Rethinking the US-Japanese Security Alliance

HomeFrom the VaultsRethinking the US-Japanese Security Alliance

Rethinking the US-Japanese Security Alliance: Okinawa’s Anti-Base Movement from the Postwar to the Present

 

In early 2025, the New York Times updated its audience on the delayed relocation of 9000 US marines from Okinawa to Guam. Agreed upon in 2013, this relocation is now two decades behind schedule and might take another ten years. This lag in what would ultimately contribute to Okinawa’s demilitarization has fanned anti-base protests dating back to the 1950s. Back then, the United States governed the island group as a UN-protectorate taken in the Pacific War. Being on route from the heavy industries in Japan to Vietnam and Korea, the islands’ strategic importance grew as the Cold War in Asia escalated. And so, the American administrators started buying up more and more Okinawan farmland to build military bases. As a consequence, Okinawan-American relations deteriorated, leading to waves of protests and issues that have yet to be resolved.

These issues largely result from the overwhelming presence of the US military, which has changed Okinawa’s economy, social fabric, culture, and environment. Over the years, activists have targeted issues such as the loss of arable land, environmental degradation, legal transgressions perpetrated by US military personnel, and accidents resulting from training exercises. Nowadays, protests often center around the facilities that are supposed to replace the bases built during the 1950s. One of them, for instance, is a new US Air Force base to be completed on a tract of the Okinawan coast, in Henoko, which would damage the underlying coral reefs. Another one, planned in Guam, is actually welcomed by Okinawans because it would allow US marines to leave their islands, but its construction keeps being delayed.

Present-day activists blame both the US and Japan for the continuing issues with the military bases, arguing that the latter privileges their security alliance with the US over the wellbeing of Okinawan citizens. These citizens, they argue, have been treated as an internal colony ever since 1972, when Okinawa lost its trusteeship status and was reincorporated into the Japanese state. Before this shift in administration occurred, the US and Japanese governments agreed that the US military bases in Okinawa would be treated differently from those on Japan’s main islands. As part of the agreement, the US was allowed to secretly store nuclear weapons in Okinawa, which made headlines after it was made public in December 2015. Additionally, it meant that US military personnel retained their extralegal status. This made it difficult for local authorities to persecute soldiers for drunk driving and sexual assault.

 

During the Vietnam War, when a multitude of US soldiers traversed the islands on their way to the front, the frequency with which such offenses occurred spurred protests among Okinawan civilians. In December 1970, for instance, a drunk driving accident in Koza, present-day Okinawa City, stirred up a riot in which Okinawan citizens set fire to military-owned vehicles and broke into the nearby Kadena Air Base. When a drunk soldier hit an Okinawan pedestrian with his car, bystanders were dismayed that the US military police allowed him to leave the scene before ascertaining the condition of the victim. It reminded them of another car accident only five weeks prior, in which the US military court declared a soldier not guilty, although the Okinawan woman he hit with his car had died.[1] Sexual assault was similarly prevalent, so much so that it became a main topic of one of Okinawa’s more well-known novellas: The Cocktail Party by Tatsuhiro Oshiro (1967). Due to the terms of the Reversion Treaty, laid out by US President Richard Nixon and Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in 1969, these problems could persist after Okinawa’s return to Japan, which the respective leaders had scheduled for 1972.

The Nixon-Sato Communiqué of 1969 came as a bitter disappointment to anti-base Okinawans, as many had hoped that Japanese politicians would come to their aid. During the 1950s, the Japanese Socialist and Communist Parties had protested the continued existence of US military bases on Japan’s main islands. The postwar US occupation of Japan had formally ended in 1952, and so, they argued, the military bases should go too. Afraid to be perceived as an imperialist power occupying another country without its people’s consent, the US responded to these protests by closing down some of the bases in Japan and building new ones in Okinawa instead. Okinawans had observed these protests and reached out to the Japanese opposition parties to help them strengthen their case against the US military. The Socialist and Communist Parties responded favorably and started promoting Okinawa’s return to Japan as a stepping stone toward its liberation from the Americans. This led some Okinawans to believe that a number of the US military bases on their islands would close down once their reincorporation into the Japanese state had materialized.

When this turned out not to be the case, Okinawan anti-base protesters reassessed their relationship with Japan’s main islands, creating a new narrative that drew heavily on the rhetoric of the Black Power Movement in the United States. This rhetoric was brought to Okinawa by antiwar GIs and their civilian allies who passed through the islands to fight both in and against the Vietnam War. Before the abolishment of the American draft system in 1973, Okinawa was home to many servicepeople who felt like they were being dragged into an unjust war against their will. They met the local population on base and in the surrounding entertainment districts, where Okinawans had sought work and residence after losing most arable land.

The locals and antiwar GIs found common ground in their opposition to the US military and concluded that they had both become victims of their respective states. Black Internationalists at the time argued that African Americans were an internal colony of the United States and thus only citizens in name. This rang true for Okinawans, who were being reincorporated into the Japanese state but would still be burdened with a large portion of the US military presence – hosting over 70% of Japan’s US military bases on merely 0.6% of its soil to this day. Accordingly, some activists started presenting themselves as a ‘Third World people’ seeking liberation from Japan, just like other post-colonial people had also sought the right to self-determination. These actors, organized in groups such as the Okinawan Youth League, reached out to allies in the US and Japan, who were similarly disillusioned with the promise of liberal democracy and had started to identify as part of the New Left.

These allies responded favorably and started broadcasting the story of Okinawa to their respective audiences. Together, New Leftists from the US, Okinawa, and mainland Japan promoted the idea that Okinawans were victimized by ‘US-Japanese imperialism’ as long as the agreement between Nixon and Sato would stand. Although they made headlines, the activists soon realized that they would fail to enact change and that Okinawa would transfer to Japanese control in 1972, just as Nixon and Sato had planned it. In the years that followed, the US incrementally withdrew its forces from Vietnam. This not only led the American and Japanese protest movements to dwindle but also cleared Okinawa of its antiwar draftees and their civilian allies.

 

International attention to the Okinawan anti-base movement would flare up again in 1995, when three US servicemen made headlines after kidnapping and raping a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl. In the decades that followed, anti-base activists continued to protest the issues that have shaped Okinawan life from the 1950s onward: environmental degradation, loss of land, and safety concerns. To this day, the New York Times underscored, Okinawan activists argue that their government treats them as an “internal colony.” As such, they keep the rhetoric of the New Left alive, in a place where a consistently overwhelming US military presence reminds local residents of the burdens they have borne for the security of the Asia-Pacific region, from the Cold War to the present day.

 

This article has drawn upon the following sources:

Microform at the RIAS:

  • CIA Research Report: Japan Korea and the Security of Asia, 1946-1976.
  • Records of the USIA: Part 1B.
  • The Black Power Movement Collection

Digital resources at the RIAS:

  • Digital National Security Archive
  • ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times
  • ProQuest History Vault: Students for a Democratic Society, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the anti-Vietnam War Movement

Also consulted:

Secondary literature:

  • Avenell, Simon. Asia and Postwar Japan: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity. Brill Academic Publishers, 2023.
  • Havens, Thomas R. H. Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan 1965-1975. Princeton University Press, 2014.
  • Immerwahr, Daniel. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
  • Oguma, Eiji. The Boundaries of “the Japanese”. Translated by Leonie R. Stickland. Trans Pacific Press, 2014.
  • Onishi, Yuichiro. Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa. New York University Press, 2013.
  • Masaie, Ishihara. “Memories of War and Okinawa.” Translated by Douglas Dreistadt. In Perilous Memories: the Asia-Pacific War(s), edited by Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama Duke University Press, 2020.
  • Nomura, Koya. “Undying Colonialism: A Case Study of the Japanese Colonizer.” Translated by Annmaria Shimabuku. New Centennial Review 12, no. 1 (2012): 93-116.
  • Shimabuku, Annmaria. Alegal: Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life. Fordham University Press, 2018.

[1]  Shimabuku, Alegal, 119-120.