Maintaining sovereignty at the margins: internal migration governance in Okinawa

Using policy and discourse analysis, as well as fieldwork across several island localities in Okinawa, I argue that Japan’s contemporary security strategy in Okinawa is not limited to exercising effective jurisdiction over territorial and maritime boundaries but also to incentivise the desirable movement of people and economic activity as a means of sustaining habitation of Japan’s remote border areas. In other words, internal migration governance is becoming an integral part of Japan’s security and sovereignty strategies. Although these policies are conceived as technocratic solutions, they are enacted upon border(is)lands that mark the geographic limits of the Japanese state, where colonial and post-colonial dynamics remain apparent. Using a multilevel approach, I juxtapose these dynamics with the agency of the local. At the national level, incentivising migration to Japan’s borderlands is framed as reinforcing the country’s sovereignty and security. At the local level, priorities are much more immediate – municipalities articulate their own narratives of local conditions and needs in implementing diverse policies, such as targeting specific categories of prospective migrants or creating strict selection criteria for limited housing in their attempts to strike a delicate balance between addressing labour deficits and maintaining social stability and a sense of local identity.