ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the various attempts to seek autonomy that have been carried in Okinawa since the end of the Second World War from the perspective of the intellectual history.
Since the modern era to the present, Okinawa has been subjected to colonial conditions by Japan and the United States. This chapter examines, in particular, the military colonial situation that Okinawa has experienced since 1945. In order to break free from this difficult situation, Okinawa has been making a number of arguments for “independence.” However, these were not simply arguments for building a new nation-state. In the context of the Cold War and the current New Cold War in East Asia, even if Okinawa achieves independence as a nation-state, it will not be able to exempt itself from the tensions between the major powers. This means that liberation from military colonialism cannot be achieved by becoming independent as a nation-state.
In Okinawa, therefore, there has been an ongoing discussion on the question of how to make self-determination possible while criticising the nation-state system. In this chapter, I will attempt to see this as an act of “inventing independence” and to interpret it as what Antonio Negri described as “constituent power.”
