This book considers the role of civilian workers on U.S. bases in Okinawa, Japan and how transnational movements within East Asia during the Occupation period brought foreign workers, mostly from the Philippines, to work on these bases. Decades later, in a seeming “reproduction of base labour”, returnees of both Okinawan and Philippine heritage began occupying jobs on base as United States of Japan (USFJ) employees. The book investigates the role that ethnicity, nationality, and capital play in the lives of these base employees, and at the same time examines how Japanese and Okinawan identity/ies are formed and challenged. It offers a valuable resource for those interested in Japan and Okinawa, U.S. military basing, migration, and mixed ethnicities.

In 1995, an Okinawan schoolgirl was brutally raped by several U.S. servicemen. The incident triggered a chain of protests by women's groups, teachers' associations, labor unions, reformist political parties, and various grassroots organizations across Okinawa prefecture. Reaction to the crime culminated in a rally attended by some 85,000 people, including business leaders and conservative politicians who had seldom raised their voices against the U.S. military presence. Using this event as a point of reference, Inoue explores how Okinawans began to regard themselves less as a group of uniformly poor and oppressed people and more as a confident, diverse, middle-class citizenry embracing the ideals of democracy, human rights, and women's equality. As this identity of resistance has grown, however, the Japanese government has simultaneously worked to subvert it, pressuring Okinawans to support a continued U.S. presence. Inoue traces these developments as well, revealing the ways in which Tokyo has assisted the United States in implementing a system of governance that continues to expand through the full participation and cooperation of residents. Inoue deftly connects local social concerns with the larger political processes of the Japanese nation and the global strategies of the United States. He critically engages social-movement literature along with postmodern/structural/colonial discourses and popular currents and themes in Okinawan and Japanese studies. Rich in historical and ethnographical detail, this volume is a nuanced portrait of the impact of Japanese colonialism, World War II, and U.S. military bases on the formation of contemporary Okinawan identity.

Exploring contemporary Okinawan culture, politics, and historical memory, this book argues that the long Japanese tradition of defining Okinawa as a subordinate and peripheral part of Japan means that all claims of Okinawan distinctiveness necessarily become part of the larger debate over contemporary identity. The contributors trace the renascence of the debate in the burst of cultural and political expression that has flowered in the past decade, with the rapid growth of local museums and memorials and the huge increase in popularity of distinctive Okinawan music and literature, as well as in political movements targeting both U.S. military bases and Japanese national policy on ecological, developmental, and equity grounds. A key strategy for claiming and shaping Okinawan identity is the mobilization of historical memory of the recent past, particularly of the violent subordination of Okinawan interests to those of the Japanese and American governments in war and occupation. Its intertwining themes of historical memory, nationality, ethnicity, and cultural conflict in contemporary society address central issues in anthropology, sociology, contemporary history, Asian Studies, international relations, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies. Contributions by: Matt Allen, Linda Isako Angst, Asato Eiko, Gerald Figal, Aaron Gerow, Laura Hein, Michael Molasky, Steve Rabson, James E. Roberson, Mark Selden, and Julia Yonetani.

The phenomenon of “war brides” from Japan moving to the West has been quite widely discussed, but this book tells the stories of women whose lives followed a rather different path after they married foreign occupiers. During Okinawa’s Occupation by the Allies from 1945 to 1972, many Okinawan women met and had relationships with non-Western men who were stationed in Okinawa as soldiers and base employees. Most of these men were from the Philippines. Zulueta explores the journeys of these women to their husbands’ homeland, their acculturation to their adopted land, and their return to their native Okinawa in their late adult years. Utilizing a life-course approach, she examines how these women crafted their own identities as first-generation migrants or “Issei” in both the country of migration and their natal homeland, their re-integration to Okinawan society, and the role of religion in this regard, as well as their thoughts on end-of-life as returnees. This book will be of interest to scholars looking at gender and migration, cross-cultural marriages, ageing and migration, as well as those interested in East Asia, particularly Japan/Okinawa.

This volume considers the possibilities of the term 'transwar' to understand the history of Asia from the 1920s to the 1960s. Recently, scholars have challenged earlier studies that suggested a neat division between the pre- and postwar or colonial/postcolonial periods in the national histories of East Asia, instead assessing change and continuity across the divide of war. Taking this reconsideration further, Transwar Asia explores the complex processes by which prewar and colonial ideologies, practices, and institutions from the 1920s and 1930s were reconfigured during World War II and, crucially, in the two decades that followed, thus shaping the Asian Cold War and the processes of decolonization and nation state-formation. With contributions covering the transwar histories of China, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the book addresses key themes such as authoritarianism, militarization, criminal rehabilitation, market controls, labor-regimes, and anti-communism. A transwar angle, the authors argue, sheds new light on the continuing problems that undergirded the formation of postwar nation-states and illuminates the political legacies that still shape the various regions in Asia up to the present.

This handbook compiles the most up-to-date research on transnational families. It employs a dialogue between classical approaches and cutting-edge directions in transnational family research to identify continuities and changes in terms of socioeconomic disparities and actors, and to analyze coexistence. Further, the volume adopts a twofold global and international comparative perspective. On the one hand, it focuses on different migratory flows around the world and describes their entangled logics; on the other, it is written by an international group of contributors, with a diverse range of professional backgrounds. Their contributions are based on sound empirical research, and explore geographical regions around the world. The handbook presents different thematic perspectives on transnational families, including an analytical focus on gender, global sociodemographic inequalities, power asymmetries, and border- and mobility regimes, as well as the organization of transnational care, transnational fatherhood, ageing, family reunions and return. It also includes a variety of methodological approaches to transnational family research, ranging from ethnography, biographical research, and life-course methods, to multi-sited approaches and quantitative surveys. Investigating an emergent debate, it sheds new light on migratory fluxes, their common and specific determinants, the types of actors involved, and ways to empirically and methodologically approach them. This is a must-read reference for social scientists interested in family research, migration, and gender studies. Chapter 7 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Women and COVID-19: A Clinical and Applied Sociological Focus on Family, Work and Community focuses on women’s lived experiences amid the pandemic, emphasising migrant labourers, ethnic minorities, the poor and disenfranchised, the incarcerated, and victims of gender-based violence, to explore the impact of the pandemic on women. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated pervasive gender inequalities in homes, schools, and workplaces in the developed world and the Global South. Female workers, particularly those from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds, were often the first to lose their jobs amidst unprecedented layoffs and economic uncertainty. National lockdowns and widespread restrictions blurred the boundaries between work and home life and increased the burden of domestic work on women within patriarchal societies. This so-called ‘new normal’ in everyday life also exposed women to increased levels of gender-based violence and the likelihood of contracting COVID-19 due to overcrowding. This edited volume includes contributions from leading applied and clinical sociologists working and living in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and gives a global overview of the impact of the pandemic on women. Each chapter adopts an applied and clinical sociological approach in analysing gendered vulnerabilities. The volume innovatively uses personal accounts, including narratives, interviews, autoethnographies, and focus group discussions, to explore women’s lived experiences during the pandemic. This edited collection will greatly interest students, academics, and researchers in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in gender and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.