Scott Musgrave-Takeda, PhD Candidate

As of last month, my chapter for the Handbook of Japanese Civil Society, titled: “Contemporary Okinawan Civil Society and Exploring Environmental Justice” is now available for viewing. Many thanks to volume editors Professor Akihiro Ogawa (University of Melbourne) and Professor Simon Avenell (Australian National University) for their invitation to contribute to this volume.

I wrote this chapter at the start of my fieldwork in Okinawa around September 2022. Much of what I had learned was still in flux conceptually, and this is perhaps reflected in this work. It is, however, something that shows one of my first more meaningful empirical contributions to this space.

In the chapter, I look at how environmental injustices regarding the United States military intersect across a number of localities before taking a deep look at PFAS pollution as well as forest pollution in Okinawa, two of the major cases that form my PhD thesis. Overall, I make an argument for the difficulty approaching environmental justices issues in Okinawa and highlight what overall seems like a lag in environmental protection and a difficult to overcome the barriers set in place by the US-Japan Status of Force Agreement (SOFA).

In a way, this chapter is a precursor to the direction my thesis has taken and is a snapshot of that exploration.

You can view the chapter via this DOI or if you have a sneak peak at my publications page.