The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 27 (2016)
Copyright © 2016 Ikue Kina. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Postwar US Presence in Okinawa andBorder Imagination:
Stories of Eiki Matayoshi and Tami Sakiyama

Ikue Kina*

Introduction
Twenty-seven years of military occupation by the United States madeOkinawa’s postwar experience significantly different from that of the rest ofJapan. As soon as US forces landed on the Kerama Islands in 1945, Fleet
Adm. Chester W. Nimitz issued the so-called Nimitz Declaration “suspending
all the political rights of the Japanese Imperial Government and declar[ing]the Nansei Islands under the jurisdiction of the United States Navy.”1 Thus
began the postwar US occupation of Okinawa during which Okinawa wasjurisdictionally and administratively separated from Japan to be
territorialized and militarized by the United States, which was anticipating
conflicts with Communist countries in Asia. In the fierce Battle of Okinawa
from April to June 1945, the lives of more than 200,000 human beings from
Okinawa, Japan, the United States, Korea, and other countries had been
wiped out. Soon, “about 320,000 Okinawan civilians and veterans and morethan 170,000 Okinawan repatriates who had lived overseas” began theirpostwar life “in civilian internment camps located in several places on theisland, where they were housed in shabby tents and mobilized by the US
military as labor to construct their base facilities and where they earned*Professor, University of the Ryukyus

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rations in a hand-to-mouth existence.”2
Postwar life in Okinawa also included the beginning of local resistanceagainst US colonialism. Confiscation of land by the United States formilitary use began as soon as World War II ended. In the case of Yomitan, avillage located in the central part of Okinawa, by the time the villagers wereallowed to return from the internment camps to their homes, 90 percent of
the village had been “requisitioned by the US military.”3 Military intervention
and land confiscation intensified further between 1953 and 1955 as theUnited States built additional military facilities on Okinawa Island to
reinforce their foothold in the Asian-Pacific region.4 The increasing numberof crimes committed by US personnel combined with the extraterritorialitythat released the perpetrators without sentencing also fueled local discontent
with the American-dominated reality that was devoid of justice and security
for Okinawans. Losing both their land ownership and the legislative right toseek justice, enraged Okinawans in this period engaged in political resistanceagainst the violence of US colonialism and finally moved toward reversion—or re-annexation, if considering Okinawan history in a larger perspective—
to Japan in 1972. The “Koza uprising,” which took place in Koza in 1970,
is considered to be one of the most powerful protests by Okinawan civilians
against the US Armed Forces. Ethnic studies scholar Wesley Iwao Ueunten
in his research on the civil resistance in postwar Okinawa deliberately
chooses to use the term Koza uprising—Koza hōki in Japanese—for the
event, which has historically been called the Koza bōdō, translated as the
Koza riot in English.5 Ueunten’s less common descriptive term is significant
because it recognizes that the volitional revolt was not merely a chaotic riot
but a revolutionary civil act reflecting Okinawans’ pent-up “discontent” that“lay just below the surface of the forced civility that Okinawans had todisplay toward American military personnel in order to survive as theirservice providers and entertainers.”6
Postwar Okinawan literature also arises as a postcolonial discourse
challenging the harsh reality of military occupation in which the basic
human rights of the Okinawan people were constantly violated and the livesof the local residents, after barely surviving the horrifying battle, were stillthreatened. Tatsuhiro Oshiro’s novel The Cocktail Party, for which he wasawarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1967, is a good example of a narrative
expressing the postcolonial struggles in Okinawa. Published when Okinawa
was going through political struggle against the US military, the novel
presented a sharp criticism of the military institution that, in the guise ofbeing a lenient occupier that was willing to put the occupied in an equalPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination

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position through what they called a “cultural exchange,” actually
manipulated the occupied people. The novel discloses that what appeared tobe friendship between the occupier and the occupied turned out to be
deceptive, as the narrator learns with bitterness when an American officer
whom he believed was a friend does not support his pursuit of justice for his
daughter who was raped by the protagonist’s American tenant, whom hehad also believed was his friend. Ironically, the incident happened while thegirl’s father was away from home at a cocktail party with military officers.
The novel acutely uncovers the distinction between the personal and thepolitical when a humane exchange involves inhumane institutional laws, abase of insuperable hypocrisy concealing the occupiers’ institutional
motives.
While Oshiro’s narrative describes how institutions and politics interferedwith equal relationships between Okinawans and Americans in postwar
Okinawa, Okinawa’s encounter with the United States was presumably far
more complex than what is merely defined with such terms as “political”
and “institutional,” since organizational order and hierarchy could be often
disrupted by irrational moments of human needs, such as the emotional
responses, hunger, and sexual desire. This colonial space that embraces
human subjects coexisting in contact in an unequal power relationshipresonates with what the Chicana writer and critic Gloria Anzaldúa calls a“borderland,” the colonial space she envisions at the US-Mexico international
border:The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World
grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it
hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form athird country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places
that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a
dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague
and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an
unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.7
Okinawa or, more specifically, the base towns such as Koza and Kin,
populated with Americans, can be regarded as a borderland where local
Okinawans’ postwar history and culture constituted a “lifeblood of two
worlds merging to form a third country,” especially given the “emotional
residue” from the irrational moments in their relationship with Americans
not only as US soldiers but also as human subjects.

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In comparing Okinawa to the borderland that Anzaldúa delineates in her
theory, I wish to illuminate the US presence in postwar Okinawan literature
through exploring the kind of colonial space and the image of Americancolonizers that writers from Okinawa created in their literature as theyreconstructed their place and community in a new living reality that requiredof them a new literary imagination to accommodate strange “others.” To
illustrate this point, I first examine Okinawan writer Eiki Matayoshi’s 1977
story “The Wild Boar That George Gunned Down” as it exemplifies a
unique narrative that subverts the hierarchical positions of the occupier andthe occupied. Matayoshi’s imagination of the psyche of the other creates
what I would call a border character whose consciousness and actions
embody the complexity of his/her position located between the dominating
and the dominated subjects.
I further explore the American presence—or absence—and the image of
Okinawa as a borderland in Okinawan novelist Tami Sakiyama’s “Kujastories,” a series of short stories written and published between 2006 and2007. All the stories are set in the base town “Kuja,” which is fictional but
evokes a strong connection with the actual base town Koza in central
Okinawa, where, during the occupation, local establishments consisted
largely of places of entertainment for US military personnel and the place
Ueunten aptly defines as “a nexus of internal, external, and sexualcolonialism.”8 I shall discuss how the communal experience of Kuja, as areminder of Koza and a “nexus” of Okinawans’ day-to-day encounter with
Americans, exemplifies the postwar Okinawan experience.

The Dual Persona of the Occupiers
While Okinawans found US militarism to be another colonizing agent
that replaced Japanese imperialism and brought destruction to Okinawa,
they also experienced a dual aspect of the American occupiers—they were
not only intimidating invaders but also saviors who provided livelihood andmet their desperate basic human needs in the aftermath of the devastating
battle. Sekihō Ikemiyagi, an Okinawan writer and poet who was born in1893 and died in 1951, imagined in his poem, written perhaps immediately
after the Battle of Okinawa, “A Can of Food” an American other through a
can of food, the material reality that sustained the lives of the Okinawan
people:Postwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination

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Doesn’t canned food from America taste good?
How splendid a can of turkey is!
The shape of sausage is funny.
What a smart idea a chicken-egg can is!
Looking at those cans of food,I imagine the landscape of an American farm,
The pasture lush green,where a fragrant eighteen-year-old maiden
with sweet eyes
strokes a cow.
After all the human labor,
the cows in the pasture
are turned into food in the cans,which came all the way here passing from one horizon to anothersinging to the rhythm of sailors’ songs.
Eating canned food,I smell the body of American mountains,listen to the voice of seagulls gliding on the blue waves,and look at the blue moonlight on the mast.
The cans,
having been through a long pilgrimage,
you will soon make my blood and flesh
and will go on the path of pilgrimage,modestly and happily.
I will kiss you, the can,now that I’ve survived starvation
and been baptized by the burning flame.
I truly learned the nobility of peace and life
and the happiness to say a blessing
even to a can of food.9
The poem exhibits that, in Okinawa, the United States, which was adestroyer, simultaneously rehabilitated the former battleground, thus
making starving residents believe that the foreign occupiers were trustworthy.
The dual persona of American occupiers reflects the self-contradictory
attitudes of Americans, both toward their role as ruler and in their faith indemocracy. Etsujiro Miyagi, in his 1982 study of the US view of Okinawa
in the US military’s postwar public discourse, indicated US communication
strategies for achieving better control over Okinawa in the 1950s. According

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to Miyagi, there was a strategic process for US achieving their goal:
To begin with, the US military advertised the economic advantages tobe gained from the new military facilities and pushed ahead with theirconstruction, expecting to get full support from the local residents. The
military then promoted economic reconstruction, as they had plannedat the same time to educate local people about democracy. This policy
involved optimistic slogans that convinced local people that the twocompletely contradictory ideals, “the Keystone of the Pacific” and “theShowcase of Democracy,” could be actualized in Okinawa with ease
as if they represented a single set.10
Miyagi, just as Oshiro in The Cocktail Party, intuited the gap between theappearance and reality of the American occupiers who, on the one hand,professed support for democracy, while, on the other, often ruled throughstrong official measures.
Miyagi further points out that the United States condescendingly viewed
the Okinawan people as needing to be “instructed, educated, and preserved.”11
The Americans appeared to wish to model themselves as democratic
Christians eager to help Okinawan war survivors start their postwar lives, as
if they were fulfilling a foreign mission. To demonstrate their goodintentions, the Americans abolished the military government and launcheda civil government, the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu
Islands (USCAR), in early 1950. Miyagi notes that the USCAR supported
Okinawa in sustaining traditional Okinawan culture by such actions asconstructing a museum to encourage Okinawans to increase their selfrespect toward their own culture and cultural identity, which had been
undervalued by the Japanese. And beginning in the 1950s, they constructed“cultural centers” at multiple locations in the Amami and Okinawa regions.
They also published such magazines as Konnichi no Ryukyu (The Ryukyus
today) and Shurei no hikari (The light in the land of courtesy) to actively
promote cultural exchange between “Ryukyuans” and the United States aswell as to pacify the anti-US sentiment that was driving Okinawan toward
reversion (reannexation) of Okinawa to Japan as its 47th prefecture.12
At the same time, the United States enacted the other prong of its cultural
policy of “restraints and prohibitions,” for example, by censoring the local
media, literature, and films to prevent the spread of Communism and antiUS sentiment.13 The USCAR, therefore, was both a pacifier and a surveillant,
striving to put every Okinawan under its control. Masanori Nakahodo, aPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination

195

critic of Okinawan literature, observes that the modern conveniences
brought to the island by the Americans, such as automobiles, appear in theearly works of postwar Okinawan novels. Lights, another modern
convenience, including “all-night lamps,” “electric lights,” and “search
lights,” are also recurrent literary motifs, creating a striking contrast between“the darkness covering the hamlets of local people” and the “the lightpicking out the military facilities.”14 Nakahodo speculates that “fear”
motivated the dominant group, who were well aware of their need to defend“the land, which was not theirs but that they confiscated by force,” and thatthey tried to “get rid of the darkness and create a world that does not havenights” as a way to overcome their fear.15 In postwar Okinawa, the occupiers
were required to negotiate between two contradictory personas: the powerful
agent who has control over the new land and the powerless subject who
confronts constant challenges and rebellion from the original landowners.
The contradictory aspects of the occupiers’ dual personas tell us about theparanoia of those who lived side by side with death in their line of duty.
Although Japan and Okinawa under US military occupation played theirroles of supporting the US wars against Korea and Vietnam, and bothbenefited economically from those conflicts in the process of post–WorldWar II reconstruction, Okinawa’s experience as the occupied was different
from that of Japan because Okinawa went through a higher intensity andlonger duration of irrational interaction with the United States. The
Okinawan historian and critic Osamu Yakabi, quoting from Okinawan
historian Masaie Ishihara and Okinawan journalist Akira Amakawa, claims
that one of the distinctive features of “the US rule over Okinawa” is that“the battlefield,” “the occupation,” and “the rehabilitation” “went on as asimultaneous and multilayered process,”16 “[w]hereas the colonizer,” Yakabi
adds, “comprehends these three events to happen one after another as if they
always form a linear chronological trajectory.”17 Okinawa after World War
II went through a rehabilitation in which the Americans presented themselves
as humane caregivers as well as violent combatants for whom the war had
not ended. Okinawa remained a part of their battlefield, a place in which
violence and death were as real as they were in Korea or Vietnam.
As mentioned, postwar Okinawa assisted the US military in fighting its
subsequent wars. The Vietnam War, the war the United States waged toprevent Communism from taking over South Vietnam, was a traumatic
experience for both US military personnel stationed in Okinawa and the
Okinawan people. Thomas R. H. Havens states that Okinawa became “thejumping-off point for the first 15,000 American combat troops” to enter the196

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Vietnam War in 1965, and that “roughly 50,000 United States troops were
stationed in the Ryukyus during the conflict, staffing ammunition depots,
supply warehouses, training grounds, ports, air bases, missile sites, andcommunication centers.”18 About three-quarters of the goods consumed
each month by US forces in Vietnam were sent from Naha, and support
activities “totaling more than a million flight operations during 1965–1973”
took place at Kadena Air Base.19
Havens further states that the “jungles of Okinawa were training areas foras many as 9,000 United States Army Special Forces (Green Berets) at thepeak of the war, and troops from South Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand,
Taiwan, and South Korea also underwent training there”20 and that “Okinawa
was a major storage ground for poison chemicals, a port for American
nuclear submarines, and the site of thirty-two nuclear-tipped Mace B
missiles in launch shelters beneath the ground.”21 The Vietnam War resulted
in unexpectedly high casualty rates for the United States and came to be
known as “America’s longest war.”22 After the first dispatch of US troops
from Okinawa to Vietnam, the war bogged down, and more than 10,000
American deaths were recorded between 1967 and 1969, the highest numberof all the years during the war from 1956 to 1975.23“The Wild Boar That George Gunned Down”:
A Reverse Appropriation of Consciousness
Eiki Matayoshi’s story “George ga shasatsu shita inoshishi” (The Wild
Boar That George Gunned Down), was published in 1977 in Japanese andanthologized in an English translation in 2011.24 The novel came out four
years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in which the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam “promised not to support subversion in the South andthe United States pledged to withdraw all remaining American troops from
Vietnam.”25 The US intervention in the Vietnam War ended, but the war left
deep scars in Okinawa, where American soldiers were stationed before
being dispatched to Vietnam or after they returned. It is not surprising thatthose soldiers were insensitive in the degree of violence with which theytreated the Okinawan people, especially in a jurisdictional environment inwhich they were rarely prosecuted. In “The Wild Boar That George Gunned
Down,” the novel’s characters, such as the servicemen John, Wilde, andWashington, with whom the protagonist, George, reluctantly hangs out
during the period of the Vietnam War, are depicted as immoral rapists andcolonizers who assault local civilians with no hesitation or guilt and whoPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination197

are seen as typical US servicemen by local Okinawan residents.
Matayoshi has George, however, play a different role from those violent
soldier types: he is a border character. The story is told by a third-person
limited narrator who speaks for George, a young American soldier who has“just arrived from the States.”26 The story’s other characters are describedsolely from George’s point of view. In this way, Geroge’s voice as an
occupier is under the control of Matayoshi, the author, who belongs to theoccupied. In other words, Matayoshi appropriates the voice that belongs to
the colonizing power in creating George’s voice so that it reflects theauthor’s imagination of his consciousness. Considering that it is usually theoccupier whose perceptions dominate, Matayoshi, an Okinawan, enacts areverse appropriation of the colonizer’s voice by entrapping his internal
reality in the subversive imagination of the colonized.
The story begins in one of the bars located in an entertainment district
where local hostesses rake in money from American soldiers, especiallythose who have just returned from Vietnam:
Two days till payday. John and the others had long since run out ofmoney, and George had no more to lend them. Hostesses at the bar nolonger sat with and entertained them as they usually did. George
noticed that the hostesses kept looking toward the entranceway, waitingfor other customers to arrive. George wanted to leave but couldn’t say
this to his companions. They seemed now to be feeling awkward
themselves, after the berserk frenzy of a few moments before. Theirbottle of whiskey had been emptied long ago. Requests for more were
met with demands for “cash, cash” from the hostesses, who no longer
let them touch their breasts and thighs.27
A real-life Okinawan rock musician, Yukio Kyan, who would perform for
Americans nightly at entertainment establishments in Koza, reflected in his
memoir on how American soldiers who were stationed in Okinawa during
the period of the Vietnam War would pay an outrageous amount for a glassof liquor: “The foreigners would place 1,000 dollars or 2,000 dollars on
their table . . . and the skilled hostesses would let them pay 1,000 dollars for
all the glasses they drank up.”28 According to Kyan, American soldiers
would pay for cocktails called “ten-dollar, twenty-dollar, or even fiftydollar zambi (zambini)” at a time when a general worker’s average monthly
salary in Okinawa was thirty or forty dollars.”29 The American soldiers who
returned from Vietnam, whom Kyan calls “yamagaeri (men back from the

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mountains of Vietnam),”30 appear in Matayoshi’s story as “yama-otoko”(“men back from the wilds”). They are “hardened by combat in numerous
battles” and thus, George imagines, would never be “free from thoughts ofwar.”31 George, at the beginning of the story, “looked down on these men,”whose minds, regardless of whether they were on or off duty, were “always
in a state of battle readiness.”32
The bar where George hangs out with his fellow soldiers turns into a kindof extended battlefield where Okinawan women are the frequent targets ofviolence induced by the soldiers’ “state of battle readiness.” The story
depicts George’s fellow soldiers getting drunk and eventually adopting thedeviant behavior of sexually assaulting a hostess, the last one leaving theirtable to join a group of yama-otoko who would enable her to make moremoney. One of George’s companions, Washington, with his jackknife,
gradually corners the woman, and when she manages to flee to the restroom,
he follows her and rapes her inside it. Washington also cuts other hostesses
while they attempt in vain to rescue their colleague. The bar owner isuseless, too; he rushes to the scene only to find he can do nothing but “settle
the matter with money” because he well understands that a local businessthat has “lost favor with the American authorities” and “ha[s] their A-sign
licenses revoked” would “suffer bitterly as a result.”33
The A-sign license was a sign on which appeared a large red letter “A.”It indicated that the establishment had been certified by the USCAR, passing
an administrative inspection to prove it had met the prescribed standards
and was thus approved for patronage by US servicemen. Takashi Yamazaki
explains that the official purpose of the A-sign system, which was in effectin Okinawa from the 1950s to 1972, “was more or less consistent”: “to granta business license for patronage by US military personnel only to thoseestablishments that met the architectural and hygienic standards prescribedby the civil administration, in order to protect the health and welfare ofmilitary personnel and their families from sex-related businesses orrestaurants.”34 The US military forced local businesses to submit to its
authority by suspending those that failed to comply with its requirements ordisobeyed its orders.
While George’s companions—John, Washington, and Wilde—are
portrayed as violent, arrogant, and crazy colonizers who abuse theirauthority, George does not seem to fall into the same category, partly
because of his physical inferiority—he describes himself as “short andskinny.” Because of this he feels his boss “hates” him.35 He is an easy target
for bullies who see him only as a good source of money to spend on womenPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination199

and drinks. George naturally despises his companions, but he is equally
disgusted with the victims, who forget about their maltreatment in order tocontinue to make money. He isolates himself from his surroundings andhates everyone around him. After a riot caused by the above mentioned rapeincident, George “was getting edgy” because of his inability to “join in withthe others,” and his internal monologue is filled with violent thoughts:
This is like the rampage John and the guys went on a month ago. Not
surprising that they did that. But I did nothing then, either. Also notsurprising. A few days later the women in the bar were hanging allover John and the others. I sat there remembering every detail of what
had happened, but not those stupid women. They’re hopeless. Even
Washington, now holed up in that restroom, won’t be turned away nexttime he shows up at this bar. Tomorrow night will roll around andthey’ll pour his drinks for him and let him fondle their breasts as if
nothing ever happened. I’d like to take his jackknife to that moustache
he’s so proud of, hack the dammed thing off, skin and all. And shootevery last one of the hostesses. They’re all disgusting. Too bad I don’t
have my pistol with me. I should always carry it. Hearing the bullets
shattering the whiskey bottles, the lights, the neon signs, the jukebox.
Hearing everything getting busted, that’d be sweet. Firing slugs into
the throats of all these repulsive people, laughing with their mouths
wide open. That’d be good, huh?36
George’s impulse to kill the hostesses, the victims, may sound insane, but
his insane thoughts may have been the sanest, considering that his fury was
directed at the victims because they ignored their rage and pain for money.
In fact, there were many Okinawan women who suffered from the indignity
inflicted by rapists from the military. According to a record of cases ofviolence against Okinawan women by US military personnel, which wascompiled by Okinawan women activists Suzuyo Takazato and Harumi
Miyagi, the first rape case involving an Okinawan women happened as
early as 1945, a few months after the landing of US forces on Zamami
Island, and it was followed by other horrible cases, including the 1948
unbelievable incident in which a soldier raped a nine-month-old baby girl.
The record they compiled lists sixty-six cases from 1945 to 1995—in most
instances, the perpetrators were not sentenced and were often just deported—and the number has continued to increase up until the present time. Takazato
and Miyagi note that in 1967 “the robbery and bar-hostess murder cases

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committed by servicemen who had returned from Vietnam happened insuccession, and it was said in those days that a woman going alone into therestroom at a bar for US servicemen was suicidal.”37 They also quote fromthe November 1949 issue of Time magazine, which stated: “The US military
stationed in Okinawa became a convenient dumping place for servicemen
who were either useless or outcasts, and they committed a total of eighteen
crimes in the six months prior to September.”38
What is unique about the narrative “The Wild Boar That George Gunned
Down” is that George’s consciousness is imagined and created based on
Matayoshi’s understanding of American soldiers. Though the islands were
populated by a large number of US military personnel, communication
between those soldiers and Okinawans was generally limited and superficial
because most Okinawans, including Matayoshi, were unable to speak in
English. Therefore, though the character George is one of the US soldiers
who dominated the island community, he is nevertheless Matayoshi’s
creation, and it is the creator’s choice to present this character as an ordinary
American man who has not yet become fully militarized. Michael Molasky
views the narrative as “a bold and ambitious strategy on Matayoshi’s part”
because “few readers at the time were predisposed to view Americans as
either weak or deserving of sympathy.”39 Molasky further indicates that thestory “begins to break down the stereotypical image of the distant andinvincible occupier, and by doing so it stakes out a new, confident stancetoward the United States—a stance that may only have been possible after
America’s humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam.”40 Whether Matayoshi’s
narrative led to “a new, confident stance toward the United States” isuncertain, but Matayoshi does create a narrative space that enables both thecolonizer and the colonized to share the feeling of injustice prevailing ineach other’s context. George resists the reality in which both his fellow
soldiers and their victims are numbed with violence, while the Okinawans
in the 1960s resisted US colonization, which subjugated indigenous people
and violated their basic human rights. The people living in the social realityof Okinawa during the period of the Vietnam War were just as frustrated as
the story’s protagonist because of their inability to change the reality they
were facing.
The majority of George’s narrative is his internal monologue, and thus
George is represented as a character deprived of his voice, just as Okinawans
were under US rule. George is unable to express himself to his companions
because they never want to listen to him. Thus, the figure that George calls“Emily” becomes a pivotal element in the story, as she enables George toPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination

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distance himself from his nightmarish reality. “Emily” emerges in George’s
thoughts whenever he is on the verge of losing his sanity. He escapes into
her, although her identity, her relationship with George, and even whether
or not she is real are never clearly disclosed in the story. Emily is his internalcorrespondent, whom he believes would listen to him and give him a voice.
George wants to “write a letter to Emily” when he tries to reject John,
Washington, and Wilde’s demands that he lend them money for drinking or
when he is desperate to run away from the bar where hostesses are constantly
trying to seduce him into a sexual relationship.41 Emily seems to embody
the ideal of womanhood, as opposed to the nonwhite prostitutes, women
mainly from Okinawa and Japan, but it is also possible to interpret her as
representing for George an innocent, decent, conscientious, and virtuous
American person living in their homeland untouched by the disasters of
battle.
George isolates himself from militaristic values; but he has nowhere,
except for Emily, to run away to. He again speaks to himself: “Soldiers
should be big and strong, [Lt. James] says. Why did they drag me into themilitary, if that’s the case? I haven’t the slightest desire to be here” (198).
The identity of the agent “they” in this statement is not clear, but George
gradually blames the unspecified “them” for confining him to this island.
His internal voice of protest against “them” is finally expressed when an
Okinawan prostitute complains to George because he refuses her sexual
service: “All of you have an Emily back home and all of us are fools to betaken in by you. Your Emily’s [sic] are wrecking us Okinawan women.”
When George responds to her that he “can’t stand being in a filthy hole like
this,” the woman says, “Then why come?” George yells back at her:
“What else is there to do on this island? No woods to walk in, no open
spaces to ride a horse in. Nothing. Just this tiny little island with its
disease-filled nights, its disease-filled bars. There’s not one single
thing, not a single person here for me. You being one example. Isn’t
that right?” The alcohol seemed to have lubricated his throat, and as
his words flowed out he felt an inexplicable pleasure in saying them.
(199)
Following a broken silence and a humiliating assault by black soldiers inthe black district (kokujin gai), a racially segregated area in the entertainment
district, George breaks out of his confinement in the ultimate way: violence.
He decides to bring down an old Okinawan man collecting scrap metal near

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the military fence. George finds in the old man “the eyes of the enemy,”
which are “greedy eyes, open wide with terror and malevolence” and “theeyes of the Vietnamese” (207), and is convinced that his “enemy is just sucha person,” with the same skin color and physique as the old man. George
pulls the trigger, telling himself that “that thing wasn’t a person” but “[a]wild boar come looking for food” (209). Molasky analyzes that “George
eventually grows paranoid and believes that even the old Okinawan man . .
. is mocking him.”42 While it’s true that George believes this, I argue that it
is also possible that the reason for George’s amplified fear, which could be
more than “paranoia,” is his sense of being trapped in what he calls “a filthy
hole like this” or “this crummy place,” which precisely means the island towhich he is confined.43 The impossibility of escaping from the place, fromthe strange others—Okinawans who are supposed to be the subordinate
occupied but who somehow disable his superiority, and the blacks who areinferior to George in the United States but are afforded a superior positionin Okinawa because of their presumed physical strength as soldiers, andfrom “them,” the dehumanizing military institution or the nation-state
controlling it—drives him to shoot the old Okinawan man with perhaps aslight hope that he “won’t be sent to the front lines in Vietnam” and “maybe
they’ll ship [him] back to the States” and he will “be able to see Emily.”44
The moment George chooses to pull the trigger, the strange others, theinvisible force he has been so eager to flee from, invade his consciousness
and eventually collapse his selfhood, surging toward him from the otherside of the border line, which was supposed to “distinguish us from them.”45

Kuja Stories: Taking American Others into
the Memory of the Place
Tami Sakiyama, an Okinawan woman writer who is Matayoshi’scontemporary, does not directly create the narrative voice of an American
character as Matayoshi does; nevertheless, she does portray her hometown
Koza as a narrative space in which US military personnel constitute part ofthe community and the communal memory. To be more accurate, Koza is
not Sakiyama’s hometown, but, in the seven stories that she calls the “Kujaseries,”46 she expresses her attachment to “Kuja,” or the fictional version ofKoza, a town that accommodates diverse kinds of people and that was “anexus” of Okinawan’s postwar contact with Americans.47 For Sakiyama,
America exists in Koza, a place equivalent to what Anzaldúa terms a “borderculture,” in a borderland or “a third country” where Okinawans andPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination

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Americans, as human subjects in a hierarchy, “merge” before “a scab forms”
over the hemorrhaging wound from the contact between them as occupierand occupied.48 Sakiyama’s stories manifest that, even after the 1972
reversion to Japan when the town changed its name from Koza to Okinawa
City, as if the old name was abolished to overwrite the town’s historicalexperience as a red-light district, America continues to exist in Koza’s
communal memory, or communal unconsciousness, if not consciousness.
The community that went through the often painful contact with the US
military should not forget the pain of their people who died after experiencing
sorrow and anger in that contact. People who happen to know they existed
are responsible for remembering them as part of continuing communal
memory; therefore, forgetfulness or historical amnesia deserves some kindof punishment in the Kuja stories. “Pingihira zaka yakō” (Nightly walk up
Pingihira Hill Road), for instance, depicts an old woman who fails toremember the past and thus is driven to hang herself. She is a resident of“the town,” presumably Kuja, where most of the residents are not “native”
but “strangers” who moved away from their hometowns because of “various
complicated reasons” and settled in this town.49 People who have lost all
hope of living, even in this town, are destined to go to the place the residents
call “Pingihira,” a hill with a small woods, and hang themselves “from the
beefwood or mokumao tree, which is so large that it proudly presents itself
as the tree most suitable for a person to hang themself” (67).
The story depicts an old woman, who not only sees but also hears things,
walking up to Pingihira to offer a prayer to expel something that may be thecause of a “strange phenomena”: “a girl in a white dress” (68–69) witnessedby the townspeople in their neighborhood. The people in town all share theunderstanding that the girl in the white dress must be the six-year-old victim
of a rape and murder that happened “in those days” (69). The townspeople
feel the pain that the girl must have gone through and feel sorry that the girl“with her mouth clenched so tightly that her lower lip may be torn and hertiny fists” could do nothing else but wander from one corner of the town toanother. The most sensitive residents start wandering at the start of theevening as if they are the girl, and wandering like her is “the only way tomourn over the sorrow of the girl who was raped and killed” (69). The
members of the whole community are required to remember the girl as if
she is part of their own selves.
The story also implies that there will be punishment if the memory is notproperly preserved. Feeling a summoning power, the old woman walks up
to Pingihira to meet the spirit of a dead young woman who tells her “she

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was born in the town fifty years ago and killed herself in this wood” (75).
The young woman speaks as if the old woman already knows who she is,but the old woman cannot remember her. To the old woman, the ghost says:“All you have to do is to remember. Ask yourself whether you and I are
related. All you need to do is remember what you have in your mind. To
remember is the most important thing to do” (76). As the old woman
struggles to remember the girl, who appears to be of mixed race, what theold woman gradually remembers is her own past “when she engaged in thebusiness of catering drinks and women to the hungry soldiers” (77) andraising two mixed-race girls—one Japanese/Caucasian and the otherJapanese/African American—who were abandoned by her employees andwhom she turned into prostitutes after she molested them verbally andphysically every day. When the old woman still cannot remember who theghost is and asks the spirit to tell her who she is, the young woman only
replies, “Auntie, I am not supposed to tell it to you. If you, Auntie, don’t
remember me, I will be nobody” (79). Eventually, with no confidence about
whether the ghost in front of her is the woman she abused in the past andfailing herself in remembering who the young woman is, the old woman
realizes she “has failed in the prayer rite” (79) for communicating with theyoung girl’s dead spirit and hangs herself.
In the Kuja stories, a recurrent motif is that the main character or the firstperson narrator is persistently and unreasonably pressured to remember the
past of the town or place through ghostly voices from the past. In “Pingihirazaka yakō,” American characters are absent; however, their shadows or“emotional residue” are embodied in the presence of mixed-race girls as if
they are physical evidence of the occupation left on the islands. The mixedrace Okinawan is a constant reminder of the community’s past, especiallythat of women whose existence and experience are buried in the memory of
the town in silence and invisibility.
Sakiyama’s mixed-race characters are not always silent or invisible. In
the story “Kotōmu dūchuimuni” (Monologue in a dream of a solitaryisland), the writer creates a powerful mixed-race character, Mariya Takaesu,
who refuses to be silenced. The first-person narrator, a thirty-nine-year-old
non-Okinawan photographer, falls in Kuja as he attempts to take aphotograph of “the landscape of the edge,” which, to his mind, means “theplace that exists between landscapes that do not match or the torn seam
where all abandoned things hide themselves, in other words, the hole of theworld, or the border that gazes back at the world.”50 Looking for objects tophotograph in Kuja, a place that may satisfy his expectations, he comesPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination

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across an ad for a theater performance by the Kuja Performing Group anddecides to be one of the few audience members for the performance. It is a
one-woman stage performance by Mariya Takaesu. Mariya begins theperformance—her interaction with the audience—with her story, revealingthat she is a “Pinā,” an Okinawan word for a Filipina:
Yes, as you see in your wide-open eyes, I am a Pinā. Do you knowwhat a Pinā is? . . . Yes, Pinā means a Filipina. Look at my jet-black
hair, big round eyes, and thick lips that are so sexy, that especiallyattract middle-aged guys. . . . And, because of the circumstances before
I was born, which means, because of a reason I cannot be responsible
for, I was born into how I look now, but, to tell you the truth, I was bornand raised in this town—sorry for not being what you expected—yes,
the town you are in now. Well, the town stays the same now and then,
the town where Americans come and go incessantly, you know. (90)Mariya continues her narrative by explaining that she is mixed race, bornto an Okinawan mother and a Filipino American US serviceman, but
simultaneously she challenges the understanding of the audience by tellingthem she is not what they may expect from how she looks; she even identifies
herself as “Japanese” because she speaks Japanese, though she is skeptical
about whether the idea of speaking Japanese is a good reason for being
Japanese (93). She goes on with her performance, telling her story, which isat the same time the history of her hometown from her perspective:
In those days, every alley of this town was flooded with American
soldiers coming and going between here and the battlefield. . . . The
soldiers often caused troubles, fighting over one woman or just being
edgy . . . . You wonder why do I know such things? Because I was achild living in a rental house behind an establishment that provided
women for American soldiers. (92)Then Mariya tells about her grandmother, who raised her affectionately
after Mariya’s mother abandoned her. Mariya’s monologue reveals that
mixed-race children are not relics from the past, buried in silence andinvisibility, but border characters who are part of the present and keepers ofthe memories of the community and residing in that third perspective thatemerges from a gap or borderland.
Locating mixed-race characters, not outside or at the margin of the206

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community but within the community, Sakiyama entrusts these characterswith connecting the past and the present as well as cultures and races—
Americans and Okinawans with their border consciousness. A mysterious
young man in the story “Psugurukaji nu hukiba” (When a Psuguru windblows),” Hiroshi, who appears to be black but speaks to the protagonist in“graceful Japanese,” is another border character who connects the past andthe present, or what is about to be forgotten with what remains in people’s
consciousness. Hiroshi brings the protagonist, a woman writer, to an old
woman called Hide Uechi, who is his grandmother, so that the writer canhear her story. According to Hiroshi, Grandma Hide suddenly lost her voice
thirty years earlier and hasn’t said anything comprehensible since, but hebelieves that Grandma Hide is desperately trying to tell her message, and heis willing to help recover her lost language.51 It is, however, a strange request
because Hiroshi also tells the writer that he is somehow able to comprehend
what Grandma Hide articulates. Perplexed, the writer proposes to Hiroshi
that he should listen to his grandmother’s story. Hiroshi replies, “The only
thing I can do is to repeat what she says like a parrot. I can repeat her voice,but I cannot give its meaning, interpret, or paraphrase what she says . . .
because, when I listen to grandma’s voice, I become her and she becomesme.”52 While Mariya’s and Hiroshi’s mixed-race bodies are physicalevidence of the US presence in postwar Okinawa, they are part of the placeand its memory. Sakiyama presents mixed-race characters, with their borderconsciousness that encompasses both sides of the dividing line between
different subjects, as sustainers of the memory of Okinawan communities
that are filled with both pain and resilience.

Conclusion
Although American influence is not as predominant as it used to be in
Okinawa after it was annexed by Japan in 1972, it is still omnipresent in
Okinawa’s communal memory. Postwar Okinawan literature attests to theviolence committed by US military personnel; however, it also enables
Okinawans to imagine the occupiers’ fears of insanity and concern to protect
themselves from corruption. The works of two Okinawan writers, Eiki
Matayoshi and Tami Sakiyama, make it clear that the postwar US presencein Okinawa and Okinawans’ contact with Americans affected Okinawan
writers’ literary imagination in regard to the other. Contact, however, does
not always happen within a situation of institutional restraint; nor does it
necessarily refer to the contact of subjects who are in an unequal powerPostwar US Presence in Okinawa and Border Imagination

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relationship. Matayoshi’s and Sakiyama’s stories portray borderconsciousness in both the characters and in the narrative voice, which are
attuned to the weakness, fear, and insanity that commonly obsess both thecolonizer and the colonized.
Though seventy years have passed since the end of the Battle of Okinawa,
Okinawa still suffers from a colonial situation that has been supported by
the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement since 1960. Despite the bilateralestablishment of the Special Action Committee on Okinawa in 1995, anagreement to reduce the burden on the people of Okinawa has not been fully
implemented. As expressed in the stories by Matayoshi and Sakiyama, aborderland is not only a confining space that accommodates the experienceof the socially marginalized and subordinated but is also a space thattransforms voices into discourses that are resistive and subversive to theoppressive power. The Okinawan community can volitionally claim theposition of borderland in order to urge the United States and Japan toreconsider what it means to be normal and to question the legitimacy ofbilateral agreements that reveal nothing but insane colonialism toward
Okinawan citizens in their uphill battle for decolonization.

Notes
1 Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education, “History of Okinawa,” Ryukyu Cultural
Archives, http://rca.open.ed.jp/web_e/history/story/hisindex5.html, accessed August 1,2015.
2 Susumu Asato, Kurayoshi Takara, Masayuki Tana, Kazuyuki Tomiyama, Kikou
Nishizato, and Fusaaki Maehira. Okinawa ken no rekishi [The history of Okinawa
Prefecture] (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppan, 2004), 302. My translation.
3 Eiko Asato. “Military Bases and the Destruction of Village Communities,” in Islandof Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, ed. Laura Heinand Mark Selden (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 230.
4 Ibid., 303–4. To represent their rule over Okinawa as less militaristic, the UnitedStates shifted the military government to a civilian one, launching the United States Civil
Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) in 1950.
5 Wesley Iwao Ueunten, “Rising Up from a Sea of Discontent: The 1970 Koza
Uprising in US-Occupied Okinawa,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized
Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 110.
6 Ibid.
7 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San

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Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1999), 25.
8 Ueunten, “Rising Up,” 108.
9 Etsu Miyazato, ed., Okinawa, onna tachi no sengo: shōdo kara no shuppatsu[Okinawa, women’s postwar life: Starting on the burned land] (Naha: Hirugi-sha, 1986),
29–30. My translation.
10 Etsujiro Miyagi. Senryōsha no me: Amerika-jin wa Okinawa wo dō mitaka [Theoccupiers’ eyes: How did Americans see Okinawa?] (Naha: Naha Shuppan, 1982), 92–
93. My translation.
11 Etsujiro Miyagi. “Amerika bunka tono sōgū: Tai Okinawa bunkaseisaku to sonojuyō ni kansuru shiron” [Encountering American culture: a thought on American cultural
policy for Okinawa and Okinawa’s reception], Shin-Okinawa Bungaku [New Okinawan
literature] 89 (1991), 15.
12 Ibid., 15–19.
13 Ibid., 17–18.
14 Masanori Nakahodo, Amerika no aru hūkei: Okinawabungaku no ichi ryōiki [Thelandscape with America: A topic of Okinawan literature] (Naha: Nirai-sha, 2008), 160–
61. My translation.
15 Ibid., 162.
16 Osamu Yakabi. “Jūsōsuru senjō to senryō to hukkō” [The multilayered battlefield,
occupation, and rehabilitation], in Okinawa no senryō to nihon no hukkō:
shokuminchishugi wa ikani keizoku shitaka [The occupation of Okinawa and rehabilitationof Japan: How did colonialism continue?], ed. Toshio Nakano, Tsuneo Namihira, andOsamu Yakabi. (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2006), 25. My translation.
17 Ibid.
18 Thomas R. H. Havens, Fire across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan 1965–1975(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 87–88.
19 Ibid., 87–88.
20 In the training area located in the north of Okinawa Island, there was a so-called
Vietnamese village (Vietnam mura), where the actual villagers from Takae were
mobilized to act as targets for US soldiers drilling for guerrilla warfare in tropical jungles.
See Ryukyu Shimpo, April 15, 2015, http://ryukyushimpo.jp/ news/storyid-241771storytopic-1.html, accessed July 1, 2015.
21 Havens, Fire across the Sea, 88.
22 Anthony Best, Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Joseph A. Maiolo, and Kirsten E. Schulze,International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond, 3rd ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2015), 312.
23 US National Archives, Statistical Information about Fatal Casualties of the Vietnam
War, “DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by Incident or Death Date
(Year) (as of April 29, 2008),” http://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/

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casualty-statistics.html, accessed July 1, 2015.
24 Eiki Matayoshi, “The Wild Boar That George Gunned Down,” in Living Spirit:
Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa, trans. David Fahy, ed. Frank Stewart and
Katsunori Yamazato (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).
25 Best, International History, 324.
26 Matayoshi, “Wild Boar,” 188.
27 Ibid., 188.
28 Okinawa City Office, Rokku to Koza [Rock and Koza] (Naha: Naha Shuppan, 1998),
150–51. My translation.
29 Ibid., 151.
30 Ibid.
31 Matayoshi, “Wild Boar,” 188.
32 Ibid., 189.
33 Ibid., 191. Bars and restaurants had to be licensed if they were to receive an A-sign.
34 Takashi Yamazaki, “USCAR bunsho kara mita A-sain seido to baishun, seibyō kisei:
1970 nen zengo no beigun fuukitorishimariiinkaigijiroku no kentō kara” [Examining theA-sign system and the control of prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases in
USCAR documents: a reading of the minutes book of the Vice Control Committee in1970], Okinawa kōbunshokan kenkyū kiyō (Journal of Okinawa prefectural archives) 10(2008), 40. My translation.
35 Matayoshi, “Wild Boar,” 198.
36 Ibid., 191.
37 Kichi guntai wo yurusanai kōdōsuru onnatachi [Women activists never acceptingbases and military], “Beiheiniyoru sengo Okinawa no josei ni taisuru hanzai” [Thecrimes committed against women by US servicemen in postwar Okinawa], data compiled
by Suzuyo Takazato, Harumi Miyagi, and Kichi guntai wo yurusanai kōdōsuru onnatachi,
http://www.jca.apc.org/~uratchan/ gbmarines/henji/jyoseinohigai.htm, accessed July 1,
2015. My translation. See also Ueunten, “Rising Up,” 105–8.
38 Women activists, “Crimes committed against women.”
39 Michael S Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literatureand Memory. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 179.
40 Ibid.
41 Matayoshi, “Wild Boar,” 194.
42 Molasky, American Occupation,179.
43 Matayoshi, “Wild Boar,” 209.
44 Ibid., 210.
45 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 25.
46 Telephone conversation with Tami Sakiyama on March 18, 2007.
47 Ueunten, “Rising Up,” 110.

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Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 25.
Tami Sakiyama, “Pingihira zaka yakō” [Nightly walk up Pingihira Hill Road],
Subaru 29, no. 1 (2007), 66. My translation.
50 Tami Sakiyama. “Kotōmu dūchuimuni” [Monologue in a dream of a solitary island],Subaru 28, no. 1 (2006), 86. My translation.
51 Tami Sakiyama. “Psugurukaji nu hukiba” [When the Psuguru wind blows], Subaru
29, no. 5 (2007), 147. My translation.
52 Ibid., 48.
48
49