Rest and Recreation and Decolonizing Heterosexuality in Okinawa

Drawing from ethnographic field work and oral history interviews conducted in Okinawa, I illuminate how tourism and militarism together create conditions for heterosexual relations between local women and U.S. GIs, particularly as parts of Okinawa are staged as U.S. military rest and recreation zones, and how the heterosexual relationship effects the demilitarization of the island. Locating the study in the history of demilitarization since the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyus, I examine the ways in which Okinawa Island as a U.S. military’s rest and recreation zone further pronounces an American romanticization of itself as a racially tolerant nation through the discourse of inter-racial, although unequal, sexual relationships between American men and Asian women. In such a zone where the tourism and militarism intersect, the expression of a militarized and colonized female heterosexuality is seen by some as a form of decolonization for native women who have been subjected to Japanese imperialism and patriarchy. I argue that tourist narratives effect racialized conditions in which Okinawan natives are gendered as feminine desiring subjects of “America,” the masculine liberator. Paying attention to such intimacies, I have shown how the collaboration of militarism and tourism exposes a triangulated postcolonial condition between the United States, Japan and Okinawa.