¹ Here I am thinking of Judith Butler's recent work on melancholy and the constitutive role that the internalization of loss has in the construction of the self. While I find Butler's argument about the repression of the originary experience of homosexual desire compelling, I would like to broaden this category of melancholy objects to include other forms of internalized historical experience. See Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identifications” in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 132-150.

² Dominick LaCapra has argued that therapeutic strategies to decathect oneself from a lost object and to articulate conceptual and affective bonds once again with the world at hand are both necessary and inadequate. Loss must also be addressed collectively, not simply at the level of individual experience. Moreover, actual, historical loss must be acknowledged and attended. The failure to do so can lead to the conversion of the historical experience of loss into a structuring sense of absence, an ahistorical originary account that authorizes repetitions of violence and ideologies of subjugation. In this failure, subjects may find themselves in an impasse of endless melancholy and impossible mourning, trapped in naturalized, repetitive cycles that seem to be beyond their understanding and control. Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence and Loss.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999).

³ Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 7.

⁴ Tomiyama Ichirō, Senjo no Kioku (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 1995).

⁵ Norma Field, In the Realm of the Dying Emperor (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 33-103.

⁶ Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa (London: Routledge, 1999) 53-59; Saundra Pollack Sturdevant and Brenda Stolzfus. Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and U. S. Military in Asia (New York: The New Press, 1993), 240-299.

⁷ A popular if somewhat illicit outdoor party involving unmarried men or women from rural communities. While it was most common before World War II, the image of the moashibi is often evoked in contemporary popular culture in Okinawa.

⁸ Molasky; Field; Gerald Figal, “Waging Peace in Okinawa” Critical Asian Studies 33 (March 2001).

⁹ The Okinawan bases do continue to generate revenue in the form of payments made to landowners who either voluntarily lease their land to the Japanese government or are compelled to do so. This land is then provided for use by American military forces.

¹⁰ Like the hansen jinushi who testified at the prefectural hearing, many of the residents of Sonda continue to own land within the US bases; however, like most Okinawan landowners, very few are active in oppositional organizations such as the hansen jinushi.

¹¹ Young men and women spend a great deal of time together, but rehearsals are controlled and there is little free time. Occasionally relationships emerge, and a number of couples that I know have married. Many others date people from work or school with no connection to the seinenkai. Surprisingly, there seem to be few relationships with the admiring mainland visitors who attend rehearsals and performances.

¹² Although women have danced in the seinenkai for decades, they have never become drummers or sanshin musicians. While local women professed to be content with this, several complained that it was difficult for women to socialize at the community center once they stop performing.

¹³ The Ballad of the Southern Grove, The Chunjun River Flows, and Kudaka Island, respectively.

¹⁴ Okuno, 93-134.

¹⁵ Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 456.

¹⁶ Kinjo Kaoru, cited in Nomura Koya, Muishiki no Shokuminchishugi: Nihonjin no Beigun Kichi to Okinawajin (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo, 2005) Note 128, page 175-177.

¹⁷ For an interesting discussion of the desire to be seen among Japanese youth, see Ikuya Sato, Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

¹⁸ Jacques Ranciere and Peter Hallward, “Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview,” Angelaki, 8, no.2 (2003), 202.

¹⁹ Iha Masakazu, “Kando o Hada de Shiru,” in Eisa 360°: Rekishi to Genzai. 306.