Bone and Coral: Ossuopower and the Control of (Future) Remains in Occupied Okinawa

Abstract

Biopolitical and necropolitical frameworks posit death as sovereignty's limit. However, colonial abuses of indigenous remains suggest otherwise. Taking Achille Mbembe's necropolitics as a point of departure, I draw attention to the extraction of soil containing human remains in the US military base construction of occupied Okinawa. I argue that ossuopower—the right to control remains, both human and nonhuman—is fundamental to colonial territorial expansion. Tracing the stories of bones, I first contextualize the exercise of ossuopower in the history of US settler colonialism and garrison militarism in the Pacific, where bones symbolize sovereign power and claims to land. I then offer a case study of the exercise of the right over remains in Okinawa, from the post–World War II era of US occupation through Reversion-era mainland Japanese development to the current Futenma Airbase relocation. Bones bear the material traces of the changing forces of US militarization and Japanese maldevelopment. In closing, I analyze Tsuyoshi Shima's short story "Bones" to illumine an indigenous Okinawan relation to land and suggest the need for epistemes of care for remains and land. In theorizing ossuopower, I offer a lens to analyze the entanglement of militarization, globalization, and securitization in the Pacific Century.