ABSTRACT
The Okinawan historian, author, and playwright Ōshiro Masayasu begins his book Okinawa in the History of the Shōwa Era by discussing the symbolic role of National Highway 58 in modern Okinawan history.1 Although the road had existed for years, it was not designated a national highway until 15 May 1972, the day of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan after twenty-seven years of American military occupation. Ōshiro describes the road as viewed from his office window in Naha, at the southern end of Okinawa’s main island: Highway 58 runs north along the entire length of the island and traces an imaginary line across the water, passing through the islands of Amami Ōshima and Tanegashima before reaching Kagoshima City in Kyushu, roughly 450 miles to the north. During the occupation years, Highway 58 was commonly known as “Military Highway No. 1” and served as the island’s main artery for American military vehicles. Before the arrival of U.S. forces on the island of Okinawa in April 1945, portions of this route were used to transport Japanese troops. Thus the road known today as “National Highway 58” not only links post-reversion Okinawa to the rest of Japan but connects three phases of modern Okinawan history: the era of Japanese imperialism and war, the postwar American occupation, and the ensuing years since Okinawa regained Japanese prefectural status. If Benedict Anderson is correct and the modern nation is indeed an imagined community, then what better testament to this idea than an invisible highway connecting a nation’s peripheral archipelago to its main islands?2 Yet it may be the actual discontinuity of Highway 58 that best represents Okinawa’s relationship with Japan, which has been fraught with ambivalence ever since Japan first “annexed” the Ryukyus in 1879. This ambivalent historical
relationship, together with the sheer length and intensity of America’s occupation of the islands, has provided postwar Okinawan writers with a distinctive perspective on both foreign occupation and Japanese imperialism. The fictional narrative that may best exemplify this perspective is Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s The Cocktail Party, which I discuss in this chapter together with Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School.”
