially during the Vietnam War. As the war intensified with the beginning of the bombing of the North Vietnam in 1965, the Kadena Aira Base was deployed with top-of-the-line fighters such as B52, F105D, and F4C. Fighters departed from the Kadena Air Base carried soldiers, dropped bombs over Vietnam, and brought back wounded soldiers and dead bodies to Okinawa.
As a consequence, Koza enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom by opening bars, strip clubs, and other components of the recreation industry to American soldiers.70 Above all, local
Okinawan rock bands became widely popular among soldiers. Among the leading Okinawan rock musicians were interracial children born between American GIs and Okinawan women, and often marginalized and described as “by-products of bases” (kichi no otoshigo). Influenced by rock and hippie culture brought by American personnel, their music provided a fleeting sense of liberation and excitement for soldiers, who were on their way to and back from the war in
Vietnam.71 With the escalation of the war, however, the musicians found that soldiers increasingly became scared of death and addicted to drugs and alcohol. A rock musician Kyan
Yukio recalls how young soldiers in the audience sometimes suddenly attacked him, punching
69 Okiyama Tomohiko, “Beihei to Kyōdō de Eisei Kensa,” in Okinawa Sengo no Hokenjo no Ayumi, 86. 70 Ishihara, Sengo Koza, 229. 71 Ibid., 316. 96
him and throwing beer bottles at him, while he was just playing music on the stage. He speculated that the drunken and drug-addicted soldiers might have mistaken him for Vietnamese enemies, whom they were going to be ordered to kill in battlefields soon: “I finally realized that they (American soldiers) were occupiers, after all, looking down on us (Okinawans) as the same yellow-face Orientals and second-class citizens (nitō kokumin) as the Vietnamese.”72 It should be noted here that “second-class citizens” was the term used in the Japanese Empire to racially distinguish naichi Japanese from Okinawans, Ainus, and colonized subjects. The violence in the midst of playing Rock reminded Kyan of not only the presence of racism and militarism accompanied by the American personnel but also Japanese imperialist gaze upon Okinawa.
Another musician made his living by washing corpses sent back from the battlefields in Vietnam, which ultimately caused him facial neuralgia.73 For those musicians in camptown, the war in
Vietnam was never something happening far away but intimately connected to their lives through the presence of wounded and dead soldiers.
While public health nurses served as the primary agent of VD control, they rarely talked about it in commemorative publications. If anything, they seem to dissociate themselves from prostitutes as much as possible. For instance, Chiyo Uehara, a public health nurse at the Naha
Health Center, described her shocking encounter with prostitutes. In 1952, she visited a brothel run by a thirty-year-old man.74 The room was packed with women sleeping on beds originally used in field hospitals. Some of them had lost every means to live but to sell their bodies, while others were brought without knowing anything about their planned fate. Uehara described prostitutes as “women who embody the defeat in war (haisen no on-na tachi),” expressing pent-
72 Ibid., 317. 73 Ibid., 304. 74 Uehara, “Beihei Tsurete VD-gari,” 88-90. 97
up anger both at U.S. soldiers who “bought” those women and at the Okinawan man who ran the brothel. Compared to male doctors who often described prostitutes as mere strangers or even betrayers, Uehara was obviously more sympathetic to the prostitutes. At the same time, however,
Uehara felt “full of shame and miserable” when she was waiting outside of the prostitutes’ room until G.I came out so that she could treat the prostitutes. Uehara further writes, “I could only put up with this kind of job because it was a part of my duties as a public health nurse.”75 In this way, public health nurses’ encounters with prostitutes redrew a boundary between those who could embody American liberalism and professionalism and those who “embodied the defeat in war.”76
In part, public health nurses’ ambivalent feelings towards prostitutes also had something to do with their prewar and wartime experience. Kinjō Taeko confessed in her memoir that she had concealed her status as a military nurse and worked as a kindergarten teacher instead while she was in a relocation camp in Okinawa right after the war, because “there were women in the camp who were brought from Korea by the Japanese army as `comfort women.’ They called themselves ‘nurses,’ taking care of the sick and the dead. I was scared to be regarded as the same kind of people as they were. ”77 Kinjō had a particularly strong sense of patriarchal femininity,
75 Ibid., 90. 76 Robert Kramm-Masaoka’s analysis on VD control in occupied Japan shows a similar observation on the tension between prostitutes and women activists. During the occupation period, Japanese police officers under the directive of the MP regularly conducted full-scale raids of brothels and red-light districts as part of VD control. Partly due to ambiguity of the VD prevention law, police often indiscriminately arrested every woman as a potential streetwalker and carrier of venereal disease, which provoked criticism among women activists. In protesting against indiscriminate roundups, Kramm argues, those women activists were actually reproducing the “older dichotomy of the innocent and respectable woman versus the lower-class, ‘ill-famed’ streetwalking sex worker who undermined military security, public health, and social stability.” In Robert Kramm-Masaoka, Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2017), 117. 77 Kinjō, Genten wo Mitsumete 261-262. 98
which had been developed in her prewar and wartime experience of serving for the Japanese Red
Cross as a military nurse. Respecting Florence Nightingale as her model nurse, she stated her motto in her autobiography and elsewhere, “to be a good nurse, you should be a good woman, and to be a good woman, you should be a good person.”78 By “a good woman”, Kinjo meant a woman who was approachable and who could deeply sympathize with others’ physical and mental suffering. With this sense of femininity in her mind, Kinjo was afraid of being mixed up with former “comfort women” who were providing care in the camp. Noriko Sekiguchi’s documentary film, Senso Daughters, Daughters of War (1989), gives us important clues to understanding Kinjo’s anxiety at the site of “comfort women.” The film features a former military nurse, who revealed her prolonging discomfort at facing “comfort women.” Near the end of the war, she was told to train those women to be nursing aides so that they could return home officially. In the interview, while expressing her indifference to “comfort women” by saying that
“they just sprang up from nowhere,” she also said, “I told those women “I can never forgive you for what you’ve done. But I suppose it’s all you were capable of.” The encounters with and training of “comfort women” therefore simultaneously threatened and reinforced military nurses’ patriarchal femininity that had been developed through their profession.
But we also need to consider “who” would mistake Kinjō for former “comfort women.”
Her fear should be further explored in relation to an ambiguous boundary between Okinawans and the colonized population in the Japanese imperial formation. Quoting Higa Schunchō’s experience when he was mistaken for Koreans by vigilantes during the Massacre of Koreans following the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, Tomiyama Ichirō argues that Okinawans, who were suspended in a liminal space between the colonized and “formal” Japanese citizens, were always exposed to imminent violence, where they would constantly be interrogated about whether or not
78 Ibid., 180. 99
they were “true” Japanese, and would killed if they failed to prove it.79 The sovereign power of the Japanese imperial state eventually did kill more than ten thousand Okinawans at war’s end.
Some of them were killed by the Japanese army as they were mistaken for spies, while others were made to kill themselves to prove that they were loyal imperial subjects. Placed in a carceral space such as a relocation camp, Kinjō could not help but keep silent and hide her professional status as a nurse in order not to be exposed to previous formations of imperial violence again that would immediately racialize and sexualize her body, just as US soldiers did to Okinawan musicians in Koza.
According to Katherine Moon, in U.S. military occupations VD control played a significant role not only in regulating physical contact between the U.S. personnel and local prostitutes but also in promoting gendered notions of femininity and masculinity, weakness and strength, and conquered and conqueror.80 VD control in occupied Okinawa delineates the boundary not only between occupier and occupied, but also among Okinawan women. It became the site in which public health nurses were enlisted to join the American Cold War project of liberation and rehabilitation. That is, by through embodying bourgeois heterofemininity in their profession, which was actually compatible well with prewar Japanese imperial modernity, nurses could distance themselves from one of its most embodied contradictions – unfree prostitutes.81
To put it differently, only by performing bourgeois heterofemininity could they possibly avoid from being mistaken for haisen no on’na-tachi.
79 Tomiyama Ichirō, Hajimari no chi: Fanon no Rinshō (Tokyo: Hōsei Digaku Shuppankyoku, 2018), 39. 80 Katherine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 81 I am indebted to Lynn Ly for theorizing nurses’ embodiment of heterofemininity in relation to the U.S. Cold War project. 100
Building Disciplinary Network
If the venereal disease control drew the gendered and racialized biopolitical borderline in camptowns, tuberculosis prevention, another major duty of public health nurses, worked as a technology of discipline targeted at the population in occupied Okinawa at large.
The history of tuberculosis in Okinawa well reflects the process in which Okinawa was incorporated into Japanese capitalist society as a major supplier of migrant workers. Okinawa had initially been a tuberculosis-free area, and it was not until the middle of the Meiji period that tuberculosis became a major health concern in Okinawa. In Japan tuberculosis was becoming increasingly widespread by the beginning of the twentieth century due to rapid modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. In particular, poor working conditions in the textile and spinning industry triggered high rates of infection among factory workers, many of who worked away from home and lived together in dormitories. The TB mortality rate in Japan peaked in
1918 (257.1 out of 100,000) but rose again with the beginning of the Asia-Pacific War.82 In contrast, the TB mortality rate in Okinawa began to sharply increase in the early 1920s, exceeding that of Japan from 1923 and 1943 and peaked around 1936.83 This trend was closely related to the movement of people to and from Okinawa. During the 1920s, a large number of
Okinawans left the islands for the mainland of Japan to look for work as a result of the collapse of sugar prices in 1920 and the subsequent economic stagnation in Okinawa. Towards the end of the 1920s, however, many of those migrant workers, female factory workers, in particular, ended
82 For the details about a history of tuberculosis in Japan, see William Johnson, The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Cambridge: The Council of East Asian Studies at Harvard University, 1995). 83 Shinjō Masaki, et.al., “Sengo Okinawa ni okeru kekkaku taisaku ni kansuru chōsa kenkyū,” Minzoku Eisei, vol. 63, no. 6 (1997): 362-373, 363-364. 101
up not being able to find jobs in Japan or became sick and returned to Okinawa.84 Those returnees became the primary source of TB infection. This also explains why the TB morbidity rate was unusually higher in rural areas than in urban areas in Okinawa from 1925 to 1930, as migrant workers were often from rural areas and they brought back tuberculosis with them to their hometowns. The Okinawan medical doctor, Kinjō Kiyomatsu further speculates that
Panama hat production, which began in Okinawa around 1907 and flourished in the 1920s, also contributed to the spread of tuberculosis, as it employed returning workers and made them work very close together in groups.85 Okinawa never fell below the third highest TB mortality of all prefectures in prewar Japan.
The U.S. Military Government launched the tuberculosis prevention program relatively early stage of the occupation for fear of the spread of infection. In 1948, a sanatorium was built in Kin made out of military quonsets as the first TB hospital in postwar Okinawa. USCAR conducted a survey in 1951 to comprehend the number of tuberculosis patients among
Okinawans, and organized a conference on tuberculosis in the Far East in 1953, inviting medical professionals from Japan, Korea, and Okinawa.86 Most notably, in December 1951, Dr. Gilberto
S. Pesquera was invited to Okinawa and stayed for a total period of over 17 months to investigate the conditions of tuberculosis in the islands. Pesquera’s research was part of the Scientific
Investigations in the Ryukyu Islands Program (SIRI), which the Pacific Science Board (PSB) of the National Academy of Science – National Research Council carried out for the Department of the Army since 1951. The PSB was convened in 1946 as a new committee of the National
84 Tomiyama Ichirō, Kindai Nihon Shakai to “Okinawa-jin”: “Nihon-jin” ni narutoiukoto (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai hyōronsha, 1990), 98. 85 Kinjō Kiyomatsu, Okinawa ni okeru Kekkaku no Rekishi-teki Ronkyū (Okinawa: Ryūkyū Kekkaku Yobōkai, 1962). 86 Ibid., 23. 102
Research Council to orchestrate the scientific investigations of America’s Pacific possessions. As
Gary Kroll rightly points out, the PSB was called upon to aid in preparing for U.S. military occupation in the Micronesian Trust Territory through charting and cataloging America’s new postwar Pacific Frontier.87 In response to the request from USCAR, PSB sent a total of 26 researchers to Okinawa from 1951 to 1953 to collect scientific data of the Ryukyu Islands.
Among the scientists who led the SIRI project were Harold Jefferson Coolidge, zoologist and a founding director of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; George P. Murdock, anthropologist of Yale University; and historian George H. Kerr, who wrote Okinawa: the
History of an Island People, the first comprehensive historical work on Okinawa written in
English, based on his research under the SIRI project.
Born in Puerto Rico in 1893, Pesquera served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Europe during World War II and continued to stay in the Military Government in Germany after the war to engage in tuberculosis prevention programs. Upon returning to the United States, he had worked for the medical department of the Metropolitan Insurance Company until he was recalled to active duty and assigned to the Public Health and Welfare Department of USCAR for the SIRI program. In Okinawa, with the assistance of local doctors such as Tōyama Kenichi and Izumi
Genshun, Pesquera first launched a group tuberculosis examination across the islands.
Consequently, it was estimated that 7,000 to 8,000 active tuberculosis cases (approximately 1 percent of the total population) existed in Okinawa when approximately 120 beds were available for TB patients. In his preliminary report submitted to PSB on July 31, 1952, Pesquera made recommendations based on his survey that became the basis for tuberculosis prevention in
87 Gary Kroll, “The Pacific Science Board in Micronesia: Science, Government, and Conservation on the Post-War Pacific Frontier,” Minerva, Vol. 41, No.1 (2003): 25-46, 26-27. For the details about the PSB and its relation to SIRI project, see Sensui Hidekazu, “SIRI project: Beigun tōchika no Ryūkyū rettō niokeru chishi kenkyū,” Kanagawa Daigaku, Kokusai Keiei Kenkyū-jo, Purojekuto Paper, vol. 16 (March 2008): 3-121. 103
occupied Okinawa. In addition to the establishment and development of sanatoriums, Pesquera’s recommendations emphasized hygiene education for the general public and training of local doctors and nurses in public health and tuberculosis control. For the former, Pesquera argues that a lack of education had led to the persistence of superstition and “inhibitory customs.” For example, he writes, “the members of the household eat with chopsticks out of a central container or from a serving container with no thought of the communicability of disease.” He also points out a particular style of child-rearing as the source of infection:
Children are loved by these people and are constantly in direct contact with the mother, either strapped to her back or in her arms, regardless of the state of her health. This primitively intimate type of family-living accounts, in part, for the high incidence and for the apparent high tolerance of tuberculosis to the disease.”88
In this way, Pesquera’s recommendations were not solely about tuberculosis prevention, but more widely involved the reforms of social habits and behavior in the local population. At the same time, Pesquera acquainted local medical practitioners with Western methods of control and treatment. Most notably, the use of X-rays was introduced to conduct surveys for incidence, morbidity, and early detection of the curable active cases. Pesquera further suggested that
USCAR send more doctors and medical personnel to Hawaiʻi or the United States to study medicine and public health. This policy of education and supervision was in clear contrast with tuberculosis programs on mainland Japan, where TB prevention had relied heavily on the isolation of TB patients and BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guerin) vaccination, especially after mass vaccination was made compulsory in 1948.89 In Okinawa, BCG vaccination was introduced in
88 Pesquera, Lt. Col. G. B., “Preliminary Report on the Program in Tuberculosis among the Ryukyuans,” USCAR records No. 0000000859, OPA. 89 The compulsory mass BCG vaccination was adopted in prewar Japan in 1943 under the total war regime, but was suspended under the U.S. occupation. 104
1965 but was limited to medical practitioners, those who were in regular contact with TB patients, and junior high school students. It was not until the reversion that mass BCG vaccination officially began in Okinawa. Science historian Tsuneishi Keiichi argues that the
United States conducted, in effect, a randomized controlled trial with occupied Okinawa as a control group to test the efficacy of BCG.90 In fact, Pesquera himself was keenly aware of the differences in the TB-prevention system between Japan and Okinawa and even suggested that the comparison could be utilized for scientific research:
The work in the Ryukyu could be considered as a research project. It should prove of great value in ascertaining the efficacy of this system – i.e. education, case-finding, isolation and treatment, versus that based primarily on prevention by BCG as practiced in other areas of this theater – Japan and Korea – where ancestry, culture and education are essentially the same.91
Indeed, USCAR apparently hesitated to introduce BCG vaccination to Okinawa. When a specialist was invited from Japan to give a talk about BCG at the above-mentioned international conference on tuberculosis held in Okinawa in 1953, USCAR suddenly demanded him to change his topic and talk about chemotherapy instead.92 In part, USCAR’s opposition to BCG reflected the long-standing controversy over this vaccine among scientists, politicians, and healthcare workers. Although the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of BCG were particularly appealing to organizations like the WHO and UNICEF to promote postwar international health, its safety and efficacy had been always questioned among scientists. Skepticism to BCG prevailed in such countries like Britain and the United States. Furthermore, the mass BCG vaccination was also
90 Tsuneishi Keiichi, Kekkaku to Nihonjin: Iryō Seisaku wo Kenshō suru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2011), 138. 91 Pesquera, “The Program in Tuberculosis Control Among the Ryukyuans,” USCAR12955, National Diet Library, Kensei shiryōshitsu (hereafter NDL), Tokyo. 92 Hara, Minoru, in a round-table discussion, “Okinawaken-shibu 30-nen no ayumi,” In Kekkaku Yobou- kai 30-shūnen Kinenshi (kekkaku yobou-kai okinawaken shibu 1986), 71. 105
criticized in countries like postcolonial India as it only deals with the biomedical aspect of tuberculosis, leaving behind the fundamental causes of rampant TB, that is, poverty.93 In Japan, right before Pesquera’s visit to Okinawa, the so-called “BCG controversy” arose as the Science
Council of Japan submitted an opinion letter to the Ministry of Health and Welfare in October
1951 to ask for the reconsideration of compulsory BCG vaccination.94
And yet, Pesquera’s implicit suggestion to use Okinawa as a testing ground should be understood and problematized in relation to the fact that the United States actually used its unincorporated territories as “laboratories” for medical and scientific research at that time. In addition to numerous nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Islands, Laura Briggs’ work reveals how U.S. scientists and the pharmaceutical companies utilized Puerto Rico literally as a laboratory to conduct the clinical trials of birth control pills.95 Furthermore, as the Tuskegee
Institute’s syphilis experiments targeted at black men epitomizes, racialized bodies in the United
States were also easily employed as the object of biomedical research. Thus, just like old empires, American scientific development went hand in hand with imperialism and racism, which continuously produced precarious “others” that could be used as “guinea pigs.” Arguably, in the case of occupied Okinawa, Japan’s residual sovereignty ultimately made it difficult for
American scientists to freely use the islands for either nuclear testing or clinical trials. However,
SIRI project itself signifies that the intensive scientific research in Okinawa, including
93 Christian W. McMillen and Niels Brimnes, “Medical Modernization and Medical Nationalism: Resistance to Mass Tuberculosis Vaccination in Postcolonial India, 1948-1944,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (1)(2010): 180-209. 94 Toida, Ichiro, “BCG no rekishi: kako no kenkyu kara nani wo manabu bekika,” Shiryō to Tenbō No. 48 (2004.1), 34. 95 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 106
Pesquera’s study on tuberculosis, did take part in producing America’s Cold War knowledge about the Pacific.
We should also consider what vaccination would mean for U.S. military management as a whole. Examining the public health programs in the Philippines under the U.S. colonial regime,
Warwick Anderson illustrates that the public health authorities of the American colonial government shifted its emphasis from vaccination (“a technology of security”) to the reform of pathological social habits of natives (“a technology of drill”) in the early twentieth century. This is when hygiene “moves out of the enclave or garrison, and becomes an operational constituent of the military management of colonial populations, a specified part of the new strategy of colonial warfare.”96 As hygiene becomes the new technology of control, Anderson argues, immunization may appear to nullify the need for discipline. Anderson also offers an interesting observation that even when vaccines were available in the Philippines, they were used primarily for state officers and military personnel, whereas not only natives but also the expatriate
American civilians were excluded from biological protection and were disciplined with intensive hygiene reform. This combination of “a technology of security” for the military and “a technology of drill” for natives and civilians became a basic principle of postwar U.S. governance in occupied territories to fortify the U.S. military bases in these places. In occupied
Okinawa too, while education for the masses is emphasized in Pesquera’s report, it is also strongly recommended and gave the highest priority to further a TB screening program for
“indigenous personnel” working for the U.S. occupation units. In particular, the report continues, the category of “domestics and food-handlers” that consisted of one-third of the total native personnel should be strictly and urgently monitored. For, according to Pesquera, the high
96 Warwick Anderson, “Immunization and Hygiene in the Colonial Philippines,” Journal of History and Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 62, No. 1 (2006): 1-20,13. 107
incidence of tuberculosis among Army personnel was found in this area of occupation, in which more frequent and intimate contacts were expected between military personnel and the indigenous population.97 In sum, keeping the garrison free from diseases by reinforcing the boundary between the military and natives comes first and, “covering new territory with a network of disciplinary structures” comes second.98
Public health nurses played a central role in supervising TB patients and disseminating public health and medical knowledge among the people. Although the TB mortality rate in
Okinawa had gradually decreased after the war, it began increasing again in the early 1950s,99 mainly due to the massive influx of construction workers from mainland Japan to build military bases following the outbreak of the Korean War. The establishment of another tuberculosis sanatorium, the Ryukyu Research Institute of Tuberculosis, in Itoman in 1952 added 60 more beds to the Kin sanatorium that had 120 beds but were far from adequate for the 20,000 TB patients found in 1954. Due to a chronic shortage of beds, patients were allowed to stay in the hospital only for six months regardless of the state of their illness.100 Priority for hospitalization was given to those who were expected to recover within a shorter period of time or with a chest surgery, whereas most of the TB patients, and severe cases, in particular, stayed at home to have homecare under the supervision of public health nurses. The sanatoriums served more as a training center for TB patients to acquaint themselves with tuberculosis and hygiene information, in general, to prepare for in-home care after leaving the hospital. In fact, the sanatorium in
97 Pesquera, “Preliminary Report on the Program in Tuberculosis among the Ryukyuans,” 9. 98 Anderson, “Immunization and Hygiene in the Colonial Philippines,” 12. 99 In contrast, in mainland Japan, TB mortality rate dramatically decreased in the same period, mostly thanks to introduction of effective medicine, most notably, streptomycin.
100 Jensen report. 108
Itoman was called “kekkaku daigaku (a university of tuberculosis)” because of the facility’s emphasis on education.101
Homecare as a central tuberculosis policy made the role of public health nurses all the more critical in supervising patients and the local community as a whole. The number of TB cases that public health nurses dealt with began rapidly increasing in 1956 when the tuberculosis prevention law was enacted. In 1960, 90 percent of public health nurses’ works were related to tuberculosis. People even called them “kekkaku kōkan (tuberculosis public health nurses),” associating public health nurses with the image of tuberculosis. So much so that, public health nurses in their distinctive uniform — white shirts and navy-blue two-piece suits — were often unwelcome in the community, since their visits would reveal the presence of tuberculosis in a family.102 As Pesquera observed in his report, and as was often the case in other regions in East
Asia, tuberculosis had been long considered a disgrace to the family in Okinawa, and thus the existence of TB patients in a family was kept secret as much as possible.103 Under these circumstances, it became crucial for public health nurses to grasp public health conditions of the community meticulously.
However, as inexperienced nurses who just graduated from school and transferred to an unfamiliar place by alone, young public health nurses often felt at a loss. For one thing, people still knew little about public health nurses and the role of their activities in the community at first. It can often be seen in commemorative publications that people quite often confused public health nurses with insurance saleswomen and expelled them from their house because the
101 Teruya Kanzen, “Omoide,” in Okinawakenritsu Itoman Ryouyoujo 30-shūnen kinenshi (Okinawakenritsu Itoman Ryōyōjo, 1982), 38.
102 Yonahara, Okinawa no Hokenfu, 32. 103 Pesquera, “Preliminary Report on the Program in Tuberculosis among the Ryukyuans,” 4. 109
Japanese words “health” and “insurance” are both pronounced hoken.104 In addition, governmental officials in the municipal offices, in which most of the stationed public health nurses set up their offices, were not always cooperative with them at first, since these officials concentrated their efforts on reconstructing social infrastructure of a local community, paying less attention to the improvement of public health.105 Without any support, public health nurses took various measures to grasp the substantive situations of the community and find targets of medical intervention accordingly. Shinzato Ayako, for example, did so by observing the kitchens and settings during home-visiting.106 Other nurses watched children playing on the streets - if they spotted someone with scabies or eczema, they visited their homes to check if their family had any disease. Regular visits to a local cooperative store (kyōdō baiten), usually the only market available in isolated areas, to gather information of the residents were among the nurses’ improvised tactics.107
Public health nurses also worked closely with local organizations in the community such as women’s associations, youth associations, and the police not only to find and supervise TB patients but also to promote hygiene education. Indeed, local women’s associations (fujinkai) - many of which were established right after the war and later incorporated into the umbrella organization, the Okinawa Fujin Rengōkai (Okinawa Women’s Federation, OWF)108 - played a
104 Teruya Zensuke, “Hokenjo Souritu Jyusshūnen wo mukaete no Zakkan.” In Hokenjo Jyūnen no Ayumi (Okinawa: Ryūkyū Seifu Kōseikyoku Kōshū Eisei-ka, 1962), 46-47. 105 Yonahara, Okinawa no Hokenfu, 15. 106 Shinzato Ayako, interviewed in Public Health Nurse in Okinawa (video). 107 Yonahara, Okinawa no Hokenfu, 16. 108 It is worth mentioning here that USCAR saw Okinawa Women’s Federation (OWF) as a useful apparatus which could provide much assistance to US operations in Okinawa for the purpose of Cold War U.S. empire-building, especially because OWF was regarded as “less infiltrated by leftists than any other mass organization in the Ryukyus” (Koikari, Cold War Encounters, 36). 110
significant role in helping public health nurses to promote public health activities such as the cleanup campaign, improvement of kitchens and bathrooms, and maternal and child healthcare.109 The assistance of women’s associations was crucial in tuberculosis prevention that broadly required the reform of customs. Public health nurses often had troubles in educating those patients who devoted themselves in religion or followed the instruction of yuta (shamans) and rejected Western medicine. In one case, for example, a patient was found to drink snake wine every day, as he heard that it would work for tuberculosis.110 In order to get rid of these
“inhibitory customs,” nurses mobilized the press and radio channels, organized exhibits, public lectures, training films for groups, and produced workshops for child health education. Radio was another important tool to disseminate the knowledge of tuberculosis. It should be noted here that those talks and leaflets often used rhetoric that depicted tuberculosis as the enemy of human beings and society at large. For example, one of the scripts used by public health nurses for local radio broadcasting reads: “Tuberculosis is the enemy of human beings that would destroy the happiness of family life and hinder prosperity of society. Let’s cooperate with everyone
(“minna”) to prevent rampant TB.”111 Therefore, it was not only the patients’ family but also the community that was expected to take responsibility to keep an eye on others to prevent tuberculosis.
In fact, community building was exactly what American supervisors expected public health nurses to achieve in each assigned area. Barbara Shay, another public health nurse
109 Higa Yoshiko, “Mura fujinkai to hokenfu,” in Okinawaken no Kōshūeiseikangofu Jigyō 30 shūnen kinenshi (Okinawaken: Nihon Kango Kyōkai Hokenfubukai Okinawakenshibu, 1982). 110 Ibid., 19-20. 111 Radio announcement in 1964, GRI record No. R00085521B, OPA. 111
consultant for USCAR, elaborated on the role of public health nurses in the community in the following remarks presented at the graduation ceremony of the public health nursing school:
Never forget that public health is not only your problem but the community’s problem. Let it be a common objective of both yourselves and the community. Use constantly your enthusiasm and good relationships with people as a means of inspiring them toward improvement in the health and welfare of their community and the Ryukyus.112
Following the lesson of American nurses, Kinjō Taeko similarly stressed the importance for public health nurses to serve the community (chi-iki), suggesting that public health nurses build stable and close relationships with local administrators and social workers so that they could look over the community as a whole.113 USCAR officials greatly benefitted from this system, as they could grasp the actual situation of local communities, especially in remote islands and areas where the USCAR officials were not physically present. Through tuberculosis prevention, public health nurses were enlisted to create a network of disciplinary structures in the local community that could cover all over the Ryukyu Islands thanks to the stationing system (see a map below).
It might be worth mentioning here that the history of field nursing programs in the United
States can be traced back to the 1930s during the era of so-called “Indian New Deal,” when public health nurses consisting primarily of educated white women from the East Coast were dispatched to the Indian reservations for health education targeted native women. The movement emphasized, “personal hygiene and individual responsibility at the expense of socio-economic causes of illness.”114 Field nurses were therefore employed to promote assimilation of the
112 USCAR News Release March 10, 1962, USCAR44115-44119, NDL. 113 Kinjō, Genten wo Mitsumete, 28. 114 Christen L. Hancock, “Healthy Vocations: Field Nursing and Religious Overtones of Public Health,” Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Fall 2011): 113-137, 113. Quoting nursing historian Barbara Melosh, Christen Hancock also points out that the ideology of public health blurred the lines between religion and health by using “rhetoric that recalled the traditional conception of nursing as Christian service,” with public health nursing manuals referring to the program of health education as “the gospel of 112
indigenous population as a vehicle of imperial expansion, transforming the colonized into the object of rescue and rehabilitation. In the case of occupied Okinawa, however, it was not white
American women but Okinawan women themselves, most of whom survived the recent war, who were assigned to provide care and health education to the people in the community. As will be discussed later, their sincere sense of vocation for bringing better a life to Okinawan communities ultimately enabled them to be not mere agents of the U.S. Empire, but observers of the contradiction of militarized welfare.
Drawing “Ryukyu” in the Fight Against Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis control as a disciplinary regime extended to the realm of cultural production. Kabira Chōshin (1909-1998), the chief of the Ryukyu Anti-Tuberculosis
Association, saw the anti-TB campaign as a way to restore the Ryukyu culture and reconstruct his homeland of Okinawa. It should be noted beforehand, however, as scholars have revealed,
USCAR took a basic stance to politically and culturally separate Okinawa from Japan, and instead encouraged people to develop their own distinct identity as the “Ryukyuans.” The policy was directly derived from the General Douglas MacArthur’s official comments in June 1947 insisting that the Okinawans were not Japanese and had been despised by the Japanese, and therefore, the Japanese government would not oppose America’s occupation of Okinawa.115
USCAR thus regarded the encouragement of “Ryukyuan identity” as a way to legitimize and facilitate American control over the islands and pacify people’s resentment against military
health” and the counsel of right living” (Barbara Melosh, “The Physician’s Hand:” Work, Culture, and Conflict in American Nursing, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982, 124. Quoted in Hancock, “Healthy Vocations,” 114). This example well illustrates how hygiene reform often accompanies Christian discourse of salvation, and together played a pivotal role in empire building. 115 Miyazato, Nichibei kankei to Okinawa, 29. 113
violence. Although it was not until 1961 when High Commissioner Paul W. Caraway took office that Okinawa’s “separation from Japan” became the established policy, USCAR launched various cultural and education programs since the beginning of the occupation that aimed to
“rediscover” and preserve the indigenous cultural heritage of Okinawa. While being aware of
USCAR’s political intention behind the cultural policy to some extent, Okinawan elites and artists attempted to utilize the opportunity to develop an ethnic identity and restore culture from the Ryukyu Kingdom.
Examining the career of Kabira Chōshin gives us an important clue to explore the relationship between the cultural restoration movement and the tuberculosis prevention campaign in occupied Okinawa. Kabira was a leading figure in establishing a foundation for postwar media and cultural industry in Okinawa and promoting Ryukyuan culture through newspapers, radio, theater, and arts. It is worth mentioning here that Kabira’s enthusiasm for cultural restoration has its roots in his early days in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial regime. Born in Shuri, Okinawa in 1908, Kabira moved to Taiwan with his family in 1924. After graduating from Taihoku High
School, he worked for a Japanese newspaper company, Taiwan Shinbun, and radio station as a writer, director, and producer. While working, he took classes in anthropology and folklore at
Taihoku Imperial University and also began studying Okinawan history and culture with scholars and artists from Japan and Okinawa. In the meanwhile, Kabira served in the intelligence office of the General-Governor of Taiwan starting in 1940, engaging in promoting assimilation policies under the Japanese Empire. Paradoxically, it was this experience that made Kabira realize once again the uniqueness and value of indigenous culture in not only Okinawa but also Taiwan.116
Not only did he try to promote the knowledge of Ryukyu culture, but also insisted that
116 Kabira Chōshin, “Watashi no sengoshi,” In Watashi no Sengoshi vol.6 (Okinawa: Okinawa taimusu sha 1982), 181-183. 114
Taiwanese folk art should be protected. Upon repatriating from Taiwan to Okinawa in 1946, he was immediately appointed to chair of the cultural and art division of the Okinawa Civilian
Administration (the predecessor of the GRI). He later took the position of a chief of the first broadcasting station in Okinawa, Voice of Ryukyu (AKAR) in 1949. As Saiki Kimiko and Sera
Toshikazu point out, Kabira’s trans-war experiences in colonial Taiwan and U.S.-occupied
Okinawa embodies the continuity that many of Okinawan elites experienced from the prewar
Japanese colonial regime to the postwar American military occupation.
Okinawan elites, doctors and teachers in particular, who received education in prewar
Japan and/or colonial Taiwan and returned to Okinawa under the U.S. control had a strong influence over not only medicine but also, politics, the economy, and culture in postwar
Okinawa. In fact, as Asano Toyomi reveals, the American consulate in Taipei well recognized that Okinawan elites in Taiwan excelled in guiding a group of Okinawan migrants, who would then become influential leaders once they repatriated to Okinawa.117 This assessment was partly based on American officials’ observation on Okinawan leaders’ initiative in organizing the association, Okinawa Dōkyō-kai Rengōkai (The association of people from Okinawa in Taiwan), which aimed to aid Okinawan migrants and evacuates who were left behind in Taiwan in early postwar period while waiting for repatriation to Okinawa.118 At the end of the war, approximately 30,000 Okinawans were in Taiwan, including evacuates from Miyako and
117 Asano Toyomi, “Nanyō Guntō karano Okinawajin Hikiage to Sai-ijūwo meguru Senzen to Sengo,” in Asano, ed., Nanyō Guntō to Teikoku Shin-chitsujo (Tokyo: Jigakusha Shuppan, 2007), 312. 118 Sensui Hidekazu. “Zai Taiwan Okinawajin Hikiage ni kansuru Oboegaki,” Kanagawa Daigaku, Kokusai Keiei Kenkyū-jo, Project Paper vol. 25 (March 2012): 1-25. According to Sensui, George H. Kerr, who was then a vice American consul in Taipei, highly appreciated the efforts of Dōkyō-kai in reducing social and welfare problems surrounding Okinawans in Taiwan. Matayoshi Seikiyo also provides detailed analysis on relationship between Okinawa and Taiwan since the beginning of the Meiji period. See Matayoshi Seikiyo, Nihon Shokuminchi-ka no Taiwan to Okinawa (Okinawa: Aki Shobō, 1990). 115
Yaeyama, repatriates from South Pacific Mandate, and those who served for the Japanese imperial army during the war.119 While Japanese soldiers and civilians were soon repatriated to
Japan, most of the Okinawans who wished to return to Okinawa were detained in Taiwan as the
U.S. military initially did not allow the entry of Japanese and Okinawans to mainland Okinawa until October 1946. Kabira Chōshin was one of the founding members of Dōkyō-kai, playing a central role in facilitating negotiation with the U.S. occupation government for prompt repatriation. Arguably, it was through this repatriation campaign that Kabira became familiar with U.S. officials. According to Hiroko Matsuda, while Okinawan migrants in Taiwan had not had a strong sense of ethnic identity in the prewar period, repatriation campaign made them form the first island-wide Okinawan community as Dōkyō-kai and develop their collective identity as
Okinawan repatriates.120 As I will also show in the next chapter, the Okinawan diaspora dispersed across the world was directly influenced by the politically and economically unstable status of postwar Okinawa. And ironically, it is this precarity that urged the Okinawan diaspora to unite together across boundaries to help each other to survive and save their homeland,
Okinawa. In the case of Kabira, his prewar ambivalent positionality as an Okinawan official serving the General-Governor of Japanese Imperial State in Taiwan -- simultaneously colonizer and colonized--, further led him to lead cultural restoration initiatives in postwar Okinawa.121
Kabira’s involvement in the anti-tuberculosis campaign began in 1952 when the chief of the public health and welfare department and a nursing advisor of USCAR visited him. They asked Kabira to utilize a broadcasting station to publicize the newly-established public health
119 Matsuda Hiroko. “Shokuminchi Taiwan kara Beigun Tōchika Okinawa heno ‘Kikan.” Bunka Jinruigaku, Vol. 80, No.4 (March 2016): 549-568, 557. 120 Ibid., 558. 121 Saiki Kimiko and Sera Toshikazu, “Kabira Chōshin ni kansuru ichikōsatsu,” Fukuyamashiritsu daigaku kyōikugakubu kenkyū kiyō, vol. 3 (2015): 29-38, 35-36. 116
centers that were still unfamiliar to most of the people at that time. Hearing that, Kabira started a radio program entitled “Rajio Dokutā (radio doctor)” and invited physicians from public health centers to talk about medicine and public health. In the following year, when the Ryukyuan Anti-
Tuberculosis Association (hereafter, RATBA) was established in response to Pesquera’s recommendation, Kabira became a member of the board of directors. In part, this was because his brother-in-law, Tōyama Kenichi, then the chief of Naha Public Health Center, was working closely with Pesquera in promoting tuberculosis prevention. In this way, in Kabira’s words,
“public health centers and a broadcasting station became closely connected like a family.”122
In 1954, as he resigned as the chief of AKAR, Kabira became the secretary-general of
RATBA and initiated various anti-TB programs on a large scale, making the maximum use of his connection with the media industry and USCAR.123 Most notable among them was the production and sale of originally-designed “anti-TB (kekkaku yobō)” seals in order to raise money to keep RATBA in operation. Inspired by the successful sale of Christmas seals in
Denmark in 1904, the Christmas Seal Campaign as part of tuberculosis prevention became widespread all over the world, beginning in the United States in 1907 and in Japan in 1925. In occupied Okinawa, it began in 1952 when Pesquera requested that the National Tuberculosis
Association in the United States donate Christmas seals to raise funds for the foundation of
RATBA. From the second year onward until the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, Kabira asked local painters to design anti-TB seals with Ryukyuan culture as its subject matter.
122 Kabira, Chōshin, “Rajio de ‘hokenjo’ wo PR,” In Okinawa Sengo no Hokenjo no Ayumi, 198. 123 For example, Kabira visited Hawaiʻi in 1955 to survey anti-TB campaign there and give talk on straitened situation in Okinawa, which eventually led to a relief campaign in Honolulu to send X-ray cars to Okinawa. Hawaiʻi served as an important reference for Kabira to pursue anti-TB campaign in Okinawa. In “Kakkaku yobōkai Okinawa-ken shibu no oitachi to jigyō,” in Ryũkyū kekakku yobōkai Okinawa shibu 25-nen no ayumi (Okinawa: Kekkaku yobō kai Okinawa shibu 1978), 11.
117
Those painters included Adaniya Masayoshi, Tamahana Seikichi, Ashimine Kanemasa,
Ōshiro Koya, Yamamoto Keiichi and Kabira Chōshin himself. In fact, all of them, except Kabira, formed an artist commune called “Nishimui Bijutsu-mura” in Shuri and lived together in the early postwar period. Modeled after Montparnasse, the Nishimui village attracted Okinawan artists; many of them were trained in Western painting techniques at the Tokyo Fine Arts School in prewar Japan and returned to Okinawa. In Nishimui, they made their living by painting portraits, landscapes, and Christmas cards for military personnel. While selling their works to
Americans, those painters looked for “local color” to express particularities of Okinawan arts.
Because of this, the artists of Nishimui were not always cooperative with Kabira, who served as a sort of liaison to bridge American military personnel and Okinawan artists. They were particularly concerned that Kabira was commercializing Ryukyuan arts and catering to the
USCAR customers too much.124
Kabira’s enthusiasm to incorporate cultural restoration into the anti-TB campaign can be also found in monthly periodicals he started in 1954, entitled, the Ryukyu Kekkaku Yobōkai
Shinbun (a newspaper of the Ryukyu Anti-Tuberculosis Association). While conveying the views of doctors and physicians, however, most of the issues spent one out of three full pages on the topic of Ryōyō Bungei (the literature in a sanatorium) to introduce novels and poems mostly written by TB patients, doctors, and nurses. Kabira himself wrote a series of essays “Omoide no
Naha (Naha Memoir)” that depicts landscape, customs, and folklore of “good old Okinawa” that had been lost through the postwar reconstruction and modernization. The following excerpt from an editorial column exemplifies what he tried to envision through tuberculosis prevention:
124 Saiki Kimiko and Kikuyama Satoru, “Sengo Okinawa ni okeru bijutsu no seiritsu to tennkai katei: Kabira Chōshin tono kakawari wo tegakarini,” Fukuyamashiritsu daigaku kyōikugakubu kenkyū kiyō, vil. 5 (2017): 35-53, 48. 118
There is only one path for us to go forward: through eradicating tuberculosis from our homeland (kyōdo), make our society bright and healthy even if we might be poor, establish a cultural nation (bunka kokka) as “Shurei no Kuni (守禮之邦 a country that follows courtesy),”125 and make our homeland happy and cheerful. It is our earnest wish to pursue this goal that makes us raising our voice and clamoring for anti- tuberculosis.126
Thus, Kabira saw tuberculosis not simply as a disease that affects the human body, but as something that was ruining society, the nation, and “our homeland.” Tuberculosis was once called “bōkoku byō (a nation-ruining disease) in prewar Japan because people were afraid that rampant tuberculosis in those days would hinder the economic development and modernization of the country. For Kabira, however, what should be restored and protected was not Japan, but
“Shurei no Kuni” that embodied Ryukyu culture and history. Quite problematically, however,
Kabira’s enthusiasm to restore the Ryukyu culture through anti-TB campaigns was quite well compatible with USCAR’s policy to separate Okinawa from Japan. Indeed, the images of anti-
TB seals were frequently used on the cover page of Konnichi no Ryukyu, a propaganda magazine published by USCAR which aimed to promote the positive image of the United States as a nation of democracy, freedom, and modernity. It is thus no surprise that anti-TB seals appeared on the cover of these magazines, as the seals not only represented American generosity to restore and preserve indigenous culture but also promoted the image of USCAR as a guardian of Okinawan people in the fight against tuberculosis.
125 “守禮之邦” is the symbolic phrase that broadly refers to Okinawa, but more specifically the Ryukyu Kingdom. The phrase was inscribed on the top of the main gate to the Shuri Castle, a political and cultural center of the Ryukyu Kingdom. It was intended to show envoys from Min and Qing China that the Ryukyu Kingdom was not a militaristic country, but a peaceful country in which people strictly followed courtesy. 126 Kabira Chōshin, “Kekkaku yobō shūkan no igi,” Kekkaku Yobōkai Shinbun, March 27, 1956. 119
For someone like Kabira, who repatriated from colonial Taiwan to Okinawa only to find his homeland completely destroyed and rapidly changing into islands of military bases after the war, the slogan of “stamping out “bōkoku-byō (a nation-ruining disease)” must have been quite a powerful statement, especially because the term bōkoku also refers to the state of statelessness. In many ways, Kabira’s longing for Shurei no Kuni overlaps with the image of Dr. Yamanouchi in
Ōshiro’s Shiroki Kisetsu. Just like Kabira and Yamanouchi, who returned from Taiwan and
Japan respectively to Okinawa after the war, Ōshiro himself repatriated from Shanghai to
Okinawa only to find his homeland completely destroyed. In a postscript of Shiroki Kisetsu,
Ōshiro revealed that he took the title of the novel from a poem by Yamanoguchi Baku. In the poem, “Kaiwa (conversation),” boku (I) pictures beautiful scenery of his homeland from far away, perhaps in Tokyo, in responding to the question, “Okuni-wa (where are you from)? ”
[…]
What is the south (nanpō)? The woman asked.
The south is south. The area of ever-lasting summer, floating on the deep blue ocean. Ryūzetsuran (Agave), Deigo (Erythina variegate), Adan (banana), a papaya etc.
Those plants live together, bathing in the Brightening Season (Shiroi Kisetsu)
But, is that my country (boku no kuni ka?), on which people are whispering, “They are not Japanese,” or “Do they speak Japanese?” to make sure that they share prevailing stereotypes?
[…]
Yamanouchi paints a scenic image of his homeland bathing in Shiroi Kisetsu, harshly juxtaposed to the derogatory terms with which his peoples and homeland were recognized in Japan.
Referring to this poem, Ōshiro confessed that part of him still nostalgically dreamed of, reminiscing about his bright and breezy homeland while he was writing the novel Shiroi
120
Kisetsu.127 But a crucial difference between Yamanoguchi and Ōshiro was that while the former described his homeland in his memory from away, the latter depicts the depressing reality of occupied Okinawa, which was ruining the very image of Okinawa being Shiroi Kisetsu. The novel Shiroi Kisetsu has, as Ōshiro himself aptly describes, the title of paradox (gyakusetsu no daimei).
In reality, in treating TB patients, public health nurses struggled to administer their planned activities. The most serious concern they had was that their activities focused too much on the treatment of tuberculosis patients, and could not do other essential public health activities such as maternal and child health care, mental diseases, health counseling, and general hygiene education. In addition, some TB patients felt uncomfortable with public health nurses, as they felt that the nurses intruded into their private space and disciplined their behavior by giving them detailed instructions on how to take medicine, how to cleanse tableware, and how to limit contact with other family members.128 It was often the case that a patient was past the possibility of full recovery when she or he finally listened to public health nurses’ advice. Seeing such cases, public health nurses expressed their frustration at the deficiencies in the TB prevention law and the system of public health nurses as a whole. Aragaki Setsuko, for example, felt helpless that she just had to watch her patient die, as he could not be hospitalized due to the lack of beds.
Aragaki argued, “This is a patient who really needs to be sent to the governmental TB institute.
How can the government leave these patients behind and force responsibility onto public health nurses in the name of ‘homecare’? This is not at all real health care.”129 In a similar way, Uza
127 Ōshiro, Shiroi Kisetsu, 269. 128 Yonahara, Okinawa no Hokenfu, 59.
129 Aragaki Setsuko. “Hino ataranai ritō no kekkaku kanja,” in Okinawa no Kōshū Kango Jigyō 15-nen Kinenshi, 94. 121
Atsuko pointed out that public health nurses’ activities were quite often hindered by social and economic problems such as patients’ poverty, sanitary environment, and religion, which, she thought, the government should have dealt with. Uza wrote with anger, “I feel irritated by contradictions and defects in the administration of Okinawa in the way that the burden of unsolved social problems will end up falling on the public health nurses.”130 Therefore, public health nurses’ frustration mostly came from the reality in which they could not do anything but let patients die, even if they were meant to make them live. In taking care of illness of patients, they vividly observed the limit of the biopolitical regime of occupied Okinawa, which only selectively protected the lives of Okinawans.
Not only public health nurses but also those who engaged in medicine and social welfare were keenly aware of the fundamental contradictions in the healthcare system in U.S.-occupied
Okinawa. For instance, Gakiya Ryōichi, a professor of social work, subtly asserted that the status of occupied Okinawa being placed outside of the Japanese jurisdiction, which is supposed to guarantee fundamental human rights of the people, resulted in deficiencies of medicine and public health in the islands.131 Neither the Japanese government nor the U.S. government took coherent and systematic measures to improve social welfare and stabilize the livelihood of the
Okinawan inhabitants until the middle of the 1960s, when the two governments reached to the agreement over the reversion of Okinawa. The already precarious lives of the Okinawans -- as the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty placed the population of the islands outside of the protection of both Japanese and U.S. constitutions-- were further imperiled by the fact that they
130 Uza Atsuko. “Kō-kan jigyō zakkan,” In Ryūkyū Kangofu Kyōkai Souritu Jyusshūnen Kinenshi (Okinawa: Ryūkyū Kangofu Kyōkai, 1961), 95. 131 Gakiya Ryōichi. Okinawa ni okeru Shakaifukushi no Keisei to Tenkai (Okinawa: Okinawaken Shakaifukushi Kyōgikai, 1994), 253. 122
were subjected to the logic of militarism. Without having adequate funding sources and human resources, GRI, medical practitioners, and inhabitants bore the financial and physical burden and greater responsibility. One medical doctor dispatched from Tokyo was particularly concerned that Okinawan public health nurses had to take care of too much work, and did not have time to focus on their essential duty, that is, preventive medicine and nursing.132 Doctors might have felt that public health nurses performing medical acts would eventually violate the authority of physicians. Another doctor Shinzato Yoshiichi made this point even more direct. He wrote that it was problematic that public health nurses performed medical acts due to the shortage of doctors especially when dealing with tuberculosis patients because it would blur the boundary of duties between clinical treatment and public health services. Shinzato cautioned public health nurses,
“we should recall the words of Prime Minister Sato that ‘unless Okinawa is returned to her homeland, the postwar period for Japan shall never end.’ Likewise, unless this exceptional
(hensoku) measure [that public health nurses cover clinical treatment] is abolished, you are not a public health nurse really, but just a temporary (rinji) one.”133 By referring to the Sato Eisaku’s famous phrase, Shinzato draws interesting sets of dichotomies, “exceptional” vs. “normal,”
“temporary” vs. “real,” and “U.S.-occupied Okinawa” vs. “Japan with restored sovereignty.”
And, Shinzao thinks, just like Okinawa should be returned to “her homeland,” “abnormality” of public health nurses having too much authority should be fixed.
Paradoxically speaking, it is that “abnormality” of occupied Okinawa that enabled public health nurses to develop a sense of pride and agency. As we have seen, due to lack of sufficient budget and physicians, public health nurses often had to serve as the only medical authority in
132 Nakagawa Yasuo, “Asueno Tameni,” in Okinawa no Kōshū Kango Jigyō 15-nen Kinenshi, 118. 133 Shinzato Yoshiichi, “Zuisō,” in Okinawa no Kōshū Kango Jigyō 15-nen Kinenshi, 125. 123
each appointed area and take the initiative to rebuild the local community through public health services. Takaesu Ikuko recalls in a commemorative publication that she matured as a person while working as a public health nurse because she always wished to serve for the public not merely as a nurse, but as a member of the community.134 Public health nurses’ sense of professionalism and solidarity became most visible in 1968. In preparing for the reversion of
Okinawa to Japan, the Japanese government and GRI proposed that Okinawan nurses and public health nurses follow the Nursing Act enforced in mainland Japan. Public health nurses immediately opposed the proposal, because the mainland act does not specify public health nurses in the title, nor did it define their duties. In particular, they were concerned that the stationing system, which enabled them to comprehend precisely the community’s needs across the Ryukyu Islands including remote islands and areas, would be abandoned under the Japanese
Nursing Act.135 Nurses and public health nurses together held demonstrations to appeal for the necessity of the public health nurse stationing system, which was accepted in the end and the system continued after the reversion.136 Kinjō Taeko, who was strongly influenced by American nursing especially through the NLP, more explicitly expressed her concerns that the integration of Okinawan public health nursing to the Japanese health care system would reduce the sense of autonomy of public health nurses, which had been cultivated throughout the occupation period, and thus also impair the quality of public health in Okinawa.137 Her ambivalent attitude towards
134 Takaesu Ikuko, “Jisaku no Shinario de Ningyōgeki,” in Okinawa no Kōshū Kango Jigyō 15-nen Kinenshi, 50. 135 Uezu Haru, roundtable Discussion (Zadankai), “Hokenfu Shibu Katsudou wo Furikaette,” in Okinawa Sengo no Hokenjo no Ayumi: Hokenjo 30 shuunen Kinenshi, 21.
136 Omine Chieko. “Kōshū Eisei Kango Jigyō no Enkaku,” in Okinawa Sengo no Hokenjo no Ayumi,40. 137 Kinjō, Genten wo Mitsumete, 213-231. 124
the reversion may sound exceptional, given that the social atmosphere at that time saw large numbers of educators and intellectuals actively participated in the so-called reversion movement.
Perhaps, for public health nurses like Kinjō, who prioritized the lives and health of the people in the community over other things, the question was not so much one of reversion or independence. Rather, they continuously sought for a way to make the best out of a given situation so that people could survive “the reality” of life under military domination.
Epilogue
On May 24, 2005, NHK broadcasted a documentary program entitled “Inochi no Ritō e,
Haha tachi no Hatenaki Tatakai (Towards an Isolated Island of Life: Mothers’ Endless
Struggle)”, which traces the history and struggles of Okinawan public health nurses. The program was made as a part of popular documentary series, Project X, which features success stories of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc., usually those who are known to have contributed to postwar recovery and economic development of Japan. As the title “Hahatachi no
Hatenaki Tatakai” well epitomizes, the program depicts the struggles of public health nurses more as mothers (hahatachi) than as professional medical workers. By describing Okinawan public health nurses as “good wives and wise mothers,” the program successfully incorporates the experiences of Okinawan nurses into the nationalistic, militaristic, and patriarchal discourse, erasing the geopolitical particularities of Okinawa under the U.S. control. Indeed, the presence of the U.S. military and USCAR are mostly invisible throughout the program. In order to tame the narratives of Okinawan public health nurses, their roles are made to fit with the national discourse of postwar Japan in which an echo of American occupation should be kept hidden.
As this chapter has revealed, however, it is impossible to comprehend the significance of public health nurses in U.S.-occupied Okinawa without carefully examining their roles in the context of U.S. Cold War geopolitics, and how their inter-imperial and trans-war experiences 125
shaped their perception about nursing. Having professional experiences as nurses and/or midwives in prewar and wartime Japan, the first group of public health nurses had a strong sense of duty to serve the community in general, and to heal war-torn Okinawan people in particular.
Their sincerity and selfless devotion undoubtedly contributed to the improvement of public health in postwar Okinawa. However, their sense of duty ironically resonated with the logic of
Cold War U.S. expansionism to train female medical personnel, who were made to embody
American liberalism and femininity on the one hand and pacify the resentment of the people against military violence and improved the image of U.S. forces on the other. Indeed, American- led nursing education and overseas training in the United States reinforced Okinawan public health nurses’ sense of professionalism and femininity, which in fact did not conflict but rather compatible with their pre-war understanding of nursing. For USCAR, the public health nurse system was not only necessary to regulate intimate relationships between U.S. soldiers and local prostitutes but also useful to comprehend the actual situation of local society. Meanwhile, Kabira
Chōshin, with his broad experience in the media and cultural industry, tried to connect the anti- tuberculosis campaign with his culturalist desire to restore the Ryukyuan folk art, which resonated well with USCAR’s cultural policy to separate Okinawa from Japan. In either case, for
USCAR, the anti-tuberculosis campaign provided a useful tool to enlist occupied subjects to create and supervise a disciplinary network by themselves on one hand, and promote the image of the United States as a guardian of Okinawan culture and welfare on the other.
It is quite ironic, however, that no matter how hard USCAR tried to depict itself as a protector of health and welfare of the people in the islands, relentless military violence caused by the very presence of the U.S. military immediately revealed what was hidden beneath the pleasant slogan, “stamp out tuberculosis for the sake of healthy society.” As was briefly shown above, it is basically military activity including the construction of bases that triggered outbreaks of tuberculosis and venereal diseases in postwar Okinawa. After all, anti-tuberculosis campaigns
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in occupied Okinawa could not tackle the fundamental cause of the disease, that is, poverty and precarious status of occupied Okinawa, where neither the Japanese nor the U.S. government took coherent and systematic measures to improve social welfare. And public health nurses were keenly aware of the contradictions and the limits of tuberculosis prevention in occupied
Okinawa. Their desperate desire for equal health care and better life eventually merged with the reversion movement in the 1960s, in which people claimed for reversion of the Ryukyu Islands to Japan. In retrospect, we know that the reversion did not bring a solution, but rather concealed the distorted healthcare and social welfare system that had been developed during the occupation. The lived experience of public health nurses provided a ground from which the nurses constructed a sense of agency and distinctive subjectivity, with which they could promote solidarity to fight for a better life in Okinawa, turning bare life into political life even under siege.
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Chapter 3
Bridging Empires: Transpacific Circuits of Care via Okinawa and Hawaiʻi
I believe we have a true showcase for democracy here in Hawaii. […] It is this combination of economic-technological competency – in an atmosphere of relative racial and political equality– that makes Hawaii such a logical place for the cultural and technical interchange between the East and West.
— John A. Burns1
Introduction
On March 20, 1968, Nakazato Sachiko, who was then a section chief of the public health and hygiene at the Department of Health and Welfare of the Government of the Ryukyu Islands
(GRI), flew from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa by a U.S. military B-272 aircraft to Hickam
Airfield in Hawaiʻi. Passengers on board were all military personnel except for her. By the recommendation of the USCAR official in charge of nursing, Nakazato was to participate in a leadership training program at the Institute of Technical Interchange of the East-West Center in
Honolulu.2 She was among over 400 young Okinawans who participated in the professional study and technical training at the East-West Center during the period from 1960 to 1972.3
1 Address by John A. Burns, Governor, State of Hawaii, “Report of the Third Far East Conference on Public Administration,” April 16-19, 1963, compiled in AID/ITI Records, HAWN LG 961. H749 1961, University of Hawaiʻi Hamilton Library, University Archives and Manuscript Collections (hereafter, UHUAMC). 2 Nakazato Sachiko, “Dear Memory of the training in Hawaii,” in Bridge of Rainbow: Linking East & West Fifty Years History of East-West Center Grantees (Okinawa: East-West Center Alumni Okinawa Chapter, 2014), 115. 3 Takayama Chōkō, “Preface,” in Bridge of Rainbow, 3. 128
The Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West, known as the
East-West Center (EWC), was authorized by the U.S. Congress under the Mutual Security Act of
1960 and established in October of that year when a grant-in-aid was signed by the Department of State and the University of Hawaii. The center was designed “to promote better relations and understanding among the nations of Asia, the Pacific and the United States through cooperative study, training, and research.”4 In many ways, the East-West Center embodied the newly appointed role of Hawaiʻi as the place, which the Saturday Reviews described in quoting
Rudyard Kipling as “Where the Twain Will meet” in Cold War geopolitics.5 As Christina Klein and others have revealed, the Hawaiian statehood campaign, which became realized in 1959, triggered a heated debate about redefining the meaning and the social organization of
“Asianness” in America.6 The incorporation of Hawaiʻi as “the first state with its roots in Asia, not in Europe,” into the nation and granting Hawaiʻi’s Asian-Pacific population the full rights of citizenship would not only erase the memory of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific but also relieve the racial tensions within the nation by interjecting Asian population as “a third term between the poles of black and white.”7 Moreover, making the nation at least partially Asian and having
“genealogical” ties with Asia was crucial in the Cold War context in which Asia, Africa, and
Latin America appeared as “both a political vacuum prone to Soviet manipulation and control and a lucrative potential market anchored in a system of subordinate allied nation-states.”8
4 William K. Cummings, “East-West Center Degree Student Alumni: Report of a Survey Reviewing the Alumni from the First Twenty-Five Years,” unpublished report, East-West Center, 1986, 1. 5 Quoted in Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 244. 6 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 246. 7 Ibid., 250. 8 Jamey Essex, Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the U.S. Agency for International Development (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 36. 129
Under the circumstance, the East-West Center served as a training ground to put U.S.
Cold War modernization theory into practice, providing students of Asia with modern technological and scientific methods so that they could lead their own country to the path of
American-style liberal democracy and industrial capitalism. In addition, the Center, together with other training programs conducted in Hawaiʻi –– most notably the Peace Corps training–– facilitated the flow of American civilians into the East, serving as a jumping-off point for tourists, scholars, and volunteers to the Asia-Pacific region. Beyond the EWC’s primary purpose as mediator between the East and the West, the active involvement of Hawaiʻi’s Asian American population, and Japanese American elites in particular, in establishing and administering the
East-West Center not only reinforced discourses of America’s commitment to democracy and racial equality, but also reinforced the social status of Japanese Americans as “model minority.”
The East-West Center was not the sole connection between occupied Okinawa and
Hawaiʻi in the field of medicine and public health. In order to alleviate the shortage of physicians in Okinawa, in 1965 USCAR contracted the University of Hawaii (UH) to develop and establish a postgraduate intern and residency program at the Okinawa Central Hospital (OCH), in which
UH physicians traveled to Okinawa to conduct training on three-month rotations. In either case, as the opening episode of this chapter epitomizes, two branches of the U.S. Army, USCAR in occupied Okinawa and the United States Army Pacific (USARPAC) in Hawaiʻi, were deeply engaged in facilitating the technical exchange of medical workers between these two highly militarized sites. This chapter explores what I call “transpacific circuits of care” that closely connected occupied Okinawa, Hawaiʻi and beyond in multifaceted ways. With the term
“militarized currents,” Setsu Shigematu and Keith Camacho aptly delineate the ways in which
Asia and the Pacific became interconnected through the dynamics between U.S. and Japanese imperialism and militarism, which continuously produced the movement of people, capital,
130
goods, knowledge, and technology.9 The chapter aims to complicate the notion of “militarized currents” by showing that the militarization of the Asia-Pacific often went hand in hand with a seemingly contradictory dynamics: the medicalization of the region. In other words, a transpacific biopolitical project of “nurturing life” was in fact facilitated through a necropolitical network that simultaneously dominated Cold War Asia-Pacific through the U.S. military interventionism.
Scholars have pointed out the simultaneity of biopolitics and necropolitics – the power to
“make” live and “let” die – in U.S. Cold War military expansionism, though in a different expression. Most notably, Lisa Yoneyama has argued that Asian populations’ “liberation” from the Japanese Empire, and its successful “rehabilitation” into an American biopolitical space has been often described as an outcome of the U.S. military interventions. It is through this “imperial myth of liberation and rehabilitation” that the act of saving (and being saved) became intricately connected with, and conceals military violence. Moreover, this myth “leaves indelible markers on the liberated of not only inferiority, subordination, and belatedness (to freedom and democracy), but also indebtedness. It prescribed “the already accrued debt” for the liberated.”10
Their “liberation” would thus serve as “payment/reparation that supposedly precedes the U.S. violence inflicted upon them,”11 which has made the redress for injuries inflicted by the U.S. military violence almost impossible. Referring to this notion of the “myth of liberation and rehabilitation,” Yen Le Espiritu illustrates the militarized violence behind the humanitarian act of refuge, in which U.S. Air Force aircraft carried the Vietnamese refugees back to the United
9 Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents. 10 Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 232-233. 11 Lisa Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice,” 81. 131
States after dropping bombs over Vietnam.12 In this context, the practice of refuge did not merely serve as reparation for massive destruction but rather legitimized U.S. military interventions. Building on this line of argument, I argue that the transpacific medical training project that closely connected Occupied Okinawa and Hawaiʻi was not antithetical to militarism, but rather served as a crucial vehicle for the U.S. empire of bases.
Indeed, as briefly mentioned in Chapter Two, promoting international health constituted the vital site for Cold-War scientific race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Besides, as Marcos Cueto rightly points out, the impetus for an international regime of health facilitated “the consolidation of U.S. bilateral cooperation in medicine, science, and culture; modernization proposals for developing countries; and the emergence of a web of multilateral agencies.”13 The chapter aims to expand upon this wider discussion by showing how medical professionals in Hawaiʻi tried to turn Hawaiʻi into what they describe as “a nidus for international health outreach.”14
While examining the transpacific circuits of medical workers, I also pay particular attention to the almost parallel historical trajectory of Okinawa and Hawaiʻi. Both flourished as independent kingdoms, both were colonized and annexed by emerging empires in the late 19th century, and both became critical sites for U.S.-Japan war, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Okinawa, and have served as hubs of the empire of bases in the postwar period.
In the 1950s and 60s, both sites were amid the process of being incorporated into the nation-
12 Espiritu, Body Counts, 40. 13 Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fevers, 18. 14 Jerrold M. Michael (Dean and Professor of School of Public Health, University of Hawaiʻi), “Delivering Health Cater to the Pacific,” paper presented at the symposium on “Health Care in the Pacific: Hawaii’s Initiatives”, Honolulu, June 5, 1990, recorded in Asia-Pacific Journal of Public Health Vol. 4, No. 1 (1990): 9-13, 9. 132
state––Japan and the United States respectively––, but still fell outside of what Lisa Lowe calls
“the government of human life by the nation-state.”15 Suspended in a state of exception, militarism and human life in each site became intricately connected. Juliet Nebolon’s analysis on biopolitics in Hawaiʻi under martial law provides insights into the entanglements of politics of life and militarism. In examining medicine and public health in Hawaiʻi following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, she convincingly argues that martial law’s claim to authority over biological life and death led to compulsory biopolitical programs, such as immunization and the creation of blood banks, through which “people were made to live.” It functioned to legitimize what Nebolon terms “settler militarism,” the dynamics through which “settler colonialism and militarization have simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated and concealed one another.”16 As
Nebolon points out, Hawaiʻi served as a “laboratory” for martial culture that could be reproduced, improvised, and expanded in Asia-Pacific.17
In fact, it could be argued that the occupation of Okinawa began in Hawaiʻi under martial law. In 1944, the U.S. Navy Department invited scholars from widely ranging field including anthropology, sociology, political science, economy, and law, to Camp Schofield in Hawaiʻi to discuss a basic plan for the occupation of Okinawa. Led by an anthropologist, George Peter
Murdock, the research team prepared a series of publications known as the Civil Affairs
Handbook, which provided a detailed analysis of history, politics, economy, culture, and nature of Okinawa, and the racial characteristics of the Ryukyu islanders.18 Most notably, one of the
15 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 29. 16 Juliet Nebolon, “Life Given Straight from the Heart”: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawaiʻi during World War II, American Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (March 2017): 23-45, 25. 17 Ibid., 40. 18 Miyagi, Senryō-sha no me. 133
publications prepared for military governance, “The Okinawans of the Loo Choo Islands: A
Japanese Minority Group,” was largely based on the research on social, cultural, and psychological characteristics of Okinawans in Hawaiʻi and their relation to Japanese immigrants
(naichijin).19 This report is particularly important in considering the occupation of Okinawa, as it suggests that the racial cleavages observed between the Japanese and the Ryukyuans could be utilized in a military administration and postwar stabilization. In this sense, Hawaiʻi, both as a laboratory of martial law and a repository of racialized immigrants laid a basis for the military occupation of Okinawa. Furthermore, as is discussed below, the transition of Hawaiʻi from a suspect colony under the martial law to a model state of multiculturalism in the 1960s again showed a model path that occupied Okinawa was expected to follow in the course of its reversion to Japan.
Besides the U.S. government, the U.S. Army and GRI, the Japanese government also played an indirect but decisive role in building the transpacific network of care and relief. As the reversion of Okinawa to Japan gradually became an established policy towards the mid-1960s, the Japanese government was no longer on the sidelines of the administration of Okinawa. In fact, it was in the fields of social welfare and public health that the Japanese government was first allowed to intervene in civil affairs of occupied Okinawa. Thus social welfare and public
19 U.S. Office of Strategic Services, ed., The Okinawans of the Loo Choo Islands: A Japanese Minority Group (Honolulu: Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis Branch, June 1, 1944). This source consists of three parts. Part I, “the Okinawans in Japan,” details the habits, language, social structure, and history of the “Loo Choo people. ” Part II, “The Okinawans in Hawaii,” provides linguistic and anthropological observations of Okinawans in Hawaiʻi, with special focus on the analysis of “segregation” of Okinawans from the Japanese in such a setting as plantations. This leads to the discussion of “Utilization of Cleavages” in Part III. In concluding part, the report writes, “Thus Psychological Warfare in its various aspects might well be brought to bear upon the cleavage outlined here between the two Japanese groups, each with its own physical type, its own history, its own dynasties, mores and attitudes. The Okinawan himself might well prove useful in this movement as our agent in the prosecution of the war” (p.88). Lisa Yoneyama offers an analysis of this study within a broader context of Cold War area studies that has its origin in the wartime need for intelligence gathering (Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 64-65). 134
health became the site in which the United States and Japan at first competed with each other to gain hegemony in Okinawa but later cooperated to nurture enough human resources in the face of the reversion. Through examining the role of the Japanese government in transpacific welfare projects, this chapter argues that the technical interchange between occupied Okinawa and
Hawaiʻi did not necessarily conflict with the processes of reversion of Okinawa to Japan; rather, it played a crucial role in preparing for the reversion, making “occupied Okinawa” assimilable into a “normal” nation state. Moreover, it was particularly important for the Japanese government to cooperate with U.S.-led development programs in Asia, not only because they were regarded as reparations for the destruction caused by Japanese imperialism and militarism, but also because U.S.-Japan economic interventions in Asia through foreign aid was the necessary vehicle for the Cold War Asia-Pacific arrangement.
This chapter further highlights Okinawan diaspora’s active and yet ambivalent involvement in building the bridge with their “home” through various welfare projects. The
Okinawan community in Hawaiʻi had long played a central role in the “relief movement” in the early postwar period, in which Okinawan diaspora around the world sent relief goods including pigs, goats, clothing, and other essentials to war-torn Okinawa. As Okano Nobukatsu argues, the relief movement in Hawaiʻi not only contributed to the recovery of Okinawan society back home but also strengthened Okinawan diaspora’s sense of solidarity and collective ethnic identity through the act of saving their homeland.20 The relief movement led to the establishment of the
United Okinawa Association of Hawaiʻi (UOA or the Hawaii Okinawa Rengō-kai) in 1951, the
20 Okano Nobukatsu, “Senryōsha to hisenryōsha no hazama wo ikiru imin: Amerika no Okinawa tōhi seisaku to Hawai no okinawa jin,” Imin Kenkyū Nenpo vol. 13 (March 2007): 3-22, 3. I am indebted to Mire Koikari for introducing me to the valuable works by Okano. 135
first umbrella organization for Okinawans in Hawaiʻi.21 As will be detailed below, while UOA utilized the connection with USCAR and USARPAC to promote the relief movement and improve their social status as “Ryukyuan-Americans,” USCAR and USARPAC in turn employed
Okinawan community in Hawaiʻi to pacify people’s sense of resentment against military violence and create a positive image of Americans in occupied Okinawa. In this regard, through building a network of care and relief, Okinawans in occupied Okinawa and the Okinawan diaspora in Hawaiʻi together effectively played a part in the “myth of liberation and rehabilitation.” And yet, both for Okinawan inhabitants living under U.S. occupation and
Okinawan immigrants in Hawaiʻi, the transpacific bridge between the two sites could nonetheless open up a space to maneuver beyond constraints imposed on their everyday life and imagine possibilities of constructing diasporic solidarity that would function as an alternative form of social security.
The former part of this chapter traces the genealogy of Hawaiʻi as a practical training ground for agents of modernization, developmentalism, and humanitarianism, such as medical workers, technicians, and engineers. The latter part details the UH-Chubu Hospital project, and its relation to the reversion of Okinawa to Japan.
Bridging the East and West
Politicians, scholars, and activists both in Hawaiʻi and the mainland U.S. were already aware of Hawaiʻi’s advantageous position for international education and training before
21 Until then, and even after the establishment of UOA, the native-place communities organized by shi (city), chō (township), son (rural township) and aza (small village) served the basic needs of immigrants and exchanges students from Okinawa by providing assistance, support and companionship. UOA renamed the Hawaii United Okinawa Association (HUOA) in 1995. 136
Hawaiʻi’s transition to statehood and the establishment of the East-West Center.22 The
University of Hawaii, established in 1907, had a long history of studies of Asian and Pacific cultures. The East-West Philosophers’ Conferences have taken place every five to ten years in
Hawaiʻi since 1939. The Fulbright Commission had often sent their grantees for orientation on
Asia as well as for language training at the University of Hawaii. The Federal Government’s involvement in broad training programs in Hawaiʻi began in 1956 through the International
Cooperation Agency. In Hawaiʻi, the International Cooperation Center, which was attached to the office of the Governor of the State of Hawaii, was in charge of providing observation, study, and training.23 The International Cooperation Center had offered training programs for more than
3,000 participants from thirty foreign countries up until 1961 and was integrated into the East-
West Center upon its establishment.
John F. Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 presidential campaign further enhanced and strengthened the role of Hawaiʻi as a training ground for international cooperation. With the appointment of Walt W. Rostow, the author of The States of Economic Growth: A Non-
Communist Manifesto, as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, modernization as a core ideology of U.S. foreign policy to prevent communist expansion received a boost.24 As
Jamey Essex rightly points out, Rostow’s main contribution in the context of American Cold
War strategies in the 1960s was to provide the premise for much of the development planning that stressed “a sequence of stages through which societies must move to achieve modernization
22 Margaret Anne Smedley, “A History of the East-West Cultural and Technical Interchange Center between 1960 and 1966,” Ph.D. Dissertation (The Catholic University of America, 1970), 72. 23 East-West Center, Annual Report 1962, University of Hawaiʻi Hamilton Library Hawaiian and Pacific Collection (Hereafter, UHHPC), 28-29. 24 Cueto, Cold War Deadly Fevers, 27. It should be noted here that, as Takashi Fujitani argues, modernization theory as a U.S. foreign policy was already hatched during the Asia-Pacific war. It was not just a postwar plan, but “a postcolonial plan for establishing U.S. hegemony in Asia” (Fujitani, Race for Empire, 231). 137
and development.”25 Rostow’s idea became institutionalized in the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), which was established through the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, replacing the International Cooperation Agency.26 In March of the same year, Kennedy also launched the Peace Corps program, which aimed to send U.S. citizens abroad as volunteers to assist other nations and areas in need. Since 1962, the University of Hawaii served as the training institution of Peace Corps Volunteers for service in the Pacific and Asian regions, and it trained some 3,000 young Americans by 1966.27
In addition to the Kennedy Administration’s emphasis on development and foreign aid,
Lyndon B. Johnson, who served as vice president under Kennedy, was a strong advocate of the
East-West Center. In fact, he was the one who first introduced legislation in the Senate for the establishment of the Center under the Mutual Security Act of 1959.28 He hoped that the institution could counter the propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union’s People’s Friendship
University of Russia, which was founded on February 5, 1960.29 In his dedication address for the
East-West Center on May 9, 1961, he stated:
To this Center, we shall bring the wise men of the West and invite the wise men of the East. From them, we shall hope that many generations of young scholars will learn the
25 Essex, Development, Security, and Aid, 15. 26 It is also worth mentioning here that institutional genealogy of USAID can be traced back to the Office of War Information, which was established in 1942 for the purpose of the distribution of information by the United States (Smedley, East-West Cultural Interchange Center, chapter 2). When World War II ended, the Department of State took over its functions and combined them with the Cultural Relations Division, and set up a new agency entitled Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs. In 1953, the International Cooperation Agency became charged with the administration of foreign economic and technical assistance as part of wider Cold War policies. This shows another example of how Cold War epistemology and institutions had their origins in wartime information gathering. 27 Office of International Programs University of Hawaii, The Peace Corps and Hawaii: A Discussion Paper, 1 (date unknown), UHHPC. 28 Smedley, East-West Center, 74. 29 Murray Turnbull, “East-West Center History Paper,” UHUAMC. 138
wisdom of the two worlds united here and to use that wisdom for the purposes and ends of mankind’s highest aspirations for peace, justice, and freedom.30
Curiously, Johnson referred to Puerto Rico when he emphasized the geopolitical importance of
Hawaiʻi, stating that just like the University of Puerto Rico had served as a bridge of understanding between U.S. and Latin America, “Hawaii, a bright, new star in our flag, could also become a bridge spanning the Pacific.”31 It is interesting to see how Puerto Rico and
Hawaii, both of which had been placed in the liminal status as “unincorporated territory,” were expected to serve as “bridges” to Latin America and Asia, respectively. Likewise, at the Third
Far East Conference on Public Administration in 1963 sponsored by USAID, John A. Burns, the second Governor of Hawaiʻi, emphasized the Hawaiʻi’s exceptional role in serving as the
“vanguard” for the United States in the Pacific era:
I believe we have a true showcase for democracy here in Hawaii. […] It is this combination of economic-technological competency – in an atmosphere of relative racial and political equality – that makes Hawaii such a logical place for the cultural and technical interchange between the East and West.32
With its geopolitical advantages, Burns was convinced that Hawaiʻi could play a decisive role in pursuing the objectives of USAID.
30 Johnson, Lyndon B., “Dedication Address for the Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West,” AID/ITI Records, HAWN LG 961. H749 1961, UHUAMC. 31 Jonson, Lyndon B, “Excerpts from the Address of the Honorable Lyndon B. Johnson, Senate Democratic Majority Leader, before the Women’s National Press Club Banquet,” quoted in Koikari, Cold War Ruins, 112. 32 Address by John A. Burns, Governor, State of Hawaii, “Report of the Third Far East Conference on Public Administration,” April 16-19, 1963, Compiled in AID/ITI Records, HAWN LG 961. H749 1961, UHUAMC. 139
In a similar way, J. Lederer, co-author of a 1958-bestselling novel “The Ugly American,” which criticizes American diplomats’ lack of knowledge and indifference to local history and customs in Asia, refers to Hawaiʻi as a potential training ground for military, state department, information service personnel, and economic advisers: “If American officials could stop here with their families for a month or two on the way to Asia they could get the feel of what they’re moving into plus language courses, history, religions, Asian politics, and customs.”33 Such a discourse of Hawaiʻi as the gateway to Asia was repeatedly reproduced in local newspapers. For example, the Honolulu Advertiser carried an open letter to political journalist Roscoe
Drummond, in response to his column on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article, entitled “Advertiser Proposes ‘Aloha Ambassador’s For Peace,” reads:
We of Hawaii have built a society in which both the East and West have come together in harmony and understanding. We of Hawaii, of all the people of our nation, can speak and listen to the people of Asia with knowledge and understanding. […] They would number among them citizens by birth and citizens by naturalization––living examples for Asia of what our country means by equality and opportunity.34
Above-mentioned celebratory accounts show how Hawaiʻi, once put under the martial law as a suspect colony, increasingly became a crucial site as a gateway to Asia in American imagination in the middle of the twentieth century. This transition should be understood in the postwar U.S. sociopolitical context, in which the Asian population was “selectively” incorporated into
American society. As Lisa Lowe puts it, with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 and the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the U.S. state legally transformed “the Asian alien into
Asian American citizen [italics in original]” in order to increase skilled migrant workers and
33 Quoted in Krauss, Bob, “Hawaii’s Role in Helping East-West Understanding,” Honolulu Advertiser (date unknown), clipped and collected in AID/ITI documents, Box 182 Newspaper Clippings, UHUAMC. 34 The Honolulu Advertiser, March 4, 1960. 140
resolve economic exigencies within the global economy. It also institutionalized “the disavowal of the history of racialized labor exploitation and disenfranchisement through the promise of freedom in the political sphere.”35 Meanwhile, the United States increasingly stabilized its hegemony in Asia through military and economic interventions throughout the 1950s and ‘60s.
Hawaiʻi’s transition to statehood symbolizes and accelerates this simultaneous process of
“Asianizing America” internally and “Americanizing Asia” externally. The East-West Center was designed to further encourage this movement through producing scientific knowledge of
Asia on the one hand, disseminating American technology to Asia on the other.
During the 1960s, the East-West Center’s activities consisted of three main programs, the
Institute of Student Interchange (ISI), the Institute of Advanced Projects (IAP), and International
Training Agency (ITA). The title of ITA was changed in 1962 to the Institute of Technical
Interchange (ITI). ISI was concerned with the exchange between students from Asia and the
Pacific who pursue American academic degrees, and students from America who engage in area studies. IAP supported the work of scholars in advanced research, most of which related to Asia.
While ISI and IAP were more or less focused on knowledge production, ITI emphasized technical training on a practical level in a variety of programs running in length from a few weeks to a year. Focusing particularly on such areas as agriculture, education, and public health,
ITI training aimed at “upgrading the technological capabilities of selected professionals, skilled technicians, and semi-skilled manpower, mainly in instructional and mid-managerial roles.”36
It was this field of technical training that the number of Okinawan participants stood out.
Of a total of 2,564 Okinawan participants from 1960 to 1972, which was the largest group among others from Asia and the Pacific, only 29 were degree students under ISI, while 2,532
35 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 10. 36 East West Center, Annual Report 1970, 29. 141
attended for professional study and training.37 They were joined by participants from U.S. Trust
Territory (1,773), American Samoa (1,093), and Japan (1,069). It is perhaps no coincidence that occupied Okinawa together with Trust Territory, and American Samoa became the three largest recipients of ITI. In fact, the Center’s Third Annual Report in 1963 clearly stated that priority of
EWC’s sponsored services was given to the Pacific islands, where “the United States has a special responsibility through the administration of Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Trust
Territory.”38 Unlike other participants, most of whom were sponsored by USAID, participants from the Pacific islands were funded directly by the East-West Center, and participants from
Okinawa were under the special contract between the Center and USCAR with ARIA
(Administration Ryukyu Islands, Army) appropriations. In addition, in the Pacific islands and
Okinawa, more “host-country based field training projects” than “Hawaii-based projects” were conducted, which means that more training workshops took place in host countries with small teams of ITI/EWC specialists coming from Hawaiʻi.39 In the case of Okinawa, for example,
2,086 out of 2,532 participants received the EWC training in Okinawa, not in Hawaiʻi.40
Mire Koikari points out that compared to the human exchange programs sponsored by
USCAR during the 1950s such as the Ryukyuan National Leader Program, the East-West Center more often focused on Okinawan women of lower social status, such as high school teachers, vocational instructors, extension agents, and employees in the service industry.41 It can be also said that while the National Leader Program primarily aimed at nurturing “pro-America”
37 East West Center, Annual Report 1972, xvi. A good comparison can be drawn with the case of Korea; of a total of 625 participants, 201 were degree students and 387 were for professional study and training. 38 East West Center, Annual Report 1963, 28. 39 East West Center, Annual Report 1970, 29-30. 40 East West Center, Annual Report 1972, xvi. 41 Koikari, Cold War Encounters, 106. 142
Okinawan elites who could contribute to promoting “Ryukyuan-American friendship,” the EWC-
ITI programs’ emphasis was more on practical training for technicians, engineers, and physicians who could serve as the actual vehicle of development. In fact, “America” became less visible in participants’ personal reflections on their EWC training, in contrast to those of the National
Leader Program, which were often filled with celebratory comments about American society and culture (see Chapter Two). Nevertheless, they were keenly aware of the societal and economic gap between Okinawa and Hawaiʻi. For example, one of the participants in the course of public health nursing administration course recalled:
[W]hat most impressed me during attending the program at the EWC was that the public health nurses in Hawaii had a car. Telecommunication and roads were well organized. However, here Okinawa most of public health nurses worked under scarcity of social infrastructure: no phone, nor cars (even no motor cycle), and no roads.42
The differences in the institutions and infrastructure of occupied Okinawa and Hawaiʻi often prevented participants from transferring skills and knowledge that they acquired during the EWC program to Okinawa.43 In fact, Yoko Fukuchi’s survey of the effect of the EWC on Okinawan participants in the field of agriculture, public health, and education reveals that while participants took initiative roles in respective fields upon their returning to Okinawa, many of them found difficulties in transferring technologies from Hawaiʻi to Okinawa, even if the two sites had much in common.
Besides technical training itself, participants re/constructed their identity as “Okinawans” through encountering with fellow participants from Asia and the Pacific. For example, in her commemorative essay, Ōmine Chieko, a participant in a public health training program, recalls
42 Yoko Fukuchi, Okinawan Participants in the East-West Center Program: Impact on the Human Resource Development in Postwar Okinawa, M.A. thesis (University of Oregon, 2011), 33. 43 Ibid. 143
her experience in a dormitory: “It was beyond my surprise and imagination when I watched my roommate Uehara from Yap Island slept naked. Her name Uehara suggested that she might be a descendent of Okinawa.” Although she did not have a chance to talk with the roommate about her roots, it was a moment that reminded her of the presence of Okinawan diaspora stretched across the Pacific, who had different ways of living but shared familiar names.44 Likewise, when
Yamashiro Masako received a five-month training course of “Nursing and Nutrition,” her class consisted of participants from Indonesia, Fiji, Tonga, American Samoa, and Palau. Surrounded by classmates with various backgrounds across the Pacific, the experience of the EWC training made Yamashiro determined to make more efforts to understand different cultures.45 Even more striking for her was the encounter with local Okinawan immigrants:
I still remember vividly the moment when we visited Hiro [sic] and Kona on Big Island. When they found we were from Okinawa, they ran out of their houses and welcomed us with pounding fry pan and tin can. Then, they started dancing for welcome chanting loudly “Ichariba chode, nu firatinu aga (Once we meet, we will be brothers forever and no barriers exist between you and I).” I was one of us who was [sic] deeply moved to find “Heart of Okinawa” had firmly rooted in the immigrated place.46
This experience made Yamashiro ponder the “Heart of Okinawa” and her identity as an
Okinawan and eventually led her, thirty years later, to Bolivia, another major destination for
Okinawan emigrants. As part of a project sponsored by Japan International Cooperation Agency
(JICA), her task in Bolivia was to set up a model on “Primary Health Care Program” in the two districts adjacent to the Okinawa Colony on the basis of a preliminary survey in the neighboring area. According to Yamashiro, the survey aimed at “finding means to strengthen relations
44 Chieko Omine, “Rainbow over Sprinkler,” in Bridge of Rainbow, 105-106. 45 Masako Yamashiro, Bridge of Rainbow, 98. 46 Ibid., 99. 144
between the native Bolivians and the Okinawans for coexistence and co-prosperity.” Recalling her involvement in the Bolivia project, she wrote:
To me, Bolivia seemed a place where the “Spirit of Uchinanchu” is brightly exhibited -- Uchinanchu who established friendly relations with the local people regardless of their place of living. The historical and cultural heritage which Okinawa people built up by overcoming uncountable hardship and endurance, and by mutual aid came into my mind overlapping with those of Hawaii and Bolivia.47
Therefore, through her encounters with Okinawan immigrants in Hawaiʻi, Yamashiro seemed to build up transpacific subjectivity as “Uchinanchu” that could connect Okinawa to Hawaiʻi and
Bolivia, which was based on not so much the fact that they shared their genealogical roots in
Okinawa, as the shared experiences of “overcoming uncountable hardship and endurance.” It should be noted here that the “Ryukyu Emigration Program” to Bolivia, which was orchestrated by USCAR together with GRI began in 1954 as a solution to overpopulation and land shortage.48
As will be discussed in the next chapter, overpopulation became a pressing social problem in occupied Okinawa in the early 1950s due to the arrival of repatriates and the American appropriation of land for base construction (see Chapter Four). Fearing that overpopulation and subsequent poverty would further exacerbate anti-American sentiment among Okinawans and invite communism, instead of implementing the Eugenic Protection Law, USCAR launched the emigration program as a means of alleviating the population pressure in the Ryukyus.49 Bolivia
47 Ibid. 48 For details about the Okinawan emigration program to Bolivia, see Pedro Iacobelli, Postwar Emigration to South America from Japan and the Ryukyu Islands (London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2017); Kozy Amemiya, “Population Pressure as a Euphemism: The Rhetoric to Push Okinawan Emigration,” in Social Process in Hawaiʻi, Vol.42, Uchinaanchu Diaspora: Memories, Continuities, and Constructions, edited by Joice N. Chinen (2007): 121-136. 49 Bolivia was selected as a destination based on the research conducted by James L. Tigner, a doctoral student in Latin American history at Stanford University. Upon request from the U.S. government, the 145
was selected as a destination for new Okinawan emigrants partly because both the Bolivian government and the local Okinawan community, consisting of prewar Okinawan migrants from other parts of South America and referred to as Uruma Colony, was eager to receive new immigrants. Moreover, according to Pedro Iacobelli, the United States had identified Bolivia as a strategically important place in the Americas against communism since the Truman era.
Therefore, the influx of Okinawan immigrants to Bolivia as a workforce for agriculture would equally benefit the United States to fortify U.S.-South America relations.50
Studies have revealed, however, that the first group of postwar government-sponsored
Okinawan migrants faced disastrous situation upon arriving in Bolivia.51 In addition to insufficient infrastructure, the Okinawan settler community was affected by an outburst of infectious disease which took at least fifteen lives in six months. As a consequence, more than three-quarters of the emigrants ended up moving out of their settlement. In this sense, the Bolivia emigration program was not so much emigration as an abandonment of people in the end. And it is this migrants’ experiences of displacement and suffering that Yamashiro found as the basis for the “Spirit of Uchinanchu.” The shared memory of displacement, in turn, fostered “mutual aid” among the Okinawan diaspora and played a significant role in saving and nurturing lives of displaced Okinawans within and beyond the Ryukyu Islands.
In fact, postwar relief activities were the crucial site for Okinawan diaspora to construct and reinforce their cultural and political subjectivity. The Okinawan Relief Movement began right after the battle of Okinawa with the establishment of the American Okinawan Relief
League in 1946, and eventually involved Okinawan immigrants not only in the United States, but
Pacific Science Board of the National Research Council assigned Tigner to a “survey of Ryukyuan immigration to South American countries” (Iacobelli, Postwar Emigration). 50 Iacobelli, Postwar Emigration to South America, 96-98. 51 Amemiya, “Population Pressure as a Euphemism,” 128-129. 146
also Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and Canada.52 Hawaiʻi especially played an essential part in the relief movement. In Hawaiʻi, Okinawa relief activities led mainly by Thomas Taro Higa began in the very early stage of postwar years. Taro Higa was a second-generation Okinawan immigrant born in Hawaiʻi, and served with the famed all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion. Higa was well known for his “legend” to save Okinawans during the Battle of Okinawa; he successfully convinced Okinawans hiding in caves to come out and surrender, with his ability to speak Uchinā-guchi (Okinawan language). Apparently, the experience of saving Okinawans while serving for the U.S. Army became the basis for his initiative in postwar Okinawa Relief
Movement in Hawaiʻi. In addition to wartime experience, prewar Okinawan immigrants from the outset were motivated by the idea of saving their homeland. Unlike the first group of Japanese immigrants who came to Hawaiʻi under contracts either with the Japanese government or private companies, the first Okinawan immigrants left Okinawa for Hawaiʻi as “free immigrants.” In the face of the severe economic problem and famine in Okinawa after World War I, known as “Sago
Palm hell”, Tōyama Kyūzō, who had engaged in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, led Okinawans to emigrate to Hawaiʻi with the slogan, “Let us go forth. The Five Continents are our home.” By doing so, Tōyama thought, people could seek a better life, and at the same time, send money back home as remittances to help their families and Okinawa.
At first, the relief activities in Hawaiʻi took the form of sending used clothing to
Okinawa. Then, various organizations were established one after another including the Hawaii
League of Okinawa Foundation, Okinawan Relief and Rehabilitation Foundation that aimed at the establishment of a university, and the Medical Relief Association through which doctors sent
52 For details about the Okinawan Relief Movement, see Higa Taro, Imin wa ikiru (Tokyo: Nichi-bei Jihō- sha, 1974). 147
medical supplies and medicines to Okinawa.53 In addition to such Nisei veterans as Higa Taro and Buddhist priests, socialist Okinawan activists played a major role in the relief activities in
Hawaiʻi. Unlike former two actors, who closely cooperated with the U.S. army, socialist activists ultimately aimed at liberating Okinawa both from Japanese imperialism and U.S. military oppression. Among them was Seiei Wakugawa, the founder of Okinawa Relief and
Rehabilitation Foundation. He also began publishing periodicals in November 1947 to share the information of Okinawa with other relief movements across the United States, while at the same time deepening the readers’ understanding of the postwar political formation that imposed on
Pacific islanders.54 The title of the periodicals, Kōsei Okinawa (rehabilitation or rebirth of
Okinawa) strongly reflects Wakugawa’s wish to establish a university to train future leaders, who could not merely rebuild war-devastated Okinawa, but politically, economically, and spiritually liberate the islands from the status of a colony. In this way, through the Okinawa
Relief Movement, Okinawan immigrants in the Territory of Hawaii, while reworking a strategy for belonging in the midst of the statehood campaign, envisioned what their home, Okinawa, should be like.
It should be noted here, however, that USCAR and USARPAC officials also sought to strengthen familial and emotional ties between Okinawans and Okinawan immigrants in
Hawaiʻi. In examining the Ryukyuan-Hawaiian Brotherhood Program, human exchange program beginning in 1959 co-sponsored by USCAR and USARPAC, Okamoto Yoshikatsu analyzes the special role that U.S. Army expected Okinawan immigrants in Hawaiʻi to play: lessening the tension between the U.S. military and Okinawans in Okinawa, which had become highly
53 Wakugawa Seiei tsuitō ikō bunshū kankō iinkai, ed., Amerika to nihon no kakehashi: Wakugawa Seiei, Hawai ni ikita ishoku no uchinaanchu (Okinawa: Niraisha, 2000). 47. 54 Wakugawa Seiei, “Kōsei Okinawa, Soukan no Ji,” November 1947, compiled in Wakugawa Seiei, America to Nihon no Kakehashi,. 148
intensified towards the end of the 1950s (see Chapter Four).55 Through the Brotherhood
Program, Okamoto argues, Okinawan immigrants in Hawaiʻi could establish their own subjectivity as “Ryukyuan Americans” by utilizing their ethnic identity to contribute to the objectives of the U.S. Army, and thus expressing loyalty to the United States. In so doing,
Okinawan immigrants would serve as a leading model that Okinawans in occupied Okinawa should follow.56 Having experienced social and economic discrimination by Japanese immigrants in prewar Hawaiʻi, Okinawan immigrants were rather willing to play such a role. In fact, the majority of Okinawans in Hawaiʻi, especially leading members of UOA, supported the
U.S. occupation of Okinawa and opposed its reversion to Japan.57 The intimate relationship with occupied Okinawa and with U.S. Army through relief projects was a crucial way not only to promote social status as U.S. citizens in Hawaiʻi but also construct their own racialized ethnic identity in American society.
Until the end of the 1950s, however, the U.S. Army did not show particular interest in utilizing Okinawan immigrants in Hawaiʻi to build a bridge between Okinawa, Hawaiʻi, and U.S. mainland. For example, when USCAR was looking for American institutions to be compiled for the advisory committee on the University of the Ryukyus in 1951, despite the Okinawan community’s enthusiastic support, it was not the University of Hawaiʻi but Michigan State
University that was chosen as the cooperative institution. The UOA sent a letter to the American
Council of Education, which was in charge of selecting the institution, to endorse the proposal that the University of Hawaii is made the cooperating university with the University of the
Ryukyus. Gregg Manners Sinclair, president of UH at that time, also emphasized the university’s
55 Okano, “Senryō-sha to Hi-Senryō-sha no Hazama wo ikiru Imin,” 11. 56 Ibid., 13. 57 Ibid. 149
close connection to the Okinawan community in a proposal submitted to American Council of
Education: “we have a great number of Americans of Okinawan descent in Honolulu and in
Hawaii and […] we have been very much interested in them as a people. We worked with some of them during the war and got to know them very well.”58 President Sinclair assumed that the
Council chose Michigan State University because it “wanted to have a college in the interior of our country become intimately acquainted with an Asiatic people and felt that there would be mutual advantages in having Michigan connected with Okinawa.”59 USCAR also weighed more on the practical capability of the university as a supervisory institution than its genealogical ties with Okinawa.
The situation surrounding the relationship between occupied Okinawa and the Okinawan community in Hawaiʻi had changed towards the end of the 1950s. For one thing, as discussed above, Hawaiʻi’s transition to statehood provided the legal and administrative ground for
Hawaiʻi to serve as a bridge between Asia and the United States. More importantly, on July 1,
1957, the Far East Command of the U.S. military, which had been in charge of the Ryukyu
Command, was eliminated and USARPAC took control of all forces in Asia-Pacific regions.
Hawaiʻi thus became literally the center of U.S. military network in Asia-Pacific. Furthermore, this change closely related to the socio-political-economic turn that took place in occupied
Okinawa around 1957. As we will see in the next chapter, Okinawan people’s outrage against
U.S. military rule, which culminated in 1956 as the “all-island struggle (shimagurumi tōsō)”, made USCAR change its ruling principles from the military’s exclusive and often violent control to more stable control that focused on the development of economy and welfare of the
58 Letters from President Sinclair to President Arthur S. Adams, May 11, 1951, in President’s Office 1987-1 Box 16. Folder 9 (“Colleges and Universities, Ryukyus, University of,”), UHUAMC. 59 Letter from UH President, Sinclair to Members of Okinawan Community in Hawaii, June 19, 1951, President’s Office 1987-1 Box 16. Folder 9, UHUAMC. 150
population. With Executive Order 10713, “Providing for the Administration of the Ryukyu
Islands,” on June 5, 1957, a civil administration of the Ryukyu Islands was placed under the
High Commissioner, who was to be designated by the Secretary of Defense, after consultation with the Secretary of the State and with the approval of the president, from among the active duty members of the U.S. armed force. In the following year, on September 16, 1958, the B-yen, military scrip used exclusively in occupied Okinawa since April 1946, was replaced with the
U.S. dollar, which facilitated the inflow of American and Japanese capital, and consequently triggered an economic boom in Okinawa. In this way, both politically and economically,
Okinawa became subject to the direction and control of the U.S. President. Furthermore, the
Price Act of 1960 (amendment in 1962) legalized the economic aid to Okinawa based on the
U.S. legislature. A joint statement by President Kennedy and Prime Minister Ikeda in 1961 further strengthened Japan’s role in complementing economic and welfare needs in Okinawa.60
As Matsuda Yoshitaka points out, this political and economic turn enabled the U. S. government to directly control Okinawa in cooperation with the Japanese government as a shared diplomatic issue, and by doing so, avoid direct conflicts between USCAR, the U.S. Army and local people.61
Consequently, the U.S. army began viewing Okinawans in Hawaii as a renewed political interest. Rather than directly educating Okinawans to become “pro-American” elites, USCAR now expected Okinawans in Hawaii to serve as agents of pacification. In correspondence dated on 29 March 1958 to Department of the Army in Washington, the commander in chief of
USARPAC wrote,
60 Matsuda Yoshitaka. Sengo Okinawa Shakai Keizaishi Kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyo Digaku Shuppankai, 1981), Ch. 10. 61 Ibid., 279. 151
Hawaii with largest[sic] population of Okinawans outside Ryukyus[sic] represents workable area for development of realistic international people-to-people program. Such plan carefully organized and stimulated could be utilized to materially contribute to better understanding between Okinawans and Americans. It is conceivable this potential may be developed and channeled to assist U.S. in achieving desirable objective in Ryukyu Islands.62
Donald P. Booth, high commissioner of the Ryukyu Islands also expressed his interest in developing relationship between Hawaiʻi and Okinawa in his correspondence on June 6, 1959 to
Laurence H. Snyder, UH President: “Our problems are similar in many ways to those of Hawaii, and because of this, a close working relationship between our leaders and advisers should prove mutually beneficial.”63 Specifically, Booth requested that UH send staff advisers to Okinawa for short periods to assist GRI in labor relations, social welfare, fisheries, and agriculture.
Furthermore, in 1959, USCAR and USARPAC with the support of UOA started the Ryukyuan-
Hawaiian Brotherhood Program to facilitate the human exchange between Okinawa and Hawaiʻi.
It also promoted the exchange between Golden Gate Club, whose membership consisted of elite
Okinawans studied in the United States, and Hui Makaala, which consisted of elite Nisei
Okinawans in Hawaiʻi. As one of the significant missions given by USAPARC, UOA launched the campaign in 1960 to send anti-communist letters to relatives and friends in Okinawa to persuade them not to vote for leftist candidates.64
62 “Development of Contacts between Hawaii and Okinawa,” record No. 0000105545, OPA. In response to this, the U.S. army consulted with United States Information Agency and Institute of Education Services to see if they could assist in the development of contacts between Hawaii and Okinawa, which did not realize in the end. 63 6 June 1959 Correspondence from Donald P. Booth, Lieutenant General, United States Army High Commissioner to Dr. Laurence H. Snyder, President, University of Hawaiʻi, President’s Office 1987-1 Box 16. Folder 9, UHUAMC. 64 Okano, “Senryō-sha to Hi-Senryō-sha no hazama wo ikiru imin,” 8. 152
This intimate relationship with the U.S. Army, however, was not fully welcomed, but rather caused mixed feelings, and even divisions within the Okinawan community in Hawaiʻi especially after the “all-island” struggle. In particular, the Honolulu Star Bulletin’s editorial column titled “Okinawa does not ‘belong’ to Japan” on November 26, 1959, triggered a dispute between those who supported the reversion of Okinawa to Japan and those who opposed it.
While the former insisted that the United States had “liberated” Okinawa from Japanese imperial violence, the latter claimed that it was natural to return to Japan based on the view that Japanese and Okinawans were descended from one “parent source (Japanese: nichiryū dōsoron).”65 We can see here how Japanese imperial discourse and neocolonialism of the U.S. empire operated together to make divisions among the Okinawan diaspora. All in all, as Yuichiro Onishi points out, “the state of indeterminacy in occupied Okinawa decisively animated the formation of
Okinawan immigrants’ distinct identity and consciousness.”66 So much so that, both for U.S.
Army and the Okinawan community in Hawaiʻi, strengthening a bridge between Okinawa and
Hawaiʻi became all the more critical in the 1960s.
While Hawaiʻi’s transition to statehood and subsequent establishment of the East-West
Center further reinforced the connection between Okinawa and Hawaiʻi, it also accelerated the involvement of Japan in U.S.-led development projects in Asia-Pacific.
Japan’s Involvement in Transpacific Welfare Projects
In the leading article entitled “Japan Enters Era of Equality with U.S.” on March 19,
1961, the Sunday Advertiser evaluated the four-year accomplishments of Douglas MacArthur II
65 Okano Nobukatsu, “Sengo Hawai ni okeru ‘Okinawa mondai’ no tenkai – Beikoku no Okinawa touchi seisaku to Okinawa imin no kankei nit suite,” Imin Kenkyū, Vol. 4 (February 2008):1-30, 10-11. 66 Onishi, “Occupied Okinawa on the Edge,” 742. 153
as ambassador to Japan from 1957 until 1961. The article reproduced MacArthur’s speech delivered at a farewell dinner just before he left Tokyo. In it, MacArthur reviewed the progress of U.S.-Japanese relations since the occupation period, when his uncle, General Douglas
MacArthur served as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. He highlighted that his tenure in the embassy was devoted to establishing a new era of “real partnership in Japanese-
American relations based on sovereign equality, mutual respect, enlightened self-interest and the independence of both nations.”67 These principles were enunciated in a joint communiqué of
Japanese Prime Minister Kishi and U.S. President Eisenhower issued on June 21, 1957.68 In reality, however, MacArthur II’s four-year term was the period when Japanese suspicion and resentment against “unequal” relations with the United States became rather intensified, which reached a peak in the struggle during the 1960s against the “automatic renewal” of the US-Japan
Security Treaty (the Anpo struggle). Assuming that the grievances were the “inevitable residue of the war and the occupation period,” MacArthur II proposed that it was necessary to build the
“genuine partnership” between the two nations through pursuing “common aims and ideals.” For this, in addition to security and trade, MacArthur raised the “historical task of economic development in Asia” as a mutual objective shared by the U.S. and Japanese governments:
As advanced industrial nations, we share another vitally important interest in the economic development and welfare of the peoples of the less developed countries. I believe that our partnership increasingly will concern itself with programs, undertaken together and with other advanced countries, to hasten the sound growth of the non-
67 Douglas MacArthur II, “Prospects Bright for Two Nations,” The Honolulu Advertiser, March 19, 1961. 68 In the same communiqué, Kishi emphasized the strong desire of the Japanese people for the return of administrative control over the Ryukyu and Bonin Islands to Japan. While Eisenhower reaffirmed the United States position that Japan possesses residual sovereignty over these islands, he pointed out that the United States would continue the present status as long as threats and tensions exist in the Far East. See “Joint communiqué of Japanese Prime Minister Kishi and U.S. President Eisenhower issued on June 21, 1957,” recorded in Hosoya Chihiro et. al., eds. Nichibei Kankei Shiryō-shū, 1945-1997 (Tokyo: Tokyo Digaku Shuppankai, 1999), 400-403. 154
industrial countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin American so that their peoples may enjoy a better way of life.69
As one such achievement of the U.S.-Japan cooperative development projects, MacArthur II refers to the technical training programs conducted in Japan under the joint auspices of the
United States International Cooperation Administration and the Government of Japan, which had already trained more than 1,000 participants from other parts of Asia by 1961. ICA had already launched the trilateral project in 1953 to send trainees from Southeast Asian countries to Japan for technical training. More than a thousand Asian participants had received training in Japan under the project by the end of 1960.70 To further increase the responsibility of Japan, on March
23, 1960, the U.S. and Japanese governments made an agreement to start the “Third-Country
Training Program,” under which “facilities for technical study, observation and training are made available in Japan for trainees or observers selected from the third countries by agreement between the governments concerned including the governments of such third countries.”71 As will be shown in detail below, Third-Country training program closely connected Japan, the
United States, Okinawa, Taiwan, and other South Asian countries, forming the Cold War Asia-
Pacific arrangements that enabled U.S.-Japan economic interventions in Asia.
Before going into detail about the third-country training program, it should be noted here that the postwar Japanese foreign aid, which began in the 1950s, closely related to war reparations to Asian countries from the very outset, and together played a crucial part of the U.S.
Cold War strategy in Asia. Utsumi Aiko provides a comprehensive view of how the U.S. Cold
69 Ibid. 70 “Hatsuka-goro chō-in.” Asahi Sminbun, March 10, 1960. 71 “Third-Country Training Program in Japan,” compiled in United States Treaties and Other International Agreements, Volume 11, Part 2, 1960, p. 1387. http://www.llmc.com/default.aspx [last accessed January 14, 2019]. 155
War policy directed negotiations on reparations for the damage and suffering caused by Japanese imperialism and colonialism.72 In order to remake Japan into a bulwark against communism, the
United States pressured other countries of the Allied Powers to reduce the reparation requirements for Japan, so that it would not hinder Japan’s economic recovery and stability. This would, in turn, reduce the financial burden of the United States. As a result, despite strong opposition from Asian countries, especially the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, and India, Article
14 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty precluded further reparations. Moreover, it states that Japan would compensate Allied countries by “making available the services of the Japanese people in production, salvaging and other work for the Allied Powers in question.” And, where the manufacturing of raw materials is called for, the Allied countries should supply them “so as not to throw any foreign exchange burden upon Japan.”
Based on Article 14 of the Peace Treaty, the Japanese government concluded reparation agreements with Burma (1954), the Philippines (1956), Indonesia (1958), and South Vietnam
(1959). The Japanese government also agreed to extend “quasi-reparations,” such as the “special yen settlement” and economic cooperation, to those countries in Asia that did not claim reparations under the Peace Treaty.73 All in all, reparations turned from redress of injustice into a system that would benefit Japanese business through processing trade with Southeast Asia, and thus greatly contributed to rapid economic recovery and industrial development on Japan side. In other words, the San Francisco Peace Treaty not only reduced the financial burden of reparation for Japan but also put Japan and its former colonies or occupied areas into the neocolonial
72 Utsumi Aiko, Sengo Hoshō kara kangaeru Nihon to Ajia, Nihonshi Riburetto (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppankai, 2001). Saori N. Katada’s article also details how the Japanese foreign aid policy was formed in response to economic imperative and U.S. Cold War policy. See Saori N. Katada, “Japan’s Foreign Aid after the San Francisco Peace Treaty,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 9, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2000): 197-220. 73 For the details of reparations to each country, see Utsumi, Sengo Hoshō kara kangaeru, 27. 156
relationship by making the latter depend on industrial development of the former under the name of “foreign aid.”
For the United States, the integration of Japan into Southeast Asian economies through reparations and foreign aid was particularly important to maintain U.S. political and economic hegemony in Southeast Asia against the Communist Bloc. Moreover, as Saori N. Katada points out, the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian Nations held in Indonesia in April 1955 triggered the Non-Aligned Movements and growing nationalism in newly independent countries in
Southeast Asia, which “made it difficult for Washington to conduct its foreign economic policy without large side-payments or a disguise of neutrality of some sort.”74 Japanese reparations thus became useful both for Japan and the United States in order to “penetrate through the Asian suspicion and pave the way for Japan toward further involvement in Southeast Asia with its foreign aid and private investment.”75 Consequently, in May 1957, Prime Minister Kishi
Nobusuke proposed the Southeast Asian Development Fund, which aimed at establishing a regional development financial organization. Finally, in 1961, Japan became one of the founding members of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development.76 In short, the “historical task of economic development in Asia” was indeed expected to be a U.S.-Japan “cooperative” project, which was crucial to maintain what Bruce Cumings describes as the “triangular arrangement” in Cold War political economy
74 Katada, “Japan’s Foreign Aid after the San Francisco Peace Treaty,” 213. 75 Ibid. 76 Japan also joined the Colombo Plan in 1954. The Colombo Plan is a foreign-aid organization created in January 1950 by the Commonwealth countries to enhance economic development of South and Southeast Asia to counter Communist economic appeals. Due to strong opposition from member countries like Australia and the Great Britain, Japan’s membership to the plan was at first not permitted. According to Katada, the United States was also reluctant to take part in the plan, partly because that the Colombo Plan had a strong focus on aid to India, the strong advocate of the non-aligned movement, and that the non- military nature of the Colombo Plan and “unwillingness of the most recipients to receive tied or military aid was incompatible with U.S. foreign aid policy at that time (Katada, “Japan’s Foreign Aid,” 204). 157
along the lines of world systems theory: the U.S. as the core, Japan as semi-periphery, and
Southeast Asia as periphery.77
What is most relevant to our discussion here is that the East-West Center in Hawaiʻi served as one of the major institutions to facilitate the U.S.-Japan joint development projects in
Asia, especially in the field of transferring technology and developing human resources. The
EWC-sponsored U.S.-Japan joint training projects often involved yet another important actor of the Cold War Asia-Pacific theater, Taiwan. In April 1962, the EWC launched a four-and-half- month pilot project in Agricultural Extension, together with a four-month program in Vocational
Education. Twelve trainees in agriculture from Asian countries spent three months in Hawaiʻi, followed by three weeks in Japan for training in the use of small farm machinery and two weeks in Taiwan studying compost fertilizer. Training in Japan was conducted under the auspices of the
Japanese Ministry of Agriculture under the Joint Agreement on the Third-Country Training
Program, whereas training in Taiwan was handled by the Sino-American Joint Commission on
Rural Reconstruction with the cooperation of the AID Mission to China.78 Specialists from the
77 Bruce Cumings, “The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy: Industrial Sectors, Product Cycles, and Political Consequences,” International Organization, 38(1) (Winter 1984): 1-40, 19. This triangular structure was first officially articulated at the National Security Council (NSC) in deliberations leading up to the adoption of NSC 48/1 in late December 1949. 78 The Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) was established on October 1, 1948 as an organ to implement the China Aid Act of 1948 (Public Law 472, Title IV) which aimed at assisting the Kuomintang (KMT) Government in establishing more stable economic conditions. Organized and carried out against a background of continuing civil war, JCRR, first convened in Nanking, moved to Taiwan in August 1949 with the defeat of the Nationalist Party. With the termination of U.S. economic aid to the Republic of China on June 30, 1965, the United States practically withdrew from the advisory position of the commission. JCRR formulated a wide variety of reconstruction projects, including not only land reform, promoting agricultural technologies, the increasing the production of fish, and the reforestation of large areas, but also developing research, education, and extension programs. It also engaged in medical and public health reforms, such as the improvement of health services in rural areas, eradicating and controlling communicable diseases, and organizing an effective family-planning system. See Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, ed., Chinese-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR): Its organization its organization, policies and objectives, and contributions to the agricultural development of Taiwan (Taipei: JCRR, 1977). The JCCR shows another example of how U.S. Cold War policy promoted development assistance in Asia in tandem with local technocrats. For a comprehensive history of the JCRR, see Joseph A. Yager, Transforming Agriculture in Taiwan: The 158
University of Hawaiʻi and cooperating agencies conducted two weeks of seminars before the field training. According to East-West Center News, Hawaiʻi was selected for the bulk of the training “not only because of the excellence of its agricultural extension service but because of the similarity of its agricultural products and problems to many of those in Asian countries.”79
The project aimed to: “(1) demonstrate the exceptionally rich opportunities in Hawaii’s vocational and agricultural training programs; (2) extend the results of these projects to larger training plans – increased numbers, greater depth in training, wider range of training; (3) provide guidance for subsequent program-planning in these and other areas both in content and in methodology; and (4) provide date to evaluate the effectiveness of “training trainers” as a
“multiplier” in technical training efforts.”80 This trilateral transpacific training project, Hawaiʻi as headquarters, Japan and Taiwan (and South Korea) as training fields became one of the new models for U.S.-led international development aid in Asia-Pacific.
It was Baron Goto, a Japanese American agricultural educator and the vice-chancellor of the Institute of Technical Interchange (ITI) of EWC, who played a pivotal role in implementing those bilateral/trilateral technical training programs. As Mire Koikari’s detailed analysis shows,
Baron Goto’s life course and activities as a leading administrator of EWC embodied the
“Japanese immigrant success narrative” that was deeply embedded in the dynamics of US expansionism in the Cold War.81 Moreover, Goto’s interaction with the network of American
Experience of the Joint Commission on Rural Construction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). Yamamoto Shin focuses on the JCRR’s early activities on mainland China, providing detailed description on how JCRR succeeded the methods and policies on rural reconstruction developed by the KMT government during the Second Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War. See Yamamoto Shin, “Chūgoku nōson fukkō rengō no seiritsu to sono tairiku deno katsudou,” Chūgoku 21 (2) (1997): 135- 160. 79 East-West Center News, Volume II, No. 2, April, 1962, 6-7. 80 East-West Center News, Volume I, No. 11, December 1961, 3. 81 Koikari, Cold War Encounters, 115. 159
social scientists reveals the role of these scholars played in adapting wartime knowledge accumulation regarding America’s enemies into a Cold War “technology” to discipline
“latecomers” who were yet to be modernized. Dispatched by UH president Gregg Sinclair, Goto frequently traveled to the U.S. mainland as well as Puerto Rico in the 1950s to obtain knowledge and technologies necessary to turn Hawaiʻi into a center for technical and educational training in the coming decade. Particularly crucial for Goto was his encounter with the Cornel sociologist and psychiatrist Alexander Leighton. During the war, Leighton participated in U.S.-government sponsored social science projects including the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in the Pacific and community analysis of Japanese American internees and their relationship to administrators within relocation camps. Believing that social scientists could serve a key role in the cross- cultural administration process, he continued to collaborate with the U.S. government after the war and directed various applied anthropology projects to train specialists and administrators involving in international development and technical aid. Most problematically, Leighton used southwestern Native American reservations as the “field laboratory” to acquaint participants with the common problems of technology transfer in “underdeveloped” societies.82 In this way, as
Nils Gilman illustrates, social scientists like Leighton tried to build a comprehensive theory on the “third world,” through simplifying, and thus erasing, “the complicated world-historical problems of decolonization and industrialization, helping to guide American economic aid and military intervention in postcolonial regions.”83
82 Wade Davis, “Cornell’s Field Seminar in Applied Anthropology: Social Scientists and American Indians in the Postwar Southwest,” Journal of the Southwest, Vol.43, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001): 317-341, 317-318. 83 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Maryland: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 3. 160
It is through participating in Leighton’s field laboratory that Goto got the basic idea for technical exchange programs at EWC. Observing the indigenous population in Leighton’s field seminar, Goto created the handbook that describes principles essential in administering international technical interchange programs, such as the importance of local participation and familiarity with language and culture of the local society. As Koikari succinctly puts it, Goto’s handbook became a site “where depoliticizing understandings of ‘racial and cultural differences,’ articulated in the contexts of Japanese American relocation and Native American reservations, were passed down from a white academician to an immigrant technician, informing the latter’s discourses and practices in the emerging project of international technical interchange that would soon spread across the vast region of Asia and the Pacific.”84
Upon returning to Hawaiʻi, Baron Goto became Director of International Cooperation
Center of Hawaii, serving as a consultant on many special assignments to Asia. Once appointed as a Vice-Chancellor of ITI of EWC, Goto put a greater emphasis on the notion of “interchange.”
When the International Training Agency was renamed as the Institute of Technical Interchange in 1962, Goto made the following comment on the East-West Center News:
Too often in the past, the unspoken assumption has been that only the Americans have something to teach. The fact is, Americans have much to learn from Asians, who have rich cultural heritages often including technological achievement. Technical training sponsored by the Center should be developed such that, as much as possible, technicians from East and West alike are both teachers and learners.85
Goto then goes on listing on-going and future ITI projects that would promote “genuine” interchange between Americans and Asians. One such program is mechanization in the small,
84 Koikari, Cold War Encounters, 121. 85 Baron Goto, “The Center’s Challenge in Technical Interchange,” East-West Center News, Vol.2, No. 6, 1962, 4. 161
family-operated farm, which Goto thought as an area that “Japan has much to teach Americans and other Asians.” Similarly, Goto continues, Taiwan excelled in the technique of making and using organic fertilizer and thus would be an ideal training place for Asian agriculturalists, who usually could not afford chemical fertilizers used extensively in the United States.86 Goto further mentioned horticulture and landscape architecture as the area in which Japan could take yjr initiative, announcing that a U.S.-Japan joint project was under consideration to develop a
Japanese garden at EWC. Financed by twenty-two Japanese business firms, involving specialists from Asia, the Pacific, and the United States, and completed in 1963, this Japanese garden indeed came to embody the spirit of “interchange” that Goto was so much eager to implement.
Most symbolically, during their trip to Hawaiʻi in 1964, Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko blessed the garden during a ceremony of releasing carps, a symbol of valor, into the garden stream. The garden’s association with Japanese emperors can be also observed in its official website. On the top of the page on the Japanese Garden, it holds an epigraph quoted a poem by the Meiji Emperor: “In my garden/ Side by side/ Native plants, foreign plants/ Growing together.”87 Here, Meiji Emperor’s imperialist and “benevolent” assimilationist gaze perfectly overlapped with U.S. Cold War modernization project embodied by the East-West Center. It is thus not surprising that the figure of the postwar imperial family, the very product of Cold War
U.S.-Japan complicity, was deployed to embrace the Japanese Garden and the East-West Center.
Third-Country Training Program also facilitated the trilateral relationship between the
United States, Okinawa, and Taiwan. In fact, under the Third Country Training Program funded mostly by USAID, Taiwan served as yet another training center for technicians from Asian and
86 Ibid., 5. 87 Japanese Garden, East-West Center, official homepage, https://www.eastwestcenter.org/about- ewc/campus-maps/japanese-garden [last accessed December 1, 2017]. 162
other regions. The training conducted in Taiwan covers such fields as agriculture, industry, health, education, public administration, and community development. For example, training programs completed in February 1967 included “Air Traffic Control” and “Educational TV training” for participants from Vietnam, “Community Development” for participants from
Thailand, “Rice Culture” for participants from Micronesia, and “Social Insurance” and “Labor
Administration” for participants from Okinawa.88 The length of the training was usually shorter than those conducted in Hawaiʻi, from two weeks to a few months. Towards the latter half of the
1960s, more and more people in Okinawan were dispatched to Taiwan for technical training, instead of Hawaiʻi or the U.S. mainland. During the period from 1960 to 1966, a total of 137
Okinawans went to Hawaiʻi to participate in EWC-ITI programs, whereas the total of 696
Okinawans received training in Taiwan.89 Especially from 1965 until the year of reversion, more than 150 Okinawans, mostly GRI officials, were sent to Taiwan under the Third-Country
Training Program each year. 1965 was also the year when USCAR transferred authorities to GRI on procedures of hiring non-Ryukyuan workers. Accordingly, enterprises in Okinawa, sugar refineries and pineapple canning factories, in particular, rushed to hire Chinese workers from
Taiwan. In 1971, as many as 3,716 Taiwanese were working in occupied Okinawa, consisting
59.3% of the non-Ryukyuan workers permitted to work in the territory.90
In addition to geographical proximity and long-existing relations between Taiwan and
Okinawa through trade and migration, the political situation surrounding Taiwan under the
Republic of China (ROC) government contributed to the frequent human exchange between the
88 USCAR record, “Medical Assistance Training (Third Country Training),” USCAR02940 [Box 29- Folder 1], NDL. 89 GRI record “Kaigisho, Daisangoku kenshū keikaku,” R00002177B, OPA. 90 Yao Shōhei, “Sengo ni okeru Taiwan kara “Ryūkyū” heno gijutsusha rōdōsha hakenjigyō nitsuite,” Nihon Taiwan Gakkaihō, vol. 12 (May 2010): 239-254. 163
two sites. Having a strategic plan to place the Ryukyu Islands under the US-ROC joint trusteeship in mind, Taiwan supported the separation of Okinawa and Amami islands from Japan and did not officially recognize the reversion of those islands to Japan. As the actualization of the reversion was close at hand by the late1960s, it became all the more critical for ROC to maintain and develop close connections between Okinawa and Taiwan through trading and human exchanges.
In addition to bilateral/trilateral interchange programs, ITI under the direction of Goto launched various training programs targeted at the Pacific areas, especially islands under U.S. administration. From September 1963 to January 1964, he made frequent trips to Pacific islands, including Fiji, New Caledonia, American Samoa, and the U.S. Trust Territory. The purpose of these trips was “to talk with various islands peoples to discuss their needs and their aspirations.”91 From observations made on these trips, special emphasis was laid on the medical and nursing training programs in order to improve the standard of living in those islands. East-
West Center’s quarterly report claims that Hawaiʻi, situated within the Pacific area, could offer
“exceptional facilities for health and medical technology” to those medical practitioners and nurses in the Pacific who were often geographically and professionally separated from important continual contact with advanced health and medical research and techniques. Accordingly, in the same year, the initial project in Continuing Medical and Health Education was completed, in which medical practitioners and nurses from Western Samoa, American Samoa, Guam, and the
Trust Territory participated in the six-month course, including field training. Department of
Public Health at UH as well as medical personnel from Hawaii’s hospitals, public and private health agencies were assisting the project. In fact, this was the first step for Hawaiʻi to develop
91 East-West Center, Quarterly Report, January to March, 1964, Box 5, Folder 11 of East-West Center Institute of Technical Interchange, UHUAMC. 164
into what medical professionals later describes as “a nidus for international health outreach.”92
And it is this impetus for building a transpacific network of healthcare with Hawaiʻi at the center that first and foremost propelled UH medical educators to engage in establishing the postgraduate intern and resident program in occupied Okinawa, to which we now turn.
Building a Nidus for Transpacific Health
In 1964, USCAR and USARPAC approached to Dr. Windsor C. Cutting, Dean of the
Medical School at the University of Hawaii, asking if the UH Medical School could develop the post-graduate education program at the new Okinawa Central Hospital.93 The Okinawan Central
Hospital relocated from Koza to Gushikawa and newly constructed jointly by GRI and USCAR was to be completed by 1965.94 The goal of this project was to alleviate the shortage of physicians in Okinawa and to improve the medical standards of the Ryukyu Islands. A most urgent and continuing problem was the shortage of trained medical personnel in occupied
Okinawa. In 1966, there were 396 physicians to serve a population of 960,000 (41.25 physicians per 100,000)95, when in mainland Japan, it was 111.3 physicians per 100,000. Although USCAR had initiated various programs to train Okinawan physicians since 1949 by sending students to
Japan and the United States, less than half of them returned to Okinawa to practice after graduating from medical schools. This is partly because no formal post-graduate education programs were available in Okinawa for medical graduates. The establishment of a postgraduate
92 Michael, “Delivering Health Cater to the Pacific,” 9. 93 The official Japanese name is Okinawa Chūbu Byōin. 94 Construction was delayed due to a lack of necessary equipment, delays in installing available equipment, and construction deficiencies. It was finally completed in April 1966. 95 “Fact Sheet: Medical Training Program for the Ryukyu Islands,” by Director of Civil Affairs, Compiled in USCAR record no. 0000000880, OPA, 165
education program aimed to increase the attractiveness of medical practice in Okinawa and thus alleviate the prolonged problem of doctor shortages. In addition, the program aimed to “provide a medical training center for doctors, nurses, and technicians in the Far East, with the ultimate objective of reaching standards recommended by the American Medical Association Council of
Medical Education and Hospitals.”96 It was thus hoped that Okinawa would serve as a nucleus of a transpacific network of medical education and healthcare.
Dean Cutting later recalled that the project found to be “exceedingly complicated,” since they were expected to deal “not only with USCAR, but with the U.S. Army in Okinawa, the U.S.
Army in Hawaii, the Government of the Ryukyu Islands, the Government of Japan, the Okinawa
Medical Association, and the large Okinawan community in Hawaii.”97 As Cutting suggested, the University of Hawaiʻi Postgraduate Medical Education Program at Okinawa Central Hospital was the site in which those actors negotiated, collaborated, and competed each other to gain its own hegemony in the realm of medicine and healthcare. Detailed analysis of development of the program below reveals at least three separate, yet interconnected currents met through this project: 1) the transpacific network of specialists in international healthcare programs and medical education based in Hawaiʻi, which had been facilitated by the State Department, AID and private welfare organizations, 2) a long-standing connection between Okinawan community in Hawaiʻi and Okinawa, and 3) Japanese government’s intervention in civil affairs in Okinawa in anticipation of the reversion.
The University of Hawaii Medical School itself was a relatively new institution when the
U.S. Army visited Dean Cutting’s office in 1964. It was in 1962 when the University of Hawaii
96 High Commissioner Report, 1968-69, 150. 97 Cutting, Windsor C., “Medical Education in the Pacific,” the report read at the 11th Congress of the Pan-Pacific Surgical Association, Honolulu, October 26, 1969. President’s Office Records A1987:001 Box 56 Fld. 5., UHUAMC. 166
officially began for a program in biomedical education. The Hawaiʻi’s transition to statehood in
1960 made people recognize once again the need for physicians in Hawaiʻi and the demands for medical education of Hawaii residents. In 1961 the State of Hawaii underscored its desire and ability to assume scientific leadership in the Pacific basin by founding the Pacific Biomedical
Research Center (PRBC), the forerunner of the School of Medicine, with the aid of the National
Institute of Health.98 In January 1964, Governor John A. Burns of the State of Hawaii issued an official statement endorsing the development of the medical school program.
Consequently, in the following year, the Hawaiʻi State Legislature passed a resolution allotting funds for the establishment of a two-year medical school at the University of Hawaii.
Besides, the grants from the two private foundations, $180,000 from the Commonwealth Fund and $1,250,000 from W. K. Kellogg Foundation not only supported a two-year biomedical program but also enabled the university to hire several key figures to develop medical education at the university. Windsor C. Cutting, a pharmacologist and the former Dean of Medicine at
Stanford, joined the University of Hawaii in July in 1964 as the first director of the PBRC and
Dean-designate of the proposed school of medicine.99 According to a memorial address delivered by George Chaplin, editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, although Cutting had never been to Hawaiʻi before this appointment, he was attracted by the “newness of Statehood and of the surge of energy this generated here and throughout the Pacific.” Recognizing that “we are in the
Pacific Era”, Cutting had a grand vision of “the unifying and humanizing role that medical education could play in the Pacific.”100 Indeed, in another article in the Honolulu Advertiser in
98 Report of Consultation Visit to the University of Hawaii Medical School, 6, Presidential Records, Box 18, UHUAMC. 99 Ibid. 100 Windsor Cutting, Honolulu Advertiser, June 8, 1972 167
1968, Cutting expressed his future vision for the medical school to be a centerpiece for medical education for the entire Pacific and Asia: “Hawaiʻi should become a principal center for teaching and study of tropical disease. Although there is little tropical disease in Hawaiʻi, the State can, and has, become a center for work in this field. Experience has shown that Hawaiʻi is an excellent staging area for expeditions all over the Pacific and free Asia.”101
Cutting was not alone in his vision that emphasized the UH’s role in transpacific and international medical education. Thomas Hale Hamilton, who became a president of the
University of Hawaii in 1964, also had a special interest in international issues and wanted to strengthen international programs at the university. Dr. Richard K. C. Lee, formerly the head of the Hawaii State Department of Health, long time World Health Organization delegate and advisor, and the first dean of Department of Public Health established in 1962, shared
Hamilton’s interest. He recognized the need for an institution that could bridge the gap between
East and West.102 Dr. Lee launched a project sponsored by East-West Center’s Institute for
Technical Interchange to train medical officers and nurses from the Pacific Islands.103 Moreover, there was yet another figure who played a pivotal role in developing international health programs at UH, Dr. Emmanuel Voulgaropoulos. Before coming to Hawaii in 1965 at the request of Hamilton to help establish the public health school, Voulgaropoulos had worked for more than five years in Cambodia and Vietnam with the Medical Eye and Dental International Care
Organization and the U.S. Agency for International Development. His extensive experience of engaging in the health development in Southeast Asia on the verge of the Vietnam War led
101 Quoted in Larry Fleece, The John A. Burns School of Medicine: 50 Years of Healing in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: Legacy Isle Publishing 2015), 20. 102 Thomas D’ Agnes, Dr. V: An Extraordinary Journey (Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc, 2012). Retrieved from Amazon. com, Chapter 7, the section starting with “Having several attractive jobs.” 103 East West Center News, Vol. 3, No.4, December 1963, 4. 168
Voulgaropoulos to develop a clear vision about international health and the role Hawaii could play. When Hamilton and Lee asked Voulgaropoulos if he had any ideas for developing international health programs at the University of Hawaii, he replied,
There are too many universities that want to do research in Asia. Asian countries don’t need research right now. They need to develop their human resources. They need to get people trained who can return to their countries and establish domestic educational institutions. The University of Hawaii could fill that niche as a hands-on training institution for countries in Asia and the Pacific.”104
Dr. Voulgaropoulos saw his new appointment at the UH public health school as an opportunity to build an institution that catered to the needs of Asian countries. In order to develop service- oriented health programs in the Pacific Islands and Asia, he made use of Peace Corps volunteers.
It was Dr. Voulgaropoulos who first served as the project director of the UH-Okinawa
Central Hospital postgraduate education program. When Dean Cutting asked Voulgaropoulos for advice on the project, he suggested that UH utilize local specialist physicians of Okinawan descent in Hawaii, since both the medical school and public health at UH were still under development and not able to organize a full teaching unit to be sent to Okinawa. Voulgaropoulos thought that it would be “an opportunity for the physicians to contribute to their ancestral homeland.”105 Richard Suehiro, project manager in the Institute for Technical Interchange at
EWC, who was experienced both as a medical social worker and public health training officer, helped Voulgaropoulos to arrange a meeting with several community-minded Okinawan physicians living in Honolulu.106 A biography of Dr. Voulgaropoulos, written by his former
104 D’ Agnes, Dr. V, Chapter 7, the section starting with “Having several attractive jobs.” 105 Ibid., Chapter 7, section starting with “Although the University”. 106 Ibid. 169
student, describes the response from the Okinawan community as “overwhelming,” speculating the reason behind their enthusiasm as follows: “These physicians were local kids who had succeeded and were anxious to give something back to Okinawa. When it came time to enlist volunteers, they were fighting to get on the roster.”107
In response to the request from US Army Pacific in Hawaii, Dr. Shōei Yamauchi, a US
Board certified general surgeon practicing in Honolulu, visited Okinawa in 1964 and inspect medical and public health conditions. Yamauchi was born in Yomitan, a village in the central part of Okinawa Island, and immigrated to Hawaiʻi before the war a child with his parents. After graduating from the University of Michigan Medical School, he completed his surgical residency at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Baltimore.108 Yamauchi’s survey in Okinawa revealed poor sanitary conditions and a need to improve the medical and public health services and facilities for the civilian population.109 In his report submitted to USARPAC, Yamauchi recommended that it was necessary to start postgraduate medical training in Okinawa in order to improve medical and public health conditions in Okinawa. The report also recommended the establishment of a medical library and further suggested that a medical school be built.
On February 1, 1965, at the beginning of the Twenty-Eighth session of the legislature of
GRI, Gen. Albert Watson II, High Commissioner of the USCAR, officially announced that
USCAR had requested funds to develop an in-country Post-Graduate Training Program for
Interns and Residents. In his address, under the section titled “A longer and more healthful life for the Ryukyuan People,” Watson stated, “Achievement of our other goals must be
107 Ibid. 108 Masao Maeshiro, Satoru Izutsu, and Kathleen Kihmm Connolly, “Medical School Hotline: A History of the University of Hawaiʻi Postgraduate Medical Educaion Program at Okinawa Chubu Hospital, 1966- 2012,” Hawaiʻi Journal of Medicine & Public Health, Vol.73, No 6 (June 2014): 191-194, 192. 109 Ibid. 170
accompanied by steady improvement of our public health services and facilities since prosperity and social development without personal health cannot bring happiness.” To make advances in the public health field, USCAR was also planning to increase the number of Ryukyuan public health personnel participating in other training programs under the auspices of the United States, such as the Third Country Training Program and programs offered by the East-West Center.110
Subsequently, in June 1965, the U.S. Army and the U.S. State Department contracted the
East-West Center and the University of Hawaii to initiate a U.S. style postgraduate medical training program. The following year, four physicians from the University of Hawaii led by
Yamakawa traveled to Okinawa to conduct training on three-month rotations.111 However, despite the eagerness of the UH faculty involved, the program did not proceed smoothly in the beginning. For one thing, the program was not able to attract a sufficient number of applicants at first. In the first year, no one applied to the program, and the staff had to tour around Japan to recruit candidates.112 Even more seriously, the University of Hawaii was experiencing difficulty in recruiting personnel to carry out the program. Voulgaropoulos thought that the difficulty arose from the fact that in addition to lack of assurance of an adequate operating budget, USCAR had changed their position on who was to have operational control over the hospital. While the first draft contract stated that the UH personnel would be provided full logistical support on Okinawa and that they would have a degree of operational control over the hospital, logistical support was subsequently withdrawn and the final contract eliminated the direct supervisory and operational
110 Message of Lt. Gen. Albert Watson, II, U.S. High commissioner, to Legislature, Government of the Ryukyu Islands (Twenty-eighth Session, 1 February 1965), 19, USCAR records, 0000000866, OPA. 111 Ibid. 112 Maeshiro Masao, “Okinawa kenritu chūbu byōin ni okeru sotsugo rinshō kenshū sono 20 nen,” Igaku Kyōiku 18 (6) (1987): 471-473. 171
control of hospitals by UH personnel.113 The UH project team led by Voulgaropoulos kept claiming that comprehensive supervisory control and an adequate budget was a necessity for this contract to be effective. They also demanded that the contract is modified to provide a broad health program as distinguished from the development of the postgraduate education program.
However, USCAR turned down the proposal for the reason that USCAR, GRI, and the government of Japan were already engaged in comprehensive public health activities.114 USCAR also reiterated in its correspondence with UH that the Okinawa Central Hospital was under GRI management and thus not considered as a separate entity under the exclusive control of USCAR.
This actually inhibited USCAR from providing adequate funds for the program, since
“guidelines established in USCAR for utilization of ARIA funds specifically forbid utilization of these funds for operational or administrative charges incurred in any facility under GRI management.”115
USCAR’s limited authority over the civil affairs of Okinawa, which perplexed the UH faculty, reflected the rapid transition that Okinawa was experiencing in the latter half of the
1960s. As the U.S. and Japan began seriously discussing the return of control of Okinawa to
Japan, USCAR gradually transferred administrative duties and responsibilities to GRI. When
USCAR and UH launched the postgraduate medical education program, the Japanese government also began officially involving in improving medicine and healthcare in Okinawa.
On August 19, 1965, during his visit to Okinawa, Prime Minister Sato Eisaku publicly promised
113 Staff Study 17 Feb 1966, by M. J. Larsen, Special Assistant to DCA, USCAR record no. 0000000880, OPA. 114 Contract No. DAGO166C0003, Department of the Army and the University of Hawaii, 7 April, 1966. USCAR record no. 0000000880, OPA. 115 Letter from USCAR/PHW to Windsor C. Cutting, 26 November 1965, USCAR record no. 0000000880, OPA. 172
to establish a medical school in Okinawa. As a result, a preparatory committee for the establishment of the University of the Ryukyus Medical School was organized under Prime
Minister’s Office, with Takemi Tarō, the head of Japan Medical Association, as a chair. After several inspection trips to Okinawa, the committee reached a conclusion that fundamental medical and public health conditions in Okinawa should be improved prior to the establishment of a medical school. As a measure to consolidate medical and healthcare conditions, the committee proposed 1) to utilize Chubu Hospital as a medical internship hospital to secure and keep medical doctors in Okinawa, 2) to establish a college of health science in the University of the Ryukyus, and 3) to reconstruct Naha Hospital, aiming at the further improvement of a medical field in Okinawa.116 As it happened, it was not until the Japanese committee’s visit to
Okinawa that Takemi and other members were informed of the UH-OCH project. Upon hearing about these developments, the committee requested USCAR abrogate its contract with the
University of Hawaii, and instead accept the Japanese government’s plans. The committee further insisted that the Japan Medical Association be used as the contract organization, so that
USCAR, GRI, and the government of Japan could together establish “a new structural pattern in
Japanese, American and Ryukyuan cooperation, and realize its basic role in the development of a medical treatment program for Okinawa.”117 While the committee eventually agreed to utilize the UH-led postgraduate medical education program and the Japanese Ministry of Welfare acknowledged the Okinawa Central Hospital to be the institute for intern and resident training
116 An Interim Report by the Preparing Committee for the Establishment of A Medical School in the University of the Ryukyus, June 8, 1967, 1, compiled in “Ryūdai hoken gakubu secchi kenkyū iinkai kankei shiryō,” Okinawa Prefectural Library (hereafter, OPL). 117 Japan Medical News (Nichi-i nyūsu), August 1966, 20, translated and compiled in USCAR file, “Medical Assistance Training Program_Postgraduate Medical Training” (NARA 189 of HCRI-HEW 2), U80800993B, OPA. 173
program, 118 the Japanese government tried to intervene in the transpacific connection between
Okinawa and Hawaiʻi and gain hegemony in medical education in occupied Okinawa.
For the Japan Medical Association, the program might have had another meaning, since medical students in Japan were about to enter an indefinite strike in 1968 against the Doctoral
Registration Law, which would have extended the unpaid internship period of graduates and thus further exacerbate already exploitative system. The UH-OCH program would secure a place for training Okinawan interns, who were to take the Japanese medical licensing examination. Asato
Hiroaki, the first UH-OCH trainee, recalled that when he applied to the program, medical students in mainland Japan were in a state of confusion. With intensification of the movement against the medical internship system, most of his classmates holed up in a university hospital, boycotting a graduate school and a national examination. The situation led him and other trainees to consider coming to occupied Okinawa, with “a pioneer spirit (kaitakusha damashi’i)” in their mind, to receive American-style intern and resident program.119
In fact, Shurei no Hikari, a propaganda magazine published by USCAR and the High
Commissioners’ Office, laid out the program in a bit of a different way than was described in the
UH and USCAR records. It states that the intern and resident program was realized through the collaboration of GRI, the U.S., and the Japanese governments. The objective of the program was to train interns to reach the standard comparable with Japan and the United States, and “let them acquire basic knowledge necessary to pass the Japanese medical licensing examinations.”120
Japanese national newspaper even more explicitly described the program as a “U.S-Japan”
118 Ryūkyū Seifuritsu Chūbu Byōin Sōritsu 25 shūnen kinenshi (Okinawa: Ryūkyū Seifuritsu Chūbu Byōin 1971), 28. 119 Asato Hiroaki, an essay complied in Okinawa Kenritsu Chūbu Byōin Sotsugo Kenshū 25 shūnen kinenshi 1967-1992 (Okinawa: Okinawa Kenritsu Chūbu Byōin, 1992), 54. 120 Shurei no Hikari, vol. 101 (June 1967), 4. 174
cooperative project, without recognizing the presence of GRI.121 Cooperation with the Japanese government became necessary for USCAR as well to recruit adequate numbers of trainees for the
UH-OCH project. Therefore, USCAR now had to eliminate UH’s direct supervisory and operational control, so as not to directly conflict with the intention of the Japanese government.
After several failed attempts to hire a director of the program, UH finally contracted Dr.
Neal L. Gault in 1967 to initiate and direct the Postgraduate Medical Training Program of
University of Hawaiʻi at Okinawa Central Hospital. Just like Voulgaropoulos, Gault also had rich experience in international medical education programs. Before joining the University of Hawaii,
Dr. Gault served in Seoul, Korea for the “Minnesota Project,” in which the University of
Minnesota provided Seoul National University with staff improvement and equipment aid in engineering, medicine, agriculture, and public administration.122 The contract between the
University of Minnesota and Seoul National University was signed in 1954 in the aftermath of the Korean War, through the International Cooperation Administration under the State
Department of the United States. The program continued for seven years until 1961. From 1956 to 1961, 77 faculty members of Seoul National University went to the University of Minnesota to re-train in their fields.
Meanwhile, eleven members of the University of Minnesota faculty, including Gault, came to Korea as advisors in medicine, nursing, and hospital administration.123 The most difficult and urgent task for Minnesota advisors was to get rid of the remnants of Japanese colonialism in medical education in Korea and instead introduce the American “scientific
121 “Nichibei kyōryoku de icchi,” Mainichi Shinbun, September 9, 1966. 122 Ock-Joo Kim, “The Minnesota Project: The Influence of American Medicine on the Development of Medical Education and Medical Research,”Korean Journal of Medical History vol. 9 (June 2000): 112- 123, 112. 123 Ibid., 116-117. 175
method”. Through the Minnesota Project, Gault recalls in his interview, “we taught people how to get their hands dirty, get in there, and get it done,” which made a great contrast with “the old
German system that the Japanese had… German Arbeit,” where students were to memorize teachers’ words. Gault continues, “We got them to participate, doing things. They did it themselves. We didn’t do it for them. I think that’s the key. They just grabbed hold.”124 Gault was convinced that the medical education was the most successful part in the Minnesota Project; all but four of the seventy-seven trainees went back to the Seoul National University and contributed to the development of healthcare in Korea.125 Gault attributed the success of the program to the fact that they built a close institutional relationship between the two universities, and melding “what the Oriental philosophy has for respect for an educational institution.”126
Although the Minnesota Project certainly contributed to the postwar development of medicine in
Korea, the Korean medical community began questioning in the 1980s whether Korean physicians adopted American medicine without critical judgment and whether the Minnesota
Project really contributed to alleviate the shortage of physicians in Korea.127 For, as Ock-Joo
Kim points out, Korean physicians, who received American medical education, tended to go to the United States, rather than stay in Korea and serve for Korean society.128
With this “success” in the Minnesota Project, Neal L. Gault was asked to serve as a consultant to the China Medical Board of New York in 1963. The China Medical Board was
124 Interview with Neal L. Gault Junior, by Associate Dean Ann M. Pflaum, University of Minnesota, January 18 and 19, 1999, University of Minnesota Libraries Digital Conservancy https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/5842 [last accessed December 5, 2017] 125 Ibid., 12. 126 Ibid. 127 Kim, “The Minnesota Project,” 120. 128 Ibis., 121. 176
funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and since its establishment, supported the Peking Union
Medical College. Through China Medical Board, Gault began engaging in medical education in
Asia, traveling around the globe to Beirut, Turkey, Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia, Taiwan, and
Japan.129 When UH was experiencing difficulty in finding personnel to carry out the postgraduate medical education program in Okinawa, the China Medical Board recommended
Gault. Under the supervision of Gault, the formal program was started in 1967.130 During the first year, eight trainees, five from Okinawa and three from mainland Japan, began their training with 14 teaching staff members the University of Hawaii. By the end of the 1971, when the five- year contract between USCAR and UH was terminated, a total of 105 trainees received the intern and resident training, and a total of 33 UH faculty came to Okinawa for three-months assignments with the director serving for two years. While most of the UH instructors were
Americans, Korean physicians, who had been trained under the Minnesota Project, also engaged with the UH-OCH project.131 In addition, Okinawan doctors, such as Maeshiro Masao, who had received a medical degree in the United States played a central role in mediating between
American instructors and Japanese/Okinawan trainees.
What did the UH-OCH project bring to medical education in Hawaiʻi and Okinawa? The
UH faculty more or less saw the project as a successful case. For example, in his paper read at the Pan-Pacific Surgical Association held in Honolulu on October 26, 1969, Dean Cutting illustrated the development of the UH-OCH project as a model case of “medical education in the
129 Interview with Neal L. Gault, 16-17. 130 Gault was later awarded the Supreme Award from the Japan Merical Association in 1969 for his contribution to improvement of medicine in Okinawa. He was also awarded in 1992 the Order of Rising Sun (Kyokujitu-shō) from the Emperor of Japan. See Maeshiro et al., “A History of Hawaiʻi Postgraduate Medical Education Program, 192. 131 Ashimine Kaoru, Ryō-i no suimyaku – Okinawaken Chūbu Byō-in no gunzō (Okinawa: Bō-dā inku, 2016), 124-125. 177
Pacific,” speculating that American-style bedside training, as well as the widespread disruption of postgraduate medical training in Japan, contributed to the success of the program. As a moral from the Okinawan experience, Cutting stated: “One can serve usefully where he doesn’t intend to stay,” meaning that “we are helping to develop clinical medicine in Okinawa, but that
Okinawa is for the Okinawans, and we are there only temporarily to help them get started.”132 In posing questions, Cutting explores the possibilities of applying what they had learned in
Okinawa to another on-going project led by UH medical school: medical education for the students from the Pacific at the Lyndon B. Johnson Tropical Medical Center built in Pago Pago,
American Samoa:
Is American Samoa different from Okinawa? Is it to be Samoa for the Samoans, or is the relationship to the rest of the world to be more like Hawaii’s? Is our interest temporary, just to get them started, or will we in time be associates, much as California and Arizona complement each other? After a while, can there be no “there and here,” but a “one world” relationship?133
Thus, the UH-OCH project was, in effect, the first step for the UH-medical school to build a medical and public health education network across the Pacific. Similarly, in his letter to Gault,
Robert T. Jensen, the director of the Health Education &Welfare at USCAR since 1969, proposed a plan based on his involvement in the UH-OCH for developing an international standard for training and career structuring to improve the workforce of healthcare workers.134
However, it is necessary to reconsider their ideas for developing a transpacific training network for healthcare workers within the socio-political climate of the late 1960s in which
132 Cutting, Windsor C., “Medical Education in the Pacific,” the report read at the 11th Congress of the Pan-Pacific Surgical Association, Honolulu, October 26, 1969. University of Hawaii, Hamilton Library, Presidents’ Office Records A1987:001 Box 56 Fld. 5, UHUAMC. 133 Ibid. 134 Letter from Jensen to Gault, October 22, 1969, U8080023B [Box No. 43 of HCRI-HEW, Folder No. 7, Gault, Neal L., Jr. M.D.], OPA. 178
Hawaiʻi was actually used to train U.S. troops to be sent to Vietnam. Simeon Man’s study reveals that the mock Vietnamese village was built in Hawaiʻi for training U.S. troops to be ready for counterinsurgency in South Vietnam. Moreover, under a statewide campaign entitled
“Operation Helping Hand,” started in 1966, the local populace was also mobilized for the war through donating goods for distribution in villages in Vietnam as “an extension of our aloha to the people of Viet Nam.”135 Just like the network of care and relief between Hawaiʻi and
Okinawa, goodwill of people in Hawaiʻi was instantly appropriated and worked hand in hand with the military operation in Vietnam. In this regard, Hawaiʻi indeed served as a “nidus” of U.S.
Cold War Empire, in which knowledge and technologies of nurturing life were developed while simultaneously military force as a killing machine was trained and multiplied.
It is equally important to consider the consequences of training physicians and nurses in
US-style medical education in the longue durée of colonialism and racism. Catherine Ceniza
Choy’s work reveals the ways U.S. colonialism in the Philippines created an Americanized training hospital system that eventually prepared Filipino women to migrate to the United States to work as nurses often under quite an exploitive condition.136 Disguised in a romanticized narrative that the United States provides opportunities for Filipino migrant nurses, Americanized medical education led to the outflow of medical workers from the Philippines, exacerbating the inequalities in health services between the countries.
The UH-OCH resident and intern program certainly offered a valuable training ground for participants to acquaint with the US style training method that focuses on clinical experiences in various areas. In fact, many of the early participants continued training and research abroad in
135 Simeon Man, Conscripts of Empire: Race and Soldiering in the Decolonizing Pacific, Ph.D. Dissertation (Yale University, 2012), 209-210. 136 Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 5. 179
the United States after completing the intern program at OCH, and subsequently help teach trainees in the program upon returning from the U.S.137 However, in contrast to the sense of achievement on the side of UH faculty, Okinawan and Japanese trainees in the UH-OCH program sensed the gap between American instructors and Okinawan staff. Some trainees, for example, saw the UH faculty nothing more than figureheads, calling them “gaijin-san
(foreigners)” or “okyakusan (guest).”138 In part, this is because the language barrier prevented them from communicating with the American instructors smoothly. Moreover, the reversion of
Okinawa to Japan made it difficult to maintain the direct connection between Hawaiʻi and
Okinawa without Japanese state’s intervention. In 1971, one year prior to the reversion, all the
UH faculty returned to Hawaiʻi with the termination of the five-year contract. As the Japanese government took over the contract (and later was transferred to the Okinawa Prefectural
Government after the reversion), the contract and the program was restored. However, the partnership between UH and OCH changed to a consultant role due to limited funding.139 In addition to separation of Okinawa from the transpacific medical network, Neal Gault as a director of the UH-OCH program was concerned about another possible consequence of the reversion for the project. In his letter to Fairchild on July 3, 1968, Gault reported that Japanese staff frequently interfered in UH staff as the reversion approached. He continued,
Colonel Fairchild, I have tried in all my dealing with the Ryukyuans to impress them with the fact that the UH is not here to make this an American hospital; we are not here to make it a Japanese hospital; we are here to help the Ryukyuans organize a medical facility that will meet the needs of the Ryukyuans. In this way, I have tried to build
137 Ashimine, Ryō-i no suimyaku, 83. 138 “10 shūnen kinen zadankai (10th anniversary round-table discussion),” Chūbu Byōin Igaku Zasshi, 2- 2/3-1 (Special Issue for the 10th Anniversary of the Postgraduate Medical Training Program), December 1976. 139 Maeshiro et. al., “A History of Hawaiʻi Postgraduate Medical Education Program,” 191. 180
confidence in their own abilities to solve their own problems. But it seems that the officials in GRI are taking the Japanese message hook, line, and sinker.140
Whether they wanted to or not, after the United States returned Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty on May 15, 1972, Okinawan medical workers had to turn OCH into a “Japanese hospital” to fit with the Japanese social security system. Most notably, once a universal health care system was applied to the people in Okinawa, most of whom had not benefitted from pre-reversion medical insurance system, the number of outpatients increased rapidly. As the only acute care hospital in
Okinawa, OCH had to deal with about 30,000 emergency cases per year, almost twice as many as the previous year, with no extra staff and no overtime pay. The miserable working conditions eventually made about one-fourth of nurses leave the hospital.141 Indeed, OCH was called a
“yasen byōin (a field hospital)” among people in Okinawa. While the nickname came from the fact that the Koza Hospital, a predecessor of OCH, was actually established by the U.S. military as a field hospital during the battle of Okinawa, it ironically expressed the disastrous condition of the hospital after the reversion. For example, as soon as a reporter Okimoto Yaemi stepped into
OCH immediately after the reversion, she instantly associated the nickname “yasen byōin” with an emergency room.142 What Okimoto saw was a long line of outpatients in front of the emergency room waiting for hours for treatment: a high school student whose right hand covered with blood, an old lady wrapped in a blanket, and a female drug addict in a coma accompanied by a U.S. soldier. Furthermore, due to a chronic shortage of beds, the OCH staff had to expel inpatients with relatively mild case from the hospital every day. One rheumatic inpatient
140 Letter from Neal Gault to John P. Fairchild, July 3, 1968. University of Hawaii; Colonel Fairchild’s File (189 of HCRI-HEW 5), U80800993B, OPA. 141 Ashimine, Ryō-i no suimyaku, 177. 142 Okimoto Yaemi, “Kenritsu Chūbu Byōin – isogareru yakan, kyūkyū iryō taisei no kakuritsu,” Okinawa Shichō Vol.1 No. 6 (January 1975), 24. 181
confided in Okimoto about her sense of shame, “I feel sorry that I have stayed in the hospital for so long. I know I must leave as soon as possible so that I won’t make further inconvenience to other people. But with this mangled body…” Upon hearing this, Okimoto lamented with anger,
“Is this really a hospital? […] Are patients asking too much when they just wish to concentrate on getting well?”143
In a sense, the plight of OCH epitomizes the consequences of the U.S. occupation of
Okinawa and subsequent reversion to Japan in the field of medicine and public health. Although
USCAR and GRI did implement various medical and public health policies on an ad hoc basis, most of them were temporary and incomplete in essence just like a field hospital on the battleground. The reversion, the incorporation of Okinawa into a “normal” biopolitical regime under Japanese sovereignty, paradoxically revealed that Okinawa had been and continued to be trapped in the state of exception, where people’s lives were intimately connected to the logic of militarism.
Epilogue
In Bill Clinton’s address on the first day of the G-8 Okinawa Summit on July 21, 2000, which I referred to at the beginning of this thesis, U.S. president Bill Clinton officially announced a plan to establish a new scholarship program to send Okinawan graduate students to the East-West Center in Hawaiʻi. In memory of late Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo, who decided to hold a Summit in Okinawa but suddenly died while in office three months before the Summit, the Obuchi Okinawa Education and Research Fellowships Program was established. In fact, it was a long waited wish for Okinawa alumni of the East-West Center to reestablish a new
143 Ibid., 27. 182
scholarship since 1972, when the reversion discontinued the EWC scholarship program for
Okinawan students. In response to the alumni’s ardent request, Charles E. Morrison, then
President of the East-West Center, appealed the issue to the state department in Washington. In the first ten years since the establishment, the program allowed over 50 Okinawan students to study at the University of Hawaiʻi. The Obuchi Program was thus meant to fill a vacuum created by the reversion and rebuild a transpacific bridge between Okinawa and Hawaiʻi once again.144
It should be noted here, however, that in his speech Clinton announced the Obuchi program right after he recognized and appreciated “an essentially vital role” Okinawa had played in “the endurance of our alliance” between Japan and the United States. In addition, as discussed in the introduction chapter, the Okinawa Summit was the vital point to reconstruct the U.S.-Japan security regime at the sacrifice of the safety of Okinawa in post-Cold War years. Given this context, the Obuchi Program could be understood as yet another “debt” imposed on Okinawans that would force them to endure the military violence for years to come. This is exactly how various transpacific technical training programs were expected to serve during the U.S. occupation.
Indeed, Clinton placed the Obuchi program in the “great tradition” of US aid to develop human resource in Okinawa:
I am especially pleased to be here in the same year that Ryukyu University celebrates its 50th anniversary; proud that the United States played a leading role in its creation; equally proud that so many young Okinawans studies in the United States through the GARIOA and Fulbright programs. In that great tradition, it is my honor to announce
144 Chōko Takayama “Background of Obuchi Okinawa Education & Research Program,” in Bridge of Rainbow, 129-130. 183
today that the United States and Japan will create a new scholarship program to send Okinawan graduate students to the prestigious East-West Center in Hawaii.145
Eleven years prior to Clinton’s speech, Seiei Wakugawa, the above-mentioned founder of Okinawa Relief and Rehabilitation Foundation, gave a talk at Ryukyu University on
Okinawa’s prospects. In concluding his speech, he suddenly changed his tone and appealed to the audience:
It is true that Ryukyu University has developed and become a decent university. However, this university is, so to speak, a pro-government school, after all, controlled and monitored by the Ministry of Education that is a hotbed of feudalism, emperor worship, and militarism. It is essential for Okinawa to establish a private university that could counter such a pro-government school. […] I do wish further development of Ryukyu University, but please do not succumb to become a colonial university (shokuminchi-daigaku)!146
Yamazato Katsutoshi, now President of Meiō University in Okinawa and the audience of the talk, recalls that Wakugawa’s concluding phrase “do not succumb to become a colonial university” sounded almost like a shout squeezed out from deep inside. Yamazato writes, “it sounded as if he could not help yelling out no matter how he tried to control himself.”147
Although Wakugawa made every effort in early postwar Hawaiʻi to establish a university to save and rebuild Okinawa, his plan was eventually appropriated by USCAR and Ryukyu
University was established in the end. Taira’s message keenly revealed the very fact behind
145 Bill Clinton’s Address at the Peace Memorial Park, Itoman City, Okinawa. July 21, 2000. The Ryukyu-Okinawa History and Culture Website, http://ryukyu-okinawa.net/pages/archive/itoman.html (last accessed November 18, 2018). 146 Wakugawa Seiei, “Okinawa no Shōrai Tenbō: Gunji kichi no tsuihō, Ryukyu Daigaku ni tsuite.” This manuscript was prepared for a lecture at Ryukyu University, December 8, 1989. It is compiled in Wakugawa Seiei. Amerika to Nihon no Kakehashi, 181. 147 Yamazato Katsutoshi, “Daigaku no Tanjō: Wakugawa Seiei to Hawai ni okeru daigaku setsuritsu undo,” in Wakugawa, Amerika to Nihon no Kakehashi, 259. 184
Clinton’s celebratory account that the establishment of Ryukyu University was deeply embedded in the Cold War dynamics of colonialism, militarism, and racism. Likewise, as we have seen throughout this chapter, Okinawan people’s wish for bringing care and rehabilitation to their home became closely connected to, and appropriated by, USCAR, the U.S. military, U.S. and
Japanese governments, and medical professionals that together formed transpacific circuits of care, which operated hand in hand with militarized currents across the Asia-Pacific. Okinawan leaders in Hawaiʻi themselves also actively enlisted in the circuits of militarized welfare in order to enter the American nation as bonafide citizen-subjects. Takigawa’s desperate caution of “do not succumb to become a colonial university” eloquently expresses this dilemma of liberation and rehabilitation in which the more people wish for development and modernization, the more deeply and intimately they became incorporated into the prolonged colonial condition. The next chapter unpacks the problematic notion of relief and compensation, tracing the ways in which it has played a central role in normalizing but simultaneously disavowing the racist and colonial condition of Okinawa.
185
Chapter 4
Begging for Life: Land Seizure and the “Law of Relief”
For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.1
How precious as gold our land is, The fields and mountains handed down by our parents; America does not know.” —Nozato Takamatsu, Chinjō Kudochi (Petition Song).2
Introduction
With the term, the “law of relief (kyūsai no hō),” Tomiyama Ichirō problematizes a series of compensation, aid, and relief measures that have been applied to Okinawa since the prewar period up until the present. Tomiyama theorizes the “law of relief” as a redistribution system in which a sovereign state recognizes those who bear the burden of military bases as an object of relief and pays compensation corresponding to that burden. Through this system, military bases became a calculable commodity, on which negotiations take place between a petitioner and those who judge the petition. Captured in this system, the only possible way for people in Okinawa to
1 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 9. 2 Translated by C. Harold Rickard and recorded in Ahagon Shōkō, The Island Where People Live: A Pictorial Record by Ahagon Shōkō (Hong Kong: Christian Conference of Asia, 1989), 70. 186
become legible subjects is to become “petitioners” who participate at the negotiating table.3
Similarly, in her discussion on miscegenation between U.S. military personnel and Okinawan women in the early occupation period, Annmaria Shimabuku reveals how people in Okinawa were transformed into a “petitioning subject.” Unlike postwar Japan, where the Japanese reappeared as a sovereign national subject by presenting themselves as “resisting subjects” against U.S. forces, Shimabuku argues, “thoroughly defeated Okinawa was given no other recourse but to absorb power into their bodies and become ‘petitioning subjects.”4 Thus, the people of Okinawa were not merely forced to participate in the negotiation table; they became what Foucault defines as the liberal subject, and therefore inevitably internalized colonial power structures, through the act of petitioning. As Tomiyama puts it, this law of relief and its entanglements with networks of militarized institutions and Cold War epistemologies has been a necessary vehicle for expansion and maintenance of the U.S. Empire.5 More problematically, the
“law of relief” conceals violence that forced people to leave their native land in the first place, and come to the negotiation table, and beg for relief from the very person who committed the violence. This line of argument can be connected to a broader critique of liberal institutions, as seen with Randall Williams references to Frantz Fanon: “all appellative modes of recognition and/or redress are doomed to reproduce the power of state and the culture-economic structures indispensable to the smooth functioning of racist-colonial capitalism.”6
What is significant about Tomiyama’s theorization of the “law of relief” is that it allows us to see the inter-imperial and trans-war continuity of the appellative system of recognition and
3 Tomiyama Ichirō, Bōryoku no Yokan, 263-264. 4 Annmaria Shimabuku, “Petitioning Subject: miscegenation in Okinawa from 1945 to 1952 and the crisis of sovereignty,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2010): 355-374, 359. 5 Tomiyama, Bōryoku no Yokan, 256. 6 Randall Williams, Divided World, 100. 187
redress as the fundamental logic of domination of Okinawa. According to Tomiyama, Okinawa first became the subject of the “law of relief” in the early 1930s, when the islands fell into the so- called “Sago Palm Hell (sotetsu jigoku)” following the collapse of the local sugar industry in the prefecture. The crisis of the Japanese capitalist economy appeared as the Sago Palm Hell divided the people of Okinawa between those who stayed in the islands and were “rescued” by the relief efforts of the Japanese government, and those who left home in search of residence and employment across the globe. Tomiyama sees this decisive moment as the beginning of “postwar
Okinawa,” space and time in which Okinawa has been continuously rendered as the object of the
“law of relief” on the one hand, while displaced Okinawan diaspora has been inevitably connected to the global capitalist economy on the other.7 Building on Tomiyama’s argument, this chapter explores how the “law of relief” re-emerged in U.S.- occupied Okinawa after a brief suspension during the battle of Okinawa and came to function as the logic to maintain a military- centered society. In tracing the genealogy of the “law of relief” in Okinawa’s modern history, I aim to elucidate how the colonial conditions of Okinawa vis-à-vis Japan did not disappear at the end of the war, but were rather reconfigured and intricately connected to the logic of U.S. Cold
War domination in Asia. I argue, if the “law of relief” first appeared in the early 1930s as a solution to the crisis of the Japanese capitalist economy taking place in Okinawa, it re-emerged in the late 1950s as a solution to the crisis of U.S. military control over the islands. This crisis stems from forcible land seizure for base construction.
The enforcement of the Land Acquisition Procedure in 1953 marked the first massive- scale land expropriation in post-World War II Okinawa. The U.S. army employed bayonets and bulldozers to seize and occupy a significant percentage of Okinawan farmland for military base construction. Deprived of their land, the Okinawans organized the large-scale protests. Most
7 Tomiyama, Ryūchaku no Shisō, esp. Intro. and Conclusion. 188
notably, Ahagon Shōkō (1901-2002), who is known as the father of the anti-war movement in postwar Okinawa, led what he called the “Begging March (kojiki kōshin)”8 in which displaced farmers marched across the island to appeal to the people. The Begging March began in a small farm village in Iejima, an island off the Motobu Peninsula in northern Okinawa, and cut north to south through the main island of Okinawa from the North to the South. Involving women and children, the Begging March eventually merged with the first “Island-Wide Struggle” against the
U.S. military rule in postwar Okinawa, known as Shimagurumi Tōsō, which culminated in 1956.
Although the island-wide protest has been often described as the origin of the Reversion
Movement (fukki undō), in which people demanded the reversion of administration over the
Ryukyu Islands to Japan, a detailed analysis of the Begging March reveals that it was first and foremost a struggle for survival–– a claim for lives without starvation. Reliant upon the agricultural economy up until the war, most of the population in Okinawa had made their living in subsistence farming by cultivating sweet potatoes, rice, and sugar. Furthermore, land in
Okinawa was traditionally handed down through the family; protecting their land equally meant preserving their genealogies. One of petitioning banners used in the protest eloquently shows the relationship between people and land: “Money is for one year; Land is for 10,000 years.”9 This recognition of land resonates well with what Mishuana Goeman calls “storied land”; by
8 Kojiki Kōshin has been usually translated as the “Beggars’ March.” In this thesis I intentionally chose the verb form “begging” instead to emphasize the performativity of this act. As Judith Butler puts, with the performative act, “there might be produced the refusal of the law in the form of the parodic inhabiting of conformity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a repetition of the law into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it.” See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 82. In fact, Ahagon as well as other landowners rarely used the word “beggars” (kojiki) as a noun. They usually used a verb in the progressive form as “begging” (kojiki-suru) to refer to their action. 9 Ahagon, The Island Where People Live, 42. The book is the English translation of the original Japanese version, Ningen no Sundeiru Shima, published in 1982. Quotations from the book hereafter follows Rickard’s translation unless otherwise specified. 189
conveying peoples’ intimate relationship to the land to the future generation, this notion of
“storied land,” as an antithesis to abstracting land as property, could be an essential basis for indigenous political struggle.10 However, the people in Okinawa did not see land as “storied” at the beginning. Especially in a place like Iejima, where most of the residents including Ahagon were coming from other parts of Okinawa and settled after the Meiji period, the relation of people to land was not a given. Rather, those settlers formed a relationship to the land through cultivating fields, living on the land, and as this chapter shows, through struggling against military violence. The first part of this chapter revisits the Begging March, exploring how land indeed became “storied” through the act of begging and served as a shared basis for island-wide protest.
The second part of the chapter then traces the ways in which the “law of relief” emerged as a response to the crisis posed by displaced farmers. The historiography of postwar Okinawa usually tells us that the Island-Wide Struggle did pose a threat to the U.S. control over the islands and that it forced the U.S. government to reconsider its ruling principles for Okinawa. At least superficially, the protests informed a shift from the military’s exclusive and often violent control to more stable control that focused on the development of the economy and the welfare of the population.11 Indeed, yen to dollar conversion in 1958 facilitated the inflow of American and
Japanese capital, which triggered an economic boom in Okinawa. Furthermore, the Price Act in
1960 (amendment in 1962) legalized the economic aid to Okinawa based on U.S. legislature.12
10 Mishuana Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008): 23-34, 23. Also quoted in Keith L. Camacho, “Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islanders Interventions across the American Empire,” Amerasia Journal 37:3 (2011): ix-xxxiv. 11 Arasaki Moriteru, Sengo Okinawa-shi (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1976), 2; Miyazato Seigen. Nichibei Kankei to Okinawa, 6-7. 12 Matsuda, Sengo Okinawa Shakai Keizaishi Kenkyū, Ch. 10. 190
As a consequence, it is often said that people’s lives stabilized, medicine and public health improved, and the social security system became more formalized. Instead of celebrating this transition, however, this chapter analyses it as the moment in which part of the population was selectively incorporated into U.S-Japan collaborative biopolitical governmentality. This was accomplished through social security measures, while others left for distant islands in Yaeyama, mainland Japan, and South America as migrant workers. Indeed, as Miyazato Seigen rightly characterizes this period as “an attempt to ‘normalize’ U.S. administration (tōchi no seijō-ka no kokoromi),”13 in the years following the Island-Wide Struggle, the U.S. and the Japanese governments, USCAR and GRI together attempted to “governmentalize” military control over
Okinawa by taming, disciplining, and depoliticizing the population so that “beggars,” or potential rebels, would not appear on the streets again. To borrow from Foucauldian framework, this moment can be described as a shift from sovereign power to modern governmentality that is grounded on pastoral power,14 which is characterized by Foucault as “a power of care”: “It looks after the flock, it looks after the individuals of the flock, it sees to it that the sheep does not suffer, it goes in search of those that have strayed off course, and it treats those that are injured.”15
13 Miyazato, Nichibei Kankei to Okinawa, 7. 14 This moment can be also connected to what Takashi Fujitani describes as the shift from “vulgar racism” to “polite racism” that took place simultaneously in Japanese and U.S. empires under their total war regimes: “Under the polite racism of the total war regimes, these individuals and subpopulations came to be targeted as worthy of life, education, health, and even to some degree happiness, precisely because these systems came to regard the health and development of even abjected populations as useful for the regime’s survival, prosperity, and victory in war” (Fujitani, Race for Empire, 26). And more problematically, the inclusion of despised populations within their national communities enabled the two empires to disavow their racism. In this chapter, I reexamine the involvement of both the U.S. and Japanese governments in promoting health and welfare of the population in occupied Okinawa (and subsequent reversion of Okinawa to Japan) as a similar process of exclusionary inclusion that led to the disavowal of racism, imperialism, and the militarism of the two regimes. 15 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 127. It is important to note here, as Foucault argues, that the emergence of governmentality does not necessarily mean the devitalization of sovereign power. On the contrary, “it is made more acute than ever” (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 107). Judith Butler 191
This chapter further analyzes this process of “normalization” of U.S. administration in its relation to Okinawan people’s own struggles for better and “normalized” life, which was eventually incorporated into the reversion movement. In so doing, I would like to explore when and how people’s demand for life was marginalized by dominant narratives of the reversion, that is, a narrative of national reunification, in which Okinawa was usually depicted as an “orphan” waiting to be “embraced” once again by its “homeland (sokoku),” Japan. As the most frequently used slogan in the reversion movement “Okinawa wo Kaese (Return Okinawa!),” plainly demonstrates, discourse on the reversion was often imbued with the nationalistic and patriarchal sentiment. The slogan was first used in a song composed by members of a labor union at the
Fukuoka High Court in the mid-1950s. As the imperative verb “kaese (return)” implies, the slogan is from the perspective of mainland Japan, objectifying Okinawa as something belonging to Japan and being “robbed” by the United States. As many have argued, the reversion of
Okinawa should be understood as a part of the process in which Japan recovered its sovereignty and developed postwar nationalism, while simultaneously forgetting its imperial past. From the
Okinawan perspective, however, even if people in Okinawa uttered the same chant “Okinawa wo kaese,” this speech act rather revealed the fundamental distance between Okinawa and Japan: how could they demand the return of Okinawa if they are already in Okinawa? Return Okinawa to whom? This chapter is an attempt to narrate different futures that people in Okinawa envisioned in the midst of the reversion movement.
analyzes “indefinite detention” at Guantanamo Bay as the site where sovereignty reemerges in the field of governmentality under emergency conditions in which the rule of law is suspended. Sovereign power is now exercised through the apparatus of governmentality, and in this way, “the exceptional becomes established as a naturalized norm” (Butler, Precarious Life, 67). In the case of occupied Okinawa, the (re)reemergence of governmentality in the late 1950s should be understood within the context of the “political turn” in 1957, in which the administration of the Ryukyu Islands was placed under the direct control of the U.S. president. Sovereignty was thus not eliminated, but institutionalized and converged with governmentality in U.S.-occupied Okinawa. 192
The Beginning of the “Land Problem”
From the perspective of the U.S. officials, the land problem in occupied Okinawa can be traced back to 1950, when the U.S. policymakers began viewing Okinawa with renewed strategic interest as the Cold War was taking shape in East Asia. With the proclamation of the People’s
Republic of China in October 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the United
States rushed to construct the Far East military defense line against communism, placing
Okinawa as the “keystone” of the military network. Harry S. Truman approved a National
Security Council proposal to retain the island on a long-term basis and authorized a massive inflow of funds for military-base development and construction. Consequently, USCAR was established in December 1950 by a directive of the Headquarters Far East Command to replace a military government in order to maintain stable and planned control of Okinawa. GRI was established in 1952 and placed under the supervision of USCAR.
As one of the highest and emergent agendas, the “Directive for United States Civil
Administration of the Ryukyu Islands” directed the Deputy Governor to “secure title to any additional real estate or facilities required permanently by the United States Government by purchase from the owners, either Ryukyuan, Japanese or other nationality, or [if the owners refuse to sell at reasonable terms or to negotiate] through condemnation.”16 Until then, the U.S. army simply seized and used Okinawans’ land without paying compensation, since “the
American point of view held that such land had been taken as an act of war and that under the
Rules of Land Warfare no compensation was required.”17 Following the directive, USCAR set
16 Yoshida, Democracy Betrayed, 63. 17 Fisch, Military Government, 81. 193
the Okinawa Engineer District (OED) to ascertain the owners of the land, determine a rental or purchase price, and initiate the condemnation process when necessary.18
Based on the OED’s assessment, USCAR proposed a contract of 20 years in length that suggested the payment of on average 1.08 B-yen per tsubo, roughly 36 square feet, when a bottle of Coca Cola and a pack of cigarettes cost about 10 B-yen.19 Enraged by unreasonably cheap rent, few landowners agreed to sign the contract. USCAR then tried to legalize its land holdings by issuing the “Land Acquisition Procedures (Ordinance No.109)” in March 1953 and
“Compensation for Use of Real Estate Within Military Areas (Proclamation No. 26)” in
December 1953. Together, this ordinance and proclamation allowed the U.S. Army to use and occupy lands presently occupied by agencies of the United States on a tacit agreement, and provided it with a “Certificate of Confirmation and Rental Deposit,” even without having mutual agreements with landowners. It should be noted that the Proclamation No. 26 first states that the
U.S. Army occupied and used Okinawan land “by virtue of the power of eminent domain conferred upon the United States by Article 3, Chapter II, of the Treaty of Peace with Japan.”20
With Article 3 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed in 1951, Okinawa was legally put outside the jurisdiction of the new Japanese Constitution, and the United States gained “the right to exercise all and any powers of administration, legislation, and jurisdiction” over the territory and inhabitants of the Ryukyu Islands.21
18 L. Eve Armentrout Ma, “The Explosive Nature of Okinawa’s ‘Land Issue’ or ‘Base Issue,” 1945-1977: A Dilemma of United States Military Policy,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter 1992): 435-463, 442. 19 Yoshida, Democracy Betrayed, 62. 20 Proclamation No. 26, reprinted in Laws and Regulations During the U.S. Administration of Okinawa 1945~1972, Vol.1 (Okinawa: Gekkan Okinawasha, 1983), 118. 21 The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, Chapter II, Article 3, quoted in Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific, 13. 194
As soon as Ordinance No. 109 was issued, the U.S. army rushed to small farm villages near Naha to take over the land by force. For the farmers, who had just returned from the refugee camp to their villages and began resettling, the land seizure abruptly deprived of them hope for restoration. Quite perversely, however, American officials attributed the Okinawan farmers’ protests against the violent land seizure to Communist agitation. For example, the English language publication, The Ryukyu Review, reported the Okinawans’ protests in such terms as “A small band of Communist-inspired demonstrators” and “the village people, duped by Communist promises.”22 Concerned about the situation, the Reverend Otis W. Bell, the American Methodist missionary residing in Okinawa in the 1950s, wrote with irony in The Christian Century, “On
December 5, 1953, troops of the United States Army on Okinawa were called out to suppress what the army termed a communist uprising on the island. The ‘trouble-makers’ were an unarmed group of Okinawans who were protesting the use of their land by the occupation forces without agreement and without payment.”23 In this way, Cold War rhetoric was employed to justify suppressing farmers’ demands for rights to their own land.
In contrast, Ahagon Shōkō had a clear sense that a series of incidents originating in the land seizure was a war engineered by the U.S. forces against farmers. Ahagon’s particular perspective had been shaped through his pre-war and wartime experience. Born in 1903 to a poor but an educated family with an aristocratic background in a village on the Motobu Peninsula,
Ahagon had been eager to seek an education throughout his life. As Kano Masanao summarizes,
Ahagon’s early life was guided by three books: the Bible, Zange no Seikatsu (“A Penitential
Life”) written by Nishida Tenkō (1872-1968), and a biography of a Danish pastor and
22 Ralph Braibanti, “The Ryukyu Islands: Pawn of the Pacific,” The American Political Science Review, vol. 48, No. 4 (December 1954): 972-998, 995. 23 Otis W. Bell, “Play Fair with Okinawans!”, The Christian Century, January 20, 1954, 76-77. 195
philosopher, Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872).24 Nishida Tenkō was the founder of a farming commune, Ittōen (1904- ), inspired by Christianity and Zen-Buddhism, where people engaged in collective farming while seeking an ascetic life with religious mendicancy
(takuhatsu). Grundtvig’s Darnish folk high school, which aimed to give the peasantry higher education through personal development, was introduced to Japan in 1911 by a Christian evangelist, Uchimura Kanzō, and became very popular in pre-war Japan. Ahagon came to know about those thinkers during his stay in Cuba and Peru as a migrant worker. Deeply impressed by
Nishida and Grundtvig’s emphasis on farming as the basis of communal life, Ahagon little by little purchased land in Iejima with hopes of creating a farming commune.
While the influence of these thinkers and the Bible is apparent in Ahagon’s non-violent campaign,25 the loss of his son during the war was also critical to his anti-war principle. Kano further adds that his sense of regret for not being able to oppose the war only later made him lead the farmers’ protest against military violence.26 Recalling the days when the land problem began in Iejima, Ahagon wrote: “Maja27was on its way to recovery and to a settled life. We thought, let’s forget the war, it is enough if we have peace. It was just then that a disaster equal to the war, a disaster even worse than the war, came to Maja.” It should be noted here that Iejima had been
24 Kano Masanao, “Ahagon Shōko: ‘Nuchi du Takara’ heno tatakai,” in Tessa Morris-Suzuki ed. Hitobito no Seishin-shi 2, Chōsen no Dōran 1950 nendai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,2015), 106. 25 Because Ahagon played a leading role in introducing the principle of “non-violence” to anti-military activism in Okinawa, he has been often acknowledged as the “Gandhi of Okinawa.” Although further research is necessary to see if and in what way Ahagon was influenced by Gandhi’s thought, linking Ahagon with Gandhi would give us an important clue to understand the significance of “non-violence” in the struggle against absolute military violence in post-World War II, “post-colonial” world order. As Faisal Devji succinctly notes in his analysis on Gandhi, nonviolence is “not to provide some alternative to violence but instead to appropriate and, as the Mahatma himself often said, to sublimate it.” In Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the temptation of violence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 7. I am indebted to Aaron Peters for rethinking the connection between Ahagon and Gandhi. 26 Kano, “Ahagon Shōko,” 106.
27 The name of the ward in Iejima where Ahagon resided and became the major target for land expropriation. 196
the site of the fierce ground battle in April 1945, and about 1500 out of 3600 villagers in Iejima lost their lives during the war many of whom died as a result of so-called “collective suicide.”
The arrival of the U.S. forces in the island for land seizure certainly reminded the villagers of the unspeakable memories inscribed on their mind and bodies during the war. When three large
American landing boats appeared at the seashore of Iejima on the morning of March 11, 1955, and approximately 300 fully-armed soldiers with carbines stormed the village and began a bombing exercise, the villagers thought it was the beginning of the Third World War.28
However, what then was the “disaster worse than the war” for Ahagon and other Iejima islanders, who barely survived the mass-killings in the war?
Ahagon kept very detailed records including photos and diaries of the development of the land problem in Iejima, as he thought that they would be crucial evidence in their fight with the
U.S. military. The record describes the negotiations between the villagers and the U.S. military officers in which villagers tried to appeal for the return of their land. It also details every kind of military violence inflicted on them. At the same time, Ahagon took numerous photos of villagers on various occasions such as sit-in protests, marches, village meetings, as well as quotidian such as. One photo, for example, captures a scene in which a U.S. soldier came to the village and tried to play with children. While a boy in the foreground to whom a soldier is approaching is smiling without noticing the soldier, other children take the distance from a soldier, gazing at him with a suspicious look.29 Another photo shows a bomb crater by a roadside near a private home. Four boys standing inside the crater appear to show not only provide a scale for the size of the hole but
28 Ahagon Shōko, Beigun to Nōmin: Okinawaken Iejima, Iwanami Shinsho (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973), 86. 29 Ahagon, The Island Where People Live, 124. 197
also show how close their lives were to the grave.30 In this way, Ahagon’s photos powerfully expose how people struggled to live amid military violence. Symbolically, Ahagon titled a pictorial record on the struggle in Iejima as “The Island where human beings are living” (Ningen no Sundeiru Shima), emphasizing that the island is not a battlefield nor a shooting range, but the place where people cultivate their lives.
What also stands out in Ahagon’s record was how the land seizure caused imminent fear of starvation among the people. Upon arriving in the village, the U.S. soldiers set fire to houses, ripped crops under cultivation from the fields under cultivation, surrounded the land with the wire fence. Bulldozers, together with the constant bombing exercise, leveled everything. U.S. soldiers “loaded rifle shells into the fishermen’s small boats on the seashore, along with their nets – boats on which the fishermen depended for life; they gathered up the farmers’ scarce firewood in trucks, then build bonfires which scorched the night sky so that the American sentries could pass the cold night. More than 50 goats were turned loose in the pasture and used as shooting targets.”31 In short, the Iejima villagers were literally deprived of not only their land but also their means of living. The families whose houses were taken away gathered and stayed together in tent barracks, which flooded every time it rained.32 Severe living conditions in the tents made them despondent. Ahagon’s record vividly represents the situation in the words of a farmer: “We are standing on the boundary between life and death. Taking farmers away from their land is like taking fish out of water; there is nothing left but to die.”33
30 Ibid., 125. 31 Ibid., 22. 32 Ibid., 58. 33 Ahagon, Beigun to Nōmin, 33. Translation follows C. Douglas Lummis “I Lost My Only Son in the War: Prelude to the Okinawan Anti-Base Movement.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 8, issue 23, no. 1 (June 7, 2010): 1-20, 9. 198
Compensation, Aid, and Relief
It was not that the villagers were simply robbed of their lands. One of the fundamental problems of land expropriation in occupied Okinawa lies in the fact that their land was assessed not as a means of living but as a capital good. Just like the colonists in colonial America deployed the notion of mortgage foreclosure to turn native land into real estate, the U.S. forces turned the land of Okinawa into a monetary equivalent not through positive sale, but through compensation, aid, and relief. 34 Landowners were given a small sum of money in exchange for their land, the amount of which was far from adequate to compensate for the loss of income they incurred from not being able to cultivate their land. The following example shows that sometimes U.S. soldiers coerced landowners to receive money:
Then, about 3:00 P.M. the same day, an American soldier armed with a pistol rode around in a Jeep rounding up the fleeing evacuated heads of homes and said, “This money is compensation for the destruction of your homes, so take it!” He grabbed each of them by the shoulder and clasped their fingers, pressing the money into their hands, and forced them to affix their seals to a receipt. One man, Shimabukuro Sansuke was silent with fear. An American soldier grabbed both hands of Sansuke-san, caused him to assume the position of “Chōdai” (“Please give it to me”), lifted up his bowed head, and while someone took a picture forcibly made him accept the money for the absent head of the house [emphasis added].35
34 K-Sue Park traces the origin of the practice of calculating native land as a capital good back to colonial America. In examining the early transactions for land in colonial America, Park writes, “Land therefore became a money equivalent not through positive sale, but through debt and loss; foreclosure was a tool of indigenous dispossession.” In K-Sue Park, “Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America,” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 41, issue 4 (Fall 2016): 1006-1035, 1009. The military occupation that necessarily entailed land appropriation could be and should be situated in a genealogy of settler colonialism as a motive force of imperial expansion. 35 Ahagon, The Island Where People Live, 10. 199
The forced position of “chōdai” (“Please give it to me”) oddly inverted the relationship between the U.S. Army and the landowners, transforming the latter from victims of military violence to objects of relief. Ahagon’s record also reveals that the U.S. Army provided the village with
“used lumber with termite tunnels, rusty wires, and 300 sacks of cement” as an “aid” to rebuild houses. Although one soldier ordered villagers to shoulder sacks of cement to be photographed, the villagers refused to do so without even looking at the aid.36 In either case, it is apparent that while the U.S. Army seemed to be obsessed with archiving visible evidence of landowners’ embracing compensation and aid, Ahagon’s records eloquently exposes the violent nature of such a “false” contract. Indeed, this myth of consent would become critical grounds for what was to come.
It can be argued that violence was more explicit and prevalent in the records of land seizure in the 1950s because the “law of relief”, tailored to U.S.-occupied Okinawa, had yet to come. Thus, while the U.S. soldiers deployed such discourses as “compensation” and “aids,” because the relief and welfare system remained incomplete, U.S. military needed to appeal to violence in order to make Okinawans come to the negotiation table. Indeed, occupied Okinawa fell far behind in laws and measures concerning relief and public welfare for people in general.
As we have already seen in previous chapters, unlike the occupation of Japan, where
GHQ/SCAP’s emphasis on democratization and demilitarization led to the systematic and large- scale public health and welfare reform, in occupied Okinawa, where the military took priority over all other things, civil affairs proceeded often in a haphazard and incoherent manner.37 With regards to public health and welfare, the safety of U.S. troops “dictated a policy of epidemic
36 Ahagon, Beigun to Nōmin, 95. 37 For public health reform in U.S.-occupied Japan, see Sugiyama, Senryōki no Iryokaikaku; Takemae, Inside GHQ.. 200
control and public health measures which moved on their own momentum without regard for ultimate objectives.”38
And yet, 1953, the year that the Land Acquisition Procedure was issued, marked a turning point for public health and welfare in occupied Okinawa as well. In that year, GRI started to formulate the social security system by issuing labor laws and three basic welfare acts, namely,
Public Assistance Act (Seikatsu hogo hō), Child Welfare Act (Jidō fukushi hō), and Law for the
Welfare of Physically Disabled Persons (Shintai shōgaisha fukushi hō), following the Japanese equivalent, all of which had been already enacted in Japan by 1947. However, as occupied
Okinawa was placed outside of the Japanese jurisdiction, which is supposed to guarantee fundamental human rights of the people, the superficial application of the Japanese laws to
Okinawa only revealed defects and contradictions in the socio-political system in Okinawa under the U.S. administration.
One legal notion that particularly puzzled GRI officials and social welfare scholars was a
“right to life” (Seizon ken 生存権) prescribed by Article 25 of the Japanese Constitution that guarantees a “minimum standard of healthy and cultural life” and constitutes the legal basis for
Public Assistance Act.39 The “right to life” increasingly became the focus of contestation in mainland Japan in the mid-1950s, when the “Asahi suit (Asahi Soshō)” was filed against the
Ministry of Welfare. The plaintiff, Asahi Shigeru, who was a tuberculosis patient residing in a national sanatorium and a recipient of welfare aid, claimed that Japan’s public assistance programs did not meet the standards of living prescribed by the Constitution. The case was called the “Human Trial (ningen saiban),” as it sought to redefine what constitutes a “life worthy of
38 Braibanti, “The Ryukyu Islands: Pawn of the Pacific,” 986. 39 Gakiya Ryōichi, “Ryūkyū no kōtekifujo,” 1960, reprinted in Gakiya, Okinawa ni okeru Shakaifukushi no Keisei to Tenkai 1994; Ryūkyū Seifu Shakai-kyoku, ed. Ryūkyū Seifu, Kōsei Hakusho 1960-nendo (Okinawa: Ryūkyū Seifu Shakai-kyoku, 1961), 134-135. 201
human beings (ningen ni fusawashii seikatsu).” Reflecting on the Asahi suit, the intellectuals in
Okinawa lamented the absence of the notion of the “right to life” in Okinawan society, which they thought should be a basis for a social security system. Intellectuals were particularly concerned by Okinawans’ perceptions of their given right to assistance. Instead of receiving public assistance as a given right, most of the population regarded it as a charity that should be received with a sense of gratitude and indebtedness. Some caseworkers characterized such a consciousness as “premodern” and “a beggar’s spirit (kojiki konjō),” which needed to be wiped out in order to establish a modern social security system.40 As later scholars such as Kamizato
Hirotake point out, however, the absence of the notion of the “right to life” in occupied Okinawa ultimately came from the very status of the islands under the U.S. administration.41 If it is a sovereign state that confers the “right to life” on individual citizens within its territory, who could guarantee the lives of people living in occupied Okinawa, which was suspended in a liminal space beyond the realm of nation-states? In the end, the Public Assistance Act in occupied Okinawa designated the GRI as a quasi-state that has a responsibility to protect the lives of people in Okinawa, thus blurring the juridical and financial responsibility of the United
States and Japan. Consequently, without having adequate sources of revenue, the GRI inevitably set the limit of the total amount for relief payment.42 Because of this restriction, the GRI was not able to provide those who needed public assistance with sufficient money.
Despite the limited welfare budget, however, the GRI attempted to apply the Public
Assistance Act to displaced farmers in Iejima as a response to the petition for compensation from
40 Teruya Tomio and Yogi Hisako, “Hi-hogosetai no kenriishiki nit suite,” in Kikan Okinawa no Fukushi (December 1964), 22-24. 41 Kamizato Hirotake, “Beikoku tōchika no okinawa no shakai hoshō to shakai fukushi kyōgikai katsudō,” M.A. Thesis (Nihon Fukushi Daigaku, 1986), Ch. 2. 42 Okinawa no Shakaifukushi 25-nen, Okinawa Shakai Fukushi Kyōgikai, 1971, 42. 202
the villagers in March 1955.43 This triggered a discussion among GRI officials about whether those whose land was seized could be recipients of public assistance. Further research is necessary to see how much the Public Assistance Act was actually applied to people deprived of their land, but the episode shows how the GRI’s attempt to gain political subjectivity through the social security system was quite compatible with the U.S. forces’ desire to settle the land problem through coercive compensation. The GRI issued minimum food compensation, which was only 21 B-yen per person per day, when ordinal prisoners received 30 B-yen per person per day.44 When the villagers demanded an increase in living compensation from the GRI, however,
USCAR intervened and turned down the request on the grounds that the farmers were provided with substitute fields and thus they must have harvested enough food. However, farmers found the fields unsuitable for cultivation.45 In opposing the rejection, Ahagon and other landowners began sit-in protest in front of the GRI building in Naha. They also submitted a proclamation to resume farming within seized land, in which the U.S. already began a bombing exercise: “…so as to live, we have to continue farming within the practice range, until a permanent law to compensate our life will be drafted.”46 Contrary to landowners’ expectations, however, USCAR implicitly ordered the GRI to cut off living compensation entirely for the refugees in Iejima, as this was regarded as the GRI’s support for the anti-land seizure struggle.47 On May 1, 1955, following the USCAR’s request, living compensation, together with funds for military
43 Okamoto Naomi, “Senryōki Okinawa ni okeru tochi sesshū to seikatsu hoshō wo meguru sesshō katei,” Okinawa Bunka Kenkyū, Vol. 45 (March 2018): 319-371, 359. 44 Ahagon, Beigun to Nōmin, 93. 45 Ryūkyū Shimpō, April 23, 1955. 46 Ryūkyū Shimpō, April 22, 1955. 47 Ōsaka Yomiuri Shimbun Rōdō Kumiai, Ikari no Shima Okinawa, 1970, 2., quoted in Okamoto Naomi, “Kyūsai ni Aragau Kojiki” (unpublished paper). 203
transportation of water, were discontinued.48 The citizens in the Maja Ward were now facing the imminent fear of death from starvation. In the following month, when two doctors and nurses from the public health centers visited the island for a medical examination, 80% of the citizens in the ward were diagnosed with malnutrition, skin disease, and other illness.49 Two women, one of whom was pregnant, died from malnutrition in Maja in the same year, leaving behind her children.50
The situation in Maja vividly discloses the precarious status of occupied Okinawa under
Article 3, in which people’s lives were thrown outside of the protection of the law and exposed to the violence of sovereign power. As Judith Butler argues in her discussion of “indefinite detention” at Guantanamo Bay, sovereignty is reintroduced in the very acts by which the state suspends law; “the resurrected sovereignty is a lawless and prerogatory power, a “rough” power par excellence.”51 The only option left for people to survive in this state of exception is to keep farming while avoiding bullets and bombing. Even this act of survival performed at the risk of their lives was eventually prohibited; On June 13, 1955, 32 farmers, while cultivating within the fenced areas, were forcefully expelled from the field and taken into military custody.52 They were subsequently brought to the military court and judged guilty.53 It is within this context that
48 Ahagon, The Island Where People Live, 23. 49 Ibid.,23. 50 Ahagon, Beigun to Nōmin, 122. 51 Butler, Precarious Life, 56. 52 Ahagon, The Island Where People Live, 58. Ahagon, Beigun to Nōmin, 111. 53 The military court system was established in occupied Okinawa immediately after the U.S. force landed on the island of Okinawa on April 1, 1945. The ordinance issued in June 1949 by the military government formalized the legal system, establishing the dual court system, the civil court and the military court operating together. While the military court dealt with the cases which either involved U.S. personnel or were judged as to affect the property, security, and interest of the United States, the civil court dealt with the rest, usually more minor cases among the people in Okinawa. The relation between the two court systems was hierarchical, granting the military court higher authority. If judged necessary, the cases could 204
Ahagon Shōkō together with all the citizens in Maja began begging in order to let people know their plight, and more importantly, so they could live.
Begging to Live
At first, Ahagon and other landowners hesitated to begin begging. When they began their sit-in protest, they collected and returned all the money they received from the U.S. military as compensation. They also initially rejected money from Okinawan pedestrians as well, while they were engaged in sit-in protest. They felt that they “were being reduced to the state of receiving from someone else.”54 Their hesitation and sense of shame can be seen in the following “apology and a request” that they sent out to their home village in Iejima on July 21, 1955, the day before the Begging March started:
The road of our livelihood is completely closed off. We ward citizens have considered many solutions. Having overcome all sense of shame, we have made a decision. All the ward citizens, while sustaining our existence by the sympathy and support of all the citizens of Okinawa, so as to win our rightful demand of having our land returned, have decided to fight to the end. Also, we think this matter is tied strongly to the livelihood of all citizens. Please, we ask your sympathy and support even more in the future.
Our land was taken from us; we have no food with which to show our love for our many children. If they steal, the children cannot be put in jail with us. There is no way for the ward citizens to live except to beg. People might say that begging is also against the law. Yet, we cannot fight with armed force. Appeals to the authorities have been ignored. Begging is shameful to be sure; but taking land by military force and causing us to beg is even more shameful. The person robbed has a responsibility; but the greater shame lies with the person who steals. We solicit the understanding of all citizens [emphasis added].55
be transferred from the civil court to the military court. See Nakano Ikuo, “Beikoku tōchika Okinawa no Gunsei kara minsei heno ikō,”Senshū Shōgaku Ronshū 92 (January 2011): 69-87, 80. 54 Ahagon, The Island Where People Live, 164. 55 “Owabi to Onegai (An apology and a request)”, recorded in Ahagon, The Island Where People Live, 71. I made a few revisions to the English translation by Rickard based on my readings of the original text. 205
While they regarded begging as a shameful act that might be against the law, they simultaneously denounced the lawlessness of military violence that made them beg –– “chōdai.”
The statement clearly illuminates what land seizure meant for people living there; deprived of their access to land, they were total dispossessed, even losing the grounds upon which appeals could be made. Falling outside of the appellative mode of recognition and redress, the lawless act of begging was the only tactic left for them to live. Paradoxically speaking, however, precisely because of its lawlessness, the performative act of begging enabled displaced farmers to counter a sovereign power. Instead of accepting the coercive compensation proposed by the U.S. military, and therefore becoming the subject of the “law of relief,” those who begged effectively transformed the imposed position of “chōdai” into a political manifestation of their will to life.
The following phrase became one of the significant slogans throughout the march:
“Begging is shameful, to be sure; but taking land by military force and causing us to beg is even more shameful,” became one of the major slogans throughout the march. The Maja citizens wrote this slogan on banners and placards while walking across the island. Compared to the
Reversion Movement in the 1960s that often deployed ideological slogans such as “Return
Okinawa!” and “We are Japanese,” the banners in the Begging March used longer sentences to explain in detail how the U.S. Army acted in violation of an agreement with the villagers:
“Although the U.S. Army promised to let us farm on Sunday and half-day Saturday, they keep bombing till 6 pm on Sunday. Furthermore, they bomb fairly close to houses and people, which prevented us from farming” and “Although they said that they would build houses for us, they have never done anything for three months up to now.”56 Overall, their claims were very specific and mostly focusing on compensation for life. In part, this is because Ahagon always kept
“protecting life” as the highest priority throughout the struggle: “Because the entire village was
56 Ahagon, Beigun to Nōmin, 131. 206
on the verge of starvation, we decided that protecting life comes first, and the struggle second. In order to protect life, we need to fight.”57
The Begging March lasted for over six months until February 1956. During summer break, elementary and junior high school students also participated.58 Although the number of people in the march was relatively small, ranging from twenty to thirty, the visibility of the marching “beggars” in public space certainly made a huge impact on people’s recognition of the plight in Iejima. Some of the photos of the Begging March depict a scene in which a band of begging farmers are drawing a large crowd. Begging subjects do not seem to be distinctive strangers in these photos; a boundary between the “beggars” and the crowd is blurred.
As Mori Yoshio points out, hunger was never a problem limited to Iejima. Those who were struggling with hunger and poverty were lived across the islands.59 Indeed, in 1957, when
1.78% of the population was under the protection of public assistance in mainland Japan, 3.04% of the population in Okinawa was receiving public assistance.60 Given the fact that the standard annual income to be eligible for public assistance was quite low in Okinawa compared to Japan, the high protection rate indicates that there must have been a significant number of invisible poor, who were not protected by welfare programs.61 Furthermore, a series of incidents regularly caused by the U.S. military, most notably the murder of six-year-old girl by an American sailor in September 1955, constantly reminded the Okinawans that they were living in the midst of
57 Ibid., 122. Ahagon’s such a belief later led him to establish the first and only co-op store on the island (Kano, “Ahagon Shoko”, 119). 58 Ahagon and Rickard, The Island Where People Live, 69. 59 Mori Yoshio, Okinawa Sengo Minshū-shi: Gama kara Henoko made (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2016), 133. 60 Gakiya, Okinawa ni okeru shakai fukushi no keisei to tenkai. 31. 61 Ibid., 43. 207
what Achille Mbembe calls “death-worlds,” in which “vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”62 In this sense, anyone in occupied Okinawa was on the “verge of death.”
Right before the villagers in the Maja Ward began sit-in protest, they publicly declared
“not to leave their land (tachinokanu)” as a response to the proposal made by the GRI, USCAR, and the U.S. military regarding aid and compensation for displaced farmers and landowners.63
The villagers refused the proposal because it suggested that they move to the substitute land, which was not arable and could not produce a sufficient amount of crops for them to make a living. In carefully reading a series of petitions, declarations, and letters written by people in the
Maja Ward, Okamoto Naomi rightly points out that the Maja villagers were keenly aware of the impossibility of negotiations between their rulers and them, as the former did not recognize what land really meant for the life of the people living there. The declaration ends with the following sentence: “We hereby submit this declaration with a readiness to die (shi wo kesshita mono).”
With the words “a readiness to die,” Okamoto argues, the Maja people tried to restore their right to live, which had been appropriated by a sovereign power.64 Their “readiness to die” is therefore not the will to die, but the will to survive, or as Okamoto insightfully phrases, should be translated as their speech act so as not to be killed (korosarenai tameno kotoba). Confronting the sovereign’s absolute power to kill, exposing their bodies as “beggars” on the streets, and
62 Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics,” 40. 63 “Tachinoku wake niwa ikan [We cannot leave our land]” Okinawa Taimusu, January 27, 1955, quoted in Okamoto, “Senryōki Okinawa ni okeru tochi sesshū to seikatsu hoshō wo meguru sesshō katei,” 348. 64 Okamoto, ibid., 354. Maja people’s act of begging for life in Okamoto’s analysis resonates with Mbembe’s critique on the Hegelian paradigm, in which “the human being truly becomes a subject – that is, separated from the animal– in the struggle and the work which he or she confronts death” (Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 14). Instead of accepting “aid” proposed by rulers, or dying, and therefore, truly becoming a subject, people in Maja chose to say “no” to the proposal, sit-in and march as “beggars,” in order “not to be killed.” 208
appealing to the people was the last and only resort for them to secure their own political space and unite together with other people under hunger and violence. This shared experience of struggling against imminent hunger and death and the intimate connections to their “storied land,” strengthened the solidarity of people across Okinawa, and formed the basis for the Island-
Wide protest movement.
Containment of the Island-Wide Struggle
In May 1955, a delegation of the GRI lead by Chief Executive Higa Shūhei visited
Washington to appeal to the Armed Services Committee House of Representatives to settle the land problem. They presented “Four Principles” that had been passed by the GRI Legislature as shared wishes of Okinawan residents:1) Opposition to land purchase, permanent use, and lump- sum payment, 2) a demand for appropriate land rent and compensation for military land use, 3) a demand for reparation for the damage to land caused by the U.S. military, and 4) opposition to any new land seizure and a demand for release of land out of use. Consequently, the special committee, led by Congressman Melvin Price, visited Okinawa in October the same year to conduct research in several villages and hold public hearings. Much to the dismay of Okinawan leaders and farmers, however, the report submitted by the Price Committee never took the Four
Principles into consideration. On the contrary, the committee endorsed the lump-sum payment of
“full fair value of property” as the “only way in which a landowner can receive an amount of money truly adequate to make him whole, and sufficient for him to move to another area–– perhaps another Ryukyuan island––…”65 The report points out that the annual rental, which was
65 United States Congress House Committee on Armed Services. “Report of a Special Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee House of Representatives, Following an Inspection Tour October 14 to November 23, 1955.” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956. 209
proposed by the GRI, would “merely continue unrest and dissension by reason of inability to agree as to the rental to be paid each time the property was revalued.” Entirely ignoring the people’s relationship to the land, the Price Recommendation proposed a solution that would further facilitate the displacement of farmers from their land.
The recommendation also clearly states the reasons why the U.S. military continued to use the land of Okinawa:
In the Ryukyu Islands the circumstances of our political control and the absence of a belligerent nationalistic movement allow us to plan for long-term use of a forward military base in the offshore island chain of the Far East-Pacific area, subject, of course, to our own national policy.66
The Price Committee must have observed the Begging March and other forms of protests against land seizure during their stay in Okinawa. While the Price Committee did not seem to regard the
Begging March as a “belligerent nationalist movement,” its recommendation certainly triggered public outrage across entire islands of occupied Okinawa. Upon learning the outline of the Price
Recommendation, representatives of the executive office of the GRI, its legislature, the Council of Mayors, and the Federation of Military Landowners adopted a joint statement to oppose the
Price Report, declaring their intention to resign in protest. Not only leaders but also numerous people from all classes and occupations were mobilized through their respective organizations; teachers, housewives, youth associations, labor unions, students and veterans, actively joined the fight for the “Four Principles” again the report’s recommendation.67 Resident meetings were
66 Ibid. 67 As for the detailed analysis of the development of the Island-Wide struggle, see for example, Mori Yoshio, Okinawa Sengo Minshū-shi; Mori Yoshio and Toriyama Atsushi, ‘Shimagurumi Tōsō’ wa dō junbi saretanoka (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2013). Mori’s work reveals the role of the illegal communist party in Okinawa and migrant workers from Amami in knitting together spontaneous land struggles here and there to form the island-wide protest against the U.S. military rule. 210
held simultaneously in each community on June 20, which attracted more than 150,000 participants in total.
Toriyama Atsushi describes this moment as the crumbling of the “walls of ‘reality’”; once dividing Okinawan society under the U.S. control, these walls had now broken down.
Toriyama quotes a comment of an old person from the village of Kadena, which appeared in a newspaper article: “My sons now work for the military. I know full well that we could not make a living without this work. But we are talking about something different here. The land is more important than life!”68 In Isahama, another major site of land struggle, female farmworkers and housewives together drew up a petition, “An Appeal of Women (fujin no uttae),” which reads:
Among us were two women who lost their husbands during the war and endured hardship only in the hope of seeing their children growing up. They could barely survive because of the precious land. If we lose the land, it means that we have to pick off [tsumitoru] the lives of our children before they fully grow up.69
Another woman in Isahama claimed, “Once we have our own children, we have a responsibility to raise them. For our children, we protect our land even if we die.”70 In narrating their relationship to the land in terms of child-rearing, the land certainly became “storied” for those women; they had to fight for which their land even at the risk of their lives.
While the island-wide struggle was indeed effectively and widely organized around people’s longing for land and life, land as a singular cause simultaneously redirected the scope of
68 Asahi Shimbun, 23 July 1956, quoted in Toriyama Atsushi, “Okinawa’s ‘postwar’: some observations on the formation of American military bases in the aftermath of terrestrial warfare.” trans. David Buist, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2003): 400-418, 407. 69 “Fujin no uttae,” recorded in Sengo Shoki Okinawa Kaihō Undō Shiryō-shū, Vol. 2, quoted in Mori and Toriyama, ‘Shimagurumi Tōsō’ wa dō junbi saretanoka, 172. 70 Katō Tetsurō, Mori Yoshio, Toriyama Akira, and Kokuba Kōtarō, eds. Sengo Shoki Okinawa Kaihō Undō Shiryō-shū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2013), 306, quoted in Mori and Toriyama, ‘Shimagurumi Tōsō’ wa dō junbi saretanoka, 63. 211
the protest. As Toriyama illustrates, the Price Recommendation’s demand for land purchase instead of the rental was recognized as a threat to Japanese territorial rights. As a consequence, a slogan such as “protecting the national territory” (kokudo bōei) came to the fore, which reawakened the wish for reversion on both sides in Japan and Okinawa.71 In fact, prior to the
Price Recommendation, a series of articles carried by the Asahi Shinbun attracted Japanese public attention to U.S.-occupied Okinawa for the first time in the postwar period. The first article appeared on January 13, 1955, reporting the plight of people in Okinawa under the headline, “Criticizing the U.S. military’s civil administration in Okinawa (Beigun no ‘Okinawa
Minsei’ wo tsuku).” The article was based on reports prepared by the Japan Civil Liberties
Union, which conducted research on civil affairs of occupied Okinawa upon a request from
Roger Nash Baldwin, the chair of the American Civil Liberties Union. Baldwin learned about
Okinawa from an article that appeared in the American Christian periodical, the Christian
Century on January 20, 1954 and was written by Otis W. Bell, Methodist missionary stationed in
Okinawa. Asahi Shinbun published a series of articles over the course of a month that focused on the problems of civil administration in Okinawa. The articles describe people in Okinawan as
“our fellow countrymen (dōhō)” left behind from the mainland, and catalogue the “mistreatment” by American authorities, including the land problem, discrimination in payment for military- related works, repression of freedom of speech, and restrictions on travel to and from Okinawa.
While emphasizing that they did not mean to provoke anti-American sentiment or intervene in the internal affairs in anyways, the articles insisted that the U.S. military and the U.S. government act in accordance with the principles of human rights and democracy.
Another reason why the island-wide struggle gained so much attention outside of
Okinawa was that it excited sympathy from on-going protest movements against U.S. bases in
71 Toriyama, “Okinawa’s ‘postwar’”, 408. 212
mainland Japan. Most notably, the Sunagawa Tōsō, a struggle against the expansion of U.S.
Tachikawa Air Base in Tokyo held in Sunagawa in 1955, embodied the heightened anti-U.S. and anti-base sentiment. This was coupled with the rise of the postwar nationalism in Japan. To express solidarity with the island-wide struggle, a “Tokyo Citizens” rally was held in July 1956, in which the following resolution was adopted: “The two struggles in Okinawa and Sunagawa against the land seizure directly mean the protest of local residents to protect their lives and rights, but they should be recognized as a nationwide struggle for the peace and independence of
Japan.”72 However, while appealing to the “shared goal” of the “peace and independence of
Japan,” as Arasaki Moriteru points out, few people in Japan recognized the fundamental difference between Japan under the protection of the Japanese Constitution and Okinawa under
Article Three.73 The U.S. military ultimately gave up expanding the bases in Sunagawa. Based on the agreement in 1957 between Prime Minister Kishi and President Eisenhower, it was announced that the all American ground troops would be withdrawn from Japan, and instead, the marine corps in Fuji would be relocated to Okinawa. Consequently, while the number of U.S. military facilities decreased to one fourth in Japan, they became doubled in Okinawa by 1960, when the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was amended. It was against this backdrop of the unequal redistribution of the burdens of U.S. forces that the Okinawa Problem (Okinawa Mondai) came into the postwar Japanese discursive space as a “national” problem that needs to be fixed. The field of medicine and social welfare drew particular attention among the Okinawan Problem, which I will return in the next section.
72 “Okinawa to Sunagawa mamoru tomin taikai ketugibun,” reprinted in Nakano Yoshio, ed., Okinawa: Sengo Shiryō (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1969), 224. 73 Arasaki Moriteru, Okinawa Gendaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), 21. 213
Meanwhile, USCAR officials took oppressive measures to counter the public protest.
They put pressure on the GRI by threatening to impose complete direct control over the population if the legislators and the chief executive resigned. Accordingly, the Chief Executive
Higa declared that Okinawa’s economic dependence on the bases was a “reality no-one can deny” and called upon residents to reflect on the “‘excess’ of such things as ‘opposing the bases, seeking reversion, and non-cooperation with the United State.’”74 More crucially, USCAR declared an “off-limits” order in camp towns in central Okinawa on August 8, 1956, which prohibited American servicemen and dependents from entering the districts. As briefly discussed in Chapter 2, “off-limits” was literally a matter of life and death for owners and employees of bars, nightclubs, and restaurants catering to military personnel. It is thus not surprising that the order caused a split within the protest. Members of the association of leisure and entertainment businesses in Koza sent a warning to university students not to hold any anti-U.S. military activities in the town. The mayor of Koza expressed “regrets” at causing troubles for residents in the town because of the “off-limits” order, and publicly declared that he would not permit the holding of any anti-American demonstrations in Koza. In this way, as Toriyama Atsushi summarizes, the Island-Wide Struggle against the land seizure was contained by “the reality” of military-centered society.75
However, even if USCAR seemed to succeed in breaking up the protest, it soon faced another unexpected crisis; Senaga Kamejirō was elected as a mayor of Naha. Senaga had been arrested and imprisoned in 1954 together with other members of the People’s Party (jinmintō) as
“communist agitators,” since they were considered to lead the protest movement against the land seizure and advocated non-cooperation with the U.S. military. He was elected soon after his
74 Ryukyu Shimpo, August 9, 1956, quoted in Toriyama, “Okinawa’s ‘postwar,’” 409. 75 Ibid. 214
release in 1956. The election of a “red mayor” upset USCAR and the U.S. government, making them recognize that people were more than happy to follow Senaga despite his “anti-
Americanism.”76 In an attempt to remove Senaga from his office, USCAR cut off a subsidy to
Naha, froze the city’s bank account, and suspended a loan to Naha’s economic recovery fund from the Bank of Ryukyu.77 Finally, High Commissioner James Edward Moore of USCAR issued an ordinance to revise the electoral law to expel Senaga from the city council. Much to
USCAR’s dismay, however, Kaneshi Saichi, who was designated as Senaga’s own successor, won the following election. A series of events caused a sense of impending crisis among high- rank officials of the U.S. Department of State, especially because Moore took those coercive measures without negotiating with Washington. Criticism also emerged among U.S. high-rank officials and media critics against the oppressive administration in Okinawa. C. L. Sulzberger of
New York Times, for example, wrote an article titled “An American ‘Cyprus’ in the Pacific?,” warning that the way the United States was treating Okinawa was no different from how the
United Kingdom treated Cyprus in their attempts to suppress people’s anti-colonial struggles at the moment: “whether we remain in Okinawa de facto or de jure, our presence implies a form of that colonialism which condemn in others.”78 American critics and high-ranking officials at the
Department of State were thus concerned that the “Okinawa problem” would damage the international reputation of the United States as an advocate of democracy, and as a nation opposed to the idea of maintaining the colonial empire.
While the Department of Defense and the Department of the Army kept insisting on retaining absolute control of the Ryukyu Islands for an indeterminate period because of the
76 Miyazato, Nichibei Kankei to Okinawa, 129. 77 Ibid., 131. 78 Sulzberger, “An American ‘Cyprus’ in the Pacific?” New York Times, January 18, 1958. 215
Communist threat, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, proposed that the U.S. reconsider governing methods in Okinawa to appease people’s outrage against the military rule, and to consider such options as the early reversion of Okinawa to Japan or civilian control of the islands. Otherwise, Dulles maintained, the “Okinawa problem” would eventually become the seed of dissension between Japan and the United States.79 Notwithstanding Dulles’ proposal, however, the Executive Order 10713 issued on June 5, 1957, granted even more extensive authority to the newly-formed High Commissioner as the head of USCAR, as well as to the
Commanding General of the U.S. Army in the Ryukyu Islands. Designated by the Secretary of
Defense with the approval of the U.S. President, the High Commissioner was vested supreme power over almost all areas of civil administration: he had the right to veto upon the decisions made by the local legislative body. Furthermore, the Chief Executive of the GRI would be appointed by the High Commissioner and would have the authority to transfer a case from a
Ryukyuan court to a USCAR court if he was judged it to affect the security, property, and interests of the United States. Furthermore, if judged as such, the High Commissioner would
“promulgate laws, ordinances or regulations,” “veto any bill,” “annul any law,” “remove any public official from office.”80
Completely ignoring the Okinawan people’s call for self-determination, the order formalized the U.S. military domination in Okinawa with the High Commissioner as an absolute ruler. The order did state that the Secretary of Defense shall “make every effort” to “improve the welfare and well-being” and “promote the economic and cultural advancement of the inhabitants.” However, the renewed emphasis on welfare and economic development in the U.S.
79 Miyazato, Nichibei Kankei to Okinawa, 141. 80 Executive Order 10713, “Providing for Administration of the Ryukyu Islands,” June 5, 1957, reprinted in Laws and Regulations During the U.S. Administration of Okinawa 1945~1972, Vol.1, Gekkan Okinawasha, 1983, 1-7. 216
administration in Okinawa should be understood in relation to the simultaneous process of more fundamental and permanent militarization of the islands. Here, historian Yakabi Osamu’s analysis on displaced people from Isahama is quite suggestive. Deprived of their land for base construction, the residents in Isahama moved into In-numiyādui, a former refugee camp used in the early occupation period. A total of 10 families––59 people in Isahama village–– eventually left for Brazil as the first government-planned agricultural migrants in 1957. By contrasting their
“life stories (seikatsu no monogatari)” with a dominant narrative of high economic growth that took place in Okinawa in the late 1950s and 1960s, Yakabi urges us to see the high economic development of postwar Okinawa as a direct consequence of the forcible land seizure and military base construction.81 Yakabi argues:
The two reactions to “America” coexisted among people in Okinawa under the U.S. military control, especially in the 1960s: One is to oppose the U.S. bases as structural violence, which was organized as the reversion movement. The other is to desire and enjoy the American capitalist way of living brought by the economic development. It was teachers, who belonged to Okinawa Teachers’ Association, and civil servants who played a central role in the reversion movement. They were the one who represented the middle class of Okinawa, who benefitted the most from high economic growth.82
What Yakabi reveals here is not merely people’s ambivalent feelings towards the United States, but more importantly, a hidden link among militarization, the high economic growth, and the reversion movement. Indeed, the administrative shift was followed by a massive influx of
American and Japanese capital as a result of the B-yen to dollar conversion and U.S. and
Japanese governmental aid. Economic historian Matsuda Yoshitaka argues that the political and economic turn in the late 1950s enabled the U.S. government to directly control Okinawa with
81 Yakabi Osamu. Okinawasen, Beigun Senryō-shi wo Manabi Naosu (Yokohama: Seori-shobō, 2009), 305-314. 82 Ibid., 281. 217
the assistance of the Japanese government, and by doing so, avoided direct conflicts between the
U.S. military troops and local inhabitants.83 By revisiting the shift in the U.S. administration in the field of medicine and welfare, I will argue from the next section onward that this turn set the basis for selective inclusion of the Okinawan population into the Japanese biopolitical governmentality. This led to the disavowal of imperialism, militarism, and the racism of Japan and the United States.
Japan’s Involvement in Welfare in Occupied Okinawa
Japanese government’s official and direct involvement in medicine and public health in occupied Okinawa began in 1960 when it launched a project to send physicians to doctor-less villages in Okinawa. This was the direct consequence of the Price Act signed by President
Kennedy in July 1960, authorizing U.S. foreign aid to Okinawa. 84 Furthermore, despite the strong opposition from the military, which insisted that Japan be excluded from civil affairs in
Okinawa, President Kennedy and Prime Minister Ikeda made the joint statement on June 22,
1961. The statement publicly acknowledged Japan’s residual sovereignty over Okinawa, and affirmed that the United States would make further efforts to enhance the welfare and well-being of the inhabitants of the Ryukyus, and “welcomed Japanese cooperation in these efforts.” In the following year, the “Kennedy Declaration” anticipated eventual restoration of the Ryukyu
Islands to the Japanese administration for the first time. The Kennedy administration also made a request for an increase in the amount of aid to Okinawa. The inflow of U.S. and Japanese
83 Matsuda, Sengo Okinawa Shakai Keizaishi Kenkyū, Ch. 10. 84 The official name is “an act to provide for promotion of economic and social developments in the Ryukyu Islands.” 218
government’s financial and technological aid enabled the GRI to establish a formal social security system for the first time in the postwar period.
Prior to that, Assistance Association for Okinawa and the Ogasawara Islands (Nampō
Dōhō Engokai, or Nan-en, hereafter AAOO),85 a Japanese quasi-governmental organization was founded in 1956, partly as a direct response to the Island-Wide struggle and the Asahi report.
Shibusawa Keizō, the former Governor of the Bank of Japan and the Minister of the Finance, was appointed as the first president. AAOO aimed to diagnose problems and promote the welfare and interests of the people of Okinawa and Ogasawara, as well as of the Northern Territories
(South Kuril Islands), namely, border islands where the Japanese Government could not officially intervene in civil affairs of the people at that time. As a substitute for the government,
AAOO was assigned the role of embassy and consulate for those regions. Its activities ranged from sending delegations to the United States, promoting exchanges of youth between Japan and
Okinawa, arranging and sponsoring research, and publishing periodicals such as Okinawa To
Ogasawra (later renamed as Minami To Kita) to organizing lectures, public talk, and exhibitions, making documentary films and attending school events. Among other duties, the AAOO’s involvement in medicine and welfare in occupied Okinawa mainly consisted of research projects and relief and assistance (engo) projects. The AAOO launched primary research in the field of medicine in 1958 in order to detect and solve deficiencies in medical policies in occupied
Okinawa. The research projects included the investigation of the treatment of leprosy patients,
85 Direct translation for Nampō Dōhō Engokai would be “Southern Area Brotherhood Relief Association.” According to the AAOO’s commemorative publication, AAOO at first intended to have its English name as “Relief Association for Okinawa and the Ogasawara Islands,” but the U.S. Embassy in Japan opposed it, insisting that the United States has a primary responsibility to give a “relief” to Okinawa and that Japan is supposed to just “assist” U.S.’ relief effort. See Okinawa Kyōkai, ed. Nanpō Dōhō Engokai Jyūnana- nen no Ayumi (Okinawa: Okinawa Kyōkai, 1973), 10-11. This episode shows how relief and aid consisted the crucial site for U.S. and Japanese governments to compete with each other to gain its hegemonic control over the population living in borderland regions. 219
the treatment of disabled persons, and the prevention of filariasis. In addition to the AAOO’s research projects, medical experts from Japan visited Okinawa one after another in the late 1950s and the early 1960s to “diagnose” medical and welfare problems. For instance, Iwasaki Seisaku, a chair of the Japan National Hospital Workers’ Union (Zen-nihon kokuritsu iryō rōdō kumiai) visited Okinawa in January 1962 per the Okinawa Public Sector Union (Okinawa Kankōrōso)’s request to survey the medical situation. In his research-based report, Iwasaki harshly condemns the United States for suppressing freedom, democracy, and violating the human rights of people in Okinawa. In his report, he laments the lack of medical and welfare services: “There was not even a fragment of the social security system, nor was there medical system to be destroyed.”86
For the assistance and relief projects, the AAOO primarily aimed to compensate for the deficiencies in the social security system in Okinawa. As so many people had to rely on public assistance in Okinawa, very little of the budget and human resources were left for other welfare services, including child welfare, disabled persons’ welfare, and disaster recovery assistance. In addition to expending funds in those areas, the AAOO spent a significant amount of money on providing aid and relief to the families of those who had died in the war. As a part of the project, the AAOO founded a vocational training center in 1957, targeting at war widows and orphans.87
In fact, the Act on Relief of War Victims, Survivors, and Bereaved Families (Senshō-byō- sha Senbotsusha Izoku tō Engohō, hereafter the “Relief Act”) was one of the first Japanese welfare laws that was directly applied to Okinawa under the U.S. administration. Enacted in
1952, the Relief Act replaced a prewar imperial pension act for veterans, Onkyū-hō, which had been suspended in Japan under GHQ/SCAP occupation. In response to an appeal from the
86 Zen-nihon Kokuritsu Iryō Rōdō Kumiai, Mitekita Okinawa no Genjitu: Shimagurumi Gunji Kichi, Hakai suru Iryōmo nai, March, 1962, unpublished report, Hosei University Institute for Okinawa Studies (hereafter HUIOS), Nakano Yoshio Collection. 87 Nanpō Dōhō Engokai Jyūnana-nen no Ayumi, 77-78. 220
Ryukyu War-Bereaved Families Association (Ryūkyū Ikazoku Kai) organized in 1952, the Relief
Act was introduced to Okinawa in the following year and the Government of Japan Nanpō
Liaison Office in Naha (Naha Nihon Seifu Nanpō Renraku Jimusho, hereafter JGLO) began processing the relief payment to war victims and their families while handling war remains.
JGLO was established on July 1, 1952, immediately after the signing of the San Francisco Peace
Treaty, primarily to manage family registers (koseki) in Okinawa, as it was a crucial way for the
Japanese government to exhibit its “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa under the U.S. administration.88 Not only did the Relief Act have a crucial role in compensating social security system by financially assisting bereaved families, but it also significantly contributed to the recovery of the postwar Okinawan economy. By 1963, ten years after the law was first implemented in Okinawa, the total amount of relief payment reached 63 million U.S. dollars.89
Some scholars have pointed out problematic consequences of that the Relief Act: that it has imposed on the ways people are permitted to remember the war. Ishihara Masaie, for example, reveals that the law directed people’s accounts of their wartime experiences to fit with patriotic narratives. If they did not give the right sort of account, their relief payment would be jeopardized. In 1958, the Japanese government extended the application of the Relief Act to civilian victims and survivors in Okinawa, since the entire island’s population was involved in the ground battle in Okinawa. In order to be eligible for the Relief Act, however, people had to
88 Symbolically, JGLO kept raising up a Hinomaru flag, even when it was prohibited by the U.S. military. See Ishihara Masaie, “Engohō ni yotte netsuzō sareta Okinawa sen ninshiki,” Okinawa Kokusai Daigaku Shakai Bunka Kenkyū, vol. 10, No.1 (March 2007):31-54, 37. Asano and Taira further reveal JGLO’s involvement in the Island-Wide struggle. Not only did it constantly report the development of the struggle to the Japanese government, but it also gave suggestions to Okinawan leaders who were seeking solutions to a confrontation between the U.S. military and people in Okinawa. See Asano Toyomi and Yoshitoshi Taira, “Amerika shiseika Okinawa heno nihon seifu kanyo kakudai ni kansuru kihon shiryō: Shimagurumi Tōsō to Naha Nihon Seifu Nanpō Renraku Jimusho Bunsho,” Bunka Kagaku Kenkyū 16(1) (2004): 7-22. 89 Ryūkyū Seifu Kōseikyoku, ed. Kōsei Hakusho 1963 (Okinawa: Ryukyu Seifu Kōseikyoku, 1964), 197. 221
submit a statement with detailed accounts of their participation in military operations to prove that they (or their family) actively and willingly cooperated with the Japanese military and sacrificed themselves as a result.90 The Ministry of Health and Welfare strictly assessed the statements to evaluate whether the petitioner’s “cooperation” was active enough for them to qualify for relief payment.91 Here, Takashi Fujitani’s analysis of the U.S. campaign for army volunteers from Japanese Americans in the internment camps is helpful to understand the implication of this system. Reexamining the questionnaires that tested Japanese Americans’ willingness to soldier and loyalty to the United States, Fujitani argues that the registration system served as the new modality of governing this “subpopulation” by urging them to make voluntary, but nonetheless implicitly coerced, choices.92 In this process, those internees who made “rational decisions” to enlist in the military were welcomed by the nation as “free subjects,” while those who chose noncompliance with registration were eternally expelled from the national community. 93 Likewise, the Relief Act operated as a positive method of liberal governmentality
90 This is particularly problematic in the discussion of so-called “mass suicides (shūdan jiketsu),” or more accurately translated by Norma Field as “compulsory group suicides” or even “collective self- determination,” that happened throughout the island in the final stage of the Battle of Okinawa. People hiding in caves committed suicide in groups, or killing each other, by fear of surrender to Americans, or by implicit/explicit orders of Japanese soldiers. Whether there was a direct military order in mass suicides or not (and therefore, if mass killings were purely voluntary or not) became a point of contestation in 2005 when the former commander of the Japanese imperial army went to court over the account of mass suicides in historical textbooks. The question itself, the notion of “voluntary” in particular, should be examined carefully in the longue durée of colonialism, racism, and militarism in Okinawa, but it is likely that some of the survivors hid the fact that mass suicides/killings were the result of the military commands, and instead explained that they took their own lives in loyalty to the Japanese military or the emperor in order to be eligible for the Relief Act. 91 Ishihara, “Engohō ni yotte netsuzō sareta Okinawa sen ninshiki,” 44. 92 Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire, 126-127. 93 In a similar way, Michael Lujan Bevacqua analyzes Chamorro desire to join the U.S. military as a way to solidify their subjectivity as loyal Americans. He argues that the deaths of Chamorro soldiers create powerful forces for maintaining patriotic devotion among Chamorros toward the United States (Bevacqua, “The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier,” in Shigematsu and Camacho, eds. Militarized Currents, 40). 222
in managing people’s “free will” not only in the present but also in the past. Victims of the Battle of Okinawa, who constantly had their loyalty to the emperor tested during the war, were scrutinized once again through the Relief Act, which perused of their (or their families’) sacrifices were enough to deem them worthy of protection by the Japanese biopolitical regime.
Importantly, this process took place precisely at the moment when the land problem was about to be “settled,” and the reversion movement was formalized with the establishment of the Council for the Return of Okinawa Prefecture to the Fatherland (Okinawaken Sokoku Fukki Kyōgikai).94
Emergence of “Population Problem” and Emigration as a Solution
Okinawan social scientists and medical professionals actively engaged in “diagnosing”
Okinawan Problems. One of the impending issues shared widely by scholars and politicians towards the end of the 1950s was the so-called population problems (jinkō mondai). In 1955, the
GRI organized a special committee to investigate population problems, which was replaced by the government-led Advisory Council on Population Problems in the following year. Based on their research, the committee published a report, “Ryukyu no Jinkō Mondai (Population Problems in the Ryukyu Islands)” in 1957. The report begins with a message by GRI Chief Executive,
Tōma Jūgō, who stated that given the limited land and natural resources in the Ryukyu islands, the population problem was “a matter of life or death (shikatsu mondai),” and that and it would hinder the economic development, suppress the improvement of standard of living, and worsen inequality among residents.95 In fact, in addition to the massive influx of repatriates and demobilized soldiers in the early occupation period, a rapid decline in mortality rate and a rising
94 English name of the council follows the official translation. 95 Ryūkyū Seifu Keizai Kikakushitu, Ryūkyū no jinkō mondai, 1957.2, Hashigaki, HUIOS. 223
of fertility rate contributed to the drastic growth of the population in Okinawa in the early 1950s.
The population density in Okinawa at that time was one of the highest in the world. However, the report seemed to avoid discussing yet another, but perhaps more fundamental cause of the concentration of population at that time––that is, land seizure and the subsequent displacement of farmers. On the contrary, it proposed making use of an economy which depended on military bases to prepare for establishing a “normal” industrial structure.96
In part, Okinawan intellectuals’ concern echoed neo-Malthusian arguments on the
“danger” of overpopulation in developing countries. These concerns had been widely circulated by the mid-twentieth century, with American social scientists as their core. As Kolson Scholosser puts it, in the formation of postwar US developmentalism and containment doctrine, “models of a natural relationship between population growth, scarcity and conflict” were produced to legitimize state biopolitical intervention both domestically and internationally.97 Laura Briggs’ analysis on reproduction and sexuality in Puerto Rico further reveals how overpopulation served as a reply to, and encapsulation of, the concern among U.S. colonialists, local politicians. and liberal professionals: “something was wrong in Puerto Rico, but it could not be entirely the fault of the United States.”98 Attributing the region’s poverty to “abnormally” fertile Puerto Rican women, the notion of overpopulation pathologized and racialized women’s bodies, and re/produced the difference that makes colonialism in Puerto Rico possible and necessary.
Likewise, the emergence of the “population problem” in occupied Okinawa itself could be understand as a solution to “unruly” displaced farmers, transforming them into the source of
96 Ibid. 97 Kolson Schlosser, “Malthus at mid-century: neo-Malthusianism as bio-political governance in the post- WWII United States,” cultural geographies 16 (2009): 465-484. 98 Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 87. 224
social problems and objects for discipline. In this process, while Okinawan society became pathologized, Japan came to serve as a model society that Okinawa should follow. The notion of overpopulation thus revived racial-colonial relations between Japan and Okinawa on the one hand, and on the other concealed the presence of the U.S. military as the very cause of imbalance between population and resource in postwar Okinawa.
A close reading of the GRI report reveals what local professionals attempted to achieve through dealing with population problems. The report identifies four major issues caused by overpopulation: 1) food shortages, 2) an excess in agricultural population and law productivity,
3) unequal distribution of wealth and unstable economic structure, 4) an increase in production- age population and a high unemployment rate.99 Comparing the physiques of Japanese and
Okinawan school children, the report also refers to the importance of improving the “quality” of the population (jinkō shishitsu).100 The report then proposes five principles as solutions to the population problems: 1) to increase employment opportunities, formulate economic plans, and reorganize industrial structures, 2) to establish special employment measures for the working-age population, 3) to facilitate an emigration project, 4) to promote family planning, and 5) to expand and improve social security measures. Overall, the report emphasizes that population problems
99 Ryūkyū no jinkō mondai, 15-29. 100 The focus on the “quality of the population” partly reflects the shift in population policies in mainland Japan at that time. In the 1950s, various actors, most notably Shin-Seikatsu Undō Kyōkai (Association of New Life-Reform Movement) actively disseminated knowledge about family planning across the country. Thanks to the nation-wide family planning movement (kazoku keikaku undō) as well as the enactment of the Eugenic Protection Law in 1948, the birth rate dramatically declined in Japan throughout the 1950s. See Sawada, “Cold War Geopolitics of Population and Reproduction in Okinawa,” 402-403; Iuchi Tomoko, “Shokuba deno Shin-Seikatsu Undō,” in Ōkado Masakatsu, ed. Shin-Seikatsu Undō to Nihon no Sengo (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 2012). A population white book (jinkō hakusho) in 1959 sets the agenda as 1) Employment problems, 2) Promotion of family planning, and 3) Improvement of Quality of the Population. Sugita Nao points out that the notion of “quality of the population” can be traced back to prewar ecumenists’ understanding of the population, and that it connects population policies with social welfare system and economic policies. Quoted in Sugita Nao, “Nihon ni okeru jinkō shishitsu gainen no tenkai to shakaiseisaku,” Ōsaka Ichiritsu Daigaku. Keizaigaku Zasshi 116-2 (September 2015): 59-81, Ōsaka Ichiritsu Daigaku. 225
are not merely about the quantity of the population and cannot be solved solely through population policies like birth control. Rather, these issues required “a long-term plan for economic development that ultimately aims for economic independence (keizai no jiritsu).”101
For that purpose, the report suggests that each member of the society is expected to nurture the spirit of independence and social solidarity. It should be also noted here that “self-sufficiency in the economy (jiritsu keizai)” had become a key phrase in political discussions in Okinawa by the early 1950s. As Sakurazawa Makoto argues, in the 1950s, this basically meant establishing an economy that does not rely on U.S. foreign aid or the income from U.S. military facilities.102 It first took shape in June 1955, when the GRI formulated the five-year plans for the economic development of the Ryukyu Islands and aimed to replace a military-centered economy (kichi keizai) with a self-sufficient economy. The problematization of overpopulation in Okinawa was thus closely linked with local leaders’ call for local autonomy, at least in its initial stage.
Meanwhile, USCAR regarded the “overpopulation” in Okinawa more as a source of anti-
U.S. sentiment that would threaten the stability of the military administration and would benefit the Communists by drawing people in Okinawa into their camp on the other.103 While the GRI tried to introduce the Eugenic Protection Law as a way to promote birth control and prevent illegal abortion, USCAR rejected it and instead promoted emigration programs as a solution to surplus population. Sawada Kayo’s detailed analysis reveals that behind the official reason for denying the proposed Eugenic Protection Law, which was said to protect the lives and welfare of people in Okinawa, was USCAR’s avoidance of public involvement in population control so
101 Ibid., 30. 102 Sakurazawa Makoto, “Okinawa fukki zengo no keizai kōzō,” Shakai Kagaku Vol. 44, No. 3 (2014): 33-46, 35. 103 Sawada, “Cold War Geopolitics of Population and Reproduction in Okinawa,” 419. 226
they would not trigger religious, ethical, and political controversy. In order to smoothly carry out long-term military occupation over the islands, Sawada argues, USCAR chose to maintain its
“military neutralism.”104
As we have already seen in the previous chapter, upon request from USCAR and U.S. government, James L. Tigner, a doctoral student in Latin American history at Stanford
University conducted a research in 1951 under the supervision of the Pacific Science Board,
National Research Council to survey the condition of the Okinawan emigrants’ activities and the future settlement in Latin America. Consequently, Bolivia was selected as a destination for new
Okinawan emigrants.105
People in Okinawa were never passive during the process of the emigration programs. On the contrary, local leaders had already launched a campaign already in the summer of 1948 to resume emigration programs. They also established the Okinawa Emigration Association
(Okinawa Kaigai Kyōkai), which aimed to facilitate emigration––relative sponsored migration
(yobiyose) in particular–– by working closely with Okinawan diaspora across the world and cooperating with their “relief movement.”106 The survey carried out by the Okinawa Gunto
Government (the precursor to GRI) in 1951 shows that as much as 171,865 people
(approximately 20% of the population at that time) were willing to emigrate. Another survey in
1953 showed that over 90% of the repatriates from the South Pacific Mandate (Nanyō Guntō) expressed their wish to return to the South Pacific islands.107 This high rate can be read as a
104 Ibid., 410. 105 Iacobelli, Postwar Emigration to South America from Japan and the Ryukyu Islands; Amemiya, “Population Pressure as a Euphemism: The Rhetoric to Push Okinawan Emigration.” 106 This shows interesting connections between the “relief movement” and the emigration programs. 107 Their strong wish to return to their home in the South Pacific islands was not fulfilled in the end, as the United States, who placed those islands under its administration as a Trust Territory after the war, was 227
reflection of people’s anxiety living under the precarious sociopolitical condition in which the
U.S. military rapidly carried out forcible land seizure while Okinawa was officially separated from the protection of the Japanese Constitution. In addition, local intellectuals and politicians shared the understanding that emigration was not only the sole solution to pressing population issues in Okinawa, given the limited arable area and resources, but also “tradition” to overcome economic the disadvantages of the Ryukyu Islands. For instance, Chihō Jichi Nana-Shūnen
Kinenshi, a commemorative publication and white book of municipal councils published in 1955, traces the tradition of emigration back to the trade-centered economy from the premodern period.
It goes on to list contributions that “the ancestors” made as settler migrants (takushi 拓士) to the economic development of the world, such as road construction in the Philippines, hemp cultivation in Davao, and development of the South Pacific Islands.108
Interestingly, the white book also mentions workers at the U.S. military facilities (gun sagyō-in 軍作業員), many of whom had no choice but engage in military employment as a result of the land seizure. They were described in the white book as “domestic migrants (tōnai imin),” since their income in dollars greatly contributed to the Okinawan postwar economy in a similar way to prewar migrants who supported Okinawa with their remittance.109 All in all, the white
concerned that the influx of Okinawan migrants would accelerate overpopulation in those islands and worsen the welfare of the islanders. See Asano, Nanyō Guntō to Teikoku, Kokusai Chitsujo. 108 Okinawa Shichō Sonchō Kai, ed., Chihō Jichi Nana-Shūnen Kinenshi, 1955. The term takushi 拓士 was commonly used to refer to Japanese settlers in Manchukuo. It is striking to see the word imbued with settler colonist’s sentiment was used in this context to describe Okinawan migrant workers. 109 It might be worth mentioning here that USCAR regarded the displaced farmers together with repatriates from Japan’s former colonies in Asia and the Pacific Islands as necessary labor force for construction and management of military bases. See Namihira Isao,“Gun-Sagyō” no Genkyō: Kyu Koza shi wo Chu-shin ni.” Okinawa-shiyakusho, Koza Bunka Box, vol. 6 (2010). In this sense, they were certainly “domestic migrants.” Even if they remained in Okinawa, they were already separated from their land. 228
book decontextualizes moments of displacement in modern Okinawan history by regarding migration almost as a kind of wisdom used for survival by the Okinawan people.
When the GRI called for applicants for emigration to Bolivia, 3,591 people applied for the quota of 400. The first group of GRI-planned migrants left Okinawa for Bolivia in 1954. In addition to Bolivia, over a thousand people left Okinawa for other countries in South America every year during the period between 1957 to 1962. Among a total of 17,726 emigrants who left
Okinawa in the postwar period until 1993, the largest destination was Brazil, counting 9,494, followed by Argentina (3,897), Bolivia (3,448), and Peru (733).110 As Yakabi’s analysis above shows, the increasing number of migrants in the late 1950s should be understood in its relation to the land seizure and militarization of the islands. A portion of the displaced farmers, who demanded life as “beggars,” turned out to be migrant workers who disappeared from the islands.
In addition to the emigration projects, GRI with the assistance of the Ministry of Labor in
Japan, the AAOO, and Okinawa Prefectural Associations (Okinawa Kenjinkai) launched the so- called “mass employment (shūdan shūshoku)” project in 1957 to send out new graduates of middle schools and high schools in groups to mainland companies as the workforce. The origin of this project can be traced back to 1939 when a special train was introduced to carry a group of new graduates from Akita to Tokyo for employment. This was part of a larger system designed to control the labor supply under the wartime economy. It resumed in the postwar period in 1954 as a solution to overpopulation in rural areas and labor shortages in the metropoles against the backdrop of high economic growth. In Okinawa, GRI officials highly expected that the mass employment in Japan would be a cost-effective solution to population problems, compared to the overseas emigration that required a large amount of funds. They also thought that the youth sent
110 Ishikawa Tomonori, “Sengo Okinawa ni okeru kaigai imin no rekishi to jittai,” Imin Kenkyū, Vol. 6 (March, 2010): 45-70, 53. 229
to Japan would bridge cultural differences between Japan and Okinawa, serving as an essential vehicle for the reversion movement.111 Furthermore, as juvenile delinquency increasingly became a social problem in Okinawan society, it was also expected that youth learn to discipline themselves through living and working in a severe environment in mainland Japan.
On the contrary to the expectation of GRI officials and educators, however, the youth from Okinawa had a hard time to adjust to life in Japan. Distressed by severe working conditions, discrimination, and homesickness, some ran away from the workplace and went back to Okinawa, while others formed gangs.112 Instead of requesting that Japanese companies improve labor conditions, however, the GRI saw this issue as the result of social and cultural differences between Japan and Okinawa. Accordingly, the Okinawa Teachers’ Association organized training camp programs for new graduates to prepare for living and working in mainland Japan. Through the program, trainees learned what was/was not acceptable in Japan, and in doing so, they were expected to discard their bodily and linguistic markers as
“Okinawans” in order to become “valuable” workers in the Japanese labor market. Kishi
Masahiko analyzes the mass employment programs as the simultaneous process of assimilation and othering (tashaka). The harder the young workers from Okinawa tried to become
“Japanese,” the more differences they found in their bodies, languages, and behaviors, which were to be continuously monitored and corrected.113 In many ways, the whole process of the
111 Kishi Masahiko, Dōka to Tashaka Sengo Okinawa no Hondo Shūshokusha tachi (Kyoto: Nakanishiya Shuppan, 2013), 322. 112 Yamaguchi Satoshi, “Kaigai Ijū toshiteno ‘hondo’ shūshoku: Okinawa karano ‘shūdan shūshoku,” Jinbun Chiri, Vol. 56-1 (Nov. 1, 2004): 21-42. 113 It should be noted that around the same time the mass employment of new graduates in Japan began, various forms of social reform movements took place in Okinawa. One of them was the New Life Movement (shin seikatsu undo). Modeled after the Life Reform Movement in Japan, it was defined as “mental and physical practices” that aimd at “improving life of people, spreading health and clear lifestyle by rooting out irrational customs, increasing productivity, and stabilizing economy” (Fukushi Shimbun, July 1, 1956). 230
mass employment programs looked like a revival of prewar labor migration and the assimilation of the Okinawan community. As Tomiyama Ichirō’s earlier work reveals, Okinawan educators and intellectuals used the life reform movement to impose strict standards of conduct on migrant workers from Okinawa residing in Japan so that they could be recognized as decent and docile workers. This was done by carefully wiping any markers to indicate that they were “Okinawans.”
For those Okinawan migrant workers, Tomiyama argues, to become “Japanese” first and foremost meant to be incorporated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a standardized
“human resource.”114 In the context of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Nayan Shah observes an analogous process of racialization in which middle-class Chinese Americans adopted and internalized heteronormativity and bourgeois respectability in order to enter the American nation as a bonafide “citizen-subject.”115 Likewise, the mass employment program should be understood as yet another process of exclusionary inclusion along the line of reversion, that is, a
(re)racializing process to determine who can be made to live and who can be let to die.
Among others, tuberculosis patients vividly encountered this crucial biopolitical boundary while they were desperately longing for Japan as a site of treatment. Based on a request from the USCAR and the GRI, the Health and Welfare Ministry of the Government of Japan began to accept tuberculosis patients annually for free hospitalization and treatment in national tuberculosis sanatoria in 1963. The GOJ also covered expenses for medical treatment, travel, and the daily necessities of those patients. This was a direct consequence of the previously mentioned
Kennedy-Ikeda joint communique in 1961, which assisted in stabilizing the welfare of the inhabitants of the Ryukyu Islands. The GOJ also started to accept Hansen’s disease patients from
114 Tomiyama Ichirō, Kindai Nihon Shakai to “Okinawajin,” 280. 115 Nayan Shah, Contagious Divided: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001), 12. 231
Okinawa for treatment in national leprosaria who were eligible for education in Japan.116
Patients to be sent to Japan were selected through consultation between the GOJ and GRI upon recommendations by public health centers, hospitals, TB sanitariums, specialists, and public health nurses. In the selection process, the priority went to those patients who could resist the fatigue of long travel (thus, younger patients were preferred), those who did not have serious complications, those for whom home care would not be considered effective,117 and for those who required surgical intervention in Japan.118 In addition to these physical conditions,
Okinawan doctors insisted that the patients sent to Japan should have mental resilience to endure the life in sanatoriums, and urged them to make every effort all the time to discipline themselves and overcome the disease.119
By 1967, a total of 1,228 TB patients were sent to hospitals in mainland Japan, and 528 of them were discharged.120 Okinawan physicians and medical professionals regarded the program of sending TB patients to mainland Japan (hondo okuridashi) as “a special antidote
(tokkōyaku)” for the permanent shortage of hospital beds in Okinawa. Before the GOJ and GRI officially got involved in the program, unofficial exchanges between Japan and Okinawa in the field of tuberculosis prevention had already begun. It was a patients group, the Patients’
Association of Okinawa (Okinawa Ryōyūkai 沖縄療友会, hereafter PAO), that took the initiative
116 “Understanding Concerning Acceptance of Ryukyuan Tuberculosis Patients and Others in Japan.” In “Ryukyuan TB Patients in Japan, 1963 (Folder 1). USCAR record, No. U81100353B, OPA. 117 For example, public health nurses gave priority to TB patients with an addiction to alcohol when selecting patients to be sent to Japan. Yonahara, Okinawa no Hokenfu, 55-56. 118 “Understanding Concerning Acceptance of Ryukyuan Tuberculosis Patients and Others in Japan.” 119 Yamashiro Eisei, “Hondo itaku chiryō kanja no engo nituite,” Ryōyū Shimbun, March 30, 1964. Reprinted in Yamashiro Eisei, Dansō Chitai: Okinawa Ryōyūkai Shō-shi, vol. 1 (Okinawa: Okinawaken Kōsei Jigyō Kyōkai, 1986), 145. 120 Okinawa Ryōyūkai, Okinawa Ryōyūkai 10 shūnen Kinenshi, Ryūkyū Seifu Kōseikyoku, 1967. 232
to send TB patients to Japan and invite Japanese doctors across the border. The PAO was established in 1956 under the leadership of Teruya Kanzen, a doctor and the director of the
Ryukyu Hygiene Research Institute (Ryūkyū Kekkaku Kenkūjo), and who himself was a tuberculosis survivor. While the Ryukyuan Anti-Tuberculosis Association, mentioned in the previous chapter, primarily focused on prevention campaigns, the PAO emphasized improving patient treatment through negotiations with the GRI, USCAR, and the GOJ. In addition, especially after tuberculosis became a curable disease with the use of antibiotics and surgical operations, the PAO launched “aftercare” services to assist survivors toward rehabilitation, and to help them return to society.
In Februray1961, the PAO learned the news that a national tuberculosis sanatorium,
Shunka-en, in Hyōgo prefecture was planning to accept fifty TB patients for free treatment while the travel expenses and living cost would be covered by the patients themselves with the help of public assistance. The news was much appreciated by tuberculosis patients in Okinawa, many of whom were trapped in their homes waiting for hospitalization. However, the Health and Welfare
Ministry of the GOJ did not approve the plan at first since it was concerned that such a program would require careful diplomatic negotiations with the U.S. government. USCAR was even more reluctant to approve the project. In fact, prior to that, Col. Irvine H. Marshall, the chief of the
Public Health and Welfare Section of USCAR, ordered the GRI in 1958 to suspend inviting
Japanese pulmonary surgeons to Okinawa and suspend sending patients to Japan for surgery. The official reason given was that there were enough surgeons in Okinawa to perform operations.121
However, given the fact that USCAR officials themselves were very aware of the scarcity of physicians in Okinawa, this order probably derived from their concerns that such programs would open a room for the Japanese government to intervene in civil affairs in the Ryukyu
121 Ibid. 233
Islands. More problematically for them, it would strengthen emotional ties between Japan and
Okinawa, which would further promote pro-reversion sentiment.
The PAO with an assistance from the Okinawa Prefectural Association in Tokyo worked hard to negotiate with the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and USCAR, to actualize the plan for sending TB patients to Japan. On April 25, 1961, the first group of eleven tuberculosis patients from Okinawa arrived in a sanatorium in Hyogo. This event paved the way for the formalization of the program based on an agreement among the GOJ, GRI, and USCAR. The PAO leaders indeed expected that this project would contribute to the reversion movement. A commemorative publication from the PAO describes that the news about Shunka-en accepting patients from
Okinawa brought joyous moment not only to TB patients but also to Okinawa as a whole:
It was so painful to see the misery of many of our fellow patients (ryōyū) being not able to be hospitalized to government-run facilities in Okinawa due to lack of beds. Equally depressing is that patients with severe cases are abandoned from the world and lost their hopes to live. The more I see this tragedy, the more I am convinced that the shortest way to the reversion is to request beds for TB patients in the sanatorium in mainland Japan. Our fellow countrymen in the homeland (sokoku no dōhō) should willingly and warmly welcome us.122
Before reducing this into a dominant narrative of the reversion as national reunification, what should not be overlooked from this statement is that traveling to mainland Japan was almost the only hope for a cure for many tuberculosis patients in Okinawa, who were otherwise essentially waiting for death at home without having medical treatment. Put differently, just like starving farmers, it was only on the verge of death that these patients could possibly make a political demand for reversion, and hope that Japan would save their lives.
122 Ibid., 30. 234
In reality, however, patients sent to Japan rather found themselves standing still on the edge of biopolitical governmentality. One patient, Hentona Tomohiro was asked to show his passport at the port of Kagoshima, the southern border of Japan at that time, while he was being sent to a sanatorium in Fukuoka. The experience made him realize that “without a passport, I could not even step onto my homeland. Nor could we receive tuberculosis treatment, which has been only given to us through the “benevolence (onkei)” of our homeland.”123 Hentona was thus keenly aware of the exceptional status of TB patients from Okinawa. Contrary to the PAO leaders’ expectation that TB patients would open the door for the reversion, their passage to sanatoriums in Japan was not granted as a citizen’s right to life, but as a relief effort by the
Japanese government. In this sense, TB patients embody the very status of occupied Okinawa.
Thrown outside of the biopolitical protection of Japan and the United States, people’s lives were easily exposed to the violence of a sovereign power that would let people die. Their lives might have been saved, but only in exchange for surrendering their native land and proving loyalty to their “homeland,” Japan. It is quite striking that Hentona associated the train that carried TB patients from the port to a sanatorium with military trains. As soon as the patients got into a train, they were told by their leaders (probably, the GRI staff) to pull down all window shutters so that people outside would not be surprised by the peculiar sight of ill people with masks. This reminded Hentona of wartime military trains, as they usually closed shutters to conceal the troops inside and stay out of residents’ sight.124 It is uncertain who was trying to hide the TB patients from whom and why. And yet, Hentona’s analogy reveals how TB patients from
Okinawa were carefully hidden from Japanese society and carried to another isolated carceral
123 Hentona, Tomohiro. “Fukuoka higashi byōin deno ryōyō seikatu wo oete.” Quoted in Yonahara, Setsuko. Okinawa no Hokenfu, 63. 124 Ibid., 64. 235
space, a sanatorium. Just like “beggars” and untamed juvenile, patients were kept outside of the national community until they were disciplined, assimilated, and cured.
Epilogue
Through the perspective of the Okinawan people’s struggle for life, this chapter analyzed the shift in the U.S. administration in Okinawa that took place in the late 1950s. The massive land seizure beginning in 1953 deprived people of their land not merely as their private property but as their means of living. The fight against military violence made people re-narrate their relationship to the land, turning it into what Goeman calls “storied land.” This shared sense of being placed on the verge of death brought people together to “beg” for life so they would not be killed. The shift in civil administration that focused more on the welfare and economic development of the inhabitants did bring a drastic change to the life of people in Okinawa. The influx of Japanese and U.S. financial and technological aid helped the local government establish a formalized social security system. But this does not mean that the whole population was equally protected by either U.S. or Japanese welfare programs. In order to be included into the biopolitical governmentality, people in Okinawa had to (re)discipline their bodies and narrate their wartime experience to prove their past “sacrifices” in order to receive an entry pass to the national community.
As the date of the reversion approached, instead of celebrating the moment of “national reunification,” the writings of Okinawan radical thinkers rather became imbued with a sense of fear of death. This is partly because they already knew that their hope for peace and a secure life had already been betrayed as the reversion would not bring any changes to the status of U.S. military bases. A poet, Kawamitsu Shin’ichi, for example, used the term “the ledger of the dead
(shibō-sha daichō),” to describe the precarious status of people in Okinawa in his article published in January 1970: “Because the island will continue to be equipped with nuclear 236
weapons, the rulers of the United States and Japan have and will continue to regard a million people living in Okinawa as just a number listed on a ledger of dead, while we are still living.”125
Kawamitsu’s perception of imminent death here resonates well with what Tomiyama Ichirō terms as the “presentiments of violence,” mentioned in the introduction of this thesis. As
Tomiyama theorizes, the act of “pre-sentiments” became possible through recollecting past experience of being exposed to violence.126 What people like Kawamitsu were perceiving at the moment of reversion was not merely the fact that possession of nuclear weapons would continue to threaten the lives of people living in Okinawa, but also the “re-emergence” of Japanese imperial violence. Indeed, Tomori Masato, another leading thinker in Okinawa at that time, associated the reversion with compulsory collective suicides (shūdan jiketsu) that happened throughout the island in the final stage of the Battle of Okinawa. People hiding in caves committed suicide in groups, or by killing each other, for fear of surrendering to Americans, or by implicit/explicit orders by Japanese soldiers. Describing the forced suicides as “the death that excessively embodies Okinawa (amarini Okinawa-teki na shi),” Tomori sees it as the outcome of discord (kishimi) between the sovereign state and small communities in distant islands––people who helplessly and inevitably embraced and internalized the will of the imperial state. Tomori writes, far from the promise of a better life, “the recovery of the sovereignty of Japan [which would be accomplished through the reversion] would only bring us yet another death as national subjects.”127
125 Kawamitsu, Shin’ichi, “Waga Okinawa, kaikon 24-nen: shibō-sha daichō kara no igi mōshitate,” Tenbō 133 (January 1970): 67-71.
126 Tomiyama, Bōryoku no Yokan, 38-41. 127 Tomori Masato, “Amarini Okinawa teki na shi,” Gendai no Me, 12-8 (August 1971): 158-165. 237
Epilogue
When, and only when, imperialism on the earth is over, would Okinawans finally be liberated from “Niga-yū (the time for hardship),” be able to enjoy “Ama-yū (the time for well-being),” and contribute to world cultures by fully bringing out their distinctiveness (kosei). — Iha Fuyū1
If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood. ̶ Walter Benjamin2
On the early morning of December 20, 1970, the car driven by an American soldier under the influence of alcohol hit and injured an Okinawan pedestrian who was crossing a street in
Koza, one of the biggest camptowns adjacent to the Kadena Air Base in U.S.-occupied Okinawa.
Prior to the incident, there had been a series of assaults on Okinawans by U.S. soldiers one after another in the same year: a female high-school student was killed by a U.S. soldier in May; an attempted rape was reported in a logistics unit in August; and in September, a housewife in
Itoman was hit and killed by an American sergeant who was driving under the influence. In this last incident, despite local residents’ request to reject the transfer of a car that was involved in the
1 Iha Fuyū, Okinawa Rekishi Monogatari (original article was written in 1947, reprinted in Heibonsha Library, Okinawa Rekishi Monogatari, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001), 194; also quoted in Mori Yoshio et.al, eds. Ama-yū he: Okinawa sengoshi no jiritsu ni mukete (Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku Shuppankai, 2017). 2 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 297.
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accident, the U.S. military court immediately declared the accused not guilty.3 The incident in
Koza then finally triggered the outrage of the people of Okinawa against American military domination. While the Okinawan police began investigating the incident, a crowd of about 500 people gathered and surrounded the offender’s vehicle. Shouting “An American car is passing,”
“kuruse! (kill!),” “wasshoi, wasshoi (heave ho),” they tried to drag the foreign driver out of the car, banking and shaking the car. Although the MPs and the Okinawan police officers in the area were trying to pacify the people, the crowd had swelled to over a thousand by then. They began throwing bricks and large stones, and bottles with gasoline, overturning and burning cars with yellow plates or F-numbers ––which indicated that they were owned by Americans–– and yelling
“Yankee Go Home.” About five hundred armed soldiers were mobilized to stop the crowd. By the time nineteen Okinawans were arrested, over seventy cars owned by Americans and a few buildings on the Kadena Air Force Base had been burned.4 The incident, now known as the
“Koza Riot (koza bōdō)” or the “Koza Uprising,” has been remembered as one of a few uprisings that entailed actual violence by the people of Okinawa against the U.S. military domination.
Some scholars argued, however, that the “Koza Riot” should be understood not as senseless violence, but as an organized protest against the U.S. imperialism and prolonged Japanese colonialism in Asia.5 Wesley Iwao Ueunten, for example, highlights the fact that the participants of the riot consciously refrained from harming African American soldiers and their property, arguing that Okinawans and these black soldiers shared experiences of being exposed to racial
3 Okinawa wo shiru jiten henshū iinkai ed., Okinawa wo shiru jiten (Tokyo: Nichigai Associates, 2000), 218. 4 Wesley Iwao Ueunten, “Rising Up from a Sea of Discontent: The 1970 Koza Uprising in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa.” In Shigematsu and Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents, 96; Okinawa-shi heiwa bunka shinkōka, ed., Beikoku ga Mita Koza Bōdō (Okinawa: Yui Shuppan, 1999), 24-28. 5 Ueunten, “Rising Up From a Sea of Discontent,” 91. 239
and imperial violence, which had nurtured the sense of alliance between them.6 How can we understand what USCAR and U.S. military might have perceived as “a sudden eruption” of violence right before the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in the midst of Koza, the space most embodied the intimate relations between the U.S. military and local society?
In recalling the Koza Riot which he witnessed as a high school student, Tanaka Yasuhiro describes the incident as “a liberated space in a sea of fire (hino umi no kaihō-ku).”7 Similarly, in our casual conversation, one Okinawan artist, who was born in Koza and grew up there in the
1950s and 60s, told me that she remembered the Koza Riot as the experience of feeling a great relief (hotto shita) as she learned that people of Okinawa could get angry (okottemo ii) and finally could express their anger directly against Americans. Thus, even if the “riot” was quickly suppressed and the town became “normalized,” the Koza Riot nonetheless produced the fleeting moment of “liberation,” not as something imposed with a sense of “indebtedness” as Saidiya
Hartman theorized and Lisa Yoneyama elaborated, but as something possible to achieve by the force of people. One could associate this moment with what Walter Benjamin theorizes as
“divine violence,” which stands in contrast to “mythical violence.” Divine violence is “law- destroying” in the way that it intervenes against legal and mythical violence for the sake of living: “[divine power is defined] not by miracles directly performed by God, but by the expiating moment in them that strikes without bloodshed and, finally, by the absence of all law- making.”8 Divine violence neither makes nor preserves law, but deposes it and thus inaugurates a new historical epoch.
6 Ibid. 7 Tanaka Yasuhiro, “Kaihō-ku no yume.” Okinawa Shiyakusho, Koza Bunka Box, Vol. 7 (2011). 8 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 297. 240
It could be argued that Koza became the site for such “divine violence,” even momentarily, precisely because Koza as a camptown embodied the very status of occupied
Okinawa, where lives of people were placed outside of the protection of the state law and suspended in the state of exception. Under this liminal situation, as this dissertation has illustrated, people’s life and will for life became intricately and intimately connected with the logic of militarism. The principle of “military-first” brought about two seemingly contradictory consequences in Okinawan society. On the one hand, the lives of the local inhabitants were continuously exposed to military violence. Also, part of the population, most notably prostitutes, displaced farmers, and communists, became the target of strict surveillance for the sake of security of the U.S. military. On the other hand, the military domination also produced the space of lacuna in which various actors could take part in public health and welfare services because the military basically did not care about the lives of inhabitants as long as they would not interrupt the military operations. The military also generated multilayered circuits that closely connected Okinawa with other militarized sites across the Asia-Pacific, such as Hawaiʻi, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Korea, and Taiwan.9 Importantly, those militarized circuits often
9 As for the transnational movement of people caused by the U.S. military, see for example, Whitney Taejin Hwang, Hae Yeon Chuu, and Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon. In examining the role of U.S. military bases and camptowns in post-World War II South Korea, Hwang argues that the American military installations and their camptown communities constituted an “intimate” cold war borderland between the United States and Korea. As the most explicit example of this “Cold War intimacy,” Hwang depicts camptowns as the space of “origin” for transpacific migration for numerous Korean diaspora who traveled across the Pacific as military wives, mixed-race children and international adoptees. In Whitney Taejin Hwang, Borderland Intimacies: GIs, Koreans, and American Military Landscapes in Cold War Korea, Ph.D. Dissertation (University of California, Berkeley, 2010); Hae Yeon Choo closely examines the intimate relations between Filipina migrant women and American GIs in an American military camptown in South Korea. In Hae Yeon Choo, “Selling Fantasies of Rescue: Intimate Labor, Filipina Migrant Hostesses, and US GIs in a Shifting Global Order.” positions: east asia cultures critique 24. 1 (2016): 179-203; Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
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overlapped with, and connected to the existing routes of people, which had been formed under old empires. For instance, as Chapter Three showed, while the U.S. military utilized diasporic connections between Okinawa and Hawaiʻi, Okinawan diaspora, who left the islands of Okinawa as a result of Japanese capitalist exploitation, also attempted to appropriate the military connections in order to save and reconstruct their “home.” In this way, militarized circuits worked closely and intimately with the network of migrants, and together produced the space of excess on which alternative form of diasporic alliances could be founded.
If thinking in this way, we could argue that the reversion, the incorporation of Okinawa into the Japanese state, in effect closed those liminal spaces that had been carved out through the occupation period. This is why, as Chapter Two demonstrated, public health nurses were concerned that the integration of Okinawan public health nursing into the Japanese healthcare system would reduce the sense of autonomy of public health nurses, ruining their long-fought efforts to build up inter-island healthcare networks to better understand and serve the community’s needs. Okinawan diaspora in Hawaiʻi also felt that the reversion made it difficult to maintain their transpacific bridge with homeland Okinawa, because, it was U.S. military that played a central role in connecting the two sites. The transfer of administration over Okinawa to
Japan meant that the Okinawa-Hawaiʻi connection would become a part of U.S.-Japan diplomatic matters, and therefore, there remained less room for Okinawan diaspora to act freely.
The reversion would not merely close the spaces of excess and sever transpacific connections. Far from “liberation from the rule by a “different ethnic group (iminzoku),” reversion ultimately meant for the people of Okinawa nothing more than a transition from the rule by Americans (Amerika-yū) to the rule by Japanese (Yamato-yū). In fact, some people regarded reversion as the third “disposition”: the first had occurred in 1609, when Satsuma domain, the southernmost clan of the Tokugawa regime invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom and
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placed it under the indirect control; and the second in 1879, when the Meiji state incorporated the
Ryukyu Islands into a prefecture as Okinawa.10 The reversion thus marked the beginning of yet another phase of the colonial condition of Okinawa vis-à-vis Japan. However, it was not a simple revival of the Japanese imperialist rule over Okinawa that technically ended in 1945. Rather, a new form of control over Okinawa emerged in the late 1950s, which replaced the direct military control with U.S.-Japan collaborative “civil” control. By selectively incorporating the lives of people in Okinawa into the Japanese governmentality, it enabled the continued use of Okinawa for the U.S. military. I argue that the reversion of Okinawa did not “save” Okinawa and redeemed it from the status of bare life. On the contrary, the reversion further exacerbated the situation, as it served to conceal the fact that Okinawa continued to be the status of bare life for the sake of security of Japan and the United States. This is precisely why the “presentiments of death” expressed by Kawamitsu Shin’ichi and Tomori Masato in facing reversion, mentioned in
Chapter Four, is especially noteworthy. As the two thinkers succinctly describe, just as people in
Okinawa were made to prove their “loyalty” to the Japanese imperial state before and during the war, their continuing “sacrifice” to bear the burden of bases and risk their lives in their everyday lives was necessary condition to be accepted as a bonafide citizen-subject of Japan. In this very sense, reversion was far from liberation, but indeed “disposition” through which the life of people of Okinawa was truly put under siege.
With a slogan of the “economic development of Okinawa” (Okinawa shinkō kaihatsu), the massive state capital has been invested to Okinawa since the reversion. This investment was
10 For example, according to Wendy Matsumura, Marxist theoretician Kawada Yō presented a view that 1609, 1879, and 1972 respectively marked distinct moments in capital’s primitive accumulation process, and that reversion would simply start a new phase of the region’s expropriation by capital (Kawada, ‘Hangyaku Bōkoku, Kokkyō Toppa’ no Shisō,” cited and analyzed in Matsumura, The Limits of Okinawa, intro.). 243
not in fact made to promote the basic industry on the islands, but rather to maintain a military- centered society. Under the circumstance, the “law of relief” has kept dividing people within and beyond Okinawa into those who are seen as “benefitting from” the presence of the U.S. military and those who explicitly and publicly oppose them. The divide seems to be also reflected in academia, reducing the scholarly works on post-World War II Okinawa into the binary narrative of collaboration/resistance and domination/victimization. This framework prevents us from asking such questions as what made some people “choose” to live with U.S. bases and how and why the people of Okinawa are forced to choose between “prosperity (through coexisting together with U.S. military)” and “resistance (as Okinawans)” in the first place. It is my wish that the present work will destabilize the problematic binary by illuminating the experiences of actors and their agential struggles to pursue their life and provide care on the edge of militarized welfare. Given the pressing situation of current Okinawa where people’s will for a better life without U.S. bases is seriously violated by the military and by the state, it is all the more crucial to carefully examine the ways in which welfare and warfare, life and military, became intertwined.
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VIDEOS AND FILMS
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Sekiguchi, Yuka, dir. Senso Daughters, 1989.
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