Okinawa Agriculture and the Sterile Insect Technique

Abstract Bitter melon is a popular gourd vegetable native to Okinawa in Japan. However, because of the melon fly, a very damaging pest on the quarantine list, bitter melon could not be sold in mainland Japan until the fly was eradicated from Okinawa Prefecture in 1993 by using the nuclear-derived sterile insect technique (SIT). This essay examines the SIT project in Okinawa that began in 1972 when the United States returned Okinawa to Japan. The twenty-year-long project required the irradiation and release of fifty-three billion melon flies. Its success helped Okinawa's troubled agricultural sector and made theoretical contributions to the SIT with sophisticated models to gauge the sexual competitiveness of sterile flies. Commemorative publications and scientific reports, however, are silent about Okinawa's status as a US military-base island. Rather than seeing the SIT as the solution to the pest problem, this article situates Okinawan agriculture and the SIT project in the deeper context of colonialism, overdependence on pesticides, and the nuclearization of Japan, by taking seriously the fact that the entomologist who led the project felt profound ambivalence toward “peaceful” atomic technology.