Today, Okinawa remains one of the most militarized places on the planet. Its landscape is dominated by the current bases—thirty-one US and fifty-seven Japanese Self-Defense Force (SDF) facilities—alongside hundreds of memorials and museums to World War II. Threaded through this geography runs a vibrant river of resistance in the form of demonstrations, sit-ins, and teach-ins that embody how persistent, nonviolent resistance can bend the will of even the most powerful governments.
In Okinawa’s main island, the northernmost US base is Camp Gonsalves (a.k.a. the Jungle Warfare Training Center), named by the military after a marine corps private who died during the Battle of Okinawa. In few other allied nations (perhaps with the exception of South Korea) does the US military dedicate its facilities to those who died killing local nationals, but different rules apply here. The marines seem to think Okinawans must be reminded which side won the war and why their land is still occupied. Camp Gonsalves used to be the largest US base in Okinawa, but in December 2016, after the Japanese government forcibly constructed new helipads near Takae, 10,000 acres of land was returned, reducing the size of the base by half. Washington and Tokyo lauded this as the largest return of Okinawan land since reversion, but it soon proved to be a poisoned chalice following the discovery of unexploded ordnance, chemical contamination, and the detritus of decades of military training on the returned land.
A short drive from the base, there stands a powerful reminder to the potential of peaceful resistance. In Kunigami Village, a large stone memorial immortalizes the 1970–1971 struggle in which residents occupied marine corps artillery emplacements and forced them to abandon their drills, thus saving their community’s natural resources. The publicly funded monument is a compelling symbol of how Okinawan society champions civil disobedience in a manner unthinkable elsewhere in Japan. South from Kunigami lies a site that future generations may revere in the same way. In Henoko, near the shores of Oura Bay, a long tarpaulin tent serves as ground zero for one of the world’s longest nonviolent resistance movements. Since April 2004, Okinawans have gathered here to launch canoes to block construction of the new US Marine Corps base. These protestors represent the citizens’ struggle, while at the same time, Governor Tamaki and his colleagues at Okinawa Prefectural Government have fought to cancel the base via the legal system. Repeatedly, though, the Japanese courts have sided with the national government, signaling how Anpo still trumps the Kenpo. In 2018, construction trucks began to dump rocks and dirt into the pristine bay, the start of a landfill expected to take until the mid-2030s to complete. Environmental desecration aside, even senior US military officers have deemed the project unfeasible due to its too-short runways and proximity to mountains. Moreover the new base sits on two fault lines, and the seabed is as soft as mayonnaise, making construction extremely challenging.
Westward to Motobu Port, a short ferry ride connects to the island of Iejima. Roughly one-third is still controlled by the military and, under the terms of the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO), parachute training was moved here from the main island. Sometimes stray service members drift onto farmers’ fields, crushing their crops of sugarcane and tobacco. Such infractions bolster residents’ opposition to the military, keeping alive the spirit of their island’s most famous leader, Ahagon Shōkō. In 1984, he founded the House of Nuchi du Takara Anti-War Peace Museum, installing displays to explain why islanders so strongly oppose militarism: the bloodied clothes of a baby bayoneted by a Japanese soldier to silence its cries; photographs of the Beggars’ March; and, most strikingly, several dummy H-bombs dropped by the Americans and purloined by farmers. Ahagon welcomed thousands of visitors to the museum and gave lectures about the peace movement until his death in 2002 at the age of 101. Within the prefecture, almost everyone knows about the Gandhi of Okinawa, but few people in mainland Japan are aware of his work, or even his name; ignorance itself is a form of violence.
Back on the main island, driving south brings us to Kadena Air Base and its adjacent Ammunition Storage Area, site of the 1969 nerve-agent leak. The air base resembles an American suburb, replete with a shopping mall; two golf courses; and seven schools, one named after comedian Bob Hope, who, during his 1971 visit to the base, joked that soldiers ought to smuggle home Asian prostitutes in their luggage. The twenty square kilometers of land that Kadena Air Base occupies is owned by 12,000 residents, and some 620 family graves still lie behind its fences. According to one air force report, service members and dependents have defaced the tombs with graffiti, and “it is not uncommon to [ sic ] for human bones to be found in proximity to deteriorating or vandalized tombs.” Okinawans wishing to visit their ancestral graves require special permission. Equally inaccessible are at least sixteen utaki (sacred sites).
A quick glance at any aerial map of Kadena Air Base (and other US installations in Okinawa) reveals the stark disparity in living conditions between military personnel and their neighbors. Whereas on-base housing consists of widely spaced houses with sprawling lawns, Okinawans’ homes are crammed along narrow lanes. Thanks to Japanese taxpayers’ omoiyari funding, service members pay heavily discounted utility bills, allowing them to water their yards and run air-conditioning 24/7, oblivious to the costs. Because service personnel are exempt from paying many local taxes, the national government is forced to make up the difference. Overall, the military presence in Okinawa is estimated to hobble the economy to the tune of ¥1 trillion.
As for Kadena Air Base, in addition to the constant roar of aircraft, the base exposes Okinawans and service members to a plethora of toxins. In 2013, near US schools, construction workers unearthed 108 rusty barrels containing the ingredients of Agent Orange and arsenic, but base commanders tried to hide the discovery from parents. The military has been equally secretive about its contamination of 450,000 Okinawans’ drinking water with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) “forever chemicals.” No local officials have been allowed to inspect the base, nor has the Japanese government pushed the military for transparency. The environmental loopholes of SOFA, combined with Tokyo’s complacency, ensures the US military can poison without fear of punishment.
Eight kilometers south from Kadena Air Base lies Ginowan City. Blessed with an abundance of natural springs, humans have inhabited the area since prehistoric times, and in the early twentieth century, it was a major transport and administrative hub. But in the Battle of Okinawa, the US military expelled residents, bulldozed their homes, and built the air base still dominating the city. In 2018, Ginowan’s long and rich history was ignored by the head of the marine corps, General Robert B. Neller, who proclaimed at a Pentagon press briefing, “Futenma [Base] when it was built was—there were no people living within several kilometers. Now the cities around Futenma are right up to the fence.” The implication that the base had been built on empty space echoed tabula rasa excuses deployed by other colonizers to seize indigenous lands, and its blame on Okinawans for living near the base disguised how military occupation caused chronic land shortages. Thirty-two percent of Ginowan is occupied by Futenma Air Station, and 4,200 residents own the land beneath the base, which contains tombs and sacred sites to which they are denied access. Neller’s comment was a mistruth piled on the earlier US-Japan lie from 1996 that the base would be closed within five to seven years. That promise had precipitated grand Okinawan plans to redevelop the site into a verdant residential and business hub. The current base employs some 200 civilians, but the redeveloped land would have provided work for almost 35,000 and produced thirty-two times the economic benefit. Almost three decades after that promise had been made, the base was still there, its closure contingent on the construction of a replacement base at the expense of destroying Oura Bay.
For some tourists, the US bases contribute to Okinawa’ exotic appeal. Visitors gawk at low-flying MV-22 Ospreys, shop for surplus military clothes, and punch their names into souvenir dog tags. The American Village, located between the Kadena Air Base and Futenma Air Station, embodies this fantasy, consisting of a Vegas-esque sprawl of hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops. Gaudiness aside, the area highlights the financial benefits of shuttering bases. The land used to be occupied by the military, who, according to prefectural records, had not employed any local workers for these bases. But after their closure and redevelopment for civilian use, by the 2010s, the area created 3,400 new jobs, and the direct economic impact rose 108-fold to almost ¥34 billion per year. This reflects a wider shift in Okinawa’s postreversion finances. Today, tourism contributes approximately one-quarter to the prefecture’s economy, compared to 5 percent created by the military.
The Japanese government had long envisaged that Okinawa would rival Hawai‘i as a tourist destination. This goal was finally achieved in 2019 when 10 million people visited the islands, matching for the first time the number of tourists to the Aloha State. Such revenues, though, are notoriously unstable. In 2020, coronavirus travel bans slashed the numbers of visitors to Okinawa to 3.7 million. A similar drop had occurred in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, when Japanese schools canceled visits to Okinawa for fears the bases would become terrorist targets. Moreover, the benefits of tourism to Okinawans tend to be illusory: poverty-line wages, seasonal employment, and profits funneled to mainland corporations. Tourism also damages an environment already blighted by the military, as landfill projects and artificial beaches disrupt the ecosystem, and visitors’ demands for swimming pools and verdant golf greens strain already-precarious supplies of freshwater.
Continuing south brings us to the site where in 1955 US missionary Harold Rickard declared, “I watched a village die,” after witnessing soldiers drag Okinawans from their land and drown their fields in silt. Today, Camp Foster, the base that took their homes, is still there, and one of the only signs of the village is a bus stop named Isahama along a roadside of tattoo shops, strip clubs, and other businesses catering to US military personnel. Isahama used to be famous for its fields of rice, and the army’s seizure was mirrored across the main island as bases occupied 20 percent of agricultural land. The traditional Okinawan diet—rich in sweet potatoes, tofu, and goya —is acclaimed as one of the healthiest on the planet (it even spawned a 2004 New York Times best-seller). But the theft of farmland forced many residents to subsist on imported—usually processed—foods. (Spam is a staple of Okinawan larders, just like in other US colonies, such as Guam and Hawai‘i.) In 2015, Okinawans under the age of sixty-five had the worst mortality rate in Japan, and in 2022, Okinawans’ healthy-life expectancy (i.e., the period of time people can live without nursing care or becoming bedridden) was almost the worst nationally. Most medical professionals attribute Okinawans’ poor health to diet and an overreliance on cars, but some have also begun to assess the impact of exposure to PFAS and other military contaminants.
One base in particular underscores the persistence of environmental pollution: Makiminato Service Area (now called Camp Kinser), where the army had stored Vietnam War chemicals. As recently as 2019, the soil was still contaminated with dangerous levels of dioxin and pesticides, but the military hid the information from service members, their families, and Okinawans. For base commanders, all too often public image still outweighs public health.
From Camp Kinser to Okinawa’s capital, Naha, is less than ten kilometers, but due to congested roads, the journey by car can sometimes take almost one hour. With a population of 310,000, Naha resembles mainland Japanese cities—tower apartment blocks, and franchised restaurants and convenience stores—but residents celebrate their Ryukyu roots. Shīsā dogs stand guard atop almost every roof, street junctions display ishigantō amulets to ward off ill spirits, and families hold annual shīmī feasts in the courtyards of their family tombs. Although the Battle of Okinawa obliterated Naha, sites from the Ryukyu Kingdom’s glory days have been rebuilt, and numerous museums chronicle the islands’ history of discrimination and resistance. Pride of place in the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum hangs the fifteenth-century Bridge of Nations bell, scarred with bullet strikes and blackened from the combat of 1945. Fukutsu-kan is a museum overseen by the daughter of Senaga Kamejiro that chronicles the left-wing politician’s struggles against US authorities, their dirty tricks to oust him, and his victories on behalf of Okinawa in the Japanese parliament.
When Commodore Perry occupied the Ryukyu Kingdom, he demanded the construction of a cemetery for foreign nationals. Today, it still stands in Tomari, where among the graves is the tomb of William Board, the US sailor who allegedly raped a Naha resident in 1854. Along with the other graves, it is still carefully tended by volunteers from the American Legion. At the time of Perry’s arrival, Okinawans could not have known that Board would be the first of countless Americans to assault residents, and today, SOFA enshrines a similar extraterritoriality foisted on the island 170 years earlier. Despite promises to rewrite SOFA, it has undergone only cosmetic revisions, and US service members’ sense of impunity is bolstered by Japanese prosecutors, who often allow suspects to walk. Military-on-military crime within the bases is also rampant.
Naha is home to Okinawa’s mass media, which, unlike its mainland counterparts, is indomitably antiestablishment due to journalists’ shame that their wartime predecessors wrote propaganda urging sacrifice for the emperor and their experiences of censorship under USCAR rule. The Memorial to Fallen Journalists, engraved with the names of the fourteen reporters killed during the Battle of Okinawa, stands in Asahi ga Oka Park, where each year members of the media gather to pledge not to glorify war again. Such commitment to pacifism and service to the Okinawan people often draws acrimony from mainland Liberal Democratic Party politicians and the US military.
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