An End to Eternities

I write amid the surge of the deadly Omicron variant, starting a new year in a cycle of violence that feels very much the same—lives deemed disposable for the proliferation of capitalism. State powers tell us this is the way it has to be. However, the collective writers of On Necrocapitalism underscore the necrotic nature of capitalism to remind readers that they will be sacrificed first, their adherence to its maintenance guarantees them nothing. Despite “living under the aegis of a capitalism that imagines itself eternally triumphant,” it is just that—an imagination.1 In being able to see past the capitalist imaginary, On Necrocapitalism tells us that we are not beholden to a capitalist eternity and encourages readers to both imagine new societal relationships as well as remember ways of being that existed prior to capitalism and feudalism. In reading Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll Between Japan, America, and the Marshall Island by Greg Dvorak and In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire by Eiichiro Azuma, these texts make legible, and thus deconstructable, the imperialist imaginaries crafted by Japan and the United States. Together, Dvorak and Azuma help us to understand settler colonialism through a complex web of relationships that enables us to resist imperialism’s attempts to make itself eternal.

While Dvorak does not explicitly name it as settler colonialism, I found his use of concrete as metaphor a compelling way to describe how militarism and imperialism work to destroy a place and its people’s connection to it in order to replace them with settlers and settler structures:

In contrast to the coralline model of history, which acknowledges the agency of individuals in terms of the larger reef, conventional histories usually teach about the victories and losses of nations. I refer in this book to these kinds of layers of history as “concrete.” In Kwajalein and many other heavily militarized islands throughout Oceania, coral was literally used as an aggregate, mixed with cement and water to form quick-drying concrete that could be used to construct fortifications or to form roads and runways. Concrete is the pulverization, amalgamation, and flattening of all these coralline histories into one condensed and monolithic mass. Nationalism and historical revisionism are examples of this.2

Through this metaphor, coral is a way to see relationships and legacies that concrete attempts to hide. For an example of concrete at work, I use a 2019 Salvation Army video I came across while researching for this essay, also entitled “Coral and Concrete.”3 This video focuses on Ebeye, an island part of the Kwajalein Atoll where Marshallese people have been cordoned off due to the US bases and nuclear testing. Dvorak outlines how, as Marshallese who lived on different islands were forced to relocate to Ebeye by the United States, the infrastructural resources provided (e.g., housing, sanitation, electricity) were abysmal, while Kwajalein island was being fortified into a “small American town” for the US military personnel who would live there.4 Prior to the 1960s, Ebeye was described as “a pleasant ‘outer island,’ with peaceful streets, trees, and a warm and friendly community.”5

For the white American Salvation Army officers narrating the video and the donors to which they are speaking, the layers of concrete, lack of vegetation, and poverty are inherent, with remedy only in the form of donations to the Ebeye Christian ministry. Here, coral is just a feature of the concrete to emphasize Kwajalein’s “remoteness” (coded exotification in relation to continental United States6) as a rationale for US control. Coral being sidelined in a concretized narrative of history removes the fact that it was the United States that caused the overcrowding on Ebeye and that it poured the concrete that would deteriorate the ecosystems that had sustained life on the Kwajalein Atoll for millennia. This is one of many “legends” embedded into the concrete that work to convince US settlers and Marshallese people that the Marshall islands “need” the United States to survive, whereas coral remembers generations of Marshallese sovereignty on the islands.7

Okinawa is also part of a Kwajalein coralline history. Dvorak references Okinawan settlers as well as Okinawan military conscripts as parts of the many atollscapes connected in Kwajalein.8 However, in concrete, their lives, and many of their deaths during World War II, are hidden, both as not to soil US liberation myths nor to oppose Japan’s nation-building. But the coralline history extends further in connecting Indigenous communities throughout the Pacific.

Dvorak’s metaphor reminds me that in the northern part of Okinawa island, Oura Bay, is home to the world’s largest blue coral colony. I remember holding a small piece of the periwinkle and white coral in my hand as I rode in a boat crossing the bay in 2019. The boat’s clear glass bottom was a small window into the world below, giving us a glimpse of the incredible biodiverse ecosystem to which the blue coral is home, again one of the world’s largest. But when you look up from the boat to the surface of the water, something disturbing is happening. A stream of trucks is crossing a metal bridge to dump soil into the middle bay for the construction of the massive Henoko marine airbase. At the start of 2021, it was confirmed, after years of speculation, that this soil contained the remains of victims from the gruesome Battle of Okinawa. The land where this soil is being dredged to suffocate the ocean for the benefit of US war planes carries the remains and violent deaths of Okinawan civilians, Korean and Taiwanese hostages, and Japanese and US soldiers.9

Indigenous Okinawans—Ryukyuan, Unchinanchu, Shimanchu10—have and continue to organize against dual Japanese and US imperialism on their islands while developing protocol and community formations for what will be after colonization. The boat tour I joined is an example of an Unchinanchu-led educational project used to develop consciousness on the base’s impacts on Oura Bay as well as the daily sit-ins, composed mainly of Unchinanchu elders, block the entrance of the base. In 2019, I linked arms with these protesters, and as we blocked the entrance, they taught me about the genealogy of the region and the devastating impacts of the base. While we were having these conversations, the soil-bearing trucks began to arrive, parked idle on the highway, unable to enter the base. Then the private security guards, who had been watching the sit-in (my friend told me the company’s name plastered on their vest sounded like the Japanese word for “imperial”), started pulling apart our chain of protesters, carrying us away from the gate, and dumping us on the other side of the road.

During the Omicron surge, Okinawa has been referred to as the epicenter of “Japan’s pandemic,” with outbreaks being linked to US military personnel.11 In reading English-language coverage, none question the premise of Okinawa being Japan or why US military bases are prolific across the island. The first time I went to Okinawa was toward the end of a study abroad semester in Yokohama to visit a high school friend stationed there. It was so jarring to stay on base and feel like I was back in the United States while I “knew” I was in Japan. While I no longer think of Okinawa as Japan, it was that feeling that something was deeply wrong that informed the trajectory of my organizing. Years after that first trip to Okinawa, I returned as part of the Nikkei Decolonization Tour, which brought me to the Henoko sit-in. I remember feeling totally helpless as the security guards pulled me from the sit-in, all my bodily autonomy stripped when challenging the empire. Though I felt defeated, the elders there, who experience this abuse regularly, reminded me that this is part of the layers of structural violence they experience daily as a colonized people.

Their continued resistance is a connection to their autonomy as a people and to a future where they and their descendants will thrive beyond the borders of imperialism. Dvorak, while being conscious not to overromanticize the coral in recognizing the violence of ongoing imperialism, notes his optimism for the future by writing that “those big histories look so permanent, hard as concrete. But they crack over time, and the coral breaks through again and grows on top in new directions.”12 Because of my multiplicities as Nikkei and as a settler in the United States, I feel a responsibility to work toward allowing coral to break through.

When I first started talking about Henoko in Japanese American spaces, I was told this has nothing to do with us. While I understand that some of the need to distance Japanese America from Japan is due to the War Relocation Authority, there are many examples of Japanese Americans embracing Japan—such as how community leaders used the redevelopment period to reemphasize San Francisco Japantown’s relationship to Japan as economic a gateway to the Pacific.13 I heard this rationale again during a public comment for a proposed permanent support housing project in Japantown in 2021. A few Japanese American and white speakers mentioned that creating housing for houseless community members would damage Japantown’s reputation and harm business with Asia. This outweighed the need to provide material support to the community’s members most exploited and vulnerable to capitalism as a deadly pandemic was circling the globe. While it may seem contradictory to both embrace and distance oneself from Japan, Azuma’s interimperial framework makes clear how this is a concretized version of Japanese American history, one that seeks to absolve itself from complicity in US and Japanese imperialist violence.14

When I first began learning about Japanese American history, I was told the dominant narrative of a homogenized Issei, first wave of coming to the United States as poor farm workers hoping for a better life. I remember and still see much of the celebration of Issei farm workers as being “largely responsible for turning California’s ‘wasteland’ into the agricultural Mecca that it is known for today.”15 This is an example of settler moves to innocence, “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of Domination.”16 This narrative grants innocence by intentionally obscuring the original Indigenous communities whose traditional territories (far from being wastelands) were colonized. It also employs the image of a hardworking immigrant population to obscure that the Issei were part of a larger expansionist strategy to create “new Japans.”17 With interimperial framework, Azuma shows how the Issei utilized adaptive settler colonialism to take this expansionist strategy from California and Hawai’i for use in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria.18 In In Search of Our Frontier, this creates a critical juncture from Japanese American studies and Asian American studies by presenting a “global history of Japanese Americans beyond the narrow confines of US ethnic studies, which is usually driven by domestic civil rights agendas and the national teleology of becoming Americans.”19

In thinking of broader applications of Azuma, we can use this critique of the hyperfocus on domestic civil rights and the need to be seen as “American” to view the limitations of the pandemic discourse of Stop Asian Hate. As Dylan Rodríguez explains:

The current moment thus reflects an Asian/American scramble for legibility that runs the risk of reproducing simplistic, compartmentalized narratives and explanations for the alarming increase in gendered racist anti-Asian violence since early 2020. Many Asian/American nonprofit community-based organizations, celebrities, (aspiring) elected officials, media pundits, cultural workers, progressive activists, and academics seem to be caught up in—and in some cases resisting—a wave of compulsory liberalism that frames anti-Asian violence within commonly legible narratives of exceptional victimization at the hands of individual perpetrators. Such framings have induced a stream of militant Asian/American demands for “justice” that call on the state to increase police surveillance, validate the specificity of Asian victimization (via “hate crime” statutes), and criminally punish individuals who are demonstrably responsible for reprehensible acts of interpersonal exploitation, brutality, suffering, and fatality.20

Additionally, #StopAsianHate is used interchangeably with #StopAAPIHate. Through the creation of a monolithic AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) mass, this not only makes invisible the many violences that Pacific Islanders are experiencing during the pandemic—disproportionate COVID-19 death, multiple instances of water contamination from US bases in the Pacific, increased vulnerability due to climate change disasters, and so much more—but is a total erasure of Pasifika. This hinders our ability to resist imperialism collectively. As Tuck and Yang explain, erasing Pasifika to center Asian American settlers is part of a larger network of “excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization.”21

Azuma’s and Dvorak’s interventions are essential not only in physically removing the concrete from the land and ocean, but also in removing the deep hold of an imperialist epistemology. For Nikkei, it asks us to face our culpability in colonization, regardless of the structural violences we may have faced, to dismantle our perpetuation of an imperialist eternity. Though we must believe in decolonized, liberatory futures, we cannot wait an eternity to actualize them.

Miya Sommers (they/she) is a gosei and a third-generation settler on the territory of Huichin, Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone land. Their journey has been framed by the World War II experiences of their maternal grandparents. In navigating this inheritance, Miya has been drawn to organizing spaces that offer visions of liberatory futures. Miya is working on developing this consciousness in Nikkei communities as an organizer for Nikkei Resisters while also working as the assistant director of Asian Pacific American Student Development at the University of California, Berkeley and completing their master’s in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.