Angst LoudmouthFeministsUnchaste 2009

Loudmouth Feminists and Unchaste Prostitutes: "Bad Girls" Misbehaving in Postwar
Okinawa
Author(s): Linda Isako Angst
Source: U.S.-Japan Women's Journal , 2009, No. 36 (2009), pp. 117-141
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press on behalf of International Institute of Gender
and Media
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Loudmouth Feminists and Unchaste Prostitutes:
"Bad Girls" Misbehaving in Postwar Okinawa
Linda Isako Angst
Daughters, Chaste and Otherwise

The problem of U.S. bases in Okinawa and the abusive behavior of their occupants
toward the local population, in particular its women, is also found in other parts of East
Asia that have long been occupied by the U.S. military, most notably South Korea. The
rape of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Okinawa in February 2008, and her decision to drop
charges in the face of widespread publicity and the unlikelihood of satisfactory redress,
is an example of the tragedy that can strike women and girls in areas occupied by foreign
military troops.1 In this article I draw on current feminist theory on U.S. militarization
in East Asia to focus on two groups of women- prostitutes and feminist activists- who
together comprise the so-called bad girls of Okinawa. As will be seen, both groups owe
their existence to the military bases that have covered 20 percent of this small island
prefecture since the end of World War II.
Originally the independent Kingdom of the Ryukyus, Okinawa was annexed in
1879 by the Japanese state. The smallest and newest of Japan's prefectures, it was
reincorporated into Japan in 1972, after reversion from U.S. military jurisdiction. Though
it represents less than 1 percent of the land area of Japan, it houses 75 percent of the U.S.
Linda Isako Angst is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College, Portland,
Oregon. Her areas of interest encompass Okinawan women's narratives, war memory, military
occupation and everyday forms of violence; Japanese peace museums; and longevity and wellness
tourism in Okinawa. She is the author of "The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl: The 1995 Rape Case,
Discourses of Power, and Women's Lives in Okinawa," Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 2 (June
2001) and In a Dark Time: Memory, Community, and Gendered Nationalism in Postwar Okinawa
(forthcoming from Harvard University Press).
© 2009 by Jösai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, Jõsai University

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118 U.S.-Japan Women's Journal No. 36, 2009
troops that the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (AMPO) mandates. Okinawa has remained
a primary launching pad for deployments to the various conflicts in which the U.S. has
been engaged since 1945, including the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars and the
current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is in this context that I discuss the categories
of Okinawan feminists and prostitutes.
I identify these women as occupying what may be thought of as opposite ends of
a perceived socio-economic-moral continuum. In this scenario, feminists represent what
can be interpreted as women's agency par excellence, through their "in-your-face" tactics
of proactive social reform (especially in terms of public support for a rape crisis center
and protections for sex workers) and political protest (against the presence of U.S. bases
and, in 1 995, in support of an earlier schoolgirl who was gang raped by U.S. servicemen).
Prostitutes, in contrast, are symbols of social degradation, although they, too, can be
understood to occupy a position of agency, inasmuch as their profession can be (though
not always is) a source of independent livelihood. Ultimately, however, the selling and
buying of their bodies positions these women as objects and renders them vulnerable to
being victimized. The degree of freedom they have in choosing this particular livelihood
is exactly countered by the fact that they can do so only at the expense of their personal
integrity. Yet rather than being viewed sympathetically, as victims of a set of socio-political-
economic circumstances in which they were forced to sell their bodies to support their
families in impoverished early postwar Okinawa, prostitutes are stigmatized as occupying
the lowest rung on the social ladder.
How do we situate the narratives of women who have made the ultimate sacrifice
for family within the larger story of Okinawan identity politics? What is that story,
and how can we understand the role of feminist activists in the postwar economy in
light of this?
Despite the fact that their sacrifices are very real, prostitutes in Okinawa are
excluded from the island's emblematic category of the sacrificed daughter- the story
that most poignantly, persuasively, and prominently symbolizes Okinawa. This is the
story of Himeyuri ("Princess Lily"), the name given collectively to prewar Okinawa's
educated daughters who were students at the First Prefectural Women's Higher School.
They were called on to serve the Japanese state as wartime nurses during the bloody and
prolonged Battle of Okinawa (April-June 1945), where they died in large numbers.2 As
the representatives par excellence of the sacrificed daughter of the nationalist state, the
Himeyuri are revered symbols of Okinawan wartime sacrifice.

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Linda Isako Angst 119
In stark contrast, the sacrifices made by women selling their bodies to support their
families in the postwar period are regarded as shameful. Who could be more deserving of
inclusion in the roster of sacrificed daughters than girls who had to become prostitutes to
help feed their parents and siblings during the hard years of the U.S. occupation of Okinawa
( 1 945-72)? Yet they remain socially stigmatized for work they were forced to undertake.
While the Himeyuri are romanticized as having made the tragic ultimate sacrifice of their
young lives, there is no similar redemptive narrative for girls and women of the peasant
classes who sacrificed their respectability for the sake of the family and, ultimately, for
the sake of the Okinawan people. It is because of the work these women undertook in
the camp-town economies around U.S. bases- in Okinawa and elsewhere- that their
families were eventually able to pull themselves out of poverty and begin to reclaim
decent lives.
How do we assess the image of chaste Okinawan women, who ostensibly require
the protection of the masculinist state, alongside the image of prostitutes, who are not only
denied such protection but are often seen as defying state authority by their very existence?
How do we situate feminists as yet another category of "bad girl," in comparison both to
the Himeyuri and to prostitutes?
Camp-Town Ladies
There are parallels in Okinawa to the popular narrative line about the Korean and Chinese
military sex slaves of Imperial Japan, euphemistically called "comfort women" (jugun
ianfu), who did not speak for decades about their wartime experiences because, we are
told, of the stigma. For the vast majority, it was coerced labor, not work they knowingly
entered into. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi3 remind us, however, of the political-
economic conditions that also contributed to the women's long silence: in the post-Korean
War era of nation-building, it would have been impolitic for the South Korean military
government to jeopardize its relationship either with Japan, its former colonizer which
had enslaved these women and with which it needed to "normalize" relations, or with the
U.S., its neo-colonial occupier, which was there to help ensure democratic nation-building
and prevent incursions from communist North Korea and China.
Moreover, from the 1960s on, Japan engaged in what some Japan experts, such as
Patrick Smith and Yoshida Kensei,4 refer to as the selling-out of politics and citizen rights
in exchange for economic prosperity. The ongoing influence of the monarchy in the form
of the Showa Emperor, who was still in place as a primary Japanese cultural icon, also

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cannot be underestimated. Protected by the U.S. from prosecution as a war criminal at the
end of World War II, Hirohito's presence encouraged the burgeoning of a strong political
conservatism, in particular what is called nihonjinron - the thesis of cultural nationalism,
the essentialist argument about Japanese uniqueness. One consequence of this extension
of imperial cultural power was that until Hirohito's death in 1989, speaking out about the
comfort women's history was virtually impossible. The harsh realities of U.S. camp-town
prostitutes were also likely to get scant attention.
In the work of Hyun Sook Kim on Korea, we learn that, "whether forcibly drafted
under colonial rule or driven by financial need in the neo-colonial period dependent
economy, and despite shifting discursive constructions of the nation, these women are
variously constructed as outcastes or as a trope of suffering nation."5 The comparison with
Okinawan prostitutes working in camp towns around Kadena Air Base, Camp Hansen,
Camp Butler, and other U.S. Marine, Army, Air Force, and Navy bases in Okinawa is
unavoidable, from the Korean War era through the Vietnam era and beyond. Moreover,
after Okinawa's reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972 and the end of the Vietnam
War in 1975, the Japanese government targeted Okinawa for development as a tourist
resort. The World Ocean Exposition of 1975 was the first official showcase of the island
as a prime tourist site. With the rise of a tourist industry in Okinawa in the early 1970s,
prostitution may not have declined, but the demographics shifted: in the post-reversion
economy, women began to come in, largely from Southeast Asia and the Philippines, to
service U.S. personnel and Japanese male tourists. Many Okinawan women in the bar
and brothel trade were able to buy their way out of the profession in these boom years.6
But not all women were so lucky, and aging Okinawan women veterans of Vietnam-era
prostitution can still be found working in the poorest urban areas.7
How have outspoken feminist activists and hard-working prostitutes in camp towns
around U.S. military bases been positioned- and how do they position themselves- within
a struggling tourist economy in which Okinawans both criticize the presence of the bases
and creatively seek to absorb them as a kind of dazzling/grotesque spectacle of an eclectic,
post-reversion Okinawan ambience?
Feminism vs. Nationalism
This article attempts to "address the entwined and conflicting projects of feminism and
nationalism," as Kim and Choi seek to do in their 1998 edited volume on Korea , Dangerous
Women, and to do so by contending "with the massive sex industry around U.S. military

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camp towns scattered all over" not Korea in this case but Okinawa, where large numbers of
Okinawan women once served U.S. military personnel.8 The U.S. military base is the site
where the two quite different groups of in-your-face Okinawan women come together, so to
speak, although in reality they do not interact easily, if at all. For prostitutes, the economies
around U.S. bases are places of work and livelihood, usually a necessary evil. For Okinawan
feminists, engaged in a transnational campaign to make the world safer and more egalitarian
for women- and especially for sex workers on the margins of military bases- the project
is to rid the island of bases, as sites that epitomize the rapacity of U.S. imperialism for more
than sixty years, as manifested in direct assaults on the bodies of Okinawan women and girls.
Thus prostitutes and other women who are trapped in the marginalized sexual economy of
the military bases- and, increasingly, of the island's tourism- are the often unwitting and/or
unwilling objects of feminist campaigns.
These two unlikely groups are also linked by the fact that they are both undesirable
kinds of women within an anti-colonial nationalist discourse, a discourse that unifies
by "homogeniz[ing] the nation and normaliz[ing] women and women's chastity so that
they properly belong to the patriarchal order."9 In the patriarchal ideology of nationalist
discourse, male citizens are supposed to protect women and children from U.S. soldiers
and, perhaps lately, Japanese tourists:
Patriarchal ideology confers neither anti-colonial revolutionary agency nor autono-

mous subjectivity to women. Instead, the boundaries are drawn and the terms set by
a male elite, so that women, though always indispensable participants in a political
struggle, are relegated to the status of voiceless auxiliaries.10
It was the pressure by Okinawan feminists returning from the Fourth World Conference
on Women in Beijing in September 1995 that both brought to public attention the rape of
the schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen and sought to protect the girl's privacy by asking
for the media's restraint in seeking to uncover her identity. Women had been involved
since before the reversion era in protests against U.S. military bases, but they had played
largely supporting roles, adding necessary bodies to protests that, for example, entailed
ringing Kadena Air Base in a human chain- a feat that required thousands of participants
because the perimeter is several miles long. Yet despite the facts that a rape crisis center
was established and some other conditions were met in response to the demands of the
outspoken women activists in 1995, little more was done once attention waned after the
initial frenzied media spotlight on Okinawa's plight.

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Will male Okinawan leaders accommodate women's agendas if and when goals are
achieved for Okinawan society as a whole in the struggle for greater political autonomy
that includes the removal of military bases?
Okinawans have a pre-colonial history (until annexation in 1879) of accommodating
women in positions of religious power. In traditional Okinawan culture, a female virgin
served as religious advisor and political consort to her ruler brother. Village shamans are
women and continue to hold local respect." Yet Okinawans today, though still mindful of
women's leadership roles in religious practices and proud of their island's egalitarian tradition
of shared rule, are no less restrictive of women in contemporary politics than are mainland
Japanese. Thus traditional Okinawan culture has not been able to counter the specific forms
of patriarchy, influenced by the neo-Confucian values of its Japanese colonizers, under which
Okinawan women have had to live and work. Moreover, although Okinawan women were
raised under and influenced by American democratic educational philosophies and practices
during the occupation, as I argue elsewhere,12 they have also been subject to the racial and
gender biases of a masculinist postwar American military culture (like women in Korea under
the U.S. occupation). This is not to say that all U.S. servicemen have behaved badly, or that
all Okinawan women have experienced abuse. But it is nevertheless important to recognize
the systemic nature of patriarchy as an ideology that informs a general attitude.
As Choi and Kim rightly point out, "Feminism and nationalism are the antinomic
offspring of modernity." They go on to discuss feminism and nationalism in South Korea
in the following way:
Feminism as a project of modernity stands at odds with nationalism, which imagines

a fraternal community. On the one hand, nationalism, while emphasizing liberal
democratic notions of individual differences, has in fact reconstituted the class
hierarchy of the ancien regime. On the other hand, it is these very liberal democratic
notions that have been used to segregate gender and race in the interests of a unifying
ideology of the nation-state. . . .
Feminism in the colonies, having inherited this double legacy of discrimina-
tory gender and race politics, has either been subsumed under or subordinated to the
greater cause of national liberation, which usually imagines the liberation of men.
Women who brave these conflicting forces are at once endangered by and dangerous
to the integrity of the masculinist discourse of nationalism.13
This perception of nonconforming women can also be seen in mainland Japanese politics
and in Okinawa. In mainland Japan, for example, Tanaka Makiko, the woman who was

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minister of foreign affairs under the first Koizumi government, was chastised for being
too outspoken, even though any politician must be assertive in order to be effective in
the Japanese Diet. And Doi Takako, the longtime head of the Japan Socialist Party, was
repeatedly subjected to public scrutiny and vile verbal hazing from her male colleagues
for, among many other things, resisting the dominant ideology that says women must be
married to be respectable. (Men, too, have been targeted for being single, although Prime
Minister Koizumi was perceived as a roguishly eligible bachelor as a divorced man. This
would be unimaginable for a woman.)
In Okinawa, some of the "dangerous women" are activists who, emboldened
by being elected into the ranks of policy makers, no longer feel compelled to take
their cues from male leaders. Rather, they assert their right to make statements in the
international media about the condition of women's lives in postwar Okinawa, as
longtime Naha City council woman Takazato Suzuyo did during the 1995 rape case
(discussed in more detail below).
Here it is important to remember the proliferation of bars and brothels both around
U.S. bases and in the new business areas catering to tourists. This is the underside of
Okinawa's post-reversion economy, in which some things simply never change for poor
women. Women who worked the bar scene during the Vietnam War era are now too old to
serve as hostesses in clubs. Some now own their establishments, but most work the trade
as they can, such as on "flute alley," where on the two paydays of the month, in cities
like Koza and Kin, long lines of men can be seen waiting in the settling dusk outside of
what appear earlier in the day to be colorful garage doors. At these times women can turn
quick tricks (providing only oral sex service) in dark "rooms"- really only antechambers
or entrance areas (genkan)- in fairly rapid succession.
In contrast, younger women who enter, or find themselves in, the business of
prostitution are increasingly (though not exclusively) from outside Okinawa, pointing to
the transnational political economy of prostitution that now operates there. Clearly, these
women from outside Okinawa are vulnerable to the "dangers of a masculinist nationalism,"
in that they are victims of the Japanese mafia ( yakuza ) gangs that run the prostitution rings
that thrive in underground economies; they are also the potential victims of violence by
patrons, either U.S. military or Japanese tourist.
These women, as well as the older Okinawan women veterans of the business,
present the problem of image to a masculinist discourse of nationalism in which the
women (worthy) to be protected are (only) the women by which Okinawa would like

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to be remembered and known: namely, the aforementioned Himeyuri student nurses,

patriotic daughters who were sacrificed by the Japanese imperialist state when they were
forced to tend Japanese soldiers on the front lines of a battle the soldiers had no chance
of winning. The 1995 rape of the schoolgirl by three American servicemen resuscitated
the image of the sacrificed daughter.
By employing the language of patriarchy in bringing attention to the 1995 rape
case- which on the surface suggested their alignment with the male leaders of the anti-
base movement in Okinawa- feminists appeared to defer their own agendas, for the
time being, in order to support the larger cause of national (Okinawan) unity. Hence the
image of chaste daughters deserving of protection was revived and deployed to criticize
the Japanese state for placing Okinawan girls and women in harm's way by hosting the
servicemen responsible for that particularly vicious crime- and for the many more
perpetrated against local women since 1945.
The image of chaste women who require the protection of a masculinist state,
however, is counteracted by the image of the prostitute, who by her very existence defies
that authority. She is a representation of women who, because of their position outside
the traditional family structure, embody a dangerous and threatening nonreproductive
sexuality -despite the fact that prostitutes do have children. The children of prostitutes are
rendered invisible, precisely because they cannot be sanctioned by the state when conceived
outside of marriage. In another sense, the existence of prostitutes represents the failure
of the state (father figure) to take care of its children. We might also argue that living a
life of prostitution implies a rejection of the state and all its attendant mores and social
rules- and thus a rejection at the symbolic level of the care of the national father.
Okinawa's prefectural leaders, who have promoted a tourist- and high-tech-friendly
economy as an alternative to the island's ongoing subsidization by Tokyo,14 envision
being in the midst of and riding the waves of new global flows. Yet prostitution itself
was one of the businesses that thrived as Okinawa embarked on its new economic route
in the early 1970s.15 Moreover, as the island prefecture continues to promote itself as a
hub of the global flow of culture and goods, this flow includes the trafficking of women's
bodies: prostitution may be one of the unspoken lures to doing business in Okinawa.
Although the tourist economy has created greater prosperity for Okinawans, the flip side
is that tourism has also drawn thousands of unskilled women from poor nearby countries
to enter the sex trade there.

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Ethnographie Evidence: Women Working the Postwar Economy

When I arrived in Okinawa to carry out fieldwork about women's wartime experiences,
the example that locals always proffered when they heard about the subject of my study
was the Himeyuri. These primary symbols of Okinawan wartime victimization and
national virtue, the slain daughters of Okinawa, necessarily cannot speak. Furthermore,
their surviving classmates have made it their sacred duty to protect and nurture the
memory of their fallen comrades. I argue elsewhere that the surviving Himeyuri
are therefore curiously silent about contemporary politics.16 The museum built in
honor of the girls who were killed on the battlefield while nursing Japanese soldiers
is meant to remind viewers of the menace of war to the vast numbers of the innocent.
This generalized sentiment avoids the specificity required in critiques of the nationalist
state, whether wartime Japan or the U.S. The focus is squarely on the lost lives of
innocent civilians- female children, really.
By contrast, women who speak out critically about their experiences as citizens
(feminist activists) and/or who, through their sex work, clearly do not embody innocence
(prostitutes) have no comfortable or legitimate place in the patriarchal discourses of
nationalism. It is in this sense that both feminists and prostitutes in Okinawa occupy an
ambivalent position. Prostitutes are not only a problematic symbol of the failure of the
family (important in a nationalist agenda that sees the father as protector) but dangerous
precisely because they can exist outside the structure of the family. As a result, it is socially
acceptable to malign them as "bad" without engaging in the specificity of discourse that
is needed to understand them and their condition in human terms.
As independent thinkers, feminists, too, threaten the fabric of social institutions

that traditionally seek to rein in individual, and especially female, voices; conventionally, in
Okinawa, the family is represented by the father's name, if not voice. A fitting cultural
emblem of male/female relations on the island is the pair of shisa lions, usually ceramic
or clay, that adorns the entry to most domiciles: the he-lion bares his teeth in fierce
protectiveness of hearth and home, while the she-lion supports him in closed-mouth
silence, lion cub at her feet. Yet as outspoken critics of the 1995 rape, women activists
not only deplored the U.S. military presence in Okinawa but implicitly criticized the
failure of Okinawan males to effectively protect the family. Since men are supposed to be
the spokespersons for Okinawan political change, perhaps this is one reason women
protestors are not invited to the negotiating table. Outspoken women are a persistent
problem within a discourse of national unity. In the case of Okinawa, women must contend

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not only with the legacy of Japanese patriarchy but with existing patriarchal institutions
within Okinawan society and those imposed by the masculinist hierarchical structure of
the U.S. military as well.
Although women are represented in Okinawan myth and lore as the holders of
the purse strings,17 this was a qualified position of power. In fact, wives were expected
to do the work of the family both within the walls of the home and beyond. Many of the
women with whom I spoke complained bitterly about having to do all the work while
men "drank and took it easy."18 Once again, these are generalizations that apply in some
but not all cases. There were certainly many women with whom I spoke whose husbands
also worked hard to make ends meet. During the occupation period, even children had
to help out. Noborikawa Nobuko, an informant from Misato Village, even today grows
a huge vegetable garden and raises chickens on her urban property. Her daughter Fusae
recounted how during the 1960s and 1970s her mother would send her out to sell eggs
in the nearby foreigner neighborhoods ( gaijin juutaku ) in the northern part of the city of
Koza (now Okinawa City).19 Due to the racially segregated nature of U.S. military
culture in the Vietnam era, the foreigner neighborhoods nearest Noborikawa's home were
populated by African American servicemen, many of whom lived on the local economy
with their Okinawa wives or lovers. The urban sprawl that surrounded Kadena Air Base
in north Koza was marked by the bar and entertainment district known as "The Bush," as
well as by a low-income covered shopping street, the Silver Mall, that was frequented by
African American troops. The higher-end shopping mall at the Goya intersection, outside
of Kadena Air Base's Gate II, was for solidly middle-class Okinawan consumers and
mostly Caucasian U.S. civilians and servicemen. Both of Koza's malls were run largely
by women, some of whom were the wives of men who also held jobs on the base. Many,
however, were single Okinawan women trying to support their biracial children by
owning or working as clerks in these mall stores.
"Okinawan Women"
As a result of having U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines in their backyard for so long,
mainland Japanese have long stigmatized Okinawan women in general, and not just
women who married American servicemen. In this scenario it is assumed that, because
of Okinawa's relative economic poverty during the long occupation, island women
must have had no recourse but to fraternize with American GIs. This is, simultaneously,
a sympathetic view of Okinawan women who made personal sacrifices in order to

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feed their families. This contradictory image does not distinguish between socio-
economic classes or home regions of the women, nor does it distinguish personality
and individual preference.
Since the mid-1980s, with the appeal of American servicemen to young, relatively
financially secure mainland Japanese women, the phenomena of the Amejo (literally,
"American [-loving] woman") and kokujo (literally, "Black[-loving] woman") have come
to dominate images of Okinawa. Resort Okinawa has become stereotyped as a play land
for these women. I refer to the case of the June 2001 rape in the Mihama New Town, in
which a young mainland Japanese woman working in the bars was raped by an African
American serviceman in the parking lot outside the bar where they had just met. The
woman was labeled in some media reports as an Amejo.20 Although Okinawans may
differentiate between their own daughters and young Japanese women visiting from the
mainland, U.S. servicemen interested in using the women for sexual pleasure make no
such distinction. As part of the mentality of military occupation, all (Asian) women are
fair game, prey to the rapacious desires of foreign soldiers. In this scenario, it matters
little whether women are Okinawan, mainland Japanese, or Filipina.
In any case, women who become involved with U.S. servicemen become suspect
as "bad" women, as the media coverage of the 2001 rape revealed. They are viewed
as promiscuous and licentious because they do not choose the conventional route of
marrying local men or of "behaving" themselves by returning home at a respectable hour
and avoiding the bars frequented by soldiers. Also disturbing to traditionalists is the fact
that such women opt out of their perceived responsibility to marry before the age of 30 and
produce 1 .3 to 2 children. The model of gender relations that made Japan economically
successful is no longer salient in an age when women are better educated, able to earn
their own livings, and therefore likely to expect and desire more from life than choosing
the conventional route of being housewives.21 Although Japanese women continue
to be pressured to play domestic roles in support of wage-earning sarariiman (literally,
"salaried man") husbands, the rewards are dubious and many women choose to opt out,
sometimes by trying out new lives in places like Okinawa.
Okinawa as Dangerous Feminized Space

Okinawan women are glossed through the images of Okinawa as comprising a dangerous
feminized space. Okinawa's lack of political autonomy - through its colonial domina-
tion by Japan and postwar occupation by the U.S. military- and its peaceful past as a

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country that did not bear arms further situate it as josei bunka (feminized space/culture).
Okinawa is also stereotyped as physically beautiful, culturally "exotic," and as a warm,
welcoming, "laid back island culture" that is financially dependent, politically turbulent,
and potentially (and titillatingly) dangerous because of the presence of foreign military
bases. Provocative, alluring, and sensual, Okinawa is a tourist destination that offers an
undercurrent of mystery and danger.
While there may be similarities between the symbolic positions of feminist

activists and prostitutes in Okinawa, socio-economic class places them in fundamentally
different roles. Most women who have had to resort to prostitution for a living have not
had access to other kinds of work, often due to a lack of the family support that is crucial
to the survival of women in a society that puts the family before the individual. Many
women from rural parts of Okinawa did not complete even a basic education, let alone
have access to higher education, particularly during the occupation era (1945-72).22 In
contrast, feminist leaders in Okinawa are educated, many of them having gone to college
and graduate school.
The women who ended up in prostitution did so out of economic necessity, lacking
education and/or other means to avoid such stigmatizing and often dangerous work.
Those women with whom I spoke who ran brothels or hostess clubs also did so out of
economic need; it was not a profession about which any of them spoke with pride. One
woman I interviewed never admitted to me that she had been the proprietor of a brothel
(I learned this later from the city official who put me in touch with her); instead, she
told me she had a restaurant on Business Center Street, the bustling center of a service
economy outside Kadena Air Base catering to the various appetites of U.S. servicemen.
Her earnings allowed her to send four daughters to junior college to become skilled
workers, a nurse and a teacher among them, thereby ensuring their escape from the
unseemly life their mother had endured- and it was clear that a particular interpretation
of family history was already being imagined and disseminated along more socially
acceptable lines.23 However, another woman told me that she preferred the excitement
and financial benefits of working in the clubs during the Vietnam years over being a
nurse's assistant in a dingy hospital- boring work that paid little, she said.24
This brings me back to the question of women's agency. Feminist activists, visible
in the support of Okinawan anti-base and anti-war politics from before the time of
reversion (1972), have signaled Okinawan women's strength and agency. In addition,
ever since 1945 various groups of women activists who do not consider themselves

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feminists -including housewives' association leaders, educators, and churchwomen- have

been in the forefront of efforts to improve living conditions for poor families and to
protect their own neighborhoods from the spillover of bar and brothel activities. The
difference between women civic leaders in the early years of the occupation and the
feminists who now hold both elected and other official positions at all levels of government
is that the earlier women leaders filled the more traditional role of being the keepers of
civic virtue. They often campaigned against prostitution before it was made illegal in
Okinawa.25 Today's feminists, in contrast, may argue against the institution of prosti-
tution, but they also understand the socio-economic conditions that push women into
such undesirable work. Consequently, they make efforts to reach out and help women
change their own lives, attempting to mitigate the effects of long-standing discrimination
against women in the sex trade. To this end, they provide counseling, shelters, and,
more recently, a rape crisis center to all women.
It was at the insistence of vocal feminists after the 1995 rape of the schoolgirl that
the crime was publicized to the world media. As mentioned earlier, Naha City Council-
woman Takazato Suzuyo became a recognized spokesperson for women on Okinawa,
appearing on CNN and other broadcasts to represent the outrage that Okinawans felt.
Other local officials- such as Miyagi Harumi of the Naha City Women's Section; Itokazu
Keiko of the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly, and now of the National Assembly; other
women in charge of the Women's Sections of city and town offices throughout Okinawa;
and church and civic leaders- held massive demonstrations of protest against the bases.
Feminist leaders played a critical role in helping to stage the huge Ginowan City protest
of October 1995, when 85,000 people gathered to demand a change in the U.S.-Japan
Security Alliance (AMPO). There is no question that feminists have long been outspoken
critics of social conditions in base-occupied Okinawa.26
Victims or Agents?
Is it wrong for us to assume that because economically deprived women often had no
choice but to go into prostitution, they were or are simply victims of the social, economic,
and political conditions of occupation-era and post-reversion Okinawa? As already

mentioned, one of my informants insisted that she had chosen the life of a bar hostess (the
euphemism she used for her work as a prostitute) over life as a nurse's assistant, which
she felt would have been too confining. To be sure, her choices were severely limited in
late 1950s and 1960s Koza, the large central Okinawan city outside of Kadena Air Base

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that prospered until the 1980s on a base-dependent economy. As such, the question of
agency or victimization is muddled when we consider the enormous structural influence
of U.S. military bases as the main source of employment for Okinawans before 1972.
Ultimately, however, we could argue that the exchange value of sex for survival was the
basic, unspoken capital that circulated in the occupation-era economy, keeping families
from starvation. And just as Kim and Choi note that the discourse of "the violation of
national virgins"- the so-called comfort women- "mobilizes the Korean sense of shame,
which in turn serves to unify the nation,"27 so the discourse of the Okinawan daughter,
sister, or mother forced into prostitution mobilizes the Okinawan sense of shame and
anger, thus unifying Okinawans against their foreign occupiers.
The reality of their lives, however, is that prostitutes are neither accorded true
agency nor accepted for the work they are forced into doing, except perhaps within the
embrace of feminist activists' transnational agendas. Since it appears that the "choice"
to work in the sex trade is a function of having few if any other options, at least some
degree of victimization is involved. But there is no real place for these women within the
discourse of Okinawan identity politics, which otherwise prides itself on being all-inclu-
sive. Prostitution is, simultaneously, a dangerous threat to the mainstay of the modern
Japanese nation, the family.
Recent comments by a female Japanese cabinet member and by the commander
of U.S. forces in the Pacific both reveal the prevailing lack of respect for Okinawan
women- not to mention the speakers' lack of understanding of what it is like to live in
the shadow of U.S. military bases. The two comments also reveal the usual low regard for
women who associate with U.S. servicemen, even as they continue to affirm the political
necessity of having foreign troops stationed on the island. Ultimately, such comments are
signs of the predominance of a worldview in which the privileging of patriarchal values
is the normative order: in this case, women of so-called questionable morals are held to
a standard not applied to the men involved. These women are, in effect, accorded little
respect as human beings. Thus Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tanaka Makiko
actually commented after the June 2001 rape of the Japanese woman in Mihama that
the victim was likely at fault because she was drunk at 2 a.m. at an Okinawan bar where
women go to meet American servicemen.28 No mention was made of the morals of the
American serviceman who raped the woman.29 Ironically, Minister Tanaka herself was
soon a victim of the very patriarchal system that had engendered her criticism of the raped
woman, when she was fired by Koizumi for what he and other (conservative) male LDP

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leaders deemed to be excessively outspoken and out-of-control behavior. Yet Tanaka's

direct, no-nonsense style might have been acceptable had she been a man.
Sadly, Tanaka's comments about the 2001 rape victim reveal her own acceptance
of a masculinist worldview in which women are held to a higher and different set of moral
values than men are. This was certainly reflected in the comments of the commander of
American forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, after the 1995 schoolgirl's
rape by three servicemen under his command. He stated publicly that for the price of a
rental car, they "could have had a girl [meaning prostitute]."30
Both comments unmask widely held contempt for prostitutes, and for what is
deemed prostitute-like behavior in Okinawan women. But I also wonder if they are
in fact thinly veiled allusions to, or revelations about, a more general attitude toward
Okinawan women as a whole by Japanese mainlanders and U.S. military overlords in
Okinawa. (As already mentioned, the fact that the 2001 rape victim was Japanese rather than
Okinawan became irrelevant once she was at a bar frequented by U.S. servicemen, and the
Okinawan schoolgirl's tender age in 1995 did nothing to protect her from being treated as
fair game.) This raises other questions about the continued marginalization of Okinawa
and Okinawan political practices by both of these First World powers, often expressed by
positioning Okinawa (the sexual imagery of control and submission is intentional here) as
a feminized and/or emasculated entity- namely, as being the site of the aforementioned
josei bunka (women's culture). Mere lip service is paid to the demands of Okinawans to
(1) redress wrongs inflicted on their communities, and (2) remove the U.S. bases, which
is now even less likely to happen than before, given U.S. political concerns over China's
growing military power and the threat of North Korea in the immediate vicinity, as well
as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The continued presence of more than 50,000 U.S. military personnel and their
dependents in the island prefecture- with everything from payment of Okinawan
base-worker salaries to land and housing rents and the construction of recreation
centers taken over or heavily subsidized by the Japanese government- indicates the
true condition of disregard for Okinawa's position. These are all signs that Okinawa
continues to be the pawn of both the U.S. and Japan, confirming even today the
unfortunately still-cogent insight, expressed in 1958 by Berkeley historian George
Kerr, that this is the sad fate of a minor kingdom strategically located between major
powers.31 Recently declassified documents from the reversion era contain 1969
and 1970 statements by U.S. State Department policy makers and military decision

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makers that clearly indicate their intention to do whatever was minimally necessary to
placate Okinawans' demands for a return to Japanese sovereignty, yet in a way that would
make the U.S. look as though it supported granting Okinawans a degree of political self-
determination.
As Kim and Choi remind us, the troping of political relations between nations in
sexualized terms is not new. Benedict Anderson's now classic study of nations as imagined
communities is significant for its anthropological orientation, suggesting that nationalism
ought to be thought of "as if it belonged more with 'kinship' or 'religion,' rather than
with [ideologies such as] 'liberalism' or 'fascism.'"32 In Nationalisms and Sexualities,
Andrew Parker and his colleagues note that "nearly every aspect of Anderson's account
of the nation raises issues of gender and sexuality," then go on to say that
Though undeveloped in his analysis, Anderson's comparison enables the crucial

recognition that- like gender- nationality is a relational term whose identity derives
from its inherence in a system of differences. In the same way that 'man' and 'woman'
define themselves reciprocally (though never symmetrically), national identity is
determined not on the basis of its own intrinsic properties but as a function of what
it (presumably) is not. Implying "some element of alterity for its definition," a nation
is ineluctably "shaped by what it opposes." But the very fact that such identities
depend constitutively on difference means that nations are forever haunted by their
various definitional others.33
In the postwar geopolitical scenario, in which Okinawa has been situated within a
masculinist political narrative, the U.S. is troped in the role of alpha male to a complicit,
docile younger brother, Japan, in need of U.S. military protection. Okinawa as pawn is
left completely emasculated, a feminized non-threat.
Sympathizers with the Okinawans' plight often cite their history as the non-arms-
bearing people of a pacifist independent kingdom before colonization ( 1 609), annexation
by the Japanese (1872), and prefectural status beginning in 1879. Indeed, as a result of
banning the use of private arms in the fifteenth century, the argument goes, Okinawans
could not defend themselves against the overlords of Satsuma in the early seventeenth
century, when the loss of Okinawa's true political autonomy began.34 This is a reading of
Okinawan history from within the paradigm of imperialism, in which Okinawa can only be
viewed as a weak and vulnerable entity unable to maintain its political independence.
Yet from the perspective of some Okinawans, this paradigm is incorrect. Critics
such as economist Koji Taira would argue that reading Okinawa's political location in

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terms of an emasculation of identity is simply the imposition of a Western imperialist

paradigm in which the Machiavellian "Might makes right" philosophy prevails. And the
logic is unfortunately extended to trope the might of a nation in terms of sexual prowess
and power. As Parker and his colleagues point out,
Whenever the power of the nation is invoked - whether it be in the media, in scholarly
texts, or in everyday conversation- we are more likely than not to find it couched
as a love of the country, an eroticized nationalism.35
They go on to say that there is no privileged narrative of the nation.36 But Okinawans who
take issue with the conventional Western paradigm, in which Okinawa is symbolized as the
emasculated "other" to the powerful First World entities of the U.S. and Japan, question
the authority of this model. Hence we must pay attention to the particular and complex
instances of divergence from and resistance to "powerfully homogenizing versions of the
nation that constrain, oppress, . . . eviscerate," and emasculate.37
The Feminist Conundrum, Okinawa Style

Within the conflict over Okinawa's political autonomy, some prominent NGOs in the anti-
base movement have been composed of feminists and other women activists, contributing,
as Vincent Pollard has argued, to global civil society alternatives to traditional political
structures.38 While they have generally supported the policies of former Governor
Masahide Ota (1990-98), however, activist women- particularly feminists- have found
themselves in a conundrum. Although they support the idea of an economically more
independent Okinawa, they also question what the position of women will be within an
emerging economy that is increasingly centered on tourism.
As during the days of the U.S. occupation, a tourist-dependent Okinawa would
retain a service economy. In fact, resource-poor Okinawa's trade deficit is already more
than made up for by tourism, which is considered an export industry. Tourism generates
440 billion yen a year, more than 14 times the amount it did in 1972, and accounts for 1 7
percent of all of Okinawa's outside income (or 1 1 percent of GDP). Ninety-seven percent
of Okinawa's 4.127 million visitors in 1998 came from mainland Japan.39 These figures
have changed only slightly in the last decade, according to a JETRO (Japan External Trade
Organization) website.40 Yet unemployment in Okinawa is twice the national average,
and as young people leave the peripheries of the prefecture to come to the central cities
of Okinawa, jobs remain scarce, especially for the young.

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Where does this leave women? Feminists argue that this often leaves women on
the bottom of the service work pile. Yet we must be wary of making generalizations
about the lives of Okinawan women. All across the socio-economic spectrum, situations
for women vary according to household economic need, existing resources (labor and
financial), social beliefs and ideologies about work and gender, and individual personalities
and relationships between men and women. Many wives work outside the home, but
often to supplement the main income brought in by the husband/father/eldest son; or
women engage in civic duties that may or may not be remunerated. In any case, women
are still perceived to be the primary caretakers of the home, responsible for the care
and education of children.41
Feminists and other women activists have generally come from the educated elite
households. Longtime social activists who do not identify with the feminist movement
include Uezu Toshi, an educator from a prestigious aristocratic family from Kume Island
and longtime leader of the Okinawa Women's Association, and Asato Toshie, a retired
kindergarten teacher who served for twenty years in the Kitanakagusuku Village Assembly.
Uezu and Asato, young mothers during the Second World War, were part of the educated
elite who had careers as teachers and civic leaders after the war. Other women generally
occupied the more traditional roles of serving home and community as mothers and
housewives. Today's generation of feminist leaders may or may not be homemakers and
mothers, and they occupy prominent elected or appointed posts in various sections of the
prefectural government. However, despite the fact that feminists have been a critical part
of the anti-base protest movement in Okinawa, their agendas to put in place (or remove)
structures for the safety and welfare of women are generally accorded secondary status,
after the more pressing matter of establishing larger Okinawan political goals of base
removals and a stronger economy.
Okinawans embrace their identity as a peace-loving people, in conscious opposition
to what they see as a once militarily aggressive and now economically aggressive Japan.
Some Okinawans thus accept the depiction of their culture as a feminized one (josei
bunka ), precisely because they favor positing themselves against a Yamato (mainland
Japanese) masculinist-warrior culture. In arguing for a political paradigm that is not
confined by traditional nation-state forms, Okinawan leaders look to the global city as
a transnational entity that can take advantage of the increasing permeability of national
borders in terms of economics, technological developments, and social fluidity. Ironically,
feminists- who want to work through existing differences to help create a new, more

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tolerant and egalitarian order on a global scale- seem still to be marginalized in these
discourses of a radically new political order. As R. Radhakrishnan asks,
Why is it, then, that the advent of the politics of nationalism signals the subordination
if not the demise of women's politics? Why does the politics of the "one" typically
overwhelm the politics of the "other"? Why could the two not be coordinated within
an equal and dialogic relationship of mutual accountability? What factors constitute
the normative criteria by which a question or issue is deemed "political"? Why is
it that nationalism achieves the ideological effect of an inclusive and putatively
macropolitical discourse, whereas the women's question- unable to achieve its
own autonomous macropolitical identity- remains ghettoized within its specific
and regional space?42
Attention to and criticism of overarching transhistorical or supranational claims have been
applied to feminism. But in fact Okinawan women, like feminists elsewhere, are rethinking
community in historically specific, local terms while also linking up with women in
Asia as well as in Europe. Women seemed to fare better under Ota's governorship than
under that of Inamine, the LDP candidate who followed him; and it remains to be seen
how women will fare today, under the leadership of Nakaima Hirokazu. As a former vice
governor under Ota and outspoken proponent of the removal of U.S. bases, Nakaima is
likely to prove more like Ota than Inamine. But Okinawa may nevertheless continue
to experience the effects of traditional patriarchal hierarchies that mark social order
and practice- and that explain, at least in part, why women today still have difficulty
accessing official positions. There were also complaints by women activists during
Ota's tenure that despite women's apparent access to power and instruments of change,
in fact they still experienced many obstacles and restrictions. For example, although the
prefectural government publicly lauded the creation of the REICO rape crisis center, its
financial contribution to getting it started was surprisingly meager.
Also, although women were appointed as part of two delegations to Washington,
D.C., after the 1995 rape of the schoolgirl, they found that they were not taken seriously
and felt a less-than-genuine concern for women's issues by male members of the Ota
delegation- whose primary aim was, after all, to get U.S. lawmakers to hear them out
about base removals. Parker and his colleagues recognize this problem in their comment
that "one of the gains of academic feminism has been its hard-won recognition that gender
relations cannot be 'understood in stable and abiding terms' either within or between the
borders of nations, and that while patriarchy may be universal, its specific structures and

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embodied effects are certainly not."43 They also look at the relationship between nationalism
and women's political movements:
Historically, female solidarity emerged in the West after the first waves of nation-
alist fervor receded; working for such issues as suffrage, welfare and reproductive
rights, women's movements challenged the inequalities concealed in the vision of
a "common" nationhood. In anti-colonial struggles, on the other, feminist programs
have been sacrificed to the cause of national liberation and, in the aftermath of
independence, women have been relegated to their formerly "domestic" roles.44
In fact, women in Okinawa may enjoy more autonomy and involvement in elected and official
positions than those in mainland Japan- in part because of Okinawa's pre-colonial tradition
of women religious leaders, as well as its longer exposure to U.S. educational philosophies
during twenty-seven years of occupation (1945-72). But it is also due to the postwar history
of women's reform movements and the anti-base (read anti-colonial) struggles to which
women were necessary for success. We could also argue that the presence of unwanted U.S.
bases for over sixty years has been the defining issue that encouraged women to be more
vocal and men to be more inclusive of women in protest movements.
Still, the problem is, precisely, women's vocality. As Carol Delaney and others have
argued, the nation has long been troped as woman, with the body politic often depicted
as female and the national soil represented by the body of the mother that requires the
protection of male members of the nation. Furthermore, "this trope of the nation-as- woman . . .
depends for its representational efficacy on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful,
daughterly or maternal."45 It is for this reason, as I argued above, that certain Okinawan
women are not allowed into the roster of sacrificed daughters- namely, because they fail
the chastity/motherliness test. Curiously, both Okinawan prostitutes and feminists fall
into this disallowed category. As Delaney quotes Anne McClintock,
"No nationalism in the world has ever granted women and men the same privileged
access to the resources of the nation-state." Their claims to nationhood frequently
dependent upon marriage to the male citizen, women have been "subsumed only
symbolically into the national body politic," representing in this process "the limits
of national difference between men."46
The "deep, horizontal comradeship" of which Ben Anderson speaks, and which marks
national community, is ultimately a fraternity, as he tells us- a community of men.

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I argue, then, that the trope of the nation as a woman only works when women
remain silent, symbolizing the nation but never representing it. Loudmouth feminists and
unchaste prostitutes are excluded from this patriarchal ordering. The ideal female models
for symbolizing the nation are valorized for their reproductive capacity, their potential
for motherhood. Feminists, often equated with a masculinized femininity, are troped as
lesbians, or at best as some hybrid image of a power woman- both mother figure and
latent lesbian. It is in this way that the heterosexual family became the norm that played
a central role in the nation's public imaginings about itself, so that motherhood could
be viewed as national service. Other kinds of (nonreproductive) female sexuality were
not considered legitimate by the standards of the state. Prostitutes' reproductivity, when
they gave birth, was a tainted form of productivity for the nation, and their children were
therefore "illegitimate."
In Okinawa, ironically, women who went into prostitution during the occupation
years were often the primary breadwinners for the family, although they continued to
be stigmatized socially. Yet even as they continue, today, to be labeled "bad girls," they
act, as Laura Miller has stated, strategically and autonomously.47 Gayatri Spivak warns
us against thinking that the story of the prostitute is "an evolutionary lament that their
problems are not yet accessible to our solutions and they must simply come through
into nationalism in order then to debate" their sexual status/preference.48 Among the
prostitutes in Okinawa with whom I spoke, there is an acceptance of living in a kind of
parallel universe, where they realize their exclusion from the moral realm of Okinawan
national identity despite the inclusive rhetoric of the anti-base movement- which unifies
all Okinawans against the threat of a foreign military occupation force, and to which all
other issues are subsumed.
However, even if the goal of base closures is achieved, prostitutes and feminists
alike may find that their hoped-for transformation in social values does not occur, and
hence that they are still excluded from a traditional nationalist narrative. Neither group
has been invited to be a full participant in the nationalist project (because their actions
preclude acceptability into established norms of behavior and belief), and both groups
embody an intrinsic threat to and rejection of that modernist (and patriarchal) project.
Thus they must continue to act outside of acceptable modes of being/action. As such,
feminists and prostitutes continue to occupy a dangerously liminal zone that ultimately
relegates them to the category of Okinawa's "bad girls."

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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Kazumi Heshiki, who kindly agreed to translate the title into Japanese.
Notes
1. Norimitsu Onishi, "Japan Focuses Anger on U.S. in Rape Arrest of a Marine," The New
York Times , February 13, 2008.
2. Linda Isako Angst, "In a Dark Time: Community, Memory, and the Making of Ethnic
Selves in Okinawan Women's Narratives," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2001.
3. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, eds., Dangerous Women : Gender and Korean
Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998).
4. Patrick Smith, Japan: A Reinterpretation (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), and Yoshida
Kensei, Democracy Betrayed: Okinawa under U.S. Occupation (Bellingham: Center for East Asian
Studies, Western Washington State University, 2001).
5. Hyun Sook Kim, "Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation: Images of Working Class
Women in Popular and Radical Texts," in Kim and Choi, eds., Dangerous Women , 175-202 (see
note 3 above).
6. Suzuki Noriyuki and Tamashiro Satoko, "Okinawa no Fuiripinjin: Teijüsha to shite,
mata gaikokujin rõdõsha to shite" (Okinawa's Filipinos as Permanent Residents and as Foreign
Laborers), Ryüdai Hõgaku 58 (1997): 258-59. Ryüdai Hõgaku is a law journal published by the
University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa.
7. Linda Isako Angst, In A Dark Time: Memory , Community , and Gendered Nationalism
in Postwar Okinawa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, Harvard University
Press, forthcoming).
8. Kim and Choi, Dangerous Women , 4 (see note 3 above).
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Ibid., 4. See also Cynthia Enloe, Bananas , Beaches , and Bases: Making Feminist Sense
of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
1 1 . Takara Kurayoshi, "King and Priestess: Spiritual and Political Power in Ancient Ryukyu,"
The Ryukyuanist: The International Society for Ryukyuan Studies Newsletter , no. 27 (Winter
1994-95): 1-4.
12. Linda Angst, "Ain't Misbehavin': Practicing Propriety in Occupied Okinawa," paper
presented at the Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast Conference, Soka University, Aliso Viejo,
CA, June 20, 2009.
14. Close to 53 percent of all external revenues are in the form of subsidies from Tokyo,
according to Kensei, Democracy Betrayed , 167 (see note 4 above).
15. Okinawa's official launching of a tourism-based economy was marked by the 1975
opening of the Okinawa Ocean Exposition, or Expo '75.
16. Angst, In a Dark Time (see note 7 above).
17. Women in the village of Itoman were held up time and again as the best examples in

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premodern Okinawa of controlling household economy as they traveled far and wide to fish and
to sell their wares while the men maintained important political and social positions in the home
community.
18. An informant in Okinawa City in the mid-1990s recounted stories of her life in Yomitan
Village in prewar Okinawa. She divorced two men, claiming that there was no good reason to
have them around since she did all the work anyway.
19. Interview with Noborikawa Nobuko, Misato, Okinawa City, Okinawa, April 1994.
20. The narrative of the events that led to the accusation of rape, as reported in Time
magazine, told of the young woman, dressed in a red sundress, dancing with a serviceman, to
whom she confided that her boyfriend was out of town ( Time magazine, Asia edition, August 13,
2001). Later she was seen leaving the club with another American serviceman. They were spotted
climbing into the back seat of a car in the parking lot. According to the Time article, the woman
was seen scrambling out of the car shortly thereafter; she tried to flee, but she didn't get very far.
Soon after this, at nearly 3 a.m., her friend who worked at the club drove by looking for her and
found her sprawled across the hood of a car, the serviceman with whom she had left forcing her
into sexual intercourse from behind. As soon as the friend called out to the woman, the man zipped
up and raced to a waiting car with Y-plates (designating U.S. military), and he and the other
occupants (apparently all servicemen) sped out of sight..
21. Merry White, Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002).
22. Many of my informants explicitly addressed this issue. In the case of farming and fishing
women, most claimed that they had not had time to complete the compulsory education required
of all children from the Meiji period onward. Those informants who were teachers and community
leaders were also very clear about the importance of having achieved a certain socio-economic
status through the completion of higher school training. Most of these women were already from
the landed classes in prewar Okinawa. In the postwar period, particularly after reversion to Japanese
sovereignty, compulsory education has been much more regularly completed.
23. Interview (anonymous informant), Chatan, Okinawa, December 1993.
24. Interview (anonymous informant), Sumiyoshi, Okinawa, June 1994.
25. Interview with Uezu Toshie, Naha, Okinawa, April 1994.
26. Takazato Suzuyo, the founder of Okinawa's first rape crisis center (1995), lobbied long and
hard for this service, which was finally approved and funded by the prefectural government during
the period of my fieldwork- as a direct result of the fallout from the rape of the schoolgirl.
28. Thom Shanker, "U.S. and Japan Discuss Transfer of American Rape Suspect," New
York Times , July 6, 2001; Chalmers Johnson, "Three Rapes: The Status of Forces Agreement
and Okinawa," The Asia-Pacific Journal : Japan Focus , n.d. (on-line access July 9, 2009); Lisa
Takeuchi Cullen, "Sex and Race in Okinawa," Time Magazine , August 19, 2001.
29. To be fair, the serviceman was discussed in the context of his race. Being African
American was likely to be a factor weighing against him, given the prevailing negative view of
African American servicemen in Japan and Okinawa. This reflects a long-standing racial prejudice

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against people of color by Japanese, which, together with the specific record of attacks on local
women by servicemen of color, was deemed a possible point of bias in any local judgment of the
case. See David Allen, "Japanese Media Try Character of Alleged Rape Victim," Pacific Stars
and Stripes , August 26, 2001.
30. Irvin Molotsky, "Admiral Has to Quit over His Comments on Okinawa Rape," The New
York Times , November 18, 1995, and Art Pine, "Admiral Retires after Okinawa Rape Comment,"
The Los Angeles Times , November 18, 1995.
31. George F. Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island People (Tokyo: C. E. Tuttle Co.,
1958).
32. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1991), 15.
33. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds.. Nationalisms
and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.
34. Kerr, Okinawa , 3-17 (see note 31 above).
35. Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities , 1 (see note 33 above).
36. Ibid., 3.
37. Ibid.
38. Vincent Kelly Pollard, "Demilitarizing Okinawa: Globalization and Comparative Social
Movements," in Robert W. Compton, Jr., ed., Transforming East Asian Domestic and International
Politics: The Impact of Economy and Globalization (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2002), 180-200.
39. Kensei, Democracy Betrayed , 168 (see note 4 above).
40. Okinawa: FAQs- JETRO, athttp://www.jetro.go.jp/en/invest/region/okinawa/faq.html,
accessed July 7, 2009.
41. See the work of Ochiai Emiko, Kindai kazoku to feminizumu (The Modern Family and
Feminism), (Tokyo: Keisou shobo, 1989).
42. R. Radhakrishnan, "Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity," in Parker et al.,
eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities , 78 (see note 33 above).
43. Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities , 4 (see note 33 above).
44. Ibid., 7.
45. Carol Delaney, "Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Modern Turkey," in Sylvia
Junko Yanagisako and Carol Lowery Delaney, eds., Naturalizing Power : Essays in Feminist
Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), 177.
46. Ibid., 6. Delaney takes this quote from Anne McClintock, / Leather: Race , Gender ,
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
47. Laura Miller, Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006). In this work exploring the ways in which Japanese women
act and are acted upon by the beauty industry, Miller raises larger issues about women's agency
along changing vectors of what is deemed socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior. I
apply this general argument to the roles occupied in Okinawa by the prostitutes and feminists
I encountered in my fieldwork.

79.155.105.15 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 18:38:40 +00:00
48. Gayatri Spivak, "Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi's 'Douloti the Bountiful,'" in
Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities , 8 (see note 33 above).

79.155.105.15 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 18:38:40 +00:00

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Loudmouth Feminists and Unchaste Prostitutes: "Bad Girls" Misbehaving in Postwar

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42771995

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"Bad Girls" Misbehaving in Postwar Okinawa

Linda Isako Angst

Daughters, Chaste and Otherwise

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Feminism vs. Nationalism

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unwilling objects of feminist campaigns.

Patriarchal ideology confers neither anti-colonial revolutionary agency nor autono-

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Feminism as a project of modernity stands at odds with nationalism, which imagines

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to be remembered and known: namely, the aforementioned Himeyuri student nurses,

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Ethnographie Evidence: Women Working the Postwar Economy

As independent thinkers, feminists, too, threaten the fabric of social institutions

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a sympathetic view of Okinawan women who made personal sacrifices in order to

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sometimes by trying out new lives in places like Okinawa.

Okinawa as Dangerous Feminized Space

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While there may be similarities between the symbolic positions of feminist

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feminists -including housewives' association leaders, educators, and churchwomen- have

and political conditions of occupation-era and post-reversion Okinawa? As already

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leaders deemed to be excessively outspoken and out-of-control behavior. Yet Tanaka's

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Though undeveloped in his analysis, Anderson's comparison enables the crucial

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terms of an emasculation of identity is simply the imposition of a Western imperialist

The Feminist Conundrum, Okinawa Style

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Attention to and criticism of overarching transhistorical or supranational claims have been

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and women's political movements:

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