Blurb:

This chapter examines popular movements in post-World-War-II Okinawa, such as the 1950s Iejima land struggle; 1970s Kin Bay and Kisenbaru struggles (Kin Bay activists protested the construction of oil stockpiling tanks and the reclamation of ocean in eastern coast of Okinawa while the Kisenbaru activists organized against US military live-fire exercise); and oppositions to US military, Japanese Self-Defense Force, airport construction, and corporate land enclosure in the Ryukyu Archipelago from the 1970s to the 1990s. Some of these movements not only constituted an opposition against power but also attempted to create their own autonomous space, self-activities, and alternatives to the dominant structure of power. For example, the Kin Bay activists innovated collective bargaining negotiations with municipal and prefectural governments, undertook legal battles, created new cultural practices, and pursued community-based farming and fishing subsistence economy. They also built solidarity with anti-nuclear and anti-development activists in the islands of Ryukyu Archipelago and Mariana Islands. Many of the important testimonies and voices in these movements which focused on everyday subsistence and produced communal spaces that connected various regions came from women. Post-war Okinawan people’s movements were propelled by the memory of the Battle of Okinawa and were fueled by the presence of the US military bases, which made them into outposts of US Cold War imperialism that resulted in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Thus, in order to understand the full historical scope of Okinawan movements, we must situate them as part of a global indigenous people’s history against imperialist war and capitalist development, to which the ongoing struggles in Henoko and Takae are heirs.