Abstract
This chapter introduces readers to the major themes and goals of the book. It begins with a reference to the present social world within and outside Okinawa with its profusion of alternative facts and rationalizations appearing in the public discourse. It introduces the idea that cultural signs, symbols, and discourse practices in Okinawa reflect powerful incentives to rationalize the social processes of McDonaldization with its influence on reproduction of the socioeconomic and political order. The chapter presents readers with questions to consider as the book unfolds. The book asks how the Japan-US agreement, known as the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO), has served to construct legitimacy and popular consent and how further base construction involving the destruction of a marine environment has managed to pass as reasonable.
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Notes
- 1.
Viv Groskop, “Vulgar Misogyny didn’t harm Donald Trump —It helped him,” The Guardian (April 5, 2017).
- 2.
Anushka Asthana, “MPs pour scorn on ‘racist and sexist’ Donald Trump in state visit debate,” The Guardian (February 21, 2017).
- 3.
Emily Shugerman, “Donald Trump ’s sexist attack on MSNBC host criticized by leading Republicans and Democrats,” Independent (June 29, 2017).
- 4.
Greg Sargent, “Trump returns to his old standbys: Xenophobia , hate, lies, and, yes, mass deportation,” The Washington Post (September 1, 2016).
- 5.
A transcript of Kellyanne Conway’s exchanges with Chuck Todd can be found at, http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-01-22-17-n710491.
- 6.
George Carlin. “Life is worth losing,” Beacon Theater, New York City (November 5, 2005).
- 7.
Gavan McCormack , “Japan’s Problematic Prefecture—Okinawa and the U.S. Japan Relationship,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 14, Issue 17, No. 2 (September 2016).
- 8.
Ibid., 2.
- 9.
Kunitoshi Sakurai , “Japan’s Illegal Environmental Impact Assessment of the Henoko Base” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 9, No. 5 (February 27, 2012).
- 10.
Article 28 of the Japanese Environmental Impact Assessment Law nullifies the assessment statement altered mid-way, resulting in increased adverse impacts to the environment not reflected in the assessment’s earlier stages. Ibid., op. cit., 4.
- 11.
Ibid., 1.
- 12.
“Okinawa defense official’s injudicious remark regarding the submission of the Henoko environmental impact report,” Ryukyu Shimpo (November 29, 2011).
- 13.
Tanji, op. cit.
- 14.
See Masataka Okamoto, Minzoku no Soushutsu (Creating Ethnicities) (Tokyo : Iwanami Shoten, 2014).
- 15.
For example, the government’s deletion, in the 2007 history textbook censorship, of the element of coercion by the Japanese military needs to be understood in the context of the imperative for the Okinawans to assimilate to Japan, to overcome pre-war discrimination at the time. The pressure to assimilate made Okinawans’ (especially the teachers’) wartime embrace of emperor-centered patriotic education all the more intense, resulting in suicides in the event of capture by enemy forces. The assimilationist tendency also drove the teachers’ corporeal punishment on students against speaking Ryukyuan at school. The survivors’ testimonies of the collective suicides had been silenced by their guilt and shame for having cooperated in the killing, until 1982 when the Ministry of Education similarly instructed to delete the description of Okinawan residents killed by Japanese soldiers from history textbook . The survivors had to come out and tell their stories against the Japanese attempt to eliminate the compulsory element of the suicide, suggesting voluntary patriotism. See Miyume Tanji , Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa (London: Routledge, 2006), 38–39; and Steve Rabson, “The Politics of Trauma: Compulsory Suicides During the Battle of Okinawa and Postwar Retrospectives” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific Issue 24, June 2010, available at http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/rabson.htm (accessed May 28, 2017).
- 16.
Kent Calder . Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 65.
- 17.
David Vine , Base Nation: How U.S. Military Abroad Harm America and the World. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 3.
- 18.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “The SACO Final Report,” (accessed December 20, 2015), at http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/96saco1.html.
- 19.
President Bill Clinton observed at the 2000 Group of Eight Summit, hosted by Okinawa that, “We are going to continue to do what we can to reduce our footprint on this island.” http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/07/25/national/okinawa-stated-its-case-to-world-at-g8/#.WKKaJLZ96EI.
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Tanji, M., Broudy, D. (2017). Introduction. In: Okinawa Under Occupation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5598-0_1
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