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Jon Mitchell investigates the US and Japan’s longlasting subjugation of Okinawa
\n\n\n\nThis is a book about the battle for Okinawa. But not that battle – the infamously brutal one that ground on for 82 days at the tail end of the Second World War and has already spurred countless forensic war-history books. Rather, author Jon Mitchell traces, with calm and incisive authority, the centuries of subjugation and dominance forced on the Pacific’s Okinawa Islands by its neighbour in the north – their annexation by Japan (in 1879), sacrifice by Japan (in that 1945 battle), handing over to US control by Japan (in 1951) and partial return to Japan (in 1972) – and how its culture, languages, development, ecology and people have suffered, and continue to suffer, as a consequence.
\n\n\n\nMitchell, an investigative reporter based in Tokyo, claims in his intro that an understanding of this history is key to answering the question posed by the title: how did US military bases become concentrated in Okinawa, and why are they still there? In this regard, the book does not fall short. At junctures, Japan’s structural discrimination against Okinawa seems to foreshadow or enable the US military’s physical and environmental violence: marines committing rape with impunity, air bases displacing farmers or leaching chemicals into the earth.
\n\n\n\nOkinawa at the turn of the twentieth century was ‘a backward, sugar-producing territory run for the benefit of Japan’, he writes in chapter two, while Okinawans were labelled dojin – ‘dirt people’ – and prohibited from speaking local dialects by Japanese officials. The full, awful measure of Imperial Japan’s disregard for Okinawans, though, came as the country’s leaders, and then emperor, confronted the prospect of defeat in the Second World War. ‘In the terminology of the board game Go, Okinawa was to be a sute ishi, a stone to be sacrificed for the greater good,’ Mitchell writes.
\n\n\n\nNone of this is new ground, but the author’s equally exhaustive discussion of postwar Japan–Okinawa relations, from the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 (which conserved Japanese sovereignty yet ceded Okinawa’s to the US military) onwards, gives terms such as sute ishi a depressing resonance today. His accounts of the ecological and human cost of Okinawa’s remaining US bases, coupled with his descriptions of mainland Japan’s complicity and ‘pure NIMBY-ism’ – its refusal to allow them to be redistributed more evenly across the country – speaks to a form of double colonisation, or ‘twofold subjugation’, that has nonetheless created a geostrategic, yet vulnerable, bulwark against perceived regional threats (most pressingly, Beijing: Okinawa would likely be a battlefront again should the Taiwan Contingency – a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan – come to pass). But also, simultaneously, fomented the outrage of generations of Okinawans; Mitchell’s most original act may be collating and historicising their nonviolent acts of countering, framing their plight in terms of dynamic disobedience and living culture rather than passive victimhood.
\n\n\n\nAmong their ranks are activists such as Nakamura Fumiko, a former elementary school teacher who had encouraged her pupils to fight for Hirohito during the war but went on to become ‘the mother of the Okinawan peace movement’; and Ota Masahide, an Imperial soldier turned sworn pacifist who, as governor, opened an archive and memorial – the Cornerstone of Peace – with the goal of ensuring Okinawans know their islands’ history. Later we are introduced to the artists and musicians whose survivance takes the form of celebrations of ancestry and indigeneity, or satire, or a rousing rap song about the noise and air accidents caused by the bases (Awich’s Tsubasa, or ‘Wings’, 2022). The soul-searching question expressed in this book’s title serves to foreground the disproportionate burden of American militarism on the island, and the asymmetric alliance, cynical realpolitik and financial calculations behind it. But this proves to be an emotionally detached form of roleplay: Mitchell in fact hails from Wales, not the USA, we learn in the foreword, ‘a country with a history of discrimination and poverty that parallels Okinawa’s – combined with an equally proud pacifist tradition’. As such, and given his clear sympathy with the antibase resistance movement, a more befitting use of the plural pronoun ‘we’ might have been: why are we unheard in Okinawa?
\n\n\n\nWhy Are We in Okinawa? by Jon Mitchell. Bloomsbury, £25 (hardcover)
\n\n\n\nFrom the Spring 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
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