Ecopsychology of Border Islands of Okinawa: From Isis to Biopolitics, and Beyond

This is a book of psychoanalysis. However, the patient is not a human, but place and imagination of placing. The islands of Okinawa, placed on the border of Japan and Taiwan, consist of a complex of subtropical islands in the East China Sea with marine life abundantly found in the beautiful emerald ocean. However, Okinawa is a history of deterritorialization starting from colonization of the former Ryukyu kingdom by Japan in 1879, followed by the World War II and the US occupation until 1972. Throughout the course of world history, inventions of new machines and technologies, alteration of perception of space, subsequent deterritorialization, and new kinds of war took place coincidentally at the same time. These tiny dots on the Pacific Ocean became subject to the collective fate of the world. However, placing oneself in these tiny dots and looking at the world from there provides a picture that is totally different from looking at them from outside. There are numerous accounts by ethnographers and anthropologists who studied carnivals of masks and costumes, their belief in the paradise afar in the ocean, worship of Nature, ancestors, and women's spirituality of this region. Psychoanalysis of the former anthropological research unfolds complexity of this field and deconstructs dualistic modern mind that separates nature from psyche. What appears from the psychoanalysis of anthropology is an ecological perspective of the psyche of the new era. "Looking at the earth as the imaginal body of the anima mundi is the underlying motif of this book. In this process of viewing, geographical maps transform into cartography of the imaginal realm and its inhabitants."