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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Okinawa is simultaneously Japan's periphery and its centre. It is peripheral for obvious geographical reasons, being much closer to the China coast and Taiwan than to Tokyo, but it is also peripheral in the historical sense that its links with the main Japanese islands, and eventually with the modern Japanese state, have been thin, fraught, and relatively recent. Only belatedly incorporated as a prefecture in the Japanese state in the late 19th century, it was then excised from it between 1945 and 1972, and only half restored to it in 1972, since the US bases remained intact. It has continued since then to be governed as if the US-Japan Security Treaty mattered more than the Japanese peace constitution, half-in and half-out of the country, so to speak. Though thus peripheral, Okinawa is also “central” in that it constitutes the fulcrum on which the key security relationship between the US and Japan rests.
Japanese original text is available: https://apjjf.org/data/GavanSpeechRevised.pdf
[1] Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, London and New York, 2007.
[2] Gavan McCormack and Matsumoto Tsuyoshi, “Okinawa Says “No “to US-Japan Base Plan”, Japan Focus, 21 July 2008.
[3] Ryukyu shimpo, 5 September 2008.
[4] When a district court in the Tachikawa Case in 1959 found the US military presence in Japan in violation of the war-renouncing constitution, the US government applied intense pressure to have the judgment set aside. In due course it was, opening the path that has been followed ever since: the judiciary abstaining from questions of legitimacy of the security treaty because of its highly political nature and successive governments stepping up military commitments under the principle of “interpretative revision” of the constitution. (“Judicial independence infringed,” editorial, Japan Times, 3 May 2008; Odanaka Toshiki, “Shihoken dokuritsu e no oson kodo,” Sekai, August 2008, pp. 113-121.)
[5] See my “Okinawa and The Structure of Dependence”ã€▯in Glenn Hook and Richard Siddle, eds, Japan and Okinawa: Structure and subjectivity, New York and London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
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