Postwar Okinawa and the USA : Interdisciplinary Studies of Cross-Cultural Contact.

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The history of Okinawa after 1945 can be seen in terms of cross-cultural contact between Okinawan culture and American culture, a rare and intense experience unique to Okinawa in the postwar history of Japan. In this project, phenomena born of this cultural contact were analyzed in such fields as International Relations, the Constitution, Okinawan Literature, American Literature and Culture, Linguistic Policies, Communication, Food Science, Agricultural Economics, Architecture, and Public Health. The final object of this research has been to synthesize each research and discover a mechanism of cross-cultural phenomena, thereby presenting a universal model for such phenomena now observable worldwide. This model, we hope, will eventually contribute greatly to mutual understanding in the globalizing world of the 21^<st> century.To render this project successful, our research involved the following activities between 2002 and 2004 :1.We visited archives in the U.S. and Japan, such as the National Archives in Maryland, to collect documents.2.We interviewed Americans and Japanese who were directly involved in postwar Okinawan politics.3.We held many workshops to exchange ideas and opinions, commenting on each other's research, to develop theories on cross-culturality. We also invited lecturers from Japan and held workshops on cross-cultural contact.4.In 2003,we held a symposium ("Symposium : Cross-Cultural Contact between the U.S. and Okinawa") at the University of California, Davis, and Okinawan American scholars participated in this project to promote international academic collaborationThese activities helped the participants in this research project to develop new and deep insights into their respective fields and complete the research papers collected in the final report.