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Okinawans Vote Against Futenma And The U.S.-Japan Alliance; Remembering The Nagasaki A-Bomb, August 9, 1945 

This article is more than 9 years old.

Japan is enjoying record foreign tourism, attracted by internationally competitive, even cheap, prices--thanks to yen depreciation--and to Japan’s marvelous, distinctive culture.

Though not really a tourist, I am in Kyushu this week enjoying a part of Japan off the normal tourist route, but increasingly visited by tour groups from Taiwan, Korea, and mainland China, whose clients love Japan but have already been to Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Hokkaido.

Last week, with friends, I did the tourist thing from Tokyo, taking day tours to Mount Fuji/Hakone and to Nikko. This week, with friends and family, it is Kyushu, on a tour that originated in Southern California, booked with a Taiwan operator, and conducted in Mandarin Chinese.  

On tours, one is bombarded with information, some useful and interesting, some neither, from guides who think their job is to keep talking.  In the former category is the fact that Japan’s 127 million people are crammed into an area smaller than the state of California, most of which is hardly habitable, non-arable mountains. Kyushu, the southwesterly-most major island, has some 13 million residents, i.e., a bit over one-tenth of Japan’s total.

Tours of Kyushu typically begin in Fukuoka, proceed first south to Nagasaki. Yesterday it was Nagasaki: the peace park, the Atomic Bomb Museum, the Glover Park.  

Americans, for whom WWII is “the good war”--recalled by most fondly and nostalgically, while also with diminished emotional force under the cumulative psychic legacies of the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and, of course, Iraq and Afghanistan--cannot easily appreciate how the war’s losers remember and live with its terrors.  

One big issue would be American and Japanese attitudes toward the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The latter bomb, exploding some 500 meters above the city of 240,000 people at 11:02 a.m., killed 73,884 and wounded 74,909.  

At the peace park located near the “ground zero” monument directly below where the bomb detonated, numerous groups of elementary school children stood for photographs and bowed whiled observing silence on what is certainly a mandatory school trip lesson in the folly of war. Some 50 students in one group recited individually and collectively lines renouncing war and affirming the duty of Japanese people to promote peace throughout the world.  

This catechism in peace that has for two generations been internalized by all Japanese school children. (It is hard not to think of, and to be saddened, if not alarmed, by the stark contrast with the aggrievedly resentful, if not blatantly militant, sentiments about the same period being inculcated into Chinese students, and to wonder how the two cannot lead to further tragedy.) 

Another statistic heard during the past three days--though not from tourist guides--is that Japan’s Okinawa island group, with just 0.6 percent of Japan’s land area, is the location of 74 percent of all American military facilities in the whole of Japan, and that these facilities occupy most of its best land.  

The topic is current because Okinawa held elections on November 16 for prefecture governor and for the mayor of the capital city, Naha. The winners of both contests were fierce opponents of the U.S. military presence, of the U.S.-Japan alliance, and of the Abe government-U.S. plan for “relocating” (actually building a whole new, greatly expanded base) Futenma U.S. Marine Corps Air Station (pictured) from the center of densely populated Ginowan city to a new location on Okinawa, Henoko Bay, incorporating the present Camp Schwab.

This was big news, sure to become bigger. Especially, the victory in the governor’s race of Onaga Takeshi (64) with 52 percent of the vote over the incumbent Nakaima Hirokazu (75) is a frontal challenge to the Abe government and a resounding “no” vote for any new U.S. bases on the island. 

The election was a focus of national as well as local attention. Abe government officials made numerous trips Okinawa to support their candidate, Nakaima, who had the formidable Liberal Democratic Party organization and money behind him.  Still, Nakaima lost.  Voter turnout was high, 64.13 percent, 3.25 points higher than in the previous election.   

Nakaima won election four years ago pledging to oppose Futenma “relocation” and to work for the base’s earliest possible closure. Since 1998 the Pentagon and successive LDP governments have refused to consider any change of plan.

The Abe government exerted massive pressure on Nakaima to change his position. This he did last December by approving initial landfill work on the new base. Nakaima’s decision was a betrayal that Onaga campaigned against.  Onaga has pledged to do everything possible to block the building of the new U.S. base, suspected and feared by him and many others to represent a U.S. military occupation that will never end.

Onaga has called the vote for him “the voice of all Japan” against the U.S. bases.  It is certainly the voice of the majority of Okinawans and, I believe, does represent the prevailing sentiment in Japan.  

Americans may find it hard to believe, but most Japanese are deeply ambivalent about the U.S.-Japan “alliance.” On balance, they consider it an evil; perhaps a necessary one for now, but hopefully not forever. 

In a perfect world they would reject both the bases and the alliance, embracing a pacifism that so much death and destruction has taught them to cherish.