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Preparing Okinawa for Reversion to Japan: The Okinawa International Ocean Exposition of 1975, the US Military and the Construction State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Vivian Blaxell
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“Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones:machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Japan's war for empire in Asia had many endings: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the imperial broadcast announcing acceptance of surrender terms, “suffering the insufferable”; signing of the surrender instrument on the deck of the USS Missouri; promulgation of a new constitution; the last execution of a convicted Japanese war criminal, Nishimura Takuma; American implementation of the Treaty of Peace with Japan; the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; establishment of the Asia Women's Fund to compensate the former comfort women (1995). But no one of those endings was more protracted and potentially more recuperative of Japan's view of itself than the reversion of the Ryūkyū Islands to Japanese rule on May 15, 1972 after 27 years of direct American military control. Reversion did not go uncontested among Ryūkyūans. Memories of the entrepôt Kingdom of the Ryūkyūs and its final annexation by Meiji Japan in 1879 persisted: independence was the impossible possibility. But the hand of the Pentagon had been so stern, so deforming on the Ryūkyūs, and the realistic alternatives so few, that reversion to Japanese sovereignty seemed better to many Ryūkyūans than continuing as America's China Sea military outpost complete with nuclear weapons. Yet, at the point of reversion and in the 38 years since reversion, Japanese sovereignty was a mask: the US occupation of the Ryūkyū Islands continued undiminished, but now Tokyo and not Washington paid most of the bill; Japanese sovereignty in post-reversion Okinawa continued “to be subject to the over-riding principle of priority to the military, that is, the US military.”

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Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 29 , July 2010 , e2
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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 2010

References

Notes

1 McCormack, Gavan. 2010. “The Travails of a Client State: An Okinawan Angle on the 50th Anniversary of the US-Japan Security Treaty,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 10-3-10, March 8. For other discussions of the continued dominance of the United States in Okinawa after 1972, see for example, Yoshio Shimoji, “The Futenma Base and the U.S.-Japan Controversy: an Okinawan perspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 18-5-10, May 3, 2010. Steve Rabson, “‘Secret’ 1965 Memo Reveals Plans to Keep U.S. Bases and Nuclear Weapons Options in Okinawa After Reversion,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 5-1-10, February 1, 2010.

2 1973. “Okinawa kokusai kaiyō hakurankai – Expo 75” Tsuchi to kiso, Vol. 21, No, 4, pp. 87-89. The Japanese Geotechnical Society.

3 In Robert W. Rydell. 1985. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4 Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, p. 209.

5 See Ley, D., Olds, K. 1988. “Landscape as spectacle: World's fairs and the culture of heroic consumption.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 191 – 212.

6 For just one example, see Yamaji Katsuhiko, “Takushoku hakurankai to ‘teikoku hantonai no shojinshu‘” [The Colonial Exposition and “Peoples of the Empire”], Kansai Gakuin Daigaku Shakaigakubu Kiyō, Vol. 97, 2004, pp. 25-40.

7 Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, Vol. 59, Winter, p. 4.

8 Tada Osamu. 2004. Okinawa imeeji no tanjō: aoiumi no karuchuraru sutadiizu [Formation of the Okinawa Image: Cultural Studies of the Blue Sea], Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shinpōsha.

9 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, p. 367.

10 Kikutake Kiyonori. 1973. “Kaiyō kaihatsu” [Ocean Development], Kaiyō kaihatsu no mondai: Kenchiku nenpō 1973, Architectural Institute of Japan, p. 543.

11 Figal, Gerald. 2008. “Between War and Tropics: Heritage Tourism in Postwar Okinawa” The Public Historian, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 91-94.

12 Tada Osamu, op. cit., pp. 1-4.

13 This data is taken from the official Nippon Foundation Library website. Accessed October 20, 2009. The Nippon Foundation was established as the Sasakawa Foundation in 1962 by Sasakawa Ryoichi who also founded the Japan Motorboat Racing Association and the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Association.

14 On Sasakawa, see for example, Richard J. Samuels. 2005. Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, and Karoline Postel-Vinay and Mark Selden. 2010. “History on Trial: French Nippon Foundation Sues Scholar for Libel to Protect the Honor of Sasakawa Ryōichi,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 17-4-10, April 26.

15 Tada Osamu, op. cit., p. 48.

16 Debord, Guy. 2002. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knapp, p. 2. Available as a PDF file here. Accessed and downloaded October 25, 2009.

17 Accessed October 21, 2009.

18 Tada Osamu, op. cit., pp. 107-109.

19 Quoted in Tada Osamu, op. cit., p. 105.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid, pp. 72-75.

22 Figal, Gerald, op.cit, pp. 91-94.

23 For a full discussion of the colonial folding of Shuri Castle into a Japanese topos, see Tze M. Loo. 2009. “Shuri Castle's Other History: Architecture and Empire in Okinawa,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 41-1-09, October 12.

24 Accessed March 2, 2010.

25 Pernice, Raffaele. 2004. “Metabolism Reconsidered: Its Role in the Architectural Context of the World” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 359.

26 See this link.

27 See this link. Accessed March 16, 2010.

28 Raisbeck, Peter. 2002. “Marine and Underwater Cities 1960-1975” ADDITIONS to architectural history XIXth conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane: SAHANZ, p. 1.

29 See this link. Accessed October 19, 2009.

30 Kikutake Kiyonori. 1977. “Kaiyō wo ningenkyojū kūkan to shite toraeru hitsuyōsei” [The necessity of taking the sea as human habitat] Kenchiku Zasshi, Vol. 92, No. 1126, p. 35.

31 Hoshino Mamoru, Ishida Minoru, Ninomiya Katsuya, and Nishitani Harumitsu. 1976. “A Study of Characteristics of World-First Floating City Aquapolis” A paper prepared for presentation at the Eighth Annual Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, Texas, May 3-6, 1976.

32 Kikutake Kiyonori. 1974. “Kaiyōkaihatsu to Akuaporisu” [Ocean development and Aquapolis], Kenchiku Zasshi, Vol. 89, No. 1084, pp. 785.

33 Kikutake Kiyonori. 1975. “Akuaporisu keikakujō no shomondai” [Various problems regarding the design of Aquapolis] Kenchiku Zasshi, Vol. 90, No. 1097, p. 798.

34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 425.

35 Tada Osamu, op. cit., p. 82.

36 Okinawa Taimzu, October 24, 2000.