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

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