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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/driscoll11022010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/driscoll11022010.html<br><br>
</a></font><font size=2 color="#990000">November 2, 2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>The Undermining
of Democracy in Japan <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
When the Pentagon "Kill Machines" Came to an Okinawan Paradise
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By MARK
DRISCOLL <br><br>
</font><font size=3>When I arrived at the small village of Takae in the
northernmost part of the main island of Okinawa to spend 5 days at a
sit-in protest there in mid-July, my first image of the place was the
unusual municipal charter that greeted me as I got off the bus. Codified
in 1996, the residents pledge to: “1. Love nature and strive to create a
beautiful environment resplendent with flowers and water; 2. Value our
traditional culture, while always striving to learn new things; and 3.
Create a municipality in which people can interact in a spirit of
vitality and joy.” The charter mentioned no human founding fathers of
Takae, rather it followed with lavish descriptions of the village flower
(azalea) and bird (sea woodpecker) in addition to details about the
gorgeous waterfalls and the rare combination of seacoast and mountains
that creates a strong impression of a tropical paradise; UNESCO has
identified the ecological diversity of this area as among the richest in
the world. The sense of paradise is what brought Ashimine Genji to Takae
ten years ago. Ashimine, a native of Okinawa who moved to the Japanese
mainland during the economic bubble period in the mid-1980s, moved back
to Okinawa when he got tired of the frenetic Tokyo life and exhausting
wage labor. With his lover he bought some land in the mountains amidst
waterfalls, animals and birds and started raising their 3 kids, while
constructing a small organic restaurant. During my interview with him he
insisted that the family was committed to living as simply, slowly, and
sustainably as possible, and they deliberately spent the first two years
in Takae without electricity, reluctantly attaching to a grid only when
their oldest kid’s complaints wouldn’t stop. <br><br>
It’s hard to avoid the descriptive mantra of Okinawan life as “simple and
slow” in Japanese lifestyle magazines (with, in the last two years,
“sustainable” [<i>saiseisan</i>] commonly appended) and perusal of these
magazines convinced Naoko and Kôji Morioka to relocate to Takae four
years ago. Amateur organic farmers and part-time artists raised in Tokyo,
they had lived in Africa, India and Nepal before relocating with their
two small kids to Takae to start full-time organic rice farming. Also
refusing electricity, they built a small house from scratch just 30 yards
north of a gorgeous waterfall and 300 yards from the sea, determined both
to pioneer a new path of zero growth against Japanese postmodern
capitalism and to enjoy the close community of Takae, consisting of
farmers, fisherfolk and several convivial story-tellers/drunks. While
about a fourth of Takae’s 160 residents are eco-conscious transplants
from Tokyo and their kids, several claim descendants going back a
millennium who have enjoyed the fruits (mango) and vegetables that grow
wild in the area. Right smack in the middle of this sustainable paradise
is where a large part of the newest US military base is about to be
built. <br><br>
Takae residents were kept in the dark about the base until just before
construction was to begin. Leaks, reported in the <i>Okinawa Times</i> in
late 2006, forced the Japanese Defense Ministry to hold an information
session in early 2007. It was only here that the Ashimines and Moriokas
were informed that the main helicopter base for the US military in Japan
was about to be built in their backyard, including facilities for 3
Osprey heli-planes. When the Defense Ministry showed the people of Takae
a Power Point slide of the projected base area, they realized that two of
their homes would be within 400 meters of the proposed new base. Ashimine
recalled how he felt after the session. “One minute I was living a life
of harmony with nature with my family and friends, and the next minute I
was being told that these killing machines (<i>kiru- mashin</i>) were
coming to within a few hundred meters of my house; the disconnect
(<i>iwakan</i>) was overwhelming” (<i>Ku-yon</i> June 2010; 101). Within
a few months, Takae locals obtained a fuller picture of what was going
on: based on a secret agreement between the Japanese Foreign Ministry and
the US Pentagon made in 1996finally signed into a dubious kind of
legality in February 2009the large, but increasingly obsolete US
military base Futenma in central Okinawa was to be relocated with
completely new infrastructure to northern Okinawa. The plan was to
transfer the infrastructure of Futenma to the smaller US base Camp Schwab
located 20 miles from Takae. But airport and helicopter facilities were
necessary to fill out Futenma’s capacity and this is where Takae and the
equally pristine fishing village of Henoko, 30 minutes southeast of
Takae, would come into play. The old airport at Futenma would be replaced
with a new V-shaped one carved out of the beach in Henoko, while Takae
would get all the CH-47 and CH-54 helicopters together with the behemoth
Ospreys. <br><br>
Henoko’s proximity to Camp Schwab has created a palpable anti-base
sentiment there, and local activists started mobilizing opposition to the
proposed airport construction in 2004. With help from the all-women
anti-base group Naha Broccoli, situated in the Okinawan capital of Naha,
activist information sessions and bus tours of the proposed base areas
began in June 2007 which jumpstarted regular contact among Takae, Henoko
and Naha. Encouraged by activist friends in Tokyo to go Okinawa to look
around, in July 2007, with about 40 others, I participated in the second
Broccoli bus tour and was stunnedbut I should have known better. The
lack of transparency on the side of the Pentagon and the deafness to
local Japanese concerns were standard neocolonial postures of US base
presence in Asia going back to just after World War II. But witnessing
the sustained protest in Henoko by anti-war activists spanning 3
generations inspired all of us on the tour. The required environmental
assessment for new base construction had been underway for over a year
and Henoko activists were doing their best to disrupt it, including a
blockade of Japanese Navy vessels with cordons of local fishing boats
and, with air tanks and wet suits, conducting underwater direction action
against young Japanese Navy divers trying to complete the seabed
assessment. In November 2007 a Henoko activist almost died when the
breathing line to his airtank was severed. <br><br>
Just after our bus tour, protest signs and colorful anti-base paintings
started to show up around the two main gates to the newly fenced-in Takae
helicopter facility. By August 2007, Rie Ishihara, a Takae mother of two
started daily sit-ins in front of the main entrance by herself; soon she
was joined by other locals and then by Naha activists. Quickly, anti-base
Japanese started coming from the mainland, often devoting one day of
their Okinawa vacation week sitting in at Takae. The mushrooming
anti-base movement in Takae caught the Japanese Defense Ministry in
Okinawa off-guard and when the environment assessment group started its
two-year survey at the Takae site a year later, the Okinawan office of
the Japanese Defense Ministrythe local defender of the US bases
preemptively took the whole town to court, serving 15 Takae residents a
summons for “disrupting traffic” on Dec. 16, 2008. Ishihara told me that
when she got the summons she thought it was a practical joke as everyone
knows there is no traffic in Takae and a few local residents even refuse
to drive cars because of the impact on the environment. But this was no
joke, as the drawn-out legal hearings lasted a year and forced the Takae
farmers to spend money on lawyers and court fees. On December 11, the
provincial court in Naha ruled in favor of 13 defendants, although it
ruled against Ashimine and the head of the Takae residents anti-base
group Toshio Isa. Isa and Ashimine can now be forced to stand trial in
Tokyo at any point the Japanese government decides. <br><br>
While the events were unfolding in Okinawa, politics on Japan’s mainland
were revealing similar anti-US patterns. During the campaigning for the
crucial Lower House elections in July 2009, the upstart Democratic Party
of Japan (DPJ) promised in their manifesto to establish a “different
policy with respect to the US-Japan alliance,” one central aspect of
which would be a “significant re-thinking (<i>minaoshi</i>) of the US
military in Japan including the situation of all the US bases”.
Soon to be Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama refined his critique of the
US-Japan security framework by focusing on the unfair “burden” placed on
Okinawa by having some 24,000 US troops stationed there, including 18,000
Marines65% of the US military presence in Japan installed on a land mass
less than 1% of Japan’s total. The party in power for all but one year
since the end of the US Occupation of Japan, the right-wing Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) had been losing support since it ordered Japanese
soldiers to deploy to war-zones in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002-03 in the
face of Japanese public opposition polling at 80-90%. <br><br>
The historic victory of the DPJ over the LDP in August 2009 should be
seen as the culmination of multiple forms of opposition to the LDP’s
blind allegiance to the US, together with a pragmatic understanding that
Japan’s economic future lies more closely entwined with China. In
addition to pledging to reform aspects of Japan’s military-security
framework with the US, the DPJ Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa promised to
enhance ties to China beyond the economic sphere, where China is now
Japan’s largest trading partner. The double whammy of a confirmation that
closer ties with China are beneficial together with a groundswell of
resistance to the US military swept the DPJ into power. Right away, new
Prime Minister Hatoyama went to work on his party’s campaign promise and
started exploring ways to reform the US-Japan alliance; in a flush of
post-victory confidence he wondered out loud what a future security
framework would look like with “zero US troops stationed in Japan”
(<i>chûryû naki ampô)</i>. Several months earlier, Ozawa insisted that,
“the [US Navy] 7th Fleet alone is sufficient,” meaning that as far as the
DPJ leaders were concerned, the remaining 35,000 US troops should begin
packing up their things to leave Japan permanently. <br><br>
Although the US media underplayed this challenge, the Pentagon understood
exactly what was at stake and wasn’t liking it. Despite President Obama’s
cautious wait and see approach to the democratic regime change in Japan,
the Pentagon immediately starting sparring with the Japanese Ambassador
to the US Ichiro Fujisaki in Washington over issues like the Guam Treaty
signed by the weakened LDP in early 2009, which dictated the terms of the
new base construction in Henoko/Takae and the planned move of somewhere
between 3000 to 9000 of the 18,000 Marines in Okinawa to new facilities
in Guamwith Japanese taxpayers forced to pay 65-70% of the costs for
both the move and the new base in Guam. During the July 2009 campaign
several DPJ candidates echoed the argument made by Okinawan critics that
the Guam Treaty was clearly unequal because it obliged the Japanese to
construct one new base in Okinawa and to contribute most of the money
toward building another in Guam, while the American side merely offered
an ambiguous pledge to withdraw some troops while reserving the right to
change its commitments when it wanted. Furthermore, critics argued that
the Guam Treaty was illegal as it violated Article 95 of Japan’s
constitution, which stipulates that any law applicable only to one locale
requires the consent of the majority of the voters of that province, and
support for the construction of the new base among Okinawans had been
almost completely absent<i>. </i>Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled
to Tokyo for two days of meetings in late October 2009 clearly intending
to muzzle the critiques of the US presence in Japan and to remind the new
DPJ leaders of the post-WW II status quo, where senior (US) and junior
(Japan) partners would continue to work together to contain China and
North Korea. “It is time to move on,” Gates scolded the new Japanese
leaders on October 22, calling DPJ proposals to reopen the base issues
“counterproductive.” Then, deliberately insulting the DPJ in the eyes of
almost all Japanese commentators Gates refused to attend the welcoming
ceremony and formal dinner organized for him at the Defense Ministry in
Tokyo on October 23. In enumerating the insults and behind the scenes
threats made by Gates in Tokyo a few days after his departure, the
Okinawan newspaper the <i>Ryukyu Shimpo </i>lambasted the “diplomacy of
intimidation” practiced by the US in its editorial of October 26.
<br><br>
By several accounts, Defense Secretary Gates’ intimidation in late
October 2009 ended the honeymoon Hatoyama and the DPJ were enjoying with
the Japanese public. From that point on, the Japanese media grew
increasingly vocal in criticizing Hatoyama’s sudden lack of political
focus as “cluelessly running all over the place” (<i>meitô</i>). With
respect to the issue of the new US base in Okinawa, he actually
<i>was</i> running all over Japan trying to find an alternative location
to Henoko/Takae since he was informed by Gates that the US Pentagon was
unwilling to give up its plans for a new base there in Henoko/Takae. For
his part, the DPJ’s pro-China leader Ichiro Ozawa responded to the
Pentagon’s intimidation with a little of his own, and in November
arranged a high-level trip to Beijing bringing 140 DPJ politicians and
400 other supporters to meet his friends. But the US and it’s LDP allies
in Japan held the trump card in this high-stakes game as just a few weeks
after Ozawa’s return from China in December he was greeted with a
deafening chorus of accusations of financial impropriety. Based on rumors
that dogged Ozawa months before the DPJ victory, on January 16, 2010
three of his former secretaries were indicted on charges that Ozawa
neglected to publicly report the dormitory he purchased for them in
Tokyo. During the ensuing trial it turned out that he didn’t declare it
the first year, but did so properly from the second year on. The
prosecutors never had any evidence of Ozawa’s direct involvement and his
main secretary testified that Ozawa himself knew nothing about the
failure to report. It became clear during the trial in March that the
prosecutors were trying to use this court case to uncover facts in a
second, potentially more serious case involving kickbacks from Nishimatsu
Construction. Ozawa has been cleared of the first charge and has yet to
be indicted for the second. <br><br>
But the damage to the DPJ had been done. With Hatoyama unable to fulfill
his campaign promise to prevent new base construction in Okinawa and
reduce the US military’s footprint in Japan, the well-covered allegations
of dirty money involving Ozawa and other DPJ leaders made the Japanese
public think that the modus operandi of the corruption-prone LDP and the
new DPJ were ultimately indistinguishable. The week after Ozawa’s
secretaries were indicted, support for the DPJ dropped below 50%, and
continued to plummet thereafter. Less than 9 months after their
overwhelming victory, on May 25, 2010 Hatoyama announced that with all
other options exhausted, construction on the new US base in Henoko/Takae
would move forward. In dramatic contrast to their position of August
20009, Hatoyama spoke for the DPJ in saying that now, the US and Japan
are in “complete agreement” on military-security matters. The DPJ’s
coalition party, the leftist Social-Democratic Party, subsequently
withdrew from the government; finally on June 2, Hatoyama himself was
forced to resign. The Democratic Party, along with the democratic
process, has been successfully undermined in Japan. <br><br>
Japanese taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the US military presence
in their own country. In Okinawa in recent decades, 80% of base costs are
payed by Japan’s Foreign Ministry directly to the US who then pay “rent”
to a few Okinawan landowners, a situation designed originally to
camouflage the fact that the US military simply took at gunpoint the
Okinawan land it wanted for new base construction. As the respected
historian of post-WW II Okinawa Moriteru Arasaki has described in several
books, the forced seizures (<i>kyôsei sesshû</i>) of Okinawan land by the
US were largely of lush agricultural flatlands in the center of the main
island, where the Futenma, Hanson and Kadena bases are located today.
Arasaki explains that 44% of the pre-WW II rice farming area in Okinawa
was stolen by the US, and these fields were filled in with sea water,
sand and cement, a combination guaranteeing that they can never again be
used as farmland. This situation transformed Okinawa from being an
exporter of agricultural goods for 500 years into an importer overnight
and made Okinawa dependent on shrinking development assistance from
Tokyo. Moreover, the Marines have not proven to be the roles models for
the new post-WW II democratic order that the US Occupation promised the
Japanese people they would be. But in fairness to individual Marines, the
legal structure of the Status of Forces (SOFA) agreement excuses outlaw
behavior as soldiers are largely shielded from Japanese law. It took the
gang rape of a 5th-grade Okinawan girl by 3 Marines in 1995 to slightly
alter the situation of total extraterritoriality enjoyed until then.
Furthermore, as <i>Okinawa Times</i> journalist Tomohiro Yara puts it in
his 2009 book <i>The US-Japan Alliance</i> <i>of Sand</i>, the absurd
fiction of owner (Japan) and renter (US military) encourages bad boy
behavior in Okinawa. “What do you expect,” Yara quips, “when what has to
be the most lenient landlord in the world pays 80% of the rent, doesn’t
charge for any of the utilities, and then has to do the repairs himself
when the renter decides to trash the place?” <br><br>
But the last three years of anti-US sentiment in Okinawa has brought with
it a renewed desire for independencefrom the US military <i>and</i> from
the Japanese government. The economic austerity facing Japan means that
the old LDP mode of silencing Okinawan opposition through bribes and
development assistancewhat Okinawan leftists call “sweets (<i>ame</i>)
to make us forget the whippings (<i>muchi</i>) handed out by the
Marines”is no longer feasible. Tokyo started being stingy about handing
out sweet treats to Okinawa over a decade ago, leaving only the “whip” of
the US military for Okinawans. The predictable outcome of the withdrawal
of the sweets is the almost complete absence of Okinawan support for the
new US base; a May 31, 2010 poll conducted by the <i>Ryukyu Shimpo
</i>newspaper found only 6.3% of Okinawans supporting it.<br><br>
<b>Mark Driscoll</b> is an Associate Professor of East Asian History at
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:mdriscol@email.unc.edu">mdriscol@email.unc.edu</a>
<br><br>
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