“Asia” as Decolonial Analytic: Critiques of Cold War Neocolonialisms in Okinawa and Mainland Japan, 1960-70s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study analyzes the ways in which critically minded intellectuals employed the idea of “Asia” as an analytic tool to interrogate Cold War neocolonialisms in Okinawa and mainland Japan between the 1960s and 1970s. By examining discourses on political and social issues such as national security (anpo), neocolonialism, and postwar democracy, this study demonstrates how imagining a decolonial Asia constituted an important element in critiques of Cold War neocolonialism, and particularly in critiques of American imperialism. Yet this process pertained to more than just criticisms of Cold War American imperialism. I argue that renewed visions of Asia allowed for interrogations of Japan’s own collusive relationship with the United States as well as for critiques of Japan’s postwar democracy through a series of events in the 1960s and 1970s. These included the 1960 and 1970 Anpo struggles, protests against the 1965 Japan-South Korean diplomatic normalization, and the 1972 reversion of Okinawa. I further argue that one of the most significant features of the critical capacity of Asia as a decolonial analytic came primarily from those who looked to and from the margins of the Japanese Empire. In particular, I stress the crucial role and historical significance of a group of Okinawan and mainland Japanese intellectuals who envisioned the possibility of a new subjectivity against logics of assimilation. For them, situating postwar Japan within the broader spatiotemporal “Asian” context was necessary to initiate critical interventions into Japan’s postimperiality as well as its collusive role in sustaining the neocolonial order in Asia. By looking at their writings on the colonial history of Japan, this study reexamines nationalism and colonialism in postwar Okinawa and mainland Japan within a broader Cold War context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".