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6 Being Okinawan in Japan Today (1972–) Two months after Yamaguchi Shigemitsu’s arrest, Okinawans on the mainland observed Reversion Day on May 15, 1972, by celebrating the end of U.S. military rule and protesting the terms of the “prejudiced agreement.” At the Hyōgo Association’s twenty-seventh annual convention, members commemorated the event by burning their U.S.-issued “passports.” Demonstrations the same month in several cities protested the deployment of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to Okinawa, as well as U.S. bases there. For Okinawans on the mainland, the terms of the agreement meant not only that their relatives in Okinawa would have to continue living with noise, accidents, GI crime, and all the other dangers and disruptions associated with the presence of tens of thousands of soldiers, but also that their families’ lands seized earlier for base expansion would remain under military occupation.1 Asked about the continuing burden of bases, Japanese government officials have called it an unavoidable result of “history” and have claimed that Okinawans, unlike other Japanese, are now accustomed to “coexisting” with them. As residents of Japan’s poorest prefecture with less than 1 percent of the nation’s total population and land area, Okinawans have been unable to muster the political influence necessary for pressuring the Japanese government to honor its pre-reversion pledge of reducing bases there to “mainland levels.” However, organized protests have resulted in some consolidations and the cancellation or postponement of plans for new facilities. A few local governments elsewhere in Japan, recognizing the unfair burden, have recently agreed to permit U.S.Marines from bases in Okinawa to conduct exercises at facilities of the Japan Self-Defense Forces in Yamanashi and Hokkaido . In 2008, the U.S. and Japanese governments signed an agreement to transfer 8,000 U.S. Marines, approximately half of the force in Okinawa, to Guam, but on the onerous condition that a marine air base scheduled for closure be relocated in Okinawa. Even if the agreement is implemented, the prefecture’s burden will remain disproportionate. Seeking to assuage resentment over inequities and stabilize land use for 196 | chapter 6 the American military, the Japanese government increased “rental payments” to the owners of military-occupied land in 1972 by as much as six times the pre-reversion rates paid by the U.S. government. Some of these landowners now lived on the mainland. Thus, a number of Okinawans there, including prominent members of the Osaka League of Okinawa Prefectural Associations , suddenly began receiving substantially more income for land that had been seized from their families two decades earlier. Among “military landowners ” (gun-jinushi) I interviewed in 2000 and 2001, one woman in Taishō Ward showed me her contract for annual payments from the Japanese government of 12 million yen (about $100,000) for land seized from her family in the early 1950s to expand a U.S. air base in Okinawa. Perhaps partly as a result of this policy, the Osaka League has remained comparatively quiet on the issue of military bases. By contrast, the Okinawa Association in neighboring Hyōgo Prefecture has been at the forefront of the movement for their removal, although some military landowners in the prefecture maintain that, if bases are closed, compensation should be paid for lost income. A woman interviewed in April 2001 said her father was receiving money on a large tract of land he owned that is now part of the U.S. Army’s Yomitan Airfield. “He gets angry whenever there’s news about antibase demonstrations, insisting on compensation for landowners if they are closed.” In 1979, activists in Osaka opposing the military bases formed a separate organization, the Association of Okinawans (Okinawa Kenjin no Kai), as they had fifteen years earlier when the Osaka League initially refused to join the campaign for reversion. Several of those who had founded the Association for the Protection of Okinawa in 1963 now served as officers in the new organization , including its president, Oyakawa Takayoshi. The earlier association had claimed to be nonpartisan, although it received valuable assistance from individual members of the Japan Communist Party. Having embraced the cause of reversion in the early 1960s, the JCP now made opposition to the bases in Okinawa a central campaign issue, and the new association openly backed its local candidates. They included Itatani Seiji, a Lower House Diet member, and Yadatsu Kō, who has served eight four-year terms on the Osaka city council.2 As...

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