Protesting beyond the Borders: the Vietnam War and Trans-Pacific protests

• In Event: Other Trans-Pacific Alliances: 1960s Protest Movements Crossing Borders in the US and Japan

Abstract

This paper focuses on transnational activism in Okinawa in the late 1960s. Given its unique status as a US-Occupied territory governed with Japanese “residual sovereignty” and its disproportionate concentration of US bases, Okinawa became the central point of radical convergence in the Pacific at the time. In September 1969, for instance, a large-scale uprising at Koza shocked US authorities in Okinawa. The “riots” were initially triggered by an incident in which a car driven by an American serviceman hit and killed an Okinawan woman. Okinawans quickly mobilized against US authority when the American military court found the serviceman innocent and refused to turn him over to Okinawan authorities. Some black GIs who witnessed the protests linked the anger of local Okinawans with their own experiences of the long liberation struggle of African Americans. These Americans interpreted the events as another instance of protest against the global structure of power and oppression, which they recognized as a direct cause of struggles they had engaged in within their own specific local contexts. The flow of contacts between individuals and the growing knowledge of radical movements and interactions across the Pacific mutually shaped the ways the Japanese and American radicals imagined their movements beyond the anti-Vietnam War movement, and their transnational activism arguably contributed to the dynamics of local struggles in Okinawa and raised serious concerns for US authorities there.

Author

• Naoko Koda, Kindai University