The disproportionate U.S, military presence in Okinawa, which began with the 1945 battle followed by twenty-seven years under U.S. military occupation, continues to this day. It has brought deadly accidents, serious crimes, including rape and murder, environmental destruction, and economic stagnation to what remains Japan’s poorest prefecture. These small islands bear 70 percent of the total U.S. military presence in Japan on 0.6 percent of the nation’s land area with less than 1 percent of its population. Yet, even as this burden of bases continues to impose dangers and disruptions, approxima ... More

The disproportionate U.S, military presence in Okinawa, which began with the 1945 battle followed by twenty-seven years under U.S. military occupation, continues to this day. It has brought deadly accidents, serious crimes, including rape and murder, environmental destruction, and economic stagnation to what remains Japan’s poorest prefecture. These small islands bear 70 percent of the total U.S. military presence in Japan on 0.6 percent of the nation’s land area with less than 1 percent of its population. Yet, even as this burden of bases continues to impose dangers and disruptions, approximately 200 Okinawan women every year have married American servicemen and returned with them to live in the United States. Former Okinawa Times reporter Etsuko Takushi Crissey traveled throughout their adopted country, conducting wide-ranging interviews and a questionnaire survey of women who married and immigrated between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s. She asked how they met their husbands, why they decided to marry, what the reactions of both families had been, and what life had been like for them in the United States. She concentrates especially on their experiences as immigrants, wives, mothers, working women, and members of a racial minority. Many describe severe hardships they encountered. Crissey presents their diverse personal accounts, her survey results, and comparative data on divorces, challenging the widespread notion that such marriages almost always fail, with the women ending up abandoned and helpless in a strange land. She compares their experiences with international marriages of American soldiers stationed in Europe and mainland Japan.