“Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones:machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Japan's war for empire in Asia had many endings: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the imperial broadcast announcing acceptance of surrender terms, “suffering the insufferable”; signing of the surrender instrument on the deck of the USS Missouri; promulgation of a new constitution; the last execution of a convicted Japanese war criminal, Nishimura Takuma; American implementation of the Treaty of Peace with Japan; the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; establishment of the Asia Women's Fund to compensate the former comfort women (1995). But no one of those endings was more protracted and potentially more recuperative of Japan's view of itself than the reversion of the Ryūkyū Islands to Japanese rule on May 15, 1972 after 27 years of direct American military control. Reversion did not go uncontested among Ryūkyūans. Memories of the entrepôt Kingdom of the Ryūkyūs and its final annexation by Meiji Japan in 1879 persisted: independence was the impossible possibility. But the hand of the Pentagon had been so stern, so deforming on the Ryūkyūs, and the realistic alternatives so few, that reversion to Japanese sovereignty seemed better to many Ryūkyūans than continuing as America's China Sea military outpost complete with nuclear weapons. Yet, at the point of reversion and in the 38 years since reversion, Japanese sovereignty was a mask: the US occupation of the Ryūkyū Islands continued undiminished, but now Tokyo and not Washington paid most of the bill; Japanese sovereignty in post-reversion Okinawa continued “to be subject to the over-riding principle of priority to the military, that is, the US military.”
