Week 7 Discussion

During the Battle of Okinawa, many Okinawan women lost their husbands who die in this battle, which we can define as Okinawan women’s postwar “trauma”. As a consequence, those women mainly relied on their fields and agricultural production to survive. However, United States’ military base construction on Okinawa island occupied a large scale of the local Okinawan people’s plowland and made local people’s life even harder. More and more enclosures for military uses caused heavily stress on Okinawan women who live on only agricultural production. As Professor states in page 8, Okinawan women’s rejection to those enclosures was “more than an expression of discontent over the amount of compensation that they were being offered”. Without the fields that they live on, those women had to find new ways to survive, and this caused Okinawans’ dissatisfaction and refusal.

Personally speaking, one trauma which is dissociated from the Battle of Okinawa and related to US military occupation is US’s unequal compensation for enclosing local residents’ land. Accoeding to Higa Shuhei, “Most of the landowners who had been forced to move from their lands have had to pay much higher rents for their new residences than what the US forces paid them as rents”. US militory’s behaviors sound like the oppressive actions of capitalism and colonialism which caused new trauma for local Okinawans postwar.