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Okinawa's G.I. Brides: Their Lives in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

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Okinawa Prefecture comprises more than one hundred islands with a population of about 1,400,000. The islands reach to the southernmost tip of Japan where the climate is subtropical. In 1945, after the end of the Pacific War, the U.S. placed Okinawa under military occupation and constructed an extensive network of bases there. The American military seized many privately-owned lands for this purpose, violating basic human rights and igniting widespread protests. Relations between the American military and local residents were strained, to say the least. Yet, even under these circumstances, large numbers of American soldiers and Okinawan women fell in love, married, and moved to the United States. Okinawa's G.I. Brides: Their Lives in America explores this little-studied aspect of postwar history during the U. S. occupation period involving multiple confrontations between the U.S. military and local residents before Okinawa reverted to Japanese administration in 1972. The book presents interviews of women who discuss their lives in the U.S., their opinions of America, and their feelings about Okinawa. The original Japanese version, Okinawa: umi wo watatta Beihei hanayome-tachi, was published by Kōbunken in 2000. The English version based on it was completed in 2016 and published in 2017.

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Research Article
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2019

References

Notes

1 Occupation marriage policies are discussed in Chapter III, “American Soldiers and Okinawan Women.”

2 At this time most local posts of veterans organizations in the south were segregated. While this is no longer official policy, many posts throughout the U.S. remain predominantly white or black.

3 See here, March 24, 2011.