The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have sparked numerous uprisings in the Arab world, including tiny Bahrain. But as AOL News reports, due to the strategic location and the large U.S. military bases on Bahrain, the political unrest there has U.S. officials worried:

Most Americans couldn’t find Bahrain on a map before this week, but the escalating violence unfolding in the tiny island monarchy could do more damage to U.S. interests in the Middle East than the more high-profile revolution in Egypt.

Bahrain is a tiny group of islands that could fit nearly six times over into Rhode Island. The country has been the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet since shortly after World War II and is a major resupply and refueling depot for warships supporting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia.

It is also a strategic listening post for keeping tabs on Iran and its navy

The military issued warnings to U.S. personnel in the area and is also monitoring the situation in Djibouti, the location of another U.S. military base:

The Navy said it is monitoring the situation and stressed that the demonstrations are not aimed as the U.S. government. Still, the Navy has warned uniformed personnel, civilian workers and their families to stay clear of the area where the protests are taking place.

U.S. forces in Bahrain aren’t the only ones on heightened alert. The Pentagon has several strategic military bases scattered around the gulf. It also is watching closely as protests heat up in the small nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, where the only U.S. military base on that continent is located.

Al Jazeera coverage of the uprising in Bahrain:

Global Research posted an article on the social and political roots of the uprising in Bahrain:

“Have you ever seen an island with no beaches?” The question posed by the young Bahraini taxi man standing among thousands of chanting anti-government protesters seemed at first to be a bit off the wall. But his explanation soon got to the heart of the grievances that have brought tens of thousands of Bahrainis on to the streets over the past week – protests which have seen at least seven civilians killed amid scenes of excessive violence by state security forces.

Why no beaches?

In the early hours of Thursday, up to five thousand Bahraini protesters were forced from the main demonstration site at the Pearl Roundabout, a landmark intersection in the capital, Manama. The Bahraini authorities deployed helicopters, dozens of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, with army and police firing teargas and live rounds. Among the protesters were hundreds of women and children.

At the centre of the site is the Pearl Monument, which alludes to the country’s traditional pearl diving and fishing industries – industries that were the mainstay of communities.

Within view of the monument are the iconic skyscrapers of Bahrain’s newfound wealth, including the Financial Harbour and the World Trade Center. Only a few years ago, this entire area of the capital was sea, the land having been reclaimed and developed. Up to 20 per cent of Bahrain’s total land area has been reclaimed from the sea over the past three decades.

However, this vast reclamation and development drive has, according to local environmental groups, devastated the island’s marine ecology and fish stocks in particular. The rampant development – which has made fortunes for the country’s elite – has had an equally devastating effect on local communities who have depended on the sea for their livelihoods. While these communities have suffered the blight of unemployment and poverty, they also have witnessed roaring property development, land prices and profits benefiting the ruling elite.

And these destabilizing social conditions are linked to the U.S. military interests in Bahrain:

Bahrain’s unstable social formation is underpinned by unwavering US diplomatic and military support. The island serves as the base for the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. The latest wave of state repression has tellingly elicited only a subdued, ambivalent comment from Washington, urging “all sides to refrain from violence” – Washington-speak that translates into support for the government. Last year, Bahrain received $19.5 million in US military aid, which, on a per capita basis, equates to greater than that delivered to Egypt.

Katy Rose, a good friend and activist who played a key role in the Superferry resistance on Kaua’i and who now works for a union in Californa, sent this insightful article about the revolutionary transformation that is taking place within Egyptian society, much of it driven by the awakened power of the working class: Mubarak’s Folly: The Rising of Egypt’s Workers. Here are a few excerpts:

Rarely do our rulers look more absurd than when faced with a popular upheaval. As fear and apathy are broken, ordinary people – housewives, students, sanitation workers, the unemployed –remake themselves. Having been objects of history, they become its agents. Marching in their millions, reclaiming public space, attending meetings and debating their society’s future, they discover in themselves capacities for organization and action they had never imagined.

…

After all, revolutions are not just about changing institutions. Most profoundly, they are about the dramatic remaking of the downtrodden. Revolutions are schools of profound self-education. They destroy submission and resignation, and they release long-repressed creative energies – intelligence, solidarity, invention, self-activity. In so doing, they reweave the fabric of everyday life. The horizons of possibility expand. The unthinkable – that ordinary people might control their lives – becomes both thinkable and practical.

…

Participants repeatedly describe how their fear has lifted. “When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win,” Ahmad Mahmoud told a reporter. “What we have achieved,” proclaimed another, “is the revolution in our minds.” The significance of such a revolution in attitudes is inestimable. But such shifts do not happen at the level of consciousness alone; they are inextricably connected to a revolution in the relations of everyday life – by way of the birth of popular power. And these new forms of people’s power and radical democracy from below have emerged as steps necessary to preserve the Revolution and keep it moving it forward.

…

What the coming weeks will bring is still uncertain. But Mubarak’s folly has triggered an upsurge of workers’ struggle whose effects will endure. “The most precious, because lasting, thing in this ebb and flow of the [revolutionary] wave is . . . the intellectual, cultural growth of the working class,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg.

In Tahrir Square and elsewhere thousands of signs depict Mubarak accompanied by the words “Game Over.” For the workers of Egypt it is now, “Game On.”

Al Jazeera produced this excellent documentary about the April 6 Movement, the youth organization behind the revolution in Egypt.   The small group of disciplined and sophisticated leaders were the spark.  Getting training from the Serbian nonviolent youth movement, they applied classic nonviolence organizing principles with new technological tools.  The rest is history.

<After initially posting this link, Puerto Rican scholar and activist Deborah Santana pointed out that giving all the credit to one group for the revolution in Egypt is inaccurate and simplistic.  I agree with her.  The documentary is portrays ONE of the leading groups, but the April 6 movement is by no means the only one organizing for change.  I look forward to other accounts of the Egyptian revolution that helps to explain the diversity of groups and interests that converged to topple Mubarak.  Mahalo for the correction.>

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/feb/10/egypt-miracle-tahrir-square

For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square

There is no room for compromise. Either the entire Mubarak edifice falls, or the uprising is betrayed

Slavoj Žižek

Thursday 10 February 2011 20.30 GMT

One cannot but note the “miraculous” nature of the events in Egypt: something has happened that few predicted, violating the experts’ opinions, as if the uprising was not simply the result of social causes but the intervention of a mysterious agency that we can call, in a Platonic way, the eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity.

The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society. In contrast to Iran’s Khomeini revolution (where leftists had to smuggle their message into the predominantly Islamist frame), here the frame is clearly that of a universal secular call for freedom and justice, so that the Muslim Brotherhood had to adopt the language of secular demands.

The most sublime moment occurred when Muslims and Coptic Christians engaged in common prayer on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, chanting “We are one!” – providing the best answer to the sectarian religious violence. Those neocons who criticise multiculturalism on behalf of the universal values of freedom and democracy are now confronting their moment of truth: you want universal freedom and democracy? This is what people demand in Egypt, so why are the neocons uneasy? Is it because the protesters in Egypt mention freedom and dignity in the same breath as social and economic justice?

From the start, the violence of the protesters has been purely symbolic, an act of radical and collective civil disobedience. They suspended the authority of the state – it was not just an inner liberation, but a social act of breaking chains of servitude. The physical violence was done by the hired Mubarak thugs entering Tahrir Square on horses and camels and beating people; the most protesters did was defend themselves.

Although combative, the message of the protesters has not been one of killing. The demand was for Mubarak to go, and thus open up the space for freedom in Egypt, a freedom from which no one is excluded – the protesters’ call to the army, and even the hated police, was not “Death to you!”, but “We are brothers! Join us!”. This feature clearly distinguishes an emancipatory demonstration from a rightwing populist one: although the right’s mobilisation proclaims the organic unity of the people, it is a unity sustained by a call to annihilate the designated enemy (Jews, traitors).

So where are we now? When an authoritarian regime approaches the final crisis, its dissolution tends to follow two steps. Before its actual collapse, a rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy; its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down …

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroads, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew; within hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over.

Is something similar going on in Egypt? For a couple of days at the beginning, it looked like Mubarak was already in the situation of the proverbial cat. Then we saw a well-planned operation to kidnap the revolution. The obscenity of this was breathtaking: the new vice-president, Omar Suleiman, a former secret police chief responsible for mass tortures, presented himself as the “human face” of the regime, the person to oversee the transition to democracy.

Egypt’s struggle of endurance is not a conflict of visions, it is the conflict between a vision of freedom and a blind clinging to power that uses all means possible – terror, lack of food, simple tiredness, bribery with raised salaries – to squash the will to freedom.

When President Obama welcomed the uprising as a legitimate expression of opinion that needs to be acknowledged by the government, the confusion was total: the crowds in Cairo and Alexandria did not want their demands to be acknowledged by the government, they denied the very legitimacy of the government. They didn’t want the Mubarak regime as a partner in a dialogue, they wanted Mubarak to go. They didn’t simply want a new government that would listen to their opinion, they wanted to reshape the entire state. They don’t have an opinion, they are the truth of the situation in Egypt. Mubarak understands this much better than Obama: there is no room for compromise here, as there was none when the Communist regimes were challenged in the late 1980s. Either the entire Mubarak power edifice falls down, or the uprising is co-opted and betrayed.

And what about the fear that, after the fall of Mubarak, the new government will be hostile towards Israel? If the new government is genuinely the expression of a people that proudly enjoys its freedom, then there is nothing to fear: antisemitism can only grow in conditions of despair and oppression. (A CNN report from an Egyptian province showed how the government is spreading rumours there that the organisers of the protests and foreign journalists were sent by the Jews to weaken Egypt – so much for Mubarak as a friend of the Jews.)

One of the cruellest ironies of the current situation is the west’s concern that the transition should proceed in a “lawful” way – as if Egypt had the rule of law until now. Are we already forgetting that, for many long years, Egypt was in a permanent state of emergency? Mubarak suspended the rule of law, keeping the entire country in a state of political immobility, stifling genuine political life. It makes sense that so many people on the streets of Cairo claim that they now feel alive for the first time in their lives. Whatever happens next, what is crucial is that this sense of “feeling alive” is not buried by cynical realpolitik.

Source: http://www.mauitime.com/Articles-i-2011-01-20-75645.113117-Retired-Colonel-Ann-Wright-Discusses-Why-the-War-in-Afghanistan-is-Unwinnable.html

Retired Colonel Ann Wright Discusses Why the War in Afghanistan is Unwinnable

We’ve spoken with Ret. Col. Ann Wright of Oahu before—about her decision to resign from the State Department on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, about the follies of the Bush Administration, about Israel, and about the importance of dissent.

Now, recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, Wright has plenty to say about America’s oft forgotten, decade-old war.

You went to Afghanistan in September 2009, and then again last month. What, if anything, has changed?

The change that I noticed and that was talked about the most by Afghans was the huge increase in U.S. military bases—now over 400. We saw the construction of a huge base just north of Kabul. The high wall on the front side of it stretches over two miles and encloses a large training area. In the shadow of the wall, just across the road in an internal displacement camp, are tens of thousands of Afghans who have fled the fighting in the South and East of the country. They are living in abject misery in small dirt hovels, with no water or sewage and only a few sticks of wood each day to cook a tiny meal. Yet across the road are hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars spent on infrastructure for military training and operations. Villas built with the huge profits from the multi-million dollar U.S. logistics contracts to support our military presence are rented back to the international community contractors and non-governmental agencies for $10,000 to $15,000 per month. Yet most Afghans live in poverty.

In travelling outside of Kabul north of the Panjshir Valley, we went past the turn-off to Bagram Air Base, now an American city with over 20,000 U.S. military living and working there, as well as an infamous prison with over 10,000 detainees who are being held without any judicial process, many for years. We observed two new, ‘smaller’ U.S. military bases on the way to the valley—with the standard and expensive bomb-blast protective walls with at least 50 pre-fab buildings in each and an American flag flying above each base.

With its latest $500 million expansion project, the United States Embassy in Afghanistan will be the largest in the world, even bigger than the mammoth U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Over 1,400 U.S. government employees will reside inside the walls of the compound, which is expanding to take over the Afghan Ministry of Health grounds and part of an Afghan Ministry of Defense area. The U.S. is building two consulates, one in Heart and one in Mazir Sharif. Each will cost $50 million.

The United States’ presence in Afghanistan is so large that it has its own air terminal at the Kabul International Airport, plus the two mega air bases at Bagram and Kandahar, and the air base in Kyrgyzstan.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Thanks to Gavan McCormack, Norimatsu Satoko and Mark Selden for this excellent recap of events surrounding the U.S. military base controversy in Okinawa and an analysis of prospects for for the future. Please visit the Japan Focus website for some of the best analysis of Japan and East Asia issues.

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New Year 2011, Okinawa and the Future of East Asia

by Gavan McCormack, Norimatsu Satoko and Mark Selden

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Norimatsu-Satoko/3468

The mood across East Asia as 2011 dawns is one of foreboding. Can the militarization and confrontation that gathered momentum through 2010 in the spiral of incidents (Cheonan in March, Senkaku in September, Yeonpyeong in November) and massive regional war rehearsals by the US and its allies be halted and reversed? The fear that events might slide during 2011 into catastrophe is hard to resist.

In Japan, the gloom was compounded by a sense of despair at the betrayal of its electoral pledges by the Democratic Party of Japan, and the reassertion of precisely the clientelist and neo-liberal policies the DPJ had attacked on the part of its conservative Liberal Democratic Party predecessors when it won office in 2009. Then, Hatoyama Yukio, enjoying near landslide support, promised far-reaching change: an “equal” relationship with the United States, closer ties with China, the vision of an East Asian Community and the transformation of the South China Sea into a “Sea of Fraternité,” a reversal of the “structural” (i.e., inequality deepening) “reforms” of the LDP, and the recovery without substitution in Okinawa of the US base lands in the middle of Ginowan City (Futenma Marine Air Station). By late 2010, these promises had either evaporated or been reversed under a combination of American and conservative Japanese pressures, and reinstatement of policies if anything to the right of the LDP. As this happened, the nine month Hatoyama government’s support fell steadily, from 70 plus per cent in September 2009 to around 20 per cent in May 2010 on the eve of its collapse, and that of the Kan Naoto government that succeeded it from 60 plus per cent in June 2010 to around 25 per cent by year’s end. Dispirited, disillusioned and feeling disfranchised, far more Japanese people supported no party than either of the two main parties. One looked in vain to the Kan government for any regional or global diplomatic initiative to reverse the vicious cycle of regional confrontation. Instead, it seemed to have embraced at least as passionately as its predecessor the role of US subordinate “client state” in which resort to military power increasingly overshadowed diplomacy.

Hatoyama Yuki and Hu Jintao at the bilateral summit on October 10, 2009. There Hatoyama proposed the idea of transforming the East China Sea into a “Sea of Fraternité,” which was welcomed by Hu.

Yet the process of reconstituting state and economy in Japan to advance the clientelist and neo-liberal agenda is not without challenge. That challenge is best seen through focus on the contest between the national government, the bureaucracy, and almost all the national media on the one hand, and the people of one region, Okinawa, on the other, odds so unequal as to defy even such analogies as David and Goliath. The improbable fact as of early 2011 is that the advantage is with the Okinawan resistance and the nation state is on the ropes. For 14 years now, national governments, one after another, have declared various plans to foist new US Marine Corps high tech facilities on Okinawa but have been consistently beaten back. 2010 marked a significant upswing in the stakes, the intensity of the confrontation, and the overall balance of advantage. It is a mistake to see the Okinawan struggle as local, or “Okinawan,” because its implications are national, regional, and global with the nature of Japanese democracy and US strategic planning for its empire of bases across the Pacific in the balance. For example, the Okinawan resistance has already delayed US plans to expand its bases on Guam with the transfer (paid largely by Japan) of 8,000 Marines and dependents from Okinawa. In 2011 the best hope for peace and democracy in Japan and throughout the region is the continuing success of the Okinawan struggle in stalemating US-Japan plans for base reorganization and expansion.

It should be unnecessary to revisit here the Okinawa story of 2010, but in broad outline it included the following: in January the election of a Nago City mayor who declared that “no new base will be built in this city, whether on land or on sea;” in February the adoption by the Okinawa assembly of a unanimous resolution to the same effect; in April the gathering of the “All-Okinawan” mass meeting of some 90,000 people, including the Governor and heads of all local governing authorities, to reinforce the same demand (prefectural support for such positions was running at 84 per cent levels, according to a Ryukyu Shimpo opinion survey); followed in May by the “surrender” and then resignation of Prime Minister Hatoyama. Hatoyama under overwhelming American and Japanese bureaucratic and media pressure, capitulated, signed the 28 May agreement with Washington, and promptly resigned. The year turns on the axis of that infamous agreement, which Tokyo University political scientist Shinohara Hajime described as “Japan’s second defeat” (i.e., ranking with the surrender of 1945).¹

All-Okinawa rally of April 25, 2010 to oppose construction of a new base in Henoko (Photo by New York Times)

The new Prime Minister made it his priority to “restore” relations with Washington, which meant to restore the relationship of faithful service. Kan and his ministers repeatedly bowed their heads to Okinawa saying how sorry they were that they had had to renege on their pre-election pledges that Futenma would not be replaced with a new base within Okinawa, but that there was no alternative and the matter was closed. Rather than seek to advance Okinawan interests by attempting to re-negotiate with Washington, Prime Minister Kan and his ministers concentrated instead on a search for a formula to overcome stubborn Okinawan resistance and to combat the extraordinary levels of hostility to Tokyo and the DPJ that its retreat had fostered. As confidence and trust in the DPJ collapsed, in the Upper House elections of July, it was unable to field a single candidate in Okinawa. In September, the pro-base forces (backed by Tokyo) were again decisively defeated in a Nago City Assembly election. In November, Nakaima Hirokazu was re-elected Governor, backed by the Kan government on the understanding that his opposition to any new base construction was less adamant than that of his opponent, in other words, in the expectation that he would be amenable to persuasion provided the price was right. The one candidate who explicitly endorsed the national government’s position for implementation of the May agreement to relocate Futenma to Henoko was dismissed with a derisory 2 per cent of the vote.

As 2010 wound down, the Japanese state chose the Emperor’s birthday holiday, on a day and at an hour when it expected the people’s defenses might be low, to launch an assault at what it presumed was one of the weakest point of the Okinawan resistance movement, beside Prefectural Road 70 in northern Okinawa.

Takae Protest Tent (Photo by Norimatsu Satoko)

Just before dawn on December 22nd, the Okinawa Defense Bureau (ODB, the Okinawan branch of the Japanese Ministry of Defense) re-started construction of new US helipads in Takae, a village in Yanbaru Forest, rich with 4,000 species of wild life. The plan, defying local protest, is to build six helipads within the Northern Training Area in exchange for returning half of the massive US Marine jungle training center. The helipads are to accommodate the V-22 Osprey – an accident-prone aircraft, capable of vertical and parallel take-off and landing. Residents of the 160-household Takae village have been sitting-in around the clock to protest the helipad construction plan since 2007. In November 2008, the ODB prosecuted 15 protesters for obstructing traffic, and though the suit was dropped for 13 of them, two were charged, and the case is continuing.

On the night of December 23rd, in deliberate harassment, a military helicopter hovered 15 meters above the sit-in tent, blowing it down and damaging its contents. Residents immediately filed a complaint against ODB, demanding investigation. When local residents went to the ODB office on December 28 with Okinawan members of the Diet and Prefectural assembly, ODB chief Mabe Ro was not available to meet them. When they finally met several hours later, he merely repeated that the US military had not confirmed the incident. Having visited the Takae tent only a few days before the incident, we note that the new Takae helipads and the “Futenma Replacement Facility” in Henoko are both to be Osprey-capable. If the helipad construction at Takae were to proceed , this would pave the way for forcible construction of the Henoko base. It would also mark a significant reversal of a 14 year-long successful people’s struggle.

Inside the damaged tent, an hour after the helicopter hovering incident in Takae(Photo from Ryukyu Shimpo)

In 2010, the Japanese government tightened the screws on Nago City for its stubborn refusal to submit to base construction plans by suspending part of its budget, explicitly restoring the “carrot and sticks” link between base consent and fiscal policy that it had earlier denounced on the part of the LDP. The Kan government also threatened Governor Nakaima and the Okinawan people by intimating that unless Okinawa surrendered to Tokyo, the dangerous and disruptive Futenma Marine base would remain indefinitely. Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito told a Tokyo press conference that Okinawans would have to “grin and bear” (kanju) the new base. Within days, public outrage forced him to withdraw his words. In December 2010, Prime Minster Kan flew in to Okinawa, expressed his “unbearable shame as a Japanese” at the way the prefecture had been treated only to go on to say that relocation of the Futenma base to Henoko “may not be the best choice for the people of Okinawa but in practical terms it is the better choice.” Governor Nakaima countered that the Prime Minister had got it wrong, and that any relocation within the prefecture would be “bad.” Kan, as he entered the prefectural hall on December 17 to meet with Nakaima, encountered some 500 protesters outside the building. Their placards read “Rescind!” (the US-Japan plan to build a base in Henoko), and made noises with cans, mocking Prime Minister “Kan” as an empty “can.”

Protesters showing “NO” formed with empty cans on Henoko Beach, so Prime Minister Kan can see from his helicopter. (Photo from Okinawa Taimusu)

So apparently fearful was the Prime Minister of the reception he could expect from Okinawans that, on this December visit, he met no one but the Governor. Avoiding even the members of his own party, he presented a forlorn spectacle surveying his rebellious prefecture from the safety of an SDF helicopter. It is hard to think of any previous Prime Minister in modern times so distrusted and rejected in any part of the country.

While these Tokyo visitors pressed their unwelcome suit upon Okinawans, a different set of visitors gathered in Naha with prominent members of the Okinawan resistance and their academic and other citizen leaders and activists.Days later, Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji followed Kan to Okinawa. When he offered to address the dangers posed by the Futenma base by saying that he would relocate the schools and hospitals of the densely populated Ginowan, local people were incredulous and Governor Nakaima denounced as “the utmost degeneracy” any suggestion that Futenma air base might become permanent. “The basic problem, he said, “is to advance by even one day the removal of the dangers of Futenma, and it is turning things upside down to start extrapolating from the assumption that it is going to be permanent.”²

A December 19 forum cosponsored by the Asia-Pacific Journal (APJ) and Okinawa University, addressed the question “Where is Okinawa going?” Speakers at three sessions – environmental, geopolitical, and economic – engaged in discussion with nearly 200 participants on goals and ideals while addressing contemporary challenges to Okinawa and the region.

Kawamura Masami, Director of Okinawa BD (Citizens’ Network for Biological Diversity in Okinawa), an NGO that fielded one of the largest representations at the 10th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, October 2010, discussed Okinawa BD’s activities, illustrating characteristics and difficulties of “politicized” environment movements in Okinawa while suggesting strategies to overcome obstacle to broader civil participation. Sakurai Kunitoshi, an environmental assessment specialist, emphasized civil society engagement to empower and provide leadership for Okinawans to rebuild the prefecture, by taking advantage of Okinawa’s rich environment based upon the principles of “Conserve, Use, and Know the environment.”

Forum “Where is Okinawa Going” held at Okinawa University, December 19, 2010

Amid rising tensions in East Asia, typified by the China-Japan conflict over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, historian Arasaki Moriteru and APJ coordinator Gavan McCormack spoke of the danger of Okinawans getting caught up in the Japanese national narrative of their islands as “inherent territory” of Japan. Arasaki stressed Okinawa’s significance as a “space of livelihood” for people in the area’s fishing community, while McCormack presented an international vision of Okinawa as a place in the Asia-Pacific notable for its tradition of serving as a peaceful bridge between China, Korea, Japan and insular areas.

In the final session, political scientist Shimabukuro Jun pointed out that Okinawa’s history of “economic development” has only reinforced its status as a military colony and made it an integral part of the post-war AMPO (US-Japan security treaty) system, which de facto overrides Japan’s peace constitution. Shimabukuro called for a redefined local autonomy and legislation that would provide Okinawa with “regional sovereignty.” Miyagi Yasuhiro, a former Nago assembly member who led the 1997 plebiscite that said “no” to the Henoko base plan, explained that Nago had never prospered under the system of subsidies (bribes) from the Japanese government in exchange for hosting military bases. He urged Okinawans to unite in opposing military base expansion, and to engage in new forms of economic and social planning when the government’s Okinawa development program expires in 2012.

The forum’s nearly two hundred participants, boosted no doubt by anger at Prime Minister Kan’s cavalier visit to Okinawa the previous day, discussed the issues of Okinawa’s future within the broader context of alternative courses for the Asia-Pacific region notable both for economic dynamism and the dangerous clashes taking place in 2010. Expansive plans for US base construction in both Okinawa and Guam thus need to be assessed in light of the responses to conflicts between North and South Korea and between China and Japan, responses notable for provocative joint US-Japan-South Korea military exercises replicating the Cold War alliance structures of the 1950s and directed against China and North Korea. Above all, the subordination of Okinawa to US and Japanese security concerns—intensified in the wake of the clash over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands—needs to be set off against alternative environmentally sound and peaceful possibilities for a region whose history throughout the long twentieth century has been one of sacrifice to imperial and military demands.

In short, the significance of the long-running Okinawa struggle extends far beyond the projected base construction and transfer. The sharp focus on Futenma (and Henoko) has always been tactical, but it is also a measure of the careful strategic planning and organization that underpinned the long-running Okinawan struggle. Even if, as one Okinawan newspaper calculated, Futenma was indeed returned to its owners without replacement, the outcome would merely be to reduce Okinawa’s percentage of the total US base land in Japan from 74 to 72 per cent. While the tactical focus is therefore indisputably Futenma/Henoko/Takae, Okinawan civil society’s strategic orientation has always been towards demilitarization in general, the implementation of the Japanese constitution, especially Article 9 (peace), 12-40 (human rights and livelihood), and 92-95 (local self-government) in particular, and, particularly given Okinawa’s close proximity to China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, alternative regional economic possibilities. It is high time to overcome Okinawa’s subordination to the imperatives of the US-Japan Security Treaty.

Beyond the base confrontation, Okinawans are able to see with increasing clarity, through the exposures of “secret diplomacy” and other revelations of the inner workings of the government and the US-Japan-Okinawa relationship, that they had been consistently lied to, tricked, and cheated within the state system they were incorporated in from 1972. That was the case in the deals that Tokyo thrashed out with the Nixon administration in the late 1960s leading to the 1972 reversion and was equally the case in the deals done by the Democratic Party government in Tokyo with the Obama administration in 2009-10. Detail after detail confirms the pattern and demonstrates Tokyo’s contempt for Okinawa and its ongoing efforts to neutralize Okinawan democracy.

In 1965, as was disclosed only recently in declassified documents from the US archives, then US ambassador Edwin Reischauer (éminence grise of Japanese studies in the US through much of the post-war era), proposed a formula for managing Okinawa: “if Japan would accept nuclear weapons on Japanese soil, including Okinawa, and if it would provide us with assurances guaranteeing our military commanders effective control of the islands in time of military crisis, then we would be able to keep our bases on the islands, even though ‘full sovereignty’ reverted to Japan.”³ Nuclear weapons were later in fact removed, but otherwise the Reischauer formula has underpinned the Okinawan position within the US-Japan relationship ever since: free use of the bases under “full sovereignty” – words as requiring of parentheses now as then.

Reischauer’s further 1965 advice on the channelling of discreet funds to aid conservative (pro-US) candidates in elections was also followed, and essentially has been followed in Okinawan elections ever since, though in more recent times the Japanese government has substituted cabinet secretariat secret funds for the CIA or other, direct, American sources. The way in which the crucial 1998 election, in which determinedly anti-base Governor Ota Masahide was defeated following large infusion of those special funds is just one of the many revelations of 2010.⁴

The Okinawan City of Nago has attracted particular attention from the Japanese nation state for the past 14 years because its initially local resistance to the base construction project, first materializing in the 1997 plebiscite in which a clear majority opposed any new base construction, slowly spread prefecture-wide and now shows signs of spreading to the rest of Japan. Massive Tokyo interventions against Nago—in the form of bribery and coercion—followed the 1997 Nago Plebiscite in a desperate effort to crush or neutralize this local democratic will. Continuing without break, they led to the DPJ’s abject failure in the Nago election of 2010. By holding the nation state, and its US backer, at bay for that time, the citizens of Nago (and more broadly of Okinawa as a whole) have already accomplished a huge victory. It remains to be consolidated, and Tokyo today imposes new fiscal sanctions on the city to try to wrest submission from it. The Nago accomplishment is a victory for democracy in one city, but it will remain a brittle victory until it is consolidated first at prefectural and then at national level. As we argue in the New Year edition of theRyukyu shimpo, it is time now to go from 14 years of successful resistance to a new phase in which positive Okinawan agendas, programs and vision are articulated to help lift Japan as a whole out of the doldrums of subordination to American power and policies.⁵

Forty years ago, in December 1970, the citizens of Koza (now Okinawa City) rose up in anger at the trampling on their rights by the US occupying forces. In a single night, they destroyed more than 80 US military and private vehicles and many buildings in a spontaneous burst of rage. These events, known generally as the “Koza Riots,” are better described as the “Koza Uprising,” for this was the sole occasion in post-war Japan in which Okinawan or Japanese people actually rose up, desperately if futilely, against US military occupation. Forty years on, a former official of the city lamented that “fundamentally, nothing has changed … in the name of democracy, we have had an occupation, with the same treatment meted out to us as to Iraqis and Afghanis, while both the US and Japan turn a blind eye. The anger that exploded 40 years ago has not abated.”⁶

Aftermath of Koza Uprising, December 20, 1970

Okinawa was once the independent Ryukyu Kingdom, negotiating treaties with neighboring foreign countries and kingdoms through the 1850s and only fully subordinated within the modern Japanese state in 1879. As resentment deepens today over ongoing discrimination, some begin to draw attention to the past, and to suggest a future either on a renegotiated and more autonomous basis within the Japanese state or as an independent entity outside it. In June 2010, a “Declaration of Independence” was issued at a meeting on Iriomote Island, in the name of “The Federation of Ryukyu Self-Governing Republics.” Its initial demands of the Japanese national government included apology and compensation for the abolition of the Ryukyu Kingdom and subordination of the islands as Okinawan prefecture in 1879, abolition of the Reversion Agreements of 1969-72 (on grounds of dubious legality and the complex of secret deals that enveloped them) and negotiation of a new, autonomous status.⁷ The past is unlikely to be a sure guide to the future, but as resentment builds, and so long as Ampo (the US-Japan Security Treaty) continues to take precedence over Kempo (the constitution of Japan, with its core principles of peace, human rights, and self-government), support for independence will grow.⁸

On December 17, the Japanese Cabinet approved the New National Defense Program Guideline, which stressed increasing confrontation over the “grey zones” and identified the threat of the military modernization of China as part of the “Security Environment Surrounding Japan.” It unveiled a plan to enhance the SDF presence in “southwestern Japan,”⁹ including Ishigaki. Four days later, we called on Ohama Nagateru, former Mayor of Ishigaki. Ohama, as mayor from 1994 to 2010, had encouraged citizens to establish an Article 9 (no-war clause of the Japanese Constitution) monument in the city, and had initiated various projects to strengthen ties with Taiwan and China, including a sister city agreement with Su-ao, Taiwan. While Tokyo was proposing to reinforce the SDF on the Sakishima Islands, the southernmost islands of Japan bordering China/Taiwan and including Ishigaki, Ohama took a very different view.

Article 9 monument on Ishigaki Island (Photo from JANJAN)

“We don’t need the SDF on these small islands near the border,” he said, explaining that a fishery rights agreement was on the verge of being completed around the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands before the September 7 ship collision that led Japan’s Coast Guard to detaining the captain of the Chinese fishing boat, thereby provoking an international incident. “A territorial dispute certainly can lead to war,” he said, warning against the military build-up around the border. Ohama also stressed the island’s bitter collective memory of the Japanese military’s failure to protect local citizens in the past. During the Battle of Okinawa, 3,800 people, one out of seven on the island, died of malaria, as local citizens were forced by the Japanese military to move to a malaria-infested mountain area. Ohama, who lost in the February 2010 mayoral election to LDP/Komeito-backed Nakayama Yoshitaka, warned of recent provocative moves by city officials, such as two city assembly members landing on one of the disputed Senkaku islands, and passage of a law designating January 14 as “Senkaku Day” to commemorate the day in 1895 when Japan incorporated the islands as its territory, now part of Ishigaki City in Japanese understanding.

Ishigaki Island (Map from Ishigaki Tourist Information website)

Nago Mayor Inamine’s determination to prevent construction of a base in his city has assured that Nago remains at the forefront of Okinawan resistance. In July 2010, the Mayor refused to permit the Okinawa Defense Bureau to conduct a further assessment with an eye to building a Futenma replacement base. Inamine’s bold act recently gained nationwide support, as hundreds of people elsewhere in Japan transferred their resident tax to Nago, in response to the Defense Ministry’s suspension of a 1.6 billion yen (approximately 20 million US dollars) “realignment subsidy,” one provided specifically to municipalities that host US military bases during the base construction process. The payments of those who have chosen to pay their tax to Nago instead of to the municipality of their residence is small (as of January 6 just 4.7 million yen, or approximately 60,000 US dollars),¹⁰ insignificant against the forgone subsidy. But it carries the symbolic meaning of citizens’ support to a city that is determined to finance its own economic activities, even resisting central government bribery for hosting a new base. In late December 2010, Inamine told a group of American University students visiting Okinawa, that “People here are hanging on to their conviction not to allow another base in Okinawa, and not to succumb to state power. I would like young people like you to go back to the US and tell people about it.”

Nago Mayor Inamine speaks to US students(Photo from Okinawa Taimusu)

The New Year Day issue of Ryukyu Shimpo carried encouraging news for anti-base forces. As of December 31, 2010, an unprecedented number of over 20,000 plaintiffs have joined the collective lawsuit against the government over the noise pollution of Kadena US Air Force Base. This is the third such lawsuit, the first being in 1982 and the second in 2000. The second was called a “mammoth lawsuit,” with 5,500 plaintiffs, one-fourth the present number. The second lawsuit demanded that the government ban landing and take-off between 7 pm and 7 am, restrict aircraft noise, and pay compensation for the psychological damage inflicted by the noise. The third lawsuit is expected to make similar demands.

Kadena US Air Force Base and adjacent neighborhood (Photo from Ryukyu Shimpo)

The Kadena-based F-15s are among the aircraft that impose the greatest burden on surrounding neighborhoods. About one hundred aircraft are permanently stationed and operated there, and foreign-based planes also frequently visit. Residents complain of being woken up by 110-120 decibel sound blasts, the kind of noise one hears when a car revs its engine from one meter away. In the first two lawsuits, the high court turned down the plaintiff’s demand for a flight ban, saying it was a third-party (US military) operation that the Japanese government could not control. The plaintiffs of the second lawsuit have appealed to the Supreme Court.

Takara Tetsumi, a constitutional law specialist at the University of Ryukyus compares this large-scale suit to the movement for Okinawan reversion to Japan prior to 1972, both based on the constitutional principle of the right of peaceful existence. Ryukyu Shimpo calls the lawsuit “a modern-day popular uprising.”¹¹ The suit, coming at a time when China-Japan tensions have led to heightened pressures for militarization, is the latest sign that Okinawa will continue at the center of efforts to define Japan’s future.

Gavan McCormack, Norimatsu Satoko and Mark Selden are coordinators of The Asia-Pacific Journal. They visited Japan, including Okinawa and Ishigaki, in December 2010, and were joint organizers and participants in the Forum at Okinawa University, “Where is Okinawa Going?”

Recommended citation: Gavan McCormack, Norimatsu Satoko and Mark Selden, New Year 2011, Okinawa and the Future of East Asia, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 2 No 3, January 10, 2011.

Notes

¹ See Gavan McCormack,  The Battle of Okinawa 2010: Japan-US Relations at a Crossroad.

² Okinawa Taimusu, 29 December 2010.

³ Steve Rabson, “‘Secret’ 1965 memo reveals plans to keep US bases and nuclear weapons in Okinawa after reversion,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 21 December 2009.

⁴ Ida Hiroyuki, “Kambo kimitsuhi yaku 3 oku en ga Okinawa chijisen ni nagarekonda shoko,” Shukan kinyobi, 22 October 2010, p. 20-21.

⁵ “Teiko koeta bijon o,” Ryukyu shimpo, 4 January 2011.

⁶ Okinawa Taimusu, 17 December 2010.

⁷ On the Declaration of Independence issued by “Ryukyu Jichi Kyowakoku Renpo” (by the alliance of Amami, Okinawa, Miyako, and Yaeyama islands) on 23 June 2010, see Matsushima Yasukatsu, “Yuimaru Ryukyu no jichi – ‘Ryukyu’ dokuritsu de ‘heiwa na shima’ e,” Shukan kinyobi, 23 July 2010, p. 22; also “NPO Hojin Yuimaru Ryukyu no jichi,” (link).

⁸ Paraphrasing the sentiment expressed by Ryukyu University’s Shimabukuro Jun, “Jichishu to nari kizuna o saisei suru,” Asahi shimbun, 24 August 2010.

⁹ Japan Ministry of Defense, Summary of National Defense Guidelines, FY2011.

¹⁰ “Furusato nozei kyuzo,” Ryukyu Shimpo, 6 January 2011

¹¹ For discussion on the Kadena noise lawsuits, see “Kokunai saidai genkoku 2 man kyo ? Kadena bakuon 3ji sosho, 2ji no 4bai,” Ryukyu Shimpo, 1 Jan 2011 (link) and“Genkoku 2man kyo gendai no minshu hoki dahiko sashitome ni fumikome,” Ryukyu Shimpo, 3 Jan 2011 (link).