R&R at the Intersection of US and Japanese Dual Empire: Okinawan Women and

Decolonizing Militarized Heterosexuality

Author(s): Ayano Ginoza
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3, Special Issue: Tours of Duty and Tours of
Leisure (September 2016), pp. 583-591
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26360916
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 Okinawan Women and Decolonizing Militarized Heterosexuality I 583

R&R at the Intersection of US and

Japanese Dual Empire: Okinawan
Women and Decolonizing Militarized
Heterosexuality
Ayano Ginoza

by a large billboard of a young Asian woman. She is, by any norma

At the center of Okinawa
tive standard, Island,
"exotic." She isin Koza,
local, yetvisitors and
has blond locals are
undulating greeted
hair and
blue eyes that gaze at the viewer. The bingata kimono, which was traditionally
designed for Ryukyu Kingdom royalty, is sliding off the woman's shoulders,
exposing her cleavage, and her crossed legs are slightly revealed at the hem. She
is holding a guitar representing the significant influence of rock music from the
US military bases in this town. In the background, there is a sunset reminiscent
of the Japanese national flag, with bingata design decorations scattered over
the sun. The pink English-language lettering on the billboard says "Welcome
to Koza." The Japanese phrase right beneath it reads "Ban lifted in Koza."
Koza was a name given to the city by the US military in 1956 during the
occupation of the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands
(USCAR).1 Known as a red-light district with A-sign bars during the oc
cupation, Koza continues to exist as a US military rest and recreation zone
(R&R)—34 percent of the city is still occupied by the base.2 In many ways, the
billboard discursively performs the multiple ways in which the dual empires
of the United States and Japan constitute a raced, gendered, and sexualized
narrative of postcolonial Okinawans' lives and social landscapes. In this essay,
I unpack the imperial entanglement of dual empires and discuss how tourism
and militarism together create conditions for heterosexual relations between
local women and US GIs, particularly as parts of Okinawa are staged as US
military rest and recreation zones.
The history of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Kingdom has been marked by
Japanese invasion and colonization since 1609, and then by a US military
government at the end of World War II, followed by USCAR from 1950 to
1972. During the USCAR occupation of Okinawa, Japan regained its sover

2016 The American Studies Association

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584 I American Quarterly

eignty from the United States. Japan was a modern nation-state, but it also
maintained a subordinate position in relationship to the United States, even
as the Japanese economy reasserted its hegemony in East Asia.3 Since then,
Okinawa has arguably existed as an internal colony of Japan and a military
colony of the United States.
Today, even though Okinawa constitutes only 0.6 percent of Japan's total
landmass, it is burdened with 73.8 percent of the US military bases in Japan
under the US-Japan Security Treaty. Recently, President Barack Obama and
former secretary of state Hillary Clinton promoted the further American
militarization of Okinawa and the wider Asia-Pacific region. Continuously,
the Okinawan peoples right to self-determination has been denied by both
nation-states.4 For instance, in 2014, 80 percent of Okinawans voiced their
opposition to the construction of a US base in the northern part of the island,
Henoko-Oura Bay, and formed the All Okinawa Council (AOC), or Kenpak
usho shomagurumi kaigi. As a result, Okinawans elected the current Okinawan
governor Takeshi Onaga in June 2014, and the AOC supports around-the-clock
sit-in protests at Oura Bay. On October 13, 2015, Governor Onaga revoked
the land reclamation permit for the construction of the US military base that
had been granted by his predecessor, Hirokazu Nakaima. Many Okinawans
were relieved and hopeful that their right to self-determination and democracy
would be honored. However, the Japanese Defense Ministry quickly filed an
"appeal" against Onagas revocation.
The AOC sent twenty-six delegates to Washington, DC, to discuss Oki
nawa's democratic will with US congressional representatives in November
2015.1 accompanied the delegation as a staff member. This meeting continues
a history of Okinawan efforts against both empires, fighting concurrently for
demilitarization, decolonization, democracy, sovereignty, and the right to
self-determination. In the 1940s many Okinawans hoped the US presence
in the archipelago would decolonize Okinawa from Japan. The twenty-seven
years of USCAR occupation, however, proved similar to Japanese imperialism
in many ways. In the 1970s some Okinawans had advocated for a reversion
to Japanese sovereignty in hopes of demilitarizing the islands. Yet, today, the
tie between the two empires could not be more intimate. In fact, at a "White
House banquet in April 2015, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used a
Diana Ross hit song to describe the foundation of his country's foreign policy.
Declaring that "Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough to
keep me from you," Abe asserted, "The relationship of Japan and the United
States is just like this."5

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 Okinawan Women and Decolonizing Militarized Heterosexualily I 585

The collusion of the two empires represented by the Japanese prime minister
through a popular love song stands in stark contrast to the sit-in protest site
at Henoko-Oura Bay. The formation and praxis of dual empire hide behind
sites of rest and recreation where political awareness is numbed. At the same
time, as Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho argue, a place like Koza is
also "simultaneously commodified and exploited for its visible militarist and
tourist value yet ultimately made invisible in its human diversity and complex
ity."6 As the products of two imperial histories, tourism and US military bases
in Okinawa have insinuated themselves into the landscape and every aspect of
the social life of the island.

While as a native Okinawan I acknowledge the complexity and diversity of

social relations in Okinawa, in the rest of this essay I focus on the particular
dynamic between the native and US military servicemen, especially the sexual
economy of power and desire that underpins both tourism and militarism on
the island. My focus on native Okinawan women and US military personnel
is fueled by a cry for an explicit acknowledgment of the histories of rape and
sexual violence by US servicemen, especially marines, in Okinawa. Histori
cally, the Japanese government and the US military have controlled Okinawan
women's reproduction, sexuality, and images in order to secure their nation
states.7 Anyone like me, who was born and raised at the heart of these two
empires, has been publicly and personally affected by the militarized rapes and
sexual assaults comitted by Okinawan US servicemen stationed in Okinawa.
My essay follows Ikue Kina, a native feminist scholar, who has called for a
rethinking of Okinawa's colonial encounters with America. Kina draws atten
tion to Okinawan women's lived experiences and situated knowledges in order
to resist their marginalization in the tripartite relationship that binds Okinawa
to both the United States and Japan.8
It was because I was concerned about the security of Okinawan women
and children that I became a member of Okinawa's first feminist organization.
Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence (OWAAMV) was established
in response to the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three US servicemen in
1995. More recendy, with the cochair of the OWAAMV, I helped coordinate
the AOC delegations visit to the United States in November 2015. My engage
ments in the OWAAMV and the AOC emerge from a sense of responsibility
to raise Okinawans' awareness of and opposition to the "everyday" process of
sexualization in the rest and recreation sites that US soldiers occupy as a path
of imperialist militarism.
These dynamics resonate with Teresia K. Teaiwa's notion of "militourism,"
which describes how a "collaboration between militarism and tourism affects

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586 I American Quarterly

the complex process of displacement and social mobility for Islanders, affecting
the physical, mental, and emotional health of island bodies."91 have argued
elsewhere that sexual politics on the island are at the heart of the dual empire
and constitute an entangled site of both longing and resistance.10 R&R sites
and sights are also salient to Okinawans and socially silenced by the structure
of the dual empires. Highlighting R&R spaces renders this type of intricate
everyday process of US militourism visible, as well as illuminates intersecting
discourses of US and Japanese Empires.
As a child, I received contradictory messages about the US military stationed
in Okinawa—one from the images of militarized violence and assaults against
local women and children in the local newspapers, and the other through
national and international security discourses, which portrayed the United
States as the defender of our peace and security, a champion of democracy
and paragon of modernism. While we read occasional reports of robberies,
accidents, and rapes by the military, what dominated our thoughts and what
had already become an indispensable part of our lives was the ideology of the
American dream—freedom through the consumption of the "modern" West
as represented by American food, clothes, well-kept lawns, and Hollywood
movies. In other words, the American bases that were scattered throughout the
island's hilltops and sacred mountains, scarring the landscape of contemporary
Okinawa, were part of the "modern" West that we looked up to.
The barbed wire fences around the military bases delineate the space between
"us" and "other," except that the other was us, the non-Western, Okinawans.
The soldiers and base personnel have unfettered mobility and access to the
whole island. But Okinawans can only view the spacious properties, mani
cured lawns, and housing structures on American bases through the barbed
wire fences; we see, but cannot touch, further fueling our imagination and
desire for the land of the free and all its promises. Even during the USCAR
occupation, an Okinawan woman recalled being in her twenties and seeing
"military housing units behind the barbed wire fences and always imagined
it was [a] different world there, a dream world of sorts. It was."11 She was not
the only one who thought of America as a dreamworld. Having access to the
bases during the USCAR occupation meant having the means to transform
experiences of poverty and gender subordination. For Okinawan women whose
circumstances enabled them to access the bases, such spaces of America became
a realm of opportunity, liberation, and romantic self-expression.12
An entertainment facility named the American Village was built in 1992 in
Chatan Town adjacent to and to the west of the US military bases of Camp
Foster, Camp Kuwae, Kadena Air Base, and Futenma Air Base. In 2006 Koza

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 Okinawan Women and Decolonizing Militarized Heterosexuality I 587

Music Town was built on the other side or east of the US military bases. At
night and on weekends, both places serve as rest and recreation sites for military
servicemen and local people alike to enjoy the feeling of being "in America," in
a landscape carefully curated with English names, restaurants, a movie theater,
flea market, and fair rides. In such rest and recreation spaces, militarization is
a deliberately cultivated process.13
A popular tourist website describes the process this way: "The presence of the

U.S. Military has had a great influence on Okinawa's culture. In the Mihama
area of Chatan, you'll see firsthand how this small tropical island developed a
portion of its land into an American style village."14 Another website states that
the "theme of Americana provides a nostalgic pleasure for residents of the bases
as well as an interesting diversion for the locals."15 Tourist narratives tactically
blur the divide between tourism and militarism, incorporating the former
into the militarization process. Thus, tourism and militarism together create
a spectacle that is generated by the striking images of America that manifest
as the prevailing site and sights of the unspoken colonial reality. Militourism
further ensures the condition of the dual empire. The construction and rep
resentation of Okinawa in touristic advertising reproduce hegemonic social
relations that are embedded in militarized postcolonial zones. Such postcolonial
zones create tensions and contradictions for racialized heterosexual attractions
between Okinawan women and male GIs.

Militarized tourist spaces embrace a strategic function beyond simple tour

ism or "rest and recreation" by glorifying the US contribution to "developing"
Okinawa and promoting the idea that prior to US occupation Okinawa was
premodern. Militourist zones emerge as spaces of "nostalgic pleasure" for US
soldiers, reassuring them of both the glory of Western power and American
masculinity.16 Such a militarized tourist discourse displaces local women's sense
of security onto American bases and American men. The militourist zones reify
the liberal ideology of independence, freedom, and individualism, and lead
some Okinawan women to seek refuge in them from both Okinawan and Japa
nese patriarchies. Through their interactions with the US military, Okinawan
women have access to a performative discourse of desire that transforms them
into independent actors with access to Western modernity.17 Militourist sites
in Okinawa thus transcend the geographic boundaries of "East" and "West" in
a condition that is similar to what Karen Kelsky describes as "a constantly ex
panding and contracting discursive axis around which women speak, write and
act, and a fluid basis for a dynamic narrative of internationalist becoming."18
Okinawan women who are discontent with the state of their society under
the Japanese government seek out the companionship of US soldiers; they

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588 I American Quarterly

in turn are desired by the GIs stationed there, who idealize a feminized Japan;
and the United States is romanticized by the Japanese, as Prime Minister Abe's
White House remark exemplifies. A US soldier's remark reflects a dichotomy
between the modern "West" and Japan/Okinawa in heteronormative terms:

[Okinawan women] come out to bars. What do you think they're looking for? .. I mean,
they live in Okinawa, and they still keep coming, looking for us.... So they come in, have
a good time, and the guy says, so you want to come home with me, and they say, sure,
because that sounds like fun and you know we Americans treat them a helluva lot better
than the Japanese guys do, right?"

Women who seek relationships with American men are often outcast and
pejoratively labeled amejo (girls who favor Americans), and are sometimes even
called hikokumin (traitor).20 However, many of those Okinawan women claim
that they are looking for serious love and life partners.21 The desires of local
women reveal the complex imperialist conditions they live under: US bases in
Okinawa serve as outposts of the dual empire; soldiers sent to those areas on
tours of duty find themselves in a "local paradise" filled with supposedly exploit
able feminized natives. For the GIs, the R&R serves as a temporary detour into
sexualized encounters. Emergent heterosexual relations then crystallize into a
militarized structure of heteronormative hypermasculinity.
Thus, the collaboration of militarism and tourism facilitates contested and
discursive heterosexual attractions between local women and male GIs reflect

ing a sociopolitical locus of racial, sexual, and national intimacies between the
United States and Japan, as well as a heterosexual hegemony of incorporating
native people into the dual empires. Sexual desire is constructed through an
ideological apparatus; therefore sexuality and sexual freedom are in fact intimate
and persuasive manifestations of social control.22
While local women attain "freedom" from the Japanese patriarchal system
in Americanized entertainment places, they are also exploited. Showcasing
modernism, liberation, and desire for better social, racial, gender, and sexual
relations, the militarized tourist space represents America as physically acces
sible and attainable. In the staged American space, local people and nature
become "othered" again as exotic and native, and in turn the United States of
America reemerges as the hegemonic modern and global power. The tactically
and carefully constructed tourist space supports desiring agency for decoloniz
ing Okinawan women from indigenous patriarchy and for attaining privileged
American citizenship, via the promise of marriage to a GI. Yet, what we are also
colonized by is an American "structure of feeling," as Raymond Williams might
describe it.23 The long-term American occupation of the island has colonized

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 Okinawan Women and Decolonizing Militarized Heterosexuality I 589

and governed our emotional landscape. Such conditioning leads some native
women to opt for an American dream that has apparent material substance
but may not take care of them in the long run.
The collaboration of militarism and tourism in a colonial emotional land

scape thus reinforces extreme positions for Okinawan natives in relation to

the perceived promises (or threats) of heterosexual relations with US GIs. The
friction that may be caused as a result of Okinawan women and US GIs seek
ing intimate sexual relationships extends to both public and private spheres.
In public, the racial and sexual visibility of some Okinawan women's desire
for intimacy with a GI partner may expose her to silent questioning of her
national belonging and loyalty.24 Given the intense opposition of the major
ity of Okinawans to the construction of a new state-of-the-art US military
base at Henoko-Oura, one can assume that most of the women's families and
friends would be a part of the protests. For Okinawan women married to US
servicemen, in the intimate sphere of their homes, their positions on the US
base and the sociopolitical realities on the island can become matters for heated
discussion and conflict. Because of the primary relationship and commitment
of love to their partners, many Okinawan girlfriends and wives may feel mar
ginalized by Okinawan society, as amejo, and consequently feel obliged to play
the role of faithful military wives. Okinawan women who are in relationships
with GIs are imagined and politicized as hypersexual in the public discourse,
and their supposedly hypersexualized bodies extensively expose the tactics,
contradictions, and anxieties of living under dual empires.
Materialized in the overlapping spheres of militarism and tourism, Okinawan
women's hypersexualized bodies are where the contradictions of empire are
intimately felt and dealt with.25 This is also where women strive to fulfill their

desires for higher social status, crossing racial and national lines by dating and
marrying US soldiers. In this sense, intersections of tourism and militarism are
where tolerance or "liberal" multiracialism and heterosexuality are accepted
and encouraged. Rest and recreation sites further pronounce an American
romanticization of itself as a racially tolerant nation through the discourse
of interracial, although unequal, sexual relationships between American men
and Asian women.26 In the militourist zone, the expression of a militarized
and colonized female heterosexuality is seen by some as a form of decoloniza
tion for native women who have been subjected to Japanese imperialism and
patriarchy. I argue that tourist narratives affect racialized conditions in which
Okinawan natives are gendered as feminine desiring subjects of "America," the
masculine liberator. Paying attention to such intimacies, I have shown how the

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590 I American Quarterly

collaboration of militarism and tourism exposes a triangulated postcolonial

condition between the United States, Japan, and Okinawa.
The welcome billboard to the rest and recreation site in Koza described at

the beginning of this essay unwittingly tells that intimate sexualized story of
dual empire. In turn, the woman depicted is both a symbolic representation
and a material reality of the militourist culture of R&R. But is it possible to
articulate indigenous feminist decolonizing sexualities that stay connected to
indigenous community critically while resisting both US and Japanese Empire?
I hope the contradictions and complexities of militarized, colonized, raced,
and sexual landscapes discussed in this essay can be used to enhance strategies
and continue conversations for transnational demilitarization.

Notes

I would like to thank the special issue editors, Vernadette Gonzalez, Jana K. Lipman, and Teresia K.
Teaiwa, for their editorial suggestions and important feedback. Especially, Teresia has offered me invalu
able editorial guidance to refine my essay. I also would like to thank Gwyn Kirk, Crystal Mun-Hye
Baik, Keith L. Camacho, and Setsu Shigematsu for their encouragement and comments on an earlier
version of this essay. I am grateful for the International Institute for Okinawan Studies Postdoctoral
Fellowship at the University of the Ryukyus for providing me with crucial time and resources to
conduct fieldwork.

1. The place known as "Koza" used to be Goeku Village until World War II, and the name did not exist
until the US military occupation of Okinawa. Koza was renamed Okinawa City in 1975. Nevertheless,
the city is still called and remembered as Koza by many Okinawans.
2. "A-sign" was an approval sign given to restaurants and brothels that passed health and sanitation in
spections during the USCAR occupation of Okinawa between 1950 and 1972. "A" stands for Army
approved.
3. See John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II ( New York: W. W. Norton,
1999).
4. Norihiko Kato, "The Battle of the Okinawans," New York Times, May 14, 2014, www.nytimes.
com/2014/05/15/opinion/kato-the-battle-of-the-okinawans.html?_r=0.
5. The White House, "Toast Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe at State Dinner,"
April 29, 2015, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/04/29/toast-remarks-president-obama
and-prime-minister-abe-state-dinner.
6. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, "Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonial Futures,"
in Militarized Currents: Towards a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Sestsu Shigematsu
and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxx.
7. Kayo Sawada, Sengo Okinawa no seishoku wo meguru poritikusu: Beigun töchika no shusseiyoku tankan
to onnatachi no köshö (Fertility Transitions under US Rule and Women's Negotiation) (Tokyo: Otsuki
shöten, 2014).
8. Ikue Kina, "Subaltern Knowledge and Transnational American Studies: Postwar Japan and Okinawa
under US Rule," American Quarterly 68.2 (2016): 443—455. Kina uses the "tripartite relationship" to
describe the situation in which local Okinawans' outcry for demilitarization has been continuously
disregarded by the Japan and the US Empires.
9. Teresia K. Teaiwa, "Reading Gauguin's Noa Noa with Epeli Hau'ofa's Kisses in the Nederends: Mili
tourism, Feminism, and the 'Polynesian' Body," in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity

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All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Okinawan Women and Decolonizing Militarized Heterosexuality I 591

in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Litdefield,
2000), 252.
10. AyanoGinoza, "The American Village in Okinawa: Redefining Security in a 'Militourist' Landscape,"
Journal of Social Science 60 COE Special Edition (International Christian University) (2007): 135-55;
"Space of 'Militourism': Intimacies of U.S. and Japanese Empires and Indigenous Sovereignty in
Oldnawa," International Journal of Okinawan Studies 3.1 (2012).
11. Ruth Ann Keyso, Women of Okinawa: Nine Voicesfrom a Garrison Island (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000), 25.
12. Karen Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2001).
13. See Cynthia H. Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004).
14. Bankoku Shinryo Kan: After Convention, 2003, www.shinryokan.com/e/after/middle.html#05 (inac
tive).

15. "Mihama American Village," Japan-guide.com, www.japan-guide.com/e/e7127.html.

16. Ibid.
17. See Keysos chapter "Contemporary Okinawan Women"; and Kelsky, Women on the Verge.
18. Kelsky, "Introduction," in Women on the Verge.
19. T. Lartimer, "The Sashimi Report: Ask a Stupid Question ...," Time, July 2, 2001, www.time.com/
time/worldarticle/0,8599,166095, OO.html.
20. Kaori Miyanishi, A Study of Okinawan Military Wives (Kyoto: University of Kyoto Press, 2012). See
also Keyso, "Contemporary Okinawan Women," 100. Although originally the word was a neologism
of ame for American and jo for an Okinawan word jogu meaning "favors," nowadays, the word amejo
more commonly refers to women who favor American (men) because of jo being misunderstood as a
homonym, jo meaning "women."
21. Ibid.
22. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Har
mondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979). See also Stephan Legg, Prostitution and the End of Empire: Scale,
Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
23. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
24. Chris Ames, "Crossfire Couples: Marginality and Agency among Okinawan Women in Relationship
with U.S. Military Men," in Over There: Living with the US Military Empire from World War II, ed.
Seugsook Moon and Maria Hohn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 176-202.
25. Ann L. Stoler, "Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen," in Haunted by
Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001), 1-22.
26. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003).

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