Imagined Okinawa: Challenges from Time and Space
TAIRA Kōji (University of Illinois)
Remembering the Past, Fearing the Future
The enormity of civilian casualties during the Battle of Okinawa is Okinawa's most important collective memory. This memory reflexively evokes in the hearts of Okinawans a strong wish for permanent secure peace. In Okinawa, the effect on peace is a major consideration in ordering public priorities and seeking meanings in private life. The peace wish and the peace effect consciousness have generated Okinawa's unique moral and intellectual climate, which has nourished distinctive characteristics of culture and society.
From Okinawan perspectives, the "big world out there" appears to be too lenient to conflict and war. The "big world" maintains extensive means and institutions for contingencies of conflict and war. Okinawa's "little world over here" has given up on that kind of big world culture and rejects war and death in favor of peace and life. An indigenous philosophy of Okinawa expresses this preference most vividly: i.e., nuchi du takara (life is a supreme treasure). The challenge to a little people that rejects war and death is to find, develop, and enforce a system of thought and action robust enough to keep the war-like big world from intruding into its peace-wishing little world. This means self-defense against war with peace.
The Battle of Okinawa represents one of the most virulent intrusions of the war-like big world into the peace-wishing little world of Okinawa. Yet the means and institutions for war are entrenched and constantly being strengthened in Okinawa. Okinawa is firmly incorporated into the U.S. "Empire of Bases." Japan is fast becoming a genuine partner in the U.S. scheme of global hegemony. Okinawa wishes to be freed from confinement in this system.
Okinawa is administratively a part of Japan and simultaneously belongs to the U.S. Empire of Bases. It is a joint military colony of the U.S. and Japan. Okinawa's value to Japan, as demonstrated by the Battle of Okinawa, is to draw Japan's enemy to Okinawa to keep the rest of Japan out of fire. The U.S. views Okinawa as a front line of offensive military deployment to keep imagined or potential troublemakers of East Asia at bay. Until recently, the "exclusively defensive" Japan cooperated with the unabashedly offensive U.S. in rear guard supportive roles. Today the division of labor has blurred and the prized concept is "inter-operability" (threatening to develop into "inter-changeability" within a more closely integrated system of alliance) of the U.S. and Japanese military forces. Okinawa appears to be on its way to becoming a battleground again. The fear of massive civilian casualties is beginning to grip the hearts of Okinawans.
This paper, born of the writer's fear of war, explores how residents of Okinawa may cope with the imminent dangers of military emergencies with a view to the prevention, or at least minimization, of civilian casualties. We discuss certain provisions in the Laws of War, especially, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Protocols additional to them (a.k.a. the International Humanitarian Law). Beyond the emergency protection of non-combatants and civilians, we raise sights to look to a more permanent solution for the peace of Okinawa under arrangements such as internationalization and neutralization of the Ryukyu Islands
