Members

• “The Politics of Extraterritoriality in Post-Occupation Japan and U.S.-Occupied Okinawa, 1952-1972,” Ph.D. dissertation, (Boston College, 2021).
• “Rethinking the Power of the Voiceless: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Birth of Popular Human Rights Activism in Occupied Okinawa,” in Halina Zaiszová and Martin Lavička, eds. The Voiced and Voiceless in Asia. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2023, pp. 235-261.
• “Japanese Solidarity with U.S.-Occupied Okinawa in the 1950s: Historical Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Reversion of Okinawa to Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Vol. 20, Issue 10, No. 9 (May 18, 2022).

The Okinawa-Japan-U.S. relationship

As a historian, I try to depoliticize the present by identifying and contextualizing its historical roots in global history.

My book manuscript, The Politics of Extraterritoriality in Post-Occupation Japan and U.S.-Occupied Okinawa, 1952-1972, explores how the politics surrounding the U.S. military’s policy of maximizing national jurisdiction over its service members’ cases committed on foreign soil unfolded in Japan—as a former colonial empire—and Okinawa as a borderland for both nations with imperial legacies. The book focuses on the formative period of the Japan-U.S. security relationship, during which the two nations’ policy elites learned how to contain Japanese nationalism and sustain U.S. exceptionalism by normalizing unconstitutional policy making and embarking in 1972 on a joint spatial reordering of the uneven basing structure, single-handedly operated by Washington before then. It is a project of transnational history, transimperial history, and what I call a diplomatic history from below.

Extraterritoriality and “Cocktail Party”: Right Protection Politics in the Post-1945 Okinawa-Japan-U.S. Relationship