Archipelagic Feminisms
Critical Interventions into the Gendered Coloniality of Okinawa
Ayano Ginoza
Introduction
What kind of feminism is deeply rooted in the islands of Okinawa, and how do organizers route this feminism to mobilize a transoceanic network? Suzuyo Takazato, co-chair of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence (OWAAMV), describes their mission as, “Toward Islands Where Each of Our Voices Can Firmly Be Heard” in her first book Women in Okinawa: Women’s Human Rights and the Bases and Military (2003).1 In the text, Takazato offers a feminist praxis as remembering and articulating the sexual violence against women and girls in the islands of Okinawa. For her, the women and girls can advance feminist knowledge about their memories of sexual violence in the Okinawa islands as much as they can reveal the transoceanic dimensions of said memories. Take, for instance, Takazato’s reference to Bae Bong-Gi, a former Korean sexual slave who spoke about her experiences with the Japanese military during World War II in Okinawa. Takazato expresses that “as a land where Ms. Bae lived and died … ianfu (sexual slavery) issue is an Okinawan issue.”2 Similarly, Takazato acknowledges that the women from the Philippines who worked in postwar Okinawa for US servicemen, the US servicemen who committed sexual violence against Okinawan women, and children born to US soldiers and local Okinawan women represent OWAAMV’s issues. In this light, Takazato’s notion of the “islands” involves women whose lives are rooted in and routed to Okinawa.
Since its founding by the Okinawan feminist activists Suzuyo Takazato and Harumi Miyagi in 1995, the OWAAMV have played an instrumental role in mobilizing feminists and demilitarizing the islands in Okinawa. Their actions after the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three US military personnel in Okinawa illustrate this feminist praxis, a point I later elaborate upon in this essay. For now, it suffices to say that OWAAMV exposes the mechanisms of sexual violence, critiques the imposed framework of Okinawa and Ryukyu, and seeks to “take back the islands without … military bases.”3 The archipelagic feminist praxis speaks to the transpacific as a critical ethnic studies issue in this special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies. As the editors Jinah Kim and Nitasha Sharma write, this issue tackles ongoing concerns of “non-nationalist solidarities and cross-racial alliances committed to demilitarization and decolonization across Asia, the Americas, and Oceania.”4 This essay responds to Lisa Yoneyama’s insights on the ways in which absences of connections and entanglements may obscure dialogues across Asian and Asian American studies, Pacific Islander studies, and North American Indigenous studies, as also quoted in Kim and Sharma’s introduction.5
Elsewhere, Takazato and Miyagi are involved in feminist work through women’s call centers and working in publishing companies where they listened to, consulted with, and supported women’s stories. The relationship between storytelling of sexual violence against women and girls is a crucial tool by which Okinawan feminists working in alliances across various borders mobilize their experiences to articulate militarized power structures and to imagine their own visions of demilitarized future. Born in Taiwan in 1940 to Okinawan parents, Takazato is also a core member of the Unai Festival. She has also organized the Okinawan women’s gathering held annually between 1985 and 1995. In 1989, she then ran as an assembly member for Naha City and received support from many women from the festival. Takazato served for four terms between 1989 and 2004. She likewise consulted for the Tokyo Women’s Call Center and Naha Women’s Call center. In 2005, Takazato was nominated by the initiative 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize. Born in Zamami Island of Okinawa Prefecture in 1949, Miyagi completed a BA in economics and an MA in humanities and social sciences with a focus on Okinawan history. Among many noteworthy positions, she was best known as the editor and writer for Aoi Umi [Blue Ocean] published annually in Okinawa. Miyagi also received employment as an editor for Naha City History and Naha Women’s History, a chief editor of the History of Okinawa Prefecture: Women’s History (2016), and a historian of Okinawan women at several universities in Okinawa. Their work through OWAAMV initiated an international women’s nonprofit organization, International Women’s Network against Militarism (IWNAM) in 1997, which is featured in this special issue.
Having worked with both Miyagi and Takazato locally and off-islands since 2007 in preparation for the IWNAM in San Francisco, I read and learned from their publications, public speeches, short reports, lectures, and interviews. The IWNAM in San Francisco was organized by the Women for Genuine Security (WGS), a women’s group based in the Bay Area whose members include Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey, whose co-authored publications include a widely adapted women’s studies textbook, Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (a total of six editions), and Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (the seventh edition). During the years of my residence in California, I have participated in their work as a member.
Throughout my participatory experiences with OWAAMV as well as WGS and IWNAM, I have come to understand their feminist methodologies and theories of militarized colonialism. In each case, Takazato and Miyagi developed what Takazato calls “their own” feminisms. Here I conceptualize their efforts as archipelagic feminisms. Archipelagic feminisms best illustrate what Miyagi and Takazato theorize as island-based feminist research, methodologies, and activism. Archipelagic feminisms are also informed by women’s and girls’ memories of and mobilizations against sexual violence in Okinawa and elsewhere. Unlike the common imperial misconceptions of islands as isolated, small, and distant, archipelagic feminisms recognize islands as places where women and girls make deliberate connections among women of different races, classes, genders, and nations. Archipelagic feminisms also include the linking and cataloging of domestic patriarchies and Japanese and US militarisms among women and girls who have roots in and routes to Okinawa.
In this essay, I first delineate a praxis of archipelagic feminisms. I then show the ways in which Takazato and Miyagi’s work challenges the sexual violence enacted by colonial nomenclatures in the islands of Okinawa during the occupations by Japan and the United States. As Māori scholar Michelle Erai asserts in her analysis of sexual violence in Aotearoa [New Zealand], renaming the nation is more than a battle over who was the dominant power in the Northern Hemisphere. Renaming also allowed colonizers to fantasize “a future that is wide open for colonization, tempus nullius.”6 Erai describes tempus nullius as the blank slate upon which colonizers can carve their channels for power through time and which would direct the enactments of violence.7 But whereas Erai’s insightful analysis reveals the patriarchal gaze of colonizers, the work of Takazato and Miyagi invokes what Mishuana Goeman calls “storied land.”8 That is to say, Takazato and Miyagi center the memories of women and girls as they collectively demilitarize the local naming of the islands in Okinawa by Japan and the United States. Thus, demilitarization is attention to structural change as well as discourse of naming and demilitarizing stereotypes.
In chronological order, I illuminate Takazato and Miyagi’s critiques of sexual violence from the era of the Ryukyu Kingdom to the Ryukyu disposition (1429–1879) and between the Battle of Okinawa and the US occupation (1945–72). I then a call for a re-understanding of the 1995 rape of the twelve-year-old girl by three US military personnel. I argue that Takazato and Miyagi’s work underscores how any unquestioned usage of the nomenclature applied to Ryukyu and Okinawa actually maintains the colonial formation of an island nation-state. This formation operates through the system of patriarchy that sustains the militarized coloniality in contemporary Okinawa. I then conclude by looking at the beginning of the IWNAM, which OWAAMV initiated in 1997 across the Pacific Ocean, involving the Philippines, South Korea, Guåhan [Guam], Hawai‘i, and Puerto Rico, as well as Japan and the United States, through the praxis of archipelagic feminism and its potential limitations and challenges.9
Archipelagic Feminisms as a Praxis
In “Why Island Feminism?” Marina Karides defines island feminism as “the intellectual sensibilities of island place and [the] constructs of gender and sexuality as intertwining forces that contour the particular conditions of life.”10 Island feminism is also “action oriented, in pursuits of just and fair conditions for all beings but is guided by specific interests in islanders’ local and subaltern strategies that remain resistant to hegemonic discourses and practices of power.”11 Kozue Akibayashi, a feminist scholar in OWAAMV, recently proposed calling OWAAMV’s feminism “island feminism.”12 Indeed, a praxis of archipelagic feminisms overlaps with Karides’s and Akibayashi’s definitions of island feminism in that the former is also action-based and challenges the interlocking of military, colonial, and patriarchal violence.
I chose to use archipelagic, rather than island, to nuance relationalities and solidarities of islands and islanders in a way that their agencies and mobilizations are not predetermined by language barriers or ideological divisions, as well as the hegemonic geopolitical designation of islands by their isolation, distance, and smallness. In this sense of articulating mobilizations and agencies, archipelagic feminisms resonate what Teresia Teaiwa advocated for: to use island as a verb. Teaiwa writes: “As a noun, it’s so vulnerable to impinging forces. Let us turn the energy of the island inside out … Once islanded, humans are awakened from the stupor of continental fantasies…Continents do not exist, metaphysically speaking. It is a way of living that could save our lives.”13 Teaiwa’s call not simply shifts a way of thinking about islands, but attempts decolonizing islands and islanders into agents of actions involving the continents and non-islands and non-islanders.
For instance, as a place-based decolonial praxis, it resonates with the Indigenous decolonial methodologies of “storied land.”14 Archipelagic feminisms also challenge the colonial namings of the islands that seek to void our histories and memories. For Takazato and Miyagi, the memories of women and girls in the Okinawa islands are always told, but fragmented; such memories are also untold stories of multinational, racial, and ethnic women’s lives as they intersect with Okinawan women through militarized sexual violence. This aspect of storytelling islands emphasizes OWAAMV’s visions of islands as not fragmented or isolated, but a connected network of solidarity.
Archipelagic feminisms also acknowledge women of different racial, ethnic, class, and national origins and roots who have lived, stayed, and forcefully been brought to the islands. This point resonates with what Yoneyama calls critical feminism or the mobilization of a transnational network beyond the borders of the nation-state.15
Finally, for archipelagic feminisms to address differently experienced violence, they offer historical and contemporary self-criticisms of Okinawan societies as well as women’s silences and indifferences that have perpetuated the militarized structural violence against racialized and classed women who have lived in the islands. Like island feminism, Okinawan women residing in Okinawa act quickly upon receiving information on militarized violence, organize actions, and support the survivors of militarized sexual violence and the aftermath of deaths resulting from it in Okinawa and globally. This praxis allows the feminists to unpack, to quote Cynthia Enloe, militarization’s “step-by-step process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives value from the military or militaristic criteria.”16 Their theorizing enables them to hear and piece together hidden, unheard, and fragmented stories of sexual violence, and then to connect and work alongside women in Okinawa and transnationally. Takazato’s renarrating gestures toward Yoneyama’s critical feminist question: how do those who are racialized, colonized, and occupied comprehend what Walter Benjamin calls “the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule” and earn redress?17
Additionally, archipelagic feminisms enable internal critiques of the patriarchal system represented in a topological continuum from the Ryukyu Kingdom to the present, thereby enabling feminist critiques of the nation-states of Ryukyu, Okinawa, or Japan. By working in solidarity with other island communities to combat the divisive global forces of militarism, archipelagic feminisms present a praxis, to borrow Keith Camacho’s words, where feminists mobilize toward a structural change and demilitarize the gendered stereotypes of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific “as feminine and vulnerable, thus requiring the protection of a masculine, military presence.”18 Thus, archipelagic feminisms are in conversation with the theories, methods, and actions of multiple feminisms, including island feminisms, postcolonial feminisms, and Indigenous feminisms.
From the Ryukyu Kingdom to “Okinawa”
As described above as one of characteristics of archipelagic feminisms, decolonization work for OWAAMV takes into account that historical forms of naming were bult into the domination of colonial power. Questioning colonial namings and renaming of “Okinawa,” I unpack epistemological underpinnings that obscure intertwined patriarchal systems tied to the present-day US militarization of the Okinawa islands.
The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) used the nomenclature for the archipelago to designate it as its tributary state.19 What “Ryukyu” and “Okinawa” have in common is that they are not self-articulations by the islanders. Gregory Smits, a Ryukyu Okinawa historian, asserts that “Ryukyu has long functioned as a blank screen upon which people have projected fantasies and desires,” thereby signaling Erai’s “tempus nullius.”20 The myth of Ryukyuan pacifism is one such fantasy. As with the Ming Dynasty’s naming of the archipelago as Ryukyu, Smits argues that the myth of Ryukyuan pacifism partly stems from “scholars who should know better.”21 According to Smits, these scholars narrate the so-called pacifist aspects of Okinawan culture, such as karate (also known as “empty hands,” or “without weapons”), musicology, and peaceful international politics. Collectively, the myth of Ryukyuan pacifism increased the “rhetorical poignancy to portraying the postwar militarization of the islands [in Okinawa] as tragedy.”22
Countering this myth, Takazato offers a critical feminist analysis of the Ryukyu Kingdom era by tracing women’s lives at the time. She asserts that the dominant discourse of the Ryukyu Kingdom as peaceful diplomacy and a peace-loving people who live in a matriarchal system run by a priestess holding power only serves to disguise a colonial patriarchal mechanism. The high-ranking priestess, for instance, maintained the male-centered monarchy by ensuring the well-being of the king and the prosperity of the kingdom. In turn, the king and the kingdom functioned as a small-scale empire that deployed military force to defend and expand the monarchy.23 In 1609, Japan invaded Ryukyu Kingdom and set in motion its imperial occupation of Okinawa by Satsuma. The Satsuma was one of Japan’s most powerful domains between 1602 and 1871, based in present-day Kagoshima Prefecture. The Satsuma military killed Okinawans and sexually assaulted women and girls as part of their military colonization of the islands.24
Another example of sexual violence as part of the domination of these islands concerned establishment of the Tsuji brothels in 1679. The brothels mainly employed young girls from impoverished families and operated until their destruction during an air raid in 1944.25 Japanese visitors from Satsuma were frequent customers.26 Miyagi adds that the munchu system, a Confucian tradition based on the blood lineage of male heirs that was practiced among the aristocrats, also forced women into arranged marriages. Quite often, the munchu system compelled women to bear male heirs to assure the male succession of the family lineages.27
The Ryukyu Shobun in 1879 then enacted a new political framework in the islands. The timing was inseparable from the establishment of the Japanese empire in the Asia-Pacific region through the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the invasion of Taiwan (1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1904), and World Wars I and II. In each case, these conflicts must be understood as “militarized colonization” of the islands.28 Incorporated into the Japanese sovereignty, the colonial naming project therefore allowed for the state-sanctioned sexual control of women and girls wherein mothers and daughters were responsible for raising patriotic male soldiers. During the Japanese conscription of Okinawan men in 1898, for example, the Japanese education system systematically implemented ryosai kenbo in schools and households. Ryosai kenbo literally means “good wives and good mothers”; this educational system emphasized women’s role in producing war-ready husbands and educating future soldiers. Ryosai kenbo also ensured premarital women’s chastity and purity.
The Japanese imperial government targeted moashibi, or popular get-togethers among young people in Okinawa in order to sexually control women.29 Many young Okinawans found lifelong partners at moashibi. Yet Miyagi argues that by labeling the activities as backward and savage, the Japanese government suppressed Okinawan understandings of women’s sexual freedom with Japanese notions of pure, faithful, and feminine women.30 The Japanese government also replaced common traditional Okinawan women’s names, such as Ushi (cow), Nabe (pot), and Kamado (fireplace), which respectively represented health, abundance of food, and life-sustaining fire.31 The renaming thus disconnected islanders’ epistemology from the place and women’s meaningful cultural roles that were imperative to understanding the interrelatedness of island cultures and the environment.
The archipelagic feminist praxis connects these often-subtle gendered ideological controls through their own epistemological and ontological connection to the place. For these reasons, Takazato and Miyagi weave seemingly disconnected ways in which the Ming Dynasty, the Ryukyu Kingdom, and Imperial Japan renamed women’s and girls’ epistemologies. In doing so, they destabilize the dominant narratives of the past and foreground the internalized forms of colonialism in the islands of Okinawa under the Japanese empire. As Leo T. S. Ching asserts, the purpose of Japanese assimilation and colonial policies was to place Indigenous peoples in a constant state of “becoming” Japanese but never actually arriving at that goal. This process sustained the hegemonic relationship between the “Japanese” and the colonial “other.”32 The discursive tactics allowed for the Japanese government to mobilize Okinawans as their national soldiers in Japan’s wars and to designate Okinawan islands at the “breakwater” that halts the US attack on Japan during World War II.
The Battle of Okinawa in 1945
During World War II, Japan designated Okinawa as the last battleground between Japan and the United States to stave off or at least delay for as long as possible an assault on the mainland. The battle lasted from March 26 to June 23, 1945, killing one-fourth of the population of Okinawa. According to Miyagi, Japanese colonialism continued to operate through the sexual control of, and violence against, Okinawan women during the war. It is internationally known, for example, that the Japanese military established so-called comfort stations to enslave Korean women for Japanese soldiers’ sexual outlet. Less known is that approximately five hundred Okinawan women were also forced to serve in that capacity. Many of these conscripted women already worked at the Tsuji brothel, where many families in poverty sold their daughters into the sex business, and how systems of oppression shape archipelagic.
Within a year of the Japanese military’s arrival in Okinawa in September 1944, they established approximately 145 comfort stations and stationed “comfort women” there well into the time when US forces landed on Zamami Island on March 26, thirty-five miles east of Okinawa.33 Japanese soldiers withdrawing from China, many of whom had committed war crimes including sexual violence against the local women and girls, also racialized Okinawans as barefooted pig farmers and lazy guitar players who dance and sing at night.34 The Japanese military personnel likewise justified their raping of women in Okinawa because they were perceived as an “uncivilized” and sexually sloven culture, as exemplified by practices like the moashibi.35 Such colonial and racial discourses motivated Okinawans to disarticulate their historical ties with the Ming Dynasty when Ryukyu was known to the world, and to become Japanese.36
These conflicting pressures imposed binaries in the sexualized colonial discourse about the women—colonized women, for example, had to “protect” their chastity in order to be seen as sexually available in the comfort stations.37 In each village in Okinawa, the leaders and mothers also participated in the promotion of ryosai kenbo with the purpose of differentiating themselves from comfort women and to protect members of their community against increased sexual violence. Miyagi argues that this racialized and classed apparatus of sexual violence compelled civilians to commit mass suicide on Zamami Island.
In What My Mother Bequeathed: New Testimonies of Mass Suicides in Zamami Island of Okinawa (2000), Miyagi draws from her mother’s and other islanders’ oral histories about the mass suicides on Zamami Island.38 Her mother, Hatsue (1921–90), survived not only the last horrific battleground of the Battle of Okinawa, but also the suicide orders by Japanese soldiers. According to Hatsue and others, the Japanese military conducted a fear-mongering campaign among locals against the invading force. The Japanese military claimed that captured Okinawan women and girls would be raped by the US soldiers. Such violations of chastity by foreign military men must be prevented at all costs, even if that meant taking the lives of their own wives and daughters before being captured.39 As a result, families without females did not commit mass suicide.40 In this way, the mass suicide ordered by the Japanese military operated as gendered militarism and sexual violence. Miyagi’s book therefore presents an archipelagic feminist praxis that links women’s experiences beyond the scope of nation-state.
Miyagi adds that the suicides operated within a complex, layered hierarchy of military captains, their soldiers, the heads of local villages, and parents, as well as the generations of patriarchal systems of the Ryukyu Kingdom. Fearing that it would bring shame to the entire village, the leaders upheld a sense of patriarchal responsibility to reinforce the Japanese military’s order on the villagers. Not only many fathers but also mothers highly trained in the system of ryosai kenbo took their family members’ lives. They sought to ensure the wives’ exclusive chastity to their husbands and to prohibit them from carrying the child of another man.41 Miyagi’s interpretation of her mother’s experiences and trauma represents an important aspect of archipelagic feminist praxis that interweaves a story of the island as an intergenerational and feminist epistemology of the islands. Thus, the praxis generates connections and relationships through temporal and special memories of the islands.
US Military Occupation and the Reversion to Japan: 1945–72
While colonial naming and renaming fragments islanders’ connections to the land and history as well as their ontological meanings, Suzuyo Takazato sees them in the continuum of colonial sexual violence. Takazato calls the period between the end of World War II on August 15, 1945, and the US military occupation of the islands that officially ended in 1972 as the “beginning of a new war, namely sexual violence against women in Okinawa by US military personnel.”42 Shortly after World War II, the US military governed Okinawa Prefecture strategically, using “Ryukyu” for their administration of the now United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR, 1950–72). Reinstating “Ryukyu” in the name of USCAR was intended for an ideological maneuver to politically and epistemologically separate the islands from the Japanese sovereignty with the United States’ initial plan to permanently militarily control the islands. This left Okinawa in limbo between the sovereignties of Japan and the United States.43 Despite the political shift, militarized sexual violence continued to target women and girls of lower social classes and racialized others in the islands of Okinawa.
During my interview at the office of OWAAMV in January 2021, Takazato referenced an episode from Eiko Uehara’s biography, The Flower of Tsuji (1984), that stitched the fragments of violence into a seam showing the ambivalent relationships between the US military and Okinawan women.44 Takazato recited Uehara’s memoir as if she was there: “at the opening ceremony of the new establishment of Matsunoshita, a reconstruction of the Tsuji brothel in 1952, Eiko Uehara was exuberated and proud to welcome the lines of buses and automobiles of officers from the US Marines, Air Force, Navy, and Army, and to receive celebratory remarks from Mayor Matayoshi and US Military officer Luis.”45 When I asked Takazato if she analyzed Uehara’s complicity in the sexual exploitation of girls from impoverished families, she answered with a reference to Masako Shinjo (1928–2016), who at age four was sold to the brothel by her father and served as/in a Japanese military’s comfort station during the Battle of Okinawa.46 “Masako managed to pay her debts as well as her father’s by working multiple jobs and was able to free herself,” Takazato continued.47 Using Shinjo as an example, Takazato delineated the complex system of sexual violence operated by the patriarchy and the sexualization of lower class girls subjected to Japanese, American, and Okinawan forms of patriarchy and sexual violence.
Takazato’s storytelling highlighted and connected the systems of violence from different positionalities yet indicated how such positionalities were differently trapped within the systems of colonial violence. I recognize how Takazato’s narrative avoided moral judgments that modeled a universal form of care for women of different social practices. Instead, Takazato’s analysis leaves me room to interpret the women’s experiences as told by Takazato within my conceptualization of overlapping colonialisms of the islands of Okinawa.48 The manner of Takazato’s storytelling made me recall that of many of my own elders’ who practiced storytelling that leaves listeners to ponder and interpret through their own words. Evoking a traditional form of storytelling, Takazato led me to weave Shinjo’s story into my own epistemology and ontological understanding of the place we all live.
Takazato’s writings also critique the Ryukyu government, which obeyed US military orders to build “special districts” of brothels throughout Okinawa Island with the purpose of creating a “stability of society.”49 Despite strong opposition from groups like the Women’s Federation of Okinawa (WFO), the government believed special districts brought more US dollars to the districts and protected women (namely, “non-prostitutes”) from falling victim to sexual violence.50 As Miyagi points out, many WFO members represented the middle-class community, maintained their faith in the patriarchal structure, and followed the ryosai kenbo practices in the household. Together, these conditions further marginalized young girls’ existence in the brothels. Overall, the WFO participated in the reversion movement to Japan with the naïve belief that Japanese sovereignty would rid Okinawans of militarized sexual violence by the United States.51 An archipelagic feminist praxis advances the WFO women’s demilitarization work by moving beyond Okinawa’s belonging to the nation-state to argue sexual violence was a structure co-maintained by locals and transnational imperial powers. Hence, the praxis delineates sexual violence, patriarchy, colonialism, and militarism as interrelated and a continuum, beginning with the Ryukyu Kingdom, the Satsuma invasion, the Japanese comfort stations, and the US military occupation of Okinawa.
Women Act Against Military Violence: 1972 to Present
Despite many Okinawans’ hopes to be free from militarized violence upon the reversion, Japan supports the US military presence in Okinawa with the pretext of protecting the peace and security of the nation-state. Although Okinawa constitutes just 0.6% of the Japanese land mass, the US military bases and the thirty-one post-occupation military facilities of the US military in Okinawa burden the islanders with 70% of the total US military bases in all of Japan.
According to Takazato, OWAAMV was established in 1995 in response to the “courage” of the twelve-year-old survivor of rape by three US military personnel on September 4, 1995, in Okinawa.52 An important event for the establishment of OWAAMV was called the Unai Festival, a women’s festival held annually between 1985 and 1995. Both Takazato and Miyagi played central roles in the organizing and preparing of the Unai Festival and OWAAMV. Another core member of OWAAMV, Hiromi Minamoto, then a radio host at an Okinawa radio station, initiated the festival in 1985. Unai is an Okinawan word that describes sisters with male siblings; unai is also exclusively used by the unai’s male siblings to refer to their sisters. Thus, unai has only historically existed for the male siblings. Contrary to women’s existence within this male-centered viewpoint, the women in the Unai Festival intentionally appropriated unai to critique women’s relationship to men. These occasions created opportunities for women to gather physically in the same space at Yogi Park in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, to listen to each other, share their experiences, invite feminist lecturers, and perform plays, dances, and music. Despite their differences in politics, occupation, marital status, geographic location, social class, religion, sexual orientation, or race, the festivals served to build women’s networks across the islands and beyond Okinawa and Japan, thereby showcasing archipelagic feminism. Countering the patriarchies of locals and empires alike, Takazato and Miyagi along with other women in the festivals developed spaces for the archipelagic feminist praxis in the islands of Okinawa.
Another significant turning point for gender equality globally occurred when Takazato was at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 and heard the news of the rape of the twelve year-old girl by three US servicemen. The incident eventually led to a mass prefecture-wide protest of approximately 85,000 people on October 21, 1995. Takazato recalls returning immediately to Okinawa from Beijing because in her experience many survivors dropped their cases when facing public blaming and shame. The Okinawan government and law enforcement, largely consisting of men, thought it would be best to keep their response to a minimum “to protect the survivor and her family.”53 In her capacity as a member of the Naha City Assembly, Takazato met with other assembly representatives, including then-Governor Masahide Ota and then-Vice-Governor Mitsuko Tomon of Okinawa, and other women leaders to draft a statement, hold a press conference, and oppose any effort to stifle news about the rape incident. Shortly thereafter, together with the other women who had returned from the Beijing conference, Takazato held a gathering of three hundred women for three consecutive days to attain public support in the islands of Okinawa and internationally.
Having recently addressed militarized sexual violence as “structural violence” of the United States and Japan as well as Okinawan patriarchy at the Beijing conference, the Okinawan women prepared to make an explicit critique of the militarized violence in order to support the courage of the survivor.54 Despite the fact that the growing media coverage might expose her identity to the public and thereby risk a lasting victim bashing, Takazato understood that the girl’s courage could be strengthened by a sustained effort in the telling and retelling of the horrific incident to the police. Without the bravery of the survivor and the timely support of the mobilized women, Takazato felt that the prefectural government might not have known what would be the right course of action to take.55 Takazato still wonders, too, what it means to “protect” the survivor: “Does protection mean to conceal the atrocious incident? Does silence protect perpetrators instead of the survivors?” For her, the most important task is to protect sexual survivors by prioritizing their will while taking action.56 Takazato states that if it were not for the women’s actions, the mass rally might not have happened.57
The feminist mobilization in 1995 consolidated a series of events and movements that sustained the twelve-year-old girl’s strength in persisting throughout the prosecution despite her physical, mental, and emotional suffering, and her commitment to prevent further sexual violence against other women on the islands, which also illustrates a commitment to archipelagic feminism. There had been multiple incidents of sexual assault against women by US military personnel in Okinawa prior to this incident. Indeed, Takazato, Miyagi, and others had attempted to support all survivors in their efforts to bring them justice. One such case was the rape of a nineteen-year-old girl in 1993. However, Miyagi and Takazato were unable to move forward with the case because they respected the survivor’s decision to withdraw the charges.
In an article titled “Postcolonialism in the ‘Imperial Ianfu’” (2017), a prominent Japanese feminist, Chizuko Ueno, argued that the island-wide mass protest in 1995 was enabled by the ideology of purity and chastity, citing that “the nineteen-year-old’s rape of the previous year did not become an issue.”58 Responding to this criticism in “An Objection from Okinawa,” Miyagi expressed that she was “in disbelief of the commentary by Ms. Ueno,” whom Miyagi had worked with and respected.59 Miyagi then juxtaposed a similar criticism of Okinawan women by Norma Field, a prominent Japanese American feminist scholar who responded to the 1995 rape of the twelve-year-old girl. Miyagi quotes Field, who said, “the movement might preserve notions of chastity and purity when other violent crimes and sexual assaults against women didn’t lead to such a movement but sexual violation of a young girl’s body did.”60 Miyagi expressed her “shock” by posing this question to Field and Ueno: “Is it just me who feels the top-down perspective of feminists from the colonizing states that have been ruling Okinawa?”61 In other words, Miyagi points out that even well-established feminists make problematic assumptions when they are physically located off the islands and detached from the Okinawan feminist praxis that has a deep epistemological connection to the islands.62
Miyagi’s “Objection from Okinawa” occasions a critical moment wherein Okinawan feminists transnationally articulate their critiques to advance equal feminist footing on the playing field in which everybody can participate. Miyagi continues: “I would like to pose a question to both of you [Ueno and Field]. Are the US military base issues Okinawa’s problem? Do Okinawan women have to tackle the problem of sexual assaults committed by the US soldiers alone?”63 The powerful queries by Miyagi challenge Ueno and Field to reflect on their privileges that are often disguised as non-White, feminist positionalities. Miyagi’s questions simultaneously disrupt the hegemonic containment of OWAAMV’s feminist agency from the realm of incomplete and essentialist knowledge that needs improvement. “We have to be mindful,” notes Miyagi as she concludes her objection, “of the danger of perpetuating discrimination against Okinawan critiques when one’s Okinawan critiques lacks a tojisha [a subject] consciousness.”64 Here, Miyagi articulates an epistemologically rooted feminism in the islands of Okinawa as an enabling and critical intersectional feminist praxis.65 Her questioning of Ueno and Field invites both women to engage in what Setsu Shigematsu calls “decolonial praxis,” “whereby first world (Japanese) feminists would support rather than lead and determine the political agenda.”66 The archipelagic feminist praxis, as demonstrated by Miyagi and Takazato, thus informs and reshapes transoceanic feminist discourses by engaging in constructive critiques that foster solidarity and not opposition.
A similar critique can be applied to Masamichi S. Inoue’s interpretation of Ota’s testimony. Inoue states that the mass protest “enabled Okinawa to present the girl as innocent, helpless, and pure (all of which she was).”67 He was referencing one sentence from Ota’s speech that stated: “As the person granted responsibility for administering Okinawa, I would like to apologize from the bottom of my heart that I could not protect the dignity of a child, which I must protect above all else.”68 The very act of theorizing from afar can produce the danger of subsuming the survivor to all of which she was not. On the contrary, the survivor of the rape in 1995 was courageous enough to disavow the very notion of the “helpless victim” trope that scholars from afar frequently reproduce in their analyses. In this sense, the place-based praxis of archipelagic feminisms hints at the epistemological challenges of feminist discourse analyses that can potentially reduce the survivor of sexual assault to a representation and object of analysis. To be clear, the place-based praxis of archipelagic feminisms does not rely on the identities or blood linage of Okinawa or Ryukyu. Instead, the OWAAMV’s membership inscribed the following provision at its very beginning in 1995: “Women residing in Okinawa who agree to support our mission.”69 In fact, even prior to the establishment of OWAAMV, the women had already been working with Carolyn Francis, a Methodist missionary from the United States who lived in Okinawa from 1989 to 1999. During this period, Francis assumed the responsibility of translating the OWAAMV documents and participated in the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where she served as the secretary general of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) committee from Okinawa.70 Knowing the limitations and possibilities of movements within geopolitical and national boundaries, Francis, Miyagi, Takazato, and other women in OWAAMV created a network of transnational allies to achieve their goal of freedom from militarized sexual violence.
Takazato describes this transnational development of the Okinawan women’s demilitarization movement as “tojisha theorizing.”71 Tojisha is the Japanese word for a person who experienced events firsthand. While the term may intersect with Black feminist theorizing from an earlier period that foregrounded standpoint epistemology, which emphasizes identity and experience, it differs in that the concept of tojisha theorizing is a place-based feminism that helps describe deep ancestorial cultural belongings and accountabilities to specific places.72 Takazato describes this theorizing: “Although we borrowed their [Japanese or English] language, for instance, tojisha, the theorizing was our own.”73 Takazato continues, “While anthropology, the study of people, began as the study of ‘others,’ feminism can be described as the study of our own experiences. Feminism is therefore the theory of tojisha women. And our feminist theorizing is of our own.”74 If we recall, Miyagi also used tojisha theorizing in her objection to Ueno and Field. Considering the tensions between archipelagic feminisms and Ueno and Field’s feminism, one may identify a contradiction in the appropriation of tojisha theorizing as was earlier developed by Ueno. The tojisha in Ueno’s theorizing concerned Masashi Nakanishi, who was disabled in an accident; subsequently, Ueno developed tojisha as a critique of the welfare system.75 Tojisha here is reappropriated in Takazato or Miyagi’s feminist theorization, as exemplified by Miyagi. They acknowledge that their feminist theorizing and activism are not in opposition or independent from mainland Japanese or the United States’ or other islands’ feminisms. Rather, their theorizing of tojisha, itself a vital part of archipelagic feminisms, enables more opportunities for internal critiques of feminisms and for solidarities that are not predetermined by the nation-states.
This stance is exemplified by the first international speaking tour of OWAAMV, called “Women’s Peace Caravan” to the United States from February 3 to 17, 1996. The report about the tour opens with Takazato’s essay titled “Women’s Peace Caravan to the United States: Creating a Network of Life.” The article states that the caravan was initiated with the “purpose of having a discussion between the people who sent the soldiers to Okinawa and the people who had to host them,” and “to find solutions with them [US citizens].”76 The caravan also welcomed US women allies, including Francis, and Martha Matsuoka who lived in Okinawa as a researcher and arranged meetings with NGOs in San Francisco. Their collective action became an awakening for those who learned about Okinawa, which led to the establishment of a California-based nonprofit organization called Women for Genuine Security in the same year.77
In the following year, 1997, the women organized IWNAM, an organization featured in this special issue, with delegates from Okinawa, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the United States. They employed the four languages of English, Japanese, Korean, and Tagalog. Their most recent meeting was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2021, which marked the tenth meeting and twenty-fourth year of the women’s demilitarization movement, with an expanded network that now includes Guåhan [Guam], Hawai‘i, and Puerto Rico.78
Conclusion: International Women’s Network against Militarism
By tracing the works of two women—Suzuyo Takazato and Harumi Miyagi—who played a central part in OWAAMV, I demonstrated how OWAAMV’s praxis of archipelagic feminisms are conceptualized. Archipelagic feminisms, which I developed from the work of Takazato and Miyagi, seek to decolonize the patriarchal and militarized nomenclature of Okinawa and Ryukyu, advance internal critiques of feminists, and generate transnational feminist solidarities. Their efforts are not fixed but rather provisional and forming. The transpacific network of islands in IWNAM also exposes US and Japanese militarist and postcolonial practices through the rooted epistemologies of women whose lives have historically and contemporaneously intersected in the Okinawan archipelago. By engaging in Lisa Yoneyama’s critique of the “absence” of islanders’ agency, the IWNAM praxis also participates in and contributes to the decolonial genealogies of islander and Indigenous interventions against the US colonial presence in Asia and the Pacific.79
Takazato and Miyagi’s feminism requires a physical rootedness, a sense of commitment to a place and a physical presence. These sensibilities place them at the forefront of theorizing against sexual violence, Japanese and US occupation, and Ryukyu-Okinawan patriarchies. Since returning to my home on Okinawa Island in 2017, I have been physically here, theorizing alongside these women. Takazato and Miyagi’s leadership has helped me to gain insight into the physical rootedness of feminist demilitarization I have been calling archipelagic feminisms. But what would it mean if I, as an Okinawan woman, bring archipelagic praxis to, for instance, Ohlone in Oakland? Archipelagic feminisms signal toward more sustained conversations about these questions in a “trans-Indigenous” manner, to borrow from Chadwick Allen’s analytic and a political framework that is further modeled by Vicente M. Diaz.80 Diaz defines the term as “the claims and conditions of aboriginal belonging to specific places while also permitting wide lateral reach across time and space, albeit in ways that do not lose familiar and signature indigenous belongings and accountabilities to place, to site, and cultural specificity.”81
Corrina Gould, a Native American Ohlone activist, traveled across the Pacific to join the IWNAM meeting in Okinawa in 2017 to share her stories and listen to other participating nations while paying particular attention and respect to the Okinawa islands. Her continental stories do not foreclose the political and decolonial possibilities of solidarities, but rather illustrate the global reach of archipelagic feminisms.
Ayano Ginoza is an associate professor with the Research Institute for Islands and Sustainability at the University of the Ryukyus. Her research mainly focuses on the study of US and Japanese militarism and colonialism, island feminisms, and transoceanic demilitarization movements in Okinawa and the Pacific Islands. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Intersections, and International Journal of Okinawan Studies, among other publications. She has been the editor of the Okinawan Journal of Island Studies since 2019.
Notes
Suzuyo Takazato, Women of Okinawa: Women’s Human Rights and Military [沖縄の女たち：女性の人権と基地軍隊]” (Bunkyoku, Tokyo: Akaishi Shoten, 2003).
Takazato, Women of Okinawa, 201.
Takazato, Women of Okinawa, 226.
Jinah Kim and Nitasha Sharma, “Introduction to Interventions in Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies,” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal 7, no. 2 (Fall 2021).
Lisa Yoneyama. “Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific,” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017): 471–82.
Takazato, Women of Okinawa, 198–99.
Michelle Erai, “Criminal Sittings: Rape in the Colony, New Zealand, 1862,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 2 (June 2011).
Mishuana Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the Discussion of Indigenous Nation-Building,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1 (January 2008): 24.
See, for instance, Akihito Fukazawa, “Concepts of Ryukyu and Okinawa” [琉球と沖縄の概念の整理],” History of Okinawa: The Ancient Ryukyu [沖縄県史：古琉球] 3 (Naha, Okinawa, Japan: Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education, 2010), 20–21; and Susumu Asato et al., eds, Prefectural History: History of Okinawa Prefecture [県史：沖縄県の歴史], (Chiyodaku, Tokyo: Meiwa Insatsu, 2004), 2–10.
Marina Karides, “Why Island Feminism?” Shima 11, no. 1 (March 2017): 32.
Karides, “Why Island Feminism?”
Kozue Akibayashi, “Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence: An Island Feminism Reclaiming Dignity,” Okinawan Journal of Island Studies 1 (March 2020): 37–54.
Teresia K. Teaiwa, “To Island,” in A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader, ed. Godfrey Baldacchino (Charlottetown, Canada, and Luqa, Malta: Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island and Agenda Academic, 2020), 514.
Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again.”
Lisa Yoneyama. “Liberation under Siege: US Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 885–910.
Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2000), 291.
Lisa Yoneyama, “Impossibilities of Redress: Saigon, Hiroshima, and Franz Fanon [リドレスの不可能性について: サイゴン, 広島, フランツ・ファノン],” Politics of Postwar Thought [戦後思想のポリティックス], ed. Aiko Ogoshi and Midori Igeta (Chiyodaku, Japan: Seikyusha, 2005), 210–226, 223.Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
Keith Camacho, “Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions across the American Empire,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 3 (2011): ix–xxxiv.
There have been several etymological accounts of the naming, spelling, and phonetics of “Ryukyu.” However, historians, linguists, and other scholars have not reached a consensus. What seems to be the dominant understanding among them is that the name did not originate in present-day Okinawa or the Ryukyu archipelago. See, for instance, Masatou Kodama, Ryukyu to Okinawa no Meisho no Henkan (Naha, Japan: Ryukyu Shimpo, 2007). Kodama chronologically traces the archival documents from China detailing debates over origin of the word and the process of naming the Ryukyu kingdom. According to Asato et al., Prefectural History, Ryukyu appeared in Ming Shilu, which contained the imperial annals of the Ming emperors to describe a chain of islands in the East China Sea, and it gradually applied to calling the Ryukyu archipelago.
Gregory Smits, “Romanticizing the Ryukyuan Past: Origins of the Myth of Ryukyuan Pacifism,” International Journal of Okinawan Studies 1, no. 1 (March 2010): 58.
Smits, “Romanticizing the Ryukyuan Past,” 4.
Smits, “Romanticizing the Ryukyuan Past,” 4.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 7, 2021.
See also Fusaaki Maehara, “The Relationship between Satsuma and Ryukyu in Women’s History [女性誌から見た薩摩と琉球の関係],” in History of Okinawa: Women’s History [沖縄県史:女性史] (Naha, Japan: Okinawa Prefecture Board of Education, 2016): 62–69.
See also Sayaka Aso, “The Aspects of Tsuji Yukaku in the Meiji Period [明治期の辻遊郭の諸相],” in History of Okinawa: Women’s History [沖縄県史:女性史] (Naha, Japan: Okinawa Prefecture Board of Education, 2016).
Harumi Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women: Through the History of Women in Meiji to the End of War [軍事的に支配された沖縄女性の性：明治から敗戦までの女性史をとおして], in Sexual Violence and Militarism in Okinawa [沖縄にみる性暴力と軍事主義], ed. Fusaka Christian Center (Bunkyoku, Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo, 2017), 3–21.
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women”; Harumi Miyagi, “Implementation of ‘Ie’ System and Education through Good Wife and Good Mother: How Okinawan Women Were Imperialized [家制度の導入と良妻賢母], in History of Okinawa: Women’s History [沖縄県史:女性史] (Naha, Japan: Okinawa Prefecture Board of Education, 2016).
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women.”
Interview with Miyagi on March 20, 2020.
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women.”
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women,” 10.
Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2001).
Suzuyo Takazato, “Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ and Okinawan Women [日本軍「慰安婦」と沖縄の女性たち],” in History of Okinawa: Women’s History [沖縄県史:女性史] (Naha, Japan: Okinawa Prefecture Board of Education, 2016), 305–18.
Kazu Kondo’s talk on April 13, 2000, quoted in Takazato, “Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ and Okinawan Women.”
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women,” 13.
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women.”
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women,” 14.
Harumi Miyagi, What My Mother Bequeathed: New Testimonies of Mass Suicides in Zamami Island of Okinawa [母の遺したもの: 沖縄座間味島「集団自決」] (Chiyodaku, Japan: Koubunken, 2000).
Miyagi, What My Mother Bequeathed.
Interview with Miyagi on April 23, 2021. Also see Miyagi, What My Mother Bequeathed. Miyagi documents that in the Zami Islands, 83 percent of the causalities from forced suicides were of women and children under twelve years old.
Miyagi, “Militarily Colonized Sexuality of Okinawan Women.”
Suzuyo Takazato, “Military, Its Structural Violence and Women [軍隊その構造的暴力と女性]” in Sexual Violence and Militarism in Okinawa [沖縄にみる性暴力と軍事主義], ed. Fusaka Christian Center. (Bunkyoku, Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo, 2017), 25.
Masamichi S. Inoue, Okinawa and the US Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 39.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 2021.
Eiko Uehara, A Flower of Tsuji, Postwar 2 [辻の華戦後編下] (Chuoku, Japan: Jiji Tushin, 1989), 83–87.
See also Shinjo’s personal account of her life in The Life of a Painter Masako R. Summers, Searching for Freedom from Okinawa to the US [画家正子Rサマーズの生涯：沖縄からアメリカ自由を求めて] (Chiyodaku, Japan: Kobunken, 2017); and Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins, “My Story: A Daughter Recalls the Battle of Okinawa,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 13, no. 4 (February 2015): 1–22.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 2021.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 2021.
Suzuyo Takazato, Women in Okinawa: Women’s Human Rights and Military Bases (Chiyodaku, Japan: Akaishi Shoten, 1996), 28.
Takazato, Women in Okinawa.
Etsu Miyazato, Okinawa, Women’s Postwar: A Beginning from the Burnt Ground [沖縄女たちの戦後：焼土からの出] (Naha, Japan: Hirugisha, 1986).
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 2021.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 2021.
Takazato, Women of Okinawa, 214.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 7, 2021.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 7, 2021.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 7, 2021.
Harumi Miyagi, “An Objection from Okinawa: Ueno Chizuko’s Empire’s Comfort Women [沖縄からの異議申し立て: 上野千鶴子 “帝国の慰安婦のポストコロニアリズム”を読んで],” The Association for Research on the Impacts of War and Military Bases on Women’s Human Rights [女性戦争人権学会] 16 (July 2018): 53–64. Chizuko Ueno, “Postcolonialism in the ‘Imperial Ianfu” [“’帝国の慰安婦’のポストコロニアリズム”], in For Dialogues: Open Questions on “Imperial Ianfu [対話のために: ‘帝国の慰安婦’という問いをひらく], ed. Toyomi Asano, Kizou Ogura, and Masahiko Nishi (Musashino, Japan: Crane Book, 2017).
Quoted in Miyagi, “An Objection from Okinawa,” 53. The discussion was from my interview with Miyagi on April 23, 2021.
Norma Field, “Japan and the United States: Two Fiftieth Years [日本とアメリカ: 二つの50年目],” in Postwar Japanese History and the Contemporary Issues [戦後日本史と現代の課題], ed. Igarashi Takeshi (Chuoshi, Japan: Tsukiji Shokan, 1996), quoted in Miyagi, “An Objection from Okinawa.”
Miyagi, “An Objection from Okinawa,” 56.
See seminal works of Linda Ahmed such as Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
Miyagi, “An Objection from Okinawa,” 56.
Miyagi, “An Objection from Okinawa,” 56.
Miyagi, “An Objection from Okinawa,” 63.
Setsu Shigematsu, “Rethinking Japanese Feminism and the Lessons of Uman Ribu: Toward a Praxis of Critical Transnational Feminism,” in Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, ed. Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker (Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018), 205–29, 222.
Inoue, Okinawa and the US Military, 37.
Ryukyu Shimpo, “1995 Okinawa’s Protests against the US Military [異議申立て基地沖縄],” Ryukyu Shimpo (October 22, 1995).
Kozue Akibayashi, “Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence: A Feminist Challenge to Militarism” (Dissertation, Columbia University, 2002), 87.
Akibayashi, “Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence.”
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 7, 2021.
Patricia Hill Colins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000).
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 7, 2021.
Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, January 7, 2021.
Masashi Nakanishi and Chizuko Ueno, Tojisha Shuken [Tojisha Sovereignty] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 2003).
Suzuyo Takazato, Women’s Peace Caravan to the United States: Creating a Network of Life [Onnatachi no ‘America Piisu Karavan’: Ikita Nettowaaku wo Musubu] (Naha, Japan: Act Against Military Violence, 1996), 1.
Women for Genuine Security, “Who We Are,” http://www
.genuinesecurity .org/aboutus/index .html., accessed January 10, 2021. Women for Genuine Security, “Who We Are.”
Lisa Yoneyama, “Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific.” See also Keith L. Camacho for “the Pacific islander interventions” in Camacho, “Transoceanic Flows,” xi.
Chadwick Allen, Trans-indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Vicente M. Diaz, “Oceania in the Plains: The Politics and Analytics of Transindigenous Resurgence in Chuukese Voyaging of Dakota Lands, Waters, and Skies in Mini sota Makhoche,” Pacific Studies 42, nos. 1/2 (April/August 2019): 2.