Aaron Sherman Hopes

AARON HOPES , then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was approved funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Making Politics with the Maimed, Poached, and Extinct: Animal Care Networks and New Conservation Movements in Northern Okinawa and Japan,” supervised by Dr. Thomas Blom Hansen. This dissertation works at the intersection of political anthropology and multispecies studies. Asking 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 the making more-than-human of demilitarization movements and local autonomy discourses in Okinawa and mainland Japan differentiates from anti-base movements that span 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 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. Research was conducted primarily in Okinawa Main Island’s subtropical Yambaru rainforest region, home to Japan’s newest national park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, demilitarized 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.