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3 Okinawa and the 'beautiful
country' By Gavan McCormack
Last July, three months before he became
prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe published his
political manifesto under the title Utsukushii
kuni e ("Toward a Beautiful Country"). It is
well known that Abe's sense of beauty involves a
denial of the darkest aspects of wartime history
and insistence on compulsory love of country, and
that he is committed to revision of the country's
basic institutions accordingly.
But the
fundamental changes in the country's military
posture, and especially in its relationship with
the United States, have
received less attention. Here
we consider evidence of a new domestic role for
the Self Defense Forces (SDF) as enforcer of
unpopular policies, and the implications of a new
law to facilitate US military reorganization.
Okinawa is at the center of both.
On May
11, the Japanese Maritime SDF's Bungo minesweeper
set sail from the naval base at Yokosuka, near
Tokyo, for Okinawa, under orders from Abe to
assist in a "preliminary" survey of the ocean
floor of Oura Bay, where his government plans to
construct a state-of-the-art base for American
marines.
Under cover of darkness, divers
from the Bungo carried out their seabed survey and
the ship then withdrew. The operation took only a
few days, and neither the media nor the local and
national groups opposing the base caught sight of
the Bungo or its divers.
Insignificant,
one might say, yet it would be a mistake to
dismiss it as such, for the event reveals much
about the character of Abe's Japan.
In
2005 and 2006, the US and Japanese governments
drew up a major agreement on the reorganization of
US forces in Japan. [1] It was a complex deal, but
the bottom line was integrating the forces of the
two countries, especially their intelligence and
command functions, and transforming Japan's
"Self-Defense Forces" into a junior partner of the
United States in the "global war on terror", as
the "Great Britain of East Asia". The SDF's
justification had hitherto rested on its role in
the defense of Japan "against direct or indirect
aggression".
Japan was to meet the cost of
the reorganization, including US$6.5 billion just
for relocating 8,000 marines and their families to
Guam (even building houses and recreational
facilities there for them) and an unspecified sum
for the construction of the new base in Okinawa
(for which estimates range in the $10 billion-plus
range). This is quite apart from the
institutionally entrenched subsidies that have
been going on for more than 30 years, and will
continue.
Despite Japan's "pacifist"
constitution, which Prime Minister Abe is moving
aggressively to consign to the dustbin of history,
Japan is the world's No 3 or 4 military power. In
naval terms it is probably No 2, its Maritime SDF
having 45,842 sailors, 152 major vessels including
four Aegis destroyers (cost about $3 billion to $4
billion each), 54 convoy ships (conventional
destroyers), 16 submarines, and multiple
anti-submarine, reconnaissance, supply, rescue and
minesweeping vessels (such as the Bungo) - pretty
much everything but aircraft carriers.
For
more than a decade, the Japanese government has
worked to soften Japanese public opinion about its
steady military-expansion program by stretching
the constitution to the limits, sending the SDF to
participate, first in United Nations peacekeeping
operations, and then in US-led "coalition of the
willing" operations in the Indian Ocean and Iraq.
But that has not been enough to satisfy the
Pentagon, which now clearly wants Japan to remove
the remaining constitutional and legal shackles
from this formidable force so that it can be fully
incorporated under US command throughout the "arc
of instability".
A raft of legislation -
ultimately intended to include revision of the
constitution - became necessary to implement the
various new Japanese commitments. As the Bungo
sailed, the Diet (parliament) was considering a
bill "to facilitate the implementation of plans to
realign US forces in Japan", which it passed a few
days later, on May 23. [2]
The May 23 law
is designed to step up the pressure on local
governments by financially rewarding those who
submit to the paramount will of the national
government and accept the primacy of defense and
US considerations over civil and democratic ones,
while punishing those who give priority to local
democratic opinion and processes.
Cooperative local governments are to be
given substantial sums, in tranches at the various
stages of specific projects - consent, survey,
construction, completion. It was designed with
Okinawa particularly in mind, but other localities
too now face a panoply of financial and other
interventions.
The Oura Bay/Cape Henoko
base, whose construction the Abe government is so
anxious to advance that it sent in the SDF, has
long been a running sore in the US-Japan
relationship. [3] In 1996 such a base, at first
called a "heliport", was proposed as part of the
deal between the administrations of Japanese prime
minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and US president Bill
Clinton to allow the return to Japan of the
Futenma US Marine Corps base in central Okinawa.
Futenma sits incongruously and threateningly in
the middle of the bustling town of Ginowan.
Henoko, the chosen replacement site, was a sleepy
fishing hamlet, long coveted by the Pentagon as
part of its plan to rationalize and concentrate
its forces in the north of the island.
In
1997, however, the people of Nago city (the
administrative unit that included the base site)
intervened. In a historic referendum held under
great political and financial pressure from Tokyo,
the majority withheld consent from any base
construction plan. Tokyo, refusing to consider any
alternative, tried everything to break the city's
will: refusal of cooperation with the then
prefectural governor (who in 1998 decided to abide
by the will of the Nago people rather than do the
wishes of Tokyo), political arm-twisting, lavish
handouts (bribery), and psychological warfare (a
campaign to persuade Okinawans that their role in
the defense of the rest of Japan should be
something to be proud of).
It achieved
some success in cultivating an obedient,
base-oriented mentality on the part of local
government officials, and managed to sway the
outcomes of a string of local elections, but the
resistance remained strong. For much of 2004 and
2005 all attempts to conduct the necessary
preliminary environmental survey of the base site
(a few hundred meters from the current one) were
defeated by a coalition of local and national
environmental and anti-base groups, which camped
around the clock at the site and surrounded and
blocked the survey workers in canoes and small
craft.
In September 2005, then-prime
minister Junichiro Koizumi withdrew the plan. The
new site was chosen in part because it would allow
construction to be done from within an existing US
base, Camp Schwab, a few hundred meters away from
the one that Koizumi had abandoned. It consisted
of a much-expanded, dual-runway, V-shaped
structure that would span Cape Henoko and extend
into the sea at both ends. Centering it on the
base would make the site virtually inaccessible to
protesters.
Nobody in Okinawa was
consulted, and the decision sparked outrage across
Okinawan society, from the governor on down.
Surveys recorded unprecedented (85%) levels of
opposition to the project. [4] By sending in the
Bungo to help conduct the survey, Abe signaled his
contempt for such Okinawan sentiment and his
readiness to use force if necessary to deliver
what the Pentagon (and Abe) wanted.
There
was an especially bitter irony in the fact of the
first dispatch of the forces of the newly (2006)
upgraded Ministry of Defense against Okinawans.
Okinawan understanding of "national defense" is
forever marked by the experience of 1945, when
tens of thousands died as the Imperial Japanese
Army prolonged a futile resistance to the Allied
forces in the attempt to stave off as long as
possible the attack on mainland Japan.
Having been major victims of Japanese
militarism, Okinawans since then have had foisted
on them the militarism that mainland Japan on the
whole avoided, first from 1945 to 1972 as a direct
US military colony and then, from 1972, as a part
of Japan but one that was uniquely war-oriented
and militarized.
By covertly deploying
Japan's military to Oura Bay, Abe was signaling a
shift in the postwar state, something he is
determined to consolidate by major constitutional
revision, drastically diminishing local powers and
extending the central authority of the
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