UCLA

Since WWII Okinawa Island has remained one of the densest global outposts of US militarism. Over seventy-percent of all US military land throughout Japan is concentrated in Okinawa Prefecture – the formerly independent Ryukyu Kingdom – on less than one-percent of the country’s land base. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of Indigenous repossession that occurs when militarized land is reclaimed by those from whom it was dispossessed. Specifically, I ask: What has been the effect of military base return on Okinawans’ relationships with land and strategies of resistance under the US and Japanese governments’ post-1995 regime of base realignment? Using a mixed-methods embedded case study methodology and eighteen months of fieldwork including discourse analysis, interviews and social movement participation I present three substantive sections. My historical entry-point is an archival study of militarist dispossession in the first decade of US military occupation following the Battle of Okinawa. Then, I offer two contemporary embedded cases. The first of these examines the return of the US Army’s Awase Meadows Golf Club in Kitanakagusuku Village and its subsequent redevelopment into what at the time was Okinawa’s largest Western-styled shopping mall. The second case study examines the sit-in against the construction of a new “replacement facility” in the northern village of Henoko, which was made a necessary condition for the yet unrealized return of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan City under the US-Japan Special Action Committee on Okinawa’s Final Report. I argue that the return of military land produces no necessary reversal of the territorial alienation and uneven exposure to violence that Okinawans have experienced over seventy-eight years of military occupation. Instead, novel forms of occupation and continuities of colonial violence emerge even in periods of purported demilitarization. Okinawans participate flexibly in this regime of return, negotiating mainstream planning processes and participating in protest to realize myriad benefits from economic empowerment to cultural reconstruction in the wake of Japanese and American colonialisms. Findings from this dissertation emphasize the necessity of understanding the procedural dynamics of military land reform in conjunction with the larger political frame of reterritorialization in which resurgent Indigenous peoples are engaged.