Part of it is this combination of sex and violence that gets people's attention. It can be used more as a metaphor for the larger political situation - Japan and the US aren't killing Okinawa, but they're raping Okinawa. They're taking something away something from Okinawa, they've violating Okinawan land.

Writer Akemi Johnson explores the lives of Okinawan women living on an island swallowed by a complex of US military bases, and the complicted economic, cultural and social relations in a space shaped by Japanese colonialism, US imperialism and daily life (and resistance) from the people in between.

Akemi is author of Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa from The New Press.