Base Towns investigates the emergence of anti-US military movements across East Asia. The author’s study highlights significant local differences, offering new insights into the dynamics of base politics and social movements.
Since the end of World War II, the United States (US) has become the largest basing nation in the world, with access to as many as 750 bases in about 80 countries, including Australia. In some instances, protests and anti-US-military social movements have emerged to challenge the US’s military presence in their country or community. Okinawa, Japan, for example, which hosts several US bases, has had a strong anti-US-military movement for decades and has at times seen protests with tens of thousands of participants, often in response to crimes attributed to US military personnel.
Over the past few decades, scholars have examined the resistance of the host nation public to the US military, focusing on the impacts of these protests on the US’s basing access and anti-US-military movements’ ability to garner governmental concessions. However, this focus on host nation and host community protests obscures the fact that host nation public opinion towards the US military is either positive or neutral in many countries.
The question that emerges from these observations is: when and why do protests and social movements against the US military emerge? It is that question to which Claudia Junghyun Kim’s Base Towns: Local Contestation of the US Military in Korea and Japan provides some much-needed answers. These movements have important implications for US and host nation policymakers and, as such, understanding when movements emerge, and how they can garner significant levels of public support.
Kim analyzes the politics around 20 US bases in Japan and South Korea, focusing on three key variables: changes in the status of the bases, the messaging activists use, and local political allies. First, Kim examines the impacts of shifts at the bases themselves (what she terms “status quo disruptions”) on activists’ ability to garner public support or mobilize other residents (“latent adherents”) to protest. Status quo disruptions take on many forms in the study: from base construction and expansion to relocation, reduction, and closure. Additionally, short-term status quo disruption can happen, such as when nuclear-powered aircraft carriers began docking at Command Fleet Activities Yokosuka in Japan, garnering local protest. Kim argues that status quo disruptions often present opportunities for activists to attempt to rally public support to their cause, “allow[ing] them to newly emphasize grievances, deprivations, and the collective identity of host communities.” However, movements may demobilize when there are status quo disruptions caused by base reduction, relocation, or closure.
The second variable is the content of the frames, or messages, that activists use to try to persuade people to support or join their movement and garner concessions from policymakers. As with her previous work, Kim finds that frames that are more pragmatic are generally more likely to mobilize the public and persuade policymakers. For example, activists in the communities around Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan have problematized the noise pollution emanating from the base instead of as a violation of Japanese sovereignty.
Finally, Kim explores activists’ ability to find allies in local political elites. When activists find local politicians who are empathetic to their cause, the opposition to the local US military presence becomes more intense. While local governments have thus been unable to effect much change to the US military presence in their community without the support of their national governments, they can play a key role in legitimising a movement and rallying opposition through their support. As Kim notes, one need not look further than Okinawa, home to several strategically important US bases, to find that “the alliance between activists and their local representatives […] should be at least partially credited for the resilient opposition to the construction of a Marine air facility in the northern city of Nago.”
Base towns is a path-breaking book in the study of (US) base politics, social movements, and local politics in its focus on subnational variation across US military-hosting countries. As noted, large and vocal anti-US-military movements have captured journalists’ and academics’ attention, but there are many communities where protests against the local US military presence are few or poorly attended. The Japanese case is an example that shows the importance of studies like Base towns that explore within-case variation. While many base politics studies have focused on the decades-old protest movement(s) in Okinawa, scholars have largely neglected the fact that there are many communities in mainland Japan that host US bases with much less local opposition than that in Okinawa. One of the major contributions of the study is not just the focus on variation across host communities, but the number of communities/bases that Kim includes in painstaking detail in the study. Another contribution is its focus on local political elites, which many studies in base politics overlook.
The book also raises questions about base politics for future research. One of Kim’s key claims in Base towns is that pragmatic framing is more likely to garner support from latent adherents or politicians. However, two key aspects of this claim are unclear. First, to what extent is “pragmatic” framing subjective; pragmatic for whom? Pragmatic framing appears to include environmental concerns about the US military presence, but how “pragmatic” are frames that highlight the impacts of base-related construction on the dugong in Okinawa? The base-related construction in question is far from many of the Okinawan residents (and protesters from outside of Okinawa) and likely has little impact on their everyday lives. In a similar vein, it is unclear to what extent one can separate frame types as some host communities like those in Okinawa, Pyeongtaek, South Korea, and elsewhere, pragmatic frames are intertwined with “ideological” and “nationalistic” frames. Not only do activists often use multiple frames but latent adherents likely do not cognitively separate frame types. In that sense, it is unclear to what extent pragmatic frames encourage latent adherents to protest and other framing types discourage them from doing so.
Base towns also highlights the importance of the local through its focus on host communities. However, it downplays the linkages between local activists and those in other communities, which can have significant impacts on the framing choices that activists make, their resources, and ultimately their ability to mobilize protesters. As previous studies have illustrated, there is an important element of transnational or national connectivity between activists in anti-US-military contention, where activists exchange ideas and even attend others’ protests. In my own research, for example, several interviewees in Japan and South Korea reported traveling to another movement’s protest site, learning from activists in another community.
Overall, Base towns advances our knowledge about public opinion and protests against the US military abroad, and offers new directions for future base politics research.
This is a review of Claudia Junghyun Kim’s Base Towns: Local Contestation of the U.S. Military in Korea and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2024). ISBN 9780197665275.
Charmaine N. Willis is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY. She studies comparative politics and international relations with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia.
This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
