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 nonetheless imposed their will, their culture and their interests on these islands, This leads us to the present today, where eventually many of the people have accepted the surface of that colonization.

When we look at what is formally defined as colonialism today, we cannot call it direct domination. It could take that form (and in some places you can make a strong case that it exists although with very different names), but it is ludicrous to look at the relationship people in Guam or Okinawa have to their colonizers and say that power is applied or expressed in the same ways as in the past. 

That difference shouldn’t be interpreted as their being less power, but rather that the forms of the power are diffuse, and that the colonized themselves have accepted roles in supporting that colonizing system. The domination may not be there at present, but the system that was started with it persists. At every level of society people take on the role of colonizing themselves and keeping Guam in a fundamentally unequal relation to the US.

This isn’t something that is a simple matter of being duped or that people have drunk too much tuban Dinagi that the US brews and imports to Guam. When the Spanish first arrived in Guam, you would have been silly to believe everything they said. lure of colonial participation wasn’t strong. There was some incentive to join the Spanish and abandon your culture and your community, but the perception of a need to join and accept the Spanish didn’t come until after years of warfare and thousands of Chamorus dying from diseases. By then Chamorus accepted colonization, but only as a last resort and only because they saw it as how they could survive. Eventually, as generations passed this changed to a deeper acceptance. 

But the fact that people on Guam participate in their own colonization, sometimes in very enthusiastic ways doesn’t make it right. It just makes it something more difficult to fix or correct. Both the colonial histories of Guam and Okinawa justify that this be a place that is inferior, that it be a place where you put lots of military bases, that it be a place where it does not have an equal say over its future compared to others. The colonial participation just makes it harder to get past this point. It makes it harder to fight for a future in places such as Guam and Okinawa where they are not encased in this naturalized subordination.

I constantly need to remind myself however that for all on Guam that signifies American power, the success of colonization and the sad ways in which Chamorus are addicted to the tuban Dinagi, there are also signs of the failure of colonization and persistent pushes for decolonization. The strongest similarity that I see between Okinawa and Guam is the way their marginal and unequal status has resulted in the development of oppositional identities, or a commonsensical and sometimes hardly radical way in which people assert a difference between them and the colonizer.

In both Okinawa and Guam there is a willingness to not just critique their “central” or their “federal” governments, but to also see the nation itself as not including them, but that they belong to something else, something that predates the colonizer’s existence or his capturing of them. But in Guam this critique has already taken on an independent strain where Chamorus and others see themselves not just as a minor part of the US, but as a part which need not exist for eternity waiting outside the door of the US, begging to be brought in. 

For almost a decade prior to the COVID pandemic, I visited Okinawa annually and saw the ways in which different groups were beginning to take what had long been articulated as cultural or historical differences and begin to assert them as political differences. Sometimes through the use of independence frameworks or decolonization, or Okinawans as being indigenous not solely in a cultural way, but also a political way, possessing self-determination and rights beyond just being fodder for tourism campaigns. What pushing much of this was military increases and military deals made between the US and Japan at Okinawa's expense which always reinforced how the island was different and not like the rest of Japan, in subordinate sense. 

I have not been back to Okinawa since the pandemic, I hope to visit there again soon and visit my friends, see what has become of the movements lately.