The Translocal Island of Okinawa : Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism

The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality.As Okinawa’s base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people’s protest movement.The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between ‘local’, which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and ‘regional’, a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries.This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal