Not until after the rape incident of September 1995, as part of an effort to reduce the American “footprint” in Okinawa (as Secretary of Defense Perry called it) and fifty-one years after their arrival in Okinawa, did American military cars and trucks begin to carry license plates. Prior to that Okinawans usually had no way of identifying a vehicle that collided with theirs or injured them. It took the “sacrifice of a schoolgirl,” noted the Okinawa Times, to achieve any progress at all in making “good neighbors” out of the Americans.16 There are still about fifteen thousand licensed drivers at Kadena Air Force Base and another twenty-five thousand affiliated with the marines on Okinawa, including service personnel and Department of Defense civilians, teachers, and dependents, who also pay specially reduced automobile taxes. By one estimate, were they to pay at Japanese rates, the incomes of the Okinawan prefectural government and the Tokyo municipal government would increase by ¥250 million and ¥200 million respectively.
In February 1996, a month after the Padilla case, a nineteen-year-old on a motor scooter was struck and killed by a car driven by a U.S. Navy chief petty officer. The young man’s father, Daisuke Ebihara, a mainland schoolteacher, described the callous attitudes of U.S. military representatives to a reporter for the Japan Times. “Nobody . . . attended the funeral or sent a telegram or wreath of condolence. And a Japanese working for the U.S. military phoned my wife and urged us not to engage a lawyer, saying it would be cheaper. Even before I got to the hospital, they were telling me ‘we will decide how much compensation you get.’ ”17 An American spokesman, Major Kevin Krejcarek, admitted that the U.S. forces had not properly understood how to handle the custom of a solatium in Japanese culture. This prompted Dr. Robert Orr of Nippon Motorola and the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan to comment that there is something wrong when a military that has occupied Okinawa for half a century has never heard of such a basic aspect of local judicial custom.
On October 7, 1998, the inevitable again happened. A twenty-two-year-old marine corporal, drunk and driving at high speed, knocked an eighteen-year-old high school student, Yuki Uema, off her motorbike. He fled, only to be apprehended by an alert guard at his base who noticed the heavy damage to the front of his car. Possibly because the marine failed to help his victim, she died a week later, without regaining consciousness. U.S. forces then refused to hand over the suspect to the local police for a week, on the grounds that under the Status of Forces Agreement, the United States did not have to give up suspects except in “heinous crimes” until a Japanese court indicted them. The American ambassador and the Japanese prime minister were quick this time to express their condolences and to offer money as compensation; they recognized that much—from large-scale arms sales to the Japanese place in U.S. global strategy—might be at stake. A Japanese court sentenced the hit-and-run marine to twenty months in prison, and in March 1999, the Marine Corps started sending patrols of off-duty marines to the bar districts around Futenma, Kadena, Camp Foster, and Camp Hansen in a limited attempt to curb drunkenness and lawlessness among service personnel and their dependents.
Even if they avoid being raped or run down, no Okinawans can escape the endless noise the Americans make. A teacher in Ginowan City typically reports, “My class lasts for fifty minutes. It is interrupted at least three times by the incredible noise of planes landing and departing. My students cannot hear me, so we just wait patiently.”18 There are 52,000 takeoffs and landings each year at Futenma Marine Corps Air Station alone, or 142 a day. The military airfield is in the center of and entirely surrounded by Ginowan’s neighborhoods. The middle of a densely populated city is hardly an appropriate place to locate an airport, let alone a military one, and genuinely thoughtful neighbors would have moved it long ago. Even the marines know this. In March 1997, the corps grounded its helicopters for a day just so the students of Ginowan’s high schools could take their college entrance exams in peace. “ ‘Not in my backyard’ politics have motivated Okinawans for a long time,” asserts Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist and former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs whom the Pentagon employed to study potential new “threats” to national security that might justify its expensive presence in other people’s countries.19 But Nye, while suggesting the United States keep one hundred thousand troops in Japan and South Korea until at least the year 2015, like so many American officials and policy advisers, never once visited Okinawa to see what that “backyard” was really like.
While the major cause of noise pollution in Okinawa is military aircraft, there are some other unusual sources. From 1973 to 1997, the 12th Marine Regiment passed its time in Okinawa by periodically firing 155 mm. howitzer shells over Highway 104 where it enters Kin village (which also happens to be where the rape took place). Every time the marines decided to fire their guns, the highway had to be closed. In 1993, for example, the marines poured 5,606 rounds into Mount Onna on the other side of the highway, causing great environmental damage, including repeated forest fires. Unsurprisingly, they also left numerous unexploded shells on its gently inclined slopes. Requests to stop lest the tourist industry, which is by far Okinawa’s most important current source of income, be damaged were simply ignored.
Only after the rape did the local marine commander suspend the firing for three months, as a gesture of contrition. In response to continuing protests, the Japanese government finally found mainland sites for marine artillery practice. In so doing, it allocated ¥238 million to help relocate mainland families likely to be disturbed by one of the new firing ranges near Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, which led the mayor of Kin to ask bitterly, “If the government can provide such compensation on the mainland, why the hell not in Okinawa?”20
Noise-pollution suits are starting to prove expensive for the Japanese government. In 1982, some 906 residents of Kadena and Chatan villages filed a noise-pollution suit against Kadena Air Force Base and asked the court to halt night flights. Sixteen years later the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court ordered the central government to pay compensation of ¥1,373 million to those plaintiffs still alive. The court did not, however, order a suspension of flights between seven P.M. and seven A.M., on the grounds that nothing in the security treaty or in domestic law allows Japan to interfere with the operations at Kadena Air Force Base. The U.S. military likes to say that the noise from its aircraft is the “sound of freedom,” but many Okinawans have been so deafened that they can no longer hear it.
Closely related to noise pollution is damage to the environment. This includes serious soil erosion from artillery firing and damage to coral reefs by ships and amphibious landing practice (despite a U.S. commitment to an international initiative to save the globe’s dying coral reefs). Runoff jet fuel and other toxic substances permeate the soil and water supplies in certain areas of the island and have generally neither been controlled nor cleaned up. As the U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office reported in 1998, “Marine Corps Bases, Japan, and other Okinawa-based U.S. forces were informed by a letter dated August 25, 1997, from the Government of Japan’s Naha Defense Facilities Administration Bureau that the toxic substances mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls were found on the Onna communications site. The United States had closed the base and returned the land to Japan in November 1995. . . . The letter indicated that the presence of these substances has prevented the land from being returned to its owners and thus being available for reuse. The letter concludes by requesting that the United States conduct a survey, identify any contamination that may exist, and clean up bases scheduled for closure in the future.”21 The government, while proclaiming itself devoted to protecting the environment, has also claimed that the security treaty explicitly exempts the United States from any responsibility for environmental cleanup.
The most spectacular documented environmental outrage to date has been a barrage of some 1,520 “depleted uranium” shells fired in December 1995 and January 1996 into Torishima Island, located about a hundred kilometers
west of the main island of Okinawa. These 25 mm. armor-piercing shells, each of which contained 147 grams of uranium, were first used by the United States in the Gulf War. It is suspected that the uranium oxide produced when this kind of projectile hits its target (along with other gases released when the Americans demolished Saddam Hussein’s armories) may have been a cause of so-called Gulf War syndrome.22 For over a year the Americans failed to inform Japanese officials about this open violation of Pentagon regulations specifying that such ammunition should be used only at specific firing ranges on the U.S. mainland. No one, in fact, would ever have known, had the Washington Times not broken the story.23 Clearly fearing its culpability, however, the military had already sent troops into Torishima in March and April 1996 but had recovered only 192 of the shells.
The use of any weapon laced with uranium in any capacity in the only nation on earth to have experienced atomic warfare firsthand—and especially given that the “hands” that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were American—was hardly likely to engender good publicity, to say the least. When the story broke, in fact, a deeply embarrassed Prime Minister Hashimoto had to reveal that he had learned about the depleted uranium shells still on Torishima from the Americans (who undoubtedly knew that the story would soon break) and had done nothing. When the unauthorized use of such ammunition in Okinawa was exposed, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs assured the media, “There is no danger to the human body or to the environment. The level of radiation [emitted by depleted uranium bullets] is just about half that of a TV set in the 1950s.”24 But a TV set emits ultraviolet rays, not gamma or X-rays, and ultraviolet rays do not cause cancer—as the Japanese media were quick to point out. Depleted uranium bullets, on the other hand, gasify into uranium oxide upon hitting a target, such as a tank or the ground. This gas is then carried as particles in the air or dust into the lungs, bloodstream, kidneys, and bone marrow, leading to possible leukemia and tumors.
Each mini-crisis like this is in itself a mini-example of blowback, as American imperial policies and attitudes, long established, manifest themselves in particular incidents. Each of these further undermines not only long-term American policy in Asia but, far more important, long-term attitudes of the Japanese toward Americans in general. The Americans have a record of degrading some of the most exquisite subtropical terrain in the Pacific and also of depriving the Okinawan people of the livelihoods they might have reasonably expected if the bases were not located in their midst. It is a common bit of American folklore that such bases are valuable to local economies, whose peoples have vested interests in them. In the case of Okinawa, this could not be further from the truth. Its major industry today is tourism. The presence of so many sprawling, disconnected American installations, as well as over fifty thousand Americans who do not pay taxes and have no stake in Okinawa’s future, does nothing to enhance the islands’ attraction to Japanese and Taiwanese tourists.
As the economist and editor of the Ryukyuanist, Koji Taira, observes, “According to the best estimates, the incomes generated directly or indirectly by the bases are only 5 percent of the gross domestic product of Okinawa. This is far too small a contribution for an establishment sitting on 20 percent of Okinawa’s land. Given the choice locations of the bases, if these areas were used as part of the civilian market economy, they should yield more than 20 percent of Okinawa’s GDP [gross domestic product]. In effect, the U.S. and Japan are forcing on Okinawa’s economy a deadweight loss of 15 percent of its GDP every year. In a democracy, such an abuse of the state’s taxing power should never be tolerated.”25 According to the Nikkei Weekly, a Japanese business newspaper, the aggregate income from the bases, including off-base consumption by American military personnel, the salaries of the approximately eight thousand Okinawans working on the bases, and rents paid to Okinawan landowners by the Japanese government for the land on which the bases sit, totaled ¥162 billion in fiscal year 1994, or 4.9 percent of gross prefectural income.26
Most of the acreage on the mainland used for American bases is owned by the Japanese government and housed Imperial Japanese military installations up until 1945. In Okinawa, virtually all the land occupied by bases was seized from private owners either at the time of the Battle of Okinawa or during the 1950s. As former governor of Okinawa Prefecture, Masahide Ota, an authority on the island’s postwar history, testified in a base lands case before the Fukuoka High Court on December 22, 1995: “Just after the Battle of Okinawa, while forcibly confining survivors in concentration camps, they [the American military] immediately enclosed all the land and picked up land for military use to the extent they wanted for ensuring U.S. military purposes. It was done as if drawing lines on a blank map. When residents were allowed to come home from the camps, they found their hometowns had disappeared behind barbed wire.”27
This process of seizure at bayonet point followed by the burning and bulldozing of houses and cultivated fields continued throughout the 1950s. Okinawan objections to American arbitrariness and unwillingness to pay appropriate compensation led to the first demonstrations against the U.S. presence and to the election in 1956 of a Communist mayor of Naha. The Americans thereupon rescinded the law under which the mayor had been elected, stripped him of office, and used the Central Intelligence Agency to funnel money to his conservative opponents.
The protest movement that lasted from 1952 to 1957 was the first of three major waves of protest focusing on bringing democracy to Okinawa. Its issues were the right to freedom of speech for Okinawans, unionization, proper compensation for expropriated lands, and popular election of a chief executive. The second wave crested at the end of the 1960s; its issues were the use of B-52s based in Okinawa to bomb Vietnam and the impact of the segregated military whorehouses that served the black and white G.I.s, near Kadena Air Force Base. This movement resulted in the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty. The third wave, which arose in the wake of the 1995 rape case, still continues. Although none of these can claim to have produced victory—which by definition will not be achieved until the last base has been shut down—they have given Okinawa a special political culture. Unlike the main islands, where after the war the Allied occupation bestowed democracy and a “peace constitution” on the people from above, Okinawa is the only Japanese community whose residents have fought for what democracy they enjoy.
In the 1950s, one of the least-known American tactics for seizing land while controlling the rebellious sentiments of expropriated farmers was to offer them land in Bolivia and aid in emigrating. On arrival in Bolivia, however, the Okinawan farmers discovered that the land was nearly unusable jungle and the Americans had no intention of delivering any of the promised financial assistance. As neither American nor Japanese citizens, they had no place to turn for help and so were at the mercy of the terrain, the climate, and their Bolivian neighbors. Most of the early settlers died of disease or fled to Bolivian towns, to Peru or Brazil. The few who survived at Colonia Okinawa, as it was called, north of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, are today, after almost unbelievably difficult lives, comparatively successful farmers. However, of some 3,218 identified emigrants whom the Americans shipped to Bolivia between 1954 and 1964, only 806 (including their offspring) reside there today.28
Most of the land that the Americans occupy in Okinawa is still legally owned by 31,521 individuals or families who are forced by various laws to lease it to the Japanese government, which, in turn, subleases it to the Americans without charge. These leases must periodically be renewed. In 1991, newly elected Governor Ota exercised the power given to him under the forced leasing laws to renew some 2,636 leases that had expired. This was, he has explained, the “most difficult decision of my life”—the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had made economic support for Okinawa contingent on preservation of the bases.29 In late 1995, with the movement inspired by the rape already growing, he refused to renew any more expired leases, forcing Prime Minister Hashimoto to play a politically unattractive role as lackey to the
Pentagon. He had to renew the leases himself.
A sizable number of small landholders have become explicit and outspoken antiwar landlords, including some three thousand Okinawan and mainland intellectuals who have bought handkerchief-sized parcels of base land in order to protest the continued American presence. They are known as the one-tsubo landlords—a tsubo being a measure equal to 3.3 square meters—and have proved a severe thorn in Tokyo’s side. In May 1997, as the leases of many of the one-tsubo landlords came up for renewal, it became clear that the prefectural government would not save Tokyo’s face by forcibly renewing them. Prime Minister Hashimoto therefore introduced and guided through the Diet legislation that transferred all control over leases for base land to the central government. This law is almost surely unconstitutional on several grounds—it deprives Japanese citizens of their property rights without due process of law and it applies to only one place, Okinawa, although Article 95 of the Constitution stipulates that no law can deal with a particular area without its people’s consent.
The most famous of the Okinawan antiwar landlords is Shoichi Chibana. In 1945, his grandfather, armed only with a bamboo pole, attempted to protect his land from seizure and was shot to death. This land, in American hands ever since, is today on the site of the Sobe Communications Facility, one of numerous American installations in Okinawa for eavesdropping on the conversations of the surrounding nations, including Japan, and for communicating with U.S. submarines. In the spring of 1996, the lease on that land expired and Chibana refused to renew it. As a result, until the enactment of Hashimoto’s law a year later, the Americans were illegally occupying Chibana’s land. Much to the irritation of the American and Japanese governments, the Okinawan police forced the Americans to open their gates to Chibana and let him visit his land. On May 14, 1996, he and twenty-nine friends legally entered the Sobe Communications Facility, held a picnic on the lawn, sang Okinawan songs, and conducted a memorial service for his grandfather and father. The Japanese government will go to almost any lengths to avoid a repetition of this widely reported and photographed event.
Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Page 9