The Community of Subjects, the Power, and thePublic-Sphere of Citizens : A New Stage of the Theory and Discourse of Appropriation and the U.S. Base Problems in Okinawa

<p>On the basis of my continuing fieldwork in the Henoko district in Nago City, Okinawa, since the summer of 1997, I will ethnographically examine in this article why and how the anti-base movements in Okinawa, arisen and expanded in response to the 1995 rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by U.S. servicemen, are now on the decline. I will accomplish this task through critically engaging in the theory/discourse of new social movements in general, and that of "appropriation" in particular. Since the 1970s, scholars have addressed a shift in the nature of social movements from the "old", unified revolutionary insurrections of the "people" to the "new", less organized, diverse, smaller-scale resistance of "citizens". In the process, merging with the problems of post-colonial criticism, the idea of appropriation has made its appearance in scholarly discourses as a common term in anthropology, cultural studies and other related fields to describe contemporary social protest and resistance. The concept of appropriation helps articulate the agency of the oppressed people by showing that they do not simply accept power, but also actively use, redefine, and even manipulate power in their social context for their own sake. Yet, a simplistic celebration of appropriation as the sign of progressive social movements leads to the danger of obscuring different kinds of appropriations. In fact, the notion of appropriation often reduces diverse movements into intimate "games" of deconstruction and subversion between "us" (the subjects) and "them" (the power), and in doing so, it not only helps proliferate "our" resistance but also helps multiply "their" power within a closed, homogeneous space of communal action and discourse. I analyze the pro-base movement in Nago to illustrate this danger. At the same time, in order to take advantage of the potentialities of the idea and practice of appropriation, I introduce the perspective of the "third person", namely Okinawan citizens, who, by appropriating power in a different way, constructed (and eventually destroyed) the open and heterogeneous public-sphere. To this end, I first discuss the changing historical and political context of the post-cold-war world within which Okinawa came to be situated, and show that in the 1990s, Okinawa was built up as the linchpin of the Asia-Pacific security system by global and national powers (the U.S. and Japanese governments). The 1995 rape incident took place precisely in this changing context of international security, from which the idea of reduction and reorganization of U.S. bases surfaced as the general will of the Okinawans. The U.S. and Japanese governments proposed, in order to pacify the anger of Okinawans, the return of Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to Okinawa (which is located in a congested residential area of central Okinawa). However, the return of the base was conditional upon the construction of a new base in Okinawa. Eventually, a site offshore of Henoko, a district of Nago City, was selected as the location for the new base. Henoko is a sparsely populated northeastern coastal community on the northern part of the island of Okinawa and has been the home of U.S. Marine Corps Camp Schwab since the late 1950s. The anti-base voices soon surfaced within and beyond that region, but pro-base voices were also strong for economic reasons. The tension between anti-base and pro-base voices, in fact, reflects and embodies broader fissures in contemporary Okinawa itself. More specifically, since the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japan, public funds under the banner of hondonami (catching up with the mainland) have been massively transferred from Tokyo to Okinawa as political compensation for local discontent with the continuous U.S. military presence. As a consequence, Okinawa' s overall living</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>