Colonial Differences: Okinawa and Guam
Over the years, as I’ve traveled around Asia and the Pacific, whether for research, for conferences, for solidarity actions, I’ve found a list of places similar to Guam, that you could call ambiguous. They belong to a certain country, but they don’t really feel like it at times. Okinawa is one such place. There is way that history and culture have combined to create a rift between Japan and Okinawa, that is invisible most of the time, but is the stark the next. There was a sense of pride and identity that could not be explained solely through references to regionalism or local love. It was something more, and something very similar to what we see on Guam. The particularities of history have created the situation where you can stand in either Guam or Okinawa and say with great force that these places are either American or Japanese. Colonialism and imperialism have taken these places and remade them. They might have said they did so for the benefit of the people there, but they noneth...