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

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