Achieving Reversion: Protest and Authority in Okinawa, 1952-70

Abstract

The build-up and development of the Okinawan struggle for reversion to Japanese administration does not figure prominently in the English-language literature on the American occupation of Okinawa, nor does it occupy a central place in Japanese analyses of this subject. Rather there is a tendency to view Okinawa as a subset of US-Japanese postwar relations, and to explain reversion as a process carried through by senior American and Japanese officials, largely governed by high-level diplomatic and military-strategic considerations. There is often only passing mention of the rising tensions within Okinawa itself and, perhaps more importantly, the increasing effectiveness through the 1960s of the indigenous reversion movement centred on the Okinawa Teachers' Association (Okinawa kyōshokuinkai). For example, John Welfield's trenchant account of the ‘three years of tortuous negotiations’ that culminated in November 1969 in an American pledge to return the islands hardly mentions conflicts within Okinawa itself, remarking only that ‘the swing to the left’ in 1968 foreshadowed major problems for the US if Okinawan demands for reversion were not met.