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Uniquely Okinawan explores how American soldiers, sailors, and Marines considered race, ethnicity, and identity in the planning and execution of the wartime occupation of Okinawa, during and immediately after the Battle of Okinawa, 1945–46.

Okinawa

United States. Department of the Army. Office of Military History

Published: 1948

Total Pages: 660


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"Okinawa: the last battle: Here the Imperial Army braced for its last stand. From the bloody victories that brought U.S. forces to Okinawa, to the desperate, suicidal resistance of the Japanese, this is the complete story of the final beachhead battle of the Pacific campaign.
The experiences of Okinawans in mainland Japan, like those of migrant minorities elsewhere, derive from a legacy of colonialism, war, and alien rule. Okinawans have long coped with a society in which differences are often considered “strange” or “wrong,” and with a central government that has imposed a mono-cultural standard in education, publicly priding itself on the nation’s mythical “homogeneity.” They have felt strong pressures to assimilate by adopting mainland Japanese culture and concealing or discarding their own. Recently, however, a growing pride in roots has inspired more Okinawan migrants and their descendants to embrace their own history and culture and to speak out against inequities. Their experiences, like those of minorities in other countries, have opened them to an acute and illuminating perspective, given voice in personal testimony, literature, and song. Although much has been written on Okinawan emigration abroad, this is the first book in English to consider the Okinawan diaspora in Japan. It is based on a wide variety of secondary and primary sources, including interviews conducted by the author in the greater Osaka area over a two-year period. The work begins with the experiences of women who worked in Osaka’s spinning factories in the early twentieth century, covers the years of the Pacific War and the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, and finally treats the period following Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972. Throughout, it examines the impact of government and corporate policies, along with popular attitudes, for a compelling account of the Okinawan diaspora in the context of contemporary Japan’s struggle to acknowledge its multiethnic society. The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan will find a ready audience among students of contemporary Japanese history and East Asian societies, as well as general readers interested in Okinawans and other minorities living in Japan.
A “hauntingly beautiful memoir about family and identity” (NPR) and a young woman's journey to understanding her complicated parents—her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran—and her own, fraught cultural heritage. Elizabeth's mother was working as a nightclub hostess on U.S.-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their only daughter. There, Elizabeth grew up with the trappings of a typical American childhood and adolescence. Yet even though she felt almost no connection to her mother's distant home, she also felt out of place among her peers. Decades later, Elizabeth comes to recognize the shame and self-loathing that haunt both her and her mother, and attempts a form of reconciliation, not only to come to terms with the embattled dynamics of her family but also to reckon with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people. Clear-eyed and profoundly humane, Speak, Okinawa is a startling accomplishment—a heartfelt exploration of identity, inheritance, forgiveness, and what it means to be an American.
"Okinawa: the last battle: Here the Imperial Army braced for its last stand. From the bloody victories that brought U.S. forces to Okinawa, to the desperate, suicidal resistance of the Japanese, this is the complete story of the final beachhead battle of the Pacific campaign.
"Three of the women were born before the Pacific War, and their first memories of Americans are of troops coming ashore with bayonets fixed. A second group, now middle-aged, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when massive American bases were a fixture of the landscape. The youngest women, for whom the bases are a historical accident, are in their twenties and thirties, raised in a country increasingly confident of its status as a world power.".