Okinawa has long occupied an ambivalent position within the imagined community of modern Japan and global geopolitics. This panel explores the dynamic and often ironic processes through which ideas of Okinawan identity are today negotiated. Against and through hegemonic, global cultural forms and practices of Japan, US military occupiers, and its own official history, Okinawans fashion for themselves lives that are a mix, or champuru, of influences in a complex cultural politics of place and self. In their eclectic arts and persistent postwar political dissent, Okinawans demonstrate that idioms of resistance and incorporation are always expressed in specific local registers.

Roberson argues that, beyond facile interpretations of its "colorful," "world/ethnic" appeal, Okinawan pop music expresses a hybrid Okinawan identity produced as part of a national and global political economy. Angst, likewise, says the remaking of Koza as an "international town" entails a creative re-visioning (and erasure) of its history (and that of women workers) in the shadow of a U.S. base in a new political economy of Japanese tourism. Residents of Henoko Village see themselves as "a different kind of Okinawan," Inoue reports, embracing a proposed sea-based heliport and a "mutually beneficial interdependence" with bases. Nelson suggests that comedic performance creates a poetics of occupation and colonial history, linking art to answerability and, in the process, reveals dialogic practices that produce complex political subjectivities. In the overlap of art and politics, pop music, a social movement, storytelling, and city planning are sites of production for hybridized identities.

James E. Roberson, College of William and Mary

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, "Okinawan Pop" music has gained popularity in mainland Japan—especially in metropolitan areas such as Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Nagoya. Okinawan groups such as "Kina Shoukichi and Champloose," "The Rinken Band," and "The Nenes" have primarily been perceived—inside and outside Japan—as examples of "ethnic" music or as "Japan’s" contribution to "world music." Certainly part of the appeal of or source of interest in new Okinawan music lies in innovative and enjoyable syntheses of traditional Okinawan folk music with "Western" musical styles and instruments. However, other levels of cultural and political significance reflected and constructed within the music are silenced by writing and audiences that focus only on its "world/ethnic" music appeal.

In this paper, I examine the cultural politics of the images of Okinawa—as both physical place and emotional space—that are constructed within Okinawan Pop music. I argue that these images construct "Okinawa" as an internally creolized/hybridized "champuru" and as marked by other differences from mainland Japan(ese society and culture), including a(n endangered) purity of heart, continuing closeness to nature, and proud and sometimes overtly political defense of Okinawan identity. I suggest that such musically constructed images of champuru hybridity and Okinawan difference must be understood within a set of national and international political-economic dynamics which render any simple listening to Okinawan Pop as "colorful," "world/ethnic" music politically problematic.

Linda Isako Angst, Earlham College

Evocative of the day-to-day struggle of working class residents’ lives after the war, Koza, the area that developed outside Kadena Airbase in postwar Okinawa, was the interface between the mostly male world of US military personnel and the female/feminized world of Okinawan service workers. It was officially designated "Okinawa City" after reversion to Japan to reflect a changed demographic status while also "cleaning up" Koza’s base-town image as an economy of desire resting on the labor of Okinawan women. Calling the area a kokusai machi or international town, city officials, tapping the mainland’s late 1980s kokusai-ka (internationalization) campaign, attempt to lure tourists to this mid-island location far from beach resorts and war memorials—main attractions for Okinawa’s post-reversion industry, tourism.

Officials reinterpret Koza’s past relationship with US bases, promoting the hybrid, champuru cultural mix of life around the bases as a uniquely Okinawan take on "internationalization." The official celebration of "kokusai-machi Koza" romanticizes or excludes the seamy sex industry and the history of working women’s lives. Koza’s positive image depends on this exclusion, creating a problematic identity particularly given the influx of Filipina sex workers since the 1980s. Through tourist brochures, official city documents, and ethnographic vignettes, I examine locals’ attempts to salvage Koza’s economy by looking nostalgically to a more palatable (sanitized) version of Koza and its history—a romantic ideal of its former self. In the process, they draw on American, Japanese, and their own distinct postwar history to promote an image of mid-island Okinawan identity.

Christopher Nelson, University of Chicago

The full moon rises above the red-tiled rooftops of the walled compound in central Okinawa. A solitary figure stands in the center of the courtyard; around him, dozens of men and women listen from the shadowed rooms and verandas of the farmhouse. With a dynamic synthesis of Okinawan humor, Japanese manzai and rakugo, improvisational comedy and dramatic monologue, Fujiki Hayato weaves complex performances about everyday life in modern Okinawa. This paper examines Okinawan comedic performance and its relationship to a critical understanding of contemporary social conditions. It focuses on the work of the artist Fujiki Hayato and his critique of Okinawa’s history of colonialism and occupation, the experience and memory of war, and the ambivalence of modernization and Okinawan cultural identity. Against the problems of cultural commodification and nativist claims of authenticity, of economic and political marginalization, Fujiki deploys traditional forms such as the moai (cooperative credit associations) in innovative and complex ways. Fujiki’s performances are more than mere narratives of social criticism. They represent a move toward dialogic practices that are productive of complex forms of political subjectivity. For Fujiki, the concept of "Art" is inexorably linked to that of answerability. As a performer, essayist, teacher and social critic, Fujiki Hayato’s work represents a powerful and transformative action against the colonization and commodification of the everyday in modern Okinawa.

Masamichi S. Inoue, University of Kentucky

In 1996, the U.S. and Japanese governments agreed on returning Futenma Air Station to Okinawa. However, this return was conditional on the construction of a sea-based facility east of Camp Schwab, stationed in the Henoko district of Nago City since 1957.

This paper ethnographically and historically examines local Henoko identity, and explores how it entered the making and unmaking of an island-wide social upheaval concerning the planned base. Henoko had asserted its social formations (e.g., festivals, kinship, local administration) in prolonged interactions with Camp Schwab, constituting its Okinawan-ness and self-image distinct from mainland Japan. In the process, however, residents had also differentiated themselves from the rest of Okinawa by proclaiming mutually beneficial interdependence between the base and the community (e.g., entertainment industry in the past; revenue of the land at present). The communal identity had thus long been constituted in a twofold feeling that "we are Okinawan, but a different kind of Okinawan."