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The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community
Since its incorporation into the Japanese nation-state in 1879, Okinawa has been seen by both Okinawans and Japanese as an exotic “South,” both spatially and temporally distinct from modern Japan. In The Limits of Okinawa , Wendy Matsumura traces the emergence of this sense of Okinawan difference, showing how local and mainland capitalists, intellectuals, and politicians attempted to resolve clashes with labor by appealing to the idea of a unified Okinawan community. Their numerous confrontations with small producers and cultivators who refused to be exploited for the sake of this ideal produced and reproduced “Okinawa” as an organic, transhistorical entity. Informed by recent Marxist attempts to expand the understanding of the capitalist mode of production to include the production of subjectivity, Matsumura provides a new understanding of Okinawa's place in Japanese and world history, and it establishes a new locus for considering the relationships between empire, capital, nation, and identity.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2014
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About the author
Wendy Matsumura
3 books2 followersWendy Matsumura is Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies at Furman University.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 30, 2015
Wendy Matsumura narrates a compelling history of Okinawan peasantry's historical struggles against a variety of coercive forces. This text illustrates a variety of liminal and subaltern spaces - Okinawa's peripheral relationship to the mainland as neither colony nor country, peasants as debated proletariat, or even the limits of Okinawa's construction of its own prefectural "imagined community" - and how these precarious spaces can give the hope of revolutionary action.
Matsumura traces a variety of themes through labor movements in late-19th/early-20th Century Okinawa: The Okinawan leadership's attempts to navigate between assimilation to the mainland and creation of a prefectural community out of fear of relegation to colonial status; the conflicts between dead and living labor and negotiations between small scale producers, their leaders, and the national government; peasant resistance as a non-capitalist force that holds the potential to incite a different kind of revolution than that envisioned by traditional Marxists. She relies on Althusser's concept of imminent causality, that social transformations, rather than full-scale revolution, can cause and lead revolutionary moments; Italian autonomist recognition of the existence of living labor (that adheres to individual needs and desires) and its subjectivity that challenges capitalist control of surplus labor; theories on the peasantry's revolutionary subjectivity; and more recent theoretical challenges to (Eurocentric) stagism and epochism that challenge orthodox Marxism's conceptualizations of time and space.
While the first chapter covers an overview of Ryūkyū's transformation to Okinawa prefecture (Satsuma and Chinese dominion to periphery of the nascent nation state), each subsequent chapter details political and economic transformations and the peasantry's struggle against it, with the leadership's response as an attempt to conceptualize the broader Okinawan community, under the logic that it's better to be dominated by a friend than a stranger. The second chapter focuses on the Miyako Island Peasantry Movement's attempt to reform the Preservation Policy in the late 19th century, which granted former nobles exploitative power in an attempt to meditate the territory's liminal status. This illustrates the producers' refusal to have their labor exploited by their former leaders and adherence to former customs. The third chapter focuses on female producers' challenges against cultural reforms that would normalize gender relations and relegate women's potential to earn their own living through weaving practices in the early 20th century. This chapter demonstrates capital's attempt to exploit gender and a rejection of cultural transformation for the sake of the nation state. The fourth chapter follows the entry of mainland sugar factories and non-selling movements organized by the peasantry during the First World War, showing commitment to local communities despite the emergence of Okinawan identification. The final chapter highlights two local struggles in northern Okinawa, coalesced through Marxist organizations that focus on the communal, despite post-World War I economic strife.
Each of these chapter's labor struggles portray how labor has attempted to define its own community that goes against the logic of the national or prefectural government. We can see how there is no logic underlying any of these movements, aside from the desire of producers to control their own labor. Despite the seemingly small scale of each of these movements - the perceived limits of their successes and failures - they have succeeded in invoking societal change. In response to apocalyptic visions of revolutionary failure, Matsumura quotes Deleuze and Guattari, "practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines" (A Thousand Plateaus). Wendy Matsumura provides with a text that can not only help us reconceptualize the victimized meaning of Okinawa, as periphery sphere to the emipire or unified island community, but also provides a hopeful reinterpretation of Marxist revolutionary theory in a time when global capital seems to have won.
Matsumura traces a variety of themes through labor movements in late-19th/early-20th Century Okinawa: The Okinawan leadership's attempts to navigate between assimilation to the mainland and creation of a prefectural community out of fear of relegation to colonial status; the conflicts between dead and living labor and negotiations between small scale producers, their leaders, and the national government; peasant resistance as a non-capitalist force that holds the potential to incite a different kind of revolution than that envisioned by traditional Marxists. She relies on Althusser's concept of imminent causality, that social transformations, rather than full-scale revolution, can cause and lead revolutionary moments; Italian autonomist recognition of the existence of living labor (that adheres to individual needs and desires) and its subjectivity that challenges capitalist control of surplus labor; theories on the peasantry's revolutionary subjectivity; and more recent theoretical challenges to (Eurocentric) stagism and epochism that challenge orthodox Marxism's conceptualizations of time and space.
While the first chapter covers an overview of Ryūkyū's transformation to Okinawa prefecture (Satsuma and Chinese dominion to periphery of the nascent nation state), each subsequent chapter details political and economic transformations and the peasantry's struggle against it, with the leadership's response as an attempt to conceptualize the broader Okinawan community, under the logic that it's better to be dominated by a friend than a stranger. The second chapter focuses on the Miyako Island Peasantry Movement's attempt to reform the Preservation Policy in the late 19th century, which granted former nobles exploitative power in an attempt to meditate the territory's liminal status. This illustrates the producers' refusal to have their labor exploited by their former leaders and adherence to former customs. The third chapter focuses on female producers' challenges against cultural reforms that would normalize gender relations and relegate women's potential to earn their own living through weaving practices in the early 20th century. This chapter demonstrates capital's attempt to exploit gender and a rejection of cultural transformation for the sake of the nation state. The fourth chapter follows the entry of mainland sugar factories and non-selling movements organized by the peasantry during the First World War, showing commitment to local communities despite the emergence of Okinawan identification. The final chapter highlights two local struggles in northern Okinawa, coalesced through Marxist organizations that focus on the communal, despite post-World War I economic strife.
Each of these chapter's labor struggles portray how labor has attempted to define its own community that goes against the logic of the national or prefectural government. We can see how there is no logic underlying any of these movements, aside from the desire of producers to control their own labor. Despite the seemingly small scale of each of these movements - the perceived limits of their successes and failures - they have succeeded in invoking societal change. In response to apocalyptic visions of revolutionary failure, Matsumura quotes Deleuze and Guattari, "practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines" (A Thousand Plateaus). Wendy Matsumura provides with a text that can not only help us reconceptualize the victimized meaning of Okinawa, as periphery sphere to the emipire or unified island community, but also provides a hopeful reinterpretation of Marxist revolutionary theory in a time when global capital seems to have won.
December 14, 2017
4.5 stars. The introduction made me a little skeptical but in the end I enjoyed the book very much. Okinawa's story is complicated. Her book hits major issues in the Okinawan history (the sugar industry, sogo palm hell, Ogimi's movement, etc), but with better, more meaningful, details than I have read elsewhere and a coherent Marxist perspective that made those details alive and important. I liked this book better than Ken Kawashima's Proletarian Gamble, because of her super compassionate treatment of peasants' active and successful struggle (as opposed to Kawashima's rather blanket depiction of exploitation). The book left me with an awe toward those quiet yet firm peasants.
But I am a little dissatisfied in two aspects. One is the lack of comparisons to Japanese villages or colonial villages. The Marxist take detaches Okinawa out of the regional context and put it right in the global process of capitalism, for good and bad. The power of local leaders and confrontation between them and peasants is a very familiar topic in the rural histories of Japan and Korea. I keep thinking how different or similar these stories are--and where does Okinawa fit in the experiences of the empire. But no engagement in the book. The other is the reduction of the story to the economic struggle. Yes, it does seem dominant in the Okinawan countryside, but there was a lot more going on--the militarization and conscription, the spread of elementary schools, and more "assimilation" as time went on. How did that complicate village politics and generations? Did these communities stay pretty much the same?
But I am a little dissatisfied in two aspects. One is the lack of comparisons to Japanese villages or colonial villages. The Marxist take detaches Okinawa out of the regional context and put it right in the global process of capitalism, for good and bad. The power of local leaders and confrontation between them and peasants is a very familiar topic in the rural histories of Japan and Korea. I keep thinking how different or similar these stories are--and where does Okinawa fit in the experiences of the empire. But no engagement in the book. The other is the reduction of the story to the economic struggle. Yes, it does seem dominant in the Okinawan countryside, but there was a lot more going on--the militarization and conscription, the spread of elementary schools, and more "assimilation" as time went on. How did that complicate village politics and generations? Did these communities stay pretty much the same?
August 22, 2021
overall, i liked this book, i find it useful, and i'll cite it. her historicizing of the creation of okinawan difference is helpful and i thought her narration of an "unapocalyptic history" was clarifying and compelling, especially since injury is so central to the historiography of the archipelago. this book also made me realize how many studies of okinawa and the ryukyu kingdom are mediated through the monarchy and so her attention to everyday people's experiences under japanese capitalism is important.
i am still sitting with her critiques of the idealistic vision of a unified Okinawan community--she's right, especially for the specific historical moments and smaller scale modes of resistance she is talking about, though i wonder if there's some flexibility to a strategic essentialism for the current and ongoing anti-base movement. is there something unique to "okinawa" as an organizing rubric that is inherently limiting? or is it just like any floating signifier with its limitations? would be curious how alternatives like uchinaanchu and shimanchu both overlap with okinawan but are distinct, insofar as they are arguably less tethered to the japanese nation state.
i am still sitting with her critiques of the idealistic vision of a unified Okinawan community--she's right, especially for the specific historical moments and smaller scale modes of resistance she is talking about, though i wonder if there's some flexibility to a strategic essentialism for the current and ongoing anti-base movement. is there something unique to "okinawa" as an organizing rubric that is inherently limiting? or is it just like any floating signifier with its limitations? would be curious how alternatives like uchinaanchu and shimanchu both overlap with okinawan but are distinct, insofar as they are arguably less tethered to the japanese nation state.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews