ABSTRACT
The story of Okinawa remains a story hardly told beyond the East-Asia region where people strive to preserve and reassert remnants of their identity, unique culture, history, and language. Since Japan’s late 19th-century colonisation of the Ryukyu Kingdom, the minor Ryukyu archipelago renamed “Okinawa” has been relegated to an exotic, feminine, inferior, cultural backwater: that is, Japan’s internal South, in geographical, political, and socio-economic sense. Since its 1972 reversion from American post-war military occupation to Japanese governance, Okinawa has remained a major US military outpost in East Asia. This chapter interrogates the following question: does the 2013 bi-partisan “All Okinawa” political coalition against the new base construction in Henoko signify Okinawa’s departure from a modern “dependent development” towards a post-development alternative? Does such an alternative manifest local cultural and historical uniqueness and epistemological strengths in ways that contribute to the pluriverse? Okinawa’s past and present are explored through the lens of socio-cultural, environmental, political economy justice, and communicative justice.
