Rethinking the Power of the Voiceless:
Rethinking the Power of the Voiceless:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Birth of Popular Human Rights Activism in Occupied Okinawa

Author(s): Fumi Inoue
Subject(s): Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Recent History (1900 till today), Post-War period (1950 - 1989)
Published by: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci
Keywords: contemporary Okinawa-Japan-U.S. relations; Cold War history; extraterritoriality; human rights; social activism;
Summary/Abstract: This paper rethinks the power of the voiceless by interrogating Okinawans’ resis­tance to extraterritorial American military justice in the mid-1950s. Despite the long history of, and continuing public attention to, the issue of American military legal immunity from local jurisdiction, historians have not yet traced the genealogy of protest movements against it in U.S.-occupied and post-reversion Okinawa. This paper sheds new light on the islanders’ 1955 protest against the murder of a local girl by a U.S. military service member by defining it as a pivotal moment for the rise of popular human rights activism in contemporary Okinawa. This case study attests that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) empowered the lo­cals, whose legal status was reduced to being treated as the “voiceless” under the San Francisco System, by allowing them to demand the occupied people’s equal status as the peoples of sovereign nations and the protection of their human rights.

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