Epilogue

Among countless tragedies visited upon the islanders during the US occupation
of Okinawa, a military accident at the Miyamori Elementary School in the
Ishikawa district was especially harrowing. On June 13, 1959, a US Air Force
F-100 jet exploded in mid air and crashed into the school, instantly engulfing
the area in an inferno. Although the American pilot parachuted to safety,
the accident killed 18 people and injured more than 100 others, many of them
second graders whose classroom was hit by the fighter jet. The accident occurred
at 10.30 a.m., when the school was in the middle of a “milk break,” part of the
school lunch program initiated by the occupiers and symbolizing, in domestic
terms, American generosity bestowed on the islands’ children. The tragedy
not only took away young lives, it left an indelible impression on those who
witnessed the crash – of burning children running to a water fountain trying
to escape from the unbearable heat, of the school yard covered with wreckage
and adults staring at the scene speechless, broken milk cups scattered on the
ground, parents collapsing over their children’s corpses.
The accident at the Miyamori Elementary School was a moment where
domesticity and militarism, two strands of the dynamics circulating across
post-war Okinawa, collided with each other to illuminate the violent nature of
US imperial rule on the islands. Revealing the falsity of US claim of “gen-
erosity” and “humanitarianism” propagated through domestic discourses and
activities, the accident exposed in a stark light the limitation of domesticity as a
depoliticizing tool of empire. Yet, in US-occupied Okinawa, a moment like this
was rare. As seen throughout this book, on the garrison islands the domesti-
cating dynamics of empire and the expansionist dynamics of domesticity went
hand in hand, feminizing (and thus depoliticizing) the violent and masculine
dynamics of expansionism and obscuring the contours and contents of Cold
War militarization.
As this book re-traces the varied and intersecting trajectories of Okinawan,
American, and Japanese women in the Cold War Asia-Pacific region, it pro-
vides an occasion to re-read and re-think the meanings of home, Cold War
culture, and empire-building in the middle of the twentieth century. Set within
the analytical context of the book, domesticity was not a static, immobile
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 220 Epilogue

entity where women were removed from the dominant workings of power.
Instead domesticity re-emerged as a “movable entity” and a “relay point” of
empires, a central mechanism that energized post-war American expansionism,
re-circulated Japanese imperial legacies, and mobilized women to the domi-
nant workings of power. Functioning as the “engine of empire,” the sphere of
home and women’s discourses and practices within it have taken on far more
salient – political as well as problematic – meanings in occupied Okinawa than
previously understood.
The Cold War, a historical period in which women were presumed to be con-
tained at home and thus distant from and irrelevant to the geopolitics of the day,
has turned out to be an era in which women – home economists among them –
gained extraordinary degrees of mobility to participate in political dynamics
at home and abroad. Driven by a sense of mission, domestic experts of vary-
ing nationalities left their “domestic” spheres of home and nation, crossing
racial, cultural, and geographical borders and creating a vast transnational net-
work of women concerned with homes and homemaking. Traversing the Cold
War Asia-Pacific region with much energy and determination, they exhibited
extraordinary capacities as historical actors in post-war international relations,
while also becoming gendered agents of Cold War expansionism with prob-
lematic results. Cold War culture was, then, a dynamic, multifaceted project
that was animated by gendered and gendering dynamics, where women and
homemaking played indispensable roles.
Situated within this book’s analytical context of women, home, and power,
the task of empire-building has re-emerged as an endeavor of exceptional
complexity, a transnational project that not only mobilized men and masculine
logics of violence but enlisted women and their quotidian activities at home
and in communities. Post-war American expansionism infiltrated into homes
and informed the everyday discourses and practices of ordinary people. It also
mobilized discourses of civil rights, feminism, and transnationalism, where
seemingly progressive articulations of multiculturalism, female empowerment,
and “post-colonial” globalism were constantly enfolded back into the workings
of empires. As the logic and logistics of American empire intersected with those
of Japan in Cold War Okinawa, the islands became an even more complex
terrain of political negotiations and re-negotiations, where locating a space
untouched by the dynamics of empires often seemed impossible, if not entirely
unimaginable. Empire’s reach was vast and extensive, recruiting heterogenous
individuals, institutions, and dynamics into its fold to exert even more power
in ways both predictable and unpredictable. The modern history of Okinawa,
articulated at the intersection of these dynamics, defies facile notions of “anti-
imperial” and “anti-colonial” and demands, instead, a far more nuanced and
complex analysis.

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 Epilogue 221

With its sustained attention to “fissures, contradictions, historical particular-

ities, and shifts in imperial processes,” this book is one attempt at such analysis.
Re-situating what is feminine and domestic at the center of the varied dynam-
ics articulated in US-occupied Okinawa, and focusing on the heterogenous and
sometimes contradictory voices and practices of people at the grassroots level,
the book presents a history of Cold War culture from frequently obscured and
even forgotten vantage points, providing a moment of critical reflection on the
past and present militarization and violence in Asia and the Pacific.

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