UC Santa Barbara

How does the U.S. military make use of the foreign cultures into which it has inserted itself? Based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork on and around U.S. military facilities in Japan (host to over 100,000 American military personnel and family members), this dissertation argues that military policy generates narratives for American troops’ self-identification and aspiration vis-à-vis the local culture that are ultimately detrimental to the U.S.-Japan Alliance. Specifically, it identifies four such narratives and their consequences: First, American troops are told they are ambassadors in a bid to get them to spend more time outside of the bases. I conclude that this is a means of shifting responsibility for troops’ mental well-being and morale onto the Japanese communities surrounding the bases and that it makes some Japanese feel they are being forced into complicity with American militarism. Second, military narratives divide troops into “good neighbors” and “bad apples” in a move that both isolates the “bad apples” from cultural and historical patterns of behavior (and thus absolves the military of responsibility for those patterns) and rewards personnel for good intentions and the appearance of good deeds regardless of the often-problematic consequences of their altruistic efforts. Third, American troops adopt the mantle of samurai as a means of replacing the aspirational fantasy at domestic bases of being “super-citizens” (Lutz 2001, 236), naturalizing U.S. military deployment in Japan in a way that encourages the widespread dismissal of all forms of Japanese masculinity. Finally, Okinawans—residents of the prefecture most impacted by the military—are painted as adversaries to the U.S. military’s goals and operations, sorting them into binaries of good/pro-base/Japanese and bad/anti-base/Okinawans that deny the complexities of their relationships with troops, bases, the United States, and Japan. This is the first ethnographic study of how forward-deployed military bases navigate and utilize local culture and contributes to scholarship on the constitutive interplay between interpersonal and international relations, highlighting how imperial and Orientalist legacies inform the everyday functions and expressions of alliance.