Farming the Shima: Indigenous Resurgence in Militarized Okinawa

In the 1950s, the United States Army described Okinawa as a ravaged site littered with damaged weaponry and abandoned supplies—a “junk heap of the Pacific.” Once fertile islands were reduced to rusting debris and ruins, scarred by war and prolonged military occupation. Farming the Shima turns this imperial portrait of the island inside out. Even in what was called a “junk heap,” life goes on.

In Farming the Shima, Chibana tells the stories of Shimanchu (Okinawans) who reclaim, regenerate, and reimagine their island communities through everyday acts of cultivation. Drawing on autoethnographic research, multilingual archival sources, and oral histories, Chibana shows how small-scale farming in Okinawa functions as a decolonial practice and a form of Indigenous resurgence. Island farmers do more than just resist (settler) colonial, nationalist, and militarist forces—they transform the “junk heap” into a site of agroecological relations, community care, and Indigenous world-making. Through grounded stewardship of land, stories, and relations, farmers restore living ecologies and unsettle the settler military uses that once defined their home.

Farming the Shima offers a new way to think about indigeneity, political scale, and everyday forms of sovereignty. Working within Indigenous studies while challenging the boundaries of anthropology, history, and literary scholarship, Chibana foregrounds intergenerational knowledge and Indigenous sensibilities that have rarely been addressed with such weight. Chibana’s personal familiarity with and urgent commitment to Okinawa’s landscapes and communities enable an account that is both theoretically ambitious and intimately rooted in place.

At once a scholarly intervention, a political meditation, and a personal reckoning, this book weaves memoir with analysis to explore what it means to live and cultivate life within a militarized island. Farming the Shima plows out a new space for critical Okinawan studies and invites readers to reconsider how sovereignty, responsibility, and resurgence sprout from the ground up.

• Megumi Chibana, Author

  Megumi Chibana is associate professor of politics at Kanagawa University, Yokohama, Japan.