Organizer and Chair: Stephen B. Snyder, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discussant: Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University
The United States military bases located throughout the Japanese archipelago occupy an anomalous position in the surrounding cultural terrain. On the one hand, they have served as direct, immediate instances of American culture for a society that has realized a complex but indisputably significant "Americanization" in the postwar period. On the other hand, the bases have been objects of disdain and active political protest from those directly affected by their physical presence or cultural fall-out. This panel examines the nature of this primary transnational interaction from a variety of perspectives: an ethnographic study of the experience of women living in the cultural interstices of neighborhoods adjoining bases in Okinawa; an examination of the deployment of feminist discourse on the issue of the Okinawan rape case; an analysis of the protest movement against a proposed Navy housing area in Zushi; and a reading of postwar Japanese fictions set at the margins of U. S. bases.
The panel addresses both the current situation, in flux in the wake of the vigorous protests against the bases in Okinawa and elsewhere, and the changing nature of the base/community relations, which has mirrored changes in U.S.-Japan relations in the postwar period. It becomes apparent that the boundaries between the bases and their surrounding communities are sites where, over time, existing definitions of and relations between the genders, races, and nationalities get renegotiated, often resulting in new, signal configurations. The cultural contradictions inherent in these interactions and the resulting ambivalence (on both sides) are problematized in each paper. Along these oddly porous barbed-wire borders, we observe sexual politics merging with global geopolitics, local movements becoming national concerns, and representations of the other slipping in and out of focus. By reading the various cultural texts generated by this intersection, we hope to elucidate both the nature of these "base" relationships and what they tell us, more generally, about the contested categories of self and nation.
Life at the Margins/Marginalized Lives: Working Women at the Borders of Base and
Off-Base Economies in Postwar Okinawa
Linda Angst, Yale University
The abduction and gang-rape by three U.S. servicemen of a twelve-year-old girl in Kin, Okinawa on Labor Day, 1995, prompted a variety of powerful responses-from local citizen protests by landowners forced to lease land to the U.S. military, to a reconsideration of the nature and role of the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, involving also the "retirement" of Prime Minister Murayama and the postponement of President Clinton's November 1995 Tokyo visit. Media coverage of the rape concentrates on these "larger" events as well as the symbolic rape of Okinawans and Okinawan culture historically by both the U.S. and Japan. Yet we must return, I argue, to the rape itself which begs the question of the representation of an immediate and on-going reality: the position of women in local economies dominated-still physically if no longer (since 1972) socially, and economically-by U.S. military installations, their personnel, and dependents.
Here, I examine the lifestyles and livelihoods of women survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, their daughters, and granddaughters, who live in the border areas of U.S. bases in central Okinawa. Ethnographic portraits include hairdressers, small marketers, farmers, bar "hostesses" and "Mama-san" in Chatan, Kin, Yomitan, and Okinawa City/Koza whose lives have been shaped-though never wholly determined-by serving a military clientele. Contrary to the stark media images of oppressed/oppressor relations, the lives of border-area women attest to the necessarily interactional and contingent nature of base/off-base categories. I examine ways in which these working (and working class) women incorporate, as well as are incorporated by, "base(ic)" relations in contrast to often sympathetic but static images of them in the rhetoric of women in Okinawa-images which whether wittingly or not implicate women from base border areas as objects of local political discourse. Working women's stories attest to the gendered generational legacy of the Pacific War and to the complex dynamics of class differences among women in Okinawa. I also examine ways in which local municipalities have creatively sought to include and redeploy (to varying degrees of success) images of these border economies, particularly through the slogan of kokusai machi ("international town") in Koza.
Strained Relations: Japanese Feminist Discourse on the Comfort Women and the
Okinawa Rape Case
Linda E. White, University of Colorado, Boulder
During the past ten years, the issue of comfort women (ianfu mondai)-women who were systematically used throughout Asia to sexually service the Japanese military during the Pacific War-has been brought to light by activists primarily in Korea and Japan. Some Japanese feminists have played an active role in supporting Asian women who were subjected to the wartime system and in condemning the Japanese government for trying to deny the existence of this brutal historical episode. At the same time, present day forms of sexual exploitation of women such as prostitution, sexual assault, and sexual harassment have been widely protested by Japanese feminist groups. When a 12-year-old Okinawan girl was raped by three U. S. servicemen in 1995, along with the mainstream of Japanese society, feminists were outraged and vocal. The rape came to stand for the problems of U.S. imperialism in Japan, Japanese imperialism in Okinawa (and racism associated with both of these), violence against women and children, and the myriad tensions between American military bases and the Japanese communities that surround them.
Japanese feminists have played a key role in critically articulating the problems of military operations in Japan today, Japanese as well as American. A connection between the wartime comfort station system and sexual abuse by U.S. servicemen around military bases in Japan has been made by some feminists. The sense that abuses of women similar to the atrocities of war could crop up around bases directs anger and resentment about the comfort system of the past toward the U.S. military presence in Japan today. As feminists responded to the rape incident of 1995 the power of the dreaded past and the Japanese military's role in destroying the lives of so many innocent women through wartime sexual conscription throughout Asia fueled their rhetoric about the U.S. military in Japan today.
This paper will explore the relationship between the comfort system and the issue of rape around U.S. military bases in Japan in order to illuminate some of the underlying attitudes about ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality which shape feminist discourses on these matters. The power dynamics between the U.S. and Japan, the mainland and Okinawa, and African Americans and white Americans in the U.S. military play out in multiple ways in feminist discourses about the 1995 rape. This paper will attempt to address some of these intersections as they are expressed in feminist writings and commentaries.
The Zushi Citizens Movement Against the Housing Project for United States Navy
Personnel
Kenneth J. Ruoff, Columbia University
Outside of Okinawa, no place in the last decade better symbolized the tension between the American military and local residents than Zushi City in Kanagawa Prefecture. The Japanese government's decision in 1982 to build over 1,000 units of housing for U.S. Navy personnel in a pristine forest in Zushi outraged local citizens who waged a decade-long campaign to halt the project. Zushi serves as an excellent case study of the complex influence American bases exert on local society
Zushi's Mayor Tomino Kiichiro (who became a media star), defined the protest movement as a textbook example of American-style grass-roots democracy: "I belong to a generation that was physically nourished by American food aid and spiritually nourished on American principles of democracy." While leading the newly politicized citizens in protest against the housing project, Tomino also drew on American models to expand democracy in Zushi. With the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in mind, he established an Information Access Section in city hall to guarantee citizens open access to information about their local government. Zushi thus became one of the few public bodies in Japan to freely distribute information
The housing project, an enclosed community of suburban houses complemented with pools, tennis courts, and baseball fields, both affronted and intrigued local residents. Citizens criticized their government for its callous attitude toward the environment and pointed to the U.S. as a model of a country that at least domestically respected the environment. While protesting against the American-style housing project, local residents nonetheless used it as a symbol to show the gap between the wealth of Japan and the living conditions of its people.
Base Fictions: Writing to Secure the Perimeter
Stephen B. Snyder, University of Colorado, Boulder
Karatani Kôjin has written that the only novel he remembers reading during the time he spent at Yale in the seventies is Murakami Ryû's Almost Transparent Blue. The reading, he says, affected him so much that American friends commented on his glum mood, necessitating his coining an English explanation for his depression: he had read, he told them, a "basically base novel based upon the base." This paper is an examination of a number of narrative fictions, base or otherwise, based upon the fact of the U.S. military installations in Japan in the postwar period. The bases from the period of the Occupation to the present, have reflected or enacted the changing political, economic, and cultural valences that have existed between Japan and the United States, and the literature they have spawned is an imaginative reenactment of those valences, focusing principally on the sexual politics (as a trope for other brands) of the relationship.
In the paper, I argue that the bases have been marked in the Japanese cultural imaginary as "inverted," modern day yûri, or pleasure quarters. While the Yoshiwara and its counterparts throughout Japan were walled "akusho" ("evil" yet sacred places), sealed off from society to contain the perceived contamination of female sexuality that lay inside (with all the contradictions reality maps onto that model), the bases are conceived as walled, sealed (contaminated) areas where sexuality collects outside. The walls or fences, of course, in both cases are porous, and just as Edo society eventually comes to pattern itself on Yoshiwara values and styles, the influence of American culture, learned in part from the bases, inevitably infects postwar Japan. Looking at the representations of "base" sexuality in novels by Murakami, Yamada Eimi, Higashi Mineo, Tamura Taijuro, and others, I examine shifting definitions of self and other, shifting patterns of bodily "consumption" on both sides of the fences. In each text, the liminal space between base and community, where the notion of nation is both forefronted and deconstructed, allows for these imaginative reconfigurations of self and other. This paper traces a genealogy of "base" fictions in an attempt to determine their particular contribution to postwar constructions of identity and representational practices.