Japan Focus just published two excellent articles about the release of the environmental impact study for the military base expansion in Okinawa: “The Fatally Flawed EIS Report on the Futenma Air Station Replacement Facility – With Special Reference to the Okinawa Dugong” by Sakurai Kunitoshi and “Pre-Dawn Surprise Attack: The “Drop-off” of the Environmental Impact Statement” by Urashima Etsuko.
In the introduction to the articles, Gavan McCormack writes that Tokyoʻs delivery of the EIS under the cover of darkness “showed the mentality of the rapist: violent, contemptuous of its victim, and moved by shame to commit its deed at the darkest hour of the night, when witnesses could least be expected.”
Hereʻs an excerpt from the introduction:
Here is not the place for a comprehensive account of the deepening crisis of Japan-Okinawa-US relations. The forthcoming study by Satoko Oka Norimatsu and myself attempts to do that in a systematic way (Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa vs Japan and the United States, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.)
Here, however, we present two Okinawan accounts of the events on which the year 2011 ended: one by Okinawa’s leading environmentalist, specialist in environmental assessment law and till 2010 president of Okinawa University, the other by the long-time chronicler of the Okinawan resistance movement and Nago city resident. Both are core members of that movement. They write of the astonishing events that marked the end of 2011.
[…]
The fact is that the DPJ government today faces a level of resistance unprecedented in the history of the modern Japanese state, with the (conservative) Governor, the prefectural Assembly (Okinawa’s parliament), virtually all city, town and village assemblies and mayors, and all media groups and civic and labour organizations firmly opposed to the attempted relocation of the Marine base to Henoko.
The following accounts deal with the submission by the Government of Japan of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) designed to accelerate construction at the projected Henoko site. The story, told here from two different but closely connected viewpoints, reveals the depths to which the DPJ has sunk, its disregard for due process and law, its insistence on the priority that must be attached to service to the US over attention to the interests of its own citizens, its contempt for democracy, and its systematic and continuing discrimination against Okinawans. This might not be unique among contemporary industrial democratic states, but this deepening crisis is little appreciated. Okinawa is Japan’s Tahrir Square. The “Okinawa problem” is Japan’s problem. And it is presently the crux of the US-Japan problem.
Just weeks before the “delivery” described here, the head of Okinawa’s Defense Bureau, the local section of the national Ministry of Defense, had to resign over his statement explicitly comparing the delivery of the EIS to rape. When about to commit rape, he said, you do not announce it to your victim in advance. The Government of Japan might have submitted to pressure to replace him in his post, but in the way it went about delivery of the crucial EIS in December, it showed the mentality of the rapist: violent, contemptuous of its victim, and moved by shame to commit its deed at the darkest hour of the night, when witnesses could least be expected.
Leave a Reply