Week 7&8 Discussions
How do you think the trauma that Okinawan women experienced during the Battle of Okinawa impacted their responses to the military base construction that the US military Occupation authorities enacted during the early 1950s that we see in the Isahama struggle? What traumas have to be dissociated from the Battle of Okinawa and understood as new to the time of US military occupation?
The Battle of Okinawa caused terrible trauma to Okinawan women even if they did not fight at the battlefront as men did. Since men died in the war, women widowed and they had to take over their husbands' responsibility and start to support the family on their own. However, the social norms implemented by the US military at the time made their situation even tougher. As Matsumura indicates in the article, the U.S. wanted to restore a patriarchal social system and enclosed large acres of land in Okinawa for military use as a result of capitalism and imperialism (153). Due to hyper-militarization, local Okinawan people’s life was heavily affected. “The Women’s Appeal” reveals the “water problem” such as pollution, shortage, and contamination caused by military expropriation of water sources (Matsumura 156). This led to distrust between the Okinawans and the US military, and Okinawan women had to stand together to fight firmly against imperialist control. The imperialist power only cared about their advantages from occupying the resources, such as fertile land and water, but they disregarded how that could be detrimental to the well-being of the local people.
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How does Kwon’s exploration of “the work of waiting” impact the way that we think about immigration policy in a specific country? What kind of map of global migration patterns would be adequate to express the range of labors that people engage in to support one migrant worker?
In “the work of waiting”, Kwon provides deep insights regarding the impact of immigration policy on families. The author indicates that although Korea granted overseas Koreans quasi-citizen status, the Korean Chinese were excluded(Kwon 483). Concerning their potential relationship with socialism and the issue of dual-citizenship in China, Korean Chinese had to face more strict immigration policies. This became a huge barrier, both physical and mental, to those Korean Chinese who wanted to immigrate to Korea or had families there. However, the policy at the time really could not allow them to travel freely and conveniently. Due to such difficulties, families could be separated, so some people even had “paper marriage”, to marry a Korean person in order to get Korean citizenship (Kwon 485).
A map of global migration should include the job patterns of migrants, such as how many of them are doing manual labor work versus intellectual work. This would really help people to see the social status of immigrants and whether they are treated equally as local citizens.
