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October 7, 2025

[MJHA] New Books on Japan: "The Translocal Island of Okinawa: Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism"

From: Dahlberg-Sears, Robert <dahlberg-sears.1@buckeyemail.osu.edu>
Date: 2025/05/19

Dear Colleagues,

Please join us next week for the next in the MJHA's New Books on Japan series. Details are included below.


(Americas) Monday, May 26, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET
(Japan) Tuesday, May 27, 2025 | 9:00-10:30 AM JST
(Australia/New Zealand) 10:00-11:30 AM AEST | 12:00-1:30pm NZST


Presenter: Shinnosuke Takahashi, Senior Lecturer in the Asian Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington
Discussant: Grant Jun Otsuki, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, University of Tokyo
Moderator: Simon Avenell, Professor of History, Australian National University
The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Shinnosuke Takahashi, who will be speaking about his new book The Translocal Island of Okinawa: Anti-Base Activism and Grassroots Regionalism (Bloomsbury, 2024). The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions, and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi argues, is neither self-evident, fixed, nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict, and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. The concept of Okinawa as a translocal island offers a new way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive, and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region. Grant Jun Otsuki (Tokyo) will serve as interlocutor.



Robert M. Dahlberg-Sears
Part-time Lecturer
Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University | 上智大学
7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554
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Part-time Lecturer
Liberal Arts and Sciences, Musashi University | 武蔵大学
1-26-1 Toyotamakami, Nerima-ku, Tokyo 176-8534

Approved by ssjmod at 08:30 PM