OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Following Japanese colonisation and US military occupation, Okinawa Island was heavily militarised. The militarised status of the island continues to this day, with 15% of its land area currently occupied by US military. The military presence has long posed a threat to the lives of the islanders and their environment. Activists, scholars, and progressive politicians have initiated demilitarisation resistance movements over the past decades, but no meaningful change has been made. Not only does the Japanese government, led by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, continue to ignore the colonial past of Okinawa and the present military issues on the island, but there have been also new challenges to the resistance movements in recent years. In this talk, I will explore new and persistent challenges and different sites of contestation concerning the (de)militarisation of Okinawa. The talk will conclude with a discussion of what the decolonisation of Okinawa can mean and how it might take place.