By Robert Whiting (2016)
This column has nothing to do with baseball, or even sports, unless you consider protesting against the American presence in Japan as a sport. But it is a subject that needs to be addressed and written about. So here goes.
The historic visit to Hiroshima by President Obama was a source of international goodwill and healing. The first US president ever to visit the Hiroshima peace shrine and museum gave a moving speech about the evils of nuclear weapons and listened heartfelt to the tales of Hiroshima atomic bombing survivors.
Here is a sample: “Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.”
He went on to call for a “moral revolution” in regard to nuclear arms—a world without nuclear weapons.
It was a genuinely moving event, covered widely by the US, Japanese and global media.
It was unfortunate that it was overshadowed by yet another terrible incident involving an American worker on an Okinawan base—this time the murder of a young woman.
There were huge demonstrations—”Yankee Go Home!”—outside the bases, and of course the Japanese media covered it all in big, bold, screaming headlines.
There were the usual abject apologies from the US ambassador and other officials, and I see where the Commander of US Marine forces in Okinawa issued an order banning Marines on bases there from driving off base and drinking off base, which may have the unintended effect of hurting the local economy. “All local clubs and bars will be off limits. Troops who live on base will not be allowed to drink alcohol when they’re off base. And those who live off base will be permitted to drink only while in their homes or on base.”
But nothing they will do will alleviate the grief that the girl’s father is feeling, and none of these actions are going to solve the basic problem.
Defenders of the US bases in Okinawa would argue that the news media blow such incidents out of proportion. Sex-related crimes are quite frequent in today’s Japan, and had the perpetrator been Japanese, they say, the press would not have paid so much attention—that murders and rapes and other ugly things happen on a regular basis, as a fact of life.
They would add that opponents of US military bases are just using the incident to embarrass both the US and Japanese governments—the insinuation being that if there were no US military bases, there would be no such crimes in Okinawa anymore. And after all, it is the Japanese government that has invited the Americans to keep bases and soldiers on Japanese soil, under a Mutual Security Treaty that came about as a result of a war that Japan started.
However, there is another side to the argument. Okinawa is by and large a very peaceful place, and violent crimes against women are very rare there. When American soldiers are involved, the reaction is more severe, because from an Okinawan perspective, a massive concentration of US military on their small island has been forced upon them by an agreement between the Tokyo government and the United States government. Basing the vast majority of American soldiers in Okinawa—there are only a few other US military bases elsewhere, in Iwakuni, Atsugi, Yokosuka, Misawa, etc.—is convenient for the Americans because the location is useful for guarding and, if necessary, blocking sea lanes the North Koreans and Chinese might want to move through. And it is also convenient for ‘mainland’ Japanese who don’t wish to have the American military around.
For many Okinawans, every crime is an affront that symbolizes resentment over the disproportionately large U.S. military presence on Okinawa and the prefecture’s complicated relationship with the rest of the country.
Okinawa has always been treated as subpar by the rest of Japan. I became friends with a member of the Higashi-Nakano Sumiyoshi-ikka long ago because he was from Okinawa. He said to me, “Bob, you and I are the same. We are both outsiders in Japan. Japanese don’t like gaijin and they don’t like Okinawans. So let’s be friends.”
Remember, it was Okinawa where the Japanese militarist government decided to make its last stand in WWII, in the Battle of Okinawa, where up to 150,000 Okinawans, nearly half of the island’s population, sacrificed their lives.
Then, for nearly 30 years after the war, the US government continued to occupy Okinawa as a special fiefdom, then, after turning it back to the Japanese government in the Reversion, continued to occupy 20% of the Okinawan mainland to this day.
There are certain analogies here to the ‘illegal immigrant’ debate in the USA. Defenders of illegal immigration (e.g., workers need the money to feed hungry families back in Mexico, American farming and industry in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas need their help) say that crime caused by illegal immigration is lower, percentage-wise, than that of the American citizenry as a whole—so why complain? The retort of the anti-immigration side is, “America already has enough crime. We don’t need to import more by allowing illegal immigration. Let them stand in line with other legal applicants.” That’s exactly what many Okinawan people are saying.
The Japanese government could solve this problem quite easily by asking the Americans to leave and using Japanese soldiers to protect the Japanese islands. Or by moving the US military elsewhere in Japan.
Why don’t they?
Tokyo Junkie 