âNow I had to go to the U.S. Embassy to apply for a visa just to return to my old home,â Raphael Miyagi1 told me one autumn day in September 2007. We were seated at a doughnut shop inside a shopping mall in Naha, the Okinawan capital, where I talked to him about his life in Okinawa and the Philippines as well as his work on one of the U.S. bases in the prefecture. Raphael, at that time, was in his 50s, and has been living in Okinawa for around 30 years. Despite this, we spoke in both English and Filipino (Tagalog) interspersed with some Japanese words and expressions. His âold homeâ, as it turns out, is Okinawaâthe place where he was born and his motherâs place of origin.
Up until 1972, Okinawa was governed by the American Occupation Forces and this was the Okinawa Raphael was born in and returned to, a year before its reversion to Japan. This was a turning point in his life, when at the young age of 20, he set out to travel from Manila to Okinawa for a supposedly short visit: a visit though that saw him staying in the southernmost Japanese prefecture for 40 years and counting. He was in his second year of studies at a university in Manila when he decided to make the trip in October 1971. Classes in Manila were suspended a number of times due to protests and rallies against the government of then President Ferdinand Marcos, who declared martial law the following year in 1972.
When Raphael arrived in Okinawa, he was surprised to find out that there were a lot of work opportunities there, particularly inside the U.S. military bases, dotting the main island. Trying his luck in landing a job, he found himself starting work for the U.S. military as a civilian employee at Camp Kinser in Urasoe City, a few kilometres north of Naha. This was on 3 January 1972, a mere three months after his arrival in 1971. Upon moving to the Philippines 15 years prior to his return to the place of his birth, Raphael lost whatever Japanese language he learned when he was attending primary school in Okinawa. Thus, working on these military installations was the best option for him as he need not know Japanese to land a job inside the U.S. bases.
Raphael was born in Koza City, now known as Okinawa City, in the central part of the main island of Okinawa prefecture, in December 1950. His Filipino father was working with the U.S. military, when he met and married an Okinawan womanâRaphaelâs motherâin Okinawa. Spending the early years of his childhood in Okinawa, he and his whole family had to move to his fatherâs country upon the termination of his fatherâs work contract. As it turns out, the experience of Raphael was not particular to his family. It was also the experience shared by countless others.
Meanwhile, five years after Raphael returned to his birthplace, Marco Yara decided to return to Okinawa in 1976. I first met Marco at Oroku Catholic Church in Naha in March 2010 after the 10 a.m. Sunday Mass and he gladly talked to me about his life as well as his own experiences of growing up in Okinawa. We were seated at a food court of a shopping centre in Nahaâs Shintoshin district, which in Japanese translates to ânew metropolitan centreâ, a district that used to be the location of the U.S. Military Makiminato Housing District (Beigun Makiminato JĆ«taku Chiku) from the early 1950s until it was returned in 1987. Marco mentioned to me that he was a college student in the Philippines when he decided on the return trip to the land of his birth mainly because of the unstable political situation in the Philippines, which was under martial rule during the Marcos regime. Upon his arrival in Okinawa, he decided to look for work and engaged himself in different jobs before landing in his present job (at the time of interview) at Futenma Air Base, a U.S. military facility located in the middle of Ginowan City, several kilometres north of Naha, in 1989.
Marco was born in a town called Akamichi (which was under Gushikawa City, and is now known as Uruma City), located near Koza City, and grew up in the Moromi district in Koza. Like Raphael, his father was also a Filipino who worked in a U.S. base facility in Okinawa as a heavy equipment operator. There, his father met and married his Okinawan mother. Spending the early years of his life in Okinawa attending an international school, Marco experienced difficulty understanding the lectures as he used to speak Japanese at home. His Filipino name also prompted him to question who and what he really was: âPumasok ako [nang] hindi ko alam kung ano akoâPilipino ba ako o ano? Bakit ako may pangalan na ganito? (I went to school, not knowing what I wasâam I Filipino or what? Why do I have a name like this?)â. These questions were momentarily put to a halt when Marco moved to the Philippines with his family when he was in the second grade of elementary school. The move to the Philippines was prompted by the expiration of his fatherâs work contract.
A decade after Marcoâs return to Okinawa, Stephanie Ojana decided to take the same route and return to her birthplace. I met and spoke to Stephanie, then in her 50s, at a Japanese restaurant inside a shopping mall across Kadena Airbase, on a warm early autumn day back in September 2007. She told me that after working for 11 years in an insurance company in the Philippines, she decided to return to Okinawa in February 1986 and acquire Japanese nationality. Like Raphael and Marco, Stephanie was born in Okinawa to a Filipino father who was a civilian employee on base during the American Occupation, while her mother is Okinawan. Leaving Okinawa for the Philippines with her family in 1961 at the young age of five, Stephanie barely remembered her Japanese upon her return to island in the late 1980s. Like Raphael and Marcoâs fathers, Stephanieâs father was also working on a contractual basis and had to return to the Philippines upon the contractâs expiry.
It was in January 1987 that Stephanie found work in Okinawa as an editor for the air forceâs and marineâs newspapers. However, after four and a half years of working as an editor, she quit her job and went to the mainland to work for Sony, where she worked as a contract worker for six months. Before finally settling in Okinawa in 1999, she had travelled back and forth between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland a number of times. Currently retired, she was working as a shift manager for a fast-food outlet at Kadena Air Base when I met her. Kadena Air Base is the largest air force installation in the Asia-Pacific region, which spans a huge area covering the towns of Kadena and Chatan, and Okinawa City.
On my visits and temporary sojourn in Okinawa from 2007 to 2013, as well as my sporadic trips there from 2014 to 2018, I met and spoke with people like Raphael, Marco, and Stephanie who all share the same life historiesâtheir birth in Okinawa to an Okinawan mother and a Filipino father, their move to the Philippines in their childhood, their return to their birthplace in their adult years, the acquisition of a Japanese nationality, their base-related work, their families in Okinawaâand probably, the same futures. I met them in churches (both Catholic and Protestant), in parties hosted by Filipino organizations in Okinawa, at the Philippine Honorary Consulate, as well as on- and off-base. The exact population of this particular group is difficult to grasp due to the fact that most of them have acquired Japanese nationality and Japanese census data do not necessarily indicate a personâs ethnic background, much less his/her parentage. As with convention, they have Japanese names that they use in formal settings and in official documents (although some chose to retain their Filipino/Western first names, writing them in katakana), but in social interactions among themselves, with non-Japanese, and with other Filipinos (including myself), they tend to use their Filipino/Western first names or even nicknames. Do I consider them Japanese or Okinawan? Or Filipino? Why do most of them work on base, or do work related to the U.S. military? These were some of the many questions I tried to answer when I first met these individuals more than a decade ago. Many were answered in the course of my research, and many more questions came up, especially those pertaining to the futureâan uncertainty that these people, not even I, can fully prepare for.
The above vignettes of Raphael, Marco, and Stephanie are just few of the many accounts of civilians working (or have worked) on U.S. military bases in Okinawa and in other parts of East Asia. The existence of these individuals is oftentimes overlooked as much focus is accorded to the more conspicuous U.S. military troops that are assigned for duty on these bases. Base towns and communities surrounding these military installations are wont to the ubiquitous presence of these military perso...