The Battle for Okinawa

Photograph by Shizuo Kambayashi/ Associated Press

It’s tradition to celebrate 50 years of marriage with gold. But in January, the golden anniversary of the U.S.-Japan military nuptials—the landmark 1960 Treaty of Mutual Co-operation and Security that united the two nations in holy (armed) matrimony—was celebrated not with precious metals or affectionate toasts, but with mounting tension and a growing unease about the future of the U.S.-Japan security alliance.

It’s all come to a head in Okinawa, a southern Japanese prefecture made up of dozens of tiny islands. Ever since the area fell to the Allies in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, the U.S. military has used the islands as a stronghold in the Pacific. Today, about half of the almost 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are concentrated here, in an area that represents just one per cent of Japan’s land mass. It is also here that the pugnacious new Japanese PM is making his first stand: threatening, with broad Japanese support behind him, to boot the Americans off the island.

Calls for the U.S. to reduce its military footprint in Japan have been building. In 2006, the U.S. answered those calls head-on: signing a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) deal with Tokyo that would relocate some 8,000 troops to Guam by 2014 and move the bustling Futenma air base to a less populated part of Okinawa. For a while, the situation calmed. But last September, Japan held a general election—and the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled the country for 54 of the last 55 years, lost. Now, Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, who ran in part on a platform of distancing Japan from the U.S., is at the helm. And while his wife steals headlines with bizarre claims that her “soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Hatoyama has been working more quietly to erode Japan’s relationship with the U.S.

In the new year, he dropped his bombshell: announcing that he might renege on the 2006 deal, but that he would need until May to decide. Then, just last week, another blow: Japanese media reported that Hatoyama will not uphold the SOFA accord. According to those reports, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano met informally with U.S. Ambassador John Roos last Thursday, telling him that sticking to the 2006 timeline had “become too difficult politically.” Some accounts made mention of potential alternative deals. One would see the entire base moved to sparsely populated Uruma, and Tsuken Island, off of Okinawa’s main island. This despite ominous insistence from U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that the terms of the 2006 pact are “non-negotiable.”

It’s not as though the old cross-Pacific knot was tied in bliss. The 1945 Battle of Okinawa, the Americans’ 82-day-long assault on Japan, claimed over 200,000 lives, U.S. and Japanese. The U.S. lost so many men that some in Congress demanded an investigation. And Okinawa lost as much as a quarter of its civilian population (estimates vary)—both in battle and through mass suicides, propelled by rumours about the brutality of approaching American soldiers. After the Allies occupied Japan, things remained tense.

Japanese anger flared into the open in 1995, with the notorious rape and kidnapping of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. military men, which led to widespread protests. Since then, criticism of the U.S. presence has broadened: media reports lambaste the U.S. military golf courses that cover scarce Japanese land; officials complain about the $2 billion that Japan pays annually to maintain U.S. troops (more than any other U.S. ally); and residents stage pedestrian protests against the noise and pollution coming off the base. Increasingly, antipathy is seen on signs held by young protesters, which, borrowing a page from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, call to “Change! Japan-U.S. Relations.” It’s also at the forefront of political pledges, like those of Japan’s Social Democratic Party, which is theatening to pull out of the governing coalition if the base is not scrapped entirely. (A statement provided to Maclean’s by the Japanese Embassy in Ottawa is more tempered: “Japan will maintain the Japan-U.S. Alliance as the cornerstone of its diplomacy,” while trying “to alleviate so far as possible the extremely heavy burden that has been borne by the residents of Okinawa.”)

What is undeniable is that Japan’s new demands are set against a backdrop of cooling U.S.-Japan relations. That is, in part, precipitated by a burgeoning Japanese nationalism. Take Japan’s sensitivity about anti-Japanese sentiments in China. Or the backlash last year against a group of Tokyo teachers who fought against a city law mandating that they stand and sing the national anthem at school ceremonies. But the new mood has been made more obvious by last September’s elections. After 55 years of a regime that deferred major foreign policy decisions to the U.S., says Linus Hagström, a senior research fellow at Sweden’s Institute of International Affairs, the U.S. “will now have to deal with a Japan that isn’t an obedient little brother.” As Hatoyama confirmed after his election, “This will be a very important year for our relationship.”

Perhaps that’s why, in January, the international media was focused on the mayoral race in the small Okinawan city of Nago—and why headlines worldwide sold the campaign of Susuma Inamine, a municipal school-board chairman, as nothing short of a litmus test for the future of the U.S.-Japanese pact. Why Nago? Because that 2006 deal with the U.S. proposed relocating the Futenma air station to Nago. And Inamine, the candidate who eventually won the race with 64 per cent of the vote, was campaigning “with a pledge not to have a new base built.” Hatoyama says he will listen to Okinawans, 85 per cent of whom are opposed to the base, when making his decision, something he now plans to do by the end of March. Others aren’t waiting to lend a hand; on Jan. 30, thousands gathered in Tokyo to protest in sympathy.