ABSTRACT
Throughout many decades, the people of Okinawa, where to this day three quarters of U.S. military facilities in Japan are hosted, have triggered multiple waves of upheaval through local social movements against what is perceived as a discriminatory deployment policy carried out by Japan’s central government. This chapter traces and compares the development of social movements in two decisive moments of recent Okinawan history: (a) the reversion movement of the late 1960s, and (b) the period of massive island-wide protests following the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three U.S. military personnel in the fall of 1995. Activists in the 1960s advocated for a reversion under Japan’s “peace constitution” and, amid a profound disappointment with the conditions of reversion, re-emerged as a movement challenging the meaning of Japan’s pacifism. In the 1990s, activists openly opposed the central government’s base-siting policy and demanded a reform of the political system towards a stronger decentralization. In both cases, the activists’ claims were framed as grounded in concerns over peace, the right to political participation, and environmental protection, i.e. as demands of global citizens. These frames have eventually paved the way to transboundary activism, and they continue to challenge the Japanese nation-state to this day.
