Johanna O. Zulueta - Transnational Identities on Okinawa’s Military Bases: Invisible Armies

Cover illustration: Archistoric / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Japanese words and names that have prolonged or extended vowel sounds are indicated by a macron (i.e. ). Translations of Japanese words are given in parenthesis whenever these words appear for the first time in the text. Japanese words are italicized throughout the texts, except for words that are used as concept (i.e. Nisei).

Japanese names that appear in the text are written following the Japanese way of writing, with the last name preceding the given (or first) name, except for sources written in English by Japanese authors, where I write the authors first name before his/her surname. Pseudonyms are used to identify my informants to protect their privacy.

Place names (e.g. Tokyo, Ryukyu) as well as some surnames (e.g. Ota, Oshiro) are written in their common Anglicized forms.

As a young graduate student in the early 2000s, I had been interested in issues of ethnic identityhow people define themselves and how their identities are also ascribed by society. As a person of Chinese descent, I have always grappled with my background; but as someone who has been detached from her Chinesenessone who is totally not familiar with her heritage and does not even speak a word of ChineseI saw myself in a seemingly liminal space, one whose physical features point to her Chinese ancestry, but one who is ignorant of her cultural heritage. While it may have been common sense to study more about my heritage, I took to the study of Japan to try to answer questions about ethnicity and identity. More so, my interest expanded beyond issues of ethnic identity, which led me to explore Japans peripheries and its marginal spaces, in particular, Okinawa.

My interest in Okinawa began accidentally in 2003, when I was introduced to the Philippine Okinawan Society (POS) by my adviser, Nagai Hiroko, of the Ateneo de Manila University. The POS is an organization founded in 1982 by Okinawan women who travelled to the Philippines as wives of Filipino men stationed in U.S. military bases in Okinawa. Incidentally, I chose to study their offspringhalf-Okinawan, half-Filipino individuals and analysed their identity constructions. They call themselves Nisei, to indicate their identity as second-generation Okinawans.

I continued to explore this group of individuals when I decided to embark on my doctoral study in 2005, at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Under the guidance of my supervisor, Iyotani Toshio, I was encouraged to look into migration processes between Okinawa and the Philippines during the post-war years and problematize the significance of the Occupation in this migration scheme. In my trips to Okinawa for fieldwork, I found out that a large percentage of these Nisei have gone back to Okinawa as adults to work on U.S. military bases. However, this significant migration to Okinawa has been overlooked and overshadowed, not to mention, under-researched. I continued working on Okinawa-Philippines migration well until my postdoctoral years as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow based at Hitotsubashis Transnational Sociology Programme, under the tutelage of Ito Ruri. After several conference presentations and publications for almost 15 years, I realized that I had to sit and write a book about these individuals who deserve to be recognized for their place in the whole post-war and contemporary story of Okinawa.

Writing a book while working full-time as a university professor is a daunting task, where I had to balance teaching, research, and administrative work, while combatting procrastination and self-doubt. Nevertheless, the countless individuals who supported me throughout the years made me recognize the importance of producing a book on this topic; not so much so as an evaluation of ones research performance, but more so to give a voice to these people who have been invisible in this whole transnational project of military basing in Okinawa. Thus, I spent my summers and spring breaks working on-and-off on this project. I also benefitted from the time I spent at the Hawke Research Institute (HRI) at the University of South Australia in Adelaide as a visiting fellow under the Kantoh Sociological Society-HRI Fellowship Grant I received in 20152016, which enabled me to stay a month at the HRI from February to March 2016, where I worked on early versions of this manuscript.