Where Okinawa is Headed
There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation.
- George Washington
But for now, let me focus on the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between U.S. and Japan and SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) signed on January 19, 1960 between U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and Nobusuke Kishi, a CIA agent.
Delusion on Delusion
The single most important question the Japanese must ask themselves is what the U.S. Marine Corps are deployed there for.
The rubberstamp answer they hear from policymakers and political pundits of the two countries is that they are stationed there to protect Japan against its enemies or deter them from launching an attack on the country.
Give me a break.
It's too touching to be true that the USMC units based in Okinawa are poised to risk their own lives to protect the Japanese living more than 5,000 miles away from their own home country. This is a fairytale especially when the Americans have increasingly proved incapable of even taking care of themselves.
The USMC's missions defined by the National Security Act of 1947 do not include defense or deterrence in the first place. And in reality, the marines deployed in Okinawa are spearheading amphibious and expeditionary warfare in and around Afghanistan and Iraq.
NOTE: Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force has "bought" six AEGIS-equipped destroyers to defend the Japanese archipelago from possible missile attacks. But since this is a different issue from the USMC deployed in Okinawa, I don't touch on it in this post. These vessels are said to be filled with state-of-the-art technologies all sealed off in a black box. But actually it's a Pandora's Box which is the subject I'm addressing here.
Aside from the definition of their roles, what enemies are they supposed to defend Japan against?
Maybe the People's Republic of China is at the top of their list of potential enemies.
What a delusion.
Just for one thing, a record 481,696 Chinese tourists flocked to Japan in 2009, up 20% from 2007. Each of them spent an average 110K yen ($1.2K) for shopping a wide range of consumer goods from appliances, to cosmetics, to high-end nailclippers. The Japan National Tourism Organization is now expecting the influx of cash from the continent to accelerate in the years to come.
Another example of Japan's dependency on China is imports of raw materials. Although Japan at present has to depend more on Chile than China for the supply of lithium, the country's morbid culture centered around the keitai (handset) technology will fall apart if China further lowers its export quota on the rare metal mainly excavated in Tibet.
So, make no mistake - automakers are not alone in increasingly getting addicted to the world's most populous and prosperous marketplace. It's not China's problem, but Japan's.
In the wake of the deepening economic doldrums, Japan couldn't withstand a single day without China. China, too, has to count on Japan to sustain its growth path, but only to a far lesser degree.
Amid the campaign for the upcoming Upper House election, Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, as the "cheerleader" of the Rise-Up Japan Party, has been repeatedly warning the voters that if they don't support the newborn party he roots for, Japan will be demoted to the 24th province or 6th autonomous region of the People's Republic of China from the 51st star on the national flag of the United States. The old cretin at the helm of the metropolitan government should know this won't make any difference to Okinawa's status as Japan's 47th prefecture.
In short, you've got to be totally out of your mind, or out of touch with reality, to foresee a military conflict between the two countries in the first half of this century.
Maybe China's ambition to capture Taiwan is a little more real, but there is no reason the Okinawans have to suffer the consequence from the possible conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
What about North Korea, then? It's another baloney that the tiny republic whose defense budget is estimated at the vicinity of $6 billion poses a threat to Japan whose military spending always tops $40 billion. The American fortress in Okinawa is nothing but superfluous.
True, you can't rule out Ryu Murakami's scenario in which North Korea successfully subverts the ailing Japanese regime, but there will never be a nuclear warfare as the novelist expressly stresses.
I don't care a bit about the reason why on earth the U.S. has had to turn down so frantically North Korean U.N. Ambassador Sin Son Ho's request to reopen the probe into the Cheonan sinking. Neither do I care exactly why the U.S., notwithstanding, has stopped short of calling it an act of international terrorism.
But one thing is for sure; the incident in the Yellow Sea has nothing to do with Okinawa.
NOTE: According to the recently declassified documents, even Nobusuke Kishi, the traitor, confided to some officials in the Foreign Ministry his fear that Japan would possibly get embroiled in a military confrontation between the U.S. and a communist regime in the Far East.
Red Herrings
To gloss over all this hocus-pocus, politicians and pundits on both sides of the Pacific have invented a lot of red herrings about SOFA.
Their modus operandi is to single out isolated incidents such as sexual crimes committed by U.S. servicemen stationed there, or the 1959 crash of the U.S. jet fighter (F-100) into an elementary school that left 17 dead and other 210 injured. It's as though Japanese men have seldom raped their female compatriots, or car accidents caused by locals haven't killed much more civilians in the last 51 years.
To that end they make believe that the single most important issue involved in Japan's part of SOFA is which party should have civil and criminal jurisdiction. Even the anti-U.S. leftists here have never failed to raise their voices to demand the transfer of jurisdiction every time a U.S. serviceman raped a Japanese girl.
Actually the media-salient topic of how to handle criminal cases around the military bases is yet another red herring because it has nothing to do with the core issue with the islands of Okinawa.
Regime for Dual Oppression of Japan's Tibet
It seems to me that self-styled American experts in the Okinawa issue, and their Japanese minions as well, feel mandated to perpetuate the dual oppression regime for another half century. To that end they keep pontificating on the necessity for the Tokyo government to remain under the wing of America.
I don't know any other word than a colony to describe what Japan is to the U.S. and what Okinawa is to Japan.
In general terms, a colony is defined like below:
■ A colony is a territory which is politically controlled by people living in a geographically separate land.
■ The natives who inhabit the region have ethnic, cultural and historical background which differs from that of the ruling group. Despite the inevitable progress of assimilation over time, their distinctive identity is retained for many centuries.
■ A local governing body may or may not exist. Wherever there is one, it looks like yet another local government on the surface. But essentially, it is totally subordinated to the government of the mainland. Its autonomy is largely a nominal thing.
■ A minority group among the natives willingly collaborates with the government of the suzerain power solely because of the financial interests they are vested there, while the vast majority of the people have nothing but to suffer from the subservience.
No sane person can deny both Japan and Okinawa meet these descriptions, though to varying degrees.
The beauty of this regime is that the U.S. government doesn't have to deal directly with the Okinawans who have been going through all this predicament in the last sixty-five years. So the Obama administration seems fully determined to preserve the mechanism of exploitation without running counter to the nation's founding principle. In this respect the incumbent president is no different from his predecessor.
And that is where American pundits who claim to be well-versed in Japan's sociopolitical landscape kick in. Now they have rallied behind Washington's absurd foreign policy both from liberal and conservative camps. This is a real bipartisan effort.
The primary mandate these bastards are given by Washington is to constantly mix up legality with legitimacy by always putting laws and legal documents before people. In fact, though, we all know it's men that sign them - not the other way around.
To that end, these Japan experts try hard to prove that America's Far Eastern ally is a sovereign and viable nation with a legally competent government. It takes a special set of skills to defy all the evidence indicating that the successive Tokyo governments have always acted like a dupe.
To be more specific, skills required from them can be summarized as below:
■ They have to have a good enough memory to name 7 prime ministers of Japan who came in and went out of office through its revolving door since the turn of the century.
■ They ought to have a nerve to look back at the 14 remarks each of them made one week after and six months after each transition of power without blushing for a split second.
■ They should be able to ignore the fact that these prime ministers have invariably left in the air the gut issues with the convoluted trilateral relations between Washington, Tokyo and Okinawa islands. In other words, they should be able to skate over people issues because it's next to impossible to mold living people in an ideological context even with their special skills to falsify the truth.
And these are also why Hillary Clinton has seldom talked about the Okinawans who are suffering from the illegitimate presence of the U.S. occupation forces in Okinawa.
Only at times she gives the islanders lip service that she and her counterparts in Tokyo will make every possible effort to mitigate risks and burdens on the Okinawans. But she has never given specifics about her action plans and timeline.
Despite all these deceptions, there is only one truth they should face up to:
America should keep its hand off Okinawa, totally and for good, so the Tokyo government stops using Japan's southernmost islands as a permanent shield against external threats, imaginary or real.
Ask Clinton when she will relieve the Okinawans of such risks and burdens altogether or how she will alleviate them in the meantime. U.S. Secretary of State would certainly parrot the wornout statement she hears from her Chinese counterpart every time she criticizes his country over its oppression of the Tibetans.
"That's none of America's business. It's a purely domestic matter."
Independence from the Two Countries in One Go
Okinawa's cultural identity will be lost if the islands remain exploited by the two governments for some more decades.
This is, however, not to say Okinawa should seek secession from Japan right away. The governing structure in place here is not that simple.
Yoshimi Watanabe, head of the newborn Your Party, is practically the only politician whose vision of Japan's future makes some sense. The avowed advocate of a small government has been arguing that a regional system (道州制) similar to that of the United States in its prime should be introduced in Japan.
While most of these future states, including what is now called Tokyo, would certainly be doomed to failure sooner or later, at least Okinawa State with newfound autonomy would survive the disintegration of Japan.
In this context, I believe the scenario of independence from Tokyo and Washington in one go is the only realistic course of action for the Okinawa islanders to liberate themselves.
Once they become their own masters for the first time in 400 years, they will defend themselves against the real threat posed by Washington and Tokyo, not Beijing and Pyongyang.
POSTSCRIPT July 8: Last week the municipality of Ginowan, where the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma air base is located, announced a plan to file a lawsuit against the central government on the ground that the entire arrangement is unconstitutional. But this is something that is only a little better than doing nothing. ·
- George Washington
   |
So many people talk about the Okinawa issue these days. But very few of them really care about the suffering of the 1.4 million Okinawans, which actually constitutes the gut issue with the alliance between the U.S. and Japan. Based on the false premise that Okinawa is just the forty-seventh prefecture of Japan, politicians and political analysts on both sides of the Pacific keep scratching the surface of what's really going on out there. These political racketeers make every possible effort to get around the real issue simply because they know very well that delving into the heartache of the Okinawans as second-class citizens will jeopardize, in one way or the other, their ideological cause on which they make their own living. In my view, you can't really understand the predicament the Okinawans have been going through in the last 65 years under the partial occupation of their lands by the U.S. armed forces without further tracking it back to the early-17th century when Satsuma clan annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom on behalf of the Tokugawa Shogunate based in Edo, the city named Tokyo today. Sixty-five years have passed since the Tokyo government yielded its rule over the islands to Washington. The "return" of Okinawa thirty-eight years ago has made little difference to the situation; the people are still suffering under a two-tiered oppression - something really unprecedented in modern history. |
But for now, let me focus on the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between U.S. and Japan and SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) signed on January 19, 1960 between U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and Nobusuke Kishi, a CIA agent.
Delusion on Delusion
The single most important question the Japanese must ask themselves is what the U.S. Marine Corps are deployed there for.
The rubberstamp answer they hear from policymakers and political pundits of the two countries is that they are stationed there to protect Japan against its enemies or deter them from launching an attack on the country.
Give me a break.
It's too touching to be true that the USMC units based in Okinawa are poised to risk their own lives to protect the Japanese living more than 5,000 miles away from their own home country. This is a fairytale especially when the Americans have increasingly proved incapable of even taking care of themselves.
The USMC's missions defined by the National Security Act of 1947 do not include defense or deterrence in the first place. And in reality, the marines deployed in Okinawa are spearheading amphibious and expeditionary warfare in and around Afghanistan and Iraq.
NOTE: Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force has "bought" six AEGIS-equipped destroyers to defend the Japanese archipelago from possible missile attacks. But since this is a different issue from the USMC deployed in Okinawa, I don't touch on it in this post. These vessels are said to be filled with state-of-the-art technologies all sealed off in a black box. But actually it's a Pandora's Box which is the subject I'm addressing here.
Aside from the definition of their roles, what enemies are they supposed to defend Japan against?
Maybe the People's Republic of China is at the top of their list of potential enemies.
What a delusion.
Just for one thing, a record 481,696 Chinese tourists flocked to Japan in 2009, up 20% from 2007. Each of them spent an average 110K yen ($1.2K) for shopping a wide range of consumer goods from appliances, to cosmetics, to high-end nailclippers. The Japan National Tourism Organization is now expecting the influx of cash from the continent to accelerate in the years to come.
Another example of Japan's dependency on China is imports of raw materials. Although Japan at present has to depend more on Chile than China for the supply of lithium, the country's morbid culture centered around the keitai (handset) technology will fall apart if China further lowers its export quota on the rare metal mainly excavated in Tibet.
So, make no mistake - automakers are not alone in increasingly getting addicted to the world's most populous and prosperous marketplace. It's not China's problem, but Japan's.
In the wake of the deepening economic doldrums, Japan couldn't withstand a single day without China. China, too, has to count on Japan to sustain its growth path, but only to a far lesser degree.
Amid the campaign for the upcoming Upper House election, Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, as the "cheerleader" of the Rise-Up Japan Party, has been repeatedly warning the voters that if they don't support the newborn party he roots for, Japan will be demoted to the 24th province or 6th autonomous region of the People's Republic of China from the 51st star on the national flag of the United States. The old cretin at the helm of the metropolitan government should know this won't make any difference to Okinawa's status as Japan's 47th prefecture.
In short, you've got to be totally out of your mind, or out of touch with reality, to foresee a military conflict between the two countries in the first half of this century.
Maybe China's ambition to capture Taiwan is a little more real, but there is no reason the Okinawans have to suffer the consequence from the possible conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
What about North Korea, then? It's another baloney that the tiny republic whose defense budget is estimated at the vicinity of $6 billion poses a threat to Japan whose military spending always tops $40 billion. The American fortress in Okinawa is nothing but superfluous.
True, you can't rule out Ryu Murakami's scenario in which North Korea successfully subverts the ailing Japanese regime, but there will never be a nuclear warfare as the novelist expressly stresses.
I don't care a bit about the reason why on earth the U.S. has had to turn down so frantically North Korean U.N. Ambassador Sin Son Ho's request to reopen the probe into the Cheonan sinking. Neither do I care exactly why the U.S., notwithstanding, has stopped short of calling it an act of international terrorism.
But one thing is for sure; the incident in the Yellow Sea has nothing to do with Okinawa.
NOTE: According to the recently declassified documents, even Nobusuke Kishi, the traitor, confided to some officials in the Foreign Ministry his fear that Japan would possibly get embroiled in a military confrontation between the U.S. and a communist regime in the Far East.
Red Herrings
To gloss over all this hocus-pocus, politicians and pundits on both sides of the Pacific have invented a lot of red herrings about SOFA.
Their modus operandi is to single out isolated incidents such as sexual crimes committed by U.S. servicemen stationed there, or the 1959 crash of the U.S. jet fighter (F-100) into an elementary school that left 17 dead and other 210 injured. It's as though Japanese men have seldom raped their female compatriots, or car accidents caused by locals haven't killed much more civilians in the last 51 years.
To that end they make believe that the single most important issue involved in Japan's part of SOFA is which party should have civil and criminal jurisdiction. Even the anti-U.S. leftists here have never failed to raise their voices to demand the transfer of jurisdiction every time a U.S. serviceman raped a Japanese girl.
Actually the media-salient topic of how to handle criminal cases around the military bases is yet another red herring because it has nothing to do with the core issue with the islands of Okinawa.
Regime for Dual Oppression of Japan's Tibet
It seems to me that self-styled American experts in the Okinawa issue, and their Japanese minions as well, feel mandated to perpetuate the dual oppression regime for another half century. To that end they keep pontificating on the necessity for the Tokyo government to remain under the wing of America.
I don't know any other word than a colony to describe what Japan is to the U.S. and what Okinawa is to Japan.
In general terms, a colony is defined like below:
■ A colony is a territory which is politically controlled by people living in a geographically separate land.
■ The natives who inhabit the region have ethnic, cultural and historical background which differs from that of the ruling group. Despite the inevitable progress of assimilation over time, their distinctive identity is retained for many centuries.
■ A local governing body may or may not exist. Wherever there is one, it looks like yet another local government on the surface. But essentially, it is totally subordinated to the government of the mainland. Its autonomy is largely a nominal thing.
■ A minority group among the natives willingly collaborates with the government of the suzerain power solely because of the financial interests they are vested there, while the vast majority of the people have nothing but to suffer from the subservience.
No sane person can deny both Japan and Okinawa meet these descriptions, though to varying degrees.
The beauty of this regime is that the U.S. government doesn't have to deal directly with the Okinawans who have been going through all this predicament in the last sixty-five years. So the Obama administration seems fully determined to preserve the mechanism of exploitation without running counter to the nation's founding principle. In this respect the incumbent president is no different from his predecessor.
And that is where American pundits who claim to be well-versed in Japan's sociopolitical landscape kick in. Now they have rallied behind Washington's absurd foreign policy both from liberal and conservative camps. This is a real bipartisan effort.
The primary mandate these bastards are given by Washington is to constantly mix up legality with legitimacy by always putting laws and legal documents before people. In fact, though, we all know it's men that sign them - not the other way around.
To that end, these Japan experts try hard to prove that America's Far Eastern ally is a sovereign and viable nation with a legally competent government. It takes a special set of skills to defy all the evidence indicating that the successive Tokyo governments have always acted like a dupe.
To be more specific, skills required from them can be summarized as below:
■ They have to have a good enough memory to name 7 prime ministers of Japan who came in and went out of office through its revolving door since the turn of the century.
■ They ought to have a nerve to look back at the 14 remarks each of them made one week after and six months after each transition of power without blushing for a split second.
■ They should be able to ignore the fact that these prime ministers have invariably left in the air the gut issues with the convoluted trilateral relations between Washington, Tokyo and Okinawa islands. In other words, they should be able to skate over people issues because it's next to impossible to mold living people in an ideological context even with their special skills to falsify the truth.
And these are also why Hillary Clinton has seldom talked about the Okinawans who are suffering from the illegitimate presence of the U.S. occupation forces in Okinawa.
Only at times she gives the islanders lip service that she and her counterparts in Tokyo will make every possible effort to mitigate risks and burdens on the Okinawans. But she has never given specifics about her action plans and timeline.
Despite all these deceptions, there is only one truth they should face up to:
America should keep its hand off Okinawa, totally and for good, so the Tokyo government stops using Japan's southernmost islands as a permanent shield against external threats, imaginary or real.
Ask Clinton when she will relieve the Okinawans of such risks and burdens altogether or how she will alleviate them in the meantime. U.S. Secretary of State would certainly parrot the wornout statement she hears from her Chinese counterpart every time she criticizes his country over its oppression of the Tibetans.
"That's none of America's business. It's a purely domestic matter."
Independence from the Two Countries in One Go
Okinawa's cultural identity will be lost if the islands remain exploited by the two governments for some more decades.
This is, however, not to say Okinawa should seek secession from Japan right away. The governing structure in place here is not that simple.
Yoshimi Watanabe, head of the newborn Your Party, is practically the only politician whose vision of Japan's future makes some sense. The avowed advocate of a small government has been arguing that a regional system (道州制) similar to that of the United States in its prime should be introduced in Japan.
While most of these future states, including what is now called Tokyo, would certainly be doomed to failure sooner or later, at least Okinawa State with newfound autonomy would survive the disintegration of Japan.
In this context, I believe the scenario of independence from Tokyo and Washington in one go is the only realistic course of action for the Okinawa islanders to liberate themselves.
Once they become their own masters for the first time in 400 years, they will defend themselves against the real threat posed by Washington and Tokyo, not Beijing and Pyongyang.
POSTSCRIPT July 8: Last week the municipality of Ginowan, where the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma air base is located, announced a plan to file a lawsuit against the central government on the ground that the entire arrangement is unconstitutional. But this is something that is only a little better than doing nothing. ·