Clinton’s fix
The end of the Cold War raised hopes that Okinawa might, at last, be able to reap a ‘peace dividend’. In February 1995, however, Clinton’s Assistant Defense Secretary, Joseph Nye, produced a strategy document for the East Asia–Pacific region. [35] This repudiated the Bush Senior Administration’s plans for troop reductions and called for US forces to be maintained at Cold War levels of 100,000 troops in Japan and South Korea, with these allies also pressed to contribute more themselves. In a Foreign Affairs article, Nye justified a policy of ‘deep engagement’ for the post-Cold War era on the grounds that ‘rising powers create instability in the international state system’. A forward-based troop presence ‘ensures the US a seat at the table on Asian issues’ and ‘enables us to respond quickly to protect our interests, not only in Asia but as far away as the Persian Gulf’. For the foreseeable future, Japan and the Okinawa bases would serve as ‘the cornerstone of our security strategy for the entire region’. [36] The Governor of Okinawa at the time, Ota Masahide, remarked that Nye spoke of the island as if it were ‘American territory’. [37] The US’s East Asian bases, far from being liquidated, as people especially in Okinawa had grown to hope, were to be upgraded.
Within six months of the Nye Report, the Japan hands’ complacency was challenged by an eruption of protest on Okinawa itself. A particularly brutal assault—three US servicemen snatched a 12-year-old girl, duct-taped her eyes and mouth, and serially raped her—occasioned such outpouring of angry protest, not only throughout Okinawa but also in ‘mainland’ Japan, that for the first time the perpetrators were handed over to the Japanese authorities, and in due course sentenced and imprisoned. President Clinton, visiting Tokyo in April 1996, agreed that the US Marines would be moved out of Futenma; but he made the promise conditional on the construction of a new, alternative base.
Initially the Futenma Replacement Facility was to be a modest heliport, some 45 metres in length, located ‘off the east coast of Okinawa’. Tokyo soon specified that this meant the fishing port of Henoko, on Oura Bay, a site that the US Navy had been eyeing for decades. During the Vietnam War, the USAF had even started bombing the seabed in an effort to get rid of the ‘nuisance’ coral. [38] In fact the coral and marine resources in the Bay are of global importance. The internationally protected dugong graze on sea grasses in its waters, turtles come to rest and lay their eggs, and numerous protected birds, insects and animals thrive. A World Wildlife Fund study found an astonishing 36 new species of crab and shrimp in the area. [39]LDP governments produced one Futenma replacement plan after another, nearly all centring on Henoko and Camp Schwab, and each more elaborate than the one before. No expense was spared in cultivating and co-opting Okinawan political and business elites. An Open Letter from community leaders complained movingly that the American and Japanese governments ‘have changed their strategy for maintaining the base presence from using force to using money’:
This is very cruel treatment. The people of Okinawa are increasingly dependent on such money. The money has created a system which has corrupted our minds. It has taken away alternatives. The acceptance of US bases is seen as the only way to live . . . It is as if the Japanese government has made Okinawa a drug addict, and the US government takes full advantage of the addiction, in order to maintain its military presence. [40]
Nevertheless, local opposition to the planned new base persisted. The people of Nago rejected it by a clear majority in a 1997 plebiscite, despite massive central government intervention. In a bizarre twist, Nago’s mayor announced that City Hall rejected the voters’ decision. From 1999, Nago City and Okinawan prefectural authorities adopted a position of ‘conditional acceptance’, although popular hostility to the various Henoko plans still ran strong. When environmental survey work in Henoko finally began in 2004 it was met by a protest ‘sit-in,’ both on land and in the water, so effective that Koizumi cancelled the plan in the run-up to the 2005 election. A year later, however, with the election behind him, Koizumi approved a new Futenma replacement plan: it would be land-based, with two 1.8km airstrips, joined in a V-shape, stretching out from Camp Schwab into Oura Bay. It included a deep-water naval port and a chain of helipads, scattered through the forest. It amounted to a comprehensive hi-tech air, land and sea base, far larger and more multifunctional than the outdated Futenma. The cost was estimated at around $16 billion.
But despite Koizumi’s efforts, progress on the project was slow. By 2008 the environmental survey process was still incomplete and the opposition DPJ—increasingly articulate in its resistance to any new base and demanding that Futenma be shut down straight away—was far ahead of the governing LDP. [41] Popular resistance on the periphery was beginning to set the agenda for a national debate. American officials, though never failing to state that the decision was entirely up to the sovereign government of Japan, were determined to pin down agreement before the LDP’s warrant ran out. In May 2008 Bush’s Deputy Defense Secretary Richard Lawless told the Asahi Shimbun that Washington needed ‘top-down leadership’ from Tokyo: ‘Japan has to find a way to change its own tempo of decision-making, deployment, integration and operationalizing this alliance’. [42] At a Tokyo conference in December 2008, Nye spelled out that any attempt to cancel the Indian Ocean refuelling mission, renegotiate the AMPO Status of Forces agreement or revise the Koizumi plan for Futenma–Henoko relocation would be seen by Congress as ‘anti-American’. [43]
In 2009 the Obama Administration picked up the baton. With few exceptions, the ‘Japan specialists’ of the Bush Administration were kept in place (many had been in service since the 1990s Clinton Administration). [44] As noted above, in February Secretary of State Clinton pushed through the misleadingly entitled ‘Guam International Agreement’, pledging Japan to build the new base at Henoko by 2014 and to step up the Self Defense Forces to a more forward role under US command. It was the culmination of a fifteen-year process, in accordance with the Nye framework. Clinton made clear that it was intended to pre-empt the outcome of the August 2009 election: ‘The agreement that I signed today with Foreign Minister Nakasone is one between our two nations, regardless of who’s in power.’ [45] Within nine months of the DPJ government taking office, the combined efforts of the American imperial state and its relays in Japan’s bureaucracy and media had proved her right.
Having caved in on Henoko, the DPJ proceeded to capitulate all along the line. Under pressure from the bureaucracy, Kan reversed the DPJ’s fiscal policy and moved to raise consumption tax. Support for his government fell by 8 points overnight, and its talk of ‘a strong economy, strong finances and strong welfare’, rang hollow. The Hatoyama vision of fraternity and an autonomous East Asian Community evaporated, as traditional subservience to Washington returned. The distinctive policies that had underpinned its 2009 electoral triumph have vanished. The DPJ had been ‘LDP-ized’. [46] The Kan government was duly punished by its voters in the July 2010 elections to the Diet’s Upper House, with a 16 per cent swing against it. By comparison to the 2007 Upper House election, its share of the vote dropped from 40 per cent to 24 per cent, and from 23 million to 18 million ballots in the proportional sector. In Okinawa it did not dare to field a candidate at all. Occupying 103 seats in an Upper House of 242, it will scarcely be able to govern without some sort of alliance. There is now a distinct possibility of a ‘left–right’ coalition, as in the mid-1990s when the Socialist Party’s Murayama served briefly as Prime Minister, having abandoned the Socialists’ core policies. The differences between the two major parties are now minimal.
Outcomes
With Hatoyama’s inglorious capitulation, Ozawa’s forced resignation and Kan’s pledge of submission to Washington, friendly trans-Pacific relations resumed. Once Kan had announced his determination to press ahead with the landfill plan at Oura Bay, he was rewarded by prime photo-time with Obama at the Toronto G-20 Summit. The smiling faces of the two leaders shaking hands on the deal were seen in Okinawa as nothing but ‘a cover for the naked violence’ that they were planning to direct against the island. [47] In Washington, a House of Representatives resolution expressed ‘appreciation to the people of Japan, and especially on Okinawa’, for their continued hosting of the US bases. This was too much even for the conservative Prefectural Governor, who protested at such insensitivity to the ‘disappointment’ of the Okinawans at the deal Obama and Kan had negotiated over their heads. [48]
From Washington’s perspective, this satisfying outcome also offers an opportunity to press forward with the longer-term project of integrating Japan’s highly equipped armed forces under US command. Already, Japan’s Ground SDF command has moved to Zama, outside Tokyo, where it is merged with US Army 1 Corps command; its Air SDF command has merged with that of the US Fifth Air Force at Yokota; and its Maritime SDF has long acted as a subsidiary to the Yokosuka-based US Seventh Fleet, regularly engaging in joint exercises under American direction. The chorus from Japan’s elites about the need to ‘repair the damage’ done by Hatoyama suggests that this may now move forward more swiftly. Michael Green, another Washington ‘Japan hand’ closely involved with formulating the 1995 Nye doctrine, recalled that preparations for the Clinton–Hashimoto 1996 Joint Security Declaration began under the supposedly dissident Murayama: ‘history suggests’ that this could be the moment for a new push. ‘The next generation of leaders in the DPJ is made up of realists who want a more effective Japanese role in the world and are not afraid to use the Self Defense Forces or to stand up to China or North Korea on human rights.’ [49] However attractive to Washington the agreement to construct the Henoko base, the prospect of ‘peaceful’ Japan submitting its 240,000-strong armed forces to Pentagon direction must be even more so.
Yet resolve in Okinawa has only stiffened. While the Hatoyama government was floundering, the Okinawan Prefectural Assembly demanded unanimously that Futenma Marine Corps Air Station be closed. [50] Nago City elected a new mayor, who promised a break with the corrupt and dependent politics of past decades and declared that his city would not allow the construction of any new bases. In March and April 2010, all the town and city mayors followed suit. A mass rally of 90,000 called for Futenma’s unconditional closure and no new base at Henoko. Nago Mayor Inamine has said that there is ‘zero possibility’ of the May 2010 Agreement being implemented: ‘It simply will not happen.’ He described the Hatoyama capitulation as marking a ‘day of humiliation’ for the Ryukyus akin to that of April 1952, when the islands were offered to the US as part of the deal for restoration of Japanese sovereignty. A Ryukyu Shimpo survey found opposition to the new base running at 84 per cent. At the Henoko village sit-in, 87-year-old Muneyoshi Kayo declared that any monetary ‘thanks’ Tokyo might offer to sweeten the deal should be thrown into the sea. [51] There is no precedent in modern Japanese history for an entire prefecture to unite in saying ‘No’ to the central state authorities. If the movement did not clash with Washington’s strategic agenda it would be acclaimed as an inspiration and given a colourful epithet by the Western media—‘goya revolution’, perhaps, after the Ryukyuan bitter melon. But not in Okinawa.
Sixty-five years after its unconditional surrender, the humiliating circumstances in which the terms of the US ‘alliance’ were imposed remain deeply impressed upon Japan’s institutional memory. I have defined it elsewhere as a client state: that is, one that enjoys the formal trappings of Westphalian sovereignty and independence, and is therefore neither a colony nor a puppet state, but which has internalized the requirement to give preference to ‘other’ interests over its own. Over the decades, thick webs of deception have grown around its surrendered sovereignty. Japan’s ruling elite, in place since the Meiji era, has had much to gain from the arrangement, in terms of its own political and economic security. From 1978, with Japan’s economy becoming competitive with America’s, it began to pay for the occupiers’ presence, embracing a strategem of ‘spontaneous servitude’. [52] With the Cold War over, Germany renegotiated its Status of Forces agreement with the US, dramatically reducing the troop numbers there. Japan, by contrast, has pledged to pay for an expanded US military presence, not for defence against a Soviet threat but as a forward base for power projection across the region.
Terashima Jitsuro, an analyst close to Hatoyama—indeed once mooted as a DPJ foreign minister—has argued that the US–Japan security apparatus is today largely geared towards joint operations in America’s ‘war on terror’, from the Middle East to Central Asia:
From Japan’s perspective, it is foolish to place itself in a framework where Islam is seen as a threat to Japan’s security . . . In contrast to the US, there are no domestic pressures on Japan to support the Israeli side in the Israel–Palestine conflict. We must be aware of where Japan stands and realize there are things in the world that should be confronted jointly with the US and others that should not. [53]
Terashima is well aware of the problems that stand in the way of an independent foreign policy. He has written of the mutual dependence between the ‘Japan hands’ in Washington, who ‘make their living from US–Japan security’, and the ‘US hands’ in Tokyo, who sing along in chorus. Recalling Lu Xun’s description of the hollow expression worn by those Qing officials so accustomed to toadying to colonial powers that they have lost the capacity to think independently, he has charged that ‘slave-faced expressions have become a permanent feature of the Japanese media’. [54] It will take a more determined leadership than Hatoyama’s, and a deeper popular mobilization, if the orientation of Japan’s foreign policy is to be altered. In the meantime, Okinawa continues to bear the main burden. In February 2009, Ryukyuan community leaders sent an Open Letter to Secretary of State Clinton, as she nailed down the agreement to land-fill Oura Bay. ‘Okinawa, a small island, has lived under great stress for over sixty years’, they wrote. ‘The presence of US military bases has distorted not only the politics and economy of Okinawa, but also its society and people’s minds and pride. We do not need to remind you that Okinawa is not your territory. Your 50,000 military members act freely as if this is their land, but, of course, it is not.’ [55] The sit-in at Henoko continues.
[1] Hatoyama Yukio, ‘A New Path for Japan’, New York Times, 27 August 2009.
[2] Born in 1947, Hatoyama is a scion of a famous Tokyo political family: his great-grandfather was Speaker of the Diet in the Meiji era, his grandfather Prime Minister in the 1950s, his father Foreign Minister in the 1970s. He took a Stanford PhD in engineering in 1976 and was elected as an LDP member of the Lower House in 1986, quitting the Party in 1993 and sitting as a member of various small groupings. He was a founder of the DPJ in 1998.
[3] In the early 2000s the DPJ received a degree of support from the business federation, Keidanren, though only around $1m, compared to $22m for the LDP. From 2005 Keidanren reverted to sole support for the LDP. It was highly critical of the DPJ’s labour policy after Ozawa took over as party leader in 2007.
[4] Ambassador Rust Denning, speaking at a Brookings Institution briefing before Obama’s APEC visit: ‘Obama Goes to Asia: Understanding the President’s Trip’, Washington, DC 6 November 2009, p. 38.
[5] In February 2009 Secretary of State Clinton signed an agreement with the Aso government, which pledged Japan to build the new base at Henoko by 2014, to which most of the Futenma-based Marines would relocate. Japan would also pay $6bn towards building a new base on Guam, to which some fraction of the Futenma Marines would move. Presented as though it were a significant US withdrawal from Okinawa, the misleadingly titled ‘Guam International Agreement’ was actually a design to expand the American presence there and increase Japan’s military contribution to the alliance. In May 2009 Aso rammed it through the Diet as an international treaty, in such a way as to bind the prospective DPJ government then waiting in the wings.
[6] The Guardian, 10 August 2009; Okinawa Times, 23 October 2009.
[7] Keiko Iizuka, ‘Three Keys to Japan’s New Diplomacy’, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC 16 October 2009.
[8] Itoh Shoichi, ‘Will Japan be Different?’, Brookings Institution, September 2009.
[9] Denning, in ‘Obama Goes to Asia’, pp. 38–9.
[10] Joseph Nye, ‘An Alliance larger than One Issue’, New York Times, 6 January 2010.
[11] Richard Armitage, ‘America needs a Plan B’, CSIS Pac Forum, 15 January 2010.
[12] Richard Bush, ‘Okinawa and Security in East Asia’, Brookings Institution, 10 March 2010.
[13] Department of Defense, Joint Press Conference Tokyo, 21 October 2009.
[14] Asahi Shimbun, 18 October 2009.
[15] ‘US pressures Japan on military package’, Washington Post, 22 October 2009; ‘Gates gets grumpy in Tokyo’, Asia Times, 28 October 2009.
[16] ‘Interview—Fukushima Mizuho zendaijin’, Shukan Kinyobi, 18 June 2010, pp. 14–17.
[17] ‘Relocating Futenma Base’, Asahi Shimbun, 23 October 2009.
[18] ‘Hatoyama, key ministers split on Futenma’, Weekly Japan Update, 29 October 2009.
[19] Ryukyu Shimpo, 25 October 2009.
[20] ‘Pentagon prods Japan on Futenma deadline’, Japan Times, 8 January 2010.
[21] ‘Among leaders at summit, Hu’s first’, Washington Post, 14 April 2010.
[22] ‘US distrust of Japan sharply accelerating’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 19 April 2010.
[23] ‘Japan moves to settle dispute with US over base relocation’, Washington Post, 23 April 2010.
[24] Ryukyu Shimpo, 22 April 2010.
[25] Yoichi Funabashi, ‘Open letter to the Prime Minister’, Asahi Shimbun, 11 May 2010.
[26] George Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island People, revised edition, North Clarendon, VT 2000 [1958], pp. 15–16.
[27] Kerr, Okinawa, pp. 152–66.
[28] Kerr, Okinawa, pp. 360–72, 397.
[29] Kerr, Okinawa, pp. 414–5, 431–2, 424–8, 460–3. In April 1945 General Ushijima had 89,000 troops under his command on Okinawa, of whom only 4,575 were Ryukyuans.
[30] Kerr, Okinawa, p. 5.
[31] Kishi had served in the war-time Imperial government and was held as a Class-A war criminal, 1945–48, before the US helped restore him to one of the highest offices of state. He was forced to resign in the aftermath of AMPO’s ratification, and Eisenhower to cancel a planned visit to Japan for fear of a hostile reception.
[32] ‘Record of discussion, 6 January 1960’, US National Archives; quoted in Akahata editorial, Japan Press Weekly, 5 July 2009.
[33] LDP governments had long denied the existence of the mitsuyaku, even though documentary proof had emerged from the US archives. In 2009, however, the DPJ Foreign Minister Okada ordered a search of the archives for relevant materials. His committee’s findings, published in March 2010, confirmed three ‘understandings’, of which most important was that on nuclear weapons. Four former Foreign Ministry vice-ministers had already testified to their existence. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Iwayuru ‘mitsuyaku’ mondai ni kansuru chosa kekka’, 9 March 2010.
[34] ‘Cost to remove US nukes from Okinawa exaggerated to dupe public’, Asahi Shimbun, 13 November 2009. A detailed accounting of the entire sum involved remains to be made.
[35] US Department of Defense, ‘United States Security Strategy in the East Asia-Pacific Region’, 27 February 1995.
[36] Joseph Nye, ‘The Case for Deep Engagement’, Foreign Affairs, July–August 1995.
[37] Ota Masahide, interview, Videonews, 11 March 2010.
[38] See ‘The Targeted Sea’, a documentary on the evolution of the Henoko site by Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting, October 2009, with English commentary by Satoko Norimatsu: Asia-Pacific Journal, on the Japan Focus website.
[39] Ryukyu Shimpo, 25 November 2009. A suit was launched in 2003 on behalf of the dugong in a San Francisco court. It ruled in January 2008 that the Defense Department had violated the National Historic Preservation Act by failing to take into account the effects on the dugong of a US base in Oura Bay. Hideki Yoshikawa, ‘Dugong Swimming in Uncharted Waters’, Asia-Pacific Journal, 7 February 2009.
[40] Miyazato Seigen and 13 others, ‘Open Letter to Secretary of State Clinton’, 14 February 2009, cited in my ‘Battle of Okinawa 2009’, Asia–Pacific Journal, 16 November 2009; Japanese text at ‘Nagonago zakki’, Miyagi Yasuhiro blog, 22 March 2009.
[41] See the Democratic Party of Japan’s ‘Okinawa Vision 2008’.
[42] Asahi Shimbun, 2 May 2008.
[43] Asahi Shimbun, 25 February 2009.
[44] Kurt Campbell, who conducted the Futenma negotiations under Bush, has become Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State for East Asia; Wallace Gregson, Marine Commander in Okinawa under Bush, now heads the Defense Department’s Asia-Pacific section; Kevin Maher, Consul-General in Okinawa under Bush, has become Director of the State Department’s Office of Japan Affairs. Neither Nye nor Armitage hold official posts, but their influence is indisputable.
[45] ‘Clinton praises strong US–Japan ties’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 18 February 2009.
[46] As veteran economist Ito Mitsuharu put it: ‘Kokoro ni kakutaru taikojiku o’, Sekai, August 2010.
[47] Miyagi Yasuhiro, ‘Yo ni mo kimyo na monogatari’, Nagonagu Zakki, 29 June 2010.
[48] ‘Chiji, Nichibei ‘kansha’ ni fukaikan, kengikai daihyo shitsumon’, Okinawa Times, 26 June 2010.
[49] Michael J. Green, ‘Tokyo Smackdown’, 13 October 2009.
[50] ‘Kengikai, Futenma “kokugai kengai isetsu motomeru” ikensho kaketsu’, Okinawa Times, 24 February 2010. A resolution to the same effect had been passed by a majority in July 2008.
[51] ‘Kitai wa maboroshi, Okinawa okoru’, Asahi Shimbun, 29 May 2010.
[52] Nishitani Osamu, ‘Jihatsuteki reiju o koeyo—jiritsuteki seiji e no ippo’, Sekai February 2010, p. 126.
[53] Terashima Jitsuro, ‘The Will and Imagination to Return to Common Sense’, Asia-Pacific Journal, 15 March 2010.
[54] Terashima Jitsuro, ‘Zuno no ressun, 100, Nichibei domei wa “shinka” saseneba naranai’, Sekai, August 2010.
[55] Miyazato and others, ‘Open Letter’.
