Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

OKINAWA:

ASIA’S LAST COLONY

At about eight P.M. on September 4, 1995, two American marines and a sailor seized a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl on her way home from shopping, bound and gagged her, drove her in a rented car to a remote location, and raped her. Marine Pfc. Rodrico Harp and Seaman Marcus Gill confessed that they violently beat her and that Marine Pfc. Kendrick Ledet bound her mouth, eyes, hands, and legs with duct tape. Described in court by an acquaintance as a “tank,” Gill was six feet tall and weighed 270 pounds. He confessed to raping the girl, while the other two claimed that they had merely abducted and beaten her. According to an Associated Press account of the trial, “The court interpreter broke down upon hearing [Gill’s] account of lewd jokes he and his companions made about their unconscious and bleeding victim.”¹ Police introduced into the trial proceedings a plastic bag found in a trash can that contained three sets of bloodstained men’s underwear, a school notebook, and duct tape.

The three accused rapists—Gill, twenty-two, of Woodville, Texas; Harp, twenty-one, of Griffin, Georgia; and Ledet, twenty, of Waycross, Georgia—were in no way unusual for U.S. servicemen stationed on the island of Okinawa. Harp was the father of a nine-month-old daughter and a graduate of an ROTC program in Griffin. Ledet had been a Boy Scout and church usher. Gill had taken advanced-placement English and had won a football scholarship. All were based at Camp Hansen. Gill told the court that the three men had embarked on the rape “just for fun” and had picked the girl out at random as she was leaving a stationery store.

A few weeks later, from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, remarked to the press, “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.”² Although Macke was permitted to retire following this lighthearted comment, there was no Congressional or official inquiry into his leadership of the Pacific Command and no review of why a decade after the end of the Cold War the United States still had one hundred thousand troops based in Japan and South Korea. There was only endless public relations spin about how the gang rape of a child was a singular “tragedy,” not a consequence of U.S. basing policy, and how East Asia “needs” its American peacekeepers.

Few Americans who have never served in the armed forces overseas have any conception of the nature or impact of an American base complex, with its massive military facilities, post exchanges, dependents’ housing estates, swimming pools, and golf courses, and the associated bars, strip clubs, whorehouses, and venereal disease clinics that they attract in a land like Okinawa. They can extend for miles, dominating localities and in some cases whole nations. In South Korea, for example, huge military camptowns (kijich’on) have existed around all the American bases from the time of the Korean War. Katharine Moon writes, “They are like stage sets, in a sense, for the U.S. military presence in Korea, characterized by dimly lit alleys blinking with neon-lit bars boasting names like Lucky Club, Top Gun, or King Club. The alleys rock with loud country-western or disco music, drunken brawls, and American soldiers in fatigues and heavily made-up Korean women walking closely together with hands on each other’s buttocks.”³ Until the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Philippines in 1992, the town of Olongapo, adjacent to the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, had no industry except for the “entertainment” business, which supported approximately 55,000 prostitutes and a total of 2,182 registered establishments offering “rest and recreation” to American servicemen.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States built a chain of military bases stretching from Korea and Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, England, and Iceland—in effect ringing the Soviet Union and China with literally thousands of overseas military installations. In Japan alone, immediately following the end of the Korean War, there were six hundred U.S. installations and approximately two hundred thousand troops. There are still today, ten years after the end of the Cold War, some eight hundred Department of Defense facilities located outside the United States, ranging from radio relay stations to major air bases. To those living around them (and often dependent upon them), the personnel based on them may feel less like “peacekeepers” than occupiers. This is certainly the case in Okinawa, a land whose people have in any case felt themselves under occupation by Japan since the seventeenth century and by the United States since 1945.

The island of Okinawa measures 454 square miles, almost exactly the size of Los Angeles and smaller than the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian chain. It now contains thirty-nine bases, ranging from Kadena Air Force Base, the largest airfield in East Asia, to the Sobe Communications Facility, known locally as the “elephant cage” because of its bizarre antennae, a center for communicating with submarines, intercepting other people’s telephone conversations, and intelligence operations. In the 1960s, when Okinawa was directly administered by the Pentagon, there were 117 bases, and at the time of the rape there were 42. Though few of them are contiguous to each other, in total they take up an estimated 20 percent of the prime agricultural land in the central and southern parts of the main island of Okinawa. The United States also controls twenty-nine areas of the surrounding seas and fifteen air spaces over the Ryukyus. As a prefecture of Japan, Okinawa occupies only 0.6 percent of Japan’s total land area, but about 75 percent of facilities exclusively used by the American armed forces stationed in Japan are concentrated there. With a population density amounting to 2,198 persons per square kilometer, it is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Neither Japanese nor Okinawan courts or police have any jurisdiction over these American-occupied lands, seas, and air spaces.

It may be hard for Americans to imagine why a single rape case would cause such outrage among Okinawans or endanger an almost half-century-old Japanese-American security relationship. Part of the reason is because it is hard to grasp the particular imperial circumstances under which they live. A reader trying to imagine what follows would perhaps have to transpose the Okinawan situation to Greater Los Angeles, imagining the choicest fifth of it to be occupied in a similar way by an allied and “friendly” foreign military. In addition, the reader would have to understand that the very reason for the presence of those bases, weapons, and personnel, dinned into public consciousness for forty years—the enmity of an ominous neighboring superpower and its bloc of allies—had ceased to be relevant for a decade.

Certainly, from an Okinawan point of view, Admiral Macke’s remark merely confirmed what they had already long experienced: that this was not an isolated incident committed by undisciplined enlisted men but part of a pattern ignored, if not condoned, at the highest levels of the American military hierarchy. But even more important, it posed in the starkest terms a question increasingly asked in the satellites of the informal American empire: Why absorb such costs? Why, in fact, are foreign troops based in countries like Japan more than half a century after the end of World War II and more than a decade after the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a military threat?

Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which is located at the southernmost tip of Japan. Its capital, Naha, is considerably closer to Shanghai than to Tokyo, and the culture of the Ryukyu Islands reflects strong Chinese as well as Japanese influences. The Ryukyus were formerly an independent kingdom, annexed by Japan in the late nineteenth century, at about the same time the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands.

The main island of Okinawa was the scene of the last great battle of World War II—also the last time the United States used military force victoriously in East Asia. (During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon was successful but led to his march north to the Yalu River, which precipitated Chinese intervention and the United States’ ultimately having to settle for a divided Korea.) Some 14,005 Americans and 234,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were killed in that brutal, three-month-long campaign, so bloody that it became the main American rationale for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If using atomic weapons to end the war prevented more Okinawan-type carnage in an invasion of Japan’s main islands, then, the Americans claimed, it was more than justified.

The monument the Okinawan government built to the war dead, unveiled on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, is testimony to what the Okinawans call the “typhoon of steel.” On dozens of stone tablets, it lists the names of all the people on all sides killed in the battle—Japanese and American soldiers and affiliated personnel (including the journalist Ernie Pyle), Okinawan and Japanese civilians, and Korean slave laborers. The battle lasted from April to June 1945 and totally devastated the island. In September 1945, the American armed forces occupied defeated Japan, promising to bring to those emperorruled islands an American-style series of democratic reforms. Okinawa, however, was separated off from Japan and ruled by the military in a purely autocratic manner.

From 1945 to 1972, American military officers governed Okinawa as their exclusive preserve. In 1952, retention of Okinawa proved to be the price the American government extracted from Japan in return for the signing of an early peace treaty and of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, which signaled the end of the occupation of Japan’s main islands. Many Okinawans believe that Emperor Hirohito sacrificed them in 1945 in a meaningless battle meant to elicit better surrender terms from the Allies, and that Tokyo sacrificed them again in 1952 so that the rest of Japan could regain its independence and enjoy the beginnings of a return to economic prosperity. In this view, Japan felt relatively comfortable with the Japanese-American Security Treaty largely because most American military bases were consigned to a small southern island, where they and the problems that come with them could be ignored by the majority of Japanese. (There are still, it should be added, eight major American bases in Japan proper, located at Atsugi, Iwakuni, Misawa, Sagamihara, Sasebo, Yokosuka, Yokota, and Zama.)

America’s two major wars against Asian communism—in Korea and Vietnam—could not have been fought without bases on Japanese territory. Those military outposts were critical staging and logistics areas for the projection of American power onto the Asian mainland, as well as secure sanctuaries, invulnerable to attack by North Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Cambodian forces. Large American staffs involved in conducting those wars lived in security and comfort, and American troops often enjoyed “R & R” (rest and recreation) in Okinawa or Japan as well as in Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. In 1965, Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of American forces in the Pacific, explicitly stated that the United States could not fight the Vietnam War without its Okinawan bases.

Had the Americans had to ask for Japanese permission to conduct wars from their territory, they would have been turned down. But when the Korean War broke out in 1950, the American military still occupied all of Japan, and throughout most of the Vietnam War they still governed Okinawa as if it were their private military colony. By the late 1960s, the Americans had built their complex of more than a hundred bases, much of it by forcibly seizing land from defenseless Okinawans who were without official citizenship, legal protections, or rights of any sort from any country. When, at the height of the Vietnam War, Okinawan protests against B-52s, bars, brothels, stores of nerve gas, and G.I.-committed crimes reached a combustible point, the Americans finally took the step of officially returning Okinawa to Japanese control. Nothing, however, changed in terms of the actual American presence—except that Americans now felt obliged to justify their behavior. This they proceeded to do, ushering in a period of extraordinary American hypocrisy, mendacity, and greed, which reached an apogee just when the end of the Cold War seemed to signal a possible end to the daily indignities inflicted on the 1.3 million people of the island.

Instead, during the Clinton administration the Americans simply began to invent new “threats” that required their presence and to offer heightened assurances of their goodwill and good-neighborliness. In a November 1995 speech to the National Press Club in Tokyo, then secretary of defense William Perry assured the Japanese, “The bases are here for your good more than ours,” arguing that “without the troops, Japan would be vulnerable.” On the rape, Perry added, “The American people share this pain with you.”⁴ General C. C. Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote in reference to Okinawa that “a Marine installation is more than a collection of buildings and equipment; it is a community of good, decent and caring people, people with families and interests far beyond day-to-day military affairs; and people involved in the community. They are people who care about the lives of those beyond the fences of their installation.”⁵ Ambassador Walter Mondale, who helped engineer a deceitful scheme in which the American government publicly promised to give back the Marine Corps air station at Futenma to the Okinawans but privately required that Japan provide the United States with an equivalent base elsewhere in Okinawa, insisted to the press just before his return to the States that “we have tried in a very intensive way to be good neighbors to our friends in Okinawa.”⁶

Certainly, Okinawan daily life in the 1990s was an improvement over the days when the territory was under exclusive American jurisdiction. Japan poured money into the island, understanding that the mainland’s postwar economy had been built partly at the expense of the Okinawans and that a transfer of wealth was in order. Although Okinawa is still Japan’s poorest prefecture, it had by the 1990s reached 70 percent of the national level of wealth. Since Japan is the world’s richest large country in terms of per capita income, this meant that tiny Okinawa was now far richer than all of North Korea, to take but one example.

It is not absolute deprivation that maddens Okinawans but relative deprivation—the realization that American noise, traffic accidents, environmental degradation, and moral offenses should not have to be endured. As Etsuko Miyagi Utsumi, a leader of the women’s coalition that came into being after the 1995 rape, puts it, “The Japanese government has so far been successful in making Okinawa, the most remote prefecture, serve as the ‘garbage dump’ of the Security Treaty.”⁷

Sexual assault, for example, remains a fact of daily life. Shortly after the notorious rape that created a crisis in Japanese-American relations, the New York Times editorial page informed its readers that “American military behavior in Japan has generally been good since the occupation in 1945.”⁸ Given that in a period of only six months in 1949 journalist Frank Gibney reported G.I.s killing twenty-nine Okinawans and raping another eighteen and that in late 1958 a quarter to a third of the Third Marine Division in Okinawa was infected with venereal disease, one has to ask what the New York Times might consider bad behavior.⁹

Similarly, Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Myers, commander of U.S. Forces in Japan, has maintained that the 1995 rape was an isolated incident, not characteristic behavior of “99.99 percent of U.S. Forces.”¹⁰ But General Myers is simply wrong. According to the conservative Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun, which studied bookings at the Okinawan Prefectural Police Headquarters, U.S. servicemen were implicated in 4,716 crimes between 1972 and 1995—just under a crime a day throughout the period of General Myers’s command.¹¹

Of course, most of these criminal acts were not sexual assaults. Russell Carollo and a team of reporters from the Dayton Daily News went through one hundred thousand court-martial records going back to 1988 to find out how many servicemen had been brought before military courts charged with rape and how they had been treated. They discovered that since 1988, navy and marine bases in Japan have had 169 courts-martial for sexual assaults, the highest number of all U.S. bases worldwide, 66 percent more cases than at the number-two location, San Diego, which has more than twice the personnel. Since the navy has a large Okinawa base at White Beach and another contingent at Kadena and the marines have twenty different bases spread all over the island, “Japan” here essentially meant Okinawa. As getting information on courts-martial required months of filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and the army released its records only after being sued by the Dayton Daily News, the statistics cited in their stories of October 1-5, 1995, do not even include army figures.¹²

While the incidence of reported rape in the United States is forty-one for every one hundred thousand people, at the military bases in Okinawa it is eighty-two per one hundred thousand. And that, of course, is counting only reported rapes. In Okinawan culture it is unbearably humiliating for an adult woman to bring a charge of rape (something that the Marine Corps has often relied on in covering up its record). Thus, the numbers undoubtedly significantly understate the actual occurrence of rape. Disturbingly, the Dayton Daily News articles revealed that the military had allowed hundreds of accused sex offenders in its ranks to go free despite courts-martial convictions. The Nation magazine, considering what the Dayton reporters uncovered, concluded, “Covering up sexual assault is Pentagon policy.”¹³

But the Pentagon may finally have met its match in a group of women determined to publicize and bring to justice military rapists. The organization, Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, was founded by Suzuyo Takazato, a member of the Naha City Assembly, and Carolyn Francis, an American Methodist missionary in Okinawa. They had attended the Fourth U.N. Forum on Women in Beijing in September 1995, and with colleagues they presented a revealing report on and chronology of what Okinawan women had experienced during the military occupation of their country. Returning to Okinawa to news of the gang rape of the twelve-year-old girl, they spearheaded a mobilization of Okinawans and their government that led to the largest protest demonstration in Okinawa’s history. A rally of eighty-five thousand people on October 21, 1995, demanded that the American and Japanese governments pay some attention to their grievances. The Okinawan Women repeatedly (and without irony, despite her husband’s seeming indifference to the victims of sex crimes by American servicemen) quoted from the speech of Hillary Rodham Clinton, honorary chairwoman of the U.S. delegation to the Beijing women’s forum, that “women’s rights are human rights” and that military rape is a war crime.

The rape took place on September 4; by September 8, the Okinawan police had identified the perpetrators on the basis of rental-car records and had issued warrants for their arrest, but the military did not turn them over to local authorities until September 29. It was widely reported that the three had the run of their base and were spending their time “eating hamburgers.”¹⁴ This is a matter not of simple delays but of “extraterritoriality,” one of the historically most offensive aspects of Western (and Japanese) imperialism in East Asia. From the time the United States got it written into its treaty with China following the Opium War of 1839-42 (yes, it was an American invention), “extra’lity,” as it was informally called, meant that if a European, American, or Japanese committed a crime in China (or today in Japan or Korea if he or she is a member of, married to, or the child of a member of the American armed forces), that foreigner would be turned over to his or her own consular officials, rather than being tried under the laws of the country in which the crime occurred.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chinese revolution was in part fought to be rid of this demeaning provision, which lasted in China until 1943. The Western insistence on extraterritoriality reflected the belief that Asian law was barbaric and that no “civilized” person should be subjected to it. In actuality, all sorts of Chinese criminals took advantage of it, claiming Christian conversion or other ruses to ingratiate themselves with one or another imperialist power in order to place themselves beyond the reach of local laws.

Article 17, section 5, of the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) stipulated: “When U.S. servicemen and their families commit crimes, they shall be detained by U.S. authorities until Japanese law enforcement agencies file complaints with the prosecutors’ office based on clear suspicion.” While not quite full-blown extraterritoriality, it gave U.S. authorities the right to refuse Japanese investigators’ requests to hand over suspects attached to the military. Delays built into the system were often used as opportunities to transfer American suspects back to the United States, where they were beyond the reach of Japanese authorities.

Under the pressure of escalating protests in Okinawa and mainland Japan following news of the rape, the United States and Japan signed a “side letter” to SOFA allowing G.I.s suspected of rape or murder to be placed in Japanese custody before being indicted if Japanese investigators request it. This represented a distinct break in American global policies. In Korea, suspects still get handed over to local authorities only after being convicted by a U.S. military court. Similarly, in Italy, the American fliers charged in 1998 with flying so low that their jet cut a ski-lift cable, plunging twenty skiers to their deaths, were returned to the States for a military trial where, to the outrage of Italians, they were exonerated of responsibility. It is, of course, unimaginable that Americans would accept such special treatment for foreign military personnel visiting or training in our country. And that is precisely what breeds such a deep sense of injustice among Okinawans.

Certainly, the initial American response to the rape caused the greatest crisis in Japanese-American relations since a tumultuous struggle against the renewal of the security treaty in 1960. No one should be surprised to discover, however, that the sexual offenses that had plagued Okinawans did not abate. Only three months later, in December 1995, the U.S. military released a composite sketch of an American suspected of raping a woman at knifepoint near Futenma Marine Corps Air Station. Ben Takara, an Okinawan poet and chemistry teacher at Futenma Senior High School, told Newsweek, “We once surveyed our girl students, asking if they had had any scary experiences with U.S. soldiers on their way to school or back home. One-third to one-half of the students answered yes. . . . The rape case . . . was just the tip of the iceberg. I must say that the Japan-U.S. security treaty has not protected the safety of Okinawans.”¹⁵

Many of the acts that so disrupt Okinawan life are less sensational than rape but no less disturbing to the people of that island. Traffic accidents are an example. On a Sunday in early January 1996, four months after the rape that had allegedly caused the U.S. military to tighten up discipline, a female marine from the air base at Futenma drove off the road and onto a sidewalk at high speed in Chatan, near Kadena Air Force Base, killing Rojita Kinjo, thirty-six, and her daughters, Mitsuko, ten, and Mariko, one. Lance Corporal Lori Padilla, twenty, the driver, pleaded guilty to a charge of professional negligence leading to death. It may be that she was confused by driving on the left side of the road, as is the custom in Japan. She received a two-year prison sentence.

Five months later, the remaining Kinjo family sued Padilla and the two marine co-owners of the car in the Naha District Court for sixty-two million yen (about $580,000) as a solatium to compensate them for the emotional losses due to the deaths of their relatives. The payment of a solatium in the case of accidents of all kinds is an essential and longaccepted part of Japanese culture. None of the defendants appeared at the trial, one having already left for the United States (the average tour of duty for American service personnel in Okinawa is only six months). In December, the court ordered Padilla and her two codefendants to pay the sum requested, but the second codefendant had by then also left Japan and was untraceable. Padilla had neither savings nor insurance. Ultimately the U.S. military paid the family twenty-five million yen (40 percent of the total) but extracted from them, in return, a statement that this was a gift from the U.S. government and that the family in accepting it gave up any further claims against the United States. At this point, the Japanese government paid the remaining thirty-seven million yen to the victims’ family.

It was noted that at the time of the accident the driver was neither arrested nor checked to see if she was drunk but was instead transported to a military hospital. This was, of course, only one of just over a thousand auto accidents each year in Okinawa involving U.S. service personnel (slightly under two thousand for Japan as a whole), and it was quite typical in that American drivers normally do not have insurance (or at least not enough) and have often left Japan by the time Okinawan victims catch up to them in court.

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.

One of the lengths to which it will go is to spend large amounts of public money to cover the costs of the bases, thereby turning the Pentagon into a central component of the Japan lobby in Washington, D.C. Japan is not obligated by any treaty to do this. The Status of Forces Agreement clearly states that “the United States will bear without cost to Japan all expenditures incident to the maintenance of the United States forces in Japan” except for the “construction of facilities.” But in May 1978, Shin Kanemaru, then chief of the Japanese Defense Agency and one of the legendary power brokers of the Liberal Democratic Party, arranged for Japan to donate ¥6.2 billion toward support of the U.S. forces. Kanemaru dubbed this the omoiyari yosan, or “sympathy budget,” because the American government had said to Tokyo that it was experiencing budgetary difficulties following the Vietnam War and could not cover all the costs of its bases in Japan. Initially the omoiyari yosan covered only the medical insurance of Japanese civilians working on the bases, but the Americans have asked for an increase in the sympathy budget every year since, and by 1997 it was ¥273.7 billion ($2.36 billion), more than forty-four times larger than the original sum.

Needless to say, the American press has barely reported these developments; and the Pentagon certainly never uses the term “sympathy budget,” preferring instead the euphemism “host nation support.” According to a 1998 Department of Defense report on allied nations’ “contributions to the common defense,” Japan’s host nation support is the most generous of all. It supplied 78 percent of the costs of the 42,962 U.S. troops on its soil, while Germany paid only 27 percent of the costs of the 48,878 U.S. troops based there. Of the 1997 omoiyari yosan, a bit more than half, or ¥146.2 billion, went to pay the salaries of Japanese who provide some 1,472 separate services to the U.S. troops as translators, gardeners, waitresses, and manicurists, among other things; ¥95.3 billion went to improve American apartments, golf courses, and churches; and ¥31.9 billion, to pay the costs of the public utilities supplied to the bases.³⁰

The overall Japanese government budget for the bases in fiscal year 1997 was ¥647 billion, including rents paid to landowners for use of their land, investments in countermeasures against noise pollution, and funds to “realign” bases in Okinawa in fulfillment of promises made by the Americans after the rape incident (“realignment” was the official Japanese-American euphemism for moving bases around within Okinawa but not actually changing them in any substantial ways). The total national budgetary support for U.S. forces is ¥28 billion more than the entire 1997 budget of Okinawa Prefecture, 2.2 times greater than Japan’s expenditures for university subsidies, and 2.1 times the amount it spends for day-care centers. The United States has military bases in nineteen countries, but Japan is the only one that pays all the costs of local employees. Whatever economic interest some people in Okinawa might have in the presence of the facilities, one wonders why the rest of Japan puts up with this use of national tax moneys.

In May 1997, 296 Japanese citizens from twenty-nine prefectures filed suit in Osaka District Court arguing that the omoiyari yosan violates Article 9 of Japan’s pacifist Constitution and asking that the amount of their national taxes spent for the bases be returned to them. This was the first suit to legally challenge the use of public money to maintain the American military, and its sponsors say that it was partly motivated by the 1995 rape incident. Given the length of time that Japan’s ultraconservative court system can take to resolve something it basically does not want to touch, it is extremely unlikely that this suit will ever be concluded. However, the global economic crisis that began in East Asia in 1997 may very well spell the end of the omoiyari yosan when it next comes up for reauthorization. Even Japan’s obsequiously pro-American government may find it has better things on which to spend its money in the coming century.

Nonetheless, according to the Pacific Stars and Stripes, in 1998 the marines asked the Japanese to build them what would be, if completed, in 2003, the largest golf course on Okinawa. The new four-hundred-acre facility on virgin land at the Kadena Ammunition Storage Area would replace the 116-acre Awase Meadows Golf Course in urban Naha, which the Americans agreed to return to “civilian use” if Japan would supply them with equivalent facilities elsewhere on the island. The government has no desire to build the new golf course, noting that there is already an eighteen-hole course within Kadena Air Force Base. (Kadena also houses a twenty-six-lane bowling alley, two gymnasiums, two parks, two theaters, two libraries, three swimming pools, four tennis courts, seventeen baseball diamonds, four officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs, a riding academy, a ballet studio, and a dog obedience school.) But these are Air Force facilities, as Lt. Col. Billy Birdwell, deputy director of U.S. Forces Japan Public Affairs, explained: “We want the public to know that this is not going to be another golf course on Kadena Air Base. This will be a Marine facility, Marine managed.”³¹

In 1996, General C. C. Krulak, the marine commandant, became so worried that the rape incident might force his troops to give up Okinawa’s plush officers’ clubs and golf courses that he proposed moving the 3rd Marine Division to Darwin, Australia. This idea fell through when it became clear that Australia would not pay the same lucrative benefits to keep the marines happy.

The prefecture of Okinawa is, in fact, forced to pay many other costs that are incidental to housing the bases. There are an estimated ten thousand children of mixed parentage—offspring of unknown or longgone American fathers and Okinawan mothers—whom the prefecture is obliged to support and educate. During his 1998 visit to Washington, Governor Ota indicated to Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and the Pacific, that “we have a situation in Okinawa where children with dual citizenship and one parent who is American are not receiving an adequate education.” He asked that they be allowed to attend schools on the bases free of charge. Campbell, who was three years old when the revision of the security treaty was signed in 1960, fobbed off the seventy-three-year-old Ota with a standard response that disguises the nature of the de facto American colonialism in Okinawa: he urged the governor to take up such issues with the government in Tokyo. Since Okinawa is part of Japan, the United States now pretends that its military bases are there as a result of Japan’s allocation of base sites. This amounts to a permanent collusion of the United States and Japan against Okinawa.³²

What does the U.S. government say it is doing in Okinawa fifty-five years after the end of World War II? Throughout the postwar period, the United States has vacillated between two basic arguments: the forces are there either in order to defend Japan or in order to contain Japan. Though one contradicts the other, each is alternately resurrected, depending on the current situation in East Asia, and used to justify policies that were first formulated to deal with conditions that existed in 1951, when the peace treaty and the security treaty were negotiated, and that ceased to exist at least two decades ago. Even in 1951, Japan was in no danger of being attacked by another nation and even less capable of attacking one of its neighbors.

According to Article 5 of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, the purpose of the treaty is to defend Japan. Needless to say, the document did not explain whom Japan was to be defended from or dwell on whether Japan needed America’s help in defending itself. No attempt has been made to invade the main islands since a Mongol fleet dispatched by Kublai Khan was dispersed by a “divine wind” in A.D. 1281. After the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, the Americans essentially gave up on the idea of an invasion and turned instead to defeating Japan through the use of nuclear weapons, strategic bombing, and a blockade.

Since World War II, only the former Soviet Union could conceivably have mounted such an invasion, although there is no evidence that it ever seriously considered doing so. American and Japanese defense officials love to say that Okinawa’s excessive burdens in the Cold War are a result of the island’s “strategic location.” But Okinawa was hardly well located to anchor a defense against the USSR, which in any case self-destructed a decade ago.

The Pentagon regularly suggests that Japan faces potential threats from North Korea and China. But North Korea is a failed Communist regime unable to feed its own people and still engaged in a barely repressed civil war with South Korea, which is twice as populous, infinitely richer, and fully capable of defending itself. The Japanese government has strongly expressed its own fears of a potential North Korean missile assault ever since Pyongyang in August 1998 fired a rocket over Japan in the process of launching a small satellite. The real threat, however, is that a suicidal North Korea—itself feeling threatened by the might of the United States—could deliver some kind of terror weapon (if it has one) to Japan by boat and detonate it there as a final, if futile, act of retaliation for Japan’s brutal colonial rule of and postwar hostility toward it. This would be more than half a century late, the worst blowback nightmare and a horrific reminder that the acts of empire are seldom forgotten by those who have suffered them. To date, however, there is no evidence that North Korea is suicidally inclined. Public opinion in Japan, in fact, remains deeply suspicious of American claims that North Korea is a threat. In 1994, when the possible existence of a North Korean nuclear arsenal first surfaced in the media, in a four-nation poll of attitudes, the Japanese named the United States as “the biggest threat to world peace,” followed by Russia and only then by North Korea.³³

The notion that the main thrust of the security treaty was to defend against Chinese expansionism, or to “contain” China, or to provide a platform from which the United States could intervene militarily in the Taiwan Strait to defend Taiwan, Japan’s former colony, from attack by mainland China is a very embarrassing and dangerous one for Japan. In Japan’s own peace treaty with China ending World War II, Japan clearly acknowledged Taiwan as a part of China. Chinese leaders regularly remind Japan that enlarging the scope of the security treaty to include Taiwan directly violates commitments Japan has long made to China.

The Japanese public (and even the conservative ruling party) do not in any case believe that their country is threatened by China. It is widely accepted that Taiwan’s highly modern defense forces effectively deter any form of military takeover by the mainland. For the public, given what Japan did in China during World War II, a serious conflict with that nation over Taiwan is unthinkable. The Japanese also applaud the evolution of the previously revolutionary People’s Republic from its emphasis on opposition to its former imperialist oppressors to domestic development through commerce with them. Japan’s policy is to do everything in its power to adjust to the reemergence of China on the world stage. It also appreciates that China, while resurgent, still has only a gross domestic product of $560 billion, compared to Japan’s $5 trillion and the United States’ $7.2 trillion; a defense budget of $31.7 billion, compared to Japan’s $47 billion and the United States’ $263.9 billion; and perhaps as many as 149 strategic nuclear weapons, compared to the United States’ 7,150.

In polls, the Japanese public has repeatedly expressed a greater concern about oscillations in U.S. policy toward China than about anything China has done or has the capability to do to Japan. Given the large military expeditionary forces the United States maintains in Japan, the real fear is that increased American belligerence toward China might invite Chinese retaliation against the bases in Japan. This is one reason why former Japanese prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa advocates maintaining the Japanese-American alliance while eliminating permanent U.S. forces from Japanese territory.³⁴

The Japanese, too, have the ability to defend themselves from any likely nonnuclear threat to their security. With the second largest navy in the Pacific, more destroyers than the United States, and 120 F-15 fighter interceptors, Japan is quite capable of meeting any challenge that might arise, including one to its merchant fleet. Shunji Taoka, the military correspondent for the Asahi newspaper, argues that Japan has long been fully capable of supplying its own air, naval, and ground defenses and need rely on the United States only for its “nuclear umbrella.” According to Taoka, if the United States withdrew its forces, Japan would not need to add anything further to its defense expenditures in order to maintain its security.³⁵

If, then, American troops are not in Japan to defend Japan, could they be there to contain it? Is their role that of an “honorable watchdog” (gobanken-sama), as many conservative Japanese politicians have contended in the postwar years? The most famous expression of this came from Lt. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole, commander of the 3rd Marine Division in Okinawa, in a 1990 interview with the Washington Post.³⁶ His forces, he claimed, were like a “cap in the bottle,” preventing the monster of revived Japanese militarism from jumping out and, as in the first half of the twentieth century, threatening other East Asian countries. Versions of this view are often seen in the American press; a typical example also from the Post: “Neighboring countries, with a particularly vivid memory of Japanese aggression during World War II, also worry that if the U.S. withdrew its troops, Japan would almost certainly build up its own military power.”³⁷

One problem with this theory is that the United States has long pushed Japan to build up exactly the military power it is supposed to be containing. The government sells more advanced weapons to Japan than to any other nation or territory except Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. It has allowed the licensing of the technology of General Dynamics’ F-16 fighter plane (a derivative of which in Japan became the FS-X); it has sold Japan advanced Aegis ship missile-defense systems, ultrasophisticated AWACS command and control aircraft, Patriot missile-defense batteries, and with highly publicized threats about the dangers of the “rogue state” of North Korea has even gotten the Japanese to agree to help fund research for an antiballistic missile system. And that only scratches the surface of U.S. arms and technology transfers. In addition, administration and Pentagon officials have urged their Japanese equivalents to be strategically bolder in deploying Japanese defense forces in Asia—far bolder, in fact, than most Japanese would like their country to be.

The Pentagon is today the most important political force inside or outside Japan calling for a greatly expanded Japanese military role in world affairs. In a public-opinion poll conducted by the Asahi newspaper, 43 percent of the Japanese public opposed and only 37 percent approved the expanded Guidelines on U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation that the two countries signed in 1997.³⁸ These commit Japan to supporting American troops in times of “emergency” with many forms of assistance—opening up Japan’s civilian airports to American military operations, collaborating with American forces in removing mines, enforcing naval embargoes, and other types of direct military operations. These guidelines, as the Asahi newspaper declared editorially, have, in effect, rewritten the security treaty without consultations either with the Japanese Diet or Congress.³⁹ Such ongoing American policies undoubtedly serve to maintain American hegemony in the Pacific but bear no relation to a supposed “watchdog” role.

As former Okinawan governor Ota commented, “What’s actually happening in Japan is that, with practically no public debate, hypothetical enemies are produced one after another, and potential threats are loudly proclaimed. People talk of the need to maintain an American military presence and to pass legislation to deal with national security emergencies, without making any move to accept bases in their own communities.”⁴⁰ The Pentagon understands that it cannot come up with a credible threat to Japan or any other nation in East Asia that would demand the forward deployment of American troops. As mentioned in chapter 1, it has therefore decided to rely on something comparable to the old domino theory used to justify the war in Vietnam. According to that theory, nations all over Asia and elsewhere would “go Communist” if North Vietnam were allowed to win its civil war. With communism long gone as an enemy, the new, abstract danger is “instability.” Grave dangers, it is said, will result from the “destabilizing” act of withdrawing American troops from Asia. This new, exceedingly vague doctrine indirectly acknowledges that the purpose of American forces in Japan is neither to defend nor to contain Japan but simply by their presence to prevent the assumed dangers of their absence. The Japanese are being propagandized to believe that in these unknown future conflicts they will have a huge if unspecified stake.

In 1995, this new domino-like theory was given a classic formulation in a series of essays by former assistant secretary of defense Joseph Nye. With very little in the way of specific scenarios or threats, he argued in Foreign Affairs magazine that “security is like oxygen: you tend not to notice it until you lose it.”⁴¹ In the Washington Post, he put it this way: “Our forward presence provides for the stability—the oxygen—that has helped provide for East Asian economic growth.”⁴² And in a Department of Defense publication, he offered, “Having United States forces in Asia also promotes democratic development in Asia, by providing a clear, readily observable example of the American military’s apolitical role.”⁴³

Such formulations have since entered official Washington culture and are now served up as catechism. On March 24, 1997, for instance, Vice President Al Gore told American troops and their families at Yokota Air Force Base near Tokyo, “The peace and security of the Pacific region rest on your backs.”⁴⁴ And the Pentagon has come to like this idea so much that it has announced its intention to keep troops in Korea indefinitely, even after North and South Korea have been unified. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has also defended the continued presence in Japan by insisting that any pullout would create a dangerous power “vacuum” that “might be filled in a way that would not enhance stability but detract from it.”⁴⁵

The most obvious problem with these propositions is that they have simply not proved true. When “instability” finally hit the region, the American forward bases offered no solace. The economic crisis that began in 1997 revealed that in East Asia, rather than security being like oxygen, it is money that you may not miss until it is pulled out. The presence of American military forces in the region did not prevent the instability—in some cases, chaos—that ensued in the wake of this crisis. In fact, the Pentagon only made matters worse by continuing to try to hawk massively expensive weapons systems to countries no longer able to afford them. As for the military’s contributing to economic growth, former Japanese prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa has this sharp observation: “It was after U.S. forces withdrew from Indochina and Thailand in the 1970s that economic growth in Southeast Asia gained momentum and economic relations with the United States began to expand. The economy of the Philippines took off after the U.S. forces left there in the 1990s. These experiences show that there is little or no relation between foreign military presence and economic growth.”⁴⁶

That the forward deployment of American troops brings “stability” to East Asia is, of course, a false syllogism and, as military strategist Col. Harry Summers Jr. puts it, the equivalent of using elephant bane in New York City. Elephant bane is a chemical repellent spread by African farmers to keep elephants out of their gardens and orchards. Pentagon theorists, Colonel Summers suggests, are like the New Yorker who spreads elephant bane around his apartment and then extols its benefits because he encounters no elephants.⁴⁷ The strategy “works” because the threat is illusory. The real, long-term threat to stability in East Asia is the economic crisis caused by an American determination to perpetuate its system of satellites and its own regional hegemony long after it has lost whatever Cold War economic or political rationale it had.

Why is the United States really still in Okinawa? For its military personnel, the answer is obvious. They enjoy being based there for the same reasons that the former Soviet Union’s troops enjoyed being based in East Germany. Life in one of their country’s military colonies was for the officers and enlisted men and women of both armies better than anything most of them could possibly have experienced back home. As the unofficial guide to American military bases in Okinawa puts it, “If you prefer living with a view of beautiful Kin Bay from a lofty high-rise, [Camp] Courtney [headquarters of the 3rd Marine Division] provides hundreds of scenic dwellings in the form of nine-story apartment complexes.” For the marine family’s shopping needs, “At a construction cost of more than $11 million, the [Camp] Foster Exchange is the newest in the Pacific area. It offers all the conveniences of a modern shopping center. . . . When they’re not at work, [Camp] Hansen Marines can take advantage of two of the most beautiful beaches on the island, Kin Red and Kin Blue.”⁴⁸ All active-duty military personnel on Okinawa receive either rent- and utility-cost-free housing on base or enormous housing allowances ranging from $900 to $2,000 a month, depending on rank and family size. These benefits are supplemented by generous cost-of-living allowances—which for a captain or a major with one dependent is about $700 a month. This is not hardship living.

Okinawa is still essentially a military colony of the Pentagon’s, a huge safe house where Green Berets and the Defense Intelligence Agency, not to mention the air force and Marine Corps, can do things they would not dare do in the United States. It is used to project American power throughout Asia in the service of a de facto U.S. grand strategy to perpetuate or increase American hegemonic power in this crucial region. The U.S. military is the author and prime beneficiary of this strategy, and it is in the driver’s seat executing it. This becomes clear when we turn to some of its secret global (and especially Asian) activities that it is fully aware of—but that other parts of its government and its people are not.