This paper represents one section of a book project that examines the connections among war, peace, and tourism in postwar Okinawa. While the U.S. military in Okinawa is often treated as one distinguishing trait of the place, it is discounted as a part of the "Okinawanness" promoted by the tourism industry. Still, it is seen as contributing to Okinawa's "champuru" (mixed) culture and to an exotic cosmopolitanism obtainable within Japan's borders. I argue in this presentation that despite the absence of U.S. bases in mainstream tourism promotion, there has been a long history of treating bases as tourist sites. In the context of early postwar tourism to Battle of Okinawa war memorials, the U.S. base construction boom provided other objects of fascination for visitors from mainland Japan. The initiative to define U.S. bases as tourist sites came from Japanese observers who sought in general to fashion Okinawa as an exotic experience. This exotic foreign atmosphere was found primarily in shaping Okinawa as "Japan's Hawaii" and in the presence of U.S. bases. To mainland Japanese visitors, this was Okinawa's main selling point: being able to taste American culture and modern military technology in the comfort of one's own language and in one's own backyard. In some instances, tropical south sea motifs and U.S. bases converged both before and after Okinawa's reversion to Japan in 1972. This paper outlines the scope of the tourist appeal of the U.S. military in Okinawa, from the spectacle of the bases and their hardware to the personnel themselves.
