“Paradise in a war zone”: The U.S. Military and Tourism in Okinawa, 1945–1972

Abstract

War and tourism exist in a complicated relationship in Okinawa. One mani festation of this is the fact that, despite their heavy presence on Okinawa’s main island, U.S. military bases and their personnel are often excluded from discussions about Okinawa’s tourism, which the prefecture has targeted as an area of major economic investment and expected growth. Yet American military personnel were some of the earliest tourists in Okinawa in the immediate postwar, consumers of a tourist landscape that the U.S. military was instrumental in producing for its personnel. In addition, tourism offers a rich window into some of the workings of the twenty-seven-year U.S. Occupation of Okinawa. This paper explores how tourism as a mode of engagement figured in both the imagining and operating of Occupation authorities’ rule of the islands, and how military personnel on the ground negotiated and understood their time there.