Postwar Racial Liberalism from Mississippi to Okinawa

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Sponsored by the ASA-JAAS Joint Project committee (a collaboration between the American Studies Association and the Japanese Association of American Studies), this panel explores the historical antecedents of US imperial decline, probing the instabilities that have shaped the postwar liberal order. The papers converge around the postwar transition to racial liberalism, which broke from the racial essentialism that had dominated US domestic and foreign policy. Examining the maintenance of colonial racial capitalism through racial liberalism, our panelists consider its impact on racial desegregation, legal sovereignty, nuclear policy, and oceanic climate change.

Hiraku Abe begins the panel by focusing on religious organizations in the US Civil Rights movement, exploring the instrumental “Kneel-in Movement” of the early 1960s, a campaign to desegregate all-white churches in Jackson, Mississippi. Pivoting to US postwar involvement in the Asia Pacific, Jinshiro Motoyama examines the US military nuclear strategy in the Asia-Pacific region from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, and the positioning of the Okinawa military bases within this strategy, in order to clarify the US demand for the retention of nuclear weapons and its response to the removal of nuclear weapons in the “Sato-Nixon Agreement.” Kei Kato’s paper turns to questions of oceanic climate change, investigating how U.S. empire is reproduced through climate change programs that focus on the ocean. Finally, Mika Tamai examines the implementation of a self-governing jury system in Okinawa through the contradictory role of Paul Wyatt Caraway, who served as third High Commissioner of the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) from February 1961 to July 1964.

Taken together, the papers on this panel address the 2025 Annual Meeting theme, “Late-stage American Empire” by investigating the histories of American imperialism at home and abroad, in political centers and their peripheries. By attending to under-studied moments and locations of the American Empire – and by featuring the voices of Japanese graduate students studying in the United States – we hope to create new vantage points and methodologies for imagining the future of globalized American Studies scholarship and collaboration.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• U.S. Nuclear Operation Plan and Okinawa - Jinshiro Motoyama

• Interracial Student Activism in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s: Early History of the Kneel-in Movement - Hiraku Abe, University of Alabama

• Climate Coloniality, the Ocean, and the U.S. Empire - Kei Kato

• High Commissioner Caraway and the Establishment of the Jury System in Okinawa: Behind “Autonomy is a Myth” Speech - Mika Tamai, Northwestern University

Chair

• Patricia Ventura, Spelman College

Virtual Accommodation Commentator

• Julie Sze, University of California-Davis

Biographical Information

Hiraku Abe, originally from Sendai, Japan, is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on 20th-century U.S. Southern history, religious and racial history, and the history of the Black Freedom Movement. In her recent article published in American and Canadian Studies, Hiraku examined racial integration within white church communities in the South, using Galloway Memorial Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s as a case study. She has also presented at various conferences and seminars, delivering talks on the Black Freedom Struggles in Mississippi and Alabama. Hiraku’s current work explores interracial student activism in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1950s. The interracial dialogues and networks developed within academic and religious institutions laid the foundation for the Kneel-in Movement, a direct-action campaign of “church visits” aimed at appealing to the Christian conscience of white congregations and challenging the exclusion of Black individuals from white Protestant churches. While her research focus has gradually evolved, Hiraku has consistently studied the role of white churches in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Jinshiro Motoyama is a Ph.D. Student at the Graduate School of Law, Hitotsubashi University. He received a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from International Christian University and a master’s degree in Social Sciences from the Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University, both in Tokyo, Japan. He is interested in U.S.-Japan Relations, Modern History of Okinawa, and Cold War Studies. His most recent paper is “Examining the Okinawa Factor in the U.S.-China Rapprochement: U.S. Combat Operation Against China and Non-Interference of China” (The Japan Association of International Relations, 2023). Currently, he is working on the project called “Exploring International Reconciliation Studies based on Universal Values and Collective Memory” centered in Waseda University in Japan.
He is also leading a social movement of U.S. military base problems in Okinawa, Japan. He is a former representative of the “Henoko” Okinawa Prefectural Referendum Committee, A founding member of SASPL (Students Against Secret Protection Law), SEALDs (Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy), and SEALDs RYUKYU. In January 2019, he went on hunger strike against five city mayors who announced their non-participation in the Okinawa prefectural referendum regarding the construction of a new military base in Henoko, Okinawa. In May 2022, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Okinawa Reversion, he went on hunger strike in front of the Prime Minister’s Office to demand the immediate termination of the construction of the new military base at Henoko.

Kei Kato (pronounced kay-ee kah-toh) (he/his) is a critical human geographer from Japan, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. His research interests include political ecology, more-than-human worlds, the political economy of the ocean, climate change, science and technology, infrastructure, and (maritime) logistics. Broadly, he is interested in how the ocean, its more-than-human inhabitants, and human societies interact. His dissertation investigates the colonial nature of climate change, with a focus on how ocean-centric climate programs perpetuate it. More specifically, he seeks to understand how climate adaptation projects that are designed to sustain maritime logistics operations reinforce oppressive power structures while advancing imperialist-capitalist agendas.

Mika Tamai is a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University from February 2024 to February 2026. She received her doctorate from Osaka University in Language and Culture in 2022, with her dissertation titled “The Jury System in Okinawa after World War II: Women’s Jury Duty under the U.S. Occupation in the 1960s and early 1970s.” She received a master's degree in American Studies from Doshisha University in 2005, and her bachelor's degree in English from Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in 1999. She has previously been awarded fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Overseas Challenge Program for Young Researchers and has held the position of visiting student researcher at the Center for Japanese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. She has also received grants from the Stanford East Asia Library and the Japanese Association for American History. Most recently, she was awarded the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Overseas Research Fellowships - Restart Research Abroad (RRA), which enabled her to conduct two-year research in the U.S.
Her research has been published in Japanese academic journals, including a study titled “Multinational Juries: Factors in the Establishment of the Jury System in Okinawa during the American Occupation,” which appeared in American History, 41 (2018, in Japanese). She will present on a panel at the Association for Asia Studies 2025 Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio in March focused on “Leveraging Contradictions and Ambiguities at the Margins of Imperial Powers: Governance, (Un)freedom, and War in Japan’s Southern Islands.” She is a member of the board of trustees of the Association for the Study of Political Society, a position she has held since 2022.