Intimacy across the Fencelines

Sex, Marriage, and the U.S. Military in Okinawa

Rebecca Forgash

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501750410
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Intimacy Across the Fencelines examines intimacy in the form of sexual encounters, dating, marriage, and family that involve US service members and local residents. Rebecca Forgash analyzes the stories of individual US service members and their Okinawan spouses and family members against the backdrop of Okinawan history, political and economic entanglements with Japan and the United States, and a longstanding anti-base movement. The narratives highlight the simultaneously repressive and creative power of military "fencelines, " sites of symbolic negotiation and struggle involving gender, race, and class that divide the social landscape in communities that host US bases.

Intimacy Across the Fencelines anchors the global US military complex and US-Japan security alliance in intimate everyday experiences and emotions, illuminating important aspects of the lived experiences of war and imperialism.

1

INTERNATIONAL MARRIAGE IN JAPAN’S PERIPHERY

Popularly referred to as the “Gateway to Yanbaru,” Nago City (population 62,868) is an administrative unit encompassing a number of towns and villages separated by sugarcane and pineapple fields and large stretches of mountainous subtropical forest scattered between the east and west coasts of Okinawa’s main island. It connects to Naha and other cities to the south by two commercial highways that hug the coastlines and the Okinawa Expressway, a more direct high-speed toll road completed in 1975. Nago town, the administrative seat of Nago City, overlooks Nago Bay on the west coast of the island and has been an important market town and commercial hub since the fourteenth century. Today, Highway 58 is the town’s central artery, lined with grocery stores and fast-food restaurants, large franchises selling books and music, and the ever-present convenience store. In contrast, the streets of the old town center contain the occasional bar or “snack,” family-owned household goods and soba shops, and more than a few vacant storefronts. While fishing, agriculture, and animal husbandry continue to be important, Nago is also home to the Orion Brewing Company, a cement manufacturing plant, a number of sugar refineries, a regional hospital, an agricultural college, and Meio University. In other words, Nago’s primary identity is not that of a “base town.”

In 1996, however, the Japanese government announced plans to build a new U.S. Marine Corps helicopter base in the Henoko district, a small settlement on the Pacific coast, across the mountains from central Nago. Henoko has hosted U.S. Marine Corps Camp Schwab and the Henoko Ordnance Ammunition Depot since 1957, when the community (then part of Kushi village) became the first municipality in Okinawa to voluntarily lease lands to the U.S. military for base construction. During the Vietnam era, the hilltop neighborhood adjacent to the base was transformed into a thriving entertainment district featuring restaurants, camera stores, pawnshops, bars, and brothels. Entering this neighborhood in the early 2000s, one was struck by the ghostly remnants of occupation-era prosperity. A large rust-stained sign reading “Yōkoso Henoko shakōgai e” (“Welcome to the Henoko entertainment quarter”) and “WEL COME BAR St.” was followed by rows of concrete buildings bearing faded lettering proclaiming the names of bars, tailors, and pizzerias, long abandoned or transformed into private homes.

Since 1996, this out-of-the-way corner of Okinawa has become the frontline of the struggle to contain and ultimately oust the U.S. military presence from the prefecture. As such, it is a mecca for activists and protesters from Okinawa Prefecture, mainland Japan, and around the world, who come to support the local opposition by manning the protest tent that stands on the beach next to Henoko’s fishing port, and participating in ocean-based kayak protests and sit-ins outside the gates of Camp Schwab. The prevalence of outsiders in the movement rankles some Henoko residents who have close economic and personal ties to the base. Hank and Mutsuko Megason have lived in the hilltop neighborhood next to Camp Schwab since 1982. After retiring from the Marine Corps, Hank took a civilian position at Camp Schwab, and the couple built a three-story house on land owned by Mutsuko’s mother. In recent years, the two have played an important role in Henoko’s probase community network, made up of small business owners, construction and transportation workers, cashiers, and other wage earners (Inoue 2007). Mutsuko has held leadership positions in local women’s organizations at various levels, while Hank volunteers as an interpreter for community events and organizations aimed at bringing together Okinawan residents and U.S. troops.¹ Hank and Mutsuko are not the only U.S. military-Okinawan couple residing in Henoko. Stew Brown lives with his wife, also Okinawan, across the bridge in a neighborhood bordering Kushi district. After fulfilling his enlistment and leaving the Marine Corps, Stew worked a series of odd construction jobs and then signed on for a temporary gig at the Toyota plant in mainland Japan. After returning to Okinawa, he ran the kitchen at a factory that produced shima-dōfu (island tofu) for a few months. When we met in October 2001, he was captaining charter boats for Marine Corps Community Services out of Camp Schwab. Hosing off a fleet of rental kayaks, Stew claimed to have little knowledge of or contact with antibase protestors in Henoko and expressed little interest in the tense political situation. Quickly dismissing my questions, he suggested that concerns and divisions within the Okinawan community were only incidental to his own life. Hank and Mutsuko, on the other hand, interacted frequently with business leaders and politicians in Henoko and Nago and were themselves involved in local base-related politics.

Entrance to former entertainment district, Henoko. Photo by the author.

Military fencelines structure the lives of these couples and others living in Nago City and throughout Okinawa. The communities they live in, whether remote mountain villages or congested urban zones surrounding the mid-island bases, are crisscrossed by physical barbed wire fences, along with symbolic fencelines, sites of negotiation and struggle involving gender, race, class, and nation. Okinawa’s fencelines are a product of shifting local, national, and international history and politics alongside everyday economic transactions, social interactions, and cultural beliefs developed within the contexts of Japanese colonialism, war, postwar U.S. occupation, and continuing militarization. Although Stew Brown imagined himself to be largely unaffected by base-related community politics and sentiments, his lifestyle was entirely contingent upon the U.S. military presence and terms of the status of forces agreement, which structured his residency, career opportunities, and social networks. Furthermore, as a white American man and former member of the U.S. military married to a local woman, he stood for a particular kind of politically privileged yet economically and socially marginal person in the eyes of many Nago residents. Even Hank Megason repeatedly referred to “those guys” who live in Okinawa but never try to outgrow their dependence on the bases, learn the language, or integrate into Okinawan family and community networks.

Former entertainment district, Henoko. Photo by the author.

This chapter sketches the broad contours of military international intimacy in Nago City and across Okinawa in relation to military fencelines and changing community norms, especially regarding marriage, family, and community. Since the nineteenth century, Okinawan families and communities have changed dramatically due to government modernization and assimilation programs, out-migration and growth of the Okinawan diaspora, war and confiscation of land by the U.S. military, and integration into the global economy. Opportunities for intimacy, ideas concerning appropriate romantic partners, residence and household membership, and responsibilities for childcare, eldercare, and care of the family altar have shifted accordingly. In connection with this history, marriages to individuals from different villages, Okinawa’s outer islands, and mainland Japan have been frowned upon. But since 1945, marriages involving U.S. military personnel have sparked strong community opposition due to their symbolic association with colonialism, foreign occupation, and continuing marginalization within Japan. The chapter discusses military international marriage in relation to other types of “marrying out” in Okinawa, as well as international marriage in mainland Japan. I argue that community perceptions of military international marriage are best understood in relation to symbolic fencelines—some associated with the U.S. military presence and others based on prewar and wartime experiences of Japanese colonialism and the Ryūkyū Kingdom—that shape distinctions among “insiders” and “outsiders” and notions of appropriate marriage partners. Examining the narrative strategies Okinawans employ when speaking of military international relationships and other forms of “marrying out,” the analysis reveals the many creative ways in which couples assert the legitimacy of their relationships and challenge social norms.

International Marriage in Okinawa versus Mainland Japan

In 2015, the rate of international marriage throughout Japan was 3.3 percent (20,976 of 635,156 total marriages). In Tokyo, one in twenty marriages was a mixed union; in Osaka, the number was one in twenty-five (Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2016). Although international marriages make up a small fraction of overall marriages, they have increased significantly during the past half century. In 1965, there were only 4,156 international marriages, but the number rose steadily until peaking at 44,701 in 2006 (Nippon.com 2015).² As early as the 1970s, municipal governments in rural mainland Japan began recruiting brides from other Asian nations (such as China, Korea, and the Philippines) in an effort to alleviate a shortage of eligible single women caused by the outflow of young Japanese women to larger cities (Asakura 2002).³ Although the number of international marriages has declined in recent years, the media continues to feature stories about the lives of international couples, feeding popular interest.⁴

In Japanese, the phrase kokusai-kekkon (international marriage) refers to conjugal relationships between Japanese persons and persons from foreign countries.⁵ Despite media claims that kokusai-kekkon is contributing to the formation of a new multiethnic Japan (Curtin 2002a; Japan Times 2002), scholars have argued that in Japan discourses on international marriage, like those associated with internationalization (kokusaika),⁶ “reinscribe notions of Japanese ethnic and cultural homogeneity by marking nationality as the primary index of difference” (Faier 2009, 3; see also Befu 1983). That is, they reinforce the conceptual division of the world’s people into two major categories: Japanese and foreigners. In Okinawa, however, the phrase kokusai-kekkon carries additional meanings. Compared to other Japanese prefectures, Okinawa reports consistently high rates of international marriage, although not as high as urban centers like Tokyo and Osaka. Moreover, while more than 70 percent of international marriages nationwide are between Japanese men and foreign women, in Okinawa nearly 80 percent involve Japanese women with foreign men. In 2015, a typical year, a stunning 86.8 percent of foreign grooms in Okinawa were American, with most affiliated with the U.S. military (Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2016).⁷ What is more, in addition to marriages with citizens of foreign countries, the phrase kokusai-kekkon is also used to refer to marriages between Okinawans and persons from mainland Japan, a dramatic illustration of perceptions of historical variance and racial/ethnic difference from mainlanders.

To illustrate, in 2002 I was invited to give a talk on international marriage at the monthly tea time of a Nago City housewives group. I had been living in Nago for nearly eight months and already knew several members of the group, including the mayor’s wife, a past president of the Nago City Women’s Association, the wife of the director of the Nago City International House, and Mutsuko Megason, introduced above. These middle-class women were well known throughout the northern region based on their marriages to prominent men and their own volunteer activities. Over tea and snacks, they conducted a brief business meeting and then invited me to speak. After my presentation, the group leader asked Shirota-san, a housewife from nearby Motobu, to comment on her own experiences as a naichi no kata (person from mainland Japan; polite) married to an Okinawan man. The phrase naichi no kata is a holdover from the Japanese colonial period (1879–1945), when the imperial government maintained an administrative and social distinction between Japanese citizens from the naichi (inner territories) and imperial subjects from the gaichi (outer territories or colonies). Although Okinawa was technically classified as part of the naichi—that is, its governance did not fall under the Bureau of Colonial Affairs (Christy 1993)—Okinawans tended to be excluded from the term naichi in popular usage (Morris-Suzuki 1998). As Shirota-san’s example illustrates, many Okinawans continue to recognize this distinction, and discussions of kokusai-kekkon are convenient opportunities for pointing out mainlanders’ continuing outsider status and lack of cultural competence in Okinawa. Shirota-san, who had met her husband while on vacation in Okinawa twenty-five years earlier, admitted that Okinawan language and customs associated with caring for the household altar and family tomb were difficult to master. Her husband was a chōnan (eldest son), and this meant that as his wife she would inherit responsibility for carrying out family rituals and organizing family gatherings. Referred to as yamatunchu-yome (Yamato, or mainland Japanese, brides) in Okinawan dialect, mainland Japanese women who marry Okinawan men are considered foreigners of sorts, and their marriages are therefore viewed as examples of kokusai-kekkon (Ishizuki 2001; Ueno 2001). In mainland Japanese discourses, generally speaking, foreigners embody notions of soto (outside) in contrast to Japan’s uchi (inside).⁸ In Japanese print advertising, for example, images of racially diverse foreign Others figure importantly in the process through which a homogenous Japanese national self is constructed (Creighton 1997). More specifically, the racial and cultural diversity of imagined foreign Others constitutes a projection of Japanese heterogeneity onto the outside world, thereby preserving the illusion of racial and ethnic homogeneity within Japan (Creighton 1997). Okinawan approaches to kokusai-kekkon, however, inclusive of marriages of Okinawans to mainland Japanese, undermine this tenet of Japanese national ideology, supporting instead a noncompliant formulation of Okinawan identity based on regional cultural distinctiveness and a history of Japanese colonialism and suppression of Okinawan language and culture.

Military international marriages in Okinawa also complicate Japanese notions of kokusai-kekkon because they contradict the typical gendered pattern of international unions. Nationwide, more than 70 percent of international marriages involve Japanese men with foreign women. This pattern is even more pronounced for certain nationalities. In 2015, for example, more than 95 percent of marriages between Japanese and citizens of the Philippines were between Japanese men and Filipina women. The pattern is reversed in marriages where the non-Japanese partner is from North America, western Europe, or Australia. In 2015, 85 percent of marriages to Americans and 84 percent of marriages to U.K. citizens involved Japanese women marrying foreign men. Until recently, much of the scholarship on international marriage in Japan has focused on just such cases, examining the appeal that Western lifestyles, and especially Western men, have for Japanese women (Cornyetz 1994; Russell 1998; Kelsky 2001).⁹ Karen Kelsky’s analysis of Japanese women’s eroticized discourses on Western men, in which the foreign is sought out and incorporated in a process of self-transformation, has been influential among those interested in women’s agency. Sex with foreign men, Kelsky argues, has the potential to free Japanese women from the confines of traditional Japanese gender roles (Kelsky 2001). Women’s participation in such discourses—popularly tagged with the Japanese term akogare, translated variously as “longing,” “desire,” or “idealization” of the West—thus constitutes an act of resistance against Japanese patriarchal norms. The space of the foreign, Kelsky writes, “offers those women inclined to use it … the means to radically challenge persistent gender ideologies that make authentic Japanese womanhood (and the stability of the Japanese nation) contingent on women’s continued subordination to Japanese men and ‘traditional’ gender roles” (Kelsky 2001, 3). However, as Kelsky points out, Japanese women’s celebration of white Western male sexuality simultaneously plays into colonialist narratives that position the “Orient” as inferior to the West. Situated within global relations of power, Japanese women’s desire for the West is already constituted through hegemonic discourses that posit the West, imagined as both male and white, as the object of desire.¹⁰ Kelsky describes numerous encounters with Japanese women married to white Western men who objected to her...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. International Marriage in Japan’s Periphery
• 2. Race, Memory, and Military Men’s Sexuality
• 3. Living Respectably and Negotiating Class
• 4. The Marine Corps Marriage Package
• 5. Creating Family and Community across Military Fencelines
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• References
• Index