Creating Family and Community across Military Fencelines

Abstract

This chapter looks into strategies that military-Okinawan couples employ to navigate life across the fencelines and achieve acceptance for themselves and their children. It describes active-duty couples living in central Okinawa, especially young Okinawan women, who make use of military family services and successfully integrate into the U.S. military community. The stories in the chapter illustrate how couples struggle to balance commitments to the military, extended family, and local community that conform to American and Okinawan cultural expectations and contend with challenges to their relationship from both sides of the fences. It talks about factors that affect long-term chances for intimate relationships and popular attitudes toward military dating and marriage, biracial children, and broader formulations of Okinawan and U.S. military community. It also investigates several stories that demonstrate people engaging in intimate relationships across military fencelines that have the capacity to influence U.S. military–host community relationships and politics in even the most contentious locales.