Critical Asian Studies

33:2 (2001), 243-266

OKI N AWA FE ATU R E

TH E SACRI FI CE OF A SCH OOLG I RL

The 1995 R ape Case, Discourses of Power,

and Wom en ’s Lives in Okinawa

Lind a I sako Angst

In September 1995 relations between the United States, Japan, and Okinawa were
transformed when three U.S. servicemen brutally gang-raped a twelve-year-ol d
schoolgirl. Okinawan feminists called public attention to the rape, but it wasn’t long
before the media and political leaders shifted their focus to concerns about Oki-
nawa’s colonial history and its postwar occupation by the United States. A crisis of
sovereignty replaced the crisis for women and a particular girl, which gradually
faded from view, as did the agenda of feminist activists. Through an examination of
Okinawa’s contentious identity politics, the author traces the political trajectories of
Okinawa’s component groups and asks why this particular crime, in a long list of
crimes against Okinawans by U.S. personnel since 1945, resonates so strongly both
in Okinawa and in mainland Japan. The author argues that the rape has been enlisted
for its powerful symbolic capacity: Okinawa as sacrificed schoolgirl/daughter. As
such it is emblematic of past, prior narratives of Okinawan victimhood, most nota-
bly the Himeyuri students in the Battle of Okinawa. Feminists’ cooperation in a pa-
triarchal language that posits Okinawa as daughter within a national Japanese family
is problematic but necessary as a strategy in the fight for women’s human rights.

The 1 995 Rape of a Schoolgirl

On the night of 4 September 1995, as she walked home after purchasing a note-
book for her lessons from a neighborhood store, a twelve-year-old Okinawan
school girl was abducted at knife-point by three U.S. servicemen in a rented car
in the town of Kin and gang-raped. This was the Labor Day holiday for U.S.
ISSN 1467-2715 print / 1472-6033 online / 02 / 000243-24 ©2001 BCAS, Inc.
forces in Okinawa, and the three men — two Marines and one sailor — had
been partying all day in the capital city of Naha, an hour south of Kin. According
to a fourth Marine who was with them earlier in the day, the three plotted to “get
a girl” after failed attempts to meet women in Naha. Unwilling to join them
should they follow through with their plan, he left the others, but did not report
the plan to authorities or do anything to stop the impending crime.
The three then drove back to Kin, the location of their home base, Camp
Hansen. The old bar and brothel area outside the main gates of Camp Hansen
thrived during the Vietnam War era. Today this area, which relies on the patron-
age of dwindling numbers of U.S. Marines from the camp across the road, is
filled with time-worn, seedy sex and entertainment establishments that appear
to be on the verge of collapse. The remote town is a far cry from the lively, so-
phisticated entertainment district of Kokusai-dori (International Boulevard)
where the men had been, the hub of tourist commerce in downtown Naha. But
on weekends and on that particular American holiday in 1995, the Kin area was
full of the usual crowd of bar hostesses, prostitutes, service workers, and lonely
young Marines too broke or too uninterested to spend time and money in hip
Naha.
Lacking the means to venture far beyond the gates of the base, the Marines at
Camp Hansen gain a perspective on the world “outside the base” (Okinawa it-
self) through the circumscribed lens of base authorities. Tours of the island by
(military) bus are called “off-base” excursions, clearly indicating the perspective
soldiers adopt as their legitimate source of knowledge regarding Okinawa.
Both the land around them and its occupants are peripheral to their primary
(American) presence, despite (or perhaps because) they themselves are (unwel-
come) “guests” on the island. The tour guides are military personnel or affiliates
working for the USO. 1
Most Camp Hansen Marines are new recruits, sent from the United States
right after basic training. From the 1950s through the 1990s, troops who trained
at Camp Hansen and other bases in Okinawa were deployed to conflicts in the
immediate Pacific region and around the world, serving in the Korean, Vietnam,
and Gulf wars. Camp Hansen comprises the bulk of Kin, leaving most local resi-
dents along the narrow strip of town land that hugs Okinawa’s northeast coast.
Its primary purpose is to train recruits for artillery and other kinds of combat.
For most, the tour of duty on Okinawa is their first time abroad — and, indeed,
the first time many of them have ever been away from their American home-
towns. As part of the military services’ recruiting strategies, such tours of duty
are billed as cross-cultural experiences, opportunities to “see the world.” In
fact, recruits often find that, for a variety of reasons, including deficiency in lan-
guage skills, high costs of the local economy, and sometimes local resentment of
their presence, their lives are confined to the narrow world (and world view) of
the base.
The Marines in Kin are physically isolated from the general population, living
and working within the barbed-wire fences of the camp and far removed from
the urban centers of life on the island. Since the salaries of recruits are notori-
ously low (and the value of the dollar in 1995 was also low compared to the
244 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
yen), regular excursions off base are difficult if not impossible, except to the ar-
eas right outside the base that were established to cater to their needs.
Marines at Camp Hansen are also separated from others through the nature
of their work as combat soldiers, labor that is physically focused, much as was
their basic training. Through the nature of their work as well as their segrega-
tion in the base, their attentions are unavoidably, intensely, and intentionally
fixated on the manifestations of their own physicality. As well as being geo-
graphically, socially, and economically outside the bounds of ordinary Okina-
wan life, they most profoundly experience their difference from local people in
terms of their physical (including racial) difference. All of these factors suggest
that an occupation army of young, foreign men is a clear and present danger to
the local community, as Okinawans have long argued.
On the night in question, the three U.S. soldiers returned from Naha to the fa-
miliar terrain of Kin. Early September is still summer in Okinawa, and nightfall
offers some respite from the day’s subtropical heat and humidity. They cruised
the neon-bright area outside the gates of Camp Hansen before finally heading
for the darker local neighborhood streets of Kin. At 8 P.M., the world of a twelve-
year-old schoolgirl was forever changed by her brutal encounter with the three
servicemen. After pulling the girl from the street into the car, the soldiers si-
lenced and immobilized her by taping her mouth and binding her arms and
legs. They then took her to the remote beach military officials label the Kin Blue
Amphibious Training Area, a place that by day is hauntingly beautiful: a penin-
sula of jagged rocks jutting into the deep waters of a wild-looking, dark-blue
sea. At night the area is pitch black, and locals steer clear. Discarded beer bottles
reveal that Marines frequent the spot late at night, sneaking past the military’s
“off-limits” sign once the lights from local houses and streets are out. At this
lonely site, the three men repeatedly raped the girl, who was still bound, then
discarded their bloodied undershorts in a trash bin before abandoning her limp
form on the beach.
The girl managed to drag herself up to one of the string of houses beyond the
stretch of mangrove trees on cliffs overlooking the beach. She gave a description
of the car and the men (she even remembered the rental number of the vehicle,
according to one source), and the three rapists were apprehended within hours
of the crime. Although initially taken into U.S. military custody, as a result of
public outrage over the rape, the men were eventually handed over to the local
authorities, then tried and convicted in Japanese courts of law in Okinawa and
sentenced to time in a Japanese prison — both unprecedented actions.

Sovereignty, G ender, and P ostwar I dentity Politics

The abduction and gang-rape of the schoolgirl prompted powerful responses.
Locally these included the demand by women’s groups in Okinawa to publicize
the crime immediately and increase protection for women, particularly around
U.S. bases; renewed protests by landowners forced for decades to lease lands to
the U.S. military; and promises by then-governor Ota Masahide to heighten his
ongoing efforts to pressure Tokyo to rid the island of U.S. bases. Internationally,
its most profound effect was the sparking of a debate over the nature and role of
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 245
Kin’s time-worn, seedy sex and entertainment establishments, just outside the gates of
Camp Hansen (visible in the distance), appear on the verge of collapse as business owners
desperately try to keep businesses afloat. (Photo: Gerald Figal, 2001)

the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, particularly as it affected the Status of Forces

Agreement (SOFA) regarding the treatment of U.S. military personnel accused
of crimes abroad. 2 Protest of the rape also caused the postponement of Presi-
dent Clinton’s November 1995 Tokyo visit and triggered a premature end to
Prime Minister Murayama’s tenure as the first non-LDP (Liberal Democratic
Party) postwar Japanese leader in decades.
Soon after the rape, media coverage began to concentrate on the “larger” po-
litical issues of lands leased for U.S. bases, base returns, and troop reduction,
pointing out the long-standing victimization of Okinawa by both the U.S. and Ja-
pan. Initial coverage of the rape carried by CNN, the New York Times, and the
Asahi Shimbun showed images of women demonstrating in downtown Naha,
notably Naha City councilwoman Takazato Suzuyo,3 and of 80,000 people pro-
testing the rape at Okinawa’s Ginowan City Convention Center. 4 These reports
were soon replaced by editorials debating the base issue, 5 photos of Chibana
Shoichi6 sitting in protest on his ancestral property in Yomitan Village7 and of
vast, virtually empty tracts of land comprising the Marine Corps Air Station
(MCAS) at Futenma, cheek-by-jowl with the crowded urban sprawl of Ginowan
City.8 The rape itself gradually disappeared from the media.
Later media coverage of Okinaw a spoke metaphorically of the rape in
terms of the rapacious behavior of imperialist powers acting on a histori-
cally marginalized population. Commentators in the media and in the
anti-base movement shifted public intellectual and ethical focus. While
feminist groups protested the rape as the figu ration and potential rape of
all women in and around U.S. military installations in Asia, the Okinawan
246 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
political establishmen t and international media moved from a particular sex-
ual crime of violence against an individual, a young girl, to a crisis of sovereignty.
Prefectural officials and political activist leaders interpreted the rape more
broadly, focusing on the perpetrators’ identity and agency. Doing so empha-
sized the political/nationalist dimension of Okinawan autonomy over the more
immediate personal dimension of the act. Like the land, which is the main ob-
ject of political leaders’ concerns, women and the body of the schoolgirl be-
came significant mainly because they pointed out the crisis of sovereignty. Most
stories situated the rape not only among the many heinous crimes perpetrated
by U.S. soldiers against local Okinawans in the fifty years since the war, but also
within a broader historical context that included colonial and neocolonial op-
pression by Japan and the United States. In a representative example, ratified by
the New York Times, the Okinawa Times editorialized that it took the “sacrifice
of a schoolgirl” to make progress in the movement to scale back the American
military bases that occupy 20 percent of the land on this Japanese island.9
The female victim, a Kin schoolgirl, the original focus of concern, and the
rape (her rape) were hidden from view as they were appropriated by all sides,
including the prefectural government, various women’s groups, landlords, and
other activist groups throughout Japan. Her pain was transformed into a
symbol of national subjugation with its own narrative: the concerns of
Okinawans are routinely ignored, and Okinawa, as the feminized body poli-
tic, remains a site of contestation between contending political powers, local
and international.
Interpretations of the rape by political leaders and feminists, while very dif-
ferent, both make explicit unequal power relations. Although both groups have
appropriated the image of the rape for their own agendas, for feminists and
women’s rights activists the rape itself continues to inform a larger feminist pol-
itics as a violent physical act against a female victim. But within the protest for
Okinawan rights as part of Japan the rape is nearly invisible, operating almost
purely as a political metaphor. The abstracted idea of the ravaged female body,
victim of a misplaced and grotesquely twisted sexual desire has been juxta-
posed with Okinawan soil as the object of nationalist desire; the point has be-
come the rape of the body politic. In this reading, desiring an underaged girl
and inflicting violence on her both show the perversion of desire for the bases in
Okinawa. Both woman (or her representation) and soil are critical symbolic ele-
ments within (emergent) nationalist discourses.
When various groups appropriate the incident and the victim for larger polit-
ical purposes, they are participating in the complex field of identity politics in
Okinawa. By engaging feminist and other critical approaches, I wish to re-frame
and re-position questions of agency, determination, and victimization.
I first consider the reasons why this particular incident in the long history of
abuses committed by U.S. servicemen against Okinawan people and property
resonates so strongly throughout Okinawa and mainland Japan. I suggest that
the answer has to do with more than the literal (political), on-the-ground condi-
tions of the violation of a local child by soldiers of an occupying force at a partic-
ular moment in Okinawan history — though this cannot be minimized — and
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 247
must include a figurative (poetic) reading of the rape as the defilement and vic-
timization of an idea of pure and innocent Okinawa. Clearly, the rape of the
schoolgirl is enmeshed in these larger and complex discursive realities.
Second, I argue that through a feminist politics, we can counteract the
objectification of the twelve-year-old girl (and the rape event) and reclaim her
subjectivity, indeed her very humanity. We must return to the rape to under-
stand it both concretely and symbolically as an act of violence between perpe-
trators and victim. One aim of this article is to examine the power of rhetorical
strategies and agendas in politicizing and thus transforming the rape into meta-
phors for contemporary Okinawa’s condition of subjugation.
Third, I problematize the idea of a unified voice of Okinawan identity politics
as presented in the media explosion surrounding the rape and promoted espe-
cially in the rhetoric of the prefecture’s elected leaders at the time, who quickly
assumed the position of main spokespersons after the rape. While a unified
voice helps build momentum for social change, I question to what degree this
unified voice acts hegemonically in Okinawa to subsume and defer other voices
and agendas? By examining the anti-base protest movement, I hope to show
some of the internal Okinawan tensions — ideological, regional, classist, and
gender-based — that are welded together into local anti-base demands. Here,
too, I work from a feminist critique. As Judith Butler and Joan Scott have argued,
women’s voices are often lost in a generalized voice of identity politics,10 and as
Cynthia Enloe has pointed out, feminist agendas are often subsumed under the
rubric of the larger political good and deferred, ostensibly for the short term.11
The presumably more pressing needs of the “good of the political whole” — re-
patriation of land and political sovereignty, in the Okinawa case — replace the
“private” importance of the rape and the suffering of the young female victim.
The focus on sovereignty appears to have sidelined, on the grounds that it is
part of a less-central “feminist” agenda, the wider universal issue of women’s
(and general human) rights, as well as the initial efforts of local women’s groups
to improve safety and work/living conditions for all Okinawan women.12 I also
suggest, however, that feminist agendas must meet the same standards of criti-
cal inquiry, and feminists must recognize their own classist and regional politi-
cal biases and engagements in hegemonic practices.
The rape victim and the rape have been absorbed into existing political ideol-
ogies and discourses, local and international, in various ways, and redeployed
in a variety of representative capacities. The rhetoric used by activist groups ex-
plains the rape as something else: as a catalyst in local political leaders’
long-standing negotiations with the Japanese government over rights to land
and Okinawan sovereignty; 13 as the unwitting and unwanted object of post-cold
war military alignments in the transnational policies of Japan and the United
States, the world’s wealthiest and therefore most powerful “first world” coun-
tries; and as the subject of feminist campaigns to further women’s human
rights.
In each instance, groups draw upon and interpret particular aspects of a co-
lonial, precolonial, and postwar/occupation-era past to buttress their represen-
tations of the rape. Such conscious re-membering of Okinawan pasts generates
248 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
sometimes competing images of contemporary Okinawan identity, attesting to
the heterogeneous and mutable character of a politics of identity and ethnic
identity formation. Situated as they are within various, contending spheres of
power, these competing discourses are, by turns, dominant and dominated.
Finally, not only has the rape been redeployed in a representational capacity,
it has simultaneously been absorbed into and redefines existing symbolic ex-
pressions of Okinawan victimhood. It is as symbol that the rape/rape victim
functions most powerfully and critically for Okinawan identity politics. More-
over, particularly in the discourse of nationalism, as Carol Delaney tells us,
“Women do not represent, they are what is represented.…This observation
opens theoretical space to think about the differences between symbolization
and representation, often held to be the same.” In many countries, women sym-
bolize the nation, but men represent it, and often the nation is referred to as fe-
male and represented as a female statue. Most fundamentally, “because of their
symbolic association with land, women are, in a sense, the ground over which
national identity is played out.” 14
As symbol, the 1995 rape and the rape victim can serve in many capacities to
many Okinawans, and as such, the event and the girl made it possible, beyond
the immediate exigencies of political protest, for a variety of groups with differ-
ent goals and competing agendas to come together as a unified Okinawan voice
of dissent. Identity politics is implicitly one of resistance — in this case, against
the Japanese state and the powerful myth of Japanese cultural homogeneity,
and against U.S. military power. This article explores the nature and practice of
hegemony within a politics of protest, including the ways in which activists in
the Okinawa anti-war movement appropriate and apply the rape as a symbol of
Okinawan subjugation.

The Trope of the Sacrificed/P rostituted Daughter

The fervor with which Okinawans protested the rape — and by implication the
ongoing policies under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty — cannot be ex-
plained solely by a literal reading of the rape as an act of violence by members
of a foreign occupation force against a local girl. Beyond the outpouring of
outrage at the attack and compassion for the girl by Okinawans, it was also be-
cause of its powerful figurative capacity that this particular act of violence elic-
ited such a strong reaction. That is, a fuller understanding of Okinawan politics
requires us to consider how the image of a victimized schoolgirl resonates over
time as a symbol of both wartime and postwar Okinawa, and thus of Okinawa as
a victim of both Japanese and U.S. hegemony. The unity of the anti-base move-
ment in Okinawa today seems to rest on a shared symbolic understanding of
Okinawa and Okinawan history as violated and sacrificed schoolgirl/daughter.
Behind that unity lies the “split” to which Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe re-
fer; 15 that is, the pluralistic and often competing nature of interest groups, with
their “specific literal demands,” within the totalized idea of Okinawan identity
politics and the shared goals of greater autonomy and rights to confiscated land.
One possible way to return attention to the actual experience of Okinawan
women would be to focus on the direct experience of the raped girl herself. Yet
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 249
direct attention to the personal experience of the victim of the 1995 rape is not
possible. Her very youth, as well as the crime itself, which traditionally stigma-
tizes its victims, demands that she be protected through anonymity. It is pre-
cisely because she goes unnamed — and is thus anonymous — that the rape vic-
tim serves so well in a general symbolic capacity. Her youth contributes to this
symbolic power. As a child, she is innocent and pure; she does not yet know the
world of work or women. Her position shifts from that of general female victim
symbolizing (all) women to a more abstract, and therefore more generalizable,
category of victimization: the symbol of an innocent, pure, and feminized Oki-
nawa subjugated by the dominant powers of the United States and Japan.
The potency of this image of violated innocence and purity has great power
in Okinawa because it is already part of an existing iconography of modern
Okinawan victimhood.16 The Himeyuri, or Maiden Lily, Student Nurse Corps, is
an earlier, highly salient (because widely accepted and recognized) symbol of
Okinawan sacrifice. In 1945, 219 female students of the top two girls’ higher
schools in pre-surrender Okinawa were forced to accompany Japanese soldiers
into the battlefield as student nurses. Most were killed in the last days of the bat-
tle, trapped between Japanese soldiers and U.S. troops. In the minds of most
Japanese, the Himeyuri have come to embody an idea of Okinawa as sacrificial
victim. To both Okinawans and mainland Japanese, Himeyuri has become the
canonical narrative of Okinawan identity in the postwar era. In this scenario, the
socially peripheral becomes the symbolically central.

Tourists visit a reproduction of a “surgery cave,” with photos of Himeyuri nurses who died
at the end of the Battle of Okinawa. “In the minds of most Japanese, the Himeyuri have
come to embody an idea of Okinawa as sacrificial victim.” (Photo: Himeyuri Peace Museum)
250 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
 Since the rape, however, I would argue that mainland Japanese focus, al-
though not the Okinawan one, has shifted: the raped schoolgirl now acts as the
preeminent symbol of postwar Okinawan victimhood. In a crucial difference,
unlike the case of the Himeyuri, who were victimized by Japanese soldiers, this
time the active agent of violence is the U.S. military.
In each case, however, both countries are implicated: the Himeyuri were
quite literally caught between the Japanese and American forces on the battle-
field, although the schoolgirls were compelled to follow Japanese soldiers into
battle areas on the orders of Japanese commanders. Today once again, Okinawa
is caught between the political agendas of these two world powers (this time in
alignment), and the schoolgirl’s pain was a grotesque manifestation of Oki-
nawa’s powerless position. Thus, for Okinawans, the resonance with the story
of the Himeyuri Student Nurse Corps is enormous.
Drawing direct parallels between the rape of women citizens and the inva-
sion of land by foreigners is not unusual for nationalist discourse. Carol
Delaney makes this argument eloquently in the case of Turkey when she argues
that Turks conceived of the nation-state as their mother who was being raped
and violated. This motivated them to protect their threatened soil. 17 Takazato
Suzuyo, who led the Okinawan delegation to the 1995 Women’s Conference in
Beijing, explicitly links the 1995 rape of a young girl to an allegorized image of
Okinawa as a daughter sold by Japan into prostitution: “Okinawa is the prosti-
tuted daughter of Japan. Japan used her daughter as a breakwater to keep the
battlefields from spreading over the mainland until the end of World War II. Af-
ter the war, she enjoyed economic prosperity by selling the daughter to the
United States.” 18
As I argue at greater length elsewhere,19 oppositional discourse about
Himeyuri (as symbol, not representation) actually reinscribes Okinawa and
women’s marginality and subordination. The aging survivors of the Himeyuri
now find that, rather than speaking their own story, the story of their wartime
experiences “speaks” them. Transposable to any agenda and hence universally
appealing, it is as symbol that the Himeyuri are contained (the passive voice is
deliberate here) inescapably within competing discourses, just as they were in-
escapably engulfed by a prewar nationalist ideology that compelled them to fol-
low the orders of Japanese military commanders. On the battlefield they found
themselves physically positioned between Japanese and American forces. To-
day, they find again that their quiescence positions them discursively between
contending Okinawan and Japanese political agendas.
Similarly, referring to the 1995 rape victim as a sacrificed daughter figurates
her within an existing nationalist patriarchal discourse. This language is used
not only by male leaders of Okinawa’s political movement, but more disturb-
ingly by women in the feminist movement, as in the quote by Takazato, above.
This language reinscribes Okinawa as a dependent of the patriarchal family
state, even as Okinawans (and especially feminists) adamantly reject that role as
one imposed on them by coercive U.S. and Japanese policies.
The Himeyuri and the rape discourses both thrive on the relationship be-
tween the tropes of virginity and purity betrayed, on the one hand, and
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 251
nationalism, on the other. Purity seems to be a critical component of nationalist
symbols that are gendered female. In the Okinawa case, however, it is not the
purity of selfless motherly love mobilized in Turkey. Rather, the virginity of the
Himeyuri maidens as well as of the schoolgirl rape victim is celebrated here, as is
patriarchal authority, as the foundation of the modern nation-state. The rape
victim has been framed rhetorically by activists as a daughter violated because
her father failed to protect her. Moreover, if the violation is understood to be a
sacrifice, then the Japanese parent/nation is even more gravely implicated:
mainland Japanese lived a safer life under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty be-
cause their leaders agreed to sacrifice the Okinawan daughter. 20
Okinawan politicians and activists link the rape of the schoolgirl and the con-
tinued presence of U.S. military forces on Okinawan soil — that is, the rape of
Okinawa. In their rhetoric, the violation of the girl’s virginal body is equated
with the violation of the Okinawan body politic, and thus Japan’s discrimination
toward Okinawa.
Okinawans also build their identity politics today on a narrative of recon-
structed Okinawan history. They look to a precolonial past marked by peace and
prosperity. In so doing, Okinawans identify with a mythic, hence pre-political,
and thus pristine (pure) past.21 In this narrative, there are discursive parallels
between how the rape ended the schoolgirl’s innocence and defiled her purity
and how the colonization by Satsuma fundamentally changed (that is, politi-
cized) Okinawa. Both violations brought about a transformation toward a new,
critical self-consciousness: the end of innocence and the birth of a political
consciousness.
The appropriation and colonization of Ryâ kyâ by Satsuma in 1609 repre-
sents a fundamental shift in political status (the loss of real autonomy), while
the rape of the schoolgirl shatters and reformulates her personal identity
(through the loss of childhood innocence) and re-politicizes Okinawa through
an ongoing identity politics. Okinawans consciously reclaim and privilege as of-
ficial history a version of their past character as that of an inherently peace-lov-
ing people, despite the reality of precolonial internal struggles for territorial
power. This creates a seamless whole, short-circuiting Okinawan history. Yet
this is precisely the point: identity politics seeks out a compelling narrative of,
quite literally, mythic proportions about the collective self around which people
can rally. And to be compelling, the story has to be sufficiently accessible — that
is, simple. The 1995 rape, too, lends itself well to this purpose and provides a
positive reading of the idea of a unified Okinawan voice of protest. In this way,
myth and symbol operate in the cause of Okinawan identity politics.
This idealized history is linked with certain functional political and economic
ends. For example, Governor Ota originally proposed the development of Oki-
nawa as a free trade zone, which would bring in trade from the Asian region to
make the local economy more independent of Japanese government subsidies.
This has been defended ideologically as a “natural” strategy for a historically
peaceful, maritime Okinawa. Similarly, peaceful Okinawa is a critical ideological
component of a still-struggling economy of tourism. This idealized past offers
Okinawans the moral high ground, positing Okinawans against Japanese as a
252 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
traditionally non-arms-bearing people, and therefore, inherently non-aggres-
sive. It claims a virtually sacred genealogy rooted in a pristine, pre-political past,
used today to approve and shape a morally superior identity to those of the
mundane and profane politics of “first world” imperialist control.
Analysis of this strategy also raises the question of whether gender is
reinscribed in the international political relation between the powerful imperi-
alist nation-states of Japan and the United States, on the one hand, and occu-
pied Okinawa, on the other. This is an explicit area of difference among
Okinawans. In one view, Okinawa is gendered as woman by virtue of a negation
— the emasculation of Okinawan cultural and political autonomy. Other
Okinawans, who purposely seek to present an image of themselves as inher-
ently different from traditionally warlike, aggressive Japanese, however, read
their own cultural persona as “peace-loving” rather than “emasculated.”

H ow Can This Rape B e U nderstood in Fem inist Term s?

Although the 1995 rape may be read as an allegory of long-standing Okinawan
suffering, it also exists fundamentally on its own terms, prior to its appropria-
tion as a symbol of Okinawan victimhood. The power relations between the vic-
tim and the perpetrators of the rape are made clear by a focus on different
political realities in Okinawa, such as the presence of Camp Hansen, that gave
rise to the possibility of the rape.
Considered on its own terms — as an event with its own ontology, occurring
at a specific place and point in time — the rape evokes outrage as a particular act
of violence. Yet its facticity is eclipsed and eventually overlooked by the power
of its metaphorical, representational significance. Sharon Marcus, in “Fighting
Bodies, Fighting Words,” argues “against an identity politics which defines
women by our violability,” that is, against the political efficacy of interpreting
rape as the fixed reality of women’s lives. She argues for a shift in focus, from the
scene of the rape and its aftermath to “rape situations themselves and to rape
prevention.”22 Women need to empower themselves by understanding rape as a
process to be analyzed and undermined as it occurs rather than as a fact that is
accepted, opposed, tried, or avenged. 23 This challenges the view of rape as en-
dowed with a “terrifying facticity.”
To be sure, the rape is already a metaphoric relation even when described in
the most basic possible terms: as the violation of a girl(’s body) by three men.
Even so, attention to the event of the rape helps to unpack a variety of its possi-
ble meanings. First, it exists a priori as an action, specifically an act of violence,
and as such, it is clearly a political action on several levels. The act of the rape
consists of a fundamental power differential defined in terms of a(n inherent,)
gender(ed) asymmetry: a girl overtaken by three men. The shift in media repre-
sentation of the rape from violation of one girl’s body to that of the Okinawan
body politic signals an interpretive reorientation of the rape from the pri-
vate/personal realm to the public/political realm. Strictly speaking, however,
the political cannot be separated from the private in any instance of rape. As
Marcus has argued, “A rapist chooses his target because he recognizes her to be a
woman, but a rapist also strives to imprint the gender identity of ‘feminine
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 253
victim’ on his target. A rape act thus imposes as well as presupposes misogynist
inequalities; rape is not only scripted — it also scripts.” 24
Moreover, the affiliation of these men with the U.S. military — the very rea-
son for their being on Okinawa — is also a critically defining aspect of this basic
political relation. In this case, the girl’s gender may be primarily what drew the
men to her, but it is impossible to separate out issues of gender, race, ethnicity,
class, age, and national identity from the identity of the victim or the act of the
rape. Indeed, the rape is simultaneously the rape of an Okinawan girl by for-
eign — in this case, U.S. military — men who are part of an occupying military
force, as discussed earlier. Furthermore, the men themselves are also impli-
cated within these asymmetrical power structures. They imprint “the gender
identity of ‘feminine victim’ on [their] target” 25 and, in this case, they also im-
print the victim as “Okinawan.” Furthermore, the victim is a child, abused and
attacked by adults. The sheer physical power of three men over one girl must
not be overlooked, for this signifies once more the position of power that the
United States exercises over Okinawa.
As feminist activists argue, the rape represents the potential endangerment
of all women in Okinawa from the presence of thousands of mostly young, un-
accompanied men who train on a regular basis to fight and kill enemy forces.26
This threat is real. Since 1945, there have been thousands of examples of U.S.
servicemen assaulting local women. In this sense, the rape of a female Okina-
wan forces us to appreciate the daily reality of all women in Okinawa.

Okinawan I dentity P olitics — Official Voices

Although many interest groups, often with competing agendas, make up
Okinawan identity politics, the official representative voice of Okinawan pro-
test after the rape was elected prefectural officials, especially Governor Ota. Ac-
cording to Laclau and Mouffe, the nature of political struggle or “revolution” in
a bourgeois state, is (appropriately) representative — that is, carried out by an
elected official.27 The power of the protest movement in the last decade has, to a
large degree, been the result of Ota, whose tenure as governor (1990-1998) was
predicated on a platform prioritizing base removals. Many groups in Okinawa,
including feminists seeking improved safety conditions, have rallied behind this
cause, deferring their own agendas for now.
As Okinawans struggled economically and politically under the severe limita-
tions imposed by prolonged foreign military occupation, they have become in-
creasingly vociferous in their dissent against both the United States and Japan,
developing a strong local, national, and at times international voice since 1952.
Although most Okinawans say they are committed to the removal of the U.S.
bases, groups that comprise the anti-base movement also have specific and
sometimes competing local interests.28 For example, there are mixed senti-
ments among landowners whose property is within fences surrounding U.S.
bases. While some demand the return of their land, most have benefited from
the rents paid them recently by the Japanese government and are willing to con-
tinue this arrangement if well compensated. Immediate return of the land (un-
likely in any event) would impose financial hardships on them. At reversion in
254 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
1972, out of the 30,000 Okinawans leasing their land to the U.S. military, the
Anti-War Landowners group numbered 2,850. That number plummeted to 70
members by 1988 as a result of successful central government campaigns. In
1982 in response to this political maneuver, the One Tsubo Anti-War Land-
owners Association was formed to support the first group. The organization
buys rented land from owners who want to sell, then subdivides it and sells
one-tsubo (3.954 sq. yds.) portions to individuals in Okinawa and Japan. 29 In
this way, the number of landlords hostile to the bases has grown.
Identity politics is at one level a unified voice, but simultaneously internally
pluralistic, if not sometimes divisive. In Okinawa it is a combination of the strug-
gle for political and economic equity with Japan’s other forty-six prefectures
and recognition of Okinawa’s distinct cultural heritage from that of Yamato
(mainland) culture. This “same but different” argument is one of the tensions at
the heart of Okinawa’s internal politics. Most Okinawans want to resolve this
tension by enhancing Okinawa’s position within Japan, but a handful of
Okinawans, mostly intellectuals, make the case for an independent Okinawa.
The main tension, however, is the internal pull between groups promoting
their own goals within the anti-base movement and presenting the overarching
goal of a unified voice of protest. The news of the rape initially bridged that ten-
sion. Okinawans felt both a deep compassion for the raped girl and rage toward
the perpetrators, and they were profoundly affected by the brutality she suf-
fered. The crime, acting as a catalyst to mobilize Okinawans (including tens of
thousands of women for the first time), across all lines, was an important and
positive rallying point, galvanizing long-standing frustrations about U.S. bases
and the abuses inflicted by U.S. personnel against local people.
The rape itself has also been situated within a roster of other crimes or uneth-
ical acts committed by U.S. soldiers over the past fifty-five years. These include
robberies, beatings, and violence ending in manslaughter. That context has the
effect of minimizing the impact of, and thereby desensitizing us to, the horror of
this particular crime and to the crime as a rape, a violent sexual attack. In effect,
we are encouraged to read that history according to certain specifications: that
is, as a history in which U.S. servicemen have committed repeated offenses
against Okinawans — not just Okinawan women — in the years since 1945. In
this sense the gender dimension of the crime at hand is minimized or forfeited
to the larger ethical issues of human rights violations, violations of international
law by soldiers of a foreign occupation force, and felonious crimes against the
local civic order. Ironically, the metaphorization of rape as the violation of the
Okinawan body politic similarly takes the focus off the specific experience of
Okinawan women. This focus does not highlight crimes committed against
women alone, nor crimes committed by Okinawans or Japanese, against either
women or Okinawans in general. The focus is placed explicitly on the imperi-
alist relationship of U.S. military dominance over Okinawa, not on the un-
equal relationship between Japan and Okinaw a nor on the crime at hand as a
sex-related one — and therefore not on women, per se. These absences reveal
how the rape — and its unwilling subject, woman — have been appropriated
(and in effect erased) by all sides.
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 255
 In the period after World War II, most Okinawans expressed opposition to
the U.S. occupation and favored reversion to Japanese sovereignty. Okinawan
leaders argued that unity on this strategy was crucial to secure rights from both
the United States and Japan. The early years of protest were motivated by a de-
sire to improve desperate economic conditions. Although its economy has im-
proved recently, Okinawa remains the poorest of Japan’s forty-seven prefec-
tures with per capita income at 70 percent of the national average, and
Okinawans continue to live in the shadow of U.S. military bases.
The demands made by Okinawan interest groups within the anti-base move-
ment vary. They include demands for the return of or compensation for base
lands, often contaminated by toxins; policies and programs to protect women;
stronger environmental regulations against noise and other pollution gener-
ated by the U.S. military; and greater regular access to ancestral tombs located
on bases. Yet at the prefectural level elected officials argue for removal of all
bases, which does not address or may be at odds with many of the above issues.
Base removals do not guarantee compensation for U.S.-used lands nor do they
address how families will get along whose livelihoods, until now, depended on
leased lands. Women’s groups will still require policies and infrastructure to
deal with the influx of foreign male tourists, and women in the military service
industries, who may not be in the anti-base movement, are torn: on the one
hand, concerns for personal and family safety may lead to shared sentiments
against the presence of bases; on the other hand, their livelihoods have de-
pended on the work generated by bases.
Many Okinawans feel that development projects that enhance Okinawa’s
main industry, services for the military and tourists, have forced them to recon-
cile or compromise moral/political concerns and revealed schisms within the
protest movement. The proposed construction of a heliport off the coast of
Nago (for U.S. equipment transferred from MCAS Futenma in Ginowan City) is
not only politically controversial, but also raises concerns about environmental
issues, including the endangerment of the dugong manatee, the flightless na-
tive bird yanbaru kweena, and the habu snake, and the destruction of local coral
reefs by increased construction.
Furthermore, the local postwar politics of protest has been guided histori-
cally by a series of narratives about Okinawa’s relationship to the rest of Japan,
often drawing on images similar to that of the betrayed but (for some) still lov-
ing daughter. Constructed, dynamic, and often-changing, these discourses have
ranged from protest against Japan for “abandoning” Okinawa when the Treaty
of Peace was signed with the United States in 1951, to an embrace of Japan dur-
ing the anti-American reversion movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to
the present-day critique of Japan in an explicitly stated identity politics. Political
rhetoric is employed strategically to emphasize Okinawa’s role as either loyal
prefecture, oppressed colony, occupied territory, or a combination of these.
The ambiguity of Okinawa’s status within Japan remains useful to a politics of
resistance, and the redeployment of history (and memory) is critical strategy.
Citing their history as a weapons-free culture, as well as the list of military crimes
since 1945, Okinawans have pleaded with other Japanese for the removal of
256 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
The Kin Blue Amphibious Training Area…”a place that by day is hauntingly beautiful: a
peninsula of jagged rocks jutting into the deep waters of a wild-looking, dark-blue sea. At
night the area is pitch black, and locals steer clear.” (Photo: Gerald Figal, 2001)

U.S. bases. Their requests have become part of a larger struggle over how to re-
member Japan’s wartime past. Many insist that the national conscience cannot
rest until the internal problems of the Japanese house and its history are set in
order, including the placement of Okinawan wartime and postwar suffering.

G ender in I dentity P olitics

Referring to Homi Bhabha’s interpretation of nations and nationalist discourse,
Lydia Liu comments that by foregrounding marginal spaces and peoples of the
“nation-space,” the taken-for-granted boundaries of imagined national commu-
nities are clearly revealed. Distinctions among “us” and “others” are made and
provide the grounds on which resistance can take place. Okinawans raise the
question of the “otherness of the people-as-one” by highlighting their distinc-
tiveness from Yamato culture: Okinawan identity resists the model of a racially
and culturally homogeneous Japan. 30 The potency of that politics today derives
largely from the transformations inside and outside Japan since the end of the
cold war and the Sh¬wa emperor’s death. In particular, Japanese are contend-
ing with ways to compensate or make reparations to victims of imperialist ag-
gression, most prominently Asian “comfort women” who suffered as sex
slaves to Japanese soldiers. 31
This presents the problem of gender in postwar Japanese politics, which per-
sists on a range of fronts, including contemporary Okinawan politics surround-
ing the rape. The relationship between military aggression (including occupa-
tion) and sexual abuse of local women is not accidental; rather, they are
intimately linked, as Cynthia Enloe and Carol Delaney both argue. Enloe exam-
ines the profane dimension of the relationship between women, nationalism,
and war — including how base economies embed and exploit women’s work32
— while Delaney focuses on the ways in which the relationship between woman
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 257
and nation is elevated to the status of sacred symbol in nationalist discourses.33
In either case, they argue, woman is made an object in body or sentiment, com-
promising her (political) human rights.
This raises a critical problem with Okinawan identity discourse, which is pre-
cisely the problem suggested by Liu about Bhabha’s analysis: it fails to acknowl-
edge the individuality of the groups comprising that identity politics. That is,
Bhabha, in Liu’s estimation, makes the mistake of conflating distinct modes of
oppression and lumping marginal groups into one category, thereby “level[ing
it] down to homogeneous totality.”34 Okinawan political leaders, who insist on a
unified Okinawan voice, effectively silence the voices of other groups including
Okinawan women activists on measures promoting women’s rights. Five years
after the rape, women’s issues are still sidelined, this time by new prefectural
leaders as islanders protest the heliport.
The gender problem begs the identity of the hegemon: for feminist activists,
it is not just the Japanese state or the U.S. military, or even both. While
Okinawan feminists participate in the broader politics of Okinawan rights,
which situates itself against the hegemon of Japanese politics and culture, they
are engaged simultaneously in a universal protest movement for women’s
rights, in which the hegemon is male dominance and patriarchal institutions,
including within Okinawa.35
Yet some feminists are frustrated by the expectation that they defer their own
agendas “for now,” 36 in the interest of showing Okinawan solidarity. In linking
local social ills and the presence of U.S. bases, the prefectural government’s po-
sition invariably results in advocating the development of valuable base-leased
lands into profitable (generally tourist) businesses for Okinawans. In effect, the
rape becomes an opportunity for business and political leaders to emphasize
(and conflate) the volatile issue of U.S. occupation in ongoing discussions
about the economy.
Before the rape, in a presentation by a member of the Okinawa Prefecture
Policy Regulation Board at the Okinawa Peace Seminar ’94,37 issues of the envi-
ronment, peace, safety/human rights, and economic development were welded
together as a package. That development agenda does not necessarily insure ei-
ther the safety of residents or the protection of the environment; rather, given
the government’s bypass of feminist agendas in the interests of the larger good,
the mention of peace and the environment is simply a rhetorical way of masking
the bottom line — development for the sake of improving economic condi-
tions.38 U.S. base lands occupy pristine areas of natural growth that represent
the only green belts within densely populated cities. The kinds of development
being planned would work against an environmentalist agenda and would not
necessarily “promote peace” except as it displaces U.S. military operations.
Many Okinawans utter the words “peace,” “human rights,” and “development”
in the same breath. While it is imperative to foster a more independent
Okinawan economy, for some the economic issues seem to override all others,
including women’s safety — which is co-opted to serve development agendas.
An interesting contrast is the rhetoric of “women-peace-environment” by
feminists, not only in Okinawa but worldwide. At the Japan Foundation
258 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
European Women’s Study Tour on the Environment, entitled “Looking toward
Tomorrow: Women, Environment, Peace,” speakers addressed these issues in
their presentations to an assembly of several thousand (mostly) women in
Naha, in April 1994. The forum focused on changes at the grassroots level.
One example of the kind of grassroots “development” they encouraged is the
Churasa Soap Factory, an enterprise built and run by a woman farmer from
Onna Village. The woman recycles cooking fat and oil donated by local women
for her handmade soaps at a small, two-person factory, then sells the soap at
enough profit to maintain the operation and live modestly. This stands in stark
contrast to prefectural officials’ plans to develop base lands for major for-profit
resort industry use.
Economically, Okinawans today no longer rely as heavily on the business
from U.S. bases as they did before 1972, when the bulk of the labor force was
employed directly or indirectly in a military service economy. 39 (There is no reli-
able figure for the thousands of women who worked for U.S. service personnel
in eateries, shops, nightclubs, and brothels in and around bases.40 )
During his tenure Ota focused on improving Okinawan living conditions by
linking the removal of bases with the development of a more autonomous econ-
omy. Ota’s economic goals were reasonable. To feminists, however, their in-
volvement in the peace movement is a means of securing better lives for
women, and the prefecture’s economic development agenda — more closely
tied to Tokyo’s agendas for the island since Ota’s departure — does not directly
address safety and economic concerns of women, especially women dependent
upon base economies. Feminists argue that because these women work in the
sex/entertainment sector, the prefecture’s tourist-based development agenda
means that their livelihoods will continue to be precarious.
One feminist activist expressed concern that the Ota government took ad-
vantage of the groundswell of anti-base sentiment and Ota’s immense popular-
ity after the rape to promote an economic development agenda that ignored
women’s concerns. Ota is not necessarily anti-feminist, but after 1995 he
seemed less attentive to women’s demands. Feminist activists worked hard to
get a prefectural government contribution of 500,000 yen per year, or slightly
less than $5,000 in (1995-96), toward the funding of a long-awaited rape crisis
center (RAICO-Rape Intervention Crisis Center in Okinawa), which became a
reality in October at the initiative and with the support of women’s groups.
However, the Ota government refused to house the center in the prefectural
government building (the Kento), as Takazato and other feminists had hoped.
Since then, prefectural funds have been cut for this and for other social services.
Women active in the prefectural government were also upset that, although
they were part of a delegation from Okinawa to Washington in 1998 to argue for
base closures, they were merely visual props and were not given the opportu-
nity to raise their concerns about women’s safety. The Ota government did sup-
port and house the prefectural Women’s Affairs section in the new Kento build-
ing, located in the heart of Naha. The new governor, Inamine, however,
supports plans to replace the women running this section with a male bureau-
crat and perhaps to remove the Women’s Affairs section from its offices in the
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 259
Vietnam-era brothel, near Gate II (KAB), Koza. Payday for U.S. personnel means business
for local prostitutes in the form of long lines of patrons waiting outside drab and dilapi-
dated garages in the area outside Kadena Air Base’s Gate II. (Photo: Linda Isako Angst)

government building, suggesting that his administration does not see the
Women’s Affairs operations as a central concern of the prefectural government.
Moreover, the fact that the new government is responsible for encouraging the
development of a new base in Nago without attention to women’s safety indi-
cates not only that the rape has receded from view, but that the broader issue of
women’s safety has also been set aside. Feminists, however, keep the rape in
mind, as well as the safety of Nago women, as they continue to protest the con-
struction of the heliport.

The Rape within M eta-d iscourses of I dentity Pol itics

The appropriation of the rape — its extrapolation to represent larger issues of
sovereignty in Okinawa — signals its politicization, no matter how closely impli-
cated the rape event may be from the outset within the larger political realities
in Okinawa. In this sense, we might argue that the rape victim undergoes a sec-
ond metaphorical assault, no matter how unwitting or unintended. As I argue
above, a sense of compassion was the original impetus for Okinawans to rally
around the rape event, but they quickly allowed it to stand for other things.
The focus has shifted from the rape as a particular, physical act of violence to
the metadiscourses of Okinawan rights within the arena of international power
politics or of Asian women’s human rights, moving from the thing itself to the
representation of the thing as defined by two distinct lines of political move-
ment. One line emanates from a combination of political activists, labor union
leaders, and prefectural officials in Okinawa who often operate in coalition,
while the other is articulated by Japanese and Okinawan feminist activists.
Concerned with issues of sovereignty and economy when they invoke the
rape to protest U.S. military presence on their lands, some Okinawan men have
moved far from the rape itself. Women and the concept of gender appear to have
260 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
been erased from this portion of the political discourse. Feminists and other
women in Okinawa continue to foreground the rape within the larger discourse
of women’s human rights, distinguishing themselves from the other groups
comprising an ostensibly all-encompassing Okinawan voice. On a positive note,
the rape has served as a catalyst in bringing together women from all classes in
Okinawa, as well as Japanese and other Asian feminists, particularly from the
Philippines and South Korea, where there is also a long history of U.S. base
presence.
The shifting of focus, from the rape to its political representation, and again
from feminist protest to identity politics, reveals the nature and direction of
power politics in Okinawa. The discourse has been transformed from protests
voiced largely by women concerning human rights and headed by an outspo-
ken local feminist human rights activist, Takazato Suzuyo, to protests by (male)
landowners about rights to land, and hence to issues of national sovereignty
and political identity, led by former governor Ota. Women address the issue of
individual rights as they adhere in female bodies, while male politicians general-
ize in order to address the identity and rights of the body politic.
In her critique of Homi Bhabha, Lydia Liu warns that distinct and specific
modes of oppression must not be conflated. Each and every discursive system of
discrimination, such as the ones based on gender and sexuality, deserves an ex-
planation specific to its own historical practice.41 As “part of a patriarchal ideol-
ogy of nationalism,” Okinawan nationalist discourse has effectively eclipsed the
rape and issues of women’s safety.42 I suggest that the problem of an overarch-
ing Okinawan voice that both subsumes feminist/ women’s agendas and inter-
prets the rape of the schoolgirl metaphorically as the defilement of an image of a
pure and chaste Okinawa is its link with an inherently patriarchal political
outlook.
The language in which Okinawa is a sacrificed or prostituted daughter is in-
appropriate for use by feminists. It indicates a tacit acceptance of the nationalist
trope of the family state. The chastity of the victim as daughter becomes the lo-
cus of concern and the condition for regarding the rape as sacrifice. While this
language is not immediately in conflict with feminists’ language of the system-
atic violation of women’s civil rights through violence, it does not criticize a
sexual double standard in which raped girls are “ruined,” although it presents
that loss in the name of the greater good. The girl’s defilement and victimization
are presented as a sacrifice on the altar of nationalism; they are interpreted as a
patriotic act, a “sacrifice” by Okinawans for the good of the larger, national
whole.
It seems incongruous that feminists should espouse this patriarchal model,
yet perhaps Okinawan feminists feel that toeing the nationalist line is simply a
practical strategy for criticizing the structure from within. In other words, it may
be that they hope that by adopting this language, Okinawan feminists are, in ef-
fect, standing the state on its head, criticizing it by using the very language (of
patriarchal nationalism) by which it is legitimized. Feminism as subversion is
the most positive reading possible of what seems, on balance, a problematic
adoption of nationalist, patriarchal tropes.
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 261
 Women working in Okinawa’s base-related and (now) resort tourism-re-
lated sex and entertainment industry have long borne the brunt of their socially
stigmatizing and physically debilitating, dangerous work, including abuse by
their patrons. Protest leaders, who define an idea of collective cultural self
through reference to a pristine, precolonial past, draw upon images of purity
and chastity, such as the Himeyuri and the raped schoolgirl; yet the real prosti-
tuted daughters of Okinawa are excluded. Indeed, in many ways, bar and
brothel women are lingering and unwanted images of prewar era Okinawa as
low ethnic other. 43
Despite their many and long-standing sacrifices, these women are coded as
less deserving of public concern by many groups because they are not “pure.”
The lack of sensitivity to the fact that there is little work available to uneducated
women other than bar and sex work melds with the focus on the twelve-year-old
raped girl as the primary symbol of sacrifice and victimhood (just as the
Himeyuri served in this capacity for wartime and postwar Okinawa until 1995).
Yet the raped girl differs fundamentally from other women in Okinawa: pre-
cisely because she is a girl, her chastity places her within the protection of the
patriarchal family. Women working in the sex trade have always been relegated
to the lowest rungs of the social ladder, although in the first decades after the
war the survival of many Okinawan families relied on the incomes of these same
women — sisters, mothers, and other female relatives. Now that most Okina-
wans have managed to put behind them the hardscrabble years, the women
who still bear the burden of such sacrifices — now mostly older Okinawan
women or Filipinas working in Okinawa — have been forgotten, stigmatized by,
and therefore relegated to, work in bar and brothel districts.
Ironically, the very women who have experienced the life of the prostituted
daughter are excluded from public recognition as that particular symbol of
Okinawan victimhood. That is, Okinawan women working in the sex trade,
around bases and in the tourist industry, are ineligible for inclusion within the
protective embrace of the collective family, despite having sacrificed their own
reputations as “decent women” in the service of families. Feminists have often
been guilty of misrepresenting these women and claiming to speak for them.
Still, whatever criticisms we may have of feminist appropriations of other
women’s voices, in Okinawa they are at least willing to take seriously the situa-
tion of these forgotten women and include them in their agendas.

Conclusion
Today, Okinawans generally agree that the 1995 rape shows the need to reexam-
ine policies allowing U.S. bases on Okinawa. It has been used justifiably as lever-
age against Tokyo for the removal of U.S. bases and the return of Okinawan
lands. Feminist groups object to the focus on an agenda of economic develop-
ment of Okinawan lands (most probably by Japanese corporate capital, as has
been the case with resort development in Okinawa since the late 1960s), which
they believe leads to the marginalization and perhaps eventual exclusion of
what they consider to be the heart of the matter: protecting and improving
women’s lives. For example, to what degree would small businesses owned and
262 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)
run by women be protected? Much of the development that has already oc-
curred in Okinawa is by large, well-known Japanese corporations that may not
be interested in the needs of small business owners, women like Keiko and
Kaa-chan, who run a snack shop and bar in Kin, or the woman who operates the
Churasa Soap Factory in Onna.
Indeed, the issue of how women will figure in the service economy of tour-
ism is not addressed. While women have been expected to support men in their
political protests for Okinawan rights, the result has not necessarily been the
fulfillment of women’s agendas. Rather, women are expected to defer their
goals to the aims of Okinawan identity politics (read, economic development,
in this case).
From the perspective of a local government attempting to improve overall
economic conditions, there is a practical logic to moving from servicing the U.S.
military to servicing Japanese and Asian tourists. The infrastructure is in place:
shops catering to outsiders, recreational/entertainment outlets, and a history of
leasing land to foreigners. Because women in these industries will simply cater
to a different clientele, the problem of women seems to disappear.44
Okinawan feminists and other women with whom I have spoken fear that in
this way, women will continue to be the base of a new tourist economy pyramid,
mostly earning minimum wages and enjoying few if any employee benefits. As
Enloe suggests, an economically and socially marginalized existence will con-
tinue for these women within the sexual economy of tourism. The problem will
remain invisible as long as officials insist on deferring issues of women’s human
rights to the cause of Okinawan nationalism. Many local businesses have been
transformed by tourism, but the lot of most unskilled female laborers, espe-
cially those in the sex trade, has not changed. Assemblywoman Takazato is con-
cerned that women’s lives may not improve in the development scenario
painted by prefectural authorities; 45 this plan simply replicates a service econ-
omy that is patriarchal in its ideological origins, particularly in the ways that
work roles have been designated male or female. 46
By raising these issues, one of my goals has been to remind those of us who
so readily appropriate the rape for our various purposes of the person at its
core: the twelve-year-old Okinawan girl whose body was brutally beaten and
whose life was forever altered by that violation one night five years ago. Indeed,
I began to write about this rape in order to understand and work through how
to write about this tragedy as a feminist scholar — that is, without losing sight of
the girl herself. This is why it is necessary to revisit the rape. For it was initially
from compassion for the victim that most of us became “involved” in our various
ways with this rape. While the compassion may not have disappeared, most of
us have shifted our focus to the so-called larger political issues. A feminist poli-
tics calls on us to maintain and reaffirm, as much as possible, the connection to
the subjects of our study. In the end, we must remember that the victim is a
schoolgirl, a child in an Okinawan family in Kin deprived of her youth and inno-
cence. Whatever else we have had to say about the connection between her and
Okinawa belongs to the political world of adults, a world into which she was vio-
lently and prematurely thrust.
Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 263
 N otes
My thanks to Tom Fenton, Gerald Figal, Takashi Fujitani, Yoko Genka, David Howell,
William Kinzley, James Roberson, and especially Laura Hein for comments and sug-
gestions. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Washington and
Southeast Japan Seminar, George Washington University, 29 January 2000. This arti-
cle is based on my dissertation research on Okinawan women’s wartime memo-
ries, wartime and postwar experiences, and the development of their political
subjectivity.
1. This organization, often located at the main gates of U.S. bases, provides recre-
ational programs for service personnel abroad.
2. The clause that stipulated that U.S. soldiers be tried by military courts of law
was amended as a result of this trial. Accused offenders may now be tried in lo-
cal courts of law.
3. New York Times, 4 October 1995; Asahi Shimbun, 3 December 1995.
4. New York Times, 22 October 1995.
5. Asahi Shimbun, 22 November 1995.
6. Chibana Shoichi is the activist who burned the Japanese flag in protest of the
visit of the crown prince to the 1987 national sports meet held that year in his
village, which had been the site of one of the first “forced mass suicides” during
the Battle of Okinawa; Okinawans generally hold Japanese soldiers and Japa-
nese wartime propaganda responsible for these civilian atrocities.
7. Asahi Shimbun, 11 November 1995 and 9 March 1996; Japan Times, 25 June
1996.
8. New York Times, 3 December 1995.
9. New York Times, 9 March 1996.
10. Joan Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York
and London: Routledge, 1992).
11. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Inter-
national Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1989).
12. Admittedly, “solving” the problem of sovereignty — that is, ridding the island
prefecture of U.S. bases — may seem on the surface to present the conditions
women demand, namely, a safer living and work environment for Okinawans,
especially Okinawan women, freed from tens of thousands of mostly young,
foreign, male troops. However, given the unlikelihood of the United States and
Japan agreeing to the removal of U.S. bases any time soon, except in rare con-
cessions (such as the MCAS facility), the deferral of a feminist agenda is likely to
be a long-term, and therefore serious, problem in local identity politics. A re-
cent example is the minimal coverage of the international women’s summit
(entitled “Redefining Security”), sponsored by the San Francisco-based East
Asia-U.S. Women’s Network Against Violence, held in Okinawa in June 2000,
one month before the Group of 8 summit in July (personal communication, in-
cluding conference materials, from women’s summit organizers, May 2000).
13. “Ota Eyes Budget for Plebiscite on Future of Okinawa Bases,” Japan Times, 21
May 1996.
14. Carol Delaney, “Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Modern Turkey,” in
Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Yanagi-
sako and Carol Delaney (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 190, 191.
15. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: To-
wards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 11.
16. Linda Angst, “Gendered Nationalism: The Himeyuri Story and Okinawan Iden-
tity in Postwar Japan,” in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, spe-
cial edition, 20, no.1 (May 1997): 100-113.

264 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)

17. See Mike Molasky’s discussion of the imagery of raped Japanese prostitutes as
“an allegory of national crisis and shared victimhood” in The American Occu-
pation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, 1999). Molasky provides a provocative analysis of ways in
which the Himeyuri image enjoys popular appeal in the mainland, in part
through its sexualization. On the other hand, Lisa Yoneyama argues that mater-
nal purity is evoked in nationalist discourse on the atomic bombing of Hiro-
shima. Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of
Memory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
18. Takazato Suzuyo, “I Refuse,” in “Fort Okinawa,” special issue, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, July/August 1996.
19. Angst, “Gendered Nationalism.”
20. This fact has implications for Japanese democracy as well: The most contro-
versial aspect of the Himeyuri story is whether the girls sacrificed themselves
willingly or were coerced into dying, an ambiguity that speaks directly to con-
temporary Japanese democracy. If Okinawa was abandoned by the nation, are
Japan’s leaders really acting in the best interests of all the citizens? As one of Ja-
pan’s prefectures, doesn’t the very condition of Okinawa, essentially a territory
given over to an outside sovereign power, raise the question of political fair-
ness as well as effectiveness and legitimacy?
21. Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of
Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and
Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 387.
22. Ibid., 388.
23. Ibid., 391.
24. Ibid.
25. Marcus, 391.
26. Gwen Kirk, Rachel Cornwell, and Margot Okazawa-Rey, “Women and the U.S.
Military in East Asia,” in Foreign Policy in Focus, Interhemispheric Resource
Center and Institute for Policy Studies 4, no. 9 (1999): 2.
27. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
28. Tony Barrell and Rick Tanaka. Okinawa Dreams OK (Berlin: Die Gestalten
Verlag, 1997), 120-21.
29. Carolyn Francis, “The One Tsubo Antiwar Landowners Association,” Okinawa
Voice, May 1992, 1-5.
30. Lydia Liu, “The Female Body and National Discourse: The Field of Life and
Death Revisited,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transna-
tional Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 40.
31. See Kazuko Watanabe, “Militarism, Colonialism, and the Trafficking of Women:
‘Comfort Women’ Forced into Sexual Labor for Japanese Soldiers” in Bulletin
of Concerned Asian Scholars 26, no. 4 (1994): 3-16, and Laura Hein, “Cursing
and Celebrating the Victims: ‘Military Comfort Women,’” paper delivered at
Washington and Southeast Japan Seminar, Georgetown University, Washing-
ton, D.C., January 1998.
32. See Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases.
33. See Delaney, “Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Modern Turkey.”
34. Liu, “The Female Body and National Discourse,” 41.
35. See Sara Ruddick’s discussion of an “antimilitarist feminism in which feminist
and antimilitarist commitments are interwoven from the start.” In this sce-
nario, any man or woman becomes simultaneously feminist and antimilitarist
by linking war-making with masculine domination. My argument here ques-
tions the authenticity of — or at least the degree of commitment to — such
claims by male and other non-feminist leaders of Okinawa’s anti-base move-

Angst/The Sacrifice of a Schoolgirl 265

 ment. Sara Ruddick, “Notes toward a Feminist Peace Politics,” in Gendering
War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press,1993), 109-127.
36. Enloe notes that this is a common problem. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and
Bases, 19-41.
37. Okinawan prefectural government pamphlet, “Okinawa no Beigun Kichi” (U.S.
military bases on Okinawa), 30 July 1994.
38. See also scholar/activist Arasaki Moriteru’s critique of prefectural agendas.
Arasaki Moriteru and Nishi Tomoko, “Okinawa and the Struggle for Democ-
racy: An Interview with Arasaki Moriteru,” in AMPO: Japan Asia Quarterly Re-
view 28, no. 2 (1998).
39. Several sources estimate that in 1969, when there were 80,000 U.S. personnel
on Okinawa at the height of the Vietnam War, U.S. spending on the island
amounted to $260 million per year or 40 percent of Okinawa’s GNP. The per ca-
pita income of Okinawans was $580 per year. James Billard, “Okinawa: The Is-
land without a Country,” in National Geographic Magazine 136, no. 3 (1969):
423-88. See also Kyan Shinichi, ed., Okinawa no Rodo Keizai (Okinawa’s labor
economics) (Naha: Okinawa Labor Economics Office,1989).
40. Looking only at prostitution in Okinawa in 1969, three years before reversion
and during the height of the Vietnam War, Takazato reports that “7,360
Okinawan women were known to be involved in prostitution. Calculating Oki-
nawa’s population at 500,000, we can see that one out of every seventy
Okinawan women was involved in prostitution in that period. Furthermore,
calculating the age when women might become involved…as between 13-16 to
60, the ratio of women in this age group who may have been involved in prosti-
tution increases to 1 in 40.” This is reported in an article published shortly
before the schoolgirl’s rape: Takazato Suzuyo, “Testimony: An Okinawa
Swallowed Up by the Bases,” in the “Voices from Japan” edition of Women’s
Asia 1, August 1995.
41. Liu, “The Female Body and National Discourse,” 41.
42. Ibid., 43.
43. Angst, “Gendered Nationalism,” and “‘In a Dark Time’: Community, Memory,
and the Making of Ethnic Selves in Okinawan Women’s Narratives” (Ph.D. diss.,
Yale University, January 2001).
44. Suzuki Noriyuki and Tamashiro Satoko, “Okinawa no Fuiripinjin: Teijâ sha to
shite, mata gaikokujin r¬d¬sha to shite” (Okinawa’s Filipinos: As permanent
residents and as foreign laborers), in Ryâ dai H¬gaku (University of Ryâ kyâs,
School of Law Publishing) 58 (1997): 1-23.
45. Takazato, “Testimony,” 21-22.
46. See also Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, ed., Sites of Desire, Economies
of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997).

266 Critical Asian Studies 33:2 (2001)

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