My research focuses on the modern history of Japan and Okinawa, with particular attention toward the people and communities who engendered and participated in social movements. My manuscript, The Sunagawa Struggle: A Century of Anti-Base Protest in a Tokyo Suburb, explores one of the most important (and least known) social movements in modern Japanese history. The Struggle was a pioneering anti-US military base and runway expansion movement that began in 1955 in the Sunagawa district of Tachikawa, a Tokyo suburb. Since Tachikawa had been a military base community since 1916, my project is able to connect the Japanese imperial era with the postwar period by examining a long period of base-town relations. In doing so, mine is the first Anglophone project to take seriously the local history and experience of a community near a military base in Japan. Centered on the everyday lives of Japanese people who live in so-called basetowns, my project highlights structures of local communities that are interspersed with moments of direct, and often violent, opposition to military bases.
A 1956 map, produced by a women’s coalition of anti-base activists, outlines all of the militarized spaces in western Tokyo, particular near the village of Sunagawa. From Even if the Wheat is Trampled: Anthology of Sunagawa Mothers and Children. 麦はふまれても；砂川の母と子らの文集 (1956)
