No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Conspicuous of late, in light of this historical moment that marks forty years since the ‘restitution’ of the rights to administrative control over Okinawa from the United States to Japan, have been media special reports which, be they designed for publication in print or for broadcast over the airwaves, have featured in their titles the phrase ‘Fukki 40 Nen [40 Years Since Reversion]’. There are, however, no few individuals in Okinawa who harbor a certain hostility to the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, this word ‘reversion’ is deployed without being bracketed in quotation marks, as if it represented a simple matter of fact.
1 Translator's Note: I am indebted to Michael K. Bourdaghs, Michiko Hase, Satoko Norimatsu, and Mark Selden for their expertise, invaluable feedback, and suggestions for improvement to earlier drafts of this translation. Any mistakes or insufficiencies that remain herein are mine alone.
2 Translator's Note: This translation of the book's original Japanese title is provided by David John Obermiller in his The United States Military Occupation of Okinawa: Politicizing and Contesting Okinawan Identity, 1945~1955 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006).
3 Translator's Note: The Kōjien is widely regarded as the standard, go-to dictionary for the Japanese language, and has a status similar to that of Webster's or OED among English speakers.
4 Translator's Note: Japan's 32nd Army was in fact headquartered in Okinawa's Shuri Castle, which has been described by Laura Hein and Mark Selden as “[t]he most important physical symbol of an autonomous Okinawan past.” See Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Eds., Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003).
5 Translator's Note: This bipartisan rally, held in protest of government attempts to eliminate references to compulsory suicides during the Battle of Okinawa during the Pacific War described by Arakawa herein, drew a total of 117,000 people from across Okinawa, making it the largest such gathering to occur in the Prefecture since reversion to Japanese control in 1972. For more on the rally, see Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu. Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), esp. pp. 33~34.
6 Translator's Note: In September, 2012, subsequent to the publication of this essay, Noda Yoshihiko's administration did in fact nationalize the Senkaku Islands - known in Chinese as the Diaoyu - sparking a renewed and still intense (as of June, 2013) round of China-Japan tensions.
7 Translator's Note: This provisional constitution for the Ryūkyūs, submitted by an author who identified her- or himself only by the single initial ‘F’, appeared in the June, 1981 edition of the journal Shin Okinawa Bungaku (pp. 174~183).
You have
Access
Open access