Organizer and Chair: Patricia Maclachlan, University of Texas, Austin

Rebecca Forgash, University of Colorado

This paper explores some of the social and cultural conflicts faced by young Okinawan women who marry U.S. military men. Analysis of the International Spouses Group on Okinawa’s U.S. Camp Foster reveals a concerted effort on the part of the U.S. military to interpellate young Okinawan military brides as "proper" American military spouses with an approved set of family values and a particular gendered role in the global U.S. military community. Military-institutional discourses on marriage, the family, and community, however, are often interpreted in unintended ways by the women who belong to the Camp Foster group. In particular, I investigate the ways in which young Okinawan military brides appropriate and reframe such discourses in statements about their own class identity vis-à-vis other Japanese women. Examined against the backdrop of popular mainland Japan discourses celebrating romance and sexual encounters with foreign men (Cornyetz 1996; Kelsky 2001; Russell 1998), Okinawan military spouses’ decidedly conservative statements about marriage and family reflect the larger social and political project of constructing a distinctive Okinawan identity vis-à-vis the rest of Japan. Indeed, the statements of young Okinawan military brides tend to display a community-wide posture of resistance against mainland discourses that position Okinawans as second-class citizens.

By foregrounding the activities and statements of young Okinawan military brides, this presentation thus addresses questions concerning not only the impact of the U.S. military presence on Okinawan society, but also the ideologies of gender and sexuality that underlie contemporary Okinawan perceptions of belonging within the Japanese nation-state.

Organizer: Natsuyo Ishibashi, Indiana University

This paper examines the effects of public opinion and elections on Japan’s policy toward the U.S. invasion of Iraq from September 2001 to December 2004. The study will make two contributions, one to the field of Japanese politics, the other to theories of international relations.

Although scholars of Japanese politics have often argued that both public opinion and elections have little impact on Japan’s foreign policy, no one has yet explained why that might be the case. My research explores how public attitudes on the Iraq issue influenced the outcomes of the November 2003 lower-house election and the July 2004 upper-house election. In the process, it explains why negative public opinion on Iraq failed to deter the government from supporting the U.S. intervention by dispatching the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq. I demonstrate that the structure and norms of domestic institutions—bureaucracies, political parties, media, and big business—ultimately outweighed the influence of public opinion on Japanese decision-making.

The findings of my study take a middle ground in the debate between so-called realists and liberals in research on foreign policy. Contrary to the liberal position, public opinion does not always constrain policymakers, even in democratic countries where elections are held regularly. But contrary to the realists’ dismissal of public opinion altogether, political leaders in democracies are not completely free to pursue foreign policy aims without taking it into account.

Bridget Love, University of Michigan

Rural Japan has recently witnessed a proliferation of female farm groups, organized to study, and transform local food cultures into commodity food products. Images of white-aproned farm mothers and grandmothers staffing farmers’ markets, and glossing food product PR are a staple of rural revitalization efforts in Japan. With its gendered imagery, this publicity blitz coincides with a perceived demographic crisis within rural villages and farm families. Its causes are population aging and the outmigration of youth to Japan’s cities, both long term trends with their own gendered dimensions. Namely, contemporary rural Japan finds itself peopled by an abundance of elderly widows, and plagued by a dearth of marriagable women. My paper probes the intersection of these optimistic representations and troubling demographic trends. I examine local farm enterprises organized to produce and market local heritage foods by mobilizing the labor and image of farm mothers and grandmothers, as gatekeepers of local food culture, in one municipality in northeastern Japan. Exploring these enterprises as representative of larger agricultural practices and consumer trends in Japan, I also situate them within a local social context in which women are a marked demographic category of concern. My paper, thus, examines a constellation of issues that speak to urban-rural relations, national (and nationalistic) obsessions with domestic food safety, and changing demographics of the family in Japan.

Marvin Dale Sterling, Indiana University

For nearly 20 years, Japan has been the site of an intense and sustained underground engagement with Jamaican popular culture. This interest achieved "boom"-like status in the early 1990s around the popularity of roots reggae music (a form of protest music born among the Jamaican underclass during the late 1960s), and is re-emerging today in the form of a vibrant dancehall subculture largely centered in the city of Yokohama (dancehall is the latest incarnation of roots reggae). A smaller number of individuals have come to identify not only with roots reggae but also Rastafari. This anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist socioreligious movement which significantly informed the development of roots reggae music posits Ethiopia’s late emperor Haile Selassie as the returned Messiah and Afro-Jamaicans as the Chosen People. Among the ways in which some Japanese individuals have come to identify with Rastafari are through rejection of full-time work for the part-time pursuit of reggae musical careers, the wearing of dreadlocks, the smoking of marijuana, and sociopolitical critique of the West (and by extension modern Japan). The remove of Rasta-identified Japanese from the mainstream that these practices imply can be especially profound given Rasta’s status as an Afro-Jamaican cultural form to which Japanese would appear to have little inherent claim. With a focus on race and nation, this paper identifies several discursive strategies through which this claim has been made.

Christopher S. Thompson, Ohio University

The study of rural folk performance has been a mainstay of Japanese ethnology since the early 20th century. Yet, relatively little is known about the politics of folk performance preservation from a local point of view. Studies of folk theatre have focused on the expression of local beliefs and rituals in historical practice, and explored the symbolic significance of individual folk performances themselves. However, age-old folk performances also reflect many contradictions between local fears of losing highly treasured cultural values, customs, and traditions and the pressure to conform to changes imposed by national political circumstances beyond their control. This paper explores the cognitive and emotive landscape underlying the shamanic dancing (Kagura) tradition among its practitioners at the base of Mt. Hayachine in Iwate prefecture, eager to affirm their history locally, but wanting to assert a modern regional and national identity relevant to the circumstances of the present as well. It examines the repositioning of Kagura by its local practitioners as a valuable modern asset within the culture of Northeastern Japan as a response to feelings of anomie resulting from a series of forced municipal consolidations in the area threatening the sanctity and originality of their grassroots folk tradition. Understanding the regional dynamics of state societies is one of the most pressing issues for anthropology today. By resituating their Kagura tradition to fit their post consolidation circumstances, residents of the Hayachine basin demonstrate how they can mediate the present with the past as they prepare for the future to counter the alienating forces of Japan’s contemporary social milieu.