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Huge protests demand U.S. leave Okinawa air base

Published Jun 10, 2010 10:08 AM

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama had promised before taking office last year that he would make the Pentagon close a U.S. Marine base on Okinawa called the Futenma Air Station. It got him a lot of votes, especially in Okinawa, a group of islands occupied by the U.S. after World War II but “reverted” to Japan in 1972.


Tens of thousands of Okinawans rallied
Nov. 10 against the u.S. military base
in Ginowan, Okinawa.

Once Hatoyama was elected, however, the U.S. government put heavy pressure on him to go back on his pledge to the Japanese people. Hatoyama finally caved in April and agreed to keep the Futenma base.

That’s when all hell broke loose. Huge demonstrations rocked Okinawa and other parts of Japan. On June 2, after his popularity plummeted and his coalition government fell apart, Hatoyama resigned his post, bowing to the greater pressure, the power of the people.

When Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) swept the Liberal Democratic Party out of office after a 50-year reign, it was partly due to his Okinawa Vision 2008, which called for the complete removal of Futenma, not just moving it away from the heavily populated city of Ginowan.

Futenma had been fiercely opposed by the people, especially after the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. servicemen in 1995. The U.S. had then agreed to turn over Futenma in five to seven years. Urgency was added in 2004 when a Marine helicopter crashed into Okinawa International University in Ginowan. Two years later the U.S. agreed to eventually relocate the base to a less populated area. But the people kept up their struggle to get rid of the base altogether.

When Okinawans this year sensed that Hatoyama might double-cross them, they launched two months of protests. On April 6-9, some 150 Okinawans staged a sit-in at the Japanese Diet (parliament) building, along with their legislators.

On April 25 crowds of people wearing yellow — the color of warning — packed an athletic field in Yomitan, Okinawa. High school student Shikiya Narumi spoke of traditional Okinawan ideals that “valued human ties more than anything else.” A roar of approval went up when she declared, “Bases are not necessary in Okinawa.” (Visit http://tinyurl.com/247twc2 to see YouTube excerpts of this rally.)

In addition to the 93,700 at this rally, another 3,000 were demonstrating on the neighboring island of Miyako. Together, the two protests were attended by almost 7 percent of all the people in Okinawa.

On May 16, despite heavy wind and rain, 17,000 Okinawans formed a human chain surrounding the 8-mile perimeter of Futenma. This was the fifth time a human chain demonstration around the base had been organized. With leadership from the cities most affected and from peace organizations, the event was timed to coincide with the 38th anniversary of “reversion.”

In other parts of Japan, moves to expand U.S military operations were also met with angry protest. On May 8, 5,000 people rallied on the small island of Tokunoshima in Kagoshima Prefecture — nearly one-fifth of the population — to oppose the U.S. military relocating some of its functions there from Okinawa.

On May 23, 5,000 residents of Iwakuni, almost 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo, turned out in the rain to protest the addition of a runway to the U.S. Marine base there. Seventeen-year-old Mizuho Okada told the protesters that the high school students frequently cannot hear their teachers due to noise from aircraft.

Prior to 1972, Okinawans had neither U.S. nor Japanese passports when Okinawa was a U.S. military colony. Reversion officially transformed Okinawa into a prefecture of Japan, but the U.S. military retains control over what takes place on the bases and in the airspace.

Okinawa makes up less than 1 percent of Japan’s land mass. However, 75 percent of Japanese land used exclusively by the U.S. military is in Okinawa. In fiscal 2005, more than half of the crimes and accidents linked to members of the U.S. military in Japan took place in Okinawa.

Prime Minister Hatoyama took advantage of a major U.S. scare campaign against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to justify caving in to the demands of the Obama administration and return to the 2006 plan to relocate Futenma rather than abolish it entirely, as he had promised.

When Mizuho Fukushima, head of the Social Democratic Party, a coalition partner with DPJ, opposed the plan, Hatoyama dismissed her from her position as minister for consumer affairs and gender equality.

Fukushima had been adamant that Futenma should be moved off Okinawa and that the SDP could not agree to relocating the base to Okinawa’s coast. She stated, “It tramples on the feelings of the people of Okinawa and breaks a promise.” Senior Vice Transport Minister Kiyomi Tsujimoto, another SDP legislator, resigned her position, and the SDP left the coalition to protest the relocation of Futenma.

On May 28 when the plan was announced ignoring Okinawa’s expressed concerns, emergency demonstrations took place at Nago City Hall and Okinawa Prefectural offices. A 70-year-old farmer spoke for other residents when he said, “We are boiling with rage like magma.”

The writer was a civilian activist with the anti-war G.I. movement in Okinawa from 1971 to 1973. Material for this article came from Mainichi Daily News, earthtimes.org, the L.A. Times, Xinhua and China Daily.