Military aircraft noise and the politics of spatial affect in Japan

Aircraft noise in Japan, as elsewhere, relates to economic and population growth and to the mechanics of aircraft design. It is also connected to the specific characteristics of hearing as a sense that cannot be closed down or separated from other bodily functions. These factors can act together to produce detrimental health outcomes and forms of social protest and resistance for those exposed to the long-term effects of aircraft noise. The conflict between concerns for the public sphere and the forces of economic progress, population expansion and mobility is based on the promise of controlling aircraft sound through certain measurements of scale and by the spatial character of interventions. The case of US military airbases located mostly on the island of Okinawa and built in the aftermath of the massive losses inflicted on Okinawa’s civilian population during the last land battle of the Pacific War reveal how aircraft noise may be constitutive of what has been called a ‘politics of frequency’ (Goodman, S. 2010, ‘Sonic Warfare’. MIT Press). For the residents of the village of Sunabe in Okinawa, who live under the flight paths of the US airbase at Kadena, the sounds of US military aircraft constitute their sense of place in historical time; that is, since the US airbase was built on land appropriated or forcibly leased by the Japanese government and the sense of time as a confluence of physical memories that are embedded in pathologies of the body. This paper will show how the relationship of aircraft sound to the public sphere and protest groups in the vicinity of Sunabe may be revealed firstly through a comparison with the forms of sociality, constructed around working with aircraft sound in the ‘on-base’ community. Secondly, this relationship can be understood through the medium of sound recordings made by the author and through reflection on the collaborative and creative processes of making those recordings. As medium and as a practice, these recordings render the significance and meaning of aircraft sounds in terms of a relationship between their existence at a quantifiable level and at the level of experience. As the Kadena base is a centre for US military operations in East Asia and the Middle East, there is a sense in which the history of US foreign policy in the postwar period is literally written into the constitution of the bodies of those who live in its audible domain. As such, this paper will expand upon the emerging field of acoustic archaeology, where it has been shown that there may be contradictions and absences in the material record of a contested and dangerous spaces, and that these need to be excavated and represented by different means (in this case, sound recordings). This paper will contribute to recent and growing interest in exploring the senses in their historical and cultural variations. It is different, however, from the current social science literature on the bodily locus of memory in Japan, which focuses on the discursive analysis of visual and textual material alone. It aims to extend the debates in the anthropology of the senses by acknowledging but also questioning through media productions the emphasis on the patterned organisation of sensory experience.