Wendy Matsumura. The Limits of Okinawa

Wendy Matsumura has crafted a well-documented, theory-heavy account of labor and identity along the colonial periphery of imperial Japan. The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community examines the simultaneous processes of co-option, exploitation, and subversion experienced by Okinawans living and working within the sugar production system that emerged alongside Japanese modernity. Matsumura refocuses the history of industrialization, modernization, and colonialism through the lens of Okinawa’s “inclusion in the Japanese nation-state qua empire . . . in a manner that established it as a periphery—simultaneously inside and outside the Japanese nation-state—in political, economic, and cultural terms” (24). Matsumura interrogates the Marxist transformation problem (the process by which the value of a commodity as determined by its social necessity is transformed by marketplace competition) through the very intriguing argument that “the emergence of a singular Okinawan difference from mainland Japan by the early 1930s was inextricably linked to multiple confrontations between dead labor and living labor after the prefecture was violently incorporated into the empire by the Meiji state” (186).

Capitalism · Colonialism · Commodity · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Empire · Market economy · Marxist philosophy · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subversion · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies