Aaron Hopes

My dissertation works at the intersection of political anthropology and multispecies studies. Taking as a starting point the question of how ecological discourses and non-human entities integrate into mediations of the economic, environmental, and social impacts of U.S. military infrastructures, the project is a political ethnography of how and to what effect the making more-than-human of demilitarization movements and local autonomy discourses in Okinawa and mainland Japan differentiates from anti-base movements that span nearly 80 years since 1945, and in the half-century since Okinawa’s reversion back to Japan in 1972, when it ceased to be a formal U.S. territory. Asking on the one hand how a new demilitarization movement (hikitoru undō), a women-led movement started in Osaka in 2015, contests and dissolves long-standing frameworks of Japanese left and right political ideologies within discourses about the environment, and how Japanese “positionality” activists pursue Okinawan demilitarization from mainland Japan, the project also takes up the expanding question of Japanese settler migration (ijūsha) to Okinawa. 

For my research, I conduct participant observation, archival study, and interviews in Okinawa Main Island’s subtropical Yambaru rainforest region, home to Japan’s newest national park, a new UNESCO World Heritage Site, demilitarized U.S. marine training zones, Japanese Self-Defense Forces installations, the U.S.’s only overseas “Jungle Warfare Training Center”, and over a hundred endemic species of flora and fauna threatened by habitat loss and poaching. In addition to traditional ethnographic research methods, I also work with U.S. military documents, obtained by submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As the project asks how and to what extent the animal other provides an alternative medium for an alternative politics, and a means of intervening in this Pacific border region’s militarization, and if it aids or re-works forms of local autonomy and non-Okinawan (i.e. Japanese) allyship, several consistent spaces in Okinawa and mainland Japan form the foundation for this project. While my primary field site is the Kunigami district in Northern Okinawa’s Yambaru region, I also conduct fieldwork in Osaka’s Taishō Ward, and in Yufuin, in rural Kyushu’s Ōita Prefecture, tracing the networks and evolution of new demilitarization movements’ ecological politics and coalitionary membership. 

            I hold B.A. degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Environmental Sciences, and an M.A. in Social Sciences from universities in the United States. I received training in Japanese language at Middlebury College’s Summer Language School, at Stanford, and at the Inter-University Center in Yokohama. 

Feminist scholarship guiding my work in Okinawa, and are available in English, include the writings of Ayano Ginoza, Rima Higa, Wendy Matsumura, Annmaria Shimabuku, Miyume Tanji, and poetry from Shō Yamagushiku. 

            I began full-time fieldwork in August, 2022 and will be in the field until August, 2025.