Political space of Okinawa: Geographical perspectives on ethno-regional integration and protest

Why and how is a territorial ethnic group politically mobilized against oppression? Is/Is not the mobilization successful? If so, why? Can geography answer these questions? Drawing on these fundamental questions, I explore the development of political mobilization in postwar Okinawa in Japan. Okinawa is a group of islands which were governed by the U.S. military force after the Second World War. Currently more than thirty U.S. military bases are located in Okinawa under the Japan-U.S. security arrangements. This situation of Okinawa has been a cause of various social movements and has mobilized leftist votes against the U.S. military presence and Japan's security policy in the Asia-Pacific region. In such a macro geopolitical context, the development of protest in Okinawa has varying historical stages.;Drawing on the theoretical frameworks concerning a structure/agency dynamic, center-periphery relations, and collective identity formation, I attempt to clarify key geographical factors to produce/reproduce oppositional movements in and the subordinate situation of Okinawa. Through empirical analyses, the following conclusions are drown: (1) according to the geopolitical location of Okinawa, Okinawan protesters mobilized different protest identities over time; (2) they seem to have failed to construct Okinawan solidarity due to the development of the internal conservative-reformist cleavage; (3) micro geographical settings such as the existence of U.S. bases contributed to the construction of not only protest actions but also the cleavage; and (4) even in the recent geo-economic (neo-liberal) context, Okinawa's financial dependence on Japan proper diluted the impact of protest. The significance of this study is to illustrate macro/micro geographical settings in which particular types of political behaviors are constructed and to show that political economic dynamism within a locality may contribute to the perpetuation of the structure of oppression. While this thesis is based on the theories in Euro-American political geography and social sciences, the findings in this Asian case indicate that since political subjectivity and behaviors can be constructed according to macro/micro geographical settings, a more ‘regionally sensitive’ approach is useful.