AlegalOkinawan life, at the crossroads of American militarism and Japanese capitalism, embodies a fundamental contradiction to the myth of the monoethnic state. Suspended in a state of exception, Okinawans have never been officially classified as colonial subjects of the Japanese empire or the United States, nor have they ever been treated as equal citizens of Japan. As a result, they live amid one of the densest concentrations of U. S. military bases in