ABSTRACT
This article excavates the power of memory by investigating how the politics of
contested memory and the ‘unfinished war’ in Okinawa interrogates the link
between the memories of the Battle of Okinawa and US military accidents in the
prefecture, on the one hand, and the calls to reduce the presence of US installa-
tions, on the other.1 National government policy-makers and security managers
view US military facilities in the prefecture as integral to the USJapan alliance and as an essential ingredient in the security of Japan. From their perspective,
these outposts of the American eagle play a vital role in the deterrence of poten-
tial adversaries, whether these are identified as the Soviet Union during the Cold
War, or a rising China and a nuclear-armed North Korea today. In other words,
American military forces in Okinawa are viewed as offering security against Japan
becoming the victim of an external aggressor, suggesting how their role is seen as
contributing to a collective good for the benefit of all in Japan (on security as a
collective good, see Rothschild 1995, pp. 6364). However, US bases in Japan, purportedly for the benefit of all, pose a risk to the
everyday security of Okinawans (Hook et al. 2015). This is particularly the case as American forces are unequally distributed amongst Japanese prefectures and are
concentrated overwhelmingly in the Okinawa prefecture, which hosts nearly
three-quarters of the military installations used solely by the American military
(for details, see Okinawa Prefectural Government 2013). Due to the resistance of
other prefectures to hosting US bases, maintaining this unequal distribution in
US deployments remains an overriding goal of policy-makers and security manag-
ers on both sides of the Pacific. Indeed, the present Abe Shinzo administration
has been devoting considerable energy to perpetuating this inequality by seeking
to gain the prefecture’s acquiescence in the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station
Futenma from the heavily populated city of Ginowan to the sparsely populated
Henoko district of Nago city, including the construction of part of the new facili-
ties off-shore Henoko in the environmentally fragile Oura Bay (Okinawa Taimuzu, 7 August 2014; McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012).
