How We were Exposed to “Empire”

For centuries, proponents of American exceptionalism tried to persuade the world that the U.S. is unique and benevolent. They argue that the U.S. overseas expansion in the 19th century and subsequent military invasions in the Middle East were done in the name of human rights and democracy and are thus justified (see Cumings 2010; Hoffman 2009). They also tell us that the U.S., the leading liberal democratic country that emerged victorious after the Second World and Cold Wars, has the distinct capacity to forge binding institutional commitments with other democracies to sustain a liberal world order (Ikenberry 2019). The Americans argued former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski have uniquely achieved this because its ‘vassals and tributaries, some yearning to be embraced by even more formal ties to Washington, dot the entire Eurasian continent’ (Brzezinski 1997, 23). In other words, the United States’ distinct ability to maintain international order also lies in its capacity to sustain these ‘dots’ by keeping its acquiescent allies feeling secure. That without the hegemon, the allies would be defenseless.

Although such convictions command the approval of many, it makes those weary of such bravado cringe. I was part of the cringing group. I was a student born and educated in the Philippines (a former American colony) who completed graduate studies in Japan (the Philippines’ former occupier and a former American-occupied territory). My exposure to Western academia was limited to the conferences and workshops I attended as a PhD student and the literature I read, which played a huge role in nourishing my sensitivity to questions of colonialism and occupation and the pervasiveness of West vs. non-West binary thinking in international politics. Yet, while these critical developments were occurring in the ‘West,’ I wondered why our syllabi in the ‘non-West’ were still often about mastering Western theories to understand East Asian international affairs. It did not help that my country, known for ejecting American Naval Bases in Subic in 1991, is currently hosting American ‘rotational’ bases, allowing their soldiers to move in and out as they deem necessary. I remembered griping. This attested not only to the primacy of the U.S. in world politics. More distressingly, it confirmed the argument that postcolonial states remain dependent on their former colonial masters.

While mainstream I.R. scholarship and policy analyses see U.S. relations with its allies as hierarchical, it was rare to attribute unequal relations to colonial relations. By the time I entered the PhD program, the growing literature on postcolonial I.R. had already enthralled me, so I assigned myself one task: to excavate American hegemony’s coloniality using the cases of U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Philippine relations. The desire to repudiate the idea that the U.S. was a benign hegemon grew strong as I immersed myself in the literature that challenged the thesis of a benign America. How can I.R. scholars and policy analysts, who I presumed were not ignorant of Okinawans’ history and current condition, support this thesis? Through my research on American global hegemony and its enduring preponderance in East Asia, I was exposed to the harsh undercurrent driving American exceptionalism.

Fortunately, for doctoral students like me looking for ways to address this imbalance, many critical scholars have already produced inspiring, influential, and solid work linking American military bases to empire. Many of them were dedicated to tearing apart American state-centric narratives from the perspective of non-state actors and local communities. Reading these works paved the way for me to shift from my initial objective of analysing inter-state relations to exploring American preponderance in the Pacific from its ‘constitutive outside’ (see Bilgin 2021). Pursuing this objective is pertinent to incise the international political discourse where the steadfast adherents of American exceptionalism flourish and to articulate the voices of actors who speak but are unheard. Although my research is not on military bases per se, the literature taught me that marginalised ideas and actors are powerful enough to make us rethink military bases simultaneously in terms of empire and outside the sphere of American-centric notions of security and order and in terms of ordinary people’s lives.

In reading about military bases, I observed that a common approach to deflating American centrist narratives on military bases is by inflating them. Yet, instead of discussing how necessary and benign its military presence is, critics focus on unraveling its imperial underside. (Lutz 2006) This is necessary because much of the life inside the bases is hidden from the public. According to critics, military bases are not merely ‘forward strategic’ locations for containing security threats. They are tools to preserve and extend the legacies of American imperialism. (Johnson 2004a) Legacy is a crucial concept, for it conveys that the ‘rule of colonial difference’ that animated the former colonial apparatus remains in the present.(Chatterjee 1993; Barkawi 2017) Indeed, despite the fluidity of the Pentagon’s contemporary strategies of control (Davis 2011), they hardly deviated from the basic tenets of its origins.¹ The United States hid its ‘pointillist empire’ via the Cold War’ strategic island concept’: it was taboo to colonize entire countries formally, but not ‘relatively small, lightly populated islands, separated from major population masse.’(Immerwahr 2019, 362)

One might wonder, like I did, whether exposing the intentions of Washington policymakers constitutes a de-centring American agency. Historian Paul Kramer warned against ‘transnational nationalist’ scholarship, which challenges American exceptionalism from the perspective of actors and institutions in the United States. (Kramer 2018) A more comprehensive critical approach that avoids this is emphasizing the imperial aspect of military bases and examining life in these islands. This is what Catherine Lutz did that helped her aptly characterize American military bases as the ‘essence of empire.’ While their defensive purpose and geographical locations depict them as edges (remember our dotted map), ‘empire’ better captures the American military base system because they are imperial relics of the Second World and Cold Wars. American policymakers perpetuate the system in two ways. First, through fostering asymmetrical relations with their allies, and second, through tampering with host communities’ politics, economics, and social fabric. It operates through hard and soft colonialism, where life is Americanized from security to diet. (Gerson 2009)

Ultimately, what is really at stake in exposing the ‘Empire of Bases’ is its impact on ordinary people’s lives. As Cynthia Enloe reminded us in her ground-breaking work on women’s role in international politics, military bases’ slip into the daily lives of the nearby community … [they] can become politically invisible’ through micropolitical channels which are not immune to imperial effects. It is, therefore, essential to understand military bases as ‘zones of encounter between the U.S. military and the people and environments that host them.’(Davis 2011, 217) The existence of interaction is vital to recognizing that despite their subjugated relationship with the U.S., local communities exercise their agency, which simultaneously resists and verifies that empire inscribes itself in everyday life.(Shigematsu and Camacho 2010) It is the American policymakers who perpetuate the system by fostering asymmetrical relations with their allies and through tampering with host communities’ politics, economics, and social fabric (Gerson 2009).

While some consent because they benefited politically and economically from the bases, participants of anti-military struggles demonstrate that local actors exercise agency even if the United States and their allies exclude them from the negotiating table. (Vine 2019) These movements have significantly contributed to closing bases in the Philippines, as I mentioned, in South Korea’s Yongsun Garrison, Vieques, Puerto Rico, and several other areas. Others have also inspired global and regional networks where they learn from each other’s experiences and share strategies of resistance. These do not count as ‘long-term’ successes. The United States’ responses to ‘anti-Empire activism’ have focused on making their military imprint less visible and more efficient. ‘Military bases’ are now called ‘logistics and training facilities.’ Some were scaled down into ‘lily pads,’ small, armed operating sites where soldiers could leap from bigger military bases to critical areas like ‘well-armed frogs.’(Johnson 2004b) Rhetorically, the Americans dismiss anti-military base activists as unappreciative of their gifts of protection. (Lutz 2016)

Despite, and perhaps because of, my exposure to literature on American military bases, I still found it challenging to avoid binary thinking. The U.S. appears to be at the center of many of these accounts. The agency of people engaged in anti-military base struggles is animated as a reaction to their subjugated relationship with the U.S. To my mind, even if they retained the centrality of American power, the important thing was that they revealed how oppressive the system was. Indeed, given my predisposition towards the ‘outsiders’ of I.R., these perspectives have naturally convinced me (or fed my bias) that military bases are indeed tools of American imperialism that subjugated ‘others.’ These texts reminded me that despite the prevalence of American-centric discourse, a community of scholars and practitioners insist on calling out the United States’ iniquities and, above all, emphasise subaltern agencies resisting imperialism. This stuck even when I looked at counterarguments that disprove the connection between military bases and empire.(Yeo and Pettyjohn 2021) At times, the ‘empire thesis’ is recognized as a means of informing American policymakers of what can be done. Regardless, they appeared to me as supportive of the American empire deniers (empire is a perception, not reality) and state-centric paradigms. American imperialism was a foregone conclusion for me. The discourse linking military base and empire further convinced me that to understand the relations between the U.S. and its allies, it is necessary to focus on what the U.S. did and how societies reacted to it.

But then …

The Many Agencies in Okinawa

I had spent a couple of my Ph.D. years researching critical I.R. theories and US-Japan relations. Still, it was not until my fieldwork in Okinawa that I came to terms with the fact that neatly framing military bases as imperial tools and anti-military base struggles as ‘anti-empire’ activism could deny the agency of actors who do not necessarily share an American-centric critical view. I must mention here that the trip was unplanned. I intended to do fieldwork in Okinawa a year before, but I did not have the resources to do so. I thus resigned myself to reading and patching up data that other scholars have collected and published. Then, towards the end of my third year, unexpected funding for fieldwork came. Equipped with the knowledge I acquired in conducting my literature review, I prepared a questionnaire for semi-structured interviews and mapped out areas I intended to visit. Before my trip, I was unaware of my fixation on castigating the U.S. Until then, Okinawa was significant for my research insofar as military base-hosting represented Japan’s subjugation to the alliance. Convinced that the data I would gather would confirm the idea of the ‘Empire of bases,’ I flew feeling assured.

Okinawa was a surprise from beginning to end. Before leaving Osaka, my supervisor asked me about transportation. I wondered why transportation would be a problem in Japan. The question only made sense when I left Naha airport. I was not expecting a complex railway system similar to that in major cities like Tokyo or Osaka. Still, I was surprised to see only one monorail system operating in the entire prefecture. The bus system was not as efficient as the mainland’s either. There were times I had to walk for an hour because it was quicker than waiting for a bus. The lack of transportation did not bother me because I got to see parts of Okinawa where visitors rarely go, such as abandoned fields, almost empty roads, and other indicators of a slow, quiet life. I especially remembered my long walk from the Okinawa Peace Memorial Museum to the Himeyuri Peace Museum, a museum built to commemorate Okinawan female teachers and students who served as nurses and brutally died, some forced to commit suicide, during the Battle of Okinawa. I spent the first couple of days roaming around and strangely felt at home. I ate dishes that are more common (and affordable) in Manila than in Osaka: Spam and corned beef, noodles with braised pork, and massive hamburgers with bacon. ‘Tokyo calls us lazy; we call them crazy,’ an Okinawan told me. His statement rang a postcolonial bell.

I write this anecdote to show that even an ordinary person visiting both mainland Japan and Okinawa can tell the difference between the two. This, as I would later find out, significantly complicated the issue of military bases. At the risk of simplification, I would describe the difference as follows: for an anti-military base Okinawan resident, it is about the unfair burden. Okinawa, which comprises only 0.6 percent of Japan’s total land area, is home to 70.4 percent of American military bases in the country. Dubbed the ‘Keystone of the Pacific,’ roughly 8.2 percent of Okinawa’s total land area is allocated for ‘strategic and forward defense deployment.’ This burden is invisible to ordinary Japanese mainland tourists. For them, the difference is about the weather and beaches. If you can’t afford an exotic and tropical vacation to Guam or Hawaii, go to Okinawa. When I asked my colleague Oshiro-san, who kindly offered to take me around the protest areas and help me with the translations during our trip around the protest areas, ‘Where are the beaches?’. She answered, ‘They are located where the sun sets, hidden from the unpleasant reality only Okinawans and those aware of their condition know.’

My trip, as I expected, confirmed the literature that military bases adversely affected ordinary people’s lives. The locals had to deal with high rates of criminality and accidents, earsplitting noise, environmental degradation, and the fear of cultural loss. Indeed, many are unhappy. However, while it is easy to construe this as an imperial effect, as existing discourse presents, the idea that base politics revolved around American empire-building slowly crumbled as my trip advanced. What I found out, and will narrate in this section, is that for the anti-military base protesters, military bases represent a more complex issue involving Okinawans’ relationship with each other, with mainland Japan, and with the world (Tanji 2006). My colleague advised me that Okinawa is not an unequivocal issue, ‘even among us we cannot agree! I immediately thought it was a mistake to have a unifying perspective of anti-military base struggle and to pit their agency against ‘empire.’ Doing so would inevitably silence other agencies that lie outside this understanding, providing an incomplete portrayal of base politics in Okinawa.

The basis of this advice, I recall, was the highly controversial relocation of the mcas Futenma Air Station, which former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called ‘the most dangerous base in the world,’ from Ginowan to Nago City. Two reasons underlie this issue: first, the U.S. and Japanese governments agreed to return Futenma to Okinawa in 1996, which never happened. This was a further blow to the Okinawans, whose majority voted against the relocation during a 1996 referendum, a year after three (black) American soldiers raped and killed an Okinawan girl. This fostered an ‘All-Okinawan movement’ that gave the anti-military base struggle a semblance of unity. The second ‘return’ meant relocation to a less populated but equally perilous area where the foundation of the offshore base was compared to a ‘mayonnaise.’ The environmental situation has become so desperate that residents have partnered with local and international ngo s and scientists to uphold the conservation of endangered marine wildlife. However, amidst these shared commitments, locals were divided. For instance, the local government of Ginowan City agreed with the relocation, while some residents from Kadena City, I was told, ‘were jealous of the attention Nago is getting.’

I began questioning the idea that military bases represent mere subjugation as I got a better picture of a divided Okinawa during a boat ride with a fisherman. His boat had clear floors to show his passengers the beautiful coral reefs, which had deteriorated since construction began. With my colleague kindly translating, I asked him about anti-military base protests in Nago. He pointed at the kayaks and fishing boats surrounding the construction site, ‘You see those? Those are hired fishermen guarding the construction against protesters. I was baffled, ‘You mean locals support the bases?’. He replied, ‘I am not sure if that’s the case. It became difficult to buy fish. But the job of fending off protesters pays more. It’s like a gold rush!’ He gave me a comparison of earnings between fishing and guarding, and I must admit, I understood why many prefer the latter. He added, ‘ldp politicians come here in stylish suits, posing as the cool guys … the young generation wanted an ldp leader because they will bring us money’. Local elections just ended. The incumbent anti-military base candidate lost to a conservative ldp candidate who explicitly supported base construction. He won because he promised to bring economic development to Nago City.

I heard similar stories of locals preferring to host the bases. One day, I decided to go to Koza Gate Street, near the Kadena Air Base, the largest American Air Force Base in the Pacific. It used to be an entertainment district mainly catering to American military personnel. It was also where the famous 1970 Koza Riot occurred, where angry Okinawans burnt American vehicles, threw Molotov cocktails, and clashed with American military police, expressing discontent with the discriminatory treatment they get from American servicemen. Interestingly, some Okinawans agreed not to attack black Americans because they empathized with their subjugation back home. I walked into what was once a busy and sleepless street, which has turned into a corridor of abandoned stores and hostess bars, some even had dilapidated prints of Philippine flags. I stumbled upon a fabric shop owned by a South Asian who was selling inexpensive Indian cloth that I wanted to buy. For some reason, we began talking about Koza (he lived there for around 15 years) and the nostalgia some Okinawans have for the ‘decade of abundance’ when ‘money just kept flowing,’ a perspective another local later reiterated.

I realized that empire or not, there are Okinawans who benefitted and are not necessarily for or against military bases. Their reasons vary from profit to survival. Was this the invisible hand of the empire working to force the locals to work for it, or were the locals deciding how to adapt to their circumstances? I couldn’t resist blaming this on the U.S. Yet, at the same time, I felt uncomfortable in plainly attributing this to the logic of empire. I also had to remind myself that this was not proof of a popular ‘mainland’ perception that Okinawans cannot live without the bases. A professor showed me a feasibility study that proved otherwise. Perhaps due to economic reasons, or the fact that the fishermen could no longer continue their usual work due to the bases, this is an active choice for many Okinawans rather than passively accepting bases as part of their lives.

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‘If you’re from Tokyo, I probably won’t talk to you,’ a local jokingly told me. This and subsequent interviews forced me to confront two significant ‘biases’ I had: one, treating military bases within an American-centric timeline, and two, looking at Japan as a subjugated ‘other’ to the U.S. Military base politics, I learned, is also about how Japanese national leaders have appropriated the base for their political survival and present regional security posturing. Issues of inequality, democratic rights, and governance currently attached to military bases were conceived before the Americans erected their bases in Okinawa.

A quick historical background is necessary here: the Satsuma han annexed the then-independent Ryukyus kingdom in the 17th century. It was forced to be part of the Japanese nation-state during the Meiji period in 1879. Considered ‘backward savages,’ they underwent ‘Japanization,’ discrimination, and land dispossession like other Japanese colonial subjects. Thousands of Okinawans died during the Battle of Okinawa when the Japanese government forced them to commit suicide and kill their children to prevent them from becoming spies and captives of the Allied Forces. Because of Japan’s defeat during the Second World War, Americans occupied Japan and Okinawa separately. Japanese national politicians agreed to continue occupation in Okinawa for almost two decades in exchange for mainland independence. The ‘reversion’ of Okinawa to Japan was tumultuous; some wanted the Americans to stay, while the majority preferred to return to the Japanese nation-state. They thought Japanese citizenship would protect them from the inequality and abuse they experienced under the occupation. Alas, this has not been the case. At present, many Okinawans use the metaphor ‘sacrificial stones’ (sute-ishi), denoting the mainland Japanese’ willingness to sacrifice Okinawa, their people, and resources for the sake of war and national security.

Three anti-military base protesters, one from Tokyo, one from Takae, a small town in Northern Okinawa, and one from Naha, illuminated me about this complicated relationship. The Tokyoite, Yamamoto-san, was a photographer from Tokyo. He told me that he joined the anti-military base protests because he wanted to ‘see’ Anpo, a shorthand term for the 1952 US-Japan Security Treaty that allowed the Americans to establish military bases in Japan.² He barely mentioned the U.S. For him, the problem was that people in Tokyo had been apathetic to the issue of Anpo and that it was in Okinawa, not the mainland, where the spirit of democracy that animated the 1960s protests against the extension of the U.S.-Japan security treaty lived. He told me how his trips to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Manila, parts of China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Okinawa taught him about the horrors of Japanese imperialism. He lamented, ‘Japan has no shame; they do not care about what they have done in the past.’

Gibo-san, a farmer who participated in the anti-military base struggle for more than 40 years, had a somewhat similar view. His hometown of 150 people, Takae, is located within the Yanbaru Forest, a unesco World Natural Heritage site. I went to the tent the residents set to raise awareness about the catastrophic consequences that constructing another helipad for U.S. Marines’ military training brought and will bring to the community. Although the construction seemed unstoppable, they came up with various modes of resistance: sit-in protests, barring the gates, and even standing in front of American construction and military vehicles. In our conversation, what appeared as a significant issue is how the Japanese government, since the Meiji Restoration, ‘has taken away the commons.’ Nature used to provide for the people, who in turn take care of it. ‘Peaceful life is borderless …’, he laments, yet ‘America always interferes with peace because war is their world policy.’ Then he said, ‘Maybe it’s okay for America because [that’s their] way of life … but why does Japan join the USA?’ I could only nod. ‘The Japanese government doesn’t feel shame … why not protect their people? The U.S. has a strategy to protect Americans; Japan has no strategy, which is strange for an independent country.’ The next day, during a (very early) morning protest, Gibo-san smiled at me, ‘I do not hate the Americans. If they get rid of the bases, we could be friends.’

I had another interview with an English teacher who promotes the preservation of the Okinawan local language at home and abroad. She told me that some Okinawans detest Tokyoites who turn Okinawa into a ‘battlefield of mainland ideologies.’ She said it ‘feels like the Japanese are again transferring their conflict to Okinawa.’ They should do it in Tokyo if they want to protest military bases and militarism. She was the granddaughter of an anti-base landowner and saw the oppressive character of the U.S.-Japan alliance through her grandfather’s struggle. She continued, ‘They are anti-base but do not like the idea of burden-sharing. Her following words struck me, ‘To the U.S., Japan is nothing.’ She added, ‘It is important to Okinawans that the Japanese recognize the problem. Before the reversion, they easily communicated with Americans. Still, it was difficult to talk to America after that because Tokyo shut it down … this is an international issue the Okinawan voice could not represent. It should be Japan.’

Two things baffled me during these interviews: First was the relative absence of binary essentialist thinking. While anger, resentment, and hostility were present, these people showed varying willingness to work with each other to promote the values of democracy, the commons, peace, and identity. Second, they seemed to be cognizant not only of their agency but also the agency of the Japanese national government in dealing with the military bases. Their awareness of Japan’s imperialism and militarism and the postwar government’s prioritisation of foreign affairs and national security broadened their outlook beyond the U.S. An American-centric critique, I realised, could obfuscate Japan’s responsibility as a former imperial power itself. Listening to a Tokyoite also made me realise how we talk about states, and capitals as a single unit, neglecting that even ‘Tokyo’ is composed of people with diverging views. To an extent, between these interviews and the ‘cheers you got rid of the bases,’ I asked myself, ‘I am from imperial Manila. Is it not possible that in criticising American imperialism, I am imposing my perspective on those outside the capital, therefore denying their agency?’

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I confess that I lack what Cynthia Enloe calls a ‘feminist curiosity’ (Enloe 1990). People seemed to think that because I am a woman, I am ‘naturally’ inclined toward studying women’s role in American security architecture in East Asia. It makes sense to study bases from the women’s perspective because they are a necessary labour force, from nurses to entertainers, and the usual victims of sexual violence. Most tipping points that made anti-base protests grow revolve around sexual abuse. Nevertheless, even if I knew that the operation of highly masculinized spaces like military bases in Okinawa, in the Philippines, and elsewhere all involve women, even if Enloe’s ground-breaking work Bananas, Beaches, and Bases was one of the books that made me think of I.R. differently, I was not keen to explore that angle. However, I felt the urgency to cultivate a feminist curiosity after interviewing two Okinawan women about their participation in the anti-military struggles. They are critical of the U.S. and the indifference of mainland Japanese to the Okinawan’s plight, but the female perspective they offered showed me that there are things, such as women’s rights, which are bigger than “empire.”

Takazato-san is a renowned Okinawan feminist who has been engaged in women’s rights activism for almost 50 years. As a social worker who had been involved with victims of sexual violence, including former comfort women, she realised that is not the woman’s fault, but society blamed them anyway. The problem is the whole system of patriarchy, from which the military structure of violence subsists: ‘Japan is a very-male dominating society – same in Okinawa.’ She told me, however, that it is difficult for mainland Japanese to understand military bases-related sexual violence because the media barely covers issues in Okinawa. After the reversion, Okinawa became a local issue external to international affairs. Japan’s utmost priority was to maintain the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance. As for the U.S., the more we know about the U.S., she said, the more we realise that it is not a nation of democracy but a controlling nation. Despite her misgivings towards the U.S., as she recalled the repressive American policies in the past, she acknowledged the instances where Washington acted on issues that Okinawans forwarded. But the problem of colonialism remains, ‘the sex industry is a social demand, not a woman’s demand.’

I was dumbfounded when she handed me a long list of postwar military-base-related crimes against women that the civic group ‘Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence’ compiled. I noticed that it didn’t indicate nationalities. I asked why, considering my attachment to national identities, especially when criticising ‘the Americans this, the Europeans that.’ She replied, ‘When we compiled this, we did not put nationality because it is violence against women … we did not mention if it is a white soldier or a black soldier because black soldiers are also discriminated, so we did not want to mention who they are’. They wanted to emphasise how women were mistreated, regardless of nationality. She told me there are cases of Filipino base workers raping Okinawan women. When the Anti-Prostitution law was established in the 1950s, Okinawan bar owners hired Filipinas who were treated inhumanely. Okinawan men also went to the Philippines during the Pacific War, some of whom married Filipino women. This made me realise that such a borderless take on women’s issues helped the Okinawan women’s rights movement become transnational. They were active during the 4th U.N. Women’s World Conference and had been working with a global network of women’s rights activists from Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico to prevent the unfair burden of military bases from eclipsing women’s rights issues.

While Takazato-san made me rethink the violence against women, Isai-san, a mother from Takae, made me think twice about the label ‘activism.’ One of the first things she told me was, ‘We are not activists, but citizens whose activity is to protect life and our children.’ Activism for her takes too much time and can be divisive. She joins international and local conferences (some organised by Suzuyo-san) as a mother. For her, protesting is not her life, her life is at home, taking care of her children, hence the importance of raising awareness about American military presence in Okinawa. She explained the problem of U.S. military training from a woman’s perspective. For instance, she said the vibration from the Ospreys (Americans sometimes train at 11 pm for weeks) is a health risk for everyone, and pregnant women feel it in their bellies, and they get sick. She also told me that the majority of Takae residents disagree with the new helipad construction but work and childcare kept them from joining. What they do is take turns manning the tent, and those who have free time go to the other parts of Okinawa to talk about Takae, to the mainland to explain Okinawa’s situation, and to Guam and Hawaii to share their experience. Isai-san talks from a mother’s perspective, which can resonate with ordinary people. Reaching a consensus is difficult, she says, but once they gain international support, they feel connected to others.

From these interviews, I painstakingly began to grasp the importance of stepping outside the American imperialism discourse. One does not need to define/intellectualise ‘empire’ to realise the damage the system of military bases inflicts upon societies. Takazato-san and Isai-san, while critical of the evils of the U.S. system of military bases, focused on protecting women’s rights and their children, concerns that they share with other women who were sexually violated and mothers raising their children. These are not exclusive to bases. To an extent, their agency exceeds the problem of bases. It should not only emerge in service to imperial/postcolonial critique because of issues that the Okinawans have pointed out – democracy, justice, protecting the commons, quality of life, and peace – resonate across peoples, space, and time.

These interviews showed me what an oft-quoted statement about performativity means, which captures how I’d like to define agency in this essay: it is a relation of being implicated in that which one opposes … of turning power against itself to produce alternative political modalities, to establish a kind of political opposition that is not “pure opposition” but difficult labour of forging a future from resources relatively impure.’ (Butler 1993, 241). The Okinawans’ willingness to work with others, and to use various means, including engaging with the Japanese government, mainland citizens, and groups overseas, showed me that they were not impaired nor dictated by structural constraints imposed upon them. Borders, nation-states, globalisation, liberal democracy, military bases, and other ‘Eurocentric’ constructs which we critics of I.R. are fond of condemning, are to them (at least in my view) a pharmakon; they are both poison and cure: they borrow and take advantage of the tools of empire to de-centre it, to re-create an understanding of security based on their experience as unwilling contributors to war. I realised these values could retain meaning without referencing them back to the U.S., critically or otherwise.

How Writing Unfolds Knowledge

‘Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of the story’, writes Arundhati Roy in her book God of Small Things, which tells a story about how small things create massive ripple effects. What I have tried to do in the preceding paragraphs is to reconstitute the story of military base politics through my visit to Okinawa, from looking at Okinawa as among the many dots that make up the American empire to showing that these ‘dots’ are composed of dynamic agencies. From the viewpoint of ‘big things’ – the U.S. and ‘national security – military bases and host communities are dots that enable them to do ‘grand’ projects. From a critic’s viewpoint, these ‘little things’ attest to the monstrosity of ‘big things,’ the former moving to disrupt the legacies of the latter. For the Okinawans, the anti-military base struggle grew from what ‘big things’ considered ‘small events’: seizing the power of a small kingdom, the rape of an innocent girl, and crashing helicopters. From these experiences, they acted not just as prisoners of the past but as agents of the present and future.

Indeed, I came to terms with the fact that even critical perspectives of American imperialism can be American-centric. This led me to develop two de-centring strategies that address the questions I raised at the beginning of this essay: first, by imagining the situation in terms of a fluid Venn diagram. If earlier we see the dots forming the Empire of Bases inside the big circle representing the U.S., we can probably enlarge these dots to the size of the U.S. and put them side-by-side so that the overlap shows that the U.S. is a factor, but so does Okinawa’s history and agency that is irreducible to the logic of American imperialism. Second, by treating the military bases as a vanishing mediator that opens up/resurrects issues that have been buried or yet to be seen (the Japanese national government’s neglect of its people, generational perspectives, possibility of life without bases, pacifism, etc.). In this sense, denied agency is reanimated without re-centering the U.S. while simultaneously recognising its presence. This avoids denying agency as much as possible, even if the agent had occupied the centre long enough, a thought inspired by my visit to the Okinawa Peace Museum, where everyone who died during the war, including ‘enemies’ and ‘foreigners’, was commemorated.

The question is, would it have been possible to convey my reflections had I chosen to write ‘academically’? Perhaps not. It is undeniable that having a clear, linear outline aids authors in explaining a highly complex phenomenon, such as military bases. It is also indisputable that it can be frustrating for readers to go through a text that appears disorganized. Conventions set expectations for both writers and readers. But these expectations can also limit what authors can express, and what readers can learn from the text. As Beauchamps observes, academic texts have a way of filtering out stories that ‘contain knowledge in their own right’. (Beauchamps 2021) Many have chosen other writing forms, such as poetry and storytelling, that are more expressive and relatable. They do not only subvert academic writing. They also preserve voices without burying them into incomprehensible jargon and formulaic analyses. In my case, my choice of disruptive writing depended on my artistic limitations, an idea of how I could best describe the mental dialogues I had, and the desire to take the reader with me in my struggle to confront my prejudices.

I decided that an absolute break from academic writing conventions would not suit my purpose. I chose to retain a brief literature review section because it was crucial to show that I am simultaneously a writer and a reader, on the one hand, and that what I have read is part of my research trajectory on the other. As I tried to illustrate above, when we read, we tend to embrace texts and then later write articles for an audience who shares our fundamental perspectives. This itch to find allies in existing literature was crucial to the story of personal transformation, from being critical yet fixated on the U.S. empire to acknowledging multiple agencies. If I dropped the ‘literature’ section, I would have risked filtering a crucial part of my story as a researcher. I wonder, for instance, if I would have arrived at a similar reflection about the dialogues I had with the anti-military base protesters had I not read the existing scholarship? Would it have been fair to exclude them because I was trying to write differently? Some might think that this decision demonstrates the persistence of conventions and the difficulty young scholars face in their attempts to ‘dis-internalize’ them. Perhaps. But at least for this experiment, I took writing as a medium to convey my experience and the agencies outside the empire rather than treat it as an objective.

Another thing I decided not to do before writing the draft was to make an argument. Arguments, addressing puzzles, proving a thesis, and finding gaps constitute the core of academic writing and research. The ‘main argument’ is the compass that prevents the author from getting lost after writing 4000 or more words. Whereas the objective of conventional academic writing compels one to showcase authority, I chose to write from the position of ignorance. This is not to be confused with being clueless about the subject. Following Ranciere’s provocations, assuming ignorance is a means to forge an equal relationship with the reader. In writing without an argument, I share the uncertainty of confronting my research topic with my reader. Indeed, the challenge in this experiment is different. It is not to convince the readers but to make them reconsider. I want to show that I am critical, but at the same time, I am also interested in exploring other agencies involved in military base politics. To do so, I avoided jargon such as human security, new social movements, and ‘transnational solidarity to prevent these ‘preemptive’ and ‘authoritative’ concepts from affecting the reader. What is at stake in decentering agency through writing is shedding light on the diversity of agencies in highly contentious and oppressed places like Okinawa and not casting a shadow upon them through the certainty that comes with argumentation.

As I write this essay, I am constantly reminded that de-centring the U.S., or any oppressive power, is both an intellectual and affective task. Some years after finishing my dissertation, I am still struggling to overcome the biases that come with binary thinking. To do research is to become intellectually and emotionally invested in a topic, a perspective, and a cause. Even some postcolonial and decolonial scholarship that promise to destroy the binaries inherited from the colonial masters end up reinforcing it. In my case, this struggle comes with the fear that suspending judgment for former colonial masters, hegemons, and other powerful institutions could furnish further oppression. It also comes with the egoism of wanting my initial assumptions proven. The truth is, I am not sure. For now, what I can do is constantly recall how Okinawans showed me the importance of reflexivity. By admitting that they are divided, that they experience difficulties in dealing with their historical baggage, and that they are willing to work towards the common good, they somehow taught me to confront my unacknowledged Eurocentric biases openly. Decentering agency entails a sociological imagination with the aid of those denied agency. It is another practice of their agency to open up to us researchers and let us into their worlds at the risk of being judged. We allow ourselves to their judgments as well. Only when we overcome our dearest prejudices, take a brief rest from standing on the shoulder of our giants, and when the process of decentering has occurred can we proceed to construct a decentered argument and say that we at least tried to avoid denial of agency.