The Island

The Island
This poem erases “The Island,” Chapter 1 of Gladys Zabilka’s Customs and Culture of Okinawa (Revised Edition), the 1959 guidebook designed for American children accompanying their servicemember parents on tours of duty. Though the U.S. Armed Forces originally intended to invest in Okinawa only as an air base and staging ground for the invasion of the Japanese mainland, by 1950 Mao led China and the Korean War had begun. Okinawa’s value as the “Keystone of the Pacific” was clear to military strategists, and its status as a U.S. territory after the 1951 peace treaty with Japan made it easier to appropriate farmland on which to build permanent bases. By 1959 more than twenty American military installations existed, several of which hosted families with children.