2025 Volume 6 Pages 50-62
Discourses portraying Okinawan society as retaining traditional communal structures remain widespread. However, as in other regions, the structure of postwar Okinawan society has undergone significant changes amidst involvement in the Cold War strategies of the United States. The image of Okinawan society as a traditional communal society is nothing more than a projection dole by the mainland Japanese media, imagining a lost “good old Japan” onto Okinawa. This paper attempts to reveal the unique aspects of modernization in postwar Okinawa, while avoiding discussions that portray postwar Okinawa as untouched by modernization. It then elucidates how military bases have contributed to this uniqueness. Although it has been suggested that military bases have distorted Okinawa’s postwar experience, there has been surprisingly little specific examination of how the bases have shaped the modernization of postwar Okinawa. To accurately explain the reality of contemporary Okinawan society, it is essential to elucidate the process of forming economic and social structures based on the assumption of military bases and to reveal the mindset of the residents developed within such structures. This paper draws specifically on social surveys conducted during the occupation period regarding educational attitudes and employment structures to reveal the gradual decline of communal characteristics in Okinawan villages during the 1950s. In doing so, it aims to provide a perspective for understanding the transformation of Okinawan society during the period of rapid economic growth in the 1960s, following the “Island-wide Struggle.”
